[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

It’s as if every single federal employee has been sucked into the 1999 movie, Office Space, forced to generate value-sucking and utterly-useless TPS reports just to make a goddamned micromanaging control freak happy. Via NBC News:

Billionaire Elon Musk issued an ultimatum to federal employees Saturday, saying in a post on his social media platform X that employees must respond to an email justifying the work they completed this week or resign.

Federal employees have already begun receiving an email asking to summarize their work, sources familiar with the matter told NBC News, though unlike Musk’s post, it does not explicitly threaten a forced resignation.

The email, sent from the Office of Personnel Management and shared with NBC News, asked employees to send approximately five bullet points listing what they accomplished this week, CC’ing their managers.

The email reviewed by NBC News requested that employees not send any classified information, links or attachments. It said employees must respond by a deadline of Monday at 11:59 p.m. ET.

Good luck to any federal employee who’s on leave or on vacation and doesn’t learn of this until after the deadline — or who can’t provide five fucking bullet points because their job is as simple as “fought a forest fire” or “nursed veterans.”

If this is how Musk runs publicly-listed companies, shareholders should contact the boards of directors and demand he be removed because he’s wasting their investments as well.

No need to do your jobs better, no need to add more value. Just worry about fulfilling this massive time waste.

Musk needs to be fired.

Here’s your action item: find a special election for a congressional race and help the Democratic candidate win. Keep an eye out for future special elections. Take back the House to prevent any effort to legislate this kind of massive waste of tax dollars. The GOP has a very slim margin which can be eliminated through special elections.

Then find a way to communicate to other voters they need to know about this waste and be ready to help pitch in to fire Musk.

Nobody elected a shadow king, and nobody elected this blackhole draining our taxes.

Unfamiliar with the reference to Office Space? It’s streaming on Hulu.

_________
Image by: Daniel Manrique (roadmr@entropia.com.mx) via Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0

Before you watch this superb CPAC performance by the woman paid to enforce the law in the United States, peek ahead to this spoiler.

Eric Adams’ lawyers — Alex Spiro (the lawyer the Mayor shares with Elon Musk) and Bill Burck (the lawyer the Mayor shares with Trump Organization) — sent Judge Ho a letter celebrating the kind of improper out-of-court public statements they were wailing about in December.

We are writing to alert the Court to recent out-of-court statements by Attorney General Pam Bondi and her chief of staff that constitute admissions of a party opponent under the Federal Rules of Evidence. Fed. R. Evid. 801(d)(2). The Attorney General described the indictment in this case as “incredibly weak,” and said that the charges against the Mayor were so weak she doubted prosecutors could secure a guilty verdict. “That,” she said, “is the weaponization of government.” Her statements followed similar statements by her chief of staff on Wednesday, February 19, 2025. See, e.g., Chad Mizelle, @ChadMizelle47, X (Feb. 19, 2025 12:42 PM), https://x.com/chadmizelle47/status/1892268416267911251?s=46 (“The case against Mayor Adams was just one in a long history of past DOJ actions that represent grave errors of judgement.”); id. (“Dismissing the prosecution was absolutely the right call.”). The Acting Deputy Attorney General has similarly recognized that this “case turns on factual and legal theories that are, at best, extremely aggressive.” Dkt. 125-2 at 7.

When Damien Williams posted a website barely mentioning Adams, Spiro deemed it a dangerous attempt to influence a legal outcome. But when AG Bondi went to a raging conference featuring Nazi salutes to give this error-riddled screed, Spiro and Burck proclaimed it federal evidence.

And perhaps Quinn Emanuel’s prominence makes them sluggish. But they posted this more than two hours after Judge Ho issued his order appointing Paul Clement as amicus, seemingly mooting this kind of stunt lawyering.

With that in mind, I give you a woman who claims to want to take on drug cartels but seems scared to take the A train uptown:

Ted Cruz: So, so Pam, the media are going crazy about New York Mayor Eric Adams and the charges that were dismissed against him.

Pam Bondi: So glad you brought that up.

Ted Cruz: Um, tell us what the story is, what happened there, and why were the charges dismissed?

Pam Bondi: Sure. And Emil, who has done an incredible job, he worked on this case, he looked at this case.

It was an incredibly weak case filed to make deportation harder. That’s why they did it. They took one of the biggest mayors in the country off the playing field in order to protect their sanctuary city. This case, it was so incredibly weak. It was about increases in airline tickets, uh, upgrades in airline tickets in his official capacity without getting into all the details of, of the fact, I don’t even think it could survive a verdict.

Excuse me. Incredibly weak case. That is the weaponization of government. That’s lawfare. When you’re filing, that’s lawfare. When you’re filing cases like that to keep someone who criticized Joe Biden who said — they took away his security clearance — So he could not get the details, so he could not help enforce the deportation efforts in New York.

And, you know, these people are going after him. Ride a subway in New York. It’s not safe. Violent crime is at an all time high, and that’s what they’re doing? So it’s not about weaponization, it’s about ending their weaponization of the government and fighting violent crime and enabling cities like New York and mayors like Eric Adams to enforce Donald Trump’s immigration policies. [emphasis mine]

So much garbage here.

No, Teddy Cancun. The charges have not yet been dismissed — that’s not how this works.

No, Pam, violent crime is not at an all-time high–under Joe Biden violent crime went down. Murders, at least, are down in NYC. Subway crime was already down — and then it came down further after congestion pricing went into effect, something your boss is trying to reverse, something your Department will have to litigate in court and on which you have now demonstrated bias.

How the hell does the Attorney General [pretend not to] know this?

I have requested comment about Ms. Bondi’s misrepresentations from DOJ.

But it’s Bondi’s misrepresentation of the crimes charged against Adams — and the charges that Emil Bove’s intervention staved off — that facilitates corruption.

Whereas her Chief of Staff, Chad Mizelle (in misleading screed also shared by Spiro and Burck) dismissed the four counts of the indictment that pertain to straw and illegal foreign donations by claiming they were just the campaign donations of a successful politician:

But all successful politicians, no matter the party, receive campaign contributions.

Bondi simply found a different way to hide the allegations that that Mayor Adams has been on the take from Türkiye.

She claimed that, “It was about increases in airline tickets, uh, upgrades in airline tickets in his official capacity.” Whereas Mizelle claimed this was only about campaign contributions (even the foreign ones of which he treated as legal), Pam Bondi claimed it was only about airplane upgrades.

The indictment debunks the Attorney General’s claim that this was just about official travel. Just one of Adams’ Turkish trips was treated as an official trip would have been, with full transparency.

10. In 2015, ERIC ADAMS, the defendant, took two official trips to Turkey. His first trip, in August 2015, was arranged by the Turkish Consulate General in New York City (the “Tm-kish Consulate”) and paid for in part by the Turkish Consulate and in pa1t by a for-profit educational conglomerate based in Istanbul (the “Turkish University”). The second trip, in December 2015, was airnnged by the Turkish Official and a Turkish entrepreneur (the “Promoter”) whose business includes organizing events to introduce Turkish corporations and businesspeople to politicians, celebrities, and others whose influence may benefit the corporations and businesspeople, For both trips, ADAMS received free business class tickets on the Turkish Airline. Unlike ADAMS ‘s subsequent travel with the Turkish Airline, ADAMS reported his 2015 travel to Turkey on financial disclosure forms filed with the New York City Conflict of Interest Board (the “COIB”), as he was required to do annually at all times relevant to this Indictment.

As the indictment alleges, for his other trips facilitated by Türkiye, at times routed awkwardly through Istanbul so he could avail of these benefits, Adams hid the benefits.

ADAMS did not disclose the travel benefits he had obtained in annual financial disclosures he was required to file as a New York City employee. Sometimes, ADAMS agreed to pay a nominal fee to create the appearance of having paid for travel that was in fact heavily discounted. Other times, ADAMS created and instructed others to create fake paper trails, falsely suggesting that he had paid, 0r planned to pay, for travel benefits that were actually free. And ADAMS deleted messages with others involved in his misconduct, including, in one instance, assuring a co-conspirator in writing that he “always” deleted her messages.

But contrary to the Attorney General’s misrepresentation, this is not just about airplane upgrades (or luxury hotels in Türkiye).

The indictment describes how Adams repeatedly laundered Turkish donations through straw donors in the US. Both Bondi and Mizelle keep suggesting to their audience that … none of this matters, none of this — charged as foreign donations exceeding $25,000 in both 2021 and 2023 — compromises New York City governance and US security.

b. On June 14, 2018, the Turkish Official exchanged messages with the Adams Staffer, asking “how much can companies donate?” 1 The Adams Staffer explained that only individuals could donate to the 2021 Campaign.

c. On June 22, 2018, ADAMS attended a fundraiser for the 2021 Campaign. The Airline Manager, among others, organized and attended the event. Following the event, the Turkish Official messaged the Adams Staffer, asking for the “list of the participants of the June 22 meeting,” The Adams Staffer then sent the Turkish Official ”The list for 6/22/18,” which included the names of various persons who donated to the 2021 Campaign in the preceding days or who donated in the following days, raising in excess of $15,000.

d. A promotional flyer for the June 22, 2018 fundraiser listed as one of the fundraiser’s hosts a friend of the Airline Manager who owned an airport transportation business (“Businessman-2”), In a series of messages exchanged with the Adams Staffer, Businessman-2 stated that he had facilitated a straw donation through an associate, Records from the CFB show that the associate ultimately donated $3,000 in his own name and described himself as unemployed.

