The End Of The Eric Adams Prosecution : Holier-Than-Thou Federal Prosecutors

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  • Since my post a few days ago about the demise of the Eric Adams prosecution, controversy has continued to swirl around the matter.

  • On the side supporting the action of the Trump/Bondi Justice Department, several new voices have emerged to join what were previously the lonely cries of a handful of people like myself and Josh Blackman. These new voices include James Copland and Rafael Mangual (of the Manhattan Institute), writing in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on February 18; and Alan Dershowitz in a column in the New York Post on February 19.

  • On the other side of the argument, an ex-colleague of mine sends me a copy of an “open letter” dated February 17, and signed by a gigantic list of well over 1000 former federal prosecutors. This letter essentially adopts the arguments set forth in the resignation letter of ex-SDNY US Attorney Danielle Sassoon, including echoing some of her language.

  • A fair description is that these guys adopt a holier-than-thou attitude, claiming to be wholly pure and above politics and devoted only to the “facts and law.”

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On The Sudden End Of The Eric Adams Prosecution

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  • Back in September, DOJ prosecutors in the Southern District of New York indicted Mayor Eric Adams on corruption charges.

  • The indictment came shortly before the election, and at a time when Adams was making noises that he would cooperate with a new President Trump’s efforts to step up enforcement of the immigration laws. At the time I had two posts on the subject, one on September 26 titled “Who Is More Corrupt, Eric Adams or the Biden/Harris DOJ/FBI?”, and the second on September 27 titled “More On The Adams Indictment.” My general comment then was that the indictment was “shockingly thin,” and I concluded (in the September 26 post):

  • At this point, it is a safe bet that anything the DOJ/FBI is doing in the political sphere is corrupt. Adams may well also be a little corrupt, but nothing remotely at their level.

  • A few days ago, on February 11, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove instructed the SDNY to dismiss the Adams indictment. The next day, February 12, the Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, one Danielle Sassoon, responded with a rather extraordinary 8 page single-spaced letter of resignation, addressed to new Attorney General Pam Bondi.

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How Much Of This Has Been Paid For By The U.S. Taxpayer?

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  • Elon Musk and the DOGE crew are now a few weeks into their work, and the examples of brazen waste, fraud, and misuse of taxpayer funds are exploding forth like a gusher.

  • At the first agency targeted, USAID, an early revelation was that much of the left-wing press has been quietly underwritten by the taxpayers in the form of hundreds of phony premium-priced subscriptions to such outlets as The New York Times, Associated Press, Politico, and Reuters.

  • On February 5, the White House put out a document titled “At USAID, Waste and Abuse Runs Deep,” listing a dozen or so categories of abusive payments, including “Millions to EcoHealth Alliance — which was involved in research at the Wuhan lab . . . Hundreds of thousands of meals that went to al Qaeda-affiliated fighters in Syria . . . Hundreds of millions of dollars to fund . . . the unprecedented poppy cultivation and heroin production in Afghanistan, benefiting the Taliban. . . .”

  • These are just examples. What other pet causes and activities of the Left have been getting paid for by USAID, and more broadly, by other various federal agencies?

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Facebook, Google, et al., And DEI: Let's Not Forget Their Insufferable Sanctimony

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  • A few days ago, Google announced that it had abandoned its targets for “diversity, equity and inclusion” for its workforce. Here is the February 5 New York Times article covering the announcement. According to the Times, Google attributed the change of policy to its need “as a federal contractor . . . to comply with President Trump’s executive orders opposing diversity, equity and inclusion policies.”

  • Google’s announcement came about a month after Facebook parent Meta had (formally) made the same change of policy. (See CNBC’s January 10 piece here covering the Meta announcement.). Google and Facebook are now two leaders in what has become a full-on parade of corporate giants making the same sudden 180 degree reversal of what had previously been broadcast as fundamental corporate policy. Among others in this group are Amazon, Goldman Sachs, McDonald’s, and even Disney.

  • Was the commitment to DEI of Corporate America, and particularly of the tech giants, really this shallow, that they would all reverse course completely and suddenly and in unison and without a peep of objection?

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Kindergarten Konstitutional Law Comes To The Southern District Of New York

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Kindergarten Konstitutional Law Comes To The Southern District Of New York

  • In yesterday’s post, reviewing a Washington Post op-ed by Ruth Marcus that called efforts by the duly-elected President to direct the bureaucracy to implement his policies a “power grab” and an “onslaught against the government itself,” I described the piece as reflecting “kindergarten-level constitutional analysis.”

  • After all, my 6 year old first-grader grandson is fully capable of reading the first sentence of Article II of the Constitution (“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America”) and figuring out that this guy is given the sole and full power to direct the executive branch of the federal government. Nothing about the elected President exercising such powers is or can be a “power grab.”

  • If you are somehow unable to grasp that simple proposition, you therefore must be at sub-first grade level of comprehension, and thus kindergarten level, at the highest.

  • Well, today Kindergarten Konstitutional Law came to the Southern District of New York.

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Democracy: What You Think It Means Versus What The Establishment Thinks

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  • “Democracy.” What does that term mean? The single biggest theme of the recent campaign of Democrats and of Kamala Harris was that we had to vote for them to save “Our Democracy.”

  • If I get to summarize the meaning of “Democracy” in 25 words or less, here is my effort: “The people periodically get the opportunity to vote the current authorities out, and replace them with new authorities who will implement new policies.” (That’s 23 words.)

  • Here in the U.S. we admittedly do not have a pure Democracy, but instead a constitutional Republic, with various limitations on government powers and also power sharing among the government’s branches. However, the element of Democracy — that is, the ability of the people to demand a change of direction by exercising their power at the ballot box — is a very big part of the system, at least in theory.

  • And yet, during my post World War II lifetime, despite the theoretical promise of Democracy, the ability of the people to get some change in direction of the government through exercise of the franchise has been extremely limited. Maybe the majority approved of what they were getting, but most often when there seemed to be a vote for change, little changed. The biggest change agent by far in this period was Ronald Reagan; but to be honest the Washington establishment fought him mostly to a draw. Nixon and the two Bushes largely continued the status quo. Trump in his first term was far less effective at “draining the swamp” than I would have hoped.

  • But now we have Trump in his second term suddenly showing us what Democracy can mean in our system.

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