Good morning. It is February 19th. It is cold again in New York City as we have a rare uninterrupted stretch of winter. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The attorney general of Brazil indicted Jair Bolsonaro, the former president, yesterday for what the New York Times describes as a “vast scheme to hold on to power after losing the 2022 election, including one plot to annul the vote, disband courts and empower the military, and another to assassinate the nation's president-elect.” 

And then, the Times writes, “On Wednesday, hours after Mr. Bolsonaro was indicted, Mr. Trump’s media group sued the Supreme Court justice now weighing whether to arrest Mr. Bolsonaro, accusing the judge of censoring right-wing voices in the United States with orders against social networks. The suit appeared to be an effort to pressure the judge as he decided on next steps in the Bolsonaro case.” 

The theory, the Times writes in an accompanying story, is that when the judge ordered the right-wing social media site Rumble to take down the accounts of Bolsonaro supporters, those orders, the Times writes, “could apply to how those accounts appeared in the United States breaking American law. Mr. Trump's company,” the Times Continues, “has not been subject to the justice's orders, but it argued in the lawsuit that it relied on Rumble's technology and therefore could be harmed if Rumble's operations were affected.” That would be a double hypothetical around indirect harms. But that's lawfare for you. Now, as practiced by the International Brotherhood of Coup Plotters. 

NBC News reports that Elon Musk's government purging Doge initiative having fired the people who oversee the nuclear arsenal last week without knowing that was who they were firing has now gone from the energy department to the US Department of Agriculture where NBC writes it “accidentally fired several agency employees who are working on the federal government's response to the H5N1 avian flu outbreak. ‘We are working to swiftly rectify the situation and rescind those letters, a USDA spokesperson said in a statement.’”

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead story is “U.S. AND RUSSIA EYE THAW IN RELATIONS AS DIPLOMATS MEET / Talks in Saudi Arabia Include Commerce and Unsettle Ukraine and Europe.” 

Dateline “RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — The United States and Russia moved
toward a head-spinning reset of their relationship on Tuesday, agreeing to work together on ending the Ukraine war, on financial investment and on re-establishing normal relations. The meeting between senior officials from both countries was a striking display of bonhomie after three years of American efforts to isolate Moscow for its 2022 invasion.” There are really more layers of appeasement there than can be counted. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose job was his reward for capitulating to Donald Trump, takes the invitation from the journalist-murdering tyrant Mohammed bin Salman to come talk to the Russians without Ukraine present, about an amicable resolution to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Russian delegation included Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia's Sovereign Wealth Fund, who told the press, “‘U.S. oil majors have had very successful business in Russia. We believe at some point they will be coming back, because why would they forgo these opportunities that Russia gave them to have access to Russian natural resources?’”

Leading Western oil companies in the Times writes, “including Exxon Mobil, joined many other businesses in pulling out of Russia three years ago amid outrage over Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Mr. Dmitriev said he would present the American delegation with an estimate showing that American companies lost $300 billion by leaving Russia.” 

Speaking of business opportunities and the Saudis, on the left-hand side of page one, the headline is “TRUMP ADVANCES HIS OWN BUSINESS / Unchecked by Congress as Conflicts Abound.” It opens with the story of how the president employed the Oval Office for one end of a phone negotiation between the PGA Tour and the Saudi LIV Golf League about how to go through with the merger between the two. In this case, the Times writes, “Mr. Trump was pushing a merger that relates to his own family's financial interest. The Trump family is an LIV Golf business partner. The family has repeatedly hosted LIV tournaments at its golf venues, including one planned in April at the Trump National Doral in Miami for the fourth year in a row.”

