Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
NYC Mayor Eric Adams has a line that he trots out about life. It’s a clunky bit of received wisdom: “All my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success.”
In some sense, the drama around his case has been like a monkey’s paw realization of that wish. Yes, his haters (the United States Department of Justice) have, in a way, become his waiters at the table of success (it is moving to drop the charges as part of a corrupt bargain in which he cooperates with a Trump immigration crackdown).
The problem is that none of this remotely withstands any scrutiny or sustained thought. Take remarks from Attorney General Pam Bondi about the case at CPAC on Thursday. She substituted the rationale that acting DAG Emil Bove supplied to drop the case, saying instead that the matter was wrongly brought on the merits of the law and facts at hand.
That’s not what Bove had directed the DOJ to argue. Instead, he had said that the DOJ would dismiss the case without making an underlying claim about the facts or the law involved. This is critical to the corrupt bargain: the DOJ wants the case dismissed without prejudice, meaning it can refile the charges later and thereby keep them hanging over Adams as leverage. Claiming that the facts don’t support a charge makes it very difficult to argue for bringing the same charges later.
Bondi’s rationale blew that up, and Adams’ lawyers immediately notified the judge of the remarks, saying that they served as additional reason for the DOJ to drop the charges. Either way, it’s their table: we’re just sitting at it.
— Josh Kovensky
Here’s what else TPM has on tap this weekend:
- Khaya Himmelman unpacks a from-another-era right-wing conspiracy theory that has found new life, this time at the heart of EPA administrator Lee Zeldin’s push for a DOJ investigation of federal grants allocated by the Biden administration. It’s the latest example of the Trump administration’s continued, improper interference at the DOJ, in this case leading to the resignation of another high profile federal prosecutor.
- House Republican leadership is trying to get its conference on board with a mammoth spending bill to extend Trump’s tax cuts, raise the debt ceiling and cut $2 trillion in federal spending. Emine Yücel reports on an area of tension that we expect will divide the conference: massive cuts to Medicaid.
- Emine Yücel also weighs in on the environment of hostility, fear and suspicion towards Latino immigrants and citizens that has trickled down from the Trump administration in recent weeks.
Let’s dig in.
Senate Passed Their Budget Framework. But What About The ‘One, Big, Beautiful’ Bill?
Following a 12-hour vote-a-rama on Thursday night, Senate Republicans passed their $340 billion budget framework, which did not include Trump’s 2017 tax extensions, in a mostly party-line vote.
Stuck between a rock and a hard place (aka Trump), Republican senators are framing the budget resolution as a “Plan B,” a back up plan that gives Trump “optionality” just in case House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) isn’t successful in getting the “one, big, beautiful” bill passed in the House — the odds of which are looking increasingly unlikely as we head into next week.
“[Trump] made clear to me … he wants one big, beautiful bill. He said that two or three times on the phone,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told reporters on Thursday.
Unlike what Trump seems to believe, one big bill addressing all his priorities might not be the most realistic path forward for Congress to pass a budget resolution and avoid a government shutdown in coming weeks. So the “Plan B” might very well end up becoming Plan A, depending on how things go in the House in the week ahead.
The reality is House Republicans hold an incredibly slim majority and at any given point, on any given issue, a tiny group of holdouts threatens to tank leadership’s plans. And the “one, big, beautiful” bill that Speaker Johnson intends to bring to the House floor next week is, well, already encountering some issues.
House Republicans’ budget blueprint instructs the House Energy and Commerce Committee to find $880 billion in cuts. That panel has jurisdiction over Medicaid spending, meaning the billions in cuts will likely come out of Medicaid and social-safety net programs that millions of low-income Americans and children rely on.
Johnson says they will only enact work requirements and target waste, fraud and abuse but that’s really just a euphemism for cuts to Medicaid. And even spending cuts that fall within those buckets will be nowhere near enough to meet the spending reduction targets that the budget resolution is envisioning.
For moderate House Republicans that’s a tricky spot to be in.
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) is one of the three lawmakers who said they are “leaning no” on the budget resolution, according to Punchbowl.
Malliotakis told Punchbowl she needs more clarity from leadership on where that $880 billion in cuts will come from and what that would mean for districts like hers where many people rely on Medicaid.
Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) also is looking for assurances that there won’t be major Medicaid cuts in the final bill, according to Punchbowl.
