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. 10
Top Headlines
New York Times, Opinion: My Last Column: Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment, Paul Krugman
Syrian's Assad Regime, Russia Alliesf Flee
New York Times, Assad Flees Syria as Rebels Claim Damascus
Trump Transition News, Commentary
Donald Trump on NBC's Meet the Press on December 8, 2024.
New York Times, Political Opinion:Threatened With Jail, Cheney Condemns Trump’s ‘Assault on the Rule of Law'
Politico, Transition of Power: Pam Bondi will face an ethics quagmire as attorney general
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
Politico, January 6, 2021 Attack on the U.S. Capitol and Other Cases; Investigations, Hearings, Trials
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 Picks Former Senator and Election Denier to Be Ambassador to China
More On Health Care CEO's Murder
New York Times, Suspect in C.E.O.’s Killing Withdrew From a Life of Privilege and Promise
ABC News, What we know about Luigi Mangione, Ivy League grad and suspect in CEO's murder,
Letters from an American, Commentary: December 5, 2024 [Health Care CEO's Murder], Heather Cox Richardson
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)
The Hartmann Report, The Medicare Advantage Trap: What They Don’t Tell You, Thom Hartmann
More On South Korean Crisis
New York Times, South Korea’s President Is Still in Office. This Man Intends to Push Him Out,
More U.S. Politics, Governance, Elections
New York Times, Opinion: My Last Column: Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment, Paul Krugman
More On Tariffs, Budget Threats, U.S. Foreign Policy, Defense
New York Times, Commerce Dept. Is on the Front Lines of China Policy
New York Times, From Chinese Patriot to American Spy: The Unusual Life of John Leung
More On Presidential Pardons, Cases
Russian War Against Ukraine
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
Global Politics, War, Famine, Human Rights
Washington Post, Biden visiting an African region critical to the U.S.-China rivalry
U.S. Defense, Foreign Policy, Security
New York Times, Pete Hegseth’s Mother Accused Her Son of Mistreating Women for Years
Washington Post, Editorial: Trump wants to make a deal in Ukraine war. A bad deal is worse than none, Editorial Board
More U.S. Legal News
New York Times, Kash Patel Has Plan to Remake the F.B.I. Into a Tool of Trump
U.S. Immigration
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.
Top Stories
Politico, Watchdog faults DOJ in Trump’s first term for secretly obtaining records of lawmakers and journalists, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, Dec. 10, 2024. 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, Watchdog faults DOJ in Trump’s first term for secretly obtaining records of lawmakers and journalists, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, Dec. 10, 2024. 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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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.
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.
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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.
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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, 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.
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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, 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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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.
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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, 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.”
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Syrian's Assad Regime, Russia Alliesf Flee
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.
The rebels who ended the Assad family’s brutal rule in Syria began asserting control over the capital on Monday, announcing that a new government would begin work immediately as its fighters took up positions outside public buildings and directed traffic in a show of their newly claimed authority.
Major questions remained unanswered, including who would lead the new rebel government, as millions of Syrians and the wider world struggled to process the stunning end to the Assad family’s decades-long reign. Euphoria around the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad over the weekend mixed with uncertainty about the future of the country and the intentions of the rebels who now hold the capital, Damascus.
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.
We arrived in Damascus early Monday, after passing surreal scenes on the highway leading into the city from Lebanon. Scattered across the main highway to the Syrian capital are newfound relics of the government of Bashar al-Assad whose oppressive rule has defined the country for decades.
Less than a day after rebels took Damascus in a lightning fast offensive, abandoned Syrian military tanks littered the road. A handful of posters of Mr. al-Assad remained intact on billboards over the highway, but most had been torn down and ripped to shreds.
Checkpoints typically manned by Syrian intelligence and security forces, who would question drivers and passengers for hours on end, were empty. A few miles from the border, a body of a man in military uniform lay sprawled on the ground next to an abandoned pickup truck.
Down the road from one Syrian military base, a convoy of 10 rebel vehicles sped down the highway. They drove four-wheel drive vehicles — their doors and windows caked in mud as makeshift camouflage — and Syrian military vehicles armed with rockets that once belonged to the al-Assad government.
New York Times, Crowds Throng to Prison in Syria, Desperate to Find Relatives and Friends, Christina Goldbaum, Raja Abdulrahim and Muhammad Haj Kadour, Dec. 9, 2024. The Assad regime ran a network of torture centers that swallowed up tens of thousands of Syrians. Now that the rebels have opened the gates, many see a chance to learn of the detainees’ fates.
Crowds descended on a prison on the outskirts of Damascus, the Syrian capital, on Monday, desperate to learn the fate of friends and relatives detained at a place that symbolized terror and death under the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
Some hailed taxis or waited for buses from the city to the prison, Sednaya, which opened over the weekend as Mr. al-Assad fell. Others packed into cars, inching through traffic. Many appeared conflicted by hope and dread amid the euphoria that has gripped Damascus since Mr. al-Assad fled to Russia.
New York Times, Analysis: Revolutions Swept the Middle East in 2011. Will Syria’s End Differently? Patrick Kingsley, Dec. 9, 2024. Bashar al-Assad’s downfall evokes memories of uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen, each of which brought civil war or authoritarian rule. Syrians hope for better.
When protesters started trying in 2011 to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, they were part of a cascade of revolutions, known as the Arab Spring, that aimed to oust authoritarian leaders across the Middle East.
While opposition groups elsewhere experienced swift success, the Syrian revolution devolved into a 13-year civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions and carved the country into competing fiefs.
Update from Ukraine, Commentary: Assad is over; Damascus fallen; Russians are running away from Syria, Denys Davydov, Dec. 8, 2024. Russia has suffered a great defeat and they're very angry about it."
Times Radio, Commentary: Collapse of Assad is 'humiliation' for Putin and will weaken him on Ukraine, Bill Browder, Dec. 8, 2024. "He put his, his name behind Assad. He put his resources behind Assad. And now Assad has been humiliated, and I think by by extension, Putin has been humiliated."
The fall of the Assad is a major humiliation for Putin who had been a key backer of the Syrian regime for over a decade, says Bill Browder, human rights campaigner and British financier who fled Russia.
New York Times, Iran Makes ‘Dramatic’ Leap to Produce Near-Bomb-Grade Fuel, but to What End? David E. Sanger, Dec. 6, 2024. The United Nations chief inspector says production has quadrupled. But it is not clear whether Iran is trying to touch off a crisis or gather bargaining chips for negotiations with the United States.
New York Times, Opinion: Conversations and insights about the moment, Thomas L. Friedman, right, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). For the past few weeks, I have been arguing that Israel has inflicted the equivalent of a Six Day War-level defeat on Iran and its resistance network, 
and this would have vast consequences.
Well, irony of ironies, the Assad family in Syria took power in 1971, in part because of Syria’s devastating defeat in the 1967 war. What goes around comes around.
Hold on to your hats, though; you haven’t seen anything yet. Here are five quick observations.
Funniest statement by any world leader so far: That award goes to … President-elect Donald Trump for his social media post: “Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” Attention Mr. Trump: Syria is the keystone of the entire Middle East. It just collapsed like a blown-up bridge, creating vast new dangers and opportunities that everyone in the region will seize upon and react to. Staying out of this is not on the menu, especially when we have several hundred U.S. troops stationed in Eastern Syria. We need to figure out our interests and use the events in Syria to drive them, because everyone else will be doing just that.
Biggest U.S. interest: This is also a no-brainer. It’s that this uprising in Syria in the long run triggers a pro-democracy uprising in Iran. In the short run, it is sure to trigger a power struggle between the moderates there — President Masoud Pezeshkian and his vice president, former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif — and the Revolutionary Guards hard-liners. We need to shape that struggle. The events in Syria, on top of Iran’s military defeat by Israel, have left Tehran naked. This means that Iran’s leaders will now have to choose — quickly — between rushing for a nuclear bomb to save their regime or getting rid of the bomb in a deal with Trump, if he takes regime change off the table. That is why, Mr. Trump, to put it in your typeface: WE CAN’T HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS.
Biggest known unknown: Who are the rebels who took over Syria and what do they really want? A pluralistic democracy, or an Islamic state? History tells us that in these movements the hard-line Islamists usually win out. But I am watching and hoping it will be otherwise.
My biggest worry expressed in a single headline: That goes to Haaretz in Israel: “Post-Assad Syria Is in Danger of Being Run by Out-of-control Militias.” We are at a moment in the history of the Middle East where there are many countries that I would describe as “too late for imperialism, but they failed at self-government.” I am talking about Libya, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan. That is, no foreign power is going to come in and stabilize them, but they have failed at being able to manage their own pluralism and forge social contracts to create stability and growth. We have never been here before in the post-World War II era — a moment when so many countries have descended into this Hobbesian state of nature, but in a much more connected world.
This is why, having just spent the past week in Beijing and Shanghai, I repeatedly told my Chinese interlocutors: “You think we are enemies. You are wrong. We have a common enemy: Disorder. How we collaborate to shrink the World of Disorder and grow The World of Order is what history will judge us both for.” (Not sure they got it, but they will.)
Best Russian aphorism to sum up the challenge that regional and global powers now face in fixing Syria: “It is easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup, then to turn fish soup into an aquarium.”
New York Times, Opinion: The Winners and Losers Following the Fall of Assad, Nicholas Kristof, right, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). The stunning collapse of the brutal Assad regime in Syria, a family business since the 1970s, is a geopolitical earthquake creating winners and losers around the world. First, the losers:
Iran is a big loser; Syria has been a close ally and a vital overland transport link to Lebanon and Hezbollah. Iran supported Syria as President Bashar al-Assad fought to remain in power during the country’s horrifying civil war, and it used Syria to project power around the region. Iran has already been badly weakened in recent months, and this adds to the sense that Iran’s regime is possibly vulnerable and certainly a lesser power.
One question is whether all this adds to the arguments within Iran’s leadership to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent.
Russia likewise loses an important ally and it will presumably also lose its valuable military bases in Syria. In 2015, Moscow intervened militarily to back the Assad regime in the civil war, dropping bombs on civilian targets and adding to its unpopularity among citizens.
Russia particularly values its naval base at Tartus, which allows it to support warships in the Mediterranean Sea.
Hezbollah backed Assad in the Syrian civil war, and it depended on weapons shipped from Iran through Syria to Lebanon. The Assad regime for decades interfered violently in Lebanese politics. That said, Hezbollah remains a significant force in Lebanon, even if weakened.
The Alawite sect in Syria, an offshoot of Shiite Islam amounting to perhaps 10 percent or more of Syrians, will now be at risk. The Assads were Alawites, and Alawites were resented for the privileges they enjoyed. I would be terrified if I were an Alawite in Syria today.
I worry that Syrian Christians, who had to some degree been protected by the Assads, may also be targeted and harassed, and that women will lose rights. The triumphant forces aren’t the Taliban, but they are a step in that direction. That said, the civil war in Syria hurt everyone, including women and Christians.
So who are the winners as Syria changes hands?
Sunni Muslim Islamists have been savagely suppressed in Syria for decades, and they are finally in charge. The new leadership includes forces that had been involved in Islamic State and Al Qaeda, although they have disavowed that extremism. We’ll see. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m wary.
Israel gains, at least for a time, by the weakening of enemies like Iran and Hezbollah, not to mention the Assad regime itself. But having a hard-line Islamist regime next door, if that’s the direction Syria goes, may not be great for the long term.
Turkey wins influence next door. It may use that influence to try to rein in Kurds around the region.
The United States may also gain in the sense that Russia and Iran are clear losers, but much depends on what comes next. I’m hopeful that Austin Tice, an American journalist believed imprisoned in Syria since 2012, may be freed and allowed home. Releasing him would be a way for Syria’s new leadership to show its bona fides.
Anyone who values human rights has to feel relief at the departure of the Assad regime. But we’ve also seen how hard-line Islamists can rule in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and I fear revenge attacks in Syria. So two cheers for the overthrow of Assad, but be vigilant about what comes next. One hard lesson I’ve learned from covering the world: Sometimes what follows a terrible regime is just as bad, or even worse.
New York Times, Syria Updates: Rebels Enter Damascus, Threatening al-Assad’s Rule, Raja Abdulrahim, Vivian Yee and Aaron Boxerman, Dec. 7, 2024. Syria's military denied the rebels had entered the city, but the surprise rebel offensive has so far swiftly defeated government forces in its path toward the capital.
New York Times, In the Syrian Regime’s Hour of Need, Its Patron Iran Makes an Exit, Farnaz Fassihi, Dec. 8, 2024 (print ed.). The collapse of a partnership built over four decades would reshape the balance of power in the Middle East.
For decades, Iran has expended much blood and money in support of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, above, helping him survive a civil war that threatened his dynastic rule. Iran operated military bases, weapons warehouses and missile factories in Syria, which it used as a pipeline for arming its militant allies across the region.
Now, just as Mr. al-Assad needs help to repel a rapid advance by rebel forces, Iran is heading for the exits. On Friday, the country started evacuating its military commanders and personnel, as well as some diplomatic staff, according to Iranian and regional officials.
It is a remarkable turnabout: Iran not only appears to be abandoning Mr. al-Assad, its closest Arab ally, but also relinquishing everything it had built and fought to preserve for 40 years in Syria, its main foothold in the Arab world.
With the rebels expected to advance soon on Damascus, Iran is unable to muster a defense of the Assad government after a damaging year of regional wars that began with the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, an Iranian ally.
A collapse of Iran’s partnership with Syria would by all accounts reshape the balance of power in the Middle East. The “axis of resistance” that Iran has formed with its militant allies in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Syria, Iraq and Yemen would be weakened. Israel and its Arab allies would be strengthened.
“For Iran, Syria has been the backbone of our regional presence,” Hassan Shemshadi, an expert on Iran’s proxy militant groups who was for years a documentary filmmaker on the battlefields of Syria, said in an interview from Tehran. “Everything that Iran sent to the region went through Syria. It is now extremely difficult to keep these channels open.”
Rebel fighters breached the strategic Syrian city of Homs on Saturday, according to a war monitoring group and the rebels, whose surprise offensive has swept south toward the capital in a little over a week and threatened to collapse the rule of President Bashar al-Assad.
The antigovernment fighters then declared early Sunday that they had fully captured the city, not long after the Syrian defense ministry denied that rebels had entered Homs. The ministry said in a statement that the situation remained “stable and secure.”
But the rebels’ offensive has so far swiftly defeated pockets of government defenders in its path. Victory in Homs would set the rebel coalition up for a march on the capital, Damascus, about 100 miles south.
The rebels’ quick progress also appeared to reignite antigovernment protests near Damascus. Syrian government forces on Saturday withdrew from suburbs, including Moadamia al-Sham and Daraya, and the nearby Mezzeh military airport, according to war monitoring groups. The Syrian military also denied those assertions.
The rebel advances and protests were reported by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitoring group based in Britain, as well as by the rebels themselves on their Telegram channel.
In the capital, people crowded stores to buy food and cars disappeared from the streets, said a woman there who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern about retribution from the government. She said residents felt a mix of fear, worry and, for those opposed to the government, joy. People are waiting anxiously to learn who will run the country in the days ahead, she said.
Mr. al-Assad’s control in southern and northeastern Syria also appeared to be crumbling, with a different coalition of rebel factions capturing much of Daraa Province in the south, and United States-backed Kurdish-led forces moving into the city of Deir al-Zour in the northeast, according to the Observatory.
Still, Syrian government officials sought to project confidence on Saturday. “There is a very strong military and security cordon on the far outskirts of Damascus and the Damascus countryside,” the interior minister, Mohammad Khaled al-Rahmoun, said in a video posted online. “No one — not them, nor their masters, nor their patrons — can break that defensive line.”
How Syria’s civil war reignited: The new uprisings present the gravest challenge in years to Mr. al-Assad. It is unclear what resources he can marshal to defend the rapidly shrinking territory under his control, especially without the help of one of his staunchest allies, Iran, which began to evacuate its military commanders and personnel from Syria on Friday.
Recent Relevant Headlines
New York Times, As Syrian Rebel Advance Accelerates, Nervous Neighbors Close Their Borders
Trump Transition News, Commentary
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.”
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.
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The Hartmann Report, Commentary: The Best of the Rest of the News, Thom Hartmann, right, Dec. 8, 2024.
A large handful of billionaires spent several billion dollars to get Trump elected, and now he’s repaying — big time — the class into which he was born.
Just the billionaires Trump has so far appointed to his cabinet boast a combined wealth, at $340 billion so far, that is greater than the entire GDP of New Zealand. And at the top of their collective agenda will be kneecapping the IRS’s tax fraud division while adding another $7 trillion to the national debt by shifting their taxes onto our children and grandchildren.
It’ll be a government bought by billionaires and soon to be run by and for the exclusive benefit of billionaires. David L. Smith in his Cassandra Chronicles Substack newsletter notes that this is somewhat similar to what Herbert Hoover did in 1928, and likely to produce a similar result: a great financial crash that will throw control of our government to Democrats for a generation. That assumes that Democrats will succeed — as Congressional Progressive Caucus VP Ro Khanna demanded yesterday on my radio/TV program — at jettisoning the billionaires, big corporations, and neoliberalism that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama so fervently embraced (and Joe Biden largely rejected; his entire cabinet is worth a paltry $118 million). The February election of a new DNC head will tell us a lot; two good progressives are in the running (my favorite is Ben Wikler). Trump is teeing-up what may be a great opportunity for Democrats and progressives; let’s hope the DNC doesn’t blow it again like Democrats in the Senate just did.
New York Times, Biden Team Considers Blanket Pardons Before Trump’s Promised ‘Retribution,’ Peter Baker and Erica L. Green, Dec. 6, 2024 (print ed.). White House officials believe President-elect Trump’s choices for top law enforcement jobs indicate that he will pursue revenge against his perceived enemies.
President Biden’s staff is debating whether he should issue blanket pardons for a swath of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s perceived enemies to protect them from the “retribution” he has threatened after he takes office, according to people familiar with the discussion.
The idea would be to pre-emptively extend executive clemency to a list of current and former government officials for any possible crimes over a period of years, effectively short-circuiting the next president’s promised campaign of reprisals.
White House officials do not believe the potential recipients have actually committed crimes, but they have grown increasingly worried that Mr. Trump’s selections for top Justice Department positions indicate that he will follow through on his repeated vows to seek revenge. Even an investigation that results in no charges could drag on for months or years, costing those people hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and crippling their career prospects.
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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.
This account is based on interviews with nine people who either interviewed for jobs in the administration or were directly involved in the process. Among those were applicants who said they gave what they intuited to be the wrong answer — either decrying the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 or saying that President Biden won in 2020. Their answers were met with silence and the taking of notes. They didn’t get the jobs.
Three of the people interviewed are close to the transition team and confirmed that loyalty questions were part of some interviews across multiple agencies, and that the Trump team researched what candidates had said about Mr. Trump on the day of the Capitol riot and in the days following. Candidates are also rated on a scale of one to four in more than a half-dozen categories, including competence.
Karoline Leavitt, the incoming White House press secretary, declined to address specific questions about the topics being raised in job interviews. Instead, she said: “President Trump will continue to appoint highly qualified men and women who have the talent, experience, and necessary skill sets to make America great again.”
Previous administrations, of course, have also been interested in whether new hires were aligned with the president’s agenda. But the distinction between Mr. Trump’s process and past ones is that the interest goes well beyond alignment on policy. The Trump transition team appears to be trying to figure out whether prospective hires have ever shown a hint of daylight between themselves and Mr. Trump on specific issues, particularly as he tried to revise the history of his final weeks in office and its aftermath.
Mr. Trump has maintained that Jan. 6, when a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol, was actually an event filled with “love.” He has insisted that no one who was arrested was armed; criminal indictments say otherwise. He has described people convicted and imprisoned for their role in the Capitol attack as “hostages” and he has claimed, falsely, that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Politico, January 6, 2021 Attack on the U.S. Capitol and Other Cases —-; Investigations, Hearings, Trials, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). More lawsuits are barreling toward Trump over Jan. 6.
The criminal cases against the president-elect have crumbled, but he remains enmeshed in civil litigation over Jan. 6 and a barrage of cases he filed against the media.
Adding to the unwieldy heap of litigation are a slew of suits Trump himself has filed in recent years, accusing media organizations, his political opponents and others of spreading defamatory stories about him or otherwise treating him unfairly. Some viewed those cases as publicity stunts aimed at boosting his campaign to return to the White House, but now Trump faces the potential of being forced to give sworn testimony.
As he tries to fill out his administration and launch his promised policy agenda, those depositions — and the sessions he’ll need with lawyers to prepare for them — could be a significant distraction.Trump could avoid that predicament by dropping the cases he filed. So far, there’s no sign he’ll do so, and a spokesperson said the president-elect intends to fight on.
“President Trump will continue to hold those who have committed, and are committing wrongdoings, accountable for blatantly false and dishonest reporting, which serves no public interest and only seeks to interfere in our elections on behalf of political partisans,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the transition.
He’s pursuing a defamation lawsuit against ABC for asserting that a civil jury found that he raped Carroll, when the jury actually found him liable for sexual abuse. (A federal judge in New York ruled it was accurate to say Trump was found liable for rape in “common modern parlance.”)
Also looming are massive civil judgments rendered against him over the past year, one of which includes $97 million he owes to New York writer E. Jean Carroll in suits she brought relating to her claim that he raped her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the 1990s.
Trump is also battling with publisher Simon & Schuster over the rights to recorded interviews he gave to journalist Bob Woodward. He’s pressing suits against CBS for its handling of an interview with Harris and the Pulitzer Prize board for reaffirming awards it gave to the New York Times and Washington Post for their reporting on ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia — a claim Trump often derides as “the Russia hoax.”
Washington Post, Many targeted for removal by Trump can’t be deported, ICE data shows, Nick Miro, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). Nearly half of Washington Post, Federal employees scramble to insulate themselves from Trump’s purge, Lisa Rein and Jeff Stein, Dec. 8, 2024. Career civil servants are scrubbing social media, changing job titles and looking for private sector work over fear that the incoming president may fire them.
As President-elect Donald Trump’s transition teams move into federal agencies, thousands of civil servants — and some of the Biden appointees they work for — are scrambling to insulate themselves from the new administration’s promised purge.Get the latest election news and results
Federal employees are scrubbing their Facebook and X accounts for any negative posts about Trump. Some, including at least one prominent official who testified in Trump’s first impeachment inquiry, are weighing putting in retirement papers, while others maneuver to transfer to seemingly safer agencies. D.C. recruiting firms are seeing booming business from those looking for private-sector work.
Meanwhile, some agencies have moved to reclassify jobs with titles that could clash with Trump’s agenda, especially those promoting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, boosting environmental justice and fighting the effects of climate change. For the first time, some civil servants are taking out liability insurance to cover lawyers if they’re demoted or fired. And in a rare alliance, outgoing Biden administration appointees are joining forces with labor unions to extend collective bargaining agreements, locking in benefits before the incoming administration can seek to undo them.
Before Trump takes office Jan. 20, career staffers are racing to outmaneuver his plans to gut and radically reshape the nonpartisan bureaucracy of 2.3 million. The president-elect has promised to fire thousands of professionals and replace them with political loyalists, slash trillions of dollars from the federal budget, eliminate departments and relocate others away from what he derides as the “deep state” of intransigent bureaucrats in the capital. Russ Vought, Trump’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget, told supporters earlier this year that Trump’s second term would “put the bureaucrats in trauma.”
New York Times, Trump Transition: Did Trump Drain Democrats’ Energy? These Races Will Be the First Test, Reid J. Epstein, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). As Democrats try to fire up their fatigued base, two contests in Virginia will serve as the first measure of partisan enthusiasm since Donald Trump’s victory.
Even as the exhausted nation recovers from its two-year presidential campaign, candidates in a pocket of Northern Virginia are gearing up for a pair of special elections that may serve as barometers of partisan enthusiasm in the Trump 2.0 era.
The contests early next year in Loudoun County, for seats in overlapping districts in Virginia’s State Senate and House of Delegates, will not only determine which party holds majorities in the narrowly divided chambers. They will also be the first significant elections since voters returned President-elect Donald J. Trump to office.
Eight years ago, his surprise victory prompted a wave of Democratic energy, unleashing geysers of fund-raising and a zeal to vote that led the party to special-election victories even in deeply Republican districts.
But since Mr. Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats have focused more on protecting political turf at the state level than on engaging in flashy national demonstrations. Donations to liberal nonprofit groups have not matched the resistance anger that followed Mr. Trump’s first election. And ratings on the left-leaning cable channel MSNBC have dropped — with the hosts of the network’s flagship show having met with the president-elect.
The Loudoun County state legislative districts became vacant when Suhas Subramanyam, a Democratic state senator, resigned after winning an election to the U.S. House on Nov. 5. Kannan Srinivasan, a Democratic member of the Virginia House of Delegates, stepped down from that chamber after winning a Democratic caucus on Nov. 16 for the party’s nomination to replace Mr. Subramanyam.
Then JJ Singh, a first-time candidate, won a Democratic caucus on Nov. 23 to replace Mr. Srinivasan — the third time in November that his district’s voters were asked to go to the polls.
The districts are both heavily Democratic — Terry McAuliffe won more than 60 percent of the vote in each when he lost the 2021 election for governor. Still, party officials worry that a drop in enthusiasm could allow Republicans to snatch away key seats. Republicans have nominated Tumay Harding for the State Senate and Ram Venkatachalam for the State House. Each has emphasized school issues and a desire to end Democratic control of the legislative chambers.
New York Times, Commerce Dept. Is on the Front Lines of China Policy, Julian E. Barnes and Ana Swanson, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). . Over the past four years, the department has confronted China by restricting key exports, a policy that is likely to continue in the Trump administration.
The Commerce Department has traditionally focused on promoting the interests of American business and increasing U.S. exports abroad. But over the last four years, it has taken on a national security role, working to defend the country by restricting exports of America’s most powerful computer chips.
While the Trump administration is likely to remake much of the Biden administration’s economic policy, with a renewed focus on broad tariffs, it is unlikely to roll back the Commerce Department’s evolution.
“I’m truthfully not terribly worried that the Trump administration will undo all the great work we’ve done,” Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, said in an interview. “Number one, it’s at its core national security, which I hope we can all agree on. But two, it is the direction that they were going in.”
It was the first Trump administration that took the initial steps toward the Commerce Department’s evolution, Ms. Raimondo noted, with its decision to put the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei on the “entity list.” Companies on the list are deemed a national security concern, and transfers of technology to them are restricted.
Ms. Raimondo came into the commerce job focused on confronting the challenge of China by building upon the Trump administration’s actions.
She has overseen a significant expansion of U.S. economic and technology restrictions against China. The Biden administration transformed the tough but sometimes erratic actions the Trump administration had taken toward Beijing into more sweeping and systematic limits on shipping advanced technology to China.
The department now imposes export controls on critical artificial intelligence chips in order to slow China’s military modernizati
New York Times, As Donald Trump Threatens Tariffs, Europe and South America Strengthen Ties, Jenny Gross, Liz Alderman and Patricia Cohen, Dec. 7, 2024 (print ed.). The European Union and five South American countries have reached agreement on a deal to establish one of the largest trade zones in the world.
The European Union reached a major trade deal on Friday with five South American countries, concluding a long-delayed negotiation that took on new urgency as President-elect Donald J. Trump threatens to impose tariffs on some of the world’s largest economies.
The deal, between the European Union and members of Mercosur — a bloc that includes Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay — would establish one of the largest trade zones in the world, and would be the European Union’s biggest trade agreement ever.
With European leaders preparing for the possibility that Mr. Trump’s return to office will lead to a more fragmented global economy, the deal is a significant victory for proponents of free trade, linking markets with 780 million people. But it could fuel frustration within the European bloc, with France vehemently opposed to the agreement.
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.Get the best of The Times in your inbox
Make sense of the news, every day, with David Leonhardt.On weekdays and Sundays, we recommend one piece of exceptional writing from The Times — a narrative or essay that takes you someplace you might not expect to go.
America PAC conducted what it described as an expansive ground-game effort on Mr. Trump’s behalf. Mr. Musk came to see defeating President Biden as a vital imperative and swung hard toward Mr. Trump after the assassination attempt against him in July. He became so invested in the effort that he campaigned frequently for the Republican nominee in Pennsylvania, widely seen as the most important battleground state.
Mr. Musk also donated $4 million to America PAC on Nov. 12, a week after Election Day. He has vowed to keep his super PAC active by targeting progressive prosecutors and supporting Mr. Trump’s agenda.
Since the election, Mr. Musk has become inescapable at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club in Florida. He is leading an effort to try to trim the size of the federal government, and he has weighed in on various personnel choices that the incoming president has made.
While some in Mr. Trump’s orbit — and at times the president-elect himself — have at times seemed weary of Mr. Musk’s constant presence, the upside he brings in the form of enormous financial support and a major social media platform have clearly outweighed any concerns.
Mr. Musk’s total spending on the election is not yet known — and may never be. He cut other political checks to conservative down-ballot groups this cycle, including $12 million to two groups trying to elect Republican senators, the Senate Leadership Fund and the Sentinel Action Fund. Mr. Musk, who originally wanted to keep his support for Mr. Trump quiet, may have also funded dark-money entities that will never disclose his involvement or donations.
On Thursday, Mr. Musk was revealed as the hidden funding source behind RBG PAC, a Republican group that worked to elect Mr. Trump but was named after a liberal jurist who despised him.
The Forward, Trump Transition: Internal Project Esther documents describe conspiracy of Jewish ‘masterminds’ seeking to dismantle Western values, Arno Rosenfeld, Dec. 6, 2024. A presentation meant to win supporters for the Heritage Foundation’s plan to fight antisemitism draws a line from George Soros to Antifa and pro-Palestinian protests
The Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, a conservative plan to counter antisemitism, sees the problem as one in which a handful of “masterminds” including Jews like George Soros and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker are seeking to “dismantle Western democracies, values and culture,” according to internal Heritage documents obtained by the Forward.
The documents, a pitch deck that Heritage used in trying to build support from Jewish foundations and other organizations, also outline several tactics the group plans to use to undermine a collection of anti-Zionist nonprofits and progressive groups that it refers to as the Hamas Support Network. The actions include identifying “foreign members vulnerable to deportation” and enlisting law enforcement to “generate uncomfortable conditions” for progressive activists.A slide from the presentation about Project Esther. Graphic by Heritage FoundationRelated
The group behind Project 2025 has a new plan to fight antisemitism
Heritage did not respond to an inquiry Friday about the presentation.NEW weekly newsletterAntisemitism Notebook
The think tank, which also produced the controversial Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump administration, has struggled to attract Jewish supporters for its antisemitism plan, which appears to have been assembled by several evangelical Christian groups.
Project Esther focuses exclusively on left-wing critics of Israel, ignoring the antisemitism problems from white supremacists and other far-right groups. James Carafano, who runs the Heritage Foundation’s antisemitism task force, said in October that “white supremacists are not my problem because white supremacists are not part of being conservative.”Eclectic group of ‘masterminds’
The promotional presentation includes two slides headlined “antisemitism’s ecosystem.” One features a pyramid topped by a list of “progressive ‘elites’ leading the way.” In addition to Soros and his son Alex, who run the Open Society Foundations, it also includes the Pritzker family and the Marxist academic and author Angela Davis.
George Soros has funded a variety of progressive causes and long been a boogeyman among conservatives; Alex recently took over the family foundation. It’s less clear why JB Pritzker, who was first elected governor of Illinois in 2018, was on the list, or his broader family — his sister Penny, who served as a Commerce Secretary under President Barack Obama and a special envoy for Ukraine in the Biden administration, is on the board of Harvard University and has compared pro-Palestinian protesters at the school to the Klu Klux Klan.
Politico reported in May that Pritzker family members ran a foundation that funded groups, including Climate Justice Alliance, which had also participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. But subsequent reporting cast doubt on those ties..
“That’s a completely false story,” JB Pritzker said of the Politico article at the time. He also chided the Chicago City Council for calling for a ceasefire in Gaza early this year.
The pitch deck draws lines from these figures to “Backers,” including foundations both large and small, like Tides, which helps individual donors funnel more than $1 billion to various liberal nonprofits; the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; and Wespac, a tiny charity that sponsors several of the most radical pro-Palestinian groups in the country (and whose board chair is Jewish. Activist movements like Antifa and Black Lives Matter are also included on that tier, below which are “organizers,” including the nonprofit groups Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine and Fight Back, the arm of a Chicago construction workers union.
In the presentation, the work of these leaders, funders and organizations is described as “violent activity” directed at Jews, including “riots.” One slide includes a photo of a violent 2017 demonstration in Paris.A plan to ‘neutralize’ the network
Project Esther’s strategy to “neutralize” this network, according to the documents, includes six distinct “lines of effort” with different outcomes.
The version of the plan publicly released on the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack in Israel, had criticized American Jewish organizations for not taking the threat posed by the “Hamas Support Network” seriously enough. The pitch deck says that Heritage plans to “conduct tailored outreach” to Jews and identify “key influencers” who can help unify the community behind Heritage’s strategy.The presentation included a list of specific tactics Project Esther would deploy to “neutralize” the Hamas Support Network. Graphic by Heritage Foundation
Referring to the activist network as a “cancer,” the group also calls for passing legislation to counter it at the federal, state and local levels. One goal is to get groups designated as “TSEs,” an abbreviation for “terrorism support entity,” which can have severe legal consequences.
President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to make fighting antisemitism a priority in his administration. He has suggested that he’s open to at least some of the tactics referenced in Project Esther, including deporting international students who protest against Israel. And the project was assembled by a group that includes the America First Policy Institute, a think tank staffed by some of his top advisors.
No major Jewish organizations appear to have participated in drafting the plan, or publicly endorsed it since its release.
Everyone is entitled to my own opinion, Commentary: Elderly golfer is an incoherent mess on Meet the Press, Jeff Tiedrich, Dec. 9, 2024. Promises are easy. Policies are hard.
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More On Health Care Exec's Murde
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.
That search continued until Monday morning, when someone in a McDonald’s in Altoona — a small city about 290 miles west of the Hilton where Thompson was killed — recognized Mangione and contacted authorities shortly after 9 a.m., authorities said.
According to court papers released Monday, police in Altoona arrived in the McDonald’s and found Mangione sitting at a table toward the back of the restaurant. Police described him as wearing a blue medical mask and looking at a laptop on the table, with a backpack nearby.
The two officers approached and asked him to pull his mask down, and when he did so, both “immediately recognized him” from the images circulating of the person wanted in connection with the New York shooting, they wrote in the criminal complaint.
Soon after, the officers wrote, they asked “if he had been to New York recently and the male became quiet and started to shake.”
The officers asked him for identification, and he handed over a New Jersey driver’s license that police said later turned out to be a fake, the complaint stated. When officers told him he would get arrested for lying about his identity, he said his name was Luigi Mangione, according to the complaint.
Mangione was placed into custody, handcuffed and searched at the McDonalds, the complaint said. His backpack was searched at the police station, where officers said they found a black pistol and silencer that appeared to be 3D-printed, along with a loaded Glock magazine with six 9mm rounds.
Mangione was arraigned Monday evening in a courthouse near Altoona and denied bail, according to a court official. It was not immediately clear whether he had an attorney.
Joseph Kenny, the New York City police chief of detectives, said Mangione would have to be extradited to New York to face additional charges. The Manhattan district attorney’s office declined to comment on what those charges might be. Officials from that office and the New York police force traveled to Altoona on Monday as part of the investigation.
Peter J. Weeks, the Blair County district attorney, said that once Mangione is charged in New York, officials would seek to have him transported there. If Mangione challenges his extradition, the process could take up to 45 days, Weeks said.
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.
A University of Pennsylvania graduate is in custody following the targeted attack of Brian Thompson, the CEO of major insurance group UnitedHealthcare who was fatally shot outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel ahead of an investor conference, police said Monday.
Luigi Mangione is a suspect in the fatal shooting, authorities confirmed Monday night during a press briefing in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where he was apprehended after an individual at a McDonald's recognized him from the wildly circulated images of the suspect sought in the shooting.Mangione faces 5 charges in PennsylvaniaLuigi Mangione is seen inside the police station in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Dec. 9, 2024.Obtained by ABC News
Mangione, 26, was initially identified as a "strong" person of interest in the shooting death after he was apprehended at the McDonald's, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said during a press briefing in New York on Monday.
Charges could be filed against Mangione in the homicide as early as Monday or Tuesday, authorities said. Investigators are working to determine whether anyone else was involved in Thompson's death.
Mangione was eating at the McDonald's Monday morning when an individual thought he looked suspiciously like the shooting suspect and alerted an employee, who called police, authorities said.
He was carrying a firearm and suppressor "both consistent with the weapon used in the murder," NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said during the press briefing earlier Monday. The gun "may have been made on a 3D printer," police said.
He also had "multiple fraudulent IDs," including a fake New Jersey ID matching the ID the suspect used to check into his New York City hostel before the shooting incident, Tisch said. He was carrying a U.S. passport that identified him as Luigi Mangione, police said.An image of the fake ID used by the Midtown Manhattan shooting suspect to check into an Upper West Side hostel.ABC NewsThis is an image of the ghost gun recovered from Luigi Mangione in Altoona, PA, law enforcement sources told ABC News.Obtained by ABC News
Police also recovered clothing, including a mask consistent with those worn by the wanted individual, as well as a three-page "handwritten document that speaks to both his motivation and mindset," she said.
Mangione was arrested on unrelated charges Monday, police said. He was in possession of a ghost gun capable of firing a 9mm round and will face gun charges in Altoona, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told reporters during the briefing earlier Monday.
He has been charged in Pennsylvania with five crimes, including carrying a gun without a license, forgery, falsely identifying himself to authorities and possessing "instruments of crime," according to a newly released criminal complaint.
The charging document alleges that Mangione lied about his identity to police and carried the ghost gun without a license.
When Altoona police asked him if he had ever been to New York City, Mangione started shaking, according to the charging document. He didn't answer the question directly, police said.
Police said they are working to develop a full sense of his timeline in Pennsylvania and how long he has been in Altoona.
The NYPD sent detectives to Altoona to interview him and are going through the recovered writings and his social media, police said.
"It does seem that he had some ill will toward corporate America," Kenny said.
A Goodreads account that appears to belong to Mangione left a four-star review on Ted Kaczynski's "Industrial Society and Its Future" -- more commonly known as the "Unabomber manifesto" -- and described Kaczynski as "a violent individual -- rightfully imprisoned -- who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy Luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary."
A source confirmed to ABC News that the Goodreads account is part of the law enforcement investigation.
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.
“Slowly but steadily it could turn the West’s youth—its future—into perpetually distracted dopamine junkies ill-equipped to maintain the civilization built by their ancestors,” the article retweeted by Mangione reads.
In one post on X, Mangione responded to a post claiming that people had replaced GOD by “worshipping at the DEI shrine, using made-up pronouns like religious mantras, and firing professors for saying men can't get pregnant.” In his response, Mangione recommended an article from The Telegraph’s Madeline Grant claiming that atheists now worshipped “intolerant new gods” while attacking Scotland’s 2021 anti-hate crime law.
In another post, Mangione advocated for increasing birth rates in Japan by banning sex toys marketed towards men and by replacing internet cafes with athletics to revitalize “traditional Japanese culture.”
This is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of Mangione’s tweets and retweets, which include self-help threads, long posts about the “Great Fall” of the Roman Empire, and vox populi interviews in which a reporter asks people whether men are important in society.
Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
One consistent throughline in Mangione’s online presence is his opposition to smartphones. In another post, he retweeted a link to an article on Bari Weiss’ conservative news site, The Free Press, proscribing a “fix” for children using their phones. One of his favorite books on GoodReads was “How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life” by Caterin Prince.
New York Times, An N.Y.P.D. Manhunt Caught a Subway Shooter. This Time, It’s Different, Matthew Haag and Patrick McGeehan, Dec. 8, 2024 (print ed.). Capturing a suspect who slips away from a crime scene requires solid police work, help from the public and a little luck, experts say. So far, it’s not working.
A shocking early morning act of violence, a frantic New York Police Department search for a suspect and a gunman seemingly in the wind: The year was 2022, and the man the police had fanned out to find was Frank R. James, who had set off smoke grenades inside a crowded subway car in Brooklyn and opened fire.
Now, more than two years later, another manhunt has gripped the city. But unlike Mr. James, who was apprehended the day after his rampage, the man who assassinated the chief executive of a health insurance company just before dawn on Wednesday in Midtown Manhattan has not been caught or even identified after more than four days.
The two most recent fugitive searches in New York City have involved gunmen who made seemingly improbable escapes in a city teeming with surveillance cameras and people. But despite some similarities between the cases and the investigative tactics being used to try to solve them, the search for the man who killed Brian Thompson, right, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, has proved far more challenging.
The suspect’s ability to evade capture appears to be tied to his methodical planning, including wearing a mask and a hood during nearly all of his time in New York City and paying with cash everywhere, along with using a fake driver’s license.
And unlike Mr. James, who did essentially nothing to conceal himself after slipping away amid the chaotic aftermath of the shooting that wounded 10 people, the suspect in Mr. Thompson’s killing fled quickly into Central Park, away from the surveillance cameras that blanket much of Manhattan. He also appears to have left the state long before the police could possibly have begun to track his movements.
“I don’t think I’ve seen this level of operational preplanning in any crime, never mind in a murder,” said Kenneth E. Corey, a former chief of department in the New York Police Department.
New York Times, UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Shooting: Torrent of Anger for Health Insurance Industry Follows C.E.O.’s Killing, Dionne Searcey and Madison Malone Kircher, Dec. 6, 2024 (print ed.). The shooting death of a UnitedHealthcare executive in Manhattan has unleashed Americans’ frustrations with an industry that often denies coverage and reimbursement for medical claims.
The fatal shooting on Wednesday of a top UnitedHealthcare executive, Brian Thompson, on a Manhattan sidewalk has unleashed a torrent of morbid glee from patients and others who say they have had negative experiences with health insurance companies at some of the hardest times of their lives.
It is unclear what motivated the incident or whether it was tied to Mr. Thompson’s work in the insurance industry. The police have yet to identify the shooter who is still on the loose.
But that did not stop social media commenters from leaping to conclusions and from showing a blatant lack of sympathy over the death of a man who was a husband and father of two children.
“Thoughts and deductibles to the family,” read one comment underneath a video of the shooting posted online by CNN. “Unfortunately my condolences are out-of-network.”
On TikTok, one user wrote, “I’m an ER nurse and the things I’ve seen dying patients get denied for by insurance makes me physically sick. I just can’t feel sympathy for him because of all of those patients and their families.”
The dark commentary after the death of Mr. Thompson, a 50-year-old insurance executive from Maple Grove, Minn., highlighted the anger and frustration over the state of health care in America, where those with private insurance often find themselves in Kafka-esque tangles while seeking reimbursement for medical treatment and are often denied.
Washington Post, NYPD searches for gunman after fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO, Shayna Jacobs, Daniel Gilbert, Trisha Thadani, Aaron Gregg and Jarrett Ley, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). Brian Thompson was heading to the Hilton Midtown for a conference when the brazen, targeted attack (shown above) occurred, police said.
UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, right, was fatally shot on a Midtown Manhattan sidewalk early Wednesday morning in what police called a premeditated ambush that sent them on a manhunt for the unidentified gunman, who fled the area on a bicycle and was last seen heading into Central Park.
The health insurance executive from Minnesota was walking outside the New York Hilton Midtown about 6:40 a.m., before an investors conference his company was holding in the hotel, when a gunman wearing a hood and a mask fired off several rounds from a pistol. Thompson had been staying in another hotel across the street.
He was killed in one of the busiest parts of the city, an area teeming with tourists as well as people in business suits. Even as New Yorkers prepared for a bustling Christmas season with the traditional tree lighting Wednesday night at Rockefeller Center, officers had cordoned off sections of 54th Street outside the Hilton with yellow crime scene tape and were counting 9mm casings on the ground.
Police tracked the gunman’s movements in a neighborhood saturated by city-operated and private surveillance cameras, releasing images of him making a cash purchase at a nearby Starbucks and then, a short time later, taking aim at Thompson, who authorities said was shot in the back and leg.
Surveillance camera footage obtained by The Post appears to show the suspect exiting the 57th Street F Train station timestamped at 6:15 a.m. The individual — wearing clothing, shoes and a backpack that match images released by police — leaves the station and walks briskly down Sixth Avenue toward the Hilton Hotel, where police say they responded to a call of a person being shot at 6:46 a.m.
The targeted shooting of the chief executive officer of an American company, in the nation’s financial capital, shocked the health and business communities nationally and in Minnetonka, Minnesota, outside Minneapolis, where UnitedHealth Group is headquartered. Police said they were searching for a motive.
New York Police Department investigators were looking into whether anyone had a known grudge against the victim. Police said they were combing social media and speaking to witnesses in an effort to track down anyone who may have knowledge of why Thompson was killed, offering a $10,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest and prosecution. They said they also were looking into the possibility that the shooter had been hired to kill the executive.
Thompson, a 50-year-old Iowa native, joined UnitedHealth Group in 2004 and rose through a series of top leadership posts to become the CEO of its largest unit, the health insurance firm UnitedHealthcare.
The company is a dominating presence in American health care, providing employer and individual health coverage to about 50 million Americans. UnitedHealthcare brought in $281 billion last year, accounting for about 75 percent of its parent company’s revenue; had it been a stand-alone firm, it would have ranked among the top 10 publicly traded American companies by sales, according to data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence.
The Hartmann Report, The Medicare Advantage Trap: What They Don’t Tell You, Thom Hartmann, right, 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?
Yesterday a gunman assassinated the chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, as he arrived at a meeting of investors in New York City.
While authorities are still investigating, officials have released the information that the casings of the bullets that killed Thompson bore the words “deny,” “defend,” “depose,” all words associated with companies’ denial of health insurance, taken from the longer phrases “deny the claim,” “defend the lawsuit,” “depose the patient.”
While those clues could simply be a red herring, posters on social media have cheered what they seem to see as revenge against an abusive system in which people’s lives are at the mercy of executives who prioritize profits.
Health insurance companies have long been under scrutiny for their practices. For the past two years, ProPublica has run a long series exploring the different ways in which companies have developed systems to deny healthcare coverage to their policyholders.
UnitedHealthcare has been no exception either to such practices or to scrutiny. Its parent group UnitedHealth has a market valuation of $560 billion and was the eighth largest corporation in the world last year as measured by revenue. This year, UnitedHealthcare—Thompson’s unit—is expected to bring in $280 billion in revenue.
UnitedHealth is embroiled in a number of lawsuits. Andrew Stanton of Newsweek reported that on November 14, 2023, families of two now-deceased patients sued UnitedHealthcare over denial of coverage for Medicare Advantage patients for nursing home stays prescribed by their doctors. Medicare Advantage is the private insurance alternative to Medicare that receives a flat fee from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It’s an enormously profitable industry, and UnitedHealth controls almost a third of it.
The lawsuit alleges that UnitedHealthcare uses artificial intelligence to deny claims from Medicare Advantage policyholders. The lawsuit claims that the company knowingly uses an algorithm that makes errors 90% of the time because it also knows that only about 0.2% of policy holders will appeal the decision to deny their claims. Last month the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hammered UnitedHealth for dramatic increases in their denial rates for post-acute care between 2019 and 2022 as it switched to AI authorizations.
On the same day as the shooting, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance covering Connecticut, New York, and Missouri announced it would cover anesthesia during surgery or procedures only for a specific time period in order to make insurance more affordable by reducing overbilling.
After an outcry both from anesthesiologists and the public, the company today retracted its policy change, saying it had never intended to avoid “medically necessary anesthesia,” but meant simply to “clarify the appropriateness of anesthesia consistent with well-established clinical guidelines.” Their explanation might have calmed the news cycle, but its suggestion that the insurance officials rather than doctors should determine what anesthesia is appropriate for a patient during surgery echoed the argument in the UnitedHealthcare lawsuit.
Thompson’s murder seems to be a cultural moment in which popular fury over the power big business has over ordinary Americans’ lives exploded. Maureen Tkacik of The American Prospect noted, “Only about 50 million customers of America’s reigning medical monopoly might have a motive to exact revenge upon the UnitedHealthcare CEO.” The shooter, whose actual motive remains unknown, is fast becoming a folk hero.
Social media has exploded with users writing things like “[t]his claim for sympathy has been denied”; songs featuring the words “deny, “defend,” and “depose”; and recorded commentary condemning the healthcare insurance industry. UnitedHealth Group posted its sadness about Thompson’s death on Facebook yesterday about 1:00 p.m.; 36 hours later the post had 65,000 laughing emojis under it.
Security expert Charlie Carroll expressed surprise to Josh Fiallo of the Daily Beast that Thompson did not have a security detail. “We’re living in a world where people are extremely disgruntled,” Carroll said. “When people lose trust in the system, you start seeing more kidnappings and assassinations because they feel like they have to take matters into their own hands.”
In the wake of the shooting, UnitedHealthcare and several other insurance companies took down from their websites the names and photographs of their officials.
Emptywheel, Analysis Zeynep Tufekci’s Two Blind Spots Cross at DOGE, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), Dec. 7, 2024.The glee surrounding Brian Thompson's 
death is not unprecedented -- Donald Trump campaigned on a similar mob glee, targeting Paul Pelosi, to get elected. And then he installed a bunch of billionaires to start looting. And politicians like Elizabeth Warren have already suggested some "broad public solutions" to that looting.
Zeynep Tufekci has a column at NYT scolding thousands of people on social media for taking glee in the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
I don’t care one way or another for the scold. I care about how she makes a remarkable claim and then uses it to engage in political nihilism.Tufekci claims that she can’t remember any murder being so openly celebrated in the US. "I’ve been studying social media for a long time, and I can’t think of any other incident when a murder in this country has been so openly celebrated."
From there, Tufekci likens this moment to the Gilded Age, where social upheaval led to exploitation and political violence.
.As a threshold matter, I find her claim that this is a unique moment of glee to be … forgetful. Just two years ago, after all, Donald Trump and Elon Musk — whose platform has encouraged such mob celebrations — both led their mob in vicious jokes about Paul Pelosi’s near-murder.
Indeed, Trump used attacks on Paul Pelosi at least twice in his campaign — most recently, campaigning with some cops in September.
How do you forget that the richest man in the world and the President-elect have engaged in just such celebration of political violence (and that’s before he pardons seditionists)?
Donald Trump got elected by celebrating political violence. And then he proceeded to install at least 11 billionaires, ready to start looting government.
Which is where Tufekci’s failure to find any will to push for systematic solutions gets curious. After all, Lina Khan’s efforts to rein in monopolies played a role in last year’s election.
WaPo’s coverage of all the billionaires Trump installed quotes Josh Hawley along with Elizabeth Warren and Noah Bookbinder.
Trump’s team of rivals stands in stark contrast with President Joe Biden’s Cabinet, which had a combined net worth of $118 million in the first year of his presidency, according to Forbes. Trump’s picks have not yet released their financial disclosures, but his 2025 Cabinet is likely to be even richer than the first Trump Cabinet, which had a combined net worth of $6.2 billion.[snip]Trump’s selections may be more inclined to look out for the interests of their own businesses and their fellow billionaires than for working-class voters, said Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.“It is hard to see how a Cabinet made up largely of the very, very wealthiest of Americans is going to have an understanding of what the needs of regular Americans are,” he said.[snip]
And even beyond Khan’s work, the Biden Administration took efforts to reverse the kind of concentration that made Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg rich. They’ve even taken action against … United Healthcare.
The richest man in the world is about to come for VA Health Care and once that fails to make way for new tax cuts, Medicare. No one knows where this moment of rage will go. The oligarchs have the means to exercise the power of the state against those complaining that Trump’s billionaires plan to use bullshit claims about efficiency to make things far worse.But the people who brought us to this moment where mobs take glee at political violence are about to loot the government.And I’m pretty sure Senator Warren will be ready at hand to explain what is going down.
New York Times, The ‘Chilling’ Fatal Shooting of a C.E.O. Has Business Leaders on Edge, Emma Goldberg, Dec. 6, 2024. After Brian Thompson of UnitedHealthcare was killed in Manhattan, the phones at corporate security firms were “ringing off the hook.”
A Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company raised its drug prices, and then board members and executives received phone calls threatening violence. A health care company’s board meeting was disrupted after board members were targeted in “swatting” attacks that wrongly sent law enforcement officers to their homes.
These incidents happened before the fatal shooting of Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive, in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday. The police had not offered a motive for the shooting as of Thursday night, or said it was related to Mr. Thompson’s work in the insurance industry.
The killing, however, stunned business leaders, some of whom were already concerned about safety. Over the last five years, there has been a sharp rise in targeted attacks, digital and offline, of executives and their families, said Chris Pierson, the chief executive of BlackCloak, a digital executive protection firm. Health care, biomedical and pharmaceutical leaders tend to be targeted more often than executives in other industries, according to the firm’s data.
Digital platforms have made it easier to obtain information about executives’ identities and locations, while social media has fanned the flames of vitriol directed at these corporate leaders.
Businesses have been increasing their spending on protection: The median amount spent on executive security among the S&P 500 companies that disclose that information doubled from 2021 to 2023, according to Equilar, an executive compensation research firm.
New York Times, Was Brian Thompson’s Killer a Hit Man? Unlikely, Experts Say, Annie Correal, Dec. 6, 2024. The murder of Brian Thompson did not appear to have been committed by a coldly calculating professional, according to people who study criminal behavior.
For the general public, the shooting in Manhattan of the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare on Wednesday seemed like something off Netflix: a coldblooded morning murder outside a hotel, a hooded man shooting a corporate bigwig from behind, the victim turning to face the attacker before crumpling to the ground, mortally wounded.
But beyond those images from a dark surveillance video, little is known about the shooting or the gunman. The police have not established a motive for the killing, and three days into their search they have not publicly named a suspect or made an arrest.
For those who professionally study criminal behavior, though, the shooting was packed with crucial information, with the killer’s every known move providing new opportunities to speculate about who he might be.
The police said the shooting was a targeted attack by someone with experience with firearms. But was that someone acting on a personal grudge — or a hired hand? And if the killer was a hit man, was he an amateur or a seasoned professional?
The consensus among experts following the killing of Brian Thompson, the veteran chief executive of one of the nation’s largest health insurers, was that the shooter could indeed handle himself around a gun, but that everything else suggested that he was unlikely to have been hired to commit the crime.
“Forgive me for saying too much on too little evidence, but it looks like the kind of guy that made up his mind that he was doing the right thing,” said David Shapiro, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, and a former F.B.I. special agent. “He didn’t look like a guy that was fearful.”
He added: “In terms of a professional hit man, that seems unlikely. It would be very hard to get somebody to do something like this. It’s very high risk.”
The gunman waited by a specific entrance to the New York Hilton Midtown and fired his weapon with confidence. He also appeared to have outfitted his gun with a silencer, which are rarely used in murders.
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.
The union made sense, at first, when you rationalized that she was famous, and he was a Kennedy and an environmental lawyer. His anti-vax stuff is weird, but then again, Hollywood is also a weird place, with people rolling jade over their faces and stuffing jade up their hoo-has and spending $22 for a single dumb smoothie at a grocery store called Erewhon. The spectrum of nutty is sometimes a circle. Mazel tov, you crazy kids.
Then, in 2022, RFK Jr. compared coronavirus restrictions to the Holocaust, and accused Anthony S. Fauci of perpetuating “fascism.” Hines responded on Twitter: “My husband’s opinions are not a reflection of my own. While we love each other, we differ on many current issues.” This sounded like the kind of statement that usually precedes a carefully crafted conscious uncoupling. But instead it preceded the announcement that Kennedy was running for president, with Hines by his side. “I support Bobby and I want to be there for him, and I want him to feel loved and supported by me,” she told the New York Times.
Then the personal stuff started to trickle out — the stuff about planting a dead bear cub in Central Park, the stuff about strapping a decaying whale head to his car roof, the stuff about the nanny who said he had sexually assaulted her (he allegedly sent her a text saying he had “no memory” of the incident) — and you thought, Eesh, these things could not possibly have been part of Kennedy’s courtship disclosures, and once Cheryl is fully aware, it’s over. He had a brain worm, he’d once revealed in a deposition, and it had eaten part of his brain. Girl, run.
But no! She persevered. In August, Kennedy officially suspended his hopeless presidential campaign and further announced that, instead of supporting Kamala Harris, the son of a Democratic dynasty would be supporting Donald Trump. Earlier in the year, Kennedy was asked on a “Curb” premiere red carpet whether he would consider becoming Trump’s running mate. “I don’t think that my marriage would survive it,” he responded, prompting Hines to quip: “I think he’s right.”
Well, now she’ll leave, you might think, but you are being too literal: Kennedy did not become Trump’s running mate, he’s merely Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, so here we are.
If political betrayals did not end this marriage, what about personal scandals? Because, in September, after the brain worms and the “fascism” and the allusions to making ivermectin and raw milk available throughout the land — after all that, a 31-year-old reporter from New York magazine was suspended when it was revealed that she had engaged in a “personal relationship” with Kennedy, about whom she had written a profile for the magazine.
A week later, there was Cheryl, photographed in Paris, holding her hands up to her face with her fingers ostentatiously splayed outward to show us that her ring finger still bore a wedding band.
I have spent more time than is reasonable (and truly, any amount of time is unreasonable) thinking about the interior life of Cheryl Hines, a woman who has gone from playing a beleaguered wife on prestige television to a beleaguered wife in real life, hanging on to a husband whose hero’s journey is one absurd plot twist after another, whose soundtrack is a tuba.
But more than that, Hines is making me think about the ways we talk about political wives. The things we think we know about them, the inner lives we invent. The fact that for an entire term, delusional resistance figures speculated that Melania Trump was their ally on the inside — Did she secretly hate her husband? — except she never left, and her memoir published earlier this year makes it clear that she never will. The way that observers have expected Usha Vance to moderate her husband when she has given no public indication that she thinks he needs moderating. The Hillary Clinton of it all.
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.
New York Times, How Kennedy Has Worked Abroad to Weaken Global Public Health Policy, Selam Gebrekidan, Justin Scheck, Sarah Hurtes and Pete McKenzie, Dec. 1, 2024 (print ed.). Donald Trump’s health secretary pick, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and his nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, have worked to undermine policies on measles, AIDS and more.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is in line to lead the Department of Health and Human Services in the next Trump administration, is well-known for promoting conspiracy theories and vaccine skepticism in the United States.
But Mr. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, has also spent years working abroad to undermine policies that have been pillars of global health policy for a half-century, records show.
He has done this by lending his celebrity, and the name of his nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, to a network of overseas chapters that sow distrust in vaccine safety and spread misinformation far and wide.
He, his organizations and their officials have interfered with vaccination efforts, undermined sex education campaigns meant to stem the spread of AIDS in Africa, and railed against global organizations like the World Health Organization that are in charge of health initiatives.
Along the way, Mr. Kennedy has partnered with, financed or promoted fringe figures — people who claim that 5G cellphone towers cause cancer, that homosexuality and contraceptive education are part of a global conspiracy to reduce African fertility and that the World Health Organization is trying to steal countries’ sovereignty.
Washington Post, The New Administration: Trump’s former FDA commissioner warns RFK Jr. could ‘cost lives,’ Dan Diamond, Nov. 30, 2024 (print ed.). Scott Gottlieb, right, who led the Food and Drug Administration during the Trump administration, on Friday warned that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could “cost lives” if confirmed as the next secretary of Health and Human Services.
“You’re going to see measles, mumps and rubella vaccination rates go down,” Gottlieb said on CNBC, referencing Kennedy’s longtime criticism of federal recommendations for childhood immunizations, and noting a recent decline in childhood vaccination rates. The nation is approaching a “tipping point,” Gottlieb said, where a continued decline in childhood vaccines could soon lead to measles outbreaks and deaths of children.
“We’re going to start seeing epidemics of diseases that have long been vanquished, and, God forbid, we see polio reemerge in this country,” he said.
Gottlieb said he had been warning senators against confirming Kennedy to run the federal health department, although he did not identify with whom he had spoken. He added that Kennedy, who founded one of the country’s most prominent antivaccine groups, had “smart people” around him who could take immediate steps to affect Americans’ access to vaccines, such as changing federal vaccine recommendations.
“There’s a lot of things that they could do day one, very easily, administratively,” Gottlieb said.
NBC News, RFK Jr. attacked the CDC’s ‘fascism’ and likened vaccinating children to abuse by the Catholic Church, Brandy Zadrozny, Nov. 27, 2024. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary, also argued for jailing vaccine scientists in previously unreported comments at autism conferences.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a dark view of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2019, he called the federal agency’s vaccine division a fascist enterprise and accused it of knowingly hurting children. He also compared what he saw as a widespread conspiracy to hide harms from the child vaccination program to the cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
“The word ‘fascism’ in Italian means a bundle of sticks, and what it means is the bundle is more important than the sticks,” Kennedy said in previously unreported remarks in 2019 to a private audience at AutismOne, a conference for parents of autistic children. “The institution, CDC and the vaccine program, is more important than the children that it’s supposed to protect.
New York Times, Trump Transition: Kennedy’s Inheritance: How Addiction and Trauma Shaped a Turbulent Life, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Susanne Craig and Rebecca Davis O’Brien, Nov. 29, 2024. Donald Trump’s pick to be health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has had a life of fame and addiction, and a career intertwined with conspiracy theories.
New York Times, How Will Trump’s Covid Contrarians Handle the Next Pandemic? Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Nov. 28, 2024 (print ed.). President-elect Donald J. Trump’s selections to run the nation’s health agencies are alarming infectious disease experts.
President-elect Donald J. Trump had already succeeded in rattling the nation’s public health and biomedical establishment by the time he announced on Tuesday that he had picked Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to run the National Institutes of Health. But amid growing fears of a deadly bird flu pandemic, 
perhaps no one was more rattled than experts in infectious disease.
Dr. Bhattacharya, a Stanford University medical economist and outspoken opponent of lockdowns, masking, school closures and other Covid-19 mitigation measures, and Mr. Trump’s other health picks have one thing in common. They are all considered Covid contrarians whose views raise questions about how they would handle an infectious disease crisis.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right, Mr. Trump’s choice for health secretary, has said he wants the N.I.H. to focus on chronic disease and “give infectious disease a break for about eight years.” Dr. Martin Makary, the president-elect’s choice to run the Food and Drug Administration, incorrectly predicted in 2021 that the nation was “racing toward an extremely low level of infection.”
Dr. David Weldon, a Republican former congressman who is Mr. Trump’s choice to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has espoused the debunked theory that thimerosal, a mercury compound in certain vaccines, causes autism. As a congressman, he introduced legislation that would 
strip the C.D.C. of its role in ensuring vaccine safety, saying the agency had a “conflict of interest” because it also promotes vaccination.
And Dr. Mehmet Oz, left, the talk show host who has been picked by Mr. Trump to run Medicare and Medicaid, prodded officials in the first Trump administration to give emergency authorization for the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19. The F.D.A. later revoked the authorization when studies showed the drug carried risks, including serious heart issues, to coronavirus patients.
Washington Post, Trump picks Jay Bhattacharya to lead NIH, overseeing scientific research, Dan Diamond, Nov. 28, 2024 (print ed.). The president-elect also named Jim O’Neill, a Silicon Valley investor and former federal health official, to be deputy secretary of Health and Human Services. Jay Bhattacharya will preside over the National Institutes of Health, a nearly $50 billion agency, if confirmed by the Senate.
Recent Relevant Headlines
The Bulwark, Opinion: RFK Jr. Said the Government May Have Planned COVID, Sam Stein and Andrew Egger
Politico, Health Care: Trump transition closes in on picks for top health posts
The Hill, Medicare Advantage gets ally in Dr. Oz
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.
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
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 3, 2024 [South Korea's Attempted Coup], Heather Cox Richardson
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.
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.”
Trump’s transition did not respond to a request for comment. Blanche did not respond to a message sent to his law firm email address.
The issue extends beyond Blanche, given that Trump also picked two of his other attorneys — Emil Bove and D. John Sauer — for principal associate deputy attorney general and solicitor general, respectively. Those are also top Justice Department roles. But Blanche has been tapped for the No. 2 position, just below the attorney general, and he has effectively been the face of Trump’s defense team since he signed on as his lawyer last year.
Blanche represented Trump through a tumultuous period that saw four separate indictments against Trump as he campaigned for another term in the White House. He led Trump’s defense team in three of the four cases: a federal case in Florida accusing Trump of mishandling classified materials; a separate federal case in D.C. charging him with trying to obstruct Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election; and a New York case involving charges of falsifying business records related to a 2016 hush money payment.
The two federal prosecutions against Trump have been dismissed, while the ultimate outcome of the New York case remains unclear. A jury there convicted Trump of 34 felony counts in May, though the judge has postponed sentencing multiple times, most recently to give the president-elect’s attorneys more time to argue the case should be thrown out given the results of the election.Former president Donald Trump addressed reporters before entering a Manhattan courtroom on April 15. (Video: The Washington Post)
While it remains unclear what specific steps Trump’s Justice Department could take involving matters where Blanche represented the president-elect, Trump has demanded retribution against his perceived foes.
Among other things, Trump has suggested that special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the two federal cases, should be thrown out of the country and said Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), who brought the New York case, should be prosecuted. The Washington Post has also reported that Trump plans to fire all members of Smith’s team.
“It’s not at all unusual for a criminal defense lawyer in the private sector to join DOJ,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University and an expert in legal and government ethics. “What makes this situation possibly fraught, I think, is not so much that revolving door as much as the threats, the completely inappropriate threats of retaliation.”
The deputy attorney general is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations at the Justice Department, a sprawling agency with more than 115,000 employees that bills itself as “the world’s largest law office.”
Blanche has experience with that office, having spent nearly a decade as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, according to his law firm’s website. He went on to become a criminal defense attorney and was a partner at the firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, before resigning to start his own firm and represent Trump.
During the New York trial, Blanche drew some reprimands from the judge, acting New York Supreme Court justice Juan Merchan, who told Blanche at one point that he was “losing all credibility.”
The judge found Trump in contempt, imposed a gag order and fined him for violating it. Hours after Trump was convicted, Blanche went on CNN to say Trump’s behavior was “exemplary.” He also criticized the prosecution, calling the case “completely unjust.”
Blanche’s stout defense of the president-elect continued with the court filing this month in New York. “Just as a sitting President is completely immune from any criminal process, so too is President Trump as President-elect,” Blanche and Bove wrote in arguing that the case should be dismissed. Prosecutors in Manhattan have suggested instead delaying any criminal proceedings until after Trump’s second term ends.
Experts said there was no issue with Blanche continuing to represent Trump during the transition period, emphasizing that he is a private citizen and has obligations toward Trump and any other clients.
Ethics expert Stephen Gillers said if he were advising Blanche, he would suggest that he stop representing Trump once he is formally nominated as deputy attorney general, presuming the New York case remains active at that point. “It looks bad when you’re representing the president while you’re awaiting confirmation for DOJ deputy,” said Gillers, a law professor emeritus at New York University.
Still, “the clear dividing line is the moment he’s sworn in,” Gillers said. Then, he said, “his client will change. His client will be the United States, and only the United States.”
Trump’s first attorney general in his first term, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election after it emerged that he had met with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the campaign and did not disclose that to senators during his confirmation.
Trump was outraged by Sessions’s recusal, and he remained angered by it years later, blaming Sessions for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s lengthy probe into whether Trump campaign officials had coordinated with Russian efforts.
Sessions was right to recuse himself, said Clark, the Washington University professor. But Trump’s reaction to his decision signals why it would be important for members of the Senate Judiciary Committee involved in Blanche’s confirmation hearing to “get on the record exactly what the scope of his recusals will be, where he sees the line of where he cannot participate,” Clark said.
While Justice Department prosecutors work for the executive branch, they have long operated “independent of presidential power,” said Scott Cummings, a UCLA law professor who teaches legal ethics.
That separation is based on rules and tradition, rather than constitutional constraints, Cummings said, adding that Trump picking his defense attorneys for top Justice Department jobs appears meant to “undercut the norm of independence” and bring the department under the president’s control.
Wald, the University of Denver professor, said Blanche is clearly qualified to be deputy attorney general but should steer clear of any Justice Department business that intersects with his previous work for Trump.
There have been attacks on the rule of law in the United States for the past decade or so, Wald said, and it’s important “to shore up trust and confidence in legal institutions,” including the Justice Department.
“An easy, easy solution could be simply to make sure that people who represented the president recently are not the same people making decisions about the very same matters on behalf of the United States of America,” Wald said.
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.
Often history tells us how the future may turn out: Trump isn’t the first American politician to use lies and slanders to whip up a war-like frenzy. Or to use the language of war for political gain.
Bush Junior wasn’t the first president to have lied to us about foreign affairs and war, or to use lies to justify eviscerating the Constitution. For example, Lyndon Johnson lied about a non-existent attack on the US warship Maddox in the Vietnamese Gulf of Tonkin. William McKinley (the presidency after which Karl Rove has said he’d modeled the Bush presidency) lied about an attack on the USS Maine to get us into the Spanish-American war in The Philippines and Cuba.
But most relevant to today's situation were John Adams’ version of Trump’s slanders when Adams (shown at left in an official portrait by John Trumbull circa 1792 when Adams was vice president), sent three emissaries to France and criminals soliciting bribes approached them late one evening. Adams referred to these three unidentified Frenchmen as “Mr. X, Mr. Y, and Mr. Z,” and made them out to represent such an insult and a threat against America that it may presage war.
Adams’ use of “The XYZ Affair” to gain political capital — much like Trump demonizes Hispanic and Haitian immigrants for political gain — nearly led us to war with France and helped him carve a large (although temporary) hole in the Constitution. Similarly, much like Trump’s anti-media “enemy of the people” rhetoric, John Adams then used that frenzy to jail newspaper editors and average citizens alike who spoke out against him and his policies.
