ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

It was the night after President Trump had officially taken over the Kennedy Center and made himself its chairman, and two well-dressed Washington women were wandering along the plush red carpet inside its Grand Foyer, so grand it could fit the Washington Monument laid on its side. They reached the eight-foot-tall bronze head of John F. Kennedy that lords over the hall and looked forlornly into his eyes.

How much longer, one woman joked to the other, until the statue of the 35th president gets torn down and replaced with one of the 47th? They laughed bitterly.

It was just last week that Mr. Trump announced his plan to purge the Kennedy Center’s board of its Biden appointees and to install “an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!” He named one of his most fiercely loyal apparatchiks, Richard Grenell, interim president and proclaimed that there would be no more “ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA” shown. He complained about drag queens performing there and said it had all become too “wokey.” Some artists canceled shows. “Welcome to the New Kennedy Center!” Mr. Trump said on social media, posting an A.I.-generated image of himself waving his arms like a conductor in a concert hall.

Most of the people who turned up at the Kennedy Center on Thursday night to see performances in its various theaters had purchased their tickets long before any of that was set in motion. Now they found themselves at an arts center on the cusp of becoming something different — something Trumpian.

Some speculated what that might look like.

“I feel like we might just have ‘Cats’ on rotation moving forward,” said Pamela Deutsch, a documentary film producer who once worked as an usher at the Kennedy Center. (Mr. Trump, who once had dreams of becoming a Broadway producer, is a longtime fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber.) She was there to catch a set by the comic W. Kamau Bell. So was Louis Woolard, a 73-year-old psychotherapist from Maryland. What sort of cultural programming did he envision under the artistic stewardship of the 47th president? “I don’t know,” said Mr. Woolard. “I guess country music.”

At the other end of the Grand Foyer, American Ballet Theater was putting on a production of “Crime and Punishment,” an effort to make dance out of Dostoyevsky. A 75-year-old real estate investment banker named Wayne Koonce waited in line to have his ticket scanned. “Maybe the Mariinsky and the Bolshoi will be invited back now that he’s cozying up to Putin,” he said.

For the many people in liberal Washington scandalized by Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center, Thursday night was like a cross between a wake and last call. Drag performers protested outside in the cold, as students from George Washington University marched around shouting about Mr. Trump. Inside, some well-heeled patrons of the ballet were literally clutching their pearls as they contemplated the future of the institution. At the other end of the foyer, copies of a children’s book called “Do the Work! An Antiracist Activity Book” were being sold ahead of Mr. Bell’s stand-up routine. (He co-wrote the book.)

“You know, Trump took over, he’s the new chairman of the Kennedy Center,” he said at the top of his set. The audience let out a low boo. “You shouldn’t call it the Kennedy Center anymore,” he said. “Let’s call it the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Center.” More booing. “If you’re going to have people running it with no expertise at all,” he continued, “you might as well have it named after the guy with no expertise at all.” (Earlier that day, Mr. Kennedy had been confirmed as health secretary.)

Mr. Bell tore into the president and talked about white supremacy, nationalized health care, oligarchy, fascism, socialism, transgender rights, slavery, kale chips, Nazidom and other such topics that would presumably qualify as “wokey” under new management. The comic also guessed at what sort of changes were in store.

“How many times can you give Kid Rock the Mark Twain award?” he wondered as the audience groaned.

On a settee outside the ballet, a husband and wife — both teachers from Arlington, Va. — tried to figure out what the president meant by “anti-American propaganda.” “I can’t figure it out,” said the wife. “Immigrants,” suggested the husband. “But what does that actually mean?” asked the wife.

Some fretted as to whether they ought to boycott the place going forward. “Like a lot of people in Washington,” said Mr. Koonce, “we’re trying to figure out: Will we continue to come? You want to support the artists, but you don’t want to support anything connected with this philistine, backward movement of the arts, which is exactly what it’s going to be.”

So much of what President Trump is up to in Washington is about payback. He is taking his revenge on a town that snubbed him. Last time he was president, some artists accepting the Kennedy Center honors refused to go to the White House, and in response he and Melania Trump never went to the Kennedy Center.

Vice President JD Vance, and his wife, Usha, though, seem to genuinely enjoy the Kennedy Center’s programming. She has been a member of the opera’s board for more than a year, and the couple took their young children there in December for a production of “Jungle Book” that the Kennedy Center described as being told “through a contemporary lens by framing Mowgli as a refugee trying to find safety in a new environment.” (In other words, possibly wokey.) They enjoyed it so much they went backstage after it was over.

In Mr. Trump’s war against the town’s institutions, the battle over this one can seem low-stakes by comparison. What is a performing arts center compared to the Justice Department, trans-Atlantic alliances, foreign aid and all the rest? Still, it has struck a chord. People perambulating up the Grand Foyer on Thursday — many of whom were federal workers now fearing for their jobs — seemed especially agitated by what was happening there.

Michael Gray, a 63-year-old retired refugee officer who worked for the State Department beginning under George H.W. Bush, was there to see the ballet. Asked what he thought about the president’s proclamation about anti-American propaganda, Mr. Gray said, “I think it’s nonsense.” But he was able to take the long view.

“Things come and they go,” he said, “but the arts don’t, and the love of the arts does not.”

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

The NY Times

By Jonah E. BromwichBenjamin Weiser and William K. Rashbaum

Feb. 14, 2025

Hagan Scotten, the lead prosecutor on the federal corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, resigned after Justice Department officials ordered the dismissal of charges he had helped bring, suggesting that only a “fool” or a “coward” would obey.

In an undated, scathing resignation letter, Mr. Scotten wrote that any federal prosecutor “would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials.”

He added: “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.”

Mr. Scotten was responding to a Justice Department official’s directive this week to dismiss the bribery, fraud and other charges against Mr. Adams so the mayor could help with President Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Read the Resignation Letter

The official, Emil Bove III, who is the acting deputy attorney general, gave the order to Danielle R. Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. She resigned on Thursday rather than carry out the order to seek dismissal of the charges against Mr. Adams.

Ms. Sassoon, 38, a veteran Southern District prosecutor, was elevated last month by the Trump administration to lead the office. At the time, she and Mr. Scotten were co-chiefs of the office’s criminal appeals unit.

A Southern District spokesman declined to comment on Mr. Scotten’s resignation.

Mr. Scotten served three combat tours in Iraq as a U.S. Army Special Forces Officer and earned two Bronze Stars. He graduated from Harvard Law School and clerked for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court, and for Brett M. Kavanaugh before he, too, became an Supreme Court justice.

Mr. Scotten has led the investigation into Mr. Adams since it began in the summer of 2021. It resulted in an indictment that was announced in September by a previous U.S. attorney, Damian Williams, an appointee of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

In a hearing in October, Mr. Scotten said in court that additional charges could be brought and additional defendants charged.

Ms. Sassoon, in a letter on Thursday, noted that the Southern District was prepared to seek a new indictment that would add an obstruction count based on evidence the mayor destroyed and told others to destroy evidence and to lie to the F.B.I. She said such an indictment would also include new campaign finance accusations.

A lawyer for Mr. Adams, Alex Spiro, responded to the threat of new accusations, saying that if federal prosecutors “had any proof whatsoever that the mayor destroyed evidence, they would have brought those charges — as they continually threatened to do, but didn’t, over months and months.”

In his four-paragraph letter, Mr. Scotten expressed disdain for Mr. Bove’s rationale for dismissing the case.

“The first justification for the motion — that Damian Williams’s role in the case somehow tainted a valid indictment supported by ample evidence, and pursued under four different U.S. attorneys — is so weak as to be transparently pretextual.”

The second justification, he wrote, was worse: “No system of ordered liberty 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.”

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

The NY Times

By Glenn ThrushDevlin Barrett and Adam Goldman

Feb. 13, 2025

In less than a month in power, President Trump’s political appointees have embarked on an unapologetic, strong-arm effort to impose their will on the Justice Department, seeking to justify their actions as the simple reversal of the “politicization” of federal law enforcement under their Biden-era predecessors.

The ferocious campaign, executed by Emil Bove III — Mr. Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer who is now the department’s acting No. 2 official — is playing out in public, in real time, through a series of moves that underscore Mr. Trump’s intention to bend the traditionally nonpartisan career staff in federal law enforcement to suit his ends.

That strategy has quickly precipitated a crisis that is an early test of how resilient the norms of the criminal justice system will prove to be against the pressures brought by a retribution-minded president and his appointees.

On Thursday, the interim U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Danielle R. Sassoon, resigned rather than sign off on Mr. Bove’s command to dismiss the corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York. Ms. Sassoon is no member of the liberal resistance: She clerked for the conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, and had been appointed to her post by Mr. Trump’s team.

Dropping the charges, “for reasons having nothing to do with the strength of the case” went against the “duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor,” she wrote in a letter to Mr. Boveexplaining her decision.

Mr. Bove, rebuffed by Ms. Sassoon, tried a procedural end-around, asking officials in the department’s Washington headquarters to take over the case, then have someone on their staff sign the dismissal.

Instead, five prosecutors in the criminal division and public integrity unit also quit, leaving their colleagues to furtively discuss their options, expressing their hope that they would not be called upon to take actions that would end with their resignation or termination.

As of late Thursday, no department official had formally filed the dismissal motion in federal court.

The consequences of the confrontation extend far beyond the fate of Mr. Adams. It has set up what promises to be a protracted and damaging battle over the integrity, independence and direction of a department that Mr. Trump views like a piece of captured battlefield artillery he is now able to turn against his attackers.

Mr. Bove is, in the view of his critics, imposing what amounts to a political loyalty test on prosecutors — demanding they comply with his requests, however unacceptable and incompatible with norms, or get out.

It is no accident, they say, that Mr. Bove has quickly targeted some of its most powerful officials and divisions: overseeing a shake-up at the national security division, insisting that the F.B.I.’s acting leadership turn over a list of agents who worked on the Capitol riot investigations and, finally, targeting the most prestigious U.S. attorney’s office in the country, known for guarding its independence.

“It’s a symptom of a bigger problem — how are we going to do this for four more years, having to choose whether to do something unethical or be fired?” said a current Justice Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, asking why Congress seemed unwilling to intervene. “Everyone has to jump ship or be thrown overboard.”

No U.S. attorney’s office “is a separate sovereign,” Mr. Bove said in a statement sent to reporters after Ms. Sassoon stepped aside.

Mr. Bove’s boss, Attorney General Pam Bondi, has vowed to root out “politicized” officials in the department, without providing evidence of wrongdoing or professional misconduct.

On her first day in office, she announced the creation of a “Weaponization Working Group,” purportedly intended to root out “abuses of the criminal justice process” by local and federal law enforcement officers, including those who had investigated Mr. Trump.

Current and former Justice Department officials view those claims as merely an excuse to justify the brazen politicization of the department under Mr. Trump and his team. It has left many employees angry and worried for the department’s future.

The Adams case brought those concerns to a head.

One veteran prosecutor told a friend late Thursday that he was not answering phone calls, in hopes of avoiding a demand to take an action that would force his resignation.

Thursday’s events have echoes in the department’s darkest distant past. During the Watergate era, senior political appointees resigned rather than carry out what they viewed as an unlawful order to fire the prosecutor investigating President Nixon — an event referred to as the Saturday Night Massacre.

Thursday’s crisis was different, according to Justice Department veterans, in that the political leadership seemed resolved to assert total control over the career prosecutors that many staff members see as the backbone of the agency.

There is growing fear at department headquarters that its politically appointed leaders are determined to remove an entire layer of highly qualified and experienced senior career officials, and in doing so, end the traditional independence of investigating and charging corruption cases. The administration has already moved on a number of fronts to scale back anti-corruption work.

In response, current and former Justice Department officials said, defense lawyers on a wide variety of cases are drafting direct appeals to Mr. Bove to try to nullify pending charges or investigations.

In her letter of refusal to Mr. Bove, Ms. Sassoon suggested that should he find a career employee to sign off on his request, the judge overseeing the case was likely to ask tough questions of department officials.

To an agency run by lawyers, Mr. Bove’s actions after her resignation were even more troubling than his order that she drop the case. Mr. Bove did not try to give the same instruction to another person in her office in New York. In fact, he placed several of Ms. Sassoon’s deputies on paid leave pending an investigation of their role in the episode.

Instead, he took the unusual step of rerouting his demand to career officials in Washington, and fared no better.

Two senior lawyers, who had been tapped for interim leadership positions by the Trump administration, resigned. Current and former officials pointed out that what Mr. Bove asked them to do may well violate bar rules and their oath — to dismiss a criminal case without having reviewed the facts or the law.

Later, three other officials in the department’s public integrity unit also refused to follow Mr. Bove’s directive and resigned.

Days earlier, Ms. Bondi issued a memo insisting that Justice Department lawyers could not avoid signing legal documents they happened to disagree with. Given that explicit instruction, Mr. Bove’s demands for someone in the department to sign the document carry an unspoken threat, these officials said — do it or leave.

Mr. Bove, in a memo to Ms. Sassoon this week, said his order for dismissal was not based on questions about the evidence collected by prosecutors, but because the charges filed against the mayor last fall came too close to the 2025 mayoral election and created the appearance that the indictment was intended to influence the outcome.

