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Russia Russia Russia

March 2, 2025/34 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

In a piece describing how, after Trump attempted to publicly humiliate Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talks on normalizing relations with Russia (negotiated by Kirill Dmitriev, of Mueller Report fame) will accelerate…

There is also renewed optimism in Moscow that, with President Zelensky at odds with President Trump and his team, difficult negotiations to end the war in Ukraine will now take a back seat to a raft of potentially lucrative US-Russia economic deals already being tabled behind closed doors.

[snip]

Already the Kremlin’s key economic envoy to the talks, Kirill Dmitriev, has told CNN that cooperation with the US could “include energy” deals of some kind, but no details have been announced.

Separately, the Financial Times is reporting that there have been efforts to involve US investors in the restarting Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe, which Germany halted at the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Dmitriev has called for the Trump administration and Russia to start “building a better future for humanity,” and to “focus on investment, economic growth, AI breakthroughs,” and long-term joint scientific projects like “Mars exploration,” even posting a highly produced computer graphic, on Elon Musk’s X social media platform, showing an imagined joint US-Russia-Saudi mission to Mars, on board what appears to be a Space X rocket.

CNN described literal “bewilder[ment]” about why Trump would sell out America’s allies.

[W]hy the US president would choose the Kremlin over America’s traditional partners remains the subject of intense speculation.

Much of it, like the frequent suggestion that Trump is somehow a Kremlin agent, or beholden to Putin, is without evidence.

Perhaps the right-wing US ideological fantasy that Russia is a natural US ally in a future confrontation with China, and can be broken away from its most important backer, is motivating Washington’s dramatic geopolitical shift.

But for many bewildered observers, both explanations for Trump’s extraordinary pivot to the Kremlin seem equally misplaced. [my emphasis]

CNN asserted there’s no evidence to back the claim that Trump is “beholden to Putin” in spite of the fact that Russia helped Trump win in 2016, after which Dmitriev reached out and discussed a bunch of investments — investments which would require ending sanctions — as a way to improve relations. CNN asserted there’s no evidence to back the claim that Trump is “beholden to Putin” in spite of the fact that Russia attempted to help Trump win in 2020 at least by sending disinformation framing Joe Biden and his kid via Russian agent Andrii Derkach to Trump’s personal lawyer. CNN asserted there’s no evidence to back the claim that Trump is “beholden to Putin” in spite of the fact that Derkach made similar efforts in 2024, and a bunch of Russian malign influence efforts (possibly including bomb threats that forced the evacuation of Democratic precincts) similarly aimed to help Trump and others who would “oppose aid to Ukraine.”

CNN asserted there’s no evidence to back the claim that Trump is “beholden to Putin” in spite of the fact that a key Putin advisor, Nikolay Patrushev, said this in November:

In his future policies, including those on the Russian track US President-elect Donald Trump will rely on the commitments to the forces that brought him to power, rather than on election pledges, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev told the daily Kommersant in an interview.

“The election campaign is over,” Patrushev noted. “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”

He agreed that Trump, when he was still a candidate, “made many statements critical of the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current administration.”

“But very often election pledges in the United States can iverge [sic] from subsequent actions,” he recalled.

As people puzzle through this bewilderment, as people puzzle through why Trump appointed people who undermined the Russian investigation to lead the FBI, the boilerplate about what Robert Mueller discovered about Russia’s 2016 efforts to help Trump remains wildly inadequate, as in this recent version in a story on Don Bongino’s propaganda about the investigation.

Mueller’s inquiry found repeated contacts between Russia-linked entities and Trump campaign advisers, but didn’t establish a conspiracy between the two.

Mueller didn’t establish a conspiracy between Trump and Russia. But such boilerplate always leaves out that his key aides lied about the true nature of those contacts, which is a big reason why we wouldn’t know if there had been one.

In the Mueller investigation, Trump’s campaign manager, foreign policy advisor, National Security Adviser, personal lawyer, and rat-fucker were all adjudged to have lied about the true nature of Trump’s ties to Russia from the first campaign.

Let’s unpack that even further.

Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, confessed to lying to hide the direct contact he had during the campaign with Dmitry Peskov’s office in pursuit of an impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal, a deal that would have required lifting sanctions to complete. Cohen confessed to lying to cover up his conversations with Trump about that impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal. His confession meant that when Trump disclaimed pursuing business deals with Russia — in the same July 27, 2016 press conference where he asked Russia to hack Hillary some more and said he might bless Russia’s seizure of Crimea — Trump lied to cover up that dangle for an impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal.
Trump’s foreign policy advisor, George Papadopoulos (who was overtly involved in Derkach’s efforts last year), confessed to lying about the timing and circumstances of learning that Russia had thousands of Hillary’s emails and planned to release them to hurt her campaign. He lied about the other Russians that Joseph Mifsud introduced to Papadopoulos. After he pled guilty, Papadopoulos remembered and then unremembered telling his boss on the campaign, Sam Clovis, about the emails. He also claimed to forget what his own notes describing a proposed meeting in September 2016 with Putin’s team pertained to (notes that also mentioned Egypt and involved Walid Phares, whom investigators suspected of having a role in any $10 million payment Egypt made to Trump).
A jury found Trump’s rat-fucker, Roger Stone, guilty of lying to cover up the nature and source of his advance notice of the Russian hack-and-leak campaign. Over the course of the investigation, the FBI found evidence Stone knew of several of the Russian personas before they went public. There’s good reason to believe that Stone got advance knowledge, in mid-August 2016, of the substance of select emails from the later John Podesta leak. When prosecutors indicted Stone, they were very keen to obtain a notebook containing notes he took of all his conversations with Trump during the 2016 campaign. Stone stayed out of jail by repeatedly claiming prosecutors offered leniency to get knowledge of those contacts.
Don Jr. refused to testify before a grand jury, an appearance that presumably would have included questions about his understanding of the June 9 meeting at which Aras Agalarov offered dirt on Hillary in exchange for sanctions relief.
Amy Berman Jackson ruled that Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, reneged on his plea agreement, in part, by lying about his August 2, 2016 meeting with Konstantin Kilimnik, at which three topics were discussed: The campaign’s strategy to win swing states, how Manafort could get paid millions, and a plan to carve up Ukraine. In 2021, Treasury stated as fact that Kilimnik. was a “known Russian Intelligence Services agent” who had “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy” during 2016. The report went on to explain that, “Kilimnik sought to promote the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” a narrative Trump keeps pushing.
Trump’s National Security Adviser, Mike Flynn, confessed, twice, to lying about his efforts to undercut Barack Obama’s policy, including efforts to sanction Russia in response to the 2016 attack. There’s a good deal of evidence — including Flynn’s assurances to Sergey Kislyak that the “Boss is aware” — that Trump was involved in those efforts.

All of the people who lied to cover up the true nature of Trump’s Russian contacts in 2016, save Michael Cohen, were pardoned.

So was one other person — someone else who probably lied about the nature of Trump’s Russian contacts in 2017.

In the section describing his declination decisions, Mueller explained that there were three other people who probably lied, but whom he wasn’t charging.

We also considered three other individuals interviewed–[redacted]–but do not address them here because they are involved in aspects of ongoing investigations or active prosecutions to which their statements to this Office may be relevant.

The report itself and the 302s of Steve Bannon’s testimony, which evolved over the course of four interviews to more closely approximate the evidence, suggests Bannon could be one of those three (after all, Bannon, Trump’s other campaign manager, was a key witness at the Stone trial).

Not least because the report describes a pretty big discrepancy between Bannon’s testimony and Erik Prince’s regarding conversations the latter had with Kirill Dmitriev, now starring in negotiations about Russia. And both men played dumb about where the texts they exchanged in that period disappeared to.

Prince said that he met Bannon at Bannon’s home after returning to the United States in mid-January and briefed him about several topics, including his meeting with Dmitriev.1086 Prince told the Office that he explained to Bannon that Dmitriev was the head of a Russian sovereign wealth fund and was interested in improving relations between the United States and Russia.1087 Prince had on his cellphone a screenshot of Dmitriev’s Wikipedia page dated January 16, 2017, and Prince told the Office that he likely showed that image to Bannon.1088 Prince also believed he provided Bannon with Dmitriev’s contact information.1089 According to Prince, Bannon instructed Prince not to follow up with Dmitriev, and Prince had the impression that the issue was not a priority for Bannon.1090 Prince related that Bannon did not appear angry, just relatively uninterested.1091

Bannon, by contrast, told the Office that he never discussed with Prince anything regarding Dmitriev, RDIF, or any meetings with Russian individuals or people associated with Putin.1092 Bannon also stated that had Prince mentioned such a meeting, Bannon would have remembered it, and Bannon would have objected to such a meeting having taken place.1093

The conflicting accounts provided by Bannon and Prince could not be independently clarified by reviewing their communications, because neither one was able to produce any of the messages they exchanged in the time period surrounding the Seychelles meeting. Prince’s phone contained no text messages prior to March 2017, though provider records indicate that he and Bannon exchanged dozens of messages.1094 Prince denied deleting any messages but claimed he did not know why there were no messages on his device before March 2017.1095 Bannon’s devices similarly contained no messages in the relevant time period, and Bannon also stated he did not know why messages did not appear on his device.1096 Bannon told the Office that, during both the months before and after the Seychelles meeting, he regularly used his personal Blackberry and personal email for work-related communications (including those with Prince), and he took no steps to preserve these work communications.1097

The lies Trump’s top aides told to hide aspects of the 2016 Russian effort — his campaign manager, foreign policy advisor, National Security Adviser, personal lawyer, and rat-fucker — along with gaps left by both Jr and Bannon’s testimony (note, Bannon’s testimony also conflicts with Mike Flynn’s regarding whether he was privy to Flynn’s effort to undermine sanctions) trace out clear outlines of a quid pro quo: a serial agreement to reward Russia by acceding to carve up Ukraine and an agreement to lift sanctions, in exchange for help getting elected.

And here we are, eight years later, utterly bewildered why Trump might be in such a rush to deliver up Ukraine to Russia and lift sanctions to pursue business deals, precisely the quo outlined by the lies told years ago.

Really? How is anyone bewildered about this?

On November 11, one of Putin’s closest allies complained about how, “election pledges in the United States can [d]iverge from subsequent actions.” Patrushev warned that, this time, Trump will “be obliged to fulfill” his “corresponding obligations.”

And what we are seeing in real time, in plain sight, protected by an Attorney General who has promised to investigate neither the campaign assistance nor the bribery, is Trump picking up precisely where things left off in 2017.

Starting with the very same offers Dmitriev was offering eight years ago.

Five Ways Trump Is Sabotaging the United States

March 1, 2025/96 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

Yesterday, arguably for (at least) the second time, Trump declared fealty to Vladimir Putin.

As I contemplated the awful but in no way surprising developments (here’s a good podcast, featuring Marc Polymeropoulos, Doug Lute, and Rosa Brooks), I thought about the various ways Trump is sabotaging the United States, based on apparently different motivations.

But we only assume those motivations are different because we (or much of the legacy press, anyway) accept the claimed motivation Trump offers. When you look at all of them together, you simply can’t rule out they’re all part of the same effort to capitulate to Putin.

Project 2025

There’s a consensus that Trump is following the plan mapped out in Project 2025. This Politico report, from early February, laid out how Executive Orders Trump had signed implemented plans to attack diversity and LGBTQ protections, attack migrants, and protect disinformation. It focuses on fossil fuel plans that have mostly defunded renewable energy without raising fossil fuel exploitation (in part because it was already so high under Biden).

