DOJ Attorney Danielle Sassoon

Dear Commons Community,

In response to a federal order to drop criminal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, seven people, including the acting chief, a deputy assistant attorney general and three deputy chiefs have resigned from the Department of Justice.

Adams was accused in November 2023, of accepting over $100,000 in travel perks from Turkish nationals in exchange for expediting Manhattan’s Turkish consulate’s opening.

In September last year, under President Joe Biden, a federal grand jury announced they would be indicting the mayor, a move Adams believes was politically motivated due to his outspoken opposition to housing migrant asylum seekers in New York City.

On Feb. 10, Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York to drop Adams’ corruption charges.

To drop the charges, two attorneys at the U.S. Attorney office for the Southern District of New York must sign the motion, per CNBC.

One resignation, announced in a letter to newly-sworn in U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, from attorney Danielle Sassoon, said the government did not have a “valid basis to seek dismissal” of Adams’ charges.

The resignation was accepted by Bove in a letter released by The New York Times. Bove wrote, “This decision is based on your choice to continue pursuing a politically motivated prosecution despite an express instruction to dismiss the case.”

“You lost sight of the oath that you took when you started at the Department of Justice by suggesting that you retain discretion to interpret the Constitution in a manner inconsistent with the policies of a democratically elected President and a Senate-confirmed Attorney General,” Bove wrote.

As an aside, Sassoon, who clerked for the late conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and is a member of the right-leaning Federalist Society, was appointed by Trump0.

Another resignation letter came from an assistant U.S. attorney in Sassoon’s office, Hagan Scotten.

He ended his resignation letting by saying, “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”

Adams maintains he did not accept bribes from Turkey and was never offered a trade of authority for the dismissal of his criminal charges.

What an embarrassment Adams and Bove are for an honest judicial system.

Tony

Roger Wicker

Dear Commons Community,

Republican Senator Roger Wicker, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee thinks Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made a “rookie mistake” earlier this week when he undercut Ukraine’s bargaining position with Russia before peace talks have even started.

In an address to NATO in Brussels Wednesday, Hegseth, a former Fox News weekend host with no prior experience implementing defense policy, said it was “unrealistic” for Ukraine to expect a return to its prewar borders or to join NATO. 

Hegseth also sharply criticized America’s closest military allies and said NATO wouldn’t rescue a European nation if it’s attacked by Russia.  As reported by The Huffington Post.

“I don’t know who wrote the speech — it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) told Politico in an interview at the Munich Security Conference Friday, referring to Carlson’s inexplicable infatuation with Moscow.

Wicker said he was “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments, adding, “Everybody knows … you don’t say before your first meeting what you will agree to and what you won’t agree to.”

After Wicker’s comments gained traction Friday, Hegseth reversed his own reversal, telling reporters he “stands by the comments [he] made on that first day in the Ukraine Contact Group.”

President Donald Trump has broadcast a particular chumminess with Putin, but Wicker called the Russian authoritarian a “war criminal who needs to be in prison for the rest of his life.”

“There are good guys and bad guys in this war, and the Russians are the bad guys,” he added. “They invaded, contrary to almost every international law, and they should be defeated.”

Wicker and his fellow Republicans confirmed this “rookie”.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In an effort to align with President Donald Trump’s recent executive order that terminated diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives across the federal government, the Army and Navy took down web pages that highlighted the history and myriad contributions of female soldiers and sailors.

While webpages on the history of female service remains intact on the U.S. Army Reserve website, the Army’s link to its “Women in Army History” page was taken down.  

Similarly, last week, a page devoted to women’s service in the U.S. Navy, as well as a page entitled “Navy Women of Courage and Intelligence,” was removed by the Navy History and Heritage Command, replaced by a “page not found” message.  As reported by Military Times.

“We are working to fully execute and implement all directives outlined in the Executive Orders issued by the President, ensuring that they are carried out with utmost professionalism, efficiency, and in alignment with national security objectives,” Lt. Cmdr. Anthony Ivester, a spokesman for the command, told Military Times.

In regards to the Navy History and Heritage Command website, the process of revising and reuploading the sub-landing pages regarding diversity, women and Black service members is ongoing but, according to Lt. Cmdr. Lauren Chatmas, a Navy spokesperson, will eventually all be back online, in accordance with Trump’s directives.

“Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) is in the process of reviewing and updating their online content to ensure compliance with directives outlined in Executive Orders issued by the President,” Chatmas told Military Times. “As this alignment systematically occurs, content will be available in the Heritage section of NHHC’s website. The Navy is executing and implementing the directives with professionalism, efficiency, and in full alignment with national security objectives.”

Elsewhere across Navy websites, some pages remain intact, including a “Women in the Navy” landing page.

Last Tuesday, the web page for the U.S. Army Women’s Museum at Fort Gregg-Adams in Hopewell, Virginia — the only museum in the world dedicated to “preserving and sharing the history of the contributions of women to the Army” — was removed, showing an error message. Since Friday afternoon, however, the webpage has since been restored, and the museum is operating at its normal hours.

Other government entities, such as the National Park Service, Library of Congress, the National Archives and the Smithsonian, have so far eschewed removing their history landing pages regarding women in uniform.

On Jan. 20, Trump signed an executive order deeming that “influential institutions, including the Federal Government … have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) or ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) that can violate the civil-rights laws of this Nation.”

The order left many of the branches scrambling to halt DEI programming, with the Air Force pulling a basic military training course on Jan. 23 that included videos on the Tuskegee Airmen and Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs, before reinstating it after initial outcry.

On the eve of Black History Month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared “Identity Months” dead at the Defense Department and “that DoD Components and Military Departments will not use official resources, to include man-hours, to host celebrations or events related to cultural awareness months, including National African American/Black History Month, Women’s History Month … Pride Month” among others.

As the proud father of a daughter who is an Iraq War veteran, it is disgusting that someone like Trump would provide even an inkling of the idea that the contributions of women in the military should be negated.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is providing a table of the first wave of reconceived Carnegie classifications.  The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the American Council on Education, which manage the classifications, posted the new college research designations yesterday.

There are now three possible research categories that colleges can fall under:

• Research 1: Very High Spending and Doctorate Production (187 institutions): Institutions that, on average in a single year, spend at least $50 million on research and development and award at least 70 research doctorates.
• Research 2: High Spending and Doctorate Production (139 institutions): Institutions that, on average in a single year, spend at least $5 million on research and development and award at least 20 research doctorates.
• Research Colleges and Universities (218 institutions): Institutions not on one of the above lists that, on average in a single year, award at least $2.5 million on research and development.

The third category, “Research Colleges and Universities,” is new, and allows for institutions that conduct some research to get a research designation even if they don’t offer doctorates, which wasn’t possible in past Carnegie classifications. It also allows for tribal colleges to get a research designation. In the past, “tribal college” and the “R1” and “R2″ categories were mutually exclusive. The change is intended to “shed light on institutions that have engaged in research but historically haven’t been recognized for it,” Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, said in a statement.

Over all, the Carnegie Classification’s managers hoped both to acknowledge the research that happens at non-doctoral universities, and to make research intensity less central to a college’s identity, as they told The Chronicle previously.

The American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation plan to release new classifications for every college — not just those that conduct research — in April 2025. In the new core classifications, colleges will be sorted by “characteristics including the types of degrees they award, the fields of study in which students receive their degree, and the size of the institution,” according to a release accompanying the new research listings.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading a third novel by Ronald H. Balson entitled, The Girl from Berlin, written in 2018.  This is the third book by Balson that I have read during the winter intersession.  He has a formula that captivates the reader and uses a modern day trial investigation to unravel a mystery that took place during the 1930s and 1940s in Europe.  This story is based in Germany and Italy and focuses on the life of an aged Italian woman (Gabrielle) who is about to lose her home and villa in Tuscany in 2017 to a German-owned corporation.  Gabrielle’s attorney, Catherine Lockhart,  and private investigator husband, Liam Taggart, are employed to reveal events that took place eighty years ago to determine who are the rightful owners of the property. There is lots of intrigue and Nazi cruelty in the story.

If you are a mystery fan and at all interested in World War II, the Holocaust, and the Nazi era, I highly recommend The Girl from Berlin.

Below is a brief review and summary that appeared in Class and the City.

Tony

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Class and the City

January 2, 2019

Book Review – The Girl From Berlin by Ronald H. Balson

It’s a little bit tricky – maneuvering crying on your commute into the city because you’ve reached the point where the book you’re reading has had one too many parallels to contemporary times and none of the characters deserve the violent endings they inevitably receive. Of course, when you embark on reading historical fiction about WWII and the Holocaust, happy endings are not to be expected. Yet in this story, Ronald Balson is able to weave in a few necessary plot development surprises.

