Good morning. It is February 6th. The light blanket of overnight snow on New York City still looks like snow for the moment, but it's clearly bound for slush, and soon, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

We'll start with a new piece of the small picture, which essentially contains the entire big picture. Wired, America's leading source for breaking political news, reports, “a young technologist known online as Big Balls, who works for Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, (DOGE), has access to sensitive U.S. government systems. But his professional and online history call into question whether he would pass the background check typically required to obtain security clearances. Security experts tell Wired. Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old high school graduate, established at least five different companies in the last four years with entities registered in Connecticut, Delaware and the United Kingdom, most of which were not listed on his now deleted LinkedIn profile. Coristine also briefly worked in 2022 at Path Network, a network monitoring firm known for hiring reformed black hat hackers. Someone using a telegram handle tied to Coristine also solicited a cyber attack for hire service later that year,” Wired writes “‘If I was doing the background investigation on him, I would probably have recommended against hiring him for the work he's doing,’ says E.J. Hilbert, a former FBI agent who also briefly served as the CEO of Path Network prior to Coristine's employment there. ‘I’m not opposed to the idea of cleaning up the government, but I am questioning the people that are doing it.’” 

And what are these people doing? The Washington Post reports “agents of billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency have gained access to highly restricted government records on millions of federal employees, including Treasury and State Department officials in sensitive security positions, as part of a broader effort to wrest control over the government's main personnel agency, according to four U.S. officials with knowledge of the developments.” The Post continues, “the records maintained by the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, amount to a repository of sensitive information about employees of most federal agencies, including addresses, demographics, profiles, salary details, and disciplinary histories. The moves at the OPM by members of Musk's pseudo-governmental DOGE have coincided with similar efforts to gain access to sensitive systems at other agencies, including a Treasury Department system responsible for processing trillions of dollars in U.S. government payments. Records obtained by The Post show that several members of Musk's DOGE team, some of whom are in their early 20s and come from positions at his private companies, were given administrative access to OPM computer systems within days of Trump's inauguration last month. That gives them sweeping authority to install and modify software on government-supplied equipment and, according to two OPM officials, to alter internal documentation of their own activities.” Later on, the Post notes “the data that the Doge team can access includes a massive trove of personal information for millions of federal employees, included in systems called Enterprise Human Resources Integration and Electronic Office Personnel Folder. It also includes personal information for anyone who applied to a federal job through the site USA Jobs. The people said. Last year alone, the people said, there were 24.5 million such applicants.

On the front of this morning's New York Times. The lead to news columns are devoted to trying to understand what it was that Donald Trump said about Gaza two days ago. “Trump’s Proposal for Gaza Is Rattling the Middle East.” On the right is news analysis, “Experts Ask if He Is Serious or Bluffing.” On the left, “A Plan Put Forward Without Details or Consultation.” The news analysis story is not the kind of analysis that achieves any synthesis because the proposal doesn't make any sense. “President Trump's plan to place Gaza under American occupation,” the Times writes, “and transfer its two million Palestinian residents has delighted the Israeli right, horrified Palestinians, shocked America's Arab allies, and confounded regional analysts who saw it as unworkable. For some experts, the idea felt so unlikely. Would Mr. Trump really risk American troops in another intractable battle against militant Islamists in the Middle East, that they wondered if it was simply the opening bid in a new round of negotiations over Gaza's future?” The Times does seem to be trying its best here, but the characterization of an effort to drive Palestinians out of their sovereign territory in Gaza as a fight against militant Islamists, and by extension, the reduction of the American occupation of Iraq and the civil war thereby precipitated as also a struggle against militant Islamists basically reframes any self-determination by Arab peoples in the Middle East as primarily a matter of religious fanaticism. “To the Israeli right,” the Times writes, “Mr. Trump's plan unraveled decades of unwelcome orthodoxy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, raising the possibility of negating the militant threat in Gaza without the need to create a Palestinian state. In particular, settler leaders hailed it as a route by which they might ultimately resettle Gaza with Jewish civilians, a long-held desire. To Palestinians,” the Times continues, “the proposal would constitute ethnic cleansing on a more terrifying scale than any displacement they've experienced since 1948, when roughly 800,000 Arabs were expelled or fled during the wars surrounding the creation of the Jewish state.” Right. Those aren't two different perspectives. Those are two visions of exactly the same thing. That it would constitute ethnic cleansing on a grand scale is not some perception of the Palestinians. It is the explicit goal of the right-wing Israelis. And it is also indisputably what such a relocation program would be under international law. But will Trump really do it? 