The backstory is both fascinating and hopeful.
At that time in the late 1790s, Adams was President and Jefferson (shown in a portrait at right by Rembrandt Peale) was Vice President. Adams led the Federalist Party (which today could be said to 
have reincarnated as the Republican Party), and Jefferson had just brought together two Anti-Federalist parties — the Democrats and the Republicans — into one party called The Democratic Republicans. (Today they’re known as the Democratic Party, the longest-lasting political party in history. They dropped “Republican” from their name in the 1820-1830 era).
Adams and his Federalist cronies, using war hysteria with France as a wedge issue, were pushing the Alien & Sedition Acts through Congress, and even threw into prison Democratic Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont for speaking out against the Federalists on the floor of the House of Representatives.
Adams was leading the United States in the direction of a fascistic state with a spectacularly successful strategy of vilifying Jefferson and his Party as anti-American and pro-French. He was America’s first Trump, albeit nowhere near as toxic or psychopathic.
Adams rhetoric was described as “manly” by the Federalist newspapers, which admiringly published dozens of his threatening rants against France, suggesting that Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans were less than patriots and perhaps even traitors because of their opposition to the unnecessary war with France that Adams was simultaneously trying to gin up and saying he was working to avoid.
Jefferson knew that Adams’ Federalists did not represent the true heart and soul of America, and commented to Taylor about how Adams had been using divide-and-conquer politics, and fear-mongering about war with France (the XYZ Affair) with some success.
Jefferson did everything he could to stop that generation’s version of Trump, but Adams had the Federalists in control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and pushed through the Alien and Sedition Acts. In protest, Jefferson left town the day they were signed, never to return until after Adams left the presidency.
The tide was turned, to use Jefferson’s phrase, by the election of 1800, as Dan Sisson and I document in our book The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction — and What This Means Today.
The abuses of the Federalists were so burned into the people’s minds when Jefferson's party came to power and he freed the imprisoned newspaper editors so reform-minded newspapers were started back up again, that the Federalists disintegrated altogether as a party over the next two decades.
As may well happen to Trump’s GOP two or four years from now.
All because average citizens and pamphleteers — and a handful of progressive politicians — stood up and challenged the lies of a fear-mongering president, and politicians of principle were willing to lead.
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.
Politico, 2024 Elections: Trump voters feel very differently about things now that he’s won, our new poll shows, Jessica Piper, Nov. 29, 2024 (print ed.). A pair of POLITICO|Morning Consult polls, one conducted in the final days of the election and the other conducted after Trump won, show how public opinion has changed.
Donald Trump’s supporters thought voter fraud could determine the election outcome — until he won.
Heading into Election Day, nearly 9 in 10 Trump voters said fraud was a serious issue. Afterward, just a bit over one-third said so.
Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris has scrambled public opinion about a range of other issues, too. For example, his supporters were also more likely to feel good about the economy after the election — while Harris supporters adopted a more negative outlook.
Those are among the results of a new POLITICO|Morning Consult poll, designed to measure change in public opinion before and after the election. The results largely track with recent consumer sentiment data and comments from Republican leaders.
Our new poll showed voters’ perceptions of issues like election security and the economy swung substantially post-election, with deep differences based on who they voted for. The poll also found mixed expectations for a second Trump term.
The first poll (toplines, crosstabs) was conducted from Oct. 30 to Nov. 1, the week before the election, while the second (toplines, crosstabs) was in the field from Nov. 20 through 22, two weeks after Trump’s victory. Both surveys sampled more than 4,000 registered voters, with a margin of error of 2 percentage points.
Here are some of the big takeaways we learned from the results.Trump supporters worried less about voter fraud after he won
In polling just days before the election, Trump supporters expressed little confidence in the election outcome, with a whopping 87 percent substantially or somewhat agreeing with the statement that voter fraud was a “serious issue” that could determine the outcome of the election. Among Harris supporters, roughly half expressed similar worries.
That partisan divide disappeared after Election Day.
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.
These are frenzied times for the nascent Department of Government Efficiency.
In Silicon Valley, tech leaders are eagerly seeking positions or introductions to the department, even though for now it is not an actual part of government, but a loose grouping that Elon Musk named after an internet meme. On his social media platform, X, Mr. Musk posted a “Godfather”-style photo of himself as the “Dogefather,” asking government employees, “What did you get done this week?”
And in Washington, a House subcommittee has been announced to help push through President-elect Donald J. Trump’s vision, announced on Nov. 12, for a department that would slash the $6.7 trillion federal budget.
Members of Congress — even Democratic ones — have been offering up ideas for where to cut what Mr. Musk said could be $2 trillion out of the budget.
“It’s going to be very easy,” Elon Musk’s mother, Maye Musk, told Fox News on Tuesday, after she sat in on some of her son’s meetings. Mr. Musk will 
lead the department along with Vivek Ramaswamy, right, a former Republican presidential candidate.
The coming months will show if her prediction proves right.
When Mr. Trump takes office, Mr. Musk’s group will face a daunting reality. An entire apparatus has developed over the centuries that allows the government to keep marching on in the face of economic shocks, wartime hardships, or — as in this case — political vows to diminish its size and spending.
Any effort to slash the federal government and its 2.3 million civilian workers will likely face resistance in Congress, lawsuits from activist groups and delays mandated by federal rules. Unlike in his businesses, Mr. Musk will not be the sole decider, but will have to build consensus among legislators, executive-branch staffers, his co-leader and Mr. Trump himself. And federal rules ostensibly prevent Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy from making decisions in private, unlike how many matters are handled in the business world.
Meetings would have to be open and minutes made public, said Brian D. Feinstein, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies administrative law.
“All of this would have to happen in the sunlight,” Mr. Feinstein said.
A 1972 law says federal open-records laws apply to advisory committees. If a committee does not follow those rules, it could be sued — and a judge could order the committee to stop meeting, or order the government to disregard its advice.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump’s presidential transition team, Brian Hughes, declined to answer detailed questions about the effort. He sent a written statement, saying that Mr. Ramaswamy and Mr. Musk “will work together slashing excess regulations, cutting wasteful expenditures, and restructuring federal agencies.”
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'
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
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.
Recent Relevant Headlines
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then Israeli Foreign Minister Yoav Gallant (File pool photo).
New York Times,Middle East War Updates: International Criminal Court Issues Arrest Warrants for Netanyahu and GallantNew York Times, Will the Lebanon Deal Break the Gaza Deadlock? Experts Doubt ItNew York Times, Biden Says Israel and Lebanon Have Agreed to Cease-Fire; Deal Could End Conflict With Hezbollah That Has Lasted Over a Year
More On U.S. Tariffs, Trump Budget Threats, Foreign Police, Defense
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
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.
Recent Relevant Headlines
New York Times, Biden and Xi Meet, Delivering Messages Seemingly Intended for Trump, Zolan Kanno-Youngs
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, 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.”
Recent Relevant Headlines
New York Times, Syrian Rebels Breach City of Aleppo, in Biggest Advance in Years
U.S. Law, Cases, Courts
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, 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.
New York Times, Inside the Supreme Court Ethics Debate: Who Judges the Justices? Jodi Kantor and Abbie VanSickle, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). In private meetings and memos, the justices made new rules for themselves — then split on whether they could, or should, be enforced.
As the summer of 2023 ended, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court began trading even-more-confidential-than-usual memos, avoiding their standard email list and instead passing paper documents in envelopes to each chambers. Faced with ethics controversies and a plunge in public trust, they were debating rules for their own conduct, according to people familiar with the process.
Weeks later, as a united front, they announced the results: the court’s first-ever ethics code. “It’s remarkable that we were able to agree unanimously,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said in a television interview this year.
But a New York Times examination found that behind the scenes, the court had divided over whether the justices’ new rules could — or should — ever be enforced.
Justice Gorsuch was especially vocal in opposing any enforcement mechanism beyond voluntary compliance, arguing that additional measures could undermine the court. The justices’ strength was their independence, he said, and he vowed to have no part in diminishing it.
In the private exchanges, Justice Clarence Thomas, whose decision not to disclose decades of gifts and luxury vacations from wealthy benefactors had sparked the ethics controversy, and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote off the court’s critics as politically motivated and unappeasable.
The three liberal justices insisted that the rules needed to be more than lofty promises. But their argument never had a chance.
To piece together the previously undisclosed debate, The Times interviewed people from inside and outside the court, including liberals and conservatives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the proceedings and the justices’ thinking. This article also draws upon public statements by the justices, who declined to comment.
While the court was praised for setting ethics rules, the lack of an enforcement provision has been criticized by ethics experts and figures on the left. One year later, the justices’ internal debate has spilled into a wider, more fractious one.
President Biden and Democratic lawmakers have called for a code with teeth. Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson have publicly pledged support for an enforcement mechanism. Outside legal experts have circulated proposals that would enlist the guidance of other federal judges. The conservative pushback has been strong and sometimes furious.
Now the election of former President Donald J. Trump, and a new era of unified Republican government, are raising the stakes for a branch supposed to serve as an independent guardrail. The court, which has a conservative supermajority, is already perceived as partisan by many Americans. And the justices largely appear to be split along the same lines on how far to go to ensure that its rules are followed.
New York Times, Nadler to Relinquish Top Judiciary Post, Bowing to Calls for Change, Nicholas Fandos, Dec. 4, 2024. Representative Jerrold Nadler faced a challenge from Representative Jamie Raskin, and pressure from colleagues who wanted a younger figure at the helm.
Representative Jerrold Nadler plans to step down as the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee next term, succumbing to calls for generational change as his party prepares to confront a second Trump administration.
Mr. Nadler, the 77-year-old dean of New York’s congressional delegation, had been facing a direct challenge from a close ally, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland. Mr. Raskin, 61, was said to have secured the votes necessary to defeat him.
The transition would represent a significant departure for House Democrats, who have traditionally awarded coveted committee leadership jobs based primarily on seniority. After November’s losses, though, many in the party have argued that President-elect Donald J. Trump’s return to power would require a younger, more dynamic crop of leaders.
Furious over being challenged, Mr. Nadler had initially fought to hold the position he has held since 2017. But on Wednesday, he conceded that he did not have a path to victory and endorsed Mr. Raskin to replace him in a letter to colleagues.
“As our country faces the return of Donald Trump, and the renewed threats to our democracy and our way of life that he represents, I am very confident that Jamie would ably lead the Judiciary Committee as we confront this growing danger,” Mr. Nadler wrote.
New York Times, Supreme Court Returns to a Culture War Battleground: Transgender Rights, Adam Liptak, Dec. 3, 2024. On Wednesday, the justices will hear the marquee case of the term, a challenge to a Tennessee law banning several forms of medical care for transgender youths.
A little more than four years ago, the Supreme Court delivered a surprise victory to L.G.B.T.Q. communities. Rejecting the position of the Trump administration, the court ruled by a lopsided margin that a federal civil rights law protected transgender people from workplace discrimination.
In the intervening years, transgender rights have become a ferocious battleground in the culture wars, and controversies over health care, bathrooms, sports and pronouns played a prominent role in the presidential campaign. But the Supreme Court has had only glancing encounters with such issues since the employment discrimination case in 2020, which featured a majority opinion from Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, Mr. Trump’s first appointee to the court.
That will change on Wednesday, when the court hears its second major case on transgender rights, a challenge to a Tennessee law that prohibits some medical treatments for transgender youths.
It is the marquee case of the term. The court’s decision, expected by June, may determine not only the fate of the law and similar ones in more than 20 other states but also what role the Constitution’s equal protection clause has to play in cases claiming discrimination against transgender individuals.
The Tennessee law prohibits medical providers from prescribing puberty-delaying medication, offering hormone therapy or performing surgery to treat the psychological distress caused by incongruence between experienced gender and that assigned at birth. But the law allows those same treatments for other purposes.
The primary question for the justices is not whether Tennessee’s ban is wise or consistent with the views of medical experts. It is, instead, whether the law makes distinctions based on sex. If it does, a demanding form of judicial review — “heightened scrutiny” — kicks in. If it does not, the Tennessee law will almost certainly survive. The case has some curious features.
Washington Post, Editorial, How L.A.’s ‘godfather’ of progressive prosecution failed, Editorial Board, Dec. 1, 2024. District Attorney George Gascón, below right, will leave office on Monday after being defeated by 20 points.
He is one of several progressive prosecutors to lose their jobs on the West Coast over the past two years, from San Francisco and Oakland’s Alameda County to Portland and Seattle. But this is the biggest blow yet to their movement: Not only has Mr. Gascón long been considered “the godfather” of progressive prosecution, Los Angeles County — with nearly 10 million residents — is by itself more populous than all but 10 states.
What happened is instructive as reformers regroup. Based on our extensive interviews and on-the-ground reporting, Angelenos repudiated Mr. Gascón and his approach to criminal justice for five reasons:
1. He failed to secure buy-in from career prosecutors. Mr. Gascón never recovered after getting off on the wrong foot with the nearly 1,000 deputy district attorneys who worked for him. Minutes after taking office in December 2020, he issued far-reaching and sometimes unrealistic edicts formulated with academics during the transition. Mr. Gascón blames civil-service protections for stymieing his efforts to uproot a culture resistant to change. But he aggravated tensions by hiring a chief of staff who had called police “barbarians,” promoted the “defund the police” movement and posted pictures of herself on social media wearing a T-shirt that said: “The police are trained to kill us.” The upshot was that his own career prosecutors became his fiercest critics. About two dozen deputy district attorneys eventually filed civil suits alleging retaliation. One prompted a jury to award $1.5 million. Another settled for $800,000. Antagonism led to attrition, which worsened a backlog of open cases.
2. Restricting sentencing enhancements made it harder to keep the worst offenders off the streets. Mr. Gascón believes that adding extra time to someone’s sentence if they committed a crime with a gun or as a gang member is “the biggest driver of mass incarceration.” He forbade prosecutors from asking for longer sentences for known gang members, arguing that people had been added to the gang database without due process. Fine. But that shouldn’t preclude prosecutors from adding enhancements when they are clearly warranted.
3. Mr. Gascón directed that juveniles could not be charged as adults, no matter how egregious their crimes. In one of several such cases, his office tried a 17-year-old member of the Crips street gang as a juvenile for brutally murdering two men. Just six months after her release, police arrested her again in connection with another homicide.
4. Nonviolent “quality of life” crimes must be taken seriously. Under Mr. Gascón, the district attorney’s office filed misdemeanor cases about half as often as under his predecessor. He discouraged prosecution of lower-level crimes such as trespassing, public intoxication and drug possession, which created a sense of disorder on the streets while removing an incentive for people with mental health issues and addiction to seek needed help.
5. Mr. Gascón overread his mandate.
Egberto Off The Record, Opinion: Mass deportation is just another Trump con to line the pockets of his friends and himself, Egberto Willies, below right, Nov. 30, 2024. He 
may use it to line his pockets and those of his friends with private detention camps and extortion to farmers.
The video highlights the economic and moral ramifications of Donald Trump’s proposed mass deportation policies. It argues that these measures would devastate industries like agriculture, which heavily rely on immigrant labor, leading to economic disruptions 
and inflated prices. The speaker speculates that Trump might use deportations as a public show while secretly taking bribes to shield industries from labor shortages. They criticize the private detention center industry for exploiting immigrants for profit and highlight the hypocrisy of evangelical Christians supporting anti-immigrant policies contrary to biblical teachings. Ultimately, the speaker calls for awareness of these manipulative tactics and stresses the need for progressive solutions prioritizing justice and fairness.
Donald Trump’s deportation agenda serves as a smokescreen for policies designed to exploit immigrants and enrich the powerful. By destabilizing industries, enriching private detention centers, and perpetuating systemic inequality, this plan reflects the worst of crony capitalism. A progressive approach is essential, focusing on compassion, economic equity, and recognizing the invaluable contributions of immigrant communities to the nation.Please subscribe for the much more in-depth article.
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Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric on mass deportation is designed to stoke fears, reinforce division, and distract from the economic realities that his policies are likely to exacerbate. The former president’s proposed deportation initiatives present themselves as a way to restore “law and order,” but a closer examination reveals the profit-driven motives that underpin them. Far from solving economic or immigration challenges, these policies aim to enrich private sector cronies while leaving American workers and immigrants alike in precarious positions.The Economic and Agricultural Fallout
As one of the nation’s most significant agricultural powerhouses, California is a prime example of how mass deportations could wreak havoc on essential industries. The state’s agricultural sector contributes about a quarter of the nation’s food supply, much of which depends on the labor of undocumented immigrants. Many Americans are unwilling to take on the grueling, low-paying jobs that characterize this sector, even when wages are increased. This was evidenced in states like Georgia and Florida, where anti-immigrant policies led to unharvested crops and paralyzed construction industries.
Trump’s mass deportation rhetoric ignores this reality, instead painting undocumented immigrants as threats rather than contributors. The potential removal of these workers would devastate industries reliant on their labor, leading to higher food prices, supply chain disruptions, and economic instability. In practice, this creates a twofold crisis: economic harm to consumers and industries and increased hardship for immigrant communities.Detention Centers: A Profit Machine for the Privileged
One of the most alarming aspects of Trump’s deportation plans is the role of private detention centers. The United States already has a shameful history of using private prisons to detain immigrants, turning human suffering into profit. Trump’s policies, if implemented, would likely expand this system, funneling taxpayer dollars into the hands of private contractors who run these facilities.
Private detention centers are notorious for cutting costs at the expense of detainees’ well-being, providing substandard healthcare, overcrowded conditions, and inadequate oversight. These facilities generate immense profits for their operators while exacerbating the suffering of vulnerable populations. By prioritizing profit over human dignity, these detention centers exemplify the moral bankruptcy of Trump’s deportation agenda.Bribes and Backroom Deals
The possibility that deportation policies serve as a mechanism for corruption cannot be dismissed. As suggested in the video, Trump and his administration could very well use mass deportations as a public spectacle while quietly accepting bribes from agricultural and industrial leaders to allow undocumented workers to remain in certain sectors. This would not only undermine the stated goals of the policies but also reveal their true purpose: enriching the powerful at the expense of the marginalized.
This pattern aligns with Trump’s broader approach to governance, characterized by self-enrichment and crony capitalism. From tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy to using public office to promote his private businesses, Trump has consistently prioritized his and his allies’ interests over the public good.The Human and Moral Cost
The human cost of mass deportation is incalculable. Families are torn apart, communities are destabilized, and children are left without parents. Beyond the immediate harm to immigrants, these policies deepen societal divisions and normalize dehumanization. This runs counter to the values that many Americans, including Christians who form a key part of Trump’s base, claim to hold dear.
The Bible teaches compassion and care for strangers, yet Trump’s deportation agenda weaponizes fear and xenophobia. The disconnect between these teachings and the actions of Trump’s evangelical supporters underscores the moral hypocrisy that permeates his policies.A Call for Progressive Solutions
Rather than pursuing punitive measures that harm immigrants and Americans alike, a progressive approach to immigration reform would prioritize human rights, economic stability, and social cohesion. This includes creating pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, protecting labor rights, and investing in industries that rely on immigrant workers. By recognizing immigrants as integral to the nation’s fabric, such policies would strengthen communities and promote shared prosperity.Conclusion
Donald Trump’s deportation rhetoric is not about solving real problems; it is a con designed to enrich his cronies while distracting from the harm his policies inflict on ordinary Americans. From exploiting private detention centers to undermining critical industries, Trump’s agenda reflects a cynical prioritization of profit over people. As long as such policies persist, the American public will bear the economic and moral costs of a system designed to divide and exploit rather than unite and uplift. The fight for progressive immigration reform is not just about policy—it is about reclaiming the values of fairness, compassion, and justice that should define America.
New York Times, Tax Preparers Charged in Scheme to Defraud Covid Relief of $65 Million, Adeel Hassan, Nov. 30, 2024. The preparers filed for pandemic-related tax credits on behalf of ineligible clients and then netted hefty filing fees, officials said.
Two Mississippi tax preparers used multiple schemes to defraud $65 million from programs that had been designed to help businesses stay afloat during the coronavirus pandemic, federal prosecutors said this week.
The preparers, Renata Walton, 44, and Nicole Jones, 36, both of Olive Branch, Miss., were indicted on more than 50 counts of wire fraud, money laundering, preparing false tax returns and obstruction of justice, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Tennessee said on Wednesday.
They both pleaded not guilty and were each released on $100,000 bond, court documents show.
Ms. Walton owned R&B Tax Express in Moscow, Tenn., where she and Ms. Jones prepared tax returns.
Federal prosecutors said that the two women contacted small-business clients and asked if they were interested in pandemic-related grant money, according to court records. The women would then file for pandemic-related tax credits on behalf of the clients even though they were ineligible for those funds, officials said.
New York Times, F.T.C. Launches an Antitrust Investigation Into Microsoft, David McCabe, Nov. 27, 2024. U.S. regulators are demanding information from the company on its cloud computing, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity products.
The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into whether Microsoft has violated antitrust law in multiple segments of its wide-ranging business, according to two people familiar with the inquiry, the latest salvo in a battle by the government to rein in the most powerful tech companies.
The agency recently sent a long and detailed formal request for information to the company asking about its cloud computing, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity products, the people said. Of particular interest to the F.T.C. is the way that Microsoft bundles its cloud computing offerings with office and security products, they added, alongside the company’s growing power in the artificial intelligence space.
The aggressive move by the F.T.C. comes as its chair, Lina Khan, is probably heading out the door with less than two months left in the Biden administration. Ms. Khan, 35, has pushed the agency to police big companies and has tried to get ahead of fast-moving changes in the technology industry.
Ms. Khan is expected to leave her post as part of the transition to the administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump, after which the focus of tech regulation could change.
The inquiry into Microsoft continues the Biden administration’s scrutiny of the biggest tech companies over the way people consume information, communicate and shop online. Already, the F.T.C. has sued Amazon and Meta, accusing them of anticompetitive behavior and stifling rivals. The Justice Department has also sued Google over its dominance in advertising technology, and Apple for making it difficult for consumers to leave its tightly knit universe of devices and software.
Microsoft, one of the most valuable companies in the world, with a disparate business that includes its Windows operating software, social media platform LinkedIn and video game platform Xbox, had largely escaped the recent ramp-up in antitrust scrutiny.
But in the late 1990s, the government attempted to break up the company over the dominance of its operating system and its efforts to stymie rivals to its own web browser. A judge ordered the breakup of the company, but an appeals court overturned his decision.
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.
Susan Lorincz spoke about a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder linked to childhood sex abuse (Pool photo by Doug Engle).
New York Times, Florida Woman Who Fatally Shot Black Neighbor Gets 25 Years in Prison, Annie Correal, Nov. 26, 2024 (print ed.). Susan Lorincz, who shot Ajike Owens, was convicted of manslaughter. The case prompted national outrage.
A white woman in Florida who fatally shot a Black neighbor who confronted her amid a longstanding dispute over the neighbor’s children was sentenced on Monday to 25 years in prison.
In a case that prompted national outrage and reignited debate around “stand your ground” laws, Susan Lorincz, 60, shot Ajike (A.J.) Owens as Ms. Owens, 35, stood outside the door of Ms. Lorincz’s home in Ocala, a city about 80 miles northwest of Orlando, last June.
Ms. Lorincz, who was convicted of manslaughter by an all-white jury in August, had faced a maximum sentence of 30 years.
New York Times, Rudy Giuliani Loses His Lawyers, and His Cool, in Court, Stefanos Chen and Olivia Bensimon, Nov. 26, 2024. The subject of several cases, the former New York City mayor lashed out at a judge questioning why he had not forfeited personal assets as required.
Rudolph W. Giuliani was not having a good day, and it showed.
The former New York City mayor was in federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday to discuss his continuing failure to give up nearly $11 million worth of personal assets. The forfeiture was meant as a down payment on the $148 million Mr. Giuliani owes to two Georgia election workers for defaming them by claiming, without evidence, that they had helped to steal the 2020 presidential election.
But first, Judge Lewis Liman allowed Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers to withdraw from the case. They had requested to be removed two weeks ago, citing an unspecified “professional ethics” concern.
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).
Associated Press via Politico, Man convicted of killing Laken Riley sentenced to life in prison without parole, Staff report, Nov. 21, 2024 (print ed.). Riley’s killing added fuel to the national debate over immigration when federal authorities said Ibarra illegally entered the U.S. in 2022 and was allowed to stay in the country while he pursued his immigration case.
The Venezuelan man convicted in the killing of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Jose Ibarra was charged with murder and other crimes in Riley’s February death, and the guilty verdict was reached on Wednesday by Athens-Clarke County Superior Court Judge H. Patrick Haggard. Ibarra, 26, had waived his right to a jury trial, meaning Haggard alone heard and decided the case.
New York Times, Venezuelan Migrant Is Found Guilty of Killing Laken Riley in Georgia, Rick Rojas, Nov. 21, 2024 (print ed.). The verdict followed a trial in which prosecutors detailed a violent attack that became a flashpoint in the bitter national debate over immigration policy. A 26-year-old migrant from Venezuela was convicted on Wednesday of murdering Laken Riley, a Georgia nursing student whose killing has been repeatedly cited by President-elect Donald J. Trump in his push for the mass deportation of millions of undocumented people.
Recent Relevant Headlines
Egberto Off The Record, Opinion: Mass deportation is just another Trump con to line the pockets of his friends and himself, Egberto WilliesNew York Times, Florida Woman Who Fatally Shot Black Neighbor Gets 25 Years in Prison
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.”
Recent Relevant Headlines
New York Times, A Potential Fight Over the Fed’s Future Ramps UpThe Hartmann Report, The Great Dismantling: Trump’s Coming Attack on America’s Economic Backbone, Thom HartmannPolitico, DNC chair hits back at Sanders over party criticism: 'Straight up BS'
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.
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.
Gaetz has consistently denied the allegations and a Department of Justice investigation into him resulted in no charges. But the accusations quickly dogged his confirmation process, prompting him to drop out of consideration one week after Trump first announced plans to nominate him. The early withdrawal precluded what would have been a deeply personal and brutal confirmation hearing.
At OAN, Gaetz will also co-host a video podcast with Dan Ball, host of "Real America with Dan Ball," that the network said would feature "unfiltered conversations" for Gen Z, Millennials and early Gen Xers.
Gaetz praised the network in a statement for embracing platforms like streaming, apps, podcasts and social media, which he called places "where Americans are going." Trump during his 2024 run similarly embraced alternative media sources to reach voters.
CNN first reported that Gaetz would be an OAN anchor. The network is among the outlets that pushed groundless stories about the 2020 election saying vote tallies in swing states were rigged against Trump. The stories resulted in now-settled lawsuits from voting technology companies Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems.
Plenty of questions swirled about what Gaetz would do next. The former Florida lawmaker didn’t do much to tamp down speculation that he might run for governor of Florida, including sharing a gif on X of the state flag in response to a suggestion that he might seek that office. In August 2023, Gaetz told Donald Trump Jr. and his fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, that if ever elected to the governor’s mansion he would “definitely enjoy that job so much.”
“I would never leave it if I ever got that opportunity,” he said at the time.
Forbes also reported the recent formation of a political action committee that seemed tied to Gaetz, called Florida Firebrand PAC.
Gaetz frequently dragged congressional colleagues when he was in office and, in his highest-profile clash, led the ouster of then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Ever since dropping out, Gaetz has derided members of Congress who buy and sell stocks — something he tried to ban while in Congress — and voiced support for policies such as providing IVF to servicemembers.
He explicitly ruled out a return to his seat in Congress, which will be filled by a special election.
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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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.”
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.”
Washington Post, Person of interest in UnitedHealthcare shooting arrested in Pa., police say, Mark Berman and Shayna Jacobs, Dec. 9, 2024. 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.
That search continued until Monday morning, when someone in a McDonald’s in Altoona — a small city about 290 miles west of the Hilton where Thompson was killed — recognized Mangione and contacted authorities shortly after 9 a.m., authorities said.
According to court papers released Monday, police in Altoona arrived in the McDonald’s and found Mangione sitting at a table toward the back of the restaurant. Police described him as wearing a blue medical mask and looking at a laptop on the table, with a backpack nearby.
The two officers approached and asked him to pull his mask down, and when he did so, both “immediately recognized him” from the images circulating of the person wanted in connection with the New York shooting, they wrote in the criminal complaint.
Soon after, the officers wrote, they asked “if he had been to New York recently and the male became quiet and started to shake.”
The officers asked him for identification, and he handed over a New Jersey driver’s license that police said later turned out to be a fake, the complaint stated. When officers told him he would get arrested for lying about his identity, he said his name was Luigi Mangione, according to the complaint.
Mangione was placed into custody, handcuffed and searched at the McDonalds, the complaint said. His backpack was searched at the police station, where officers said they found a black pistol and silencer that appeared to be 3D-printed, along with a loaded Glock magazine with six 9mm rounds.
Mangione was arraigned Monday evening in a courthouse near Altoona and denied bail, according to a court official. It was not immediately clear whether he had an attorney.
Joseph Kenny, the New York City police chief of detectives, said Mangione would have to be extradited to New York to face additional charges. The Manhattan district attorney’s office declined to comment on what those charges might be. Officials from that office and the New York police force traveled to Altoona on Monday as part of the investigation.
Peter J. Weeks, the Blair County district attorney, said that once Mangione is charged in New York, officials would seek to have him transported there. If Mangione challenges his extradition, the process could take up to 45 days, Weeks said.
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.
A University of Pennsylvania graduate is in custody following the targeted attack of Brian Thompson, the CEO of major insurance group UnitedHealthcare who was fatally shot outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel ahead of an investor conference, police said Monday.
Luigi Mangione is a suspect in the fatal shooting, authorities confirmed Monday night during a press briefing in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where he was apprehended after an individual at a McDonald's recognized him from the wildly circulated images of the suspect sought in the shooting.Mangione faces 5 charges in PennsylvaniaLuigi Mangione is seen inside the police station in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Dec. 9, 2024.Obtained by ABC News
Mangione, 26, was initially identified as a "strong" person of interest in the shooting death after he was apprehended at the McDonald's, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said during a press briefing in New York on Monday.
Charges could be filed against Mangione in the homicide as early as Monday or Tuesday, authorities said. Investigators are working to determine whether anyone else was involved in Thompson's death.
Mangione was eating at the McDonald's Monday morning when an individual thought he looked suspiciously like the shooting suspect and alerted an employee, who called police, authorities said.
He was carrying a firearm and suppressor "both consistent with the weapon used in the murder," NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said during the press briefing earlier Monday. The gun "may have been made on a 3D printer," police said.
He also had "multiple fraudulent IDs," including a fake New Jersey ID matching the ID the suspect used to check into his New York City hostel before the shooting incident, Tisch said. He was carrying a U.S. passport that identified him as Luigi Mangione, police said.An image of the fake ID used by the Midtown Manhattan shooting suspect to check into an Upper West Side hostel.ABC NewsThis is an image of the ghost gun recovered from Luigi Mangione in Altoona, PA, law enforcement sources told ABC News.Obtained by ABC News
Police also recovered clothing, including a mask consistent with those worn by the wanted individual, as well as a three-page "handwritten document that speaks to both his motivation and mindset," she said.
Mangione was arrested on unrelated charges Monday, police said. He was in possession of a ghost gun capable of firing a 9mm round and will face gun charges in Altoona, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told reporters during the briefing earlier Monday.
He has been charged in Pennsylvania with five crimes, including carrying a gun without a license, forgery, falsely identifying himself to authorities and possessing "instruments of crime," according to a newly released criminal complaint.
The charging document alleges that Mangione lied about his identity to police and carried the ghost gun without a license.
When Altoona police asked him if he had ever been to New York City, Mangione started shaking, according to the charging document. He didn't answer the question directly, police said.
Police said they are working to develop a full sense of his timeline in Pennsylvania and how long he has been in Altoona.
The NYPD sent detectives to Altoona to interview him and are going through the recovered writings and his social media, police said.
"It does seem that he had some ill will toward corporate America," Kenny said.
A Goodreads account that appears to belong to Mangione left a four-star review on Ted Kaczynski's "Industrial Society and Its Future" -- more commonly known as the "Unabomber manifesto" -- and described Kaczynski as "a violent individual -- rightfully imprisoned -- who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy Luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary."
A source confirmed to ABC News that the Goodreads account is part of the law enforcement investigation.
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.
“Slowly but steadily it could turn the West’s youth—its future—into perpetually distracted dopamine junkies ill-equipped to maintain the civilization built by their ancestors,” the article retweeted by Mangione reads.
In one post on X, Mangione responded to a post claiming that people had replaced GOD by “worshipping at the DEI shrine, using made-up pronouns like religious mantras, and firing professors for saying men can't get pregnant.” In his response, Mangione recommended an article from The Telegraph’s Madeline Grant claiming that atheists now worshipped “intolerant new gods” while attacking Scotland’s 2021 anti-hate crime law.
In another post, Mangione advocated for increasing birth rates in Japan by banning sex toys marketed towards men and by replacing internet cafes with athletics to revitalize “traditional Japanese culture.”
This is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of Mangione’s tweets and retweets, which include self-help threads, long posts about the “Great Fall” of the Roman Empire, and vox populi interviews in which a reporter asks people whether men are important in society.
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One consistent throughline in Mangione’s online presence is his opposition to smartphones. In another post, he retweeted a link to an article on Bari Weiss’ conservative news site, The Free Press, proscribing a “fix” for children using their phones. One of his favorite books on GoodReads was “How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life” by Caterin Prince.
New York Times, Daniel Penny Is Acquitted in Death of Jordan Neely on Subway, Hurubie Meko and Anusha Bayya, Dec. 9, 2024. 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, 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.
“This little book packs a punch,” Mangione wrote.
Other books on his GoodReads profile include Ted Kaczynski's "Industrial Society and Its Future," David Goggins’s "Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds," and Timothy Ferriss’ self-help book "The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich."
On his GoodReads profile, Mangione left a review praising Kaczynski's book earlier this year, including a passage from it that he said he found interesting.
“We're animals just like everything else on this planet, except we've forgotten the law of the jungle and bend over for our overlords when any other animal would recognize the threat and fight to the death for their survival. 'Violence never solved anything' is a statement uttered by cowards and predators,” the quoted excerpt in the review reads.
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.
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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.
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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, 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.”
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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.
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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.
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The Hartmann Report, Commentary: The Best of the Rest of the News, Thom Hartmann, right, Dec. 8, 2024.
A large handful of billionaires spent several billion dollars to get Trump elected, and now he’s repaying — big time — the class into which he was born.
Just the billionaires Trump has so far appointed to his cabinet boast a combined wealth, at $340 billion so far, that is greater than the entire GDP of New Zealand. And at the top of their collective agenda will be kneecapping the IRS’s tax fraud division while adding another $7 trillion to the national debt by shifting their taxes onto our children and grandchildren.
It’ll be a government bought by billionaires and soon to be run by and for the exclusive benefit of billionaires. David L. Smith in his Cassandra Chronicles Substack newsletter notes that this is somewhat similar to what Herbert Hoover did in 1928, and likely to produce a similar result: a great financial crash that will throw control of our government to Democrats for a generation. That assumes that Democrats will succeed — as Congressional Progressive Caucus VP Ro Khanna demanded yesterday on my radio/TV program — at jettisoning the billionaires, big corporations, and neoliberalism that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama so fervently embraced (and Joe Biden largely rejected; his entire cabinet is worth a paltry $118 million). The February election of a new DNC head will tell us a lot; two good progressives are in the running (my favorite is Ben Wikler). Trump is teeing-up what may be a great opportunity for Democrats and progressives; let’s hope the DNC doesn’t blow it again like Democrats in the Senate just did.
New York Times, Biden Team Considers Blanket Pardons Before Trump’s Promised ‘Retribution,’ Peter Baker and Erica L. Green, Dec. 6, 2024 (print ed.). White House officials believe President-elect Trump’s choices for top law enforcement jobs indicate that he will pursue revenge against his perceived enemies.
President Biden’s staff is debating whether he should issue blanket pardons for a swath of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s perceived enemies to protect them from the “retribution” he has threatened after he takes office, according to people familiar with the discussion.
The idea would be to pre-emptively extend executive clemency to a list of current and former government officials for any possible crimes over a period of years, effectively short-circuiting the next president’s promised campaign of reprisals.
White House officials do not believe the potential recipients have actually committed crimes, but they have grown increasingly worried that Mr. Trump’s selections for top Justice Department positions indicate that he will follow through on his repeated vows to seek revenge. Even an investigation that results in no charges could drag on for months or years, costing those people hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and crippling their career prospects.
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Syrian's Assad Regime, Russia Alliesf Flee
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.
The rebels who ended the Assad family’s brutal rule in Syria began asserting control over the capital on Monday, announcing that a new government would begin work immediately as its fighters took up positions outside public buildings and directed traffic in a show of their newly claimed authority.
Major questions remained unanswered, including who would lead the new rebel government, as millions of Syrians and the wider world struggled to process the stunning end to the Assad family’s decades-long reign. Euphoria around the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad over the weekend mixed with uncertainty about the future of the country and the intentions of the rebels who now hold the capital, Damascus.
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.
We arrived in Damascus early Monday, after passing surreal scenes on the highway leading into the city from Lebanon. Scattered across the main highway to the Syrian capital are newfound relics of the government of Bashar al-Assad whose oppressive rule has defined the country for decades.
Less than a day after rebels took Damascus in a lightning fast offensive, abandoned Syrian military tanks littered the road. A handful of posters of Mr. al-Assad remained intact on billboards over the highway, but most had been torn down and ripped to shreds.
Checkpoints typically manned by Syrian intelligence and security forces, who would question drivers and passengers for hours on end, were empty. A few miles from the border, a body of a man in military uniform lay sprawled on the ground next to an abandoned pickup truck.
Down the road from one Syrian military base, a convoy of 10 rebel vehicles sped down the highway. They drove four-wheel drive vehicles — their doors and windows caked in mud as makeshift camouflage — and Syrian military vehicles armed with rockets that once belonged to the al-Assad government.
New York Times, Crowds Throng to Prison in Syria, Desperate to Find Relatives and Friends, Christina Goldbaum, Raja Abdulrahim and Muhammad Haj Kadour, Dec. 9, 2024. The Assad regime ran a network of torture centers that swallowed up tens of thousands of Syrians. Now that the rebels have opened the gates, many see a chance to learn of the detainees’ fates.
Crowds descended on a prison on the outskirts of Damascus, the Syrian capital, on Monday, desperate to learn the fate of friends and relatives detained at a place that symbolized terror and death under the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
Some hailed taxis or waited for buses from the city to the prison, Sednaya, which opened over the weekend as Mr. al-Assad fell. Others packed into cars, inching through traffic. Many appeared conflicted by hope and dread amid the euphoria that has gripped Damascus since Mr. al-Assad fled to Russia.
New York Times, Analysis: Revolutions Swept the Middle East in 2011. Will Syria’s End Differently? Patrick Kingsley, Dec. 9, 2024. Bashar al-Assad’s downfall evokes memories of uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen, each of which brought civil war or authoritarian rule. Syrians hope for better.
When protesters started trying in 2011 to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, they were part of a cascade of revolutions, known as the Arab Spring, that aimed to oust authoritarian leaders across the Middle East.
While opposition groups elsewhere experienced swift success, the Syrian revolution devolved into a 13-year civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions and carved the country into competing fiefs.
Update from Ukraine, Commentary: Assad is over; Damascus fallen; Russians are running away from Syria, Denys Davydov, Dec. 8, 2024. Russia has suffered a great defeat and they're very angry about it."
Times Radio, Commentary: Collapse of Assad is 'humiliation' for Putin and will weaken him on Ukraine, Bill Browder, Dec. 8, 2024. "He put his, his name behind Assad. He put his resources behind Assad. And now Assad has been humiliated, and I think by by extension, Putin has been humiliated."
The fall of the Assad is a major humiliation for Putin who had been a key backer of the Syrian regime for over a decade, says Bill Browder, human rights campaigner and British financier who fled Russia.
New York Times, Iran Makes ‘Dramatic’ Leap to Produce Near-Bomb-Grade Fuel, but to What End? David E. Sanger, Dec. 6, 2024. The United Nations chief inspector says production has quadrupled. But it is not clear whether Iran is trying to touch off a crisis or gather bargaining chips for negotiations with the United States.
New York Times, Opinion: Conversations and insights about the moment, Thomas L. Friedman, right, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). For the past few weeks, I have been arguing that Israel has inflicted the equivalent of a Six Day War-level defeat on Iran and its resistance network, and this would have vast consequences.
Well, irony of ironies, the Assad family in Syria took power in 1971, in part because of Syria’s devastating defeat in the 1967 war. What goes around comes around.
Hold on to your hats, though; you haven’t seen anything yet. Here are five quick observations.
Funniest statement by any world leader so far: That award goes to … President-elect Donald Trump for his social media post: “Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” Attention Mr. Trump: Syria is the keystone of the entire Middle East. It just collapsed like a blown-up bridge, creating vast new dangers and opportunities that everyone in the region will seize upon and react to. Staying out of this is not on the menu, especially when we have several hundred U.S. troops stationed in Eastern Syria. We need to figure out our interests and use the events in Syria to drive them, because everyone else will be doing just that.
Biggest U.S. interest: This is also a no-brainer. It’s that this uprising in Syria in the long run triggers a pro-democracy uprising in Iran. In the short run, it is sure to trigger a power struggle between the moderates there — President Masoud Pezeshkian and his vice president, former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif — and the Revolutionary Guards hard-liners. We need to shape that struggle. The events in Syria, on top of Iran’s military defeat by Israel, have left Tehran naked. This means that Iran’s leaders will now have to choose — quickly — between rushing for a nuclear bomb to save their regime or getting rid of the bomb in a deal with Trump, if he takes regime change off the table. That is why, Mr. Trump, to put it in your typeface: WE CAN’T HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS.
Biggest known unknown: Who are the rebels who took over Syria and what do they really want? A pluralistic democracy, or an Islamic state? History tells us that in these movements the hard-line Islamists usually win out. But I am watching and hoping it will be otherwise.
My biggest worry expressed in a single headline: That goes to Haaretz in Israel: “Post-Assad Syria Is in Danger of Being Run by Out-of-control Militias.” We are at a moment in the history of the Middle East where there are many countries that I would describe as “too late for imperialism, but they failed at self-government.” I am talking about Libya, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan. That is, no foreign power is going to come in and stabilize them, but they have failed at being able to manage their own pluralism and forge social contracts to create stability and growth. We have never been here before in the post-World War II era — a moment when so many countries have descended into this Hobbesian state of nature, but in a much more connected world.
This is why, having just spent the past week in Beijing and Shanghai, I repeatedly told my Chinese interlocutors: “You think we are enemies. You are wrong. We have a common enemy: Disorder. How we collaborate to shrink the World of Disorder and grow The World of Order is what history will judge us both for.” (Not sure they got it, but they will.)
Best Russian aphorism to sum up the challenge that regional and global powers now face in fixing Syria: “It is easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup, then to turn fish soup into an aquarium.”
New York Times, Opinion: The Winners and Losers Following the Fall of Assad, Nicholas Kristof, right, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). The stunning collapse of the brutal Assad regime in Syria, a family business since the 1970s, is a geopolitical earthquake creating winners and losers around the world. First, the losers:
Iran is a big loser; Syria has been a close ally and a vital overland transport link to Lebanon and Hezbollah. Iran supported Syria as President Bashar al-Assad fought to remain in power during the country’s horrifying civil war, and it used Syria to project power around the region. Iran has already been badly weakened in recent months, and this adds to the sense that Iran’s regime is possibly vulnerable and certainly a lesser power.
One question is whether all this adds to the arguments within Iran’s leadership to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent.
Russia likewise loses an important ally and it will presumably also lose its valuable military bases in Syria. In 2015, Moscow intervened militarily to back the Assad regime in the civil war, dropping bombs on civilian targets and adding to its unpopularity among citizens.
Russia particularly values its naval base at Tartus, which allows it to support warships in the Mediterranean Sea.
Hezbollah backed Assad in the Syrian civil war, and it depended on weapons shipped from Iran through Syria to Lebanon. The Assad regime for decades interfered violently in Lebanese politics. That said, Hezbollah remains a significant force in Lebanon, even if weakened.
The Alawite sect in Syria, an offshoot of Shiite Islam amounting to perhaps 10 percent or more of Syrians, will now be at risk. The Assads were Alawites, and Alawites were resented for the privileges they enjoyed. I would be terrified if I were an Alawite in Syria today.
I worry that Syrian Christians, who had to some degree been protected by the Assads, may also be targeted and harassed, and that women will lose rights. The triumphant forces aren’t the Taliban, but they are a step in that direction. That said, the civil war in Syria hurt everyone, including women and Christians.
So who are the winners as Syria changes hands?
Sunni Muslim Islamists have been savagely suppressed in Syria for decades, and they are finally in charge. The new leadership includes forces that had been involved in Islamic State and Al Qaeda, although they have disavowed that extremism. We’ll see. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m wary.
Israel gains, at least for a time, by the weakening of enemies like Iran and Hezbollah, not to mention the Assad regime itself. But having a hard-line Islamist regime next door, if that’s the direction Syria goes, may not be great for the long term.
Turkey wins influence next door. It may use that influence to try to rein in Kurds around the region.
The United States may also gain in the sense that Russia and Iran are clear losers, but much depends on what comes next. I’m hopeful that Austin Tice, an American journalist believed imprisoned in Syria since 2012, may be freed and allowed home. Releasing him would be a way for Syria’s new leadership to show its bona fides.
Anyone who values human rights has to feel relief at the departure of the Assad regime. But we’ve also seen how hard-line Islamists can rule in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and I fear revenge attacks in Syria. So two cheers for the overthrow of Assad, but be vigilant about what comes next. One hard lesson I’ve learned from covering the world: Sometimes what follows a terrible regime is just as bad, or even worse.
New York Times, Syria Updates: Rebels Enter Damascus, Threatening al-Assad’s Rule, Raja Abdulrahim, Vivian Yee and Aaron Boxerman, Dec. 7, 2024. Syria's military denied the rebels had entered the city, but the surprise rebel offensive has so far swiftly defeated government forces in its path toward the capital.
New York Times, In the Syrian Regime’s Hour of Need, Its Patron Iran Makes an Exit, Farnaz Fassihi, Dec. 8, 2024 (print ed.). The collapse of a partnership built over four decades would reshape the balance of power in the Middle East.
For decades, Iran has expended much blood and money in support of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, above, helping him survive a civil war that threatened his dynastic rule. Iran operated military bases, weapons warehouses and missile factories in Syria, which it used as a pipeline for arming its militant allies across the region.
Now, just as Mr. al-Assad needs help to repel a rapid advance by rebel forces, Iran is heading for the exits. On Friday, the country started evacuating its military commanders and personnel, as well as some diplomatic staff, according to Iranian and regional officials.
It is a remarkable turnabout: Iran not only appears to be abandoning Mr. al-Assad, its closest Arab ally, but also relinquishing everything it had built and fought to preserve for 40 years in Syria, its main foothold in the Arab world.
With the rebels expected to advance soon on Damascus, Iran is unable to muster a defense of the Assad government after a damaging year of regional wars that began with the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, an Iranian ally.
A collapse of Iran’s partnership with Syria would by all accounts reshape the balance of power in the Middle East. The “axis of resistance” that Iran has formed with its militant allies in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Syria, Iraq and Yemen would be weakened. Israel and its Arab allies would be strengthened.
“For Iran, Syria has been the backbone of our regional presence,” Hassan Shemshadi, an expert on Iran’s proxy militant groups who was for years a documentary filmmaker on the battlefields of Syria, said in an interview from Tehran. “Everything that Iran sent to the region went through Syria. It is now extremely difficult to keep these channels open.”
Rebel fighters breached the strategic Syrian city of Homs on Saturday, according to a war monitoring group and the rebels, whose surprise offensive has swept south toward the capital in a little over a week and threatened to collapse the rule of President Bashar al-Assad.
The antigovernment fighters then declared early Sunday that they had fully captured the city, not long after the Syrian defense ministry denied that rebels had entered Homs. The ministry said in a statement that the situation remained “stable and secure.”
But the rebels’ offensive has so far swiftly defeated pockets of government defenders in its path. Victory in Homs would set the rebel coalition up for a march on the capital, Damascus, about 100 miles south.
The rebels’ quick progress also appeared to reignite antigovernment protests near Damascus. Syrian government forces on Saturday withdrew from suburbs, including Moadamia al-Sham and Daraya, and the nearby Mezzeh military airport, according to war monitoring groups. The Syrian military also denied those assertions.
The rebel advances and protests were reported by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitoring group based in Britain, as well as by the rebels themselves on their Telegram channel.
In the capital, people crowded stores to buy food and cars disappeared from the streets, said a woman there who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern about retribution from the government. She said residents felt a mix of fear, worry and, for those opposed to the government, joy. People are waiting anxiously to learn who will run the country in the days ahead, she said.
Mr. al-Assad’s control in southern and northeastern Syria also appeared to be crumbling, with a different coalition of rebel factions capturing much of Daraa Province in the south, and United States-backed Kurdish-led forces moving into the city of Deir al-Zour in the northeast, according to the Observatory.
Still, Syrian government officials sought to project confidence on Saturday. “There is a very strong military and security cordon on the far outskirts of Damascus and the Damascus countryside,” the interior minister, Mohammad Khaled al-Rahmoun, said in a video posted online. “No one — not them, nor their masters, nor their patrons — can break that defensive line.”
How Syria’s civil war reignited: The new uprisings present the gravest challenge in years to Mr. al-Assad. It is unclear what resources he can marshal to defend the rapidly shrinking territory under his control, especially without the help of one of his staunchest allies, Iran, which began to evacuate its military commanders and personnel from Syria on Friday.
Recent Relevant Headlines
New York Times, As Syrian Rebel Advance Accelerates, Nervous Neighbors Close Their Borders
Trump Transition News, Commentary
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.
This account is based on interviews with nine people who either interviewed for jobs in the administration or were directly involved in the process. Among those were applicants who said they gave what they intuited to be the wrong answer — either decrying the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 or saying that President Biden won in 2020. Their answers were met with silence and the taking of notes. They didn’t get the jobs.
Three of the people interviewed are close to the transition team and confirmed that loyalty questions were part of some interviews across multiple agencies, and that the Trump team researched what candidates had said about Mr. Trump on the day of the Capitol riot and in the days following. Candidates are also rated on a scale of one to four in more than a half-dozen categories, including competence.
Karoline Leavitt, the incoming White House press secretary, declined to address specific questions about the topics being raised in job interviews. Instead, she said: “President Trump will continue to appoint highly qualified men and women who have the talent, experience, and necessary skill sets to make America great again.”
Previous administrations, of course, have also been interested in whether new hires were aligned with the president’s agenda. But the distinction between Mr. Trump’s process and past ones is that the interest goes well beyond alignment on policy. The Trump transition team appears to be trying to figure out whether prospective hires have ever shown a hint of daylight between themselves and Mr. Trump on specific issues, particularly as he tried to revise the history of his final weeks in office and its aftermath.
Mr. Trump has maintained that Jan. 6, when a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol, was actually an event filled with “love.” He has insisted that no one who was arrested was armed; criminal indictments say otherwise. He has described people convicted and imprisoned for their role in the Capitol attack as “hostages” and he has claimed, falsely, that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Politico, January 6, 2021 Attack on the U.S. Capitol and Other Cases —-; Investigations, Hearings, Trials, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). More lawsuits are barreling toward Trump over Jan. 6.
The criminal cases against the president-elect have crumbled, but he remains enmeshed in civil litigation over Jan. 6 and a barrage of cases he filed against the media.
Adding to the unwieldy heap of litigation are a slew of suits Trump himself has filed in recent years, accusing media organizations, his political opponents and others of spreading defamatory stories about him or otherwise treating him unfairly. Some viewed those cases as publicity stunts aimed at boosting his campaign to return to the White House, but now Trump faces the potential of being forced to give sworn testimony.
As he tries to fill out his administration and launch his promised policy agenda, those depositions — and the sessions he’ll need with lawyers to prepare for them — could be a significant distraction.Trump could avoid that predicament by dropping the cases he filed. So far, there’s no sign he’ll do so, and a spokesperson said the president-elect intends to fight on.
“President Trump will continue to hold those who have committed, and are committing wrongdoings, accountable for blatantly false and dishonest reporting, which serves no public interest and only seeks to interfere in our elections on behalf of political partisans,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the transition.
He’s pursuing a defamation lawsuit against ABC for asserting that a civil jury found that he raped Carroll, when the jury actually found him liable for sexual abuse. (A federal judge in New York ruled it was accurate to say Trump was found liable for rape in “common modern parlance.”)
Also looming are massive civil judgments rendered against him over the past year, one of which includes $97 million he owes to New York writer E. Jean Carroll in suits she brought relating to her claim that he raped her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the 1990s.
Trump is also battling with publisher Simon & Schuster over the rights to recorded interviews he gave to journalist Bob Woodward. He’s pressing suits against CBS for its handling of an interview with Harris and the Pulitzer Prize board for reaffirming awards it gave to the New York Times and Washington Post for their reporting on ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia — a claim Trump often derides as “the Russia hoax.”
Washington Post, Many targeted for removal by Trump can’t be deported, ICE data shows, Nick Miro, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). Nearly half of Washington Post, Federal employees scramble to insulate themselves from Trump’s purge, Lisa Rein and Jeff Stein, Dec. 8, 2024. Career civil servants are scrubbing social media, changing job titles and looking for private sector work over fear that the incoming president may fire them.
As President-elect Donald Trump’s transition teams move into federal agencies, thousands of civil servants — and some of the Biden appointees they work for — are scrambling to insulate themselves from the new administration’s promised purge.Get the latest election news and results
Federal employees are scrubbing their Facebook and X accounts for any negative posts about Trump. Some, including at least one prominent official who testified in Trump’s first impeachment inquiry, are weighing putting in retirement papers, while others maneuver to transfer to seemingly safer agencies. D.C. recruiting firms are seeing booming business from those looking for private-sector work.
Meanwhile, some agencies have moved to reclassify jobs with titles that could clash with Trump’s agenda, especially those promoting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, boosting environmental justice and fighting the effects of climate change. For the first time, some civil servants are taking out liability insurance to cover lawyers if they’re demoted or fired. And in a rare alliance, outgoing Biden administration appointees are joining forces with labor unions to extend collective bargaining agreements, locking in benefits before the incoming administration can seek to undo them.
Before Trump takes office Jan. 20, career staffers are racing to outmaneuver his plans to gut and radically reshape the nonpartisan bureaucracy of 2.3 million. The president-elect has promised to fire thousands of professionals and replace them with political loyalists, slash trillions of dollars from the federal budget, eliminate departments and relocate others away from what he derides as the “deep state” of intransigent bureaucrats in the capital. Russ Vought, Trump’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget, told supporters earlier this year that Trump’s second term would “put the bureaucrats in trauma.”
New York Times, Trump Transition: Did Trump Drain Democrats’ Energy? These Races Will Be the First Test, Reid J. Epstein, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). As Democrats try to fire up their fatigued base, two contests in Virginia will serve as the first measure of partisan enthusiasm since Donald Trump’s victory.
Even as the exhausted nation recovers from its two-year presidential campaign, candidates in a pocket of Northern Virginia are gearing up for a pair of special elections that may serve as barometers of partisan enthusiasm in the Trump 2.0 era.
The contests early next year in Loudoun County, for seats in overlapping districts in Virginia’s State Senate and House of Delegates, will not only determine which party holds majorities in the narrowly divided chambers. They will also be the first significant elections since voters returned President-elect Donald J. Trump to office.
Eight years ago, his surprise victory prompted a wave of Democratic energy, unleashing geysers of fund-raising and a zeal to vote that led the party to special-election victories even in deeply Republican districts.
But since Mr. Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats have focused more on protecting political turf at the state level than on engaging in flashy national demonstrations. Donations to liberal nonprofit groups have not matched the resistance anger that followed Mr. Trump’s first election. And ratings on the left-leaning cable channel MSNBC have dropped — with the hosts of the network’s flagship show having met with the president-elect.
The Loudoun County state legislative districts became vacant when Suhas Subramanyam, a Democratic state senator, resigned after winning an election to the U.S. House on Nov. 5. Kannan Srinivasan, a Democratic member of the Virginia House of Delegates, stepped down from that chamber after winning a Democratic caucus on Nov. 16 for the party’s nomination to replace Mr. Subramanyam.
Then JJ Singh, a first-time candidate, won a Democratic caucus on Nov. 23 to replace Mr. Srinivasan — the third time in November that his district’s voters were asked to go to the polls.
The districts are both heavily Democratic — Terry McAuliffe won more than 60 percent of the vote in each when he lost the 2021 election for governor. Still, party officials worry that a drop in enthusiasm could allow Republicans to snatch away key seats. Republicans have nominated Tumay Harding for the State Senate and Ram Venkatachalam for the State House. Each has emphasized school issues and a desire to end Democratic control of the legislative chambers.
New York Times, Commerce Dept. Is on the Front Lines of China Policy, Julian E. Barnes and Ana Swanson, Dec. 9, 2024 (print ed.). . Over the past four years, the department has confronted China by restricting key exports, a policy that is likely to continue in the Trump administration.
The Commerce Department has traditionally focused on promoting the interests of American business and increasing U.S. exports abroad. But over the last four years, it has taken on a national security role, working to defend the country by restricting exports of America’s most powerful computer chips.
While the Trump administration is likely to remake much of the Biden administration’s economic policy, with a renewed focus on broad tariffs, it is unlikely to roll back the Commerce Department’s evolution.
“I’m truthfully not terribly worried that the Trump administration will undo all the great work we’ve done,” Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, said in an interview. “Number one, it’s at its core national security, which I hope we can all agree on. But two, it is the direction that they were going in.”
It was the first Trump administration that took the initial steps toward the Commerce Department’s evolution, Ms. Raimondo noted, with its decision to put the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei on the “entity list.” Companies on the list are deemed a national security concern, and transfers of technology to them are restricted.
Ms. Raimondo came into the commerce job focused on confronting the challenge of China by building upon the Trump administration’s actions.
She has overseen a significant expansion of U.S. economic and technology restrictions against China. The Biden administration transformed the tough but sometimes erratic actions the Trump administration had taken toward Beijing into more sweeping and systematic limits on shipping advanced technology to China.
The department now imposes export controls on critical artificial intelligence chips in order to slow China’s military modernizati
New York Times, As Donald Trump Threatens Tariffs, Europe and South America Strengthen Ties, Jenny Gross, Liz Alderman and Patricia Cohen, Dec. 7, 2024 (print ed.). The European Union and five South American countries have reached agreement on a deal to establish one of the largest trade zones in the world.
The European Union reached a major trade deal on Friday with five South American countries, concluding a long-delayed negotiation that took on new urgency as President-elect Donald J. Trump threatens to impose tariffs on some of the world’s largest economies.
The deal, between the European Union and members of Mercosur — a bloc that includes Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay — would establish one of the largest trade zones in the world, and would be the European Union’s biggest trade agreement ever.
With European leaders preparing for the possibility that Mr. Trump’s return to office will lead to a more fragmented global economy, the deal is a significant victory for proponents of free trade, linking markets with 780 million people. But it could fuel frustration within the European bloc, with France vehemently opposed to the agreement.
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.Get the best of The Times in your inbox
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America PAC conducted what it described as an expansive ground-game effort on Mr. Trump’s behalf. Mr. Musk came to see defeating President Biden as a vital imperative and swung hard toward Mr. Trump after the assassination attempt against him in July. He became so invested in the effort that he campaigned frequently for the Republican nominee in Pennsylvania, widely seen as the most important battleground state.
Mr. Musk also donated $4 million to America PAC on Nov. 12, a week after Election Day. He has vowed to keep his super PAC active by targeting progressive prosecutors and supporting Mr. Trump’s agenda.
Since the election, Mr. Musk has become inescapable at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club in Florida. He is leading an effort to try to trim the size of the federal government, and he has weighed in on various personnel choices that the incoming president has made.
While some in Mr. Trump’s orbit — and at times the president-elect himself — have at times seemed weary of Mr. Musk’s constant presence, the upside he brings in the form of enormous financial support and a major social media platform have clearly outweighed any concerns.
Mr. Musk’s total spending on the election is not yet known — and may never be. He cut other political checks to conservative down-ballot groups this cycle, including $12 million to two groups trying to elect Republican senators, the Senate Leadership Fund and the Sentinel Action Fund. Mr. Musk, who originally wanted to keep his support for Mr. Trump quiet, may have also funded dark-money entities that will never disclose his involvement or donations.
On Thursday, Mr. Musk was revealed as the hidden funding source behind RBG PAC, a Republican group that worked to elect Mr. Trump but was named after a liberal jurist who despised him.
The Forward, Trump Transition: Internal Project Esther documents describe conspiracy of Jewish ‘masterminds’ seeking to dismantle Western values, Arno Rosenfeld, Dec. 6, 2024. A presentation meant to win supporters for the Heritage Foundation’s plan to fight antisemitism draws a line from George Soros to Antifa and pro-Palestinian protests
The Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, a conservative plan to counter antisemitism, sees the problem as one in which a handful of “masterminds” including Jews like George Soros and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker are seeking to “dismantle Western democracies, values and culture,” according to internal Heritage documents obtained by the Forward.
The documents, a pitch deck that Heritage used in trying to build support from Jewish foundations and other organizations, also outline several tactics the group plans to use to undermine a collection of anti-Zionist nonprofits and progressive groups that it refers to as the Hamas Support Network. The actions include identifying “foreign members vulnerable to deportation” and enlisting law enforcement to “generate uncomfortable conditions” for progressive activists.A slide from the presentation about Project Esther. Graphic by Heritage FoundationRelated
The group behind Project 2025 has a new plan to fight antisemitism
Heritage did not respond to an inquiry Friday about the presentation.NEW weekly newsletterAntisemitism Notebook
The think tank, which also produced the controversial Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump administration, has struggled to attract Jewish supporters for its antisemitism plan, which appears to have been assembled by several evangelical Christian groups.
Project Esther focuses exclusively on left-wing critics of Israel, ignoring the antisemitism problems from white supremacists and other far-right groups. James Carafano, who runs the Heritage Foundation’s antisemitism task force, said in October that “white supremacists are not my problem because white supremacists are not part of being conservative.”Eclectic group of ‘masterminds’
The promotional presentation includes two slides headlined “antisemitism’s ecosystem.” One features a pyramid topped by a list of “progressive ‘elites’ leading the way.” In addition to Soros and his son Alex, who run the Open Society Foundations, it also includes the Pritzker family and the Marxist academic and author Angela Davis.
George Soros has funded a variety of progressive causes and long been a boogeyman among conservatives; Alex recently took over the family foundation. It’s less clear why JB Pritzker, who was first elected governor of Illinois in 2018, was on the list, or his broader family — his sister Penny, who served as a Commerce Secretary under President Barack Obama and a special envoy for Ukraine in the Biden administration, is on the board of Harvard University and has compared pro-Palestinian protesters at the school to the Klu Klux Klan.
Politico reported in May that Pritzker family members ran a foundation that funded groups, including Climate Justice Alliance, which had also participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. But subsequent reporting cast doubt on those ties..
“That’s a completely false story,” JB Pritzker said of the Politico article at the time. He also chided the Chicago City Council for calling for a ceasefire in Gaza early this year.
The pitch deck draws lines from these figures to “Backers,” including foundations both large and small, like Tides, which helps individual donors funnel more than $1 billion to various liberal nonprofits; the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; and Wespac, a tiny charity that sponsors several of the most radical pro-Palestinian groups in the country (and whose board chair is Jewish. Activist movements like Antifa and Black Lives Matter are also included on that tier, below which are “organizers,” including the nonprofit groups Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine and Fight Back, the arm of a Chicago construction workers union.
In the presentation, the work of these leaders, funders and organizations is described as “violent activity” directed at Jews, including “riots.” One slide includes a photo of a violent 2017 demonstration in Paris.A plan to ‘neutralize’ the network
Project Esther’s strategy to “neutralize” this network, according to the documents, includes six distinct “lines of effort” with different outcomes.
The version of the plan publicly released on the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack in Israel, had criticized American Jewish organizations for not taking the threat posed by the “Hamas Support Network” seriously enough. The pitch deck says that Heritage plans to “conduct tailored outreach” to Jews and identify “key influencers” who can help unify the community behind Heritage’s strategy.The presentation included a list of specific tactics Project Esther would deploy to “neutralize” the Hamas Support Network. Graphic by Heritage Foundation
Referring to the activist network as a “cancer,” the group also calls for passing legislation to counter it at the federal, state and local levels. One goal is to get groups designated as “TSEs,” an abbreviation for “terrorism support entity,” which can have severe legal consequences.
President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to make fighting antisemitism a priority in his administration. He has suggested that he’s open to at least some of the tactics referenced in Project Esther, including deporting international students who protest against Israel. And the project was assembled by a group that includes the America First Policy Institute, a think tank staffed by some of his top advisors.
No major Jewish organizations appear to have participated in drafting the plan, or publicly endorsed it since its release.
Everyone is entitled to my own opinion, Commentary: Elderly golfer is an incoherent mess on Meet the Press, Jeff Tiedrich, Dec. 9, 2024. Promises are easy. Policies are hard.
New York Times, Opinion: Trump’s F.B.I. Pick Has an Enemies List. Biden Should Pardon Everyone on It, Michelle Goldberg, right, Dec. 6, 2024. There are few 
good things to be said about Donald Trump’s plan to fire the F.B.I. director, Chris Wray, and install in his place Kash Patel, a thuggish lackey who has spent years fantasizing about taking revenge on Trump’s enemies. But there is one: Patel has helpfully provided us with a list of people President Biden should pardon before he leaves office.
Patel’s 2023 book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, purports to show how government employees who defied Trump constitute a shadowy cabal that is “the most dangerous threat to our democracy.” The “deep state,” in Patel’s telling, is “as treacherous and evil as the villains portrayed in books and movies.” Virtually every investigation of Trump and his allies, Patel suggests, is part of a monstrous plot against “the people’s president.” The book strongly implies that Jan. 6, “the insurrection that never was,” was encouraged by “deep state” agitators and then used as a pretext to persecute patriotic Trump supporters. In a blurb on the book jacket, Trump wrote, “We will use this blueprint to help us take back the White House and remove these gangsters from all of government!”
Who are these gangsters? Patel lists 60 of them in a useful alphabetized appendix. It is not, as he acknowledges, exhaustive, since he limits himself to the executive branch, leaving out “other corrupt actors of the first order” like Senator-elect Adam Schiff, the former Republican House speaker Paul Ryan and “the entire fake news mafia press corps.” His catalog of the “deep state” includes some of Patel’s bureaucratic foes from when he served in Trump’s first administration, like Bill Barr, who as attorney general said that Trump could make Patel the deputy F.B.I. director only “over my dead body,” and Wray, the man Patel would replace.
Patel also lists both the current secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, and Trump’s secretary of defense Mark Esper. Cassidy Hutchinson, the brave young former aide to Mark Meadows who testified before the Jan. 6 committee, is on the list, as is Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump staff member who often criticizes her old boss on “The View.” Naturally, Biden, Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton are on it as well.
Except for himself, Biden should pardon them all, along with pretty much everyone else Patel has singled out by name and those who worked on the Jan. 6 committee. On Wednesday, Jonathan Martin reported in Politico that there’s a “vigorous internal debate” among Biden aides about issuing pre-emptive pardons to officials likely to be unjustly targeted by Trump. A drawback of such pardons, Martin wrote, is that they “could suggest impropriety, only fueling Trump’s criticisms.” After all, Biden may struggle to explain why he’s pardoning people who have done nothing wrong.
Patel’s appendix, however, makes the case for blanket pardons easier to convey. The breadth of it demonstrates his McCarthyite impulses better than his critics ever could.
Though Biden is not much of a communicator, he could give a speech laying out the well-founded fears that Patel may try to harass the people on his list with spurious investigations. In addition to justifying sweeping pardons, such a speech could prompt a useful nationwide discussion about what it would mean to put a man like Patel in charge of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency.
We are entering a period when the ideal of Justice Department independence will almost certainly be swept away. Political persecution — the kind Trump and his allies claim, falsely, to have been subjected to — will become routine. Biden tried to defend the basic integrity of our imperfect institutions against Trumpist aggression, and he failed. All he can do now is help the American people understand what’s coming and try to protect the ones with MAGA targets on their backs.
Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: Ben Meiselas and Michael Popok return with a new episode of the Legal AF Podcast, delivering an in-depth update at the intersection of law and politics, Dec. 8, 2024. In this show, they explore whether President Biden should expand his use of pardon power to issue blanket pardons for patriots—such as elected officials, judges, and prosecutors—who have defended democracy.
They also discuss new developments involving Trump’s inner circle and their ongoing civil and criminal challenges, Trump’s relentless attempts to evade criminal liability, and much more.
Salon, Commentary: Welcome to the New Dark Ages, Austin Sarat, Dec. 7, 2024. If Trump has his way, the next four years will be far worse than even the Gilded Age Donald Trump has moved at warp speed to nominate people to serve in his Cabinet and other important government posts who have chosen loyalty to him as their most important virtue, making a mockery of merit even as the nominees claim to uphold meritocracy.
Moreover, like Trump himself, his nominees denigrate science and scientific expertise, subscribe to conspiracy theories, are eager to impose litmus tests in the arts and education, and seem hostile to the world beyond America’s borders.
Elections have consequences, so the saying goes.
And if that wasn’t enough to remind us that elections have consequences, the president-elect announced that on the first day of his administration, he will order a mass deportation of millions of immigrants and impose stiff tariffs on this nation’s most important trading partners.
