Coup du jour (parts 2 & 3)

February 14, 2025

Feb 14, 2025

Winter at Soda Lake (2020)

A Briefing You Can’t Unsee

First, I want to thank President Trump and his devoted enablers for ameliorating virtually all the heartbreak I would ordinarily re-live on Valentine’s Day. Having neither the time nor inclination to get drunk and rummage through old photos and unsent letters is oddly liberating. It’s just better this way.

Secondly, if you’re keeping score, I’ve noticed the eminent legal analyst and former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance has joined the ranks of observers who believe we’re presently experiencing an American coup. She did so first last week but reaffirmed it two days ago with a piece “Call it what it is” here, on Substack, in which she underscores a grave warning about Trump’s machinations from the American Bar Association.

Fresh evidence for the coup came during and shortly after the most bizarre event I’ve ever seen (thanks to YouTube) or read about in the Oval Office. Musk and his DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) have been getting a steady drumbeat of bad press this month as they’ve slashed and rummaged through the offices of federal agencies, denigrating and in some cases outright bullying federal workers and their supervisors, gaining access to some of the Treasury Department’s most sensitive files, and all but shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Some perspective.

Not all of my friends enjoy football, but many of them do, and Super Bowl week reminded me of how united football fans are in rules and the ethics of fair play, at least on the field during the game. We even added video replay to collegiate sports (volleyball, basketball, football) so referees can check themselves to make sure they got key calls correct. Such verifications are broadly and enthusiastically accepted. And, yet, millions of sport fans who demand and accept the rules of observable reality at a football game seem far less interested in discerning what’s true in our politics and governance. That’s just weird, especially given the virtue we assign to truth-telling, our sanctions for perjury, and our basic grasp (I hope) of the life and death consequences of bad decisions, whether they’re motivated by vice or indifference.

The truth has practical benefits as well. As a journalist and a public-interest advocate who frequently provided testimony and comments for the record to Congress and federal and state agencies, it goes without saying that statements of fact should be attributed, footnoted and otherwise verifiable. For years, next to my desk, there were file boxes (now in storage) filled with General Accountability Office (GAO) and inspector general reports, along with reports from respected non-governmental projects like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Natural Resources Defense Council. There was an unspoken rule in all this that’s rooted in the Enlightenment: you can’t just make shit up and expect to get away with it.

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I hate to use the past-tense here, even though it seems more honest to do so. But then I also hate that the Senate, yesterday, approved the nomination of a well-documented and dangerous anti-vaccination conspiracy theorist (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) to head up the Department of Health and Human Services, an agency for whom I once served as an advisor on epidemiological research.

So those are the chips on my shoulder when I watch the video, below. I mean, my god, what a shit show. Watch all of it if you can (maybe after Valentine’s Day). It’s a little more than 30 minutes.

Stunning, no?

Now think of all the careers this preening billionaire and his sponsor (to whom Musk donated nearly $300 million in the 2024 campaign)—have already ruined, just in the past two weeks. More importantly, think of the human toll caused by the sudden USAID cut-off of lifelines for desperately needed food and medical care to people in stressed populations in Africa, Bangladesh and Haiti among others.

You’ll see as the briefing unfolds that both Musk and Trump are emphasizing the supposed frauds and other corruptions they allege are costing billions of dollars of losses to American taxpayers. It’s all anecdotal— no efforts made to connect their accusations to verifiable evidence.

In the later half of the session, when a few reporters got to ask questions, one of them gingerly confronted Musk about his false claim (which he posted to his social media platform, “X”) that USAID had sent $50 million worth of condoms to Hamas in Gaza. Trump picked up on the story and, in typical Trump fashion, just tacked on another $50 million.

She walked him through it, pointing out that he’d gotten it flat wrong, that the condoms had been sent to the Gaza province in Mozambique, where a raging AIDS epidemic is underway.

“So,” she asked in broken English, “can you correct the statements that [the shipment] wasn’t sent to Hamas, actually, it was sent to Mozambique, which makes sense why condoms was sent there?”

Then she added: “And how can we make sure that all the statements that you said were correct so we can trust what you're saying?”

