Citizen Cartwright

ABC News succumbed to Trump’s pressure; will others?

By John Dineen
Columnist, One dog barking

There’s a theme emerging in some of the news recently. It began just before the election, when owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times both killed plans by their editorial boards to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris to be president.

 

Since Donald Trump was elected, more stories have followed the same theme:

— Several tech CEOs have made $1 million contributions to Trump’s inaugural committee.

— Tech leaders also have made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago

— And the tech bro who got there first with the most, Elon Musk, may already be seeing return on his investment: According to Reuters, the Trump transition team plans to kill a regulation requiring the reporting of accidents involving self-driving vehicles — most of which involve cars by Musk’s Tesla.

— This follows Trump’s announced plan to nominate Jared Isaacman, a tech billionaire with close ties to Musk and SpaceX, to head NASA.

 

Of course, where there are carrots, there are sticks: The Senate had a press protection bill pending that had passed the House with bipartisan support; it would have barred the federal government from compelling reporters to reveal confidential information, such as sources. Trump announced his opposition, and Senate Republicans blocked floor action.

 

Most notable of all was the decision by ABC News, revealed last weekend, to settle a libel suit filed by Trump. The decision is striking, given the difficulty facing public figures under U.S. law to win such suits in the absence of particularly egregious behavior.

Historian Timothy Snyder, who has written frequently about authoritarianism, calls it “obeying in advance.”

Margaret Sullivan commented:

“ABC News should never have caved. They might well have prevailed if they had hung in there. The legal bar is very high for libeling a public figure, and Trump is the ultimate public figure. Instead, this outcome encourages Trump in his attacks on the press — and he needs no encouragement.

“As one law professor told the Times, what ABC News did was very unusual,” she said. “News organizations generally don’t settle ‘because they fear the dangerous pattern of doing so and because they have the full weight of the First Amendment on their side.’”

“Why did ABC News throw in the towel? It‘s hard to know for sure, but gets easier if you are aware that the news organizations is owned by Disney, a huge corporation with a lot of turf to protect,” Sullivan said. “As the Times reported, the Disney executive who oversees ABC News had dinner with Trump’s top aide, Susan Wiles, just days before the settlement, as ‘part of a visit by several ABC News executives to Florida to meet with Mr. Trump’s transition team.’”

“Was this settlement, which includes ABC’s public expressions of regret, a simple case of kissing the ring? It sure looks that way. Trump has sworn to get revenge on his enemies and he values, above all, loyalty and kowtowing.”

Brian Stelter of CNN noted: “The president-elect has a long history of litigation, with numerous unsuccessful cases against news outlets in the past. Some media law experts believed ABC had a good chance of beating him at trial, given the inherent challenge of proving Stephanopoulos acted with ‘actual malice.’ But trials also add uncertainty and a risk of severe reputational damage – factors that ABC’s parent company, Disney, is now avoiding.”

 

Journalist Parker Molloy, writing in Nieman Lab’s predictions for 2025, argued that acquiescence won’t spare journalism organizations: 

“The bitter irony is that this voluntary surrender won’t protect these outlets from Trump’s attacks. He’ll continue using them as punching bags to rally his base, even as they bend over backwards to appear ‘fair’ to his administration. But their owners calculate that performative criticism is preferable to actual accountability journalism that might threaten their bottom lines.

“For those who remember post-9/11 journalism, this feels eerily familiar,” Molloy said. “But at least then, the press could claim they were caught off guard by an unprecedented national crisis. This time, they’re choosing compliance with eyes wide open, trading their watchdog role for a seat at the billionaire’s table.

 

“The question isn’t whether mainstream media will hold Trump accountable in his second term — they’ve already decided not to try. The question is whether enough independent voices can survive to fill the vacuum they’re leaving behind.”

 

Molloy’s prediction for 2025 is coming true early. The New York Times reported over the weekend that Trump and his allies were threatening more lawsuits.

 

In fact, on Monday, Trump sued the Des Moines Register and Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, seeking “accountability for brazen election interference” over a Nov. 2 poll that showed Kamala Harris up by 3 percentage points in Iowa.

