Good morning. It is June 2nd. It is a bright and temperate morning in New York City. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Wired reported over the weekend that despite the complacently elegiac coverage of Elon Musk's purported departure from the Trump administration, his Department of Government Efficiency is continuing its demolition of state capacity. Wired writes, “members of Musk's early Doge team, including Luke Farritor, Gavin Kliger, Edward Coristine, and Sam Corcos have met with a number of departments and agencies, including the Treasury, the Office of Management and Budget, and the FBI in recent days, seemingly continuing business as usual. Wired has learned. The team also appears to be actively recruiting, according to documents viewed by Wired.” The story goes on to say, in recent weeks, “the pressure to slash and cancel contracts, specifically focused on workforce management and IT, has drastically increased. Multiple sources at a variety of agencies tell Wired.” 

Swarms of explosive Ukrainian drones attacked military airfields from one end of Russia to the other yesterday. The Ukrainian Security Bureau supplied videos of planes on the ground going up in smoke and flames. CNN citing a Ukrainian security source, writes, “the security source said that the operation was extremely complicated from a logistical point of view with the drones carried inside wooden mobile homes that had been carried into Russia on trucks. The drones were hidden under the roofs of the houses, which were already placed on trucks. At the right moment, the roofs were remotely opened and the drones flew out to hit Russian bombers.”

Russian and Ukrainian representatives met in Istanbul for public peace negotiations this morning. Bloomberg reports that the talks lasted a little over an hour. 

A man spraying flammable alcohol and throwing Molotov cocktails attacked a march in Boulder, Colorado yesterday, held by people showing support for Israeli hostages. CNN reports that “at least eight people were injured, including four women and four men between the ages of 52 and 88, authorities said. Among the eight injured,” CNN writes “is a Holocaust survivor, according to an individual who knows the person and who was at the event. The accused attacker was arrested on the scene. The suspect,” CNN writes, “has been identified as 45 year old Mohammed Sabry Soliman, according to the FBI. In videos obtained by CNN, the suspect is seen shirtless, yelling, ‘Palestine is free’ and ‘Zionists are killers.’” CNN also reports that according to the Department of Homeland Security, 
Soliman was in the country on an expired visa.

In the print edition of the New York Times this morning, Ukraine's attack on Russia and the attack on the bolder march both got put inside the paper rather than dislodging any important but non-breaking stories from the already assembled front page package. The lead news column is, “FEAR WITHIN F.B.I.
DEEPENS AS PATEL EXPELS OFFICIALS / TRUMP LOYALISTS RISE / Polygraph Tests Intensify Worries — Some See Loss of Experience.” It's about how FBI Director Cash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino are largely acting on their long-expressed paranoid fantasies about the deep state that won them their jobs in the first place and are purging the Bureau of people who might have served as enemies of Trump by dint of trying to enforce the law.

“The actions,” the Times writes “have obliterated decades of experience in national security and criminal matters at the FBI and raised questions about whether the agents taking over such critical posts have the institutional knowledge to pursue cornerstones of its work.” The story goes on to say that Bongino wrote on social media that the agency would revisit past investigations like the 2022 leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion on abortion, cocaine found two years ago at the White House, and the pipe bombs found near the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. “Two of the cases,” the Times ads in parentheses, “were not the FBI's to start. The Secret Service investigated the cocaine and the Supreme Court marshal the leak of the draft opinion.” The story goes on. “‘The director and I evaluated a number of cases of potential public corruption that understandably have garnered public interest.’ Mr. Bongino said, oddly referring to the pipe bombs as a potential act of public corruption rather than domestic terrorism.”

“In his previous role as a podcast host, he insisted without offering evidence that the pipe bombs were an ‘inside job’ and that ‘the FBI knows who this person is.’” The second news column on the front page is “Disdain of E.U. Rises as Theme For U.S. Right / Stance Risks Hindering Talks on Trade Deal.” Dateline Brussels, “The United States populist right has its calling cards. Make America Great Again hats. A distaste for immigration. A love of tax cuts. But a more subtle unifying thread has been creeping into Republican discourse for years. One that has exploded onto the global stage with the potential to reshape the contours of alliances and redirect the flows of global trade. MAGA deeply dislikes the European Union.” Not sure contempt for Europe is an especially subtle or new thread in right-wing American thought.

“While about half of American conservatives,” the Times writes, “have taken a glum view of the European Union for years, the share who say they rate the block very unfavorably has been increasing. About 18 % rated it very poorly last year, up from 14 % in 2020. A few research surveys showed that really seems to fall within the substantial share of the second term Trumpist ideology.” That's just more of the same, only louder.

Next to that on the front page is another story like the FBI story about how things have genuinely changed rapidly and for the worse. “New ICE Playbook: Arrests at Immigration Court / Government’s Lawyers Help Effort to Ramp Up Deportations.” The narrative anecdote at the beginning of the piece describes one incident of what the standard procedure is now under the Trump administration, which is that someone shows up at immigration court because they are lawfully pursuing their options within the system. In this case, it's an asylum application, only to have the government dismiss the case, severing the ongoing legal process in which they had been participating, so that a bunch of ICE agents waiting in the hallway outside can simply grab the person and start deporting them. “The operations,” the Times writes, “which have taken place across the country in the past two weeks have required a high level of coordination between the government lawyers in the courtrooms and the ICE officers waiting to make the arrests.” The story continues, “the tactic is a significant break from past practice when immigration officials largely steered clear of courthouse arrests out of concern that they would deter people from complying with orders. Critics, including some former Homeland Security officials, say the practice is deceptive and could backfire.” Later on, the story says, “in New York on Wednesday, ICE officers, wearing face masks and carrying photographs of migrants they were seeking to arrest, waited by the elevators of the courthouses in lower Manhattan. Outside, protesters tried to block vans carrying detained migrants, leading to the arrests of 23 people. Among the migrants arrested in a Manhattan courthouse lobby was a young Venezuelan man who appeared to be the first public school student in New York City to be detained by ICE since President Trump returned to office. The student, a 20-year-old named Dylan, entered the country last year by registering through a mobile app the Biden administration had offered migrants to temporarily live and work in the United States while they applied for asylum. When he showed up for a May 21st court date, his case was dismissed. He was followed into the elevator by ICE officers who then arrested him in the lobby, according to his mother, Raiza. ‘It was like a trap,’ said Raiza, who spoke on the condition that her last name be withheld.” More sloppy copy editing for the print edition there. By Wednesday, they meant two Wednesdays ago and nobody bothered to update it. Nor did the story incorporate the related story that ran on page A13.

“Nadler aid is detained as migrants are seized. Federal officers entered Representative Gerald Nadler's office in lower Manhattan on Wednesday and handcuffed and briefly detained one of his aides. The confrontation happened shortly after the aid observed federal agents detaining migrants in a public hallway outside an immigration courtroom in the same building as the congressman's office. The episode was recorded by someone who is sitting in the office” the Times writes in the video, an officer with the federal protective service, part of the Department of Homeland Security, shown demanding access to a private area inside the office. The video was obtained by Gothamist, which earlier reported the confrontation. ‘You're harboring rioters in the office,’ the federal agent whose name tag and officer number are not visible in the video says to a member of Mr. Nadler's staff. There were no riots reported Wednesday at the federal building,” The Times continues, “though protesters and immigrant rights advocates gathered inside and outside the building earlier.” That's where we're at now. The whole gambit of snatching people out of immigration court completely contradicts the message of the Trump campaign and administration, that it is turning ICE loose to seize and deport the most dangerous criminal elements in the country because Trump's preferred arms of federal law enforcement are lazy and incompetent, and because the real point is to create a spectacle of brutality, instead of trying to track down hardened criminals, they are literally going after the most law-abiding immigrants they can lay their hands on by seizing them as they're in the middle of trying to abide by the law. Beyond contradicting Trump's rhetoric, the whole setup violates the fundamental premise of having a legal system by making the act of showing up to defend yourself in court the occasion for stripping you of your right to participate and springing a trap on you. 

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 Socca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Continue sending those along if you can. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we'll talk again tomorrow.