[snip]

20. ERIC ADAMS, the defendant, also sought to arrange for his campaigns to receive unlawful contributions from Turkish nationals, which would be routed through U.S.-based straw donors.

a. On June 22, 2018-the same day as the fundraising event just describedthe Adams Staffer and the Promoter discussed by text message a possible trip by ADAMS to Turkey. The Promoter stated, in part, “Fund Raising in Turkey is not legal, but I think I can raise money for your campaign off the record.” The Adams Staffer inquired, “How will [ADAMS] declare that money here?” The Promoter responded, “He won’t declare it … Or … We’ll make the donation through an American citizen in the U.S …. A Turk … I’ll give cash to him in Turkey … Or I’ll send it to an American … He will make a donation to you.” The Adams Staffer replied, “I think he wouldn’t get involved in such games. They might cause a big stink later on,” but “I’ll ask anyways.” The Adams Staffer then asked, “how much do you think would come from you? $?” The Promoter responded, ”Max $100K.” The Adams Staffer wrote, “100K? Do you have a chance to transfer that here? … We can’t do it while Eric is in Turkey,” to which the Promoter replied, ”Let’s think.” After this conversation, the Adams Staffer asked ADAMS whether the Adams Staffer should pursue the unlawful foreign contributions offered by the Promoter, and contrary to the Adams Staffer’s expectations, ADAMS directed that the Adams Staffer pursue the Promoter’s illegal scheme.

b. In November 2018, Businessman-1-the wealthy Turkish national who owned the Turkish University, a for-profit educational conglomerate in Turkey, and whom ADAMS met there in 2015-visited New York City. ADAMS and the Adams Staffer met with Businessman-1 at Brooklyn Borough Hall. At the close of the meeting, Businessman-1 offered to contribute funds to the 2021 Campaign. Although ADAMS knew that Businessman-1 was a Turkish national who could not lawfully contribute to U.S. elections, ADAMS directed the Adams Staffer to obtain the illegal contributions offered by Businessman-1. Following up on this directive, ADAMS wrote to the Adams Staffer that Businessman-1 “is ready to help. I don’t want his willing to help be waisted [sic].” As ADAMS directed, the Adams Staffer maintained contact with Businessman-1 through intermediaries, culminating in ADAMS accepting straw donations of Businessman-1’s money, discussed below.

[snip]

b. On July 11, 2021, the Adams Staffer asked the Promoter how much would be donated, explaining in a message that she needed to “tell [ADAMS] a net number.” When the Promoter estimated between $35,000 and $50,000, the Adams Staffer replied that the Promoter earlier “had mentioned 200K.” When the Promoter explained that the requisite number of straw donors could not be gathered, the Adams Staffer offered to help with that aspect of the scheme. The Promoter responded, ”Hnnnm then great,” and when the Adams Staffer then wrote “From what I gathered you’ll distribute the money,” the Promoter responded “Yes.” The Adams Staffer later told ADAMS that the estimated total amount of the foreign donations would be $45,000.

c. In August 2021, the Promoter, the Adams Staffer, and the president of the Turkish University’s American campus (the “University President”) exchanged messages and voice notes explicitly discussing the plan to funnel Businessman-1 ‘s contribution to the 2021 Campaign through the Turkish University’s U.S.-based employees. The Promoter assured the Adams Staffer that those employees are “[U.S.] citizens and green card holders.” The Adams Staffer told ADAMS about the plan to funnel Businessman-1 ‘s contribution through U.S.-based straw donors, and ADAMS approved the plan, knowing that Businessman-1 was a Turkish citizen.

[snip]

b. The Adams Fundraiser suggested that the true foreign donors make their contributions through straw donors considerably in advance of the event at which ADAMS would meet the true foreign donors, so that the event did not appear connected to the contributions. As the Adams Staffer explained to the Adams Fundraiser in a text message regarding the planned attendees, “Mayor knows most of them from turkey[.] The People who has business here as well.” The Adams Staffer and the Promoter agreed to execute this plan, which ADAMS approved.

c. The Adams Fundraiser, the Promoter, and the Adams Staffer scheduled an event for September 20, 2023 in a private room at a Manhattan hotel. To conceal the event’s true purpose, the Promoter provided a PowerPoint presentation billing the event as a dinner hosted by “International Sustainability Leaders” with the subject “Sustainable Destinations” and an attendance price of $5,000. The event was not publicized or listed on ADAMS’s public calendar. The Adams Fundraiser entered the event on ADAMS’s private calendar as a “Fundraiser for Eric Adams 2025,” with the host listed as the Promoter, a goal of”25k,” and the note “Total Submitted before the event: $22,800.”

d. Prior to the scheduled fundraiser, the Promoter collected payments of $5,000 or more from attendees, many of whom were foreign nationals. The Promoter then used a portion of the attendees’ payments to make straw donations to the 2025 Campaign, by sending cash from the foreign national donors to the Adams Staffer. The Adams Staffer then distributed $2,100 in cash to at least three straw donors who each made an online $2,100 contribution to the 2025 Campaign

In other words, to sustain her claims of weaponization before the braying mob, the Attorney General of the United States completely dismisses the import of public officials secretly being on the take of foreign powers.

And all that’s before the efforts to lie to the FBI and destroy evidence with which SDNY was poised to charge the Mayor, before Emil Bove intervened just in time, a planned indictment about which Bondi had personal notice.

As you know, our office is prepared to seek a superseding indictment from a new grand jury under my leadership. We have proposed a superseding indictment that would add an obstruction conspiracy count based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI, and that would add further factual allegations regarding his participation in a fraudulent straw donor scheme.

In her first big public appearance, in her public effort to substantiate her claims of weaponization, Pam Bondi lied. She lied about threats to America. She lied about foreign influence peddling. She lied to cover up lies to the FBI. She even lied — or perhaps simply confessed a white non-resident’s terror — about the New York Subway.

In her first big public appearance, Pam Bondi lied to cover up the true nature of allegations charged against a corrupt Democrat.

Listen on Spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

Wow. Judge Dale Ho came up with a remarkable approach to deal with DOJ’s request to dismiss the Eric Adams prosecution.

First, he canceled the trial for now, taking away one of DOJ’s major claimed problems with the case against Eric Adams. He also said that Adams doesn’t have to show up at any hearings for now.

Then, he asked Paul Clement — as opposed to the several people who offered to serve as an amicus to help him consider the issue — to address the following questions.

1) The legal standard for leave to dismiss an indictment under Rule 48(a);

2) Whether, and to what extent, a court may consider materials other than the Rule 48(a) motion itself;

3) Under what circumstances, if any, additional procedural steps and/or further inquiry would be appropriate before resolving a Rule 48(a) motion;

4) Under what circumstances, if leave is granted, dismissal should be with or without prejudice;

5) If leave were denied under Rule 48(a), what practical consequences would follow, including whether dismissal would nevertheless be appropriate or necessary under other rules or legal principles (e.g., for “unnecessary delay” under Rule 48(b) or under speedy trial principles, see United States v. N.V. Nederlandsche Combinatie Voor Chemische Industrie, 453 F. Supp. 462, 463 (S.D.N.Y. 1978)); and

6) Any other issues the parties or amicus consider relevant to the Court’s resolution of the Government’s motion.

Clement was George W Bush’s Solicitor General and has argued a slew of cases before the Supreme Court. Like we assume Danielle Sassoon and Hagan Scotten will someday be, he’s a right wing legal superstar; Clement was, like Sassoon, an Antonin Scalia clerk.

As several people have noted, the language Ho used to justify appointing an amicus is language that invoked Clement’s appointment in another important case, by name.

Accordingly, to assist with its decision-making via an adversarial process, the Court exercises its inherent authority to appoint Paul Clement of Clement & Murphy PLLC as amicus curiae to present arguments on the Government’s Motion to Dismiss. See Seila L. LLC v. Consumer Fin. Prot. Bureau, 591 U.S. 197, 209 (2020) (“Because the Government agrees with petitioner on the merits of the constitutional question, we appointed Paul Clement to defend the judgment below as amicus curiae. He has ably discharged his responsibilities.”)

So one of Joe Biden’s most liberal appointees hired one of the most prominent conservative lawyers in the country.

The Other Half of the AI relationship

Part 2- Pareidolia as a Service

(Go to Part One) (Go to Part Three)

When trying to understand AI, and in particular Large Language Models, we spend a lot of time concentrating on their architectures, structures, and outputs. We look at them with a technical eye. We peer so close and attentively to AI that we lose track of the fact that we’re looking into a mirror.

The source of all AI’s power and knowledge is humanity’s strange work. It’s human in form and content, and only humans use and are used by it. It is a portion of our collective consciousness, stripped down to bare metal, made to fit into databases and mathematical sets.

