Good morning. It is February 12th. New York City lies under a minor but picturesque blanket of overnight snow. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news column belongs to Gaza. Although Gaza news and Washington DC news are inseparable now.

The headline is “ISRAEL THREATENS TO RENEW COMBAT IN HOSTAGE CRISIS / ULTIMATUM TO HAMAS / Vowing to End the Truce Unless the Release of Captives Resume.” Yesterday's front page headline was “HAMAS SUSPENDS FREEING CAPTIVES, IMPERILING TRUCE.” So the blame is swinging around. Within the story, there's a bit of a tennis match. Hamas accused Israel of violating parts of the ceasefire. Israel has denied the claim. Hamas led the attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023, Israel retaliated by bombing the territory and displacing millions of Palestinians. Then it focuses in on the present situation. “The current standoff stems in part from Hamas's accusation that Israel has not upheld its promises for the first phase of the ceasefire. Israel was required to send hundreds of thousands of tents into Gaza, a promise that Hamas says Israel has not kept. Three Israeli officials and two mediators who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter said that Hamas's claims were accurate. But COGAT, the Israeli military unit that oversees aid deliveries, said in a written response that Hamas's accusations were completely false.” 

And before getting to any of that, the story had to deal with the latest on Donald Trump's frivolously conceived and logistically nonsensical, but by all appearances seriously committed plans to seize Gaza himself. “Mr. Trump's pronouncements this week,” the Times writes, “including his statements that the United States will take over the devastated territory and that its Palestinian residents have no rights to return, have infuriated Hamas, flummoxed world leaders, and amplified the sense of chaos surrounding the ceasefire negotiation. Mr. Trump has said the United States will rebuild Gaza into the Riviera of the Middle East, and on Monday he threatened to withdraw financial support for Egypt and Jordan unless they take in all the Palestinians who would be displaced by that effort.” He was meeting with Jordan's King Abdullah II yesterday. “During that meeting,” the Times reports, “Trump said, ‘we will have Gaza. It's a war torn area. We're going to take it.’ Jordan's parliament, the Times notes last week, introduced a bill that would ban the resettlement of Palestinians in the country. But King Abdullah is trying to protect the more than one point five billion dollars in foreign aid his country receives from the United States. He said in the meeting that Jordan was willing to take in 2000 Palestinian children with cancer or other serious illnesses right away. Mr. Trump called the offer ‘a beautiful gesture,’” just a little, lightweight limited humanitarian ethnic cleansing there Surely no one could object to the children getting medical treatment, which they can't get in Gaza because t he Israelis blew up all the hospitals in the course of trying to make Gaza uninhabitable. So what else can anyone do now really? 

Next to that on page one below a big photograph of a tent on a field of rubble in northern Gaza, there's a big win for Trump. “Trump’s Envoy Gets American Freed by Russia” is the headline. “President Trump on Tuesday secured the release of an American imprisoned in Russia as part of a deal with the Kremlin negotiated by Mr. Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff. Marc Fogel, a teacher who was arrested on charges of bringing medical marijuana into Russia in August 2021, was released by the Kremlin and flown out of the country on Mr. Witkoff’s plane.” The story has four bylines on it, but even so, half the news is missing. “Mike Waltz,” the Times writes, “Mr. Trump's national security adviser said in a statement that Mr. Woodcock at the president's direction had brought Mr. Fogel out of Russia on his plane as part of an exchange. But he did not provide any details about whether the United States or an ally had released someone in return or what other steps the administration had taken to win Mr. Fogel's release.” There was a deal and the deal is presented as a success for Donald Trump, but the Times can't tell the reader what was dealt. 

That question seems even more pertinent given that on Monday, when the Trump administration ordered the suspension of the prosecution of New York Mayor Eric Adams, the memo giving the order written by the current number two at the Justice Department, Trump's former personal lawyer, Emil Bove, contained a seemingly gratuitous shot at the deal the Biden administration made with Russia to secure the release of basketball star Brittney Griner in exchange for the arms merchant Viktor Bout. That was apparently a great crime in Trump administration lore, but apparently this administration is avoiding any similar prisoner exchange scandal by simply not acknowledging whatever or whoever it is that they've exchanged. 