The book begins with an Alfa Romeo driving through the gorgeous hills of Tuscany – my mother’s dream – in modern times. This is before we get into the book within the book that takes us back into the confusion and total hell of the Holocaust. I haven’t read any of Balson’s first four books (yet!) but I understand that he writes a series that features lawyer Catherine Lockhart and her husband, Liam. Similar to the way Fredrick Backman writes his stories, they are not sequels and prequels to one another, but instead just hold the same two crime solving characters like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, who are apt to pop up in any story to take charge of an unfortunate situation.

In this book, I was thrilled to see that three of the main characters were female. That Balson, a practicing lawyer himself, wrote from the perspective of two female lawyers, who had men as their sidekicks. It was a nice surprise to have a book written by a man where powerful women were at the forefront and their husbands were able to pleasantly support them in their professional endeavors. It is these characters and the characters of the story from the past that make the book truly spectacular. The character development is phenomenal and the way Balson is able to portray the lasting affects of trauma was so creative. The premise of the story is that an eighty-something year old woman in Pienza is about to be evicted from her villa and vineyard due to confusing property title records, after charges were pressed by a major wine manufacturer. The woman, Gabrielle, is unable to speak about her past due to traumatic events and instead shares copies of an unpublished manuscript with her new lawyer, Catherine Lockhart. By reading through the manuscript and following the clues it leads her to, Lockhart and her husband are able to realize discrepancies in the property records surrounding the villa and nearby properties. It’s perhaps the most frightening aspect of all, when you realize that the Holocaust was a reality not too long ago.

This book is a must-read, for the clever story crafting and interesting characters and the mysteries they carry with them. But not only for these purposes. In today’s political climate there are many seriously stomach-flipping parallels occurring with what took place in Germany in the early 1900’s. I was on the NJ transit entering the tunnel heading into New York Penn Station when I read on page 66 that Hitler had promised to “Make Germany Great Again.” My stomach entirely turned on itself and I started to feel bile coming up through my throat. These are not coincidences. Just like it’s not a coincidence that earlier last month Trump announced that he was trying to modify citizenship rights so that not everyone born in the United States should be considered a citizen anymore. Perhaps the one difference between the present United States and Germany in the 1930’s and 40’s is that the US has a democracy and constitution. And though the democracy part seems to be easily manipulated by foreign powers and complying social media networks, it does still give me the smallest piece of mind that the Democrats just took back the majority in the House.

Politics aside, do yourself a favor and read this captivating book. Who knows, you might learn a little something too.

Stay Classy, xx.

Dear Commons Community,

John Bolton, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, believes that Trump’s statements about Ukraine’s potential losses before the start of negotiations with Russia mean that Trump “has effectively surrendered to Putin”.

In an interview on CNN (see video above), Bolton stressed that “it is unconscionable to allow Russia to assault Ukraine’s sovereignty, recruit enemies like North Korea to aid in their fight, and then sell out the Ukrainians by conceding the loss of their territory and NATO security guarantees or membership”.  

“By making these and others concessions before negotiations even started, Trump has effectively surrendered to Putin on Ukraine,” he said.  

Bolton noted that he had warned many times that Trump would favor Russia in negotiations between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin.

“Russia’s military performance has been miserable, but Trump is vindicating Putin’s decision to invade,” Bolton pointed out. 

Bolton thinks that the harm and damage to US security interests “will extend well beyond Central Europe, as our adversaries in the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific can plainly see”.

Bolton said:  “It is incumbent on US leaders to stand unequivocally with Ukraine and whatever NATO allies stick with Kyiv. It is not in our national interest to let the Kremlin’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine prevail. Shame on the Trump administration.”

Yesterday, US Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, said  that a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is not a realistic goal, and that the US does not consider NATO membership for Ukraine a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement of the war.

Sounds like Trump and company are raising the white flag!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A large group of Danes are mocking Trump by circulating a petition to buy California. 

The petition to buy the state of California for Denmark prompted more than 200,000 signatures by yesterday in response to President Trump’s talk about taking control of Greenland, a vast and mineral-rich Arctic island.  As reported by Time.

