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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bloomberg.com reported that the 500 richest people in the world have $10 trillion in wealth.
The biggest winners were leaders of the tech industry. Elon Musk is the richest man in the world, with a fortune exceeding $400 billion.
The world’s 500 richest people got vastly richer in 2024, with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang leading the group of billionaires to a new milestone: A combined $10 trillion net worth.
An indomitable rally in US technology stocks played a key role in turbocharging the trio’s wealth, as well as the fortunes of Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The eight tech titans alone gained more than $600 billion this year, 43% of the $1.5 trillion increase among the 500 richest people tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
But consider this: The United States is considered the richest country in the world, and yet 37.9 million (11.5%) of its residents live in poverty.
The tech bros could pool their excess billions and end poverty in America. Imagine if each of the top 500 contributed $1 billion to a fund to end poverty. What’s $1 billion to someone with $10 billion or $50 billion or $400 billion. Pocket change.
Homelessness is on the rise across the country, including in Massachusetts, which had the third largest increase among all states in 2024.
The number of people experiencing homelessness across the nation rose 18.1 percent between 2023 and 2024, according to new data from the federal housing agency’s annual report to Congress. In New England, the data showed diverging trends, with two states, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, reporting steep increases, while two others, Maine and New Hampshire, had smaller homeless populations.
In Massachusetts, the homeless population increased by 53 percent, to about 29,300 in 2024, from just over 19,100 the year before. That’s nearly three times the national rate, and behind only Illinois and Hawaii. Massachusetts is unusual among states in that it has a right-to-shelter law, so the majority of homeless families had a place to sleep indoors in a state-sponsored facility.
In New York State, where I live, 158,000 people are homeless, a 53% increase from 2023 to 2024.
In California, 187,000 are homeless, an increase of 3%.
During the pandemic, the Biden administration expanded the child tax credit, and child poverty plummeted. But Republicans refused to renew the higher payments proposed by Biden, and child poverty rate more than doubled from 5.2% in 2021 to 12.4% in 2022, according to the US Census Bureau.
I recommend to you a book called The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. It was written by British sociologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. The more equality, the happier people are. Extreme inequality contributes to envy, rage, and despair.
Again, the fabulously wealthy tech bros could end poverty in America. But I’m not holding my breath. They are too engaged in competing to see who can amass the biggest fortune.
For five days, the public was obsessed with the search for the man who murdered the CEO of United Healthcare. For a while, he seemed to be a mastermind, evading the surveillance state that so closely monitored his movements. But then he was caught while eating breakfast at a McDonald’s in Altoona, PA.
There is no excuse for murder. None, unless you are acting in self-defense, which Luigi Mangione was not. He has ended the life of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UHC, and simultaneously destroyed his own life. He is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison. Couldn’t he have thrown a bucket of red paint in protest? Or a cream pie?
The health insurance industry in this country is a mess. Most insurance companies operate for profit, and their actions seem to based on the prospect of profit, not the well-being of their customers. The industry makes obscene profits, based on its frequent denials of reimbursement.
This post was written by Qasid Rashid. When he learned that his child had a deadly disease, he sought help from his insurance company but was repeatedly denied any help. Read the story. It shows how repellent privatized for-profit insurance is. The insurance company was willing to let the child die rather than pay the cost of her desperately needed treatment.
He and his wife wrote:
This article is a deeply personal and vulnerable piece about our daughter Hannah Noor. It is primarily written by my wife Ayesha Noor. We are sharing this not because our daughter’s story is special, but sadly, because her story is all too common. Every year thousands of children and adults suffer incomprehensible pain, suffering, and even death. They suffer not because we lack the means to treat them, but because exploitative insurance companies, incompetent bureaucrats, and apathetic politicians deny them access to the life saving care they need. In light of recent events [See: America’s Violent Health System], we are sharing this story to bear witness to the preventable suffering of so many, the deadly violence imposed upon them, and to give hope that even in the darkest of times things can get better if we demand it. Let’s Address This.
Hannah Noor (Pictured Right) at 5 hours old.
A Scream in the Dark
It was just after her sixth birthday in 2021 when our daughter screamed from her bed in the middle of the night. We rushed to her room to find she had thrown up all over her bed. We cleaned her up, changed her sheets, and blamed the incident on the Oreos she’d eaten after dinner. The next day she complained of a stomach ache and rushed to the bathroom, experiencing diarrhea. Like most parents, we dismissed it as a passing bug—kids get diarrhea now and then. But something felt different this time, even though it was her first experience.