Even if that were the only thing going on or if that were really what was going on, it would raise real questions about foreign influence. Last year, Casey Michel mapped out how Viktor Orbán used the Heritage Foundation as a beachhead for his influence peddling in the US (which I discussed in this post on Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025).

While much attention has understandably focused on Heritage’s so-called “Project 2025,” which provides a roadmap for Trump to seize as much power as he can, such a shift has extended to foreign policy. This has been seen most especially in Heritage leading the effort to gut funding for Ukraine. But it’s also evident in the way Heritage has endeavored to anchor its relations with Orbán, making Budapest once more America’s preferred partner in Europe—regardless of the cost.

Much of that shift is downstream from Heritage’s leadership, overseen by Kevin Roberts. Appointed as Heritage’s president in 2021, Roberts immediately began remaking Heritage’s priorities with a distinctly pro-Orbán bent—and began opening up Heritage as a vehicle for Hungarian influence in the U.S.

Part of that involved things like last week’s confab, one of many meetings between Roberts and Orbán. (After one 2022 sit-down, Roberts—who, among other things, has said he doesn’t think Joe Biden won the 2020 election—posted that it was an “honor” to meet with Orbán, praising his “movement that fights for Truth, for tradition, for families.”) But the relationship is structural as well: Heritage finalized what they refer to as a ‘landmark’ cooperation agreement with the Danube Institute, a Hungarian think tank that appears to exist only to praise Orbán’s government.*

The Budapest-based Danube Institute is largely unknown in the U.S., but it has transformed in recent years into one of the premier mouthpieces for propagating Orbánist policies. While it is technically independent, it is, as Jacob Heilbrunn notes in his new book on the American right’s infatuation with dictators, located “next to the prime minister’s building and funded by Orbán’s Fidesz party.” Indeed, the Hungarian think tank is overseen by a foundation directly bankrolled by the Hungarian state—meaning that the Danube Institute is, for all intents and purposes, a state-funded front for pushing pro-Orbán rhetoric.

A spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation told The New Republic that their arrangements with the Danube Institute is “restricted to carrying out educational research and analysis, as well as related events—none of which involved any financial commitment from either party” and that “at no point did Heritage receive funds from or pass funds to the Danube Institute, the Hungarian government, or the prime minister’s office.”

The Danube Institute claims it is dedicated to “advocat[ing] conservative and national values and thinking,” which almost always ends up with the institute praising Orbán’s pronouncements. It has become, according to Hungarian journalists at Atlatszo, “one of the main tools of the Orbán government’s ideological expansion abroad”—and one of the “main vehicles” to “building a political network in the United States.

Christopher Rufo, the propagandist behind the demonization of trans people, has ties to the Danube Institute.

So even if this was just about implementing Project 2025, that would best be described as replacing American democracy with Orbanist authoritarianism — adopting the model from a key Putin puppet.

DOGE infiltration and destruction of US government

There have been a slew of stories about how DOGE provided cover for Russ Vought and Stephen Miller to implement Project 2025. Wired, for example, described how Stephen and his wife Katie, who is formally on the DOGE team, serve as gatekeepers to Elon and use Elon to carry out their dirty work.

Meanwhile, Stephen Miller has, along with Project 2025 coauthor and Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, became one of Musk’s closest allies in the administration, The New York Times reported earlier this month. WIRED has learned that the relationship is far closer, and more complicated, than has been previously known publicly.

In many ways, Musk’s targeting of federal agencies is perfectly in sync with the aims of Miller, who has championed DOGE’s work internally and even helped in making a lot of it possible. (In public, Miller has equated federal workers with “radical left Communists” and “criminal cartels.”) Still, sources tell WIRED that Trumpworld is more comfortable with Musk taking the heat for the recent federal cuts rather than the less famous—and, in their view, far less telegenic—Miller.

Yet through their actions so far, the Millers and Musk have developed a MAGA version of the Pet Shop Boys adage from the song “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)”: You’ve got the brawn / I’ve got the brains. Stephen Miller’s knowledge of the federal apparatus, Katie Miller’s contacts on Capitol Hill, and the couple’s good standing among Trump loyalists, coupled with Musk’s relentless ambition and effectively infinite resources, made the scale of the DOGE government takeover possible. Musk is not the independent actor he’s often portrayed as and taken to be, in other words, but is rather carrying out actions essentially in concert with the man to whom the president has delegated much of the day-to-day work of governance.

“Stephen is kind of the prime minister,” one of three Republicans close to Trump and familiar with the situation tells WIRED. Another Republican familiar with the dynamic also used the term “PM” to describe Miller, short for prime minister. The implication is that Miller is carrying out the daily work of governance while Trump serves as head of state, focusing on the fun parts of being president.

But DOGE is going beyond the scope of Project 2025, and in ways that directly harm the United States.

Take the Project 2025 recommendations on USAID, the first target of DOGE. DOGE adopted the general theme of the Project 2025 chapter — that USAID had been used to implement a lot of radical plans. But the virtual elimination of USAID implemented last week goes well beyond Project 2025’s recommended reversal to 2019’s budget of $39.3 billion.

Project 2025 hailed Trump’s use of USAID to push for religious protection for Christians which — as I showed — got shut down early along with everything else.

It promoted international religious freedom as a pillar of the agency’s work and built up an unprecedented genocide-response infrastructure.

It specifically called for greater reliance on local NGOs — and pointed to PEPFAR as a model.

Streamlining Procurement and Localizing the Partner Base. USAID is a grantmaking and contracting agency that disburses billions of dollars of federal funding in developing countries through implementing partners, such as U.N. agencies, international NGOs, for-profit companies, and local nongovernmental entities. In rare instances, such as in Jordan and Ukraine, the agency provides direct budget support to finance the operations of host-country governments. USAID far more often counts on expensive and ine!ective large contracts and grants to carry out its programs. It justifies these practices based on speed and a lower administrative burden on its institutional capacity.

[snip]

The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has shown that localization at scale is possible within a short time span. Over the four years of the Trump Administration, the multibillion-dollar program increased the amount of funding disbursed to local entities from about 25 percent to nearly 70 percent with positive overall results. This model should be replicated across all of USAID.

But as declarations in various lawsuits repeat over and over, these local partners are not getting paid, and it’s destroying the credibility of the US (and rule of law).

11. Currently my mission has more than $30 million in unpaid invoices for 2 months of implementing partners’ work, with half of those past Prompt Payment Act due date (30 days) and incurring interest every day. If one were to extrapolate the numbers across all of the missions and USAID/Washington, given that annual USAID appropriation is $40 billion, the total dollar amount of unpaid invoices would certainly surpass $1billion at the most conservative estimate.

[snip]

13. Arbitrary withholding of due payments to U.S. and non-U.S. based partners does grave damage to the reputation and reliability of the U.S. government both domestically and internationally. USAID is a USG Agency which signed the contracts and grants in line with the Code of Federal Regulations and other statutes; USG refusal to pay for the past performed work and non-compliance with the TRO can shatter Americans’ certainty in the rule of law.

Rather than empowering local partners and capabilities, the quick decimation has devastated them — and left Americans still located overseas exposed to backlash.

USAID is just the most substantiated example of the sheer waste DOGE is creating. We’re seeing similarly stupid decisions in the firings of critical personnel (some of whom get hired back), but also the elimination of long-term maintenance or safety programs that will cost far more when those protections are gone.

Project 2025 envisioned stripping civil service protections and politicizing the bureaucracy. But with DOGE cuts, it’s not clear the bureaucracy can be rebuilt, even assuming the Heritage hires knew what they were doing. Meanwhile, the method of those cuts is more likely to elicit a backlash from judges, potentially even from the Supreme Court justices whom right wingers were counting on to bless all this.

And all that’s before you contemplate the possibility that Elon’s DOGE boys are doing something else with the data they’re accessing, or — intentionally or not — setting up backdoors via which adversaries can do so themselves.

Assume you were a true believer in Project 2025 (and not far greater authoritarianism). DOGE puts all that at risk, because by breaking so much so early, it is eliciting backlash and collapse of the economy.

The installation of useful idiots

It’s not just Elon who is making a mess. So are the other unqualified useful idiots Trump has installed — people like Pete Hegseth (who has fired three senior women officers after assuring Joni Ernst he wouldn’t target women) and Tulsi Gabbard (who parroted the same Russian propaganda she partly disavowed to get confirmed yesterday) and RFK Jr (who reneged on his promise not to cut off vaccine programs) and Kash Patel (who reneged on his promise to appoint a career FBI Agent as his Deputy).

These people are doing precisely the affirmative damage to the US that Democrats warned they would do — most obviously in RFK’s initial dismissal of the measles outbreak spreading from Texas to other states. And they’re doing it after years of parroting Russian propaganda.

The personalization of DOJ

We expected DOJ to be politicized in a second Trump term. I was even cynical enough to imagine that he would pardon all the January 6ers. The denialism about both Russia and January 6 were baked right into Project 2025.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, knowing that claims of collusion with Russia were false,5 collaborated with Democratic operatives to inject the story into the 2016 election through strategic media leaks, falsified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant applications, and lied to Congress.6
Personnel within the FBI engaged in a campaign to convince social media companies and the media generally that the story about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop was the result of a Russian misinformation campaign—while the FBI had possession of the laptop the entire time and could have clarified the authenticity of the source.

[snip]

The FBI engaged in a domestic influence operation to pressure social media companies to report more “foreign influence” than the FBI was actually seeing and stop the dissemination of and censor true information directly related to the 2020 presidential election.11

But the personalization of DOJ, along with Pam Bondi’s orders to stop chasing foreign influence operations, does something more.

It effectively makes foreign bribery — as well as the kind of kickbacks we saw in advance of Trump’s inauguration — legal.

As I noted here, the SEC, for example, has paused its suit against Justin Sun. As Judd Legum describes, this follows the Chinese-linked businessman’s multi-million “investment” in Trump’s crypto currency.

In March 2023, the SEC charged Sun and three of his companies, accusing him of marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a crypto token. The SEC accused Sun of wash trading, which involves buying and selling a token quickly to fraudulently manufacture artificial interest.

[snip]

Sun’s purchase put millions in Trump’s pocket. WLF was entitled to “$30 million of initial net protocol revenue” in a reserve “to cover operating expenses, indemnities, and obligations.” After the reserve was met, a company owned by Trump would receive “75% of the net protocol revenues.” Sun’s purchase covered the entire reserve. As of December 1, this amounted to $18 million for Trump — 75% of the revenues of all other tokens sold at the time. Sun also joined WLF as an advisor. While the purchase benefited Trump, WLF tokens are essentially worthless for Sun, as they are non-transferable and locked indefinitely.

Nevertheless, Sun has since invested another $45 million in WLF, bringing his total investment to $75 million. This means Sun’s purchases have sent more than $50 million to Trump, Bloomberg reported. Sun has also continued to shower Trump with praise. On January 22, Sun posted on X, “if I have made any money in cryptocurrency, all credit goes to President Trump.”

Once you’ve installed lawyers who publicly represent they are Trump’s lawyers, once you’ve ensured that no one friendly to Trump will be prosecuted for bribery, then Ukraine was bound to lose any negotiation with Russia. Russia has been dangling bribes in front of Trump for years and now they’ll be free to deliver in plain sight.

