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Oceania was not after all at war with Eric Adams. Oceania was at war with The Federalist Society. Eric Adams was an ally.
A few days ago, news broke that the DOJ ordered the federal corruption charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams dismissed. As of this writing, the charges have still not been formally dismissed. Apparently, the Attorney General's office can't find anyone willing to sign their name on the dismissal paperwork. The acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, resigned yesterday after refusing to carry out the order. If the name sounds familiar, she was the lead prosecuter in the SBF case. She must be some typical big-city liberal lawyer right? Well, apparently not.
The gorgeous Miss Sassoon wasn't the only casualty. Reports are at least six people have resigned rather than sign-off on this.
It's worth taking a step back here. Six months ago, anyone would have expected that a big-city Democrat mayor getting indicted on federal corruption charges would have been the reddest of red meat to the online right. How did we get to the point that right-wing law influencers are denouncing the Federalist Society for prosecuting Democrats for corruption? The monkey wrench thrown in the gears is Trump's decision to use the charges as leverage to extract concessions on immigration. A few offhand comments by Adams critical of mass immigration are retroactively cast as the Casus Belli for the initial investigation by Biden's DOJ. Am I missing something here? Why is this not an obvious quid pro quo? I can't tell whether the MAGA claim is that, "yes, this is a quid pro quo, and that's fine", or if the claim is that, "no, actually the corruption charges were themselves corruption. Dismissing the corruption charges is actually fighting corruption".
The key point here is that this is in SDNY. SDNY likes to pretend that it's not a normal district, instead it's a second DOJ.
The prosecutors are resigning in large part to promote that myth.
Of course that's not true. SDNY has no special legal status over say the Northern District of Alabama.
Barnes specifically has long been critical of the Federalist Society. Culturally it skews more pro corporate and more authoritarian than most of the right wing base would like.
It has no such legal status, but it does have a much higher caliber of staff. Bondi lost a lot of her best lawyers, which will no doubt translate to losing a lot of important cases.
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Is this all over Turkey paying rather measly sums of money to this guy because we struggle to bribe anyone of actual importance?
A lot of countries have very slushy influence budgets that are very corruptly spent, like much of the money that went toward the Turkish consulate building in NYC, money that Russia spends on influence ops etc. Even if some of it ‘works’, the real beneficiaries are more likely to be irrelevant corrupt politicians in the west (as you say) and some expatriate citizens of the home country who are well connected enough to be able to siphon money off the defense/intelligence/foreign service budget.
It’s like that’s Bob Menendez stuff. Clearly it makes theoretical sense for Egypt to spend a few million a year bribing politicians to get a couple billion a year in aid plus preferential trading terms for some things. But in practice they don’t really accomplish much other than enriching a network of wealthy Egyptian fixers in the US who can each persuasively explain to their associates in Cairo why this money is 100% necessary.
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It's pretty remarkable that the level of stank on this is so high, by a brief googling so far three Trump-appointed Republican judges have resigned rather than be the one to formally dismiss the charges.
Not judges, DAs. One of them was a 2 bronze star vet, clerked for Roberts and Kavanaugh.
Interesting that his letter still leans into mistake theory and even avows that he supports the administration and even says that he understands why the administration wanted to have something over Adams to get his cooperation on other matters.
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Maybe it's the cajun in me but what is wrong with a quid pro quo? The president is supposed to enact his agenda and that entails some corrupt deals. If you don't like it vote him out.
Nothing wrong with a quid-pro-quo when it comes to things that either side is entitled to use as bargaining chips. You get me an airport, I'll help your stadium, we'll build a bridge, I'll pass your law, all that's regular politics.
What's awful about this is that both "I won't obstruct immigration enforcement" and "I will have your criminal indictment dismissed" are both beyond the Overton window of things to be bargained with.
IOW -- there's nothing wrong with trading favors, provided that thing you're doing is actually supposed to be a discretionary thing.
Exactly which part is awful? Keeping in mind the order in which these things have been done.
I'm willing to agree that local jurisdictions actively obstructing enforcement of immigration law is awful. Lots of left-leaning jurisdictions have been doing that for decades though.
Dismissing criminal indictments is pretty bad too. But if it's the only stick they've got that's big enough to get them to stop obstructing immigration enforcement, I can live with it. I don't exactly love it, but if that's where we're at now, well then okay I guess.
The part that's awful is being rewarded for doing awful things or, if you prefer, allowing people that chose to do awful things to be rewarded for stopping it.
Behavior that is rewarded is repeated.
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Would you also be happy to apply that reasoning to Biden (Sr. and Jr.) and Ukraine? Surely "get Ukraine tangled up in US patronage networks" was part of the Biden admin's agenda.
I'd say it was part of Ukraine's agenda and Hunter Biden's agenda, but Biden was off the Burisma board before Joe Biden became President.
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Yes. I’m not sure why some favor trading with a second world country that serves mostly as the punchline for jokes about corruption is worth getting upset about.
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Yes? I'm against Biden's agenda, and I'm against US patronage networks psy-opping half the world, but it's not something beyond the pale in pursuit of political goals.
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My sister knew one of Scalia's law clerks, but I don't believe this one. Said clerk was extremely progressive, but clerked for Scalia because despite having opposing views on many things, he was just that good. Also it was hyper-prestigious.
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I think it probably is a quid pro quo and I think Adams started singing out about immigration probably when he was being investigated
Perhaps a new phrase is needed: "indulgentia pro abstinendo" "Indulgence for abstaining".
Trump is the chief law enforcement official in the country, and also the top immigration enforcer per the Constitution, which gives the President the power to control immigration and repel invasions, including the power to limit or suspend entry of noncitizens. It's his purview to drop charges when Adams is flipping/informing on a colleague in corruption.