When it happened again just a short time later, the stomach pain was more severe. She screamed, cried, and rushed to the bathroom, but this time there was blood—so much blood. It terrified us. Before we could even make it to urgent care, she had another episode with even more bleeding. We hurried her in, only to be told by the nurse practitioner to “keep her hydrated” and that it was probably a stomach virus. But again, something in our gut told us otherwise.
This was just before Thanksgiving 2021, and I convinced myself she’d recover over the break and be able to return to school. She loved school, as most kindergarteners do. But the bleeding continued. The pain worsened. More urgent care and pediatrician visits followed, but answers did not. By now, our once energetic and chatty daughter was pale, frightened, and visibly losing weight.
Navigating Through the Dark
We reached out to a close friend who happened to be a pediatric gastroenterologist. His questions and careful listening indicated it was not a simple virus, but he didn’t say much directly. He urged us to connect with the GI team at Children’s National Hospital in Washington D.C. Unfortunately, we were met with insurance hurdles and skepticism from her pediatrician. Weeks passed, and her condition deteriorated until, thanks to our friend’s intervention, we finally secured an appointment with a pediatric GI doctor in December.
Hannah Noor, now frail and scared, was put on iron supplements, and an colonoscopy was scheduled for January. She now weighed just 30 pounds—skin and bones, and we feared the worst. Her fear of eating, going to the bathroom, or even moving too much consumed her days. Our winter break became a period of sleepless nights, endless tears, and prayers. We felt like prisoners trying to navigate through treacherous terrain while blindfolded and shackled.
The preparation for the scope was grueling—a 24-hour liquid diet. To make matters worse, a severe snowstorm in early January 2022 left us without power for three days. Despite the chaos, we made it to the hospital. As I held her tiny hand, she bravely went under anesthesia. Hours later, the doctors confirmed what we feared: Hannah had ulcers all over her colon.
Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) was the diagnosis—a chronic, lifelong condition that would require extensive management. Even as the doctor explained, I couldn’t fully grasp the gravity of it. I naively asked, “How long will she need the medication?” The doctor replied—“Do you understand what it means to have IBD? This is for life.”
It shattered me. My world crumbled.
Steroids, with their array of side effects, initially helped stabilize her condition, and she was subsequently started on mesalamine. However, managing IBD is never straightforward. Moving homes and finding a new doctor compatible with our insurance became an uphill battle. Procuring mesalamine was a nightmare, as our insurance kept on requiring prior-authorization—a term we’d never even heard before. Evidently, even though our doctor had prescribed a specific medication to save our daughter’s life, the insurance company required their non-medically trained admins to agree that our board certified physician knew what she was doing in prescribing the medication she prescribed. Spoiler: They disagreed and repeatedly denied the critical medication our daughter needed.
Making matters worse, moving meant we were in between doctors. Desperate to try anything to improve Hannah’s quality of life, we spent hours consulting with a nutritionist to see if dietary changes could make a difference. We invested extensive time and resources into a gluten-free diet, but it did not help at all; in fact, it made her averse to eating. We also tried the FODMAP diet, which was recommended during a flare, but it added to the confusion of what she should or shouldn’t eat. Every day became a battle over something as simple as food—one filled with uncertainty and frustration. Despite our efforts, Hannah’s condition remained unpredictable, with debilitating flares continuing to disrupt her life. By late 2023, we had pursued every imaginable route to find a way to protect our daughter’s health and life, and yet felt exhausted and at a dead end.
It was clear that only one option remained—she needed a quickly advancing form of therapy known as biological treatment. This would be a direct IV infusion of medication to stabilize the IBD, every six to eight weeks, forever.
A Dark Dead End
We were at the end of the road. If we couldn’t access biologic treatment, there was nowhere left to go. But what we hoped would finally bring us closure and healing, resulted in yet another emotional roller coaster and painful circus—our insurance corporation blocked us. Turns out, insurance corporations block more than 51% of patients whose doctors prescribe them biologic treatment to save their lives.
The recommended biologic promised not a cure, but a chance at living a healthy life. Our insurance rejected us outright reasoning that we hadn’t tried other medications first—a policy called “step therapy.” Despite our daughter’s life threatening condition, they wanted us to try every other variation of every other possible medication—knowing full well they would likely fail just as much and make our daughter suffer, vomit, bleed, and lose weight. But that did not matter to them, because that was the preferable path to ensure they “maximized shareholder value.”
