Manhattan DA Bragg privately warns on intimidation after Trump calls for protest

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg offered a private retort to Donald Trump’s message Saturday urging supporters to protest his expected indictment, telling office employees in an email that “we do not tolerate attempts to intimidate our office or threaten the rule of law in New York,” according to a copy obtained by POLITICO.

“Our law enforcement partners will ensure that any specific or credible threats against the office will be fully investigated and that the proper safeguards are in place so all 1,600 of us have a secure work environment,” Bragg wrote, adding that the office has been coordinating with the New York Police Department and Office of Court Administration, the administrative arm of the court system in New York.

Bragg added that “as with all of our investigations, we will continue to apply the law evenly and fairly, and speak publicly only when appropriate.” In his email, Bragg didn’t identify Trump by name, referring only to the “public comments surrounding an ongoing investigation by this office.”

A spokeswoman for Bragg’s office declined to comment.

On Saturday morning, the former president and 2024 GOP presidential candidate told supporters on his social media platform to “Protest, take our nation back!” citing “illegal leaks” about the investigation, which he said indicated he would be arrested Tuesday. Though a person familiar with the Trump operations said they were not actively organizing protests, Trump’s comments raised alarms about how his followers might be incited to act.

Bragg’s office appears poised to bring criminal charges against Trump in connection with a hush-money payment made to a porn actress, Stormy Daniels, at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign. A flurry of activity related to the grand jury investigation into the hush-money issue, including recent testimony by Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer who arranged the payment to Daniels, has signaled an indictment is likely to happen soon.

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Who said it: Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump?

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Gov. Ron DeSantis is often called “Trump 2.0” for his embrace of conservative policies and his take-no-prisoners style of politics.

And ahead of the 2024 presidential election — as both Florida men vie to lead the party and ultimately the nation — they have openly feuded over Covid-19 and vaccines and whether DeSantis is truly loyal to the former president, whose 2018 endorsement helped the Florida governor win election.

But the men are also very similar in their approach to issues like critical race theory, China and especially their criticism of Democrats and President Joe Biden.

How similar? POLITICO collected some of Trump’s and DeSantis’ quotes. See if you can tell who said it.

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D.C. chief judge post turns over with Trump probes in balance

To hear Beryl Howell’s colleagues tell it, the tenure of the federal district court’s outgoing chief judge has been defined by work of monumental importance that the public — and even most of them — will never see.

Howell formally handed off that post to a colleague Friday, but not before she was toasted, and occasionally roasted, by fellow judges who made clear they were as tantalized as the rest of the the political world by Howell’s secret work presiding over grand juries that could lead to charges against former President Donald Trump — particularly for his bid to subvert the 2020 election.

Howell seemed to freeze in her seat as the most senior jurist on the court, Judge Paul Friedman, publicly described her still-secret rulings in grand jury-related matters, pointing to press accounts of Howell ruling in favor of Trump in a contempt dispute over his office’s response to a grand jury subpoena for classified records and against Trump on an effort to assert attorney-client privilege in the same probe.

“What fascinating issues!” Friedman declared wryly as Howell remained stone-faced on the dais. “We’d all love to read her opinions, but we can’t,” he said to laughter.

Friedman did note, however, that Howell had issued 100 secret grand jury opinions during her seven-year term.

Another colleague, Judge Tanya Chutkan, also alluded to Howell’s work resolving disputes related to the court’s grand juries over the past seven years.

“There’s so much work Chief Judge Howell has done that we may never know about,” Chutkan said.

Another tribute to Howell came from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who served on the district court in D.C. before being elevated to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and then the Supreme Court. Jackson said Howell has been vital to keeping the critical district court in the Capital operating through a series of major challenges.

“She’s like that steel beam in a construction project that holds everything else up,” Jackson said.

Howell was replaced as chief Friday by Judge James Boasberg. Both are appointees of President Barack Obama.

Boasberg also referenced Howell’s handling of secret grand jury proceedings.

“Most of the work she has done has been secret so she doesn’t even get credit for that,” he said.

By law, the chief judge position on federal courts is filled chiefly by seniority, with a maximum term of seven years. Howell, a former prosecutor and Senate aide who has served on the U.S. District Court since 2010, will continue to hear cases in the normal rotation.

No major shift in the direction of the court or those probes is expected as a result of the change, but Boasberg will now have to resolve privilege fights and other disputes at the grand jury and could receive remands from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is now considering several appeals related to Howell’s decisions.

Howell’s work overseeing the high-profile grand jury matters involving former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, the ongoing Trump probes and the criminal cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol have brought her a cult following on social media.

Chutkan alluded to that fame in her remarks Friday, pointing to memes about Howell on TikTok and to “stans” who applauded her rulings.

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Marines furious over the Navy’s plan for troop-carrying ships

By the time the Pentagon rolls out its annual budget request each spring, leaders usually have hashed out the details and present themselves — at least in public — as a united front.

Not this year.

The Defense Department this month rejected a key element of the Navy’s newest shipbuilding plan, touching off a behind-the-scenes scrum that spilled out into public view this week over the future of troop-carrying ships that are the centerpiece of the Marine Corps’ seaborne mission.

The disagreement raises questions over what direction Pentagon leadership wants to go in building new amphibious ships to ferry Marines and their equipment around the globe as the Corps pivots to countering China after two decades in the Middle East.

It’s the latest flareup in a yearslong debate over what kind of ships to build for the Marines, as policymakers try to chart a course for the future in which Beijing has quickly emerged as a military and economic rival.

The Navy on Monday announced that this year’s budget blueprint won’t include money to fund the 17th San Antonio-class amphibious ship, a $1.6 billion vessel that carries Marines and launches helicopters and watercraft.

The reason comes down to money, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday said Wednesday.

“The driving issue here that drove that decision had to do with cost,” Gilday said at the McAleese Defense Programs conference, explaining that it was the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s decision to carry out a “strategic pause” in buying and constructing amphibs.

He noted the unit cost of the first three ships belonging to the ship class’s latest version — called Flight II — has gone up with each hull. “We’re moving in the wrong direction,” he said.

The same day Gilday spoke, Marine Commandant Gen. David Berger rejected the cost argument. “You could say it’s more expensive today. Well yeah, so is a gallon of milk, right, than last year. I got that. But in base dollars, I think industry is driving that price down.”

The decision to pause the ship funding is part of a wider relook at the Navy’s amphibious ship programs ordered by the Pentagon, to consider whether they align with broader policy goals. The Navy had only just submitted an amphibious plan to Congress in December, but the Pentagon ordered a redo and the Navy, to the frustration of the Marine Corps, did little to push back.

“We just did a study and came up with a number [of ships], we would like to know what has changed over the past few weeks” that requires a new look, said one Marine officer, who like others quoted for this story, was granted anonymity to speak candidly about an internal issue.

The Navy referred questions on the need for the new study to the Pentagon, and Pentagon officials did not respond to a request for comment.

SETTING A COURSE

The issue of the amphibious fleet in particular has become a cornerstone issue for the Navy as it struggles to modernize to meet China's increasingly effective anti-ship capabilities, putting large ships such as amphibs and aircraft carriers at greater risk.

Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro, speaking at the McAleese conference, didn’t say the service is walking away from the amphibious ship program, but instead is taking the pause before putting money toward the ship and any next-generation amphibious ships, which the Marines say they desperately need.

Berger argued that the Navy is squandering a moment where the shipbuilding industry is primed to keep building the vessels. But now “we’re going to take a timeout. From my perspective, I can’t accept that when the inventory, the capacity has to be no less than 31” ships.

The number is a reference to the “bare minimum” of what the Corps says it needs to meet Pentagon tasking.

The actual number of hulls will drop to 24 this decade if Congress allows the Navy to follow through on plans it presented on Monday to begin retiring some of the oldest ships without buying replacements.

The problem has real-world consequences. The Marines have said that twice over the past year the service has been unable to deploy in emergency situations due to lack of ships. The first time came when Russia invaded Ukraine and a Marine unit couldn’t head to the region, and the second was in February when a unit couldn’t provide humanitarian assistance after the devastating earthquake in Turkey.

The halting of the ship’s production this week along with the Pentagon’s squelching of the Navy’s plans recall a similar event in 2020, when then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper publicly rejected the Navy’s annual 30-year shipbuilding plan, and personally oversaw the writing of a new document that was released months later, in the lame duck days of the Trump presidency.

This split between the Navy and Marine Corps “is partly [the Pentagon’s] fault,” according to Bryan Clark, a retired Navy officer now at the Hudson Institute.

The competing visions for the size and composition of the fleet revolve around how it will prepare to confront or deter China in the coming years.

“The problem is the large amphib requirement is based largely on peacetime presence needs, rather than warfighting scenarios,” where amphibious operations would not likely be heavily employed, Clark said. The Pentagon “has prioritized meeting needs for defending an invasion of Taiwan and other warfighting scenarios over presence needs, so the large amphibious ship requirement goes unfilled.”

While strategies remain in flux, neither the Pentagon nor the Navy has been able to offer a detailed explanation as to why the December study needed immediate rethinking.

“If you want to kill a program, you commission study after study and you study it to death,” a Senate aide said.

Leaders across the Pentagon are “really at loggerheads” on the amphibious ship issue, and “coupled with the strategic pause comments, it really gets you to a place where you can understand that the anti-amphibious coalition is in the driver's seat on this one,” the aide continued.

PLANS HELD UP

The amphibious plan, which is being worked on by the Navy, Marines and the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office is just one of three shipbuilding plans the Navy owes the Pentagon and Congress this year.

The annual 30-year shipbuilding plan, which is required to be submitted along with the budget, is late for the second year in a row. Navy officials say it will be released in the coming weeks, however.

The Navy came under fire last year from Capitol Hill for releasing a 30-year plan document that offered three options rather than a single plan. Under that guidance, the first option would build a 316-ship fleet by 2052, the second sketched a 327-ship Navy and the third, which the service said in the document that the industrial base is currently unable to support, would yield a 367-ship fleet. The first two options fell short of the congressionally mandated 355-ship Navy, which the service maintained as its goal since 2016 but had made no progress toward reaching.

Del Toro confirmed this week he’ll present a document with the three options again, and the new plan will also include a menu of possibilities for Congress and Pentagon leadership to consider.

The top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Roger Wicker, said in a statement this week that “no matter the favored phrase of the day – ‘divest to invest,’ ‘strategic pause,’ ‘capability over capacity,’ – the president’s defense budget is, in practice, sinking our future fleet.” Wicker’s state of Mississippi is home to the Huntington Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula, which builds the San Antonio-class ships.

While the new $255 billion Navy budget was the highest ever, “we’re not going to be swimming in money forever,” said Gilday, the Navy admiral. “We’ve got to start making some hard decisions.”

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Turkey, Hungary to approve Finland’s NATO membership

Sweden, however, has yet to receive support from Ankara and Budapest.

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The Sharp-Witted Representative Who Opened the Doors of Congress to Young Moms

Pat Schroeder was never supposed to win her congressional seat. As she recounted in her 1998 book 24 Years of House Work … and the Place Is Still a Mess — a title that hints at the irreverent public figure she cut in Washington — she was recruited as a “kamikaze” anti-war candidate for Colorado’s 1^st Congressional District in 1972. In the primary, she faced a well-funded state senator; in the general election, an overconfident Republican district attorney.

More to the point, she was just 31, with a 6-year-old and a 2-year-old.

“The consensus, even from some of my most liberal friends, was that I was trying to do too much too fast,” Schroeder, who died this week at 82, wrote in her book. The National Women’s Political Caucus, which she had helped to found previously, encouraged her to run for city council or school board instead. After she won, with 52 percent of the vote, New York Democratic Rep. Bella Abzug called Schroeder on the phone and offered a warning: “I hear you have little kids. You won’t be able to do this job.”

“So it wasn’t even just being a woman,” Schroeder recalled in a 2015 interview with the House’s Office of the Historian. “It was being a young woman with little kids, and that really threw people for a loop.” Entering Congress, at her stage of life, seemed not just subversive, but absurd.

Schroeder would wind up serving 12 terms in Congress, cementing herself not just as a trailblazer — she and Abzug were among only 14 women in the House when she was elected — but a symbol of what can happen when people, and particularly women, in the thick of life experience get a seat at the table of power. Among her highest-profile legislative victories were the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, which protected women from being fired for being pregnant (following a 1976 Supreme Court ruling that denied that protection under gender discrimination law), and the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993, which entitles most employees to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for family members or themselves. (The original bill Schroeder filed asked for 26 weeks, with pay.)

What hard-fought success Schroeder got — “It took nine months to deliver each of my children and nine years to deliver FMLA,” she’d later say — came from “her humanity and her persistence and her humor,” says Ellen Bravo, the former director of 9to5, National Association of Working Women, one of many national groups that worked for the bill’s passage. Year after year, Schroeder leaned into the absurdity of Washington, deploying a brand of witty straight talk that drew attention to her causes, well before social media and viral memes.

“She was able to not just withstand obnoxious attacks on her, but to direct withering responses at the people” who went after her, Bravo says. “She handled them in a way that ate right through the veneer of authority.”

Schroeder was the one who declared that Ronald Reagan had a “Teflon-coated presidency” (an idea that reportedly came to her while frying eggs on a nonstick pan) and dubbed George H.W. Bush and Dan Quayle members of the “lucky sperm club” because they were able to run for office with the benefit of family wealth.

And she faced her own indignities with humor and theatrics. When she won a seat on the House Armed Services Committee early in her tenure, the chair, a Louisiana Democrat named F. Edward Hébert, was angry that she and Ron Dellums, a Black Democrat from California, had been placed on the committee against Hébert’s wishes. He provided only a single chair for the two of them, so Schroeder and Dellums squeezed into it together — “cheek-to-cheek,” she would later write — and sat that way for two years. “Barney Frank used to always say it’s the only half-assed thing I did when I was in Congress, but I’m not sure that’s true,” she quipped to the House historian years later.

Even as Schroeder grew in influence, eventually launching a short-lived bid for president in 1987, she faced doubts and digs about her demeanor: the time she wore a bunny suit to entertain kids in the U.S. Embassy during a 1987 Armed Services trip to China, the fact that she would sometimes sign her name with a smiley-face in the “P.” Some of the biggest scrutiny came when she dropped out of the presidential race and openly cried at the press conference, launching 1,000 think pieces about gender, politics and public norms.

But Schroeder had never feared wearing her motherhood or womanhood on her sleeve, down to bringing her children — and sometimes a pet bunny named Franklin Delano Rabbit — back and forth with her to Denver and on official international trips. “They’d usually spill at least two Cokes and a glass of milk on me before I got off [the ground],” she told the House historian years later. “I was always sticky … People would just be horrified, but that’s how we were.”

That unapologetic approach to parenthood is less rare today, in many public spheres. But there are still plenty of barriers to women with young children running for office, says Liuba Grechen Shirley, who ran for a New York congressional seat in 2018 with two toddlers at home and went on to form the group Vote Mama, which supports young mothers in politics.

And on the congressional level, at least, the family-friendly policies Schroeder championed at the height of her influence have largely been frozen in time. While the FMLA was game-changing 30 years ago, most of its advocates consider it woefully incomplete. As Grechen Shirley and Bravo point out, the law covers only 60 percent of workers, due to restrictions on eligibility. Many eligible people aren’t able to take advantage of it because they can’t afford to take the time off. (Bravo notes that state laws mandating paid sick leave are gaining momentum — they’ve been passed now in 11 states and the District of Columbia.)

Grechen Shirley attributes the lack of progress to a lack of representation. The 118th Congress has a record number of women and yet that's still only 153 of 540 voting and nonvoting members, or 28 percent of the body. But it’s not just that there aren’t enough women in Congress, Grechen Shirley contends, echoing what Schroeder discovered 50 years ago. It’s that there aren’t enough mothers.

“It’s because our policies were not made by people who have the lived experience. If we want to change the system, we have to change the system-makers,” she says. “So many women will wait until their children are grown before they consider running, so it’s difficult to build that political power to get tenure, to get those leadership positions.”

During her own race, Grechen Shirley successfully petitioned the Federal Election Commission to allow the use of campaign funds for child care. And in her own campaign and afterward, she would often repeat a political line, something she’d heard that a congresswoman once said — “I have a brain and a uterus, and I use both.”

“Dammit, I love that quote,” Grechen Shirley says, though for years, she didn’t know the source.

Of course, it was Pat Schroeder.

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Zelenskyy digs in against calls to quit Bakhmut

Holding Bakhmut made sense while Russia was suffering far higher casualties, but the logic of slogging it out is now in question.

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