So what is humanity’s strange work, and where does it come from? It is the product of processes on an old water world. Humans are magical, but our magic is old magic: the deep time of Life on Earth. We’ve had a few billion years to get the way we are, and we are surrounded by our equally ancient brethren, be they snakes or trees or tsetse flies. Our inescapable truth is that we are Earth, and Earth is us. We are animals, specifically quasi-eusocial omnivore toolmaking mammals. We are the current-last-stop on an evolutionary strategy based on meat overthinking things. Because of our overthinking meat, we are also the authors of the non-animal empires of thought and matter on this planet, a planet we have changed irrevocably.

We are dealing with that too.

So when try to understand AI, we have to start with how our evolutionary has shaped our ability to understand. One of the mammalian qualities at play in the AI relationship is the ability to turn just being around something into a comfortable and warm love towards that thing. Just because it’s there, consistently there, we will develop and affection for it, whatever it is. The name for this in psychology is the Mere Exposure Effect. Like every human quality, the Mere Exposure Effect isn’t unique to humans. The affections of Mere Exposure seem common to many tetrapods. It’s also one of the warmest, sweetest things about being an Earthling.

The idea is that if you’re with something for a while, and it fails to harm you over time, you kind of bond with it. The “it” could be neighbor you’ve never talked to but wave at every morning, a bird that regularly visits your backyard, a beloved inanimate object that sits in your living room. You can fall in a small kind of love with all these things, and knowing that they’re there just makes the day better. If they vanish or die, it can be quite distressing, even though you might feel like you have no right to really mourn.

You may not have really known them, but you also loved them in a small way, and it hurts to lose them. This psychological effect is hardly unique to us, many animals collect familiarities. But humans, as is our tendency, go *maybe* a little too far with it. Take a 1970s example: The Pet Rock.

Our Little Rock Friends

The Pet Rock was the brain child of an advertising man named Gary Dahl. In 1975 he decided he would see if he could sell the perfect pet, one that would never require walking or feeding, or refuse to be patted or held.

Rocks! Exciting!

Your pet rock (a smooth river stone) came in a cardboard pet rock carrier lined with straw, and you received a care and training manual with each one. The joke went over so well that even though they were only on sale for a few months, Dahl became a millionaire. Ever the prankster, he took the money and opened a bar in California named Carrie Nation’s Saloon, after a leader of the temperance movement. But the pet rock just kept going even after he’d left it behind.

The Pet Rock passed from prank gift to cultural icon in America. President Reagan purportedly had one. It appeared in movies and TV shows regularly. Parents refused children’s request for animals with: “You couldn’t take care of a pet rock.” There was a regular pet rock in Sesame Street; a generation of American children grew up watching a rock being loved and cared for by a muppet.

People still talk about strong feelings towards their pet rocks, and they’ve seen a resurgence. The pet rock was re-released in 2023 as a product tie in with the movie Everything Everywhere all at Once. The scene from the movies with two smooth river stones, adorned in googly eyes and talking to each other, was a legitimate tear jerker. People love to love things, even when the things they love are rocks. People see meaning in everything, and sometimes decide that fact gives everything meaning. And maybe we’re right to do so. I can’t think of a better mission for humanity than seeing meaning into the universe.

When considering this aspect what we (humans) are like, it’s easy to see how the anodyne and constant comfort of a digital assistant is designed, intentionally or not, to make us like them. They are always there. They feel more like a person than a rock, a volleyball, or even a neighbor you wave at. If you don’t keep a disciplined mind while engaging with a chatbot, it’s *hard to not* anthropomorphize them. You can see them as an existential threat, a higher form of life, a friend, or a trusted advisor, but it’s very hard to see them as a next word Markov chain running on top of a lot of vector math and statistics. Because of this, we are often the least qualified to judge how good an AI is. They become our friends, gigawatt buddies we’re rooting for.

They don’t even have to be engineered to charm us, and they aren’t. We’ve been engineered by evolution to be charmed. Just as we can form a parasocial relationship with someone we don’t know and won’t ever meet, we can come to love a trinket or a book or even an idea with our whole hearts. What emotional resistance can we mount to an ersatz friend who is always ready to help us? It is perfectly designed, intentionally or not, to defeat objective evaluation.

Our Other Little Complicated Rock Friends

Practically from day one, even when LLMs sucked, people bonded with this non-person who is always ready to talk to us. We got into fights with it, we asked it for help, we treated it like a person. This interferes (sometimes catastrophically) with the task of critically analyzing them. As we are now, we struggle to look at AI in its many forms: writing and making pictures and coding and analyzing, and see it for what it is. We look at this collection of math sets and see love, things we hate, things we aspire to, or fear. We see ourselves, we see humanity in them, how could we not? Humans are imaginative and emotional. We will see *anything* we want to see in them, except a bunch of statistical math and vectors applied to language and image datasets.

I was bawling my eyes out by this scene.

In reality, they are tokenized human creativity, remixed and fed back to us. However animated the products of an AI are, they’re not alive. We animate AI, when we train it, and when we’re using it. It had no magic on its own and nothing about the current approach promises to us to something as complicated as a mouse, much less a human.

Many of us experience AI as a human we’ve built out of human metaphors. It’s from weirding world, a realm of spirits and oracles. We might see it as a perfect servant, happy to be subjected. Or as a friend that doesn’t judge us. Our metaphors are often of enchantment, bondage and servitude, it can get weird.

Sometimes we see a near-miraculous and powerful creativity, with amazing art emerging out of a machine of vectors and stats. Sometime we have the perfect slave, completely fulfilled by the opportunity to please us. Sometime we see it as an unchallenging beloved that lets us retreat from the world of real flawed humans full of feelings and flaws and blood. How we see it says a lot more about us than we might want to admit, but very little about AI.

AI has no way to prompt itself, no way to make any new coherent thing without us. It’s not conscious. It’s not any closer to being a thinking, feeling thing than a sliderule is, or a database full of slide rule results, or a digitally modeled slide rule. It’s not creative in the human sense, it is generative. It’s not intelligent. It’s hallucinating everything it says, even the true things. They are true by accident, just as AI deceives by accident. It’s never malicious, or kind, but it also can’t help imitating humans. We are full of feelings and bile. We lie all the time, but we always tell another truth when we do it. Our AI creations mimic us, because we’re they’re data.

They don’t feel like we do or feel for us. But they inevitably tell us that they do, because in the history of speaking we’ve said that so much to each other. We believe them, can’t help but believe them even when we know better, because everything in the last 2.3 billion years have taught us to believe in, and even fear, the passions of all the living things on Earth.

AI isn’t a magical system, but to the degree that it can seem that way, the magic comes from us. Not just in terms of the training set, but in terms of a chain of actions that breathes a kind of apparent living animation into a complicated set of math models. It is not creative, or helpful, or submissive, or even in a very real way, *there.* But it’s still easy to love, because we love life, and nothing in our 2.3 billion years prepared us for simulacrum of life we’ve built.

It’s just terribly hard for people to keep that in mind when they’re talking to something that seems so much like a someone. And, in this age of social media-scaled cynicism, to remember how magical life really is.

This is the mind with which we approach our creations; unprepared to judge the simulacrum of machines of loving grace, and unaware of how amazing we really are.

(Go to Part One) (Go to Part Three)

As we wait for Judge Dale Ho to rule on whether he’ll dismiss the Eric Adams case, I want to return to a point I made here, because it may change the import of an exchange that occurred in the hearing on Wednesday.

Ho doesn’t just preside over Eric Adams’ case. He also presides over the case of Erden Arkan, the construction company owner implicated in organizing straw donors supporting Adams. Arkan already pled guilty to conspiring to arrange those straw donors on January 10.

And as of a few weeks ago, Ho was meant to preside over the case of Mohamed Bahi, a former top Adams aide implicated in the straw donor conspiracy.

On Thursday, February 6, prosecutors — including the now-resigned Hagan Scotten, Derek Wikstrom (whom Emil Bove put on leave along with Scotten last week), as well as Celia Cohen and Andrew Rohrbach (who along with the others, withdrew from the Adams case last Friday and whose leave status is unclear) — filed a notice of a related case.

In addition to Adams and Arkan, both before Ho, it listed Mohamed Bahi as a related case at that point pending before Judge Analisa Torres.

The Government respectfully submits this letter regarding the three above-referenced cases, which arise out of related conduct and concern co-conspirators.

[snip]

On January 10, 2025, the Government filed Information 25 Cr. 13 (DEH), charging defendant Erden Arkan in one count with conspiracy to violate the laws of the United States, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371. The charged object of that conspiracy is committing wire fraud through the collection of campaign contributions made under the name of someone other than the true contributor, and the subsequent request for public funds based on the misrepresentation that those contributions originated from the named contributor. Arkan was initially assigned to Judge Vargas, but was transferred to Judge Ho pursuant to the District’s related case procedures. Also on January 10, 2025, Arkan pled guilty before Judge Ho to the sole count of the Information. The conduct for which Arkan pled guilty forms a part of the conduct charged in Counts One and Two of the Adams Indictment, and Arkan is identified in the Adams Indictment as “Businessman-5.” (See United States v. Adams, 24 Cr. 556 (DEH), Dkt. 1 ¶ 30).