Now they have to bring in the experts to certify that this is exactly what it is. In other words, the Times writes, “according to half a dozen former Justice Department prosecutors and government ethics lawyers, Mr. Trump's participation in this discussion was a brazen conflict of interest, one of the series that have played out over the past few weeks with a frequency unlike any presidency in modern times, even in the first Trump term.” After the jump, the story spreads out into a discussion about the broader immolation of ethics under Trump. covering not just his own self-dealing, but his demolition of the entire structure of ethical enforcement in the federal government. “Mr. Trump,” the Times writes, “not only fired nearly 20 inspectors general who investigate waste, and abuse, he also fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel who examines public corruption and the head of the Office of Government Ethics, which provides guidance to agencies across the government on what is right and wrong. At the Justice Department,” the Times continues, “which can take up criminal violations of ethics laws even without referrals from separate federal agencies. Mr. Trump has appointed members of his former criminal defense team to top posts, including Emil J. Bove III, the acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General, who helped defend Mr. Trump against charges in New York that he falsified business records.” The story also mentions how Elon Musk is slashing his way through government agencies. Even though the Times writes “some of those are investigating Mr. Musk's companies or cumulatively paying them billions of dollars a year.” Also, as one more case study in the non-existence of ethics, the Times writes, “in Washington, Mr. Trump appointed the lawyer Edward R. Martin Jr. to serve as the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Mr. Martin resigned from representing a criminal defendant before moving in his capacity as a federal prosecutor to dismiss the charges filed against his client.” That would be a January 6th client. And if I recall rightly, there was another one for whom he did the same without even having bothered to go through with his resignation as a defense lawyer before dismissing the charges from the other side. 

Right below that story on the Jump page, Edward R. Martin appears again, this time under the headline, “A top federal prosecutor in Washington resigns.” She resigned at the Times writes “after she declined to comply with a request by Trump administration officials to freeze the assets of a government contractor because of what she said was insufficient evidence to do so, according to her resignation letter. In the letter, which was obtained by the New York Times, Denise Cheung, who oversaw the office's criminal division, described how the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, Ed Martin, had asked her to step down after she refused to order a bank to freeze accounts of an unnamed contractor. ‘I still do not believe that there is sufficient evidence to issue a so-called freeze letter to the unidentified bank,’ Ms. Cheung, a 24-year veteran of the department, wrote.” It appears, according to the Times, “to be an effort to rescind Clean Energy grants that were awarded by the Biden administration. In a separate move,” the Times writes, “Mr. Martin told his staff on Friday that he was planning to hire about 20 more line prosecutors, according to an email obtained by the Times. His announcement of the hires came a little more than two weeks after top officials at the Justice Department fired more than a dozen rank and file prosecutors who had been brought into the office to work on cases stemming from the January 6th attack.” 

Back on page one. In the middle of the page is an extremely understated headline. “Detained by U.S., Migrants Are Flown to Panama.” The subhead warms up a little with “Hundreds from Africa, Asia and Mideast locked in hotel.” The story itself is excellent and horrifying reporting. Dateline “PANAMA CITY — They arrived at the United States border from around the world, hoping to seek asylum. Instead, they were detained, shackled and flown by the U.S. military to a faraway country, Panama.
They were stripped of their passports and most of their cellphones, they said, and then locked in a hotel, barred from seeing lawyers and told they would soon be sent to a makeshift camp near the Panamanian jungle. At the hotel,” the Times continues, “at least one person tried to commit suicide, according to several migrants. Another broke his leg trying to escape. A third sent a plaintiff missive from a hidden cell phone” ‘Only a miracle can save us.’” 

Along with the migrants, the United States is exporting our lawless and slapdash approach to replacing our obligations to asylum seekers under international law with nothing in particular, as long as it's mean. “Panama's president, the Times writes, has said that the plan is to send people back to their home countries. But if the United States could not easily send deportees back to certain countries, it is unclear how Panama will do so.” The story also says “lawyers in Panama say it is illegal to detain people without a court order for more than 24 hours. Yet roughly 350 migrants deported by the United States on three military planes have been locked in a soaring glass paneled hotel, the Decapolis Hotel Panama, in Panama City for nearly a week while officials ready a camp near the jungle. Armed guards prevent any of the deportees from leaving the hotel. Several of them are children.” The deportees, not the armed guards. “The Panamanian government,” the Times writes, “has barred journalists from visiting the migrants, but the New York Times managed to interview several people inside the hotel, all of whom said they were asylum seekers being held against their will. Among them, the Times found an Iranian family with three children ages eight, 10, and 11, who identify as Christian converts and say they're fleeing the risk of punishment for apostasy. A Chinese asylum seeker told them he had crossed into the United States where he was detained, cuffed and put on a plane to Panama.” The Times writes, ‘I thought America is a free country with respect for human rights.’ He said, ‘I had no idea it was like a dictatorship.’ As far as his home country went, he said, ‘I would rather jump off a plane than go back to China.’ 

And the condition of Pope Francis is still deep inside the paper down at the bottom of page A9. But now the word from the Vatican is that he has bilateral pneumonia and that his condition “continued to present a complex picture.”

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 with your paid subscriptions and your tips. Thank you, please continue if you’re able, and, if nothing gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.