And speaking of the Emil Bove, we take a little journey to the bottom of page A15 where the headline is “Pardoned by Trump, January 6th, defendants assail those who worked on their cases.” Headline space is tight and this one is tricky, but assail doesn't really get at it. “In one social media post,” the story says, “a rioter pardoned by President Trump after taking part in the storming of the Capitol, expressed his joy and happiness at just how badly prosecutors who worked on cases like his own were hurting right now after some of them were fired. In a different post, another pardoned rioter taunted agents who worked on investigations linked to the events of January 6th, 2021, ridiculing them for worrying that they would be revealed and asking sarcastically, ‘why would you be afraid of us knowing your names?’ In a third post, yet another rioter granted clemency by the president featured the image of a document that clearly showed the name and cell phone number of the FBI agent who oversaw his case.” The story goes on to say that “pardoned rioters have assailed these law enforcement officials as “traitors” or “evil,” often doxxing them by posting their names, photos and contact information online. Many of the messages,” the Times writes,” “are likely protected by the First Amendment, at least for now, is no indication that they have led to any violence.” Meanwhile, as the story notes, “inside the FBI, agents and others who worked on the cases are deeply concerned about losing their jobs, but also fear for their personal safety, given that the Justice Department asked for names of employees who handled the January 6 investigations and a terrorism case.”

And from there we jump to NBC News for some new helpful background on the FBI purge. “In the months after the January 6th attacks,” NBC reports, “a hard charging federal prosecutor in Manhattan eagerly oversaw efforts to find and arrest Capitol rioters in the New York area, his former colleagues say, and even proposed to the Justice Department that his office should play a central role in the investigation. His name? Emil Bove. Bove,” NBC continues, “whose prominence soared when he was one of Donald Trump's defense lawyers last year, is now the Trump appointed acting deputy attorney general, essentially the chief operating officer of the Justice Department. He has been leading an effort to identify everyone who worked on January 6th cases and remedy what Trump called a grave national injustice by rooting out those who acted with corrupt or partisan intent when they investigated Trump and Capitol rioters. 

For more on disingenuous persecutions. The top left of the front page of the Times is “Musk Provides Fraud Claims, But Not Proof / Blasts Federal Workers From the Oval Office,” describing how in his press conference yesterday “Elon Musk offered no evidence for his sweeping claims that the federal bureaucracy had been corrupted by cheats and officials who had approved money for fraudsters.” The story continues “among Mr. Musk's claims, which he offered without providing evidence, was that some officials at the now-gutted U.S. Agency for International Development had been taking “kickbacks.” He said that ‘quite a few people’ in the bureaucracy somehow had ‘managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth while they are in that position,’ without explaining how he had made that assessment. He later claimed that some recipients of Social Security checks were as old as 150.” 

The reason Musk is saying these things is that he's a liar and an ignoramus But his bullshit is backed by a so-far unchecked power to do things. 

On page A19, the Times struggles and largely fails to wrest a coherent news framework out of those two conflicting facts. The headline is, “Femas Chief of Budgeting is Forced Out Over Outlays.” The headline is simply false, as the text of the story covers. That person and three other FEMA employees were not forced out over outlays. They were forced out because Elon Musk as the story says, “claimed misleadingly that FEMA had recently sent $59 million meant for disaster relief to New York City to pay for high-end hotels for migrants and called the expenditure unlawful. New York City officials,” the story says, “raced to clarify that the federal money had been properly allocated by FEMA under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. last year, adding that it was not a disaster relief grant and had not been spent on luxury hotels.” Then a Homeland Security spokesperson repeats the falsehoods saying that the people were fired for circumventing leadership to unilaterally make egregious payments for luxury NYC hotels for migrants. Again, they were actually fired because Elon Musk made something up about them because his brain, which never worked well to begin with, has been totally hollowed out by ketamine and rewired by his own self-inflicted social media diet of Nazis and or conspiracists and or trolls. Who are the people depraved and or cynical enough to give him the flattery that he can't live without. 

And speaking of how far-right nonsense gets forced into the mainstream, down at the bottom of page one, on a story about how Wong Kim Ark secured the Constitution's promise of birthright citizenship for all more than 125 years ago, the Times' print headline desk went with, “After a Century, a Crackdown Could Redefine Who Is American.” A crackdown on what exactly? A crackdown on the uncontrolled activity of being an American citizen under the Constitution? The Trump administration's desire to strip away a Fundamental and completely established right is not a crackdown in any sense. It's a radical rejection of a settled and guaranteed state of affairs. The story gives the Trump administration less credit than the headline does but it still says that “the Trump administration is pushing forward a reinterpretation of the 1898 decision, drawing on ideas from a small group of legal scholars like John Eastman, a lawyer known for drafting a plan to block congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election.” By “known for” there, what they mean is “disbarred for,” and it's not a small group of legal scholars like John Eastman. If John Eastman is even a legal scholar, it's just John Eastman, a lawyer so uninterested in the law that it's cost him his ability to practice. Really, even ideas and reinterpretation are nonsense here. There's no conceptual or intellectual process behind it. The white nationalists who have seized control of the federal government want to unconstitutionally ban birthright citizenship. And a handful of the most corrupt and dishonest people in the country have set about the perfunctory task of trying to invent some fake reasons for it.

That is the news. 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 continue supporting us if you can and if nothing too unexpected happens, we will talk again tomorrow.