And Trump has never placed his own self interest behind the interests of the United States.

The capitulation to Russia

Keep all that in mind as you consider Trump’s abject capitulation yesterday.

Keep in mind that even before yesterday’s ambush of Zelenskyy, Pete Hegseth ordered Cyber Command to stand down any targeting of Russia.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Hegseth gave the instruction to Cyber Command chief Gen. Timothy Haugh, who then informed the organization’s outgoing director of operations, Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Ryan Heritage, of the new guidance, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

The order does not apply to the National Security Agency, which Haugh also leads, or its signals intelligence work targeting Russia, the sources said.

CISA, too, has taken its focus off of Russia, something that risk grave damage to private companies as well as the government.

Liesyl Franz, deputy assistant secretary for international cybersecurity at the state department, said in a speech last week before a United Nations working group on cybersecurity that the US was concerned by threats perpetrated by some states but only named China and Iran, with no mention of Russia in her remarks. Franz also did not mention the Russia-based LockBit ransomware group, which the US has previously said is the most prolific ransomware group in the world and has been called out in UN forums in the past. The treasury last year said LockBit operates on a ransomeware-as-service model, in which the group licenses its ransomware software to criminals in exchange for a portion of the paid ransoms.

In contrast to Franz’s statement, representatives for US allies in the European Union and the UK focused their remarks on the threat posed by Moscow, with the UK pointing out that Russia was using offensive and malicious cyber-attacks against Ukraine alongside its illegal invasion.

“It’s incomprehensible to give a speech about threats in cyberspace and not mention Russia and it’s delusional to think this will turn Russia and the FSB [the Russian security agency] into our friends,” said James Lewis, a veteran cyber expert formerly of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington. “They hate the US and are still mad about losing the cold war. Pretending otherwise won’t change this.”

The US policy change has also been established behind closed doors.

A recent memo at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) set out new priorities for the agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security and monitors cyber threats against US critical infrastructure. The new directive set out priorities that included China and protecting local systems. It did not mention Russia.

A person familiar with the matter who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity said analysts at the agency were verbally informed that they were not to follow or report on Russian threats, even though this had previously been a main focus for the agency.

The person said work that was being done on something “Russia-related” was in effect “nixed”.

And, again, this happened before the ambush yesterday.

Eight years ago, as Mueller’s prosecutors started to focus on Roger Stone’s possible implication in a hacking conspiracy with Russia, Trump declared that he was going to partner with Putin; Russia and the US would jointly guard things like elections.

Now, Trump has chosen to unilaterally disarm.

Yesterday, Roger Sollenberger unpacked the Gitub of one of Elon’s boys, Jordan Wick.

In addition to his AI start-up, AccelerateX (which Wired wrote about), Wick has been fiddling with:

Tracking government employees by union status
Downloading Xitter DMs
Identifying open source data on submarine cables, ports, and mineral deposits

Sure, the utility of some of that — tracking union status — maps right onto the Project 2025 plans DOGE is purportedly implementing, even if that, plus the DM download, raise grave concerns about privacy.

But the submarine cables too?

Even as Donald Trump has made his fealty to Putin clear, even as his Director of National Intelligence parrots Russian disinformation (protected now by the FBI), Elon Musk has been vacuuming up all the data of all the government. And every claim that he’s been modernizing networks or searching for fraud have fallen apart.

At this point, we simply cannot rule out deliberate wholesale sabotage.

Update: Thought I’d repost what I wrote in December in response to Kimberly Strassel complaining about Trump’s useful idiot picks.

But I don’t doubt that the rat-fucker wing of Trump’s advisory team believes that Bobby and Tulsi do accomplish something. The question is whether some really smart politicos believe it’ll be a good thing to kill children and give dictators America’s secrets and let the richest men in the world destroy America’s banking system and the dollar exchange — whether they believe this will win lasting approval from America’s great disaffected masses. It might well! It certainly will expand the pool of disaffected Americans, and with it, increase the market for a strong man to respond to it all.

Or whether there’s some reason Trump is tempting Republican Senators to defy his plans to do great damage to the United States. Perhaps he intends to dare them to start defying him in bulk.

Or perhaps the rat-fucker wing of Trump’s entourage simply has an unknown reason they want to destroy America. Maybe Trump has other election debts — debts he’d get in more trouble for ignoring — that make him amenable to dropping policy bomb after policy bomb on America’s children.

But that’s sort of the point. You’ve got Kimberly Strassel up in arms because Trump is going to the mat for a conspiracist with a Democratic name who’ll get children killed. But it’s more likely to do with the policy bombs that RFK will help Trump drop than the specific conversations that led Bobby Jr to drop out of the race.

Fridays with Nicole Sandler

February 28, 2025/21 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

This was an odd podcast, because Nicole and I went back and opened live to talk about Trump’s ambush of Zelenskyy.

I’ll say more in coming days. One thing I think is super important is that the SEC is moving to settle with Justin Sun, the Chinese-linked businessman who dumped $30 million into Trump’s crypto scam during the election. Once you do that, you’ve made bribery legal (which Pam Bondi and Chad Mizelle have been rushing to do in any case). Once Russia has the luxury of bribing Trump, Ukraine was never going to win this “negotiation.” The rest is just show, with America’s sovereignty and world peace to pay for it all.

Listen on Spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

Russ Vought Got His Trauma — But Not the Villains He Imagined

February 28, 2025/144 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

This story, about a Biden-to-Trump voter in rural Michigan who got fired in the probationary worker purge, caused a bit of controversy on Bluesky. After personalizing Ryleigh Cooper, describing her educational successes and her struggles to conceive a child, the story described how Trump’s empty promise to make IVF free was one of the things (the other being high costs) that led Cooper, after a 15-minute struggle in the voting booth, to vote for Trump instead of Kamala Harrs.

Cooper did not want to think about what happened three months prior but her mind went there anyway. To the voting booth in Baldwin’s town hall, where she filled out every part of the ballot before turning to the box that said “Presidential.” She recalled staring at it for 15 minutes.

She did not want to vote for Trump. Cooper hated what he said about women and hated how he treated them. Her family always said the women who accused the president of sexual assault had either made it up or deserved it. Cooper heard them and kept her own experience a secret, thinking that they might feel the same way about her.

She voted for Joe Biden in 2020, her first time casting a ballot in a presidential election. But life felt more complicated these days. Her mortgage was too expensive, groceries were nearly $400 a month, and one single cycle of IVF could cost more than 10 percent of her annual household income.

Trump, at a campaign stop an hour and a half south of her, had promised to make IVF free. She knew that from a video clip she saw on TikTok. And she had believed him.

A number of lefties argue that Cooper got what she voted for and is due no sympathy.

Even ignoring basic humanity, they’re missing how people decide to vote, and so also how people might choose to fight fascism.

They vote based on what their close families and friends do and say. As the piece notes, people in Baldwin, MI — one of the poorest towns in MI — are predominantly Trump people.

Most people in Baldwin like Trump; more than 62 percent in Lake County, which includes the town, voted for him in November and in 2020. But people don’t talk about it. Politics here, at least until recently, felt removed from everyday worries.

That’s not surprising. Baldwin is at the edge of a large swath of National Forest. I’ve driven through, at least twice; the area is pretty, but I drove through on the way to places on Lake Michigan that are beautiful, and so attract wealthy outsiders like Pete Buttigieg and tourism dollars (Baldwin is about an hour closer to Traverse City than to Grand Rapids). The area is focused on forestry and outdoor activities like hunting and fishing (a lovely bike trail ends in Baldwin). Cycling close to there once, I remember the discomfort of hearing people shooting on property sporting a Confederate flag flying right next to the bike trail.

There are news outlets close, in Big Rapids and Cadillac. But there’s not much substantive news, which may be why the piece describes that people don’t talk about politics. The article describes Cooper accessing two kinds of information: the “news” about Trump’s promise to make IVF free, which she found on TikTok, and Facebook posts from her grandmother and a former teacher parroting right wing lines.

She thought about the Facebook posts she had seen a few days earlier.

“It’s February 3,” her grandmother posted, “and we’re going in the right direction.”

“Any government employee who is afraid of transparency,” wrote the man who taught her AP government class in high school, “is a criminal!”

Cooper knew the people in her life meant well, but she wanted her future to be different from theirs. She had grown up watching her family struggle as her mother lost one job, then another, then another. She was just a few months shy of her graduate degree and close to a promotion that could nearly double her salary. Even $50,000 or $60,000 a year, she thought, could help get her a house a few counties over, with better schools.

Aside from her gender, Cooper is the kind of person who voted for Trump because they consume little real news but instead rely on algorithmic garbage, the kind of person who based her vote on a single TikTok post.

Even still, as a number of people on Bluesky noted, the two topics on which Cooper was misinformed, the veracity of Trump’s promise for free IVF and his claim to have nothing to do with Project 2025, were left unchallenged by a great many purportedly factual news outlets. And unless she got her undergraduate degree at Ferris State in Big Rapids, there’s a decent chance she was away at college when she voted for Biden in 2020 (Michigan State, along with some schools further north and in the UP, offer Forestry programs).

The reason why the United States is so polarized — the reason why Cooper is mostly surrounded by people who support Trump and therefore is statistically likely to rely on Trump voters’ opinion to decide how to vote — is because there’s little circulation between increasingly polarized urban and rural areas. She lives in Baldwin because her family does; she worked in forestry because that’s what the local industry is. Cooper’s isolation is the problem we need to fix, not the person we need to abandon.

And this story, the stories of thousands of people like her, are the quickest way to do that.

After all, I’m betting that her grandmother and AP government teacher didn’t think she’d be targeted by Trump’s cuts. She’s not an arrogant academic, she’s someone who made good by going to college and starting a graduate degree. I’m betting neither thinks she’s a criminal, either.

There’s a quote from Russ Vought that has been cited frequently, especially in the wake of Elon Musk’s five bullet email demand last week. Vought described how he wanted to traumatize people he labeled as “bureaucrats.”

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

“We want to put them in trauma.”

But Vought not only wanted to traumatize people he called bureaucrats, he wanted to turn them into villains.

With regards to the trauma, Vought has undoubtedly succeeded, possibly beyond his wildest dreams. Cooper’s story has already been matched by hundreds and thousands of others reported all over the country. The people who are left in government are waiting for the next blow, struggling to make sense of guidance that changes from minute to minute, paranoid that Musk’s boys are spying on their work emails.

But Vought’s effort to turn government workers into villains has largely backfired.

To be sure, several efforts to villainize workers have succeeded. Complaints about Musk’s disinformation targeting USAID appear throughout court declarations and interviews, such as this one submitted by “Diane Doe” in the AFSA lawsuit.

7. The following days maintained high levels of uncertainty, we tried to focus our team on continuing to analyze our portfolio to align with the America First agenda. It started to slowly become evident that the Administration was targeting USAID. For example, many tweets on X from Elon Musk attack USAID which made it clear that these actions had nothing to do with actually reviewing programs.

8. On Friday, January 31st through media posts many of us learned that the goal was in fact to abolish USAID. The level of chaos and uncertainty has been menacing since then. We thought the entire weekend our Mission Director was going to be recalled without cause. Our website where people could go to learn facts about our work disappeared. The social media attacks against USAID escalated to alleging us to be criminals, comparing us to worms, bragging about putting us through a wood chipper, and publishing false headlines about USAID’s work (the worst of which may be accusing USAID of manufacturing bio weapons including COVID-19). The online campaign against USAID has been unfounded and slanderous

10. Since then, as of February 6th 2025 we have received no official orders or travel authorizations, but have been told to continue to plan our immediate departure. Elon Musk and elected officials continue to misrepresent USAID on social media by sharing false information. I would also like to note that despite media talking points, life saving aid has still not been given a waiver. Our PEPFAR programs are still stalled.

