February 13, 2025
Four years ago today, on February 13, 2021, Senate Republicans acquitted former president Donald Trump of incitement of insurrection in his second impeachment trial. Although 57 senators, including 7 Republicans, voted to convict Trump for launching the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, that vote did not reach the threshold of 67 votes—two thirds of the Senate—necessary to convict a president in an impeachment trial.
After the trial, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) explained his refusal to convict by saying he did not believe the Senate could convict an ex-president, although McConnell had been instrumental in delaying the impeachment trial until Trump was out of office, perhaps out of concern about dividing the Republican Party between pro-Trump MAGAs and his own establishment wing. McConnell acquitted Trump but, after the vote, blamed Trump alone for the events of January 6, calling his behavior “unconscionable” but adding: “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”
Four years later, Trump is back in the White House, and today McConnell provided the only Republican vote against confirming Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become the secretary of health and human services, just as yesterday he provided the only Republican vote against the confirmation of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence.
Of Kennedy’s confirmation, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) said to his colleagues: “It’s truly astounding that the Senate stands on the brink of confirming Mr. Kennedy to lead America’s public health agencies. And if the Senate weren’t gripped in this soon-to-be infamous period of total capitulation, I don’t think this nominee would have made it as far as a hearing…. If I’d told you a couple of years ago, ‘There’s a guy who’s been nominated to run public health nationwide. His job will be to protect American families from death and disease. He’s going to run the whole public health system: Medicare, Medicaid, the C[enters] for D[isease] C[ontrol and Prevention], the N[ational] I[nstitutes of] H[ealth]—all of it. He’ll decide how we protect the country from infectious disease, he’ll set the rules for every hospital in the country, he’ll decide what healthcare and medicines get covered by Medicare, he’ll manage our response in the event of a pandemic.’ And then I told you,… ‘Well,... there are a few concerns about this nominee. First of all, zero relevant experience. He’s a trial lawyer, a politician from a famous family. No medical or scientific background, he’s never run a hospital or a health system or anything like that. Second of all… he’s said some pretty wild stuff about public health, over and over and over again, like: he proposed that Covid-19 might be ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews. Ethnically targeted to spare Jews. He said Lyme disease was a military bioweapon. For years he’s been persuading American families against routine childhood immunizations. He’s compared the work of the CDC to ‘Nazi death camps.’... If a couple of years ago I told you all that, and I told you that the Senate was about to put America’s health in this man’s hands, you’d probably tell me the Senate has lost its mind.”
All the Senate Republicans but McConnell voted to confirm Kennedy.
But while Senate Republicans are enabling the Trump administration, a significant revolt against it took place today in New York City and Washington, D.C., when at least six prosecutors resigned in protest after Emil Bove III, the acting deputy attorney general of the Department of Justice, ordered them to dismiss corruption charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams.
In September 2024, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York indicted Adams on five counts of wire fraud, campaign finance offenses, and bribery. According to then–U.S. attorney Damian Williams, “Adams abused his position as this City’s highest elected official…to take bribes and solicit illegal campaign contributions. By allegedly taking improper and illegal benefits from foreign nationals—including to allow a Manhattan skyscraper to open without a fire inspection—Adams put the interests of his benefactors, including a foreign official, above those of his constituents.”
But on February 10, 2025, Bove directed acting interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon, who was elevated by the Trump administration just last month, to dismiss the charges against Adams. That same day, Adams told top New York City officials to stay out of the way of immigration enforcement and to refrain from criticizing President Trump.
Yesterday, February 12, Sassoon wrote an 8-page letter of protest to Attorney General Pam Bondi about the order to drop charges against Adams, but to keep open the possibility of future prosecution. She noted that “the evidence against Adams…proves beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed federal crimes” and suggested that Bove and the Trump administration proposed “dismissing the charges against Adams in return for his assistance in enforcing the federal immigration laws.” “[T]he rule of law depends upon the evenhanded administration of justice,” Sassoon wrote, and the “legal judgments of the Department of Justice must be impartial and insulated from political influence.”
“But Adams has argued in substance—and Mr. Bove appears prepared to concede—that Adams should receive leniency for federal crimes solely because he occupies an important public position and can use that position to assist in the Administration's policy priorities.” Sassoon called Adams’s offer of help to the Trump administration “an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for the dismissal of his case.” She recounted a meeting on January 31 with Bove, Adams’s lawyers, and members of her office, in which Adams’s lawyers repeatedly offered an exchange, “indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed.” Bove ordered the confiscation of notes of the meeting taken by a member of Sassoon’s team.
“Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged,” Sassoon wrote, “I cannot agree to seek a dismissal.” She continued: “I remain baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seeming collaboration with Adams’s counsel….” But if Attorney General Bondi was unwilling to meet or reconsider the dismissal, Sassoon wrote, she was “prepared to offer my resignation.”
Today, in a defensive 8-page letter, Bove attacked Sassoon and accepted her resignation, claiming she was “pursuing a politically motivated prosecution,” and dismissed her suggestion “that you retain discretion to interpret the Constitution in a manner inconsistent with the politics of a democratically elected President and a Senate-confirmed Attorney General.”
Bove transferred the Adams case to the Public Integrity Section (PIN) in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. Rather than dismiss the case, the chief of the Public Integrity Section and the senior career official in the Criminal Division, as well as three of the deputy chiefs at PIN, also resigned. A fourth was giving birth, but Ryan J. Reilly of NBC News reported that she was expected to resign when she was able.
Today, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro sued the Trump administration to guarantee the release of more than $3 billion allocated to Pennsylvania’s state agencies. Shapiro noted that multiple federal judges have ordered administration officials to release the funding they have impounded, but that funding has not been restored. The lawsuit details the programs funded with federal money, including repairing abandoned mining lands and contaminated waterways, plugging abandoned oil and gas wells, upgrading energy efficiency for up to 28,000 low-income households to lower utility bills, and so on.
The lawsuit reiterates that “unilaterally suspending funds…violates the U.S. Constitution,” which gives Congress alone the power to write the laws that appropriate funding.
Also today, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ordered the Trump administration to disburse the foreign aid it has impounded. As Lindsay Whitehurst and Ellen Knickmeyer of the Associated Press note, the judge rejected the administration's argument that it impounded funds to review each program. He said officials “have not offered any explanation for why a blanket suspension of all congressionally appropriated foreign aid, which set off a shockwave and upended reliance interests for thousands of agreements with businesses, nonprofits, and organizations around the country, was a rational precursor to reviewing programs.”
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Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/12/tulsi-gabbard-confirmed
https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/02/10/eric-adams-donald-trump-pardon-2/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/13/us/doc-annotation-letter-to-bondi.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/13/us/doc-annotation-memo-from-bove.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/nyregion/danielle-sassoon-quit-eric-adams.html
https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/12025-02-13-Complaint.pdf
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.277333/gov.uscourts.dcd.277333.17.0.pdf
YouTube:
We keep asking what we, the people, can do. Here is something that we can do. You may already have heard about it, but in case you haven't, please join in the economic boycott on February 28. There's a group called The People's Union USA
(https://jointhepeoplesunion.com/) that has been organizing it. I just joined, so that I can keep up to date and learn what further actions they're planning. This is a one-day boycott, but it probably won't be the last.
Please tell everyone you know about the boycott--the more people who take part, the more effective it will be. We, the people, can make a difference, especially when we all work together.
A friend wrote a guest opinion for his local paper and gave me permission to post it for others to adapt:
In a recent letter to constituents entitled “The Amodei Report: Roundup of Presidential Actions”, MAGA Mark Amodei stated that a “90-day pause in foreign assistance fulfills President Trump’s commitment to ensuring responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”
Amodei goes on to list a “few initiatives” funded through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under President Biden’s watch with which he apparently disagrees, and I quote:
— $2.5 million for electric vehicles for Vietnam
— $2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala
— Hundreds of thousands of dollars to a non-profit linked to designated terrorist organizations, even after an Inspector General initiated an investigation
— $47,000 for a “transgender opera” in Colombia
— $32,000 for a “transgender comic book” in Peru
Now, let’s put on our Critical Thinking Caps, shall we?
According to the most recent full-year fiscal report for USAID, USAID spent $39 billion dollars on its mission around the world. However, USAID also carries out programs funded by the US State Department. Adding in those expenditures, USAID executed missions totaling between $50 and $60 billion in 2023, according to public reporting. Let’s use $55 billion as an estimate.
Apparently, Mr. Amodei has a gripe with the five programs he mentioned. The approximate total expenditure for these five is about $5.1 million dollars. Dividing $5.1 million dollars by USAID’s total expenditures of $55 billion dollars, we find that Mr. Amodei is apparently complaining about expenditures totaling 0.00927% of USAID’s budget!!!
In other words, Mr. Amodei is literally ignoring the remaining 99.9907% of USAID’s expenditures. One would wonder if he knows or cares what activities are included in 99.9907% of USAID’s activities? Do you, Mark? How about holding one of your very rare constituent town halls so that we can discuss?
A rhetorical point is being made, not a point of substance. In truth, Mr. Amodei’s email to his constituents is not a product of his own independent thinking about USAID, but instead merely a subset of 12 talking points distributed by MAGA, intent upon attacking USAID in districts around the country with the usual “culture war” messages. Fact-checker Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post has declared that 11 of the 12 are wrong: "The White House’s wildly inaccurate claims about USAID spending: Eleven out of 12 claims about the agency’s work are misleading, wrong or lack context.” https://wapo.st/3X2I77c
In truth, USAID performs the vital mission of supporting the U.S. government’s foreign policy by helping countries with economic development, disaster relief, and promoting democracy.
What has USAID accomplished in recent years with the other 99.9907% of the budget that Mr. Amodei didn’t mention?
Well, only saved over 25 million lives in Africa under a program started by President George W. Bush called PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), called by many the most successful humanitarian aid program in history.
What else has USAID done? Daily, USAID saves starving people in sub-Saharan Africa using a substance manufactured from Georgia peanuts, suppresses the production of cocaine in South America, fights to save the Amazon rainforest, and acts through its nearly 100 missions worldwide as a pandemic early-warning system as it provides rudimentary anti-viral health care for the poorest people on earth.
The eradication of smallpox was achieved by a collaboration between USAID and the CDC and the World Health Organization (from which President Trump recently had us withdraw).
The bottom line is that every year, again using the 99.9907% of the budget that Mr. Amodei does not mention, USAID saves millions of lives worldwide, promotes democracy, and promotes American “soft power.”
But don’t just take my word for it, listen to conservative former USAID chief under President G.W. Bush, Andrew Natsios. He says “the notion that the agency are criminals and all that, that’s a lot of garbage. It’s a lie, it’s an insult.” Simply Google "Andrew Natsios USAID", and you will find numerous interviews where Mr. Natsios explains all the good that USAID does, and why America is worse off without it.
It is an abomination that the wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, bragged on “X” about how he and his young coders and hackers “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper.” The wealthiest man on earth is bragging about an action that will cause thousands and probably millions of deaths of the poorest people on earth, without any review by the U.S. Congress.
This is a sad, disgusting chapter in our country’s history, and Mr. Amodei is complicit, spreading defaming tidbits about USAID while ignoring its magnificent accomplishments for the world and for all Americans. I am disgusted that he apparently condones Mr. Musk’s “feeding USAID through the woodchipper.”
As Mr. Natsios has pointed out, true conservatives don’t feed agencies through the woodchipper, they make course corrections, eliminating the bad and improving on the good works being done. Musk and Trump’s approach is not conservatism… it’s nihilism and anarchy.
I call on Mark Amodei to think for himself, and to stop supporting the ravings of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, before it is too late. American foreign policy and American democracy are at stake. If today’s MAGA will lie about USAID and “feed it through the woodchipper", soon they will come for FEMA, for Medicaid, for Social Security, for Medicare and other programs vital to American citizens to justify the $4.5 trillion dollar tax cut for billionaires that they just proposed in the upcoming budget talks.
Wake up, citizens, before it is too late. As I write this, Donald Trump has abandoned Ukraine, essentially promised disputed territory to Vladimir Putin, and invited this man, a war criminal, to the White House. These are disgraceful moments in American history, and we all need to wake up and think for ourselves.
Especially our elected representatives, like Mark Amodei.
Voter
Reno, NV