Archives for category: Injustice
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Trump Is Breaking the Law By Banning Teaching About DEI

By dianeravitch
February 16, 2025 //
10

Haley Bull of Scripps News reported yesterday that Trump sent out an order to all 50 states warning that the federal government would cut off funding to any school that teaches about “diversity, equity or inclusion.”

She wrote:

The Department of Education is warning state education agencies they may lose federal funding if they do not remove DEI policies and programs to comply with the department’s interpretation of federal law.

A letter from the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights was sent to the departments of education in all 50 states, according to the Department of Government Efficiency.

“Institutions that fail to comply with federal civil rights law may, consistent with applicable law, face potential loss of federal funding,” acting assistant secretary for civil rights Craig Trainor writes in the letter. The message warns that “the department will vigorously enforce the law” to schools and state educational agencies receiving funding and that it will start taking measures “to assess compliance” in no more than 14 days.

The letter argues that a Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which found that affirmative action in the university’s admission process violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, should apply more broadly. 

“The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent,” the letter states.

This letter fails to mention that since 1970, the U.S. Department of Education has been subject to a law that states clearly that no officer of the federal government may interfere with what schools teaching.

The law states: “No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, employee, of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, [or] administration…of any educational institution…or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials.“

The law is P.L. 103-33, General Education Provisions Act, section 432.

These zealots are trying to turn teaching about civil rights, about Black history, and about LGBT people into a criminal act.

They are wrong. Reality exists no matter what they ban and censor.

They are violating the law, and they must be stopped.

They must be sued by the ACLU, the NAACP, and every other legal organization that defends the rule of law.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Curriculum, Disruption, Equity, Extremism, Fraud, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Gender, Ignorance, Inequity, Injustice, Racism, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Heather Cox Richardson: Keeping track of Trump’s Assault on the Rule of Law

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2025 //
9

The far-right forces behind Trump have been planning their assault on democracy and the rule of law for years. Decades even, if you consider ALEC and other rightwing groups, like the Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 was the plan, and one of its author is now director of the powerful Office of Management and Budget.

A central part of their plan was to overwhelm the public and the media with a flurry of executive orders. They call it “flooding the zone.” It’s nearly impossible to react to three or four outrages a day. Who can even catalogue all of them?

Heather Cox Richardson tries to pull it together for her readers. Yesterday there were multiple court orders, more than she has room to report. And multiple executive orders, including one suspending enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits U.S. firms from bribing foreign officials; Trump thinks it puts American businesses at a disadvantage if they can’t bribe foreign officials as their competitors do. There were multiple DOGE assaults on federal agencies. Even HRC has to be selective. But it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

That’s exactly what the Trump enablers want. They want the public to feel as though resistance is futile. It’s not. The courts keep telling them “you can’t do that.” So now, through JD Vance, the Trump team is hinting that they might ignore the courts.

Repeat after me. “We will not give up. We will resist. We will work with others. We will join Indivisible or some other resistance group. We will resist.”

She writes:

As soon as President Donald Trump took office, his administration froze great swaths of government funding, apparently to test the theory popular with Project 2025 authors that the 1974 law forbidding the president from “impounding” money Congress had appropriated was unconstitutional. The loss of funding has hurt Americans across the country. Today, Daniel Wu, Gaya Gupta, and Anumita Kaur of the Washington Post reported that farmers who had signed contracts with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to improve infrastructure and who had paid up front to put in fences, plant different crops, and install renewable energy systems with the promise the government would provide financial assistance are now left holding the bag.

With Republicans in Congress largely mum about this and other power grabs by the administration, the courts are holding the line. Chief Judge John McConnell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island today found that the Trump administration has refused to disburse federal funding despite the court’s “clear and unambiguous” temporary restraining order saying it must do so. McConnell said the administration “must immediately restore frozen funding” and clear any hurdles to that funding until the court hears arguments about the case. This includes the monies withheld from the farmers.

This evening, Massachusetts U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley blocked the Trump appointees at the National Institutes of Health from implementing the rate change they wanted to apply to NIH grants. But, as legal analyst Joyce White Vance notes, the only relief sought is for the twenty-two Democratic-led states that have sued, keeping Republican-dominated states from freeloading on their Democratic counterparts. As Josh Marshall noted today in Talking Points Memo, it appears a pattern is emerging in which Democratic-led states are suing the administration while officials from Republican-led states, which are even harder hit by Trump’s cuts than their Democratic-led counterparts, are asking Trump directly for help or exceptions.

As soon as he took office, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, who was a key author of Project 2025 and who is also acting as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, announced he was shuttering the agency. That closure was a recommendation of Project 2025, which called the consumer protection agency “a shakedown mechanism to provide unaccountable funding to leftist nonprofits.” Immediately, the National Treasury Employees Union sued him, saying that Vought’s directive to employees to stop working “reflects an unlawful attempt to thwart Congress’s decision to create the CFPB to protect American consumers.”

MAGA loyalists, particularly Vice President J.D. Vance, have begun to suggest they will not abide by the rule of law, but before Trump and Vance took office, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts called out Vance’s hints that he would be willing to defy the rulings of federal courts as “dangerous suggestions” that “must be soundly rejected.”

Today the American Bar Association took a stand against the Trump administration’s “wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself” as it attacks the Constitution and tries to dismantle departments and agencies created by Congress “without seeking the required congressional approval to change the law.”

“The American Bar Association supports the rule of law,” president of the organization William R. Bay said in a statement. “That means holding governments, including our own, accountable.” He cheered on the courts that “are treating these cases with the urgency they require.”

“[R]efusing to spend money appropriated by Congress under the euphemism of a pause is a violation of the rule of law and suggests that the executive branch can overrule the other two co-equal branches of government,” Bay wrote. “This is contrary to the constitutional framework and not the way our democracy works. The money appropriated by Congress must be spent in accordance with what Congress has said. It cannot be changed or paused because a newly elected administration desires it. Our elected representatives know this. The lawyers of this country know this. It must stop.”

He called on “elected representatives to stand with us and to insist upon adherence to the rule of law…. The administration cannot choose which law it will follow or ignore. These are not partisan or political issues. These are rule of law and process issues. We cannot afford to remain silent…. We urge every attorney to join us and insist that our government, a government of the people, follow the law.”

Today, five former Treasury secretaries wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that also reinforced the legal lines of our constitutional system, warning that “our democracy is under siege.” Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers, who served under President Bill Clinton; Timothy F. Geithner and Jacob J. Lew, who served under President Barack Obama; and Janet L. Yellen, who served under President Joe Biden, spoke up about the violation of the United States Treasury’s nonpartisan payment system by political actors working in Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”

That DOGE team “lack training and experience to handle private, personal data,” they note, “like Social Security numbers and bank account information.” Their involvement risks exposing highly sensitive information and even risks the failure of critical infrastructure as they muck around with computer codes. The former Treasury secretaries noted that on Saturday morning, a federal judge had temporarily stopped those DOGE workers from accessing the department’s payment and data systems, warning that that access could cause “irreparable harm.”

“While significant data privacy, cybersecurity and national security threats are gravely concerning,” the former secretaries wrote, “the constitutional issues are perhaps even more alarming.” The executive branch must respect that Congress controls the nation’s money, they wrote, reiterating the key principle outlined in the Constitution: “The legislative branch has the sole authority to pass laws that determine where and how federal dollars should be spent.”

The Treasury Department cannot decide “which promises of federal funding made by Congress it will keep, and which it will not,” the letter read. “The Trump administration may seek to change the law and alter what spending Congress appropriates, as administrations before it have done as well. And should the law change, it will be the role of the executive branch to execute those changes. But it is not for the Treasury Department or the administration to decide which of our congressionally approved commitments to fulfill and which to cast aside.”

That warning appears as Trump indicates that he is willing to undermine the credit of the United States. Yesterday, on Air Force One, he told reporters that the members of the administration trying to find wasteful spending have suggested that they have found fraud in Treasury bonds and that the United States might “have less debt than we thought.” The suggestion that the U.S. might not honor its debt is a direct attack on the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which says that “[t]he validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” That amendment was written under similar circumstances, when former Confederates sought to avoid debt payments and undermine the power of the federal government.

Lauren Thomas, Ben Drummett, and Chip Cutter of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that “for CEOs and bankers, the Trump euphoria is fading fast.” Consumers are losing confidence in the economy, and observers expect inflation, while business leaders find that trying to navigate Trump’s on-again-off-again tariffs is taking all their attention.

Meanwhile, Trump has continued his purge of government employees he considers insufficiently loyal to him. On Friday he tried to get rid of Ellen Weintraub of the Federal Elections Commission, who contended that her removal was illegal. He also fired Colleen Shogan, the Archivist of the United States, head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the government agency that handles presidential records. The archivist is the official responsible for receiving and validating the certified electoral ballots for presidential elections—a process Trump’s people tried to corrupt after he lost the 2020 presidential election.

It was NARA that first discovered Trump’s retention of classified documents and demanded their return, although Shogan was not the archivist in charge at the time.

The courts happened to weigh in on the case of the retained classified documents today, when U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled that the FBI must search its records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from journalist Jason Leopold after Leopold learned that Trump had allegedly flushed presidential records down the toilet when he was president, and later brought classified documents to Florida. The judge noted that the Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. United States that the president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official duties and is “at least presumptive[ly] immune from criminal prosecution for…acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility” means that there is no reason to hold back information to shield him from prosecution. Indeed, Howell notes, that decision means that the FOIA request is now the only way for the American public to “know what its government is up to.”

Howell highlighted that the three Supreme Court justices who dissented from the Trump v. United States decision described it as “mak[ing] a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.” In a footnote, Howell also called attention to the fact that presumptive immunity for the president does not “extend to those who aid, abet and execute criminal acts on behalf of a criminally immune president. The excuse offered after World War II by enablers of the fascist Nazi regime of ‘just following orders’ has long been rejected in this country’s jurisprudence.”

Today, Trump fired David Huitema, director of the Office of Government Ethics, the department that oversees political appointments and helps nominees avoid conflicts of interest.

On Friday, Trump fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, U.S. Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger. That office enforces federal whistleblower laws as well as the law that prohibits federal employees from engaging in most political activity: the Hatch Act. Congress provided that the special counsel can be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” and today Dellinger sued, calling his removal illegal.

Tonight, Judge Amy Berman Jackson blocked Dellinger’s firing through Thursday as she hears arguments in the case.

—

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Injustice, Justice, Trump

Dana Milbank: When You Elect a Felon as President, You Get a Scofflaw

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2025 //
6

Trump has rolled out multiple executive orders that violate the law. He has installed submissive officials in key departments (like Justice) who will defend his law-breaking. The Republicans (who called Joe Biden a dictator) defend Trump’s reign of lawlessness. They have gleefully given Trump their Constitutional powers. Without a peep.

Dans Milbank advises Democrats: Don’t help him. He doesn’t need your vote.

He writes:

So, here’s a shocker: It turns out that, if you elect a felon as president of the United States, he will continue to break laws once he’s in office.

Who knew?

Ultimately, it will be up to the courts to determine which of President Donald Trump’s actions are illegal. But a case can be made — indeed, many cases already have been made in federal courts — that the new administration over the course of the last fortnight has violated each of the following laws. See if you can say them in one breath. In reverse chronological order of first enactment:

The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act of 2024. The Administrative Leave Act of 2016. The Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2014. The Affordable Care Act of 2010. The Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. The Inspector General Act of 1978. The Privacy Act of 1974. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946. The Public Health Service Act 1944. The Antideficiency Act of 1870.

That’s a century and a half of statutes shredded in just over two weeks. And those don’t include the ways in which Trump already appears to be in violation of the Constitution: The First Amendment’s protections of free speech and association; the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection and due process; the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment; the 14th Amendment’s promise of birthright citizenship; Article I’s spending, presentment, appropriations and bicameralism clauses; Article II’s take-care clause; and the separation of powers generally.

“The Trump administration so far has been the Advent calendar of illegality,” says Norman Eisen, whose group, State Democracy Defenders Action, has been filing lawsuits against the administration. At least seven federal judges appointed by presidents of both political parties have already blocked Trump’s moves to freeze federal funding, end birthright citizenship, extend a dubious buyout offer to government employees and deny treatment to transgender inmates.

Benjamin Wittes, who runs the popular Lawfare publication, predicts that, of the dozens of instances in which Trump is in conflict with existing law, he will ultimately lose 80 percent of the cases when they eventually arrive at the Supreme Court after 18 months or so of litigation. But that’s a long time to wait while the president’s lawlessness causes chaos and suffering. And even if the pro-Trump majority on the Supreme Court hands him a victory only 20 percent of the time, that could still fundamentally reshape the U.S. government, reducing Congress to irrelevance.

Republicans in Congress have for years asserted their Article I authority, and they howled about encroaching dictatorship when President Joe Biden did nothing more nefarious than forgive student-loan debt. (The Supreme Court struck that down.) So what are they doing about Trump usurping the powers of Congress? They’re applauding.

Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, acknowledged that what Trump and Elon Musk are doing to cut off congressionally mandated funding “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, he told reporters this week, that’s “not uncommon” and “nobody should bellyache about that.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson, at a news conference Wednesday, was asked by Fox News’s Chad Pergram about the “inconsistency” of Republicans who are now “ceding Article I powers to the executive branch under Elon Musk.”

“I think there’s a gross overreaction in the media,” Johnson replied, with a forced chuckle. He admitted that what Trump is doing “looks radical,” but went on: “This is not a usurpation of authority in any way. It’s not a power grab. I think they’re doing what we’ve all expected and hoped and asked that they would do.”

These are not the words of a constitutionally designated leader of the legislative branch. These are the words of a Donald Trump handmaiden. And it is time for Democrats to treat him as such.

Democrats have been negotiating in good faith on a deal to fund the government for the rest of fiscal year 2025; the government shuts down in five weeks if funding isn’t extended. There’s no doubt that Rep. Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, are also negotiating in good faith.

But the whole thing is not on the level. Trump has shown that he will ignore the spending bills passed by Congress and fund only those programs he supports — the Constitution, and the law, be damned. And Johnson has made clear that this is “what we’ve all expected and hoped and asked that they would do.”

In a letter to his Democratic colleagues this week, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said he told House GOP leaders that Trump’s efforts to cut off programs funded by Congress “must be choked off in the upcoming government funding bill, if not sooner.” But even if Democrats extracted from Republicans language in the spending bill that the programs must be funded as Congress specifies, Trump has already made clear that such a law wouldn’t be worth the paper it’s written on. And Johnson made it clear he has no intention of obliging Democrats with such a guarantee anyway; he said at his Wednesday news conference that Jeffries’s letter “laid out the foundation for a government shutdown.”

Clearly, there is no hope of good-faith negotiation with Trump, or with Johnson. Republicans control the House, Senate and White House. Let them pass a 2025 spending bill on their own. Let them raise the debt ceiling on their own. Let them enact Trump’s entire agenda on their own. They have the votes. Democrats ought not give them a single one.

Good parenting uses the idea of “natural consequences”: If your child refuses to wear her coat, let her be cold for the day. Either way, the voters will provide the consequences: FAFO. Trump knows what this means: He posted a picture of himself next to a FAFO sign, to deliver the message to Colombia’s president during their recent deportation standoff.

Democrats, by withholding their votes, will be giving Trump and Johnson some good parenting. Republicans can shut the government down. Or they can enact the sort of devastating cuts to popular programs that they like to talk about. Either way, the voters will provide the natural consequences.


The third week of the Trump presidency has been just as chaotic as the first two. Trump, who won the 2024 election promising to end wars and to put “America First,” now proposes to take over Gaza and to spend American taxpayer dollars to dismantle bombs and make it a “Riviera” on the Mediterranean. (He later clarified that Israel would handle the forced resettlement of the 2 million Palestinians there — “people like Chuck Schumer” — and then cede the Palestinian land to the United States.) The Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is using his agency to assist Trump in his personal vendetta against CBS News, forcing the network to hand over unedited tapes of an interview with Kamala Harris that are the subject of a lawsuit Trump filed against CBS.

Funding was shut off to some Head Start programs for preschoolers. And the administration, though it isn’t deporting any more migrants than the Obama administration did, stepped up efforts to humiliate them and is now sending deportees to Guantánamo Bay.

Meantime, the world’s wealthiest man runs amok through the federal bureaucracy, and he appears to have access to private records of all Americans and highly classified information such as the identities of CIA operatives. He is reportedly doing this with a group of unvetted men in their early 20s — as well as a 19-year-old heir to a popcorn fortune who recently worked as a camp counselor. Musk, though he seems to be running much of the country, has exempted himself from all government disclosure and ethics requirements. But fear not: If Musk, whose companies get billions of dollars in federal contracts, “comes across a conflict of interest,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, he will — Scout’s honor — recuse himself. The administration’s attempt to induce federal employees to take a legally dubious buyout came in the form of an email with the same subject line — “fork in the road” — that Musk used to drive Twitter employees to quit.

The South Africa-born Musk, fresh from his encouragement of far-right extremists in Germany, replied “yes” this week to a post on X that said “we should allow more immigration of White South Africans.”

Musk moved to dismiss staff and shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Musk calls “evil.” Maybe that’s because USAID’s inspector general was investigating the activities of Musk’s Starlink in Ukraine. But the administration and its allies rushed to justify the decision — by fabricating propaganda. At the White House, Leavitt told reporters that she was “made aware that USAID has funded media outlets like Politico. I can confirm that more than $8 million … has gone to subsidizing subscriptions.” Trump inflated the fiction further, to suggest “BILLIONS” went to “THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A ‘PAYOFF’ FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS.” In reality, $44,000 of USAID money went to Politico over several years — not from “payoffs” or “subsidies” but from officials subscribing to Politico Pro, as they did throughout the government (hence the $8 million). On Capitol Hill, Johnson provided a different fabrication, crediting Trump and Musk for stopping USAID from funding “transgender operas in Colombia,” “drag shows in Ecuador” and “expanding atheism in Nepal.” But it appears USAID did not fund any of those things.

The willy-nilly cancellation of all foreign aid would end lifesaving programs and various counterterrorism and counternarcotics efforts, dealing a lethal blow to U.S. soft power and driving countries into the arms of China and Russia, while hurting American farmers in the bargain. But it’s not just USAID. Trump and Musk, with their reckless and unfocused attack on federal workers, are raising the likelihood of any number of crises, at home and abroad. Their hollowing-out of the FBI and the Justice Department (with the notable exception of activities targeting Trump critics and migrants) raises the likelihood of a terrorist attack and foreign infiltration, not to mention more crime domestically. Their attempt to drive workers to quit at the CIA and NSA jeopardizes national security. Depleting the ranks of food-safety inspectors and bank regulators poses obvious dangers, as would Trump’s idea of abolishing FEMA. The administration tried to reduce personnel at the FAA — but last week’s plane crash in D.C. suddenly made it discover we need more air traffic controllers.

Yet Republican leaders on Capitol Hill either salute Trump or look the other way. They’re on their way to confirming all of Trump’s nominees, including vaccines opponent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the federal government’s health programs; Tulsi Gabbard, who has a bizarre fondness for Russia, to oversee intelligence; and Kash Patel, Trump’s agent of vengeance, to run the FBI.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) said the sort of thing Trump and Musk are doing to USAID is “probably true of any administration when they come in.” Handmaiden Johnson even welcomed the proposed U.S. takeover of Gaza, saying, contrary to reality, that it was “cheered by, I think, people all around the world.”

A few Republicans are raising objections. Collins doesn’t think Musk’s upending of USAID “satisfies the requirements of the law,” and she pronounces herself “very concerned.” But what’s the senator from Maine going to do about it? Apparently, nothing.

That will have to be up to Democrats. The out-of-power party has been bashed in the news media and by progressives for doing too little to stand up to Trump. Then, when Democratic lawmakers protested outside USAID headquarters, they were criticized for doing too much. “You don’t fight every fight,” Rahm Emanuel told Politico.

In truth, Democrats have almost no ability to stop Trump, but they do have the power, and the obligation, to stand in lockstep opposition to what the president is doing. Some of them might argue that the only way to protect certain programs, and the vulnerable people who need them, is to cut a deal with Trump and Republicans. But Trump has demonstrated abundantly that he will try to use unconstitutional means to kill off those programs regardless of what Congress does.

But if Democrats can’t stop a reckless president from creating unnecessary crises and harming millions of Americans, they certainly don’t need to give a bipartisan veneer to the atrocity. Let Republicans own the consequences of breaking government. Don’t save Trump from himself.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, Injustice, Trump

Will the FBI Sabotage Trump’s Witch-hunt?

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2025 //
4

A few days ago, I suggested in a post that every FBI agent should defeat Trump’s purge if every one said that he or she was involved in the arrest or investigation of the January 6 insurrectionists or the search of Mar-a-Lago. This is a good tactic of resistance.

But wiser heads at the FBI and its branch offices have another plan, which may also be effective. Basically, it is non-compliance.

Trump wants to fire every FBI agent who obeyed lawful orders.

Benjamin Wittes wrote about this strategy in Lawfare, a Brookings Institution blog:

He writes:

The Situation on Friday was too fluid to write responsibly on the ongoing purge at the FBI. 

Things have clarified enough today to say one thing clearly: A lot of people at the bureau—leadership and street agents, analysts and staff alike—are flirting with heroism right now.

Here is my best understanding of what is going on from a combination of press reporting and my own poking around. 

Last week, as has been widely reported, the Justice Department leadership sought to force into retirement a variety of senior leaders at FBI headquarters. In addition, the FBI’s interim leadership was pressured to identify agents and other personnel who had worked on the Jan. 6 investigations. And special agents in charge around the country were told to help identify such personnel. Specifically, they were told to administer a questionnaire to staff—a questionnaire that was due at 3:00 pm today—in which agents and others are asked to self-report on their own Jan. 6-related activities. 

From what I gather, the pushback has been remarkable. A large number of agents are refusing to fill out the questionnaire. The FBI Agents Association has sent around model language for agents who refuse to cooperate. At the management level, the leadership of a number of field offices has made clear that they will not take administrative action against those who do not self-report. And the bureau’s acting leadership itself is clearly pushing back against the demands for this information. 

In his email to the workforce, Acting Director Brian J. Driscoll, Jr. made clear that the demand for information “encompasses thousands of employees across the country who have supported these investigative efforts. I am one of those employees, as is acting Deputy Director Kissane.” 

How widespread is the internal resistance? I don’t know. But we are going to find out soon. 

The results of the questionnaire, over the next day or so, will be sent to the deputy attorney general’s office which—as Driscoll quotes a memo sent to him, “will commence a review process to determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.” 

Will the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, receive a pile of actionable material or will he receive what amounts to a large pile of spoiled questionnaires? And either way, what will he—and the White House—do with whatever it receives? In one situation, it will have to take on the reality that a shockingly large number of bureau personnel played a role, quite unsurprisingly, in the largest federal investigation in American history. They executed search warrants, ran down leads, interviewed people, made arrests and testified in one or more of the 1,500 plus federal prosecutions that resulted.

Does Bove imagine that he will fire all of these people? Does he imagine administering loyalty tests to them somehow? What do you do when you want to punish FBI agents for enforcing the law—and thousands of them did it faithfully?

Conversely, as seems more likely, Bove may find himself with a whole lot of survey refusal—and thus limited useful data on who the villains are who actually did their jobs with respect to Jan. 6. What does he do then? Does he fire everyone who refused to self-disclose? Does he fire the management in the field offices who tolerated—or even encouraged—the refusal? 

What does an administration bent on revenge do when FBI personnel en masse choose to “hang together” rather than hanging separately?

The FBI rank and file have power in this equation that other agencies, such as USAID for example, do not have. The Trump administration does not need USAID. It wants to eliminate foreign aid anyway, so if the personnel at the aid agency get uppity, who cares? And if they quit? All the better. 

The FBI is not that simple. For one thing, the administration does need law enforcement. If there’s a terrorist attack, and there will be, and the FBI is not in a position to prevent it or investigate it quickly and effectively, the administration will take the blame.

This administration also draws its legitimacy from backing the blue. Even in their war on the intelligence community, Donald Trump and his people always tried to distinguish between the rank and file and the “bad apples” who were running things. Waging a full-scale war against the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, a war that is all about targeting street agents for having done their jobs, is a dangerous game—far different from sacking an FBI director, or even two, who went to some elite law schools and served at the upper levels of the Justice Department.

Then there’s the problem of capacity. FBI agents are actually very hard to replace—good ones are, anyway. The physical demands are significant. Most have specialized education of one sort or another. And while people often imagine FBI agents as glorified cops who kick doors down, the truth is that a lot of agents have exquisitely specialized expertise. The training of a good counterintelligence agent takes many years. Some agents have specialized scientific training. There are even agents who specialize in art theft. Take out a thousand FBI personnel for political reasons, and you destroy literally centuries of institutional capacity. A good FBI agent is much harder to create than, say, a good assistant United States attorney. 

It’s early yet, and I don’t want to wax over-optimistic in dangerous times. 

But I will say this: I’m very proud of how the FBI is performing under incredible stress. 

An FBI that was putting its collective foot down and refusing to be politicized, refusing to participate in a political witch hunt within its own ranks, and refusing to become political agents of the regime in power would, so far anyway, look almost exactly like what we are seeing.

It is always a dangerous thing to cheer when an armed component of the federal government resists political leadership. Nobody, after all, elected the FBI. 

