Rising This Week: A weaponized government
A prosecutor loses his job after refusing to charge Trump's target; the FCC holds an open meeting after Kimmelgate, and Kilmar Abrego Garcia returns to court.
No other newsletter previews the week’s news cycle with legal roundups, protest listings, and opportunities for civic engagement, informing and empowering readers.
On the day of Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension, ABC News published a bombshell story reporting that a U.S. Attorney risked losing his job because he wouldn’t charge one of Donald Trump’s most-hated targets with a crime unsupported by the evidence.
That prosecutor, now-former Eastern District of Virginia U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert, resigned under pressure on Friday, seemingly in line to be replaced with someone more willing to open a politically motivated criminal case against New York Attorney General Letitia James. In a deeply sourced story, ABC News reported that Siebert did not find enough evidence to support the mortgage fraud case that Trump has been angling for against James, who successfully held Trump’s business empire liable for fraud.
Public actions related to this story:
The climate of state and corporate censorship behind Kimmel’s suspension has sparked protests, boycotts and calling campaigns in the public and private sectors.
Find out more about them in the listings below.
Any news organization would have been proud of that scoop, an early warning signal about the latest escalation in Trump’s attack on the rule of law. With his scheme uncovered, Trump spent Saturday night openly demanding the prosecution on his political targets “NOW.”
Instead of being celebrated this week, ABC (unjustly) damaged the credibility of its (uninvolved) news division once again by apparently bending to an intense campaign of government and corporate pressure. No comedian has a First Amendment right to a TV show, but it quickly became clear that more than simple market forces were at work in benching Kimmel.
Reasonable observers concluded that the network capitulated to threats from Trump’s FCC attack dog Brendan Carr to punish ABC the “hard way” and abuse his power over the financial futures of Sinclair and Nexstar, the conglomerates that own more than 60 of ABC’s local stations nationwide. Those companies have been pushing for local TV market deregulation that is on the agenda of an upcoming FCC meeting this week.
Rightly or wrongly, the timing reinforces the belief that the network’s corporate owners will not support their journalists reporting critically on the Trump administration, and they have done so right at the time that ABC News arguably produced the most important accountability journalism on the justice beat last week.
The journalists who exposed Trump’s pressure on Siebert deserved better, and so did the public, which shouldn’t have to wonder whether the network will hold its punches the next time the Trump administration leans on their corporate owners.
Having spent most of my career in institutional news media, I hesitated before going independent, and I am sympathetic to the talented, tenacious and professional reporters who landed the ABC News scoop. They’re colleagues on the justice beat whom I know and trust, whose reporting is always fair and incisive.
The public needs a strong institutional press to produce deeply sourced multi-byline investigations with the backing of a newsroom to give the reporting gravitas and a wide reach. News divisions are always the first to feel the pain for the sins of their corporate parents, whose actions predictably inspired massive boycotts.
As this week demonstrated yet again, the public also needs to strengthen the ability of independent media to maintain a free press that won’t be muzzled in a climate of censorship. A growing number of journalists with storied, decades-long careers inside legacy newsrooms have been making this transition.
Through All Rise News, I join this project of rebuilding, adhering to traditional news values and stepping them up to meet this unprecedented assault on our freedoms. That means producing firsthand, original reporting: navigating the public record, verifying information, cultivating sources, and traveling to the spaces like courtrooms where news breaks. But this editorial project rejects business-as-usual journalism, calling out authoritarian bullying by its name and empowering readers to act.
Nearly five months in, readers keep signing onto this project, allowing me to invest in reporting and have confidence that I can make a living as a fully independent journalist. My long-term goal is to expand this ethos into a broader newsroom guided by these editorial values.
Later this week, I will be traveling once again to Nashville for another pre-trial hearing in Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s criminal case.
To sustain this type of on-the-ground reporting, and the editorial values guiding it, consider becoming a subscriber. Paid subscribers will unlock a preview of Abrego’s hearing, other court listings, protest information, and an overview of civic engagement that’s a signature of this newsletter.
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