11. I have not slept in days. I am not eating. This insanely rapid upheaval of USAID and its personnel has been appalling and sickening. Our country that we have served honorably has been turned against us. I sit by my phone fearing every email. The entire experience is traumatic and continues to be so. We are being treated unfairly and unjustly despite dedicating our lives to public service.

[snip]

15. The head of Congress in the country I am serving responded to Musk’s tweets by saying that they would be investigating USAID and their staff. This has put our safety and security at risk. Additionally, due to the online attack campaign against USAID and the threatening comments to posts the U.S. does not feel safe to return to.

And the far right has built on years of success villainizing the lead scapegoats for this fascist effort, trans people. Don Moynihan wrote up how the NYT, even after disavowing its past propaganda against trans people, adopted the frame set by Libs of TikTok and Christopher Rufo when they misrepresented NSA chat logs to claim the workers were engaged in wild deviance during work hours.

The bigger issue is that a political activist has a direct pipeline into everything government employees are saying, even platforms that are supposed to include sensitive security messages. Who leaked the information?

The bigger issue is that the DNI fired these employees without even a hint of due process.

The bigger issue is that these employees were targeted and fired because they were trans.

It is simply impossible to believe that a group of White male analysts would have been peremptorily fired for engaging in what their Commander in Chief has deemed “locker room talk.” The political activist being mocked, LibsofTikTok, were known for their anti-trans activism. That is why she was being mocked in the first place.

The political activist who broke the story, Chris Rufo, also mischaracterizes much of the discussion: he presents shared advice about transition surgeries and related medical issues as sexually deviant fetishes, leading to headlines like this in right-wing media:

Pink News analyzed the leaked chats and characterized the discussions as “honest and open accounts of various LGBTQ+ topics and experiences, many of them apparently written by trans employees and offered up as useful advice for colleagues.” People outside the trans community may have different levels of comfort with these discussions, but the context is that Rufo and others have consistently fed a stereotype of trans people as dangerous deviants. You don’t have to condone what the employees did to realize that the accusations of deviance are being used here in a way that would never be the case for other employees.

None of this is about security. Not really. It is about purging certain people and identities from public life. Whatever you think about trans people, you should be disturbed by this. If you are familiar with the Lavender Scare — when gay people were purged from government positions in the 1940s to 1960s — you probably know it as a cautionary tale from an intolerant past. A tale of moral panic and persecutions not to be repeated. But it is being repeated.

[snip]

Time and again Rufo’s harassment campaigns have worked because institutions and the media go along with one story he is telling — that he is battling institutional corruption — while deliberately ignoring another story he is telling about a campaign to purge certain ideas and people from public life.

I in no way want to diminish the effect of years of demonization of trans people, though even there, I hope the contributions trans men and women have made to the military, as Pete Hegseth tries to claim they’re disqualified to work in his DOD, undercuts this campaign. We’re about to hear 4,000 stories about the contributions trans people have made to keeping America safe. Let’s be ready to elevate those stories.

Plus, several things are happening that have dulled the effect of Elon Musk’s normally fine-tuned machine for fascism.

First, Elon and his mob have too many targets, with a focus shifting between lawyers and NGOs organizing the resistance, a wildly mismanaged Jeffrey Epstein disinformation effort yesterday as alleged sex traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate arrived in the US, judges, not to mention Trump’s old villains from his investigations. You need some modicum of focus — and usually more concerted attention from Trump than he has given so far — to fully demonize a person.

And these campaigns are misfiring. Elon Musk’s targeting of a woman who shares the last name of Norm Eisen, who has launched some of the more aggressive lawsuits against Trump’s abuses, misidentified the person in question.

Elon Musk falsely accused prominent lawyer and CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen of leading a “crime family” after he discovered a woman with the same last name who worked for an organization that accepted funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The only problem? The woman, Tamar Eisen, is no relation to Norm Eisen.

On X, Musk amplified a post which falsely stated that Tamar, an employee of the nonprofit National Democratic Institute, was the CNN personality’s daughter.

The post took aim at the elder Eisen for being “the mastermind behind a slew of lawsuits” that seek to stifle the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s gutting of USAID.

Tamar Eisen, the post alleged, “was strutting her stuff as a Program Officer for the NDI’s Gender, Women and Democracy team for almost three years.”

Musk wrote in response Thursday afternoon: “The Eisen crime family.”

Yet the two have no familial connection, a source familiar told the Daily Beast.

The guy in a Project Veritas video that Lee Zeldin has used in a corrupt campaign to criminalize green programs has, according to Mark Zaid, no tie to the disbursements Zeldin has targeted.

Meanwhile, the former EPA official in the Project Veritas video, Brent Efron, was contacted last week by the EPA’s inspector general’s office and on Monday by an FBI agent from Washington at the request of Miami federal prosecutor Joshua Paster, deputy chief of an asset forfeiture unit with the southern district of Florida, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Miami office is at least the third U.S. attorney’s office asked to take part in the investigation. It was not clear if Paster would remain on the case, the person said.

Spokespeople for the U.S. attorney’s offices in D.C. and Miami declined to comment.

Efron’s lawyer, Mark Zaid, said in an interview that his client “doesn’t know what this is about, and that he was never involved in the obligation or disbursement of funds from any EPA assistance program, including NCIF and CCIA [held at Citibank]. And he was not involved in any conversations about EPA and Citibank.”

Some of these misfires will just fizzle out as they’re replaced by new chosen villains. But some of them could blow up in spectacular (and useful) fashion, especially if Ed Martin — currently the Acting US Attorney but aspiring to win confirmation for the job by the Senate — judge-shopped until he got a warrant using the video to try to claw back $20 billion in funds.

Meanwhile, as Elon strikes out at everyone who crosses his path (including judges whose actions he seems to barely understand), both the national press like this WaPo story but also the local press continues to tell the stories of the people DOGE has fired. One I’m partial to (in part because I understand how a passion for the Great Lakes unifies the two parties) is this story about how the firings of some Fish and Wildlife personnel stationed a half hour away from Cooper may halt the effort to rid the Great Lakes of nasty lamprey eels (if you don’t know what a lamprey eel looks like, click through for the picture).

Over the weekend, 14 US Fish & Wildlife Service employees who implement the program — most if not all of them based in Ludington and Marquette — were fired in a nationwide purge that some have dubbed “The Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

On top of that, the agency has been forbidden from hiring dozens of seasonal workers needed to dose Great Lakes rivers with lamprey-killing chemicals, prompting officials who oversee the program to question whether it can function at all.

[snip]

The program costs US taxpayers more than $20 million annually, and in return it protects a multibillion-dollar fishery from an eel-like invader that entered the Great Lakes on manmade shipping canals more than a century ago.

A single lamprey can consume 40 pounds of fish annually by attaching to the animals’ skin with razor-sharp teeth, slowly draining their fluids. The Great Lakes ecosystem was in collapse by 1957, when scientists discovered a chemical compound called TMF that kills lamprey while sparing other species.

Today, the fishery commission contracts with the Fish & Wildlife Service to dose hundreds of rivers with TMF each year. As a result, lamprey populations are down about 90% from historical averages. But recent history offers a window into the risk of a lapse in treatments.

The story also focuses on other Forest personnel fired along with Cooper.

“These aren’t … quote-unquote bureaucrats,” Vanderheuel said. “They’re people who get their hands dirty and make sure the trails are cleared so you can ride your ATV. They clean your campgrounds. All the paint on the trees that people see? These are the guys and gals who paint the trees so we can sell timber.”

There are stories like this in every locality. People are saying, “these aren’t … quote-unquote bureaucrats,” in every locality.

The first and second batch of firings has already created a surge in stories portraying people Vought calls bureaucrats as, instead, people’s neighbors, neighbors who perform valuable functions that taxpayers have paid for. These people aren’t villains — they’re the ones protecting us from lamprey eels, cancer, and hurricanes. And by firing them, Elon has made it visible to a lot of people who didn’t know that that is what the federal government is about.

Even the USAID cuts — thought to be among the hardest thing to defend — are eliciting rich profiles of people affected, at least overseas, like this FT profile of both a patient at one of the South African HIV clinics shut down, and the network of people who contributed to its work. In short order, the stories will be a lot more dire, depicting the large number of children that Marco Rubio let die, possibly even examples of potentially violent backlash against America for not paying money owed to local partners.

The US government has, for decades, allowed its work to remain invisible to taxpayers, even as those taxpayers relied on programs to support their lifestyle and even to feed their kids. That invisibility made it easy for goons like Vought, Stephen Miller, and Elon Musk to villainize anonymous government workers.

But even as the richest man in the world finds new ways to terrorize people while demanding big tax cuts and $2.4 billion contracts — a villain every bit as ugly as a lamprey eel — he is creating a flood of stories about the people, your neighbors, who provide the services you may not have realized came from the government.

It is, to my mind, an insane waste of time for self-imagined lefties to complain that newspapers are telling the story of Ryleigh Cooper. Not only is the firing spree we’re seeing an unprecedented attack on the American way of life, one that can and almost certainly will disrupt prior patterns of political formation, meaning whatever influence you think her firing will have on her future politicization is without past precedent. But whatever you think about the past choices Ryleigh Cooper made, she is the daughter of a local community that had a wildly distorted understanding of government — even from her AP government teacher! — before Elon’s firings made government visible in a new way. It may be too little or too late, but changing that understanding is a necessary precondition to trying to reverse the damage.

And making Ryleigh Cooper’s story a localized way to portray what government did, before Elon interrupted it, is an irreplaceable way to do that.

More importantly, no lefty should spend their time trying to make Ryleigh Cooper a villain: That’s precisely what the fascists have, explicitly, set out to do.

Update: Fixed my reference to Biden instead of Harris in first paragraph.

Elon Musk’s AI-bola and Marco Rubio’s Very Busy Month

February 27, 2025/71 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

Trump had a ritual humiliation session yesterday he billed as a Cabinet Meeting. One purpose of it was to perform complaisance with DOGE [sic]. Trump had Elon lie about his accomplishments and goal, and then invited Cabinet Members to speak up publicly about problems with him, which of course all declined to do.

And obviously, that can only be done with the support of everyone in this room. And I’d like to thank everyone for — for your support. Thank you very much this. This — this can only be done with — with your support.

So, this is — it’s really — DOGE is a support function for the president and for the — the agencies and departments to help achieve those savings and to effect- — effectively find 15 percent in reduction in fraud and — and waste.

And — and we bring the receipts. So, people say, like, “Well, is this real?” Just go to DOGE.gov. We l- — we — line item by line item, we specify each item. So — and w- — and I — I should say, we — also, we will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect. But when we make mistake, we’ll fix it very quickly.

So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled, very briefly, was Ebola — Ebola prevention. I think we all wanted Ebola prevention. So, we restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.

But we do need to move quickly if we’re — if we’re to achieve a trillion-dollar deficit reduction in tw- — in — in financial year 2026. It requires saving $4 billion per day, every day from now through the end of September. But we can do it, and we will do it.