But when the political leadership seeks to conduct personnel actions against career officials based on who was involved in lawful and appropriate law enforcement actions against those who now have the protektzia of the faction in power, a certain measure of conscientious objection is in order—lest the entire operation become an organ of authoritarianism. And when the Justice Department tried to fire people because Trump does not trust them, which violates the Civil Service Reform Act—a law that forbids the government from taking adverse action against those in the competitive service for improper reasons, politics foremost among them—agents who resist are upholding the law, which is closely aligned with their own oaths and the FBI’s culture, and the rule of law itself.

Whether this is happening in the numbers it will take to force the administration to back down I don’t know. Whether it is happening in the numbers it will take to make some Republican senators reconsider their race to install a partisan apparatchik at the helm of the agency, I don’t know either. And whether the next week will see a wholesale elimination of decades of investment in law enforcement and intelligence under the rule of law, I cannot say. 

Today, I can only say thank you to everyone who is doing the right thing in ways the public will probably never see. Right now. Today. When it’s very hard. To everyone who is telling Bove, “Fire me if you don’t like it but no, I’m not helping”: may all the gods keep you safe.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Fascism, Injustice, Trump

Wired: The Young Men Who Are Helping Musk Evaluate Federal Programs and Personnel

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2025 //
22

Wired magazine published an article identifying the young men who are members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team. They are called “experts,” even though they range in age from 19 to 24. Some of these “experts” are college dropouts. All of them worked for either Musk or billionaire Peter Thiel before their current assignment.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Injustice, Musk, Elon, Trump

How FBI Agents Can Protect the FBI

By dianeravitch
February 3, 2025 //
30

The FBI is supposed to be a nonpolitical agency, although every FBI director chosen by every president was a Republican.

Over the past four years, the FBI was assigned the job of identifying and arresting those who planned and participated in the January 6, 2021, invasion of the U.S. Capitol. The mob was incited by Trump; its goal was to stop the certification of the 2020 election. The insurrection was an attempt to overthrow the Constitution and give Trump a position he lost in the 2020 elections.

The investigation of the January 6 insurrection was the largest in the history of the FBI.

Now Trump’s minions are asking FBI agents whether they were part on the investigation of January 6 or part of the investigation of Trump’s theft of classified documents.

Those who were will be fired because they can’t be trusted to faithfully execute Trump’s agenda.

Understand that the FBI agents who worked in these investigations were carrying out their duties. Understand that in no sane world is it right to send an angry mob to ransack the U.S. Capitol and to disrupt Congress in performing its prescribed duties.

Trump wants to rewrite history. He wants to make it official that the prosecution of the January 6 mob should never have happened. It was, he says, “a day of love.” The mob that beat up and bludgeoned police officers defending the Capitol and members of Congress were “patriots.”

Historians will ignore his lies. The criminal actions of Trump’s mob are well documented.

How can the FBI save itself from a mass purge?

Simple. Every single member of the FBI should sign a statement saying that they were part of the January 6 investigation. Every. Single. Member.

This is a true statement because who investigated the largest single attack in the Capitol were chosen at random. They were not there as volunteers or Trump-haters. They were there because FBI agents take their assignments seriously and execute them with fidelity.

To defend the FBI, sign your name. They can’t fire everyone. That might even offend the sombolent Republicans in Congress. Most were there on January 6. No matter what they say now, they know that their lives were in danger then. Will they sit by silently and let Trump eliminate the entire FBI? Not likely.

Their Trump obeisance must have limits.

Stand together. Sign your name.

Categories Accountability, Courage, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, History, Injustice, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Fired Inspectors General Illegally. Do Republicans Care?

By dianeravitch
January 26, 2025 //
12

When I worked in George H.W. Bush’s administration from 1991-92 as Assistant Secretary of Education, I quickly learned about the importance of the Department’s Inspector General. He or she is nonpolitical, a guardian of the Department’s integrity, a watchdog. The IG is a crucial safeguard against corruption. Trump fired a bunch of them Friday night.

He acts as though he is a king or a dictator and the laws do not apply to him.

Heather Cox Richardson explained that his firing of them was illegal:

We have all earned a break for this week, but as some of you have heard me say, I write these letters with an eye to what a graduate student will need to know in 150 years. Two things from last night belong in the record of this time, not least because they illustrate President Donald Trump’s deliberate demonstration of dominance over Republican lawmakers.

Last night the Senate confirmed former Fox News Channel weekend host Pete Hegseth as the defense secretary of the United States of America. As Tom Bowman of NPR notes, since Congress created the position in 1947, in the wake of World War II, every person who has held it has come from a senior position in elected office, industry, or the military. Hegseth has been accused of financial mismanagement at the small nonprofits he directed, has demonstrated alcohol abuse, and paid $50,000 to a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a nondisclosure agreement. He has experience primarily on the Fox News Channel, where his attacks on “woke” caught Trump’s eye.

The secretary of defense oversees an organization of almost 3 million people and a budget of more than $800 billion, as well as advising the president and working with both allies and rivals around the globe to prevent war. It should go without saying that a candidate like Hegseth could never have been nominated, let alone confirmed, under any other president. But Republicans caved, even on this most vital position for the American people’s safety.

The chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker (R-MS), tried to spin Hegseth’s lack of relevant experience as a plus: “We must not underestimate the importance of having a top-shelf communicator as secretary of defense. Other than the president, no official plays a larger role in telling the men and women in uniform, the Congress and the public about the threats we face and the need for a peace-through-strength defense policy.”

Vice President J.D. Vance had to break a 50–50 tie to confirm Hegseth, as Republican senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky joined all the Democrats and Independents in voting no. Hegseth was sworn in early this morning.

That timing mattered. As MSNBC host Rachel Maddow noted, as soon as Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA), whose “yes” was secured only through an intense pressure campaign, had voted in favor, President Trump informed at least 15 independent inspectors general of U.S. government departments that they were fired, including, as David Nakamura, Lisa Rein, and Matt Viser of the Washington Post noted, those from “the departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Labor, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Energy, Commerce, and Agriculture, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, Small Business Administration and the Social Security Administration.” Most were Trump’s own appointees from his first term, put in when he purged the inspectors general more gradually after his first impeachment.

Project 2025 called for the removal of the inspectors general. Just a week ago Ernst and her fellow Iowa Republican senator Chuck Grassley co-founded a bipartisan caucus—the Inspector General Caucus—to support those inspectors general. Grassley told Politico in November that he intends to defend the inspectors general.

