We’re not even one month into this regime from Hell and every single day feels interminable. The reason for that is that time has become compressed in a sense. By that I mean that only an hour may go by but there are explosions during that time frame that make it significant. But the only problem with continuous explosions is that after a while you simply become deaf to them. It’s one loud, never ending noise with no surcease in sight. So you become, and stay, shell shocked. Today, for example, a number of things happened. You’ll see a small synopsis of them in this clip by Meidas News. But within each one of these events there are smaller events, still, which lead to an erosion of government as we know it. Get the broad brushstrokes and then we’ll determine where this is going.
We could go on at length about any one of those issues for hours. It was no small thing that the resignations took place in the Eric Adams issue. That, alone, is commensurate with the Saturday Night Massacre of the Watergate Era. But as you see here, it bounces off Trump. He truly has no clue who the players are and of course he follows his rule book, which is Blame Biden. He’s still new enough into Trump 2.0 that he can make that fly a little, usually with respect to inflation, but there’s no way he can intimate that the people involved in the Bove/Adams debacle are liberals. Quite the contrary.
We have a quid pro quo which is alarming, to say the least, where a New York mayor can get let off the hook legally if he agrees to go along with migrant political theater — and that was agreed to on Fox News. Say what you will, at least back in 2017 when Trump proposed the same kind of a set up to FBI director James Comey, Comey told him to go pound sand and then got fired. Nowadays, this is the new normal and the outrage is minimal because of all the other things which are exploding simultaneously.
On Thursday, Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, resigned. Her resignation letter is a master class in how to call your boss, in this case the No. 2 lawyer in the Justice Department, a corrupt scumbag … without using the term “corrupt scumbag.”
The allegedly corrupt scumbag in question is Emil Bove, who worked as Donald Trump’s private attorney during the interregnum and now serves as presidential enforcer against the “deep state” as acting deputy attorney general. A few days ago, Bove sent Sassoon a memo directing her to dismiss the federal corruption charges pending in her district against New York City Mayor Eric Adams—but not because the DOJ wasn’t confident in a conviction.
“The agency’s justification for dropping the case was explicitly political,” the New York Times explained. “Mr. Bove had argued that the investigation would prevent Mr. Adams from fully cooperating with Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown. Mr. Bove made a point of saying that Washington officials had not evaluated the strength of the evidence or the legal theory behind the case.”
I’m not dropping the charges, a defiant Sassoon declared in her resignation letter, which was addressed to Attorney General Pam Bondi. To do so under the circumstances would be unethical: The Justice Department is not in the business of doing legal favors for a politically powerful defendant just because the president’s agenda might benefit from that defendant’s cooperation. Prosecutors are told to apply the law impartially, without fear or favor. Cutting Adams a break in exchange for his help in boosting Trump’s deportation numbers would be the definition of a favor.
That wasn’t all.
She claimed that more charges against the mayor were in the works, alleging that “Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI.” And she noted that dismissing the indictment against him without prejudice, as the DOJ had instructed her to do, would allow the White House to coerce the mayor going forward by threatening to refile charges if he ever stopped complying with its political demands.
Here was the showstopper, though:
I attended a meeting on January 31, 2025, with Mr. Bove, Adams’s counsel, and members of my office. Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed. Mr. Bove admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting’s conclusion.
Nothing says “Trump lawyer” like warning others present not to make a written record of some scumminess they’ve just witnessed. A fun fact courtesy of the Times: Adams’ counsel includes Alex Spiro, who represents Elon Musk in other matters, and William Burck, an outside ethics adviser to, er, Donald Trump’s company. Not only is justice not blind in this case, the lawyers on both sides are all basically on the same team.
The corruption is so brazen that, the day after Sassoon’s resignation letter was published, Adams and Trump’s immigration czar appeared together on Fox News to joke about the pressure the mayor would face to help the White House meet its immigration goals. They needn’t worry: Adams seems to understand quite well what this quid pro quo requires of him.
Danielle Sassoon wanted no part of it. Three weeks into her prestigious new job as acting U.S. attorney, she quit on principle rather than participate in Trump’s effort to turn American law into a patronage system. At least one prosecutor working under her followed her out the door. On Thursday night, Bove took the Adams case away from the Manhattan office altogether and handed it to the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section in Washington with orders to dismiss the charges—and then the head of that department resigned in protest, as did three of his colleagues.
Question: What on earth were these people doing working for Donald Trump to begin with?
That leads us back to a question that we began asking in 2017. You remember how it was thought that Lindsay Graham, as one example, was going along with Trump so that he could be there to staunch Trump’s unreasonable excesses when they occurred, a kind of human fail safe mechanism. This is the same kind of reasoning applied to these lawyers, that if they’re on the inside, then they can keep things from getting worse. That sounds good in theory but it doesn’t work that way in practice.
The article linked to here goes on to say that Sassoon, with her qualifications, will undoubtedly land on her feet in a white shoe law firm — that is, unless Bove makes good on his threat to investigate her for “insubordination” and wreck her career — which could well happen. And it might happen because we live in a culture of fear now.
Every day you see some punishment meted out for not going along with Donald Trump. Yesterday it was the Associated Press, for not going along with the Gulf Of America. Also, 1,800 employees were let go at the U.S. Nuclear Agency. Who will it be tomorrow?
We are inundated and overwhelmed and we are fearful. This is not the sign of a healthy culture. But give it time. We’re not even a month in and when an analysis of Trump’s First 100 Days happens, it will be a laundry list of screw ups and chaos like you’ve never seen before. And the sublime irony of it all is that Trump, at the head of it all, hasn’t the slightest clue about most of what is going on. He just gets up every day and if he’s not headed for the golf course, he slathers on a tremendous amount of makeup, gets his few remaining hairs sprayed in place and waddles down to the Oval Office to scrawl with a sharpie on an executive order. Then he goes to watch television.
Only one piece of advice: Try to at least get the main stories of the day and keep up. It’s difficult in a scenario awash with corruption but it will help you keep your bearings if you at least know the top five things that tank on any given day.
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Equally awful. Our allies know Trump isn’t all there. Vance could end up.succeeding him.if he has a heart attack or stroke, and the allies have to wonder if Vance means the BS he is expected to say as Veep, or really believes it. I think they’re hoping it’s the former,,and are likely lighting candles and praying that Donnie keeps over.