And in just a week the DOJ will be back under Trump again. This time, his appointees must stay out of politics, whether to help or hinder anyone for partisan reasons. We realize that might be a naïve hope.

In his report, IG Michael Horowitz concluded that in the final weeks of the 2020 campaign three senior unnamed Trump DOJ officials intentionally plotted to use official proceedings against how Andrew Cuomo in New York and Phil Murphy in New Jersey handled COVID in nursing homes in direct violation of the rules of the DOJ.

As the incriminating text message showed, one plotter wrote to another that this “will be our last play on them before election, but it’s a big one.” “Them” being Cuomo and Murphy. What the Trump officials did was to break clear DOJ rules about keeping secret info secret and tell the press in an effort to score points against the Democrats.

The New York Post and the Wall Street Journal were told about the probes, even before the two states were informed of the investigations. The Post and the Journal then reported the news of the DOJ inquiry, which was news indeed, but telling the press at that preliminary stage — and right before a national election — was against long-standing policy against politicization of the government.

Isn’t that what Trump gripes about?

In August of 2020, the department announced publicly it was looking at COVID nursing home deaths in those two states, along with Michigan and Pennsylvania (which also had Democratic governors) even though there were states with similar situations regarding COVID nursing home deaths in states with GOP governors that were not being reviewed.

The political focus was then amped up in October, as the IG uncovered in reviewing emails, telephone call logs, instant messages, text messages, and calendar entries.

The IG’s summary report says: “The OIG investigation found that three then Senior DOJ Officials violated DOJ’s Confidentiality and Media Contacts Policy by leaking to select reporters, days before an election, non-public DOJ investigative information regarding ongoing DOJ investigative matters, resulting in the publication of two news articles that included the non-public DOJ investigative information. The OIG investigation also found that one of these three then Senior DOJ Officials violated the Confidentiality and Media Contacts Policy and DOJ’s Social Media Policy by reposting through a DOJ social media account links to the news articles.”

Last Friday, during his sentencing in his Manhattan Stormy Daniels hush money felony conviction, Trump used his time before the judge to repeat his rant: “this has been a weaponization of government. They call it lawfare. Never happened to any extent like this, but never happened in our country before. And I’d just like to explain that I was treated very, very unfairly.”

Actually, he was treated correctly. But it was his own men at DOJ who engaged in “weaponization of government.”

Four years ago, when Trump lost, Zuckerberg had Meta tamp down on conspiracies after Trump’s election denial and Jan. 6 attack and banned the defeated president from Facebook and Instagram. Now, Zuckerberg is swinging the other way.

Meta is a publicly-traded but private company and they can make any content and moderation decisions they want, when they want. There’s no legal argument to be made against this turn away from fact-checking and towards a more freewheeling, more disinformation-laden, more confusing, more hateful and less illuminating approach.

The timing mostly makes sense here if you take this not really as a principled stand on speech but as an effort to curry favor with an incoming administration helmed by a man that essentially built his brand and political movement on a rejection of shared reality and adherence to narratives, even if those narratives were false. To say that Trump lies is almost beyond the point; every politician fibs but Trump has no use for the truth if it doesn’t aid his cause.

By that token, a turn away from a focus on accuracy and moderation is not an above-the-fray, non-ideological decision. It won’t impact the postings of people who tell the truth and believe in reality. Those who benefit will be the peddlers of lies and provable garbage, on everything from the efficacy of vaccines to the reality of climate change to the basic fact of who won the 2020 election.

Claims of bias against what are by and large dedicated journalists and fact-checkers striving to hit as close to the mark of truth as is possible are often simple acknowledgements that one movement is more in the business of falsehoods, yet these claims are now coming from Zuckerberg himself.

Beyond fact-checking, there’s much to take away from the modifications to speech policies, including the detail that Meta has explicitly carved out LGBTQ identity from a prohibition on referencing or alleging users’ mental health or illness status. What is this, a throwback to the discredited idea from a half century ago when the American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders? That was dropped in 1973, the last time it was acceptable in civil society to call a gay person mentally ill. Moving in this direction is, once more, not an apolitical choice but a starkly political one.

There was a time when Zuckerberg sang a tune, making public assurances that the company was aggressively tamping down on fake news as it faced escalating pressure in the aftermath of its role in the 2016 election. It seems like Zuckerberg has adjudged the winds are blowing differently now, to the detriment of our public discourse.

Under state law —  Civil Rights Law § 52 — audio-visual coverage of court proceedings that include witness testimony is fully prohibited, and by default the rest isn’t allowed to be broadcast unless the judge gives special permission.

Yes, the courts are technically public for those who have the time and wherewithal to travel to the court (and can compete for the tiny handful of public seats for the Trump trial), but the rest of us have no way to see them, making a mockery of the Sixth Amendment’s promise of a public trial.

That law should be rewritten as soon as possible. Until then, judges should routinely allow cameras in courtrooms, especially in cases of high public interest like the Trump trial. 

The public should see jury selection. Motions. Rulings. Opening arguments. Closing arguments. Jury readbacks. Verdicts. Sentencings. All as they happen, everything but witness testimony. And not because they’re spectacular —  but because so often, they’re wonderfully workmanlike and mundane, teaching a terrific lesson about the way this vital branch of government actually operates.

Decades ago, the practice of putting cameras in the courtroom was controversial. When CourtTV premiered, some share of America worried that the flashbulbs might disorient poor blindfolded Lady Justice.

There are 49 other states that allow cameras in court. Only New York says no. Albany’s fear that letting the public see the courts in action will somehow corrupt their basic integrity is at this point positively absurd. A far higher value, in any event, is letting the public understand how prosecutors and defense attorneys build their cases, and how judges and juries come to their conclusions. The same also applies for civil trials, as cameras were barred from the bench trial on the Trump Organization’s phony valuation of its assets.

Think of the Daniel Penny trial: A precious few journalists in the courtroom related the events of each day, leaving the rest of us to form our conclusions based on characterizations rather than the actual facts exposed to the jury..

It would’ve been far better for all New Yorkers to be able to tune in to as much of the trial as possible, formulating their own opinions with as much information as possible.

New York State’s court system is hopelessly complex and intimidating to the general public. It’s difficult and expensive to obtain transcripts. There are 11 different trial courts and multiple levels of appellate courts. The lowest level trial court is oddly called the Supreme Court.

There’ve been countless attempts to make some sense of the tangled mess, all of which have failed, because that’s what almost always happens in Albany. 

Given the failure to bring order to the courts, we don’t expect the powers that be to require transparency under law anytime soon. So the least judges can do is use their authority in every possible case to open up their individual courtrooms. Merchan took some baby steps. Going forward, he and everyone else should stride more boldly into the future.

As we’ve said before, we are against a ban on TikTok, as are the 170 million Americans who use it, so the Chinese parent company, ByteDance, better find a buyer before the law kicks in a week from now, on Jan. 19. That assumes that the high court ratifies the law, and puts national security over TikTok’s claims of First Amendment protection.

As several justices pointed out, it’s not what is being said on the TikTok platform, or who is saying, but who owns the platform itself. It doesn’t matter if the subject is cat videos or cookie recipes or even supposed news or straight-up anti-American or pro-China propaganda right from the Politburo. The concern is what the owner of TikTok is doing with the data it collects from the users.

Out of 193 members of the United Nations, there are only four countries in this context that Uncle Sam considers foreign adversaries, a term that was used 40 different times by the lawyers or the justices during Friday’s argument: China, North Korea, Russia and Iran, nasty hostile governments all that like to interfere with U.S. domestic politics.

If TikTok was owned by interests in any other foreign country besides the People’s Republic of China or those three other garden spots, or if it was owned by Americans, there would be no issue. If Beijing-controlled ByteDance insists on keeping ownership of TikTok, it won’t be permitted in the U.S. The ban would then be the doing of ByteDance.

In 2020, when he was in the White House, Donald Trump tried to force a TikTok sale or face a ban by executive action, but it was knocked down, as Congress was required. So last year, the bill was passed with big majorities in the GOP House and the Democratic Senate and then signed by President Biden.

This is not about consumer awareness, as suggested by Justice Sam Alito: “Warning, Communist China is using TikTok to manipulate your thinking and to gather potential blackmail material.” The rationale for the legislation is that Congress doesn’t want despots in North Korea or Russia or Iran or China to have reams of private and personal information on half of the country.

Again, we don’t want TikTok banned. It can be useful or educational or informative or entertaining or a horrible waste of time or push harmful ideas to impressionable youngsters. All of that good and all of that bad can be addressed. But the policymakers have decided that the ultimate power behind TikTok can’t be the government of China. If the Supreme Court agrees, TikTok will need a new owner.