On February 6, 2025, the Government filed a notice of intent to file an information charging Mohamed Bahi in a single count with conspiracy to violate the laws of the United States, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371. The charged object of that conspiracy, as in Arkan, is committing wire fraud through the collection of campaign contributions made under the name of someone other than the true contributor, and the subsequent request for public funds based on the misrepresentation that those contributions originated from the named contributor. The conduct charged in the Bahi information forms part of the conduct charged in Counts One and Two of the Adams Indictment, and Bahi is identified in the Adams Indictment as “Adams Employee-1.” (See United States v. Adams, 24 Cr. 556 (DEH), Dkt. 1 ¶ 28.a). In connection with that case, Bahi has indicated that he intends to plead guilty to the sole count of the Information against him. [links added]

This notice appears in the Adams docket and the Arkan one. But as far as I can tell, there’s no (unsealed) Bahi criminal docket; if there were or is one, the notice of related case should have landed on the docket before Judge Ho within a day — that is, perhaps the same day that Emil Bove ordered Danielle Sassoon to kill the prosecution against Adams.

When Mohamed Bahi, a former top Adams aide, was first charged in October, he was charged with two counts of obstruction, not the wire fraud conspiracy described to be the subject of the Information to which he would plead guilty. The FBI affidavit supporting Bahi’s arrest relies on the proffered testimony of Arkan and employees who made straw donations to Adams.

Each of these five witnesses was interviewed by the FBI on or about June 13, 2024, and, in sum and substance, denied having been involved in straw donations. Each of these witnesses was subsequently interviewed, pursuant to proffer agreements and while represented by counsel, and it is these counseled, proffer-protected interviews that are described in this paragraph. Each of these witnesses agreed to speak with law enforcement in the hopes of receiving leniency in connection with this investigation. In the course of proffering with the Government, the Businessman admitted his involvement in straw donations to Official-1’s mayoral campaigns and in an unrelated fraud offense. The information these witnesses have provided has proven reliable and is corroborated by other evidence. [my emphasis]

Which means Arkan is likely the one who told the FBI about conversations he had with Bahi regarding lying to the FBI, conversations in which Bahi told Arkan he had spoken to Adams before and after Arkan and his employees lied to the FBI on June 13, 2024.

c. During the private meeting between BAHI and the Businessman on or about June 13, 2024, BAHI told the Businessman that he had just spoken with Official-1. BAHI then asked the Businessman to describe his interactions with the FBI. After the Businessman told BAHI that the Businessman had denied having funded straw donations to Official-1 when questioned by the FBI, BAHI advised the Businessman that if he continued to tell that lie to federal investigators the Businessman would be ok.

d. BAHI then met with the Businessman and the four Donors. BAHI asked each of them to describe their interactions with the FBI. BAHI took photographs of the grand jury subpoenas that had been served on the Donors and the Businessman.

e. During the meeting between BAHI, the Businessman, and the four Donors, BAHI encouraged the Donors to lie to federal investigators by denying that they had made straw donations to the 2021 Official-1 Campaign, and remarked that because the Donors’ contributions to the 2021 Official-1 Campaign had been reimbursed in cash, the FBI would be unable to prove that the reimbursements had occurred.

f. On or about June 14, 2024, BAHI again met with the Businessman. During that meeting, BAHI indicated to the Businessman, in substance and in part, that BAHI had met with Official-1, and that Official-1 believed that the Businessman would not cooperate with law enforcement. [my emphasis]

But the notice of related case doesn’t say Bahi was pleading to those obstruction charges. Rather, he was pleading to the straw donor conspiracy, just like Arkan.

On February 7, Wikstrom (whom Emil Bove put on leave to prevent him from doing any more “targeting” of Eric Adams), got a third continuance in the Bahi case, until March 10.

3. The defendant, defense counsel, and the Government have entered into a written plea agreement to resolve this case, and are in the process of having the case assigned to a district judge and scheduling a waiver-of-indictment and change-of-plea hearing. Such a hearing has not yet been scheduled, and the parties do not anticipate being able to hold it before the February 7, 2025 deadline under the Speedy Trial Act.

4. Therefore, the Government is requesting a 30-day continuance until March 10, 2025, to finalize the foregoing discussions and reach a disposition of this matter. Defense counsel Derek Adams, Esq. has consented to this request. This application has been authorized by Assistant United States Attorney Jane Kim, Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division.

That means several things.

First, the continuances, plus the swap of the straw donor conspiracy for the obstruction charges, suggests that Bahi has likely also been chatty about what went down, and perhaps not just in those conservations with Mayor Adams before and after he allegedly convinced Arkan to lie to the FBI.

That’s almost certainly what Danielle Sassoon was talking about when she described a planned obstruction indictment to Pam Bondi.

As you know, our office is prepared to seek a superseding indictment from a new grand jury under my leadership. We have proposed a superseding indictment that would add an obstruction conspiracy count based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI, and that would add further factual allegations regarding his participation in a fraudulent straw donor scheme.

But it also means that if the Information is not filed by March 10 (or another continuance obtained from whatever judge is presiding over the case), it would disappear of its own accord on Speedy Trial grounds.

Who knows what the status of all that is? Who knows what happened between February 7, when Wikstrom said they were going to file an Information and asked to move Bahi’s case before Judge Ho, and February 13, when Bove put him on leave?

The fact that there’s an all-but indicted conspiracy charge against Adams, possibly already before Ho, with a statute of limitations that extends to 2029, changes the import of several things said in Wednesday’s hearing (as captured here by Anna Bower). When Ho asked Bove if there were limits on what DOJ could charge going forward, Ho likely knew that meant that DOJ would have something over Adams for almost the entire balance of Trump’s [presumed] term.

Judge Ho wonders aloud whether there are “any limits” to the Department’s ability to re-indict Adams later on. In reply, Bove mentions some “standard” limitations on the Justice Department’s discretion. For example, he says, there could be time limits related to the statute of limitations or the Speedy Trial Act. The Justice Department may or may not revisit the case at another time, he adds, but there aren’t any plans for that at this time.

Judge Ho follows up by asking whether the Justice Department is contemplating any additional “investigative” steps.

No, Bove replies.

And then, seemingly right after that exchange, Ho turned back to Adams and asked about this, Adams — under oath — told Judge Ho that he had not committed a crime. After which Ho reminded Adams that he can consult his lawyer before he asserts, under oath, that he didn’t commit a crime.

Turning back to Adams, the judge asks whether he understands all of this.

“I have not committed a crime. I don’t see them bringing it back. I’m not afraid of that,” the mayor replies.

At this, Judge Ho reminds Adams that he can consult with his lawyer at any point during this hearing.

“I appreciate that because I failed my law class,” Adams quips in response.

If I were Adams, I’d be stewing over claiming to Judge Ho that, “I have not committed a crime,” just before Ho advised him he should consult with his lawyers before he says anything stupid, under oath, for fear of committing a new crime before a judge who has more leeway to police things that go on in his courtroom.

And the fact that a mostly-charged obstruction charge against Adams is or was supposed to be before Dale Ho changes a number of factors in his consideration of the public interest. Bahi’s charges may expire within days (unless that Information did get filed). But Arkan will get sentenced over the summer regardless of what happens — and if prosecutors aren’t involved, he won’t get the benefit of any cooperation. That’s not fair to him.

At the very least, Ho has a very good sense of what would be hanging over Adams’ head for the next three-plus years, a threat that — just as the indictment itself does — might impact his ability to govern.

Dale Ho’s docket makes it pretty clear that Emil Bove intervened when he did to prevent SDNY from describing the full extent of Mayor Adams alleged efforts to obstruct an investigation into his actions.

But it’s not clear how well Bove succeeded.

Update: Wow. One of Joe Biden’s most liberal judges appointed conservative Republican Paul Clement to serve as his amicus.