He also claimed that the indictment, which resulted in the stripping of Mr. Adams’s security clearance, made it harder for the mayor to cooperate with the administration on immigration enforcement. The assertion amounted to a highly unusual injection of a policy issue into a criminal case.

“There is no room at the Justice Department for attorneys who refuse to execute on the priorities of the executive branch,” Mr. Bove wrote on Thursday, adding that he looked forward to working with the U.S. attorney’s office “on the important priorities President Trump has laid out for us to make America safe again.“

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

The NY Times

By Michael S. SchmidtWilliam K. RashbaumMaggie Haberman and Jonah E. Bromwich

Feb. 13, 2025

President Trump had just taken office when lawyers for Mayor Eric Adams of New York went to the White House with an extraordinary request: They formally asked in a letter that the new president pardon the mayor in a federal corruption case that had yet to go to trial.

Just a week later, one of Mr. Trump’s top political appointees at the Justice Department called Mr. Adams’s lawyer, saying he wanted to talk about potentially dismissing the case.

What followed was a rapid series of exchanges between the lawyers and Mr. Trump’s administration that exploded this week into a confrontation between top Justice Department officials in Washington and New York prosecutors.

On Monday, the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department sent a memo ordering prosecutors to dismiss the charges against the mayor. By Thursday, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Danielle Sassoon, had resigned in protest over what she described as a quid pro quo between the Trump administration and the mayor of New York City. Five officials overseeing the Justice Department’s public integrity unit in Washington stepped down soon after.

The conflagration originated in the back-and-forth between Mr. Adams’s lawyers, Alex Spiro and William A. Burck, and the Justice Department official, Emil Bove III, exchanges which have not been previously reported.

The series of events — in which the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department seemed to guide criminal defense lawyers toward a rationale for dropping charges against a high-profile client — represents an extraordinary shattering of norms for an agency charged with enforcing the laws of the United States.

It also sends a message that, under the Trump administration, the Justice Department will make prosecutorial decisions based not on the merits of a case but on purely political concerns, longtime prosecutors and defense lawyers said.

Prompted by Mr. Bove, the mayor’s lawyers refined their approach until they landed on a highly unorthodox argument, records and interviews show — one that was ultimately reflected in Mr. Bove’s memo to prosecutors on Monday. That memo stated that the criminal case had “unduly restricted Mayor Adams’s ability” to address illegal immigration and violent crime. It also pointedly said that the decision had nothing to do with the evidence or the law.

This account of what led to Mr. Bove’s memo and the internal resistance with which it was met is based on interviews with five people with direct knowledge of the matter, as well as documents related to the case against Mr. Adams.

There remain several unanswered questions about the lead-up to the extraordinary decision, including how many times Mr. Spiro and Mr. Bove interacted.

But the sudden push to dismiss the case against Mr. Adams came even as Manhattan prosecutors were preparing to move forward with more charges against him.

Just weeks before the order to drop the case, prosecutors had said in a court filing submitted on Jan. 6, during the presidential transition, that they had uncovered unspecified “additional criminal conduct by Adams.”

In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi on Wednesday, Ms. Sassoon said that prosecutors in her office had been prepared to seek a new indictment of the mayor, “based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the F.B.I., and that would add further factual allegations regarding his participation in a fraudulent straw donor scheme.”

Mr. Spiro shot back in a public statement, saying that if the Manhattan prosecutors “had any proof whatsoever that the mayor destroyed evidence, they would have brought those charges — as they continually threatened to do, but didn’t, over months and months.”

But in private, far from a courtroom, the picture was different. Amid rumblings of potential new charges, Mr. Spiro, Mr. Burck and Mr. Bove appear to have structured what the defense lawyers likely hoped would be the end of the corruption case against Mr. Adams.

On Wednesday, the same day that the acting U.S. attorney was privately saying she would not comply with the Justice Department’s directive, Mr. Spiro held a news conference and repeatedly called the charges politically motivated, saying that the Justice Department’s dismissal order was the only legitimate conclusion it could have reached.

The directive from Mr. Bove was like a neon sign signaling that a connection within Mr. Trump’s orbit matters as much as the facts. Until recently, Mr. Bove was a criminal defense lawyer for Mr. Trump. Mr. Spiro also represents Elon Musk, a close adviser to Mr. Trump and the world’s richest man. And Mr. Burck recently became the outside ethics adviser to Mr. Trump’s company.

“The message is getting out that if you want to save yourself from prosecution, it’s best to find someone from Trumpworld,” said Daniel C. Richman, a law professor at Columbia University and former federal prosecutor in Manhattan. “Why is that bad? Generally, we like to think criminal prosecutions are resolved on the merits, not political intervention.”

The White House did not respond to several requests for comment. Officials at the Justice Department declined to engage with questions about the reporting.

Mr. Adams was indicted in September after a yearslong investigation. Manhattan prosecutors charged him with conspiracy, bribery and other crimes, saying that he had accepted more than $100,000 in flight upgrades and airline tickets; pressured the city’s Fire Department to sign off on the opening of a new high-rise Turkish consulate building despite safety concerns; and fraudulently obtained millions of dollars in public funds for his campaign.

The mayor pleaded not guilty. His informal efforts to win a pardon began shortly after Mr. Trump’s victory in the presidential election. The mayor sharpened his position on immigration, refused to say Vice President Kamala Harris’s name the day before the election, met with Mr. Trump near Mar-a-Lago and attended the inauguration.

The formal, legal effort to kill the case began immediately after Mr. Trump took office. Mr. Spiro sent a letter directly to the White House counsel, David Warrington, requesting a pretrial pardon from Mr. Trump. On his first day in office, Mr. Trump signed roughly 1,500 pardons, all prepared by Mr. Warrington, for people convicted in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.

The letter from Mr. Spiro appeared to be focused on appealing to Mr. Trump’s own grievances with how the Justice Department treated him. It echoed the president’s arguments about the federal cases against him. It said that Mayor Adams was the victim of a “weaponized” Justice Department and leaks to the news media, particularly to The New York Times. It also mounted a lengthy attack on the merits of the case.

“President Trump has made clear his desire to reform the Department of Justice so that it is an agency that once again seeks justice and truth above all else,” Mr. Spiro wrote. “This case is a prime example.”

Mr. Trump had said in December that he would consider pardoning the mayor. But in the days after the letter was sent, the White House had been silent on the matter.

Around that time, the acting deputy attorney general, Mr. Bove, who represented Mr. Trump in three of his criminal indictments, reached out to Mr. Spiro.

