MegLavDC

The Southern District of New York is the office that prosecuted Trump on 34 felony counts. He is still appealing those convictions. The lawyer he just named to run that office - James M. McDonald - is on the legal team handling that appeal. McDonald is a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell. He is part of the team that last month secured the Justice Department's decision to drop a fraud and conspiracy case against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani - a case brought under the Biden administration and killed under this one. SDNY has jurisdiction over terrorism, espionage, securities fraud, and public corruption. It is arguably the most consequential prosecutor's office in the country. Trump is now placing his personal defense attorney in charge of it. Jay Clayton, who previously held the SDNY job, is being moved to director of national intelligence - a role that opened when Tulsi Gabbard resigned and that Trump briefly tried to fill with Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, before congressional pressure forced a different choice. The chain here is not complicated. The office that convicted him gets his lawyer. The intelligence community gets the man who ran the housing finance regulator. A personal attorney now controls a portfolio that includes public corruption cases. This is what the completion of the project looks like.

Florida paid a portable toilet company called Doodie Calls more than $92 million over six months to haul wastewater out of the Everglades. The state projected it would pay Doodie Calls $480 million over two years. For comparison, building a sewage treatment plant for a city of 10,000 people costs about $5 million. That is one vendor. At one facility. Built in eight days on an Everglades airstrip using hurricane disaster funds because Ron DeSantis declared immigration a state of emergency in 2023 to access a $5 billion fund set aside for floods and hurricanes. The facility costs between $1.2 million and $3 million per day to operate. A conservative estimate puts the annual per-capita cost at $500,000 per detainee. Florida spends $30,000 a year to house a convicted criminal in a state prison. The math on Alligator Alcatraz is not tougher than a prison. It is more than sixteen times more expensive. Three quarters of the men held there have never been convicted of a crime. They are awaiting civil immigration proceedings. They are being held in kennels - cages with steel mesh sides, 16 bunks, three toilets, brightly lit 24 hours a day. Amnesty International documented what it called deliberate neglect designed to dehumanize, including credible allegations of men held in stress positions in direct sunlight without food or water for hours at a time. Governor Braun opened the Speedway Slammer at an Indiana prison. The Cornhusker Clink in Nebraska. The Louisiana Lockup at Angola. The naming contest is ongoing. The cruelty is the point. The cost is someone else's problem. Florida's emergency fund has dwindled to $200 million. The facility cannot run to the end of the year. The men in the cages are still there.