While much of the post-election commentary has focused on its implications for American democracy, there is another side to what will unfold starting on Jan. 20. When he takes office, Trump, who promised to Make America Great Again, seems determined to lead America into a period of scientific, cultural, educational, and global retrenchment, which collectively might be called the new “Dark Ages.”
Some see Trump as reviving the so-called Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an era of great prosperity as well as technological and industrial growth. It was an era dominated by corrupt "captains of industry" or "robber barons" whose corrupting influence also extended to government and politics.
However, leaders in the Gilded Age did not reject science and rationality. Quite the contrary, they embraced both because they saw them as essential to the growth of capitalism. And they invested in culture and the arts, rather than trying to make them hue to a particular orthodoxy.
Yes, Trump’s era may ultimately have some attributes of the Gilded Age, I think it will be much worse. Trump and his MAGA followers reject the cultural legacy of the people who founded this nation. The people who led the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution were, deeply impressed by “the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution and its emphasis on empiricism, objective observation, and using rationality over faith or tradition as the foundations of truthful knowledge.” They founded “an Enlightenment country” and borrowed from the Enlightenment hostility toward the “hierarchically ordered societies of Europe.”
The president-elect seems determined to end all that. In 2017, Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of the writers group PEN America, warned of Trump’s “repudiation of the American ideals — grounded in the Enlightenment — of self-expression, knowledge, dissent, criticism, and truth.” What Nossel predicted then seems even more apt today.
During the 2024 campaign and transition period, Trump and his cronies have broadcast their determination “to entrench within the machinery of the U.S. government… elemental disdain for intellectuals, analysts, and experts.” They regularly denigrate rationality and elevate superstition, tradition, and hierarchy. I call their program a recipe for the return of the "Dark Ages."
Though the term is now much disputed, the phrase “Dark Ages” is used by some historians to describe a “’ period of intellectual depression in Europe from… the fifth century to the revival of learning about the beginning of the fifteenth….’” During that time, Europe experienced “a decline in culture (and) learning…. and a shift towards a feudal society with limited literacy and widespread superstition.”
Petrarch, an Italian scholar who lived from 1304 to 1374, described the time when he lived as an era of “darkness and dense gloom.” As he put it, “My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms” and to experience the “sleep of forgetfulness.”
The era that Petrarch described was also marked by a deep skepticism about science and rationality, a personalistic form of politics marked by a clear division between “lords” and vassals,” religious domination over culture, and the collapse of trade networks among European nations. Sound familiar?
Let’s start with Trump‘s threat to impose stiff tariffs on goods coming into this country from Canada, Mexico, and China. As he put it in a Truth Social post, “On January 20th… I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States.”
This is no small matter. Reuters reports that “The U.S. accounted for more than 83% of exports from Mexico in 2023 and 75% of Canadian exports” and that “Trump's threatened new tariffs would appear to violate the terms of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) on trade” which guaranteed “largely duty-free trade between the three countries.” The president-elect also threatened China, promising the Chinese “an additional 10% Tariff, above any additional Tariffs, on all of their many products coming into the United States of America.”
Whether or not Trump follows through on his threats, they immediately sent shock waves through our trade networks and promise to ignite trade wars as countries respond to Trump’s tariffs by imposing their own tariffs.As Reuters notes, “Trump's overall tariff plans… would push U.S. import duties back up to 1930s levels, stoke inflation, collapse U.S.-China trade, draw retaliation, and drastically reorder supply chains.” That would put the Dark Ages monarchs of Europe to shame.
If that is not enough to capture the Dark Ages vibe, consider what the new administration will do to education, the arts, and science.
On education, the incoming Trump Administration hopes to give free rein to “an army of far-right Christians” and attack “the very foundations of free, secular education.” Last week, Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for Defense Secretary, called for “an ‘educational insurgency’ where ‘you build your army underground" of children, so they can grow up to be the next generation of fundamentalist culture warriors.’” For the arts, Trump’s first term was something of a disaster. As Judy Berman, television critic for Time, explained, “the arts and entertainment…suffered mightily as Trump held court in the White House….(H)is policies…made it harder to subsist as a creative professional…as he lashed out at the arts and their practitioners.” More damaging, she argued, were Trump’s “repeated attempts to defund already-strapped federal arts organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which helps fund PBS and NPR) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.”
“Trump’s rhetoric, Berman concluded, “intensified an enmity between the arts community and the right… that dates back to Reagan-era censorship of transgressive artists…Put simply: Donald Trump was bad for art.”
Now, the country is facing “four more years of antagonist cultural policy (and the outright antagonism of people and places that do not align with Trump’s values).”
Finally, consider what Smart News dubbed Trump’s "Cabinet of quacks and hacks." They are science skeptics, conspiracy theorists, and eager supplicants to their “lord,” Donald Trump.Chief among these Dark Ages throwbacks is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s nominee for the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Among other things, he has spoken out against “vaccines that have saved millions of lives.” Showing his conspiratorial bone fides, Kennedy claims that “the COVID-19 virus was targeted so that Chinese and Jewish people are more immune.” And he has not just targeted the COVID vaccine. Kennedy and his allies in the incoming administration are deeply suspicious of “expert authority,” which they claim “hides elite power.”
That is why US News predicts that they will lead “a radical antiestablishment medical movement with roots in past centuries… threatening the achievements of a science-based public health order painstakingly built since World War II.”
And if Kennedy is confirmed, he will have plenty of company in doing Trump’s bidding by pushing this country toward a new Dark Ages in medicine, health care, scientific research, education, and the arts. To avoid that fate, we must mount sustained and effective resistance in each of those domains.Ultimately, we can only hope that what Petrarch said in his time is true in ours. “This sleep of forgetfulness,” he predicted, “will not last forever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in…pure radiance."
Washington Post, Analysis: The fascinating — and important — Florida and Ohio Senate appointments, Aaron Blake, Dec. 7, 2024. A look at the dynamics for both appointments, which could make the Senate more or less Trump-y.
President-elect Donald Trump is engaged in a battle of wills with GOP senators over his Cabinet picks — a joust that will say a lot about just how much of a rubber stamp congressional Republicans will be over the next four years.Get the latest election news and results
They have thus far shown at least some willingness to buck Trump, or at least resist him. That has endangered Pete Hegseth’s selection as defense secretary and led to attorney general pick Matt Gaetz’s rapid withdrawal.
Republicans will have 53 senators, so just four voting with Democrats can reject Trump’s ideas. And we’re already getting a sense of which GOP senators could be thorns in Trump’s side. (Politico’s Jonathan Martin has a good rundown of those potential thorns here.)
But we also don’t know exactly what the Senate GOP conference will look like next year, thanks to an impending vacancy in Ohio (Vice President-elect JD Vance’s seat) and another likely vacancy in Florida (secretary of State pick Marco Rubio’s seat). And given the fine margins, the appointments to replace them could matter greatly.
The big question is whether a pair of governors who have had their differences with Trump, to varying degrees — Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Ohio’s Mike DeWine — will choose picks that enable Trump or maybe provide some more potential checks on him.
New York Times, Supreme Court Appears Inclined to Uphold Tennessee Law on Transgender Care, Adam Liptak, Dec. 4, 2024. Assessing the court’s direction was complicated by the silence of one justice in the conservative majority, Neil Gorsuch. A decision is expected by June.
Members of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed ready on Wednesday to uphold a Tennessee law denying transition care to transgender youth, with some of them saying that judgments about contested scientific evidence should be made by legislatures rather than judges.
“The Constitution leaves that question to the people’s representatives, rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said leaving the question to the states was an alarming abdication of responsibility. “I’m suddenly quite worried,” she said, adding that courts must assess the constitutionality of laws challenged on equal protections.
The wide-ranging argument, which lasted about two-and-a-half hours, touched on the approaches of other nations, the force of a precedent protecting transgender workers and the role of parental rights. But the core question the justices focused on was whether the Tennessee law made distinctions based on sex, which would subject it to a demanding form of judicial scrutiny.
Assessing the court’s ultimate direction was complicated by the silence of the author of the employment discrimination case, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch. But it seemed probable that there were at least five votes for rejecting the equal protection challenge to the law.
More than 20 other states have similar laws that could be affected. The court’s decision, expected by June, will almost certainly yield a major statement on transgender rights. Arguments are unfolding against the backdrop of a fierce public debate over the role that gender identity should play in matters as varied as sports, bathrooms and pronouns.
The Tennessee law, which is being challenged by three families and a doctor, prohibits medical providers from prescribing puberty-delaying medication, providing hormone therapy, or performing surgery to treat what the law calls “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.”
The law allows those same treatments for “a congenital defect, precocious puberty, disease or physical injury,” leading the plaintiffs, backed by the Biden administration, to argue that the law violates the Constitution by denying equal protection to transgender people, primarily by discriminating against them based on sex.
New York Times, Trump’s Incoming Border Czar Sees Texas as a ‘Model’ for Enforcement, J. David Goodman, Dec. 4, 2024. Tom Homan, an immigration hard-liner selected by President-elect Donald J. Trump to be his “border czar,” squeezed into a helicopter last week, as Gov. Greg Abbott gave an aerial tour of all that Texas had done to stop people from crossing illegally from Mexico.
There is a newly built camp for the Texas National Guard, whose border mission has looked a lot like a military deployment. Nearby, a line of buoy barriers in the Rio Grande puts migrants at risk of drowning. The river’s edge bristles with concertina wire that has often left bordercrossers with cuts and gashes. State police officers regularly patrol the brush, arresting migrants in an unusual extension of state authority into immigration matters.
“This is a model we can take across the country,” Mr. Homan said, addressing a group of National Guard members and Texas state troopers involved in border enforcement in the border city of Eagle Pass. “I am impressed by what I’ve seen today.”
Meidas Touch Network, Kash Patel Called for Impeaching Federal Judges in 2023, Staff Report, Dec. 2, 2024. Trump's FBI nominee: "People aren't going to like this."
During an appearance on Don Jr.'s Triggered podcast in September 2023, Kash Patel, a close ally of Donald Trump and his nominee for FBI director, advocated for Republicans to begin impeaching federal judges—an extraordinary suggestion that undermines judicial independence and the rule of law.
Patel had his perpetual trademark sniffle working during the interview (the cold he has apparently had for years that he just can’t shake), while Junior looked on through bloody slits for eye sockets with a bright red flushed face.
Patel specifically targeted judges presiding over cases involving January 6th rioters and Trump himself, labeling them as "political terrorists" and calling impeachment a necessary "drastic measure." His comments suggest a willingness to use the power of impeachment—a tool historically reserved for addressing misconduct or criminal behavior—as a partisan weapon against members of the judiciary who rule against his political allies.
This rhetoric is not only unprecedented but also disqualifying for someone seeking to lead the FBI, a position that demands impartiality and a steadfast commitment to the Constitution. The FBI director must uphold the principles of justice and independence, not orchestrate politically motivated attacks on judges.
Patel’s comments signal that, under his leadership, the FBI could be weaponized to target perceived political enemies, eroding public trust in the agency and the judiciary alike. Judicial independence is a cornerstone of American democracy. It ensures that judges can make decisions based on the law, free from political pressure or intimidation.
The call to impeach judges who oversee politically sensitive cases should alarm Americans across the political spectrum. It is a blatant effort to undermine the judiciary’s independence and turn it into a partisan battleground. Kash Patel’s comments are a stark reminder of why his nomination to lead the FBI is deeply troubling and why his vision for the agency is incompatible with democratic principles.
Meidas Touch Network, Investigative Commentary: The Big Reason Why Hunter's Pardon is Justified: Kash Patel, Ron Filipkowski, right, Dec. 2, 2024. I've 
listened to hundreds of interviews of Trump's FBI Director nominee.
I awoke this morning after a three day unplugged trip to Montreal to learn that in the previous 24 hours, two things had happened: Trump named Kash Patel as his FBI Director and then Joe Biden pardoned his only surviving son, Hunter. Neither one of these things were especially surprising since it is clear to me the two things are connected, but I was surprised by some of the reaction from those in the media, the Never Trump (former) Republicans, and a few Democratic elected officials.
Most of the criticism has taken the form of three primary arguments: 1. Trump will now have justification to make egregious pardons because of this; 2. Joe Biden lied and Dems who support the decision are hypocrites who claim to believe in the Rule of Law but really don’t; 3. Critics of the critics who cite Trump’s previous pardons are wrong because his awfulness doesn’t justify Joe’s awfulness.
None of these things address the REAL reason for the pardon: Trump’s appointment of Patel, who has ranted and raved for the past four years on every right-wing podcast in America that he was going to get Hunter Biden for things he has never been prosecuted for. Joe takes that threat seriously. Apparently, the critics either do not, or are ignorant and unaware of exactly who Patel is and what he has pledged to do specific to Hunter.
I have spent the last 4 years covering right-wing shows, channels, conferences and podcasts. Some very fringy, conspiratorial and obscure. I am aware from time to time a legacy media journalist will dip their toe into that world by spending a week watching Steve Bannon or Charlie Kirk, write an article, and give their expert analysis. That has not been me. I have been immersed in their world day after day, week after week, year after year. One person I have watched hundreds of times at all of these places is Kash Patel.
Patel first caught the attention of Trump while serving as an aide to Devin Nunes’s staff during the 2017-18 RussiaGate investigation. That led to an appointment by Trump late in his Administration to a post that Patel has no business ever being in: interim Chief of Staff to interim DOD Secretary Chris Miller, left. An interim to an interim. I have also heard Patel lie about and exaggerate his resume and accomplishments on an almost daily basis to the point of absurdity.
In these hundreds of Patel interviews, there was always a central theme: That Trump was going to win, Patel was likely going to be appointed CIA or FBI Director, then he was going to use that appointment to go after Trump’s enemies from the Russia investigation, members of the media who supposedly lied about Trump, eliminate thousands of career civil servants (the Deep State), and go after Hunter and Joe Biden with a new criminal investigation.
I have posted many clips over the years of some of Patel’s most outlandish threats and statements. Some of them have been resurfaced by legacy media outlets, but only the ones where Patel vows to go after them, or to clean out government agencies. They never play the clips I posted where he obsesses on Hunter Biden, and boy, was he obsessed with Hunter Biden.
This is what Patel said last year in just one of the clips I posted:
Steve Bannon to Kash: “Do you feel confident when you go back as a senior member of this Administration starting in 2025 that you will be able to deliver the goods? That we can have serious prosecutions? That the people who did evil deeds will be held accountable and prosecuted? Can you deliver this in the first couple of months so we can get rolling on criminal prosecutions?”
Kash Patel: “Yes. We will find the conspirators not just in government but in the media. We are going to come after the people in the media who helped Biden rig the presidential election - we’re putting you all on notice.”
I should also emphasize that when he is talking about media “rigging” the election, he is talking about their refusal to cover the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop -- Rudy Giuliani’s October Surprise in 2020.
SpyTalk, Investigation: How Kash Patel Bungled a SEAL Team Six Hostage Rescue, Seth Hettena, Dec. 2, 2024. “You could’ve gotten these guys killed!” a Pentagon official screamed at Patel.
YEARS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP NAMED HIM TO RUN THE FBI, Kash Patel was a prosecutor in the Obama Justice Department assigned to work with Delta Force and the SEAL Team Six.
He told Vanity Fair that his job was to advise the elite operators as they went after “the global rack and stack of bad guys, determined the order, established find/fix/finish options, and then executed.”
A self-described “deep state” wrecking ball, Patel is fond of saying things like this that have made him a favorite of Trump’s MAGA base. However, during the first Trump administration, Patel’s actions revealed him as a bombastic fool who put SEAL Team Six in harm’s way through his ineptitude.
On October 30, 2020, President Trump signed off on a mission to have SEAL Team Six rescue Philip Walton, a 27-year-old American who gunmen had abducted from his farm in the West African nation of Niger, near the border with Nigeria. The kidnappers had hustled Walton across the border to Nigeria and were demanding a $1 million ransom.
In their book Only I Can Fix It, journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker reported that the plan called for the SEALs to parachute into northern Nigeria and move three miles on foot to reach the compound where Walton was being held.
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper had signed off on the plan with one or two questions: Did we have permission to fly over Nigeria?
Patel, then the senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, assured the Pentagon that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “got the airspace cleared.”
A few hours later, the Pentagon learned that Patel was wrong: Nigeria had not given permission.
This was a huge mistake. By that point, the aircraft carrying the SEALs were only fifteen miles away from the Nigerian border.
The Air Force planes were swiftly rerouted, circling the skies for an hour while State Department officials worked frantically to obtain clearances to cross the border.
As Esper recalled in his memoir, A Sacred Oath, “By the time Mike [Pompeo] and I spoke an hour later, he still didn’t have the okay from the remaining country. He also didn’t know where Patel received his information. Pompeo never spoke with him.”
“How did we receive the bad information in the first place?” Pompeo wondered.
Esper said his team “suspected Patel made the approval story up, but they didn’t have all the facts.”
New York Times, Trump Wants to Shake Up Health Care. Many Americans Don’t Mind, Jack Healy, Isabelle Taft and Kate Selig, Dec. 3, 2024 (print ed.). Some voters said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has teamed up with President-elect Trump, had given voice to their frustrations with the health system.
As a nature-loving physical therapist in Boulder, Colo., Colin O’Banion shops at farmers markets, grows organic squash in his backyard and thought he could never vote for Donald J. Trump.
But during the pandemic, he said, he and his wife became social outcasts when they refused Covid-19 vaccines for themselves and their three sons. Tuning in to alternative health podcasts, he became convinced that the country’s public health establishment was corrupt, and that the only antidote was the upheaval being promised by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as he teamed up with Mr. Trump.
“That’s what brought me on board,” Mr. O’Banion, 49, said, still sounding surprised that he had voted for Mr. Trump, now the president-elect. “We have a real epidemic going on with metabolic disease, diabetes, obesity. How is it possible we have so much money and the most unhealthy people?”
Scientists and public health experts have expressed alarm that Mr. Trump wants to give over the country’s health agencies to people like Mr. Kennedy and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who have spread misinformation about vaccines and Covid treatments and vowed to gut the government agencies that regulate food and medicines.
But to people like Mr. O’Banion, rejecting norms is exactly the point.
Trust in scientists and medical experts has eroded since the pandemic, and voters galvanized by Mr. Kennedy’s pledge to “Make America Healthy Again” as head of the Department of Health and Human Services said that he had given voice to their frustrations with the whole system — from vaccines and Covid rules to hospitals and health insurance.
New York Times, Director of ‘2000 Mules’ Acknowledges the Conspiratorial Film Was Flawed, Nick Corasaniti and Ken Bensinger, Dec. 3, 2024 (print ed.). The director, Dinesh D’Souza, who is facing a lawsuit over the documentary, admitted that an analysis used to make claims about election fraud that were later debunked had been faulty.
More than two years after the widely debunked film “2000 Mules” poured gasoline on right-wing conspiracy theories about election fraud, the documentary’s writer and director, Dinesh D’Souza, has acknowledged that its findings were based on a faulty analysis.
Mr. D’Souza, right, said in a statement on his website that the analysis used in the film, which claimed to depict a vast ring of “mules” illegally gathering large numbers of ballots and surreptitiously placing them in drop boxes, was incorrect.
The film’s premise was based on matching surveillance videos from drop-box locations with geolocated cellphone data that appeared to show repeated trips to areas near drop boxes during the 2020 election.
“We recently learned that surveillance videos used in the film may not have actually been correlated with the geolocation data,” Mr. D’Souza, who is facing a lawsuit over the documentary, said in the statement, which he released on Nov. 26.
Despite being swiftly debunked by both Republican and Democratic election officials, the film garnered more than a million views online in less than two weeks after its release in 2022 and eventually grossed more than $1.4 million. A glitzy premiere at Mar-a-Lago drew Donald J. Trump, the once and future president, as well as Republican luminaries and influential figures in the movement to discredit the 2020 election.
The surveillance videos used in the film were obtained by True the Vote, a right-wing election organization that was a partner in producing the film. In a statement on its website on Monday, the group said the film’s central premise “remains accurate” despite the apology.
The admission from Mr. D’Souza follows years of defiance: He had long argued that the evidence in his film was sound even as election experts at the state and local levels declared the conclusions unfounded. In 2022, the Republican attorney general of Arizona asked the F.B.I. to investigate True the Vote for ignoring requests to share the documentary’s evidence.
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More On Health Care Exec's Murder
New York Times, An N.Y.P.D. Manhunt Caught a Subway Shooter. This Time, It’s Different, Matthew Haag and Patrick McGeehan, Dec. 8, 2024 (print ed.). Capturing a suspect who slips away from a crime scene requires solid police work, help from the public and a little luck, experts say. So far, it’s not working.
A shocking early morning act of violence, a frantic New York Police Department search for a suspect and a gunman seemingly in the wind: The year was 2022, and the man the police had fanned out to find was Frank R. James, who had set off smoke grenades inside a crowded subway car in Brooklyn and opened fire.
Now, more than two years later, another manhunt has gripped the city. But unlike Mr. James, who was apprehended the day after his rampage, the man who assassinated the chief executive of a health insurance company just before dawn on Wednesday in Midtown Manhattan has not been caught or even identified after more than four days.
The two most recent fugitive searches in New York City have involved gunmen who made seemingly improbable escapes in a city teeming with surveillance cameras and people. But despite some similarities between the cases and the investigative tactics being used to try to solve them, the search for the man who killed Brian Thompson, right, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, has proved far more challenging.
The suspect’s ability to evade capture appears to be tied to his methodical planning, including wearing a mask and a hood during nearly all of his time in New York City and paying with cash everywhere, along with using a fake driver’s license.
And unlike Mr. James, who did essentially nothing to conceal himself after slipping away amid the chaotic aftermath of the shooting that wounded 10 people, the suspect in Mr. Thompson’s killing fled quickly into Central Park, away from the surveillance cameras that blanket much of Manhattan. He also appears to have left the state long before the police could possibly have begun to track his movements.
“I don’t think I’ve seen this level of operational preplanning in any crime, never mind in a murder,” said Kenneth E. Corey, a former chief of department in the New York Police Department.
New York Times, UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Shooting: Torrent of Anger for Health Insurance Industry Follows C.E.O.’s Killing, Dionne Searcey and Madison Malone Kircher, Dec. 6, 2024 (print ed.). The shooting death of a UnitedHealthcare executive in Manhattan has unleashed Americans’ frustrations with an industry that often denies coverage and reimbursement for medical claims.
The fatal shooting on Wednesday of a top UnitedHealthcare executive, Brian Thompson, on a Manhattan sidewalk has unleashed a torrent of morbid glee from patients and others who say they have had negative experiences with health insurance companies at some of the hardest times of their lives.
It is unclear what motivated the incident or whether it was tied to Mr. Thompson’s work in the insurance industry. The police have yet to identify the shooter who is still on the loose.
But that did not stop social media commenters from leaping to conclusions and from showing a blatant lack of sympathy over the death of a man who was a husband and father of two children.
“Thoughts and deductibles to the family,” read one comment underneath a video of the shooting posted online by CNN. “Unfortunately my condolences are out-of-network.”
On TikTok, one user wrote, “I’m an ER nurse and the things I’ve seen dying patients get denied for by insurance makes me physically sick. I just can’t feel sympathy for him because of all of those patients and their families.”
The dark commentary after the death of Mr. Thompson, a 50-year-old insurance executive from Maple Grove, Minn., highlighted the anger and frustration over the state of health care in America, where those with private insurance often find themselves in Kafka-esque tangles while seeking reimbursement for medical treatment and are often denied.
Washington Post, NYPD searches for gunman after fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO, Shayna Jacobs, Daniel Gilbert, Trisha Thadani, Aaron Gregg and Jarrett Ley, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). Brian Thompson was heading to the Hilton Midtown for a conference when the brazen, targeted attack (shown above) occurred, police said.
UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, right, was fatally shot on a Midtown Manhattan sidewalk early Wednesday morning in what police called a premeditated ambush that sent them on a manhunt for the unidentified gunman, who fled the area on a bicycle and was last seen heading into Central Park.
The health insurance executive from Minnesota was walking outside the New York Hilton Midtown about 6:40 a.m., before an investors conference his company was holding in the hotel, when a gunman wearing a hood and a mask fired off several rounds from a pistol. Thompson had been staying in another hotel across the street.
He was killed in one of the busiest parts of the city, an area teeming with tourists as well as people in business suits. Even as New Yorkers prepared for a bustling Christmas season with the traditional tree lighting Wednesday night at Rockefeller Center, officers had cordoned off sections of 54th Street outside the Hilton with yellow crime scene tape and were counting 9mm casings on the ground.
Police tracked the gunman’s movements in a neighborhood saturated by city-operated and private surveillance cameras, releasing images of him making a cash purchase at a nearby Starbucks and then, a short time later, taking aim at Thompson, who authorities said was shot in the back and leg.
Surveillance camera footage obtained by The Post appears to show the suspect exiting the 57th Street F Train station timestamped at 6:15 a.m. The individual — wearing clothing, shoes and a backpack that match images released by police — leaves the station and walks briskly down Sixth Avenue toward the Hilton Hotel, where police say they responded to a call of a person being shot at 6:46 a.m.
The targeted shooting of the chief executive officer of an American company, in the nation’s financial capital, shocked the health and business communities nationally and in Minnetonka, Minnesota, outside Minneapolis, where UnitedHealth Group is headquartered. Police said they were searching for a motive.
New York Police Department investigators were looking into whether anyone had a known grudge against the victim. Police said they were combing social media and speaking to witnesses in an effort to track down anyone who may have knowledge of why Thompson was killed, offering a $10,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest and prosecution. They said they also were looking into the possibility that the shooter had been hired to kill the executive.
Thompson, a 50-year-old Iowa native, joined UnitedHealth Group in 2004 and rose through a series of top leadership posts to become the CEO of its largest unit, the health insurance firm UnitedHealthcare.
The company is a dominating presence in American health care, providing employer and individual health coverage to about 50 million Americans. UnitedHealthcare brought in $281 billion last year, accounting for about 75 percent of its parent company’s revenue; had it been a stand-alone firm, it would have ranked among the top 10 publicly traded American companies by sales, according to data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence.
The Hartmann Report, The Medicare Advantage Trap: What They Don’t Tell You, Thom Hartmann, right, 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?
Yesterday a gunman assassinated the chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, as he arrived at a meeting of investors in New York City.
While authorities are still investigating, officials have released the information that the casings of the bullets that killed Thompson bore the words “deny,” “defend,” “depose,” all words associated with companies’ denial of health insurance, taken from the longer phrases “deny the claim,” “defend the lawsuit,” “depose the patient.”
While those clues could simply be a red herring, posters on social media have cheered what they seem to see as revenge against an abusive system in which people’s lives are at the mercy of executives who prioritize profits.
Health insurance companies have long been under scrutiny for their practices. For the past two years, ProPublica has run a long series exploring the different ways in which companies have developed systems to deny healthcare coverage to their policyholders.
UnitedHealthcare has been no exception either to such practices or to scrutiny. Its parent group UnitedHealth has a market valuation of $560 billion and was the eighth largest corporation in the world last year as measured by revenue. This year, UnitedHealthcare—Thompson’s unit—is expected to bring in $280 billion in revenue.
UnitedHealth is embroiled in a number of lawsuits. Andrew Stanton of Newsweek reported that on November 14, 2023, families of two now-deceased patients sued UnitedHealthcare over denial of coverage for Medicare Advantage patients for nursing home stays prescribed by their doctors. Medicare Advantage is the private insurance alternative to Medicare that receives a flat fee from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It’s an enormously profitable industry, and UnitedHealth controls almost a third of it.
The lawsuit alleges that UnitedHealthcare uses artificial intelligence to deny claims from Medicare Advantage policyholders. The lawsuit claims that the company knowingly uses an algorithm that makes errors 90% of the time because it also knows that only about 0.2% of policy holders will appeal the decision to deny their claims. Last month the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hammered UnitedHealth for dramatic increases in their denial rates for post-acute care between 2019 and 2022 as it switched to AI authorizations.
On the same day as the shooting, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance covering Connecticut, New York, and Missouri announced it would cover anesthesia during surgery or procedures only for a specific time period in order to make insurance more affordable by reducing overbilling.
After an outcry both from anesthesiologists and the public, the company today retracted its policy change, saying it had never intended to avoid “medically necessary anesthesia,” but meant simply to “clarify the appropriateness of anesthesia consistent with well-established clinical guidelines.” Their explanation might have calmed the news cycle, but its suggestion that the insurance officials rather than doctors should determine what anesthesia is appropriate for a patient during surgery echoed the argument in the UnitedHealthcare lawsuit.
Thompson’s murder seems to be a cultural moment in which popular fury over the power big business has over ordinary Americans’ lives exploded. Maureen Tkacik of The American Prospect noted, “Only about 50 million customers of America’s reigning medical monopoly might have a motive to exact revenge upon the UnitedHealthcare CEO.” The shooter, whose actual motive remains unknown, is fast becoming a folk hero.
Social media has exploded with users writing things like “[t]his claim for sympathy has been denied”; songs featuring the words “deny, “defend,” and “depose”; and recorded commentary condemning the healthcare insurance industry. UnitedHealth Group posted its sadness about Thompson’s death on Facebook yesterday about 1:00 p.m.; 36 hours later the post had 65,000 laughing emojis under it.
Security expert Charlie Carroll expressed surprise to Josh Fiallo of the Daily Beast that Thompson did not have a security detail. “We’re living in a world where people are extremely disgruntled,” Carroll said. “When people lose trust in the system, you start seeing more kidnappings and assassinations because they feel like they have to take matters into their own hands.”
In the wake of the shooting, UnitedHealthcare and several other insurance companies took down from their websites the names and photographs of their officials.
Emptywheel, Analysis Zeynep Tufekci’s Two Blind Spots Cross at DOGE, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), Dec. 7, 2024.The glee surrounding Brian Thompson's death is not unprecedented -- Donald Trump campaigned on a similar mob glee, targeting Paul Pelosi, to get elected. And then he installed a bunch of billionaires to start looting. And politicians like Elizabeth Warren have already suggested some "broad public solutions" to that looting.
Zeynep Tufekci has a column at NYT scolding thousands of people on social media for taking glee in the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
I don’t care one way or another for the scold. I care about how she makes a remarkable claim and then uses it to engage in political nihilism.Tufekci claims that she can’t remember any murder being so openly celebrated in the US. "I’ve been studying social media for a long time, and I can’t think of any other incident when a murder in this country has been so openly celebrated."
From there, Tufekci likens this moment to the Gilded Age, where social upheaval led to exploitation and political violence.
.As a threshold matter, I find her claim that this is a unique moment of glee to be … forgetful. Just two years ago, after all, Donald Trump and Elon Musk — whose platform has encouraged such mob celebrations — both led their mob in vicious jokes about Paul Pelosi’s near-murder.
Indeed, Trump used attacks on Paul Pelosi at least twice in his campaign — most recently, campaigning with some cops in September.
How do you forget that the richest man in the world and the President-elect have engaged in just such celebration of political violence (and that’s before he pardons seditionists)?
Donald Trump got elected by celebrating political violence. And then he proceeded to install at least 11 billionaires, ready to start looting government.
Which is where Tufekci’s failure to find any will to push for systematic solutions gets curious. After all, Lina Khan’s efforts to rein in monopolies played a role in last year’s election.
WaPo’s coverage of all the billionaires Trump installed quotes Josh Hawley along with Elizabeth Warren and Noah Bookbinder.
Trump’s team of rivals stands in stark contrast with President Joe Biden’s Cabinet, which had a combined net worth of $118 million in the first year of his presidency, according to Forbes. Trump’s picks have not yet released their financial disclosures, but his 2025 Cabinet is likely to be even richer than the first Trump Cabinet, which had a combined net worth of $6.2 billion.[snip]Trump’s selections may be more inclined to look out for the interests of their own businesses and their fellow billionaires than for working-class voters, said Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.“It is hard to see how a Cabinet made up largely of the very, very wealthiest of Americans is going to have an understanding of what the needs of regular Americans are,” he said.[snip]
And even beyond Khan’s work, the Biden Administration took efforts to reverse the kind of concentration that made Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg rich. They’ve even taken action against … United Healthcare.
The richest man in the world is about to come for VA Health Care and once that fails to make way for new tax cuts, Medicare. No one knows where this moment of rage will go. The oligarchs have the means to exercise the power of the state against those complaining that Trump’s billionaires plan to use bullshit claims about efficiency to make things far worse.But the people who brought us to this moment where mobs take glee at political violence are about to loot the government.And I’m pretty sure Senator Warren will be ready at hand to explain what is going down.
New York Times, The ‘Chilling’ Fatal Shooting of a C.E.O. Has Business Leaders on Edge, Emma Goldberg, Dec. 6, 2024. After Brian Thompson of UnitedHealthcare was killed in Manhattan, the phones at corporate security firms were “ringing off the hook.”
A Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company raised its drug prices, and then board members and executives received phone calls threatening violence. A health care company’s board meeting was disrupted after board members were targeted in “swatting” attacks that wrongly sent law enforcement officers to their homes.
These incidents happened before the fatal shooting of Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive, in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday. The police had not offered a motive for the shooting as of Thursday night, or said it was related to Mr. Thompson’s work in the insurance industry.
The killing, however, stunned business leaders, some of whom were already concerned about safety. Over the last five years, there has been a sharp rise in targeted attacks, digital and offline, of executives and their families, said Chris Pierson, the chief executive of BlackCloak, a digital executive protection firm. Health care, biomedical and pharmaceutical leaders tend to be targeted more often than executives in other industries, according to the firm’s data.
Digital platforms have made it easier to obtain information about executives’ identities and locations, while social media has fanned the flames of vitriol directed at these corporate leaders.
Businesses have been increasing their spending on protection: The median amount spent on executive security among the S&P 500 companies that disclose that information doubled from 2021 to 2023, according to Equilar, an executive compensation research firm.
New York Times, Was Brian Thompson’s Killer a Hit Man? Unlikely, Experts Say, Annie Correal, Dec. 6, 2024. The murder of Brian Thompson did not appear to have been committed by a coldly calculating professional, according to people who study criminal behavior.
For the general public, the shooting in Manhattan of the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare on Wednesday seemed like something off Netflix: a coldblooded morning murder outside a hotel, a hooded man shooting a corporate bigwig from behind, the victim turning to face the attacker before crumpling to the ground, mortally wounded.
But beyond those images from a dark surveillance video, little is known about the shooting or the gunman. The police have not established a motive for the killing, and three days into their search they have not publicly named a suspect or made an arrest.
For those who professionally study criminal behavior, though, the shooting was packed with crucial information, with the killer’s every known move providing new opportunities to speculate about who he might be.
The police said the shooting was a targeted attack by someone with experience with firearms. But was that someone acting on a personal grudge — or a hired hand? And if the killer was a hit man, was he an amateur or a seasoned professional?
The consensus among experts following the killing of Brian Thompson, the veteran chief executive of one of the nation’s largest health insurers, was that the shooter could indeed handle himself around a gun, but that everything else suggested that he was unlikely to have been hired to commit the crime.
“Forgive me for saying too much on too little evidence, but it looks like the kind of guy that made up his mind that he was doing the right thing,” said David Shapiro, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, and a former F.B.I. special agent. “He didn’t look like a guy that was fearful.”
He added: “In terms of a professional hit man, that seems unlikely. It would be very hard to get somebody to do something like this. It’s very high risk.”
The gunman waited by a specific entrance to the New York Hilton Midtown and fired his weapon with confidence. He also appeared to have outfitted his gun with a silencer, which are rarely used in murders.
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.
The union made sense, at first, when you rationalized that she was famous, and he was a Kennedy and an environmental lawyer. His anti-vax stuff is weird, but then again, Hollywood is also a weird place, with people rolling jade over their faces and stuffing jade up their hoo-has and spending $22 for a single dumb smoothie at a grocery store called Erewhon. The spectrum of nutty is sometimes a circle. Mazel tov, you crazy kids.
Then, in 2022, RFK Jr. compared coronavirus restrictions to the Holocaust, and accused Anthony S. Fauci of perpetuating “fascism.” Hines responded on Twitter: “My husband’s opinions are not a reflection of my own. While we love each other, we differ on many current issues.” This sounded like the kind of statement that usually precedes a carefully crafted conscious uncoupling. But instead it preceded the announcement that Kennedy was running for president, with Hines by his side. “I support Bobby and I want to be there for him, and I want him to feel loved and supported by me,” she told the New York Times.
Then the personal stuff started to trickle out — the stuff about planting a dead bear cub in Central Park, the stuff about strapping a decaying whale head to his car roof, the stuff about the nanny who said he had sexually assaulted her (he allegedly sent her a text saying he had “no memory” of the incident) — and you thought, Eesh, these things could not possibly have been part of Kennedy’s courtship disclosures, and once Cheryl is fully aware, it’s over. He had a brain worm, he’d once revealed in a deposition, and it had eaten part of his brain. Girl, run.
But no! She persevered. In August, Kennedy officially suspended his hopeless presidential campaign and further announced that, instead of supporting Kamala Harris, the son of a Democratic dynasty would be supporting Donald Trump. Earlier in the year, Kennedy was asked on a “Curb” premiere red carpet whether he would consider becoming Trump’s running mate. “I don’t think that my marriage would survive it,” he responded, prompting Hines to quip: “I think he’s right.”
Well, now she’ll leave, you might think, but you are being too literal: Kennedy did not become Trump’s running mate, he’s merely Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, so here we are.
If political betrayals did not end this marriage, what about personal scandals? Because, in September, after the brain worms and the “fascism” and the allusions to making ivermectin and raw milk available throughout the land — after all that, a 31-year-old reporter from New York magazine was suspended when it was revealed that she had engaged in a “personal relationship” with Kennedy, about whom she had written a profile for the magazine.
A week later, there was Cheryl, photographed in Paris, holding her hands up to her face with her fingers ostentatiously splayed outward to show us that her ring finger still bore a wedding band.
I have spent more time than is reasonable (and truly, any amount of time is unreasonable) thinking about the interior life of Cheryl Hines, a woman who has gone from playing a beleaguered wife on prestige television to a beleaguered wife in real life, hanging on to a husband whose hero’s journey is one absurd plot twist after another, whose soundtrack is a tuba.
But more than that, Hines is making me think about the ways we talk about political wives. The things we think we know about them, the inner lives we invent. The fact that for an entire term, delusional resistance figures speculated that Melania Trump was their ally on the inside — Did she secretly hate her husband? — except she never left, and her memoir published earlier this year makes it clear that she never will. The way that observers have expected Usha Vance to moderate her husband when she has given no public indication that she thinks he needs moderating. The Hillary Clinton of it all.
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.
New York Times, How Kennedy Has Worked Abroad to Weaken Global Public Health Policy, Selam Gebrekidan, Justin Scheck, Sarah Hurtes and Pete McKenzie, Dec. 1, 2024 (print ed.). Donald Trump’s health secretary pick, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and his nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, have worked to undermine policies on measles, AIDS and more.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is in line to lead the Department of Health and Human Services in the next Trump administration, is well-known for promoting conspiracy theories and vaccine skepticism in the United States.
But Mr. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, has also spent years working abroad to undermine policies that have been pillars of global health policy for a half-century, records show.
He has done this by lending his celebrity, and the name of his nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, to a network of overseas chapters that sow distrust in vaccine safety and spread misinformation far and wide.
He, his organizations and their officials have interfered with vaccination efforts, undermined sex education campaigns meant to stem the spread of AIDS in Africa, and railed against global organizations like the World Health Organization that are in charge of health initiatives.
Along the way, Mr. Kennedy has partnered with, financed or promoted fringe figures — people who claim that 5G cellphone towers cause cancer, that homosexuality and contraceptive education are part of a global conspiracy to reduce African fertility and that the World Health Organization is trying to steal countries’ sovereignty.
Washington Post, The New Administration: Trump’s former FDA commissioner warns RFK Jr. could ‘cost lives,’ Dan Diamond, Nov. 30, 2024 (print ed.). Scott Gottlieb, right, who led the Food and Drug Administration during the Trump administration, on Friday warned that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could “cost lives” if confirmed as the next secretary of Health and Human Services.
“You’re going to see measles, mumps and rubella vaccination rates go down,” Gottlieb said on CNBC, referencing Kennedy’s longtime criticism of federal recommendations for childhood immunizations, and noting a recent decline in childhood vaccination rates. The nation is approaching a “tipping point,” Gottlieb said, where a continued decline in childhood vaccines could soon lead to measles outbreaks and deaths of children.
“We’re going to start seeing epidemics of diseases that have long been vanquished, and, God forbid, we see polio reemerge in this country,” he said.
Gottlieb said he had been warning senators against confirming Kennedy to run the federal health department, although he did not identify with whom he had spoken. He added that Kennedy, who founded one of the country’s most prominent antivaccine groups, had “smart people” around him who could take immediate steps to affect Americans’ access to vaccines, such as changing federal vaccine recommendations.
“There’s a lot of things that they could do day one, very easily, administratively,” Gottlieb said.
NBC News, RFK Jr. attacked the CDC’s ‘fascism’ and likened vaccinating children to abuse by the Catholic Church, Brandy Zadrozny, Nov. 27, 2024. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary, also argued for jailing vaccine scientists in previously unreported comments at autism conferences.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a dark view of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2019, he called the federal agency’s vaccine division a fascist enterprise and accused it of knowingly hurting children. He also compared what he saw as a widespread conspiracy to hide harms from the child vaccination program to the cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
“The word ‘fascism’ in Italian means a bundle of sticks, and what it means is the bundle is more important than the sticks,” Kennedy said in previously unreported remarks in 2019 to a private audience at AutismOne, a conference for parents of autistic children. “The institution, CDC and the vaccine program, is more important than the children that it’s supposed to protect.
New York Times, Trump Transition: Kennedy’s Inheritance: How Addiction and Trauma Shaped a Turbulent Life, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Susanne Craig and Rebecca Davis O’Brien, Nov. 29, 2024. Donald Trump’s pick to be health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has had a life of fame and addiction, and a career intertwined with conspiracy theories.
New York Times, How Will Trump’s Covid Contrarians Handle the Next Pandemic? Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Nov. 28, 2024 (print ed.). President-elect Donald J. Trump’s selections to run the nation’s health agencies are alarming infectious disease experts.
President-elect Donald J. Trump had already succeeded in rattling the nation’s public health and biomedical establishment by the time he announced on Tuesday that he had picked Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to run the National Institutes of Health. But amid growing fears of a deadly bird flu pandemic, perhaps no one was more rattled than experts in infectious disease.
Dr. Bhattacharya, a Stanford University medical economist and outspoken opponent of lockdowns, masking, school closures and other Covid-19 mitigation measures, and Mr. Trump’s other health picks have one thing in common. They are all considered Covid contrarians whose views raise questions about how they would handle an infectious disease crisis.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right, Mr. Trump’s choice for health secretary, has said he wants the N.I.H. to focus on chronic disease and “give infectious disease a break for about eight years.” Dr. Martin Makary, the president-elect’s choice to run the Food and Drug Administration, incorrectly predicted in 2021 that the nation was “racing toward an extremely low level of infection.”
Dr. David Weldon, a Republican former congressman who is Mr. Trump’s choice to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has espoused the debunked theory that thimerosal, a mercury compound in certain vaccines, causes autism. As a congressman, he introduced legislation that would strip the C.D.C. of its role in ensuring vaccine safety, saying the agency had a “conflict of interest” because it also promotes vaccination.
And Dr. Mehmet Oz, left, the talk show host who has been picked by Mr. Trump to run Medicare and Medicaid, prodded officials in the first Trump administration to give emergency authorization for the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19. The F.D.A. later revoked the authorization when studies showed the drug carried risks, including serious heart issues, to coronavirus patients.
Washington Post, Trump picks Jay Bhattacharya to lead NIH, overseeing scientific research, Dan Diamond, Nov. 28, 2024 (print ed.). The president-elect also named Jim O’Neill, a Silicon Valley investor and former federal health official, to be deputy secretary of Health and Human Services. Jay Bhattacharya will preside over the National Institutes of Health, a nearly $50 billion agency, if confirmed by the Senate.
Recent Relevant Headlines
The Bulwark, Opinion: RFK Jr. Said the Government May Have Planned COVID, Sam Stein and Andrew EggerPolitico, Health Care: Trump transition closes in on picks for top health postsThe Hill, Medicare Advantage gets ally in Dr. Oz
South Korean Crisis
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.
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.
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.”
Trump’s transition did not respond to a request for comment. Blanche did not respond to a message sent to his law firm email address.
The issue extends beyond Blanche, given that Trump also picked two of his other attorneys — Emil Bove and D. John Sauer — for principal associate deputy attorney general and solicitor general, respectively. Those are also top Justice Department roles. But Blanche has been tapped for the No. 2 position, just below the attorney general, and he has effectively been the face of Trump’s defense team since he signed on as his lawyer last year.
Blanche represented Trump through a tumultuous period that saw four separate indictments against Trump as he campaigned for another term in the White House. He led Trump’s defense team in three of the four cases: a federal case in Florida accusing Trump of mishandling classified materials; a separate federal case in D.C. charging him with trying to obstruct Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election; and a New York case involving charges of falsifying business records related to a 2016 hush money payment.
The two federal prosecutions against Trump have been dismissed, while the ultimate outcome of the New York case remains unclear. A jury there convicted Trump of 34 felony counts in May, though the judge has postponed sentencing multiple times, most recently to give the president-elect’s attorneys more time to argue the case should be thrown out given the results of the election.Former president Donald Trump addressed reporters before entering a Manhattan courtroom on April 15. (Video: The Washington Post)
While it remains unclear what specific steps Trump’s Justice Department could take involving matters where Blanche represented the president-elect, Trump has demanded retribution against his perceived foes.
Among other things, Trump has suggested that special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the two federal cases, should be thrown out of the country and said Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), who brought the New York case, should be prosecuted. The Washington Post has also reported that Trump plans to fire all members of Smith’s team.
“It’s not at all unusual for a criminal defense lawyer in the private sector to join DOJ,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University and an expert in legal and government ethics. “What makes this situation possibly fraught, I think, is not so much that revolving door as much as the threats, the completely inappropriate threats of retaliation.”
The deputy attorney general is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations at the Justice Department, a sprawling agency with more than 115,000 employees that bills itself as “the world’s largest law office.”
Blanche has experience with that office, having spent nearly a decade as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, according to his law firm’s website. He went on to become a criminal defense attorney and was a partner at the firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, before resigning to start his own firm and represent Trump.
During the New York trial, Blanche drew some reprimands from the judge, acting New York Supreme Court justice Juan Merchan, who told Blanche at one point that he was “losing all credibility.”
The judge found Trump in contempt, imposed a gag order and fined him for violating it. Hours after Trump was convicted, Blanche went on CNN to say Trump’s behavior was “exemplary.” He also criticized the prosecution, calling the case “completely unjust.”
Blanche’s stout defense of the president-elect continued with the court filing this month in New York. “Just as a sitting President is completely immune from any criminal process, so too is President Trump as President-elect,” Blanche and Bove wrote in arguing that the case should be dismissed. Prosecutors in Manhattan have suggested instead delaying any criminal proceedings until after Trump’s second term ends.
Experts said there was no issue with Blanche continuing to represent Trump during the transition period, emphasizing that he is a private citizen and has obligations toward Trump and any other clients.
Ethics expert Stephen Gillers said if he were advising Blanche, he would suggest that he stop representing Trump once he is formally nominated as deputy attorney general, presuming the New York case remains active at that point. “It looks bad when you’re representing the president while you’re awaiting confirmation for DOJ deputy,” said Gillers, a law professor emeritus at New York University.
Still, “the clear dividing line is the moment he’s sworn in,” Gillers said. Then, he said, “his client will change. His client will be the United States, and only the United States.”
Trump’s first attorney general in his first term, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election after it emerged that he had met with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the campaign and did not disclose that to senators during his confirmation.
Trump was outraged by Sessions’s recusal, and he remained angered by it years later, blaming Sessions for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s lengthy probe into whether Trump campaign officials had coordinated with Russian efforts.
Sessions was right to recuse himself, said Clark, the Washington University professor. But Trump’s reaction to his decision signals why it would be important for members of the Senate Judiciary Committee involved in Blanche’s confirmation hearing to “get on the record exactly what the scope of his recusals will be, where he sees the line of where he cannot participate,” Clark said.
While Justice Department prosecutors work for the executive branch, they have long operated “independent of presidential power,” said Scott Cummings, a UCLA law professor who teaches legal ethics.
That separation is based on rules and tradition, rather than constitutional constraints, Cummings said, adding that Trump picking his defense attorneys for top Justice Department jobs appears meant to “undercut the norm of independence” and bring the department under the president’s control.
Wald, the University of Denver professor, said Blanche is clearly qualified to be deputy attorney general but should steer clear of any Justice Department business that intersects with his previous work for Trump.
There have been attacks on the rule of law in the United States for the past decade or so, Wald said, and it’s important “to shore up trust and confidence in legal institutions,” including the Justice Department.
“An easy, easy solution could be simply to make sure that people who represented the president recently are not the same people making decisions about the very same matters on behalf of the United States of America,” Wald said.
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.
Often history tells us how the future may turn out: Trump isn’t the first American politician to use lies and slanders to whip up a war-like frenzy. Or to use the language of war for political gain.
Bush Junior wasn’t the first president to have lied to us about foreign affairs and war, or to use lies to justify eviscerating the Constitution. For example, Lyndon Johnson lied about a non-existent attack on the US warship Maddox in the Vietnamese Gulf of Tonkin. William McKinley (the presidency after which Karl Rove has said he’d modeled the Bush presidency) lied about an attack on the USS Maine to get us into the Spanish-American war in The Philippines and Cuba.
But most relevant to today's situation were John Adams’ version of Trump’s slanders when Adams (shown at left in an official portrait by John Trumbull circa 1792 when Adams was vice president), sent three emissaries to France and criminals soliciting bribes approached them late one evening. Adams referred to these three unidentified Frenchmen as “Mr. X, Mr. Y, and Mr. Z,” and made them out to represent such an insult and a threat against America that it may presage war.
Adams’ use of “The XYZ Affair” to gain political capital — much like Trump demonizes Hispanic and Haitian immigrants for political gain — nearly led us to war with France and helped him carve a large (although temporary) hole in the Constitution. Similarly, much like Trump’s anti-media “enemy of the people” rhetoric, John Adams then used that frenzy to jail newspaper editors and average citizens alike who spoke out against him and his policies.
The backstory is both fascinating and hopeful.
At that time in the late 1790s, Adams was President and Jefferson (shown in a portrait at right by Rembrandt Peale) was Vice President. Adams led the Federalist Party (which today could be said to have reincarnated as the Republican Party), and Jefferson had just brought together two Anti-Federalist parties — the Democrats and the Republicans — into one party called The Democratic Republicans. (Today they’re known as the Democratic Party, the longest-lasting political party in history. They dropped “Republican” from their name in the 1820-1830 era).
Adams and his Federalist cronies, using war hysteria with France as a wedge issue, were pushing the Alien & Sedition Acts through Congress, and even threw into prison Democratic Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont for speaking out against the Federalists on the floor of the House of Representatives.
Adams was leading the United States in the direction of a fascistic state with a spectacularly successful strategy of vilifying Jefferson and his Party as anti-American and pro-French. He was America’s first Trump, albeit nowhere near as toxic or psychopathic.
Adams rhetoric was described as “manly” by the Federalist newspapers, which admiringly published dozens of his threatening rants against France, suggesting that Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans were less than patriots and perhaps even traitors because of their opposition to the unnecessary war with France that Adams was simultaneously trying to gin up and saying he was working to avoid.
Jefferson knew that Adams’ Federalists did not represent the true heart and soul of America, and commented to Taylor about how Adams had been using divide-and-conquer politics, and fear-mongering about war with France (the XYZ Affair) with some success.
Jefferson did everything he could to stop that generation’s version of Trump, but Adams had the Federalists in control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and pushed through the Alien and Sedition Acts. In protest, Jefferson left town the day they were signed, never to return until after Adams left the presidency.
The tide was turned, to use Jefferson’s phrase, by the election of 1800, as Dan Sisson and I document in our book The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction — and What This Means Today.
The abuses of the Federalists were so burned into the people’s minds when Jefferson's party came to power and he freed the imprisoned newspaper editors so reform-minded newspapers were started back up again, that the Federalists disintegrated altogether as a party over the next two decades.
As may well happen to Trump’s GOP two or four years from now.
All because average citizens and pamphleteers — and a handful of progressive politicians — stood up and challenged the lies of a fear-mongering president, and politicians of principle were willing to lead.
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.
Politico, 2024 Elections: Trump voters feel very differently about things now that he’s won, our new poll shows, Jessica Piper, Nov. 29, 2024 (print ed.). A pair of POLITICO|Morning Consult polls, one conducted in the final days of the election and the other conducted after Trump won, show how public opinion has changed.
Donald Trump’s supporters thought voter fraud could determine the election outcome — until he won.
Heading into Election Day, nearly 9 in 10 Trump voters said fraud was a serious issue. Afterward, just a bit over one-third said so.
Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris has scrambled public opinion about a range of other issues, too. For example, his supporters were also more likely to feel good about the economy after the election — while Harris supporters adopted a more negative outlook.
Those are among the results of a new POLITICO|Morning Consult poll, designed to measure change in public opinion before and after the election. The results largely track with recent consumer sentiment data and comments from Republican leaders.
Our new poll showed voters’ perceptions of issues like election security and the economy swung substantially post-election, with deep differences based on who they voted for. The poll also found mixed expectations for a second Trump term.
The first poll (toplines, crosstabs) was conducted from Oct. 30 to Nov. 1, the week before the election, while the second (toplines, crosstabs) was in the field from Nov. 20 through 22, two weeks after Trump’s victory. Both surveys sampled more than 4,000 registered voters, with a margin of error of 2 percentage points.
Here are some of the big takeaways we learned from the results.Trump supporters worried less about voter fraud after he won
In polling just days before the election, Trump supporters expressed little confidence in the election outcome, with a whopping 87 percent substantially or somewhat agreeing with the statement that voter fraud was a “serious issue” that could determine the outcome of the election. Among Harris supporters, roughly half expressed similar worries.
That partisan divide disappeared after Election Day.
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.
These are frenzied times for the nascent Department of Government Efficiency.
In Silicon Valley, tech leaders are eagerly seeking positions or introductions to the department, even though for now it is not an actual part of government, but a loose grouping that Elon Musk named after an internet meme. On his social media platform, X, Mr. Musk posted a “Godfather”-style photo of himself as the “Dogefather,” asking government employees, “What did you get done this week?”
And in Washington, a House subcommittee has been announced to help push through President-elect Donald J. Trump’s vision, announced on Nov. 12, for a department that would slash the $6.7 trillion federal budget.
Members of Congress — even Democratic ones — have been offering up ideas for where to cut what Mr. Musk said could be $2 trillion out of the budget.
“It’s going to be very easy,” Elon Musk’s mother, Maye Musk, told Fox News on Tuesday, after she sat in on some of her son’s meetings. Mr. Musk will lead the department along with Vivek Ramaswamy, right, a former Republican presidential candidate.
The coming months will show if her prediction proves right.
When Mr. Trump takes office, Mr. Musk’s group will face a daunting reality. An entire apparatus has developed over the centuries that allows the government to keep marching on in the face of economic shocks, wartime hardships, or — as in this case — political vows to diminish its size and spending.
Any effort to slash the federal government and its 2.3 million civilian workers will likely face resistance in Congress, lawsuits from activist groups and delays mandated by federal rules. Unlike in his businesses, Mr. Musk will not be the sole decider, but will have to build consensus among legislators, executive-branch staffers, his co-leader and Mr. Trump himself. And federal rules ostensibly prevent Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy from making decisions in private, unlike how many matters are handled in the business world.
Meetings would have to be open and minutes made public, said Brian D. Feinstein, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies administrative law.
“All of this would have to happen in the sunlight,” Mr. Feinstein said.
A 1972 law says federal open-records laws apply to advisory committees. If a committee does not follow those rules, it could be sued — and a judge could order the committee to stop meeting, or order the government to disregard its advice.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump’s presidential transition team, Brian Hughes, declined to answer detailed questions about the effort. He sent a written statement, saying that Mr. Ramaswamy and Mr. Musk “will work together slashing excess regulations, cutting wasteful expenditures, and restructuring federal agencies.”
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'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
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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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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New York Times, Trump Threatens 25% Tariff on Canada and Mexico, Potentially Crippling TradeThe Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trade Wars Are Good, And Easy to Win, Andrew Egger
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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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, 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.”
Recent Relevant Headlines
New York Times, Syrian Rebels Breach City of Aleppo, in Biggest Advance in Years
U.S. Law, Cases, Courts
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.
New York Times, Inside the Supreme Court Ethics Debate: Who Judges the Justices? Jodi Kantor and Abbie VanSickle, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). In private meetings and memos, the justices made new rules for themselves — then split on whether they could, or should, be enforced.
As the summer of 2023 ended, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court began trading even-more-confidential-than-usual memos, avoiding their standard email list and instead passing paper documents in envelopes to each chambers. Faced with ethics controversies and a plunge in public trust, they were debating rules for their own conduct, according to people familiar with the process.
Weeks later, as a united front, they announced the results: the court’s first-ever ethics code. “It’s remarkable that we were able to agree unanimously,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said in a television interview this year.
But a New York Times examination found that behind the scenes, the court had divided over whether the justices’ new rules could — or should — ever be enforced.
Justice Gorsuch was especially vocal in opposing any enforcement mechanism beyond voluntary compliance, arguing that additional measures could undermine the court. The justices’ strength was their independence, he said, and he vowed to have no part in diminishing it.
In the private exchanges, Justice Clarence Thomas, whose decision not to disclose decades of gifts and luxury vacations from wealthy benefactors had sparked the ethics controversy, and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote off the court’s critics as politically motivated and unappeasable.
The three liberal justices insisted that the rules needed to be more than lofty promises. But their argument never had a chance.
To piece together the previously undisclosed debate, The Times interviewed people from inside and outside the court, including liberals and conservatives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the proceedings and the justices’ thinking. This article also draws upon public statements by the justices, who declined to comment.
While the court was praised for setting ethics rules, the lack of an enforcement provision has been criticized by ethics experts and figures on the left. One year later, the justices’ internal debate has spilled into a wider, more fractious one.
President Biden and Democratic lawmakers have called for a code with teeth. Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson have publicly pledged support for an enforcement mechanism. Outside legal experts have circulated proposals that would enlist the guidance of other federal judges. The conservative pushback has been strong and sometimes furious.
Now the election of former President Donald J. Trump, and a new era of unified Republican government, are raising the stakes for a branch supposed to serve as an independent guardrail. The court, which has a conservative supermajority, is already perceived as partisan by many Americans. And the justices largely appear to be split along the same lines on how far to go to ensure that its rules are followed.
New York Times, Nadler to Relinquish Top Judiciary Post, Bowing to Calls for Change, Nicholas Fandos, Dec. 4, 2024. Representative Jerrold Nadler faced a challenge from Representative Jamie Raskin, and pressure from colleagues who wanted a younger figure at the helm.
Representative Jerrold Nadler plans to step down as the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee next term, succumbing to calls for generational change as his party prepares to confront a second Trump administration.
Mr. Nadler, the 77-year-old dean of New York’s congressional delegation, had been facing a direct challenge from a close ally, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland. Mr. Raskin, 61, was said to have secured the votes necessary to defeat him.
The transition would represent a significant departure for House Democrats, who have traditionally awarded coveted committee leadership jobs based primarily on seniority. After November’s losses, though, many in the party have argued that President-elect Donald J. Trump’s return to power would require a younger, more dynamic crop of leaders.
Furious over being challenged, Mr. Nadler had initially fought to hold the position he has held since 2017. But on Wednesday, he conceded that he did not have a path to victory and endorsed Mr. Raskin to replace him in a letter to colleagues.
“As our country faces the return of Donald Trump, and the renewed threats to our democracy and our way of life that he represents, I am very confident that Jamie would ably lead the Judiciary Committee as we confront this growing danger,” Mr. Nadler wrote.
New York Times, Supreme Court Returns to a Culture War Battleground: Transgender Rights, Adam Liptak, Dec. 3, 2024. On Wednesday, the justices will hear the marquee case of the term, a challenge to a Tennessee law banning several forms of medical care for transgender youths.
A little more than four years ago, the Supreme Court delivered a surprise victory to L.G.B.T.Q. communities. Rejecting the position of the Trump administration, the court ruled by a lopsided margin that a federal civil rights law protected transgender people from workplace discrimination.
In the intervening years, transgender rights have become a ferocious battleground in the culture wars, and controversies over health care, bathrooms, sports and pronouns played a prominent role in the presidential campaign. But the Supreme Court has had only glancing encounters with such issues since the employment discrimination case in 2020, which featured a majority opinion from Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, Mr. Trump’s first appointee to the court.
That will change on Wednesday, when the court hears its second major case on transgender rights, a challenge to a Tennessee law that prohibits some medical treatments for transgender youths.
It is the marquee case of the term. The court’s decision, expected by June, may determine not only the fate of the law and similar ones in more than 20 other states but also what role the Constitution’s equal protection clause has to play in cases claiming discrimination against transgender individuals.
The Tennessee law prohibits medical providers from prescribing puberty-delaying medication, offering hormone therapy or performing surgery to treat the psychological distress caused by incongruence between experienced gender and that assigned at birth. But the law allows those same treatments for other purposes.
The primary question for the justices is not whether Tennessee’s ban is wise or consistent with the views of medical experts. It is, instead, whether the law makes distinctions based on sex. If it does, a demanding form of judicial review — “heightened scrutiny” — kicks in. If it does not, the Tennessee law will almost certainly survive. The case has some curious features.
Washington Post, Editorial, How L.A.’s ‘godfather’ of progressive prosecution failed, Editorial Board, Dec. 1, 2024. District Attorney George Gascón, below right, will leave office on Monday after being defeated by 20 points.
He is one of several progressive prosecutors to lose their jobs on the West Coast over the past two years, from San Francisco and Oakland’s Alameda County to Portland and Seattle. But this is the biggest blow yet to their movement: Not only has Mr. Gascón long been considered “the godfather” of progressive prosecution, Los Angeles County — with nearly 10 million residents — is by itself more populous than all but 10 states.
What happened is instructive as reformers regroup. Based on our extensive interviews and on-the-ground reporting, Angelenos repudiated Mr. Gascón and his approach to criminal justice for five reasons:
1. He failed to secure buy-in from career prosecutors. Mr. Gascón never recovered after getting off on the wrong foot with the nearly 1,000 deputy district attorneys who worked for him. Minutes after taking office in December 2020, he issued far-reaching and sometimes unrealistic edicts formulated with academics during the transition. Mr. Gascón blames civil-service protections for stymieing his efforts to uproot a culture resistant to change. But he aggravated tensions by hiring a chief of staff who had called police “barbarians,” promoted the “defund the police” movement and posted pictures of herself on social media wearing a T-shirt that said: “The police are trained to kill us.” The upshot was that his own career prosecutors became his fiercest critics. About two dozen deputy district attorneys eventually filed civil suits alleging retaliation. One prompted a jury to award $1.5 million. Another settled for $800,000. Antagonism led to attrition, which worsened a backlog of open cases.
2. Restricting sentencing enhancements made it harder to keep the worst offenders off the streets. Mr. Gascón believes that adding extra time to someone’s sentence if they committed a crime with a gun or as a gang member is “the biggest driver of mass incarceration.” He forbade prosecutors from asking for longer sentences for known gang members, arguing that people had been added to the gang database without due process. Fine. But that shouldn’t preclude prosecutors from adding enhancements when they are clearly warranted.
3. Mr. Gascón directed that juveniles could not be charged as adults, no matter how egregious their crimes. In one of several such cases, his office tried a 17-year-old member of the Crips street gang as a juvenile for brutally murdering two men. Just six months after her release, police arrested her again in connection with another homicide.
4. Nonviolent “quality of life” crimes must be taken seriously. Under Mr. Gascón, the district attorney’s office filed misdemeanor cases about half as often as under his predecessor. He discouraged prosecution of lower-level crimes such as trespassing, public intoxication and drug possession, which created a sense of disorder on the streets while removing an incentive for people with mental health issues and addiction to seek needed help.
5. Mr. Gascón overread his mandate.
Egberto Off The Record, Opinion: Mass deportation is just another Trump con to line the pockets of his friends and himself, Egberto Willies, below right, Nov. 30, 2024. He may use it to line his pockets and those of his friends with private detention camps and extortion to farmers.
The video highlights the economic and moral ramifications of Donald Trump’s proposed mass deportation policies. It argues that these measures would devastate industries like agriculture, which heavily rely on immigrant labor, leading to economic disruptions and inflated prices. The speaker speculates that Trump might use deportations as a public show while secretly taking bribes to shield industries from labor shortages. They criticize the private detention center industry for exploiting immigrants for profit and highlight the hypocrisy of evangelical Christians supporting anti-immigrant policies contrary to biblical teachings. Ultimately, the speaker calls for awareness of these manipulative tactics and stresses the need for progressive solutions prioritizing justice and fairness.
Donald Trump’s deportation agenda serves as a smokescreen for policies designed to exploit immigrants and enrich the powerful. By destabilizing industries, enriching private detention centers, and perpetuating systemic inequality, this plan reflects the worst of crony capitalism. A progressive approach is essential, focusing on compassion, economic equity, and recognizing the invaluable contributions of immigrant communities to the nation.Please subscribe for the much more in-depth article.
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Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric on mass deportation is designed to stoke fears, reinforce division, and distract from the economic realities that his policies are likely to exacerbate. The former president’s proposed deportation initiatives present themselves as a way to restore “law and order,” but a closer examination reveals the profit-driven motives that underpin them. Far from solving economic or immigration challenges, these policies aim to enrich private sector cronies while leaving American workers and immigrants alike in precarious positions.The Economic and Agricultural Fallout
As one of the nation’s most significant agricultural powerhouses, California is a prime example of how mass deportations could wreak havoc on essential industries. The state’s agricultural sector contributes about a quarter of the nation’s food supply, much of which depends on the labor of undocumented immigrants. Many Americans are unwilling to take on the grueling, low-paying jobs that characterize this sector, even when wages are increased. This was evidenced in states like Georgia and Florida, where anti-immigrant policies led to unharvested crops and paralyzed construction industries.
Trump’s mass deportation rhetoric ignores this reality, instead painting undocumented immigrants as threats rather than contributors. The potential removal of these workers would devastate industries reliant on their labor, leading to higher food prices, supply chain disruptions, and economic instability. In practice, this creates a twofold crisis: economic harm to consumers and industries and increased hardship for immigrant communities.Detention Centers: A Profit Machine for the Privileged
One of the most alarming aspects of Trump’s deportation plans is the role of private detention centers. The United States already has a shameful history of using private prisons to detain immigrants, turning human suffering into profit. Trump’s policies, if implemented, would likely expand this system, funneling taxpayer dollars into the hands of private contractors who run these facilities.
Private detention centers are notorious for cutting costs at the expense of detainees’ well-being, providing substandard healthcare, overcrowded conditions, and inadequate oversight. These facilities generate immense profits for their operators while exacerbating the suffering of vulnerable populations. By prioritizing profit over human dignity, these detention centers exemplify the moral bankruptcy of Trump’s deportation agenda.Bribes and Backroom Deals
The possibility that deportation policies serve as a mechanism for corruption cannot be dismissed. As suggested in the video, Trump and his administration could very well use mass deportations as a public spectacle while quietly accepting bribes from agricultural and industrial leaders to allow undocumented workers to remain in certain sectors. This would not only undermine the stated goals of the policies but also reveal their true purpose: enriching the powerful at the expense of the marginalized.
This pattern aligns with Trump’s broader approach to governance, characterized by self-enrichment and crony capitalism. From tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy to using public office to promote his private businesses, Trump has consistently prioritized his and his allies’ interests over the public good.The Human and Moral Cost
The human cost of mass deportation is incalculable. Families are torn apart, communities are destabilized, and children are left without parents. Beyond the immediate harm to immigrants, these policies deepen societal divisions and normalize dehumanization. This runs counter to the values that many Americans, including Christians who form a key part of Trump’s base, claim to hold dear.
The Bible teaches compassion and care for strangers, yet Trump’s deportation agenda weaponizes fear and xenophobia. The disconnect between these teachings and the actions of Trump’s evangelical supporters underscores the moral hypocrisy that permeates his policies.A Call for Progressive Solutions
Rather than pursuing punitive measures that harm immigrants and Americans alike, a progressive approach to immigration reform would prioritize human rights, economic stability, and social cohesion. This includes creating pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, protecting labor rights, and investing in industries that rely on immigrant workers. By recognizing immigrants as integral to the nation’s fabric, such policies would strengthen communities and promote shared prosperity.Conclusion
Donald Trump’s deportation rhetoric is not about solving real problems; it is a con designed to enrich his cronies while distracting from the harm his policies inflict on ordinary Americans. From exploiting private detention centers to undermining critical industries, Trump’s agenda reflects a cynical prioritization of profit over people. As long as such policies persist, the American public will bear the economic and moral costs of a system designed to divide and exploit rather than unite and uplift. The fight for progressive immigration reform is not just about policy—it is about reclaiming the values of fairness, compassion, and justice that should define America.
New York Times, Tax Preparers Charged in Scheme to Defraud Covid Relief of $65 Million, Adeel Hassan, Nov. 30, 2024. The preparers filed for pandemic-related tax credits on behalf of ineligible clients and then netted hefty filing fees, officials said.
Two Mississippi tax preparers used multiple schemes to defraud $65 million from programs that had been designed to help businesses stay afloat during the coronavirus pandemic, federal prosecutors said this week.