Thank you.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, do you have any questions of Elon while we’re on the subject of DOGE? Because we’ll finish off with that. And if you would have any questions, please ask — you could ask me or Elon.

Go ahead, please.

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Mr. Musk. I just wanted to ask you, the — President Trump put out a Truth Social today saying that everybody in the Cabinet was — was happy with you. I just wondered if that — if you had heard otherwise, and if you had heard anything about members of the Cabinet who weren’t happy with the way things were going. And if so, what are you doing to address those — any dissatisfaction?

MR. MUSK: To the best of —

THE PRESIDENT: Hey, Elon, let the Cabinet speak just for a second. (Laughter.)

Is anybody unhappy with Elon? If you are, we’ll throw them out of here. (Laughter.) Is anybody unhappy? (Applause.)

They are — they have a lot of respect for Elon and that he’s doing this. And some disagree a little bit, but I will tell you, for the most part, I think everyone is not only happy, they’re thrilled.

The Ebola line — one Marco Rubio did not contest — got a ton of press.

But WaPo’s story — describing that Elon’s claimed restoration was a lie — got far less.

Yet current and former USAID officials said that Musk was wrong: USAID’s Ebola prevention efforts have been largely halted since Musk and his DOGE allies moved last month to gut the global-assistance agency and freeze its outgoing payments, they said. The teams and contractors that would be deployed to fight an Ebola outbreak have been dismantled, they added. While the Trump administration issued a waiver to allow USAID to respond to an Ebola outbreak in Uganda last month, partner organizations were not promptly paid for their work, and USAID’s own efforts were sharply curtailed compared to past efforts to fight Ebola outbreaks.

“There have been no efforts to ‘turn on’ anything in prevention” of Ebola and other diseases, said Nidhi Bouri, who served as a senior USAID official during the Biden administration and oversaw the agency’s response to health-care outbreaks.

Last month’s Ebola outbreak has now receded, but some former U.S. officials say that’s in part because of past investments in prevention efforts that helped position Uganda to respond — and that other countries remain far more vulnerable.

Bouri said her former USAID team of 60 people working on disease-response had been cut to about six staffers as of earlier this week. She called the recent USAID response to Uganda’s Ebola outbreak a “one-off,” far diminished from “the full suite” of activities that the agency historically would mount, such as ramping up efforts to monitor whether the disease had spread to neighboring countries.

“The full spectrum — the investments in disease surveillance, the investments in what we mobilize … moving commodities, supporting lab workers — that capacity is now a tenth of what it was,” Bouri said.

[snip]

“We have the programs and the people who were working on Ebola and other deadly-disease prevention capacity in other countries not able to do their jobs because their work is frozen, and many of the people have been put on administrative leave,” said Cameron, who worked on biosecurity efforts in the Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. “And we have a response that is, at best, less efficient, because the implementers are not able to get reliably paid.” [my emphasis]

This is consistent with what people have been claiming in court declarations (in this case from a Controller stationed overseas) for weeks: even where State/USAID claims to have sustained a program, it was nevertheless gutted through non-payment and staffing cuts.

8. Every single payment that I tried unsuccessfully to process after January 27 was for an expense incurred before January 20. Most of the payments I have been trying to process were for expenses incurred in November or December of 2024. These included large payments to partners who bill us every month for the work performed in the previous month, as well as smaller administrative items like cell phone and other utility payments, travel reimbursements, and rental payments.

9. On February 3, the situation changed yet again. As of that date, every time I tried to hit the “certify” button to begin a disbursement, I received an error message stating that I did not have authority to proceed. I contacted Phoenix Security to inquire if there was a technical problem in the system and was told “on Friday January 31, we were instructed to remove the ability to certify payments.” They did not indicate who instructed them, only stating “Unfortunately I am unable to reverse this decision.”

10. On February 5, all USAID controllers received another diplomatic cableindicating that USAID personnel could no longer process payments themselves but must request approval from a Senior Bureau Officer before forwarding the payment packages for processing. However, as of February 11, nobody can agree on who is the appropriate SBO for USAID payments and the State Department hasn’t processed a single payment based on the new procedure.

11. As of February 9, when I try to log into Phoenix, I receive a new error message stating that my sign-in attempt has failed. I have even less access to Phoenix after the February 7 court order than I did before that date.

[snip]

13. I have not been able to process payments under any of the waivers included in the January 24 cable, including legitimate expenses incurred prior to January 24 under existing awards or those for employee operating expenses. Though the waivers exist on paper, in reality all USAID funds have remained frozen because of technological barriers added to the system, I don’t know by whom. Phoenix will not let us disburse anything.

The people who pay the bills have all been forced out of payment systems. And it’s not clear whether DOGE [sic] broke the system or simply disabled it (a Matt Bai report I find suspect, but which plaintiffs have now cited in court filings, says it’s the latter).

The first of these USAID cases — on Judge Amir Ali’s order to halt freezes of such funding — landed before SCOTUS last night; the government’s request to vacate Ali’s order presents a wildly misleading description of the posture of the case.

It also wails mightily about plaintiffs’ request to conduct discovery, including by deposing Marco Rubio.

Worse, this order exposes the government to the risk of contempt proceedings and other sanctions. Agency leadership has determined that the ordered payments “cannot be accomplished in the time allotted by the” district court. App., infra, 97a. That risk is especially concerning because the district court appears poised to require mini-trials, discovery, and depositions of senior officials as to whether a host of foreign-aid decisions genuinely rested on the government’s conceded discretionary authority to terminate contracts and grants, or were instead supposed pretexts for a blanket foreign-aid cut that the district court considers unlawful. See id. at 141a (respondents’ proposed discovery plan) (requesting deposition of Secretary of State) Respondents are pressing even further, demanding discovery into personnel actions, payment-processing protocols, and other agency actions that have nothing to do with their original APA claims challenging a categorical funding pause. The threat of invasive discovery into senior officials’ subjective motivations only exacerbates the Article II harms inflicted by the court’s order.

Or perhaps it wails mightily about being called on a claim made below: That Marco Rubio has been personally involved in all this.

After Judge Ali first issued a TRO, State offered a new claimed basis for the freeze: that State was in the process of canceling the contracts via clauses within the contracts, applied individually. It claimed that the reduced staff of State reviewed every contract and decided whether to keep or eliminate it.

And according to multiple declarations from Pete Marocco, Marco Rubio was personally involved in all of that.

5. USAID led a rigorous multi-level review process that began with spreadsheets including each contract, grant, or funding instrument where each line of the spreadsheeting reflected one such agreement and included information about the recipient, the amount of the award, the subject matter, and a description of the project that often included the location of the project. Policy staff first performed a first line review to determine whether the individual agreement was in line with foreign policy priorities (and therefore could potentially be continued) or not (and presumptively could be terminated as inconsistent with Agency priorities and the national interest). Those recommendations were reviewed by a senior policy official to confirm that, for awards recommended for termination, that ending the program was consistent with the foreign policy of the United States and the operations and priorities of the Agency. The results of that review were routed to me for further review, including of institutional and diplomatic equities. As one example, a presumptively terminated agreement might be continued for a variety of foreign policy reasons, such as the location of the project or the general subject matter, or the judgment and foreign policy perspectives of the second line reviewer. Termination recommendations approved by me ultimately received the Secretary of State’s review. The Secretary of State’s personal involvement confirmed that termination decisions were taken with full visibility into the unique diplomatic, national security, and foreign policy interests at stake vis-à-vis foreign assistance programs. [my emphasis]

Just in time to rush this to the Supreme Court, Marocco claimed that Rubio had finished his decision-making.

Since last night when I executed a declaration, the process for individually reviewing each outstanding State Department grant and federal assistance award obligation has concluded. Secretary Rubio has now made a final decision with respect to each such award, affirmatively electing to either retain the award or terminate as inconsistent with the national interests and foreign policy of the United States. State is processing termination letters with the goal to reach substantial completion within the next 24-48 hours. Notification letters will be distributed for retained awards withing 2 weeks to take account of the overseas lag. In total, approximately 4,100 awards were terminated, and approximately 2,700 awards were retained. Of approximately 711 contracts originally paused, approximately 297 still need to be reviewed; the remainder have either been terminated or resumed. Defendants are committed to fully moving forward with the remaining awards and programs that Secretary Rubio has determined to retain.

A Contracting Officer submitted a declaration yesterday explaining how “implausible” the claim of personal involvement from Rubio is.

36. As a CO who manages a portfolio of less than 50 awards, the claims of “individual reviews” by Secretary Rubio are completely implausible. Contracts and awards are lengthy, technical, and complicated documents. They often include technical specifications that are dozens of pages long, as well as lengthy technical appendices. It would take a single person weeks and weeks of work to substantively review hundreds of contracts and awards, especially if that person was not already familiar with the programs at issue. For example, when the Agency asked COs to review the Scopes of Work and Program Descriptions contained in our awards to determine whether provisions regarding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion were incorporated, it took me and my team a week to review fewer than 50 awards. Not only did we have a team of people doing this work, but these were awards which I manage and have significant foundational knowledge about.

37. Beyond that, without consulting the COs and CORs/OARs who manage a specific contract or award, it would be impossible in most cases to understand whether a specific award could be terminated, effective immediately, without incurring even greater termination costs or causing even greater harms to the national interest or Agency priorities. For example, the COs and CORs/OARs have specific information about the status of ongoing work, whether immediate termination would incur sunk costs (for example, by allowing already-purchased food and medicine to expire), whether immediate termination would risk the health or safety of Agency personnel or implementing partners, among many other award-specific factors.

Rubio’s recent schedule makes that all the more implausible. For six days after the original stay, Rubio was traveling.

Secretary Rubio is on travel to Germany, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates from February 13-19, 2025.

He had nothing but briefings on his schedule on February 20. But then he had two high level meetings on February 21. More high level meetings, including with President Macron, on Monday. A meeting with the Saudi Defense Minister Tuesday. And the aforementioned Cabinet Meeting yesterday, where Rubio didn’t speak up to correct Elon’s false claim about Ebola. Rubio did, however, blow off EU foreign policy minister Kaja Kallas yesterday, avoiding a discussion about Ukraine. Today, Keir Starmer visits.

Even with the canceled Kallas meeting, though, Rubio simply had no time — especially not blocks of time that fell into the periods when Pete Marocco claims these decisions were made — to review the contracts in depth.

State needs to claim Rubio had personal involvement in rescinding these contracts. But it is virtually impossible that he did, much less that he had meaningful input on it.

What is far more likely is that Elon’s AI reviewed these contracts, and State is claiming that the work of that AI is instead the considered conclusion of the Senate-confirmed Secretary of State.

No wonder DOJ panicked when plaintiffs said they wanted to depose the people who made the decisions (a request Judge Ali has not endorsed).

Someone just shut down the bulk of foreign aid, purportedly with the personal involvement of the Secretary of the State. But that very same Secretary of State sat silent when Elon Musk falsely claimed that State was still funding Ebola prevention.

Two Weeks of Work: Hampton Dellinger

February 26, 2025/95 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

In this post, I used Kel McClanahan’s lawsuit against OPM, claiming the email via which Elon Musk sent out his five bullets email was added without proper privacy review, as an example of the added benefits that lawsuits can have, whether or not they succeed. (Though Elon’s email has raised the likelihood the lawsuit will succeed, because it has undermined DOJ’s claims about the email thus far.)

