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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The Eric Adams quid pro quo is a BFD [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-15
New York Times:
A Justice Dept. in Turmoil Moves to Dismiss Eric Adams’s Corruption Case New York City’s mayor was accused of bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. President Trump’s administration wants him free to help with mass deportations. The first act of a drama that has shaken the Department of Justice ended Friday when a top official signed a formal request to drop corruption charges against New York’s mayor after Manhattan’s acting U.S. attorney refused to and resigned. The official, Emil Bove III, had originally ordered Manhattan federal prosecutors who brought the case against Mayor Eric Adams to seek its dismissal. But the leader of the Manhattan office, Danielle R. Sassoon, resigned rather than obey, and she was followed out the door by at least six other prosecutors in New York and Washington. Mr. Bove, whose order specified that the decision to dismiss the case had nothing do with its legal strengths, was ultimately compelled to sign the motion himself, along with two other Washington prosecutors, Edward Sullivan and Antoinette T. Bacon.
x NEW: House Judiciary Ranking Member Jamie Raskin calls on Trump AG Pam Bondi "to put an immediate halt to this illegal and unconscionable intimidation campaign" over the Eric Adams case.
"Your Department of Justice has been caught engaging in a corrupt deal with Mayor Adams and… — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) February 14, 2025
x From the resignation letter of AUSA Hagan Scotten:
"I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me."
https://t.co/awnFnoWqm3 pic.twitter.com/1XmEpQxzce — Anna Bower (@AnnaBower) February 14, 2025
x This is the end of the rule of law as we know it.
Right out on the open air, Trump tonight did a deal with Eric Adams, a corrupt Democratic official, in which he let him get away with (and continue) his corruption as long as Adams pledged loyalty to Trump. pic.twitter.com/9gYivSUcGO — Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) February 15, 2025
KFF Health News:
As States Mull Medicaid Work Requirements, Two With Experience Scale Back The Georgia and Arkansas proposals, from the only two states to have implemented Medicaid work requirements, reveal the disconnect between rhetoric behind such programs and the realities of running them, said consumer advocates and health policy researchers. “They recognize that what they did the first time didn’t work,” said Ben Sommers, a Harvard professor and a former health official in the Biden and Obama administrations. “It should be a signal to federal policymakers: Don’t point to Georgia and Arkansas and say, ‘Let’s do that.’”
x A foreign service employee tells me their team can no longer access Politico, NYT or Bloomberg -- even though they have paid subscriptions to all of them.
"It is critical to our jobs" to have this access, says this employee. — Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) February 14, 2025
Alex Burness/Bolts:
A Supreme Court Race May Shuffle the Rules of Wisconsin’s Democracy, Again Two years after liberals flipped this supreme court, ushering in a new era on election issues from gerrymandering to drop boxes, conservatives hope to win it back in April. Decades later, when T.R. started working as a voting rights organizer in Milwaukee, he was dismayed to find versions of his grandmother’s story all over the city, with young adults and old folks alike struggling to meet the state’s rules for proving their identity, a prerequisite to voting, particularly on the majority-Black north side of town. This became much more of a barrier after 2011, when state GOP lawmakers passed a law that made Wisconsin’s voter ID rules among the strictest in the nation. The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the law ahead of the 2016 presidential election, on the grounds that the legislature “has the power to say how, when, and where a qualified elector may vote.” A subsequent University of Wisconsin study found that up to 28,000 people—disproportionately Black and low-income—in the overwhelmingly Democratic areas of Madison and Milwaukee were deterred or outright blocked from registering to vote that year because of voter ID rules; Donald Trump won the state in 2016 by about 22,750 votes. Wisconsin’s attorney general at the time, Republican Brad Schimel, boasted that those requirements were crucial to his side’s victory, telling a local radio station that Trump may not have won the state “if we didn’t have voter ID to keep Wisconsin’s elections clean and honest and have integrity.” This year, Schimel is running to join the Wisconsin Supreme Court. He faces an opponent, Susan Crawford, who as an attorney helped lead the challenge to the state’s voter ID law in court.
JV Last/The Bulwark:
The “Novel” and “Complex” Idea of Trump 2028 A federal judge is just asking questions. I have been saying for a very long time that Donald Trump is likely to test the Twenty-second Amendment. In general, people tell me I’m crazy. He couldn’t/wouldn’t do it. And if he did, the courts would slap him down. It’s an open-and-shut case! There’s not even a debate! Well, maybe it’s not so “open and shut”? This week we got a ruling in the 10th Circuit on an obscure case, Castro v. Oliver. I’m going to walk you through the facts of the case, and then the verdict, because I want you to have context. But if you want to just skip to the conclusion, it’s this: A federal judge called the possibility of Trump running for president in 2028 a “novel and complex constitutional question.” I’m not a lawyer but those words do not sound like “open-and-shut case” to me. It sure seems like a federal judge is curious to hear a potential Trump challenge on eligibility for a third term . . .
Jim Sciutto/X via Threadreader:
Do not underestimate the shift the Trump administration is laying out in its public comments. This is not just a shift away from supporting Ukraine against Russia, it is the U.S. reducing its support for, and involvement in, Europe’s security - and more
broadly, in the security of allies in Asia and around the world. 1/ 2/ European leaders should have seen this coming, and some did, given Trump has expressed similar views during the campaign. While some nations have gotten the message and not only increased their defense spending but also began working on how to strategize for a reduced U.S. leadership, others have been demonstrably slow.
Dr. Angela Rasmussen/X via Threadreader:
Giving infectious disease research a break, as promised by the MAHA agenda.
Let's break down what exactly this Executive Order is *really* saying. Fortunately, I speak fluent anti-vax grifterese & can translate: Establishing the President's Make America Healthy Again Commission There's this background section about the terrible epidemic of chronic disease & they are VERY worried about children.
Note the diseases they focus on? Autism spectrum disorders, obesity, & ADD/ADHD = vaccines did it.
"increased prescriptions" = evidence-based medicine is bad
Tony Michaels and Cliff Schecter take on Joe Scarborough:
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