Our doctor stepped in and conducted a peer-to-peer direct meeting with the insurance company to show all the data, blood tests, and medical reports to prove that our daughter needed biologics to live. To show without a shadow of a doubt that the yet untried medications they demanded we try were not substantively different than the plethora of medications we had tried and had not worked. Yet, that meeting also went in vain. The insurance company still refused to approve our claim. And Hannah Noor’s condition worsened. She was pale, swollen from steroids, in pain, losing weight, and back to missing school.
We finally contemplated paying for the biologic treatment out of pocket. We knew it would only require six doses a year. How much could one dose be, after all? We checked and our hearts sank once more. Each dosage cost and administration would run into the tens of thousands of dollars. A year’s supply to keep our daughter alive would run into the hundreds of thousands. We certainly did not have that kind of money. We were cornered and desperate.
We contemplated what any parents might. Do we sell the house and cars and move into a small apartment? Do we set up a GoFundMe? Do we borrow money from family and friends? Do we take out a second mortgage?
Do we file for medical bankruptcy, as 500,000 Americans do annually?
But we soon learned another sinister result of hyper-privatization of health insurance—even if we had the excessive means to pay the hundreds of thousands of dollars out of pocket, the hospital would not accept the funds. Why? The industry is such that not only do insurance companies deny 51% of claims, they have enacted policies forbidding people from paying for the critical medication they need out of pocket, lest the insurance company lose control and revenue. “Either you pay us, or you pay no one,” is a line you’d expect out of a mafia handbook—not out of a health provider. This is not health insurance, this is health exploitation.
A Spark of Light in the Darkness
In that moment of confusion we happened to run into to a fellow parent who, now is a great friend, and learned her children shared a similar medical struggle. She suggested calling the biologic manufacturers directly and applying for their patient assistance program. An idea that seems so obvious now, but something we did not even know was a possibility then.
The application process was tedious, and even then, it was initially rejected. But after weeks of back-and-forth, countless phone calls, and sleepless nights, a miracle happened—we finally secured approval. We let out a cathartic sigh of relief after more than two years of suffocation. And to be sure, the approval was not through our insurance company, who never even bothered to offer such an option, likely because it would cost them money. Rather, the approval was from the drug manufacturer directly. To this day our health insurance company has refused to budge on their cruel and calloused “maximizing shareholder value” decision to deny our daughter the medicine she needs to live.
On March 6, 2024—more than two months after the doctor first prescribed it, a period in which our daughter suffered horrific and unimaginable pain, bleeding, and vomiting—Hannah Noor received her first infusion at Comer Children’s Hospital in Chicago. And since then, everything has changed. Her spark of light returned. Our daughter was back.
The Light We Create
A process that should have only taken 30-60 days from the night we heard that scream in the dark, took us on a 28 month torturous journey to finally see light again. Hannah Noor’s journey since starting biologic treatment has been a blessing. She’s eating, playing, drawing, and even learning karate (currently a Yellow Belt). The last three years of her life had been a torture for her, but now she is finally thriving as any 9-year-old girl should. Though the fear of flares always looms, we refuse to let it dictate our lives. Herbal and homeopathic treatments complement her medical regimen, and her strength inspires us daily.
As for our insurance company? Those corporate leeches also denied covering the hospital costs as well. Fortunately, despite that high price tag still running into the thousands, we tightened our belts and found a way to pay for that out of pocket, and continue to pay for that out of pocket. (We were shocked there wasn’t some additional insurance rule preventing us from paying our hospital directly). Despite us paying our insurance premiums every single month without exception, our insurance company has not covered a single penny of our daughter’s critical healthcare needs. The care she needs to live. But at least they’re maximizing shareholder value.
This story isn’t just about one child’s struggle with IBD; it’s about the systemic barriers hundreds of millions of families face every single day. From insurance denials to inaccessible care, to step therapy nonsense, to prior authorization red tape, the system fails the most vulnerable. What if we didn’t speak English? What if we couldn’t afford out-of-pocket costs for tests and treatments? What if one of our close friends didn’t just happen to be a national expert on this particular rare disease, and couldn’t leverage his relationships to get us access to a world leading expert? What if we didn’t have a network of supportive friends to recommend new ways to acquire this life saving medicine?
A Brighter Future Is Possible
We named our daughter Hannah Noor because Hannah was the mother of Mary Mother of Jesus, and Noor means light. We couldn’t think of a more beautiful name for our only daughter, and she has lived up to it every day of her life.
In these darkest of times, she is the Light of our eyes.
