"It Was Never Going To Be Me."

Courage is contagious.

“There is a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake…[Any] assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way.

“If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion.

“But it was never going to be me.”

— Hagen Scotten, Assistant US Attorney, Southern District of New York

There are, indeed, heroes amongst us, unbowed, unsullied, and unwilling to let the strangulation of decency go unchallenged.

Happy Saturday.

Folks, we are really going to have to hang together if we’re going to make it.

And I’m afraid we can’t count on the billionaires, the oligarchs, or the corporate media to hold the line. That’s where you come in.

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Courage is Contagious

Because we don’t deal in hopium here, I’m not going to tell you that the resignation of more than a half-dozen Department of Justice lawyers marks a decisive turning point in the resistance to Trump’s mobification of the government. As dramatic as it was, the revolt may be quickly memory-holed.

So, it’s up to us to recognize the gravity of what just happened and remember it; because, as rare as they are these days, this is what courage and principle look like.

Making America Corrupt Again

The background:

[Deputy AG Emil] Bove instructed prosecutors in New York on Monday to drop the charges, saying the case could interfere with the mayor’s reelection bid and his efforts to work with the Trump administration on immigration enforcement. He said his decision was not based on a consideration of the evidence or the legal theories underpinning the case.

Danielle Sassoon, acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, quit instead and accused President Donald Trump’s appointees of acting for political, rather than legal, reasons. Nearly all of the supervisors within the Justice Department’s public integrity section followed suit.

That defiance led to a remarkable scene on Friday, when Bove — Trump’s latest Roy Cohn-knock off — sought to bully other DOJ lawyers into doing his bidding. He gathered “roughly two dozen remaining members of the public integrity unit and ordered them to figure out who would file the dismissal motion. He made clear that lawyers not willing to do so could be fired and those who were could be promoted….”

For many lawyers in the Department of Justice, this was their moment of choosing. There will be more.

Even as billionaires, giant corporations, and US Senators are cowering in fear, those attorneys will have to choose whether to put their legal careers and their reputations on the line. Standing on principle will cost them their jobs and inevitably unleash a torrent of vilification.

And this week, more than a half-dozen elite attorneys decided it was worth it. They decided that they’d rather be Danielle Sassoon than Emil Bove.

Emil Bove. Trump’s low-rent Roy Cohn.

Eventually, Bove found two lawyers willing to sign the motion to dismiss the charges against Adams. But not before Hagen Scotten called bullshit.

Scotten was unintimidated by a legal hack of Bove’s non-stature. A former Army Ranger, who was awarded two Bronze Stars, Scotten graduated first in his Harvard Law class and was a clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts.

Responding to Bove’s bluster, Scotten said essentially: GFY.

“No system of ordered liberty,” he wrote, “can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.”

And then came the words that I am tempted to have tattooed on my arm:

An Iconic Oval Office Moment

Meanwhile…

The scenes of courage at the DOJ were bookended by the ritualized self-abasement of the beneficiary of the corrupt bargain. David Graham in the Atlantic chronicled “The Public Humiliation of Eric Adams”:

It’s not hard to find hostage videos online, if for some reason you’re into that sort of thing. Seeing one broadcast live on national television is more unusual, but that’s exactly what happened this morning. New York Mayor Eric Adams and the Trump-administration border czar Tom Homan appeared together on the Fox & Friends couch, where hizzoner pledged cooperation with the federal government on immigration and Homan pledged in graphic terms to hold him to that.

“If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City, and we won’t be sitting on the couch—I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’” Homan warned. Federal officials have Adams, a Democrat, where they want him: They’ve ordered that the federal criminal charges against him be suspended, and now he has no choice but to do exactly what the White House wants. Humiliating as shameless a figure as Adams is no mean feat, but Donald Trump seems to have managed it.

Speaking of bribery…

It turns out that bending the knee can actually be risky. This morning, The Wall Street Journal is out with this exclusive:

Paramount Global is wrestling with whether to settle President Trump’s lawsuit against its CBS News unit, and how it might do so without exposing executives to future legal threats, such as accusations of bribery….

Insurance policies for company directors and officers typically cover legal costs for individuals accused of “bad acts,” such as criminal acts or bribery, unless they are found guilty or liable ultimately, said Bill Passannante, co-chair of the insurance recovery group at Anderson Kill. This would be the case for both criminal charges and civil shareholder lawsuits.

Still, he said, there is always the risk of an “unusual unicorn” case—in which the directors and officers are found liable or guilty in a final appeal, and thus aren’t covered.

Screenshot this

Someday this will be an entertaining relic of our era:

If you were lucky enough to be a fan of “This is Us,” you might recall this conversation:

“The Buffalo Bills lost the Super Bowl four years in a row when we were kids,” Randall Pearson (played by Sterling K. Brown) tells his brother, Kevin. “Remember that?”

“Before every Super Bowl they make Super Bowl champion merch with both teams on it so they have stuff ready to go no matter who wins, right? But once a team loses, they don’t want the stuff with the losing team on it. They don’t want Super Bowl champion Buffalo Bills sweatshirts so you know where that stuff used to go?”

“Other continents,” Randall says. “Africa, Asia, any and every nation in need. So for four consecutive years in the early 90s there was World Champion Buffalo Bills merch flooding other continents. Kev, there are tens of thousands of people who grew up thinking the Buffalo Bills were the greatest team of all-time.”

**

This reminded me of the only Super Bowl I ever attended, the 1998 game where the Denver Broncos defeated my Green Bay Packers. After the game, I made what I thought was an heroic effort to score some of the now-defunct “World Champion Packer” merch, because I thought it would be a helluva what-could-have-been souvenir to take home. I had no luck whatsoever, as one vendor after another told me that they would be fed to fire ants if they sold me any of the Packer stuff.

You, however, are luckier, because you have easy access to screenshots that will prove to future generations that there was a time when America was so deranged that it tried to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico — and that, for a time, even Google, went along.

What Happens if Trump Defies the Courts?

But…

Because our insanity is both absurd and ominous, the Trump White House is banning reporters from the Associated Press because the outlet refuses to use the term “Gulf of America.”

I regret to tell you that this is NOT A PARODY:

"It is a privilege to cover this White House," White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Wednesday. "Nobody has the right to go into the Oval Office and ask the president of the United States questions. That's an invitation that is given."

"I was very up front in my briefing on Day One that if we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable," Leavitt continued, in response to questions from CNN's Kaitlan Collins. "And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America. And I'm not sure why news outlets don't want to call it that. "

Orwell would blush.

"The actions taken by the White House were plainly intended to punish the AP for the content of its speech," AP’s executive editor, Julie Pace, wrote. "It is among the most basic tenets of the First Amendment that the government cannot retaliate against the public or the press for what they say."

Exit take:

Saturday dogs

Via my wife’s delightful Substack: