Cry Me a River for Pam Bondi

The parallels between President Trump’s firings of Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi are so striking that I was tempted to copy and paste the March 6 Morning Memo, and merely swap the names.

It’s not that there’s no news value in reporting Bondi’s ouster. It’s that the old journalistic tropes for cabinet shuffles not only don’t work when every department is being run directly out of the White House; instead, they actively mislead, blur, and obscure the truth of Trump’s iron (if erratic) grip on the Justice Department. What difference does it make, really, who runs these departments if they are at the beck and call of Stephen Miller all day. Said one former DOJ prosecutor:

The traditional journalistic approach to a sacking also hyper-personalizes the emotional experience and career prospects of the ousted official in a way that feels gross in the current moment. Bondi has decimated the historic foundations of the Justice Department, served as a willing cipher for President Trump’s campaign of retribution against his political foes, overseen the purging of career prosecutors and investigators, put hapless line attorneys in impossible positions in court, and defied court orders to the point that the government’s hard-earned presumption of regularity evaporated during her tenure.

But tell us more about how hard this all is on her:

• NYT: Bondi “grew emotional … in conversations with friends and colleagues after she realized she was out.”

• WSJ: “While Bondi has been stung by the dismissal she has been heartened by the support she has received and a flood of job offers …”

“It’s ALL so positive,” Bondi herself texted the WSJ.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, where palace intrigue entirely misses the point, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the president’s own criminal defense attorney who operationalized all of what Bondi presided over, was elevated to acting attorney general.

A lot of ink will be spilled on who will replace Bondi permanently, but so long as the DOJ is run out of the Trump White House, the attorney general is just window-dressing. And one thing remains depressingly true: Across two terms, each Trump attorney general has been worse than the last one.

Trump Wants a MAL Docs Redo?

In a lazy, sloppy, predetermined memo, the deeply compromised Trump DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel has concluded that the 1978 post-Watergate Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional and that Congress cannot force the president to surrender his records to the National Archives at the end of his administration.

The memo was written by the OLC head: 36-year-old T. Elliot Gaiser, a former law clerk to the 5th Circuit’s Edith Jones, D.C. Circuit’s Neomi Rao, and Justice Samuel Alito.

Violations of the Presidential Records Act were at the core of the Mar-a-Lago criminal case against the president, though the charges related the sensitivity of the documents in question and Trump’s alleged obstruction of the investigation.

Tina Peters Will Be Resentenced

A Colorado appeals court threw out the nine-year prison sentence — but not the conviction of election denier Tina Peters — and ordered her to be resentenced, ruling that the trial judge has improperly taken into account her improperly her repeated false claims about elections in violation of her First Amendment rights.

The Purges: Pentagon Edition

In his ongoing crusade to stack the Pentagon with white, male loyalists, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth:

• fired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, whose term typically wouldn’t have ended until 2027. The new acting chief of staff will be Gen. Christopher LaNeve, who was Hegseth’s military aide before being named the vice chief of staff, in a move seen as a prelude to canning George. In his year in office, Hegseth has now removed the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and the chiefs of staff of the Army, Navy and Air Force.

• forced out two other Army generals: Gen. David Hodne, who became the head of the service’s Training and Transformation Command in October, and Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., the chief of Army chaplains.

George had attempted to stand up to Hegseth over his decision to block the promotions of one-star general of two Black officers and two women officers, the NYT reports:

Two weeks ago, General George asked Mr. Hegseth to meet with him to discuss the removal of the four officers from the one-star list, as well as the general’s view that Mr. Hegseth was interfering unnecessarily in Army personnel decisions overall, the officials said. Mr. Hegseth refused to meet with General George about the matter, they said.

In other Pentagon news: Hegseth directed military commanders to allow troops to carry personal firearms on base.

