I was happy that the program was reinstated, but the entire thing didn’t feel right. Something was up. Then, that night, a New York Times story broke: The U.S. attorney’s office filed a motion late in the day to officially drop the case. They admitted in the filings that DHS officials not only made numerous false statements to justify the department’s banning of New Yorkers from the Trusted Traveler Program but did so knowingly. The office went even further, apologizing to the state of New York for having had to unlawfully undergo the ordeal.
DHS lied and they got caught.
The next morning, I held a press conference and laid out my case against DHS. It was extortion and abuse of power by the federal agency. I called for a congressional investigation and said that New York State would pursue civil damages from the Department of Homeland Security. What they did to New York in this instance was emblematic of the rampant abuses the citizens of this country have endured. It had to be stopped.
Congressmember Bennie Thompson, head of the DHS oversight committee and a real professional, sent a letter saying that he would do an investigation. It will be revealing. I had had a meeting in the Oval Office on the matter. They all knew what DHS was doing. DHS acting secretary Chad Wolf and his deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, were only the hatchet men. They were handed the ax. I hope justice will finally be done.
I could tell the DHS scandal made them nervous. First, having a U.S. attorney’s office refuse to represent the federal government because a federal agency was lying is very serious. I had never seen it before. Second, the prospect of a congressional investigation with subpoena power is also worrisome. One subpoena to Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli and I am sure they would list a number of people who knew about the issue and who were part of the fraud and abuse. Shortly after my press conference on the DHS, I received a call from people in the White House who said they were willing to reopen discussion on the Second Avenue subway project. The Second Avenue subway project is the extension of the subway from 96th Street to 125th Street. It has always been a joint federal and state project. In the normal course of business, it would have been funded by the federal government years ago. But with this administration, where everything is political and personal, they have refused to fund it because New York is a Democratic state. I had been pushing them literally for years to fund the project, as well as others. They never say no, but then it never happens either. I keep expecting a different outcome. In any event, I believe their purported reopening of the Second Avenue subway discussion was intended to slow me down from pursuing the DHS scandal. That’s not going to happen.
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IN LATE MARCH, the number of cases in New York was spiking but remained low in the rest of the country. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida complained that New Yorkers were bringing the virus to Florida. Florida is a key electoral state for President Trump, and Governor DeSantis was very much a Trump supporter. In fact, to secure a political advantage, President Trump had just changed his residency from New York to Florida. After DeSantis’s statements, the president’s aides started to talk about limiting New Yorkers’ ability to travel. At first, we didn’t take them seriously, but with a Trump White House you have to be constantly on guard because they were capable of anything. There was also a White House–driven theme emerging that COVID was a Democratic state problem, not a Republican state problem. Governor DeSantis’s remark was another manifestation of this theme, and it was conceivable that targeting New York would be advancing this political narrative.
I have found that when two discrete situations coalesce, it can present a third, different, and worse problem. This was about to occur on March 27, when Governor Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island, a Democrat, said that she was wary of New York’s high infection rate. That weekend, there were reports of Rhode Island police and National Guard troops pulling over cars with New York license plates. I feared that if a Democratic governor of a nearby state established a blockade against New Yorkers, Trump would seize upon the opportunity to expand on the blockade. This was all the stuff of nightmares.
When they were young, Michaela and Cara watched the movie I Am Legend, which caused Michaela to have nightmares for weeks. I remember having to explain to her how it was just a movie and it could never happen in real life. Now the movie was coming back to me. In it Will Smith is a doctor who is working on a cure for cancer when a virus is released that turns people into zombies. When the federal government realizes the virus is in Manhattan, they blow up the bridges and crossings leading to the island to isolate the virus—leaving the population trapped.
Now I could see Trump blockading New York State. If the Rhode Island governor could station police at the border, why couldn’t Trump station Customs and Border Protection officers at the New York borders? Department of Homeland Security would jump at the chance to be able to stop every vehicle entering or leaving the state. They could check citizenship and have a field day for deportation. Trump could use it to highlight