In one of the conversations, Mr. Bove said that he would like to know how the prosecution was affecting Mr. Adams’s ability to do his job. Mr. Bove also said he wanted to have a meeting in Washington with prosecutors and Mr. Spiro to discuss dismissing the case.

That meeting occurred on Jan. 31, 11 days after Mr. Trump was sworn in.

Mr. Spiro — a brash defense lawyer with a record of representing celebrity clients like Mr. Musk — had repeatedly angered prosecutors with his contentious style, outlandish claims and unsupported accusations that the authorities were leaking confidential grand jury evidence.

But he was accompanied at the meeting by Mr. Burck, who is known for having a softer touch and has become increasingly close to Mr. Trump, his aides and his political appointees. Along with his appointment last month as the outside ethics adviser to the Trump Organization, Mr. Burck helped lead the confirmation process of the Treasury secretary.

The meeting was attended by Ms. Sassoon and several of her deputies.

During the meeting, Mr. Bove signaled that the decision about whether to dismiss the case had nothing to do with its legal merits.

Instead, Mr. Bove said he was interested in whether the case was hindering Mr. Adams’s leadership, particularly with regard to the city’s ability to cooperate with the federal government on Mr. Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

Mr. Bove also said he was interested in whether the case, brought by the former U.S. attorney, Damian Williams, was a politically motivated prosecution meant to hurt Mr. Adams’s re-election prospects.

In her letter to Ms. Bondi, Ms. Sassoon said that she was “baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seeming collaboration with Adams’s counsel and without my direct input on the ultimate stated rationales for dismissal.”

She also said that when she and other prosecutors attended the meeting, Mr. Adams’s lawyers “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.” She said that Mr. Bove had chastised a member of her team for taking notes and directed that they be confiscated when the meeting ended.

Asked to respond, Mr. Spiro said, “The idea that there was a quid pro quo is a total lie. We offered nothing and the department asked nothing of us.

“We were asked if the case had any bearing on national security and immigration enforcement, and we truthfully answered it did,” he added.

Four days after the meeting, Mr. Adams’s team sent a letter to Mr. Bove at the Justice Department, this one signed by both Mr. Spiro and Mr. Burck. The letter showed the issues Mr. Bove was focused on.

“We wanted to address questions you have raised with respect to the indictment’s impact on Mayor Adams’s ability to lead New York City, including by working with the federal government on important issues of immigration enforcement and national security,” the letter said.

The letter went on to make a more refined argument about how the indictment was impinging on Mr. Adams’s role as mayor, while also attacking Mr. Williams for what it said was a politically motivated investigation.

The letter also said that trial preparation would unduly restrict Mr. Adams and that the trial itself would keep him stuck in court, potentially for more than a month. It said that Mr. Adams’s loss of a security clearance during the inquiry had hurt his ability to cooperate with federal authorities on important national security investigations.

And it asserted that Mr. Adams was aligned with the Trump administration on public safety and illegal immigration. If the prosecution proceeded, the letter said, Mr. Adams could not be an active partner to the Department of Homeland Security.

Despite those arguments — or perhaps in light of them — Mr. Bove’s directive to Manhattan federal prosecutors included an unusual footnote.

“The government is not offering to exchange dismissal of a criminal case for Adams’s assistance on immigration enforcement,” it said.

Mr. Spiro has asserted that the case against Mr. Adams, if dropped, will not be revived, but the Justice Department memo left open the possibility that it could be brought again. It said that Mr. Trump’s pick for U.S. attorney in Manhattan, who has yet to be confirmed by the Senate, will review the case after the mayoral election in November.

Mr. Spiro insisted on Wednesday that the plan would not give the Trump administration leverage over Mr. Adams.

“This isn’t hanging over anybody’s head,” he said. “This case is over. I think everybody knows this case.”

The mayor met on Thursday with Mr. Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan.

Afterward, Mr. Adams announced he would issue an order allowing federal immigration authorities into the Rikers Island jail complex.

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

The NY Times

By William K. RashbaumBenjamin WeiserJonah E. Bromwich and Maggie Haberman

Feb. 13, 2025 Updated 4:09 p.m. ET

Manhattan’s U.S. attorney on Thursday resigned rather than obey an order from a top Justice Department official to drop the corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams.

Then, when Justice Department officials sought to transfer the case to the public integrity section in Washington, which oversees corruption cases, the two men who led that unit also resigned, according to five people with knowledge of the matter.

The resignations represent the most high-profile public resistance so far to President Trump’s tightening control over the Justice Department. They were a stunning repudiation of the administration’s attempt to force the dismissal of the charges against Mr. Adams.

The departures of the U.S. attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, and the officials who oversaw the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, Kevin O. Driscoll and John Keller, came in rapid succession on Thursday. Days earlier, the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department, Emil Bove III, had ordered Manhattan prosecutors to drop the case against Mr. Adams.

The agency’s justification for dropping the case was explicitly political; 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.

Mr. Bove accepted Ms. Sassoon’s resignation in a remarkable eight-page letter on Thursday, in which he blasted her handling of the case and decision to disobey his order.

He told her the prosecutors who had worked on the case against Mr. Adams were being placed on administrative leave because they, too, were unwilling to obey his order.

He said they would be investigated by the attorney general and the Justice Department’s internal investigative arm. He also told Ms. Sassoon both bodies would also evaluate her conduct.

But the internal investigations ordered by Mr. Bove could prove risky for him. Officials will likely review Mr. Bove’s conduct as well, and the judge overseeing the case could demand answers from Justice Department officials in Washington.

Mr. Bove’s letter offered a window into a dispute that has been raging between the Justice Department officials in Washington and federal prosecutors in Manhattan, out of sight of the public.

Mr. Bove made explicit that he believed Mr. Trump holds sway over the Justice Department, which for decades has operated at a remove from the White House.

“In no valid sense do you uphold the Constitution by disobeying direct orders implementing the policy of a duly elected President,” he wrote, “and anyone romanticizing that behavior does a disservice to the nature of this work and the public’s perception of our efforts.”

He wrote he had accepted Ms. Sassoon’s resignation “based on your choice to continue pursuing a politically motivated prosecution despite an express instruction to dismiss the case. You lost sight of the oath that you took when you started at the Department of Justice.”

Until recently, Mr. Bove was one of Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers, representing him in his New York State criminal trial last year. The trial led to Mr. Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal that had threatened to derail his 2016 campaign.

The Southern District has long been viewed as the nation’s most prestigious U.S. attorney’s office, and has a reputation for guarding its independence and fending off interference from Washington, winning it the nickname “the Sovereign District.”

A spokesman for the office did not comment. An official with the Justice Department in Washington declined to comment.

