DL Open Thread: Tuesday, May 20, 2025
Political Arrests Becoming The Norm:
The Justice Department charged a New Jersey congresswoman with assaulting federal agents during a clash outside a Newark immigration detention center and dropped a trespass charge against the city’s mayor that arose from the same episode, the department said Monday.
Alina Habba, the interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey, disclosed the move in a post on X, saying that the congresswoman, LaMonica McIver, had been charged “for assaulting, impeding and interfering with law enforcement” when she visited the detention center with two other Democratic members of Congress from New Jersey on May 9.
“No one is above the law — politicians or otherwise,” Ms. Habba said in a statement. “It is the job of this office to uphold justice impartially, regardless of who you are. Now we will let the justice system work.”
In a statement on Monday, Ms. McIver blamed federal law enforcement for instigating the clash, saying that “ICE agents created an unnecessary and unsafe confrontation.”
“The charges against me are purely political — they mischaracterize and distort my actions, and are meant to criminalize and deter legislative oversight,” she said.
…Federal prosecutors across the country may soon be able to indict members of Congress without approval from lawyers in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, according to three people familiar with a proposal attorneys in the section learned about last week.
If adopted, the changes would remove a layer of review intended to ensure that cases against public officials are legally sound and not politically motivated. Career prosecutors in the Public Integrity Section guided and signed off on the criminal investigations into alleged corruption by New York Mayor Eric Adams (D) and then-Sen. Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey).
But cutting the Public Integrity Section out of the approval process for lawmaker prosecutions entirely could give presidentially appointed U.S. attorneys more authority in shaping public corruption cases, making prosecutions more political, said Dan Schwager, a former Public Integrity Section attorney who now works in private practice.
“The reason you have the section is exactly what this administration says they want, which is stop politicization,” Schwager said. “That requires a respect and ability to understand how the laws have been applied in similar situations in the past. The only way to ensure that public officials on both sides of the aisle are treated similarly is to have as much institutional knowledge and experience as possible.”
Uh, this is not about ensuring ‘that public officials on both sides of the aisle are treated similarly’. But then, you already knew that.
Supreme Court To Venezuelans: “KMAGYOYO”:
Ahilan Arulanantham, a lawyer representing the immigrants challenging the Trump administration, called the court’s decision “truly shocking,” especially that it was announced “in a two-paragraph order with no reasoning.”
“This is the largest single action stripping any group of noncitizens of immigration status in modern U.S. history,” Mr. Arulanantham said. “The humanitarian and economic impact of the court’s decision will be felt immediately, and will reverberate for generations.”
You just know that Clarence Thomas lit up a big fat cigar after this ruling was made public.
Trump Gifts Jan. 6 Rioter’s Family $5 Mill. It’s your money, of course, not Trump’s money. Because Bizarro World is now where we live:
President Donald Trump’s administration is set to pay nearly $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt to settle a lawsuit brought by the estate of the Trump supporter who was fatally shot by police when she tried to storm the House Speaker’s Lobby during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Babbitt’s family filed the wrongful-death lawsuit in early 2024, seeking $30 million. Lawyers for both sides told a judge this month that they had reached a settlement in principle, reversing the Justice Department’s earlier opposition in the case, which had been set for trial in July 2026.
Will LBR And Coons Cave On Crypto? Looks like a phony ‘compromise’, which is no compromise at all, has been reached:
Here’s an example of the kind of compromise included in the Senate’s updated crypto bill. After bipartisan negotiations this month, the GENIUS Act will now ban stablecoins from using “United States,” “United States Government,” or “USG” in their name.
In some ways, it’s important: stablecoins, typically used to purchase other, more volatile forms of cryptocurrency, are pegged to the dollar.
But, alas, they are not dollars.
That’s left a world where companies that issue stablecoins seek to project a sense of stability by naming and marketing these digital currencies as closely tied to the stability of the U.S. government. After negotiations, a handful of Senate Democrats who support the new version of the bill say that changes to it would ban certain forms of that.
But a venture by President Donald Trump shows the limitations of such a measure. A Trump-linked company has a stablecoin is called USD1. You might be mistaken, given the name and the President’s personal involvement, for thinking that it’s affiliated with the U.S. government. But it’s not, though it would slide through that one provision in the new bill.
Some Democrats who plan to vote for the legislation touted the ban, among others, in a summary of “negotiation wins” that is being circulated on Capitol Hill. TPM obtained that memo, along with drafts of the legislation.
And while it’s not clear yet if Republicans have secured the Democratic support they need — or, if they haven’t, what final form the bill will take — the drafts have sparked criticism that the latest version of the bill does little to address President Trump’s ongoing, brazen crypto-involved corruption schemes. Those involve an Emirati firm using Trump’s USD1 to close a $2 billion investment; the chief executive’s family and friends deeply involved at every level of the company issuing the stablecoin; and top holders of $TRUMP coin, a non-stablecoin asset, gaining access to the President. It’s a potpourri of graft, the brazenness of which would make Gilded Age wheeler-dealers blush.
Critics say that changes in the legislation, which some Democrats are trumpeting as allowing them to vote for the package amid the Trump corruption, are mere window dressing.
‘Window dressing’. As in giving our pathetic Senate delegation just enough cover to hide their DINOism from their constituents.
Post Office Initiative To Enter The Rotisserie Chicken Market Fails.
What d0 you want to talk about?
Our “genius” Junior Senator voted for the dumb and shameful “Genius” Bill. Terrible vote that 15 of her colleagues joined in , they are complicit in the destruction of our monetary system and handed a blank check to the ever greedy Trump and his gangster pals!
The classic ‘Carper’ move–vote to end cloture.
Doesn’t matter now whether she votes no on the final roll call.
Her vote helped enable the passage of the bill.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the mentor tree
The only smart thing that lady did was hyphenate her last name so that no one would forget she comes from Delaware’s “political elite” otherwise she is just another empty suit.