The un-Americans mean to outlast you
For anyone you know who still believes government should be run like a business, a tale I’ve been here long enough to retell several times.
Back in the age of rotary phones (around 1970), I read about a school bus service in Greensboro or High Point, NC. (Maybe via Ralph Nader.) The owner had purchased a half dozen new buses in another state. His drivers had trouble with them on the trip back. A couple wouldn’t pass inspection brand new. They kept burning out clutches (transmissions?). Despite repeated telephoned and snail-mailed complaints, the owner kept getting the runaround from the area rep, and then from the regional rep. The company claimed that no other customers had had similar problems.
That was a lie. The owner already had a sheaf of complaints from contacting other owners around the country (and the rep knew it). The breakdowns must have been caused by the service’s drivers, the regional rep insisted to his face.
The money quote went something like this:
“He was lying to me. I knew he was lying to me. He knew I knew he was lying to me. But he was lying anyway, not because he had anything to gain from the lies, but because it was company policy.”
By the way, Kilmar Abrego García, the undocumented immigrant snatched up and sent to a hellhole prison in El Salvador on an administrative error arrived back in the U.S. on Friday.
Behold your federal administration, run by a businessman like his business, and stocked with people who will lie to your faces because it’s company policy.
“He is not coming back to our country. President Bukele said he was not sending him back. That’s the end of the story,” Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted in April. “There was no situation ever where he was going to stay in this country. None, none.”
“There is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told a Senate hearing in May.
Via The New Republic :
Attorney General Pam Bondi revealed in a press conference that Abrego Garcia had landed back in the U.S., after the government presented El Salvador with an arrest warrant for him. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele had initially balked at the idea that he would ever return Abrego Garcia, saying in April that he would not “smuggle” a “terrorist” back into the U.S.
Bondi alleged that Abrego Garcia had a “significant role” in a smuggling ring that moved people, as well as firearms and narcotics, and said that the illegal transport of undocumented immigrants was his “full-time job.”
“This is what American justice looks like,” Bondi said, seemingly referring to due process, which she conveniently ignored for the last three months.
No, said several pundits. The charges assembled since Abrego Garcia’s deportation are being reverse engineered as a face-saving move by the Trump administration. Perhaps they have back-channel signals that even the Roberts Supreme Court will not back his open defiance of its April 10 order to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return for the due process to which he (and the others still in El Salvador) are constitutionally entitled. Now that he is back on U.S. soil, the government has asked the judge presiding over the case challenging his mistaken deportation to dismiss it.
The administration responded to public condemnation over its flaunting constitutional protections with a smear campaign against Abrego Garcia, branding him a dangerous “convicted” criminal [he isn’t] “and MS-13 gang member despite their thin evidence.”
Forced to back down on their insistence that he would never return, Bondi doubled (or is it tripled?) down on those allegations on Friday in announcing Abrego Garcia had been returned to face charges.
Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters that Abrego Garcia “played a significant role in an alien-smuggling ring.” The criminal charges, filed in the Middle District of Tennessee, allege that Abrego Garcia participated in a nine-year conspiracy that moved thousands of people to destinations across the United States and totaled more than 100 trips. The indictment also accuses him of gun running and drug smuggling.
And more. In her press conference and in the indictment, Bondi threw in a kitchen sink’s worth of hearsay allegations against Abrego Garcia that a federal prosecutor with scruples would not allege without bringing charges. (George W. Bush threw his own kitchen sink’s worth of thinly sourced allegations at Saddam Hussein when he wanted to illegally invade Iraq.) The only two crimes charged in the Abrego Garcia indictment are associated with conspiracy to transport undocumented immigrants.
Maybe he’s guilty. Maybe he’s not. Now her team has to prove it in court without lying under oath.
By the way again (ABC News):
Abrego Garcia’s attorney, in an online press briefing, called the charges against his client “an abuse of power.”
“They’ll stop at nothing at all — even some of the most preposterous charges imaginable — just to avoid admitting that they made a mistake, which is what everyone knows happened in this case,” said attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg.
Yes, there’s fallout:
The decision to pursue the indictment against Abrego Garcia led to the abrupt departure of Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee, sources briefed on Schrader’s decision told ABC News. Schrader’s resignation was prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons, the sources said.
Schrader, who spent 15 years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and was most recently the chief of the criminal division, declined to comment when contacted by ABC News.
But it is the tone, the intensity, and the brazenness of Bondi’s retconning of justifications for Trump 2.0’s denial of fundamental constitutional rights that is most unsettling. The message she sends is that if you belong to a group this administration disfavors, you have and deserve none.
Bondi’s press conference comes just days after the administration announced yet another travel ban. His first in 2017 sparked mass protests at airports. This time, “nothing of the sort,” writes Adam Serwer. “The disparity in reactions helps illustrate how habituated Americans have become to a president who wields his power with discriminatory intentions.”
“The number of disastrous things the administration is doing makes prioritizing difficult for its opponents,” he adds. “But there is also the reality that Trumpism is a kind of authoritarian autoimmune disease, one that has been ravaging the American body politic for so long that there are fewer small-d democratic antibodies left to fight it off.”
And Pam Bondi? She is lying to you. You know she is lying to you. She knows you know she is lying to you. But she is lying anyway, not because she has anything to gain from the lies, but because it is Trump 2.0 company policy.
A happy warrior for authoritarianism, Bondi makes Margaret Hamilton’s witch look like a Junior Leaguer.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that George Clooney brings a live performance of his Good Night, and Good Luck stage play to CNN tonight at 7 p.m. ET. He means to extend its reach beyond its Broadway performance run “to a much larger audience and also return it to its original source.” It will also stream on MAX and on CNN’s website without a subscription. He clearly hopes to send America a message.
UPDATE 2: ICYMI
* * * * *
Have you fought dictatorship today?
No Kings Day, June 14th (one week away)
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense