There were 68 cardboard boxes full of answers that nobody could find for nearly 25 years, no matter how many times New Yorkers asked. Last year they turned up at a New York City agency. On Tuesday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani put the first 170,000 pages online. He decided the families, the survivors, and everyone who was down there are owed the truth, so he handed it to them.
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Twenty-Five Years, Sixty-Eight Boxes
For 25 years New Yorkers have asked City Hall what they knew about the air quality following 9/11. They filed countless records requests along with lawsuits—and essentially got nothing. Here’s part of why. In 2002, the Law Department ordered city agencies to funnel all 9/11 records requests to one lawyer, and to report back on anyone who so much as called asking.
Then last year, 68 boxes that held part of the answer showed up at the NYC Department of Environmental Protection.
On Tuesday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted the first 170,000 pages from the 9/11 files online. He also settled two lawsuits 9/11 Health Watch filed to get access to them.
“People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,” Mamdani said.
We pulled one of the most damning documents from the stack, the one being called the Harding Memo. It went to Deputy Mayor Robert Harding in the fall of 2001—reporting that the city’s lawyers had counted around 35,000 potential plaintiffs and expected 10,000 of them to file.
The memo then lists the lawsuits City Hall was bracing for. Third on that list was “health advisories caused individuals either to return to the area too soon (causing toxic exposure or emotional harm).” Fourth was that “rescue workers were provided with faulty equipment or no equipment (i.e. respirators).”
The Giuliani administration was still urging people back into Lower Manhattan, while its own memo had already filed that advice under liability.
Jon Stewart, standing beside Mamdani, said what that meant for folks on the ground. “There was poison in the air, and on the ground, and in the window sills, and in your air conditioners and covering your pets and your clothes, and it stayed there for months. Everyone knew. Now it’s very clear that the city knew as well.”
Then there was the plan. The first recommendation in the memo was getting Congress to build a victim compensation fund modeled on the airline bailout. The memo noted that anyone who took money from such a fund would waive the right to file a civil action against the city.
In a statement released by City Hall, Dem Rep. Jerry Nadler accused former Mayor Rudy Giuliani of “intentional obfuscation of the truth.” That’s putting it nicely. New York disbarred Giuliani, as did DC. Not to mention the fact that a jury ordered him to pay $148 million for lying about two Georgia election workers.
2,977 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks. Thousands more have died due to what they breathed in the months after.
Mamdani opened boxes that should have been public decades ago, after being on the job for only eight months. The records didn’t change. Neither did the law. What changed was who New Yorkers put in charge.
The Violence They Didn’t Ask About
Around 140,000 people depend on the World Trade Center Health Program, so it’s a tragedy that HHS head Bob Kennedy is now running it. In his first year at the helm the program fired staff and rehired them numerous times.
By March the program was down to just 84 staffers filling 120 funded positions, while enrollment into the program climbed.
Benjamin Chevat from 9/11 Health Watch spent a year hammering Kennedy with letters. Lawmakers in both parties eventually piled on. In April, Kennedy lifted the hiring freeze. Pressure does indeed burst pipes.
There are some things Kennedy never needed to be pressured into asking for.
On August 26, HHS released a 24-page paper that wasn’t peer reviewed. It is being pushed as showing that support for transgender people goes hand in hand with excusing political violence.
This whole paper rests on five survey questions that the authors describe as measuring views on “medical interventions.” They don’t name a single medical treatment. There’s nothing about hormones, surgery, or even doctors.
They simply ask whether rejection hurts, if you should use somebody’s name, and whether parents should stand by their kids. The survey then asks about six kinds of violence, all of it from the left. Nothing about Jan 6. Nothing about clinics or Pride.
One more thing. Of the 1,208 adults surveyed, 13 were transgender or gender-nonconforming.
HHS’s own press release admits the “study” never checked if any respondent ever did anything violent, which seems pretty important here.
None of the five authors would answer interview requests from The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom covering gender and politics. Neither would HHS. But one of them, Colin Wright of the Manhattan Institute, had already given a quote to the New York Post, which obtained the paper before it was public.
Wendy Via runs the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “I would call it pseudo-science,” she said. On what comes next: “I don’t doubt that they will try to act on this in some way.”
The Post, the Daily Caller, Blaze Media, and the Washington Examiner are all citing it, which is exactly how it’s being used. We read it so you don’t have to take their word for it. It’s pure propaganda with a government seal on it.
67 Million Registrations Run Through A Broken File
For years, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has said it can’t tell who is and isn’t a citizen. Its own inspector general once estimated 3.3 million naturalized Americans were logged as noncitizens—with 25% of SSA files listing nothing at all. And if you were born before 1981, or became a citizen after you got your card, it could become a major problem for you.
SAVE is a federal database that was built to check if someone who was born abroad qualified for benefits. You could run only one name at a time.