We expect that tensions within the House Republican conference over the push to gut Medicaid will boil over next week. In the end, both chambers need to adopt identical budget resolutions to move onto the next step of the reconciliation process. And with how vastly different the budget plans are as of now, this process is far from done.
— Emine Yücel
Nothing But Old School Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories At Heart Of Lee Zeldin’s Improper Push For DOJ Investigation
EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has roped Stacy Abrams into his push to improperly rescind and investigate $20 billion in grants that were already allocated for climate projects by the Biden administration. The continuing saga is only one of many examples of the Trump administration’s continued, improper interference at the Department of Justice. And it’s the story at the heart of a recent resignation by a top federal prosecutor who left in protest of the erosion of the DOJ’s independence from the Trump administration.
Zeldin claimed last week, based on nothing more than a video clip from right-wing conspiracy theory website Project Veritas, that money and contracts tied to the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund were part of some amorphous, corrupt scheme put in motion by the Biden administration.
Zeldin latched onto the Project Veritas video as justification for his push to rescind funds and push for a DOJ investigation into the grant contracts, but the video only shows a former Biden-era employee being filmed speaking about “tossing gold bars off the Titanic.” In reality, the employee was talking about distributing grant funding to “nonprofits, states, tribes” ahead of Trump’s presidency. But for Zeldin, it was somehow proof that the grant money had been improperly distributed by the Biden administration.
And now the latest in Zeldin’s “gold bar” conspiracy theory, according to his recent post on X, is that right-wing boogeywoman, Stacey Abrams is somehow involved. “Stacey Abrams’ Power Forward Communities received $2 BILLION to be a pass through entity for Biden EPA’s $20 billion ‘gold bar’ scheme,” Zeldin tweeted.
Power Forward Communities is not Abrams’ organization as Zeldin implies in his post. It’s a nonprofit coalition of five different organizations, one of which, Rewiring America, Abrams serves on as senior counsel.
An EPA press release on Friday similarly says that Zeldin has “shined a light on $2 billion of the $20 billion gold bars parked by the Biden-Harris administration at an outside organization to reduce oversight set to be distributed to Stacey Abram’s Power Forward Communities.”
But the money, as senior communications director at Evergreen Action Holly Burke, explained in an interview with TPM, was never a secret to begin with. It was publicly announced that the coalition would be a distributor of Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund money in April 2024, per a White House press release.
“They’ve [the Trump administration] just been finding uses of public money that maybe they don’t think the general public knows about,” said Burke. “And they’ve been calling it waste fraud and abuse, even if it’s something that was very well known and very public and very congressionally approved and went through all of the legal processes that public money has to go through.”
Zeldin’s “gold bar” conspiracy theory is in large part the reason why federal prosecutor Denise Cheung, who was in charge of the criminal division in the Washington, D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, resigned on Tuesday.
In her resignation letter, she cited her refusal to open a grand jury investigation into these grants and to freeze assets of the grant initiative because she found no legal justification for doing so. Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove’s office insisted that the Project Veritas clip was enough evidence to justify an investigation, but Cheung determined that the clip was not sufficient evidence, according to Cheung’s letter of resignation.
— Khaya Himmelman
Words Of Wisdom
“I don’t know. I assume you’re a citizen. Maybe you’re not. Maybe you are…”
That’s Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) questioning the citizenship status of an elected county official in New York this week during a public meeting.
Lawler’s baffling remarks came after José Alvarado — the vice chair of Westchester County’s Board of Legislators — asked the congressman what documentation people should be ready to produce if they are stopped by ICE agents.
Lawler responded by saying Alvarado should be ready to cooperate with ICE if he were to be stopped, right before suggesting the local elected official might not be a U.S. citizen, based on little other than Alvarado’s name.
The remarks led to laughter from the attendees, with one person audibly calling the congressman’s comments “unbelievable.”
“I didn’t realize that you didn’t know that in order to be elected, you have to be a citizen,” Alvarado said in response.
This is the second week in a row, I’m suggesting a congressman brush up on something they should already know but alas … Mr. Lawler might need to retake the high school U.S. government and civics class.
Obviously, we know that Lawler knows what is required to become an elected official in this country. The actions that the Trump administration has taken toward Latino people in America has had the desired effect: creating an environment of hostility, fear and suspicion towards Latino immigrants and citizens that trickles down from the top, and is only reinforced by Trump allies and MAGA Republicans.
— Emine Yücel