Merchan handled the trial and the post-trial period astutely, holding off sentencing until after the election and then indicating that an unconditional discharge would be his decision. 

The sentence follows the failure of Trump’s last-minute appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to stop it. Thankfully, the justices said no, on a vote of 5-4. That any justices at all would have seen fit to intervene in this state-level sentencing of an individual found guilty by a jury after a full criminal proceeding — not on any procedural or due process arguments but simply because Trump doesn’t feel like being labeled a convicted felon throughout his presidency — is just one more embarrassment for the court.

But that doesn’t bother the four justices who wanted to help Trump: Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Their agreeing to interfere came right after Trump spoke by phone with Alito, ostensibly about an applicant for an agency general counsel position that had been an Alito clerk. Color us doubtful of that explanation, which would be a little more believable if either Trump or Alito had given us much reason to take them at their word or assume good faith.

This should have been a 9-0 decision, and we shudder to imagine that it might have gone the other way entirely had Merchan not signaled that the sentence would be unconditional discharge, or effectively nothing. Not that it necessarily should have been anything else; Trump was a first-time nonviolent offender, after all, and while we stand steadfastly behind the principles of equal application of the law, it is inarguable that having any kind of detention or probation conditions against a sitting president would have heavy logistical and legal impediments.

So this is where we end up. Trump, through sleight of hand, subservient courts, procedural delay and the existence of a system that generally never assumed a president or presidential candidate would act in the ways that he has, is headed for a second term without ultimately facing almost any material penalties for his conduct.

The impeachments didn’t get across the finish line, the federal criminal cases, tackling some of the worst imaginable offenses for a person tasked with being a steward for the country’s interests, were dismissed upon Trump’s November election following his own Florida Federal Judge Aileen Cannon’s efforts to throw a wrench in the works.

His civil judgments for defaming and sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll will remain, as will this verdict, though he is going to appeal. As for the rest, he got away with it.

Still, unless an appeal changes it, he is now, fully, officially and formally, a convicted felon. 

As currently written, the legislation, named after a young Georgia woman horribly murdered by an undocumented immigrant last year, would do little to prevent acts of violence like that awful crime and much to unnecessarily terrorize millions of peaceful undocumented immigrants around the country, while setting our immigration policy on a course for chaos.

The original bill passed the House, but it needs 60 votes for approval in the Senate, where the ruling Republicans hold 53 seats. So Democrats will have the leverage to temper the bill. And it must be tempered. But the Dems need to know what needs tempering.

Take Democratic freshman Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego who reportedly said the bill, which would mandate the detention of immigrants who committed certain theft-related crimes including shoplifting, was “very clear” that it would not target DACA recipients, and that’s simply not true.

The broad language would direct ICE to detain people who entered or were present in the country unlawfully regardless of whether they fell under programs like DACA, TPS or parole, and before they were convicted of anything.

We are all for law and order, but punishment before conviction is fundamentally unfair. Accusations do not equal guilt and in situations like shoplifting, we are talking about nonviolent crimes at that. Let’s not forget the saga of the migrants arrested in Arizona for last year’s Times Square brawl with the cops, who turned out to have had nothing to do with the fight and had not even been there.

This sort of thing happens all the time; people are arrested and then have their cases dismissed, or are acquitted, or never have charges filed at all. We already have laws and regulations in place that direct the immigration authorities to detain people who have been convicted of certain types of violent crimes under the same public safety rationale that is being deployed here.

It also makes little sense to hand state officials who have proven themselves to be political bomb-throwers — like Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’s made a habit of using the powers of his office to harass nonprofits for their protected speech — new powers over what should be federal immigration policy. Under the bill, state attorneys general could sue to, among other things, force the feds to halt visa issuance to entire countries in an unprecedented manner.

For well more than a century, regulating immigration has been purely a federal prerogative. That separation has already been chipped away by activist federal judges like Trump appointee Drew Tipton, a Texas federal judge who wrested away policy-making ability from the Department of Homeland Security to impose his own preferences. That disorder will only get far worse if officials like Paxton are able to run to Tipton and ask that he rewrite immigration laws on the fly.

We understand that a lot of Democrats feel, with validity, that concerns over immigration helped drive Republican gains and a Donald Trump reelection. The solution is in part to calmly insist on consistency in the rule of law and point out immigration’s obvious benefits, not to capitulate to the extreme position in ways that won’t pan out politically anyway.