Congress passed a law in 1978 to create inspectors general in 12 government departments. According to Jen Kirby, who explained inspectors general for Vox in 2020, a movement to combat waste in government had been building for a while, and the fraud and misuse of offices in the administration of President Richard M. Nixon made it clear that such protections were necessary. Essentially, inspectors general are watchdogs, keeping Congress informed of what’s going on within departments.

Kirby notes that when he took office in 1981, President Ronald Reagan promptly fired all the inspectors general, claiming he wanted to appoint his own people. Congress members of both parties pushed back, and Reagan rehired at least five of those he had fired. George H.W. Bush also tried to fire the inspectors general but backed down when Congress backed up their protests that they must be independent.

In 2008, Congress expanded the law by creating the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency. By 2010 that council covered 68 offices.

During his first term, in the wake of his first impeachment, Trump fired at least five inspectors general he considered disloyal to him, and in 2022, Congress amended the law to require any president who sought to get rid of an inspector general to “communicate in writing the reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress, not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer.” Congress called the law the “Securing Inspector General Independence Act of 2022.”

The chair of the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, Hannibal “Mike” Ware, responded immediately to the information that Trump wanted to fire inspectors general. Ware recommended that Director of Presidential Personnel Sergio Gor, who had sent the email firing the inspectors general, “reach out to White House Counsel to discuss your intended course of action. At this point, we do not believe the actions taken are legally sufficient to dismiss” the inspectors general, because of the requirements of the 2022 law.

This evening, Nakamura, Rein, and Viser reported in the Washington Post that Democrats are outraged at the illegal firings and even some Republicans are expressing concern and have asked the White House for an explanation. For his part, Trump said, incorrectly, that firing inspectors general is “a very standard thing to do.” Several of the inspectors general Trump tried to fire are standing firm on the illegality of the order and plan to show up to work on Monday.

The framers of the Constitution designed impeachment to enable Congress to remove a chief executive who deliberately breaks the law, believing that the determination of senators to hold onto their own power would keep them from allowing a president to seize more than the Constitution had assigned him.

In Federalist No. 69, Alexander Hamilton tried to reassure those nervous about the centralization of power in the new Constitution that no man could ever become a dictator because unlike a king, “The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.”

But the framers did not anticipate the rise of political parties. Partisanship would push politicians to put party over country and eventually would induce even senators to bow to a rogue president. MAGA Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming told the Fox News Channel today that he is unconcerned about Trump’s breaking the law written just two years ago. “Well, sometimes inspector generals don’t do the job that they are supposed to do. Some of them deserve to be fired, and the president is gonna make wise decisions on those.”

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Injustice, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: A New Era of Lies and Corruption Begins

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2025 //
3

Heather Cox Richardson is wise not to put titles on her posts. They combine several topics. But this day’s posting has a common thread: the next four years will see a changed focus: from the public interest to private greed. Please read it all!

She writes:

Shortly before midnight last night, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published its initial findings from a study it undertook last July when it asked eight large companies to turn over information about the data they collect about consumers, product sales, and how the surveillance the companies used affected consumer prices. The FTC focused on the middlemen hired by retailers. Those middlemen use algorithms to tweak and target prices to different markets.

The initial findings of the FTC using data from six of the eight companies show that those prices are not static. Middlemen can target prices to individuals using their location, browsing patterns, shopping history, and even the way they move a mouse over a webpage. They can also use that information to show higher-priced products first in web searches. The FTC found that the intermediaries—the middlemen—worked with at least 250 retailers.

“Initial staff findings show that retailers frequently use people’s personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services—from a person’s location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage,” said FTC chair Lina Khan. “The FTC should continue to investigate surveillance pricing practices because Americans deserve to know how their private data is being used to set the prices they pay and whether firms are charging different people different prices for the same good or service.”

The FTC has asked for public comment on consumers’ experience with surveillance pricing.

FTC commissioner Andrew N. Ferguson, whom Trump has tapped to chair the commission in his incoming administration, dissented from the report.

Matt Stoller of the nonprofit American Economic Liberties Project, which is working “to address today’s crisis of concentrated economic power,” wrote that “[t]he antitrust enforcers (Lina Khan et al) went full Tony Montana on big business this week before Trump people took over.”

Stoller made a list. The FTC sued John Deere “for generating $6 billion by prohibiting farmers from being able to repair their own equipment,” released a report showing that pharmacy benefit managers had “inflated prices for specialty pharmaceuticals by more than $7 billion,” “sued corporate landlord Greystar, which owns 800,000 apartments, for misleading renters on junk fees,” and “forced health care private equity powerhouse Welsh Carson to stop monopolization of the anesthesia market.”

It sued Pepsi for conspiring to give Walmart exclusive discounts that made prices higher at smaller stores, “​​[l]eft a roadmap for parties who are worried about consolidation in AI by big tech by revealing a host of interlinked relationships among Google, Amazon and Microsoft and Anthropic and OpenAI,” said gig workers can’t be sued for antitrust violations when they try to organize, and forced game developer Cognosphere to pay a $20 million fine for marketing loot boxes to teens under 16 that hid the real costs and misled the teens.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau “sued Capital One for cheating consumers out of $2 billion by misleading consumers over savings accounts,” Stoller continued. It “forced Cash App purveyor Block…to give $120 million in refunds for fostering fraud on its platform and then refusing to offer customer support to affected consumers,” “sued Experian for refusing to give consumers a way to correct errors in credit reports,” ordered Equifax to pay $15 million to a victims’ fund for “failing to properly investigate errors on credit reports,” and ordered “Honda Finance to pay $12.8 million for reporting inaccurate information that smeared the credit reports of Honda and Acura drivers.”

The Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice sued “seven giant corporate landlords for rent-fixing, using the software and consulting firm RealPage,” Stoller went on. It “sued $600 billion private equity titan KKR for systemically misleading the government on more than a dozen acquisitions.”

“Honorary mention goes to [Secretary Pete Buttigieg] at the Department of Transportation for suing Southwest and fining Frontier for ‘chronically delayed flights,’” Stoller concluded. He added more results to the list in his newsletter BIG.

Meanwhile, last night, while the leaders in the cryptocurrency industry were at a ball in honor of President-elect Trump’s inauguration, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency. By morning he appeared to have made more than $25 billion, at least on paper. According to Eric Lipton at the New York Times, “ethics experts assailed [the business] as a blatant effort to cash in on the office he is about to occupy again.”

Adav Noti, executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told Lipton: “It is literally cashing in on the presidency—creating a financial instrument so people can transfer money to the president’s family in connection with his office. It is beyond unprecedented.” Cryptocurrency leaders worried that just as their industry seems on the verge of becoming mainstream, Trump’s obvious cashing-in would hurt its reputation. Venture capitalist Nick Tomaino posted: “Trump owning 80 percent and timing launch hours before inauguration is predatory and many will likely get hurt by it.”