“Have you ever looked at a map and thought, ‘You know what Denmark needs? More sunshine, palm trees, and roller skates,’” the petition asks. “Well, we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make that dream a reality. 

“It is in the national interest to promote the extraordinary heritage of our Nation, so California will become New Denmark. Los Angeles? More like Løs Ångeles,” it says.

Xavier Dutoit, the petition’s organizer, got the idea last month while vacationing in the Philippines. He overheard an American tourist loudly discussing Trump’s Greenland pitch.

“That American didn’t seem to grasp how unhinged and absurd it was for any country’s President — especially in a stable democracy that the USA claims to be — to offer or threaten to take over another sovereign country’s territory,” Dutoit wrote in an email to The Associated Press.

While Dutoit is not Danish — he is Swiss-French — he consulted a multi-national group of friends who are helping him, including Kenneth Haar, who is Danish and lives in Copenhagen.

“The Trump-Greenland issue is, by far, the biggest political issue in this country at the moment,” Haar told AP in a Zoom interview. “It is considered a very depressing and a very dangerous situation.”

While Løs Ångeles is a joke, there is another city in Southern California with a very real connection to the land of Vikings, Lego and Hans Christian Andersen. Known as “the Danish capital of America,” Solvang was founded by three immigrants from Denmark in 1911.

The city is popular with tourists, who come in droves for its aebleskiver pastries (similar to fritters), Scandinavian windmills, a main street called “ Copenhagen Drive ” and, of course, a Hans Christian Andersen Museum to honor the famous Danish fairy tale author. Danish royals have visited several times over the decades.

In 2019, Trump scrapped a trip to Denmark, blaming Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen for making a “nasty” statement when she rejected his first-term idea of buying Greenland as an absurdity. Greenland is a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, a U.S. ally and fellow member of NATO.

Before taking office again last month, Trump said he would not rule out the use of military force to seize control of Greenland, calling it vital to U.S. national security, and last month his son visited the island.

Múte B. Egede, Greenland’s prime minister, shot back: “Greenland is for the Greenlandic people. We do not want to be Danish, we do not want to be American. We want to be Greenlandic.”

Haar said California’s appeal to Danes is obvious, from its towering mountains to its sunny beaches.

“We have none of that here,” he said. “Denmark is a pretty flat country with a pretty boring climate.”

The petition organizers even have their own plans for Disneyland in Southern California: “We’ll rename it Hans Christian Andersenland. Mickey Mouse in a Viking helmet? Yes, please.”

The petition notes that Trump isn’t a fan of the Golden State. Last year, he called it “Paradise Lost” and he regularly derides Gov. Gavin Newsom with the nickname “Newscum.”

But of course, every petition needs some fine print, way down at the bottom:

“Disclaimer: This campaign is 100% real … in our dreams.”

Tony

Jerome Powell.  Courtesy of Bloomberg News.

Dear Commons Community,

The growing crisis in the insurance industry may make it hard to get a mortgage in parts of the country in the coming decades, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said on Tuesday.  As reported by Yahoo Fianance and other media.

“If you fast-forward 10 or 15 years, there are going to be regions of the country where you can’t get a mortgage,” he said during his semiannual testimony to Congress, noting that banks and insurance companies have been pulling out of coastal and fire-prone areas they deem too high risk.

Insurers have been canceling policies across the country as climate change intensifies natural disasters, saddling them with multibillion-dollar losses. State Farm, for example, canceled thousands of policies in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles months before it was devastated by wildfires.

Because mortgage lenders typically require homeowners insurance as a condition of making a loan, prospective buyers with few alternatives are increasingly purchasing coverage from state-designed insurers of last resort, which can have higher premiums and skimpier coverage than traditional alternatives.

Banks and insurers won’t keep making loans or providing coverage when faced with evidence of disasters, Powell said in response to a question from Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith.

Questions about high housing costs came up repeatedly throughout Powell’s testimony. The Fed chair reiterated that interest rate normalization may help buyers in the years ahead, but much of the problems with affordability boil down to a lack of supply, an issue outside of the Fed’s purview.

“There’s a short-term problem that will go away in the coming years, but there’s a longer-term problem with housing affordability, and that’s going to be something that’s not within our authorities or powers to affect,” Powell said in response to a question from Sen. Ruben Gallego.

Even if rates do fall, Powell said it’s “not obvious” that lower rates would slow housing inflation because demand would likely rise.