The preparers, Renata Walton, 44, and Nicole Jones, 36, both of Olive Branch, Miss., were indicted on more than 50 counts of wire fraud, money laundering, preparing false tax returns and obstruction of justice, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Tennessee said on Wednesday.
They both pleaded not guilty and were each released on $100,000 bond, court documents show.
Ms. Walton owned R&B Tax Express in Moscow, Tenn., where she and Ms. Jones prepared tax returns.
Federal prosecutors said that the two women contacted small-business clients and asked if they were interested in pandemic-related grant money, according to court records. The women would then file for pandemic-related tax credits on behalf of the clients even though they were ineligible for those funds, officials said.
New York Times, F.T.C. Launches an Antitrust Investigation Into Microsoft, David McCabe, Nov. 27, 2024. U.S. regulators are demanding information from the company on its cloud computing, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity products.
The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into whether Microsoft has violated antitrust law in multiple segments of its wide-ranging business, according to two people familiar with the inquiry, the latest salvo in a battle by the government to rein in the most powerful tech companies.
The agency recently sent a long and detailed formal request for information to the company asking about its cloud computing, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity products, the people said. Of particular interest to the F.T.C. is the way that Microsoft bundles its cloud computing offerings with office and security products, they added, alongside the company’s growing power in the artificial intelligence space.
The aggressive move by the F.T.C. comes as its chair, Lina Khan, is probably heading out the door with less than two months left in the Biden administration. Ms. Khan, 35, has pushed the agency to police big companies and has tried to get ahead of fast-moving changes in the technology industry.
Ms. Khan is expected to leave her post as part of the transition to the administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump, after which the focus of tech regulation could change.
The inquiry into Microsoft continues the Biden administration’s scrutiny of the biggest tech companies over the way people consume information, communicate and shop online. Already, the F.T.C. has sued Amazon and Meta, accusing them of anticompetitive behavior and stifling rivals. The Justice Department has also sued Google over its dominance in advertising technology, and Apple for making it difficult for consumers to leave its tightly knit universe of devices and software.
Microsoft, one of the most valuable companies in the world, with a disparate business that includes its Windows operating software, social media platform LinkedIn and video game platform Xbox, had largely escaped the recent ramp-up in antitrust scrutiny.
But in the late 1990s, the government attempted to break up the company over the dominance of its operating system and its efforts to stymie rivals to its own web browser. A judge ordered the breakup of the company, but an appeals court overturned his decision.
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.
Susan Lorincz spoke about a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder linked to childhood sex abuse (Pool photo by Doug Engle).
New York Times, Florida Woman Who Fatally Shot Black Neighbor Gets 25 Years in Prison, Annie Correal, Nov. 26, 2024 (print ed.). Susan Lorincz, who shot Ajike Owens, was convicted of manslaughter. The case prompted national outrage.
A white woman in Florida who fatally shot a Black neighbor who confronted her amid a longstanding dispute over the neighbor’s children was sentenced on Monday to 25 years in prison.
In a case that prompted national outrage and reignited debate around “stand your ground” laws, Susan Lorincz, 60, shot Ajike (A.J.) Owens as Ms. Owens, 35, stood outside the door of Ms. Lorincz’s home in Ocala, a city about 80 miles northwest of Orlando, last June.
Ms. Lorincz, who was convicted of manslaughter by an all-white jury in August, had faced a maximum sentence of 30 years.
New York Times, Rudy Giuliani Loses His Lawyers, and His Cool, in Court, Stefanos Chen and Olivia Bensimon, Nov. 26, 2024. The subject of several cases, the former New York City mayor lashed out at a judge questioning why he had not forfeited personal assets as required.
Rudolph W. Giuliani was not having a good day, and it showed.
The former New York City mayor was in federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday to discuss his continuing failure to give up nearly $11 million worth of personal assets. The forfeiture was meant as a down payment on the $148 million Mr. Giuliani owes to two Georgia election workers for defaming them by claiming, without evidence, that they had helped to steal the 2020 presidential election.
But first, Judge Lewis Liman allowed Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers to withdraw from the case. They had requested to be removed two weeks ago, citing an unspecified “professional ethics” concern.
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).
Associated Press via Politico, Man convicted of killing Laken Riley sentenced to life in prison without parole, Staff report, Nov. 21, 2024 (print ed.). Riley’s killing added fuel to the national debate over immigration when federal authorities said Ibarra illegally entered the U.S. in 2022 and was allowed to stay in the country while he pursued his immigration case.
The Venezuelan man convicted in the killing of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Jose Ibarra was charged with murder and other crimes in Riley’s February death, and the guilty verdict was reached on Wednesday by Athens-Clarke County Superior Court Judge H. Patrick Haggard. Ibarra, 26, had waived his right to a jury trial, meaning Haggard alone heard and decided the case.
New York Times, Venezuelan Migrant Is Found Guilty of Killing Laken Riley in Georgia, Rick Rojas, Nov. 21, 2024 (print ed.). The verdict followed a trial in which prosecutors detailed a violent attack that became a flashpoint in the bitter national debate over immigration policy. A 26-year-old migrant from Venezuela was convicted on Wednesday of murdering Laken Riley, a Georgia nursing student whose killing has been repeatedly cited by President-elect Donald J. Trump in his push for the mass deportation of millions of undocumented people.
Recent Relevant Headlines
Egberto Off The Record, Opinion: Mass deportation is just another Trump con to line the pockets of his friends and himself, Egberto WilliesNew York Times, Florida Woman Who Fatally Shot Black Neighbor Gets 25 Years in Prison
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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New York Times, A Potential Fight Over the Fed’s Future Ramps UpThe Hartmann Report, The Great Dismantling: Trump’s Coming Attack on America’s Economic Backbone, Thom HartmannPolitico, DNC chair hits back at Sanders over party criticism: 'Straight up BS'
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.
New York Times, Elon Musk’s $50 Billion Tesla Pay Can’t Be Reinstated, Delaware Judge Rules, Peter Eavis and Jack Ewing, Dec. 3, 2024 (print ed.). The judge said she would not reverse her decision to strike down the enormous compensation package, which helped make Mr. Musk the richest person on the world.
A Delaware judge on Monday affirmed an earlier ruling that rescinded a giant pay package that Tesla had awarded its chief executive, Elon Musk.
The pay, in the form of stock options, was worth more than $50 billion and helped make Mr. Musk the richest person in the world. The package is now worth $100 billion after Tesla’s share price jumped sharply in recent weeks.
The judge, Chancellor Kathaleen St. J. McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery, struck down the award in January, ruling that shareholders had not been properly informed of its details and that members of Tesla’s board were not sufficiently independent.
But lawyers for Tesla and Mr. Musk argued that a second shareholder vote in June in favor of the package cleared the way for effectively reinstating it.
The pay comes from a 2018 award that said Mr. Musk would get all the options only if Tesla’s stock price soared and its sales and earnings grew strongly. Few expected Mr. Musk to achieve all of those targets because Tesla was still struggling to sell enough electric cars to become profitable. But Tesla’s business took off and its stock rocketed higher, allowing Mr. Musk to earn all the options. He has to hold them for five years.
The shareholder who brought the suit, Richard J. Tornetta, contended that Tesla’s board had not acted independently of Mr. Musk when devising the package and that the company had provided “materially misleading” information to investors. In her January ruling, after a trial in 2022, Chancellor McCormick said, “The process leading to the approval of Musk’s compensation plan was deeply flawed.”
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Media, High Tech, Culture, Education
Washington Post, Commissioner rejects Rupert Murdoch’s effort to change family trust, Jeremy Barr and Sarah Ellison, Dec. 9, 2024. 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 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, 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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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. 7, 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.”
New York Times, Political Opinion:Threatened With Jail, Cheney Condemns Trump’s ‘Assault on the Rule of Law,’ Peter Baker, Dec. 8, 2024. 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.”
Politico, Transition of Power: Adam Kinzinger: I’m not afraid of Trump’s jail threats, Greta Reich, Dec. 7, 2024. “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.”
Kinzinger was one of two Republicans who served on the select committee, along with former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the panel’s vice chair. Others included Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the panel’s chair; Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.); and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who was elected to the Senate in November.
Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: Ben Meiselas and Michael Popok return with a new episode of the Legal AF Podcast, delivering an in-depth update at the intersection of law and politics. In this show, they explore whether President Biden should expand his use of pardon power to issue blanket pardons for patriots—such as elected officials, judges, and prosecutors—who have defended democracy.
They also discuss new developments involving Trump’s inner circle and their ongoing civil and criminal challenges, Trump’s relentless attempts to evade criminal liability, and much more.
Salon, Commentary: Welcome to the New Dark Ages, Austin Sarat, Dec. 7, 2024. If Trump has his way, the next four years will be far worse than even the Gilded Age Donald Trump has moved at warp speed to nominate people to serve in his Cabinet and other important government posts who have chosen loyalty to him as their most important virtue, making a mockery of merit even as the nominees claim to uphold meritocracy.
Moreover, like Trump himself, his nominees denigrate science and scientific expertise, subscribe to conspiracy theories, are eager to impose litmus tests in the arts and education, and seem hostile to the world beyond America’s borders.
Elections have consequences, so the saying goes.
And if that wasn’t enough to remind us that elections have consequences, the president-elect announced that on the first day of his administration, he will order a mass deportation of millions of immigrants and impose stiff tariffs on this nation’s most important trading partners.
While much of the post-election commentary has focused on its implications for American democracy, there is another side to what will unfold starting on Jan. 20. When he takes office, Trump, who promised to Make America Great Again, seems determined to lead America into a period of scientific, cultural, educational, and global retrenchment, which collectively might be called the new “Dark Ages.”
Some see Trump as reviving the so-called Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an era of great prosperity as well as technological and industrial growth. It was an era dominated by corrupt "captains of industry" or "robber barons" whose corrupting influence also extended to government and politics.
However, leaders in the Gilded Age did not reject science and rationality. Quite the contrary, they embraced both because they saw them as essential to the growth of capitalism. And they invested in culture and the arts, rather than trying to make them hue to a particular orthodoxy.
Yes, Trump’s era may ultimately have some attributes of the Gilded Age, I think it will be much worse. Trump and his MAGA followers reject the cultural legacy of the people who founded this nation. The people who led the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution were, deeply impressed by “the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution and its emphasis on empiricism, objective observation, and using rationality over faith or tradition as the foundations of truthful knowledge.” They founded “an Enlightenment country” and borrowed from the Enlightenment hostility toward the “hierarchically ordered societies of Europe.”
The president-elect seems determined to end all that. In 2017, Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of the writers group PEN America, warned of Trump’s “repudiation of the American ideals — grounded in the Enlightenment — of self-expression, knowledge, dissent, criticism, and truth.” What Nossel predicted then seems even more apt today.
During the 2024 campaign and transition period, Trump and his cronies have broadcast their determination “to entrench within the machinery of the U.S. government… elemental disdain for intellectuals, analysts, and experts.” They regularly denigrate rationality and elevate superstition, tradition, and hierarchy. I call their program a recipe for the return of the "Dark Ages."
Though the term is now much disputed, the phrase “Dark Ages” is used by some historians to describe a “’ period of intellectual depression in Europe from… the fifth century to the revival of learning about the beginning of the fifteenth….’” During that time, Europe experienced “a decline in culture (and) learning…. and a shift towards a feudal society with limited literacy and widespread superstition.”
Petrarch, an Italian scholar who lived from 1304 to 1374, described the time when he lived as an era of “darkness and dense gloom.” As he put it, “My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms” and to experience the “sleep of forgetfulness.”
The era that Petrarch described was also marked by a deep skepticism about science and rationality, a personalistic form of politics marked by a clear division between “lords” and vassals,” religious domination over culture, and the collapse of trade networks among European nations. Sound familiar?
Let’s start with Trump‘s threat to impose stiff tariffs on goods coming into this country from Canada, Mexico, and China. As he put it in a Truth Social post, “On January 20th… I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States.”
This is no small matter. Reuters reports that “The U.S. accounted for more than 83% of exports from Mexico in 2023 and 75% of Canadian exports” and that “Trump's threatened new tariffs would appear to violate the terms of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) on trade” which guaranteed “largely duty-free trade between the three countries.” The president-elect also threatened China, promising the Chinese “an additional 10% Tariff, above any additional Tariffs, on all of their many products coming into the United States of America.”
Whether or not Trump follows through on his threats, they immediately sent shock waves through our trade networks and promise to ignite trade wars as countries respond to Trump’s tariffs by imposing their own tariffs.As Reuters notes, “Trump's overall tariff plans… would push U.S. import duties back up to 1930s levels, stoke inflation, collapse U.S.-China trade, draw retaliation, and drastically reorder supply chains.” That would put the Dark Ages monarchs of Europe to shame.
If that is not enough to capture the Dark Ages vibe, consider what the new administration will do to education, the arts, and science.
On education, the incoming Trump Administration hopes to give free rein to “an army of far-right Christians” and attack “the very foundations of free, secular education.” Last week, Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for Defense Secretary, called for “an ‘educational insurgency’ where ‘you build your army underground" of children, so they can grow up to be the next generation of fundamentalist culture warriors.’” For the arts, Trump’s first term was something of a disaster. As Judy Berman, television critic for Time, explained, “the arts and entertainment…suffered mightily as Trump held court in the White House….(H)is policies…made it harder to subsist as a creative professional…as he lashed out at the arts and their practitioners.” More damaging, she argued, were Trump’s “repeated attempts to defund already-strapped federal arts organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which helps fund PBS and NPR) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.”
“Trump’s rhetoric, Berman concluded, “intensified an enmity between the arts community and the right… that dates back to Reagan-era censorship of transgressive artists…Put simply: Donald Trump was bad for art.”
Now, the country is facing “four more years of antagonist cultural policy (and the outright antagonism of people and places that do not align with Trump’s values).”
Finally, consider what Smart News dubbed Trump’s "Cabinet of quacks and hacks." They are science skeptics, conspiracy theorists, and eager supplicants to their “lord,” Donald Trump.Chief among these Dark Ages throwbacks is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s nominee for the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Among other things, he has spoken out against “vaccines that have saved millions of lives.” Showing his conspiratorial bone fides, Kennedy claims that “the COVID-19 virus was targeted so that Chinese and Jewish people are more immune.” And he has not just targeted the COVID vaccine. Kennedy and his allies in the incoming administration are deeply suspicious of “expert authority,” which they claim “hides elite power.”
That is why US News predicts that they will lead “a radical antiestablishment medical movement with roots in past centuries… threatening the achievements of a science-based public health order painstakingly built since World War II.”
And if Kennedy is confirmed, he will have plenty of company in doing Trump’s bidding by pushing this country toward a new Dark Ages in medicine, health care, scientific research, education, and the arts. To avoid that fate, we must mount sustained and effective resistance in each of those domains.Ultimately, we can only hope that what Petrarch said in his time is true in ours. “This sleep of forgetfulness,” he predicted, “will not last forever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in…pure radiance."
New York Times, Assad Flees Syria as Rebels Claim Damascus, Raja Abdulrahim, Hwaida Saad, Farnaz Fassihi and Adam Rasgon, Dec. 8, 2024. 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.”
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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.
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Politico, Transition of Power: Pam Bondi will face an ethics quagmire as attorney general, Hailey Fuchs, Dec. 7, 2024. 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.
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The Hartmann Report, Commentary: The Best of the Rest of the News, Thom Hartmann, right,
A large handful of billionaires spent several billion dollars to get Trump elected, and now he’s repaying — big time — the class into which he was born.
Just the billionaires Trump has so far appointed to his cabinet boast a combined wealth, at $340 billion so far, that is greater than the entire GDP of New Zealand. And at the top of their collective agenda will be kneecapping the IRS’s tax fraud division while adding another $7 trillion to the national debt by shifting their taxes onto our children and grandchildren.
It’ll be a government bought by billionaires and soon to be run by and for the exclusive benefit of billionaires. David L. Smith in his Cassandra Chronicles Substack newsletter notes that this is somewhat similar to what Herbert Hoover did in 1928, and likely to produce a similar result: a great financial crash that will throw control of our government to Democrats for a generation. That assumes that Democrats will succeed — as Congressional Progressive Caucus VP Ro Khanna demanded yesterday on my radio/TV program — at jettisoning the billionaires, big corporations, and neoliberalism that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama so fervently embraced (and Joe Biden largely rejected; his entire cabinet is worth a paltry $118 million). The February election of a new DNC head will tell us a lot; two good progressives are in the running (my favorite is Ben Wikler). Trump is teeing-up what may be a great opportunity for Democrats and progressives; let’s hope the DNC doesn’t blow it again like Democrats in the Senate just did.
New York Times, Biden Team Considers Blanket Pardons Before Trump’s Promised ‘Retribution,’ Peter Baker and Erica L. Green, Dec. 6, 2024 (print ed.). White House officials believe President-elect Trump’s choices for top law enforcement jobs indicate that he will pursue revenge against his perceived enemies.
President Biden’s staff is debating whether he should issue blanket pardons for a swath of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s perceived enemies to protect them from the “retribution” he has threatened after he takes office, according to people familiar with the discussion.
The idea would be to pre-emptively extend executive clemency to a list of current and former government officials for any possible crimes over a period of years, effectively short-circuiting the next president’s promised campaign of reprisals.
White House officials do not believe the potential recipients have actually committed crimes, but they have grown increasingly worried that Mr. Trump’s selections for top Justice Department positions indicate that he will follow through on his repeated vows to seek revenge. Even an investigation that results in no charges could drag on for months or years, costing those people hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and crippling their career prospects.
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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, right, Dec. 6, 2024. There are few good things to be said about Donald Trump’s plan to fire the F.B.I. director, Chris Wray, and install in his place Kash Patel, a thuggish lackey who has spent years fantasizing about taking revenge on Trump’s enemies. But there is one: Patel has helpfully provided us with a list of people President Biden should pardon before he leaves office.
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New York Times, Live Job Updates: U.S. Employers Add 227,000 Jobs, a Big Rebound, Lydia DePillis, Dec. 6, 2024. Job creation bounced back in November after disruptions from storms and a major strike, reinforcing a picture of modest expansion over the past few months.
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New York Times, Torrent of Anger for Health Insurance Industry Follows C.E.O.’s Killing, Dionne Searcey and Madison Malone Kircher, Dec. 6, 2024 (print ed). The shooting death of a UnitedHealthcare executive in Manhattan has unleashed Americans’ frustrations with an industry that often denies coverage and reimbursement for medical claims.
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Syrian's Assad Regime, Russia Alliesf Flee
New York Times, Assad Flees Syria as Rebels Claim Damascus, Raja Abdulrahim, Hwaida Saad, Farnaz Fassihi and Adam Rasgon, Dec. 8, 2024. 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.
Update from Ukraine, Commentary: Assad is over; Damascus fallen; Russians are running away from Syria, Denys Davydov, Dec. 8, 2024. Russia has suffered a great defeat and they're very angry about it."
Times Radio, Commentary: Collapse of Assad is 'humiliation' for Putin and will weaken him on Ukraine, Bill Browder, Dec. 8, 2024. "He put his, his name behind Assad. He put his resources behind Assad. And now Assad has been humiliated, and I think by by extension, Putin has been humiliated."
The fall of the Assad is a major humiliation for Putin who had been a key backer of the Syrian regime for over a decade, says Bill Browder, human rights campaigner and British financier who fled Russia.
New York Times, Political Opinion:Threatened With Jail, Cheney Condemns Trump’s ‘Assault on the Rule of Law,’ Peter Baker, Dec. 8, 2024. 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.”
New York Times, Iran Makes ‘Dramatic’ Leap to Produce Near-Bomb-Grade Fuel, but to What End? David E. Sanger, Dec. 6, 2024. The United Nations chief inspector says production has quadrupled. But it is not clear whether Iran is trying to touch off a crisis or gather bargaining chips for negotiations with the United States.
The United Nations’ chief nuclear inspector said on Friday that Iran was quadrupling its production of near-bomb-grade material, a move likely to intensify the challenge it will pose to the incoming Trump administration — but one that might also open the way to a new negotiation with the West.
“It is a dramatic acceleration,” Rafael M. Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said as the organization sent out a confidential assessment to its member states.
In a text message, he said that his inspectors had seen a quadrupling of production of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity, just shy of the levels needed to produce a weapon.
“These actions by Iran are worrying,” added Mr. Grossi, who visited Tehran last month and left the country in hopes that he had won its agreement to freeze new production of the fuel that has put Iran at the threshold of being able to produce a bomb.
But after the board of the I.A.E.A. passed a resolution that condemned Iran for blocking inspectors from key sites and dismantling some inspection gear, the Iranians responded by saying they would enrich uranium faster than ever before. And that appears to be exactly what they did at a plant called Fordow, built deep into a mountain so that Israel could not bomb it.More in Politics
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“Our inspectors are on the sites confirming that the process has indeed started,” Mr. Grossi said in a text exchange. “It is a very steep increase” that he said was still accelerating. “Now more than ever engagement and diplomacy are necessary.”
The timing of the move is striking. Iran is, by some measures, weaker than it has been in years. Its chief proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, have been crushed by Israeli onslaughts on their tunnel systems, their missiles and their leadership. It has also moved to evacuate military commanders and other personnel from Syria, after rebels in the long-running civil war there made rapid gains, posing a significant threat to the rule of President Bashar al-Assad, whom Iran has staunchly supported.
Iran’s missile attacks on Israel have also largely been failures, and the air defenses around its military and nuclear sites have been badly damaged. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in mid-November that its most recent strike on Iran damaged what he called a “specific component” of Iran’s nuclear program, though both Israeli and American intelligence officials have been largely silent on what that facility was — or how significant it was to the program.
All of this has led analysts inside and outside the U.S. government to wonder which of two paths Iran may take in the next few months: toward nuclear breakout or nuclear negotiations.
New York Times, Opinion: Conversations and insights about the moment, Thomas L. Friedman, right, Dec. 8, 2024. For the past few weeks, I have been arguing that Israel has inflicted the equivalent of a Six Day War-level defeat on Iran and its resistance network, and this would have vast consequences.
Well, irony of ironies, the Assad family in Syria took power in 1971, in part because of Syria’s devastating defeat in the 1967 war. What goes around comes around.
Hold on to your hats, though; you haven’t seen anything yet. Here are five quick observations.
Funniest statement by any world leader so far: That award goes to … President-elect Donald Trump for his social media post: “Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” Attention Mr. Trump: Syria is the keystone of the entire Middle East. It just collapsed like a blown-up bridge, creating vast new dangers and opportunities that everyone in the region will seize upon and react to. Staying out of this is not on the menu, especially when we have several hundred U.S. troops stationed in Eastern Syria. We need to figure out our interests and use the events in Syria to drive them, because everyone else will be doing just that.
Biggest U.S. interest: This is also a no-brainer. It’s that this uprising in Syria in the long run triggers a pro-democracy uprising in Iran. In the short run, it is sure to trigger a power struggle between the moderates there — President Masoud Pezeshkian and his vice president, former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif — and the Revolutionary Guards hard-liners. We need to shape that struggle. The events in Syria, on top of Iran’s military defeat by Israel, have left Tehran naked. This means that Iran’s leaders will now have to choose — quickly — between rushing for a nuclear bomb to save their regime or getting rid of the bomb in a deal with Trump, if he takes regime change off the table. That is why, Mr. Trump, to put it in your typeface: WE CAN’T HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS.
Biggest known unknown: Who are the rebels who took over Syria and what do they really want? A pluralistic democracy, or an Islamic state? History tells us that in these movements the hard-line Islamists usually win out. But I am watching and hoping it will be otherwise.
My biggest worry expressed in a single headline: That goes to Haaretz in Israel: “Post-Assad Syria Is in Danger of Being Run by Out-of-control Militias.” We are at a moment in the history of the Middle East where there are many countries that I would describe as “too late for imperialism, but they failed at self-government.” I am talking about Libya, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan. That is, no foreign power is going to come in and stabilize them, but they have failed at being able to manage their own pluralism and forge social contracts to create stability and growth. We have never been here before in the post-World War II era — a moment when so many countries have descended into this Hobbesian state of nature, but in a much more connected world.
This is why, having just spent the past week in Beijing and Shanghai, I repeatedly told my Chinese interlocutors: “You think we are enemies. You are wrong. We have a common enemy: Disorder. How we collaborate to shrink the World of Disorder and grow The World of Order is what history will judge us both for.” (Not sure they got it, but they will.)
Best Russian aphorism to sum up the challenge that regional and global powers now face in fixing Syria: “It is easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup, then to turn fish soup into an aquarium.”
New York Times, Opinion: The Winners and Losers Following the Fall of Assad, Nicholas Kristof, right, Dec. 8, 2024. The stunning collapse of the brutal Assad regime in Syria, a family business since the 1970s, is a geopolitical earthquake creating winners and losers around the world. First, the losers:
Iran is a big loser; Syria has been a close ally and a vital overland transport link to Lebanon and Hezbollah. Iran supported Syria as President Bashar al-Assad fought to remain in power during the country’s horrifying civil war, and it used Syria to project power around the region. Iran has already been badly weakened in recent months, and this adds to the sense that Iran’s regime is possibly vulnerable and certainly a lesser power.
One question is whether all this adds to the arguments within Iran’s leadership to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent.
Russia likewise loses an important ally and it will presumably also lose its valuable military bases in Syria. In 2015, Moscow intervened militarily to back the Assad regime in the civil war, dropping bombs on civilian targets and adding to its unpopularity among citizens.
Russia particularly values its naval base at Tartus, which allows it to support warships in the Mediterranean Sea.
Hezbollah backed Assad in the Syrian civil war, and it depended on weapons shipped from Iran through Syria to Lebanon. The Assad regime for decades interfered violently in Lebanese politics. That said, Hezbollah remains a significant force in Lebanon, even if weakened.
The Alawite sect in Syria, an offshoot of Shiite Islam amounting to perhaps 10 percent or more of Syrians, will now be at risk. The Assads were Alawites, and Alawites were resented for the privileges they enjoyed. I would be terrified if I were an Alawite in Syria today.
I worry that Syrian Christians, who had to some degree been protected by the Assads, may also be targeted and harassed, and that women will lose rights. The triumphant forces aren’t the Taliban, but they are a step in that direction. That said, the civil war in Syria hurt everyone, including women and Christians.
So who are the winners as Syria changes hands?
Sunni Muslim Islamists have been savagely suppressed in Syria for decades, and they are finally in charge. The new leadership includes forces that had been involved in Islamic State and Al Qaeda, although they have disavowed that extremism. We’ll see. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m wary.
Israel gains, at least for a time, by the weakening of enemies like Iran and Hezbollah, not to mention the Assad regime itself. But having a hard-line Islamist regime next door, if that’s the direction Syria goes, may not be great for the long term.
Turkey wins influence next door. It may use that influence to try to rein in Kurds around the region.
The United States may also gain in the sense that Russia and Iran are clear losers, but much depends on what comes next. I’m hopeful that Austin Tice, an American journalist believed imprisoned in Syria since 2012, may be freed and allowed home. Releasing him would be a way for Syria’s new leadership to show its bona fides.
Anyone who values human rights has to feel relief at the departure of the Assad regime. But we’ve also seen how hard-line Islamists can rule in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and I fear revenge attacks in Syria. So two cheers for the overthrow of Assad, but be vigilant about what comes next. One hard lesson I’ve learned from covering the world: Sometimes what follows a terrible regime is just as bad, or even worse.
New York Times, Syria Live Updates: Rebels Enter Damascus, Threatening al-Assad’s Rule, Raja Abdulrahim, Vivian Yee and Aaron Boxerman, Dec. 7, 2024. Syria's military denied the rebels had entered the city, but the surprise rebel offensive has so far swiftly defeated government forces in its path toward the capital.
New York Times, In the Syrian Regime’s Hour of Need, Its Patron Iran Makes an Exit, Farnaz Fassihi, Dec. 7, 2024. The collapse of a partnership built over four decades would reshape the balance of power in the Middle East.
For decades, Iran has expended much blood and money in support of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, above, helping him survive a civil war that threatened his dynastic rule. Iran operated military bases, weapons warehouses and missile factories in Syria, which it used as a pipeline for arming its militant allies across the region.
Now, just as Mr. al-Assad needs help to repel a rapid advance by rebel forces, Iran is heading for the exits. On Friday, the country started evacuating its military commanders and personnel, as well as some diplomatic staff, according to Iranian and regional officials.
It is a remarkable turnabout: Iran not only appears to be abandoning Mr. al-Assad, its closest Arab ally, but also relinquishing everything it had built and fought to preserve for 40 years in Syria, its main foothold in the Arab world.
With the rebels expected to advance soon on Damascus, Iran is unable to muster a defense of the Assad government after a damaging year of regional wars that began with the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, an Iranian ally.
A collapse of Iran’s partnership with Syria would by all accounts reshape the balance of power in the Middle East. The “axis of resistance” that Iran has formed with its militant allies in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Syria, Iraq and Yemen would be weakened. Israel and its Arab allies would be strengthened.
“For Iran, Syria has been the backbone of our regional presence,” Hassan Shemshadi, an expert on Iran’s proxy militant groups who was for years a documentary filmmaker on the battlefields of Syria, said in an interview from Tehran. “Everything that Iran sent to the region went through Syria. It is now extremely difficult to keep these channels open.”
Rebel fighters breached the strategic Syrian city of Homs on Saturday, according to a war monitoring group and the rebels, whose surprise offensive has swept south toward the capital in a little over a week and threatened to collapse the rule of President Bashar al-Assad.
The antigovernment fighters then declared early Sunday that they had fully captured the city, not long after the Syrian defense ministry denied that rebels had entered Homs. The ministry said in a statement that the situation remained “stable and secure.”
But the rebels’ offensive has so far swiftly defeated pockets of government defenders in its path. Victory in Homs would set the rebel coalition up for a march on the capital, Damascus, about 100 miles south.
The rebels’ quick progress also appeared to reignite antigovernment protests near Damascus. Syrian government forces on Saturday withdrew from suburbs, including Moadamia al-Sham and Daraya, and the nearby Mezzeh military airport, according to war monitoring groups. The Syrian military also denied those assertions.
The rebel advances and protests were reported by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitoring group based in Britain, as well as by the rebels themselves on their Telegram channel.
In the capital, people crowded stores to buy food and cars disappeared from the streets, said a woman there who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern about retribution from the government. She said residents felt a mix of fear, worry and, for those opposed to the government, joy. People are waiting anxiously to learn who will run the country in the days ahead, she said.
Mr. al-Assad’s control in southern and northeastern Syria also appeared to be crumbling, with a different coalition of rebel factions capturing much of Daraa Province in the south, and United States-backed Kurdish-led forces moving into the city of Deir al-Zour in the northeast, according to the Observatory.
Still, Syrian government officials sought to project confidence on Saturday. “There is a very strong military and security cordon on the far outskirts of Damascus and the Damascus countryside,” the interior minister, Mohammad Khaled al-Rahmoun, said in a video posted online. “No one — not them, nor their masters, nor their patrons — can break that defensive line.”
How Syria’s civil war reignited: The new uprisings present the gravest challenge in years to Mr. al-Assad. It is unclear what resources he can marshal to defend the rapidly shrinking territory under his control, especially without the help of one of his staunchest allies, Iran, which began to evacuate its military commanders and personnel from Syria on Friday.
Recent Relevant Headlines
New York Times, As Syrian Rebel Advance Accelerates, Nervous Neighbors Close Their Borders
Trump Transition News, Commentary
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.
This account is based on interviews with nine people who either interviewed for jobs in the administration or were directly involved in the process. Among those were applicants who said they gave what they intuited to be the wrong answer — either decrying the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 or saying that President Biden won in 2020. Their answers were met with silence and the taking of notes. They didn’t get the jobs.
Three of the people interviewed are close to the transition team and confirmed that loyalty questions were part of some interviews across multiple agencies, and that the Trump team researched what candidates had said about Mr. Trump on the day of the Capitol riot and in the days following. Candidates are also rated on a scale of one to four in more than a half-dozen categories, including competence.
Karoline Leavitt, the incoming White House press secretary, declined to address specific questions about the topics being raised in job interviews. Instead, she said: “President Trump will continue to appoint highly qualified men and women who have the talent, experience, and necessary skill sets to make America great again.”
Previous administrations, of course, have also been interested in whether new hires were aligned with the president’s agenda. But the distinction between Mr. Trump’s process and past ones is that the interest goes well beyond alignment on policy. The Trump transition team appears to be trying to figure out whether prospective hires have ever shown a hint of daylight between themselves and Mr. Trump on specific issues, particularly as he tried to revise the history of his final weeks in office and its aftermath.
Mr. Trump has maintained that Jan. 6, when a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol, was actually an event filled with “love.” He has insisted that no one who was arrested was armed; criminal indictments say otherwise. He has described people convicted and imprisoned for their role in the Capitol attack as “hostages” and he has claimed, falsely, that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Politico, January 6, 2021 Attack on the U.S. Capitol and Other Cases —-; Investigations, Hearings, Trials, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, Dec. 8, 2024. More lawsuits are barreling toward Trump over Jan. 6.
The criminal cases against the president-elect have crumbled, but he remains enmeshed in civil litigation over Jan. 6 and a barrage of cases he filed against the media.
Adding to the unwieldy heap of litigation are a slew of suits Trump himself has filed in recent years, accusing media organizations, his political opponents and others of spreading defamatory stories about him or otherwise treating him unfairly. Some viewed those cases as publicity stunts aimed at boosting his campaign to return to the White House, but now Trump faces the potential of being forced to give sworn testimony.
As he tries to fill out his administration and launch his promised policy agenda, those depositions — and the sessions he’ll need with lawyers to prepare for them — could be a significant distraction.Trump could avoid that predicament by dropping the cases he filed. So far, there’s no sign he’ll do so, and a spokesperson said the president-elect intends to fight on.
“President Trump will continue to hold those who have committed, and are committing wrongdoings, accountable for blatantly false and dishonest reporting, which serves no public interest and only seeks to interfere in our elections on behalf of political partisans,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the transition.
He’s pursuing a defamation lawsuit against ABC for asserting that a civil jury found that he raped Carroll, when the jury actually found him liable for sexual abuse. (A federal judge in New York ruled it was accurate to say Trump was found liable for rape in “common modern parlance.”)
Also looming are massive civil judgments rendered against him over the past year, one of which includes $97 million he owes to New York writer E. Jean Carroll in suits she brought relating to her claim that he raped her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the 1990s.
Trump is also battling with publisher Simon & Schuster over the rights to recorded interviews he gave to journalist Bob Woodward. He’s pressing suits against CBS for its handling of an interview with Harris and the Pulitzer Prize board for reaffirming awards it gave to the New York Times and Washington Post for their reporting on ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia — a claim Trump often derides as “the Russia hoax.”
Washington Post, Many targeted for removal by Trump can’t be deported, ICE data shows, Nick Miro, Dec. 8, 2024. Nearly half of Washington Post, Federal employees scramble to insulate themselves from Trump’s purge, Lisa Rein and Jeff Stein, Dec. 8, 2024. Career civil servants are scrubbing social media, changing job titles and looking for private sector work over fear that the incoming president may fire them.
As President-elect Donald Trump’s transition teams move into federal agencies, thousands of civil servants — and some of the Biden appointees they work for — are scrambling to insulate themselves from the new administration’s promised purge.Get the latest election news and results
Federal employees are scrubbing their Facebook and X accounts for any negative posts about Trump. Some, including at least one prominent official who testified in Trump’s first impeachment inquiry, are weighing putting in retirement papers, while others maneuver to transfer to seemingly safer agencies. D.C. recruiting firms are seeing booming business from those looking for private-sector work.
Meanwhile, some agencies have moved to reclassify jobs with titles that could clash with Trump’s agenda, especially those promoting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, boosting environmental justice and fighting the effects of climate change. For the first time, some civil servants are taking out liability insurance to cover lawyers if they’re demoted or fired. And in a rare alliance, outgoing Biden administration appointees are joining forces with labor unions to extend collective bargaining agreements, locking in benefits before the incoming administration can seek to undo them.
Before Trump takes office Jan. 20, career staffers are racing to outmaneuver his plans to gut and radically reshape the nonpartisan bureaucracy of 2.3 million. The president-elect has promised to fire thousands of professionals and replace them with political loyalists, slash trillions of dollars from the federal budget, eliminate departments and relocate others away from what he derides as the “deep state” of intransigent bureaucrats in the capital. Russ Vought, Trump’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget, told supporters earlier this year that Trump’s second term would “put the bureaucrats in trauma.”
New York Times, Trump Transition: Did Trump Drain Democrats’ Energy? These Races Will Be the First Test, Reid J. Epstein, Dec. 8, 2024. As Democrats try to fire up their fatigued base, two contests in Virginia will serve as the first measure of partisan enthusiasm since Donald Trump’s victory.
Even as the exhausted nation recovers from its two-year presidential campaign, candidates in a pocket of Northern Virginia are gearing up for a pair of special elections that may serve as barometers of partisan enthusiasm in the Trump 2.0 era.
The contests early next year in Loudoun County, for seats in overlapping districts in Virginia’s State Senate and House of Delegates, will not only determine which party holds majorities in the narrowly divided chambers. They will also be the first significant elections since voters returned President-elect Donald J. Trump to office.
Eight years ago, his surprise victory prompted a wave of Democratic energy, unleashing geysers of fund-raising and a zeal to vote that led the party to special-election victories even in deeply Republican districts.
But since Mr. Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats have focused more on protecting political turf at the state level than on engaging in flashy national demonstrations. Donations to liberal nonprofit groups have not matched the resistance anger that followed Mr. Trump’s first election. And ratings on the left-leaning cable channel MSNBC have dropped — with the hosts of the network’s flagship show having met with the president-elect.
The Loudoun County state legislative districts became vacant when Suhas Subramanyam, a Democratic state senator, resigned after winning an election to the U.S. House on Nov. 5. Kannan Srinivasan, a Democratic member of the Virginia House of Delegates, stepped down from that chamber after winning a Democratic caucus on Nov. 16 for the party’s nomination to replace Mr. Subramanyam.
Then JJ Singh, a first-time candidate, won a Democratic caucus on Nov. 23 to replace Mr. Srinivasan — the third time in November that his district’s voters were asked to go to the polls.
The districts are both heavily Democratic — Terry McAuliffe won more than 60 percent of the vote in each when he lost the 2021 election for governor. Still, party officials worry that a drop in enthusiasm could allow Republicans to snatch away key seats. Republicans have nominated Tumay Harding for the State Senate and Ram Venkatachalam for the State House. Each has emphasized school issues and a desire to end Democratic control of the legislative chambers.
New York Times, Commerce Dept. Is on the Front Lines of China Policy, Julian E. Barnes and Ana Swanson, Dec. 8, 2024. Over the past four years, the department has confronted China by restricting key exports, a policy that is likely to continue in the Trump administration.
The Commerce Department has traditionally focused on promoting the interests of American business and increasing U.S. exports abroad. But over the last four years, it has taken on a national security role, working to defend the country by restricting exports of America’s most powerful computer chips.
While the Trump administration is likely to remake much of the Biden administration’s economic policy, with a renewed focus on broad tariffs, it is unlikely to roll back the Commerce Department’s evolution.
“I’m truthfully not terribly worried that the Trump administration will undo all the great work we’ve done,” Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, said in an interview. “Number one, it’s at its core national security, which I hope we can all agree on. But two, it is the direction that they were going in.”
It was the first Trump administration that took the initial steps toward the Commerce Department’s evolution, Ms. Raimondo noted, with its decision to put the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei on the “entity list.” Companies on the list are deemed a national security concern, and transfers of technology to them are restricted.
Ms. Raimondo came into the commerce job focused on confronting the challenge of China by building upon the Trump administration’s actions.
She has overseen a significant expansion of U.S. economic and technology restrictions against China. The Biden administration transformed the tough but sometimes erratic actions the Trump administration had taken toward Beijing into more sweeping and systematic limits on shipping advanced technology to China.
The department now imposes export controls on critical artificial intelligence chips in order to slow China’s military modernizati
New York Times, As Donald Trump Threatens Tariffs, Europe and South America Strengthen Ties, Jenny Gross, Liz Alderman and Patricia Cohen, Dec. 7, 2024 (print ed.). The European Union and five South American countries have reached agreement on a deal to establish one of the largest trade zones in the world.
The European Union reached a major trade deal on Friday with five South American countries, concluding a long-delayed negotiation that took on new urgency as President-elect Donald J. Trump threatens to impose tariffs on some of the world’s largest economies.
The deal, between the European Union and members of Mercosur — a bloc that includes Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay — would establish one of the largest trade zones in the world, and would be the European Union’s biggest trade agreement ever.
With European leaders preparing for the possibility that Mr. Trump’s return to office will lead to a more fragmented global economy, the deal is a significant victory for proponents of free trade, linking markets with 780 million people. But it could fuel frustration within the European bloc, with France vehemently opposed to the agreement.
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.Get the best of The Times in your inbox
Make sense of the news, every day, with David Leonhardt.On weekdays and Sundays, we recommend one piece of exceptional writing from The Times — a narrative or essay that takes you someplace you might not expect to go.
America PAC conducted what it described as an expansive ground-game effort on Mr. Trump’s behalf. Mr. Musk came to see defeating President Biden as a vital imperative and swung hard toward Mr. Trump after the assassination attempt against him in July. He became so invested in the effort that he campaigned frequently for the Republican nominee in Pennsylvania, widely seen as the most important battleground state.
Mr. Musk also donated $4 million to America PAC on Nov. 12, a week after Election Day. He has vowed to keep his super PAC active by targeting progressive prosecutors and supporting Mr. Trump’s agenda.
Since the election, Mr. Musk has become inescapable at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club in Florida. He is leading an effort to try to trim the size of the federal government, and he has weighed in on various personnel choices that the incoming president has made.
While some in Mr. Trump’s orbit — and at times the president-elect himself — have at times seemed weary of Mr. Musk’s constant presence, the upside he brings in the form of enormous financial support and a major social media platform have clearly outweighed any concerns.
Mr. Musk’s total spending on the election is not yet known — and may never be. He cut other political checks to conservative down-ballot groups this cycle, including $12 million to two groups trying to elect Republican senators, the Senate Leadership Fund and the Sentinel Action Fund. Mr. Musk, who originally wanted to keep his support for Mr. Trump quiet, may have also funded dark-money entities that will never disclose his involvement or donations.
On Thursday, Mr. Musk was revealed as the hidden funding source behind RBG PAC, a Republican group that worked to elect Mr. Trump but was named after a liberal jurist who despised him.
New York Times, Opinion: Trump’s F.B.I. Pick Has an Enemies List. Biden Should Pardon Everyone on It, Michelle Goldberg, right, Dec. 6, 2024. There are few good things to be said about Donald Trump’s plan to fire the F.B.I. director, Chris Wray, and install in his place Kash Patel, a thuggish lackey who has spent years fantasizing about taking revenge on Trump’s enemies. But there is one: Patel has helpfully provided us with a list of people President Biden should pardon before he leaves office.
Patel’s 2023 book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, purports to show how government employees who defied Trump constitute a shadowy cabal that is “the most dangerous threat to our democracy.” The “deep state,” in Patel’s telling, is “as treacherous and evil as the villains portrayed in books and movies.” Virtually every investigation of Trump and his allies, Patel suggests, is part of a monstrous plot against “the people’s president.” The book strongly implies that Jan. 6, “the insurrection that never was,” was encouraged by “deep state” agitators and then used as a pretext to persecute patriotic Trump supporters. In a blurb on the book jacket, Trump wrote, “We will use this blueprint to help us take back the White House and remove these gangsters from all of government!”
Who are these gangsters? Patel lists 60 of them in a useful alphabetized appendix. It is not, as he acknowledges, exhaustive, since he limits himself to the executive branch, leaving out “other corrupt actors of the first order” like Senator-elect Adam Schiff, the former Republican House speaker Paul Ryan and “the entire fake news mafia press corps.” His catalog of the “deep state” includes some of Patel’s bureaucratic foes from when he served in Trump’s first administration, like Bill Barr, who as attorney general said that Trump could make Patel the deputy F.B.I. director only “over my dead body,” and Wray, the man Patel would replace.
Patel also lists both the current secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, and Trump’s secretary of defense Mark Esper. Cassidy Hutchinson, the brave young former aide to Mark Meadows who testified before the Jan. 6 committee, is on the list, as is Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump staff member who often criticizes her old boss on “The View.” Naturally, Biden, Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton are on it as well.
Except for himself, Biden should pardon them all, along with pretty much everyone else Patel has singled out by name and those who worked on the Jan. 6 committee. On Wednesday, Jonathan Martin reported in Politico that there’s a “vigorous internal debate” among Biden aides about issuing pre-emptive pardons to officials likely to be unjustly targeted by Trump. A drawback of such pardons, Martin wrote, is that they “could suggest impropriety, only fueling Trump’s criticisms.” After all, Biden may struggle to explain why he’s pardoning people who have done nothing wrong.
Patel’s appendix, however, makes the case for blanket pardons easier to convey. The breadth of it demonstrates his McCarthyite impulses better than his critics ever could.
Though Biden is not much of a communicator, he could give a speech laying out the well-founded fears that Patel may try to harass the people on his list with spurious investigations. In addition to justifying sweeping pardons, such a speech could prompt a useful nationwide discussion about what it would mean to put a man like Patel in charge of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency.
We are entering a period when the ideal of Justice Department independence will almost certainly be swept away. Political persecution — the kind Trump and his allies claim, falsely, to have been subjected to — will become routine. Biden tried to defend the basic integrity of our imperfect institutions against Trumpist aggression, and he failed. All he can do now is help the American people understand what’s coming and try to protect the ones with MAGA targets on their backs.
Washington Post, Many targeted for removal by Trump can’t be deported, ICE data shows, Nick Miro, Dec. 8, 2024. Nearly half of Washington Post, The New Administration: Trump hesitates to personally lobby for endangered Cabinet picks, Isaac Arnsdorf, Ashley Parker, Marianne LeVine and Liz Goodwin, Dec. 7, 2024. The president-elect has not yet personally lobbied hard for his choices, limiting his exposure if they are not confirmed. Some allies fear he’ll be weakened if another pick withdraws.
Washington Post, Many targeted for removal by Trump can’t be deported, ICE data shows, Nick Miro, Dec. 8, 2024. Nearly half of Washington Post, Analysis: The fascinating — and important — Florida and Ohio Senate appointments, Aaron Blake, Dec. 7, 2024. A look at the dynamics for both appointments, which could make the Senate more or less Trump-y.
President-elect Donald Trump is engaged in a battle of wills with GOP senators over his Cabinet picks — a joust that will say a lot about just how much of a rubber stamp congressional Republicans will be over the next four years.Get the latest election news and results
They have thus far shown at least some willingness to buck Trump, or at least resist him. That has endangered Pete Hegseth’s selection as defense secretary and led to attorney general pick Matt Gaetz’s rapid withdrawal.
Republicans will have 53 senators, so just four voting with Democrats can reject Trump’s ideas. And we’re already getting a sense of which GOP senators could be thorns in Trump’s side. (Politico’s Jonathan Martin has a good rundown of those potential thorns here.)
But we also don’t know exactly what the Senate GOP conference will look like next year, thanks to an impending vacancy in Ohio (Vice President-elect JD Vance’s seat) and another likely vacancy in Florida (secretary of State pick Marco Rubio’s seat). And given the fine margins, the appointments to replace them could matter greatly.
The big question is whether a pair of governors who have had their differences with Trump, to varying degrees — Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Ohio’s Mike DeWine — will choose picks that enable Trump or maybe provide some more potential checks on him.
The Hartmann Report, What Does Agenda 47 Spell for America’s Future? Thom Hartmann, right, Dec. 3, 2024. A stark warning about Trump’s dystopian plans for his second term...
“The ideas you are about to hear are not idle conjecture. I have built upon a foundation of indisputable first causes, so that the unifying force which controls the cosmos is revealed in full clarity.” — Jack Vance
Trump named the plans for his second term “Agenda 47,” although for reasons known only to them, America’s mainstream media persists in ignoring it. They shouldn’t.
At best, it’s a dystopian nightmare: at worst it means ending our current system of American government; aligning the US with Russia and other autocratic nations; and the USA leading the charge against democracy and in favor of authoritarian, strong-man forms of government across the world.
Over at his website, Trump lays out the details of his governing agenda, complete with short videos promoting each of the steps he plans to take. They, and his many statements about future plans — which we’ll probably see implemented during his first 100 days — include:Gut the EPA, OSHA, CPSB, IRS, the Labor Department, and other federal agencies that keep our air clean, our water pure, and protect average Americans from predation by the morbidly rich and their corporations
Back in the 1970s, Richard Nixon said he was going to use “impoundment” to strip funding from agencies his donors didn’t like, claiming that, even though Congress had appropriated budgets for them, he could, as head of the Executive Branch, simply “impound” the money and refuse to spend it. His plan to remake the federal government was interrupted by Watergate.
In 1974, Democrats in Congress got together and passed legislation outlawing this and Jerry Ford signed it into law. But Trump’s lawyers apparently think they can get it overturned through their appointees on the courts or even, as they will now have both branches of Congress, through new legislation. As Trump says on his website:
“I will use the president’s long-recognized Impoundment Power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings.”
Trump’s appointed Musk and Ramaswamy to identify “fraud and waste” in federal agencies, a mantra since the Reagan presidency used to strip agencies his donors and their corporations resent. Every Republican president has used this phrase in this way, but Trump promises to turn Reagan’s and Bush’s scalpel into a meataxe.
Since the fossil fuel companies, banks, refineries, anti-union big employers, and their billionaires who fund the GOP hate all of these agencies, it’ll be a bonanza for them.
Not so much for working people, retirees, and those of us concerned about a livable future environment for our kids and grandkids, though.Destroy the media and the truth
First, he wants to make it illegal for the federal government’s security services to notify social media platforms about Russian disinformation and other foreign efforts to swing elections, since nearly 100% of those efforts are coming from authoritarian countries in support of Trump and against democracy.
“I will ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-’ or ‘dis-information,’” Trump proclaims on his Agenda 47 website.
He also wants to force social media to carry his buddy Putin’s trolls’ lies and attempts to pit Americans against each other, and limit the companies’ ability to label or block lies and propaganda. As Trump puts it:
“I will ask Congress to send a bill to my desk revising Section 230 to get big online platforms out of censorship business.”
In Hungary, one way Viktor Orbán got rid of actual news media and replaced the ownership of all the nation’s major radio and TV networks, websites, and newspapers was by changing the libel laws so that public figures (like Orbán himself) could sue for libel when they thought they were treated unfairly.
They then sued company after company, commentator after commentator, reporter after reporter, into bankruptcy.
Orbán’s rightwing buddies then bought the media properties out of bankruptcy which is why now virtually all the media in Hungary is like Fox “News,” broadcasting suck-ups to Orbán and criticism of “liberals,” immigrants, and gays 24/7.
Trump wants to do the same here in the US. Is the announced divestment of MSNBC by Comcast an early indicator that corporate media sees this coming?
When Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury came out with some unflattering characterizations of Trump in it, the then-president said:
“We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts. And if somebody says something that’s totally false and knowingly false, that the person that has been abused, defamed, libeled, will have meaningful recourse.”
Similarly, Trump’s appointee to head the FBI says they’ll be coming after reporters and opinion writers and their publications:
“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Kash Patel said. “We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
Simply reporting on what Trump’s up to could bring lawsuits that would bankrupt even the Times or the Post, and, like in Hungary and Russia, pretty much end the existence of a free and independent press in America.Turning America into a vigilante police state
Trump has promised to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists who tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House (and whose actions led to the death of four police officers), and put into place a national “stop and frisk” law that upends the 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
It would also — like Duterte in the Philippines who executed over 10,000 people during his reign of terror — authorize the federal government to immediately execute anybody convicted of trafficking in drugs without further due process or appeals.
Trump has already tested the limits of his own lawbreaking when it comes to creating a police state and gotten away with it. In 2020, he sent armed federal officers — without identification and in unmarked vehicles — into Portland to illegally snatch unarmed peaceful protestors off the streets, intimidate and beat them up, and dump them. Expect this test to go nationwide.
Republicans in Texas have already pioneered using vigilantes to hunt down women who’ve had abortions and the people who’ve helped them. Expect these vigilante-enforced laws to spread across the country with a second Trump administration, with groups like the Proud Boys and 3 Percenters becoming the modern-day equivalent of the old west’s 19th century bounty hunters.
New York Times, Guest Essay: Trump’s Project 2025 May Not Be What It Seemed. It’s Worse, Thomas B. Edsall, right, Dec. 4, 2024. On Nov. 19, two weeks after Election Day, Elon Musk demonstrated perhaps the most brutal, if not sadistic, technique for making life in the federal civil service intolerable.
A Wall Street Journal headline from Nov. 22 captured the situation well: “Musk Unleashes Online Army on Federal Workers.”
What happened? Musk had reposted a tweet declaring, “I don’t think the U.S. Taxpayer should pay for the employment of a ‘Director of Climate Diversification’ at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.” Musk added a comment, echoing the language of the president-elect: “So many fake jobs.”
Musk’s tweet, which was viewed by 33.2 million people, described Ashley Thomas, a 37-year-old who, The Journal reported, holds “engineering, business and water science degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Oxford” and works as the “little-known director of climate diversification” at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, which advises “private companies to fund ways to improve living standards in developing countries.” A Finance Corporation official told The Journal that Thomas’s work “is highly technical and is focused on identifying innovations that serve U.S. strategic interests, including bolstering agriculture and infrastructure against extreme weather events.”
As evidence mounted that Thomas’s job was under threat, she sought to pull herself out of the spotlight, taking down all of her social media accounts.
The social media excoriation of public sector employees is just one way that President-elect Donald Trump and his MAGA loyalists are using to destroy what they see as strongholds of the left in government and academia.
Despite their owners’ protestations to the contrary, the fear of retribution from Trump and his allies appears, at least to me, to have prompted two major newspapers, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, to decline to endorse anyone in the presidential contest.
Similarly, corporate America — also seemingly in recognition of Trump’s explicit threats to punish adversaries — nearly doubled its support for Trump to $660.5 million in 2024, up from $358.2 million in 2020. Business support for President Biden was $563.3 million in 2020, and it was $450.8 million for Kamala Harris in 2024, according to OpenSecrets.
In further anticipation of a vengeful Trump-led administration, companies are “scrubbing left-leaning policies from their websites and scoping out appearances on conservative podcasts,” The Journal reported last week.
With Trump and his allies on the move, organizations that rose after the 2016 election to fight the Trump administration have largely folded their tents, at least for now. “The anti-Trump movement,” Politico reported shortly after Nov. 5, “is in tatters. Now it’s scrambling to remain relevant.”
In fact, preliminary signs — “Anti-Trump Burnout: The Resistance Says It’s Exhausted,” as my colleagues in the newsroom put it — suggest that the liberal opposition is doing just what Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale who has written extensively about Hitler and Stalin, warned against: “Do not obey in advance.”
New York Times, Trump Chooses Paul Atkins to Run the S.E.C., Matthew Goldstein and David Yaffe-Bellany, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). President-elect Donald J. Trump picked Paul Atkins to serve as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, turning to a pro-business conservative and former regulator to run the agency that is in charge of protecting investors from fraud and malfeasance on Wall Street.
Mr. Trump made the announcement in a post on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday.
Mr. Atkins, 66, who was an S.E.C. commissioner under President George W. Bush, is a well-known, and generally admired, figure in Washington legal circles and the securities regulatory community. In the early 1990s he worked at the S.E.C. during both Republican and Democratic administrations.
He is also seen as a strong advocate for looser regulation of crypto assets — an issue that Mr. Trump adopted as part of his campaign.
Shortly after his term as S.E.C. commissioner ended in 2008, Mr. Atkins founded Patomak Global Partners, a financial services consulting firm. Patomak provides advisory services to banks and investment firms on regulatory and compliance matters. More recently, the firm has advised clients on issues related to crypto and digital assets.
Patomak is an influential firm in the financial world and many lawyers who have worked at the S.E.C. are familiar with Mr. Atkins. Tyler Gellasch, a former S.E.C. lawyer who runs the Healthy Markets Association, an organization that advocates greater securities regulation, called Mr. Atkins the “godfather of Republican capital markets policy.”
Mr. Atkins, a lawyer, has been playing an active role in helping to draft “best practices” for crypto trading platforms as co-chair of the Token Alliance, which is part of the Digital Chamber of Commerce. He is also on the advisory board for Securitize, a digital asset firm that promotes the use of digital tokens.
New York Times, Trump Picks Jared Isaacman, Entrepreneur and Private Astronaut, to Lead NASA, Kenneth Chang, Dec. 4, 2024. Mr. Isaacman’s company Shift4 Payments made him a billionaire, and he has financed two trips to orbit on SpaceX vehicles, including a daring spacewalk in September.
Mr. Isaacman, the chief executive of the payment processing company Shift4 Payments, is a close associate of Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, and, if confirmed to the post by the Senate, would bring the perspective of an outsider to the space agency and its $25 billion budget.
“Jared will drive NASA’s mission of discovery and inspiration, paving the way for groundbreaking achievements in Space science, technology, and exploration,” Mr. Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.
One of the key issues for the next NASA administrator is how to get NASA’s centerpiece Artemis program back on track to send NASA astronauts to the moon. The first landing of astronauts is to occur during the Artemis III mission, currently scheduled for late 2026. However, key components needed to accomplish that, including the lunar lander being developed by SpaceX, appear to be behind schedule.
The Trump administration could seek much bigger changes at NASA, including possibly scaling back Artemis and pivoting to Mr. Musk’s desired destination: Mars. NASA could also be included in wider efforts to pare down the number of federal employees.
New York Times, Supreme Court Appears Inclined to Uphold Tennessee Law on Transgender Care, Adam Liptak, Dec. 4, 2024. Assessing the court’s direction was complicated by the silence of one justice in the conservative majority, Neil Gorsuch. A decision is expected by June.
Members of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed ready on Wednesday to uphold a Tennessee law denying transition care to transgender youth, with some of them saying that judgments about contested scientific evidence should be made by legislatures rather than judges.
“The Constitution leaves that question to the people’s representatives, rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said leaving the question to the states was an alarming abdication of responsibility. “I’m suddenly quite worried,” she said, adding that courts must assess the constitutionality of laws challenged on equal protections.
The wide-ranging argument, which lasted about two-and-a-half hours, touched on the approaches of other nations, the force of a precedent protecting transgender workers and the role of parental rights. But the core question the justices focused on was whether the Tennessee law made distinctions based on sex, which would subject it to a demanding form of judicial scrutiny.
Assessing the court’s ultimate direction was complicated by the silence of the author of the employment discrimination case, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch. But it seemed probable that there were at least five votes for rejecting the equal protection challenge to the law.
More than 20 other states have similar laws that could be affected. The court’s decision, expected by June, will almost certainly yield a major statement on transgender rights. Arguments are unfolding against the backdrop of a fierce public debate over the role that gender identity should play in matters as varied as sports, bathrooms and pronouns.
The Tennessee law, which is being challenged by three families and a doctor, prohibits medical providers from prescribing puberty-delaying medication, providing hormone therapy, or performing surgery to treat what the law calls “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.”
The law allows those same treatments for “a congenital defect, precocious puberty, disease or physical injury,” leading the plaintiffs, backed by the Biden administration, to argue that the law violates the Constitution by denying equal protection to transgender people, primarily by discriminating against them based on sex.
New York Times, Trump’s Incoming Border Czar Sees Texas as a ‘Model’ for Enforcement, J. David Goodman, Dec. 4, 2024. Tom Homan, an immigration hard-liner selected by President-elect Donald J. Trump to be his “border czar,” squeezed into a helicopter last week, as Gov. Greg Abbott gave an aerial tour of all that Texas had done to stop people from crossing illegally from Mexico.
There is a newly built camp for the Texas National Guard, whose border mission has looked a lot like a military deployment. Nearby, a line of buoy barriers in the Rio Grande puts migrants at risk of drowning. The river’s edge bristles with concertina wire that has often left bordercrossers with cuts and gashes. State police officers regularly patrol the brush, arresting migrants in an unusual extension of state authority into immigration matters.
“This is a model we can take across the country,” Mr. Homan said, addressing a group of National Guard members and Texas state troopers involved in border enforcement in the border city of Eagle Pass. “I am impressed by what I’ve seen today.”
Meidas Touch Network, Kash Patel Called for Impeaching Federal Judges in 2023, Staff Report, Dec. 2, 2024. Trump's FBI nominee: "People aren't going to like this."
During an appearance on Don Jr.'s Triggered podcast in September 2023, Kash Patel, a close ally of Donald Trump and his nominee for FBI director, advocated for Republicans to begin impeaching federal judges—an extraordinary suggestion that undermines judicial independence and the rule of law.
Patel had his perpetual trademark sniffle working during the interview (the cold he has apparently had for years that he just can’t shake), while Junior looked on through bloody slits for eye sockets with a bright red flushed face.
Patel specifically targeted judges presiding over cases involving January 6th rioters and Trump himself, labeling them as "political terrorists" and calling impeachment a necessary "drastic measure." His comments suggest a willingness to use the power of impeachment—a tool historically reserved for addressing misconduct or criminal behavior—as a partisan weapon against members of the judiciary who rule against his political allies.
This rhetoric is not only unprecedented but also disqualifying for someone seeking to lead the FBI, a position that demands impartiality and a steadfast commitment to the Constitution. The FBI director must uphold the principles of justice and independence, not orchestrate politically motivated attacks on judges.
Patel’s comments signal that, under his leadership, the FBI could be weaponized to target perceived political enemies, eroding public trust in the agency and the judiciary alike. Judicial independence is a cornerstone of American democracy. It ensures that judges can make decisions based on the law, free from political pressure or intimidation.
The call to impeach judges who oversee politically sensitive cases should alarm Americans across the political spectrum. It is a blatant effort to undermine the judiciary’s independence and turn it into a partisan battleground. Kash Patel’s comments are a stark reminder of why his nomination to lead the FBI is deeply troubling and why his vision for the agency is incompatible with democratic principles.
Meidas Touch Network, Investigative Commentary: The Big Reason Why Hunter's Pardon is Justified: Kash Patel, Ron Filipkowski, right, Dec. 2, 2024. I've listened to hundreds of interviews of Trump's FBI Director nominee.
I awoke this morning after a three day unplugged trip to Montreal to learn that in the previous 24 hours, two things had happened: Trump named Kash Patel as his FBI Director and then Joe Biden pardoned his only surviving son, Hunter. Neither one of these things were especially surprising since it is clear to me the two things are connected, but I was surprised by some of the reaction from those in the media, the Never Trump (former) Republicans, and a few Democratic elected officials.
Most of the criticism has taken the form of three primary arguments: 1. Trump will now have justification to make egregious pardons because of this; 2. Joe Biden lied and Dems who support the decision are hypocrites who claim to believe in the Rule of Law but really don’t; 3. Critics of the critics who cite Trump’s previous pardons are wrong because his awfulness doesn’t justify Joe’s awfulness.
None of these things address the REAL reason for the pardon: Trump’s appointment of Patel, who has ranted and raved for the past four years on every right-wing podcast in America that he was going to get Hunter Biden for things he has never been prosecuted for. Joe takes that threat seriously. Apparently, the critics either do not, or are ignorant and unaware of exactly who Patel is and what he has pledged to do specific to Hunter.
I have spent the last 4 years covering right-wing shows, channels, conferences and podcasts. Some very fringy, conspiratorial and obscure. I am aware from time to time a legacy media journalist will dip their toe into that world by spending a week watching Steve Bannon or Charlie Kirk, write an article, and give their expert analysis. That has not been me. I have been immersed in their world day after day, week after week, year after year. One person I have watched hundreds of times at all of these places is Kash Patel.
Patel first caught the attention of Trump while serving as an aide to Devin Nunes’s staff during the 2017-18 RussiaGate investigation. That led to an appointment by Trump late in his Administration to a post that Patel has no business ever being in: interim Chief of Staff to interim DOD Secretary Chris Miller, left. An interim to an interim. I have also heard Patel lie about and exaggerate his resume and accomplishments on an almost daily basis to the point of absurdity.
In these hundreds of Patel interviews, there was always a central theme: That Trump was going to win, Patel was likely going to be appointed CIA or FBI Director, then he was going to use that appointment to go after Trump’s enemies from the Russia investigation, members of the media who supposedly lied about Trump, eliminate thousands of career civil servants (the Deep State), and go after Hunter and Joe Biden with a new criminal investigation.
I have posted many clips over the years of some of Patel’s most outlandish threats and statements. Some of them have been resurfaced by legacy media outlets, but only the ones where Patel vows to go after them, or to clean out government agencies. They never play the clips I posted where he obsesses on Hunter Biden, and boy, was he obsessed with Hunter Biden.
This is what Patel said last year in just one of the clips I posted:
Steve Bannon to Kash: “Do you feel confident when you go back as a senior member of this Administration starting in 2025 that you will be able to deliver the goods? That we can have serious prosecutions? That the people who did evil deeds will be held accountable and prosecuted? Can you deliver this in the first couple of months so we can get rolling on criminal prosecutions?”
Kash Patel: “Yes. We will find the conspirators not just in government but in the media. We are going to come after the people in the media who helped Biden rig the presidential election - we’re putting you all on notice.”
I should also emphasize that when he is talking about media “rigging” the election, he is talking about their refusal to cover the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop -- Rudy Giuliani’s October Surprise in 2020.
SpyTalk, Investigation: How Kash Patel Bungled a SEAL Team Six Hostage Rescue, Seth Hettena, Dec. 2, 2024. “You could’ve gotten these guys killed!” a Pentagon official screamed at Patel.
YEARS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP NAMED HIM TO RUN THE FBI, Kash Patel was a prosecutor in the Obama Justice Department assigned to work with Delta Force and the SEAL Team Six.
He told Vanity Fair that his job was to advise the elite operators as they went after “the global rack and stack of bad guys, determined the order, established find/fix/finish options, and then executed.”
A self-described “deep state” wrecking ball, Patel is fond of saying things like this that have made him a favorite of Trump’s MAGA base. However, during the first Trump administration, Patel’s actions revealed him as a bombastic fool who put SEAL Team Six in harm’s way through his ineptitude.
On October 30, 2020, President Trump signed off on a mission to have SEAL Team Six rescue Philip Walton, a 27-year-old American who gunmen had abducted from his farm in the West African nation of Niger, near the border with Nigeria. The kidnappers had hustled Walton across the border to Nigeria and were demanding a $1 million ransom.
In their book Only I Can Fix It, journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker reported that the plan called for the SEALs to parachute into northern Nigeria and move three miles on foot to reach the compound where Walton was being held.
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper had signed off on the plan with one or two questions: Did we have permission to fly over Nigeria?
Patel, then the senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, assured the Pentagon that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “got the airspace cleared.”
A few hours later, the Pentagon learned that Patel was wrong: Nigeria had not given permission.
This was a huge mistake. By that point, the aircraft carrying the SEALs were only fifteen miles away from the Nigerian border.
The Air Force planes were swiftly rerouted, circling the skies for an hour while State Department officials worked frantically to obtain clearances to cross the border.
As Esper recalled in his memoir, A Sacred Oath, “By the time Mike [Pompeo] and I spoke an hour later, he still didn’t have the okay from the remaining country. He also didn’t know where Patel received his information. Pompeo never spoke with him.”
“How did we receive the bad information in the first place?” Pompeo wondered.
Esper said his team “suspected Patel made the approval story up, but they didn’t have all the facts.”
New York Times, Trump Wants to Shake Up Health Care. Many Americans Don’t Mind, Jack Healy, Isabelle Taft and Kate Selig, Dec. 3, 2024 (print ed.). Some voters said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has teamed up with President-elect Trump, had given voice to their frustrations with the health system.
As a nature-loving physical therapist in Boulder, Colo., Colin O’Banion shops at farmers markets, grows organic squash in his backyard and thought he could never vote for Donald J. Trump.
But during the pandemic, he said, he and his wife became social outcasts when they refused Covid-19 vaccines for themselves and their three sons. Tuning in to alternative health podcasts, he became convinced that the country’s public health establishment was corrupt, and that the only antidote was the upheaval being promised by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as he teamed up with Mr. Trump.
“That’s what brought me on board,” Mr. O’Banion, 49, said, still sounding surprised that he had voted for Mr. Trump, now the president-elect. “We have a real epidemic going on with metabolic disease, diabetes, obesity. How is it possible we have so much money and the most unhealthy people?”
Scientists and public health experts have expressed alarm that Mr. Trump wants to give over the country’s health agencies to people like Mr. Kennedy and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who have spread misinformation about vaccines and Covid treatments and vowed to gut the government agencies that regulate food and medicines.
But to people like Mr. O’Banion, rejecting norms is exactly the point.
Trust in scientists and medical experts has eroded since the pandemic, and voters galvanized by Mr. Kennedy’s pledge to “Make America Healthy Again” as head of the Department of Health and Human Services said that he had given voice to their frustrations with the whole system — from vaccines and Covid rules to hospitals and health insurance.
New York Times, Director of ‘2000 Mules’ Acknowledges the Conspiratorial Film Was Flawed, Nick Corasaniti and Ken Bensinger, Dec. 3, 2024 (print ed.). The director, Dinesh D’Souza, who is facing a lawsuit over the documentary, admitted that an analysis used to make claims about election fraud that were later debunked had been faulty.
More than two years after the widely debunked film “2000 Mules” poured gasoline on right-wing conspiracy theories about election fraud, the documentary’s writer and director, Dinesh D’Souza, has acknowledged that its findings were based on a faulty analysis.
Mr. D’Souza, right, said in a statement on his website that the analysis used in the film, which claimed to depict a vast ring of “mules” illegally gathering large numbers of ballots and surreptitiously placing them in drop boxes, was incorrect.