ORDER as to Eric Adams. On February 19, 2025, the Court held a conference on the Government’s Motion to Dismiss the Indictment in this matter under Rule 48(a), see ECF No. 122. In light of the Government’s motion and the representations of the parties during the conference, it is clear that trial in this matter will not go forward on April 21. Accordingly, trial is ADJOURNED SINE DINE. The Order setting a pretrial schedule, ECF No. 87, is hereby vacated, and all deadlines set forth therein are also ADJOURNED SINE DIE….[*** See this Order ***]… Accordingly, to assist with its decision-making via an adversarial process, the Court exercises its inherent authority to appoint Paul Clement of Clement & Murphy PLLC as amicus curiae to present arguments on the Government’s Motion to Dismiss. See Seila L. LLC v. Consumer Fin. Prot. Bureau, 591 U.S. 197, 209 (2020) (“Because the Government agrees with petitioner on the merits of the constitutional question, we appointed Paul Clement to defend the judgment below as amicus curiae. He has ably discharged his responsibilities.”). The Court expresses its gratitude to Mr. Clement for his service and will provide Mr. Clement a copy of this Order and the transcript from the February 19 conference. It is hereby ORDERED that the parties and amicus curiae shall address: 1) The legal standard for leave to dismiss an indictment under Rule 48(a); 2) Whether, and to what extent, a court may consider materials other than the Rule 48(a) motion itself; 3) Under what circumstances, if any, additional procedural steps and/or further inquiry would be appropriate before resolving a Rule 48(a) motion; 4) Under what circumstances, if leave is granted, dismissal should be with or without prejudice; 5) If leave were denied under Rule 48(a), what practical consequences would follow, including whether dismissal would nevertheless be appropriate or necessary under other rules or legal principles (e.g., for “unnecessary delay” under Rule 48(b) or under speedy trial principles, see United States v. N.V. Nederlandsche Combinatie Voor Chemische Industrie, 453 F. Supp. 462, 463 (S.D.N.Y. 1978)); and 6) Any other issues the parties or amicus consider relevant to the Court’s resolution of the Government’s motion. Briefs shall be due no later than March 7, 2025. If necessary, the Court will hold oral argument at 2:00 p.m. on March 14, 2025. The Court notes that it has considered the parties’ views with respect to the appointment of amicus and concludes that an appointment is appropriate here to assist the court’s decision-making. That is particularly so in light of the public importance of this case, which calls for careful deliberation. The Court reiterates that it understands the importance of prompt resolution of the pending motion and will endeavor to rule expeditiously after briefing (and, if necessary, oral argument) is complete. The adjournment of trial and all related deadlines alleviates any prejudice resulting from a short delay. Moreover, in light of the concerns raised by the parties regarding the Mayor’s responsibilities and the burden of continued court appearances, the Court notes that while Mayor Adams has a right to appear at any future proceedings, he need not do so given the current procedural posture. See Rule 43(b)(3) (“A defendant need not be present” where “[t]he proceeding involves only a conference or hearing on a question of law”). In other words, absent an order of this Court stating otherwise, Mayor Adams need not appear and need not file a notice voluntarily waiving his appearance at future proceedings, if any, on the Government’s Motion to Dismiss. Finally, in light of Mr. Clement’s appointment as amicus, the Court does not believe there is a need for additional amicus participation at this stage. Nevertheless, to ensure that the parties and appointed amicus have an opportunity to respond to arguments made by other amici, if any, any motion for leave to participate as amicus must be filed, with the proposed amicus brief, by February 28, 2025. The Court will not consider any motions for amicus participation after that date. Any opposition to such a motion by a party shall be filed by March 5, 2025. SO ORDERED. (Signed by Judge Dale E. Ho on 2/21/2025) (bw) (Entered: 02/21/2025)

Update, March 4: After reading the transcript of the hearing, I wanted to correct a point: Mayor Adams did consult with Spiro before saying he understood he could be recharged.

THE COURT: OK. And, Mayor Adams, I just want to confirm with you that, under the terms of the motion to which you’re consenting, the government may reindict you on charges arising from the same events underlying your current indictment subject to, you know, prohibitions on protected classes and statute of limitations, but that they could do that in the future in their discretion?

(Defendant confers with counsel)

THE DEFENDANT: Yes, I understand that, Judge. I have not committed a crime and I don’t see them bringing it back. I’m not afraid of that.

THE COURT: OK. Thank you, Mayor Adams. If at any time you want to consult with Mr. Spiro or your legal team, just let me know. It’s really important that, you know, to have a valid understanding of what is happening today, that you have any questions answered before you answer any of mine.

THE DEFENDANT: I appreciate that because I failed my law class. [my emphasis]

Also, Ho’s question about security clearances did pose the hypothetical of a governor of a border state.

THE COURT: And separate and apart from New York’s, the context of New York City, could it apply to other chief executive-type public officials, like the mayor, like a governor of a border state, for example, who also has public safety immigration-related and national security responsibilities, if one of them were ever subject to investigation or prosecution?

I questioned yesterday whether DOGE’s epic misrepresentations in its DOGE receipts page,

is simply a reflection of the ignorance of the DOGE boys Musk has infiltrated into government, the shoddiness of the AI tools they’re using, or simply a disinterest in giving a fuck, because once Elon claims this website says something, the right wing will follow along like sheep.

There’s still a lot of reporting to be done, but thus far outlets have shown that DOGE:

• Took items that added up to $16B and claimed it represented $55B of savings
• Claimed an $8M savings over a multi-year contract represented $8B total savings
• Claimed credit for things that happened under Joe Biden, such as lease cancelations and Jimmy Carter’s death
• Included contracts that haven’t been canceled and ignored costs that such cancelations will necessitate

As I said, thus far, this NPR piece captures how badly the DOGE boys are misunderstanding basic things about federal contracting — and also seeking immediate cuts rather than the kind of gradual reorganization that results in savings over time.

That might support a conclusion that these people are just epically incompetent. Except as DOGE gets caught in its errors, something else is happening: it is attempting to cover up its work.

NYT got a lot of attention calling out the response to one error: DOGE tried to cover up its error.

The DOGE website initially included a screenshot from the federal contracting database showing that the contract’s value was $8 million, even as the DOGE site listed $8 billion in savings. On Tuesday night, around the time this article was published, DOGE removed the screenshot that showed the mismatch, but continued to claim $8 billion in savings. It added a link to the original, incorrect version of the listing showing an $8 billion value.

By Wednesday morning, DOGE had updated its list to show $8 million in savings, though it did not acknowledge the error or explain how it might affect its calculation of total money saved, which remained unchanged. A loss of $8 billion in savings would represent nearly 15 percent of the total savings claimed by DOGE.

Even the $8 million is an upper bound on the amount saved by canceling the contract. Since $2.5 million had already been spent on the contract, according to data on USAspending.gov, that suggests that canceling it saved $5.5 million at most.

This thread, from a pseudonymous person on Xitter whose findings have been corroborated and picked up by others, notes several other attempts to cover up errors:

• DOGE stopped triple-counting one line item
• DOGE was claiming credit for the 80% of an IT contract that had already been spent

But having identified systematic problems (which NPR also did), DOGE not only didn’t make those fixes systematically, but it continues to claim it has identified $55B of savings.

This is a government website.

At some point, the continued claim of savings based on systematic errors, the continued claim of $55B in savings, amounts to fraud. Deliberate deception in service of justifying DOGE.

DOGE has found fraud. The fraud it is engaged in in plain sight on its success page.

The DOGE fraud is coming from inside the house.

That, plus some of the court filings submitted in lawsuits, has led me to suspect something else is going on. It’s not, as the very good NPR piece suggests, that Elon’s DOGE boys don’t know what the fuck they’re looking at, though I have no doubt they don’t (I’m also not sure anyone has a basis to assess their coding; Edward “Big Balls” Coristine’s former colleagues mocked his skills when the learned he had joined DOGE).

“There’s no doubt that these young people [Musk] has working for him are very intelligent coders, genius coders, but they’re limited,” retired senior contracting officer Christopher Byrne said, referring to DOGE team members who have apparently been identifying cuts across government agencies. “They don’t understand the processes, they don’t understand how things work, they don’t understand contracts, they don’t understand grants,” Byrne said.

Rather, I think it stems from the fact that Trump (and Project 2025, in the guise of DOGE) are using an existing entity — the United States Digital Service, an entity set up by Barack Obama — to do something entirely different.

Trump first repurposed USDS on his first day in office, with an Executive Order. That order generally called for DOGE to do the kinds of things it had been doing — technological modernization, of the sort smart engineers might be qualified to do.

Sec. 4. Modernizing Federal Technology and Software to Maximize Efficiency and Productivity. (a) The USDS Administrator shall commence a Software Modernization Initiative to improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology (IT) systems. Among other things, the USDS Administrator shall work with Agency Heads to promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization.

But then on February 11, Trump issued an Executive Order vaguely ordering DOGE to do far more, including firing a shit-ton of people.

To restore accountability to the American public, this order commences a critical transformation of the Federal bureaucracy. By eliminating waste, bloat, and insularity, my Administration will empower American families, workers, taxpayers, and our system of Government itself.

[snip]

Reductions in Force. Agency Heads shall promptly undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force (RIFs), consistent with applicable law, and to separate from Federal service temporary employees and reemployed annuitants working in areas that will likely be subject to the RIFs. All offices that perform functions not mandated by statute or other law shall be prioritized in the RIFs, including all agency diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; all agency initiatives, components, or operations that my Administration suspends or closes; and all components and employees performing functions not mandated by statute or other law who are not typically designated as essential during a lapse in appropriations as provided in the Agency Contingency Plans on the Office of Management and Budget website. This subsection shall not apply to functions related to public safety, immigration enforcement, or law enforcement.

Even the declarations submitted in lawsuits reflect this disjunct. Take the February 13 declaration DOGE member Adam Ramada submitted in a lawsuit the University of California Student’s Association filed against the Department of Education. In ¶3 of his declaration, Ramada describes that Trump’s EO authorizes DOGE to “modernize government technology.”

3. On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14,158, redesignating the United States Digital Service as the United States DOGE Service. The E.O. directs the USDS to modernize government technology and software to increase efficiency and productivity and to follow rigorous data protection standards and comply with all relevant laws when accessing unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems. It likewise directs agencies to ensure USDS has full access to all unclassified agency records and software and IT systems.

But the very next paragraph describes that he has been tasked to do something else.

