February 14, 2025 (Friday) Heather Cox Richardson in Trump presidency

On this day, I always like to tell the story of Theodore Roosevelt’s terrible 1884 Valentine’s Day and how it led to the Progressive Era. But things are happening too fast these days to leave a gap in the record, so you’ll have to look back at last year—or forward to next—for that story. For this year, here goes:

The administration’s order to drop federal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for his cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has sparked a crisis in the Trump administration’s Department of Justice, led by President Trump’s own appointees.

Yesterday that crisis led to multiple resignations from the department as acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon resigned rather than drop the corruption charges. When the acting deputy attorney general of the Department of Justice, Emil Bove III, tried to do an end run around the Southern District of New York by taking the case to the Public Integrity Section in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and getting lawyer there to dismiss the case, at least five of them resigned as well.

This crisis is really over whether the Department of Justice will defend the rule of law or declare loyalty to Trump alone. And the crisis is growing.

Bove claims that administration officials did not make an arrangement with Adams to dismiss charges in exchange for his political support. But this morning, Adams and Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan undermined that assertion when they appeared together on the Fox News Channel. “If he doesn’t come through,” Homan said of Adams, “I’ll be back in New York City and we won’t be sitting on the couch. I’ll be in his office, up his butt saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’”

Today, Hagan Scotten, the acting assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned in a blistering letter to Bove, calling his justification for dropping the charges against Adams “transparently pretextual.” “[N]o system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives,” he wrote.

Scotten was awarded two bronze stars as a troop commander in Iraq and clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts. He pointed out to Bove that “[t]here is a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake…. [A]ny assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way.”

He continued: “If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion [to dismiss the case]. But it was never going to be me. Please consider this my resignation.”

Also this morning, legal analyst Barb McQuade reported that “DOJ leadership has put all Public Integrity Section lawyers into a room with 1 hour to decide who will dismiss Adams indictment or else all will be fired.” “Sending them strength to stand by their oath, which is to support the Constitution, not the president’s political agenda,” she added. According to Jeremy Roebuck, Shayna Jacobs, Mark Berman, and Carol D. Leonnig of the Washington Post, one lawyer at the meeting said the discussion was “gut-wrenching” and “not anything any of us expected to see in America.”

At first, they all agreed to resign together, but then Edward Sullivan, a career federal prosecutor approaching retirement, said he would sign the motion to dismiss the case in a bid to save the jobs of his colleagues.

The crisis was reminiscent of the “Saturday Night Massacre” of October 20, 1973, when President Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox after Cox subpoenaed a number of the tapes Nixon had recorded in the Oval Office concerning the break-in to the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Washington, D.C., Watergate complex. Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused to execute Nixon’s order and resigned in protest; it was only the third man at the Justice Department, Solicitor General Robert Bork, who was willing to carry out the order firing Cox.
In that case, popular outrage at the resignations and firing forced Nixon to ask Bork—now acting attorney general—to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, a Democrat who had voted for Nixon, on November 1. On November 17, Nixon assured the American people: “I am not a crook.”

The administration’s determination to impose its will on the United States is behind its insistence that Trump can rename the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Denali, the highest peak in North America, by executive order. In 2017, Trump pushed hard to make Americans accept that the crowds at his inauguration were bigger than those at President Barack Obama’s, an immediately disprovable lie that seemed unimportant at the time but was key to establishing the primacy of Trump’s vision over reality, an acceptance that led, eventually, to the Big Lie that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election and now, apparently, to the lie that Elon Musk is cutting “waste and fraud” from the government when, in fact, he appears simply to be cutting programs he and Trump dislike.

Although tech companies and various media outlets have accepted Trump’s language, the Associated Press has continued to use the internationally accepted, historic name: the Gulf of Mexico. The Associated Press is a not-for-profit news cooperative founded in 1846 that produces and distributes news reports across the country and the world. White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich today claimed that the AP’s use of “Gulf of Mexico” showed its “commitment to misinformation,” and announced that the AP would be barred from the Oval Office and Air Force One.

In the Senate, Alaska’s senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, both Republicans, are pushing back on Trump’s name change for Denali, sponsoring a bill to require the mountain to be designated “Denali” on maps, documents, and any official U.S. records.

Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) pushed back today on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “rookie mistake” on Wednesday when he offered that the U.S. would not support Ukraine’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and that it was “unrealistic” for Ukraine to demand a return to its borders before Russia invaded in 2014, essentially offering to let Russia keep Crimea.

Wicker said he was “puzzled” and “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments and added: “I don’t know who wrote the speech—it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.” Joe Gould and Jamie Dettmer of Politico identified Carlson as a “pro-Putin broadcaster.”
“There are good guys and bad guys in this war, and the Russians are the bad guys,” Wicker said. “They invaded, contrary to almost every international law, and they should be defeated. And Ukraine is entitled to the promises that the world made to it.”

Hackers pushed back today on Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” website, launched earlier this week after Musk claimed that the group was posting its actions on the DOGE website. At the time, the website was essentially blank. Jason Koebler of 404 Media reported that the website was built out on Wednesday and Thursday. It appears not to be on government servers, is not secure, and pulls information from an open database that anyone could edit. Coders promptly added: “this is a joke of a .gov site” and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN-roro.” One coder told Koebler that the website “[f]eels like it was completely slapped together. Tons of errors and details leaked in the page source code.”
Indeed, Jennifer Bendery of HuffPost pointed out that one of the errors on the page is that it appears to have posted classified information about the size and staff of a U.S. intelligence agency. Security clearance lawyer Bradley Moss posted: “If you’re a clearance holder, stay away from the DOGE site. These ignorant virgins are going to find themselves prosecuted for violating the Espionage Act before all is said and done.”

Protesters today packed Christopher Park in New York City’s Greenwich Village near the Stonewall National Monument after the Trump administration erased “TQ+” from the LGBTQ+ on the monument’s website. The Stonewall Uprising of 1969, six days of conflict between police and LGBTQ+ protesters after police raided the Stonewall Inn, brought the longstanding efforts of LGBTQ+ activists for civil rights to popular attention, making Stonewall a symbol of LGBTQ+ rights.

Trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera were key figures in the Stonewall Uprising. Acknowledging their contribution, one protester held a sign that read, “NATIONAL PARK SERVICE: YOU CAN’T SPELL HISTORY WITHOUT A ‘T’”

Former Republican operative Stuart Stevens had a different take. He posted: “When I see the sexual orientation hate come out of the Republican party under the pretext of just being anti-Trans, I am very tempted to name the Republican operatives and elected officials who are closeted gays. It’s not a short list.”