The film’s premise was based on matching surveillance videos from drop-box locations with geolocated cellphone data that appeared to show repeated trips to areas near drop boxes during the 2020 election.
“We recently learned that surveillance videos used in the film may not have actually been correlated with the geolocation data,” Mr. D’Souza, who is facing a lawsuit over the documentary, said in the statement, which he released on Nov. 26.
Despite being swiftly debunked by both Republican and Democratic election officials, the film garnered more than a million views online in less than two weeks after its release in 2022 and eventually grossed more than $1.4 million. A glitzy premiere at Mar-a-Lago drew Donald J. Trump, the once and future president, as well as Republican luminaries and influential figures in the movement to discredit the 2020 election.
The surveillance videos used in the film were obtained by True the Vote, a right-wing election organization that was a partner in producing the film. In a statement on its website on Monday, the group said the film’s central premise “remains accurate” despite the apology.
The admission from Mr. D’Souza follows years of defiance: He had long argued that the evidence in his film was sound even as election experts at the state and local levels declared the conclusions unfounded. In 2022, the Republican attorney general of Arizona asked the F.B.I. to investigate True the Vote for ignoring requests to share the documentary’s evidence.
Relevant Recent Headlines
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 2, 2024 [Defense Nominee's Reported Scandal], Heather Cox RichardsonThe Bulwark, Opinion: Does Trump Even Care About Pete? Andrew EggerThe Hartmann Report, What Does Agenda 47 Spell for America’s Future? Thom Hartmann
More On Health Care Exec's Murder
New York Times, An N.Y.P.D. Manhunt Caught a Subway Shooter. This Time, It’s Different, Matthew Haag and Patrick McGeehan, Dec. 8, 2024 (print ed.). Capturing a suspect who slips away from a crime scene requires solid police work, help from the public and a little luck, experts say. So far, it’s not working.
A shocking early morning act of violence, a frantic New York Police Department search for a suspect and a gunman seemingly in the wind: The year was 2022, and the man the police had fanned out to find was Frank R. James, who had set off smoke grenades inside a crowded subway car in Brooklyn and opened fire.
Now, more than two years later, another manhunt has gripped the city. But unlike Mr. James, who was apprehended the day after his rampage, the man who assassinated the chief executive of a health insurance company just before dawn on Wednesday in Midtown Manhattan has not been caught or even identified after more than four days.
The two most recent fugitive searches in New York City have involved gunmen who made seemingly improbable escapes in a city teeming with surveillance cameras and people. But despite some similarities between the cases and the investigative tactics being used to try to solve them, the search for the man who killed Brian Thompson, right, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, has proved far more challenging.
The suspect’s ability to evade capture appears to be tied to his methodical planning, including wearing a mask and a hood during nearly all of his time in New York City and paying with cash everywhere, along with using a fake driver’s license.
And unlike Mr. James, who did essentially nothing to conceal himself after slipping away amid the chaotic aftermath of the shooting that wounded 10 people, the suspect in Mr. Thompson’s killing fled quickly into Central Park, away from the surveillance cameras that blanket much of Manhattan. He also appears to have left the state long before the police could possibly have begun to track his movements.
“I don’t think I’ve seen this level of operational preplanning in any crime, never mind in a murder,” said Kenneth E. Corey, a former chief of department in the New York Police Department.
New York Times, UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Shooting: Torrent of Anger for Health Insurance Industry Follows C.E.O.’s Killing, Dionne Searcey and Madison Malone Kircher, Dec. 6, 2024 (print ed.). The shooting death of a UnitedHealthcare executive in Manhattan has unleashed Americans’ frustrations with an industry that often denies coverage and reimbursement for medical claims.
The fatal shooting on Wednesday of a top UnitedHealthcare executive, Brian Thompson, on a Manhattan sidewalk has unleashed a torrent of morbid glee from patients and others who say they have had negative experiences with health insurance companies at some of the hardest times of their lives.
It is unclear what motivated the incident or whether it was tied to Mr. Thompson’s work in the insurance industry. The police have yet to identify the shooter who is still on the loose.
But that did not stop social media commenters from leaping to conclusions and from showing a blatant lack of sympathy over the death of a man who was a husband and father of two children.
“Thoughts and deductibles to the family,” read one comment underneath a video of the shooting posted online by CNN. “Unfortunately my condolences are out-of-network.”
On TikTok, one user wrote, “I’m an ER nurse and the things I’ve seen dying patients get denied for by insurance makes me physically sick. I just can’t feel sympathy for him because of all of those patients and their families.”
The dark commentary after the death of Mr. Thompson, a 50-year-old insurance executive from Maple Grove, Minn., highlighted the anger and frustration over the state of health care in America, where those with private insurance often find themselves in Kafka-esque tangles while seeking reimbursement for medical treatment and are often denied.
Washington Post, NYPD searches for gunman after fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO, Shayna Jacobs, Daniel Gilbert, Trisha Thadani, Aaron Gregg and Jarrett Ley, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). Brian Thompson was heading to the Hilton Midtown for a conference when the brazen, targeted attack (shown above) occurred, police said.
UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, right, was fatally shot on a Midtown Manhattan sidewalk early Wednesday morning in what police called a premeditated ambush that sent them on a manhunt for the unidentified gunman, who fled the area on a bicycle and was last seen heading into Central Park.
The health insurance executive from Minnesota was walking outside the New York Hilton Midtown about 6:40 a.m., before an investors conference his company was holding in the hotel, when a gunman wearing a hood and a mask fired off several rounds from a pistol. Thompson had been staying in another hotel across the street.
He was killed in one of the busiest parts of the city, an area teeming with tourists as well as people in business suits. Even as New Yorkers prepared for a bustling Christmas season with the traditional tree lighting Wednesday night at Rockefeller Center, officers had cordoned off sections of 54th Street outside the Hilton with yellow crime scene tape and were counting 9mm casings on the ground.
Police tracked the gunman’s movements in a neighborhood saturated by city-operated and private surveillance cameras, releasing images of him making a cash purchase at a nearby Starbucks and then, a short time later, taking aim at Thompson, who authorities said was shot in the back and leg.
Surveillance camera footage obtained by The Post appears to show the suspect exiting the 57th Street F Train station timestamped at 6:15 a.m. The individual — wearing clothing, shoes and a backpack that match images released by police — leaves the station and walks briskly down Sixth Avenue toward the Hilton Hotel, where police say they responded to a call of a person being shot at 6:46 a.m.
The targeted shooting of the chief executive officer of an American company, in the nation’s financial capital, shocked the health and business communities nationally and in Minnetonka, Minnesota, outside Minneapolis, where UnitedHealth Group is headquartered. Police said they were searching for a motive.
New York Police Department investigators were looking into whether anyone had a known grudge against the victim. Police said they were combing social media and speaking to witnesses in an effort to track down anyone who may have knowledge of why Thompson was killed, offering a $10,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest and prosecution. They said they also were looking into the possibility that the shooter had been hired to kill the executive.
Thompson, a 50-year-old Iowa native, joined UnitedHealth Group in 2004 and rose through a series of top leadership posts to become the CEO of its largest unit, the health insurance firm UnitedHealthcare.
The company is a dominating presence in American health care, providing employer and individual health coverage to about 50 million Americans. UnitedHealthcare brought in $281 billion last year, accounting for about 75 percent of its parent company’s revenue; had it been a stand-alone firm, it would have ranked among the top 10 publicly traded American companies by sales, according to data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence.
The Hartmann Report, The Medicare Advantage Trap: What They Don’t Tell You, Thom Hartmann, right, 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?
Yesterday a gunman assassinated the chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, as he arrived at a meeting of investors in New York City.
While authorities are still investigating, officials have released the information that the casings of the bullets that killed Thompson bore the words “deny,” “defend,” “depose,” all words associated with companies’ denial of health insurance, taken from the longer phrases “deny the claim,” “defend the lawsuit,” “depose the patient.”
While those clues could simply be a red herring, posters on social media have cheered what they seem to see as revenge against an abusive system in which people’s lives are at the mercy of executives who prioritize profits.
Health insurance companies have long been under scrutiny for their practices. For the past two years, ProPublica has run a long series exploring the different ways in which companies have developed systems to deny healthcare coverage to their policyholders.
UnitedHealthcare has been no exception either to such practices or to scrutiny. Its parent group UnitedHealth has a market valuation of $560 billion and was the eighth largest corporation in the world last year as measured by revenue. This year, UnitedHealthcare—Thompson’s unit—is expected to bring in $280 billion in revenue.
UnitedHealth is embroiled in a number of lawsuits. Andrew Stanton of Newsweek reported that on November 14, 2023, families of two now-deceased patients sued UnitedHealthcare over denial of coverage for Medicare Advantage patients for nursing home stays prescribed by their doctors. Medicare Advantage is the private insurance alternative to Medicare that receives a flat fee from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It’s an enormously profitable industry, and UnitedHealth controls almost a third of it.
The lawsuit alleges that UnitedHealthcare uses artificial intelligence to deny claims from Medicare Advantage policyholders. The lawsuit claims that the company knowingly uses an algorithm that makes errors 90% of the time because it also knows that only about 0.2% of policy holders will appeal the decision to deny their claims. Last month the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hammered UnitedHealth for dramatic increases in their denial rates for post-acute care between 2019 and 2022 as it switched to AI authorizations.
On the same day as the shooting, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance covering Connecticut, New York, and Missouri announced it would cover anesthesia during surgery or procedures only for a specific time period in order to make insurance more affordable by reducing overbilling.
After an outcry both from anesthesiologists and the public, the company today retracted its policy change, saying it had never intended to avoid “medically necessary anesthesia,” but meant simply to “clarify the appropriateness of anesthesia consistent with well-established clinical guidelines.” Their explanation might have calmed the news cycle, but its suggestion that the insurance officials rather than doctors should determine what anesthesia is appropriate for a patient during surgery echoed the argument in the UnitedHealthcare lawsuit.
Thompson’s murder seems to be a cultural moment in which popular fury over the power big business has over ordinary Americans’ lives exploded. Maureen Tkacik of The American Prospect noted, “Only about 50 million customers of America’s reigning medical monopoly might have a motive to exact revenge upon the UnitedHealthcare CEO.” The shooter, whose actual motive remains unknown, is fast becoming a folk hero.
Social media has exploded with users writing things like “[t]his claim for sympathy has been denied”; songs featuring the words “deny, “defend,” and “depose”; and recorded commentary condemning the healthcare insurance industry. UnitedHealth Group posted its sadness about Thompson’s death on Facebook yesterday about 1:00 p.m.; 36 hours later the post had 65,000 laughing emojis under it.
Security expert Charlie Carroll expressed surprise to Josh Fiallo of the Daily Beast that Thompson did not have a security detail. “We’re living in a world where people are extremely disgruntled,” Carroll said. “When people lose trust in the system, you start seeing more kidnappings and assassinations because they feel like they have to take matters into their own hands.”
In the wake of the shooting, UnitedHealthcare and several other insurance companies took down from their websites the names and photographs of their officials.
Emptywheel, Analysis Zeynep Tufekci’s Two Blind Spots Cross at DOGE, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), Dec. 7, 2024.The glee surrounding Brian Thompson's death is not unprecedented -- Donald Trump campaigned on a similar mob glee, targeting Paul Pelosi, to get elected. And then he installed a bunch of billionaires to start looting. And politicians like Elizabeth Warren have already suggested some "broad public solutions" to that looting.
Zeynep Tufekci has a column at NYT scolding thousands of people on social media for taking glee in the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
I don’t care one way or another for the scold. I care about how she makes a remarkable claim and then uses it to engage in political nihilism.Tufekci claims that she can’t remember any murder being so openly celebrated in the US. "I’ve been studying social media for a long time, and I can’t think of any other incident when a murder in this country has been so openly celebrated."
From there, Tufekci likens this moment to the Gilded Age, where social upheaval led to exploitation and political violence.
.As a threshold matter, I find her claim that this is a unique moment of glee to be … forgetful. Just two years ago, after all, Donald Trump and Elon Musk — whose platform has encouraged such mob celebrations — both led their mob in vicious jokes about Paul Pelosi’s near-murder.
Indeed, Trump used attacks on Paul Pelosi at least twice in his campaign — most recently, campaigning with some cops in September.
How do you forget that the richest man in the world and the President-elect have engaged in just such celebration of political violence (and that’s before he pardons seditionists)?
Donald Trump got elected by celebrating political violence. And then he proceeded to install at least 11 billionaires, ready to start looting government.
Which is where Tufekci’s failure to find any will to push for systematic solutions gets curious. After all, Lina Khan’s efforts to rein in monopolies played a role in last year’s election.
WaPo’s coverage of all the billionaires Trump installed quotes Josh Hawley along with Elizabeth Warren and Noah Bookbinder.
Trump’s team of rivals stands in stark contrast with President Joe Biden’s Cabinet, which had a combined net worth of $118 million in the first year of his presidency, according to Forbes. Trump’s picks have not yet released their financial disclosures, but his 2025 Cabinet is likely to be even richer than the first Trump Cabinet, which had a combined net worth of $6.2 billion.[snip]Trump’s selections may be more inclined to look out for the interests of their own businesses and their fellow billionaires than for working-class voters, said Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.“It is hard to see how a Cabinet made up largely of the very, very wealthiest of Americans is going to have an understanding of what the needs of regular Americans are,” he said.[snip]
And even beyond Khan’s work, the Biden Administration took efforts to reverse the kind of concentration that made Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg rich. They’ve even taken action against … United Healthcare.
The richest man in the world is about to come for VA Health Care and once that fails to make way for new tax cuts, Medicare. No one knows where this moment of rage will go. The oligarchs have the means to exercise the power of the state against those complaining that Trump’s billionaires plan to use bullshit claims about efficiency to make things far worse.But the people who brought us to this moment where mobs take glee at political violence are about to loot the government.And I’m pretty sure Senator Warren will be ready at hand to explain what is going down.
New York Times, The ‘Chilling’ Fatal Shooting of a C.E.O. Has Business Leaders on Edge, Emma Goldberg, Dec. 6, 2024. After Brian Thompson of UnitedHealthcare was killed in Manhattan, the phones at corporate security firms were “ringing off the hook.”
A Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company raised its drug prices, and then board members and executives received phone calls threatening violence. A health care company’s board meeting was disrupted after board members were targeted in “swatting” attacks that wrongly sent law enforcement officers to their homes.
These incidents happened before the fatal shooting of Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive, in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday. The police had not offered a motive for the shooting as of Thursday night, or said it was related to Mr. Thompson’s work in the insurance industry.
The killing, however, stunned business leaders, some of whom were already concerned about safety. Over the last five years, there has been a sharp rise in targeted attacks, digital and offline, of executives and their families, said Chris Pierson, the chief executive of BlackCloak, a digital executive protection firm. Health care, biomedical and pharmaceutical leaders tend to be targeted more often than executives in other industries, according to the firm’s data.
Digital platforms have made it easier to obtain information about executives’ identities and locations, while social media has fanned the flames of vitriol directed at these corporate leaders.
Businesses have been increasing their spending on protection: The median amount spent on executive security among the S&P 500 companies that disclose that information doubled from 2021 to 2023, according to Equilar, an executive compensation research firm.
New York Times, Was Brian Thompson’s Killer a Hit Man? Unlikely, Experts Say, Annie Correal, Dec. 6, 2024. The murder of Brian Thompson did not appear to have been committed by a coldly calculating professional, according to people who study criminal behavior.
For the general public, the shooting in Manhattan of the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare on Wednesday seemed like something off Netflix: a coldblooded morning murder outside a hotel, a hooded man shooting a corporate bigwig from behind, the victim turning to face the attacker before crumpling to the ground, mortally wounded.
But beyond those images from a dark surveillance video, little is known about the shooting or the gunman. The police have not established a motive for the killing, and three days into their search they have not publicly named a suspect or made an arrest.
For those who professionally study criminal behavior, though, the shooting was packed with crucial information, with the killer’s every known move providing new opportunities to speculate about who he might be.
The police said the shooting was a targeted attack by someone with experience with firearms. But was that someone acting on a personal grudge — or a hired hand? And if the killer was a hit man, was he an amateur or a seasoned professional?
The consensus among experts following the killing of Brian Thompson, the veteran chief executive of one of the nation’s largest health insurers, was that the shooter could indeed handle himself around a gun, but that everything else suggested that he was unlikely to have been hired to commit the crime.
“Forgive me for saying too much on too little evidence, but it looks like the kind of guy that made up his mind that he was doing the right thing,” said David Shapiro, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, and a former F.B.I. special agent. “He didn’t look like a guy that was fearful.”
He added: “In terms of a professional hit man, that seems unlikely. It would be very hard to get somebody to do something like this. It’s very high risk.”
The gunman waited by a specific entrance to the New York Hilton Midtown and fired his weapon with confidence. He also appeared to have outfitted his gun with a silencer, which are rarely used in murders.
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.
The union made sense, at first, when you rationalized that she was famous, and he was a Kennedy and an environmental lawyer. His anti-vax stuff is weird, but then again, Hollywood is also a weird place, with people rolling jade over their faces and stuffing jade up their hoo-has and spending $22 for a single dumb smoothie at a grocery store called Erewhon. The spectrum of nutty is sometimes a circle. Mazel tov, you crazy kids.
Then, in 2022, RFK Jr. compared coronavirus restrictions to the Holocaust, and accused Anthony S. Fauci of perpetuating “fascism.” Hines responded on Twitter: “My husband’s opinions are not a reflection of my own. While we love each other, we differ on many current issues.” This sounded like the kind of statement that usually precedes a carefully crafted conscious uncoupling. But instead it preceded the announcement that Kennedy was running for president, with Hines by his side. “I support Bobby and I want to be there for him, and I want him to feel loved and supported by me,” she told the New York Times.
Then the personal stuff started to trickle out — the stuff about planting a dead bear cub in Central Park, the stuff about strapping a decaying whale head to his car roof, the stuff about the nanny who said he had sexually assaulted her (he allegedly sent her a text saying he had “no memory” of the incident) — and you thought, Eesh, these things could not possibly have been part of Kennedy’s courtship disclosures, and once Cheryl is fully aware, it’s over. He had a brain worm, he’d once revealed in a deposition, and it had eaten part of his brain. Girl, run.
But no! She persevered. In August, Kennedy officially suspended his hopeless presidential campaign and further announced that, instead of supporting Kamala Harris, the son of a Democratic dynasty would be supporting Donald Trump. Earlier in the year, Kennedy was asked on a “Curb” premiere red carpet whether he would consider becoming Trump’s running mate. “I don’t think that my marriage would survive it,” he responded, prompting Hines to quip: “I think he’s right.”
Well, now she’ll leave, you might think, but you are being too literal: Kennedy did not become Trump’s running mate, he’s merely Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, so here we are.
If political betrayals did not end this marriage, what about personal scandals? Because, in September, after the brain worms and the “fascism” and the allusions to making ivermectin and raw milk available throughout the land — after all that, a 31-year-old reporter from New York magazine was suspended when it was revealed that she had engaged in a “personal relationship” with Kennedy, about whom she had written a profile for the magazine.
A week later, there was Cheryl, photographed in Paris, holding her hands up to her face with her fingers ostentatiously splayed outward to show us that her ring finger still bore a wedding band.
I have spent more time than is reasonable (and truly, any amount of time is unreasonable) thinking about the interior life of Cheryl Hines, a woman who has gone from playing a beleaguered wife on prestige television to a beleaguered wife in real life, hanging on to a husband whose hero’s journey is one absurd plot twist after another, whose soundtrack is a tuba.
But more than that, Hines is making me think about the ways we talk about political wives. The things we think we know about them, the inner lives we invent. The fact that for an entire term, delusional resistance figures speculated that Melania Trump was their ally on the inside — Did she secretly hate her husband? — except she never left, and her memoir published earlier this year makes it clear that she never will. The way that observers have expected Usha Vance to moderate her husband when she has given no public indication that she thinks he needs moderating. The Hillary Clinton of it all.
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.
New York Times, How Kennedy Has Worked Abroad to Weaken Global Public Health Policy, Selam Gebrekidan, Justin Scheck, Sarah Hurtes and Pete McKenzie, Dec. 1, 2024 (print ed.). Donald Trump’s health secretary pick, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and his nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, have worked to undermine policies on measles, AIDS and more.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is in line to lead the Department of Health and Human Services in the next Trump administration, is well-known for promoting conspiracy theories and vaccine skepticism in the United States.
But Mr. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, has also spent years working abroad to undermine policies that have been pillars of global health policy for a half-century, records show.
He has done this by lending his celebrity, and the name of his nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, to a network of overseas chapters that sow distrust in vaccine safety and spread misinformation far and wide.
He, his organizations and their officials have interfered with vaccination efforts, undermined sex education campaigns meant to stem the spread of AIDS in Africa, and railed against global organizations like the World Health Organization that are in charge of health initiatives.
Along the way, Mr. Kennedy has partnered with, financed or promoted fringe figures — people who claim that 5G cellphone towers cause cancer, that homosexuality and contraceptive education are part of a global conspiracy to reduce African fertility and that the World Health Organization is trying to steal countries’ sovereignty.
Washington Post, The New Administration: Trump’s former FDA commissioner warns RFK Jr. could ‘cost lives,’ Dan Diamond, Nov. 30, 2024 (print ed.). Scott Gottlieb, right, who led the Food and Drug Administration during the Trump administration, on Friday warned that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could “cost lives” if confirmed as the next secretary of Health and Human Services.
“You’re going to see measles, mumps and rubella vaccination rates go down,” Gottlieb said on CNBC, referencing Kennedy’s longtime criticism of federal recommendations for childhood immunizations, and noting a recent decline in childhood vaccination rates. The nation is approaching a “tipping point,” Gottlieb said, where a continued decline in childhood vaccines could soon lead to measles outbreaks and deaths of children.
“We’re going to start seeing epidemics of diseases that have long been vanquished, and, God forbid, we see polio reemerge in this country,” he said.
Gottlieb said he had been warning senators against confirming Kennedy to run the federal health department, although he did not identify with whom he had spoken. He added that Kennedy, who founded one of the country’s most prominent antivaccine groups, had “smart people” around him who could take immediate steps to affect Americans’ access to vaccines, such as changing federal vaccine recommendations.
“There’s a lot of things that they could do day one, very easily, administratively,” Gottlieb said.
NBC News, RFK Jr. attacked the CDC’s ‘fascism’ and likened vaccinating children to abuse by the Catholic Church, Brandy Zadrozny, Nov. 27, 2024. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary, also argued for jailing vaccine scientists in previously unreported comments at autism conferences.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a dark view of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2019, he called the federal agency’s vaccine division a fascist enterprise and accused it of knowingly hurting children. He also compared what he saw as a widespread conspiracy to hide harms from the child vaccination program to the cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
“The word ‘fascism’ in Italian means a bundle of sticks, and what it means is the bundle is more important than the sticks,” Kennedy said in previously unreported remarks in 2019 to a private audience at AutismOne, a conference for parents of autistic children. “The institution, CDC and the vaccine program, is more important than the children that it’s supposed to protect.
New York Times, Trump Transition: Kennedy’s Inheritance: How Addiction and Trauma Shaped a Turbulent Life, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Susanne Craig and Rebecca Davis O’Brien, Nov. 29, 2024. Donald Trump’s pick to be health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has had a life of fame and addiction, and a career intertwined with conspiracy theories.
New York Times, How Will Trump’s Covid Contrarians Handle the Next Pandemic? Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Nov. 28, 2024 (print ed.). President-elect Donald J. Trump’s selections to run the nation’s health agencies are alarming infectious disease experts.
President-elect Donald J. Trump had already succeeded in rattling the nation’s public health and biomedical establishment by the time he announced on Tuesday that he had picked Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to run the National Institutes of Health. But amid growing fears of a deadly bird flu pandemic, perhaps no one was more rattled than experts in infectious disease.
Dr. Bhattacharya, a Stanford University medical economist and outspoken opponent of lockdowns, masking, school closures and other Covid-19 mitigation measures, and Mr. Trump’s other health picks have one thing in common. They are all considered Covid contrarians whose views raise questions about how they would handle an infectious disease crisis.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right, Mr. Trump’s choice for health secretary, has said he wants the N.I.H. to focus on chronic disease and “give infectious disease a break for about eight years.” Dr. Martin Makary, the president-elect’s choice to run the Food and Drug Administration, incorrectly predicted in 2021 that the nation was “racing toward an extremely low level of infection.”
Dr. David Weldon, a Republican former congressman who is Mr. Trump’s choice to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has espoused the debunked theory that thimerosal, a mercury compound in certain vaccines, causes autism. As a congressman, he introduced legislation that would strip the C.D.C. of its role in ensuring vaccine safety, saying the agency had a “conflict of interest” because it also promotes vaccination.
And Dr. Mehmet Oz, left, the talk show host who has been picked by Mr. Trump to run Medicare and Medicaid, prodded officials in the first Trump administration to give emergency authorization for the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19. The F.D.A. later revoked the authorization when studies showed the drug carried risks, including serious heart issues, to coronavirus patients.
Washington Post, Trump picks Jay Bhattacharya to lead NIH, overseeing scientific research, Dan Diamond, Nov. 28, 2024 (print ed.). The president-elect also named Jim O’Neill, a Silicon Valley investor and former federal health official, to be deputy secretary of Health and Human Services. Jay Bhattacharya will preside over the National Institutes of Health, a nearly $50 billion agency, if confirmed by the Senate.
Recent Relevant Headlines
The Bulwark, Opinion: RFK Jr. Said the Government May Have Planned COVID, Sam Stein and Andrew EggerPolitico, Health Care: Trump transition closes in on picks for top health postsThe Hill, Medicare Advantage gets ally in Dr. Oz
South Korean Crisis
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.
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.
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.”
Trump’s transition did not respond to a request for comment. Blanche did not respond to a message sent to his law firm email address.
The issue extends beyond Blanche, given that Trump also picked two of his other attorneys — Emil Bove and D. John Sauer — for principal associate deputy attorney general and solicitor general, respectively. Those are also top Justice Department roles. But Blanche has been tapped for the No. 2 position, just below the attorney general, and he has effectively been the face of Trump’s defense team since he signed on as his lawyer last year.
Blanche represented Trump through a tumultuous period that saw four separate indictments against Trump as he campaigned for another term in the White House. He led Trump’s defense team in three of the four cases: a federal case in Florida accusing Trump of mishandling classified materials; a separate federal case in D.C. charging him with trying to obstruct Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election; and a New York case involving charges of falsifying business records related to a 2016 hush money payment.
The two federal prosecutions against Trump have been dismissed, while the ultimate outcome of the New York case remains unclear. A jury there convicted Trump of 34 felony counts in May, though the judge has postponed sentencing multiple times, most recently to give the president-elect’s attorneys more time to argue the case should be thrown out given the results of the election.Former president Donald Trump addressed reporters before entering a Manhattan courtroom on April 15. (Video: The Washington Post)
While it remains unclear what specific steps Trump’s Justice Department could take involving matters where Blanche represented the president-elect, Trump has demanded retribution against his perceived foes.
Among other things, Trump has suggested that special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the two federal cases, should be thrown out of the country and said Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), who brought the New York case, should be prosecuted. The Washington Post has also reported that Trump plans to fire all members of Smith’s team.
“It’s not at all unusual for a criminal defense lawyer in the private sector to join DOJ,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University and an expert in legal and government ethics. “What makes this situation possibly fraught, I think, is not so much that revolving door as much as the threats, the completely inappropriate threats of retaliation.”
The deputy attorney general is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations at the Justice Department, a sprawling agency with more than 115,000 employees that bills itself as “the world’s largest law office.”
Blanche has experience with that office, having spent nearly a decade as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, according to his law firm’s website. He went on to become a criminal defense attorney and was a partner at the firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, before resigning to start his own firm and represent Trump.
During the New York trial, Blanche drew some reprimands from the judge, acting New York Supreme Court justice Juan Merchan, who told Blanche at one point that he was “losing all credibility.”
The judge found Trump in contempt, imposed a gag order and fined him for violating it. Hours after Trump was convicted, Blanche went on CNN to say Trump’s behavior was “exemplary.” He also criticized the prosecution, calling the case “completely unjust.”
Blanche’s stout defense of the president-elect continued with the court filing this month in New York. “Just as a sitting President is completely immune from any criminal process, so too is President Trump as President-elect,” Blanche and Bove wrote in arguing that the case should be dismissed. Prosecutors in Manhattan have suggested instead delaying any criminal proceedings until after Trump’s second term ends.
Experts said there was no issue with Blanche continuing to represent Trump during the transition period, emphasizing that he is a private citizen and has obligations toward Trump and any other clients.
Ethics expert Stephen Gillers said if he were advising Blanche, he would suggest that he stop representing Trump once he is formally nominated as deputy attorney general, presuming the New York case remains active at that point. “It looks bad when you’re representing the president while you’re awaiting confirmation for DOJ deputy,” said Gillers, a law professor emeritus at New York University.
Still, “the clear dividing line is the moment he’s sworn in,” Gillers said. Then, he said, “his client will change. His client will be the United States, and only the United States.”
Trump’s first attorney general in his first term, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election after it emerged that he had met with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the campaign and did not disclose that to senators during his confirmation.
Trump was outraged by Sessions’s recusal, and he remained angered by it years later, blaming Sessions for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s lengthy probe into whether Trump campaign officials had coordinated with Russian efforts.
Sessions was right to recuse himself, said Clark, the Washington University professor. But Trump’s reaction to his decision signals why it would be important for members of the Senate Judiciary Committee involved in Blanche’s confirmation hearing to “get on the record exactly what the scope of his recusals will be, where he sees the line of where he cannot participate,” Clark said.
While Justice Department prosecutors work for the executive branch, they have long operated “independent of presidential power,” said Scott Cummings, a UCLA law professor who teaches legal ethics.
That separation is based on rules and tradition, rather than constitutional constraints, Cummings said, adding that Trump picking his defense attorneys for top Justice Department jobs appears meant to “undercut the norm of independence” and bring the department under the president’s control.
Wald, the University of Denver professor, said Blanche is clearly qualified to be deputy attorney general but should steer clear of any Justice Department business that intersects with his previous work for Trump.
There have been attacks on the rule of law in the United States for the past decade or so, Wald said, and it’s important “to shore up trust and confidence in legal institutions,” including the Justice Department.
“An easy, easy solution could be simply to make sure that people who represented the president recently are not the same people making decisions about the very same matters on behalf of the United States of America,” Wald said.
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.
Often history tells us how the future may turn out: Trump isn’t the first American politician to use lies and slanders to whip up a war-like frenzy. Or to use the language of war for political gain.
Bush Junior wasn’t the first president to have lied to us about foreign affairs and war, or to use lies to justify eviscerating the Constitution. For example, Lyndon Johnson lied about a non-existent attack on the US warship Maddox in the Vietnamese Gulf of Tonkin. William McKinley (the presidency after which Karl Rove has said he’d modeled the Bush presidency) lied about an attack on the USS Maine to get us into the Spanish-American war in The Philippines and Cuba.
But most relevant to today's situation were John Adams’ version of Trump’s slanders when Adams (shown at left in an official portrait by John Trumbull circa 1792 when Adams was vice president), sent three emissaries to France and criminals soliciting bribes approached them late one evening. Adams referred to these three unidentified Frenchmen as “Mr. X, Mr. Y, and Mr. Z,” and made them out to represent such an insult and a threat against America that it may presage war.
Adams’ use of “The XYZ Affair” to gain political capital — much like Trump demonizes Hispanic and Haitian immigrants for political gain — nearly led us to war with France and helped him carve a large (although temporary) hole in the Constitution. Similarly, much like Trump’s anti-media “enemy of the people” rhetoric, John Adams then used that frenzy to jail newspaper editors and average citizens alike who spoke out against him and his policies.
The backstory is both fascinating and hopeful.
At that time in the late 1790s, Adams was President and Jefferson (shown in a portrait at right by Rembrandt Peale) was Vice President. Adams led the Federalist Party (which today could be said to have reincarnated as the Republican Party), and Jefferson had just brought together two Anti-Federalist parties — the Democrats and the Republicans — into one party called The Democratic Republicans. (Today they’re known as the Democratic Party, the longest-lasting political party in history. They dropped “Republican” from their name in the 1820-1830 era).
Adams and his Federalist cronies, using war hysteria with France as a wedge issue, were pushing the Alien & Sedition Acts through Congress, and even threw into prison Democratic Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont for speaking out against the Federalists on the floor of the House of Representatives.
Adams was leading the United States in the direction of a fascistic state with a spectacularly successful strategy of vilifying Jefferson and his Party as anti-American and pro-French. He was America’s first Trump, albeit nowhere near as toxic or psychopathic.
Adams rhetoric was described as “manly” by the Federalist newspapers, which admiringly published dozens of his threatening rants against France, suggesting that Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans were less than patriots and perhaps even traitors because of their opposition to the unnecessary war with France that Adams was simultaneously trying to gin up and saying he was working to avoid.
Jefferson knew that Adams’ Federalists did not represent the true heart and soul of America, and commented to Taylor about how Adams had been using divide-and-conquer politics, and fear-mongering about war with France (the XYZ Affair) with some success.
Jefferson did everything he could to stop that generation’s version of Trump, but Adams had the Federalists in control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and pushed through the Alien and Sedition Acts. In protest, Jefferson left town the day they were signed, never to return until after Adams left the presidency.
The tide was turned, to use Jefferson’s phrase, by the election of 1800, as Dan Sisson and I document in our book The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction — and What This Means Today.
The abuses of the Federalists were so burned into the people’s minds when Jefferson's party came to power and he freed the imprisoned newspaper editors so reform-minded newspapers were started back up again, that the Federalists disintegrated altogether as a party over the next two decades.
As may well happen to Trump’s GOP two or four years from now.
All because average citizens and pamphleteers — and a handful of progressive politicians — stood up and challenged the lies of a fear-mongering president, and politicians of principle were willing to lead.
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.
Politico, 2024 Elections: Trump voters feel very differently about things now that he’s won, our new poll shows, Jessica Piper, Nov. 29, 2024 (print ed.). A pair of POLITICO|Morning Consult polls, one conducted in the final days of the election and the other conducted after Trump won, show how public opinion has changed.
Donald Trump’s supporters thought voter fraud could determine the election outcome — until he won.
Heading into Election Day, nearly 9 in 10 Trump voters said fraud was a serious issue. Afterward, just a bit over one-third said so.
Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris has scrambled public opinion about a range of other issues, too. For example, his supporters were also more likely to feel good about the economy after the election — while Harris supporters adopted a more negative outlook.
Those are among the results of a new POLITICO|Morning Consult poll, designed to measure change in public opinion before and after the election. The results largely track with recent consumer sentiment data and comments from Republican leaders.
Our new poll showed voters’ perceptions of issues like election security and the economy swung substantially post-election, with deep differences based on who they voted for. The poll also found mixed expectations for a second Trump term.
The first poll (toplines, crosstabs) was conducted from Oct. 30 to Nov. 1, the week before the election, while the second (toplines, crosstabs) was in the field from Nov. 20 through 22, two weeks after Trump’s victory. Both surveys sampled more than 4,000 registered voters, with a margin of error of 2 percentage points.
Here are some of the big takeaways we learned from the results.Trump supporters worried less about voter fraud after he won
In polling just days before the election, Trump supporters expressed little confidence in the election outcome, with a whopping 87 percent substantially or somewhat agreeing with the statement that voter fraud was a “serious issue” that could determine the outcome of the election. Among Harris supporters, roughly half expressed similar worries.
That partisan divide disappeared after Election Day.
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.
These are frenzied times for the nascent Department of Government Efficiency.
In Silicon Valley, tech leaders are eagerly seeking positions or introductions to the department, even though for now it is not an actual part of government, but a loose grouping that Elon Musk named after an internet meme. On his social media platform, X, Mr. Musk posted a “Godfather”-style photo of himself as the “Dogefather,” asking government employees, “What did you get done this week?”
And in Washington, a House subcommittee has been announced to help push through President-elect Donald J. Trump’s vision, announced on Nov. 12, for a department that would slash the $6.7 trillion federal budget.
Members of Congress — even Democratic ones — have been offering up ideas for where to cut what Mr. Musk said could be $2 trillion out of the budget.
“It’s going to be very easy,” Elon Musk’s mother, Maye Musk, told Fox News on Tuesday, after she sat in on some of her son’s meetings. Mr. Musk will lead the department along with Vivek Ramaswamy, right, a former Republican presidential candidate.
The coming months will show if her prediction proves right.
When Mr. Trump takes office, Mr. Musk’s group will face a daunting reality. An entire apparatus has developed over the centuries that allows the government to keep marching on in the face of economic shocks, wartime hardships, or — as in this case — political vows to diminish its size and spending.
Any effort to slash the federal government and its 2.3 million civilian workers will likely face resistance in Congress, lawsuits from activist groups and delays mandated by federal rules. Unlike in his businesses, Mr. Musk will not be the sole decider, but will have to build consensus among legislators, executive-branch staffers, his co-leader and Mr. Trump himself. And federal rules ostensibly prevent Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy from making decisions in private, unlike how many matters are handled in the business world.
Meetings would have to be open and minutes made public, said Brian D. Feinstein, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies administrative law.
“All of this would have to happen in the sunlight,” Mr. Feinstein said.
A 1972 law says federal open-records laws apply to advisory committees. If a committee does not follow those rules, it could be sued — and a judge could order the committee to stop meeting, or order the government to disregard its advice.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump’s presidential transition team, Brian Hughes, declined to answer detailed questions about the effort. He sent a written statement, saying that Mr. Ramaswamy and Mr. Musk “will work together slashing excess regulations, cutting wasteful expenditures, and restructuring federal agencies.”
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'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
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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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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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
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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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.”
New York Times, In Global Finale, Biden Hopes Rail Project Defines Africa Legacy, Peter Baker, right, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Dec. 4, 2024. In his last 
announced trip abroad as president, President Biden relished touring a U.S.-financed train line intended to transport goods and minerals to port.
On the final day of perhaps his final trip overseas as commander in chief, President Biden celebrated his foreign policy agenda by turning to a piece of infrastructure at the heart of his identity: a train.
It was not the Amtrak train Mr. Biden rode frequently as a senator or chose as the setting for the kickoff of his first presidential campaign nearly four decades ago. Mr. Biden instead toured a section of an 800-mile railway project in Angola that his administration hopes will be the key to expanding U.S. economic influence in Africa, a continent rich with critical minerals.
“I’m coming back to ride on the train from end to end,” Mr. Biden told President João Lourenço of Angola during a round table with African leaders in the port city of Lobito. “We’re not just laying tracks. We’re laying the groundwork for a better future for our people.”
Mr. Biden was spotlighting what is known as the Lobito Corridor, a railway project that his aides say is the proof behind the president’s commitment to be “all in on Africa’s future,” amid growing concern the United States has neglected the continent over the years and allowed China to gain economic dominance in the region.
The project, funded in part by the United States, runs from Angola’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo to Lobito, which sits on the Atlantic Ocean. Mr. Biden has said it will help connect Angola’s economy to nearby markets, including in Zambia. But it is also a means to expand U.S. access to a region rich with critical minerals, like copper and cobalt, used to make batteries for various products, including cellphones and electric vehicles.
Once the railway is complete, it would mean minerals could be more easily shipped to the United States, allowing the country to make progress on its goal of diversifying its supply chains.
Washington Post, Biden visiting an African region critical to the U.S.-China rivalry, Abigail Hauslohner, Dec. 3, 2024 (print ed.). The president arrived Monday in Angola, his first trip to Africa as president and one of his final foreign trips in office.
President Joe Biden arrived Monday in the southwestern African nation of Angola, a visit rife with symbolic importance and practical goals that marks one of the last foreign trips of his presidency and a closing moment in a 50-year public career that has focused frequently on foreign policy.Get the latest election news and results
The visit represents the first time a sitting U.S. president has visited Angola, a country that is rich in oil and diamonds, but where most of the population lives in poverty after decades of corrupt leadership and a civil war that Washington helped fuel through covert action during the Cold War.
The two-day visit will be Biden’s only trip as president to sub-Saharan Africa, which is home to nearly a fifth of the world’s population but is chronically low on the list of the United States’ foreign policy priorities. The trip will mark the first visit by a U.S. president to sub-Saharan Africa since 2015, despite the continent’s vital role in the extraction of critical minerals, and its growing significance in the strategic and economic battle for influence between the United States and China.
Biden intends to use his visit to spotlight the U.S. commitment to strengthening global partnerships and alliances, and its investment in the continent, officials said. “We have absolutely transformed this relationship,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Monday aboard Air Force One en route to Angola.
Biden arrived in Luanda on Monday evening to an Angolan honor guard’s salute, performed by the same military and ruling party against which the United States had once funded rebel fighters and sought to overthrow. Banners throughout the city displayed pictures of Biden’s face superimposed over the American and Angolan flags — the latter reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s flag — and large crowds thronged the streets to watch the president’s motorcade pass.
Angola, Kirby said, has become a valuable strategic partner in recent years, helping to mediate between warring groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo and working with U.S. and European investors to advance a trans-Africa railway project.
Biden promised at a 2022 summit of African leaders in Washington that the United States would invest $55 billion in the continent over the next three years, most of which has been fulfilled, officials said this week.
During his presidency, Biden’s global agenda has often been engulfed by the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, leaving him less bandwidth for Africa despite his vows to renew America’s involvement there. In December 2022, the president promised to visit Africa sometime in 2023, a deadline he missed by almost a year.
Biden’s message of optimism and engagement during the trip is also likely to be overshadowed by his departure from office in less than two months. President-elect Donald Trump did not visit Africa at all during his first term, and his denigration of immigrants from “shithole countries” in 2018 was widely seen to refer to Africa as well as Latin America.
New York Times, Mexican Authorities Seize 20 Million Doses of Fentanyl in Record Haul, James Wagner and Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, Dec. 4, 2024. The operation came after President-elect Trump threatened tariffs on Mexico if the country did not crack down on fentanyl.
It was the latest show of force in a crackdown on violence and illicit drugs by Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, ahead of the inauguration next month of President-elect Donald J. Trump.
Mr. Trump has vowed to place steep tariffs on Mexico until the government stops drugs and migrants from crossing the border.
Mexican authorities said officers confiscated 800 kilograms of fentanyl in a truck at a house in Sinaloa state, home of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel and a hub of fentanyl production, on Tuesday. Officials also seized chemical precursors used to make the synthetic drug, and another 300 kilos in a separate house, in addition to industrial mixers and scales.
In a separate operation that day, security officials and prosecutors said they arrested two men carrying two kilos of fentanyl pills. The authorities said the men led a cell “dedicated to the production and trafficking” of fentanyl.
New York Times, Syria’s Rebel Offensive: With Assad Challenged, a Push to Cut Syria’s Ties to Iran Grows More Unlikely, Erika Solomon, Ronen Bergman and Adam Rasgon, Dec. 4, 2024. The U.S. and Gulf countries were trying to lure President Bashar al-Assad of Syria away from Iran, officials say. But he is unlikely to give up the alliance.
For months, his country was battered by escalating Israeli bombardment, while behind the scenes, the United States and Gulf countries courted him diplomatically. It was a secretive, two-pronged approach meant to pressure President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to abandon his most important regional alliance with Hezbollah and Iran.
The overtures to Mr. al-Assad were the product of what Israel and its allies saw as a rare but risky opportunity — with Iran’s regional network fracturing under Israeli attack, they hoped to force Iran’s most important partner out of the alliance, according to former U.S. officials, two European diplomats and four Israeli officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
Now, those regional ambitions may be derailed by a far smaller and long-discounted force: Resurgent rebels have launched a surprisingly successful attack in Syria, exploiting in part the strain Israel has put on the alliance that helped Mr. al-Assad maintain power through more than a decade of uprising and civil war. In a matter of days, the rebels seized most of the country’s large city of Aleppo, and challenged Mr. al-Assad’s grip on the country’s northwest.
New York Times, China Just Showed Washington How It Plans to Fight the Next Trade War, Keith Bradsher, Dec. 4, 2024. Faltering U.S. industrial leadership has allowed China to take a harder trade stance as President-elect Trump prepares to take office.
When Donald J. Trump fired the opening shots in a trade war during his first term, Chinese officials often took days to respond and Chinese businesses followed every threat with alarm.
But this week, after the Biden administration broadened its restrictions on advanced technology that could be sent to China, Beijing announced sweeping retaliation in a single day. The country’s stock market investors mostly shrugged at the Biden administration’s action.
And on Wednesday, General Motors, a onetime cornerstone of American industrial might, said it was taking a $5 billion hit to profit to recognize that it was no longer able to adequately compete with Chinese carmakers.
The fast-moving developments have underlined how far China has come as an industrial superpower, and its readiness for a potentially bruising battle with the second Trump administration. China now has a manufacturing sector that is larger than those of the United States, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Britain put together. It produces some of the world’s most advanced technology.
New York Times, Mexican Cartels Lure Chemistry Students to Make Fentanyl, Natalie Kitroeff and Paulina Villegas, Dec. 1, 2024.Criminalsturn college campuses into recruitment hubs, recruiting chemistry students in Mexico with big paydays.
New York Times, 80 Years After Killings, Senegal Wants the Facts From France, Elian Peltier and Saikou Jammeh, Dec. 1, 2024. Senegal's new government is aiming to remove the secrecy around the mass slaying of West African soldiers by colonial forces at the end of World War II.
Ahead of the 80th anniversary of what is known as the Thiaroye Massacre, Senegal’s government has pressured France to fully explain one of the most sinister episodes of its colonial rule in Africa.
And Senegal won’t let it go, the latest signal sent by an African government that the relationship with the former colonizer is up for reconsideration.
After President Emmanuel Macron of France last week referred to the events as a “massacre” in a letter addressed to his Senegalese counterpart — the first French president to ever to describe it as such — President Bassirou Diomaye Faye had a blunt answer.
“That is not enough,” Mr. Faye said in an interview with Le Monde. “We still don’t know how many people were killed nor why, how and where they were buried.”
The calls for reparations echo campaigns demanding truth and justice for colonial-era crimes committed across the continent. In the former French colonies of West and Central Africa, where several governments have curtailed ties with France in recent years, few incidents resonate as much as the memory of Thiaroye.
“Thiaroye could be the foundation for a Pan-African consciousness shared by all African countries who have lost citizens in the tragedy,” said Mamadou Diouf, a Senegalese historian and director of Columbia University’s Institute for African Studies.
Mr. Diouf, who was appointed by the Senegalese government this summer to lead a research committee on Thiaroye, called Senegal’s new attitude “indicative of a breakaway, a strong assertion of sovereignty.”
On the morning of Dec. 1, 1944, French colonial forces gathered hundreds of West African men temporarily stationed at a garrison in Thiaroye, on the outskirts of Dakar, the then-capital of French West Africa.
It was supposed to be their last stop before home: Hailing from a dozen African colonies, the men had fought for France in the war, been detained in Nazi-run camps for years, and were now awaiting financial compensation for years of service.
The money wasn’t coming.
As tensions escalated between French and West African soldiers who had once been brothers in arms, French officers vowed to “bring back order,” according to a French military report written a day before the killings.
They brought machine guns to Thiaroye, two battalions, a tank and other military vehicles to “show so much superiority that the mutineers don’t think about resisting,” the report read.
Around 9:30 a.m., they fired more than 500 rounds of ammunition within 15 seconds, according to archives consulted by Martin Mourre, a French historian.
The first official death toll mentioned 35 West African deaths — an “indispensable surgical operation,” an act of self-defense against armed and aggressive men, claimed the French officer in charge, in a report written days later.
But historians from France and Senegal say the real death toll is likely closer to 400, and that the West African soldiers were not armed.
They argue that discrepancies in military reports and the preparedness of French troops pointed to a premeditated massacre. The lack of information around the identities of the victims and the whereabouts of their remains, are other signs that France tried to cover up a crime, they say.
New York Times, Rebels Control Most of Syria’s Largest City, War Monitor Says, Muhammad Haj Kadour and Raja Abdulrahim, Dec. 1, 2024 (print ed.).. The advance on Aleppo came just four days into a surprise rebel offensive that is the most intense escalation in years in a civil war that was mostly dormant.
Rebels had seized most of Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, on Saturday, according to a war monitoring group and to fighters who were combing the streets in search of any remaining pockets of government forces.
The rebels said they had faced little resistance on the ground in Aleppo. But Syrian government warplanes responded with airstrikes on the city for the first time since 2016, according to the war monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The city of Aleppo came to a near standstill on Saturday, with many residents staying indoors for fear of what the sudden flip in control might mean, witnesses said. Others did venture out into quiet streets, welcoming the antigovernment fighters and hugging them. Some of the rebels tried to reassure city residents and sent out at least one van to distribute bread.
The rapid advance on Aleppo came just four days into a surprise rebel offensive launched on Wednesday against the autocratic regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The development is both the most serious challenge to Mr. al-Assad’s rule and the most intense escalation in years in a civil war that had been mostly dormant.
The timing of the assault has raised questions about whether the rebels are exploiting weaknesses across an alliance that has Iran at the center and includes groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as the Syrian regime.
In Aleppo on Saturday, well-armed rebel fighters dressed in camouflage patrolled streets still lined with the ubiquitous posters of Mr. al-Assad. The opposition forces said that although they were in control of nearly the entire city, they had not yet solidified their hold on it.
Within hours from Friday into Saturday, Syrian government soldiers, security forces and police officers had fled the city, according to the observatory. They were replaced by Islamist and Turkish-backed rebels sweeping through on foot, on motorbikes or on trucks mounted with machine guns.
Recent Relevant Headlines
New York Times, Syrian Rebels Breach City of Aleppo, in Biggest Advance in Years
U.S. Law, Cases, Courts
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.
New York Times, Inside the Supreme Court Ethics Debate: Who Judges the Justices? Jodi Kantor and Abbie VanSickle, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). In private meetings and memos, the justices made new rules for themselves — then split on whether they could, or should, be enforced.
As the summer of 2023 ended, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court began trading even-more-confidential-than-usual memos, avoiding their standard email list and instead passing paper documents in envelopes to each chambers. Faced with ethics controversies and a plunge in public trust, they were debating rules for their own conduct, according to people familiar with the process.
Weeks later, as a united front, they announced the results: the court’s first-ever ethics code. “It’s remarkable that we were able to agree unanimously,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said in a television interview this year.
But a New York Times examination found that behind the scenes, the court had divided over whether the justices’ new rules could — or should — ever be enforced.
Justice Gorsuch was especially vocal in opposing any enforcement mechanism beyond voluntary compliance, arguing that additional measures could undermine the court. The justices’ strength was their independence, he said, and he vowed to have no part in diminishing it.
In the private exchanges, Justice Clarence Thomas, whose decision not to disclose decades of gifts and luxury vacations from wealthy benefactors had sparked the ethics controversy, and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote off the court’s critics as politically motivated and unappeasable.
The three liberal justices insisted that the rules needed to be more than lofty promises. But their argument never had a chance.
To piece together the previously undisclosed debate, The Times interviewed people from inside and outside the court, including liberals and conservatives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the proceedings and the justices’ thinking. This article also draws upon public statements by the justices, who declined to comment.
While the court was praised for setting ethics rules, the lack of an enforcement provision has been criticized by ethics experts and figures on the left. One year later, the justices’ internal debate has spilled into a wider, more fractious one.
President Biden and Democratic lawmakers have called for a code with teeth. Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson have publicly pledged support for an enforcement mechanism. Outside legal experts have circulated proposals that would enlist the guidance of other federal judges. The conservative pushback has been strong and sometimes furious.
Now the election of former President Donald J. Trump, and a new era of unified Republican government, are raising the stakes for a branch supposed to serve as an independent guardrail. The court, which has a conservative supermajority, is already perceived as partisan by many Americans. And the justices largely appear to be split along the same lines on how far to go to ensure that its rules are followed.
New York Times, Nadler to Relinquish Top Judiciary Post, Bowing to Calls for Change, Nicholas Fandos, Dec. 4, 2024. Representative Jerrold Nadler faced a challenge from Representative Jamie Raskin, and pressure from colleagues who wanted a younger figure at the helm.
Representative Jerrold Nadler plans to step down as the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee next term, succumbing to calls for generational change as his party prepares to confront a second Trump administration.
Mr. Nadler, the 77-year-old dean of New York’s congressional delegation, had been facing a direct challenge from a close ally, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland. Mr. Raskin, 61, was said to have secured the votes necessary to defeat him.
The transition would represent a significant departure for House Democrats, who have traditionally awarded coveted committee leadership jobs based primarily on seniority. After November’s losses, though, many in the party have argued that President-elect Donald J. Trump’s return to power would require a younger, more dynamic crop of leaders.
Furious over being challenged, Mr. Nadler had initially fought to hold the position he has held since 2017. But on Wednesday, he conceded that he did not have a path to victory and endorsed Mr. Raskin to replace him in a letter to colleagues.
“As our country faces the return of Donald Trump, and the renewed threats to our democracy and our way of life that he represents, I am very confident that Jamie would ably lead the Judiciary Committee as we confront this growing danger,” Mr. Nadler wrote.
New York Times, Supreme Court Returns to a Culture War Battleground: Transgender Rights, Adam Liptak, Dec. 3, 2024. On Wednesday, the justices will hear the marquee case of the term, a challenge to a Tennessee law banning several forms of medical care for transgender youths.
A little more than four years ago, the Supreme Court delivered a surprise victory to L.G.B.T.Q. communities. Rejecting the position of the Trump administration, the court ruled by a lopsided margin that a federal civil rights law protected transgender people from workplace discrimination.
In the intervening years, transgender rights have become a ferocious battleground in the culture wars, and controversies over health care, bathrooms, sports and pronouns played a prominent role in the presidential campaign. But the Supreme Court has had only glancing encounters with such issues since the employment discrimination case in 2020, which featured a majority opinion from Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, Mr. Trump’s first appointee to the court.
That will change on Wednesday, when the court hears its second major case on transgender rights, a challenge to a Tennessee law that prohibits some medical treatments for transgender youths.
It is the marquee case of the term. The court’s decision, expected by June, may determine not only the fate of the law and similar ones in more than 20 other states but also what role the Constitution’s equal protection clause has to play in cases claiming discrimination against transgender individuals.
The Tennessee law prohibits medical providers from prescribing puberty-delaying medication, offering hormone therapy or performing surgery to treat the psychological distress caused by incongruence between experienced gender and that assigned at birth. But the law allows those same treatments for other purposes.
The primary question for the justices is not whether Tennessee’s ban is wise or consistent with the views of medical experts. It is, instead, whether the law makes distinctions based on sex. If it does, a demanding form of judicial review — “heightened scrutiny” — kicks in. If it does not, the Tennessee law will almost certainly survive. The case has some curious features.
Washington Post, Editorial, How L.A.’s ‘godfather’ of progressive prosecution failed, Editorial Board, Dec. 1, 2024. District Attorney George Gascón, below right, will leave office on Monday after being defeated by 20 points.
He is one of several progressive prosecutors to lose their jobs on the West Coast over the past two years, from San Francisco and Oakland’s Alameda County to Portland and Seattle. But this is the biggest blow yet to their movement: Not only has Mr. Gascón long been considered “the godfather” of progressive prosecution, Los Angeles County — with nearly 10 million residents — is by itself more populous than all but 10 states.
What happened is instructive as reformers regroup. Based on our extensive interviews and on-the-ground reporting, Angelenos repudiated Mr. Gascón and his approach to criminal justice for five reasons:
1. He failed to secure buy-in from career prosecutors. Mr. Gascón never recovered after getting off on the wrong foot with the nearly 1,000 deputy district attorneys who worked for him. Minutes after taking office in December 2020, he issued far-reaching and sometimes unrealistic edicts formulated with academics during the transition. Mr. Gascón blames civil-service protections for stymieing his efforts to uproot a culture resistant to change. But he aggravated tensions by hiring a chief of staff who had called police “barbarians,” promoted the “defund the police” movement and posted pictures of herself on social media wearing a T-shirt that said: “The police are trained to kill us.” The upshot was that his own career prosecutors became his fiercest critics. About two dozen deputy district attorneys eventually filed civil suits alleging retaliation. One prompted a jury to award $1.5 million. Another settled for $800,000. Antagonism led to attrition, which worsened a backlog of open cases.
2. Restricting sentencing enhancements made it harder to keep the worst offenders off the streets. Mr. Gascón believes that adding extra time to someone’s sentence if they committed a crime with a gun or as a gang member is “the biggest driver of mass incarceration.” He forbade prosecutors from asking for longer sentences for known gang members, arguing that people had been added to the gang database without due process. Fine. But that shouldn’t preclude prosecutors from adding enhancements when they are clearly warranted.
3. Mr. Gascón directed that juveniles could not be charged as adults, no matter how egregious their crimes. In one of several such cases, his office tried a 17-year-old member of the Crips street gang as a juvenile for brutally murdering two men. Just six months after her release, police arrested her again in connection with another homicide.
4. Nonviolent “quality of life” crimes must be taken seriously. Under Mr. Gascón, the district attorney’s office filed misdemeanor cases about half as often as under his predecessor. He discouraged prosecution of lower-level crimes such as trespassing, public intoxication and drug possession, which created a sense of disorder on the streets while removing an incentive for people with mental health issues and addiction to seek needed help.
5. Mr. Gascón overread his mandate.
Egberto Off The Record, Opinion: Mass deportation is just another Trump con to line the pockets of his friends and himself, Egberto Willies, below right, Nov. 30, 2024. He may use it to line his pockets and those of his friends with private detention camps and extortion to farmers.
The video highlights the economic and moral ramifications of Donald Trump’s proposed mass deportation policies. It argues that these measures would devastate industries like agriculture, which heavily rely on immigrant labor, leading to economic disruptions and inflated prices. The speaker speculates that Trump might use deportations as a public show while secretly taking bribes to shield industries from labor shortages. They criticize the private detention center industry for exploiting immigrants for profit and highlight the hypocrisy of evangelical Christians supporting anti-immigrant policies contrary to biblical teachings. Ultimately, the speaker calls for awareness of these manipulative tactics and stresses the need for progressive solutions prioritizing justice and fairness.
Donald Trump’s deportation agenda serves as a smokescreen for policies designed to exploit immigrants and enrich the powerful. By destabilizing industries, enriching private detention centers, and perpetuating systemic inequality, this plan reflects the worst of crony capitalism. A progressive approach is essential, focusing on compassion, economic equity, and recognizing the invaluable contributions of immigrant communities to the nation.Please subscribe for the much more in-depth article.
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Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric on mass deportation is designed to stoke fears, reinforce division, and distract from the economic realities that his policies are likely to exacerbate. The former president’s proposed deportation initiatives present themselves as a way to restore “law and order,” but a closer examination reveals the profit-driven motives that underpin them. Far from solving economic or immigration challenges, these policies aim to enrich private sector cronies while leaving American workers and immigrants alike in precarious positions.The Economic and Agricultural Fallout
As one of the nation’s most significant agricultural powerhouses, California is a prime example of how mass deportations could wreak havoc on essential industries. The state’s agricultural sector contributes about a quarter of the nation’s food supply, much of which depends on the labor of undocumented immigrants. Many Americans are unwilling to take on the grueling, low-paying jobs that characterize this sector, even when wages are increased. This was evidenced in states like Georgia and Florida, where anti-immigrant policies led to unharvested crops and paralyzed construction industries.
Trump’s mass deportation rhetoric ignores this reality, instead painting undocumented immigrants as threats rather than contributors. The potential removal of these workers would devastate industries reliant on their labor, leading to higher food prices, supply chain disruptions, and economic instability. In practice, this creates a twofold crisis: economic harm to consumers and industries and increased hardship for immigrant communities.Detention Centers: A Profit Machine for the Privileged
One of the most alarming aspects of Trump’s deportation plans is the role of private detention centers. The United States already has a shameful history of using private prisons to detain immigrants, turning human suffering into profit. Trump’s policies, if implemented, would likely expand this system, funneling taxpayer dollars into the hands of private contractors who run these facilities.
Private detention centers are notorious for cutting costs at the expense of detainees’ well-being, providing substandard healthcare, overcrowded conditions, and inadequate oversight. These facilities generate immense profits for their operators while exacerbating the suffering of vulnerable populations. By prioritizing profit over human dignity, these detention centers exemplify the moral bankruptcy of Trump’s deportation agenda.Bribes and Backroom Deals
The possibility that deportation policies serve as a mechanism for corruption cannot be dismissed. As suggested in the video, Trump and his administration could very well use mass deportations as a public spectacle while quietly accepting bribes from agricultural and industrial leaders to allow undocumented workers to remain in certain sectors. This would not only undermine the stated goals of the policies but also reveal their true purpose: enriching the powerful at the expense of the marginalized.
This pattern aligns with Trump’s broader approach to governance, characterized by self-enrichment and crony capitalism. From tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy to using public office to promote his private businesses, Trump has consistently prioritized his and his allies’ interests over the public good.The Human and Moral Cost
The human cost of mass deportation is incalculable. Families are torn apart, communities are destabilized, and children are left without parents. Beyond the immediate harm to immigrants, these policies deepen societal divisions and normalize dehumanization. This runs counter to the values that many Americans, including Christians who form a key part of Trump’s base, claim to hold dear.
The Bible teaches compassion and care for strangers, yet Trump’s deportation agenda weaponizes fear and xenophobia. The disconnect between these teachings and the actions of Trump’s evangelical supporters underscores the moral hypocrisy that permeates his policies.A Call for Progressive Solutions
Rather than pursuing punitive measures that harm immigrants and Americans alike, a progressive approach to immigration reform would prioritize human rights, economic stability, and social cohesion. This includes creating pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, protecting labor rights, and investing in industries that rely on immigrant workers. By recognizing immigrants as integral to the nation’s fabric, such policies would strengthen communities and promote shared prosperity.Conclusion
Donald Trump’s deportation rhetoric is not about solving real problems; it is a con designed to enrich his cronies while distracting from the harm his policies inflict on ordinary Americans. From exploiting private detention centers to undermining critical industries, Trump’s agenda reflects a cynical prioritization of profit over people. As long as such policies persist, the American public will bear the economic and moral costs of a system designed to divide and exploit rather than unite and uplift. The fight for progressive immigration reform is not just about policy—it is about reclaiming the values of fairness, compassion, and justice that should define America.
New York Times, Tax Preparers Charged in Scheme to Defraud Covid Relief of $65 Million, Adeel Hassan, Nov. 30, 2024. The preparers filed for pandemic-related tax credits on behalf of ineligible clients and then netted hefty filing fees, officials said.
Two Mississippi tax preparers used multiple schemes to defraud $65 million from programs that had been designed to help businesses stay afloat during the coronavirus pandemic, federal prosecutors said this week.
The preparers, Renata Walton, 44, and Nicole Jones, 36, both of Olive Branch, Miss., were indicted on more than 50 counts of wire fraud, money laundering, preparing false tax returns and obstruction of justice, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Tennessee said on Wednesday.
They both pleaded not guilty and were each released on $100,000 bond, court documents show.
Ms. Walton owned R&B Tax Express in Moscow, Tenn., where she and Ms. Jones prepared tax returns.
Federal prosecutors said that the two women contacted small-business clients and asked if they were interested in pandemic-related grant money, according to court records. The women would then file for pandemic-related tax credits on behalf of the clients even though they were ineligible for those funds, officials said.
New York Times, F.T.C. Launches an Antitrust Investigation Into Microsoft, David McCabe, Nov. 27, 2024. U.S. regulators are demanding information from the company on its cloud computing, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity products.
The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into whether Microsoft has violated antitrust law in multiple segments of its wide-ranging business, according to two people familiar with the inquiry, the latest salvo in a battle by the government to rein in the most powerful tech companies.
The agency recently sent a long and detailed formal request for information to the company asking about its cloud computing, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity products, the people said. Of particular interest to the F.T.C. is the way that Microsoft bundles its cloud computing offerings with office and security products, they added, alongside the company’s growing power in the artificial intelligence space.
The aggressive move by the F.T.C. comes as its chair, Lina Khan, is probably heading out the door with less than two months left in the Biden administration. Ms. Khan, 35, has pushed the agency to police big companies and has tried to get ahead of fast-moving changes in the technology industry.
Ms. Khan is expected to leave her post as part of the transition to the administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump, after which the focus of tech regulation could change.
The inquiry into Microsoft continues the Biden administration’s scrutiny of the biggest tech companies over the way people consume information, communicate and shop online. Already, the F.T.C. has sued Amazon and Meta, accusing them of anticompetitive behavior and stifling rivals. The Justice Department has also sued Google over its dominance in advertising technology, and Apple for making it difficult for consumers to leave its tightly knit universe of devices and software.
Microsoft, one of the most valuable companies in the world, with a disparate business that includes its Windows operating software, social media platform LinkedIn and video game platform Xbox, had largely escaped the recent ramp-up in antitrust scrutiny.
But in the late 1990s, the government attempted to break up the company over the dominance of its operating system and its efforts to stymie rivals to its own web browser. A judge ordered the breakup of the company, but an appeals court overturned his decision.
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.
Susan Lorincz spoke about a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder linked to childhood sex abuse (Pool photo by Doug Engle).
New York Times, Florida Woman Who Fatally Shot Black Neighbor Gets 25 Years in Prison, Annie Correal, Nov. 26, 2024 (print ed.). Susan Lorincz, who shot Ajike Owens, was convicted of manslaughter. The case prompted national outrage.
A white woman in Florida who fatally shot a Black neighbor who confronted her amid a longstanding dispute over the neighbor’s children was sentenced on Monday to 25 years in prison.
In a case that prompted national outrage and reignited debate around “stand your ground” laws, Susan Lorincz, 60, shot Ajike (A.J.) Owens as Ms. Owens, 35, stood outside the door of Ms. Lorincz’s home in Ocala, a city about 80 miles northwest of Orlando, last June.
Ms. Lorincz, who was convicted of manslaughter by an all-white jury in August, had faced a maximum sentence of 30 years.
New York Times, Rudy Giuliani Loses His Lawyers, and His Cool, in Court, Stefanos Chen and Olivia Bensimon, Nov. 26, 2024. The subject of several cases, the former New York City mayor lashed out at a judge questioning why he had not forfeited personal assets as required.
Rudolph W. Giuliani was not having a good day, and it showed.
The former New York City mayor was in federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday to discuss his continuing failure to give up nearly $11 million worth of personal assets. The forfeiture was meant as a down payment on the $148 million Mr. Giuliani owes to two Georgia election workers for defaming them by claiming, without evidence, that they had helped to steal the 2020 presidential election.
But first, Judge Lewis Liman allowed Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers to withdraw from the case. They had requested to be removed two weeks ago, citing an unspecified “professional ethics” concern.
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).
Associated Press via Politico, Man convicted of killing Laken Riley sentenced to life in prison without parole, Staff report, Nov. 21, 2024 (print ed.). Riley’s killing added fuel to the national debate over immigration when federal authorities said Ibarra illegally entered the U.S. in 2022 and was allowed to stay in the country while he pursued his immigration case.
The Venezuelan man convicted in the killing of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Jose Ibarra was charged with murder and other crimes in Riley’s February death, and the guilty verdict was reached on Wednesday by Athens-Clarke County Superior Court Judge H. Patrick Haggard. Ibarra, 26, had waived his right to a jury trial, meaning Haggard alone heard and decided the case.
New York Times, Venezuelan Migrant Is Found Guilty of Killing Laken Riley in Georgia, Rick Rojas, Nov. 21, 2024 (print ed.). The verdict followed a trial in which prosecutors detailed a violent attack that became a flashpoint in the bitter national debate over immigration policy. A 26-year-old migrant from Venezuela was convicted on Wednesday of murdering Laken Riley, a Georgia nursing student whose killing has been repeatedly cited by President-elect Donald J. Trump in his push for the mass deportation of millions of undocumented people.
Recent Relevant Headlines
Egberto Off The Record, Opinion: Mass deportation is just another Trump con to line the pockets of his friends and himself, Egberto WilliesNew York Times, Florida Woman Who Fatally Shot Black Neighbor Gets 25 Years in Prison
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.
“The U.S. federal budget is on an unsustainable path. The debt is not at an unsustainable level, but the path is unsustainable, and we know that we have to change that,” Powell said during an interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit.
Powell, a lifelong Republican first appointed lead the central bank by President-elect Trump and reappointed by President Biden, has repeatedly warned the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal path.
His latest comments come as Republicans ready for an intraparty battle over the potential fiscal impact of massive tax cuts in Congress, which is responsible for setting fiscal policy.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and GOP leadership want to move quickly to craft a follow-up to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) once Trump takes office and the GOP consolidates control in Washington.
Many provisions in Trump’s signature tax bill are set to expire in 2026, including individual tax rate cuts, a state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap and business tax breaks.
But a small coalition of budget hawks, which last year ousted former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) over federal spending, will wield enormous power given a slim majority in the House.
Their influence could derail plans to use budget reconciliation to fast-track a tax reform bill as Republicans grapple with how to deliver Trump’s tax cuts without further accelerating the national debt, which has alarmed lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
“We don’t need to pay the debt down. We don’t need to balance the budget. We just need the economy to grow faster than the debt. And that’s not happening,” Powell said.
“We’re running very large budget deficits at a time of full employment and strong growth, so we need to address that, and we’ve got to do it sooner or later — and sooner is better than later,” he added.
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.
Ending the individual tax cuts President Donald J. Trump signed into law in 2017 would have a negligible effect on the American economy over the next decade, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found Wednesday in a projection that could deflate Republican promises to supercharge the economy with tax cuts next year.