Just last year, Homeland Security rebuilt the database to run a million names at once, and matched those to Social Security files. In March of this year, Trump ordered them to use it to list every eligible voter in every state.
Since April of last year, at least 25 states have run about 67 million voter registrations through it.
Anthony Nel came here from South Africa and has been a citizen for over a decade. Texas ran its rolls through SAVE, the file flagged him, and his registration in Denton got canceled. He fought and got it back.
Then in June a federal judge pulled the plug on the new version. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan found the government broke three laws building it. They “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” she wrote.
It’s been off ever since. The regime appealed and lost again Friday, 2-1. One judge, appointed by Trump, sided with them and said anyone wrongly flagged could just go prove they’re a citizen. Nel already did. Once was plenty.
So this week they went to the Supreme Court to get it switched back on before the midterms. Standing in the way is the League of Women Voters, founded in 1920 by women who’d just won the right to vote. They have until 4pm Tuesday to answer.
They Beat The Gerrymander Twice
Trump has been hunting for House seats in states run by Republicans, and Missouri went on a mission to build him one. Gov. Mike Kehoe called a special session, and the legislature carved up Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s Kansas City district, scattering pieces of it into rural counties. By the AP’s math, around 59% of that district’s voters were new to it.
So the group People Not Politicians got to work, gathering thousands of signatures to fight back. They turned them in last December, and demanded a statewide vote on the map itself.
The petition was thrown out by Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins. He claimed the state constitution bans any referendums on congressional redistricting. He made the announcement on primary day, while Missourians were already voting under the lines he had wanted.
The Missouri Supreme Court ruled against him, unanimously. “If the petition is sufficient, HB 1 never took effect,” they wrote. The map “is not the law and has never been the law.” The court noted Hoskins had “delayed certification until the last possible date,” and called his arguments “wholly unpersuasive.”
State Attorney General Catherine Hanaway begged Justice Brett Kavanaugh to rescue the map. On Tuesday, he said no.
A Trump-appointed district judge ordered the state to use it anyway only minutes later. Hoskins immediately emailed local election officials telling them to use the gerrymandered map, claiming the federal order “takes precedence” over his own state’s highest court.
That’s when People Not Politicians moved for contempt in state court, and took Clark’s order to the Supreme Court. On Thursday morning, the justices froze it—a brief order, no noted dissents, even after the Trump regime filed a brief backing Hoskins. Missouri goes into November under the 2022 map, and Cleaver’s Kansas City district is still intact.
“The law is the law, the Missouri constitution is clear, as was the Missouri Supreme Court,” said Richard von Glahn of People Not Politicians. Hoskins, he added, “has shown that he cannot effectively do the job he was elected to do.”
And Hoskins already certified the referendum as Proposition A. So Missourians get the old map in November and a vote on the gerrymander itself, on the same ballot. Clipboards—and more importantly, the people holding them—put both of those there.
Look at what has done damage to the regime this week. Cardboard boxes, a court ruling, five survey questions, and petition signatures. All of which landed harder than anyone expected.
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Onward!
Scott
When did not backing down pay off for you? Tell me about it:
These are the six campaigns we're focused on today, out of dozens we're running. Every one goes straight to your own representative or your senators, depending on who can actually move it, with your zip code attached. That's what makes them count. Congressional offices sort constituent mail by district and by subject, and the totals go up the chain every single day.
**Yosemite.** They worked on this quietly for over a year so there wouldn't be a public fight.
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-stop-trumps-yosemite-giveaway
**Mail voting.** Congress doesn't have to leave this to one courtroom.
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-protect-our-use-of-voting-by-mail-and-voting-machines/
**The Epstein files.** Blanche has read them. He isn't going to release them on his own.
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-demand-acting-ag-blanche-release-all-of-the-epstein-files-now/
**Investigate the case.** Somebody flew those planes. Somebody kept that calendar. Somebody moved that money. We need every one of them under oath, not just the handful who've already testified.
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-fully-investigate-the-jefrey-epstein-sex-trafficking-case/
**45 million acres.** 625,000 people filed comments against opening our national forests, and the agency moved ahead anyway. Congress holds the money.
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-stop-trump-from-destroying-45-million-acres-of-our-national-forests/
**The Forest Service.** Fire crews, trail workers, the folks who catch illegal logging. All being cut quietly, with no vote and no hearing.
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-stop-trumps-illegal-plan-to-destroy-the-us-forest-service/
Each one takes about a minute. We've sent more than 843,000 since November 2024, and every single one started with somebody deciding it was worth the minute.
And if you send one today, reply here and tell me which one. I read these, and so does everybody else scrolling past deciding whether to bother. Seeing that somebody already did it is usually what tips them.
I'm grateful you're here.
Onward!
Mamdani didn’t invent those records. He just stopped pretending they weren’t there. That’s the piece I keep coming back to — the files didn’t change. The person in the chair did. Somebody in your town is still waiting on that kind of person. And that could be YOU