Wednesday, October 22, 2025. Annette’s Roundup for Democracy.
Trump begins actions to steal more from the American people.
The Felon who occupies the White House has asked the Justice Department to pay $230 million for past cases.
He wants you, the taxpayer, to pay his bills.
Who can stop this?
Ordinary taxpayers do not have “standing,” the right to challenge or oppose a case involving government expenditures.
Congress - either the House or the Senate- as an institution can refuse appropriations, if Trump or his lawyers seek to have taxpayer money appropriated to pay him.
Maybe 7 million Americans should call their elected officials.
As for the Department of Justice leadership which is likely to meet Trump’s demands, have they no decency?
Key Justice Department officials were his defense lawyers on these cases.
Maybe 7 million Americans should visit them?
As Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace University said, “And then to have people in the Justice Department decide whether his claim should be successful or not, and these are the people who serve him deciding whether he wins or loses. It’s bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe.”
Trump Said to Demand Justice Dept. Pay Him $230 Million for Past Cases.
Senior department officials who were defense lawyers for the president and those in his orbit are now in jobs that typically must approve any such payout, underscoring potential ethical conflicts.
Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general; Attorney General Pam Bondi; and Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, with President Trump in the Oval Office last week.
President Trump is demanding that the Justice Department pay him about $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him, according to people familiar with the matter, who added that any settlement might ultimately be approved by senior department officials who defended him or those in his orbit.
The situation has no parallel in American history, as Mr. Trump, a presidential candidate, was pursued by federal law enforcement and eventually won the election, taking over the very government that must now review his claims. It is also the starkest example yet of potential ethical conflicts created by installing the president’s former lawyers atop the Justice Department.
Mr. Trump submitted complaints through an administrative claim process that often is the precursor to lawsuits. The first claim, lodged in late 2023, seeks damages for a number of purported violations of his rights, including the F.B.I. and special counsel investigation into Russian election tampering and possible connections to the 2016 Trump campaign, according to people familiar with the matter. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the claim has not been made public.
The second complaint, filed in the summer of 2024, accuses the F.B.I. of violating Mr. Trump’s privacy by searching Mar-a-Lago, his club and residence in Florida, in 2022 for classified documents. It also accuses the Justice Department of malicious prosecution in charging him with mishandling sensitive records after he left office.
Asked about the issue at the White House after this article published, the president said, “I was damaged very greatly and any money I would get, I would give to charity.”
He added, “I’m the one that makes the decision and that decision would have to go across my desk and it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.”
Lawyers said the nature of the president’s legal claims poses undeniable ethics challenges.
“What a travesty,” said Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace University. “The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it.”
He added: “And then to have people in the Justice Department decide whether his claim should be successful or not, and these are the people who serve him deciding whether he wins or loses. It’s bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe.”
The president also seemed to acknowledge that point in the Oval Office last week, when he alluded vaguely to the situation while standing next to the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and her deputy, Todd Blanche. According to Justice Department regulations, the deputy attorney general — in this case, Mr. Blanche — is one of two people eligible to sign off on such a settlement.
“I have a lawsuit that was doing very well, and when I became president, I said, I’m sort of suing myself,” Mr. Trump said, adding: “It sort of looks bad, I’m suing myself, right? So I don’t know. But that was a lawsuit that was very strong, very powerful.”
Administrative claims are not technically lawsuits. Such complaints are submitted first to the Justice Department on what is called a Standard Form 95, to see if a settlement can be reached without a lawsuit in federal court. If the department formally rejects such a claim or declines to act on it, a person could then sue in court. Still, that is an unlikely outcome in this instance, given that Mr. Trump is already negotiating, in essence, with his subordinates.
Compensation is typically covered by taxpayers. Two people familiar with the president’s legal claims said that he had not been paid by the federal government but that he expected to be.
The second claim accused Merrick B. Garland, then the attorney general, Christopher A. Wray, then the F.B.I. director, and Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating Mr. Trump at the time, of “harassment” intended to sway the electoral outcome. “This malicious prosecution led President Trump to spend tens of millions of dollars defending the case and his reputation,” the claim said.