Yesterday the European Commission, which is the executive arm of the European Union, asked X, the social media company owned by Trump-adjacent billionaire Elon Musk, to hand over internal documents about the company’s algorithms that give far-right posts and politicians more visibility than other political groups. The European Union has been investigating X since December 2023 out of concerns about how it deals with the spread of disinformation and illegal content. The European Union’s Digital Services Act regulates online platforms to prevent illegal and harmful activities, as well as the spread of disinformation.

Today in Washington, D.C., the National Mall was filled with thousands of people voicing their opposition to President-elect Trump and his policies. Online speculation has been rampant that Trump moved his inauguration indoors to avoid visual comparisons between today’s protesters and inaugural attendees. Brutally cold weather also descended on President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, but a sea of attendees nonetheless filled the National Mall.

Trump has always understood the importance of visuals and has worked hard to project an image of an invincible leader. Moving the inauguration indoors takes away that image, though, and people who have spent thousands of dollars to travel to the capital to see his inauguration are now unhappy to discover they will be limited to watching his motorcade drive by them. On social media, one user posted: “MAGA doesn’t realize the symbolism of [Trump] moving the inauguration inside: The billionaires, millionaires and oligarchs will be at his side, while his loyal followers are left outside in the cold. Welcome to the next 4+ years.”

Trump is not as good at governing as he is at performance: his approach to crises is to blame Democrats for them. But he is about to take office with majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, putting responsibility for governance firmly into his hands.

Right off the bat, he has at least two major problems at hand.

Last night, Commissioner Tyler Harper of the Georgia Department of Agriculture suspended all “poultry exhibitions, shows, swaps, meets, and sales” until further notice after officials found Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or bird flu, in a commercial flock. As birds die from the disease or are culled to prevent its spread, the cost of eggs is rising—just as Trump, who vowed to reduce grocery prices, takes office.

There have been 67 confirmed cases of the bird flu in the U.S. among humans who have caught the disease from birds. Most cases in humans are mild, but public health officials are watching the virus with concern because bird flu variants are unpredictable. On Friday, outgoing Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra announced $590 million in funding to Moderna to help speed up production of a vaccine that covers the bird flu. Juliana Kim of NPR explained that this funding comes on top of $176 million that Health and Human Services awarded to Moderna last July.

The second major problem is financial. On Friday, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen wrote to congressional leaders to warn them that the Treasury would hit the debt ceiling on January 21 and be forced to begin using extraordinary measures in order to pay outstanding obligations and prevent defaulting on the national debt. Those measures mean the Treasury will stop paying into certain federal retirement accounts as required by law, expecting to make up that difference later.

Yellen reminded congressional leaders: “The debt limit does not authorize new spending, but it creates a risk that the federal government might not be able to finance its existing legal obligations that Congresses and Presidents of both parties have made in the past.” She added, “I respectfully urge Congress to act promptly to protect the full faith and credit of the United States.”

Both the avian flu and the limits of the debt ceiling must be managed, and managed quickly, and solutions will require expertise and political skill.

Rather than offering their solutions to these problems, the Trump team leaked that it intended to begin mass deportations on Tuesday morning in Chicago, choosing that city because it has large numbers of immigrants and because Trump’s people have been fighting with Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat. Michelle Hackman, Joe Barrett, and Paul Kiernan of the Wall Street Journal, who broke the story, reported that Trump’s people had prepared to amplify their efforts with the help of right-wing media.

But once the news leaked of the plan and undermined the “shock and awe” the administration wanted, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan said the team was reconsidering it.

—

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Hypocrisy, Injustice, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Autocracy in North Carolina: Who Won the Election for State Supreme Court?

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2025 //
8

Typically, in this country, elections are decided by the voters. The candidate who gets the most votes wins. But that’s not what is happening in North Carolina, where a corrupt Republican Party pulls every imaginable trick to steal seats, gerrymander districts, and throw out votes–anything to win.

Jay Kuo writes an excellent blog at Substack–called The Status Kuo–where he dissected a political theft in broad daylight. Among other things, Kuo is a lawyer.

He writes:

There’s little that stuns me these days from Republican bad faith actors. But yesterday’s headlines out of North Carolina made me catch my breath, at least until I heard myself cursing aloud.

Here’s the top line news: The GOP-dominated North Carolina state supreme court has halted the election certification of one of its Democratic members, Justice Allison Riggs. That’s right, the Court has decided that it will decide who will sit on the bench among its justices.

Let me be very clear. This election is over, and Justice Riggs won. The race was very tight, as it often is in that state. Riggs won by just 734 votes out of a total of 5.5 million cast. No less than two recounts confirmed her victory. As a point of comparison, when a Democratic supreme court candidate lost an even closer race by 401 votes in 2020, he conceded after the second recount.

The recounts should have been the end of it, but no. The Court has now agreed to hear a case filed by Justice Riggs’s opponent, Judge Jefferson Griffin of the state Court of Appeals, demanding that over 60,000 mail-in votes cast in that election be disqualified. If the Court agrees with this madness, state law would require a complete do-over of that election (and of course, no other election, including Trump’s electoral win in the state).

It’s an unprecedented, dangerous, anti-democratic move that, as I’ll discuss below, even the most extreme election denialists wouldn’t touch as part of their strategy. Together with the GOP’s other recent attacks on democracy in that state, North Carolina is in danger of tipping into one-party rule, just as we’ve seen in Florida. This is happening even as—or perhaps precisely because—the state’s voters have consistently elected Democrats to the highest statewide offices.

Filling in the missing blanks?

The gist of the lawsuit is so absurd as to be laughable, except that no one is laughing now.
To understand how we got here, we need to go back to 2004. The North Carolina legislature passed a law that year requiring a driver’s license or social security number when registering to vote. That’s a bit stricter than other states and often results in disproportional disenfranchisement of minority voters, but it’s not unheard of.

But here’s where it gets wonky. A widely used voter registration form printed at the time failed to include a place for registrants to actually provide the required ID. As a consequence, over the years thousands of voters unwittingly registered without providing an ID required under state law.

It is reasonable, and logical, to presume that completing an official state form as printed should result in a proper voter registration. But no! Griffin now argues that any registrations that failed to provide an ID number simply should not count today.

