Terrence T. Mcdonald, New Jersey Monitor

This unlikely state is about to enter the eye of the Trump storm

NEWARK — Leave it to Joe Cryan to highlight the absurdity of the federal case against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ).

Cryan (D), a Union County state senator and one of McIver’s constituents, spoke at a rally Tuesday outside a federal courthouse in Newark as McIver’s attorneys were inside urging a judge to toss an indictment that accuses McIver of assaulting federal officers as they arrested Newark Mayor Ras Baraka in Newark on May 9.

Videos from the chaotic scene of Baraka’s arrest outside migrant hall Delaney Hall do indeed show McIver making contact with officers, pushing one on his shoulder and pushing another one aside with her arm as she walked past him. I’ve seen more jostling on a crowded boardwalk on the Fourth of July, when it barely raises an eyebrow. Cryan called her actions a “supposed assault.”

“As a kid who played a lot of basketball in those schools, if I called a foul in a game of three-on-three for that, I would get laughed at and told to man up when the ball got thrown back in my face,” he said.

The flimsy nature of the charges against McIver is compounded by the timeline of the events in question. After McIver’s alleged assault of the two officers, Department of Homeland Security agents led McIver and two of her House colleagues into Delaney Hall for a tour, and escorted them all off the property an hour later. Prosecutors didn’t announce they were charging McIver until 10 days later.

Did the officers she’s accused of assaulting even know they were assaulted that day? Or is it that prosecutors needed to charge McIver to save face after their case against Baraka crumbled in mere days? I’m certain it’s the latter.

The Trump administration’s prosecution of McIver has brought national attention, probably by design. It’s harder for the opposition party to be effective when they’re busy putting out small fires all across the nation. Some of McIver’s liberal colleagues in the House visited Newark Tuesday to rally McIver’s supporters and heap scorn on President Donald Trump for his administration’s push to lock McIver up.

“This isn’t about the law. This is about power, punishment, and pure politics,” said Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX).

“They want to see if they can get away with this. They want to test whether they can silence a sitting member of Congress who dares to ask questions. Well, the answer is hell no.”

I’m not so sure. U.S. District Judge Jamel Semper, who is overseeing McIver’s case, made no decision Tuesday on her multiple requests to have the charges thrown out, but indicated this thing may be headed to trial.

“Whether this is criminal conduct is for a jury. I’m not wading into those waters,” Semper said.

If this thing does go before a jury, it could happen as early as Nov. 10. Just what New Jersey needs after a nasty gubernatorial election — an assault trial that serves as a proxy for Trump’s immigration policy and Democrats’ response to it, with the eyes of a nation upon us. Can’t wait.

Editor Terrence T. McDonald is a native New Jerseyan who has worked for newspapers in the Garden State for 20 years. He has covered everything from Trenton politics to the smallest of municipal squabbles, exposing public corruption and general malfeasance at every level of government. Terrence won 23 New Jersey Press Association awards and two Tim O’Brien Awards for Investigative Journalism using the Open Public Records Act from the New Jersey chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. One politician forced to resign in disgrace because of Terrence’s reporting called him a "political poison pen journalist.” You can reach him at tmcdonald@newjerseymonitor.com.

This Jersey Dem clearly sees Trump for what he really is

Andy Kim rode a wave of anti-Trump rage to flip a Republican-held House seat in 2018, then latched onto anger at establishment New Jersey Democrats last year to score a promotion to the U.S. Senate.

Now that the federal government is in turmoil, shut down because of a partisan spat over Obamacare subsidies, with President Donald Trump using the shutdown as an excuse to target projects in Democratic-led states, does Kim regret his decision to begin a career in Congress during what seems like the absolute worst time to be there?

I asked him this question Thursday and didn’t get an answer. But Kim, a Democrat, reminded me that, at this point, he’s a government shutdown vet.

“I was sworn in during a government shutdown,” he said, referring to the 2018-19 shutdown. “Thankfully we were able to flip the House Representatives and take back the gavel there, but it’s sad to see just like the lack of willingness to actually engage in anything that resembles governance.”