“It would unlock people’s low mortgages, but that creates both a buyer and a seller,” Powell said. “It’s not clear that that would be something that would drive down housing inflation.”

When asked about the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Powell said that the government’s backing of the mortgage giants “does hold down mortgage rates.” He said releasing them from conservatorship was ultimately a question for Congress, adding that “putting housing finance back in the private sector has some appeal over the longer run.”

Sad situation!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Elon Musk is attempting to put himself at the forefront of artificial intelligence with a high-stakes bid that could reshape the future of the technology. The Tesla and SpaceX founder is leading a group of investors who’ve offered to buy OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, for $97.4 billion. The investment could give Musk majority control of the company, which rivals his X.AI program. In response to the unsolicited offer, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a post on X, “no thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.” Their back-and-forth comes as political and business leaders are meeting at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris to discuss how to create effective guardrails for AI without stifling innovation.  Below is further analysis and reporting by Matt O’Brien of  The Associated Press.

Tony

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The Associated Press

Elon Musk-led group proposes buying OpenAI for $97.4 billion. OpenAI CEO says ‘no thank you’

By  Matt OBrien

Updated 9:16 PM EST, February 10, 2025

A group of investors led by Elon Musk is offering about $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit behind OpenAI, escalating a dispute with the artificial intelligence company that Musk helped found a decade ago.

Musk and his own AI startup, xAI, and a consortium of investment firms want to take control of the ChatGPT maker and revert it to its original charitable mission as a nonprofit research lab, according to Musk’s attorney Marc Toberoff.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly rejected the unsolicited bid on Musk’s social platform X, saying, “no thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”

Musk bought Twitter, now called X, for $44 billion in 2022.

Musk and Altman, who together helped start OpenAI in 2015 and later competed over who should lead it, have been in a long-running feud over the startup’s direction since Musk resigned from its board in 2018.

Musk, an early OpenAI investor and board member, sued the company last year, first in a California state court and later in federal court, alleging it had betrayed its founding aims as a nonprofit research lab that would benefit the public good by safely building better-than-human AI. Musk had invested about $45 million in the startup from its founding until 2018, Toberoff has said.

The sudden success of ChatGPT two years ago brought worldwide fame and a new revenue stream to OpenAI and also heightened the internal battles over the future of the organization and the advanced AI it was trying to develop. Its nonprofit board fired Altman in late 2023. He came back days later with a new board.

Now a fast-growing business still controlled by a nonprofit board bound to its original mission, OpenAI last year announced plans to formally change its corporate structure. But such changes are complicated. Tax law requires money or assets donated to a tax-exempt organization to remain within the charitable sector.

If the initial organization becomes a for-profit, generally, a conversion is needed where the for-profit pays the fair market value of the assets to another charitable organization. Even if the nonprofit OpenAI continues to exist in some way, some experts argue it would have to be paid fair market value for any assets that get transferred to its for-profit subsidiaries.

Lawyers for OpenAI and Musk faced off in a California federal court last week as a judge weighed Musk’s request for a court order that would block the ChatGPT maker from converting itself to a for-profit company.

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers hasn’t yet ruled on Musk’s request but in the courtroom said it was a “stretch” for Musk to claim he will be irreparably harmed if she doesn’t intervene to stop OpenAI from moving forward with its planned transition.

But the judge also raised concerns about OpenAI and its relationship with business partner Microsoft and said she wouldn’t stop the case from moving to trial as soon as next year so a jury can decide.

“It is plausible that what Mr. Musk is saying is true. We’ll find out. He’ll sit on the stand,” she said.

Along with Musk and xAI, others backing the bid announced Monday include Baron Capital Group, Valor Management, Atreides Management, Vy Fund, Emanuel Capital Management and Eight Partners VC.

Toberoff said in a statement that if Altman and OpenAI’s current board “are intent on becoming a fully for-profit corporation, it is vital that the charity be fairly compensated for what its leadership is taking away from it: control over the most transformative technology of our time.”

Musk’s attorney also shared a letter he sent in early January to the attorneys general of California, where OpenAI operates, and Delaware, where it is incorporated.

Since both state offices must “ensure any such transactional process relating to OpenAI’s charitable assets provides at least fair market value to protect the public’s beneficial interest, we assume you will provide a process for competitive bidding to actually determine that fair market value,” Toberoff wrote, asking for more information on the terms and timing of that bidding process.