According to the Justice Department manual, settlements of claims against the department for more than $4 million “must be approved by the deputy attorney general or associate attorney general,” meaning the person who oversees the agency’s civil division.
The current deputy attorney general, Mr. Blanche, served as Mr. Trump’s lead criminal defense lawyer and said at his confirmation hearing in February that his attorney-client relationship with the president continued. The chief of the department’s civil division, Stanley Woodward Jr., represented Mr. Trump’s co-defendant, Walt Nauta, in the classified documents case. Mr. Woodward has also represented a number of other Trump aides, including Mr. Patel, in investigations related to Mr. Trump or the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
A spokesman for the president’s personal legal team said he was fighting back against the Russia investigation he has long denounced as a witch hunt, and what he has called the weaponization of the criminal justice system by the Biden administration.
A White House spokeswoman referred questions to the Justice Department. Asked if either Mr. Blanche or Mr. Woodward would recuse or have been recused from overseeing the possible settlement with Mr. Trump, a Justice Department spokesman, Chad Gilmartin, said, “In any circumstance, all officials at the Department of Justice follow the guidance of career ethics officials.”
In July, Ms. Bondi fired the agency’s top ethics adviser.
Mr. Trump famously hates recusals. He complained bitterly after his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, withdrew from overseeing the Russia investigation that is now the subject of one of his demands for money.
“The attorney general made a terrible mistake when he did this and when he recused himself,” Mr. Trump said in 2018. “He should have certainly let us know if he was going to recuse himself, and we would have used a — put a different attorney general in.”
The Justice Department does not specifically require a public announcement of settlements made for administrative claims before they become lawsuits. If or when the Trump administration pays the president what could be hundreds of millions of dollars, there may be no immediate official declaration that it did so, according to current and former department officials.
Some former officials have privately expressed misgivings that the department’s leaders did not reject Mr. Trump’s legal claims in the waning days of the Biden administration. It has long been standard practice for civil litigation, including lawsuits against the government, to be paused until any criminal cases around the same facts have been resolved. (Mew York Times).
Trump Retribution.
Case #1 James Comey.
The Retribution: Jim Comey Edition
Comey has filed the first two major challenges to his politicized indictment. The former FBI director is trying to get the indictment dismissed with prejudice (meaning it cannot be refiled by the government) on two primary grounds:
- that Halligan wasn’t properly appointed as U.S. attorney. The filing happened to come the same day that the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals seemed quite skeptical of the appointment of Alina Habba as U.S. attorney for New Jersey after similarly questionable machinations designed to bypass Senate confirmation and local federal judges.
- that the prosecution is vindictive and selective. Comey filed a 60-page exhibit containing an exhaustive list of Trump’s rhetorical attacks on him.
Both of Comey’s motions were well-written, tightly structured, and compelling. But more importantly, taken together they mount the first wholesale challenge to President Trump’s use of the Justice Department to conduct reprisals by prosecution. Some of the arguments are designed to appeal to conservative justices on the Supreme Court, and others are designed to appeal to the rule of law and long-standing DOJ traditions and norms. The effect, undoubtedly intended, is to make a Comey victory here have implications beyond this particular political prosecution.
Meanwhile, in a bit of gamesmanship, prosecutors fired a shot across the bow of Comey lead attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, suggesting he might need to be disqualified from the case because Comey allegedly used him “to improperly disclose classified information.” Comey fired right back against what it called the government’s effort to “defame” Fitzgerald, calling the allegation “provably false.” The judge in the case quickly denied prosecutors’ effort to expedite the briefing on this sideshow. (Talking Points Memo. Substack)
Even Republican Senators object to Trump’s attacks on Blue States.
GOP senators balk at Trump targeting blue states
Republican senators are balking at the Trump administration’s decision to cut off transportation funding to Democratic-leaning states such as New York and Massachusetts during the government shutdown, warning that freezing funds as an apparent act of political retaliation is not appropriate.
Republican senators are unified in the view that Democrats are wrong to hold government funding hostage in order to win major health policy concessions, but they feel uncomfortable about halting transportation funding to certain states because they are represented by Democrats in Washington.
Republican members of the Appropriations Committee, in particular, argue that funding decisions should be made on the basis of merit. They think quashing projects to extract political vengeance, even during the partisan shutdown fight, is a bad idea.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said targeting blue states such as New York by threatening to cut off funding for projects that have been already approved and funded, such as the construction of a new rail tunnel beneath the Hudson River to facilitate travel and commerce between Manhattan and New Jersey, will hurt people in those states regardless of their own political views.
“You show me one blue state in America where you don’t have pockets, maybe even big pockets, of Republicans, of conservatives, of MAGA people, of pro-Trump. Do we not care about them?” she said.
“Are we just saying, ‘If you don’t like it, you should move to a place where you’ve got a Republican governor?’” she added. “It makes no sense. Why are we being punitive? It’s hard enough when the government is not operating as it should be. Let’s not be punitive to Americans just to score political points.”
Murkowski made her comments after President Trump said last week that his administration had “terminated” the rail tunnel under the Hudson, a massive $16 billion construction job known as the Gateway Project.
White House budget director Russell Vought followed Trump’s threat by announcing the administration will be “immediately pausing over $11 billion” in projects in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Baltimore and other Democratic enclaves.
Vought warned that “lower-priority projects” in those states would be considered for cancellation” and explained that the “Democrat shutdown has drained the Army Corps of Engineers” of its ability to manage them.
Asked if Trump’s threat to “terminate” funding for projects such as Gateway in blue states is appropriate, Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) replied: “No.”
Collins said Monday she does not favor the administration’s plan to halt funding for infrastructure projects primarily in blue states during the shutdown.
I’m not for that. I’m not in favor of that,” she said.
But Collins faulted Democrats for repeatedly blocking a “clean” House-passed government funding stopgap over the past few weeks.
She also criticized her Democratic colleagues for last week blocking the annual defense appropriations bill, which passed out of committee with a strong 26-3 bipartisan vote in July, and for preventing the Senate and House from entering a conference negotiation on funding bills for military construction, the departments of Veterans Affairs and Agriculture, and the legislative branch.
“What we really need is for the Democrats to be more cooperative in opening government,” she said. “It is very telling last week that they voted against bringing regular appropriations bills to the Senate floor and that they also are blocking the appointment of conferees for the three bills we passed months ago.”
The Trump administration’s decision to halt funding for the Hudson rail tunnel and the Second Avenue Subway in Manhattan appeared intended to hit Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who both live in New York City.
Schumer reacted furiously last week when Trump threatened to terminate the Gateway Project.
“It’s petty revenge politics. And who gets hurt? It’s going to screw over hundreds of thousands of New York and New Jersey commuters, choke off our economy, and kill good-paying jobs,” he fumed on the Senate floor.
Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) argued that funding authority rests with Congress and that projects should be funded — or defunded — on the basis of their merit, not as acts of political patronage or retaliation.
Asked if he thought it was appropriate to dole out or rescind funds as a matter of political patronage or revenge, Moran replied, “No, I don’t.”
“It is not about what political party, what color your state is associated with, it’s about the value of the project, which is determined by Congress and implemented by the administration,” he said.
The Trump administration is prepared to freeze up to $600 million for two deteriorating bridges that carry millions of vacationers across the Cape Cod Canal every year.
Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D) said the projects were scheduled to move forward with “funding appropriated by a bipartisan Congress and lawfully awarded by the federal government.”
The Army Corps of Engineers is also planning to stop funding for a waterfront park in San Francisco and sewer projects in New York City, according to the White House budget office.
Other states that will see funding halted because of the shutdown include Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon and Rhode Island.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said punishing blue states by withholding transportation funding that Congress approved on a bipartisan basis in the past could boomerang on Republicans when Democrats control the White House and Congress.
Asked if it’s appropriate to terminate funding in blue states just because they are represented by Democrats in Washington, Capito said: “I wouldn’t think so.”
“The shoe’s going to be on the other foot someday and I don’t think that’s a good precedent to set,” Capito added.
She noted former President Obama targeted Republican-led states such as West Virginia when Democrats controlled Washington by cracking down on coal and fossil-fuel production, something that hurt her home state’s economy.
“During the Obama administration, he basically killed my red state,” she said.
Trump gave Democrats a taste of that bitter medicine earlier this month when the Energy Department announced it would terminate nearly $8 billion in grants to support more than 200 clean-energy projects.
Capito pointed out that Republicans live in liberal-leaning states such as New York, too.
Trump himself was a longtime New Yorker and lived for a while in neighboring Connecticut, another liberal state.
“We’re all in need of infrastructure. I don’t think you want to do it on political maneuvering. Maybe it’s trying to pressure [Democrats] to reopen government,” she said.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) defended the administration’s tough tactics, arguing that playing politics with transportation dollars only mirrors what he called the Democratic Party’s political calculations behind rejecting a clean seven-week continuing resolution — which triggered the shutdown.
“I don’t think there’s anybody that wins in a government shutdown, but in a government shutdown, any administration is going to have their own priorities,” he told reporters Monday.
“Obviously, this administration, like any other, is going to have to decide where they want to put the money, which programs and priorities and agencies and departments actually get resources and which ones don’t,” he said.
Asked about the concerns from his GOP colleagues that funding decisions should be made on the basis of merit, not politics, Thune responded: “The decision to shut down the government has been made on pure politics.”
“There is no reason this government should be shut down right now,” he said. (The Hill).
A legendary ballet dancer retires.
Misty Copeland redefined what a ballerina looks like. What happens after she leaves?
Still, the systemic issues that made her an exception remain. Ballet has long faced criticism for its lack of diversity and rigid beauty standards. The art form has struggled to make space for dancers who don’t fit its traditional ideals of uniformity, leaving many young dancers of color without role models. And the high cost of training, equipment and elite instruction continues to exclude many from low-income families.
Copeland has spoken candidly about her experience with these obstacles. In her 2014 memoir, “Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina,” she wrote about how being “a little brown-skinned girl in a sea of whiteness” affected her confidence.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, she reflected on the typecasting she faced early in her career. When she first started with the company, she was often cast as “the earthy character” and given roles in contemporary works rather than classical ones. She also advocated for herself and other dancers of color on social media. In 2023, she shared how she paints her pointe shoes to match her skin color, starting a conversation around inclusivity in dance uniforms that’s still happening today.
For many, her breakthrough inspired a broader conversation about ballet’s future and what it could become if it reckoned with its past. Howard believes that the last decade has brought meaningful, if uneven, change.
“We’re now able to have more informed conversations about racial barriers, segregation and omission and how all of that shaped ballet. The scarcity of Black dancers isn’t by accident. We know that Black people have been in ballet since its inception. That understanding, I think, is something we won’t roll back,” Howard said.
The timing of Copeland’s departure coincides with a broader backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the arts and beyond. Public funding for artistic programs is shrinking, and many institutions that made promises about representation have quietly scaled back those efforts. The world of ballet has seen enormous strides in the decade since Copeland’s rise to fame, but it’s hard to know how it will hold in the future. Her retirement leaves American Ballet Theatre with no Black female principal or soloist dancer.
“Now, when you look around the world, we are seeing Black dancers, dancers of color on stages, we’re seeing different types of hairstyles, and all these things that honor the artist’s identity. And that’s really wonderful,” Howard said. “But without the financial incentives to push forward, it’ll be interesting to see how much further it continues.”
Even as she steps away from the stage, Copeland is finding new ways to shape ballet’s future. Growing up, Copeland’s family couldn’t afford ballet classes, but an afterschool program at the Boys and Girls Club introduced her to the art form. In 2021, she launched the Misty Copeland Foundation to offer that same access to children who might not otherwise see themselves in ballet, beginning with its “BE BOLD” afterschool dance initiative and inclusive teaching curriculum.
“Black and brown communities are interested and want to be in these spaces,” she told The New York Times in a recent interview about her legacy. “They just need to see themselves. They need to feel like it’s something that they’re being invited into.”
Misty Copeland poses for a portrait in New York City, on June 4, 2025. (TAYLOR JEWELL/INVISION/AP)
(The 19th).