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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: NYC Mayor Eric Adams does his best to take Trump's DOJ down with him [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-14
New York Times:
Order to Drop Adams Case Prompts Resignations in New York and Washington The interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and five officials with the federal public integrity unit quit after the Justice Department ordered the charges against Mayor Eric Adams to be dropped. The serial resignations represent the most high-profile public opposition so far to President Trump’s tightening control over the Justice Department. They were a stunning repudiation of the administration’s attempt to force the dismissal of the charges against Mr. Adams.
x Eric Adams sucked up to Trump for months until the Trump DOJ ordered his case dismissed.
Now the DOJ's purging career prosecutors who couldn't stomach the corruption
https://t.co/wfbnB7HmtV — Arthur Delaney 🇺🇸 (@ArthurDelaneyHP) February 14, 2025
David Weigel and Kadia Goba/Semafor:
Actually, the #Resistance is working One particularly demoralizing storyline for Democrats — not that they have many helpful ones to choose from — is that they are so overwhelmed by the speed of the Trump administration that they don’t know how to fight it. That’s not really true. There was a playbook in place for a Trump restoration, built during the 2024 campaign, when the party messaged relentlessly against the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda and tried to make its authors famous. (Quick: Name a former OMB director who’s not Russ Vought.) Democratic legal groups and attorneys general previewed their plans in The New York Times one week after Kamala Harris’ defeat. Then they executed the plan. There’s a debate happening among liberal lawyers about which cases are the strongest, and which ones risk an adverse precedent if they get to the Supreme Court — a 6-3 supermajority less friendly to them at any time in the first Trump term. But the goal was stopping as much of the agenda as possible, and some of that has worked.
x I know a couple of the prosecutors who resigned who are (a) not liberal and (b) extremely capable. The latter in particular is going to become a huge problem for DOJ, very quickly.
https://t.co/m4DPwqi6HN — Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) February 13, 2025
Jonathan Martin/POLITICO:
‘Americans Can and Will Die from This’: USAID Worker Details Dangers, Chaos The sudden scapegoating of the once-bipartisan agency has left front-line workers in foreign countries stunned and abandoned, without even a contact in Washington. But I have been more interested in what the attack on USAID has meant for the country’s interests overseas. While the agency delivers humanitarian aid, it had been popular with many Republicans because it also projected American strength and influence in countries whose loyalties in this moment are up for grabs. Few grasp that better than a veteran USAID employee whom I’ve known for more than two decades and is currently serving abroad. I’m withholding the employee’s name and certain revealing details to protect their identity. It’s common in journalism to append a background quote with something along the lines of, “who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals.” And this person certainly recognizes the danger of retaliation from the government and even harassment from those who’d chose to target a dedicated aid worker. But this official isn’t overly alarmed by internet trolls. It’s the non-American partners, working with USAID, whose lives could be at risk if the official’s work is exposed.
Journalist Kelsey Piper looks at PEPFAR results (a program that the assault on USAID jeopardizes) via Threadreader:
PEPFAR is one of the most popular, bipartisan US foreign aid programs. The State Department says it has saved 25million lives, but there isn't much public, independent verification. Last week I invited some friends to a weekend hackatjon to see if PEPFAR's numbers held up. What we found was that, yeah, there's a pretty strong case for PEPFAR. Even using conservative assumptions and ignoring many of its positive impacts, our best guess is that the program indeed saved 19million lives by 2018. We also got an appreciation for why PEPFAR is considered such a star program. Real funding for PEPFAR has been decreasing since 2009, but the program has been doing more over time, because costs have been in freefall. When it started each patient cost $1000/month. Now? $5/mo.
x This is absolutely outrageous behavior by Bove and by Adams' lawyers. Sassoon deserves a lot of credit for how she handled this. pic.twitter.com/pVSr70lDni — Carissa Byrne Hessick (@CBHessick) February 13, 2025
Will Bunch/Philadelphia Inquirer:
Pa.’s Sean Parnell as the face of Trump’s Pentagon is another assault on women Domestic abuse allegations that derailed Parnell's Senate race make him a perfect fit for a high-level Trump post. In November 2021, Parnell’s then-estranged wife, Laurie Snell, testified at an open family court hearing in Butler, Pa., that Parnell had repeatedly abused her and their young children, both verbally and in occasional fits of violence. The decorated Afghanistan combat veteran denied the allegations, but the judge hearing that case awarded Snell full custody and found she was “the more credible witness.” “He tried to choke me out on a couch and I literally had to bite him” to get free, Snell had testified at the 2021 hearing. “He was strangling me.” She told the court Parnell would stop their car on family trips to verbally abuse her, once forcing her out of the vehicle and telling her to “go get an abortion.” In another incident, she charged, the later-Trump-endorsed Senate candidate slapped one child hard enough to leave fingerprint-shaped welts through the back of the child’s T-shirt.
x New statement from The AP:
“The decision by the White House to block an AP reporter from an open press conference with President Trump and Prime Minister Modi is a deeply troubling escalation of the administration’s continued efforts to punish The Associated Press for its… — Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 13, 2025
Annie Lowrey/The Atlantic:
Trumpflation Everything is going to be a little more expensive now. Woe to the American consumer. The price of groceries, gas, housing, and other goods and services jumped 0.5 percent from December to January; the cost of car insurance is up 12 percent year over year and the price of eggs is up 53 percent. “On day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again,” President Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail. That is not happening. Worse, the White House’s early policies are making it more likely that the country’s cost-of-living crisis will endure for years to come. Voters’ dissatisfaction with inflation delivered the White House to Trump; Americans cited the economy as their No. 1 issue, inflation as their No. 1 economic concern, and Trump as their preferred candidate to handle it. On his first day in office, Trump ordered the government to deliver “emergency price relief” by figuring out ways to expand the housing supply, streamline the health-care system, eliminate climate rules on home appliances, and expand energy production.
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