Another example of Hampton Dellinger’s decision to sue to get his job back. In the end, SCOTUS will likely let Trump fire Dellinger. But before SCOTUS does that, Dellinger has made a record of problems with the DOGE firings and gotten at least six of the firings halted for 45 days.

As the timeline below notes, Trump tried to fire Dellinger on February 7. Three days later, on February 10, he sued and asked for a restraining order, preventing Trump from removing him. Judge Amy Berman Jackson first paused, then granted the TRO; because she restored the status quo, Dellinger regained access to his office. Trump appealed, ultimately to the Supreme Court, but after delaying a week, on February 21, they deferred the decision until today (when ABJ has a hearing scheduled and is expected to make a decision that can formally be appealed).

Even as that happened, starting on February 12, Trump started his purge of people he claimed were probationary.

At least six of the people fired brought claims before the Office of Special Counsel, Dellinger’s office, claiming that the mass firings were not permissible. Some also argued they weren’t probationary (remember that some agencies tried to retroactively change the probationary period from one to two years). Others claimed they were not provided treatment to which veterans are entitled.

On Monday, word started leaking today that Dellinger was asking the MSPB to reinstate those six employees. Citing that, Dellinger provided a public statement explaining that some of the firings violated employment law.

OSC does not typically comment on stay requests while they are awaiting a decision by the MSPB. Consistent with OSC’s past practice, Special Counsel Dellinger did not comment publicly on the pending request prior to its apparent disclosure by one of the agencies named as a respondent. Because his stay requests are now being publicly discussed, the Special Counsel provides the following statement.

“Since the Civil Service Reform Act was passed in 1978, the merit system principles have guided how federal government agencies hire, manage, and, if necessary, remove federal employees. These principles establish that all federal employees, including those in a probationary status, should be evaluated based on individual performance.”

Dellinger also released a redacted version of one of his requests, sent on February 21, for the Merit Systems Protection Board to stay the termination of six employees, with descriptions of all six employees. As one example, one of the employees is a disabled veteran whose supervisor had, the day he was fired, talked about what an exceptional employee he was.

Complainant served as a probationary Program Support Assistant in the competitive service with ED. Ex. 1, Complainant Declaration, ¶¶ 3-4. Complainant was hired with a 100% disabled veteran’s preference after 14 years with the Army. Id., ¶ 5. Throughout his tenure, he received consistent praise from leadership, and there is no evidence of any performance issues. Id., ¶ 9. However, on February 12, 2025, Complainant was issued a termination notice that stated, in relevant part:

I regrettably inform you that I am removing you from your position of Program Support Specialist with the agency and the federal civil service effective today.

Ex. 2, ED Notice. Earlier that same day, Complainant s supervisor had commended his exceptional performance, praising his dedication and calling him a perfect fit for the team. Ex. 1, ¶ 11.

Several of their supervisors tried to overrule the firings. That’s one thing Dellinger used to substantiate his finding that this was a Reduction in Force finding, not termination because of performance.

As Dellinger laid out, Reductions in Force have their own requirements, even for probationary employees.

Because 1) agencies are prohibited from circumventing the requirements set forth in the RIF statute and regulations, which apply equally to probationary employees, 2) the evidence indicates that Agencies improperly terminated Complainants without reference to those requirements, and 3) the violation denied Complainants both substantive and procedural rights, OSC has reasonable grounds to conclude that Agencies have engaged in prohibited personnel practices.

Agencies must follow the RIF statute and regulations when the employee’s release is required for reasons including lack of work, shortage of funds, and reorganization. See 5 C.F.R. § 351.201. The regulations define a reorganization as “the planned elimination, addition, or redistribution of functions or duties in an organization.” 5 C.F.R. § 351.203. The Federal Circuit has “defined a ‘reduction in force’ as an ‘administrative procedure’ by which agencies eliminate jobs and reassign or separate employees who occupied the abolished positions.” See Tippins v. U.S., 93 F.4th 1370, 1375 (Fed. Cir. 2024). OPM’s website similarly explains that, “An agency is required to use the RIF procedures when an employee is faced with separation or downgrading for a reason such as reorganization, lack of work, [or] shortage of funds….”16

Each agency has the right to decide whether a RIF is necessary and when the RIF will take place. However, agencies do not have discretion to bypass RIF procedures when they are reorganizing or reducing the size of components based on lack of work or budgetary concerns.

Employees removed in an RIF get additional benefits, including notice.

Yesterday, the MSPB granted those stays. Dellinger issued a statement calling on agency heads to rescind unlawful terminations.

“I am very grateful the MSPB has agreed to postpone these six terminations,” said Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger. “These stays represent a small sample of all the probationary employees who have been fired recently so our work is far from done. Agency leaders should know that OSC will continue to pursue allegations of unlawful personnel actions, which can include asking MSPB for relief for a broader group of fired probationary employees. I urge agency leaders to voluntarily and immediately rescind any and every unlawful termination of probationary employees.”

The day after Dellinger recommended those stays, Democracy Forward provided OSC a list of those original six agencies, plus thirteen more that used standard letters for firing its people, asking that all those firings be stayed too.

U.S. Department of Education
U.S. Department of Energy 3
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
U.S. Office of Personnel Management
U.S. Department of Agriculture, Rural Development
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
AmeriCorps
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
U.S. Department of Interior
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Export-Import Bank
Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service
General Services Administration
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Institute of Museum and Library Services
Internal Revenue Service
National Archies and Records Administration
National Science Foundation
Surface Transportation Board

Dellinger’s success at reviewing and staying these six people’s termination matters for a whole bunch of reasons, even if he is removed today or in days ahead.

First, by labeling this an RIF (and releasing that decision publicly), it’ll help lawsuits designed to reinstate larger number of people get standing that otherwise would have to go through this process (which is the basis on which courts have rejected some unions’ efforts to slow the DOGE).

Establishing the import of benefits tied to RIFs is particularly important because, as Wired reported, DOGE appears to be trying to automate mass firing even further.

Finally, recall that the day after Trump fired Dellinger, he named Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins Acting Special Counsel. The VA has been among the most aggressive in firings, carrying out a second round of firings in recent days, for a total of 2,400 people.

Had Dellinger not gotten the slight reprieve on his own firing, it would have left one of the people most aggressively pursuing Trump’s purge in charge.

Again, I think it likely SCOTUS will let Trump fire Dellinger in short order.

But the fight was worth it.

Update: In a Northern CA lawsuit on behalf of the fired workers, Judge William Alsup is asking the government to answer two questions in advance of a hearing today that get at the same issue Dellinger raised.

1. To what extent did OPM or individuals within OPM direct other agencies to terminate probationary employees based on performance or misconduct? If any such direction (or advice) is in writing, please provide the documents to the Court.

2. How can an agency lawfully terminate a probationary employee on the basis of “performance” if that employee’s performance was in fact satisfactory?

Update: Having just listened to the hearing, ABJ sounds like she’s going to extend the TRO for a few days so she can rule on the merits. It further sounds she’ll say the Special Counsel is so unique that the President can only fire him for cause.

Timeline

[docket]

February 7, 2025: Sergio Gor fires Hampton Dellinger

February 10, 2025: Dellinger sues and moves for a TRO; Amy Berman Jackson issues an administrative stay

February 11, 2025: Trump names Doug Collins Acting Special Counsel; appeals stay

February 12, 2025: DC Circuit denies appeal of stay; ABJ issues a TRO; Trump appeals; Trump starts mass firings of probationary employees

February 13, 2025: Trump appeals stay to SCOTUS

February 15, 2025: DC Circuit denies appeal; ABJ consolidates preliminary injunction

February 16, 2025: Trump appeals stay to SCOTUS

February 21, 2025: SCOTUS defers appeal

How a (Thus Far Unsuccessful) Lawsuit Caused Elon Musk’s OPM Email to Faceplant

February 24, 2025/106 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

Chris Geidner did a post over the weekend explaining the importance of being litigious. He described how just forcing the Administration to defend itself, on the record and in public, can lead to wins down the road.

The reality of litigation challenging the Trump administration is that it isn’t all going to win.

That’s OK.

Forcing the administration to defend its actions, on the record and in public, is important.

The mere fact of litigating can change implementation of policy to improve its application to those affected. Even a loss can advance awareness about oppressive steps being taken by the administration. And, multiple strategies might be taken to challenge certain actions, some of which will be more successful than others.

From a litigation perspective, in other words, not suing is sometimes “obeying in advance.” Actions need to be challenged. If a key aspect of what President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and others are doing right now is seeing what they can get away with — and what they can convince people that they can do — then a key part of pushing back against that needs to be challenging everything that can be challenged.

In short: Force them to work for it.

OPM’s cave-in-process on Elon Musk’s respond-or-resign email is a very good example.

Multiple agencies are now instructing employees that, contrary to what Elon said (and Trump appeared to reiterate in presser), responding is optional.

The reason why they’re doing so is virtually certainly due to this lawsuit, filed by Kel McClanahan (here’s his website, if you want to support his work). Its theory was a bit different than a lot of other lawsuits: he argued that OPM was violating its own standards under the E-Government Act mandating the existence and substance of a Privacy Impact Assessment before collecting new information.

46. OPM is an agency subject to the E-Government Act because it is an “establishment in the executive branch of the Government.” 47. A PIA for a “new collection of information” must be “commensurate with the size of the information system being assessed, the sensitivity of information that is in an identifiable form in that system, and the risk of harm from unauthorized release of that information.” The PIA must specifically address “(I) what information is to be collected; (II) why the information is being collected; (III) the intended use of the agency of the information; (IV) with whom the information will be shared; (V) what notice or opportunities for consent would be provided to individuals regarding what information is collected and how that information is shared; [and] (VI) how the information will be secured.”

48. The Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”) is charged with “oversee[ing] the implementation of the privacy impact assessment processing throughout the Government” and “develop[ing] policies and guidelines or agencies on the conduct of privacy impact assessments.”

49. Accordingly, OMB has clarified the minimum requirements for a PIA and the role of PIAs in an agency’s decision to collect (or to refrain from collecting) personal data.

50. According to OMB, “Agencies shall conduct and draft a PIA with sufficient clarity and specificity to demonstrate that the agency fully considered privacy and incorporated appropriate privacy protections from the earliest stages of the agency activity and throughout the information life cycle.”

After he first filed the lawsuit on January 27, OPM did a (legally insufficient, McClanahan argues) Privacy Impact Assessment.

Although the E-Government Act expressly exempts the email system at issue here, which includes only federal government employees, OPM nevertheless has now prepared a PIA. See Attachment A (executed February 5, 2025). That is the sole relief sought through this litigation, and the sole source of Plaintiffs’ asserted irreparable harm. Because the agency has in fact published a PIA (despite it not being required to do so), this case is moot, and Plaintiffs cannot establish irreparable harm.

That PIA gets around providing advance notice about the email because — it claims — responding to any email is voluntary (Josh Marshall may have been the first to notice this, but I don’t think he realizes this PIA exists solely because of the lawsuit).

4.1, How does the project provide individuals notice prior to the collection of information? If notice is not provided, explain why not.

The names and government email addresses of federal government employees are already housed in OPM systems or provided by employing agencies and, in any event, do not contain substantive information about employees. As a result, there is no reason to provide advance notice for the collection of Employee Contact Data. All individuals are provided advance notice of the Employee Response Data, as it is voluntarily provided by the individuals themselves in response to an email.

4.2, What opportunities are available for individuals to consent to uses, decline to provide information, or opt out of the project?