It was then-President Trump’s big tax cut that passed in 2017 that almost wiped out the deduction, where federal filers could write off what they were paying in property taxes and income taxes. The deduction was only saved from complete elimination when moderate Maine Sen. Susan Collins stepped in with a $10,000 cap.

While better than nothing, $10,000 is only a pittance in New York, where typical property taxes in the suburbs may run double that. And then add in the income tax paid to Albany (and income taxes paid to New York City and Yonkers) and that’s a lot of extra money being sent to Uncle Sam from ordinary folks, billions every year.

It was a clever political move by Trump and the Republicans in 2017 to target the SALT deduction, as the impact was felt most in high income states that didn’t vote for Trump or send many Republicans to the House and Senate. Think New York, New Jersey, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland and Connecticut.

Some states, like New York, sued, but we said that was useless and the courts, of course, dismissed the legal challenges.

The SALT cap was imposed by Congress and had to be lifted by Congress. When the Democrats won back the House in 2019, they voted to repeal the cap, but the Senate never agreed. When the Dems also took the Senate and the White House in 2021, the urgency for repeal faded, so the harmful cap remained. Those first two years under Joe Biden should have been the time for repeal, but it never happened.

Meanwhile, some Democrats, then and now, actually want the SALT cap to stay as is, as removing it would benefit the very rich like Mike Bloomberg.

There’s an easy answer to that: limit the deduction to the $200,000 for joint filers as proposed by Lawler (or some similar number), which would help regular people, or just put a means test in place, say restricting the deduction to people with incomes under $500,000 or $1 million. Either approach, or both, will allow for full restoration of the valuable SALT deduction for most filers, while not extending it to the billionaires and others in the 1%. The ultra rich won’t miss the money, but it’s something big for people of typical means.

Now the SALT issue must be addressed as the Trump tax cuts (and the cap) are expiring this year. Because the House GOP margin is so tiny, the New York Republicans have tremendous leverage to make sure that their demands are met.

And it was Trump himself who said on the campaign trail this year that he wanted to “get SALT back.”

All the elements are there: a timeline of expiring tax laws, the pro-SALT caucus among House Republicans  and the returning president’s own promise

We look forward to the lifting of the SALT cap this year.

When you lose a defamation case, you have to pay up. Fellow lying Trump ally Alex Jones, who owes $1.5 billion to Newtown families for saying they falsified their children’s murders, could share his notes with Rudy, as could Donald Trump himself, who owes $88.3 million for defaming E. Jean Carroll.

But, surprise surprise, someone with as little tolerance for other people’s failings as Giuliani wants to be cut endless slack himself. Giuliani, says Manhattan Federal Judge Lewis Liman, “willfully violated a clear and unambiguous order” when he “blew past” a Dec. 20 deadline to turn over evidence that would help Liman decide whether Hizdisonner can keep his Palm Beach condo as his residence or must turn it over because it’s determined to be a vacation home.

Moreover, Rudy failed to provide a complete list of doctors and other professional services providers, facts the court needed to determine whether they are in fact in Florida — information essential to determine how he satisfies the judgment.

Liman says Giuliani has only produced a small set of “cherry-picked” documents — the equivalent of being told to do your homework by the teacher and handing in some scrawl on a Post-It note.

When Donald Trump was president the first time he said, “You can’t say things that are false, knowingly false, and be able to smile as money pours into your bank account” and he promised (and failed) to “open up libel laws” to punish those who illegally smear public officials.

The libel laws that Trump complains about are those that, well settled by Supreme Court precedent, create a substantially higher bar when an individual is charged with lying about a public figure. The distinction has served the Republic well, fostering open and lively conversation about powerful people even if it makes it hard to prosecute someone for saying, for example, that Democratic politicians are orchestrating a vast child exploitation network.

Under New York Times vs. Sullivan, speech about people who are already in the public eye is only deemed defamatory if it can be established that the speaker acted with “actual malice” or “reckless disregard” of the truth. When the smeared individual is just an ordinary American, the standard is much lower — mere negligence.

The Georgia election workers were private, not public, figures. Still, Giuliani acted with at least reckless disregard for the truth if not actual malice as he lied. Nevertheless, he refuses to comply with a judge’s orders. 

Sounds like someone might need to open up the libel laws in the exact opposite direction of what Trump has urged: to make sure famous folks like Giuliani pay a price after they drag through the mud the names of regular Joes and Janes.

Trump has asked Merchan and the Manhattan appellate court to stop the sentencing and they declined. He’s now banking on the justices, who’ve already done so much for him with a sweeping immunity ruling that undermined both this and the federal cases against him.

Courts and legal observers have raised understandable qualms about the prospect of state-level judges and prosecutors having the power to hold criminal proceedings against presidents, proceedings that could interfere with official duties and amount to separation-of-powers meddling against the presidency itself. But Trump is not president now. And there is no immunity for president-elects.

Trump was a private citizen when he committed the offenses in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. He was a private citizen when this prosecution began and when he was convicted and remains a private citizen as of now, for another week and a half.

The acts that he stands convicted of — acts that happened prior to his first election and which had nothing to do with any official duties — are extensively documented and were presented in exhaustive detail to a jury that was carefully selected to include a real cross section of Manhattanites. These citizens of Trump’s own home city found, unanimously and beyond any reasonable doubt, that the soon-to-be-president had falsified business records and obscured the campaign-related expense of paying off a porn actress to keep quiet about an affair.

Trump has evaded real consequences for his conduct, not just in this case but in the federal election interference and classified documents cases against him, which have now been dismissed in the aftermath of his second election. Merchan has already said that he expects Trump to receive a sentence of unconditional discharge, meaning that the felon will not be forced to even pay a fine.

Nothing would be overhanging his presidency; the case would be over without any remaining conditions on him. This is fair enough for a defendant convicted of first-time nonviolent felonies, and we’ve said as much throughout this whole process. And once that sentence is entered, Trump could appeal the conviction.

Trump’s maneuvering to try to get even a sentence of nothing tossed out — or stayed and then tossed out by the courts during his presidency, which could well happen under the Supreme Court’s over-broad determination of presidential immunity — isn’t even about dodging specific consequences but avoiding the well-earned label of convicted felon. Trump wants the courts to say that he did nothing wrong, and the history books to say that he was no criminal.

There’s no reason the man should get even that after he’s managed to worm out of all other avenues for criminal accountability. To grant him this would be to finally say, at long last, that he is and always was untouchable by the systems of justice that we have been told since grade school constrain all Americans in equal ways. Today, District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office will respond to Trump’s high court appeal. Tomorrow, Trump should be sentenced, and he should have to live with it.

Crime in 2024 dropped, a 3% yearlong reduction. There was an especially steep decline in major crimes during December — with the seven major felonies down 15.5% over the same month in 2023. However, rape reports went up 18.9% since 2023 (at least partially the result of a changing legal definition of the crime), and felony assaults climbed 5%. And that crime continues to remain stubbornly higher than it was before the pandemic hit.

That’s the bad side. On the good side, shooting incidents fell by 7.3%, to 903; that’s about two-and-half per day in a city of more than 8 million, and a sharp drop from 2022, when they topped 1,500. Incidents of the worst crime of all, murder, declined 3.6%, to just 377 — meaning there was about one killing a day in the nation’s biggest city. Chicago, less than half New York’s size, suffered 573. As recently as 2006 — in Mike Bloomberg’s New York — we had nearly 600 murders.

In the subway, crime fell, but overall numbers often gloss over disturbing trends, such as the fact that both homicides and felony assaults on the trains — awful examples of which we’ve seen in recent weeks — are far higher than recent historical averages. Underground felony assaults these past three years average about twice their annual totals over the previous 15 years, 548 vs. 268.

And the overall increase in felony assaults both underground and on the surface is especially worrisome because they happened 29,417 times in 2024 — more than 80 times a day, about the same number as robberies and burglaries combined. A felony assault is when an individual hurts another one so severely they cause serious physical injury, or when they assault someone using a weapon, or when they prey upon an individual in a protected group. 

Why are assaults still trending up even as shootings and murders come down? We don’t have an easy answer, but that’s what we pay deputy mayors and NYPD brass to figure out, and do something about. 

Also worthy of a flashing red siren is the fact that hate crimes against Jews continued to rise last year, going up 7% to 345. That’s more than half the total number of hate crimes against any and all groups.

Monday, Tisch said the city has a stubborn problem with recidivists. As she put it, “If you compare 2024 to 2018, we see a 61.3% increase in people arrested for burglary three or more times in the same year…Imagine how disheartening it is for our cops to be out there arresting the same people for the same crimes in the same neighborhoods day after day.”

How to bring those numbers down? Adams proclaimed it to be “not about bail reform” — which may or may not be true. Jailing chronic offenders while they await trial is the surest way to incapacitate them. If he’s got a better way, let’s hear it, and soon.