20250221 Emptywheel Fridays on the Nicole Sandler Show

With the D'ump/Musk regime working at breakneck speed to destroy our democracy, it's hard to keep up with it all. That's one reason I'm so grateful that Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel.net sits down with us for an hour (or more) each Friday to help us understand what happened that week. Since Marcy is in Ireland and I'm in Arizona, we record these sessions right around noon ET. By the time it goes live at 5ET/2PT, some things may have already changed .. as is the case today.When we got around to discussing the case of NYC Mayor Eric Adams, we were still waiting on Judge Ho's ruling on the DoJ's order to drop the bribery and corruption charges against him. Shortly before 2pm ET, Judge Ho refused to immediately close the case. Instead, he appointed an outside lawyer -- Paul W. Clement, US solicitor general under Pres GW Bush - to advise the court on the matter.The Washington Post reporting that the "judge noted that 'there has been no adversarial testing' of the government’s push to abandon the Adams prosecution — a controversial move that prompted the resignation of at least eight federal prosecutors, including Danielle Sassoon, the former acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.“Normally, courts are aided in their decision-masking through our system of adversarial testing, which can be particularly helpful in cases presenting unusual fact patterns or in cases of great public importance,” the judge wrote."This means that Judge Ho won't decide before mid-March whether to grant the dismissal of the case against Adams.As for the rest of what we covered on today's show... who knows?