Hannah Noor (now 9) at a recent family vacation in Lahore, Pakistan. Here she is giggling at a cat that wandered over to say meow, which Hannah Noor reminded us means “hello” in cat language.
Hannah Noor’s story highlights a flawed and cruel system that places profits over people. Yet it also underscores the power of advocacy, persistence, and community. To every parent navigating the complexities of chronic illness: stay strong, fight relentlessly for your child, and lean on the resources available, like the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation, and do not underestimate support groups on Facebook. If I can be of any support, do not hesitate to reach out at ayesha [dot] noor @ gmail.com.
Hannah Noor is living proof that even in the darkest moments, there is hope. She teaches us daily to believe in miracles—and to fight for them when necessary. It is also a reminder that our for profit exploitative health insurance system will always only serve the wealthy elites, the stock market, and whatever private investor who decides to buy and sell these corporations. They will not serve the people. Not our beautiful baby girl, nor the nearly 70,000 Americans who die annually due to lack of care, nor the 500,000 Americans who are forced to file for medical bankruptcy every single year. It is by the sheer grace of the Almighty that we still have our wonderful Light with us today. But for so many parents and families, the end result is not so fortunate.
Perhaps the most frustrating part about all of this is that the medication to save our child’s life existed all along. But because some calloused business person decided her life wasn’t profitable enough and worth saving, it was an acceptable cost to reject her claim and let her die.
It is our responsibility to demand better, not just for our daughter, but for all the daughters, sons, and children out there. We do not suffer from a lack of resources, but from an excess of greed. We can ensure high quality, accessible, and affordable healthcare for all people in this country—but we cannot ensure the satiation of greed for the billionaire corporations, corrupt politicians, and elitists who care more about shareholder value than the survival of innocent children. We have to choose one side. And we choose the children of this great country—we hope you do too.
Margaret Sullivan, the last public ombudsman for The New York Times, wrote on her blog that ABC News was wrong to settle with Trump for $15 million for “defaming” him. On television, ABC’s George Stefanopolous said that Trump had been found liable for raping E. Jean Carroll. Trump said that was wrong and malicious because he had been found guilty of “sexual assault,” not rape.
She points out that when she was chief editor of The Buffalo News, the paper had a longstanding policy of fighting every claim of defamation or libel. They did so to discourage future lawsuits and send a message: we will vigorously oppose lawsuits. If you sue, prepare for a long battle.
Trump’s lawyers claimed that Stephanopoulos was wrong to say that Trump was found guilty of rape and that he had defamed Trump. ABC settled before trial and agreed to pay $15 million for the future Trump Presidential Library and $1 million for Trump’s legal fees.
Media experts were stunned. Not only did ABC abandon its First Amendment defense, but it abandoned a viable claim that Stephanopooulos was right to use the language he did.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the Carroll defamation case, said:
“The finding Ms. Carroll failed to prove she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the N.Y. Penal Law does not mean she failed to prove Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape’. Indeed, as the evidence at trial… makes clear, the jury found Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
By settling–and at such a hefty price–ABC has encouraged Trump and other politicians to continue to sue journalists and their employers.
Sullivan believes ABC might well have won if they continued to fight:
ABC News should never have caved. They might well have prevailed if they had hung in there. The legal bar is very high for libeling a public figure, and Trump is the ultimate public figure. Instead, this outcome encourages Trump in his attacks on the press — and he needs no encouragement.
As one law professor told the Times, what ABC News did was very unusual. News organizations generally don’t settle “because they fear the dangerous pattern of doing so and because they have the full weight of the First Amendment on their side.”
Why did ABC News throw in the towel? It‘s hard to know for sure, but gets easier if you are aware that the news organizations is owned by Disney, a huge corporation with a lot of turf to protect. As the Times reported, the Disney executive who oversees ABC News had dinner with Trump’s top aide, Susan Wiles, just days before the settlement, as “part of a visit by several ABC News executives to Florida to meet with Mr. Trump’s transition team.”
Was this settlement, which includes ABC’s public expressions of regret, a simple case of kissing the ring? It sure looks that way. Trump has sworn to get revenge on his enemies and he values, above all, loyalty and kowtowing.
But loyalty and kowtowing isn’t the job of the press, which is supposed to represent the public in holding powerful people and institutions accountable.
After his victory, Trump threatened to sue the Des Moines Register for posting a poll before the election that showed Biden beating him in Iowa. He also threatened to sue Bob Woodward, “60 minutes,” and the Pulitzer Prizes. This is the mischief that ABC News unleashed.