EDIT: The case against Adams is fascinating. I listened to this Lawfare Daily podcast on the case, and it sounds like the FARA law is one of those broad laws designed to cast a wide net with a miasma of interpretations. I'd like to see a huge crackdown on straw donors, but this case is obvious lawfare from the start.
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Adams can’t even do anything on immigration. That said, while corrupt, he’s still less corrupt than the average Democrat machine politician in eg. Chicago or Philadelphia and it’s clear he was (even if justifiably) targeted because the party wanted Garcia.
I think corruption involving foreign governments is, for good reasons, taken more seriously than corruption involving domestic private-sector crooks. Even Chicago pols don't normally take bribes from foreign governments.
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Proof for either of these claims?
I don't know what you'll take for proof, but let's break it down:
This is, of course, not definitive proof, because you might dispute the following assumptions:
I don't know of another allegation of prior corruption, off the top of my head, but committing a second quid pro quo changing mayoral policy in exchange for the Feds dropping the charges for the first quid pro quo, as seems to be the case, would be pretty fucking corrupt.
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Aren’t Chicago democrats famously corrupt? And I don’t think you can fairly ask for a source on the second claim
Yes. Adams's alleged quid pro quo is tough bar to clear, though.
2rafa said it was "clear" - how is it unfair to ask for proof of a "clear" claim?
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Got a source for that, bro?
Yeah, how dare bro ask for sources here? Doesn't bro know this is
redditthemotte and everyone here already knows allrepublicansdemocrats are corrupt?Do you have a source for themotte being conservative?
That behavior is obnoxious. Don’t ask for sources. If you disagree, provide your own. Rebuttals should involve the same amount of effort as that which they wish to rebut.
No I don't think that behavior is obnoxious. I think it's obnoxious to mock someone for requesting somebody else to substantiate their claims. Actually, if you have just posted this second paragraph initially, I would not have commented, even if I disagree with it.
I don't think the request to substantiate one's claims count as a rebuttal, and the question basically involve the same amount of effort as the initial claim.
Yes, it is obnoxious to demand "Source?" when someone states an opinion. If you think they're wrong, argue the point. If someone makes a factual claim, you can politely ask for evidence, but "Democrats are corrupt" is such a general statement, anyone can throw links arguing for or against the proposition and you know it. Stop this petty sniping.
Time to return to the scheduled programming in which I complain about moderation! I believe the tropey term for statements that are impossible to corroborate or refute is "not even wrong". Either @2rafa's statement was in that category, in which case she should not have made it to begin with; or @sockpuppet2's request for evidence was in principle reasonable, in which case he shouldn't have been mocked for it, nor implicitly unilaterally dinged by the modhat. Even if the request was in fact unreasonable, a mocking one-liner is certainly not mending any broken windows in the neighbourhood.
You looked at an escalation spiral that started with 2rafa's low-quality post (red valence), which invited a low-quality reply (blue valence) by sockpuppet2, which invited an even lower-quality response (red) by jeroboam, which in turn invited an equally lower-quality response (blue) by UwU, which then invited a mercifully higher-quality meta-discussion by the last two, and modhatted it casting blame on the blue-coloured entries in the chain only. Is this not a clear case of selective enforcement (more colourfully, "anarcho-tyranny")? And then you go and act like the community's rightward shift is an unfortunate natural phenomenon that you have nothing to do with and can't do anything about.
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The Trump administration claim is that the corruption charges were pursued because of Adams criticism of the Biden administration's immigration policy. This is, I suspect, true. However, he's probably guilty as hell despite the pushing of the case being politically motivated. And I suspect the Trump administration's dismissal is indeed intended to encourage co-operation with Trump on immigration; whether anyone has been gauche enough to articulate the quid-pro-quo or not, it's there.
Whether the difference in the prosecutor's reactions is that prosecutors are more willing to accept a case being advanced for political reasons than killed for the same, or that Republican prosecutors are less corrupt, I don't know, though I suspect the former is a large part of it.
I'm leaning on the latter. FedSoc is a bastion of actual honest-to-goodness WASPiness.
Odd to bring that up when the specific attorney in question, Danielle Sassoon, is very obviously Jewish. (The Sassoon family is a very wealthy and influential Jewish banking clan of Baghdadi origin.)
Danielle is from an Orthodox family in NYC and went to Orthodox day school. The wider Sassoon family, like the Kadoories, Rothschilds and so on, certainly includes many descendants who are no longer halachically or practically Jewish due to intermarriage.
Sure, plenty of Sassoons probably aren’t Jewish anymore, but Danielle Sassoon certainly is. She credits studying the Talmud as helpful preparation for law school. Her grandmother fled persecution of Jews in Syria. She’s also married to an “Adam Katz”, an investment analyst, so it’s not as if she’s marrying out of Judaism herself.
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Hagan Scotten surely isn't.
No doubt! And to be clear, FedSoc is generally speaking a pretty WASPY milieu. I’m not claiming that Sassoon’s Judaism or ancestry played any part, positive or negative, in her role in this ongoing scandal. I just mean that clearly there are important and influential members of FedSoc who are not WASPs, and that one of them is heavily involved in the story under discussion.
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Well in this case, articulating the quid pro quo would be rather droit, no?
What does this mean in this context?
Presumably a pun meaning both "adroit", the opposite of gauche (which literally means "left") and literally "right".
Bingo. There’s also the additional layer of meaning arising from the fact that the French droit can mean “right” as in “right-wing” or as in “legal right”; and also (as an adjective) “not crooked” or “upright”
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