Kim was in New Jersey this week to chat with residents about the shutdown and the Trump administration’s move to use it as a reason to kill or delay things like the Gateway project, a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River intended to replace aging tunnels damaged by Hurricane Sandy. Kim likened Trump’s actions to “mafia tactics.”

“It just shows that he’s willing to harm the American people just for his own political purposes,” he said.

Trump and Republicans have been adamant that the shutdown is the fault of Democrats. The U.S. Senate this week considered one Dem-led stopgap budget bill and one Republican bill. The GOP measure won more than 50 votes, but neither scored the 60 it needed to pass. When I asked Kim whether it would be fair to say Democrats are indeed blocking a bill with majority support, he said no because Trump and Republicans know that they should have produced a bill that would have gotten 60 votes.

“First and foremost, again, the Republicans are in firm control over this government and they know how this works, which is you’ve got to have bipartisanship on these negotiations, which they just chose not to do,” he said. “We’ve been reaching out to have negotiations. We reached out starting this summer to sit down and have negotiations. Donald Trump didn’t agree to it until the day before the shutdown.”

When I asked the White House to comment on Kim’s criticism, it blamed his party for the budget mess.

“Andy Kim and his fellow Senate Democrats shut down the federal government in a bid to strong-arm Republicans into giving free health care to illegal immigrants,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai. “The Democrats’ government shutdown affects everyone and requires the Administration to make decisions to keep mandatory government functions operational. The Democrats can choose to reopen the government at any time.”

The claim about free health care is a canard. Immigrants without legal status are ineligible for the federal subsidies at the heart of the budget dispute. Democrats want to extend federal aid for health insurance purchased in the Obamacare marketplaces, since costs are expected to skyrocket without them. Republicans do not — though states can and have allowed undocumented immigrants to obtain subsidized health care. Here in New Jersey, children under 19 can enroll in Medicaid no matter their legal status. There are indeed noncitizens who are eligible for federal subsidies, but not every noncitizen is in the U.S. illegally (for now).

Kim is more hopeful than I am that lawmakers will come to their senses and broker a deal. He said he was involved in a productive dialogue with senators from both sides of the aisle on Wednesday.

“And I did hear from a number of them, the Republicans, that they share concerns on the health care side. They’re feeling the pressure, which is why, again, [House] Speaker [Mike] Johnson just kept them home,” he said. “He doesn’t want them here feeling the pressure and the heat about this,” he said.

Here’s why I’m not hopeful: The 2018-19 shutdown lasted for about one month, and that was back when Trump was way more interested in playing the game and surrounded by a few people who appeared interested in curbing his more insane instincts. His reascension to the presidency after years of prosecutions and two assassination attempts has him, well, emboldened would be a polite word. And judging by his public remarks since the shutdown began, he’s having a gay old time.

So what’s going to get this to stop? An appeal to reason? Trump is sh––posting from the Oval Office. Reason is in the rearview mirror.

Editor Terrence T. McDonald is a native New Jerseyan who has worked for newspapers in the Garden State for more than 15 years. He has covered everything from Trenton politics to the smallest of municipal squabbles, exposing public corruption and general malfeasance at every level of government. Terrence won 23 New Jersey Press Association awards and two Tim O’Brien Awards for Investigative Journalism using the Open Public Records Act from the New Jersey chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. One politician forced to resign in disgrace because of Terrence’s reporting called him a "political poison pen journalist.” You can reach him at tmcdonald@newjerseymonitor.com.

This ugly governor's race shows nothing is too low for Trump's GOP

NEW BRUNSWICK — In a crowded room on the Rutgers campus on Thursday, two state senators tried to impart the wisdom of political civility to students at the very moment our state’s gubernatorial race was devolving into the campaign’s ugliest day yet.

Sen. Jon Bramnick, a Republican, and Sen. Joe Cryan, a Democrat, are on what they’re calling a college civility tour, one they announced after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was killed on Sept. 10. I have my doubts about whether two lawmakers from New Jersey can help drag American politics out of the sewer, so I visited Rutgers to see if Bramnick and Cryan would dispel my doubts.