Must Read

A truly insightful analysis by Garrett Graff on how DEI has become the stabbed-in-the-back excuse in the post-Global War on Terror era that left-behind POWs were in the post-Vietnam era (and before that Jews were in the German post-World War I era) — and how Pete Hegseth wholly subscribes to this mythos.

Mass Deportation Watch

• NYT: ICE Arrests the Head of Wisconsin’s Largest Islamic Group

• WaPo: Despite signaling change, ICE still arrests many immigrants with no record

• NYT: Lawsuit Challenges Warrantless Searches and Forced Entries by ICE

• WaPo: First group of 12 deportees from the US dumped in Uganda

Quote of the Day

Former senior State Department official Vali Nasr, now a professor at Johns Hopkins University:

To the Iranians, the Strait of Hormuz now matters more than the nuclear program. The nuclear program was symbolic, but didn’t provide them with any deterrence. Now, the only reason why they are surviving this war is because of the strait. The Iranian thinking is that, at the end, the strait must remain under their control because it is their only deterrence and only source of revenue.

Latest From the Middle East …

• Politico: ‘Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!’ Trump threatens Iran’s civilian infrastructure

• WSJ: Control Over Strait of Hormuz Will Determine Who Wins the War

• NYT: How Israel Is Taking Control of Southern Lebanon

Good Read

Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post: The Trump presidential library would be a giant tower of grift

A Special Ask

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None of us here loves promoting our own stories let alone hawking the annual membership drive or touting the Journalism Fund. We’d all rather just be doing the work you’ve come to expect from us. Refining our craft, getting closer to the truth, moving the national conversation toward what really matters is infinitely rewarding.

But we have to attend to the business of the business, and practical realities force us a couple of times a year to make a concerted effort to pitch readers who aren’t members yet on joining TPM. If you’re a lurker — a regular Morning Memo reader who hasn’t take the plunge yet — make today the day.

Artemis II in Super Slo-Mo

National Geographic used it special high-resolution, slow-motion camera—the Ember s2.5k by Freefly Systems—to record Wednesday’s launch at 2,000 frames per second:

Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

The Racism Is Front and Center

Every single day of the Trump II presidency is another display of performative racism, but today’s news — punctuated by last night’s address on the Iran War — is especially saturated with the casual white nationalism that has come to define the Trump era.

In his nonsensical, bellicose, we’re-almost-winning primetime appearance from the White House, Trump did notorious Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay one better. We’re not just going to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age — a threat that roiled financial and commodities markets overnight — but the Stone Age is “where they belong,” Trump declared, saying loudly what has been the mostly quiet part of the last century plus of U.S. intervention abroad.

In a separate, under-the-radar foreign intervention, the U.S. has conducted 49 airstrikes on Islamic militant al-Shabab fighters in Somalia so far this year, a faster pace than last year’s record-setting 125 air strikes. Yesterday, Trump re-upped his viciously racist smears on Somalia and Somali-Americans:

SCOTUS Has Its Limits With Trump

Trump’s racist threat against Iran came on the same day he became the first U.S. president to sit in on Supreme Court oral arguments, where he hoped to bully the conservative justices on the birthright citizenship case, itself a sour stew of xenophobia, racism, and white supremacy.

Recapping TPM’s coverage:

• LIVEBLOG: The Supreme Court Decides Who Is Really American In Blockbuster Arguments

• Josh Kovensky: Nativists Loom Over SCOTUS Birthright Citizenship Arguments

• Kate Riga: Justices Express Skepticism Over Birthright Citizenship Case They Never Should Have Taken in the First Place

Quote of the Day

“Don’t get me wrong: I’m relieved that this case is shaping up as either 8-1 or 7-2 against the Trump executive order. But the case is a gift to the Supreme Court. By rejecting an outlandish position, it will earn credibility as apolitical, even as the Overton window moves far to the right.”—Cornell law professor Michael C. Dorf, on the birthright citizenship case

Mass Deportation Watch

Birthright citizenship is the brass ring of Trump’s mass deportation operation, which licenses the racist targeting of people of color, with appalling violations of civil rights, human rights, and basic decency:

• The Erie County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled the death of nearly blind Rohingya refugee Nurul Amin Shah Alam, who was dumped by Border Patrol officers outside a closed Tim Hortons in Buffalo in freezing February weather, a homicide.

• U.S. District Judge Jennifer L. Thurston of Fresno, California, ruled that a Customs and Border Protetion operation last year in a Home Depot parking lot in Sacramento violated her ban against random immigration sweeps, which she had found were based on racial profiling.

The Corruption: DHS Edition

The virulent racism of Trump’s mass deportation operation is an opportunity to cash in, for everyone from detention center contractors to big tech to, allegedly, officials themselves.

The DHS inspector general has reportedly undertaken an “expansive inquiry” into Corey Lewandowski’s handling of contracts while serving as a special government employee under former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, the NYT reports. Elements of the investigation have been previously reported.

New DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin yesterday rescinded the Noem-era policy that every contract of more than $100,000 had to be approved by the secretary — which created a chokepoint for Lewandowski, according to various reports. The new threshold for secretary review is $25 million, according to CBS News.

DHS Shutdown Nears End

Earlier the morning, the Senate re-sent its DHS funding bill to the House, which is now expected to pass it eventually after a deal was struck between Senate Republicans and Speaker Mike Johnson and the White House under which the House GOP and President Trump will pass the Senate version it rejected only a few days ago.

Dems Sue Over New Trump Election EO

Democrats — including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY), the DNC, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the Democratic Governors Association — sued to block Trump’s latest executive order on elections, which is both about seizing the election administration apparatus from states and throwing up inane new procedural hurdles to voting that will disproportionately impact people of color.

Mahmoud Khalil Seeks Bove Recusal

Pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, targeted by the Trump administration for removal because of his political views, is seeking the recusal of appeals court Judge Emil Bove, the former Trump DOJ official who now sits on the Third Circuit.

“Judge Bove wrote memoranda about and directed immigration enforcement investigations and decisions against student protesters on college campuses — particularly at Columbia University, where Mr. Khalil was enrolled,” Khalil’s attorneys argued in a new filing.

Trump DOJ Watch: Bondi on the Outs?

President Trump has openly talked about firing Attorney General Pam Bondi and replacing her with Lee Zeldin, the former congressman who is now the EPA administrator.

Jan. 6 Never Ends

• Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman on the Trump DOJ’s settlement with Mike Flynn: “It’s a rigged carny game, in which the marks are the American people. And Flynn won’t be the last to try his hand at it.”

• In a flurry of filings — sealed and unsealed — attorneys for accused Capitol Hill pipe bomber Brian J. Cole Jr., signaled that their defense will include a counter-narrative that a former Capitol Police officer who was briefly investigated by the F.B.I. was the real culprit.

Support Indy Journalism: Join TPM

We’re deep into our annual membership drive so if you have’t taken the plunge yet, please consider doing so today!

I don’t have to persuade you of the critical necessity of independent journalism at the present moment. It’s not a quaint throwback that needs to be preserved for the sake of preservation. It is a vital and indispensable redoubt right now against Trump’s authoritarian push to cow corporate media, silence dissent, bury facts, distort data, and undermine knowledge itself.

Morning Memo is just one part of TPM’s commitment to chronicling the depredations of the Trump II presidency: We bear witness, we uncover new facts, we speak truth to power, we refuse to be cowed or to distort or to retreat. You support makes it all possible, including bringing in new regular contributors with keen insights on the American far right, like Sarah Posner and Mike Rothschild.

Take a moment to join, please, so the we can get back to doing the essential work of journalism in this perilous time.

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‘Carry On, Patriots’

It is one of the burdens of the Trump era that the silliest, most absurd things often implicate grave matters of historic import.