Last night Trump’s lawyers sued the Des Moines Register for publishing Ann Seltzer’s poll. The implications are frightening. The media publishes polls frequently during campaigns. They may be right, they may be wrong. If they are wrong, will candidates sue them for “election interference”? How did Trump suffer any damages by publication of that poll? He won Iowa by 13 points.
Win or lose, Trump has a strategy: to strike fear in the hearts of every journalist who dares to write critically about him.
Be sure to read Jeff Tiedrich’s condemnation of ABC’s capitulation. He attributes the deal to Disney’s overriding principle: “Protect the mouse.”
A study of the crime rates of immigrants–both the documented and the undocumented–was released in September 2024. It found that undocumented immigrants had the lowest crime rates, compared to native-born citizens and documented immigrants.
This is directly counter to the current claim by Republicans that undocumented immigrants are responsible for vicious crimes.
An NIJ-funded study examining data from the Texas Department of Public Safety estimated the rate at which undocumented immigrants are arrested for committing crimes. The study found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.[1]
The question of how often undocumented immigrants commit crimes is not easy to answer. Most previous research on crime commission by immigrant populations has been unable to differentiate undocumented immigrants from documented immigrants. As a result, most studies treat all immigrants as a uniform group, regardless of whether they are in the country legally.
The estimates in this study come from Texas criminal records that include the immigration status of everyone arrested in the state from 2012 to 2018. These data enabled researchers to separate arrests for crimes committed by undocumented immigrants from those committed by documented immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens. (For more detail on the study’s data sources and methodology, see the sidebar “What Makes the Texas Data Unique?”)
The researchers tracked these three groups’ arrest rates across seven years (2012-2018) and examined specific types of crime, including homicides and other violent crimes.[2] They used these arrest rates as proxies for the rates of crime commission for the three groups. It should be noted that arrest is a commonly used, but imperfect measure of crime that in part reflects law enforcement activity rather than actual offending rates.
During this time, undocumented immigrants had the lowest offending rates overall for both total felony crime (see exhibit 1) and violent felony crime (see exhibit 2) compared to other groups. U.S.-born citizens had the highest offending rates overall for most crime types, with documented immigrants generally falling between the other two groups.
Exhibit 1.Total felony crime offending rates in Texas for U.S.-born citizens, documented immigrants, and undocumented immigrants
Researchers also looked specifically at homicide arrest trends. These rates tend to fluctuate more than the overall violent crime arrest rates because murders are relatively rare compared to other crimes. In addition, a large share of homicides go unsolved. Still, undocumented immigrants had the lowest homicide arrest rates throughout the entire study period, averaging less than half the rate at which U.S.-born citizens were arrested for homicide.[3] (The homicide rate for documented immigrants fluctuated. Sometimes it was higher than the rate for U.S.-born citizens and sometimes it was lower.)
Every other violent and property crime type the researchers examined followed the same general pattern. The offending rates of undocumented immigrants were consistently lower than both U.S.-born citizens and documented immigrants for assault, sexual assault, robbery, burglary, theft, and arson.
For drug offenses, too, undocumented immigrants were less than half as likely to be arrested as native-born U.S. citizens.[4] Moreover, the drug crime arrest rate for the undocumented population held steady throughout the seven years of data, while the rate for native-born citizens increased almost 30% during that time. As a result, undocumented immigrants had a smaller share of arrests for drug crimes in 2018 than they had in 2012.
Finally, the researchers conducted statistical tests to determine whether the share of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants had increased for any offense types between 2012 and 2018. They concluded, “There is no evidence that the prevalence of undocumented immigrant crime has grown for any category.”[5] As with drug offenses, evidence suggests the share of property and traffic crimes committed by undocumented immigrants decreased or remained close to constant throughout the period.
About This Article
The work described in this article was supported by NIJ award number 2019-R2-CX-0058, awarded to the University of Wisconsin.
Jeff Tiedrich proposes in his blog that President Biden should operate a “pardon factory” to protect everyone who has been threatened by Trump or Kash Patel.
One of the features of democracy is an assumption that parties will contend for power, accept their win or loss graciously, then prepare for next time. There will always be the next election to try again.
The threats by Trump and his toadies to prosecute his critics disrupts the comity on which a democratic system depends.
Trump thinks of his critics as “enemies,” not critics. He has made clear repeatedly that he will use his power as President to prosecute, imprison, and crush his enemies.