 

According to Semafor, “news organizations are bracing” for more attacks:

“In an email shared with Semafor, Axios’ senior counsel told staff that the news organization anticipates the new administration will attempt to force reporters to out their sources, will ramp up lawsuits against news organizations for defamation, and could charge journalists with crimes using the Espionage Act,” Max Tani wrote.

One analysis suggests that voters elected Trump due in part to their revulsion at the “elites” — a category that, for many, includes legacy media. Trump and his billionaire allies — populists, apparently — are seizing that opportunity, wielding their wealth to intimidate and isolate news organizations. ABC News acquiesced, essentially waiving the protection of the First Amendment.

The near-universal dismay within the industry at ABC News’ decision may be mere bravado. Or it may indicate not every media enterprise will be so compliant. The quality of our democracy hinges on those decisions.

One dog barking is an occasional column by my husband, John Dineen. He is a former senior congressional staffer and media executive and founder of briefing.center, a policy news and information service.

She’s on Kash Patel’s enemies list but doesn’t want a pardon

Sarah Isgur worked at the Justice Department from 2017 to 2019 as director of the Office of Public Affairs and senior counsel to the deputy attorney general, during the investigation into connections between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.

 

She’s one of 60 people named in “Government Gangsters,” a 2023 book by Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to be the next director of the FBI, as “members of the executive branch deep state” — a “cabal of unelected tyrants” who posed “the most dangerous threat to our democracy.” Patel has since said the incoming Trump administration must deal with the deep state “criminally or civilly.”

 

As President Biden reportedly considers preemptive pardons for many of Trump’s perceived enemies, such as the people on Patel’s list, Isgur says in a New York Times opinion essay that she doesn’t want a pardon and hopes nobody else will.

 

“If we broke the law, we should be charged and convicted. If we didn’t break the law, we should be willing to show that we trust the fairness of the justice system that so many of us have defended. And we shouldn’t give permission to future presidents to pardon political allies who may commit real crimes on their behalf.

“This past spring, arguing in a brief to the Supreme Court that Mr. Trump shouldn’t have immunity from prosecution, Mr. Biden’s Justice Department reminded the justices that ‘the executive branch and the criminal justice system contain strong safeguards against groundless prosecutions.’ Many former government lawyers — including a number of us on Mr. Patel’s list — were quick to publicly agree, stressing how dangerous and unnecessary such a grant of blanket immunity would be.

 

“We emphasized the importance of the rule of law and the trust we had in the jury system. Yet now that the shoe is on the other foot, suddenly we would accept total immunity from prosecution for anything we did during our time in government?”

 

“A pardon would also let Mr. Patel off the hook. If he wants to prosecute everyone on his list, it’s going to require a lot of law enforcement resources. At a time when much of the American public wants the president to focus on inflation, crime and immigration, voters may not be pleased if drug cartels are a lower priority than prosecuting Liz Cheney for treason.

 

“And as Americans start to see his lack of evidence, Mr. Patel will look ridiculous. If anything, he may end up making heroes out of his targets, who would, in turn, be able to raise money for the exorbitant cost of their legal defense from outraged Americans until judges would predictably throw out these frivolous cases.

“If I accepted a pardon, Mr. Patel could also claim that it proved the ‘deep state’ rigged the system. He could argue that he would have gotten convictions against all of us, without ever having to make his case — to a jury or to voters.

 

“Populists and cynics from both political parties want to destroy the rule of law because it’s a lot easier to tear down an institution than to build one. That’s why those of us on Mr. Patel’s list should force him to show his work.”

Paul Krugman’s final NYTimes column, on ‘finding hope in an age of resentment’

The Nobel-prize-winning economist and author of 27 books, who’s retiring from The New York Times, reflects on what's changed since he began writing his opinion column in 2000. 

 

“What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.”

 

“Why did this optimism curdle? As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.”

 

For example, “the financial crisis of 2008 undermined any faith the public had that governments knew how to manage economies.”

 

“And it wasn’t that long ago that technology billionaires were widely admired across the political spectrum, some achieving folk-hero status. But now they and some of their products face disillusionment and worse; Australia has even banned social media use by children under 16.”