The Employee Response Data is explicitly voluntary, The individual federal government employees can opt out simply by not responding to the email.

Based on those representations — that OPM has a PIA — as well as questions about standing, Judge Randolph Moss denied a Temporary Restraining Order in the lawsuit.

Mind you, the fact that agencies are only now, ten hours before the purported reply deadline, instructing employees not to respond, as well as the fact that DOJ initially instructed DOJ employees to respond (until it reversed course for confidentiality reasons), may help McClanahan prove standing. Imagine employees who did respond before agencies reversed course? Imagine employees who responded to Trump’s public backing for the email? There’s no reversing their injury, or the good faith belief many federal employees would have had that Trump’s comments could be trusted?

Furthermore, OPM claims that actual government employees have fewer privacy protections than others. The lawsuit already includes five plaintiffs who are not government employees. But the Office of US Courts employees also received this email, a violation of separation of powers.

In the course of one month, then, this lawsuit created a way to undercut Musk’s latest assault on government.

Update: In a new filing, McClanahan reveals he’s seeking sanctions.

On 23 February, Plaintiffs’ undersigned counsel served counsel for Defendant Office of Personnel Management (“OPM”) with a motion for sanctions pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 (“Rule 11”). In the spirit of that rule, Plaintiffs will not elaborate on the content of that motion at this time, other than to say that the allegations are new and relate primarily to OPM’s presentation to the Court of the Privacy Impact Assessment (“PIA”) for the GovernmentWide Email System (“GWES”), which, in light of rapidly unfolding events over the weekend, materially misrepresented the allegedly “voluntary” nature of responses to emails sent using that system,1 coupled with the newly discovered evidence that, as Plaintiffs’ undersigned counsel warned the Court in the 14 February hearing, OPM did not purge the GWES of information about non-Executive Branch employees, but only installed “filters” to keep the emails about the deferred resignation program from being sent to them.

Simply put, OPM sent an email using [email protected] demanding that all employees reply to the email with a list of things they did last week by 11:59 PM on 24 February, and today President Trump stated that if someone does not reply “[they’re] sort of semi-fired or [they’re] fired.” Elon Musk (@elonmusk), X.com (Feb. 24, 2025 1:25 PM), at https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1894091228054261781 (last accessed Feb. 24, 2025).

Update: At about 5:00 (so too late for anything but CYA), HHS sent out guidance on how to respond to the OPM email. It ends with this warning.

Assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly.

Update: OPM told everyone, just hours before end of work today, that responding is voluntary.

In an email to its workforce on Monday, the Justice Department said that during a meeting with the interagency Chief Human Capital Officers Council, OPM informed agencies that employee responses to the email are voluntary. OPM also clarified that despite what Musk had posted, a non-response to the email does not equate to a resignation, the email said.

Update: Before he likely oversaw that email warning about malign foreign actors, HHS’ Acting General Counsel raised a bunch of other reasons this email was problematic.

One message on Sunday morning from the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., instructed its roughly 80,000 employees to comply. That was shortly after the acting general counsel, Sean Keveney, had instructed some not to. And by Sunday evening, agency leadership issued new instructions that employees should “pause activities” related to the request until noon on Monday.

“I’ll be candid with you. Having put in over 70 hours of work last week advancing Administration’s priorities, I was personally insulted to receive the below email,” Keveney said in an email viewed by the AP that acknowledged a broad sense of “uncertainty and stress” within the agency.

Keveney laid out security concerns and pointed out some of the work done by the agency’s employees may be protected by attorney-client privilege.

Update: Just hours before the deadline, OPM issued new guidance. Using the word “should,” it says people should respond to their managers and CC OPM.

It also excuses Executive Office of the President — purportedly because of the Presidential Records Act.

No Kings! Around the Partisan Bend on DOGE [sic] and Ukraine

February 23, 2025/47 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

On Bluesky, folks are posting video of one after another town hall in Republican congressional districts that get heated (Nicole and I addressed the first prominent example, a Rich McCormick town hall in suburban Atlanta, in our Friday podcast).

Amid the din of lefty pundits still focused primarily on why Democratic members of Congress aren’t doing more, these town halls demonstrate the efficacy of speaking to Republicans. Whether or not they change a Congressman’s mind right away, they get press — especially local press that remains more trusted. And they define the terms of debate on which left and right might find common agreement.

This is politics.

This is a kind of politics that Democrats have too often eschewed in recent years as consultants told candidates that they couldn’t swing voters in culturally conservative areas. (Note, one of the events in the past week, a WI Eau Claire area event focused on the pain farmers are experiencing, also served as an opportunity to ask why Madison’s Mark Pocan had shown up but local WI CD-3 Congressman Derrick Van Orden did not; Orden underperformed the district’s R+4 lean against Rebecca Cooke in November.)

This kind of politics is not sufficient to reverse the fascist trend in America, but it is an irreplaceable part of any effort to try.

I want to look at this report, from a Scott Fitzgerald town hall in West Bend, northwest of Milwaukee (the district also includes Waukesha, a conservative Milwaukee exurb). The progression of the town hall — Milwaukee NBC reporter Charles Benson says his was the only news station in attendance — offers certain lessons.

As described, residents asked Fitzgerald why he wasn’t involved in all the DOGE [sic] efforts (a question Democrats are just as insistently asking their Democratic representatives).

Residents came with questions for their congressman.

“How can we be represented by you if you don’t have a voice in Congress?” asked Lorraine Henrickson.

They didn’t like some of Scott Fitzgerald’s answers.

“The end result of the fraud and abuse that has been discovered already,” Fitzgerald said before getting pushback from the audience.

Fitzgerald answered with the rote answer Republicans are still offering: that DOGE [sic] is pursuing fraud and abuse.

Of course, there’s no evidence that Elon is finding fraud and abuse. One after another analysis has debunked that claim — most recently a WSJ piece largely matching an earlier NPR one that remains among the best — that this is fraud. WSJ found that much of it is research, and just 2% of that is “DEI.”

I still think the NPR is one of the best, but the WSJ piece offers a way to share a Murdoch source with Republican members of Congress to disabuse them that this is about efficiency.

Fitzgerald’s constituents continued to ask why he, as a member of Congress, was doing nothing to oversee this and he kept retreating behind his false claim that DOGE [sic] is finding stuff.

Mary Sylvester asked about the role and responsibility of Congress. “We need three branches of government, not one. When will you stand up and say that’s enough?”

Michael Wittig is concerned with Elon Musk’s role in the Trump administration—he held a sign that read “Presidents are not kings.”

“Are you going to subpoena him at some point? Are you willing to use your subpoena power to tell Musk to stand in front of Congress and answer some hard questions?”

Fitzgerald insists Musk’s efforts to find waste and fraud are working, and Congress will eventually have budget oversight.

But then the conversation shifted (as it did in a Kevin Hern Oklahoma town hall where something similar happened) to Ukraine. While Fitzgerald backed Trump’s stated desire to end the war in Ukraine, he did agree with attendees on two points: That Ukraine did not start this war, and that Volodymyr Zelenskyy needs to be in the room for discussions on how to end it.

Many here worry about Ukraine. When asked, Fitzgerald disagreed with Trump’s false claim that Ukraine started the war.

“No, Ukraine did not start the war.”

Fitzgerald was an early supporter of U.S. aid to Ukraine but now believes Trump is right to try to end it.

“I don’t think the president’s goals are not what everybody wants, which is to end the war.”

In the end, Fitzgerald won over the crowd with this answer and suggestion about Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“Zelensky needs to be in the room,” said Fitzgerald. “He absolutely needs to be in the room.”

Fitzgerald hid behind claims that DOGE [sic] was chasing fraud and abuse, claims that have been debunked but which apparently weren’t debunked here.

But on Ukraine, he refused to back several of the untenable claims the Trump Administration has adopted.

It may well be that Trump will coerce cowardly Republicans to adopt his false claims about Ukraine in the days ahead — indeed, some have, wholeheartedly. I hope that as more media outlets expose DOGE’s fraudulent claims about waste, constituents will get better at debunking the entire claimed premise of DOGE [sic].

But in just one week of contentious confrontations, a slight break between Trump and even rabid Republicans has become clear: Ukraine.

That’s an important lesson.

Trump is trying to hide behind DOGE [sic] to pull off the firing of a bunch of people who either are or offer services cherished by the constituents of Republican Congressmen. That, by itself, is enough to create this problem for right wingers. Their constituents, just as much as Maryland and Virginia members of Congress, are the ones getting the axe.

But Trump is trying to do it even as he sells Ukraine out to Russia. And that’s an issue on which some Republicans are less willing, at least so far, to adopt Trump’s propaganda.

Note, MoJo’s Clara Jeffries posted some of these TikTok videos to Bluesky.

Rich McCormick, GA CD-7 R+13

Scott Fitzgerald, WI CD-5 R+14

Glenn Grothman, WI CD-6 R+10

Kevin Hern, OK CD-1 R+14

Stephanie Bice, OK CD-5 R +12 (Bice repeated false claims about FEMA funding for migrants)

Kevin Kyley, CA CD-3 R+4

Jay Obernolte, CA CD-23 R+8

Cliff Bentz, OR CD-2 R+15 (TPM roundup)

Pam Bondi Covers Up Foreign Influence Peddling and Lying to the FBI

February 22, 2025/58 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

Before you watch this superb CPAC performance by the woman paid to enforce the law in the United States, peek ahead to this spoiler.

Eric Adams’ lawyers — Alex Spiro (the lawyer the Mayor shares with Elon Musk) and Bill Burck (the lawyer the Mayor shares with Trump Organization) — sent Judge Ho a letter celebrating the kind of improper out-of-court public statements they were wailing about in December.

We are writing to alert the Court to recent out-of-court statements by Attorney General Pam Bondi and her chief of staff that constitute admissions of a party opponent under the Federal Rules of Evidence. Fed. R. Evid. 801(d)(2). The Attorney General described the indictment in this case as “incredibly weak,” and said that the charges against the Mayor were so weak she doubted prosecutors could secure a guilty verdict. “That,” she said, “is the weaponization of government.” Her statements followed similar statements by her chief of staff on Wednesday, February 19, 2025. See, e.g., Chad Mizelle, @ChadMizelle47, X (Feb. 19, 2025 12:42 PM), https://x.com/chadmizelle47/status/1892268416267911251?s=46 (“The case against Mayor Adams was just one in a long history of past DOJ actions that represent grave errors of judgement.”); id. (“Dismissing the prosecution was absolutely the right call.”). The Acting Deputy Attorney General has similarly recognized that this “case turns on factual and legal theories that are, at best, extremely aggressive.” Dkt. 125-2 at 7.

When Damien Williams posted a website barely mentioning Adams, Spiro deemed it a dangerous attempt to influence a legal outcome. But when AG Bondi went to a raging conference featuring Nazi salutes to give this error-riddled screed, Spiro and Burck proclaimed it federal evidence.

And perhaps Quinn Emanuel’s prominence makes them sluggish. But they posted this more than two hours after Judge Ho issued his order appointing Paul Clement as amicus, seemingly mooting this kind of stunt lawyering.

With that in mind, I give you a woman who claims to want to take on drug cartels but seems scared to take the A train uptown:

Ted Cruz: So, so Pam, the media are going crazy about New York Mayor Eric Adams and the charges that were dismissed against him.

Pam Bondi: So glad you brought that up.

Ted Cruz: Um, tell us what the story is, what happened there, and why were the charges dismissed?