He said recently that the members of the January 6 Commission “should be in jail.” Why? Is it normal or acceptable that a mob summoned by the President descends on the U.S. Capitol as they meet to certify the election, smash through the windows and doors, beat up police officers, and rampage through the building? What was criminal? The summoning of the mob? The actions of the mob? Or the investigation of the events of the day?
Biden, writes Tiedrich, should issue pre-emptive pardons to all those whose lives and freedom might be endangered by Trump, Kash Patel, or Pam Bondi.
The next four years will be a trial for our democracy. Will the norms and institutions survive the reign of this bitter, vindictive old man?
Trump is demonstrating his intention to purge the FBI by naming his close associate Kash Patel as FBI Director. Patel has said repeatedly that the FBI is loaded with “Deep State” enemies, and he plans to fire them.
The FBI is supposed to be an independent agency, not a vengeance weapon belonging to the President. Patel has made clear that he will find and punish Trump’s enemies. He will run the FBI, if confirmed, as Trump’s man, serving Trump, not justice and not the American people. He will be Trump’s avenger, as he destroys the reputation of the FBI.
President Donald Trump announced Saturday night that he has picked staunch Trump loyalist Kash Patel 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.
President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Saturday that he wants to replace Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, with Kash Patel, a hard-line critic of the bureau who has called for shutting down the agency’s Washington headquarters, firing its leadership and bringing the nation’s law enforcement agencies “to heel.”
Mr. Trump’s planned nomination of Mr. Patel has echoes of his failed attempt to place another partisan firebrand, Matt Gaetz, atop the Justice Department as attorney general. It could run into hurdles in the Senate, which will be called on to confirm him, and is sure to send shock waves through the F.B.I., which Mr. Trump and his allies have come to view as part of a “deep state” conspiracy against him.
Mr. Patel has been closely aligned with Mr. Trump’s belief that much of the nation’s law enforcement and national security establishment needs to be purged of bias and held accountable for what they see as unjustified investigations and prosecutions of Mr. Trump and his allies.
Mr. Patel “played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability and the Constitution,” Mr. Trump said in announcing his choice in a social media post….
Mr. Patel, a favorite of Mr. Trump’s political base, has worked as a federal prosecutor and a public defender, but has little of the law enforcement and management experience typical of F.B.I. directors.
He served in a series of administration positions at the tail end of Mr. Trump’s first term, including posts on the National Security Council and in the Pentagon. Before leaving office in early 2021, Mr. Trump floated the idea of making Mr. Patel deputy director of either the C.I.A. or the F.B.I. William P. Barr, the attorney general at the time, wrote in his memoir that Mr. Patel would have become deputy F.B.I. director only “over my dead body.”
FBI directors are appointed for a 10-year term, so their tenure is allegedly nonpolitical. Although Trump appointed Christopher Wray as FBI Director, Trump soured on him after the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago to recover hundreds of top/secret documents. Trump made clear to Director Wray that he should resign or be fired.
Current and former law enforcement officials have worried that a second Trump term would feature an assault on the independence and authority of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, and for many of them, Mr. Patel’s ascension to the director’s role would confirm the worst of those fears.
Mr. Patel laid out his vision for wreaking vengeance on the F.B.I. and Justice Department in a book, “Government Gangsters,” calling for clearing out the top ranks of the bureau, which he called “a threat to the people.” He also wrote a children’s book, “The Plot Against the King,” telling through fantasy the story of the investigations into Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign’s possible ties to Russians.
“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you,” he said last year. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
After Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election and staff members began an exodus from the White House, Mr. Patel’s upward trajectory continued. Mr. Trump named him to one of the most important jobs at the Pentagon: chief of staff to Christopher Miller, the acting defense secretary.
Gen. Mark A. Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was shocked when Mr. Patel presented him a document signed in Sharpie by the outgoing Mr. Trump ordering a full withdrawal of all American troops from Afghanistan by Jan. 15. General Milley, the top military adviser to the president, had never even seen the order, and neither had several other senior advisers. It turned out it was drafted by Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel named as an adviser to the Pentagon after he impressed Mr. Trump with his appearances on Fox News, according to an account in “The Divider,” a book by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.
Mr. Trump backed away from the Afghanistan plan, but soon sought to again elevate Mr. Patel by making him deputy director of either the C.I.A. or the F.B.I. Only after Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, and William P. Barr, the attorney general, both threatened to quit — Mr. Barr vowed that Mr. Patel would become F.B.I. deputy only “over my dead body”— did Mr. Trump abandon the idea.
Mr. Patel stayed at the Pentagon for three months, crediting himself in his book with leading “the biggest transition’’ of the Defense Department “in U.S. history.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 