This was Musk’s reply: “Well, first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. So nobody's going to bat a thousand. I mean, we will make mistakes, but we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”

Of course, Musk and DOGE hadn’t acted quickly. Of course, he wouldn’t have acted at all had the reporter not called him out.

These are very wealthy and powerful people. But they are not good people and it is important that actually good people find a way to outlast them.

Justice of the Plains, The Movement Westward, mural at U.S. Department of Justice, 5th floor (image courtesy of Wikimedia images)

A Letter You Can’t Unread

I’m grateful to be old enough to remember Watergate, even grateful at how upset I was, even as a teenager, that Richard Nixon had loyalists who would defend him no matter what, even if meant defending the indefensible. And then there were a handful of people whose lives were in the balance. On October 20, 1973 Nixon ordered his attorney general, Elliott Richardson, to fire the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. Richardson refused, and resigned his post. Nixon then asked the same of William Ruckleshaus and Ruckleshaus also refused, and resigned. Nixon then turned to Solicitor General Robert Bork, who did then fire Cox.

It became known as the Saturday Night Massacre and it turned public opinion against Nixon. Within days it gave rise to the movement to impeach a president who, months earlier, had seemed utterly invincible.

Something like that happened yesterday. Here’s how and why.

In late September the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York filed felony charges of bribery and campaign finance violations against New York’s Democratic Mayor Eric Adams. Adams has been mayor since 2021. His trial was scheduled for April. But not long after Donald Trump was elected, Adams started to reach out to him, to seek a pardon. Trump, in mid-December, acknowledged the outreach. He told reporters he thought Adams had been “treated pretty unfairly” and would consider a pardon for the mayor. In mid-January, Adams flew to Florida to visit with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and, a few days later, was among the guests at Trump’s inauguration.

In the meantime, the two lawyers—Todd Blanche and Emil Bove III—who represented Trump in his New York criminal trial last year (resulting in his being found guilty of 34 felony counts) have been appointed by Trump to top positions in the Justice Department. Blanche is awaiting confirmation by the Senate, but Bove is already on the job at DOJ, attempting a breath-taking purge of DOJ and FBI officials who may not have shown sufficient loyalty to Trump. It was Bove who recently sent an infamous letter to the FBI demanding the bureau turn over a list of all FBI agents who’d played any role in investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Trump-inspired riot at the Capitol.

But then came a demand from Bove, Monday, that the DOJ prosecutors in New York dismiss the charges against Adams. Remarkably, Bove offered no argument that the charges lacked foundation, instead conveying that prosecuting Adams was interfering with the mayor’s ability to fully cooperate with the Trump administration’s effort to corral illegal immigrants in the New York area.

In short, it was a thinly veiled quid-pro-quo to enlist the mayor’s help in what is, at best, a controversial arrest and deportation plan that Trump promised in his 2024 campaign and one which tests New York City’s status as a sanctuary city for immigrants.

The breaking point came Thursday when Danielle Sassoon, the interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, resigned rather than accept the order to dismiss the charges against Adams. And then the dominoes fell, as Bove went down the line trying to find someone at SDNY who would agree to go to court and explain to the federal judge hearing the case why DOJ was seeking dismissal.

When the sun rose Friday a half dozen Justice Department officials had resigned in protest.

“The serial resignations represent the most high profile public opposition so far to President Trump’s tightening control over the Justice Department,” the New York Times observed. “They were a stunning repudiation of the administration’s attempt to force the dismissal of the charges against Mr. Adams.”

But it’s Sassoon’s letter that not only called out the corruption implicit in the demand to drop the case, but powerfully illuminated the cynicism and hypocrisy in Trump’s repeated allegations that the Justice Department’s prosecution of him was politically “weaponized.”

Addressed to Pam Bondi, an ardent Trump supporter only recently confirmed as Trump’s pick for Attorney General, Sassoon’s letter lays out her own impeccable Republican credentials (she once clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the most influential conservative during his thirty years on the Supreme Court). She then walks Bondi through the relevant ethics and duties of a federal prosecutor, as applied to Bove’s demand to dismiss the case.