 

“These days there has been a lot of discussion of the hard right turn of some tech billionaires, from Elon Musk on down. I’d argue that we shouldn’t overthink it, and we especially shouldn’t try to say that this is somehow the fault of politically correct liberals. Basically it comes down to the pettiness of plutocrats who used to bask in public approval and are now discovering that all the money in the world can’t buy you love.

 

“So is there a way out of the grim place we’re in? What I believe is that while resentment can put bad people in power, in the long run it can’t keep them there. At some point the public will realize that most politicians railing against elites actually are elites in every sense that matters and start to hold them accountable for their failure to deliver on their promises. And at that point the public may be willing to listen to people who don’t try to argue from authority, don’t make false promises, but do try to tell the truth as best they can.

 

“We may never recover the kind of faith in our leaders — belief that people in power generally tell the truth and know what they’re doing — that we used to have. Nor should we. But if we stand up to the kakistocracy — rule by the worst — that’s emerging as we speak, we may eventually find our way back to a better world.”

Applebaum on what citizens who care about U.S. democracy can do

Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum, whose new book is titled “Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World,” discusses ways to think about autocracy and authoritarianism in a second Trump term with Ezra Klein on his New York Times podcast.

 

In response to Klein’s question on what members of the public can do, Applebaum says:

 

"The worst result or the worst consequence of this kind of government, if that’s what we’re going to have, and of course we still don’t know yet, is that people become apathetic. They say: This is all so overwhelming, it’s so huge. I don’t even know what’s true and what’s not true anymore, and I’m just going to stay home.

"Try to overcome that. And it almost doesn’t matter what it is that you do. Involve yourself in a local group, a discussion group. Join a political party. Run for local office. Try to be present in your community in some way. Do something that makes you active. And that makes you feel that you’re taking part in the governance of your country.

"Democracies were always meant to be political systems that involved ordinary people in all kinds of ways. And I think one of the other reasons our system has declined as far as it has, is that that has atrophied. Along with all kinds of other institutions. There’s the famous thing about Americans not being in bowling clubs anymore and not joining the Rotary Club and not participating in real-life institutions because they’re at home watching TV or playing video games. But there’s also been a decline in civic activity and civic engagement.

"And even if it’s just for your mental health, Even if it’s just to make sure that you don’t feel that you are isolated and alone and unable to affect anything, try to join some group or work with some group that is making change in your community, either politically or even apolitically. And that seems to me to be the best antidote."

Klein always asks his guests to recommend three books, and Applebum says she’s chosen books that describe "the secret world of money laundering and kleptocracy”:

— “Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World,” by Oliver Bullough
— “Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism,” by Brooke Harrington

— “American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History,” by Casey Michel

Democrats have prepared for 2 years for coming Trump actions

Democracy Forward, a liberal-leaning legal organization, has "unveiled a large-scale new effort aimed at thwarting President-elect Donald J. Trump’s second-term agenda from his first day in office," says The New York Times.

 

Unlike in 2017, when Democratic lawyers were unprepared for the onslaught of conservative policies, the intent is to be ready to unleash lawsuits immediately.

More than 800 lawyers at 280 organizations are developing cases and workshopping challenges to what the group has identified as 600 “priority legal threats” — potential regulations, laws and other administrative actions that could require a legal response, its leaders say. 

 

Democracy Forward has spent the last two years working to identify the possible actions the new Trump administration could take on issues they see as key priorities to defend, the group’s leaders say, using as a blueprint Trump’s first-term actions, his campaign promises and plans released by his allies, including the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 agenda.

Democracy Forward’s new project is called Democracy 2025. It’s focusing on issues including abortion rights, health care, climate change and other environmental protections, union protections and immigration. The group also has given particular weight to Trump’s promises to weaponize the systems of government, particularly the Justice Department, against those he sees as enemies, along with his pledges to dismantle federal agencies and fire thousands of government workers, the Times says.

 

The lawyers are preparing to challenge new regulations released by the Trump administration, even starting the process of recruiting potential plaintiffs who would have legal standing in court. They’re also exploring ways to take over the defense of Biden administration policies that are in litigation, such as student debt relief and women’s health protections, that now are being defended by the Justice Department and are unlikely to be continued under Trump.