The budget office’s analysis comes as Republicans, who will take control of Washington in January, are weighing the fate of the broad tax cut they passed in 2017. That law slashed marginal tax rates across income groups, expanded the standard deduction and made the child tax credit more generous. But many of the cuts expire at the end of next year, and lawmakers are now figuring out how to extend them.
Allowing the tax cuts to end as currently scheduled would essentially raise taxes on many Americans, with conflicting economic consequences. The budget office said higher taxes would prompt Americans to work less, slowing economic growth.
But higher taxes also generate more revenue for the government, which would allow the United States to rely less on borrowed money. Reduced government borrowing would over time support economic growth, the budget office said, by keeping interest rates lower and freeing up investors to direct more of their money into business ventures rather than government bonds.
Overall, the two effects from ending the tax cuts — lower growth because people work less and more economic activity because of a smaller debt load — would basically cancel each other out over a decade. The American economy, as measured by gross domestic product, would actually be slightly larger in 2034 if the tax cuts ended, the budget office said.
Letters From An American, Commentary: November 25, 2024 [America's Economy Now and Future], Heather Cox Richardson, right, historian and author, Nov. 26, 2024. Today, President Joe Biden laid out very clearly the argument behind the economic policies his administration has put into place.
“When I took office, the pandemic was raging and the economy was reeling,” he wrote. “From Day One, I was determined to not only deliver economic relief, but to invest in America and grow the economy from the middle out and bottom up, not the top down.”
“Over the last four years, that’s exactly what we’ve done,” he wrote. “We passed legislation to rebuild our infrastructure, build a clean energy economy, and bring manufacturing back to the United States after decades of offshoring.” Investing in America included the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that is rebuilding our roads, bridges, water systems, ports, and airports, as well as making high-speed broadband available in underserved areas; the CHIPS and Science Act that invested in bringing the manufacture of silicon chips back to the U.S. and promoting research; and the Inflation Reduction Act, which invested in technologies to combat climate change.
Today the White House announced that this federal investment has attracted more than $1 trillion in private-sector investments. “These investments in industries of the future,” Biden wrote, “are ensuring the future is made in America, by American workers.”
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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New York Times, A Potential Fight Over the Fed’s Future Ramps UpThe Hartmann Report, The Great Dismantling: Trump’s Coming Attack on America’s Economic Backbone, Thom HartmannPolitico, DNC chair hits back at Sanders over party criticism: 'Straight up BS'
Energy, Transportation, Climate Change, Environment, Space
New York Times, Elon Musk’s $50 Billion Tesla Pay Can’t Be Reinstated, Delaware Judge Rules, Peter Eavis and Jack Ewing, Dec. 3, 2024 (print ed.). The judge said she would not reverse her decision to strike down the enormous compensation package, which helped make Mr. Musk the richest person on the world.
A Delaware judge on Monday affirmed an earlier ruling that rescinded a giant pay package that Tesla had awarded its chief executive, Elon Musk.
The pay, in the form of stock options, was worth more than $50 billion and helped make Mr. Musk the richest person in the world. The package is now worth $100 billion after Tesla’s share price jumped sharply in recent weeks.
The judge, Chancellor Kathaleen St. J. McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery, struck down the award in January, ruling that shareholders had not been properly informed of its details and that members of Tesla’s board were not sufficiently independent.
But lawyers for Tesla and Mr. Musk argued that a second shareholder vote in June in favor of the package cleared the way for effectively reinstating it.
The pay comes from a 2018 award that said Mr. Musk would get all the options only if Tesla’s stock price soared and its sales and earnings grew strongly. Few expected Mr. Musk to achieve all of those targets because Tesla was still struggling to sell enough electric cars to become profitable. But Tesla’s business took off and its stock rocketed higher, allowing Mr. Musk to earn all the options. He has to hold them for five years.
The shareholder who brought the suit, Richard J. Tornetta, contended that Tesla’s board had not acted independently of Mr. Musk when devising the package and that the company had provided “materially misleading” information to investors. In her January ruling, after a trial in 2022, Chancellor McCormick said, “The process leading to the approval of Musk’s compensation plan was deeply flawed.”
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Media, High Tech, Culture, Education
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, Guest Essay: Bluesky Is Different From X. For Now, Clay Shirky (an associate professor of journalism at New York University and the author of “Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers Into Collaborators”). Dec. 7, 2024. Liberals moving away from X are giving up on the 20th-century ideal of a public sphere, best described by Hannah Arendt as a place that “gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other.”
Bluesky, the destination of the moment, is experiencing a post-election surge of new users as millions of mostly liberal users of X (nee Twitter) have moved over to the Twitter-like platform, which opened to the public last year. The platform had 13 million users by early November; 10 million more joined over the next month.
Now that social media is ubiquitous, growth in one platform often means lost users for another. The Bluesky migration suggests that the broader the “us” gathered together, the harder it is to prevent our falling on another. (Owners of giant social media platforms often imagine they can get good moderation for many users with little effort, when that is a distinctly “pick two” choice.)
On social media, the political is personal; migrating Bluesky users are signaling political separation from an increasingly conservative X and giving up on the idea of a town square that holds all voices simultaneously.
It’s obvious why liberal users might want to leave X. Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 (and renamed it in 2023), he has reshaped the platform to be more welcoming to racism, misogyny and anti-immigrant and antitrans sentiment than even the old freewheeling Twitter. Abandoning early promises to not reinstate barred users without the judgment of a review board, Mr. Musk reversed previous suspensions and bans for Nick Fuentes, an admirer of Hitler; James Lindsay, an anti-L.G.B.T.Q. activist; and, of course, Donald Trump, who was barred after the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Mr. Musk hasn’t just made X more conservative; he has also made it harder for users to ignore far-right and MAGA content, dismantling tools they had relied on to filter out those voices. X was originally a rebranding of Twitter, but over time, the service has become, in internet parlance, a Nazi bar.
Before last month’s election, though, that political transformation was not enough to cause massive defections (though several million users did abandon the platform). When Mr. Musk bought Twitter, he seems to have guessed, mostly correctly, that even users who disliked reactionary politics would not leave. Social media’s proposition is access to other people; for any individual user, moving to a new platform means abandoning friends and followers, the source of social media’s so-called stickiness. Mere personal dissatisfaction was not enough to persuade people to move; some synchronizing event was required.
Mr. Trump’s election was that event. Staying on X suddenly seemed intolerable to many, but they still needed a place to go. Before the election, it was not obvious that Bluesky was the best destination. Threads, which is owned by Meta (alongside Facebook and Instagram), had many times the number of users. If liberals on X were just looking for a populous new home, Threads would have been the logical choice. But Threads reportedly has plans to accept ads, and like most ad-supported services, it will have an incentive to fill users’ feeds with content they have not sought out, one of the issues with X as well.
The shift to Bluesky could falter. Bluesky could fail to find a workable business model. Conservatives joining Bluesky, the better to own the libs, could swamp the conversation. But movement toward a more communal platform has already been swift and vast. Demand for social spaces that are organized around user preferences instead of advertiser preferences or owners’ whims may serve as a model for better spaces for political speech and a move away from “scale at all costs” business models.
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.
New York Times, The Guardian Sells U.K.’s Oldest Sunday Paper to a Media Start-Up, Eshe Nelson, Dec. 6, 2024. The Guardian Media Group said it had struck a deal to sell The Observer to Tortoise Media, shortly after a 48-hour strike by journalists had ended.
The Observer, a British Sunday newspaper that has been running for more than two centuries, will be sold to the digital media start-up Tortoise Media, the publication’s owner, the Guardian Media Group, said Friday, despite staff protests.
The boards of the Guardian Media Group, which also publishes The Guardian, and the Scott Trust, the owner of the Guardian Media Group, have agreed “in principle” to the deal, which is expected to be signed in the next few days. The announcement came shortly after journalists at the two news outlets waged a 48-hour strike, calling the deal “rushed” and a risk to the journalism of both newspapers.
The Guardian’s parent company, which bought The Observer in 1993, did not disclose the sale price. But it said the Scott Trust, a 1.3 billion-pound ($1.7 billion) fund, would invest in Tortoise Media and become one of its largest shareholders. The trust will also have representatives on the company and editorial boards of Tortoise Media, which said it had raised £25 million to invest in The Observer.
“We knew we needed the right combination of resources and commitment to build a new platform for The Observer,” Ole Jacob Sunde, the chair of the Scott Trust, said in a statement. “It required an ally to be sufficiently funded, long-term in nature, and respect editorial independence and liberal values. I believe we have found this in Tortoise Media.”
When the proposed sale came to light in September, it was a surprise to the papers’ journalists, who raised concerns about the ability of Tortoise Media, a six-year-old company that has not recorded a profit, to preserve the future of The Observer.
Amid pressure from the staff to reconsider the deal, the Scott Trust pushed to have some say in the editorial direction of The Observer after the sale. Journalists at both newspapers walked off the job on Wednesday and Thursday, hoping to delay the deal. It was the first strike in the newsroom in more than 50 years.
New York Times, Her Wrestling Empire Was Said to Harm Children. Trump Chose Her for Education, Stephanie Saul, Zach Montague and Sharon Otterman, Updated Dec. 2, 2024. Linda McMahon, whose résumé mainly rests on running World Wrestling Entertainment, has faced questions for years over whether she is suitable for important education posts.
Appointees to the State Board of Education usually sail through the confirmation process in Connecticut’s House of Representatives, but a 2009 choice, Linda E. McMahon, drew intense pushback.
Andrew Fleischmann, who then chaired the House Education Committee, remembers being offended by her selection and leading the opposition.
“She had no involvement whatsoever in education,” Mr. Fleischmann, a Democrat, said in a recent interview. “She’s made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars pushing violence and sexualization of young women. She was a real force for doing ill to kids in our country.”
Ms. McMahon’s company, World Wrestling Entertainment, was criticized for promoting violence, steroid use and sexualized content. In the early 2000s, Ms. McMahon would go so far as to engage in the W.W.E.’s theatrics herself. She kicked her husband, Vince McMahon, the company’s co-founder, in the groin in one routine. In another, she appeared to slap her daughter, Stephanie, and knock her to the floor.
After a contentious floor debate, the House voted to approve Ms. McMahon by a vote of 96-45, an unusual split for a minor appointment in Connecticut.
Ms. McMahon may soon face another confirmation, this time as President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education.
Dr. Patrick Soon Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times, with his daughter Andrea Chang shown in a 2018 Los Angeles Times photo via the Associated Press).
Talking Feds Substack, Opinion: Why I Just Resigned From The Los Angeles Times, Harry Litman, right, Dec. 5, 2024. I have been a contributor to the Los Angeles Times op-ed page in some fashion for more than 15 years. For the last three years, I have been the Senior Legal Columnist, writing regular weekly columns about Trump’s legal troubles, the Supreme Court, and a wide range of other topics. The Times also permitted me to cover Trump’s trial in New York and the 2024 Democratic convention.
My editors have been skilled, quick, and fair. I have been able to write whatever I like, including blistering criticism of Donald Trump.
I’ve been proud of my work and proud to be part of the Times, the most prominent and storied newspaper west of the Mississippi. It’s got gravitas—and 45 Pulitzers to show for it—combined with a California flair that complements the constant variety and zaniness of my adopted state.
But I have written my last op-ed for the Times. Yesterday, I resigned my position. I don’t want to continue to work for a paper that is appeasing Trump and facilitating his assault on democratic rule for craven reasons.
Talking Feds Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
My resignation is a protest and visceral reaction against the conduct of the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. Soon-Shiong has made severalmoves to force the paper, over the forceful objections of his staff, into a posture more sympathetic to Donald Trump. Those moves can’t be defended as the sort of policy adjustment papers undergo from time to time, and that an owner, within limits, is entitled to influence. Given the existential stakes for our democracy that I believe Trump’s second term poses, and the evidence that Soon-Shiong is currying favor with the President-elect, they are repugnant and dangerous.
Soon-Shiong’s most notorious action received national attention. The paper’s editorial department had drafted an endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Soon-Shiong ordered them to spike it and make no endorsement in the election. (Soon-Shiong later implied he had just ordered up a factual analysis of both candidates’ policies, but that’s at best a distortion: he plainly blocked an already drafted Harris endorsement.) It is hard to imagine a more brutal, humiliating, and unprofessional treatment of a paper’s professional staff. Three members of the editorial page resigned in protest and 2,000 readers canceled their subscriptions.
Owners participate in setting overall editorial direction. But it’s a grave insult to the independence and integrity of an editorial department for an owner to force it to withdraw a considered and drafted opinion. And of course, this was no ordinary opinion. The endorsement of a presidential candidate is an editorial department’s most important decision, so the slight was deep.
It was also a deep insult to the paper’s readership. Like any major paper, the Times has a coherent and consistent line of reasoning to its editorial decisions. That can include idiosyncratic departures on particular issues. Where Trump was concerned, the paper had presented to its readers a long series of opinions that set out, with force and nuance, the great dangers of his return to office. That line of analysis culminated logically in the endorsement of Harris. For the Times to lead its readers to the finish line only to step off the track was bizarre and disrespectful.
By far the most important problem with Soon-Shiong’s scrapping of the editorial was the apparent motivation. It is untenable to suggest that Soon-Shiong woke up with sudden misgivings over Harris’s criminal justice record or with newfound affection for Trump’s immigration proposals. The plain inference, and the one that readers and national observers have adopted, is that he wanted to hedge his bets in case Trump won—not even to protect the paper’s fortunes but rather his multi-billion-dollar holdings in other fields. It seems evident that he was currying favor with Trump and capitulating to the President-elect’s well-known pettiness and vengefulness.
Trump has made it clear that he will make trouble for media outlets that cross him. Rather than reacting with indignation at this challenge to his paper’s critical function in a democracy, Soon-Shiong threw the paper to the wolves. That was cowardly.
And his decision had a sort of force multiplier effect with the similar conduct by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, who rammed a similar non-endorsement decision down the throat of his editorial staff. There as well, there was no argument that the intervention was based on sensible policy contrast between Trump and Harris. History will record it as a self-serving protection of other holdings, which, as in the case of Soon-Shiong’s, dwarf the newspaper itself.
Before joining the Times, I was a contributing commentator for the Post. We used to say there, tongue-in-cheek, that our billionaire was better than their billionaire, meaning Bezos was more aware of his public responsibility and more hands-off in his oversight. As it turns out, both billionaires flinched when the chips were down, choosing to appease, not oppose, a criminal President with patent authoritarian ambitions.
Before he has even taken office, Trump has faced down two of the country’s most prominent newspapers, inducing them to back off longstanding, well-reasoned editorial opposition. That is terrifying.
As a commentator, especially one dedicated to constitutional norms and the rule of law, I have spent much of the last couple of years arguing that Trump is a genuine menace to our constitutional system. November 5 showed that a narrow majority of Americans who voted disagree or don’t care.
Yet here in Southern California and in Washington, D.C., we have evidence of tangible erosion of social guardrails in real time. Trump is in the process of commandeering and corrupting institutions of government and civil society that we have always counted on to nurture our democracy.
Look closely at this already deeply eroded landscape: all the electoral branches are not only Republican but firmly within Trump’s fist and dedicated to loyalty to him over any principle of governance. The Supreme Court has assisted his authoritarian initiatives in ways that the legal profession and society as a whole have condemned. His current nomination process is seeking openly to cut the Senate, even its Republican members, out of their constitutional advice-and-consent role.
For the moment, the best hopes for desperately needed pushback lie with federal law enforcement, the lower federal courts, the military, and (an economically weakened) mainstream media. All this is material for another Substack, but Trump has taken dead aim at imposing loyalty to him as the defining feature of the first three, including a proposal to permit him to discharge generals who are not, as he put it, sufficiently like “Hitler’s generals.”
So the role and responsibility of the media have never been greater. And if major outlets can be bought off and made to cower, the impact on our liberty—and freedom of thought—is in grave jeopardy.
Thus far, I have analyzed only Soon-Shiong’s most notorious and visible action of scuttling the endorsement. That put him in lock step with Bezos. But he has combined it with a general program of cozying up to Trump, especially since the election. Soon-Shiong ordered the shelving of a multi-part series, intended to run with the endorsement but broader and of a piece with the editorial page’s opinion over the last several years, which had been entitled, “The Case Against Trump.” His spiking of the series was part of the explanation given by the editorial board members who resigned.
There is more: Soon-Shiong went on Fox News after the election to talk about the paper’s editorial direction. He advocated “diverse perspectives” in the editorial pages and voices from across the political spectrum to avoid creating an "echo chamber." Most alarmingly, and escaping the notice of no one, he pandered to Fox and Trump by saying he wanted to make the Times more “fair and balanced.”
Soon-Shiong followed up by hiring a noted pro-Trump commentator, Scott Jennings, for some as yet ill-defined role of “balancing out” the views on the editorial page. Then most recently, during an interview on CNN in which he was asked about the Jennings hire, the normally mild-mannered Soon-Shiong went full Trump, labeling the CNN correspondent a "so-called reporter" before abruptly ending the interview.
Soon-Shiong’s argument for all these moves is to create “balance” on the editorial page, which still remains unstaffed and in chaos, and a neutral, “just the facts” approach to news. It sounds banal, but in fact, it is pernicious; and it goes to the heart of my reasons for leaving.
First, the idea of balance is fundamentally misplaced when on one side of the balance is a sociopathic liar like Donald Trump. The media has struggled for years to figure out how to call out Trump’s incessant lies while still covering the contentious issues of the day. There’s good reason to think that the propagation of those lies, some of which Trump simply picks up from fringe social media sites and Fox News, influenced the results of the election. The people who voted for Trump were fed a relentless false account of issue after issue, including Trump’s signature distortions about immigrants (eating pets, committing a disproportionate number of violent crimes), which Fox News and right-wing social media parroted relentlessly.
In that context, the bromide of just being balanced is a terrible dereliction of journalists’ first defining responsibility of reporting the truth. Soon-Shiong apparently would have the Times deliver an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand presentation to readers. But there is no “other hand.” Trump is an inveterate liar, and journalists have a defining responsibility to call that out.
I don’t pretend that my resignation is any kind of serious counter-blow to the damage of Soon-Shiong’s cozying up to Trump. And I see, and I thought about, the argument that my most constructive role would be to stay on and continue to use my one voice as forcefully as I could to explain to Times readers the grave dangers on the horizon.
But the cost of alliance with an important national institution that has such an important role to play in pushing back against authoritarian rule, but declines to do so for spurious and selfish reasons, feels too great. And Soon-Shiong’s conscious pattern of détente with Trump has in fact recast the paper’s core identity to one of appeasement with an authoritarian madman. I am loath to affiliate with that identity in any way.
Recent Relevant Headlines
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Dec. 7
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Politico, Transition of Power: Pam Bondi will face an ethics quagmire as attorney general, Hailey Fuchs, Dec. 7, 2024. 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.
The Hartmann Report, Commentary: The Best of the Rest of the News, Thom Hartmann, right,
A large handful of billionaires spent several billion dollars to get Trump elected, and now he’s repaying — big time — the class into which he was born.
Just the billionaires Trump has so far appointed to his cabinet boast a combined wealth, at $340 billion so far, that is greater than the entire GDP of New Zealand. And at the top of their collective agenda will be kneecapping the IRS’s tax fraud division while adding another $7 trillion to the national debt by shifting their taxes onto our children and grandchildren.
It’ll be a government bought by billionaires and soon to be run by and for the exclusive benefit of billionaires. David L. Smith in his Cassandra Chronicles Substack newsletter notes that this is somewhat similar to what Herbert Hoover did in 1928, and likely to produce a similar result: a great financial crash that will throw control of our government to Democrats for a generation. That assumes that Democrats will succeed — as Congressional Progressive Caucus VP Ro Khanna demanded yesterday on my radio/TV program — at jettisoning the billionaires, big corporations, and neoliberalism that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama so fervently embraced (and Joe Biden largely rejected; his entire cabinet is worth a paltry $118 million). The February election of a new DNC head will tell us a lot; two good progressives are in the running (my favorite is Ben Wikler). Trump is teeing-up what may be a great opportunity for Democrats and progressives; let’s hope the DNC doesn’t blow it again like Democrats in the Senate just did.
New York Times, Biden Team Considers Blanket Pardons Before Trump’s Promised ‘Retribution,’ Peter Baker and Erica L. Green, Dec. 6, 2024 (print ed.). White House officials believe President-elect Trump’s choices for top law enforcement jobs indicate that he will pursue revenge against his perceived enemies.
President Biden’s staff is debating whether he should issue blanket pardons for a swath of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s perceived enemies to protect them from the “retribution” he has threatened after he takes office, according to people familiar with the discussion.
The idea would be to pre-emptively extend executive clemency to a list of current and former government officials for any possible crimes over a period of years, effectively short-circuiting the next president’s promised campaign of reprisals.
White House officials do not believe the potential recipients have actually committed crimes, but they have grown increasingly worried that Mr. Trump’s selections for top Justice Department positions indicate that he will follow through on his repeated vows to seek revenge. Even an investigation that results in no charges could drag on for months or years, costing those people hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and crippling their career prospects.
Excerpt continued below.
New York Times, Opinion: Trump’s F.B.I. Pick Has an Enemies List. Biden Should Pardon Everyone on It, Michelle Goldberg, right, Dec. 6, 2024. There are few good things to be said about Donald Trump’s plan to fire the F.B.I. director, Chris Wray, and install in his place Kash Patel, a thuggish lackey who has spent years fantasizing about taking revenge on Trump’s enemies. But there is one: Patel has helpfully provided us with a list of people President Biden should pardon before he leaves office.
Patel’s 2023 book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, purports to show how government employees who defied Trump constitute a shadowy cabal that is “the most dangerous threat to our democracy.” The “deep state,” in Patel’s telling, is “as treacherous and evil as the villains portrayed in books and movies.” Virtually every investigation of Trump and his allies, Patel suggests, is part of a monstrous plot against “the people’s president.” The book strongly implies that Jan. 6, “the insurrection that never was,” was encouraged by “deep state” agitators and then used as a pretext to persecute patriotic Trump supporters. In a blurb on the book jacket, Trump wrote, “We will use this blueprint to help us take back the White House and remove these gangsters from all of government!”
Excerpt continued below.
New York Times, Live Job Updates: U.S. Employers Add 227,000 Jobs, a Big Rebound, Lydia DePillis, Dec. 6, 2024. Job creation bounced back in November after disruptions from storms and a major strike, reinforcing a picture of modest expansion over the past few months.
The labor market added 227,000 jobs, a big rebound from October, when storms in the Southeast and a major strike disrupted work. The unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 4.2 percent.
Job creation bounced back in November after disruptions from storms and a major strike, reinforcing an employment picture of modest expansion over the past few months.
The economy added 227,000 jobs last month, seasonally adjusted, the Labor Department reported on Friday. Revisions to the prior two months added 56,000 jobs.
The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2 percent, from 4.1 percent in October.
Excerpt continued below.
New York Times, Torrent of Anger for Health Insurance Industry Follows C.E.O.’s Killing, Dionne Searcey and Madison Malone Kircher, Dec. 6, 2024 (print ed). The shooting death of a UnitedHealthcare executive in Manhattan has unleashed Americans’ frustrations with an industry that often denies coverage and reimbursement for medical claims.
The fatal shooting on Wednesday of a top UnitedHealthcare executive, Brian Thompson, on a Manhattan sidewalk has unleashed a torrent of morbid glee from patients and others who say they have had negative experiences with health insurance companies at some of the hardest times of their lives.
It is unclear what motivated the incident or whether it was tied to Mr. Thompson’s work in the insurance industry. The police have yet to identify the shooter who is still on the loose.
But that did not stop social media commenters from leaping to conclusions and from showing a blatant lack of sympathy over the death of a man who was a husband and father of two children.
Excerpt continued below.
Syrian's Assad Regime, Russia Alliesf Flee
New York Times, Syria Live Updates: Rebels Enter Damascus, Threatening al-Assad’s Rule, Raja Abdulrahim, Vivian Yee and Aaron Boxerman, Dec. 7, 2024. Syria's military denied the rebels had entered the city, but the surprise rebel offensive has so far swiftly defeated government forces in its path toward the capital.
After just a few days of rapid advances, the rebels now stand on the edge of seizing Syria’s capital. There was no immediate word on President Bashar al-Assad’s location.As the rebels advance, they are taking over many of the notorious prisons where the Assad regime has for decades imprisoned, tortured and executed political prisoners. In addition to capturing the notorious Sednaya prison complex early Sunday, rebels have taken the Adra Prison on the outskirts of Damascus and freed prisoners there, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.The rebels also say they have taken a prison in Aleppo, and their videos show rebel forces prying open cell doors to free prisoners there. Those videos could not be independently verified.
A photo circulating on social media shows a screen at the Damascus International Airport with nine canceled flights. The only flight on the board that took off was to Moscow, the photo shows. The photo could not be independently verified and calls to the airport rang unanswered. The tracking site Flightradar24 does not show any air traffic in the Damascus area.
On social media, Damascus residents are reporting gunfire in the streets, but they say it’s not clear who is firing. The rebel command leading this offensive has ordered rebel fighters not to fire in the air so as not to frighten civilians.
Two Iranian members of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Iranian force that has been central in supporting Syria’s government, confirmed that rebels had entered the capital and that Syrian forces were withdrawing. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military intelligence matters.
New York Times, In the Syrian Regime’s Hour of Need, Its Patron Iran Makes an Exit, Farnaz Fassihi, Dec. 7, 2024. The collapse of a partnership built over four decades would reshape the balance of power in the Middle East.
For decades, Iran has expended much blood and money in support of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, above, helping him survive a civil war that threatened his dynastic rule. Iran operated military bases, weapons warehouses and missile factories in Syria, which it used as a pipeline for arming its militant allies across the region.
Now, just as Mr. al-Assad needs help to repel a rapid advance by rebel forces, Iran is heading for the exits. On Friday, the country started evacuating its military commanders and personnel, as well as some diplomatic staff, according to Iranian and regional officials.
It is a remarkable turnabout: Iran not only appears to be abandoning Mr. al-Assad, its closest Arab ally, but also relinquishing everything it had built and fought to preserve for 40 years in Syria, its main foothold in the Arab world.
With the rebels expected to advance soon on Damascus, Iran is unable to muster a defense of the Assad government after a damaging year of regional wars that began with the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, an Iranian ally.
A collapse of Iran’s partnership with Syria would by all accounts reshape the balance of power in the Middle East. The “axis of resistance” that Iran has formed with its militant allies in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Syria, Iraq and Yemen would be weakened. Israel and its Arab allies would be strengthened.
“For Iran, Syria has been the backbone of our regional presence,” Hassan Shemshadi, an expert on Iran’s proxy militant groups who was for years a documentary filmmaker on the battlefields of Syria, said in an interview from Tehran. “Everything that Iran sent to the region went through Syria. It is now extremely difficult to keep these channels open.”
Rebel fighters breached the strategic Syrian city of Homs on Saturday, according to a war monitoring group and the rebels, whose surprise offensive has swept south toward the capital in a little over a week and threatened to collapse the rule of President Bashar al-Assad.
The antigovernment fighters then declared early Sunday that they had fully captured the city, not long after the Syrian defense ministry denied that rebels had entered Homs. The ministry said in a statement that the situation remained “stable and secure.”
But the rebels’ offensive has so far swiftly defeated pockets of government defenders in its path. Victory in Homs would set the rebel coalition up for a march on the capital, Damascus, about 100 miles south.
The rebels’ quick progress also appeared to reignite antigovernment protests near Damascus. Syrian government forces on Saturday withdrew from suburbs, including Moadamia al-Sham and Daraya, and the nearby Mezzeh military airport, according to war monitoring groups. The Syrian military also denied those assertions.
The rebel advances and protests were reported by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitoring group based in Britain, as well as by the rebels themselves on their Telegram channel.
In the capital, people crowded stores to buy food and cars disappeared from the streets, said a woman there who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern about retribution from the government. She said residents felt a mix of fear, worry and, for those opposed to the government, joy. People are waiting anxiously to learn who will run the country in the days ahead, she said.
Mr. al-Assad’s control in southern and northeastern Syria also appeared to be crumbling, with a different coalition of rebel factions capturing much of Daraa Province in the south, and United States-backed Kurdish-led forces moving into the city of Deir al-Zour in the northeast, according to the Observatory.
Still, Syrian government officials sought to project confidence on Saturday. “There is a very strong military and security cordon on the far outskirts of Damascus and the Damascus countryside,” the interior minister, Mohammad Khaled al-Rahmoun, said in a video posted online. “No one — not them, nor their masters, nor their patrons — can break that defensive line.”
How Syria’s civil war reignited: The new uprisings present the gravest challenge in years to Mr. al-Assad. It is unclear what resources he can marshal to defend the rapidly shrinking territory under his control, especially without the help of one of his staunchest allies, Iran, which began to evacuate its military commanders and personnel from Syria on Friday.
Recent Relevant Headlines
New York Times, Syria Live Updates: Rebels Enter Damascus, Threatening al-Assad’s Rule
WW II Pearl Harbor Day Dec. 7, 1941
Letters from an American, Commentary: December 6, 2024 [Lessons From a World War II on Pearl Harbor day], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Dec. 7, 2024. On the sunny Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Messman Doris Miller had served breakfast aboard the USS West Virginia, shown above, stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was collecting laundry when the first of nine Japanese torpedoes hit the ship.
In the deadly confusion, Miller reported to an officer, who told him to help move the ship’s mortally wounded captain off the bridge. Unable to move him far, Miller pulled the captain to shelter. Then another officer ordered Miller to pass ammunition to him as he started up one of the two abandoned anti-aircraft guns in front of the conning tower.
Miller had not been trained to use the weapons because, as a Black man in the U.S. Navy, he was assigned to serve the white officers. But while the officer was distracted, Miller began to fire one of the guns. He fired it until he ran out of ammunition. Then he helped to move injured sailors to safety before he and the other survivors abandoned the West Virginia, which sank to the bottom of Pearl Harbor.
That night, the United States declared war on Japan. Japan declared war on America the next day, and four days later, on December 11, 1941, both Italy and Germany declared war on America. “The powers of the steel pact, Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, ever closely linked, participate from today on the side of heroic Japan against the United States of America,” Italian leader Benito Mussolini said. “We shall win.” Of course they would. Mussolini and Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler, believed the Americans had been corrupted by Jews and Black Americans and could never conquer their own organized military machine.
The steel pact, as Mussolini called it, was the vanguard of his new political ideology. That ideology was called fascism, and he and Hitler thought it would destroy democracy once and for all.
Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown terribly frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter how hard socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince ordinary people that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production.
The efficiency of World War I inspired Mussolini. He gave up on socialism and developed a new political theory that rejected the equality that defined democracy. He came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.
Italy adopted fascism, and Mussolini inspired others, notably Germany's Hitler. Those leaders came to believe that their system was the ideology of the future, and they set out to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.
America fought World War II to defend democracy from fascism. And while fascism preserved hierarchies in society, democracy called on all men as equals. Of the more than 16 million Americans who served in the war, more than 1.2 million were African American men and women, 500,000 were Latinos, and more than 550,000 Jews were part of the military. Among the many ethnic groups who fought, Native Americans served at a higher percentage than any other ethnic group—more than a third of able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 50 joined the service—and among those 25,000 soldiers were the men who developed the famous “Code Talk,” based in tribal languages, that codebreakers never cracked.
The American president at the time, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hammered home that the war was about the survival of democracy. Fascists insisted that they were moving their country forward fast and efficiently—claiming the trains ran on time, for example, although in reality they didn’t—but FDR constantly noted that the people in Italy and Germany were begging for food and shelter from the soldiers of democratic countries.
Ultimately, the struggle between fascism and democracy was the question of equality. Were all men really created equal as the Declaration of Independence said, or were some born to lead the rest, whom they held subservient to their will?
Democracy, FDR reminded Americans again and again, was the best possible government. Thanks to armies made up of men and women from all races and ethnicities, the Allies won the war against fascism, and it seemed that democracy would dominate the world forever.
But as the impulse of WWII pushed Americans toward a more just and inclusive society after it, those determined not to share power warned their supporters that including people of color and women as equals in society would threaten their own liberty. Those reactionary leaders rode that fear into control of our government, and gradually they chipped away the laws that protected equality. Now, once again, democracy is under attack by those who believe some people are better than others.
Donald Trump and his cronies have vowed to replace the nonpartisan civil service with loyalists and to weaponize the Department of Justice and the military against those they perceive as enemies. They have promised to incarcerate and deport millions of immigrants, send federal troops into Democratic cities, silence LGBTQ+ Americans, prosecute journalists and their political opponents, and end abortion across the country. They want to put in place an autocracy in which a powerful leader and his chosen loyalists make the rules under which the rest of us must live.
Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?
When America came under attack before, people like Doris Miller refused to let that happen. For all that American democracy still discriminated against him, it gave him room to stand up for the concept of human equality—and he laid down his life for it. Promoted to cook after the Navy sent him on a publicity tour, Miller was assigned to a new ship, the USS Liscome Bay, which was struck by a Japanese torpedo on November 24, 1943. It sank within minutes, taking two thirds of the crew, including Miller, with it.
I hear a lot these days about how American democracy is doomed and the reactionaries will win. Maybe. But the beauty of our system is that it gives us people like Doris Miller.
Even better, it makes us people like Doris Miller.
New York Times, UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Shooting: Torrent of Anger for Health Insurance Industry Follows C.E.O.’s Killing, Dionne Searcey and Madison Malone Kircher, Dec. 6, 2024 (print ed.). The shooting death of a UnitedHealthcare executive in Manhattan has unleashed Americans’ frustrations with an industry that often denies coverage and reimbursement for medical claims.
The fatal shooting on Wednesday of a top UnitedHealthcare executive, Brian Thompson, on a Manhattan sidewalk has unleashed a torrent of morbid glee from patients and others who say they have had negative experiences with health insurance companies at some of the hardest times of their lives.
It is unclear what motivated the incident or whether it was tied to Mr. Thompson’s work in the insurance industry. The police have yet to identify the shooter who is still on the loose.
But that did not stop social media commenters from leaping to conclusions and from showing a blatant lack of sympathy over the death of a man who was a husband and father of two children.
“Thoughts and deductibles to the family,” read one comment underneath a video of the shooting posted online by CNN. “Unfortunately my condolences are out-of-network.”
On TikTok, one user wrote, “I’m an ER nurse and the things I’ve seen dying patients get denied for by insurance makes me physically sick. I just can’t feel sympathy for him because of all of those patients and their families.”
The dark commentary after the death of Mr. Thompson, a 50-year-old insurance executive from Maple Grove, Minn., highlighted the anger and frustration over the state of health care in America, where those with private insurance often find themselves in Kafka-esque tangles while seeking reimbursement for medical treatment and are often denied.
Washington Post, NYPD searches for gunman after fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO, Shayna Jacobs, Daniel Gilbert, Trisha Thadani, Aaron Gregg and Jarrett Ley, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). Brian Thompson was heading to the Hilton Midtown for a conference when the brazen, targeted attack (shown above) occurred, police said.
UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, right, was fatally shot on a Midtown Manhattan sidewalk early Wednesday morning in what police called a premeditated ambush that sent them on a manhunt for the unidentified gunman, who fled the area on a bicycle and was last seen heading into Central Park.
The health insurance executive from Minnesota was walking outside the New York Hilton Midtown about 6:40 a.m., before an investors conference his company was holding in the hotel, when a gunman wearing a hood and a mask fired off several rounds from a pistol. Thompson had been staying in another hotel across the street.
He was killed in one of the busiest parts of the city, an area teeming with tourists as well as people in business suits. Even as New Yorkers prepared for a bustling Christmas season with the traditional tree lighting Wednesday night at Rockefeller Center, officers had cordoned off sections of 54th Street outside the Hilton with yellow crime scene tape and were counting 9mm casings on the ground.
Police tracked the gunman’s movements in a neighborhood saturated by city-operated and private surveillance cameras, releasing images of him making a cash purchase at a nearby Starbucks and then, a short time later, taking aim at Thompson, who authorities said was shot in the back and leg.
Surveillance camera footage obtained by The Post appears to show the suspect exiting the 57th Street F Train station timestamped at 6:15 a.m. The individual — wearing clothing, shoes and a backpack that match images released by police — leaves the station and walks briskly down Sixth Avenue toward the Hilton Hotel, where police say they responded to a call of a person being shot at 6:46 a.m.
The targeted shooting of the chief executive officer of an American company, in the nation’s financial capital, shocked the health and business communities nationally and in Minnetonka, Minnesota, outside Minneapolis, where UnitedHealth Group is headquartered. Police said they were searching for a motive.
New York Police Department investigators were looking into whether anyone had a known grudge against the victim. Police said they were combing social media and speaking to witnesses in an effort to track down anyone who may have knowledge of why Thompson was killed, offering a $10,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest and prosecution. They said they also were looking into the possibility that the shooter had been hired to kill the executive.
Thompson, a 50-year-old Iowa native, joined UnitedHealth Group in 2004 and rose through a series of top leadership posts to become the CEO of its largest unit, the health insurance firm UnitedHealthcare.
The company is a dominating presence in American health care, providing employer and individual health coverage to about 50 million Americans. UnitedHealthcare brought in $281 billion last year, accounting for about 75 percent of its parent company’s revenue; had it been a stand-alone firm, it would have ranked among the top 10 publicly traded American companies by sales, according to data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence.
The Hartmann Report, The Medicare Advantage Trap: What They Don’t Tell You, Thom Hartmann, right, 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?
Excerpt continued below.
New York Times, South Korean President Backs Down From Martial Law Order, Choe Sang-Hun, John Yoon and Jin Yu Young, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed). President Yoon Suk Yeol said he would lift the order, hours after lawmakers voted to halt it. Thousands of protesters demanded his resignation.
President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea, right, said he would lift the emergency declaration of martial law he imposed on Tuesday as soon as he could convene his cabinet, bowing to pressure after the National Assembly passed a resolution demanding it end. By law, Mr. Yoon needs to convene his cabinet to lift martial law.
The announcement by Mr. Yoon early Wednesday in South Korea came five hours after he declared martial law late Tuesday night in an unannounced televised address, and soon after the assembly unanimously voted to rescind it, a swift rebuke of the president’s response to the political deadlock that has hobbled his tenure.
Thinking about...Commentary: South Korea's President Invokes Martial Law, Timothy Snyder, historian, professor, right, 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, Kash Patel Has Plan to Remake the F.B.I. Into a Tool of Trump, Elizabeth Williamson and Charlie Savage, Dec. 3, 2024 (print ed.). Donald Trump’s pick to lead the F.B.I., shown above, has called for firing top officials, closing the Washington headquarters and prosecuting journalists.
“Fire the top ranks of the F.B.I.” Encourage Congress to demand testimony exposing “every single bit of filth and corruption” at the agency, and withhold its funding “until the documents come in.” Prosecute leakers and journalists. Replace the national security work force with “people who won’t undermine the president’s agenda.”
These are among a long list of changes Kash Patel recommended in his 2023 book, “Government Gangsters.” President-elect Donald J. Trump has now said he intends to make Mr. Patel the next F.B.I. director.
Mr. Trump had wanted to install Mr. Patel as deputy F.B.I. director during his first term, but Attorney General William P. Barr, who portrayed him as manifestly unqualified in his own memoir, told the White House that Mr. Patel would become deputy F.B.I. director “over my dead body.”
Mr. Barr has since been banished from Mr. Trump’s circle, and Mr. Patel’s book and other past statements are coming under fresh scrutiny as a guide to his aspirations. Some of what he has said is hyperbole, but other things would be within his power should he be confirmed by the Senate.
Charles Kupperman, deputy national security adviser during the first Trump administration, warned that Mr. Patel’s ideas would be anathema to the F.B.I.’s mission.
“The irony of this is that they all complained about the politicization of the F.B.I., and here Trump is putting in someone who’s going to do just that,” Mr. Kupperman said in an interview. “These are not reforms, they are punitive measures from a guy trying to be the enforcer for Trump.”
New York Times, Inside the Supreme Court Ethics Debate: Who Judges the Justices? Jodi Kantor and Abbie VanSickle, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). In private meetings and memos, the justices made new rules for themselves — then split on whether they could, or should, be enforced.
As the summer of 2023 ended, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court began trading even-more-confidential-than-usual memos, avoiding their standard email list and instead passing paper documents in envelopes to each chambers. Faced with ethics controversies and a plunge in public trust, they were debating rules for their own conduct, according to people familiar with the process.
Weeks later, as a united front, they announced the results: the court’s first-ever ethics code. “It’s remarkable that we were able to agree unanimously,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said in a television interview this year.
But a New York Times examination found that behind the scenes, the court had divided over whether the justices’ new rules could — or should — ever be enforced.
Trump Transition News, Commentary
New York Times, As Donald Trump Threatens Tariffs, Europe and South America Strengthen Ties, Jenny Gross, Liz Alderman and Patricia Cohen, Dec. 7, 2024 (print ed.). The European Union and five South American countries have reached agreement on a deal to establish one of the largest trade zones in the world.
The European Union reached a major trade deal on Friday with five South American countries, concluding a long-delayed negotiation that took on new urgency as President-elect Donald J. Trump threatens to impose tariffs on some of the world’s largest economies.
The deal, between the European Union and members of Mercosur — a bloc that includes Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay — would establish one of the largest trade zones in the world, and would be the European Union’s biggest trade agreement ever.
With European leaders preparing for the possibility that Mr. Trump’s return to office will lead to a more fragmented global economy, the deal is a significant victory for proponents of free trade, linking markets with 780 million people. But it could fuel frustration within the European bloc, with France vehemently opposed to the agreement.
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.Get the best of The Times in your inbox
Make sense of the news, every day, with David Leonhardt.On weekdays and Sundays, we recommend one piece of exceptional writing from The Times — a narrative or essay that takes you someplace you might not expect to go.
America PAC conducted what it described as an expansive ground-game effort on Mr. Trump’s behalf. Mr. Musk came to see defeating President Biden as a vital imperative and swung hard toward Mr. Trump after the assassination attempt against him in July. He became so invested in the effort that he campaigned frequently for the Republican nominee in Pennsylvania, widely seen as the most important battleground state.
Mr. Musk also donated $4 million to America PAC on Nov. 12, a week after Election Day. He has vowed to keep his super PAC active by targeting progressive prosecutors and supporting Mr. Trump’s agenda.
Since the election, Mr. Musk has become inescapable at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club in Florida. He is leading an effort to try to trim the size of the federal government, and he has weighed in on various personnel choices that the incoming president has made.
While some in Mr. Trump’s orbit — and at times the president-elect himself — have at times seemed weary of Mr. Musk’s constant presence, the upside he brings in the form of enormous financial support and a major social media platform have clearly outweighed any concerns.
Mr. Musk’s total spending on the election is not yet known — and may never be. He cut other political checks to conservative down-ballot groups this cycle, including $12 million to two groups trying to elect Republican senators, the Senate Leadership Fund and the Sentinel Action Fund. Mr. Musk, who originally wanted to keep his support for Mr. Trump quiet, may have also funded dark-money entities that will never disclose his involvement or donations.
On Thursday, Mr. Musk was revealed as the hidden funding source behind RBG PAC, a Republican group that worked to elect Mr. Trump but was named after a liberal jurist who despised him.
New York Times, Opinion: Trump’s F.B.I. Pick Has an Enemies List. Biden Should Pardon Everyone on It, Michelle Goldberg, right, Dec. 6, 2024. There are few good things to be said about Donald Trump’s plan to fire the F.B.I. director, Chris Wray, and install in his place Kash Patel, a thuggish lackey who has spent years fantasizing about taking revenge on Trump’s enemies. But there is one: Patel has helpfully provided us with a list of people President Biden should pardon before he leaves office.
Patel’s 2023 book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, purports to show how government employees who defied Trump constitute a shadowy cabal that is “the most dangerous threat to our democracy.” The “deep state,” in Patel’s telling, is “as treacherous and evil as the villains portrayed in books and movies.” Virtually every investigation of Trump and his allies, Patel suggests, is part of a monstrous plot against “the people’s president.” The book strongly implies that Jan. 6, “the insurrection that never was,” was encouraged by “deep state” agitators and then used as a pretext to persecute patriotic Trump supporters. In a blurb on the book jacket, Trump wrote, “We will use this blueprint to help us take back the White House and remove these gangsters from all of government!”
Who are these gangsters? Patel lists 60 of them in a useful alphabetized appendix. It is not, as he acknowledges, exhaustive, since he limits himself to the executive branch, leaving out “other corrupt actors of the first order” like Senator-elect Adam Schiff, the former Republican House speaker Paul Ryan and “the entire fake news mafia press corps.” His catalog of the “deep state” includes some of Patel’s bureaucratic foes from when he served in Trump’s first administration, like Bill Barr, who as attorney general said that Trump could make Patel the deputy F.B.I. director only “over my dead body,” and Wray, the man Patel would replace.
Patel also lists both the current secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, and Trump’s secretary of defense Mark Esper. Cassidy Hutchinson, the brave young former aide to Mark Meadows who testified before the Jan. 6 committee, is on the list, as is Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump staff member who often criticizes her old boss on “The View.” Naturally, Biden, Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton are on it as well.
Except for himself, Biden should pardon them all, along with pretty much everyone else Patel has singled out by name and those who worked on the Jan. 6 committee. On Wednesday, Jonathan Martin reported in Politico that there’s a “vigorous internal debate” among Biden aides about issuing pre-emptive pardons to officials likely to be unjustly targeted by Trump. A drawback of such pardons, Martin wrote, is that they “could suggest impropriety, only fueling Trump’s criticisms.” After all, Biden may struggle to explain why he’s pardoning people who have done nothing wrong.
Patel’s appendix, however, makes the case for blanket pardons easier to convey. The breadth of it demonstrates his McCarthyite impulses better than his critics ever could.
Though Biden is not much of a communicator, he could give a speech laying out the well-founded fears that Patel may try to harass the people on his list with spurious investigations. In addition to justifying sweeping pardons, such a speech could prompt a useful nationwide discussion about what it would mean to put a man like Patel in charge of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency.
We are entering a period when the ideal of Justice Department independence will almost certainly be swept away. Political persecution — the kind Trump and his allies claim, falsely, to have been subjected to — will become routine. Biden tried to defend the basic integrity of our imperfect institutions against Trumpist aggression, and he failed. All he can do now is help the American people understand what’s coming and try to protect the ones with MAGA targets on their backs.
Washington Post, The New Administration: Trump hesitates to personally lobby for endangered Cabinet picks, Isaac Arnsdorf, Ashley Parker, Marianne LeVine and Liz Goodwin, Dec. 7, 2024. The president-elect has not yet personally lobbied hard for his choices, limiting his exposure if they are not confirmed. Some allies fear he’ll be weakened if another pick withdraws.
Washington Post, Analysis: The fascinating — and important — Florida and Ohio Senate appointments, Aaron Blake, Dec. 7, 2024. A look at the dynamics for both appointments, which could make the Senate more or less Trump-y.
President-elect Donald Trump is engaged in a battle of wills with GOP senators over his Cabinet picks — a joust that will say a lot about just how much of a rubber stamp congressional Republicans will be over the next four years.Get the latest election news and results
They have thus far shown at least some willingness to buck Trump, or at least resist him. That has endangered Pete Hegseth’s selection as defense secretary and led to attorney general pick Matt Gaetz’s rapid withdrawal.
Republicans will have 53 senators, so just four voting with Democrats can reject Trump’s ideas. And we’re already getting a sense of which GOP senators could be thorns in Trump’s side. (Politico’s Jonathan Martin has a good rundown of those potential thorns here.)
But we also don’t know exactly what the Senate GOP conference will look like next year, thanks to an impending vacancy in Ohio (Vice President-elect JD Vance’s seat) and another likely vacancy in Florida (secretary of State pick Marco Rubio’s seat). And given the fine margins, the appointments to replace them could matter greatly.
The big question is whether a pair of governors who have had their differences with Trump, to varying degrees — Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Ohio’s Mike DeWine — will choose picks that enable Trump or maybe provide some more potential checks on him.
New York Times, He Promised Huge Tax Refunds. Now Donald Trump Wants Him to Lead the I.R.S., Andrew Duehren, Dec. 6, 2024. Since leaving Congress in 2023, Billy Long has peddled a pandemic-era tax credit that the I.R.S. has warned is a magnet for fraud.
When Billy Long, now President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to lead the Internal Revenue Service, left Congress in 2023, he quickly set out to make money. Building off the relationships he developed as a Republican from Missouri and auctioneer, Mr. Long began encouraging people to file for a lucrative, pandemic-era tax credit.
At meetings with chapters of Hispanic Chambers of Commerce across the country and at an auctioneering convention in Oklahoma, Mr. Long sometimes wore a hat advertising the Employee Retention Tax Credit as he tried to drum up business. Working with companies that would fill out the paperwork for the tax credit in exchange for a fee, Mr. Long had success.
“What’s working for me is the trust factor because people know me,” he said in a podcast interview last year about his work, describing clients who received tax refunds of more than $1 million. “They’ve known me for 40 years in the auction business, or whatever they see me getting this money for their compadres,” he added.
The money spigot would soon shut off. In September 2023, the I.R.S. temporarily stopped processing claims for the credit, hoping to squash widespread fraud in the program. The tax break, aimed at supporting businesses that kept employees on payroll during the pandemic, had spawned a cottage industry of tax preparation firms steering people, including those who were not eligible for the credit, toward it. The I.R.S. began warning people about scams related to the tax credit, including firms that were “wildly misrepresenting and exaggerating who can qualify for the credits.”
The fiscal cost of the tax refund bonanza was steep. What analysts had initially expected would be a roughly $55 billion program had ballooned into a $230 billion one, with projections that its cost could ultimately hit $550 billion.
New York Times, Trump Picks Former Senator and Election Denier to Be Ambassador to China, Edward Wong, Dec. 6, 2024 (print ed.). David Perdue would serve in the role at a time when the U.S.-China relationship is considered to be the most consequential in the world.
President-elect Donald J. Trump announced on Thursday that he would nominate David Perdue, right, a businessman and former senator from Georgia, to be his ambassador to China.
“He will be instrumental in implementing my strategy to maintain Peace in the region, and a productive working relationship with China’s leaders,” Mr. Trump wrote in an online post.
If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Perdue would take over the ambassadorship from Nicholas Burns, a veteran diplomat and former Harvard professor. Mr. Perdue would serve as a conduit between Mr. Trump and Chinese officials in Beijing, including Xi Jinping, the country’s leader. American officials in the Biden and first Trump administrations have said the U.S.-China relationship is the most consequential in the world.Get the best of The Times in your inbox
The two nations are peer competitors, with the world’s two largest economies and most powerful militaries. American officials say that China is the only power capable of displacing the United States as the dominant nation in the world.
Mr. Trump’s picks for the top national security posts have talked about confronting and constraining China: Marco Rubio, the designated secretary of state; Michael Waltz, tapped for national security adviser; and Pete Hegseth, Mr. Trump’s deeply imperiled choice for defense secretary. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump named Peter Navarro, a vocal critic of China, to be a senior adviser on trade and manufacturing.
But Mr. Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and the one for commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, have not expressed strong animus toward China. Neither man has been a strong advocate of universal tariffs, which some of Mr. Trump’s supporters favor. Mr. Trump has threatened to impose tariffs of 60 percent or more on all Chinese goods and to revoke the nation’s preferred trade status, a move that would also lead to higher tariffs.
Mr. Trump has also praised Mr. Xi as a strong and “brilliant” leader and has called the Chinese autocrat a “very good friend.”
Mr. Perdue represented Georgia in the Senate from 2015 to 2021, leaving after he lost re-election to Jon Ossoff. Mr. Perdue publicly questioned the election results, criticized Georgia’s election officials and supported a lawsuit brought by Mr. Trump’s supporters to try to overturn the 2020 results in Georgia, a pivotal state in the presidential race. With Mr. Trump’s backing, Mr. Perdue challenged Brian Kemp for the Republican nomination in the election for governor of Georgia in 2022 but lost by a wide margin in the primary.
Mr. Perdue was the most prolific stock trader in the Senate during his six years there, a fact that raised questions about potential conflicts of interest. The Justice Department investigated him for possible insider trading in his sale of more than $1 million of stock in a financial-analysis firm, but prosecutors did not bring charges.
New York Times, Her Wrestling Empire Was Said to Harm Children. Trump Chose Her for Education, Stephanie Saul, Zach Montague and Sharon Otterman, Updated Dec. 2, 2024. Linda McMahon, whose résumé mainly rests on running World Wrestling Entertainment, has faced questions for years over whether she is suitable for important education posts.
Appointees to the State Board of Education usually sail through the confirmation process in Connecticut’s House of Representatives, but a 2009 choice, Linda E. McMahon, drew intense pushback.
Andrew Fleischmann, who then chaired the House Education Committee, remembers being offended by her selection and leading the opposition.
“She had no involvement whatsoever in education,” Mr. Fleischmann, a Democrat, said in a recent interview. “She’s made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars pushing violence and sexualization of young women. She was a real force for doing ill to kids in our country.”
Ms. McMahon’s company, World Wrestling Entertainment, was criticized for promoting violence, steroid use and sexualized content. In the early 2000s, Ms. McMahon would go so far as to engage in the W.W.E.’s theatrics herself. She kicked her husband, Vince McMahon, the company’s co-founder, in the groin in one routine. In another, she appeared to slap her daughter, Stephanie, and knock her to the floor.
After a contentious floor debate, the House voted to approve Ms. McMahon by a vote of 96-45, an unusual split for a minor appointment in Connecticut.
Ms. McMahon may soon face another confirmation, this time as President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education.
New York Times, Trump Organization Plans an Ethics Policy Without Banning Foreign Deals, Eric Lipton, Ben Protess and David Yaffe-Bellany, Dec. 5, 2024 (print ed.). The family business of President-elect Donald J. Trump is expected to announce some restrictions on transactions but is not likely to accept as many limitations as it did eight years ago.
When Eric Trump takes the stage at a cryptocurrency conference in Abu Dhabi next week, he will join a lineup of speakers celebrating “the golden age of Bitcoin.” His headlining performance will also represent a golden opportunity to signal that the Trump Organization is wide open for business.
In the wake of Donald J. Trump’s election victory, his family business is poised to capitalize on his presidency with a variety of new ventures, according to a New York Times review of financial records and interviews with people knowledgeable about his finances. And unlike in his first term, the people said, the Trump Organization aims to issue a more limited ethics plan that is unlikely to significantly curb its growth.
As the inauguration approaches, Eric Trump, Mr. Trump’s second son and the company’s de facto leader, is expected to forgo deals directly with foreign governments. But he is not planning to revive the promise the company made eight years ago to swear off all other foreign deals while his father occupies the White House.
Without that guardrail — the centerpiece of the Trump Organization’s 2017 ethics plan — the company would be free to profit from an array of business in countries essential to American foreign policy interests. In the months leading up to Election Day, Eric Trump struck real estate deals in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and he has shown interest in new hotel projects in Israel and other countries across the Middle East, Latin America and Asia.
The Trump family is also branching out to forge foreign ties beyond the real estate business.
World Liberty Financial, a new cryptocurrency platform that the Trumps helped create, recently received a lucrative investment from a Chinese entrepreneur, a deal that could ultimately pay the family about $22 million. The president-elect’s publicly traded social media company, which represents his single greatest source of wealth, is also open to foreign investment.
The new ventures — both of which will face oversight from federal regulators appointed by the president — underscore how the company’s recent expansion created an even more complicated web of conflicts than in Mr. Trump’s first term. And much like the Trump administration, the Trump Organization will be unleashed in the second term, free to pursue new deals that could blur the lines between the presidency and the business.
New York Times, Pam Bondi’s Journey From Traditional Republican to Warrior for Trump, Patricia Mazzei, Dec. 6, 2024 (print ed.). The president-elect’s choice for attorney general is known for her charm and fealty to him.
The day before Florida’s 2016 presidential primary, the state attorney general, Pam Bondi, surprised her fellow Republicans and endorsed Donald J. Trump at a rally in Tampa, her hometown.
Her first choice, former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, had recently dropped out. Senator Marco Rubio, another Floridian, remained in the race, though just barely. Few big-name Republicans in the state, and none as high-ranking as Ms. Bondi, had yet backed Mr. Trump.
In him, Ms. Bondi saw a bit of herself: an outsider with no experience in elective office. She first won the state attorney general’s race in 2010, during the Tea Party wave that catapulted novice Republican candidates like her into power.
By 2016, she was part of the state’s political establishment. But the party, she saw, was on the cusp of another pivotal moment — and her foresight then is responsible now for Mr. Trump’s decision to pick her to lead the Justice Department, as U.S. attorney general.
“Something that you don’t forget is when someone comes and gets behind you early in a situation when it’s not popular,” said Adam Goodman, a Tampa political consultant who has advised Ms. Bondi since recruiting her to run in 2010.
Over the last eight years, as Florida became Mr. Trump’s home, a cradle of right-wing politics and a solidly Republican state, Ms. Bondi went from being a traditional Republican to a Trump loyalist. Acting as confidante, impeachment lawyer and adviser, she ascended in the president-elect’s inner circle thanks to the combination of charm, savvy and a light touch that characterized her career as a telegenic prosecutor and a politician.
Florida is home to every brand of Trump Republican, including flamethrowers like Matt Gaetz, the former congressman who was forced to withdraw as Mr. Trump’s first choice for attorney general because of scandal. But perhaps no one better reflects the political evolution of the state and its once-establishment leaders than Ms. Bondi, 59, whose small risk in endorsing Mr. Trump early in 2016 paid off in a big way, making her the relatively safe pick after Mr. Gaetz’s selection collapsed.
Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, shown in a 2023 photo via Wikipedia.
New York Times, Investigation: How One of the World’s Richest Men Is Avoiding $8 Billion in Taxes Jesse Drucker, Dec. 6, 2024 (print ed.). The chief executive of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, has taken advantage of loopholes in federal estate and gift taxes, which have quietly been eviscerated.
Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, is the 10th-richest person in the United States, worth $127 billion. In theory, when he dies, his estate should pay 40 percent of his net worth to the government in taxes.
But Mr. Huang, 61, is not only an engineering genius and Silicon Valley icon whose company, the world’s second-most valuable, makes the chips that power much artificial intelligence. He is also the beneficiary of a series of tax dodges that will enable him to pass on much of his fortune tax free, according to securities and tax filings reviewed by The New York Times.
The savings for his family are on a pace to be roughly $8 billion. It likely ranks among the largest tax dodges in the United States.
The types of strategies Mr. Huang has deployed to shield his wealth have become ubiquitous among the ultrawealthy. Blackstone Group’s Stephen A. Schwarzman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and top executives at Google, Coinbase, Eli Lilly, Mastercard and Advanced Micro Devices have collectively shifted billions of dollars into financial vehicles in order to avoid the federal estate tax, according to a Times analysis of securities disclosures.
It is just one sign of how the estate tax — imposed solely on a sliver of the country’s multimillionaires — has been eviscerated.
Revenue from the tax has barely changed since 2000, even as the wealth of the richest Americans has roughly quadrupled. If the estate tax had simply kept pace, it would have raised around $120 billion last year. Instead it brought in about a quarter of that.
Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host who is President-elect Trump's nominee to be Secretary of Defense (File photos).
The New Yorker, Investigation: Pete Hegseth’s Secret History, Jane Mayer, right, Dec. 1, 2024. A whistle-blower report and other documents suggest that Trump’s 
nominee to run the Pentagon was forced out of previous leadership positions for financial mismanagement, sexist behavior, and being repeatedly intoxicated on the job.
After the recent revelation that Pete Hegseth had secretly paid a financial settlement to a woman who had accused him of raping her in 2017, President-elect Donald Trump stood by his choice of Hegseth to become the next Secretary of Defense. Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, issued a statement noting that Hegseth, who has denied wrongdoing, has not been charged with any crime. “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his administration,” Cheung maintained.
But Hegseth’s record before becoming a full-time Fox News TV host, in 2017, raises additional questions about his suitability to run the world’s largest and most lethal military force. A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.News & PoliticsThe latest from Washington and beyond, covering current events, the economy, and more, from our columnists and correspondents.By signing up, you agree to our user agreement (including class action waiver and arbitration provisions), and acknowledge our privacy policy.
A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events.
The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team.
The report also says that Hegseth (shown at both left and right), who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued 
the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.”
In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club.
In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”
In response to questions from this magazine, Tim Parlatore, a lawyer for Hegseth, replied with the following statement, which he said came from “an advisor” to Hegseth: “We’re not going to comment on outlandish claims laundered through The New Yorker by a petty and jealous disgruntled former associate of Mr. Hegseth’s. Get back to us when you try your first attempt at actual journalism.”
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 2, 2024 [Defense Nominee's Reported Scandal], Heather Cox Richardson, Dec. 3, 2024.
Last night, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker reported that Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, Fox News Channel weekend host Pete Hegseth, had been forced to leave previous leadership positions at the advocacy groups Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America because of serious allegations of “financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.”
Under his direction, Veterans for Freedom ran up huge debt for what appears to have been inappropriate expenses; the group’s donors squeezed Hegseth out of his job and then shuttered the organization. He moved to Concerned Veterans for America.
A whistleblower for Concerned Veterans for America reported that Hegseth was repeatedly so drunk at events that he had to be carried out, and that he once tried to join dancers on stage at a strip club to which he brought his work team. Their report said that Hegseth and other members of his team divided the female staffers in the organization into “party girls” and “not party girls” and sexually pursued them, leading to allegations of sexual assault. Another complaint said that at a bar in the early hours of May 29, 2015, Hegseth began to chant drunkenly: “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”
An email from one of the whistleblowers to Hegseth’s successor at Concerned Veterans for America said that “[a]mong the staff, the disgust for Pete was pretty high.” The letter detailed Hegseth’s “history of alcohol abuse” and said he had “treated the organization funds like they were a personal expense account—for partying, drinking, and using CVA events as little more than opportunities to ‘hook up’ with women on the road.”
By 2016, Hegseth was out at Concerned Veterans for America but had joined the Fox News Channel as a contributor. It was during this period that he appeared in October 2017 as a speaker at the California Federation of Republican Women’s convention, where he allegedly sexually assaulted a woman.
The Bulwark, Opinion: Does Trump Even Care About Pete? Andrew Egger, Dec. 5, 2024. Where’s Trump When Pete Needs Him? Does political peril lie in wait for those GOP senators who refuse to support Donald Trump’s most controversial nominees? That depends who you ask.
Right now, an odd split-screen is playing out among the MAGA crowd. Trump himself is playing the whole thing surprisingly quiet—for now.
But in their podcasts, posts, and media appearances, the hard-charging national populists of the Bannonite right are trying to morph the confirmation fights over the likes of Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Kash Patel into titanic, existential struggles over whether it will be Trump or the establishment that controls the GOP.
Listen to shows like Steve Bannon’s War Room or Jack Posobiec’s Human Events Daily right now, and you’ll hear a lot of rhetoric against individual GOP senators like Kevin Cramer, James Lankford, Mike Rounds, and Thom Tillis. To the MAGA crowd, these aren’t conservative lawmakers. They’re representatives of the “uniparty,” the “D.C. duopoly,” the “globalists” representing “entrenched special interests.”
From their lips to God’s ears! But there’s little chance we’ll be so lucky.
Trump is going to get his critical mass of agenda-loving sycophants sooner or later; the question is how many of those sycophants will be alleged rapists, drunks, naked conspiracy theorists, Kremlin enthusiasts, people with publicly published lists of political enemies, and so on. Think of it this way: How much of a practical difference will there be between the job Pam Bondi will do at DOJ versus how Matt Gaetz would have conducted himself?
But what’s increasingly interesting is how little of the push for confirmation is coming from Trump himself.
It’s Trump who gets the last laugh, though, because Hegseth’s career is falling apart, not his. He’ll start bullying senators plenty quick when we get to stuff he really cares about.
And as Marc Caputo reports today, two nominees may qualify for that treatment: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. Beyond them, one yes-man works about as well as another.
Politico, Ron DeSantis’ political future looked bleak a year ago. Not anymore, Gary Fineout and Kimberly Leonard, Dec. 6, 2024 (print ed.). The governor is being considered to lead the Department of Defense. It may be a strong opportunity to keep himself in the limelight for a 2028 presidential run.
Nearly a year ago, the political future of Ron DeSantis appeared to be buried in the snow alongside the highways of Iowa he had spent weeks criss-crossing, ahead of a second-place thumping at the hands of Donald Trump in that state’s crucial caucuses.
Now, Trump’s trip back to the White House is helping revitalize DeSantis’ fortune, giving him an opportunity to further cement his legacy in Florida — or even hand the governor a prestigious spot in his administration running the Pentagon. Either path could put him in a place for another run for president in 2028, which the governor’s allies have said repeatedly he is interested in.
Trump’s earlier picks for his administration have given DeSantis the opportunity for a legacy-defining pick to fill the Senate seat soon being vacated by Marco Rubio, which would let DeSantis further leave his mark on the state. But there may be an even greater prize; the president-elect has been considering offering DeSantis the position of Defense secretary if his current pick, Pete Hegseth, is unable to overcome opposition to his nomination that has built up in the Senate as allegations against him have spilled into view.
POLITICO interviewed 16 Republican lobbyists, elected officials and political consultants tied to both Trump and DeSantis about the possibility of the swap, many of whom were granted anonymity to talk freely. Many DeSantis allies see the Defense secretary job as being attractive to DeSantis, giving him the keys to run the world’s most powerful bureaucracy — and just as important, will keep him in the spotlight ahead of any potential future presidential run.
“It’s a win-win situation,” said DeSantis donor Robert Salvador. “DeSantis is very aligned with Trump and his policies around rebuilding the military, removing woke from the military, and securing the border.
Everyone's Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary: Dark Brandon: “maybe I’ll become a pardon factory,” Jeff Tiedrich, right, Dec. 5, 2024. Right now, the only 
thing standing between Donny’s Retaliation Machine and a whole bunch of innocent targets is the irrevocable and absolute pardon power of Joe Biden — which is why it’s fucking awesome that the Biden White House is gearing up to become a pardon factory.
After Biden pardoned his son Hunter to protect him from Donny’s wrath, I floated the notion that Joe should now begin the process of doling out protective pardons to … well, everyone.
John Dean agreed with me. “Biden should keep going with his pardons: Trump, Jack Smith & team, Mueller & team, and a blanket pardon for all on Trump’s enemies list for any and all political statements before December 25, 2024! Merry Christmas:-). Take the wind out of retribution/revenge!”
Now, Team Biden is announcing that they’re down with Joe becoming a perpetual motion pardon generator.
President Joe Biden’s senior aides are conducting a vigorous internal debate over whether to issue preemptive pardons to a range of current and former public officials who could be targeted with President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House, according to senior Democrats familiar with the discussions.
Biden’s aides are deeply concerned about a range of current and former officials who could find themselves facing inquiries and even indictments, a sense of alarm which has only accelerated since Trump last weekend announced the appointment of Kash Patel to lead the FBI. Patel has publicly vowed to pursue Trump’s critics.
This isn’t just a good idea — it’s a necessary idea. firewalls against fuckery need to be constructed now — before it’s too late.
Democrats are fine with the idea — but of course they have to equivocate. "If it’s clear by January 19 that [revenge] is his intention, then I would recommend to President Biden that he provide those preemptive pardons to people, because that’s really what our country is going to need next year,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) told WGBH.
“if it’s clear” —was it not clear when Donny stood up in front of a throng of bloodthirsty cultists and screamed I AM YOUR RETRIBUTION?
Was is not clear when Pam Bondi said that “prosecutors will be prosecuted”?
Politico, Secret Service head acknowledges ‘failure’ in House task force hearing, Jordain Carney, Dec. 5, 2024. Frustration briefly boiled over during the final hearing for the House task force.
Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe Jr. used an hours-long appearance before House lawmakers to outline sweeping changes the agency is making after its “failure” during the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump.
The Thursday hearing is the second, and final, public meeting by a bipartisan House task force that is investigating the attempted assassination at a Pennsylvania rally in July, as well as a second attempt in Florida. In addition to the hearing, the panel also voted on Thursday to release its final report, detailing its findings and recommendations.
“July 13 was a failure of the Secret Service to adequately secure the Butler farm show site and protect President-Elect Trump. That abject failure underscored critical gaps within Secret Service operations, and I recognize that we did not meet the expectations of the American public, 
Congress and our protectees,” Rowe told the House panel on Thursday.
Rowe detailed several changes that the Secret Service has already made both while speaking to the committee and in a lengthier written statement, including increasing the use of drones and counter-drone technology, making structural changes within the Secret Service and increasing Trump’s detail during the final months of the campaign. Rowe also said that the Secret Service is in the process of increasing its staffing.
While most of the hearing was cordial, there were brief fiery moments between Rowe and, in particular, Republican members of the panel.
Tensions briefly boiled over between Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) and Rowe as Fallon used a photo of a 9/11 remembrance event to ask Rowe about his role at the event. Fallon accused him of putting other Secret Service agents out of their usual positions so he could be more visible at the event — an accusation Rowe denied, saying security wasn’t impacted. He is visible in a photo of the event standing near President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, JD Vance and congressional leaders.
“Do not invoke 9/11 for political purposes,” Rowe yelled. “You are out of line.”
As Rowe called Fallon “out of order,” the Texas Republican yelled back: “Don’t try to bully me.”
Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), a member of the task force who also leads the Homeland Security Committee, also questioned Rowe on the culture within the Secret Service.
“Your guys showed up that day and didn’t give a shit. There was apathy and complacency, period, and that is your mission now. … This is a leadership issue, a command-climate issue, a culture issue,” Green said.
After Chair Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) said “hell” toward the tail end of the hearing, he referred back to Green’s swearing, saying, “I know we’re not supposed to use any language like that. Chairman Green, I know it’s a very emotional thing for you too.”
