Letters from an American - February 13, 2025

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

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February 13th, 2025. Four years ago today, on February 13th, 2021, Senate Republicans acquitted former President Donald Trump of incitement of insurrection in his second impeachment trial. Although 57 senators, including seven Republicans, voted to convict Trump for launching the January 6th, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, that vote did not reach the threshold of 67 votes, two-thirds of the Senate, necessary to convict a president in an impeachment trial.

After the trial, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican of Kentucky, explained his refusal to convict by saying he did not believe the Senate could convict an ex-president, although McConnell had been instrumental in delaying the impeachment trial until Trump was out of office, perhaps out of concern about dividing the Republican Party between pro-Trump magas and his own establishment wing. McConnell acquitted Trump but after the vote blamed Trump alone for the events of January 6th

calling his behavior unconscionable but adding, we have a criminal justice system in this country, we have civil litigation and former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one. Four years later Trump is back in the White House and today McConnell provided the only Republican vote against confirming Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Just as yesterday he provided the only Republican vote against the confirmation

of Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. Of Kennedy's confirmation, Senator John Ossoff, a Democrat of Georgia, said to his colleagues, It's truly astounding that the Senate stands on the brink of confirming Mr. Kennedy to lead America's public health agencies. And if the Senate weren't gripped in this soon-to-be infamous period of total capitulation, I don't think this nominee would have made it as far as a hearing. If I told you a couple of years ago, there's a guy who's been nominated to run public health

nationwide. His job will be to protect American families from death and disease. He's gonna run the whole public health system. Medicare, Medicaid, the Center for His job will be to protect American families from death and disease. He's going to run the whole public health system. Medicare, Medicaid, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, all of it. He'll decide how we protect the country from infectious disease. He'll set the rules for every hospital in the country. He'll decide what health care and medicines get covered by Medicare.

He'll manage our response in the event of a pandemic. And then I told you, well there are a few concerns about this nominee. First of all, zero relevant experience. He's a trial lawyer, a politician from a famous family, no medical or scientific background. He's never run a hospital or a health system or anything like that. Second of all, he said some pretty wild stuff about public health over and over and over again. Like he proposed that COVID-19 might be ethnically targeted to spare Jews. Ethnically targeted to spare Jews. He said Lyme disease was a military bioweapon. For years he's been persuading American families against routine childhood immunizations. He's compared the work of the CDC to Nazi death camps.

If a couple of years ago I told you all that and I told you that the Senate was about to put America's health in this man's hands, you'd probably tell me the Senate has lost its mind. All the Senate Republicans but McConnell voted to confirm Kennedy. But while Senate Republicans are enabling the Trump administration, a significant revolt against it took place today in New York City and Washington, DC, when at least six prosecutors resigned in protest after Emil Boeve III, the acting Deputy Attorney General

of the Department of Justice, ordered them to dismiss corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. In September 2024, the US Attorney for the Southern District against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. In September 2024, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York indicted Adams on five counts of wire fraud, campaign finance offenses, and bribery. According to then US Attorney Damian Williams,

Adams abused his position as the city's highest elected official to take bribes and solicit illegal campaign contributions. By allegedly taking improper and illegal benefits from foreign nationals, including to allow a Manhattan skyscraper to open without a fire inspection, Adams put the interests of his benefactors, including a foreign official, above those of his constituents. But on February 10, 2025, Boeve directed acting interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District

of New York, Danielle Sassoon, who was elevated by the Trump administration just last month, to dismiss the charges against Adams. That same day, Adams told top New York City officials to stay out of the way of immigration enforcement and to refrain from criticizing President Trump. Yesterday, February 12th, Sassoon wrote an eight-page letter of protest to Attorney General Pam Bondi

about the order to drop charges against Adams but to keep open the possibility of future prosecution. She noted that the evidence against Adams proves beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed federal crimes and suggested that Boeve and the Trump administration proposed dismissing the charges against Adams in return for his assistance in enforcing the federal immigration laws. The rule of law depends upon the even-handed administration of justice," Sassoon wrote, "...and the legal judgments of the Department of Justice must be impartial and insulated from political interference."

But Adams has argued in substance, and Mr. Boeve appears prepared to concede, that Adams should receive leniency for federal crimes solely because he occupies an important public position and can use that position to assist in the administration's policy priorities. Sassoon called Adams' offer of help to the Trump administration, an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for the dismissal of his case. She recounted a meeting on January 31st with Boeve, Adams' lawyers, and members of her office in which Adams' lawyers repeatedly offered an exchange indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the department's enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed.

Bov ordered the confiscation of notes of the meeting taken by a member of Sassoon's team. Because the law does not support a dismissal and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged," Sassoon wrote, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal. She continued, I remain baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached in seeming collaboration with Adams's counsel. But if Attorney General Bondi was unwilling to meet or reconsider the dismissal, Sassoon wrote, she was prepared to offer my resignation. Today, in a defensive eight-page letter, Boeve attacked Sassoon and accepted her resignation,

claiming she was pursuing a politically motivated prosecution and dismissed her suggestion that you retain discretion to interpret the Constitution in a manner inconsistent with the politics of a democratically elected president and a Senate confirmed attorney general. Boeve transferred the Adams case to the Public Integrity Section or PIN in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. Rather than dismiss the case, the chief of the Public Integrity Section and the senior career official in the Criminal Division, as well as three of the deputy chiefs at PIN, also resigned. A fourth was giving birth, but Ryan J. Reilly of NBC News reported that

she was expected to resign when she was able. Today, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro sued the Trump administration to guarantee the release of more than three billion dollars allocated to Pennsylvania's state agencies. Shapiro noted that multiple federal judges have ordered administration officials to release the funding they have impounded, but that funding has not been restored. The lawsuit details the programs funded with federal money, including repairing abandoned mining lands and contaminated waterways, plugging abandoned oil and gas wells, upgrading energy efficiency for up to 28,000 low-income households to lower utility bills and so on.

The lawsuit reiterates that unilaterally suspending funds violates the U.S. Constitution, which gives Congress alone the power to write the laws that appropriate funding. Also today, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ordered the Trump administration to disburse the foreign aid it has impounded. As Lindsay Whitehurst and Ellen Nickmeyer of the Associated Press note, the judge rejected the administration's argument that it impounded funds to review each program. He said, officials have not offered any explanation for why a blanket suspension of all congressionally appropriated foreign aid, which set off a shockwave and upended reliance interests for

thousands of agreements with businesses, nonprofits, and organizations around the country, was country was a rational precursor to reviewing programs. Michael Moss.