In his challenge, Griffin has targeted over 60,000 mail-in votes, with the greatest impact on racial minorities who tend to vote Democratic. An analysis of the voter challenges by the local News & Observer in North Carolina found that Black voters were twice as likely to have their votes challenged as white voters.

Further, mail-in votes in general tend to skew Democratic ever since the pandemic and as a result of Trump’s false and conspiratorial statements about the security of mail-in voting. And in a twist, the affected registrations happen also to include both of Justice Riggs’s elderly parents.

Griffin asserts this claim, and the state Supreme Court has agreed to hear it, even though there is no evidence that any voter who cast a ballot was otherwise ineligible to vote; most mail-in ballots provided proof of identification anyway; and the missing information was not the applicants’ fault.

In short, the GOP is seeking to change the rules after the fact and get handed a win by a partisan court. So you can understand Justice Riggs’s astonishment and frustration and the profound concerns of democracy activists.

Indeed, the idea of going back to the voter registrations and trying to find ones you could throw out on technicalities like this was raised and considered by some of the worst organizations that promote outright election denialism, such as the so-called “Election Integrity Network.” And even there, the idea met with resistance and got shot down. As ProPublica reports,

“Months before voters went to the polls in November, a group of election skeptics based in North Carolina gathered on a call and discussed what actions to take if they doubted any of the results.
“One of the ideas they floated: try to get the courts or state election board to throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots cast by voters whose registrations are missing a driver’s license number and the last four digits of a Social Security number.”

But that idea was resisted by two activists on the call, including the leader of the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network. The data was missing not because voters had done something wrong but largely as a result of an administrative error by the state. The leader said the idea was “voter suppression” and “100%” certain to fail in the courts, according to a recording of the July call obtained by ProPublica.

Similarly, when Griffin first lodged his protest in December before the state’s Elections Board, lawyers for Justice Riggs argued that the claim “amounted to a ludicrous request for a do-over”:

“Whether playing a board game, competing in a sport or running for office, the runner-up cannot snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by asking for a redo under a different set of rules,” they said. “Yet that is what Judge Griffin is trying to do here.”

Democrats in North Carolina are understandably fighting mad about the suit, accusing Griffin and the state GOP of seeking to overturn the election results. As state Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton said in a news release, Justice Riggs “deserves her certificate of election and we are only in this position due to Jefferson Griffin refusing to accept the will of the people. He is hellbent on finding new ways to overthrow this election but we are confident that the evidence will show, like they did throughout multiple recounts, that she is the winner in this race….”

The state’s Supreme Court has already shown its partisan stripes before and even affected national politics. Recently, it allowed the GOP to re-gerrymander the state’s district lines and squeeze three Democratic congressional seats out of realistic contention. This happened just one election after the same Court, then with a liberal majority, approved maps apportioning the purple state fairly at seven seats for each party.
Those three lost seats cost the Democrats the Congressional House majority in 2024, proving that local and state politics can have lasting national consequences.

This past fall, following statewide elections that saw Democrats prevail up and down the ticket, the GOP legislature, which itself is ensconced through brutal gerrymandering, voted to strip the new Democratic governor of his power to appoint state Elections Board members. This is a dangerous move now under challenge by the governor’s office. If ultimately successful, it would hand the GOP the power to control and administer elections in the state.

If the move to disenfranchise over 60,000 North Carolina voters over an immaterial and unknown technical defect is any indication, a remaking of the Elections Board by the GOP would deal another heavy blow to democracy in the state. The GOP there has demonstrated time and again that it will act in bad faith in the pursuit of raw power, and now the ultimate question—one of democracy itself—has reached the cynical and feckless majority of the state Supreme Court.

It sadly may prove true that the only message the GOP in North Carolina will ever understand is one of resounding electoral defeat. That worked in Wisconsin, when in 2023 a progressive Supreme Court candidate destroyed the MAGA one by double digits in a special election where voters had grown tired of extremists’ dirty political tricks. That state’s grotesque gerrymanders are now a thing of the past, and party representation at the state level (and soon national level) far better reflects realities on the ground in that state.

A similar wake-up and shake-up in North Carolina is long overdue.

Categories Accountability, Cheating, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Fraud, Injustice, North Carolina

Trump Flunkie Judge Aileen Cannon Blocks Release of Jack Smith Report

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2025 //
12

Judge Aileen Cannon of Florida was appointed by Trump. When the Justice Department and FBI investigated the highly classified documents that Trump moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago when he left in 2017, Judge Cannon slowed down the prosecution at every opportunity, then threw it out because she decided that Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional.

Now she has blocked the release of his report about his investigation, at least temporarily.

Will Trump appoint her to the Supreme Court when Thomas or Alito resigns? He owes her.

The New York Times reported:

The federal judge who handled President-elect Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case temporarily barred the special counsel, Jack Smith, on Tuesday from releasing his final report on the investigation to the public.

On Monday, Mr. Trump’s lawyers and lawyers for his two co-defendants began a multipronged effort to stop the release of Mr. Smith’s report, which they claimed was “one-sided” and part of a “politically motivated attack” against the president-elect.

In a brief ruling, Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump appointee who dismissed the documents case in its entirety this summer, enjoined Mr. Smith from sharing his report outside the Justice Department until a federal appeals court in Atlanta, which is now considering a challenge to her dismissal of the case, makes a decision about how to handle the report.

Mr. Trump’s legal team wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland asking him to stop the release of the report, which was set to be made public as soon as Friday. In a separate move, lawyers for Mr. Trump’s co-defendants in the documents case, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, went directly to Judge Cannon, of the Southern District of Florida, asking for an emergency order blocking the release.

The legal scrambling continued on Tuesday, as Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira asked the appeals court hearing the case to weigh in on blocking the report and Mr. Trump sought to join their motion in front of Judge Cannon.

With the case already dismissed, the report would essentially be Mr. Smith’s final chance to lay out damaging new details and evidence, if he has any, about how Mr. Trump mishandled a trove of classified documents after he left office in 2021.

Judge Cannon threw out the case in July, ruling, in the face of decades of precedent, that Mr. Smith had been unlawfully appointed special counsel. Mr. Smith quickly challenged that decision in front of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta.

But after Mr. Trump won the election in November, Mr. Smith dropped the appeal where Mr. Trump was concerned, effectively ending his part in the matter. Mr. Smith did not drop the appeal against Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira, and federal prosecutors in Florida intend to pursue it once Mr. Smith steps down and disbands his team.

When Trump is inaugurated, his top defense lawyers will have key roles in the Justice Department. This case will be shelved, along with Jack Smith’s report.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Injustice, Trump
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