Democracy Forward has "deep ties" to a number of prominent party strategists and lists election lawyer Marc Elias and Ron Klain, President Biden’s former White House chief of staff, as members of its board, says the Times.

 

The coalition has a multimillion-dollar war chest, according to the Times. Its partners include organizations such as unions, immigration advocacy organizations and groups working on abortion rights, civil rights and consumer protection.

A look at Project 2025’s training videos

ProPublica and the investigative journalism group Documented published on Saturday 14 hours of videos from Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy, which they say are intended to train the next conservative administration’s political appointees “to be ready on day one.” 

 

The videos were provided to ProPublica and Documented “by a person who had access to them,” they say.

 

Project 2025 is a playbook and policy agenda created by the Heritage Foundation and its allies for a future conservative presidential administration.

 

Former President Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, although “a review of the training videos shows that 29 of the 36 speakers have worked for Trump in some capacity — on his 2016-17 transition team, in the administration or on his 2024 reelection campaign,” ProPublica and Documented say.

 

For example, “In one video, Bethany Kozma, a conservative activist and former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Trump administration, downplays the seriousness of climate change and says the movement to combat it is really part of a ploy to 'control people,'” according to ProPublica and Documented.

 

“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” says Kozma.

 

The Heritage Foundation and most of the people who appear in the videos didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment, says ProPublica. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign who features in one of the videos, responded, “As our campaign leadership and President Trump have repeatedly stated, Agenda 47 is the only official policy agenda from our campaign.”

Global migrants converge at U.S.-Mexico border

Some migrants streamed across the border and others gathered in makeshift camps as America’s pandemic-era Title 42 restrictions ended on Thursday, a milestone that officials worried could trigger a major new wave of migration that strains border facilities and cities across the country, The New York Times reports.

 

Title 42 was a holdover from the Trump administration and began in March 2020. The authority allowed U.S. officials to turn away migrants at the Southern border, on the grounds of preventing the spread of the coronavirus.

 

The Biden administration has put in place a series of new policies cracking down on illegal crossings and creating new legal pathways. Anybody seeking asylum who didn’t first seek protection in a country they traveled through, or first applied online, will be turned away.

 

U.S. officials plan to open 100 regional migration hubs across the Western Hemisphere, where people can seek placement in other nations, including Canada and Spain.

 

President Biden and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez are holding talks at the White House on Friday.

 

"It was a huge boon for the White House to get Spain and Canada to agree to take in asylum seekers from Latin America,” says The Associated Press. "And it helps reinforce the Biden administration’s argument that the current migration quandary facing the Americas is a global problem that needs a global solution.”

 

The United States increasingly has seen migrants arrive at its Southern border who are from China, Ukraine, Haiti, Russia and other nations far from Latin America, and who are increasingly family groups and children traveling alone, AP says. Thirty years ago, illegal crossings were almost always single adults from Mexico who were easily turned back over the border.

Spain, like many other nations globally, needs workers, and it will be able to choose migrants who have skills needed in the country, AP says. 

 

On Thursday, the House passed legislation that would restart border wall construction and restrict asylum. The vote was 219-213, with no Democrats supporting the bill and two Republicans voting against it.

Democrats confirmed more federal judges in Biden’s first 2 years than GOP did in Trump’s

I want to mention a trend I missed.  

 

We all heard about the historic number of judges confirmed during the Trump administration.

 

But "Democrats fell just short of an ambitious goal of confirming 100 new federal judges as time ran out on the 117th Congress, but they are optimistic they can continue to reshape the courts over the final two years of President Biden’s term,” long-time New York Times reporter on Congress Carl Hulse wrote in a Dec. 29 article.

 

The 97 judges Democrats seated, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, passed the Trump total of 85 judges. And Trump’s total "was compiled with what to that point was one of the most intense efforts ever to fill court slots under the stewardship of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader who vowed to 'leave no vacancy behind,'" Hulse says.

 

The Senate’s top two Democrats say their ability to outpace Trump’s first two years was especially noteworthy considering they did it with a 50-50 Senate, an evenly divided Judiciary Committee and little cooperation from most Republicans.

 

“We had three or four Republicans who were really open-minded and helped us on the votes,” says Sen. Dick Durbin, Ill., who, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, led the judicial push. Durbin mentioned Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who says he believes that presidents are entitled to confirmation of qualified judges of their choosing, and was the most frequent Republican backer of Biden nominees on the committee.

