Donald Trump has gone from breaking the law to breaking the legal system. In his quest for revenge against James Comey, Trump replaced the top prosecutor in Virginia’s eastern district (who refused to bring a case against Comey and other Trump enemies because of a lack of evidence) with one of his personal attorneys, a loyalist named Lindsey Halligan, previously best known for agreeing with the president that the Smithsonian museums have an “overemphasis on slavery,” and who has no prosecutorial experience. Scratch that. She has a little. She just indicted James Comey. All by herself. And thus, the crucial line between a politically motivated revenge indictments and what is supposed to be an independent Justice Department has, like so many American norms, been obliterated and replaced with lawless, all-caps directives sent over social media. “The case against Comey marks the most significant step to date in Trump’s campaign to deploy the Justice Department to avenge personal grievances and prosecute those he perceives as his enemies. The president’s demands during the weekend that Attorney General Pam Bondi swiftly charge Comey and others flew in the face of long-standing norms meant to shield the Justice Department from direct political interference from the White House.” WaPo (Gift Article): Former FBI director James Comey indicted amid Trump push to prosecute foes.
+ “By directing his DOJ to charge Comey, Trump appears to be borrowing a tactic from the playbook of Vladimir Putin. According to Ben Rhodes , a former deputy national security adviser, Putin doesn’t try to convince the Russian people that he is honest. Instead, he works to persuade them that everyone else is corrupt. It’s a cynical ploy meant to condition people to tolerate corruption. If voters believe that all public officials are crooks, then they will overlook the crooked leader who professes to share their values.” Barbara McQuade in Bloomberg (Gift Article): Comey’s Indictment Subverts Justice and Trump’s Credibility.
+ “It’s telling that various experienced, conservative, pro-Trump prosecutors reportedly expressed doubts about the case. A team of career prosecutors on the case reportedly wrote a memo concluding that charges were unwarranted. Trump’s own U.S. attorney nominee for the Eastern District of Virginia, the veteran federal prosecutor Erik Siebert, refused to charge and resigned under pressure from Trump. The President replaced him with Lindsay Halligan, an unqualified loyalist who has never previously worked as a prosecutor; she pulled the trigger on a precipitous indictment of Comey during her fourth day on the job.” The Meaning of the Comey Indictment.
+ In keeping with the themes of 2025, the Comey indictment may not have even been yesterday’s worst effort by Trump to turn the American justice system into a personal retribution operation. He’s not just going after Comey. He’s going after Democratic groups and those that fund them. NYT (Gift Article): Trump Orders Broad Effort to Root Out Groups He Says Organize Political Violence.
+ “President Donald Trump recently ordered his attorney general to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey, and tonight, the Department of Justice delivered an indictment of Comey for lying to Congress. Comey, for his part, insists on his innocence. But the charges against Comey are not just about the president’s abuse of his power for personal retribution. They represent a test of the president’s plans for the future ... The American justice system is only as good as the people who staff it. Led by Kash Patel and Pam Bondi, the system can be an abundant resource for a president who wants to use the law to frighten opponents away from the political process. Troops in the streets of Washington, D.C., have deterred residents from going to bars and restaurants in 2025. Those troops could be used to dissuade residents of blue cities in red states from standing in voting lines in 2026. Selective prosecution can be used to cut the flow of money to Democratic candidates. Yes, Trump’s politicization of the Department of Justice is a backward-looking expression of hurt feelings. It’s also another step in a forward-looking plot to shred the rule of law in order to pervert the next election and protect his corruption from accountability.” David Frum in The Atlantic(Gift Article): The Comey Indictment Is Not Just Payback.
Noam Scheiber in the NYT (Gift Article) with an interesting take on Why Corporate America Is Caving to Trump. “Sheer terror undeniably plays an important role. But there appears to be a deeper explanation, too. Resisting government coercion is often a matter of collective action: Companies are much more likely to succeed if they stand together, rather than fight on their own. ‘It’s easy to pick off individual companies,’ Mark Mizruchi, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who studies large corporations, said in an interview. ‘But if they’re all coming after you as a single collective, you can’t — he’d tank the whole economy.’ Over the past few generations, however, the culture and ethos of the American business elite has changed. A once cohesive establishment has broken down, making collective action rarer and much harder to achieve. Competition among companies has become increasingly cutthroat. Chief executives are often more concerned with their share price than their company’s long-term health, much less any genteel sense of obligation to a vague greater good. The civic organizations that once bonded corporate leaders to one another have been hollowed out or disappeared altogether.” (This is one more reason why the pro democracy crowd is desperate for a leader. It’s not just that corporate America is divided and therefore easier to conquer. It’s that there is no powerful voice calling on them, or anyone else, to unify for the good of the country.)
“After he moved out of their family home, his wife started to send him strange, AI-generated messages that, through an unfamiliar blend of spiritual and therapeutic language, drew a portrait of himself and their marriage that he says he didn’t recognize. When he first read them, he said, he wondered whether his wife had joined a cult. The couple is now divorcing and engaged in ongoing custody litigation. Today, the man’s soon-to-be-ex-wife communicates with him about everything from court matters to childcare almost exclusively through peculiar-sounding ChatGPT-generated text.” ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners. Damn, all we really wanted was place to easily find funny cat videos and look what we ended up building...
+ Interesting video mini-doc from the NYT (Gift Article) on the power struggle between AI and us. A.I.’s Environmental Impact Will Threaten Its Own Supply Chain.
What to Watch: There are some excellent performances in Task on HBO Max. An FBI agent (Mark Ruffalo) heads a task force to put an end to a string of violent robberies led by an unassuming family man (Tom Pelphrey).
+ What to Binge: Nothing will ever be The Office. But it’s follow up, The Paper on Peacock, is a fun, bingeable comedy that gets better as the season goes on. The idea of placing a struggling local newspaper inside an office of its more successful toilet paper selling parent company is about as on point as you can get.
Land of Milk and Honey (And Isolation): “Facing down a mass walkout and mounting diplomatic pressure, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Friday to ‘finish the job’ as he defied growing isolation over his military’s devastating assault on the Gaza Strip.” Netanyahu blasts ‘shameful’ recognition of Palestinian state; U.N. delegates walk out to protest speech.
+ Powder Keg: “Trump and his aides have justified the extrajudicial killings as a decisive measure to protect Americans from dangerous drugs, especially fentanyl, the synthetic opioid behind the worst overdose epidemic in U.S. history, which accelerated during his first term in office ... But here’s the thing: Although the United States Coast Guard interdicts staggering quantities of illegal drugs in the Caribbean each year, it does not encounter fentanyl on the high seas.” (Details, details.) Fentanyl Doesn’t Come Through the Caribbean.
+ Let Them Eat Newsfeed: Margaret Sullivan: “In 2020, only a tiny fraction of Americans got news from TikTok. These days, that number has soared to one in five. For young adults, those figures are much higher, with almost half of adults under 30 getting news there, according to the Pew Research Center. But who will own that hugely influential purveyor of information? As with so much of American media – from television networks to some of the largest newspapers – the answer is shaping up to be as simple and short as a TikTok video: the ultra-rich.”
+ Teaming Up: “The accords are an example of the two militaries moving beyond symbolic joint drills and public statements to develop interoperable systems and shared combat experience in areas that China considers critical for winning a battle over Taiwan, the self-governing island of 23 million that Beijing claims as its territory.” WaPo (Gift Article): Russia is helping prepare China to attack Taiwan, documents suggest.
+ Every Dog Has Its Dayrate: “Drivers in London, New York and other major cities are used to being charged for bringing cars into the city. Now one municipality may demand payment to bring dogs into town. A bill in Bolzano, Italy, would mean that dogs bringing their owners to the Tyrolean Alps for some scenery and mountain air would face a new charge of roughly 1.50 euros ($1.75) per day, the Italian news media reported.” An Italian City Is Considering a Dog Tax for Tourists and Locals. (This is not nearly the weirdest thing this town has proposed to end the scourge of owners who don’t pick up after their pets.)
“Avion Anderson knew he would have to face his fear of heights when he became a firefighter. Anderson had no idea he would do it — screaming in terror at the top of his lungs — while millions of people watched him day after day on TikTok.” This firefighter overcame his fear of heights as millions cheered him on.
+ A school in Kentucky banned phones. Remarkable things started happening.
+ Las Vegas team develops tech to harvest water from desert air.
+ Huntington’s disease successfully treated for first time.
+ Comedian spots man in cardiac arrest during show, finishes set at hospital.
+ Sinclair is putting Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show back on the air.
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