Ms. Sassoon notified her office of her decision to resign on Thursday in a brief email shortly before 2 p.m. The office has not filed a motion to dismiss the case.

“Moments ago, I submitted my resignation to the attorney general,” she wrote in the email, the text of which was provided to The New York Times. “As I told her, it has been my greatest honor to represent the United States and to pursue justice as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.”

She continued: “It has been a privilege to be your colleague, and I will be watching with pride as you continue your service to the United States.”

It was not immediately clear who would replace her, but typically, it would be the office’s No. 2 official, the deputy U.S. attorney, a role currently held by Matthew Podolsky.

The Trump administration last month named Ms. Sassoon, a veteran prosecutor, to head the office on an interim basis while Mr. Trump’s choice for the job, Jay Clayton, awaited Senate confirmation.

Ms. Sassoon was quickly swept into conversations with Justice Department officials about the criminal case against Mr. Adams.

Mr. Adams was indicted last year on five counts, including bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations, stemming from an investigation that began in 2021. Mr. Adams had pleaded not guilty and was scheduled for trial in April.

Then, on Monday, Mr. Bove directed Ms. Sassoon to dismiss the case. She was also told to cease all further investigative steps against Mr. Adams until a review could be conducted by the Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney, presumably Mr. Clayton, after the mayoral election in November.

Ms. Sassoon, 38, joined the Southern District in 2016. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, she clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, and is a member of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group.

She was best known for the successful fraud prosecution and 2023 conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who received 25 years in prison. She also prosecuted Lawrence V. Ray, who was convicted in 2022 of extortion and sex trafficking related to his abuse of Sarah Lawrence College students. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison.

In 2023, Ms. Sassoon was named co-chief of the Southern District’s criminal appeals unit, the position she held when she was promoted last month to interim U.S. attorney.

Mr. Bove, in his order to drop the case, said that the directive “in no way calls into question the integrity and efforts” of the prosecutors working on the case, nor Ms. Sassoon’s efforts in leading them.

Mr. Bove said that the dismissal of charges was necessary because the indictment “unduly restricted Mayor Adams’s ability to devote full attention and resources” to Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown and had “improperly interfered” with Mr. Adams’s re-election campaign.

The memo criticized the timing of the charges and “more recent public actions” of Damian Williams, the former U.S. attorney who brought the case, which Mr. Bove said had “threatened the integrity” of the proceedings by increasing prejudicial pretrial publicity that could taint potential witnesses and jurors.

Mr. Bove appeared to be referring to an article Mr. Williams wrote last month, after leaving office, in which he said New York City was “being led with a broken ethical compass.”

The indictment against Mr. Adams was announced in September by Mr. Williams, who led the office during the Biden administration. Mr. Adams, a Democrat, has claimed that he was targeted because of his criticism of the administration over the influx of more than 200,000 migrants into the city — an assertion the Southern District has rebutted, noting that the investigation began well before the mayor made those comments.

Mr. Adams has praised parts of Mr. Trump’s agenda, visited him near his Mar-a-Lago compound and attended his inauguration a few days later. The two men did not discuss a pardon, but Mr. Trump spoke about a “weaponized” Justice Department, The New York Times reported.

Mr. Trump had criticized Mr. Adams’s prosecution, saying the mayor had been “treated pretty unfairly,” and had floated the possibility of a pardon.

On Jan. 22, just after Ms. Sassoon was elevated to her post, the Southern District vigorously defended its prosecution in a court filing made in her name. The filing cited “concrete evidence” that Mr. Adams had taken illegal campaign contributions. It called his claim that his prosecution was politically motivated an attempt to divert attention “from the evidence of his guilt.”

Devlin Barrett, Glenn Thrush, Adam Goldman and Jan Ransom contributed reporting.

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

The NY Times

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg

Feb. 13, 2025

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the vaccine skeptic and former presidential candidate who fled his family’s party and threw his “medical freedom” movement behind President Trump, was confirmed by the Senate on Thursday as the nation’s next health secretary. He is expected to be sworn in at the White House by President Trump on Thursday afternoon.

The vote, 52 to 48, capped a remarkable rise for Mr. Kennedy and a curious twist in American politics. He was confirmed by a Republican Senate, without a single Democratic vote, in a chamber where his father, Robert F. Kennedy, and his uncles, John F. Kennedy and Edward M. Kennedy, all held office as Democrats.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a polio survivor and the former Republican leader, voted no, the lone Republican to oppose Mr. Kennedy. Mr. McConnell issued a searing statement explaining his vote.

“Individuals, parents and families have a right to push for a healthier nation and demand the best possible scientific guidance on preventing and treating illness,” it read in part. “But a record of trafficking in dangerous conspiracy theories and eroding trust in public health institutions does not entitle Mr. Kennedy to lead these important efforts.”

Mr. Kennedy will now lead the federal Department of Health and Human Services, a sprawling agency with 13 operating divisions, including some — the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — that he has called corrupt.

Those scientific agencies are already reeling from the onslaught of directives coming from the Trump administration. The N.I.H., targeted for budget cuts, has just lost its No. 2 official, who retired to avoid being pushed into a job he did not want, according to people familiar with his decision.

The C.D.C.’s weekly scientific journal, which produces reports on outbreaks and other health threats, was muted by orders that prohibited the release of any public communication until it had been reviewed by a presidential appointee or designee — delaying a report on bird flu. Information was later posted, then deleted, from the department website.

The question now: What will Mr. Kennedy do with his newfound power and platform? Mr. Kennedy has said he wants to tackle the chronic disease epidemic, rid grocery stores of ultraprocessed foods, and root out conflicts of interest in federal agencies and the expert panels that advise them. He has also vowed to “follow the science” in pursuing research on vaccine safety.

But he has offered few specifics. Some of Mr. Kennedy’s allies argue that he will be able to get more done if he focuses on less contentious topics like chronic disease and the food supply — issues that can generate broad bipartisan support. But Mr. Kennedy’s allies in what they call the “vaccine safety” movement, which its critics call the anti-vaccine movement, want to see him focus his energies there.

Mr. Kennedy’s agenda may soon come into greater focus. He agreed to give his first television interview to the Fox News host Laura Ingraham; the network said it would air on her show Thursday evening.

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Kennedy is an extremely divisive figure. His “Make America Healthy Again” movement has married the far left and the far right. But mainstream Democrats decry him as a conspiracy theorist and science denier, and warn that his decades-long effort to sow mistrust in vaccination will endanger the health of all Americans. 

“A vote to confirm Mr. Kennedy is a vote to make America sicker,” Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, said moments before the vote. 

Apart from Mr. McConnell, Republicans who had concerns about Mr. Kennedy’s views on vaccination — including Senator Bill Cassidy, a doctor and chairman of the Senate Health Committee — swallowed them to support his confirmation. Others sidestepped the issue of vaccines entirely to emphasize Mr. Kennedy’s embrace of more bipartisan agenda items, including ending chronic disease epidemic and getting ultra-processed foods off grocery store shelves. 

“We have a generational opportunity to bring together the greatest minds in science, medicine, industry and government to put an end to the chronic disease epidemic facing Americans,” said Senator Mike Crapo, Republican of Idaho and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

Two of the industries that have been frequent targets for Mr. Kennedy were quick to offer friendly statements after he was confirmed.

PhRMA, the trade association for the pharmaceutical industry, said it was eager to work with Mr. Kennedy on his plan to reduce levels of chronic diseases — and their own plans to limit the ability of intermediaries to raise drug prices.

The Consumer Brands Association, which represents makers of ultraprocessed foods, issued a more pointed statement, reminding Mr. Kennedy that they are the nation’s largest manufacturing employer, and that they would like to see aspects of the status quo remain in place.

“The federal regulatory agencies within H.H.S. operate under a science and risk-based mandate, and it is critical that framework remains under the new administration,” said Sarah Gallo, the group’s senior vice president for federal affairs.

Mr. Kennedy’s views about vaccination were at the center of Democrats’ fight against him. He has said he favors both the measles vaccine and the polio vaccine, and would not do anything to prevent or discourage people from taking them. But he opposes vaccine mandates, even for schoolchildren, and when pushed, he refused to accept the mainstream scientific consensus that vaccines do not cause autism.

“Mr. Kennedy is fond of saying he’s not making recommendations about whether parents should vaccinate their kids — he’s just asking questions and giving people choices,” Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, said on Wednesday after the Senate voted to advance Mr. Kennedy’s nomination.

“That’s a slippery tactic used by conspiracy theorists to dodge any real responsibility for their words and actions,” Mr. Wyden added, “and it’s absurd coming from somebody who’s about to be confirmed for a job that is entirely about making recommendations.”

Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine, was more succinct: “If this were a secret ballot, this man wouldn’t get 20 votes.”

Republicans, even those uneasy about Mr. Kennedy, said he had assuaged their misgivings.

“I continue to have concerns about Mr. Kennedy’s views on vaccines and his selective interpretation of scientific studies,” Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, wrote in a lengthy social media post on Wednesday.

But, she added, “he has made numerous commitments to me and my colleagues, promising to work with Congress to ensure public access to information and to base vaccine recommendations on data-driven, evidence-based, and medically sound research.”

Christina Jewett contributed reporting.

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

The NY Times

By Santul Nerkar

Weihong Hu, a hotelier with close ties to Mayor Eric Adams, stole tens of millions from a temporary housing program that was designed to stop the spread of Covid-19 in New York’s jails, according to federal prosecutors in Brooklyn.

Ms. Hu, along with two other defendants, Julio Medina and Christopher Dantzler, conspired to steal from the housing program, according to an indictment unsealed Thursday in the Eastern District of New York.

The program, which was set up in April 2020 to slow the spread of the coronavirus, involved releasing inmates and housing them in hotels around the city. It partnered with a nonprofit organization called Exodus, founded and run by Mr. Medina, to place them. Mr. Dantzler was the president of a company that provided security to Exodus.

Ms. Hu is a prominent donor to Mr. Adams and has been linked to a federal investigation of a political action committee that was formed to support Mr. Adams’s agenda. A Queens hotel owned by Ms. Hu that New York uses for shelter was raided by the authorities in November, according to The City, a nonprofit news outlet.

The three defendants were arrested and were set to be arraigned before U.S. Magistrate Judge James R. Cho on Thursday.

Benjamin Brafman, a lawyer for Ms. Hu, said that she was a “victim, not a co-conspirator.” Lawyers for Mr. Medina and Mr. Dantzler could not immediately be reached.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

The NY Times

By William K. RashbaumBenjamin WeiserMaggie Haberman and Jonah E. Bromwich

Manhattan’s acting U.S. attorney resigned on Thursday after the Justice Department ordered her to drop the corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

The resignation of the U.S. attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, came amid questions about the independence of federal prosecutors under President Trump just weeks into his second term.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office did not immediately comment. An official with the Justice Department in Washington declined to comment.

Ms. Sassoon, who had supported the case against Mr. Adams, notified her office of her decision in a brief email at about 2 p.m. The office has not filed a motion to dismiss the case.

“Moments ago, I submitted my resignation to the attorney general,” she wrote in the email, the text of which was provided to The New York Times. “As I told her, it has been my greatest honor to represent the United States and to pursue justice as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.”

She continued: “It has been a privilege to be your colleague, and I will be watching with pride as you continue your service to the United States.”

It was not immediately clear who would replace her, but typically, it would be the office’s No. 2 official, the deputy U.S. attorney, a role currently held by Matthew Podolsky.

On Monday, the Justice Department’s No. 2 official in Washington, Emil Bove III, directed Ms. Sassoon to drop the case. He wrote that officials in Washington had reached their decision without assessing the strength of the evidence against Mr. Adams or the legal theories on which the case was based, issues “on which we defer to the U.S. attorney’s office at this time,” Mr. Bove said.

The Trump administration last month named Ms. Sassoon, a veteran prosecutor, to head the office on an interim basis while Mr. Trump’s choice for the job, Jay Clayton, awaited Senate confirmation.

Ms. Sassoon was immediately swept into conversations with Justice Department officials about the criminal case against Mr. Adams.

Mr. Adams was indicted last year on five counts, including bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations, stemming from an investigation that began in 2021. Mr. Adams had pleaded not guilty and was scheduled for trial in April.

But Mr. Bove directed Ms. Sassoon to dismiss the case. She was also told to cease all further investigative steps against Mr. Adams until a review could be conducted by the Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney, presumably Mr. Clayton, after the mayoral election in November.

The Southern District has long been viewed as the nation’s most prestigious U.S. attorney’s office, handling complex and often high-profile cases involving Wall Street, national security and public corruption.

Although the office is part of the Justice Department — there are 93 U.S. attorney’s offices around the country — the Southern District has a reputation for guarding its independence and fending off interference from Washington, winning it the nickname “the Sovereign District.”

Ms. Sassoon, 38, joined the Southern District in 2016. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, she clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, and is a member of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group.

Ms. Sassoon is best known for the successful fraud prosecution and 2023 conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who received 25 years in prison. She also prosecuted Lawrence V. Ray, who was convicted in 2022 of extortion and sex trafficking related to his abuse of Sarah Lawrence College students. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison.

In 2023, Ms. Sassoon was named co-chief of the Southern District’s criminal appeals unit, the position she held when she was promoted last month to interim U.S. attorney.

Mr. Bove in his order to drop the case said that the directive “in no way calls into question the integrity and efforts” of the prosecutors working on the case, nor Ms. Sassoon’s efforts in leading them.

Mr. Bove said that the dismissal of charges was necessary because the indictment “unduly restricted Mayor Adams’s ability to devote full attention and resources” to President Trump’s immigration crackdown and had “improperly interfered” with Mr. Adams’s re-election campaign.

The memo criticized the timing of the charges and “more recent public actions” of Damian Williams, the former U.S. attorney who brought the case, which Mr. Bove said had “threatened the integrity” of the proceedings by increasing prejudicial pretrial publicity that could taint potential witnesses and jurors.

Mr. Bove’s reference appeared to be to an article Mr. Williams wrote last month, after leaving office, in which he said New York City was “being led with a broken ethical compass.”

The indictment against Mr. Adams was announced in September by Mr. Williams, who led the office during the Biden administration. Mr. Adams, a Democrat, has claimed that he was targeted because of his criticism of the administration over the influx of more than 200,000 migrants into the city — an assertion the Southern District has rebutted, noting that the investigation began well before the mayor made those comments.

Mr. Adams has praised parts of Mr. Trump’s agenda, visited him near his Mar-a-Lago compound and attended his inauguration a few days later. The two men did not discuss a pardon, but Mr. Trump spoke about a “weaponized” Justice Department, The New York Times reported.

Mr. Trump had criticized Mr. Adams’s prosecution, saying the mayor had been “treated pretty unfairly,” and had floated the possibility of a pardon.

On Jan. 22, just after Ms. Sassoon was elevated to her post, the Southern District vigorously defended its prosecution in a court filing made in her name. The filing cited “concrete evidence” that Mr. Adams had taken illegal campaign contributions. It called his claim that his prosecution was politically motivated an attempt to divert attention “from the evidence of his guilt.”

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

DOGE is an obvious scam to give Elon Musk access to the 32 INVESTIGATIONS.

11 Federal Agencies were working just fine. No fraud, no waste.

Elon Musk is providing zero evidence. He is sharing nothing with oversight committees.

In essence, Trump created an illegal and unconstitutional fourth branch of government.

End Musk. Save America.

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

The NY Times By Charlie Savage

Feb. 11, 2025

The top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday accused Kash Patel, President Trump’s nominee for F.B.I. director, of improperly directing a wave of firings at the bureau without having been confirmed as its leader.

In a letter to the Justice Department’s inspector general, the senator, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, cited “highly credible information from multiple sources” that suggested Mr. Patel had been personally involved in covertly orchestrating a purge of career officials at the F.B.I.

“This alleged misconduct is beyond the pale and must be investigated immediately,” Mr. Durbin wrote to the independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz.

The accusation comes as the committee prepares to vote Thursday on whether to send Mr. Patel’s nomination to the Senate floor. Mr. Durbin said that if the allegations were true, then the acting No. 2 at the Justice Department, Emil Bove, fired career civil servants “solely at the behest of a private citizen,” and also that Mr. Patel “may have perjured himself” at his confirmation hearing last month.

Representatives for the Justice Department, the White House and Mr. Patel did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Durbin sent the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, on Tuesday.

KASH PATEL AND THE F.B.I.

Read Senator Richard J. Durbin’s letter to the inspector general.

In a speech on the Senate floor afterward, Mr. Durbin urged Republicans who had so far supported Mr. Patel to reconsider. He added that the information provided by sources he described as “whistle-blowers” underscored why he believed Mr. Patel was “not fit” to be entrusted with government power.

“If this man is so fast and loose with the truth before our committee now, imagine what he will do if given the protection of office,” Mr. Durbin said. “We need to pause in this consideration.”

In his letter, he recounted a meeting between Mr. Bove, who has helped spearhead mass ousters of Justice Department prosecutors, and F.B.I. leadership. Mr. Bove supposedly told the bureau officials that Stephen Miller, a White House aide, was pressuring him on Mr. Patel’s behalf to move more quickly in dismissing senior career officials at the bureau.

Mr. Durbin cited verbal accounts from “multiple sources” and quoted what he described as contemporaneous meeting notes as further corroboration. Mr. Durbin said the notes read: “KP wants movement at FBI, reciprocal actions for DOJ.”

Mr. Durbin did not identify his sources, but from the context, they did not appear to be direct witnesses to interactions involving Mr. Patel or Mr. Miller, but rather people at the F.B.I. who heard, or perhaps heard about, what Mr. Bove had supposedly said.

In Senate testimony last month, Mr. Patel said that he was “not aware” of any Trump administration plans to fire F.B.I. officials associated with investigations into Mr. Trump. Mr. Patel also told the senators, “I don’t know what’s going on right now over there.”

Mr. Patel also repeatedly told senators, in written answers submitted after his hearing, that he did not recall having any knowledge about the planned firings at the F.B.I. or having any discussions with the Trump transition team or administration about them.

But as a further reason to question Mr. Patel’s statements, Mr. Durbin said members of a newly established group of Trump political appointees at the F.B.I. have kept Mr. Patel informed. Each member of that group, known as the F.B.I. director’s advisory team, Mr. Durbin said, had told one or more F.B.I. officials before Mr. Patel’s confirmation hearing on Jan. 30 that they had been in direct contact with him.

The referral to Mr. Horowitz comes after Mr. Trump summarily fired 17 inspectors general across the executive branch. Mr. Horowitz has so far been spared, intensifying the stakes of opening any investigation.

A series of reassignments, forced transfers and ousters across the Justice Department — including firing all prosecutors who had worked on the two criminal cases against Mr. Trump — prompted lawmakers to press Mr. Patel during his hearing about whether the F.B.I. would be subject to a similar shake-up.

Hours after Mr. Patel’s testimony, word began to emerge that about half a dozen of the F.B.I.’s most senior leaders had been told they would be fired within days if they did not retire or resign. A day later, an all-staff memo to the F.B.I. said that Mr. Bove had demanded their ouster, along with the names of all agents who helped investigate events related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Mr. Bove had served as one of Mr. Trump’s criminal defense lawyers before Mr. Trump made him the acting deputy attorney general, putting him in the unusual position of overseeing prosecutors he had just opposed in court.

On the Senate floor and in his letter, Mr. Durbin recounted what he described as two meetings on the day before Mr. Patel’s testimony.

The members of the F.B.I. director’s advisory team had a list of specific top F.B.I. supervisors who were “identified for termination,” Mr. Durbin said. On Jan. 29, the acting leaders of the F.B.I., Brian Driscoll and Robert C. Kissane, convened a meeting at which they warned that “a lot of names were people in the crosshairs” for forced retirement or removal.

That meeting had been prompted, Mr. Durbin said, by one earlier that day between the top F.B.I. officials and Trump administration appointees at the Justice Department.

At that earlier meeting, Mr. Durbin said, Mr. Bove had revealed who was orchestrating the push, informing the F.B.I. leaders that he had “received multiple calls from Stephen Miller the night before. Mr. Miller was pressuring him because Mr. Patel wanted the F.B.I. to remove targeted employees faster as D.O.J. had already done with prosecutors,” according to the letter.

The contemporaneous notes cited by Mr. Durbin as corroboration appear to be from this earlier meeting.

Mr. Driscoll and Mr. Kissane apparently resisted Mr. Bove’s demands, leading him to instruct them two days later to tell senior leaders that they faced termination, and to demand they turn over a list of all agents and analysts who participated in the investigations related to the riot. Mr. Driscoll revealed that demand in the memo to F.B.I. employees later that day.

Mr. Bove, in his own memo to the bureau work force on Feb. 5, accused the F.B.I. leaders of “insubordination,” saying he had broadened his request after Mr. Driscoll and Mr. Kissane “refused to comply” with multiple requests to help him identify the “core team” of investigators in Washington.

Mr. Durbin warned of the potentially deleterious effects of mass dismissals and reassignments across the bureau.

“The leadership and experience vacuum created by these actions has greatly weakened the F.B.I.’s ability to protect the country from numerous national security threats and has made Americans less safe,” he said.

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

The NY Times

Julian E. Barnes and Robert Jimison Reporting from Washington

The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Tulsi Gabbard to be the next director of national intelligence in a 52 to 48 vote that demonstrated President Trump’s political control over Republican lawmakers, and she was sworn in hours later in the Oval Office.

Ms. Gabbard had one of the most contentious confirmation hearings of all of the president’s nominees. Several Republican senators joined Democrats in asking tough questions about her previous support of Edward Snowden, a former government contractor who released reams of classified data, and her skepticism about warrantless wiretaps of overseas communications.

Her defense of Bashar al-Assad, the former Syrian dictator, and her sympathy toward President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia also gave some Republican lawmakers pause.

But in the end only one Republican was willing to oppose her. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the former majority leader, voted against her.

Mr. McConnell said he voted against her because the director of national intelligence should not be someone “with a history of alarming lapses in judgment.”

“Entrusting the coordination of the intelligence community to someone who struggles to acknowledge these facts is an unnecessary risk,” he said in a statement.

Mr. McConnell has taken stances against several of Mr. Trump’s nominees, but so far has not persuaded many in his caucus to join him.

Before the floor vote, the Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee fell in line and backed Ms. Gabbard’s confirmation. Some, like Senator Susan Collins of Maine, highlighted Ms. Gabbard’s pledges to streamline the office. Others, like Senator Todd Young of Indiana, emphasized her vows to hold accountable people who leaked classified information and to help reauthorize overseas surveillance programs.

That support from skeptics paved the way for Ms. Gabbard’s confirmation by the full Senate. Republicans cited her military experience — Ms. Gabbard is a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve — and her support of Mr. Trump’s agenda.

“She has been a consumer of intelligence for many years, giving her valuable insight into the intelligence needs of our government and military,” said Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia.

Democrats remained united against her. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, said Ms. Gabbard was not qualified. He said that in a secret vote, she would have received little Republican support. He said he was troubled by her “long record of weakness” against Russia.

“We simply cannot in good conscience trust our most classified secrets to someone who echoes Russian propaganda and falls for conspiracy theories,” Mr. Schumer said.

Mr. Schumer said there was pressure on Republicans to support Ms. Gabbard. In recent weeks, supporters of Mr. Trump have made huge numbers of calls on behalf of Ms. Gabbard. Some members of Mr. Trump’s coalition see Ms. Gabbard as a key voice in their movement and have demanded more traditional Republican senators back the president’s choices.

Ms Gabbard was sworn in by Attorney General Pam Bondi on Wednesday afternoon, with President Trump in attendance at the Oval Office. He praised Ms. Gabbard and said that, despite her former leadership role with the Democratic Party, “She was never a Democrat.”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s most important job, arguably, is overseeing the President’s Daily Brief, an intelligence summary assembled each morning. In Ms. Gabbard, Mr. Trump will have someone aligned with his foreign policy views supervising those updates.

During his first term, Mr. Trump grew irritated when briefers lingered too long on Russian influence operations. He often wanted briefings focused on economics and trade. He also liked the agency’s insights on world leaders he was meeting, or with whom he hoped to make deals.

Ms. Gabbard shares Mr. Trump’s skepticism of mainstream views of Russia as a grave national security threat. She also, like Mr. Trump, is deeply critical of the long overseas wars the United States became embroiled in during the George W. Bush administration.

Still, there are limits to the office’s power and influence. While it sets broad goals for collecting intelligence, the individual spy agencies have latitude to set their own collection targets and collection goals.

Those limits, along with Ms. Gabbard’s commitment to rein in the office’s work, persuaded Republican lawmakers that opposing her nomination was not worth the political risk.

Ms. Gabbard’s fierce opposition to foreign wars, and frequent appearances on Fox News, have made her a darling of the Trump wing of the Republican Party. Elon Musk, the president’s ally, attacked at least one senator, Mr. Young, who was thought to be wavering on his support for Ms. Gabbard. Mr. Musk initially called Mr. Young a “deep state puppet,” then retracted his comment after speaking with him. Mr. Young denied he had spoken to Mr. Musk about Ms. Gabbard but later announced his support for her.

Ms. Gabbard has said her first moves will be to depoliticize the organization, a frequent refrain among Mr. Trump’s nominees. In a statement after being sworn in, she said that she understood the importance of delivering “accurate, unbiased, and timely intelligence” to the president. 

“Unfortunately, trust in the intelligence community is at an all-time low,” Ms. Gabbard asserted. “President Trump’s re-election is a clear mandate from the American people to end the weaponization and politicization of the I.C.” 

She has previously cited the faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as one example. She has said information from intelligence agencies was used to falsely portray Mr. Trump as a puppet of Mr. Putin.

She has also criticized former intelligence officials for a letter suggesting that material from Hunter Biden’s laptop could be Russian disinformation.

Some former officials expect her to halt the work of the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which watches for threats against the election from adversaries.

She is also expected to press intelligence agencies to scour their files for any information on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy that has not yet been released.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

#Tulsi Gabbard