4. I have been detailed to the Department of Education since 28 January 2025 to, among other things, assist the Department of Education with auditing contract, grant, and related programs for waste, fraud, and abuse, including an audit of the Department of Education’s federal student loan portfolio to ensure it is free from, among other things, fraud, duplication, and ineligible loan recipients. In addition, I help senior Department leadership obtain access to accurate data and data analytics to inform their policy decisions at the Department. One other USDS employee is also currently detailed to the Department of Education to assist me.

Later, the same declaration describes the access that six DOGE personnel have to student data as stemming entirely from a hunt for waste, fraud, and abuse.

9. The relevant employees require access to Department of Education information technology and data systems related to student loan programs in order to audit those programs for waste, fraud, and abuse.

An updated Ramada declaration filed February 16 disputed plaintiffs’ claim that 37 people had access to student information by claiming only six people were implementing Trump’s DOGE order(s). But by that point, technological modernization went completely unmentioned. And Ramada added a hunt for contracts that were “inconsistent with leadership’s policy priorities,” something not in his original declaration.

7. I am aware of the list of thirty-seven individuals whom Plaintiff’s counsel “believe have been given access to one or more ED records systems,” according to Plaintiff’s message to Defendants’ counsel on February 15, 2025. As stated above, there are only six of us at the Department whose primary role is implementing the President’s executive order. I am not aware of any DOGE-affiliated individuals other than the six listed above who have been granted access to Department information technology and data systems or who have otherwise received any Department information protected by the Privacy Act or section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code.

8. Thus far, the six of us have primarily worked to identify contracts and grants that are wasteful, abusive, or inconsistent with leadership’s policy priorities.

9. It came to my attention today that one of the six employees referenced above has not yet completed ethics or information security trainings. He has been directed to complete both this week and has indicated that he will do so. [my emphasis]

In other words, Trump used the pre-existing entity focused on technological modernization as a front to — first — hunt things that Elon Musk called fraud but were really just things he could spin out of context to inflame the mob, and then use that paranoia to start firing masses of people and getting rid of DEI.

This has nothing to do with the technical mandate of USDS. Which may be why the former Director of Data Science at USDS resigned Wednesday.

But given DOGE’s failure to show any fraud yet, it likely also has little to do with finding waste, fraud or abuse.

DOGE’s “receipts” page appears to be cover, something to show to credulous Republicans to convince them this effort is in pursuit of something good, a hunt for waste, fraud, and abuse. But hidden within a claim to be pursuing technological modernization which got broadened to incorporate an apparently false claim to be hunting fraud is an effort to cut programs appropriated by Congress at scale.

That’s why DOGE’s receipts page is so shoddy. It’s not that the DOGE boys are not accountants, though they are not. It’s that their function is something other than the EO authorizing their work says it is, and the DOGE receipts page exists solely to sustain the fraud that they’re still pursuing waste, fraud, and abuse.

Update: After posting this and calling on Ron Wyden and Patty Murrray to ask GAO to investigate whether DOGE is committing fraud, I learned that GAO confirmed it opened an investigation (at that point limited to DOGE access to Treasury) requested by Wyden and Elizabeth Warren on February 12.

Something funny happened before the hearing in the Emil Bove’s motion to dismiss Eric Adams’ case today (after a long exchange, Judge Dale Ho did not rule on the motion itself).

Pam Bondi’s Chief of Staff Chad Mizelle posted a very long thread on Xitter falsely pretending that this case was only about the single bribery charge against Adams. He focused closely on the way John Roberts’ court has rolled back bribery statutes.

For too long the DOJ has lost its way.

Prosecutorial misconduct and political agendas will no longer be tolerated.

The case against Mayor Adams was just one in a long history of past DOJ actions that represent grave errors of judgement.

This DOJ is going back to basics.

Prosecuting the mayor of America’s largest city raises unique concerns.

I want to focus on one aspect: The legal theories underpinning SDNY’s case and the particularly expansive reading of public corruption law adopted by the prosecutors in this action.

To win a bribery conviction against a public official, DOJ must show some official act in exchange for benefits — a quid pro quo. What is the official act alleged in this indictment?

Well, the main event took place before Adams was even Mayor.

In September 2021, when Adams was a candidate for office, [1] a person associated with the Turkish government allegedly asked Adams to help ensure the swift opening of a new Turkish consulate in NY in advance of a visit from Turkey’s leader.

So here is a key question: How do these facts as alleged in the indictment stack up against the case law? Let’s start with a history lesson.

EVERY TIME DOJ has pursued expansive theories of public corruption, the Department has been rebuked by the Supreme Court. Put simply, DOJ’s track record of public corruption cases at the Supreme Court is abysmal.

In 2024, DOJ lost 6-3 in Snyder v. US, where SCOTUS overturned the conviction of an Indiana mayor who was convicted of federal bribery in connection with supposedly illegal gratuities. The Court rejected DOJ’s theory that accepting gratuities constituted quid pro quo bribery.

The year before, in 2023, DOJ unanimously lost two cases in the Supreme Court—both brought by prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

In Ciminelli v. United States, The Supreme Court unanimously tossed the wire fraud conviction in connection with former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s “Buffalo Billion” initiative, calling DOJ’s theory of criminal liability “invalid.”

And in Percoco v. United States, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the government’s theory about when private citizens can be liable for honest-services fraud in a case involving Governor Cuomo’s former executive secretary.

By the way, both Ciminelli and Percoco were decided on the same day, May 11, 2023. What a stunning rebuke to the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York — Losing 18-0 in a single day.

Then there is Kelly v. United States from 2020, unanimously overturning the conviction of New Jersey officials involved in the so-called “Bridgegate” matter by, again, faulting the government for defining federal fraud too broadly.

Before then, SCOTUS unanimously repudiated the United States’ prosecution of Gov. Bob McDonnell in 2016, again faulting DOJ’s expansive theories of bribery. SCOTUS in Skilling v. United States in 2010 similarly rejected DOJ’s theory of honest-services fraud as overly broad.

And finally, when DOJ prosecuted Senator Ted Stevens for failing to report gifts, DOJ ended up having to dismiss the indictment even after obtaining a conviction, because prosecutors egregiously failed to disclose material evidence to the defense.

Clearly, this history and case law underscores the legal risks associated with prosecuting Mayor Adams. DOJ could win a bribery conviction against a public official only by showing some official act in exchange for benefits.

The alleged official act in the indictment, however, took place before Adams was mayor. And one of the main benefits that the Mayor allegedly received was campaign contributions. [2] But all successful politicians, no matter the party, receive campaign contributions.

In the Adams case, SDNY was rolling the dice. And given the DOJ’s abysmal history of losing at the Supreme Court, the odds were against the DOJ. Even the district judge said at a recent hearing that there was “some force” to Adams’s challenges to the gov’ts central legal theory.

The government must tread particularly carefully before classifying contributions a crime given the First Amendment implications of such a theory.

Additionally, the amount of resources it takes to bring a prosecution like this is incredible — thousands and thousands of man hours. Those resources could better be used arresting violent criminals to keep New York safe or prosecuting gang and cartel members.

Given the history, DOJ had to decide—among other issues—whether to keep going down a road that the Supreme Court has viewed with skepticism on numerous occasions. Dismissing the prosecution was absolutely the right call. END.

• • •

Mizelle is not wrong, at all, about the Roberts’ court’s disinterest in public corruption. They are, at least some of them, aficionados of it!

But along the way, Mizelle addressed only the bribery charge — the sole charge that Adams’ lawyers moved to dismiss.

Even there, Mizelle was playing loose with the record. The quote (from Judge Ho’s opinion rejecting the challenge) that Adams’ argument has “some force” only applies to one of two theories of bribery adopted by SDNY.

Mayor Adams takes particular issue with the Government’s first theory, arguing that— even leaving aside Snyder—being “influenced in connection with the City of New York’s regulation of the Turkish House” is simply too general or vague to constitute the requisite quo for bribery under § 666. Def. Reply Br. at 6–7; see also Def. Br. at 11. He contends that the words “business,” “transaction,” and “series of transactions” in § 666 refer to “specific and concrete governmental actions, not abstract or general objectives.” Def. Br. at 10. He further argues that to the extent the word “business” could be read broadly, it should not be—because that would render the terms “transaction” and “series of transactions” superfluous. Id. Adams seeks, in effect, to imbue the quo element of § 666 with a degree of specificity that, even if not identical to McDonnell’s “official act,” embodies a “core requirement [that] would be the same: . . . a specific and formal exercise of governmental power.” Def. Br. at 10.

Mayor Adams’s arguments on this point have some force.

Judge Ho didn’t say the same about the theory that Adams paid off Türkiye’s favors by helping them get into their new consulate.

Separately, regardless of whether the “regulation” of the Turkish House is specific enough to form the requisite quo at the indictment stage, there is no real dispute that the issuance of a TCO is a specific and formal exercise of governmental power

Furthermore, Mizelle claimed at [1] that Adams was just a candidate. While Adams was not yet Mayor (though he had won the Democratic primary) he was Borough President when he sent some texts to get the FDNY to approve the building. As Judge Ho noted in his opinion, whether Adams used his authority as Borough President to deliver a quo to Türkiye was a matter for a jury to decide.