The Republic will not rise or fall on Army helicopter pilots joyriding over the Tennessee mansion of Kid Rock, but the civilian secretary of defense intervening for political purposes in the military’s investigation and discipline process for the misconduct erodes command and control and good order and discipline.

Hegseth’s “it’s all good here” tweet came after the Army suspended the pilots of the two Apache helicopters and initiated an investigation. Given past incidents, it would likely have led to discipline of the pilots, in accordance with longstanding military policies against these kinds of stunts.

There’s a long history here of cowboying that the military has sought to rein in, and it’s unconnected to the midair collision last year in D.C. between a civilian airliner and an Army helicopter. In 1998, for example, 20 people were killed in Italy when their cable car plunged to the ground after a U.S. Marine Corps aircraft flying too low and too fast sheared the car’s cable. No one in the cable car survived.

The two Apaches, based at Ft. Campbell along the Tennessee-Kentucky border, also buzzed the No Kings rally in Nashville before the close approach to Kid Rock’s swimming pool. Army officials said before Hegseth’s intervention that it wasn’t clear yet if the flight path over the protest was coincidental or another unapproved deviation, the WaPo reported:

Within about two hours on Saturday, one of the helicopters flew by demonstrators six times at McGregor Park in Clarksville, Tennessee, dipping as low as 625 feet, according to publicly available flight data. At one point, the aircraft briefly circled an area where protesters were gathered.

Kid Rock is a MAGA diehard, as high-profile a pro-Trump celebrity as you’ll find. Hegseth is letting the pilots off the hook — and undermining their chain of command and the rules and regs that all military pilots must adhere to — with a bro-to-bro thumbs up that it’s all good because of the naked political affiliations involved.

Latest on the Middle East …

• WSJ: U.A.E. Wants to Force Hormuz Open and Is Willing to Join the Fight

• BBC: Jet fuel and diesel shortages to hit Europe hard in April, warns energy agency chief

• WSJ: Trump to Address Nation Wednesday on Iran

Trump Issues Wild New EO on Voting

In his latest effort to seize extralegal control over the state-run midterm elections, President Trump issued a new executive order that purports to direct:

1. DHS to create a “State Citizenship List” of “individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State.”

2. the U.S. Postal Service not to mail ballots to anyone not already on a separate approved list it keeps called the “Mail-In and Absentee Participation List.”

Election law expert Rick Hasen tries to make sense of this structure, which is odd and convoluted in addition to plainly unlawful:

To put this in plain terms: the order would use the USPS, which is not under the direct control of the President, to interfere with a state’s lawful transmission of ballots. If the state does not comply with these rules, federal law would purport to interfere with a state’s conduct of its own elections.

The EO is unlawful in numerous respects and will face immediate legal challenges.

Birthright Citizenship at SCOTUS

Detect a theme?

• Madiba K. Dennie: The Supreme Court Has Never Heard a Case As Easy As This One

• Pema Levy: The Nonsense Case Against Birthright Citizenship

• TPM’s Kate Riga and Josh Kovensky: The Supreme Court will consider President Trump’s far-right fever dream that perverts what the Constitution already says about who gets to be an American citizen.

TPM’s live coverage of this morning’s oral arguments, which President Trump is attending in person, is already underway right here.

Mass Deportation Watch

• TPM’s Josh Kovensky: Inside the Bizarre Feedback Loop Between DHS and MAGA Influencers

• Chicago Tribune: The final numbers are in on Operation Midway Blitz: 3,800 people detained, 2,500 deported, most without criminal records.

Trump DOJ Watch

• ProPublica: Trump DOJ Dropped 23,000 Criminal Investigations in Shift to Immigration

• Politico: Trump tactics leave federal prosecutors’ offices rudderless

• NYT: DOJ “Struggles” to Respond to Trump’s $10B Suit Against I.R.S

Jan. 6 Never Ends

In the long-running lawsuit by police officers and Democratic lawmakers against President Trump for the Jan. 6 attack, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta of D.C. ruled that Trump’s speech at the Ellipse was political and not covered by the official acts immunity lavished upon him by the Supreme Court.

The Purges

• FBI: Three fired FBI agents who worked on Trump investigations have filed a class action lawsuit in what is the most comprehensive effort to challenge the unlawful retributive terminations.

• VOA: The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals paused a lower court ruling that had ordered the reinstatement of about 1,000 Voice of America reporters and support staff, meaning the agency will continue to be crippled while the Trump administration’s appeal plays out.

Trump’s PBS/NPR EO Unconstitutional

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss of D.C. issued an injunction barring the Trump administration from implementing or enforcing the May 2025 executive order that purported to end federal funding for public broadcasting. Since the lawsuit was filed, Congress rescinded a billion dollars in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has since dissolved.

Ominous Headline of the Day

“Federal Judge Approves Trump Effort to Obtain List of Jews From Penn“

Notable

U.S. District Judge J. Campbell Barker of Tyler, Texas, rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to allow religious leaders to endorse candidates from the pulpit.

Judge (!) Blocks Trump Ballroom

Exclamation-point-happy Judge Richard Leon of D.C. issued a preliminary
injunction blocking the continued construction of the vanity ballroom project over the ruins of the East Wing of the White House “until Congress authorizes its completion.”

“No statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have,” Leon ruled.

President Trump reacted predictably to the adverse ruling, shifting his argument to the need for a renovated bunker under the old East Wing and hardened security for the White House.

“The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!”

The White House quickly appealed the ruling.

Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

Dan Bishop Is on the Case

New reporting out this morning from the WSJ adds to the emerging picture of how the revisionist history of Trump’s 2020 election loss is merging with the effort to exert more federal control over the midterm elections.

Let me dive right into what is new and then unpack this a bit:

That effort is now unfolding on multiple fronts. Attorney General Pam Bondi last week quietly authorized Dan Bishop, a U.S. attorney in North Carolina, to pursue election-related probes across the country, according to a copy of the order reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Bishop, a former congressman who voted against certifying Biden’s 2020 win, will also examine voter-roll data the Justice Department has been collecting from states in an effort to determine whether noncitizens have illegally registered or cast ballots, a department official said.

The WSJ story situates the news on Bishop, the former congressman tapped as interim U.S attorney, next to the FBI seizure of 2020 ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s seizure of voting machines in Puerto Rico, and the subpoena of 2020 Maricopa county voting materials from the Arizona Senate. (All of this is by way of introducing the story’s main characters: the “unlikely duo” of former CIA agent Gary Berntsen and Venezuelan fixer Martín Rodil who beat the drum early and often on the cockamamie conspiracy theory that Venezuela altered the U.S. vote count in 2020.)

At first I was a little perplexed by how the WSJ piece blurs the story of ongoing 2020 election revisionism with the newer Trump DOJ scheme to obtain voting rolls nationwide in what can only be interpreted as an effort to monkey with the 2026 midterms. But that seems to be the point: They are connected, both in spirit and intent.

As we set here at the end of Q1, the two most likely paths for this scheme are:

(1) It continues at a low burn for the rest of Trump term, serving all sorts of useful functions without really ever leading to anything: It provides anti-immigrant and voter fraud rhetorical fodder for campaign season; it’s a MAGA currency that administration officials and GOP electeds can traffic in; it’s an opportunity for up-and-comers to show their Trump loyalty ostentatiously; and it keeps election administrators on their heels.

(2) It quickly metastasizes into a deeper, darker threat to the midterm elections and democracy itself, ginning up unjust prosecutions, serving as a justification for throwing monkeywrenches into the gears of 2026 election machinery, and laying the conceptual foundation for why the 2026 election was stolen just like in 2020.

We’re only seven months from Election Day, so we’re going to know in fairly short order whether the Trump administration is going to take the second path. The clock is ticking.

For More Background on the Scheme…

Eric Columbus in Lawfare: The Trump Administration Comes for State Voter Rolls

Another MAGA Raid on the Treasury?

