It gets worse. Der Spiegel reports that the private data, phone numbers and passwords for some of the president’s most important security advisers are now freely accessible on the internet.
■ Also, Wired reports: National security adviser Mike Waltz’s Venmo friends list.
■ Addressing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s insecure group chat that revealed sensitive information about military strikes in Yemen, Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth—a military veteran who lost two legs in combat—put this in an actual, real-live news release from her office: “Hegseth is a f*cking liar. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately.”
■ She elaborated on Rachel Maddow’s show last night.
■ Politico: President Trump himself is shifting the blame from Hegseth to Waltz.
■ Jimmy Kimmel on Trump’s denial that the chat involved “war plans”: “Let’s see. ‘F-18’s launch.’… ‘First sea-based Tomahawks launched.’ Now, I’m not an expert on war—these don’t seem like peace plans to me.”
■ Axios: The story’s scrambled MAGA’s messaging machine.
■ Columnist Garrett Graff runs down five scandals at the heart of this fiasco.
■ Historian Heather Cox Richardson: “Despite the attempts to bury the Signal story, the scandal seems … to be growing.”
■ On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder: It shows an administration “openly compromising our national security, the better to violate our rights.”
■ Behind the scenes in The Atlantic’s breaking of the story: Apple founder Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, who Daring Fireball proprietor John Gruber calls “an owner committed to the cause.”
‘This is what Trump’s administration is doing to innocent people expressing their rights to free speech.’ Wonkette’s Evan Hurst assesses what happened at Tufts University in Boston as “immigration Nazis—in hoodies, plainclothes, and masks that hide their faces—abducted a student from the street and disappeared her.”
■ MSNBC’s Chris Hayes says video of her arrest is “as flatly authoritarian as anything we’ve seen in this country in a very long time.”
■ One skeptical witness to the abduction: “I can buy that badge from a fucking costume store.”
■ The Tufts Daily student newspaper: More than 2,000 last night gathered on campus for a protest.
‘Feds are watching your sarcastic posts online.’ Investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein: The FBI “is pimping itself out to corporate America to protect business executives from the American people.”
■ He shares an FBI assessment titled “Heightened Threat to Chief Executive Officers Following the Shooting of a Healthcare Senior Executive” (that’s a download link), which he says conflates outrage against corporations with terrorism.
■ The American Prospect: An intelligence dossier “cites high health care costs as a key source of instability in the country.”
Sick burn. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Health and Human Services Department tells CNN it’s cutting 10,000 full-time employees nationwide.
■ Inside Medicine: A respected National Institutes of Health official’s been put on leave “and it’s pretty obvious why.”
■ The New York Times (gift link): The Trump administration plans to end vaccine funds for poor nations.
■ The Guardian: Public health experts are sounding the alarm about vaccine skeptics in the Trump administration “at war with mRNA technology,” a key in the fight against COVID-19.
■ The Illinois Department of Public Health: “Trump Administration Slashes Pledged Funding that Would Protect Illinoisans from Infectious Disease Outbreaks.”
■ Project Democracy’s If You Can Keep It newsletter: Trump’s targeted firings, probationary purges and government layoffs are all part of a plan to assume total control of the civil service.
Car shopping? Brace yourself for Trump’s 25% tariff on auto imports beginning next month.
■ It’ll hurt even those buying domestic cars, because it’ll apply to parts—many of which are manufactured elsewhere.
‘Wanted: 12 million protesters.’ Columnist Dan Froomkin: A Harvard political scientist who’s studied hundreds of 20th-century movements says that’s a magic number for the resistance to Trump—because, she says, no government can withstand a challenge of 3.5 percent of its population without accommodating the movement or falling apart.
■ The Washington Post says the White House’s media strategy is “to promote Trump as ‘KING.’” (Gift link, funded by Square supporters.)
■ The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner spotlights next week’s “firebreak” elections across the country that could put some restraints on Trump.
■ Don’t forget Illinois communities’—outside Chicago—election Tuesday. The Square guide to voter guides is here.
Media miasma. ProPublica founder Dick Tofel: Trump allies “will very likely, sometime this year, have the votes they need to smash the current arrangement” of federal funding for public broadcasters.
■ Trump himself last night on his social media platform: “NPR and PBS, two horrible and completely biased platforms (Networks!), should be DEFUNDED by Congress, IMMEDIATELY.”
■ The Federal Communications Commission’s reactionary new chairman is putting the squeeze on ABC’s parent company, Disney, over its policies on diversity, equity and inclusion …
■ … even as a bipartisan group of former FCC commissioners calls on him to back off his assault on 60 Minutes.
■ The AP was back in court today to protest Trump’s retaliation for its refusal to abandon the name “Gulf of Mexico.”
■ The AP’s executive editor in a commentary piece for The Wall Street Journal (another gift link): “Today the U.S. government wants to control the AP’s speech. Tomorrow it could be someone else’s.”
■ Pulitzer winner Ann Telnaes explains in cartoons “how autocracies take over the news media.”
■ 404 Media: “AOL.com is using AI to write captions for photos, which gave cutesy captions to photos of a man … charged with attempted murder.”
‘Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time, and your government when it deserves it.’ Critic Bill Carter says that was Conan O’Brien’s biggest applause line Sunday at the Kennedy Center as he accepted the Mark Twain Prize by quoting Twain himself.
■ Scooping a Netflix special to come in May, O’Brien’s posted what Carter calls “must-watch” video of the speech to YouTube here.
After After Midnight? Squat. CBS is canning its 11:30 p.m. (Central) show—abandoning that timeslot for the first time in three decades.
■ Today marked iconic Chicago news anchor and commentator Walter Jacobson’s final “Perspective” commentary for WGN Radio.
■ It’ll be posted here.
■ Your Chicago Public Square columnist interviewed Jacobson on WGN in 2009—at 41:30 in this aircheck.
Correction. Yesterday’s Square mischaracterized Chicago-based law firm Jenner & Block’s connection to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump: A then-former partner was involved.
■ Jenner alumnus Ann Courter on Facebook and in Crain’s: “It is in the interest of every business to take the very real and present danger to the rule of law into account when making the decision whether to abandon a relationship with a law firm ‘under investigation’ by a capricious government.”
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