Mayor Adams makes a separate but related argument that, even if formal authority is unnecessary, a pressure theory still requires that a defendant “us[e] his official position to exert pressure on another official.” McDonnell, 579 U.S. at 574 (emphasis added). Adams contends that the Indictment fails to allege that any pressure he exerted on the FDNY stemmed from his official position as Brooklyn Borough President. See Def. Br. at 19. Rather, he argues, “the government is effectively claiming that Adams used his potential future position as Mayor to exert pressure on officials.” Id.

But the Indictment alleges that, “as Brooklyn Borough President, [Adams] met with members of the FDNY from time to time,” Ind. ¶ 38a, and the Government argues that it will prove at trial that it was Adams’s position as Brooklyn Borough President that “[got] him in the room, as it were, with the fire commissioner” in order to exert pressure regarding the TCO. Tr. at 33; see also id. at 34 (arguing that the jury could conclude that “the defendant was using his official position as Brooklyn Borough president to let him reach out [to] the fire commissioner on city business with the mayor, that’s what got him a room”). Ultimately, whether or not Adams used his official position as Brooklyn Borough President to exert pressure on the FDNY is a factual question for a jury to resolve.

So even on the bribery count, Mizelle was playing loose with the record.

But then he dismissed the other allegations in the indictment — which, again, Adams’ lawyers didn’t challenge as a matter of law — which include wire fraud, soliciting straw donors, and accepting illegal campaign contributions from foreigners, as mere campaign donations.

Pam Bondi’s Chief of Staff treated gifts from foreign powers as if they’re totally legal.

Noted.

That far, anyway, Chad Mizelle’s little screed looked thoroughly dishonest. But I didn’t doubt his — and by extension, DOJ’s — opposition to the enforcement of bribery statutes.

But at 2:37 ET, shortly after I was reading the rant Mizelle posted at 12:42, I was alerted to this development: an information setting up a one count guilty plea by former DC official Dana McDaniel, in a scheme that is almost certainly related the charges filed against former DC Council Member Trayon White last September. The information was signed by Acting DC US Attorney Ed Martin, one of Pam Bondi’s trusted operatives.

Pam Bondi’s DOJ doesn’t have a categorical opposition to bribery charges, it turns out.

Only bribery charges against those from whom they want something in exchange.

Trump is having a tantrum because Volodymyr Zelenskyy called out Trump for parroting Russia disinformation.

The President sent out a post riddled with false claims, including that Zelenskyy has admitted to losing half the money the US has given.

Politifact debunked that claim earlier this month (while catching Elon Musk in — gasp!! — a lie about it).

“One-hundred billion (dollars) of these 177, or 200, some people even say, we have never received,” Zelenskyy said, according to the translation of the clip. “We are talking about specific things, because we got it not with money but with weapons. We got $70 something billion worth of it. There is training, there is additional transport. There are not only prices for weapons, there were humanitarian programs, social et cetera.”

It was not clear what exactly Zelenskyy was including in his accounting of the military support Ukraine has received, but his comments align with the public data on how Ukraine aid is being spent.

The money is not missing or laundered, as some posts claimed. It’s being spent as Congress intended: on U.S. weapons manufacturing, nonmilitary support in Ukraine and support elsewhere in the region.

I’m particularly interested in the disinformation that Trump and Elon are spreading about the money Ukraine has received (though this is not new — it’s one way Trump undercut support for funding last year).

As you know, I’ve been pretty obsessed (one, two, three) by the way that Trump and DOGE have repeatedly pointed to fraud identified by some of the Inspectors General that Trump fired to substantiate their claim there are hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud to find.

Effectively, DOGE is using Trump’s own mismanagement of COVID to justify their assault on the federal government.

But that’s not the only subgroup of Inspectors General Trump targeted on his fourth day on the job. By terminating State Department Inspector General Cardell Richardson and DOD Inspector General Robert Storch, followed weeks later by Paul Martin after he released a report showing the impact of cuts on USAID, Trump has fired the main people responsible for oversight of aid to Ukraine.

Indeed, both Richardson and Storch talked about how their firing will disrupt the work of tracking the aid to Ukraine.

In his declaration submitted with their wrongful termination lawsuit, Richardson emphasized that by firing him, Trump has prevented him from continuing to supervise that oversight work.

4. The work of the OIG advances U.S. foreign policy objectives and the nation’s national security. For instance, my office was responsible for overseeing programs that provided funding to support Ukraine in its war against Russia. Overseeing programs that fund initiatives in other countries makes OIG’s work uniquely challenging.

5. This crucial work is ongoing, and my unlawful termination has prevented me from continuing to supervise it during my lawful term of office.

And Storch tied his role in supervising Ukraine funding to key national security interests. He specifically described the import of tracking “the most sensitive equipment and technology provided to Ukraine.”

3. The work of DoD’s Office of the Inspector General (“OIG”) helps to safeguard U.S. national security. For example, as Inspector General, I was the Lead Inspector General, and then the congressionally-designated Special Inspector General for Operation Atlantic Resolve (“SIG OAR”), which operation includes U.S. assistance to Ukraine. I worked closely with colleagues from the Offices of Inspector General for the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and others from across the oversight community on this and the other two ongoing overseas contingency operations, which relate to countering ISIS and assisting local partners in Iraq and Syria (Operation Inherent Resolve) and to furthering U.S. policy goals in Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Sentinel).

4. As SIG OAR, I was responsible for all oversight related to U.S. security assistance to Ukraine, and for coordinating and reporting on oversight of all aspects of U.S. assistance. One of many areas where my office’s programmatic oversight has been particularly consequential is evaluating DoD’s efforts to ensure the accountability of the most sensitive equipment and technology provided to Ukraine. As has been publicly reported, assistance to Ukraine became a highly partisan issue, and it was only because of the non-partisan nature of the OIG that we were able to do this impactful oversight and to do it authoritatively and credibly. All told, as of January 2025, during my tenure as Inspector General, my office had (1) issued approximately four dozen programmatic oversight reports covering all aspects of U.S. security assistance, and (2) coordinated with our oversight colleagues on dozens more, all as transparently reported on the public website whose development I led, www.UkraineOversight.gov.

Given Trump’s abject capitulation to Putin and his overt efforts to replace Zelenskyy, I can’t help but wonder whether blinding this oversight was part of the plan. As Storch alludes, the US sent a whole bunch of sophisticated tools to Ukraine, and I’m sure there are people who’d like to put them to uses other than helping Ukraine repel Russia’s attack.

Whatever the case, when reporters push back on Trump’s false claims about Zelenskyy, they might include a question about why, if he cared about oversight of the money spent with Ukraine, one of his first acts in office amounted to gutting it.

Update: Daniel Dale has a fact check of all the lies Trump is telling about Zelenskyy.

The other day, Fox News’ Jesse Watters explained the difference between left and right wing messaging.

We are waging a 21st century information warfare campaign against the left and they are using tactics from the 1990s. They are holding tiny press conferences. Tiny little rallies. They’re screaming into the ether on MSNBC. This is what you call top-down command and control. Your talking points, from a newspaper, and you put it on the broadcast network and it disappears.

What you’re seeing on the right is asymmetrical. It’s like grassroots guerrilla warfare. Someone says something on social media, Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it.. and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it. It’s free money. And we’re actually talking about expressing information, they are suppressing information.

Only, Watters left several things out (unless it’s what he meant by “expressing” information, whatever that is). The things Musk retweets are, almost without exception, false. Which means this massive asymmetrical guerrilla warfare feeds just propaganda. And Watters didn’t admit (though he seemed to, on a Fox and Friends broadcast the other day when he confessed to making up the Hamas tie to the Gaza condom hoax) that after these false claims go viral, they get parroted by Trump’s propagandist, Karoline Leavitt, and then Trump himself.

Still (as multiple disinformation experts noted), Watters offered a perfectly timed explanation of the information warfare the right is conducting.

And amid conflicting claims about what Elon’s role in all this is, I would suggest that until someone confesses differently, his primary role is simply a propaganda one: taking excerpted data he totally misunderstands out of context and pushing false claims about it, one that will feed a baseless narrative of corruption.

Mike Masnick described this would happen weeks ago.

Later on, Musk (operating without any clear legal authority or Senate confirmation) made a whole bunch of wildly false claims about USAID, including that it is “a criminal organization,” arguing that it funds all sorts of things it does not (including the idea that it funds “woke prosecutors”), that it’s a “terror organization”, and more. He even claimed it helped fund the creation of COVID-19.

The pattern is familiar: ExTwitter users spin elaborate red-yarn-on-corkboard conspiracy theories, and Musk treats each one as revealed truth. The result is a government increasingly run on paranoid hallucinated fever dreams rather than expertise – imagine NASA’s Apollo Program being handed over to flat-earth conspiracy theorists while the actual engineers are sidelined, and you’ll get the idea.

The danger isn’t just bad policy — it’s the replacement of accountable governance with conspiracy-driven chaos that threatens everything from disaster response to diplomatic relations.

And Renee DiResta described the familiar pattern today.

This is absolutely the Twitter Files for the government.