Politico’s Kyle Cheney has more details on the new class action lawsuit by members of the Jan. 6 mob, which is clearly seeking to take advantage of a friendly Justice Department, which just settled Mike Flynn’s bogus wrongful prosecution claims for a cool $1.2 million.

Speaking of Mike Flynn …

Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman rolls out the first installment of his two-part series on DOJ’s settlement with Flynn, examining the history of the Flynn prosecution and why it was 100% legit.

DOJ IG Goes AWOL

Fired DOJ attorney Erez Reuveni, who turned into a major whistleblower when he pulled back the curtain on the Alien Enemies Act and Kilmar Abrego Garcia cases that he was involved in, is now turning his considerable fire against the DOJ inspector general for not doing its job.

In a new letter, Reuveni’s attorneys allege that they provided 20 instances of possible wrongdoing by the Trump administration that were ignored by the inspector general. The IG’s office twice rejected Reuveni’s own complaints, first on the day after he submitted a complaint last summer and then in January after he had asked the IG to take another look at his complaint.

Swalwell to Patel: Cease-and-Desist

Sean Hecker and Norman L. Eisen, attorneys for Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), sent FBI Director Kash Patel a cease-and-desist letter not to release a decade-old investigative file involving the congressman and a suspected Chinese agent. The letter threatening legal action came after the WaPo reported over the weekend that Patel was pressing for the release of the file and that FBI agents in San Francisco had been tasked with making redactions in preparation for the file’s release.

John Eastman and Birthright Citizenship

With the Supreme Court scheduled to hear arguments Wednesday on President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, Politico revisits the prominent role of 2020 coup plotter John Eastman in advancing the radical theory that the Constitution doesn’t automatically confer citizenship on those born in the U.S.

Ironically, there are some indications that the California Supreme Court will consider Eastman’s appeal of his disbarment on Wednesday, too.

Mass Deportation Watch

• An unlawfully deported DACA recipient was returned to the United States from Mexico on Monday after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” her return.

• ICE agents will be stationed outside basic training graduation events for new Marines at Parris Island to identify whether any of their family members are undocumented, but the Marine Corps denies that ICE will be making any arrests.

• Parker Molloy offers a case study in how anti-immigrant right-wing propaganda is developed and weaponized against Democrats.

The Latest on the Middle East …

• WSJ: Trump Tells Aides He’s Willing to End War Without Reopening Hormuz

• New York Mag: All of the Iran Attack Plans Are Bad. This One Is the Worst.

• WSJ: UAE Suffers One of Its Most Intense Barrages in Weeks

• WaPo: Gas hits $4 a gallon for first time since 2022.

Hmmm …

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is demanding “an immediate retraction” of a Financial Times report that his broker “attempted to make a big investment in major defence companies in the weeks leading up to the US-Israeli attack on Iran.”

FT reported:

Hegseth’s broker at Morgan Stanley contacted BlackRock in February about making a multimillion-dollar investment in the asset manager’s Defense Industrials Active ETF, the people said, shortly before the US launched military action against Tehran.

The inquiry on behalf of the high-profile potential client was flagged internally at BlackRock, according to the people familiar with the matter.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell called the allegation “entirely false and fabricated” while demanding a retraction: “Neither Secretary Hegseth nor any of his representatives approached BlackRock about any such investment.”

Notable

Washington state, which doesn’t have a traditional personal income tax, has enacted a new 9.9% tax on income over $1 million to fund child care programs, free school meals, tax credits for working families, and tax breaks for small businesses.

Behold the 1980s Tackiness

A video partially generated by AI shows the predictably ostentatious plan for a Trump Presidential Library tower in downtown Miami, replete with two gold statues of himself:

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Faulty Assumptions and Hubris

The only thing more dangerous than an unbound strongman launching elective wars is when those wars begin to go badly.