Momentarily, they did. Bramnick spoke somberly about the strife and violence of the 1960s and how he fears those days are returning, and Cryan was sincere when he urged the students to remember that we don’t all live life’s experiences the same way.

“Always keep in mind that somebody else’s perspective isn’t ours, and as a result of that, let’s listen, learn, and be a part of the great shared experience called this American experiment,” he said.

Well said! Unfortunately, outside the walls of that room on Rutgers’ campus, the race to succeed Gov. Phil Murphy was deteriorating into acrimony, raising doubts about Bramnick’s and Cryan’s premise that we can all just get along.

The ugliness stems from two stories that dropped Thursday, one from the New Jersey Globe that says Democrat Mikie Sherrill did not walk with her graduating class at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1994 as punishment related to a massive cheating scandal that implicated more than 100 of her classmates, and a CBS News report that the National Archives released an unredacted copy of Sherrill’s military records to an ally of her GOP opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, records the Ciattarelli campaign then distributed to reporters without shielding personal information related to her and her family.

Republicans used the Globe story to accuse Sherrill of “cheating her way” through the Naval Academy, and are calling on her to release her disciplinary records to confirm her claim that she was merely punished for not turning in students who did cheat. And Sherrill said the CBS story proves the Trump administration and Ciattarelli are “breaking the law and exposing private records for political gain.”

The problem for Sherrill: The Globe story calls into question the very thing she has centered her campaign on, her military record.

Contemporaneous reports about the cheating scandal — an unknown number of students obtained a copy of an electrical engineering exam days before the test was given — indicate the Navy believed 15 percent of Sherrill’s graduating class were implicated, and a special naval tribunal found dozens guilty of honor violations and issued them punishments like loss of privileges, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

Sherrill’s claim that she didn’t walk in her graduation ceremony as punishment for not turning in fellow students who cheated is a plausible story. She could confirm it by letting us take a peek at those disciplinary records, but her campaign has nixed that idea.

What should have been a victory lap for the Ciattarelli campaign, though, was marred by the CBS story, which implicates the campaign in distributing documents that included Sherrill’s Social Security number, personal information about her parents, life insurance details … incredibly personal stuff handed out to reporters and God knows who else.

The campaign has pinned the blame on the National Archives, which appears to be 100 percent responsible for releasing the unredacted records in the first place, but had no role in giving them to members of the media.

Both stories dropped the same day a new poll said the governor’s race is all tied up, with Ciattarelli and Sherrill both at 43 percent and a whopping 11 percent of voters undecided. If this race is indeed a dead heat, things are only going to get uglier from here.

Meanwhile, David Weigel of Semafor reported Thursday that conservative super PAC American Principles Project is going to flood our airwaves with an ad to scare voters about transgender people. Really nasty stuff.

Back on the Rutgers campus, I asked Bramnick what he thought of the civility of the current gubernatorial campaign.

“Not bad, actually. I watched the debate — I didn’t really hear any personal insults. I think it’s shockingly good from that standpoint,” he said.

He’s right that Sunday’s debate was no brawl. But I think the days of this race being civil are over. Buckle up.

Editor Terrence T. McDonald is a native New Jerseyan who has worked for newspapers in the Garden State for more than 15 years. He has covered everything from Trenton politics to the smallest of municipal squabbles, exposing public corruption and general malfeasance at every level of government. Terrence won 23 New Jersey Press Association awards and two Tim O’Brien Awards for Investigative Journalism using the Open Public Records Act from the New Jersey chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. One politician forced to resign in disgrace because of Terrence’s reporting called him a "political poison pen journalist.” You can reach him at tmcdonald@newjerseymonitor.com.

How one Trump lackey embodies his utter contempt for the law

The Trump administration’s contempt for the law and for the people of New Jersey is on full display yet again in the new fight over control of the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

With its push to keep a Trump loyalist as our state’s chief federal prosecutor, the White House is not only ignoring the law, but also tarnishing the reputation of judges appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents and sowing chaos in a state that’s already seeing enough chaos these days, thank you very much.