 

The nominees were historically diverse, including 92 women, 60 of whom were women of color out of a total of 85 people of color, along with eight LGBTQ nominees. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., noted that of 28 appeals court judges confirmed, 11 were African American women, more than under all previous presidents combined.

 

“I’m particularly proud of the professional diversity,” Schumer says. “For the first time, we have a bunch of public defenders, immigration lawyers, consumer people, so it’s not just the corporate perspective or the prosecutorial perspective that’s on the bench.”

 

Federal judges are appointed for life.

Trump tax returns to be released, IRS didn’t do audits

The House Ways and Means Committee voted on party lines Tuesday to release six years of the former president's tax returns. The returns will cover the period between 2015 and 2021, the years Trump was running for president and serving in the White House, according to panel members. The returns are to be redacted to remove information like Social Security and bank account numbers and released in several days.

 

Hours later, a report released by the panel’s Democratic majority said the IRS didn't follow its own policy because it didn't audit Trump during his first two years in office. 

 

An accompanying report released by Congress’ nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation also found repeated faults with the IRS’s approach to auditing Trump and his companies. 

 

The reports released Tuesday renew one of the biggest questions that's surrounded Trump, says The Associated Press: Why did he abandon the post-Watergate tradition of White House hopefuls releasing their tax returns? 

 

Trump and those around him consistently have said IRS audits prevented him from doing so. There aren’t any laws that would have barred Trump from voluntarily releasing his returns even if they were being audited, AP says.

 

In response to the report findings, the Ways and Means Committee is proposing legislation to beef up the IRS’ approach, requiring an initial report no later than 90 days after the filing of a president’s tax returns. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says the House will “move swiftly” to advance the legislation. 

 

Democrats say the IRS is ill-equipped to audit high-income, complex tax returns and instead targets filers in lower-income brackets — something the lawmakers have tried to remedy in their work on the panel.

 

“Because of the dismantling of funding to the IRS, they have not been unable to do their job,” says Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev.

 

Republicans have vowed to cut recent increased funding for more IRS agents. It's the first bill they'll consider when they take over the House majority in less than two weeks, says AP.

House Jan. 6 panel’s subpoena of Trump, new revelations

The committee's unanimous vote Thursday to subpoena former President Trump came as it described his multi-part plan to overturn his 2020 election loss.

 

In the committee’s 10th public session, the panel summed up Trump’s “staggering betrayal” of his oath of office, as Chairman Bennie Thompson put it, describing Trump’s unprecedented attempt to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory.

 

Before any votes were cast, committee members said, Trump planned to simply claim victory on Election Day.

 

The committee presented new and previously seen material, including interviews with Trump’s top aides and Cabinet officials — including Secretary of State Pompeo, Attorney General Barr and Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia — in which some described the president acknowledging he'd lost.

 

Among the new revelations was that the Secret Service was aware before Jan. 6 that some Trump supporters were using online forums to discuss plans for violence, including plots to storm the Capitol. Along with interviews, the committee is drawing on the 1.5 million pages of documents it's received from the Secret Service, says The Associated Press.

 

And the panel showed previously unseen footage of congressional leaders on the phone with the Defense Department, Justice Department and governor of neighboring Virginia, asking for help during the assault as Trump refused to call off the mob. The footage also portrays Vice President Pence telling House Speaker Pelosi and the others that he's spoken with the Capitol Police, as Congress plans to resume its session that night to certify the election of Biden.

 

Trump has been telling aides privately that he favors testifying before the panel as long as he gets to do so live, The New York Times says. The lawmakers have rejected similar demands from other witnesses, but preliminary discussions among the panel members indicate more openness to a live interview with Trump, the Times says.

 

Several former presidents voluntarily testified before Congress — including Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman and Gerald Ford — but there's no Supreme Court precedent that says whether Congress has the power to compel a former president to testify about his actions in office, according to the Times.

 

A separate AP article discusses the committee’s discussions of how to preserve its transcripts of more than 1,000 interviews and millions of other documents after the panel is shut down following the release of its final report.