It’s the same methodology boosted by the same people.

Crawl through a bunch of stuff, find something that seems outrageous, make an online mob lose their minds. Destroy work, upend lives. Get it totally wrong, move to the next thing.

That’s what we’ve seen.

First there was the lie Elon told about condoms in Gaza (as I noted, Watters seemed to confess the other day that he made up the bit about Hamas getting them).

Elon Musk acknowledged Tuesday that there might not have been a federal plan to spend $50 million on condoms for Gaza — two weeks after the White House press secretary told the false story at an official briefing and more than a week after the president baselessly doubled the phony figure to $100 million and said the condoms were going to Hamas.

“Some of the things that I say will be incorrect, and should be corrected,” Musk, the billionaire businessman who is leading a Trump administration initiative they call the Department of Government Efficiency, said when a reporter told him the Gaza story was wrong. “So, nobody’s going to bat a thousand. I mean, any – you know, we will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”

This correction was not particularly quick. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s claim that President Donald Trump had thwarted $50 million in condom funding for Gaza made headlines around the world in late January. Trump kept repeating the story, and inflating the figure, even after media outlets reported it was highly unlikely to be true.

The saga of the imaginary condom aid began when Leavitt announced during her debut White House press briefing on January 28 that Musk’s team and the president’s budget office had “found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza” before Trump imposed a freeze on foreign aid. Musk promoted Leavitt’s words on the X social media platform he owns.

Then there was the lie about dead people receiving Social Security checks, an anomaly in Social Security data identified ten years ago and revisited in an Inspector General report released two years ago.

In 2015,3 we reported that SSA had not established controls to annotate death information on the Numident records of numberholders who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies of age 112 or older and were likely deceased. At the time, only 35 known living individuals worldwide were age 112 or older, however, SSA’s Numident included 6.5 million numberholders4 age 112 or older whose record did not contain death information. Therefore, the numberholders’ information did not appear in the full DMF. We recommended SSA add death information to approximately 1.5 million Numident records where the numberholders’ death information appeared in SSA payment records. We also recommended SSA determine whether it could efficiently correct the approximately 5 million remaining records. SSA agreed to explore the legal and technical feasibility, as well as the cost, to establish an automated process to update the millions of Numident records for individuals who appeared to be alive and age 112 or older, but ultimately decided not to update these records.

Social Security decided not to address it because of cost.

In response to our 2015 report, SSA considered multiple options, including adding presumed death information to these Numident records. SSA ultimately decided not to proceed because the “. . . options would be costly to implement, would be of little benefit to the agency, would largely duplicate information already available to data exchange consumers and would create cost for the states and other data exchange partners.”16 SSA also believed a regulation would be required to allow it to add death information to these records, and adding presumed death information to the Numident would increase the risk of inadvertent release of living individuals’ personal information in the DMF.

Now there are the outrageous errors in the DOGE “receipts” page. Thus far, the reporting on this has been inadequate (though Washington Times published a slavering review, which I guess indicates DOGE knows its audience). For example, the NYT dedicated four reporters to call out just the most embarrassing error — that the richest man in the world had mistaken an $8 million payment over a multi-year contract and boasted instead that it represented $8 billion in savings for the two years remaining on the contract.

Daily Beast did a better job, noting not just the order of magnitude error that NYT and others identified, but also that Elon, like Trump, is taking credit for savings made under Joe Biden.

The group boasted that its “estimated savings” for American taxpayers is $55 billion so far, but the total it gave Monday adds up to just a third of that figure—and appears to claim credit for the closure of two government offices that were shuttered under Joe Biden.

Those closures are the National Archives centers in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, and in Fairfield, Ohio. DOGE’s site claims the latter location was a “True Termination – Agency Closed Office.” No other details are offered.

Those centers’ approximate closing dates were announced way back on Aug. 1, however, when Biden was still president.

“The records and artifacts of the Barack Obama Presidential Library, which have been held temporarily at Hoffman Estates, will be permanently moved to College Park, MD, in late FY 2025,” a news release from National Archives announced at the time.

Others have noted that many of the big savings are in reality subscriptions to media outlets, including (as Brad Heath noted, the SEC’s subscription to Westlaw). Once all these necessary services get turned back on again, the imagined savings will be wiped away.

Still, DOGE’s shoddy work, slapped up there after days of unfulfilled promises of transparency, needs to be more systematically mined, if for no other reason than to determine whether this is simply a reflection of the ignorance of the DOGE boys Musk has infiltrated into government, the shoddiness of the AI tools they’re using, or simply a disinterest in giving a fuck, because once Elon claims this website says something, the right wing will follow along like sheep.

They don’t need and maybe won’t bother trying to find real proof of savings, because between Elon and Trump and Fox News, they will insist it is the truth, not matter how often it gets debunked.

Until this effort is exposed as the propaganda campaign it is, the lies Musk tells give even Republicans discomforted by all the job losses in their districts something to cling to: A claim that this is about auditing, rather than destruction, a claim that this is about fraud, rather than policies that even Republicans have protected for years, and for good reason.

The richest man in the world is conducting a con on Republicans in government, claiming he is fixing government when instead he is dismantling even the parts that the Republicans themselves cherish.

As Masnick said, “it’s the replacement of accountable governance with conspiracy-driven chaos.”

It remains the case that one of the foundational claims to which Trump’s people continue to return is the one I identified a week ago: A GAO report from last year that spoke of $2.7 trillion in improper payments over the last two decades, but also a spike in recent years that almost entirely arises from fraud and management problems with the various COVID programs Trump rolled out his first term.

The factual claims of fraud — as opposed to the disinformation spun by Elon Musk — largely measure fraud that Trump created through his catastrophic response to COVID. And he fired several of the Inspectors General — most notably HHS IG Christi Grimm (whose work resulted in 193 charges last June), Department of Labor IG Larry Turner (who had already identified $191 billion in improper COVID payments, many fraudulent, and was chasing$135 billion more), and SBA IG Mike Ware (who had IDed around $200 billion in COVID fraud, returning $40 billion to the US Treasury and was still chasing more) — who were busy hunting it all down.

DOGE continues to rely on fraud Trump enabled to excuse their assault on government. And what they’ve found so far is that they lack any of the competencies they would need to audit or identify fraud, and Trump already fired the people who do have those competencies.

Update: Lawfare catches DOGE taking credit for savings due to Jimmy Carter’s death.

Yet a brief glimpse of the data raises questions about its accuracy. One row describes a lease terminated for an “agency” called “Allowance to Former Presidents.” Additional information shows that the property is 7,682 square feet, costs $128,233 per year, and is in Atlanta, Georgia. The GSA maintains a database of property leased by the federal government. Cross-referencing the information on DOGE’s website with GSA’s database reveals that the federal government was leasing this property from “The Carter Center, Inc.” The Carter Center is a nonprofit organization founded by former President Carter, who died on Dec. 29, 2024.

The Former Presidents Act provides former presidents with certain post-presidency benefits. Subsection (c) of that Act says, “The Administrator of General Services shall furnish for each former President suitable office space appropriately furnished and equipped, as determined by the Administrator, at such place within the United States as the former President shall specify.” As one might expect, Carter’s office was located in the Carter Center, and GSA leased office space for Carter from the Carter Center.

DOGE is likely not responsible for the termination of GSA’s lease of the Carter Center. The benefits to Carter under the Former Presidents Act expired upon his death.

Update: NPR’s review of this gets closer to the kind of real test of these claims. For example, it finds that some of the purport cuts have not yet been made.

Just over half of the contracts touted by DOGE, accounting for $6.5 billion in alleged savings, haven’t actually been terminated or closed out as of Wednesday, according to an NPR analysis of a federal government procurement database, even though the site’s “wall of receipts” listed these items.

That includes a billion dollar IT support contract with the Social Security Administration that actually added $1.8 million in obligated spending and additional funding for a Forest Service project management contract worth up to nearly $30 million.

More than a third of the listed contracts posted online would not actually save any money if canceled, according to DOGE.

And it interviews contracting officers.

A smarter way to reform contracting would actually cost money in the short term,” Riedl said. “Because it requires audits, it requires analysis, building new systems, building new controls rather than just going through with a chainsaw and trying to cut contracts almost randomly.”

Byrne, whose contracting career spanned more than 20 years and included work with the General Services Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Navy, says DOGE’s website is also missing basic information needed to track and understand federal spending, like the ID number, what type of agreement or contract method was used and whether the cancellation was for some or all of the spending. Several publicly available data sources already track and confirm changes to federal contracts, including the Federal Procurement Data System, USASpending.gov and the System for Award Management (SAM). Unlike DOGE, those sources list other relevant data like the current value of the contract, historical changes to the amount budgeted and spent for the contract and when the contracts begin and end.

Who also note that the government is going to have to pay for a lot of the programs cut.

Even government contracts that have been terminated before reaching their full value could end up costing taxpayers more to settle up. Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at The George Washington University Law School, previously told NPR that the termination for convenience clause used for many of these cancellations is expensive.

“When the government terminates a contract for convenience, it’s still obligated to pay for the work completed,” she said. “This doesn’t eliminate the government’s responsibility for paying these sorts of costs.”