In the adjoining story, the Times writes, “When President Trump announced his proposal for the United States to take ownership of Gaza on Tuesday, he shocked even senior members of his own White House and government. While his announcement looked formal and thought out, he read the plan from a sheet of paper.” That is the standard for presidential forethought,  apparently. Anyway, fine, he read it from a sheet of paper, as opposed to just freestyling it into a rally microphone to see if the crowd would enjoy it. “But while he did do that,” the Times writes, “his administration had not done even the most basic planning to examine the feasibility of the idea, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly.” Times adds that the announcement came as just as much of a surprise to Mr. Trump's Israeli visitors. He reportedly told Netanyahu just before they were going to walk out for their joint press conference. Inside the U.S. government, the Times writes “there had been no meetings with the State Department or Pentagon, as would normally occur for any serious foreign policy proposal, let alone one of such magnitude. There had been no working groups. The Defense Department had produced no estimates of the troop numbers required or cost estimates or even an outline of how it might work. There was little beyond an idea inside the president's head, which was, you may recall, all it took for the president to activate the Army Corps of Engineers to start dumping reservoir water in California. A dumb idea in the president's head is a dumb idea moving through the real world. 

Next to that, on page one, for instance, “Trump bans transgender students from sports.” A slight oversimplification, since the administration's only banning trans women from women's sports, so they can stack up not one, but two layers of blackletter sex discrimination in a single policy. But congratulations to the New York Times and former New York Times culture war correspondent Michael Powell for their work in bringing that one about. 

And then on the left-hand side of the page, “swift mandate in Justice Department to fall in line.” It's an under informative headline, but it's only got a tiny space, but maybe it should have gotten a bigger space. Given that, the point of the story is that Attorney General Pam Bondi, one of the many Trump cabinet members who the Washington Post editorial board cheerfully gave the green thumbs up as being acceptable, marked her first day on the job by vowing to abuse her powers in pretty much every possible way. Bondi, the Times writes, “signed a memo creating a working group to review the weaponization of the criminal justice system by officials who had brought criminal charges or civil suits against Mr. Trump. It was one of 14 directives that shuttered department task forces, restored the federal death penalty, above all else, mandated obedience to Mr. Trump's agenda. Hours earlier, the department's number two official, Emil Bove, escalated his conflict with the acting director of the FBI, Brian Driscoll, and his deputy, Robert C. Kissane. He accused them of insubordination after they resisted his efforts to identify agents who'd investigated the January 6th, 2021 riot at the Capitol. Bondi's orders,” the Times writes, “also included the disbanding of a foreign influence task force, new limitations on prosecutions under the Foreign Agent Registration Act,” namely, she ain't gonna do it, “and the shutdown of a foreign corporate enforcement unit.” Crimes, crimes, and more crimes. 

One of Trump's leading patrons, Mark Andreessen, the egg-skulled Silicon Valley tycoon hired Subway strangler Daniel Penny to work at his investment firm, even though Penny has absolutely no relevant business expense. And if you believed his successful defense at his manslaughter trial, the whole thing happened because he misjudged when would have been the appropriate time to release his position. 

In other Trump administration data security news on page A17. “The CIA sent the White House an unclassified email listing all employees hired by the spy agency over the last two years, to comply with an executive order to shrink the federal workforce in a move that former officials say risked the list leaking to adversaries. The list included first names and the initial of the last name of the new hires who are still on probation and thus easy to dismiss. It included a large crop of young analysts and operatives who were hired specifically to focus on China and whose identities are usually closely guarded because Chinese hackers are constantly seeking to identify them. One former agency officer called the reporting of the names in an unclassified email a counterintelligence disaster.” 

Anyway, there's more and more and more stuff throughout the paper, but there also on page A17 is an attempt to make sense of it all. The headline is “Laws. What laws? A brazen grab for executive power.” Here's that word “brazen” again. The Times writes, “in his first term, President Trump seemed to relish ripping through the norms and standards of self-restraint that his predecessors had respected. Three weeks into his second term,” fact check, still only two and a half weeks, “the hand wringing about norms seems quaint.” And then comes the most perfectly Timesian sequence possible. “Other presidents, the piece says, have occasionally ignored or claimed a right to bypass particular statutes. But Mr. Trump has opened the throttle on defying legal limits. ‘We are well past euphemism about pushing the limits, stretching the envelope and the like,’ said Peter Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at New York University and the author of a casebook on separation of powers law. ‘The array of legal constraints Mr. Trump has violated,’ Mr. Shane added, ‘amounts to programmatic sabotage and rampant lawlessness.’” Even in a story about how Trump is breaking the law, even as an expert tells a Times reporter explicitly that pushing the limits is an inadequate and unsuitable euphemism for the president's law breaking. The Times goes with “defying legal limits.” And as it tries to paraphrase the expert who just said that Trump is a law breaker, goes with “the array of legal constraints Mr. Trump has violated.” Not “legal constraints,” laws. What he's violated are the laws. Even when the whole point is to say it, they can't say it.

That is the news. Good grief this went on much too long. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your subscription dollars and tips. Please do continue with those. Put on your boots because it's unambiguously slushy out there and it's only getting deeper. And if no unexpected difficulties present themselves, we'll talk again tomorrow.