Here are the details: Alina Habba, a personal attorney for President Donald Trump, was appointed interim U.S. attorney back in March, but her 120-day appointment expires this week and Trump only just nominated her for confirmation by the U.S. Senate, so her nomination has yet to move. Federal law says the state’s federal judges can name her replacement until the Senate votes to confirm her, so on Tuesday they announced they chose Habba’s deputy, Desiree Leigh Grace.

The judges did not say why they rejected the Trump administration’s push to keep Habba in the post. I have some ideas:

Her public slobbering over alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate in January.
Her stated pledge to use her job as prosecutor to help get Republicans elected in New Jersey.
Her prosecution of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a case that was so nakedly partisan she had to drop it mere days later.
Her announcement of an investigation into our governor and attorney general on Fox News, a probe that she appears to have created just so she could go viral.
Her subpoena of Gov. Phil Murphy over some dumb but obviously not criminal comments he made in February suggesting he might hide an undocumented immigrant at his home.

Whatever the reason, federal law gives our district judges the power to choose the U.S. attorney when the president’s nominee is not confirmed. So they did, and now the Trump administration is accusing them of colluding with Democrats to punish Dear Leader.

“This Department of Justice does not tolerate rogue judges — especially when they threaten the President’s core Article II powers,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said on social media.

“The district judges in NJ just proved this was never about law — it was about politics,” said Bondi deputy Todd Blanche.

This is dangerous nonsense. Bondi and Blanche know that federal law is on the judges’ side here, but they’re taking advantage of the public’s ignorance of the law to cast the judges as enemies of the state.

I worry about how this will end. The Trump administration claimed they removed Grace, whose sole crime is that the federal judges who oversee cases in New Jersey think she’s better qualified than Habba (considering Grace has worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for nearly a decade, that’s unquestionably true). But Grace told the New Jersey Globe she intends to take over as U.S. attorney on Saturday. I can’t imagine that will sit well with all the president’s men.

If what’s happening in New York is any indication, we’re stuck with Habba. Trump’s pick for U.S. attorney in New York’s northern district, John Sarcone, was not chosen to remain in the position by that district’s judges, so the president gave him a different title, and now Sarcone is still the district’s acting U.S. attorney.

Good news for Trump. Bad news for anyone interested in a government that works for anyone but him.

Emails from election law watchdog reveal bizarre fixation on LGBTQ community

Every queer person knows what it’s like to be stuck at a holiday dinner next to someone who makes us cringe when they speak.

Sometimes they don’t say anything outright offensive — nothing that would get bleeped on network television — but often what comes out of their mouths represents a relic of a more troubling time for us.

That’s the feeling I get reading Jeff Brindle’s emails.

Brindle is the executive director of the Election Law Enforcement Commission, which is tasked with keeping an eye on politicians and making sure they disclose their donors properly, don’t spend campaign cash illegally, and update the public on their finances.

He’s come under fire recently because of an email he sent to a staffer in October mocking National Coming Out Day. State officials said in a memo the New Jersey Monitor obtained this week that the email was a blatant violation of the state’s anti-discrimination policy, and Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration has made moves to oust Brindle over it.

When I first read it, I thought, well, I’d probably complain to someone if my boss sent me this, but I might be satisfied if they got a reminder about what’s appropriate to say in work emails. I don’t know if I’d push for them to be fired.

But Brindle didn’t keep his snark about the LGBTQ community confined to that one email, according to a batch obtained via the Open Public Records Act by CJ Griffin, a transparency advocate and attorney who has represented the New Jersey Monitor.

In June, state officials sent a staff-wide email noting it was Pride month and suggesting employees consider adding their pronouns to their email signature. Brindle forward to an unknown person with this comment: “Give me a break.”

To a staffer who shared a story about a gay pride stunt courtesy of Burger King in Austria, Brindle wrote, “Unbelievable.”

He shared a July story from conservative news site Town Hall about a trans woman who impregnated two inmates in New Jersey’s women’s prison. He wrote, “We truly are living through insane times.”

In July, Breitbart wrote about Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas — a transgender woman whose participation in women’s sports made her a nationwide target — not being named NCAA’s woman of the year. Brindle sent the link to a staffer. “Lia lost this one,” he wrote.

Other emails that contain links to news stories with no comment from Brindle reveal a fixation with queer folks. He shared a story on parents griping about a Pride celebration in their kids’ middle school; a Town Hall story about a trans woman who regrets transitioning and criticized gender-affirming health care; and a Breitbart story about a Pride month social media post from the U.S. Marine Corps.

I emailed Brindle asking him if the emails betray any personal animus toward the LGBTQ community. He did not respond.

I wrote last week about my opposition to Murphy’s move to force out Brindle by hijacking control of the Election Law Enforcement Commission (a bill under consideration by the Legislature would give Murphy the sole power to remove the current commissioners and replace them all). Nothing in Brindle’s emails makes me reconsider this, since I don’t think the governor should gain this power just to target one person.

But that doesn’t mean the commissioners shouldn’t examine Brindle’s behavior at work. If he’s using his work email to trade anti-LGBTQ stories with staffers, what does that mean about how he treats his subordinates from that community? What does it say about the overall environment of his office? Is the stuff he says out loud worse than what he commits to writing, in documents he knows can be publicly revealed?

And why are Brindle and other commission employees exchanging work emails during work hours about subjects irrelevant to their jobs, like transgender swimmers who live in another state or PR gimmicks by Burger King in Austria? Could this be why the commission’s investigations move at a glacial pace?

Griffin told me when she first heard about the National Coming Out Day email, it set off “alarm bells” and made her wonder whether there was more going on, “especially since it seemed unlikely that a single email would cause Murphy to demand a resignation.”

“I also doubted that his actions were just a ‘power grab.’ I always tell my clients to ‘OPRA the emails,’ so I did. As is often the case, transparency revealed that there is indeed more to the story,” Griffin said.

Brindle’s commissioners are holding a meeting next week to discuss the matter. Garden State Equality, the state’s LGBTQ rights group, is demanding Brindle resign, saying the emails reveal Brindle’s workplace “is steeped in a toxic brine of biases which has no place in a civilized society.”

“We are disgusted by his visible contempt for the LGBTQ community. This is even more shocking as it is spewed from his official government email account, which carries with it the imprimatur of an official government position,” the group’s statement reads.

One last thing, about the National Coming Out Day email. In that one, Brindle emailed a staffer in reference to an Oct. 11, 2022, email from state government noting that day was National Coming Out Day.

“Are you coming out?” Brindle wrote to the unidentified staffer. “No Lincoln or Washington‘s Birthday’s [sic] but we can celebrate national coming out day.”

But: We do celebrate Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays — it’s called Presidents Day. And Brindle, as a state employee, had a paid day off to commemorate it. He did not get one for National Coming Out Day.

New Jersey Monitor is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com. Follow New Jersey Monitor on Facebook and Twitter.

Attorney general says ironworkers union official retaliated against Black workers

The New Jersey chapter of an international ironworkers union is facing allegations that one of its officers gave preferential job treatment to its white workers, denied Black workers a chance to work on high-profile lucrative jobs, and retaliated against a worker who complained about his use of a common racial epithet.

New Jersey’s civil rights division on Tuesday announced it is moving forward with a complaint filed by one of the union’s Black members that alleges she and other Black union workers received one- or two-day assignments while their white coworkers nabbed such long-term jobs as those at Newark airport, the Bayonne Bridge, and the American Dream mall.

The union, Ironworkers Local 11, a local chapter of the International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental and Reinforcing Ironworkers Union, AFL-CIO, did not return a request for comment. In a statement to state officials investigating the matter, the union denied the Black union member’s allegations.

In a statement, acting Attorney General Matt Platkin said he is “deeply troubled” by the woman’s complaint.

“We will never waver in our commitment to fighting racial discrimination in our state,” Platkin said.

The woman, who is unnamed in Platkin’s statement outlining the allegations, has been a Local 11 member since 1988. She alleges Raymond Woodall, the former business manager for Local 11, used racial slurs to refer to Black union members. She told state officials in a complaint to the civil rights division that the quality and duration of her work assignments diminished after she confronted him about his actions.

One of Local 11’s members recorded a conversation during which Woodall used racial slurs. State officials were provided with a copy of the recording and verified it is Woodall on it, Platkin’s statement says.

Woodall could not be reached for comment.

Democrats, stop counting on Trump to win elections for you

Democrats may need an intervention to end their Donald Trump addiction, if Tuesday's election results didn't already send that message.

Take Gov. Phil Murphy's campaign. From his campaign flyers — every one I received had Trump as its main image — to the “Stop the Trump Team" signs that lined Route 3 in the days before Election Day, a casual voter may have assumed Murphy's challenger was the former president, not Jack Ciattarelli.

It was much the same, perhaps worse, in Virginia, where Democrat Terry McAuliffe could barely utter a sentence about his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, without mentioning Trump. Youngkin defeated McAuliffe Tuesday after voters all over that very Democratic state lurched right.

Murphy is probably going to defeat Ciattarelli, despite the Election Day scare the Republican gave the incumbent (the Associated Press called the race for Murphy Wednesday night). But if Murphy ekes out a victory here, he should blame his meager margin — and his party's loss of winnable seats around the state — in part on his campaign's insistence on using Trump as a boogeyman to scare Democrats and independent voters into voting for him.

There are plenty of reasons why the Ciattarelli campaign was able to eat into Murphy's margin. Republicans loathe Murphy for his COVID restrictions — his recent mandate that even toddlers should wear masks in school is a particular sore point — and they believe the governor got a pass for the thousands of nursing home deaths in the early months of the pandemic. Biden's anemic job approval ratings didn't help.

But the Murphy camp's Trump fixation probably cost them the votes of persuadable Democrats and independent voters who either sat Tuesday out or voted for Ciattarelli because the Republican was talking about New Jersey, not the former president. And dwelling on Trump probably energized GOP voters instead of reminding them their most recent president is an embarrassment.

I talked to Mike DuHaime, a longtime strategist for Chris Christie, who told me Democrats should have known raising the specter of Trump would not have the same effect in November 2021 that it did while Trump was president. Despite how “irresistible" Democratic operatives find Trump, he said, voters want to look forward, not backward.

DuHaime finds all this reminiscent of 2009, when then-Gov. Jon Corzine “spent millions" tying Christie to George W. Bush to help sink Christie's gubernatorial campaign. Bush's approval was still mired in the mid-30s back then, but Corzine's attempts to highlight Christie's ties to the former president failed to resonate enough to prevent Christie from unseating Corzine. Voters were more interested in New Jersey's problems than Christie's previous work for W.

“You don't have to look that far back in history to learn the exact lesson we just learned," DuHaime said.

I am no fan of Trump. I think he's personally odious. His apparent hijacking of the federal government to try to derail Joe Biden's election win, plus his instigation of the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot, is a travesty. And it was fair to ding Ciattarelli for appearing at a “stop the steal" rally and then making up a laughable story that he didn't know the true purpose of the event.

But, at the risk of getting very Frank Capra here, voters — not Democratic foot soldiers, but voters who worry about rising gas prices and COVID-19 and stubbornly high property taxes — want to hear about solutions to those problems, not four months of threats that a vote for [fill in the blank] is really a vote for Donald Trump.

Tuesday's results, especially in Virginia but also in parts of New Jersey, bear that out. Democrats lost legislative races in South and Central Jersey, handed myriad other seats around the state to the GOP — Republicans may win Passaic County commissioner seats! — and put the governorship in jeopardy because instead of arguing they deserve to run Trenton, they thought Trump would do the work for them.