Special Intelligence, Commentary: Five Steps To Resist The Coming Tyranny, Malcolm Nance, author, intelligence expert, right, Dec. 3, 2024. Adopt These Urgent Immediate Actions to 
Safeguard Yourself, Your Family & America.
As you know, I have been a practitioner of intelligence collection and secret activities for over thirty years. But I have also been an ardent student of the World War Two French resistance in Nazi-occupied France. The American people can learn lessons from how French society stood firm in the face of tyranny.
Why France Resisted Tyranny
On May 10, 1940, the armies of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded France, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Belgium. Three countries were subjugated within days. France finally capitulated after a month’s combat. A new French government was quickly formed to collaborate with the Nazis under a former decorated WWI General, Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, and Pierre Laval, the day-to-day administrator. They administered France from their chosen capitol, the centrally located resort and spa city of Vichy. The Vichy French worked hand in hand with Germany to occupy virtually every city and created hated paramilitary militia groups to assist the Gestapo in rooting out all opposition and sending Jews to concentration camps.
France suffered a bruising military defeat, but the people were not all subjugated. The nation broke down into three general categories of political opinion:
1) Collaborators - Those who obeyed and cooperated with the Germans. They were generally pro-fascists who admired their strength and proximity to Hitler’s power.
2) Apathetics - People who were tired of war and lived their lives within the occupation but took no action to hinder the Vichy government or antagonize the Nazi army. They could not be relied upon to be sympathetic to anything that did not immediately improve their lives financially.
3) Resisters - Many loyal French citizens saw the surrender, occupation, and collaboration with the Germans as vile and treasonous. Almost without prompting, these citizens of France chose to resist by all means necessary. At first, they chose passive resistance and clandestine propaganda campaigns until they were organized to fight back. Then, with the assistance of Britain, America, and the exiled Free French government, they formed a secret, armed underground army called the Maquis.
Facing The Coming American Dictatorship
The Impending rise of an American dictatorship under the Trump regime has familiar themes in the nazi occupation of France. The Vichy government was full of incompetent yes men and women who sold the soul of France and eventually sent tens of thousands, especially Jews and partisans, to their deaths. A tyrannical rule was the way Hitler gained the compliance of the French upper class and enforced ruthless draconian laws that led most French people to reject their governance and move from passive pushback to active resistance.
Make no mistake, we, the American people, are entering into a four-year tyranny never before seen in our history. We just do not know how bad it will get, but remember, a minority of the electorate (just 31%!) voted in a wanton authoritarian to run actively on a campaign to wreak revenge on his enemies. Now that he has that power, we must assume he intends to use all levers, including the military, to do evil.
But we cannot wait for an outright tyranny to affect our lives before a resistance loyal to the Constitution forms. No, we cannot. It is the job of the citizens who will live under this tyranny to prepare to carry out acts of resistance, no matter how small, and illustrate the lawlessness of this dictator’s incoming regime.
Here are Five steps to help you.
Step 1 - Adopt a Resistance Posture (RP)
Your Resistance Posture (RP) is an active decision you will make about what the face of your compliance or opposition to the Trump regime will look like. It is also about how far you will go to make your displeasure known. Most people should adopt a secret resistance posture. This means to carry out opposition in a way that is not known to your coworkers or the greater public. This may appear cowardly, but you cannot react to conditions you do not know about.
The most important aspect of setting your RP is collecting information, sharing accurate intelligence, and raising self-awareness about what is happening to you locally and nationally. During the initial phase of the regime’s establishment, the highest quality information must be collected and prepared for potential hardship to one’s family, community, and livelihood.
The regime will want you to be bereft of precise information and wallowing in disinformation, lies and conspiracy theories. Do not be fooled by this. They will most likely force news media to comply or even remove alarming stories that could directly impact your life.
Before you set your RP, it would be best if you also assumed the government is now going to be turned into a weapon against you. Make sure your RP is as bland as possible unless you choose, like me, to be publicly and openly defiant. Before you do that, note that these agencies may soon become enemies or surveillance arms of the Trump regime.
TAXES: Make sure your taxes are paid, and your relationship with the IRS has no basis for attacking you.
TRAVEL: This week, coming from Canada, the Customs & Border Patrol adopted a much heavier and more aggressive interrogation of everyone crossing from Montreal, particularly me. Without orders, the CBP officers have already assumed Trump’s attitude toward borders. They even gave my dogs a hassle.
LAW ENFORCEMENT: While State and federal law enforcement may be more challenging to turn, one must assume that local police & sheriffs have a highly political mind. If they feel the President of the United States may protect them, they may not see abusing their office as unlawful. Be mindful of how you drive and interact with law enforcement officers. It’s terrible to say this, but if you’re a liberal in America and have a high-profile RP, you should expect to be treated like a black man.
Step 2 - Stop Debating Maga & Use Simpler Speech
We must tear a page from the MAGA playbook sheet and throw it back in the faces. MAGA has always loved the fact that progressives, Democrats, and others seek to engage in a civilized, rational discussion in which logic, truthful arguments, and reality will win the debate. Watch their pundits on CNN or Fox; they will listen carefully and launch into a firehose of simple-to-consume lies. They’re not debating you; they’re using your goodwill as a weapon to show you are weak and “wordy.”
Step 3 – Establish A Safe & Secure Communications
Step 4 - Do Not Engage In Violent Protests Or Armed Action
Step 5 - Secure Your Home, Family & Friends
Just remember this one truism: Politically, no one is coming to your rescue in a dictatorship. You are your own Calvary.
Politico Magazine, Tom Vilsack: Why Democrats Don’t Get Rural America, Jonathan Martin, Dec. 4, 2024. The nation’s longest-serving Democratic Agriculture secretary says he’s given his party a winning program, but they need to go out and sell it.
Tom Vilsack, right, has much to say about Democrats and rural America. And for good reason.
He’s the longest-serving Democratic agriculture secretary in history, having claimed the office tucked along the National Mall for eight years under former President Barack Obama and now concluding four more years in the post in the Biden administration. Before that he was a two-term Iowa governor, state senator from eastern Iowa and mayor of his wife’s hometown, Mount Pleasant.
Frustrated with the Democrats’ defeat, and what he sees as the lack of attention and credit for what his department has done for America’s farmers, Vilsack invited me to the USDA shortly after the election.
Rural communities have grown in population in recent years, Vilsack wanted me to know. There is a good news story to tell about innovations in the ag economy.
What the heck has gone wrong for Democrats in rural America?
I think the challenge that we have in rural America is that we talk a lot about programs and not about vision. And I will, if you don’t mind, take you all the way back to my first race for governor in 1998. I ran and I was way behind and nobody thought I had a chance of winning. And I went out and I talked about making Iowa the food capital of the world. And I had a media guy who at the time was not well known [David Axelrod]. He and my pollster were not very happy with me for talking about the food capital. They basically said, nobody understands what it is and you should be talking specifically about class size reductions, property tax relief and expanding access to health care. I continued to talk about it. I won that race by 6.5 to 7 percent. I’m pretty sure that 7 percent were the people I was talking to who knew the vision. They didn’t quite understand what it was, but when you have a vision, it is what a leader does. A leader takes you from here to there, tells you where you’re going to go and allows you to fill in the detail.
We just haven’t had the vision to explain to folks in rural places, what has happened to them and why. In the 1970s, the decision was made by the Nixon administration to transition from a supply management system of agriculture support to a market-based system. When that occurred, we became a commodity producer. And by the very nature of commodities, small profit margin if any, which means you have to grow quite a bit of it, a lot of it — to grow a lot of it, you have to get bigger and bigger and bigger farming operations, which meant that you needed fewer and fewer and fewer farmers. And if you had fewer and fewer farmers, you had fewer and fewer farm families. You had fewer kids going to rural schools. You had fewer customers at the small business and downtown, fill in the blank. You had fewer folks going to the hospitals and supporting the doctors. And your community over time, began to shrink. We didn’t address that, until now. We’re addressing it now in this department, in this administration, we’ve begun that conversation to change the model.
Let me ask you a question that you’ll appreciate because you’re a small-town politician and obviously a statewide politician before becoming a national figure. And that’s my industry. And this is not self-regarding, it’s just a fact. How much of a challenge in communicating what has been done or what you are doing, flows from the fact that media has collapsed?
Well, you’re the first guy that’s asked me about this. You’re the first guy in four years from the Washington hierarchy of broadcasting and so forth that’s asked me about this. Why is that?
There’s plenty of press here. You go up to the Capitol, it’s crawling with reporters.
There’s plenty of press here, but there’s not a sensitivity to the importance of this department. And the work that this department does. You’re interested in the State Department. You’re interested in Treasury. You’re interested in the AG’s office … But you’re not coming down here.
And this department has probably the broadest portfolio of any department in the entire government. It’s like, well, that’s Ag. No. It’s rural America. It’s 15 percent of the population. It’s 75 percent of the land mass. It’s the entire feedstock for all the energy we produce in this country. It is most of the food we produce. It impacts virtually every drop of water you consume and we need. It’s a really important place.
And it doesn’t get anywhere near the attention it deserves. Not for lack of trying, man. We tried. Can’t tell you how many folks at your level that I talk to about this and it’s like, “Oh, that’s interesting. This is really important to the country.”
You make an important point about the lack of cultural awareness among the big city press corps when it comes to this department and what you guys do for the country broadly. I guess I’m talking about a separate issue which I think is just as acute, if not more so — which is the collapse of local and regional press, which would be a way to get your story out. Look, The Des Moines Register is now a shadow of what it was because Gannett, like in a lot of cities, has shredded these papers.
Wait a minute. Stop. Stop. That’s bullshit. And I’ll tell you why it’s bullshit. You’re correct that The Des Moines Register is a shadow of what it was. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that it can’t cover what it should cover.
I can tell you that The Des Moines Register has 85 articles about athlete of the week. Eighty-five articles about who scored the touchdown in the 5A game between Waukee and Ankeny. They got plenty of coverage for that. Fair enough. That’s a choice that they make. They could just as easily have two or three people covering agriculture or rural communities or small towns or the conversion of agricultural waste into energy. Or renewable energy. Or local and regional food systems. They choose not to do so.
The Hartmann Report, What Does Agenda 47 Spell for America’s Future? Thom Hartmann, right, Dec. 3, 2024. A stark warning about Trump’s dystopian plans for his second term...
“The ideas you are about to hear are not idle conjecture. I have built upon a foundation of indisputable first causes, so that the unifying force which controls the cosmos is revealed in full clarity.” — Jack Vance
Trump named the plans for his second term “Agenda 47,” although for reasons known only to them, America’s mainstream media persists in ignoring it. They shouldn’t.
At best, it’s a dystopian nightmare: at worst it means ending our current system of American government; aligning the US with Russia and other autocratic nations; and the USA leading the charge against democracy and in favor of authoritarian, strong-man forms of government across the world.
Over at his website, Trump lays out the details of his governing agenda, complete with short videos promoting each of the steps he plans to take. They, and his many statements about future plans — which we’ll probably see implemented during his first 100 days — include:Gut the EPA, OSHA, CPSB, IRS, the Labor Department, and other federal agencies that keep our air clean, our water pure, and protect average Americans from predation by the morbidly rich and their corporations
Back in the 1970s, Richard Nixon said he was going to use “impoundment” to strip funding from agencies his donors didn’t like, claiming that, even though Congress had appropriated budgets for them, he could, as head of the Executive Branch, simply “impound” the money and refuse to spend it. His plan to remake the federal government was interrupted by Watergate.
In 1974, Democrats in Congress got together and passed legislation outlawing this and Jerry Ford signed it into law. But Trump’s lawyers apparently think they can get it overturned through their appointees on the courts or even, as they will now have both branches of Congress, through new legislation. As Trump says on his website:
“I will use the president’s long-recognized Impoundment Power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings.”
Trump’s appointed Musk and Ramaswamy to identify “fraud and waste” in federal agencies, a mantra since the Reagan presidency used to strip agencies his donors and their corporations resent. Every Republican president has used this phrase in this way, but Trump promises to turn Reagan’s and Bush’s scalpel into a meataxe.
Since the fossil fuel companies, banks, refineries, anti-union big employers, and their billionaires who fund the GOP hate all of these agencies, it’ll be a bonanza for them.
Not so much for working people, retirees, and those of us concerned about a livable future environment for our kids and grandkids, though.Destroy the media and the truth
First, he wants to make it illegal for the federal government’s security services to notify social media platforms about Russian disinformation and other foreign efforts to swing elections, since nearly 100% of those efforts are coming from authoritarian countries in support of Trump and against democracy.
“I will ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-’ or ‘dis-information,’” Trump proclaims on his Agenda 47 website.
He also wants to force social media to carry his buddy Putin’s trolls’ lies and attempts to pit Americans against each other, and limit the companies’ ability to label or block lies and propaganda. As Trump puts it:
“I will ask Congress to send a bill to my desk revising Section 230 to get big online platforms out of censorship business.”
In Hungary, one way Viktor Orbán got rid of actual news media and replaced the ownership of all the nation’s major radio and TV networks, websites, and newspapers was by changing the libel laws so that public figures (like Orbán himself) could sue for libel when they thought they were treated unfairly.
They then sued company after company, commentator after commentator, reporter after reporter, into bankruptcy.
Orbán’s rightwing buddies then bought the media properties out of bankruptcy which is why now virtually all the media in Hungary is like Fox “News,” broadcasting suck-ups to Orbán and criticism of “liberals,” immigrants, and gays 24/7.
Trump wants to do the same here in the US. Is the announced divestment of MSNBC by Comcast an early indicator that corporate media sees this coming?
When Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury came out with some unflattering characterizations of Trump in it, the then-president said:
“We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts. And if somebody says something that’s totally false and knowingly false, that the person that has been abused, defamed, libeled, will have meaningful recourse.”
Similarly, Trump’s appointee to head the FBI says they’ll be coming after reporters and opinion writers and their publications:
“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Kash Patel said. “We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
Simply reporting on what Trump’s up to could bring lawsuits that would bankrupt even the Times or the Post, and, like in Hungary and Russia, pretty much end the existence of a free and independent press in America.Turning America into a vigilante police state
Trump has promised to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists who tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House (and whose actions led to the death of four police officers), and put into place a national “stop and frisk” law that upends the 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
It would also — like Duterte in the Philippines who executed over 10,000 people during his reign of terror — authorize the federal government to immediately execute anybody convicted of trafficking in drugs without further due process or appeals.
Trump has already tested the limits of his own lawbreaking when it comes to creating a police state and gotten away with it. In 2020, he sent armed federal officers — without identification and in unmarked vehicles — into Portland to illegally snatch unarmed peaceful protestors off the streets, intimidate and beat them up, and dump them. Expect this test to go nationwide.
Republicans in Texas have already pioneered using vigilantes to hunt down women who’ve had abortions and the people who’ve helped them. Expect these vigilante-enforced laws to spread across the country with a second Trump administration, with groups like the Proud Boys and 3 Percenters becoming the modern-day equivalent of the old west’s 19th century bounty hunters.
New York Times, Guest Essay: Trump’s Project 2025 May Not Be What It Seemed. It’s Worse, Thomas B. Edsall, right, Dec. 4, 2024. On Nov. 19, two weeks after Election Day, Elon Musk demonstrated perhaps the most brutal, if not sadistic, technique for making life in the federal civil service intolerable.
A Wall Street Journal headline from Nov. 22 captured the situation well: “Musk Unleashes Online Army on Federal Workers.”
What happened? Musk had reposted a tweet declaring, “I don’t think the U.S. Taxpayer should pay for the employment of a ‘Director of Climate Diversification’ at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.” Musk added a comment, echoing the language of the president-elect: “So many fake jobs.”
Musk’s tweet, which was viewed by 33.2 million people, described Ashley Thomas, a 37-year-old who, The Journal reported, holds “engineering, business and water science degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Oxford” and works as the “little-known director of climate diversification” at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, which advises “private companies to fund ways to improve living standards in developing countries.” A Finance Corporation official told The Journal that Thomas’s work “is highly technical and is focused on identifying innovations that serve U.S. strategic interests, including bolstering agriculture and infrastructure against extreme weather events.”
As evidence mounted that Thomas’s job was under threat, she sought to pull herself out of the spotlight, taking down all of her social media accounts.
The social media excoriation of public sector employees is just one way that President-elect Donald Trump and his MAGA loyalists are using to destroy what they see as strongholds of the left in government and academia.
Despite their owners’ protestations to the contrary, the fear of retribution from Trump and his allies appears, at least to me, to have prompted two major newspapers, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, to decline to endorse anyone in the presidential contest.
Similarly, corporate America — also seemingly in recognition of Trump’s explicit threats to punish adversaries — nearly doubled its support for Trump to $660.5 million in 2024, up from $358.2 million in 2020. Business support for President Biden was $563.3 million in 2020, and it was $450.8 million for Kamala Harris in 2024, according to OpenSecrets.
In further anticipation of a vengeful Trump-led administration, companies are “scrubbing left-leaning policies from their websites and scoping out appearances on conservative podcasts,” The Journal reported last week.
With Trump and his allies on the move, organizations that rose after the 2016 election to fight the Trump administration have largely folded their tents, at least for now. “The anti-Trump movement,” Politico reported shortly after Nov. 5, “is in tatters. Now it’s scrambling to remain relevant.”
In fact, preliminary signs — “Anti-Trump Burnout: The Resistance Says It’s Exhausted,” as my colleagues in the newsroom put it — suggest that the liberal opposition is doing just what Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale who has written extensively about Hitler and Stalin, warned against: “Do not obey in advance.”
New York Times, Trump Chooses Paul Atkins to Run the S.E.C., Matthew Goldstein and David Yaffe-Bellany, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). President-elect Donald J. Trump picked Paul Atkins to serve as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, turning to a pro-business conservative and former regulator to run the agency that is in charge of protecting investors from fraud and malfeasance on Wall Street.
Mr. Trump made the announcement in a post on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday.
Mr. Atkins, 66, who was an S.E.C. commissioner under President George W. Bush, is a well-known, and generally admired, figure in Washington legal circles and the securities regulatory community. In the early 1990s he worked at the S.E.C. during both Republican and Democratic administrations.
He is also seen as a strong advocate for looser regulation of crypto assets — an issue that Mr. Trump adopted as part of his campaign.
Shortly after his term as S.E.C. commissioner ended in 2008, Mr. Atkins founded Patomak Global Partners, a financial services consulting firm. Patomak provides advisory services to banks and investment firms on regulatory and compliance matters. More recently, the firm has advised clients on issues related to crypto and digital assets.
Patomak is an influential firm in the financial world and many lawyers who have worked at the S.E.C. are familiar with Mr. Atkins. Tyler Gellasch, a former S.E.C. lawyer who runs the Healthy Markets Association, an organization that advocates greater securities regulation, called Mr. Atkins the “godfather of Republican capital markets policy.”
Mr. Atkins, a lawyer, has been playing an active role in helping to draft “best practices” for crypto trading platforms as co-chair of the Token Alliance, which is part of the Digital Chamber of Commerce. He is also on the advisory board for Securitize, a digital asset firm that promotes the use of digital tokens.
New York Times, Trump Picks Jared Isaacman, Entrepreneur and Private Astronaut, to Lead NASA, Kenneth Chang, Dec. 4, 2024. Mr. Isaacman’s company Shift4 Payments made him a billionaire, and he has financed two trips to orbit on SpaceX vehicles, including a daring spacewalk in September.
Mr. Isaacman, the chief executive of the payment processing company Shift4 Payments, is a close associate of Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, and, if confirmed to the post by the Senate, would bring the perspective of an outsider to the space agency and its $25 billion budget.
“Jared will drive NASA’s mission of discovery and inspiration, paving the way for groundbreaking achievements in Space science, technology, and exploration,” Mr. Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.
One of the key issues for the next NASA administrator is how to get NASA’s centerpiece Artemis program back on track to send NASA astronauts to the moon. The first landing of astronauts is to occur during the Artemis III mission, currently scheduled for late 2026. However, key components needed to accomplish that, including the lunar lander being developed by SpaceX, appear to be behind schedule.
The Trump administration could seek much bigger changes at NASA, including possibly scaling back Artemis and pivoting to Mr. Musk’s desired destination: Mars. NASA could also be included in wider efforts to pare down the number of federal employees.
New York Times, Supreme Court Appears Inclined to Uphold Tennessee Law on Transgender Care, Adam Liptak, Dec. 4, 2024. Assessing the court’s direction was complicated by the silence of one justice in the conservative majority, Neil Gorsuch. A decision is expected by June.
Members of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed ready on Wednesday to uphold a Tennessee law denying transition care to transgender youth, with some of them saying that judgments about contested scientific evidence should be made by legislatures rather than judges.
“The Constitution leaves that question to the people’s representatives, rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said leaving the question to the states was an alarming abdication of responsibility. “I’m suddenly quite worried,” she said, adding that courts must assess the constitutionality of laws challenged on equal protections.
The wide-ranging argument, which lasted about two-and-a-half hours, touched on the approaches of other nations, the force of a precedent protecting transgender workers and the role of parental rights. But the core question the justices focused on was whether the Tennessee law made distinctions based on sex, which would subject it to a demanding form of judicial scrutiny.
Assessing the court’s ultimate direction was complicated by the silence of the author of the employment discrimination case, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch. But it seemed probable that there were at least five votes for rejecting the equal protection challenge to the law.
More than 20 other states have similar laws that could be affected. The court’s decision, expected by June, will almost certainly yield a major statement on transgender rights. Arguments are unfolding against the backdrop of a fierce public debate over the role that gender identity should play in matters as varied as sports, bathrooms and pronouns.
The Tennessee law, which is being challenged by three families and a doctor, prohibits medical providers from prescribing puberty-delaying medication, providing hormone therapy, or performing surgery to treat what the law calls “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.”
The law allows those same treatments for “a congenital defect, precocious puberty, disease or physical injury,” leading the plaintiffs, backed by the Biden administration, to argue that the law violates the Constitution by denying equal protection to transgender people, primarily by discriminating against them based on sex.
New York Times, Trump’s Incoming Border Czar Sees Texas as a ‘Model’ for Enforcement, J. David Goodman, Dec. 4, 2024. Tom Homan, an immigration hard-liner selected by President-elect Donald J. Trump to be his “border czar,” squeezed into a helicopter last week, as Gov. Greg Abbott gave an aerial tour of all that Texas had done to stop people from crossing illegally from Mexico.
There is a newly built camp for the Texas National Guard, whose border mission has looked a lot like a military deployment. Nearby, a line of buoy barriers in the Rio Grande puts migrants at risk of drowning. The river’s edge bristles with concertina wire that has often left bordercrossers with cuts and gashes. State police officers regularly patrol the brush, arresting migrants in an unusual extension of state authority into immigration matters.
“This is a model we can take across the country,” Mr. Homan said, addressing a group of National Guard members and Texas state troopers involved in border enforcement in the border city of Eagle Pass. “I am impressed by what I’ve seen today.”
Meidas Touch Network, Kash Patel Called for Impeaching Federal Judges in 2023, Staff Report, Dec. 2, 2024. Trump's FBI nominee: "People aren't going to like this."
During an appearance on Don Jr.'s Triggered podcast in September 2023, Kash Patel, a close ally of Donald Trump and his nominee for FBI director, advocated for Republicans to begin impeaching federal judges—an extraordinary suggestion that undermines judicial independence and the rule of law.
Patel had his perpetual trademark sniffle working during the interview (the cold he has apparently had for years that he just can’t shake), while Junior looked on through bloody slits for eye sockets with a bright red flushed face.
Patel specifically targeted judges presiding over cases involving January 6th rioters and Trump himself, labeling them as "political terrorists" and calling impeachment a necessary "drastic measure." His comments suggest a willingness to use the power of impeachment—a tool historically reserved for addressing misconduct or criminal behavior—as a partisan weapon against members of the judiciary who rule against his political allies.
This rhetoric is not only unprecedented but also disqualifying for someone seeking to lead the FBI, a position that demands impartiality and a steadfast commitment to the Constitution. The FBI director must uphold the principles of justice and independence, not orchestrate politically motivated attacks on judges.
Patel’s comments signal that, under his leadership, the FBI could be weaponized to target perceived political enemies, eroding public trust in the agency and the judiciary alike. Judicial independence is a cornerstone of American democracy. It ensures that judges can make decisions based on the law, free from political pressure or intimidation.
The call to impeach judges who oversee politically sensitive cases should alarm Americans across the political spectrum. It is a blatant effort to undermine the judiciary’s independence and turn it into a partisan battleground. Kash Patel’s comments are a stark reminder of why his nomination to lead the FBI is deeply troubling and why his vision for the agency is incompatible with democratic principles.
Meidas Touch Network, Investigative Commentary: The Big Reason Why Hunter's Pardon is Justified: Kash Patel, Ron Filipkowski, right, Dec. 2, 2024. I've listened to hundreds of interviews of Trump's FBI Director nominee.
I awoke this morning after a three day unplugged trip to Montreal to learn that in the previous 24 hours, two things had happened: Trump named Kash Patel as his FBI Director and then Joe Biden pardoned his only surviving son, Hunter. Neither one of these things were especially surprising since it is clear to me the two things are connected, but I was surprised by some of the reaction from those in the media, the Never Trump (former) Republicans, and a few Democratic elected officials.
Most of the criticism has taken the form of three primary arguments: 1. Trump will now have justification to make egregious pardons because of this; 2. Joe Biden lied and Dems who support the decision are hypocrites who claim to believe in the Rule of Law but really don’t; 3. Critics of the critics who cite Trump’s previous pardons are wrong because his awfulness doesn’t justify Joe’s awfulness.
None of these things address the REAL reason for the pardon: Trump’s appointment of Patel, who has ranted and raved for the past four years on every right-wing podcast in America that he was going to get Hunter Biden for things he has never been prosecuted for. Joe takes that threat seriously. Apparently, the critics either do not, or are ignorant and unaware of exactly who Patel is and what he has pledged to do specific to Hunter.
I have spent the last 4 years covering right-wing shows, channels, conferences and podcasts. Some very fringy, conspiratorial and obscure. I am aware from time to time a legacy media journalist will dip their toe into that world by spending a week watching Steve Bannon or Charlie Kirk, write an article, and give their expert analysis. That has not been me. I have been immersed in their world day after day, week after week, year after year. One person I have watched hundreds of times at all of these places is Kash Patel.
Patel first caught the attention of Trump while serving as an aide to Devin Nunes’s staff during the 2017-18 RussiaGate investigation. That led to an appointment by Trump late in his Administration to a post that Patel has no business ever being in: interim Chief of Staff to interim DOD Secretary Chris Miller, left. An interim to an interim. I have also heard Patel lie about and exaggerate his resume and accomplishments on an almost daily basis to the point of absurdity.
In these hundreds of Patel interviews, there was always a central theme: That Trump was going to win, Patel was likely going to be appointed CIA or FBI Director, then he was going to use that appointment to go after Trump’s enemies from the Russia investigation, members of the media who supposedly lied about Trump, eliminate thousands of career civil servants (the Deep State), and go after Hunter and Joe Biden with a new criminal investigation.
I have posted many clips over the years of some of Patel’s most outlandish threats and statements. Some of them have been resurfaced by legacy media outlets, but only the ones where Patel vows to go after them, or to clean out government agencies. They never play the clips I posted where he obsesses on Hunter Biden, and boy, was he obsessed with Hunter Biden.
This is what Patel said last year in just one of the clips I posted:
Steve Bannon to Kash: “Do you feel confident when you go back as a senior member of this Administration starting in 2025 that you will be able to deliver the goods? That we can have serious prosecutions? That the people who did evil deeds will be held accountable and prosecuted? Can you deliver this in the first couple of months so we can get rolling on criminal prosecutions?”
Kash Patel: “Yes. We will find the conspirators not just in government but in the media. We are going to come after the people in the media who helped Biden rig the presidential election - we’re putting you all on notice.”
I should also emphasize that when he is talking about media “rigging” the election, he is talking about their refusal to cover the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop -- Rudy Giuliani’s October Surprise in 2020.
SpyTalk, Investigation: How Kash Patel Bungled a SEAL Team Six Hostage Rescue, Seth Hettena, Dec. 2, 2024. “You could’ve gotten these guys killed!” a Pentagon official screamed at Patel.
YEARS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP NAMED HIM TO RUN THE FBI, Kash Patel was a prosecutor in the Obama Justice Department assigned to work with Delta Force and the SEAL Team Six.
He told Vanity Fair that his job was to advise the elite operators as they went after “the global rack and stack of bad guys, determined the order, established find/fix/finish options, and then executed.”
A self-described “deep state” wrecking ball, Patel is fond of saying things like this that have made him a favorite of Trump’s MAGA base. However, during the first Trump administration, Patel’s actions revealed him as a bombastic fool who put SEAL Team Six in harm’s way through his ineptitude.
On October 30, 2020, President Trump signed off on a mission to have SEAL Team Six rescue Philip Walton, a 27-year-old American who gunmen had abducted from his farm in the West African nation of Niger, near the border with Nigeria. The kidnappers had hustled Walton across the border to Nigeria and were demanding a $1 million ransom.
In their book Only I Can Fix It, journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker reported that the plan called for the SEALs to parachute into northern Nigeria and move three miles on foot to reach the compound where Walton was being held.
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper had signed off on the plan with one or two questions: Did we have permission to fly over Nigeria?
Patel, then the senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, assured the Pentagon that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “got the airspace cleared.”
A few hours later, the Pentagon learned that Patel was wrong: Nigeria had not given permission.
This was a huge mistake. By that point, the aircraft carrying the SEALs were only fifteen miles away from the Nigerian border.
The Air Force planes were swiftly rerouted, circling the skies for an hour while State Department officials worked frantically to obtain clearances to cross the border.
As Esper recalled in his memoir, A Sacred Oath, “By the time Mike [Pompeo] and I spoke an hour later, he still didn’t have the okay from the remaining country. He also didn’t know where Patel received his information. Pompeo never spoke with him.”
“How did we receive the bad information in the first place?” Pompeo wondered.
Esper said his team “suspected Patel made the approval story up, but they didn’t have all the facts.”
New York Times, Trump Wants to Shake Up Health Care. Many Americans Don’t Mind, Jack Healy, Isabelle Taft and Kate Selig, Dec. 3, 2024 (print ed.). Some voters said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has teamed up with President-elect Trump, had given voice to their frustrations with the health system.
As a nature-loving physical therapist in Boulder, Colo., Colin O’Banion shops at farmers markets, grows organic squash in his backyard and thought he could never vote for Donald J. Trump.
But during the pandemic, he said, he and his wife became social outcasts when they refused Covid-19 vaccines for themselves and their three sons. Tuning in to alternative health podcasts, he became convinced that the country’s public health establishment was corrupt, and that the only antidote was the upheaval being promised by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as he teamed up with Mr. Trump.
“That’s what brought me on board,” Mr. O’Banion, 49, said, still sounding surprised that he had voted for Mr. Trump, now the president-elect. “We have a real epidemic going on with metabolic disease, diabetes, obesity. How is it possible we have so much money and the most unhealthy people?”
Scientists and public health experts have expressed alarm that Mr. Trump wants to give over the country’s health agencies to people like Mr. Kennedy and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who have spread misinformation about vaccines and Covid treatments and vowed to gut the government agencies that regulate food and medicines.
But to people like Mr. O’Banion, rejecting norms is exactly the point.
Trust in scientists and medical experts has eroded since the pandemic, and voters galvanized by Mr. Kennedy’s pledge to “Make America Healthy Again” as head of the Department of Health and Human Services said that he had given voice to their frustrations with the whole system — from vaccines and Covid rules to hospitals and health insurance.
New York Times, Director of ‘2000 Mules’ Acknowledges the Conspiratorial Film Was Flawed, Nick Corasaniti and Ken Bensinger, Dec. 3, 2024 (print ed.). The director, Dinesh D’Souza, who is facing a lawsuit over the documentary, admitted that an analysis used to make claims about election fraud that were later debunked had been faulty.
More than two years after the widely debunked film “2000 Mules” poured gasoline on right-wing conspiracy theories about election fraud, the documentary’s writer and director, Dinesh D’Souza, has acknowledged that its findings were based on a faulty analysis.
Mr. D’Souza, right, said in a statement on his website that the analysis used in the film, which claimed to depict a vast ring of “mules” illegally gathering large numbers of ballots and surreptitiously placing them in drop boxes, was incorrect.
The film’s premise was based on matching surveillance videos from drop-box locations with geolocated cellphone data that appeared to show repeated trips to areas near drop boxes during the 2020 election.
“We recently learned that surveillance videos used in the film may not have actually been correlated with the geolocation data,” Mr. D’Souza, who is facing a lawsuit over the documentary, said in the statement, which he released on Nov. 26.
Despite being swiftly debunked by both Republican and Democratic election officials, the film garnered more than a million views online in less than two weeks after its release in 2022 and eventually grossed more than $1.4 million. A glitzy premiere at Mar-a-Lago drew Donald J. Trump, the once and future president, as well as Republican luminaries and influential figures in the movement to discredit the 2020 election.
The surveillance videos used in the film were obtained by True the Vote, a right-wing election organization that was a partner in producing the film. In a statement on its website on Monday, the group said the film’s central premise “remains accurate” despite the apology.
The admission from Mr. D’Souza follows years of defiance: He had long argued that the evidence in his film was sound even as election experts at the state and local levels declared the conclusions unfounded. In 2022, the Republican attorney general of Arizona asked the F.B.I. to investigate True the Vote for ignoring requests to share the documentary’s evidence.
Relevant Recent Headlines
New York Times, Analysis: A Second Trump Term Poses a Crucial Test of the Senate’s Independence, Carl Hulse
More On Health Care Exec's Murder
Yesterday a gunman assassinated the chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, as he arrived at a meeting of investors in New York City.
While authorities are still investigating, officials have released the information that the casings of the bullets that killed Thompson bore the words “deny,” “defend,” “depose,” all words associated with companies’ denial of health insurance, taken from the longer phrases “deny the claim,” “defend the lawsuit,” “depose the patient.”
While those clues could simply be a red herring, posters on social media have cheered what they seem to see as revenge against an abusive system in which people’s lives are at the mercy of executives who prioritize profits.
Health insurance companies have long been under scrutiny for their practices. For the past two years, ProPublica has run a long series exploring the different ways in which companies have developed systems to deny healthcare coverage to their policyholders.
UnitedHealthcare has been no exception either to such practices or to scrutiny. Its parent group UnitedHealth has a market valuation of $560 billion and was the eighth largest corporation in the world last year as measured by revenue. This year, UnitedHealthcare—Thompson’s unit—is expected to bring in $280 billion in revenue.
UnitedHealth is embroiled in a number of lawsuits. Andrew Stanton of Newsweek reported that on November 14, 2023, families of two now-deceased patients sued UnitedHealthcare over denial of coverage for Medicare Advantage patients for nursing home stays prescribed by their doctors. Medicare Advantage is the private insurance alternative to Medicare that receives a flat fee from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It’s an enormously profitable industry, and UnitedHealth controls almost a third of it.
The lawsuit alleges that UnitedHealthcare uses artificial intelligence to deny claims from Medicare Advantage policyholders. The lawsuit claims that the company knowingly uses an algorithm that makes errors 90% of the time because it also knows that only about 0.2% of policy holders will appeal the decision to deny their claims. Last month the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hammered UnitedHealth for dramatic increases in their denial rates for post-acute care between 2019 and 2022 as it switched to AI authorizations.
On the same day as the shooting, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance covering Connecticut, New York, and Missouri announced it would cover anesthesia during surgery or procedures only for a specific time period in order to make insurance more affordable by reducing overbilling.
After an outcry both from anesthesiologists and the public, the company today retracted its policy change, saying it had never intended to avoid “medically necessary anesthesia,” but meant simply to “clarify the appropriateness of anesthesia consistent with well-established clinical guidelines.” Their explanation might have calmed the news cycle, but its suggestion that the insurance officials rather than doctors should determine what anesthesia is appropriate for a patient during surgery echoed the argument in the UnitedHealthcare lawsuit.
Thompson’s murder seems to be a cultural moment in which popular fury over the power big business has over ordinary Americans’ lives exploded. Maureen Tkacik of The American Prospect noted, “Only about 50 million customers of America’s reigning medical monopoly might have a motive to exact revenge upon the UnitedHealthcare CEO.” The shooter, whose actual motive remains unknown, is fast becoming a folk hero.
Social media has exploded with users writing things like “[t]his claim for sympathy has been denied”; songs featuring the words “deny, “defend,” and “depose”; and recorded commentary condemning the healthcare insurance industry. UnitedHealth Group posted its sadness about Thompson’s death on Facebook yesterday about 1:00 p.m.; 36 hours later the post had 65,000 laughing emojis under it.
Security expert Charlie Carroll expressed surprise to Josh Fiallo of the Daily Beast that Thompson did not have a security detail. “We’re living in a world where people are extremely disgruntled,” Carroll said. “When people lose trust in the system, you start seeing more kidnappings and assassinations because they feel like they have to take matters into their own hands.”
In the wake of the shooting, UnitedHealthcare and several other insurance companies took down from their websites the names and photographs of their officials.
Emptywheel, Analysis Zeynep Tufekci’s Two Blind Spots Cross at DOGE, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), Dec. 7, 2024.The glee surrounding Brian Thompson's death is not unprecedented -- Donald Trump campaigned on a similar mob glee, targeting Paul Pelosi, to get elected. And then he installed a bunch of billionaires to start looting. And politicians like Elizabeth Warren have already suggested some "broad public solutions" to that looting.
Zeynep Tufekci has a column at NYT scolding thousands of people on social media for taking glee in the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
I don’t care one way or another for the scold. I care about how she makes a remarkable claim and then uses it to engage in political nihilism.Tufekci claims that she can’t remember any murder being so openly celebrated in the US. "I’ve been studying social media for a long time, and I can’t think of any other incident when a murder in this country has been so openly celebrated."
From there, Tufekci likens this moment to the Gilded Age, where social upheaval led to exploitation and political violence.
.As a threshold matter, I find her claim that this is a unique moment of glee to be … forgetful. Just two years ago, after all, Donald Trump and Elon Musk — whose platform has encouraged such mob celebrations — both led their mob in vicious jokes about Paul Pelosi’s near-murder.
Indeed, Trump used attacks on Paul Pelosi at least twice in his campaign — most recently, campaigning with some cops in September.
How do you forget that the richest man in the world and the President-elect have engaged in just such celebration of political violence (and that’s before he pardons seditionists)?
Donald Trump got elected by celebrating political violence. And then he proceeded to install at least 11 billionaires, ready to start looting government.
Which is where Tufekci’s failure to find any will to push for systematic solutions gets curious. After all, Lina Khan’s efforts to rein in monopolies played a role in last year’s election.
WaPo’s coverage of all the billionaires Trump installed quotes Josh Hawley along with Elizabeth Warren and Noah Bookbinder.
Trump’s team of rivals stands in stark contrast with President Joe Biden’s Cabinet, which had a combined net worth of $118 million in the first year of his presidency, according to Forbes. Trump’s picks have not yet released their financial disclosures, but his 2025 Cabinet is likely to be even richer than the first Trump Cabinet, which had a combined net worth of $6.2 billion.[snip]Trump’s selections may be more inclined to look out for the interests of their own businesses and their fellow billionaires than for working-class voters, said Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.“It is hard to see how a Cabinet made up largely of the very, very wealthiest of Americans is going to have an understanding of what the needs of regular Americans are,” he said.[snip]
And even beyond Khan’s work, the Biden Administration took efforts to reverse the kind of concentration that made Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg rich. They’ve even taken action against … United Healthcare.
The richest man in the world is about to come for VA Health Care and once that fails to make way for new tax cuts, Medicare. No one knows where this moment of rage will go. The oligarchs have the means to exercise the power of the state against those complaining that Trump’s billionaires plan to use bullshit claims about efficiency to make things far worse.But the people who brought us to this moment where mobs take glee at political violence are about to loot the government.And I’m pretty sure Senator Warren will be ready at hand to explain what is going down.
New York Times, The ‘Chilling’ Fatal Shooting of a C.E.O. Has Business Leaders on Edge, Emma Goldberg, Dec. 6, 2024. After Brian Thompson of UnitedHealthcare was killed in Manhattan, the phones at corporate security firms were “ringing off the hook.”
A Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company raised its drug prices, and then board members and executives received phone calls threatening violence. A health care company’s board meeting was disrupted after board members were targeted in “swatting” attacks that wrongly sent law enforcement officers to their homes.
These incidents happened before the fatal shooting of Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive, in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday. The police had not offered a motive for the shooting as of Thursday night, or said it was related to Mr. Thompson’s work in the insurance industry.
The killing, however, stunned business leaders, some of whom were already concerned about safety. Over the last five years, there has been a sharp rise in targeted attacks, digital and offline, of executives and their families, said Chris Pierson, the chief executive of BlackCloak, a digital executive protection firm. Health care, biomedical and pharmaceutical leaders tend to be targeted more often than executives in other industries, according to the firm’s data.
Digital platforms have made it easier to obtain information about executives’ identities and locations, while social media has fanned the flames of vitriol directed at these corporate leaders.
Businesses have been increasing their spending on protection: The median amount spent on executive security among the S&P 500 companies that disclose that information doubled from 2021 to 2023, according to Equilar, an executive compensation research firm.
New York Times, Was Brian Thompson’s Killer a Hit Man? Unlikely, Experts Say, Annie Correal, Dec. 6, 2024. The murder of Brian Thompson did not appear to have been committed by a coldly calculating professional, according to people who study criminal behavior.
For the general public, the shooting in Manhattan of the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare on Wednesday seemed like something off Netflix: a coldblooded morning murder outside a hotel, a hooded man shooting a corporate bigwig from behind, the victim turning to face the attacker before crumpling to the ground, mortally wounded.
But beyond those images from a dark surveillance video, little is known about the shooting or the gunman. The police have not established a motive for the killing, and three days into their search they have not publicly named a suspect or made an arrest.
For those who professionally study criminal behavior, though, the shooting was packed with crucial information, with the killer’s every known move providing new opportunities to speculate about who he might be.
The police said the shooting was a targeted attack by someone with experience with firearms. But was that someone acting on a personal grudge — or a hired hand? And if the killer was a hit man, was he an amateur or a seasoned professional?
The consensus among experts following the killing of Brian Thompson, the veteran chief executive of one of the nation’s largest health insurers, was that the shooter could indeed handle himself around a gun, but that everything else suggested that he was unlikely to have been hired to commit the crime.
“Forgive me for saying too much on too little evidence, but it looks like the kind of guy that made up his mind that he was doing the right thing,” said David Shapiro, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, and a former F.B.I. special agent. “He didn’t look like a guy that was fearful.”
He added: “In terms of a professional hit man, that seems unlikely. It would be very hard to get somebody to do something like this. It’s very high risk.”
The gunman waited by a specific entrance to the New York Hilton Midtown and fired his weapon with confidence. He also appeared to have outfitted his gun with a silencer, which are rarely used in murders.
Public Health, Scandal, #MeToo, Trafficking, Abortion.
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.
The union made sense, at first, when you rationalized that she was famous, and he was a Kennedy and an environmental lawyer. His anti-vax stuff is weird, but then again, Hollywood is also a weird place, with people rolling jade over their faces and stuffing jade up their hoo-has and spending $22 for a single dumb smoothie at a grocery store called Erewhon. The spectrum of nutty is sometimes a circle. Mazel tov, you crazy kids.
Then, in 2022, RFK Jr. compared coronavirus restrictions to the Holocaust, and accused Anthony S. Fauci of perpetuating “fascism.” Hines responded on Twitter: “My husband’s opinions are not a reflection of my own. While we love each other, we differ on many current issues.” This sounded like the kind of statement that usually precedes a carefully crafted conscious uncoupling. But instead it preceded the announcement that Kennedy was running for president, with Hines by his side. “I support Bobby and I want to be there for him, and I want him to feel loved and supported by me,” she told the New York Times.
Then the personal stuff started to trickle out — the stuff about planting a dead bear cub in Central Park, the stuff about strapping a decaying whale head to his car roof, the stuff about the nanny who said he had sexually assaulted her (he allegedly sent her a text saying he had “no memory” of the incident) — and you thought, Eesh, these things could not possibly have been part of Kennedy’s courtship disclosures, and once Cheryl is fully aware, it’s over. He had a brain worm, he’d once revealed in a deposition, and it had eaten part of his brain. Girl, run.
But no! She persevered. In August, Kennedy officially suspended his hopeless presidential campaign and further announced that, instead of supporting Kamala Harris, the son of a Democratic dynasty would be supporting Donald Trump. Earlier in the year, Kennedy was asked on a “Curb” premiere red carpet whether he would consider becoming Trump’s running mate. “I don’t think that my marriage would survive it,” he responded, prompting Hines to quip: “I think he’s right.”
Well, now she’ll leave, you might think, but you are being too literal: Kennedy did not become Trump’s running mate, he’s merely Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, so here we are.
If political betrayals did not end this marriage, what about personal scandals? Because, in September, after the brain worms and the “fascism” and the allusions to making ivermectin and raw milk available throughout the land — after all that, a 31-year-old reporter from New York magazine was suspended when it was revealed that she had engaged in a “personal relationship” with Kennedy, about whom she had written a profile for the magazine.
A week later, there was Cheryl, photographed in Paris, holding her hands up to her face with her fingers ostentatiously splayed outward to show us that her ring finger still bore a wedding band.
I have spent more time than is reasonable (and truly, any amount of time is unreasonable) thinking about the interior life of Cheryl Hines, a woman who has gone from playing a beleaguered wife on prestige television to a beleaguered wife in real life, hanging on to a husband whose hero’s journey is one absurd plot twist after another, whose soundtrack is a tuba.
But more than that, Hines is making me think about the ways we talk about political wives. The things we think we know about them, the inner lives we invent. The fact that for an entire term, delusional resistance figures speculated that Melania Trump was their ally on the inside — Did she secretly hate her husband? — except she never left, and her memoir published earlier this year makes it clear that she never will. The way that observers have expected Usha Vance to moderate her husband when she has given no public indication that she thinks he needs moderating. The Hillary Clinton of it all.
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.
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, How Kennedy Has Worked Abroad to Weaken Global Public Health Policy, Selam Gebrekidan, Justin Scheck, Sarah Hurtes and Pete McKenzie, Dec. 1, 2024 (print ed.). Donald Trump’s health secretary pick, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and his nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, have worked to undermine policies on measles, AIDS and more.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is in line to lead the Department of Health and Human Services in the next Trump administration, is well-known for promoting conspiracy theories and vaccine skepticism in the United States.
But Mr. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, has also spent years working abroad to undermine policies that have been pillars of global health policy for a half-century, records show.
He has done this by lending his celebrity, and the name of his nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, to a network of overseas chapters that sow distrust in vaccine safety and spread misinformation far and wide.
He, his organizations and their officials have interfered with vaccination efforts, undermined sex education campaigns meant to stem the spread of AIDS in Africa, and railed against global organizations like the World Health Organization that are in charge of health initiatives.
Along the way, Mr. Kennedy has partnered with, financed or promoted fringe figures — people who claim that 5G cellphone towers cause cancer, that homosexuality and contraceptive education are part of a global conspiracy to reduce African fertility and that the World Health Organization is trying to steal countries’ sovereignty.
Washington Post, The New Administration: Trump’s former FDA commissioner warns RFK Jr. could ‘cost lives,’ Dan Diamond, Nov. 30, 2024 (print ed.). Scott Gottlieb, right, who led the Food and Drug Administration during the Trump administration, on Friday warned that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could “cost lives” if confirmed as the next secretary of Health and Human Services.
“You’re going to see measles, mumps and rubella vaccination rates go down,” Gottlieb said on CNBC, referencing Kennedy’s longtime criticism of federal recommendations for childhood immunizations, and noting a recent decline in childhood vaccination rates. The nation is approaching a “tipping point,” Gottlieb said, where a continued decline in childhood vaccines could soon lead to measles outbreaks and deaths of children.
“We’re going to start seeing epidemics of diseases that have long been vanquished, and, God forbid, we see polio reemerge in this country,” he said.
Gottlieb said he had been warning senators against confirming Kennedy to run the federal health department, although he did not identify with whom he had spoken. He added that Kennedy, who founded one of the country’s most prominent antivaccine groups, had “smart people” around him who could take immediate steps to affect Americans’ access to vaccines, such as changing federal vaccine recommendations.
“There’s a lot of things that they could do day one, very easily, administratively,” Gottlieb said.
NBC News, RFK Jr. attacked the CDC’s ‘fascism’ and likened vaccinating children to abuse by the Catholic Church, Brandy Zadrozny, Nov. 27, 2024. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary, also argued for jailing vaccine scientists in previously unreported comments at autism conferences.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a dark view of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2019, he called the federal agency’s vaccine division a fascist enterprise and accused it of knowingly hurting children. He also compared what he saw as a widespread conspiracy to hide harms from the child vaccination program to the cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
“The word ‘fascism’ in Italian means a bundle of sticks, and what it means is the bundle is more important than the sticks,” Kennedy said in previously unreported remarks in 2019 to a private audience at AutismOne, a conference for parents of autistic children. “The institution, CDC and the vaccine program, is more important than the children that it’s supposed to protect.
New York Times, Trump Transition: Kennedy’s Inheritance: How Addiction and Trauma Shaped a Turbulent Life, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Susanne Craig and Rebecca Davis O’Brien, Nov. 29, 2024. Donald Trump’s pick to be health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has had a life of fame and addiction, and a career intertwined with conspiracy theories.
New York Times, How Will Trump’s Covid Contrarians Handle the Next Pandemic? Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Nov. 28, 2024 (print ed.). President-elect Donald J. Trump’s selections to run the nation’s health agencies are alarming infectious disease experts.
President-elect Donald J. Trump had already succeeded in rattling the nation’s public health and biomedical establishment by the time he announced on Tuesday that he had picked Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to run the National Institutes of Health. But amid growing fears of a deadly bird flu pandemic, perhaps no one was more rattled than experts in infectious disease.
Dr. Bhattacharya, a Stanford University medical economist and outspoken opponent of lockdowns, masking, school closures and other Covid-19 mitigation measures, and Mr. Trump’s other health picks have one thing in common. They are all considered Covid contrarians whose views raise questions about how they would handle an infectious disease crisis.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right, Mr. Trump’s choice for health secretary, has said he wants the N.I.H. to focus on chronic disease and “give infectious disease a break for about eight years.” Dr. Martin Makary, the president-elect’s choice to run the Food and Drug Administration, incorrectly predicted in 2021 that the nation was “racing toward an extremely low level of infection.”
Dr. David Weldon, a Republican former congressman who is Mr. Trump’s choice to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has espoused the debunked theory that thimerosal, a mercury compound in certain vaccines, causes autism. As a congressman, he introduced legislation that would strip the C.D.C. of its role in ensuring vaccine safety, saying the agency had a “conflict of interest” because it also promotes vaccination.
And Dr. Mehmet Oz, left, the talk show host who has been picked by Mr. Trump to run Medicare and Medicaid, prodded officials in the first Trump administration to give emergency authorization for the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19. The F.D.A. later revoked the authorization when studies showed the drug carried risks, including serious heart issues, to coronavirus patients.
Washington Post, Trump picks Jay Bhattacharya to lead NIH, overseeing scientific research, Dan Diamond, Nov. 28, 2024 (print ed.). The president-elect also named Jim O’Neill, a Silicon Valley investor and former federal health official, to be deputy secretary of Health and Human Services. Jay Bhattacharya will preside over the National Institutes of Health, a nearly $50 billion agency, if confirmed by the Senate.
Recent Relevant Headlines
The Bulwark, Opinion: RFK Jr. Said the Government May Have Planned COVID, Sam Stein and Andrew EggerPolitico, Health Care: Trump transition closes in on picks for top health postsThe Hill, Medicare Advantage gets ally in Dr. Oz
South Korean Crisis
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.
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.
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.”
Trump’s transition did not respond to a request for comment. Blanche did not respond to a message sent to his law firm email address.
The issue extends beyond Blanche, given that Trump also picked two of his other attorneys — Emil Bove and D. John Sauer — for principal associate deputy attorney general and solicitor general, respectively. Those are also top Justice Department roles. But Blanche has been tapped for the No. 2 position, just below the attorney general, and he has effectively been the face of Trump’s defense team since he signed on as his lawyer last year.
Blanche represented Trump through a tumultuous period that saw four separate indictments against Trump as he campaigned for another term in the White House. He led Trump’s defense team in three of the four cases: a federal case in Florida accusing Trump of mishandling classified materials; a separate federal case in D.C. charging him with trying to obstruct Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election; and a New York case involving charges of falsifying business records related to a 2016 hush money payment.
The two federal prosecutions against Trump have been dismissed, while the ultimate outcome of the New York case remains unclear. A jury there convicted Trump of 34 felony counts in May, though the judge has postponed sentencing multiple times, most recently to give the president-elect’s attorneys more time to argue the case should be thrown out given the results of the election.Former president Donald Trump addressed reporters before entering a Manhattan courtroom on April 15. (Video: The Washington Post)
While it remains unclear what specific steps Trump’s Justice Department could take involving matters where Blanche represented the president-elect, Trump has demanded retribution against his perceived foes.
Among other things, Trump has suggested that special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the two federal cases, should be thrown out of the country and said Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), who brought the New York case, should be prosecuted. The Washington Post has also reported that Trump plans to fire all members of Smith’s team.
“It’s not at all unusual for a criminal defense lawyer in the private sector to join DOJ,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University and an expert in legal and government ethics. “What makes this situation possibly fraught, I think, is not so much that revolving door as much as the threats, the completely inappropriate threats of retaliation.”
The deputy attorney general is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations at the Justice Department, a sprawling agency with more than 115,000 employees that bills itself as “the world’s largest law office.”
Blanche has experience with that office, having spent nearly a decade as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, according to his law firm’s website. He went on to become a criminal defense attorney and was a partner at the firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, before resigning to start his own firm and represent Trump.
During the New York trial, Blanche drew some reprimands from the judge, acting New York Supreme Court justice Juan Merchan, who told Blanche at one point that he was “losing all credibility.”
The judge found Trump in contempt, imposed a gag order and fined him for violating it. Hours after Trump was convicted, Blanche went on CNN to say Trump’s behavior was “exemplary.” He also criticized the prosecution, calling the case “completely unjust.”
Blanche’s stout defense of the president-elect continued with the court filing this month in New York. “Just as a sitting President is completely immune from any criminal process, so too is President Trump as President-elect,” Blanche and Bove wrote in arguing that the case should be dismissed. Prosecutors in Manhattan have suggested instead delaying any criminal proceedings until after Trump’s second term ends.
Experts said there was no issue with Blanche continuing to represent Trump during the transition period, emphasizing that he is a private citizen and has obligations toward Trump and any other clients.
Ethics expert Stephen Gillers said if he were advising Blanche, he would suggest that he stop representing Trump once he is formally nominated as deputy attorney general, presuming the New York case remains active at that point. “It looks bad when you’re representing the president while you’re awaiting confirmation for DOJ deputy,” said Gillers, a law professor emeritus at New York University.
Still, “the clear dividing line is the moment he’s sworn in,” Gillers said. Then, he said, “his client will change. His client will be the United States, and only the United States.”
Trump’s first attorney general in his first term, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election after it emerged that he had met with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the campaign and did not disclose that to senators during his confirmation.
Trump was outraged by Sessions’s recusal, and he remained angered by it years later, blaming Sessions for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s lengthy probe into whether Trump campaign officials had coordinated with Russian efforts.
Sessions was right to recuse himself, said Clark, the Washington University professor. But Trump’s reaction to his decision signals why it would be important for members of the Senate Judiciary Committee involved in Blanche’s confirmation hearing to “get on the record exactly what the scope of his recusals will be, where he sees the line of where he cannot participate,” Clark said.
While Justice Department prosecutors work for the executive branch, they have long operated “independent of presidential power,” said Scott Cummings, a UCLA law professor who teaches legal ethics.
That separation is based on rules and tradition, rather than constitutional constraints, Cummings said, adding that Trump picking his defense attorneys for top Justice Department jobs appears meant to “undercut the norm of independence” and bring the department under the president’s control.
Wald, the University of Denver professor, said Blanche is clearly qualified to be deputy attorney general but should steer clear of any Justice Department business that intersects with his previous work for Trump.
There have been attacks on the rule of law in the United States for the past decade or so, Wald said, and it’s important “to shore up trust and confidence in legal institutions,” including the Justice Department.
“An easy, easy solution could be simply to make sure that people who represented the president recently are not the same people making decisions about the very same matters on behalf of the United States of America,” Wald said.
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.
Often history tells us how the future may turn out: Trump isn’t the first American politician to use lies and slanders to whip up a war-like frenzy. Or to use the language of war for political gain.
Bush Junior wasn’t the first president to have lied to us about foreign affairs and war, or to use lies to justify eviscerating the Constitution. For example, Lyndon Johnson lied about a non-existent attack on the US warship Maddox in the Vietnamese Gulf of Tonkin. William McKinley (the presidency after which Karl Rove has said he’d modeled the Bush presidency) lied about an attack on the USS Maine to get us into the Spanish-American war in The Philippines and Cuba.
But most relevant to today's situation were John Adams’ version of Trump’s slanders when Adams (shown at left in an official portrait by John Trumbull circa 1792 when Adams was vice president), sent three emissaries to France and criminals soliciting bribes approached them late one evening. Adams referred to these three unidentified Frenchmen as “Mr. X, Mr. Y, and Mr. Z,” and made them out to represent such an insult and a threat against America that it may presage war.
Adams’ use of “The XYZ Affair” to gain political capital — much like Trump demonizes Hispanic and Haitian immigrants for political gain — nearly led us to war with France and helped him carve a large (although temporary) hole in the Constitution. Similarly, much like Trump’s anti-media “enemy of the people” rhetoric, John Adams then used that frenzy to jail newspaper editors and average citizens alike who spoke out against him and his policies.
The backstory is both fascinating and hopeful.
At that time in the late 1790s, Adams was President and Jefferson (shown in a portrait at right by Rembrandt Peale) was Vice President. Adams led the Federalist Party (which today could be said to have reincarnated as the Republican Party), and Jefferson had just brought together two Anti-Federalist parties — the Democrats and the Republicans — into one party called The Democratic Republicans. (Today they’re known as the Democratic Party, the longest-lasting political party in history. They dropped “Republican” from their name in the 1820-1830 era).
Adams and his Federalist cronies, using war hysteria with France as a wedge issue, were pushing the Alien & Sedition Acts through Congress, and even threw into prison Democratic Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont for speaking out against the Federalists on the floor of the House of Representatives.
Adams was leading the United States in the direction of a fascistic state with a spectacularly successful strategy of vilifying Jefferson and his Party as anti-American and pro-French. He was America’s first Trump, albeit nowhere near as toxic or psychopathic.
Adams rhetoric was described as “manly” by the Federalist newspapers, which admiringly published dozens of his threatening rants against France, suggesting that Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans were less than patriots and perhaps even traitors because of their opposition to the unnecessary war with France that Adams was simultaneously trying to gin up and saying he was working to avoid.
Jefferson knew that Adams’ Federalists did not represent the true heart and soul of America, and commented to Taylor about how Adams had been using divide-and-conquer politics, and fear-mongering about war with France (the XYZ Affair) with some success.
Jefferson did everything he could to stop that generation’s version of Trump, but Adams had the Federalists in control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and pushed through the Alien and Sedition Acts. In protest, Jefferson left town the day they were signed, never to return until after Adams left the presidency.
The tide was turned, to use Jefferson’s phrase, by the election of 1800, as Dan Sisson and I document in our book The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction — and What This Means Today.
The abuses of the Federalists were so burned into the people’s minds when Jefferson's party came to power and he freed the imprisoned newspaper editors so reform-minded newspapers were started back up again, that the Federalists disintegrated altogether as a party over the next two decades.
As may well happen to Trump’s GOP two or four years from now.
All because average citizens and pamphleteers — and a handful of progressive politicians — stood up and challenged the lies of a fear-mongering president, and politicians of principle were willing to lead.
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.
Politico, 2024 Elections: Trump voters feel very differently about things now that he’s won, our new poll shows, Jessica Piper, Nov. 29, 2024 (print ed.). A pair of POLITICO|Morning Consult polls, one conducted in the final days of the election and the other conducted after Trump won, show how public opinion has changed.
Donald Trump’s supporters thought voter fraud could determine the election outcome — until he won.
Heading into Election Day, nearly 9 in 10 Trump voters said fraud was a serious issue. Afterward, just a bit over one-third said so.
Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris has scrambled public opinion about a range of other issues, too. For example, his supporters were also more likely to feel good about the economy after the election — while Harris supporters adopted a more negative outlook.
Those are among the results of a new POLITICO|Morning Consult poll, designed to measure change in public opinion before and after the election. The results largely track with recent consumer sentiment data and comments from Republican leaders.
Our new poll showed voters’ perceptions of issues like election security and the economy swung substantially post-election, with deep differences based on who they voted for. The poll also found mixed expectations for a second Trump term.
The first poll (toplines, crosstabs) was conducted from Oct. 30 to Nov. 1, the week before the election, while the second (toplines, crosstabs) was in the field from Nov. 20 through 22, two weeks after Trump’s victory. Both surveys sampled more than 4,000 registered voters, with a margin of error of 2 percentage points.
Here are some of the big takeaways we learned from the results.Trump supporters worried less about voter fraud after he won
In polling just days before the election, Trump supporters expressed little confidence in the election outcome, with a whopping 87 percent substantially or somewhat agreeing with the statement that voter fraud was a “serious issue” that could determine the outcome of the election. Among Harris supporters, roughly half expressed similar worries.
That partisan divide disappeared after Election Day.
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.
These are frenzied times for the nascent Department of Government Efficiency.
In Silicon Valley, tech leaders are eagerly seeking positions or introductions to the department, even though for now it is not an actual part of government, but a loose grouping that Elon Musk named after an internet meme. On his social media platform, X, Mr. Musk posted a “Godfather”-style photo of himself as the “Dogefather,” asking government employees, “What did you get done this week?”
And in Washington, a House subcommittee has been announced to help push through President-elect Donald J. Trump’s vision, announced on Nov. 12, for a department that would slash the $6.7 trillion federal budget.
Members of Congress — even Democratic ones — have been offering up ideas for where to cut what Mr. Musk said could be $2 trillion out of the budget.
“It’s going to be very easy,” Elon Musk’s mother, Maye Musk, told Fox News on Tuesday, after she sat in on some of her son’s meetings. Mr. Musk will lead the department along with Vivek Ramaswamy, right, a former Republican presidential candidate.
The coming months will show if her prediction proves right.
When Mr. Trump takes office, Mr. Musk’s group will face a daunting reality. An entire apparatus has developed over the centuries that allows the government to keep marching on in the face of economic shocks, wartime hardships, or — as in this case — political vows to diminish its size and spending.
Any effort to slash the federal government and its 2.3 million civilian workers will likely face resistance in Congress, lawsuits from activist groups and delays mandated by federal rules. Unlike in his businesses, Mr. Musk will not be the sole decider, but will have to build consensus among legislators, executive-branch staffers, his co-leader and Mr. Trump himself. And federal rules ostensibly prevent Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy from making decisions in private, unlike how many matters are handled in the business world.
Meetings would have to be open and minutes made public, said Brian D. Feinstein, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies administrative law.
“All of this would have to happen in the sunlight,” Mr. Feinstein said.
A 1972 law says federal open-records laws apply to advisory committees. If a committee does not follow those rules, it could be sued — and a judge could order the committee to stop meeting, or order the government to disregard its advice.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump’s presidential transition team, Brian Hughes, declined to answer detailed questions about the effort. He sent a written statement, saying that Mr. Ramaswamy and Mr. Musk “will work together slashing excess regulations, cutting wasteful expenditures, and restructuring federal agencies.”
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'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
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.
What this moment requires is not a magical pony, some gimmick that will protect the strongest targets while ceding moral high ground, but a return to the work of actually defending rule of law day to day, especially those who are easy to isolate or demonize. This moment also requires actual journalism. I shouldn’t be the only one who cares about Hunter Biden’s due process rights more than his ickiness.
And yes, I realize that means that people will continue to get hurt, just as they’ve been getting hurt going back to 2017. Trust me, like many other people, I’m doing my own risk mitigation for the days ahead.
Pardoning the highest profile likely current targets of Trump capitulates to Trump’s narrative that there is no rule of law, there’s just one party against another. Instead defending the conduct of the people Trump targets takes a lot more work, a lot more courage. But without that work, Trump has won the fight.
Mark Milley’s defense of the ConstitutionFor most of the targets in question, the story you’d tell would be precisely the one Trump wants you to tell. If you pardon Cheney and Schiff because they investigated Trump, for example, you condone his narrative that that’s a crime.
It’s not.
If you pardon Fauci because he made difficult health insurance according to the best — albeit imperfect — science, you condone the pack of cranks Trump plans to install in every health-related agency.
But Mark Milley is different.
He’s different because the reason why Republicans would target him is that he upheld the Constitution, rather than Trump.
He’s different because he did something crucial — reaching out to his counterparts overseas to deescalate threats of nuclear catastrophe. Republicans want to spin that vital work as treason.
He’s different because a prosecution of Milley will be used as an excuse to deprofessionalize the military officer corps.
And he’s different because Trump might try to target Milley via military justice or might seek penalties not on the table for his other targets.
I don’t know if Milley wants that protection or if, like Schiff, he would prefer to defend his own actions. That’s his business.
The point though is nothing Biden can do will eliminate the risk that Trump will keep doing what he has been doing for eight years. Someone or someones will be that target, and imagining we can make that risk go away, it’ll only lead people to look away again instead of giving the attention the focus that it has lacked.
If we don’t find the solution to that problem, if we seek instead a quick fix, then it’ll get continually harder to defend rule of law as Trump stacks the courts and guts the guardrails at DOJ.
You can’t pardon your way out of Trump’s attack on rule of law. It’s going to take much harder work than that.
Update: Ian Millhiser makes the same argument about the inefficacy of pardons, noting as well that pardons can’t prevent lawsuits or state retribution
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.
Relevant Recent Headlines
Emptywheel, Analysis: Judge Mark Scarsi’s Umbrage: Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler)
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.”
Politico, Ocasio-Cortez launches bid for top role on Oversight, as some Dems predict she’ll win, Nicholas Wu, Daniella Diaz and Jordain Carney, Dec. 6, 2024.Some Democrats are predicting she'll win the race against Rep. Gerry Connolly.
As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez jumps into the race to be the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, she’s testing how far her colleagues are willing to go as they shake up their leadership structure.
"I write to you today to seek your support to serve as Ranking Member of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability in the 119th Congress," she wrote in a letter to colleagues. "This is not a position I seek lightly. The responsibility of leading Democrats on the House Oversight Committee during Donald Trump’s second term in the White House is a profound and consequential one."
Her official launch means she's challenging Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va), who has already announced he wants to run as the top Democrat of the committee after Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who currently occupies the spot, tossed his hat in for House Judiciary ranking member.
“We talked the other day, and [Ocasio-Cortez] indicated she was headed that way,” said Connolly. “And I said: ‘Great, we'll run an honorable race, a civil race and we'll be friends at the beginning and at the end.’”Jeffries on Dem leadership challenges: 'The caucus is working its will'
The 35-year-old outspoken progressive has long been critical of Democratic leaders and doesn't always align with the rest of her party. But she’s learned to play the inside track in the caucus, working with colleagues and leadership more rather than always using her proverbial megaphone. Raskin named her the vice ranking member of the Oversight Committee earlier this Congress.
In interviews with a half dozen Democrats Friday morning, lawmakers increasingly believed Ocasio-Cortez will enter the race with a sizable bloc of support to become the top Oversight Committee Democrat.
“She’s exactly what the committee needs,” said one lawmaker who didn’t want to formally endorse Ocasio-Cortez before her announcement. “She's phenomenal. She's someone that's gonna take the energy of new members coming in and take on Donald Trump. And I think that’s what we need at this point.”
Her entry into the race is the latest bullet point as Democrats make sweeping changes to the aging leadership of their committees. Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona is stepping aside as the Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee, Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York ended his bid to continue leading Judiciary Committee Democrats and endorsed Raskin, and Rep. David Scott of Georgia is facing tough challenges to keep his job as the top Agriculture Committee Democrat.
The official recommendation on new committee leaders will be made by the Steering and Policy Committee, a powerful and under-the-radar panel that is set to consider exclusive committee appointments like the Ways and Means panel next week, and then the remaining committees the week after. The second batch includes the contested top Democratic spots. The steering panel will first hold a secret ballot vote to recommend a committee leader, then the full caucus will vote on the leadership slot.
House Democratic leaders are staying out of the caucus battles for committee posts, a position some lawmakers believe is their tacit way of endorsing leadership turnover. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters Friday "that the caucus is working its will, and we’re doing it in a cordial fashion."
While some lawmakers believe Ocasio-Cortez already has a leg up over Connolly, many Oversight panel members stayed officially neutral. Still, they spoke positively about the leadership shifts.
“There’s a little bit of a generational thing happening in the caucus,” said Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio). “It’s exciting and encouraging.”
Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who were originally seen as possible contenders for the top Oversight spot aren’t likely to mount bids, leaving the race between Connolly and Ocasio-Cortez.
“I'm going to listen to all the arguments here,” Krishnamoorthi said in a brief interview.
Raskin has spoken to both Ocasio-Cortez and Connolly, according to a Democratic member granted anonymity to detail private conversations, but has told colleagues he is remaining officially neutral in the Oversight contest, at least until his own election for Judiciary ranking member takes place.
His endorsement would be a boon to either candidate — the former Trump impeachment manager is beloved within the conference. Raskin and Connolly have served together on Oversight for years, and previously ran against each other for the top spot in 2022. Raskin and Ocasio-Cortez have a close personal relationship.