Pam Bondi: Sure. And Emil, who has done an incredible job, he worked on this case, he looked at this case.

It was an incredibly weak case filed to make deportation harder. That’s why they did it. They took one of the biggest mayors in the country off the playing field in order to protect their sanctuary city. This case, it was so incredibly weak. It was about increases in airline tickets, uh, upgrades in airline tickets in his official capacity without getting into all the details of, of the fact, I don’t even think it could survive a verdict.

Excuse me. Incredibly weak case. That is the weaponization of government. That’s lawfare. When you’re filing, that’s lawfare. When you’re filing cases like that to keep someone who criticized Joe Biden who said — they took away his security clearance — So he could not get the details, so he could not help enforce the deportation efforts in New York.

And, you know, these people are going after him. Ride a subway in New York. It’s not safe. Violent crime is at an all time high, and that’s what they’re doing? So it’s not about weaponization, it’s about ending their weaponization of the government and fighting violent crime and enabling cities like New York and mayors like Eric Adams to enforce Donald Trump’s immigration policies. [emphasis mine]

So much garbage here.

No, Teddy Cancun. The charges have not yet been dismissed — that’s not how this works.

No, Pam, violent crime is not at an all-time high–under Joe Biden violent crime went down. Murders, at least, are down in NYC. Subway crime was already down — and then it came down further after congestion pricing went into effect, something your boss is trying to reverse, something your Department will have to litigate in court and on which you have now demonstrated bias.

How the hell does the Attorney General [pretend not to] know this?

I have requested comment about Ms. Bondi’s misrepresentations from DOJ.

But it’s Bondi’s misrepresentation of the crimes charged against Adams — and the charges that Emil Bove’s intervention staved off — that facilitates corruption.

Whereas her Chief of Staff, Chad Mizelle (in misleading screed also shared by Spiro and Burck) dismissed the four counts of the indictment that pertain to straw and illegal foreign donations by claiming they were just the campaign donations of a successful politician:

But all successful politicians, no matter the party, receive campaign contributions.

Bondi simply found a different way to hide the allegations that that Mayor Adams has been on the take from Türkiye.

She claimed that, “It was about increases in airline tickets, uh, upgrades in airline tickets in his official capacity.” Whereas Mizelle claimed this was only about campaign contributions (even the foreign ones of which he treated as legal), Pam Bondi claimed it was only about airplane upgrades.

The indictment debunks the Attorney General’s claim that this was just about official travel. Just one of Adams’ Turkish trips was treated as an official trip would have been, with full transparency.

10. In 2015, ERIC ADAMS, the defendant, took two official trips to Turkey. His first trip, in August 2015, was arranged by the Turkish Consulate General in New York City (the “Tm-kish Consulate”) and paid for in part by the Turkish Consulate and in pa1t by a for-profit educational conglomerate based in Istanbul (the “Turkish University”). The second trip, in December 2015, was airnnged by the Turkish Official and a Turkish entrepreneur (the “Promoter”) whose business includes organizing events to introduce Turkish corporations and businesspeople to politicians, celebrities, and others whose influence may benefit the corporations and businesspeople, For both trips, ADAMS received free business class tickets on the Turkish Airline. Unlike ADAMS ‘s subsequent travel with the Turkish Airline, ADAMS reported his 2015 travel to Turkey on financial disclosure forms filed with the New York City Conflict of Interest Board (the “COIB”), as he was required to do annually at all times relevant to this Indictment.

As the indictment alleges, for his other trips facilitated by Türkiye, at times routed awkwardly through Istanbul so he could avail of these benefits, Adams hid the benefits.

ADAMS did not disclose the travel benefits he had obtained in annual financial disclosures he was required to file as a New York City employee. Sometimes, ADAMS agreed to pay a nominal fee to create the appearance of having paid for travel that was in fact heavily discounted. Other times, ADAMS created and instructed others to create fake paper trails, falsely suggesting that he had paid, 0r planned to pay, for travel benefits that were actually free. And ADAMS deleted messages with others involved in his misconduct, including, in one instance, assuring a co-conspirator in writing that he “always” deleted her messages.

But contrary to the Attorney General’s misrepresentation, this is not just about airplane upgrades (or luxury hotels in Türkiye).

The indictment describes how Adams repeatedly laundered Turkish donations through straw donors in the US. Both Bondi and Mizelle keep suggesting to their audience that … none of this matters, none of this — charged as foreign donations exceeding $25,000 in both 2021 and 2023 — compromises New York City governance and US security.

b. On June 14, 2018, the Turkish Official exchanged messages with the Adams Staffer, asking “how much can companies donate?” 1 The Adams Staffer explained that only individuals could donate to the 2021 Campaign.

c. On June 22, 2018, ADAMS attended a fundraiser for the 2021 Campaign. The Airline Manager, among others, organized and attended the event. Following the event, the Turkish Official messaged the Adams Staffer, asking for the “list of the participants of the June 22 meeting,” The Adams Staffer then sent the Turkish Official ”The list for 6/22/18,” which included the names of various persons who donated to the 2021 Campaign in the preceding days or who donated in the following days, raising in excess of $15,000.

d. A promotional flyer for the June 22, 2018 fundraiser listed as one of the fundraiser’s hosts a friend of the Airline Manager who owned an airport transportation business (“Businessman-2”), In a series of messages exchanged with the Adams Staffer, Businessman-2 stated that he had facilitated a straw donation through an associate, Records from the CFB show that the associate ultimately donated $3,000 in his own name and described himself as unemployed.

[snip]

20. ERIC ADAMS, the defendant, also sought to arrange for his campaigns to receive unlawful contributions from Turkish nationals, which would be routed through U.S.-based straw donors.

a. On June 22, 2018-the same day as the fundraising event just describedthe Adams Staffer and the Promoter discussed by text message a possible trip by ADAMS to Turkey. The Promoter stated, in part, “Fund Raising in Turkey is not legal, but I think I can raise money for your campaign off the record.” The Adams Staffer inquired, “How will [ADAMS] declare that money here?” The Promoter responded, “He won’t declare it … Or … We’ll make the donation through an American citizen in the U.S …. A Turk … I’ll give cash to him in Turkey … Or I’ll send it to an American … He will make a donation to you.” The Adams Staffer replied, “I think he wouldn’t get involved in such games. They might cause a big stink later on,” but “I’ll ask anyways.” The Adams Staffer then asked, “how much do you think would come from you? $?” The Promoter responded, ”Max $100K.” The Adams Staffer wrote, “100K? Do you have a chance to transfer that here? … We can’t do it while Eric is in Turkey,” to which the Promoter replied, ”Let’s think.” After this conversation, the Adams Staffer asked ADAMS whether the Adams Staffer should pursue the unlawful foreign contributions offered by the Promoter, and contrary to the Adams Staffer’s expectations, ADAMS directed that the Adams Staffer pursue the Promoter’s illegal scheme.

b. In November 2018, Businessman-1-the wealthy Turkish national who owned the Turkish University, a for-profit educational conglomerate in Turkey, and whom ADAMS met there in 2015-visited New York City. ADAMS and the Adams Staffer met with Businessman-1 at Brooklyn Borough Hall. At the close of the meeting, Businessman-1 offered to contribute funds to the 2021 Campaign. Although ADAMS knew that Businessman-1 was a Turkish national who could not lawfully contribute to U.S. elections, ADAMS directed the Adams Staffer to obtain the illegal contributions offered by Businessman-1. Following up on this directive, ADAMS wrote to the Adams Staffer that Businessman-1 “is ready to help. I don’t want his willing to help be waisted [sic].” As ADAMS directed, the Adams Staffer maintained contact with Businessman-1 through intermediaries, culminating in ADAMS accepting straw donations of Businessman-1’s money, discussed below.

[snip]

b. On July 11, 2021, the Adams Staffer asked the Promoter how much would be donated, explaining in a message that she needed to “tell [ADAMS] a net number.” When the Promoter estimated between $35,000 and $50,000, the Adams Staffer replied that the Promoter earlier “had mentioned 200K.” When the Promoter explained that the requisite number of straw donors could not be gathered, the Adams Staffer offered to help with that aspect of the scheme. The Promoter responded, ”Hnnnm then great,” and when the Adams Staffer then wrote “From what I gathered you’ll distribute the money,” the Promoter responded “Yes.” The Adams Staffer later told ADAMS that the estimated total amount of the foreign donations would be $45,000.

c. In August 2021, the Promoter, the Adams Staffer, and the president of the Turkish University’s American campus (the “University President”) exchanged messages and voice notes explicitly discussing the plan to funnel Businessman-1 ‘s contribution to the 2021 Campaign through the Turkish University’s U.S.-based employees. The Promoter assured the Adams Staffer that those employees are “[U.S.] citizens and green card holders.” The Adams Staffer told ADAMS about the plan to funnel Businessman-1 ‘s contribution through U.S.-based straw donors, and ADAMS approved the plan, knowing that Businessman-1 was a Turkish citizen.

[snip]

b. The Adams Fundraiser suggested that the true foreign donors make their contributions through straw donors considerably in advance of the event at which ADAMS would meet the true foreign donors, so that the event did not appear connected to the contributions. As the Adams Staffer explained to the Adams Fundraiser in a text message regarding the planned attendees, “Mayor knows most of them from turkey[.] The People who has business here as well.” The Adams Staffer and the Promoter agreed to execute this plan, which ADAMS approved.

c. The Adams Fundraiser, the Promoter, and the Adams Staffer scheduled an event for September 20, 2023 in a private room at a Manhattan hotel. To conceal the event’s true purpose, the Promoter provided a PowerPoint presentation billing the event as a dinner hosted by “International Sustainability Leaders” with the subject “Sustainable Destinations” and an attendance price of $5,000. The event was not publicized or listed on ADAMS’s public calendar. The Adams Fundraiser entered the event on ADAMS’s private calendar as a “Fundraiser for Eric Adams 2025,” with the host listed as the Promoter, a goal of”25k,” and the note “Total Submitted before the event: $22,800.”

d. Prior to the scheduled fundraiser, the Promoter collected payments of $5,000 or more from attendees, many of whom were foreign nationals. The Promoter then used a portion of the attendees’ payments to make straw donations to the 2025 Campaign, by sending cash from the foreign national donors to the Adams Staffer. The Adams Staffer then distributed $2,100 in cash to at least three straw donors who each made an online $2,100 contribution to the 2025 Campaign

In other words, to sustain her claims of weaponization before the braying mob, the Attorney General of the United States completely dismisses the import of public officials secretly being on the take of foreign powers.

And all that’s before the efforts to lie to the FBI and destroy evidence with which SDNY was poised to charge the Mayor, before Emil Bove intervened just in time, a planned indictment about which Bondi had personal notice.

As you know, our office is prepared to seek a superseding indictment from a new grand jury under my leadership. We have proposed a superseding indictment that would add an obstruction conspiracy count based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI, and that would add further factual allegations regarding his participation in a fraudulent straw donor scheme.

In her first big public appearance, in her public effort to substantiate her claims of weaponization, Pam Bondi lied. She lied about threats to America. She lied about foreign influence peddling. She lied to cover up lies to the FBI. She even lied — or perhaps simply confessed a white non-resident’s terror — about the New York Subway.

In her first big public appearance, Pam Bondi lied to cover up the true nature of allegations charged against a corrupt Democrat.

Fridays with Nicole Sander

February 21, 2025/43 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel