Good morning. It is September 11th. It is a sunny and beautiful September 11th here 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. 

The weather is more gorgeous outside than the vaunted weather on the original September 11th was, but the era for such comparisons is rapidly coming to a close. The ongoing process that really kicked into high gear when George W. Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, got hired by the Saudis to promote their golf league and stopped tweeting out his annual reminiscences of the attacks, has now come pretty close to completion as Vice President JD Vance decided to fly to Utah to meet with the family of the late Charlie Kirk rather than making his scheduled appearance at the site of the World Trade Center in New York City this morning. 

President Donald Trump, who had to be driven a few hundred yards to a restaurant essentially next door to the White House the other night, restricted his travels today to a quick hop across the Potomac for a ceremony at the Pentagon because our grand national ritual of never forgetting is pretty much forgettable now. Instead, there's Charlie Kirk, or a completely fictitious figure under the name Charlie Kirk, who is being ostentatiously mourned, not just by the gutter bigots and violent, subsist fascists whose cause he championed and embodied, but by the people who consider themselves the voices of the political and journalistic mainstream. Ezra Klein of the New York Times wrote, “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him.” That's an interesting claim. It's semantically correct, but the actual Charlie Kirk showed up to campuses to encourage students to surveil and harass their professors for a blacklist Kirk maintained, of people he hoped to force out of their jobs for their expression, or just showed up to campuses to expose the students to his special guest speaker. Kyle Rittenhouse. But yes, when he brought a vigilante killer to campus, he would talk with anyone who would talk to him, although if they disagreed with him, he would try to stage their humiliation for his audience's consumption. But Klein and the rest are paying tribute to Kirk's legacy in the best way they know how, by ignoring readily available facts and basic moral precepts. 

Anyway, the killing of person who Tim Burke identified as the 19th most listened-to radio talk show host in the country, dominates the top of the front of the print edition of today's New York Times. “Charlie Kirk dies after being shot on a Utah campus. A close ally of the president and a voice of young conservatives was 31.” That's the two column wide headline package. Next to it is an extremely undistinguished four column picture of people standing around the canopy that Kirk had been speaking under, now strung off with crime scene tape. There are more striking photographs of the event available, but this one very nicely captures the spirit of trying to make something more than what it is. “Charlie Kirk,” the Times writes, “a close ally of President Trump's and the founder of the nation's preeminent right-wing youth activist organization, was fatally shot on Wednesday, an assassination that spread shock and fear across the country at a time of deep and menacing divisions.” It's a little strange to talk about an assassination in a case where at press time and even now, no suspect has been caught. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that investigators say they found ammunition engraved with expressions of transgender and anti-fascist ideology, in a 30 caliber hunting rifle, wrapped in a towel in the woods near the scene of the shooting. The FBI also released a photo of a skinny young person in a black t-shirt, sunglasses, and a cap, who the Bureau is calling a person of interest. 

But the New York Times is reporting that the information about the ammo came from a preliminary internal report circulated inside the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and that a senior law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation cautioned that report had not been verified by ATF analysts, did not match other summaries of the evidence, and might turn out to have been misread or misinterpreted. 

In a totally separate piece of news from yesterday, on page A15 of the Morning Times, the headline is, “White House exerts enormous influence over FBI, fired officials say in lawsuit.” 

“The White House,” the Times writes, “has exerted extraordinary influence over decisions at the FBI, issuing political loyalty tests, and directly ordering the firings of agents targeted by President Trump and his allies, according to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday by three former Bureau officials who accused the administration of illegally dismissing them. The sprawling suit filed in federal district court in Washington provides a disturbing account of what it describes as efforts by Mr. Trump's top aides to strip the Bureau of its century-long history of independence. It paints an unflattering portrait of the FBI director, Cash Patel, as a middleman executing the orders of top Justice Department and White House officials, including Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump's chief domestic policy advisor. The former officials who brought the suit, Brian J. Driscoll Jr., Stephen J. Jensen, and Spencer L. Evans, once occupied senior positions in the FBI. They accused Mr. Patel of dismissing them as part of a campaign of retribution for their failure to demonstrate sufficient political loyalty.”

The story goes on to say that “the lawsuit describes Mr. Patel and his top deputy, Dan Bongino, right-wing influencers with far less experience than any of their predecessors, as almost cartoonish figures more interested in social media or handing out oversized challenge coins than in running the day-to-day operations of the nation's flagship law enforcement agency.” Later on, the story notes that “early in his tenure, Trump supporters attacked Mr. Jensen outside the FBI for his previous role in overseeing the domestic terrorism operations section, a role that deeply involved him in the investigation into January 6th.” 

On the left-hand side of the front of the Times, above the fold, the paper delivers another installment in the story of how Donald Trump murdered a boatload of people in the Caribbean. “Signs of retreat before US fired” is the headline. “New doubts over attack on Venezuelan boat.” 

“Doubts” here means certainties in the ever-growing pile of certainties, as the story says, “a Venezuelan boat that the US military destroyed in the Caribbean last week had altered its course and appeared to have turned around before the attack started because the people on board had apparently spotted a military aircraft stalking it, according to American officials familiar with the matter. The military,” the story continues,” repeatedly hit the vessel before it sank, the officials added, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. President Trump has said he authorized the strike and claimed the boat was carrying drugs. The disclosures,” the story goes on, “provide new details about a military operation that was a startling departure from using law enforcement means to interdict suspected drug boats. Legal specialists who have called it a crime to summarily kill suspected low-level smugglers as if they were wartime combatants said the revelations further undercut the administration's claim that the strike was legally justified as self-defense.” The story then goes on to note that the fuller story of what happened with the boat simply confirms that even if one were to grant Donald Trump's totally unwarranted premise that drug smugglers are the equivalent of military enemies and may be treated as such, the killing would still count as an outright war crime. Shooting a retreating unarmed vessel and then making sure to massacre any survivors, would be absolutely illegal in a war, which again, is not what this was.

The Washington Post has an update on the Trump administration's immigration raid against the Hyundai factory complex in Georgia. “President Donald Trump,” the Post writes, “temporarily delayed the repatriation of more than 300 South Korean workers to South Korea after the Hyundai LG raid in Georgia to explore whether they could stay in the United States to educate and train American workers, South Korean officials said Thursday. The 316 South Koreans were released from their detention facility Thursday and are scheduled to arrive home Friday afternoon. They were initially set to leave on a chartered Korean air flight Wednesday, the day that South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington and requested their swift release. South Korean officials had attributed the delay to an issue on the American side without elaborating. Cho,” the Post writes, “learned from Rubio that Trump had halted the release to understand Seoul's position on whether they should stay to educate and train US workers or return home, given that the detained South Korean nationals are all skilled workers. A South Korean Foreign Ministry official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe diplomatic discussions. Cho told Rubio,” the post continues, “that Seoul wanted to bring the South Korean nationals home and they could return at a later date, according to the Foreign Ministry. Washington agreed to that, the ministry said. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung said on Thursday that the incident could have a chilling effect and make South Korean companies very hesitant about expanding their operations in the United States, especially without changes to the visa system. ‘I think this will have a significant impact on direct investments in the United States moving forward,’ Lee said in a news conference. ‘Our companies that have expanded overseas are probably very confused,’ he said. We're not there for long term researcher employment. You need a factory manager to install the machinery and equipment when you establish a factory, right?” 

And Bloomberg is reporting that it has obtained a cache of more than 18,000 emails from Jeffrey Epstein's Yahoo email account. The collection includes lots of emails between Epstein and Gislhaine Maxwell, his ex-girlfriend, property manager and fixer, and convicted sex trafficker, whom the Trump administration has been working with in the hopes of downplaying or obfuscating Trump's clear ties with Epstein.

The emails, Bloomberg writes, “contribute to longstanding questions about her credibility, including her truthfulness in a two-day interview she had with officials from the Department of Justice this summer.” The story goes on to say that the emails “show that Maxwell and Epstein were closer in many respects than either publicly admitted. Maxwell opened at least one foreign bank account using one of his addresses, was a named director of one of Epstein's main revenue-generating companies, and traded stock in a company they were both invested in. Details that haven't been previously reported.”

The piece goes on to say “Maxwell has maintained she was kept in the dark about details of Epstein's initial sexual abuse case in the mid-2000s, yet the emails demonstrate her deep knowledge of the legal jeopardy he faced and show how she helped him strategize over even the most consequential details.” 

And in other news from Epstein's Yahoo email trove, Bloomberg also reported that Peter Mandelson, the United Kingdom's ambassador to the United States, in addition to being one of the more effusive contributors to Epstein's birthday book, also maintained a long running close correspondence with Epstein in which, among other things, after Epstein's 2008 conviction for soliciting sex from a minor, Mandelson told him, ‘I think the world of you and I feel hopeless and furious about what has happened. I can still barely understand it. It just could not happen in Britain.’” 

In an update to the story, Bloomberg notes that the UK fired Mandelson as ambassador today. 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 Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Please keep sending those along if you are able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.