Connolly and his advocates believe he’s building a broad base of support within the caucus, including with the Black and Hispanic Caucuses, and believe he can defeat Ocasio-Cortez. In a letter to his colleagues earlier this week, Connolly leaned into his willingness to take on Trump and his Republican allies, as Democrats strategize how to combat total GOP control of Congress from the minority.
“Connolly should be in good shape. He has a proven track record. He’s been doing a great job on the Oversight Committee,” Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO about who he thought could win Oversight competition.
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), said she wasn’t sure who was officially in the Oversight race yet, “but I have supported Mr. Connolly for that, should it be open.”
Lead Art: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) listens during the House Oversight and Accountability hearing regarding FEMA's response to
Hopium Chronicles, Political Advocacy, Adam Gray Wins CA-13, Fighting Trump's Unacceptable 4, Biden's Economy Is The "Envy Of The World, Simon Rosenberg, 
right, Dec. 4, 2024. Got a few things for you today:
Adam Gray Wins CA-13! - Friends, last night Adam Gray officially won CA-13 by 187 votes! I know many of you worked very hard on this race, many donated, many helped cure ballots. The next Congress will now 220R-215D, a Democratic gain of two seats from the current Congress. With 3 Rs leaving to join (or attempt to join - Gaetz) the Trump Administration Speaker Johnson will have a 217-215 “majority” in the early days of Trump 47.
To get a sense of how close we came to winning the House, here are the final results in three closest races Republicans won:
If 3,732 people in these three districts had voted for the Democratic candidate rather than these three Republicans Hakeem Jeffries would be the next Speaker (In the Presidential race if 116,000 voters in MI, PA, WI had voted for Harris rather than Trump she would have won).
New York Times, Detroit’s Mayor, a Democrat, Will Run for Michigan Governor as an Independent, Reid J. Epstein, Dec. 4, 2024. Mike Duggan is shedding the label of his longtime party to seek the state’s highest office, as the term-limited Gretchen Whitmer departs in early 2027.
Mayor Mike Duggan of Detroit, who has identified as a Democrat for his nearly 40 years in public office, announced on Wednesday that he would run for governor in 2026 as an independent, a development that could roil the politics of his narrowly divided state.
Mr. Duggan, 66, is the first major candidate to enter the race, which will be one of the nation’s top-tier contests for governor in 2026. He is aiming to replace Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who is barred by term limits from running for a third time.
By running as an independent, Mr. Duggan will avoid what is expected to be a crowded Democratic primary race that could include several of Michigan’s statewide elected officials, including Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II, Attorney General Dana Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg moved in recent years to Michigan from Indiana, which prompted speculation that he might seek office in his new state, though he has also been floated as a potential 2028 presidential contender.
Mr. Duggan’s independent campaign announcement comes a month after Vice President Kamala Harris — with whom he campaigned — lost Michigan to former President Donald J. Trump. Her nationwide defeat has prompted Democratic hand-wringing about the party’s brand and image among various groups of voters.
While Ms. Harris lost Michigan, another Democrat, Representative Elissa Slotkin, won its Senate race. Republicans flipped four seats in the Michigan House of Representatives, narrowly taking back the chamber after two years of Democratic control.
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Duggan said he had weighed running for governor for much of this year but had decided to do so as an independent only after experiencing what he called a “toxic” general election.
“I realized that a lot of people in Michigan are sick of both parties and they wish they had a third choice,” he said. “They’re tired of being restricted to the Republican and Democratic nominees. I just felt like I’d give the people in this state a third choice.”
While Mr. Duggan is a proponent of abortion rights who has supported Ms. Whitmer and other Democrats, he said he had come to understand that a Democratic governor would be inevitably hamstrung by the state’s divided Legislature. Being elected as an independent, he reasoned, would give him more latitude to win over legislators from both parties.
At the same time, Mr. Duggan said the Democratic brand in the state had shifted away from its working-class roots and toward a reflexive anti-Trump posture.
“Right now, the Democratic Party stands for ‘Trump is terrible,’ he said. “And I think the Republican Party stands for ‘Democrats are dangerous and un-American.’ I really think that’s where we are as a country.”
Democracy Docket, Daily Docket: New SCOTUS cases could upend elections, Staff Report, Dec. 2, 2024. Republicans asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review cases out of Illinois and Montana that could upend election administration in the United States. In a new YouTube video, Marc and Democracy Docket’s Paige Moskowitz discuss the impact of these cases.
In November, Illinois Republican Rep. Michael Bost asked the Supreme Court to revive his twice-dismissed legal challenge to state law that allows election officials to count timely postmarked or certified mail-in ballots for up to two weeks after an election.
In August, Montana Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen (R) asked the nation’s highest court to consider the radical independent state legislature theory as reasoning to uphold two Montana voter suppression laws. The theory promotes the idea that only state legislatures have the power to regulate federal elections.
November had the most voting rights lawsuits filed in 2024
November saw the most voting rights lawsuits filed in 2024 so far. In fact, the 61 cases brought in November make up almost a quarter of the total cases filed this year. This includes litigation filed before, during and after the Nov. 5 election.
The Hartmann Report, Political Commentary: Privatizing the Vote with Voting Machines, Thom Hartmann, right,, Dec. 1, 2024. Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Hidden History of the War on Voting" (below, left).
While the security of our elections has apparently been put at considerable risk by bringing private, for-profit vendors into the voting business, there’s a larger issue that virtually nobody is discussing.
The Bush administration’s practice of hiring Dick Cheney’s nearly bankrupt company, Halliburton, with multibillion-dollar no-bid noncompetitive contracts to replace functions carried out by GIs for over 200 years (at a fraction of the cost) might have saved Halliburton and made hundreds of millions for Cheney and his family but was only a “small” crime against our commons, which include our military. Such privatization of our military functions has led to nearly half of the defense budget now going to for-profit corporations.
Similarly, privatizing Chicago’s parking meters by leasing them to a European company and leasing Indiana’s highways to an Australian corporation are crimes against the commons and our democracy, but small crimes.106,107 Ditto for privatizing our schools, water systems, and electrical grids—activities that, since the 1980s, have gobbled up around half of all the electric and water utilities and, in Betsy DeVos’s Michigan, about half of the schools.
Privatizing our prisons and immigration detention facilities leads to the perverse result of for-profit corporations lobbying for longer sentences for drug and other crimes, but that’s a matter of public policy that can and should be debated in the open.
Privatizing our airwaves, as Bill Clinton’s 1996 Telecommunications Act largely did, has turned out to be a public policy disaster and led to, as Forbes explained in a recent headline, the “15 Billionaires [Who] Own America’s News Media Companies,”108 but it’s reversible with enough public outrage.
But the vote is the single mechanism by which we, the people, can register our approval or disapproval of such policies and even effect their reversal. It’s the ultimate expression of the commons of our government, because it’s how we determine the course and future of our government.
To have allowed privatization of the vote—as happened on a nationwide scale with HAVA in 2002—is a crime against democracy and our commons unlike any in the history of our nation.
Now our votes are counted in secret by private corporations with specific agendas that are met, in part, by spending millions on lobbying members of Congress. They refuse to show us their software, citing trade secrets, and generally lease, rather than sell, their generally Windows-based and deeply insecure systems to states.
At the very least, states should own any voting machinery and infrastructure used in their territory, and the software should be open-source. At best, we should follow Ireland’s example and get rid of all the machines and have government own and operate all the tabulators with complete transparency.
New York Times, How the Border County Where Elon Musk Is a Local Flipped for Trump, Jazmine Ulloa, Photographs by Callaghan O’Hare, Dec. 1, 2024. Mr. Musk’s rockets and presence have helped shape, and reshape, the culture and politics of Cameron County in South Texas.
The story of the political transformation of Cameron County, a majority-Hispanic border community at the southernmost tip of Texas, began with the arrival of a billionaire.
His name wasn’t Donald J. Trump. It was Elon Musk.
More than a decade ago, Mr. Musk brought his private space company, SpaceX, to Cameron County, where the blasts from his rocket testing and launching site on Boca Chica Beach rattle homes for miles. His mark is now everywhere. And his face, too.
Downtown, in the county seat of Brownsville, the old culture — part Mexican, part American, part Tejano — clashes with the new: Images of space, astronauts and Mr. Musk adorn buildings that date to the early 1900s, blocks from the southern border. Along the Gulf Coast marshes on the road to his Starbase launch site, a giant bust of Mr. Musk keeps watch over Cameron County’s nearly 430,000 residents and the occasional wayward hog, the world’s richest man honored like a king in one of the poorest counties in America.
Such a tribute would be a mere curiosity were it not for what happened here on Nov. 5.
Mr. Trump did something no Republican has done in 20 years: He flipped Cameron County. Mr. Trump won the county with 53 percent of the vote, the first time a Republican presidential candidate claimed victory here since George W. Bush, the former Texas governor and then the president, in 2004. It was one of a string of largely blue-collar Hispanic Democratic strongholds across South Texas where Mr. Trump made major inroads.
Mr. Trump didn’t have to campaign very hard in Cameron County. Mr. Musk did the hard work for him, by slowly and subtly changing the culture, the landscape, the economy and, finally, the politics of Cameron County over the span of years.
New York Times, Wisconsin Democratic Chair Says He Is the One to Revive a Distressed Party, Reid J. Epstein, Dec. 1, 2024. Ben Wikler, who has led the Wisconsin Democratic Party since 2019, announced a bid to be national party chair with a platform to “unite, fight, win.”
Mr. Wikler, 43, has led Wisconsin Democrats since 2019, and he has served as a top official at MoveOn, the progressive advocacy group. He said in an interview that he aimed to do for the national party what he did in Wisconsin, where he presided over the rebuilding of a party weakened by years of full 
Republican control of the state’s government.
Mr. Wikler, whose start in politics came in part as a research assistant for Al Franken, joins a field of party-chair hopefuls that includes Ken Martin, the Minnesota Democratic chairman; Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor; and James Skoufis, a little-known New York state senator. While Mr. Martin has said he has endorsements from 83 of the 448 voting members of the D.N.C. (and Mr. O’Malley has said he has endorsements from three, and Mr. Skoufis does not have any), Mr. Wikler would not say his level of support when asked.
That was not the only question Mr. Wikler declined to answer in an interview this weekend. He would also not say which state he thinks should vote first in the 2028 presidential primary or whether President Biden should have sought re-election.
“My platform in this race is unite, fight, win,” Mr. Wikler said. “Uniting starts not with recriminations but with reckoning and with curiosity and data. And then you use all that to inform the way that you fight the next battle.”
New York Times, After Democratic Losses, a Little-Known Lawmaker Wants to Be the Chair, Reid J. Epstein, Dec. 1, 2024 (print ed.). State Senator James Skoufis of New York is mounting a long-shot bid for D.N.C. chair, hoping his record of success in Trump country persuades party insiders.
State Senator James Skoufis of New York announced on Saturday what is certain to be a long-shot bid to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee, pitching himself as an outsider candidate who has won in a part of the country where President-elect Donald J. Trump prevailed.
Mr. Skoufis, 37, has served in the New York State Legislature for a dozen years but is a virtual unknown outside Albany and his district, which covers Orange County in the Hudson Valley. He enters the race without extensive relationships with party members beyond New York State — a detriment he aims to turn into an advantage.
Where Democrats are is locked out of power in Washington, facing decades of conservative dominance over the federal courts and seemingly more depressed about Mr. Trump’s imminent return to power than motivated to win back political control.
In this environment, a candidate like Mr. Skoufis has little to lose and much to gain should he leave D.N.C. members with a positive impression — not to mention that it will be far easier to get booked on cable television as a candidate for party chair than as just a state senator.
Relevant Recent Headlines
Washington Post, Opinion: Democrats need ‘shortcuts’ to reach low-information voters, Jennifer RubinNew York Times, Trump Disavowed Project 2025 During the Campaign. Not Anymore
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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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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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
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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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.”
New York Times, In Global Finale, Biden Hopes Rail Project Defines Africa Legacy, Peter Baker, right, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Dec. 4, 2024. In his last announced trip abroad as president, President Biden relished touring a U.S.-financed train line intended to transport goods and minerals to port.
On the final day of perhaps his final trip overseas as commander in chief, President Biden celebrated his foreign policy agenda by turning to a piece of infrastructure at the heart of his identity: a train.
It was not the Amtrak train Mr. Biden rode frequently as a senator or chose as the setting for the kickoff of his first presidential campaign nearly four decades ago. Mr. Biden instead toured a section of an 800-mile railway project in Angola that his administration hopes will be the key to expanding U.S. economic influence in Africa, a continent rich with critical minerals.
“I’m coming back to ride on the train from end to end,” Mr. Biden told President João Lourenço of Angola during a round table with African leaders in the port city of Lobito. “We’re not just laying tracks. We’re laying the groundwork for a better future for our people.”
Mr. Biden was spotlighting what is known as the Lobito Corridor, a railway project that his aides say is the proof behind the president’s commitment to be “all in on Africa’s future,” amid growing concern the United States has neglected the continent over the years and allowed China to gain economic dominance in the region.
The project, funded in part by the United States, runs from Angola’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo to Lobito, which sits on the Atlantic Ocean. Mr. Biden has said it will help connect Angola’s economy to nearby markets, including in Zambia. But it is also a means to expand U.S. access to a region rich with critical minerals, like copper and cobalt, used to make batteries for various products, including cellphones and electric vehicles.
Once the railway is complete, it would mean minerals could be more easily shipped to the United States, allowing the country to make progress on its goal of diversifying its supply chains.
Washington Post, Biden visiting an African region critical to the U.S.-China rivalry, Abigail Hauslohner, Dec. 3, 2024 (print ed.). The president arrived Monday in Angola, his first trip to Africa as president and one of his final foreign trips in office.
President Joe Biden arrived Monday in the southwestern African nation of Angola, a visit rife with symbolic importance and practical goals that marks one of the last foreign trips of his presidency and a closing moment in a 50-year public career that has focused frequently on foreign policy.Get the latest election news and results
The visit represents the first time a sitting U.S. president has visited Angola, a country that is rich in oil and diamonds, but where most of the population lives in poverty after decades of corrupt leadership and a civil war that Washington helped fuel through covert action during the Cold War.
The two-day visit will be Biden’s only trip as president to sub-Saharan Africa, which is home to nearly a fifth of the world’s population but is chronically low on the list of the United States’ foreign policy priorities. The trip will mark the first visit by a U.S. president to sub-Saharan Africa since 2015, despite the continent’s vital role in the extraction of critical minerals, and its growing significance in the strategic and economic battle for influence between the United States and China.
Biden intends to use his visit to spotlight the U.S. commitment to strengthening global partnerships and alliances, and its investment in the continent, officials said. “We have absolutely transformed this relationship,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Monday aboard Air Force One en route to Angola.
Biden arrived in Luanda on Monday evening to an Angolan honor guard’s salute, performed by the same military and ruling party against which the United States had once funded rebel fighters and sought to overthrow. Banners throughout the city displayed pictures of Biden’s face superimposed over the American and Angolan flags — the latter reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s flag — and large crowds thronged the streets to watch the president’s motorcade pass.
Angola, Kirby said, has become a valuable strategic partner in recent years, helping to mediate between warring groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo and working with U.S. and European investors to advance a trans-Africa railway project.
Biden promised at a 2022 summit of African leaders in Washington that the United States would invest $55 billion in the continent over the next three years, most of which has been fulfilled, officials said this week.
During his presidency, Biden’s global agenda has often been engulfed by the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, leaving him less bandwidth for Africa despite his vows to renew America’s involvement there. In December 2022, the president promised to visit Africa sometime in 2023, a deadline he missed by almost a year.
Biden’s message of optimism and engagement during the trip is also likely to be overshadowed by his departure from office in less than two months. President-elect Donald Trump did not visit Africa at all during his first term, and his denigration of immigrants from “shithole countries” in 2018 was widely seen to refer to Africa as well as Latin America.
New York Times, Mexican Authorities Seize 20 Million Doses of Fentanyl in Record Haul, James Wagner and Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, Dec. 4, 2024. The operation came after President-elect Trump threatened tariffs on Mexico if the country did not crack down on fentanyl.
It was the latest show of force in a crackdown on violence and illicit drugs by Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, ahead of the inauguration next month of President-elect Donald J. Trump.
Mr. Trump has vowed to place steep tariffs on Mexico until the government stops drugs and migrants from crossing the border.
Mexican authorities said officers confiscated 800 kilograms of fentanyl in a truck at a house in Sinaloa state, home of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel and a hub of fentanyl production, on Tuesday. Officials also seized chemical precursors used to make the synthetic drug, and another 300 kilos in a separate house, in addition to industrial mixers and scales.
In a separate operation that day, security officials and prosecutors said they arrested two men carrying two kilos of fentanyl pills. The authorities said the men led a cell “dedicated to the production and trafficking” of fentanyl.
New York Times, Syria’s Rebel Offensive: With Assad Challenged, a Push to Cut Syria’s Ties to Iran Grows More Unlikely, Erika Solomon, Ronen Bergman and Adam Rasgon, Dec. 4, 2024. The U.S. and Gulf countries were trying to lure President Bashar al-Assad of Syria away from Iran, officials say. But he is unlikely to give up the alliance.
For months, his country was battered by escalating Israeli bombardment, while behind the scenes, the United States and Gulf countries courted him diplomatically. It was a secretive, two-pronged approach meant to pressure President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to abandon his most important regional alliance with Hezbollah and Iran.
The overtures to Mr. al-Assad were the product of what Israel and its allies saw as a rare but risky opportunity — with Iran’s regional network fracturing under Israeli attack, they hoped to force Iran’s most important partner out of the alliance, according to former U.S. officials, two European diplomats and four Israeli officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
Now, those regional ambitions may be derailed by a far smaller and long-discounted force: Resurgent rebels have launched a surprisingly successful attack in Syria, exploiting in part the strain Israel has put on the alliance that helped Mr. al-Assad maintain power through more than a decade of uprising and civil war. In a matter of days, the rebels seized most of the country’s large city of Aleppo, and challenged Mr. al-Assad’s grip on the country’s northwest.
New York Times, China Just Showed Washington How It Plans to Fight the Next Trade War, Keith Bradsher, Dec. 4, 2024. Faltering U.S. industrial leadership has allowed China to take a harder trade stance as President-elect Trump prepares to take office.
When Donald J. Trump fired the opening shots in a trade war during his first term, Chinese officials often took days to respond and Chinese businesses followed every threat with alarm.
But this week, after the Biden administration broadened its restrictions on advanced technology that could be sent to China, Beijing announced sweeping retaliation in a single day. The country’s stock market investors mostly shrugged at the Biden administration’s action.
And on Wednesday, General Motors, a onetime cornerstone of American industrial might, said it was taking a $5 billion hit to profit to recognize that it was no longer able to adequately compete with Chinese carmakers.
The fast-moving developments have underlined how far China has come as an industrial superpower, and its readiness for a potentially bruising battle with the second Trump administration. China now has a manufacturing sector that is larger than those of the United States, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Britain put together. It produces some of the world’s most advanced technology.
New York Times, Mexican Cartels Lure Chemistry Students to Make Fentanyl, Natalie Kitroeff and Paulina Villegas, Dec. 1, 2024.Criminalsturn college campuses into recruitment hubs, recruiting chemistry students in Mexico with big paydays.
New York Times, 80 Years After Killings, Senegal Wants the Facts From France, Elian Peltier and Saikou Jammeh, Dec. 1, 2024. Senegal's new government is aiming to remove the secrecy around the mass slaying of West African soldiers by colonial forces at the end of World War II.
Ahead of the 80th anniversary of what is known as the Thiaroye Massacre, Senegal’s government has pressured France to fully explain one of the most sinister episodes of its colonial rule in Africa.
And Senegal won’t let it go, the latest signal sent by an African government that the relationship with the former colonizer is up for reconsideration.
After President Emmanuel Macron of France last week referred to the events as a “massacre” in a letter addressed to his Senegalese counterpart — the first French president to ever to describe it as such — President Bassirou Diomaye Faye had a blunt answer.
“That is not enough,” Mr. Faye said in an interview with Le Monde. “We still don’t know how many people were killed nor why, how and where they were buried.”
The calls for reparations echo campaigns demanding truth and justice for colonial-era crimes committed across the continent. In the former French colonies of West and Central Africa, where several governments have curtailed ties with France in recent years, few incidents resonate as much as the memory of Thiaroye.
“Thiaroye could be the foundation for a Pan-African consciousness shared by all African countries who have lost citizens in the tragedy,” said Mamadou Diouf, a Senegalese historian and director of Columbia University’s Institute for African Studies.
Mr. Diouf, who was appointed by the Senegalese government this summer to lead a research committee on Thiaroye, called Senegal’s new attitude “indicative of a breakaway, a strong assertion of sovereignty.”
On the morning of Dec. 1, 1944, French colonial forces gathered hundreds of West African men temporarily stationed at a garrison in Thiaroye, on the outskirts of Dakar, the then-capital of French West Africa.
It was supposed to be their last stop before home: Hailing from a dozen African colonies, the men had fought for France in the war, been detained in Nazi-run camps for years, and were now awaiting financial compensation for years of service.
The money wasn’t coming.
As tensions escalated between French and West African soldiers who had once been brothers in arms, French officers vowed to “bring back order,” according to a French military report written a day before the killings.
They brought machine guns to Thiaroye, two battalions, a tank and other military vehicles to “show so much superiority that the mutineers don’t think about resisting,” the report read.
Around 9:30 a.m., they fired more than 500 rounds of ammunition within 15 seconds, according to archives consulted by Martin Mourre, a French historian.
The first official death toll mentioned 35 West African deaths — an “indispensable surgical operation,” an act of self-defense against armed and aggressive men, claimed the French officer in charge, in a report written days later.
But historians from France and Senegal say the real death toll is likely closer to 400, and that the West African soldiers were not armed.
They argue that discrepancies in military reports and the preparedness of French troops pointed to a premeditated massacre. The lack of information around the identities of the victims and the whereabouts of their remains, are other signs that France tried to cover up a crime, they say.
New York Times, Rebels Control Most of Syria’s Largest City, War Monitor Says, Muhammad Haj Kadour and Raja Abdulrahim, Dec. 1, 2024 (print ed.).. The advance on Aleppo came just four days into a surprise rebel offensive that is the most intense escalation in years in a civil war that was mostly dormant.
Rebels had seized most of Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, on Saturday, according to a war monitoring group and to fighters who were combing the streets in search of any remaining pockets of government forces.
The rebels said they had faced little resistance on the ground in Aleppo. But Syrian government warplanes responded with airstrikes on the city for the first time since 2016, according to the war monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The city of Aleppo came to a near standstill on Saturday, with many residents staying indoors for fear of what the sudden flip in control might mean, witnesses said. Others did venture out into quiet streets, welcoming the antigovernment fighters and hugging them. Some of the rebels tried to reassure city residents and sent out at least one van to distribute bread.
The rapid advance on Aleppo came just four days into a surprise rebel offensive launched on Wednesday against the autocratic regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The development is both the most serious challenge to Mr. al-Assad’s rule and the most intense escalation in years in a civil war that had been mostly dormant.
The timing of the assault has raised questions about whether the rebels are exploiting weaknesses across an alliance that has Iran at the center and includes groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as the Syrian regime.
In Aleppo on Saturday, well-armed rebel fighters dressed in camouflage patrolled streets still lined with the ubiquitous posters of Mr. al-Assad. The opposition forces said that although they were in control of nearly the entire city, they had not yet solidified their hold on it.
Within hours from Friday into Saturday, Syrian government soldiers, security forces and police officers had fled the city, according to the observatory. They were replaced by Islamist and Turkish-backed rebels sweeping through on foot, on motorbikes or on trucks mounted with machine guns.
Recent Relevant Headlines
New York Times, Syrian Rebels Breach City of Aleppo, in Biggest Advance in Years
U.S. Law, Cases, Courts
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.
New York Times, Inside the Supreme Court Ethics Debate: Who Judges the Justices? Jodi Kantor and Abbie VanSickle, Dec. 4, 2024 (print ed.). In private meetings and memos, the justices made new rules for themselves — then split on whether they could, or should, be enforced.
As the summer of 2023 ended, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court began trading even-more-confidential-than-usual memos, avoiding their standard email list and instead passing paper documents in envelopes to each chambers. Faced with ethics controversies and a plunge in public trust, they were debating rules for their own conduct, according to people familiar with the process.
Weeks later, as a united front, they announced the results: the court’s first-ever ethics code. “It’s remarkable that we were able to agree unanimously,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said in a television interview this year.
But a New York Times examination found that behind the scenes, the court had divided over whether the justices’ new rules could — or should — ever be enforced.
Justice Gorsuch was especially vocal in opposing any enforcement mechanism beyond voluntary compliance, arguing that additional measures could undermine the court. The justices’ strength was their independence, he said, and he vowed to have no part in diminishing it.
In the private exchanges, Justice Clarence Thomas, whose decision not to disclose decades of gifts and luxury vacations from wealthy benefactors had sparked the ethics controversy, and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote off the court’s critics as politically motivated and unappeasable.
The three liberal justices insisted that the rules needed to be more than lofty promises. But their argument never had a chance.
To piece together the previously undisclosed debate, The Times interviewed people from inside and outside the court, including liberals and conservatives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the proceedings and the justices’ thinking. This article also draws upon public statements by the justices, who declined to comment.
While the court was praised for setting ethics rules, the lack of an enforcement provision has been criticized by ethics experts and figures on the left. One year later, the justices’ internal debate has spilled into a wider, more fractious one.
President Biden and Democratic lawmakers have called for a code with teeth. Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson have publicly pledged support for an enforcement mechanism. Outside legal experts have circulated proposals that would enlist the guidance of other federal judges. The conservative pushback has been strong and sometimes furious.
Now the election of former President Donald J. Trump, and a new era of unified Republican government, are raising the stakes for a branch supposed to serve as an independent guardrail. The court, which has a conservative supermajority, is already perceived as partisan by many Americans. And the justices largely appear to be split along the same lines on how far to go to ensure that its rules are followed.
New York Times, Nadler to Relinquish Top Judiciary Post, Bowing to Calls for Change, Nicholas Fandos, Dec. 4, 2024. Representative Jerrold Nadler faced a challenge from Representative Jamie Raskin, and pressure from colleagues who wanted a younger figure at the helm.
Representative Jerrold Nadler plans to step down as the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee next term, succumbing to calls for generational change as his party prepares to confront a second Trump administration.
Mr. Nadler, the 77-year-old dean of New York’s congressional delegation, had been facing a direct challenge from a close ally, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland. Mr. Raskin, 61, was said to have secured the votes necessary to defeat him.
The transition would represent a significant departure for House Democrats, who have traditionally awarded coveted committee leadership jobs based primarily on seniority. After November’s losses, though, many in the party have argued that President-elect Donald J. Trump’s return to power would require a younger, more dynamic crop of leaders.
Furious over being challenged, Mr. Nadler had initially fought to hold the position he has held since 2017. But on Wednesday, he conceded that he did not have a path to victory and endorsed Mr. Raskin to replace him in a letter to colleagues.
“As our country faces the return of Donald Trump, and the renewed threats to our democracy and our way of life that he represents, I am very confident that Jamie would ably lead the Judiciary Committee as we confront this growing danger,” Mr. Nadler wrote.
New York Times, Supreme Court Returns to a Culture War Battleground: Transgender Rights, Adam Liptak, Dec. 3, 2024. On Wednesday, the justices will hear the marquee case of the term, a challenge to a Tennessee law banning several forms of medical care for transgender youths.
A little more than four years ago, the Supreme Court delivered a surprise victory to L.G.B.T.Q. communities. Rejecting the position of the Trump administration, the court ruled by a lopsided margin that a federal civil rights law protected transgender people from workplace discrimination.
In the intervening years, transgender rights have become a ferocious battleground in the culture wars, and controversies over health care, bathrooms, sports and pronouns played a prominent role in the presidential campaign. But the Supreme Court has had only glancing encounters with such issues since the employment discrimination case in 2020, which featured a majority opinion from Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, Mr. Trump’s first appointee to the court.
That will change on Wednesday, when the court hears its second major case on transgender rights, a challenge to a Tennessee law that prohibits some medical treatments for transgender youths.
It is the marquee case of the term. The court’s decision, expected by June, may determine not only the fate of the law and similar ones in more than 20 other states but also what role the Constitution’s equal protection clause has to play in cases claiming discrimination against transgender individuals.
The Tennessee law prohibits medical providers from prescribing puberty-delaying medication, offering hormone therapy or performing surgery to treat the psychological distress caused by incongruence between experienced gender and that assigned at birth. But the law allows those same treatments for other purposes.
The primary question for the justices is not whether Tennessee’s ban is wise or consistent with the views of medical experts. It is, instead, whether the law makes distinctions based on sex. If it does, a demanding form of judicial review — “heightened scrutiny” — kicks in. If it does not, the Tennessee law will almost certainly survive. The case has some curious features.
Washington Post, Editorial, How L.A.’s ‘godfather’ of progressive prosecution failed, Editorial Board, Dec. 1, 2024. District Attorney George Gascón, below right, will leave office on Monday after being defeated by 20 points.
He is one of several progressive prosecutors to lose their jobs on the West Coast over the past two years, from San Francisco and Oakland’s Alameda County to Portland and Seattle. But this is the biggest blow yet to their movement: Not only has Mr. Gascón long been considered “the godfather” of progressive prosecution, Los Angeles County — with nearly 10 million residents — is by itself more populous than all but 10 states.
What happened is instructive as reformers regroup. Based on our extensive interviews and on-the-ground reporting, Angelenos repudiated Mr. Gascón and his approach to criminal justice for five reasons:
1. He failed to secure buy-in from career prosecutors. Mr. Gascón never recovered after getting off on the wrong foot with the nearly 1,000 deputy district attorneys who worked for him. Minutes after taking office in December 2020, he issued far-reaching and sometimes unrealistic edicts formulated with academics during the transition. Mr. Gascón blames civil-service protections for stymieing his efforts to uproot a culture resistant to change. But he aggravated tensions by hiring a chief of staff who had called police “barbarians,” promoted the “defund the police” movement and posted pictures of herself on social media wearing a T-shirt that said: “The police are trained to kill us.” The upshot was that his own career prosecutors became his fiercest critics. About two dozen deputy district attorneys eventually filed civil suits alleging retaliation. One prompted a jury to award $1.5 million. Another settled for $800,000. Antagonism led to attrition, which worsened a backlog of open cases.
2. Restricting sentencing enhancements made it harder to keep the worst offenders off the streets. Mr. Gascón believes that adding extra time to someone’s sentence if they committed a crime with a gun or as a gang member is “the biggest driver of mass incarceration.” He forbade prosecutors from asking for longer sentences for known gang members, arguing that people had been added to the gang database without due process. Fine. But that shouldn’t preclude prosecutors from adding enhancements when they are clearly warranted.
3. Mr. Gascón directed that juveniles could not be charged as adults, no matter how egregious their crimes. In one of several such cases, his office tried a 17-year-old member of the Crips street gang as a juvenile for brutally murdering two men. Just six months after her release, police arrested her again in connection with another homicide.
4. Nonviolent “quality of life” crimes must be taken seriously. Under Mr. Gascón, the district attorney’s office filed misdemeanor cases about half as often as under his predecessor. He discouraged prosecution of lower-level crimes such as trespassing, public intoxication and drug possession, which created a sense of disorder on the streets while removing an incentive for people with mental health issues and addiction to seek needed help.
5. Mr. Gascón overread his mandate.
Egberto Off The Record, Opinion: Mass deportation is just another Trump con to line the pockets of his friends and himself, Egberto Willies, below right, Nov. 30, 2024. He may use it to line his pockets and those of his friends with private detention camps and extortion to farmers.
The video highlights the economic and moral ramifications of Donald Trump’s proposed mass deportation policies. It argues that these measures would devastate industries like agriculture, which heavily rely on immigrant labor, leading to economic disruptions and inflated prices. The speaker speculates that Trump might use deportations as a public show while secretly taking bribes to shield industries from labor shortages. They criticize the private detention center industry for exploiting immigrants for profit and highlight the hypocrisy of evangelical Christians supporting anti-immigrant policies contrary to biblical teachings. Ultimately, the speaker calls for awareness of these manipulative tactics and stresses the need for progressive solutions prioritizing justice and fairness.
Donald Trump’s deportation agenda serves as a smokescreen for policies designed to exploit immigrants and enrich the powerful. By destabilizing industries, enriching private detention centers, and perpetuating systemic inequality, this plan reflects the worst of crony capitalism. A progressive approach is essential, focusing on compassion, economic equity, and recognizing the invaluable contributions of immigrant communities to the nation.Please subscribe for the much more in-depth article.
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Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric on mass deportation is designed to stoke fears, reinforce division, and distract from the economic realities that his policies are likely to exacerbate. The former president’s proposed deportation initiatives present themselves as a way to restore “law and order,” but a closer examination reveals the profit-driven motives that underpin them. Far from solving economic or immigration challenges, these policies aim to enrich private sector cronies while leaving American workers and immigrants alike in precarious positions.The Economic and Agricultural Fallout
As one of the nation’s most significant agricultural powerhouses, California is a prime example of how mass deportations could wreak havoc on essential industries. The state’s agricultural sector contributes about a quarter of the nation’s food supply, much of which depends on the labor of undocumented immigrants. Many Americans are unwilling to take on the grueling, low-paying jobs that characterize this sector, even when wages are increased. This was evidenced in states like Georgia and Florida, where anti-immigrant policies led to unharvested crops and paralyzed construction industries.
Trump’s mass deportation rhetoric ignores this reality, instead painting undocumented immigrants as threats rather than contributors. The potential removal of these workers would devastate industries reliant on their labor, leading to higher food prices, supply chain disruptions, and economic instability. In practice, this creates a twofold crisis: economic harm to consumers and industries and increased hardship for immigrant communities.Detention Centers: A Profit Machine for the Privileged
One of the most alarming aspects of Trump’s deportation plans is the role of private detention centers. The United States already has a shameful history of using private prisons to detain immigrants, turning human suffering into profit. Trump’s policies, if implemented, would likely expand this system, funneling taxpayer dollars into the hands of private contractors who run these facilities.
Private detention centers are notorious for cutting costs at the expense of detainees’ well-being, providing substandard healthcare, overcrowded conditions, and inadequate oversight. These facilities generate immense profits for their operators while exacerbating the suffering of vulnerable populations. By prioritizing profit over human dignity, these detention centers exemplify the moral bankruptcy of Trump’s deportation agenda.Bribes and Backroom Deals
The possibility that deportation policies serve as a mechanism for corruption cannot be dismissed. As suggested in the video, Trump and his administration could very well use mass deportations as a public spectacle while quietly accepting bribes from agricultural and industrial leaders to allow undocumented workers to remain in certain sectors. This would not only undermine the stated goals of the policies but also reveal their true purpose: enriching the powerful at the expense of the marginalized.
This pattern aligns with Trump’s broader approach to governance, characterized by self-enrichment and crony capitalism. From tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy to using public office to promote his private businesses, Trump has consistently prioritized his and his allies’ interests over the public good.The Human and Moral Cost
The human cost of mass deportation is incalculable. Families are torn apart, communities are destabilized, and children are left without parents. Beyond the immediate harm to immigrants, these policies deepen societal divisions and normalize dehumanization. This runs counter to the values that many Americans, including Christians who form a key part of Trump’s base, claim to hold dear.
The Bible teaches compassion and care for strangers, yet Trump’s deportation agenda weaponizes fear and xenophobia. The disconnect between these teachings and the actions of Trump’s evangelical supporters underscores the moral hypocrisy that permeates his policies.A Call for Progressive Solutions
Rather than pursuing punitive measures that harm immigrants and Americans alike, a progressive approach to immigration reform would prioritize human rights, economic stability, and social cohesion. This includes creating pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, protecting labor rights, and investing in industries that rely on immigrant workers. By recognizing immigrants as integral to the nation’s fabric, such policies would strengthen communities and promote shared prosperity.Conclusion
Donald Trump’s deportation rhetoric is not about solving real problems; it is a con designed to enrich his cronies while distracting from the harm his policies inflict on ordinary Americans. From exploiting private detention centers to undermining critical industries, Trump’s agenda reflects a cynical prioritization of profit over people. As long as such policies persist, the American public will bear the economic and moral costs of a system designed to divide and exploit rather than unite and uplift. The fight for progressive immigration reform is not just about policy—it is about reclaiming the values of fairness, compassion, and justice that should define America.
New York Times, Tax Preparers Charged in Scheme to Defraud Covid Relief of $65 Million, Adeel Hassan, Nov. 30, 2024. The preparers filed for pandemic-related tax credits on behalf of ineligible clients and then netted hefty filing fees, officials said.
Two Mississippi tax preparers used multiple schemes to defraud $65 million from programs that had been designed to help businesses stay afloat during the coronavirus pandemic, federal prosecutors said this week.
The preparers, Renata Walton, 44, and Nicole Jones, 36, both of Olive Branch, Miss., were indicted on more than 50 counts of wire fraud, money laundering, preparing false tax returns and obstruction of justice, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Tennessee said on Wednesday.
They both pleaded not guilty and were each released on $100,000 bond, court documents show.
Ms. Walton owned R&B Tax Express in Moscow, Tenn., where she and Ms. Jones prepared tax returns.
Federal prosecutors said that the two women contacted small-business clients and asked if they were interested in pandemic-related grant money, according to court records. The women would then file for pandemic-related tax credits on behalf of the clients even though they were ineligible for those funds, officials said.
New York Times, F.T.C. Launches an Antitrust Investigation Into Microsoft, David McCabe, Nov. 27, 2024. U.S. regulators are demanding information from the company on its cloud computing, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity products.
The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into whether Microsoft has violated antitrust law in multiple segments of its wide-ranging business, according to two people familiar with the inquiry, the latest salvo in a battle by the government to rein in the most powerful tech companies.
The agency recently sent a long and detailed formal request for information to the company asking about its cloud computing, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity products, the people said. Of particular interest to the F.T.C. is the way that Microsoft bundles its cloud computing offerings with office and security products, they added, alongside the company’s growing power in the artificial intelligence space.
The aggressive move by the F.T.C. comes as its chair, Lina Khan, is probably heading out the door with less than two months left in the Biden administration. Ms. Khan, 35, has pushed the agency to police big companies and has tried to get ahead of fast-moving changes in the technology industry.
Ms. Khan is expected to leave her post as part of the transition to the administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump, after which the focus of tech regulation could change.
The inquiry into Microsoft continues the Biden administration’s scrutiny of the biggest tech companies over the way people consume information, communicate and shop online. Already, the F.T.C. has sued Amazon and Meta, accusing them of anticompetitive behavior and stifling rivals. The Justice Department has also sued Google over its dominance in advertising technology, and Apple for making it difficult for consumers to leave its tightly knit universe of devices and software.
Microsoft, one of the most valuable companies in the world, with a disparate business that includes its Windows operating software, social media platform LinkedIn and video game platform Xbox, had largely escaped the recent ramp-up in antitrust scrutiny.
But in the late 1990s, the government attempted to break up the company over the dominance of its operating system and its efforts to stymie rivals to its own web browser. A judge ordered the breakup of the company, but an appeals court overturned his decision.
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.
Susan Lorincz spoke about a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder linked to childhood sex abuse (Pool photo by Doug Engle).
New York Times, Florida Woman Who Fatally Shot Black Neighbor Gets 25 Years in Prison, Annie Correal, Nov. 26, 2024 (print ed.). Susan Lorincz, who shot Ajike Owens, was convicted of manslaughter. The case prompted national outrage.
A white woman in Florida who fatally shot a Black neighbor who confronted her amid a longstanding dispute over the neighbor’s children was sentenced on Monday to 25 years in prison.
In a case that prompted national outrage and reignited debate around “stand your ground” laws, Susan Lorincz, 60, shot Ajike (A.J.) Owens as Ms. Owens, 35, stood outside the door of Ms. Lorincz’s home in Ocala, a city about 80 miles northwest of Orlando, last June.
Ms. Lorincz, who was convicted of manslaughter by an all-white jury in August, had faced a maximum sentence of 30 years.
New York Times, Rudy Giuliani Loses His Lawyers, and His Cool, in Court, Stefanos Chen and Olivia Bensimon, Nov. 26, 2024. The subject of several cases, the former New York City mayor lashed out at a judge questioning why he had not forfeited personal assets as required.
Rudolph W. Giuliani was not having a good day, and it showed.
The former New York City mayor was in federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday to discuss his continuing failure to give up nearly $11 million worth of personal assets. The forfeiture was meant as a down payment on the $148 million Mr. Giuliani owes to two Georgia election workers for defaming them by claiming, without evidence, that they had helped to steal the 2020 presidential election.
But first, Judge Lewis Liman allowed Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers to withdraw from the case. They had requested to be removed two weeks ago, citing an unspecified “professional ethics” concern.
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).
Associated Press via Politico, Man convicted of killing Laken Riley sentenced to life in prison without parole, Staff report, Nov. 21, 2024 (print ed.). Riley’s killing added fuel to the national debate over immigration when federal authorities said Ibarra illegally entered the U.S. in 2022 and was allowed to stay in the country while he pursued his immigration case.
The Venezuelan man convicted in the killing of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Jose Ibarra was charged with murder and other crimes in Riley’s February death, and the guilty verdict was reached on Wednesday by Athens-Clarke County Superior Court Judge H. Patrick Haggard. Ibarra, 26, had waived his right to a jury trial, meaning Haggard alone heard and decided the case.
New York Times, Venezuelan Migrant Is Found Guilty of Killing Laken Riley in Georgia, Rick Rojas, Nov. 21, 2024 (print ed.). The verdict followed a trial in which prosecutors detailed a violent attack that became a flashpoint in the bitter national debate over immigration policy. A 26-year-old migrant from Venezuela was convicted on Wednesday of murdering Laken Riley, a Georgia nursing student whose killing has been repeatedly cited by President-elect Donald J. Trump in his push for the mass deportation of millions of undocumented people.
Recent Relevant Headlines
Egberto Off The Record, Opinion: Mass deportation is just another Trump con to line the pockets of his friends and himself, Egberto WilliesNew York Times, Florida Woman Who Fatally Shot Black Neighbor Gets 25 Years in Prison
U.S. Immigration
New York Times, In California’s Heartland, Some Latino Immigrants Back Trump’s Border Stance, Orlando Mayorquín and Christina Morales, Nov. 25, 2024. They said they believed that Donald Trump’s attacks on undocumented immigrants were directed at recent asylum seekers rather than their own community members.
When José Pérez Gómez came from Mexico more than 25 years ago, he scraped together money by selling handmade furniture on the streets of Fresno, Calif. Eventually, he turned that hustle into a full-fledged brick-and-mortar business, which allowed him to raise a family and send two daughters to college.
New York Times, Trump Has Made His View of Migrants Clear. Will It Stop Them From Coming? Julie Turkewitz, Emiliano Rodríguez Mega and Genevieve Glatsky, Nov. 10, 2024 (print ed.). Donald Trump has promised the largest deportation effort in American history. Now migrants are weighing his pledge in deciding whether to trek to the U.S.
New York Times, ‘An Earthquake’ Along the Border: Trump Flipped Hispanic South Texas, J. David Goodman, Edgar Sandoval and Robert Gebeloff, Nov. 9, 2024 (print ed.). Donald J. Trump’s biggest gains were along the Texas border, a Democratic stronghold where most voters are Hispanic. He won 12 of the region’s 14 counties, up from five in 2016.
Nowhere in the United States have historically Democratic counties shifted so far and so fast in the direction of former President Donald J. Trump as they have in the Texas communities along the Rio Grande, where Hispanic residents make up an overwhelming majority.
In recent elections, the region’s mix of sprawling urban centers and rural ranch lands that had been reliable Democratic strongholds for generations were beginning to turn red.
Recent Relevant Headlines
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.
“The U.S. federal budget is on an unsustainable path. The debt is not at an unsustainable level, but the path is unsustainable, and we know that we have to change that,” Powell said during an interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit.
Powell, a lifelong Republican first appointed lead the central bank by President-elect Trump and reappointed by President Biden, has repeatedly warned the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal path.
His latest comments come as Republicans ready for an intraparty battle over the potential fiscal impact of massive tax cuts in Congress, which is responsible for setting fiscal policy.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and GOP leadership want to move quickly to craft a follow-up to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) once Trump takes office and the GOP consolidates control in Washington.
Many provisions in Trump’s signature tax bill are set to expire in 2026, including individual tax rate cuts, a state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap and business tax breaks.
But a small coalition of budget hawks, which last year ousted former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) over federal spending, will wield enormous power given a slim majority in the House.
Their influence could derail plans to use budget reconciliation to fast-track a tax reform bill as Republicans grapple with how to deliver Trump’s tax cuts without further accelerating the national debt, which has alarmed lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
“We don’t need to pay the debt down. We don’t need to balance the budget. We just need the economy to grow faster than the debt. And that’s not happening,” Powell said.
“We’re running very large budget deficits at a time of full employment and strong growth, so we need to address that, and we’ve got to do it sooner or later — and sooner is better than later,” he added.
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.
Ending the individual tax cuts President Donald J. Trump signed into law in 2017 would have a negligible effect on the American economy over the next decade, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found Wednesday in a projection that could deflate Republican promises to supercharge the economy with tax cuts next year.
The budget office’s analysis comes as Republicans, who will take control of Washington in January, are weighing the fate of the broad tax cut they passed in 2017. That law slashed marginal tax rates across income groups, expanded the standard deduction and made the child tax credit more generous. But many of the cuts expire at the end of next year, and lawmakers are now figuring out how to extend them.
Allowing the tax cuts to end as currently scheduled would essentially raise taxes on many Americans, with conflicting economic consequences. The budget office said higher taxes would prompt Americans to work less, slowing economic growth.
But higher taxes also generate more revenue for the government, which would allow the United States to rely less on borrowed money. Reduced government borrowing would over time support economic growth, the budget office said, by keeping interest rates lower and freeing up investors to direct more of their money into business ventures rather than government bonds.
Overall, the two effects from ending the tax cuts — lower growth because people work less and more economic activity because of a smaller debt load — would basically cancel each other out over a decade. The American economy, as measured by gross domestic product, would actually be slightly larger in 2034 if the tax cuts ended, the budget office said.
Letters From An American, Commentary: November 25, 2024 [America's Economy Now and Future], Heather Cox Richardson, right, historian and author, Nov. 26, 2024. Today, President Joe Biden laid out very clearly the argument behind the economic policies his administration has put into place.
“When I took office, the pandemic was raging and the economy was reeling,” he wrote. “From Day One, I was determined to not only deliver economic relief, but to invest in America and grow the economy from the middle out and bottom up, not the top down.”
“Over the last four years, that’s exactly what we’ve done,” he wrote. “We passed legislation to rebuild our infrastructure, build a clean energy economy, and bring manufacturing back to the United States after decades of offshoring.” Investing in America included the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that is rebuilding our roads, bridges, water systems, ports, and airports, as well as making high-speed broadband available in underserved areas; the CHIPS and Science Act that invested in bringing the manufacture of silicon chips back to the U.S. and promoting research; and the Inflation Reduction Act, which invested in technologies to combat climate change.
Today the White House announced that this federal investment has attracted more than $1 trillion in private-sector investments. “These investments in industries of the future,” Biden wrote, “are ensuring the future is made in America, by American workers.”
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.”
The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trade Wars Are Good, And Easy to Win, Andrew Egger, In retrospect, it was a bad sign that Donald Trump kept such a surprisingly low profile over the last few weeks.
He lured us into a false sense of security, as though what really mattered was the freak machine of RFKs Jr. and Pete Hegseths he was standing up to run the government. For a moment there, we could console ourselves with the idea that at least four Republican Senators, if they chose to, could keep all that from going too far off the rails.
But there’s only so much you can do to hedge against the big guy himself. And last night he surfaced unexpectedly, like the shark in Jaws, to make a major announcement: The trade war against Mexico, Canada, and China—our three biggest trading partners—starts on Day One.
“On January 20th, as one of my many first Executive Orders, I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open orders,” Trump posted on Truth Social, where we can expect all major U.S. trade policy decisions to appear for the foreseeable future. “This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country! Both Mexico and Canada have the absolute right and power to easily solve this long simmering problem.”
Trump added that China would be hit with a 10 percent tariff as well.
There’s a lot going on here, but start with the bottom line. America just decided to put a corrupt, felonious, autocrat-admiring, expertise-allergic coupster back in the White House, primarily for one reason: Prices were too high. Joe Biden, you see, had presided over a roughly 20 percent increase in prices (and a 20 percent increase in wages to go with it, but who’s counting?).
New York Times, For Investors, the Trump Market Is High Risk, High Reward, Jeff Sommer, Nov. 25, 2024. Faced with unconventional and disruptive proposals, investors are figuring out how to place their bets.
Markets abhor uncertainty. That bit of Wall Street wisdom helps explain their ebb and flow since Donald J. Trump’s victory on Election Day, and even earlier.
Stocks and bond yields began rising early in October, when Wall Street concluded that Mr. Trump would win. The market surge accelerated after he did.
Yet for the markets, uncertainty hasn’t vanished. It’s merely coming from another direction. Because President-elect Trump’s approach to politics and economics is so disruptive and unconventional, markets have been straining to digest the implications of the power transfer in Washington, switching erratically between elation, confusion and occasional bouts of high anxiety.
New York Times, A Potential Fight Over the Fed’s Future Ramps Up, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Ravi Mattu, Bernhard Warner, Sarah Kessler, Michael J. de la Merced and Lauren Hirsch, Nov. 11, 2024. As allies of Donald Trump, including Elon Musk, endorse ending the Federal Reserve’s independence, its chair is said to be ready to battle in court.
Donald Trump’s threat to exert more say over the Fed or even fire Jay Powell, the chair of the central bank, has alarmed some on Wall Street. But the president-elect’s effort took on added weight in recent days, after Elon Musk endorsed a push to erode the Fed’s independence.
Recent Relevant Headlines
The Hartmann Report, The Great Dismantling: Trump’s Coming Attack on America’s Economic Backbone, Thom HartmannPolitico, DNC chair hits back at Sanders over party criticism: 'Straight up BS'
Energy, Transportation, Climate Change, Environment, Space
New York Times, Elon Musk’s $50 Billion Tesla Pay Can’t Be Reinstated, Delaware Judge Rules, Peter Eavis and Jack Ewing, Dec. 3, 2024 (print ed.). The judge said she would not reverse her decision to strike down the enormous compensation package, which helped make Mr. Musk the richest person on the world.
A Delaware judge on Monday affirmed an earlier ruling that rescinded a giant pay package that Tesla had awarded its chief executive, Elon Musk.
The pay, in the form of stock options, was worth more than $50 billion and helped make Mr. Musk the richest person in the world. The package is now worth $100 billion after Tesla’s share price jumped sharply in recent weeks.
The judge, Chancellor Kathaleen St. J. McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery, struck down the award in January, ruling that shareholders had not been properly informed of its details and that members of Tesla’s board were not sufficiently independent.
But lawyers for Tesla and Mr. Musk argued that a second shareholder vote in June in favor of the package cleared the way for effectively reinstating it.
The pay comes from a 2018 award that said Mr. Musk would get all the options only if Tesla’s stock price soared and its sales and earnings grew strongly. Few expected Mr. Musk to achieve all of those targets because Tesla was still struggling to sell enough electric cars to become profitable. But Tesla’s business took off and its stock rocketed higher, allowing Mr. Musk to earn all the options. He has to hold them for five years.
The shareholder who brought the suit, Richard J. Tornetta, contended that Tesla’s board had not acted independently of Mr. Musk when devising the package and that the company had provided “materially misleading” information to investors. In her January ruling, after a trial in 2022, Chancellor McCormick said, “The process leading to the approval of Musk’s compensation plan was deeply flawed.”
To try to get the judge to change her mind, Tesla’s lawyers argued that shareholders were sufficiently informed when they voted again for the package in June. But in her ruling on Monday, Chancellor McCormick wrote that the Tesla lawyers’ arguments had several flaws. Among them was that they could not hope to flip a decision “based on evidence they created after trial.”
She also said a “stockholder vote standing alone cannot ratify a conflicted-controller transaction,” referring to a situation in which a major shareholder has influence over a board and its decisions.
Tesla’s board of directors will most likely try to fashion a new pay package that falls under the jurisdiction of Texas, where the company has since moved its corporate registration from Delaware, said Charles Elson, the founding director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.
But any new compensation award will be vulnerable to legal challenges if the board does not demonstrate more independence from Mr. Musk, Mr. Elson said. “They can always create a new package,” he said. “But they have to be very careful in the way they construct it.”
Mr. Elson praised the decision, saying a ruling in Mr. Musk’s favor “would have really changed for the worse Delaware conflict-of-interest law.”
Chancellor McCormick also ordered Tesla to pay $345 million in fees to lawyers who represented shareholders in the case. That was far less than the $5.6 billion that the lawyers had sought.
New York Times, Guest Essay: New Orleans Knows It May Not Live Forever. We Could All Take a Cue, Nathaniel Rich (the author, most recently, of “Second Nature: Scenes From a World Remade.” He has lived in New Orleans for 15 years), Dec. 1, 2024 (print ed.).
A unifying theme of this year’s extremely active Atlantic hurricane season, which officially concludes on Saturday, has been the disbelief echoing from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Ozark plateau. “I had always felt like we were safe from climate change,” an Asheville, N.C., woman told The Times after Hurricane Helene. “But now this makes me question that maybe there’s nowhere that’s safe.”
To which the obvious rejoinder is: You’re right. Nowhere is safe.
But some places are less safe than others. Atop the list of unsafe places is New Orleans. But unlike the other major cities that appear on such lists (Phoenix; Norfolk, Va.; Tampa Bay, Fla; New York), New Orleans has a striking competitive advantage. It knows that every hurricane season poses an existential threat.
I’ve never met a New Orleanian who feels safe from climate change. Living here, rather, engenders hurricane expertise — and hurricane fatalism. You become your own disaster planner, insurance adjuster, land surveyor and roofer. You know how many feet your neighborhood is above or below sea level, which storm drain on the block must be cleared by hand before the rain starts, which door sill needs to be bolstered with a rolled-up towel and where water is most likely to pool, with what appalling consequences.
The National Hurricane Center advises those in the path of a storm to have an evacuation plan. Most New Orleanians I know have three plans: one if the storm lands to the east, one if to the west and a third if the evacuation lasts longer than a week. We don’t wait for a tropical storm to form. We track every depression and cyclone advisory with grim scrutiny. There are storm shutters on every window, a hammer in the attic, candles and matches and gallons of bottled water in the pantry. Local news organizations track how many of the city’s drainage pumps, steam and combustion turbine generators and frequency changers are operational at any given time. We are as prepared as anyone can be with the certain knowledge that one day a storm will come for which no preparations will be sufficient.
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White House Chronicle, Commentary: Coming Electricity Crisis Will Test Trump and Musk, Llewellyn King
Media, High Tech, Culture, Education
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.
New York Times, Guest Essay: Bluesky Is Different From X. For Now, Clay Shirky (an associate professor of journalism at New York University and the author of “Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers Into Collaborators”). Dec. 7, 2024. Liberals moving away from X are giving up on the 20th-century ideal of a public sphere, best described by Hannah Arendt as a place that “gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other.”
Bluesky, the destination of the moment, is experiencing a post-election surge of new users as millions of mostly liberal users of X (nee Twitter) have moved over to the Twitter-like platform, which opened to the public last year. The platform had 13 million users by early November; 10 million more joined over the next month.
Now that social media is ubiquitous, growth in one platform often means lost users for another. The Bluesky migration suggests that the broader the “us” gathered together, the harder it is to prevent our falling on another. (Owners of giant social media platforms often imagine they can get good moderation for many users with little effort, when that is a distinctly “pick two” choice.)
On social media, the political is personal; migrating Bluesky users are signaling political separation from an increasingly conservative X and giving up on the idea of a town square that holds all voices simultaneously.
It’s obvious why liberal users might want to leave X. Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 (and renamed it in 2023), he has reshaped the platform to be more welcoming to racism, misogyny and anti-immigrant and antitrans sentiment than even the old freewheeling Twitter. Abandoning early promises to not reinstate barred users without the judgment of a review board, Mr. Musk reversed previous suspensions and bans for Nick Fuentes, an admirer of Hitler; James Lindsay, an anti-L.G.B.T.Q. activist; and, of course, Donald Trump, who was barred after the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Mr. Musk hasn’t just made X more conservative; he has also made it harder for users to ignore far-right and MAGA content, dismantling tools they had relied on to filter out those voices. X was originally a rebranding of Twitter, but over time, the service has become, in internet parlance, a Nazi bar.
Before last month’s election, though, that political transformation was not enough to cause massive defections (though several million users did abandon the platform). When Mr. Musk bought Twitter, he seems to have guessed, mostly correctly, that even users who disliked reactionary politics would not leave. Social media’s proposition is access to other people; for any individual user, moving to a new platform means abandoning friends and followers, the source of social media’s so-called stickiness. Mere personal dissatisfaction was not enough to persuade people to move; some synchronizing event was required.
Mr. Trump’s election was that event. Staying on X suddenly seemed intolerable to many, but they still needed a place to go. Before the election, it was not obvious that Bluesky was the best destination. Threads, which is owned by Meta (alongside Facebook and Instagram), had many times the number of users. If liberals on X were just looking for a populous new home, Threads would have been the logical choice. But Threads reportedly has plans to accept ads, and like most ad-supported services, it will have an incentive to fill users’ feeds with content they have not sought out, one of the issues with X as well.
The shift to Bluesky could falter. Bluesky could fail to find a workable business model. Conservatives joining Bluesky, the better to own the libs, could swamp the conversation. But movement toward a more communal platform has already been swift and vast. Demand for social spaces that are organized around user preferences instead of advertiser preferences or owners’ whims may serve as a model for better spaces for political speech and a move away from “scale at all costs” business models.
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.
Dec. 6
New York Times, The Guardian Sells U.K.’s Oldest Sunday Paper to a Media Start-Up, Eshe Nelson, Dec. 6, 2024. The Guardian Media Group said it had struck a deal to sell The Observer to Tortoise Media, shortly after a 48-hour strike by journalists had ended.
The Observer, a British Sunday newspaper that has been running for more than two centuries, will be sold to the digital media start-up Tortoise Media, the publication’s owner, the Guardian Media Group, said Friday, despite staff protests.
The boards of the Guardian Media Group, which also publishes The Guardian, and the Scott Trust, the owner of the Guardian Media Group, have agreed “in principle” to the deal, which is expected to be signed in the next few days. The announcement came shortly after journalists at the two news outlets waged a 48-hour strike, calling the deal “rushed” and a risk to the journalism of both newspapers.
The Guardian’s parent company, which bought The Observer in 1993, did not disclose the sale price. But it said the Scott Trust, a 1.3 billion-pound ($1.7 billion) fund, would invest in Tortoise Media and become one of its largest shareholders. The trust will also have representatives on the company and editorial boards of Tortoise Media, which said it had raised £25 million to invest in The Observer.
“We knew we needed the right combination of resources and commitment to build a new platform for The Observer,” Ole Jacob Sunde, the chair of the Scott Trust, said in a statement. “It required an ally to be sufficiently funded, long-term in nature, and respect editorial independence and liberal values. I believe we have found this in Tortoise Media.”
When the proposed sale came to light in September, it was a surprise to the papers’ journalists, who raised concerns about the ability of Tortoise Media, a six-year-old company that has not recorded a profit, to preserve the future of The Observer.
Amid pressure from the staff to reconsider the deal, the Scott Trust pushed to have some say in the editorial direction of The Observer after the sale. Journalists at both newspapers walked off the job on Wednesday and Thursday, hoping to delay the deal. It was the first strike in the newsroom in more than 50 years.
New York Times, Her Wrestling Empire Was Said to Harm Children. Trump Chose Her for Education, Stephanie Saul, Zach Montague and Sharon Otterman, Updated Dec. 2, 2024. Linda McMahon, whose résumé mainly rests on running World Wrestling Entertainment, has faced questions for years over whether she is suitable for important education posts.
Appointees to the State Board of Education usually sail through the confirmation process in Connecticut’s House of Representatives, but a 2009 choice, Linda E. McMahon, drew intense pushback.
Andrew Fleischmann, who then chaired the House Education Committee, remembers being offended by her selection and leading the opposition.
“She had no involvement whatsoever in education,” Mr. Fleischmann, a Democrat, said in a recent interview. “She’s made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars pushing violence and sexualization of young women. She was a real force for doing ill to kids in our country.”
Ms. McMahon’s company, World Wrestling Entertainment, was criticized for promoting violence, steroid use and sexualized content. In the early 2000s, Ms. McMahon would go so far as to engage in the W.W.E.’s theatrics herself. She kicked her husband, Vince McMahon, the company’s co-founder, in the groin in one routine. In another, she appeared to slap her daughter, Stephanie, and knock her to the floor.
After a contentious floor debate, the House voted to approve Ms. McMahon by a vote of 96-45, an unusual split for a minor appointment in Connecticut.
Ms. McMahon may soon face another confirmation, this time as President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education.
Dr. Patrick Soon Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times, with his daughter Andrea Chang shown in a 2018 Los Angeles Times photo via the Associated Press).
Talking Feds Substack, Opinion: Why I Just Resigned From The Los Angeles Times, Harry Litman, right, Dec. 5, 2024. I have been a contributor to the Los Angeles Times op-ed page in some fashion for more than 15 years. For the last three years, I have been the Senior Legal Columnist, writing regular weekly columns about Trump’s legal troubles, the Supreme Court, and a wide range of other topics. The Times also permitted me to cover Trump’s trial in New York and the 2024 Democratic convention.
My editors have been skilled, quick, and fair. I have been able to write whatever I like, including blistering criticism of Donald Trump.
I’ve been proud of my work and proud to be part of the Times, the most prominent and storied newspaper west of the Mississippi. It’s got gravitas—and 45 Pulitzers to show for it—combined with a California flair that complements the constant variety and zaniness of my adopted state.
But I have written my last op-ed for the Times. Yesterday, I resigned my position. I don’t want to continue to work for a paper that is appeasing Trump and facilitating his assault on democratic rule for craven reasons.
Talking Feds Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
My resignation is a protest and visceral reaction against the conduct of the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. Soon-Shiong has made severalmoves to force the paper, over the forceful objections of his staff, into a posture more sympathetic to Donald Trump. Those moves can’t be defended as the sort of policy adjustment papers undergo from time to time, and that an owner, within limits, is entitled to influence. Given the existential stakes for our democracy that I believe Trump’s second term poses, and the evidence that Soon-Shiong is currying favor with the President-elect, they are repugnant and dangerous.
Soon-Shiong’s most notorious action received national attention. The paper’s editorial department had drafted an endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Soon-Shiong ordered them to spike it and make no endorsement in the election. (Soon-Shiong later implied he had just ordered up a factual analysis of both candidates’ policies, but that’s at best a distortion: he plainly blocked an already drafted Harris endorsement.) It is hard to imagine a more brutal, humiliating, and unprofessional treatment of a paper’s professional staff. Three members of the editorial page resigned in protest and 2,000 readers canceled their subscriptions.
Owners participate in setting overall editorial direction. But it’s a grave insult to the independence and integrity of an editorial department for an owner to force it to withdraw a considered and drafted opinion. And of course, this was no ordinary opinion. The endorsement of a presidential candidate is an editorial department’s most important decision, so the slight was deep.
It was also a deep insult to the paper’s readership. Like any major paper, the Times has a coherent and consistent line of reasoning to its editorial decisions. That can include idiosyncratic departures on particular issues. Where Trump was concerned, the paper had presented to its readers a long series of opinions that set out, with force and nuance, the great dangers of his return to office. That line of analysis culminated logically in the endorsement of Harris. For the Times to lead its readers to the finish line only to step off the track was bizarre and disrespectful.
By far the most important problem with Soon-Shiong’s scrapping of the editorial was the apparent motivation. It is untenable to suggest that Soon-Shiong woke up with sudden misgivings over Harris’s criminal justice record or with newfound affection for Trump’s immigration proposals. The plain inference, and the one that readers and national observers have adopted, is that he wanted to hedge his bets in case Trump won—not even to protect the paper’s fortunes but rather his multi-billion-dollar holdings in other fields. It seems evident that he was currying favor with Trump and capitulating to the President-elect’s well-known pettiness and vengefulness.
Trump has made it clear that he will make trouble for media outlets that cross him. Rather than reacting with indignation at this challenge to his paper’s critical function in a democracy, Soon-Shiong threw the paper to the wolves. That was cowardly.
And his decision had a sort of force multiplier effect with the similar conduct by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, who rammed a similar non-endorsement decision down the throat of his editorial staff. There as well, there was no argument that the intervention was based on sensible policy contrast between Trump and Harris. History will record it as a self-serving protection of other holdings, which, as in the case of Soon-Shiong’s, dwarf the newspaper itself.
Before joining the Times, I was a contributing commentator for the Post. We used to say there, tongue-in-cheek, that our billionaire was better than their billionaire, meaning Bezos was more aware of his public responsibility and more hands-off in his oversight. As it turns out, both billionaires flinched when the chips were down, choosing to appease, not oppose, a criminal President with patent authoritarian ambitions.
Before he has even taken office, Trump has faced down two of the country’s most prominent newspapers, inducing them to back off longstanding, well-reasoned editorial opposition. That is terrifying.
As a commentator, especially one dedicated to constitutional norms and the rule of law, I have spent much of the last couple of years arguing that Trump is a genuine menace to our constitutional system. November 5 showed that a narrow majority of Americans who voted disagree or don’t care.
Yet here in Southern California and in Washington, D.C., we have evidence of tangible erosion of social guardrails in real time. Trump is in the process of commandeering and corrupting institutions of government and civil society that we have always counted on to nurture our democracy.
Look closely at this already deeply eroded landscape: all the electoral branches are not only Republican but firmly within Trump’s fist and dedicated to loyalty to him over any principle of governance. The Supreme Court has assisted his authoritarian initiatives in ways that the legal profession and society as a whole have condemned. His current nomination process is seeking openly to cut the Senate, even its Republican members, out of their constitutional advice-and-consent role.
For the moment, the best hopes for desperately needed pushback lie with federal law enforcement, the lower federal courts, the military, and (an economically weakened) mainstream media. All this is material for another Substack, but Trump has taken dead aim at imposing loyalty to him as the defining feature of the first three, including a proposal to permit him to discharge generals who are not, as he put it, sufficiently like “Hitler’s generals.”
So the role and responsibility of the media have never been greater. And if major outlets can be bought off and made to cower, the impact on our liberty—and freedom of thought—is in grave jeopardy.
Thus far, I have analyzed only Soon-Shiong’s most notorious and visible action of scuttling the endorsement. That put him in lock step with Bezos. But he has combined it with a general program of cozying up to Trump, especially since the election. Soon-Shiong ordered the shelving of a multi-part series, intended to run with the endorsement but broader and of a piece with the editorial page’s opinion over the last several years, which had been entitled, “The Case Against Trump.” His spiking of the series was part of the explanation given by the editorial board members who resigned.
There is more: Soon-Shiong went on Fox News after the election to talk about the paper’s editorial direction. He advocated “diverse perspectives” in the editorial pages and voices from across the political spectrum to avoid creating an "echo chamber." Most alarmingly, and escaping the notice of no one, he pandered to Fox and Trump by saying he wanted to make the Times more “fair and balanced.”
Soon-Shiong followed up by hiring a noted pro-Trump commentator, Scott Jennings, for some as yet ill-defined role of “balancing out” the views on the editorial page. Then most recently, during an interview on CNN in which he was asked about the Jennings hire, the normally mild-mannered Soon-Shiong went full Trump, labeling the CNN correspondent a "so-called reporter" before abruptly ending the interview.
Soon-Shiong’s argument for all these moves is to create “balance” on the editorial page, which still remains unstaffed and in chaos, and a neutral, “just the facts” approach to news. It sounds banal, but in fact, it is pernicious; and it goes to the heart of my reasons for leaving.
First, the idea of balance is fundamentally misplaced when on one side of the balance is a sociopathic liar like Donald Trump. The media has struggled for years to figure out how to call out Trump’s incessant lies while still covering the contentious issues of the day. There’s good reason to think that the propagation of those lies, some of which Trump simply picks up from fringe social media sites and Fox News, influenced the results of the election. The people who voted for Trump were fed a relentless false account of issue after issue, including Trump’s signature distortions about immigrants (eating pets, committing a disproportionate number of violent crimes), which Fox News and right-wing social media parroted relentlessly.
In that context, the bromide of just being balanced is a terrible dereliction of journalists’ first defining responsibility of reporting the truth. Soon-Shiong apparently would have the Times deliver an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand presentation to readers. But there is no “other hand.” Trump is an inveterate liar, and journalists have a defining responsibility to call that out.
I don’t pretend that my resignation is any kind of serious counter-blow to the damage of Soon-Shiong’s cozying up to Trump. And I see, and I thought about, the argument that my most constructive role would be to stay on and continue to use my one voice as forcefully as I could to explain to Times readers the grave dangers on the horizon.
But the cost of alliance with an important national institution that has such an important role to play in pushing back against authoritarian rule, but declines to do so for spurious and selfish reasons, feels too great. And Soon-Shiong’s conscious pattern of détente with Trump has in fact recast the paper’s core identity to one of appeasement with an authoritarian madman. I am loath to affiliate with that identity in any way.
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The Hartmann Report, Opinion: The End of Left-Leaning News? Is Progressive Journalism Being Systematically Destroyed? Thom Hartmann
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Andrew Kreig
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The Justice Integrity Project (JIP) researches official misconduct
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