There’s no telling what President Trump will resort to doing to save face, create the mirage of victory, and extricate himself from the box canyon into which he so triumphantly galloped.

This is old-style mission creep on steroids.

As Yonatan Touval eloquently writes in a NYT op-ed, the presumptions that undergirded Trump’s lurch into the Iran war have already proven to be incorrect:

The war’s architects appear to have assumed that killing a nation’s leaders, dominating airspace and destroying infrastructure would produce regime collapse in Tehran and strategic clarity in Washington and Jerusalem. Instead, Iran, though badly weakened, has managed to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, drastically widen the war’s economic radius and force Washington into the old, unglamorous business of soliciting allied help after entering a war confident that it would be swift and decisive.

Now what? When a mission’s presumptions collapse under the weight of their own overoptimism and the original strategic objectives are no longer attainable, a different kind of self-delusion sets in: that the only way forward is to keep going forward.

To listen to Trump’s increasingly shrill threats, you’d think he was about to go Curtis LeMay on Iran. And he may. But threats like this are also a transparent negotiating tactic, which is to say it’s both announcing a planned war crime and issuing a cry for help.

A back-to-the-Stone-Age bombing campaign is but one example of what is likely to come next: an inexorable slide towards replacing already-abandoned strategic objectives with feel-good tactical wins. What’s always a danger for a bogged-down empire is a heightened risk for a superpower led by a man with a short attention span who is enthralled by military spectacle.

Without re-setting strategic objectives in light of the reality that the old ones are lost, Trump has left Iran holding the better hand, as TPM’s Josh Marshall observes:

The problem is that … the U.S. is escalating with nothing it can call a “win” that isn’t 100% at the discretion of Iran. … Military planners and heads of state who are smart really want goals they can at least realistically try to achieve entirely on their own terms. … But if your goal is entirely at the other guy’s discretion, you’ve got a big problem. And that really seems like what the U.S. is getting into now.

Whatever Trump lurches towards next, his stupidity, racism, hubris, and provincialism will — as it has for past U.S. administrations far less burdened by those weaknesses than he is — prevent him from seeing his avowed enemy clearly or on its own terms.

“[W]ar is never merely a technical contest,” Touval reminds us. “It is shaped by grievance, sacred narrative, the memory of past humiliations and the desire for revenge. Those are not atmospheric complications added to an otherwise technical enterprise. They are what the war is about.”

Playing Word Games Out Loud

The Latest From the Middle East …

• NYT: Strike on U.S. Base in Saudi Arabia Injures 12 American Troops, 2 Seriously

• Reuters: Yemen’s Iran-aligned ‌Houthis launched their first attacks on Israel on Saturday, raising the prospect that they could bottleneck a second key shipping route: the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

• WaPo: Pentagon prepares for weeks of ground operations in Iran

• NYT: U.S. Special Operations Forces Sent to Mideast

• WSJ: Trump Weighs Military Operation to Extract Iran’s Uranium

Pete Hegseth Watch

• Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the ranking member on the Armed Services Committee, said that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s intervention to block the promotion of two Black men and two women to be one-star Army generals was “not only outrageous, it would be illegal.”

• In addition to his interference with Army promotions, Hegseth also intervened to remove a Black colonel and a female colonel from the promotions list in another unspecific branch of the armed services, NPR reports.

• Greg Sargent on the Christian Reconstructionist roots of Hegseth’s bloodlust, featuring some of TPM’s own reporting.

The Retribution: Anthropic Edition

Benjamin Wittes aptly describes the real point of the Pentagon’s attack on the AI company Anthropic:

The underlying issue is simply the lack of submission. And the point is not to win. The point is to emphasize to the next recalcitrant entity, person, company, or institution that it will have to defend itself if it asserts its rights—because the government will relentlessly come at those who don’t submit. … And if you’re a frontier AI company with the temerity not to submit, they will use the opportunity of destroying you to create opportunities for businesses associated with friendlier billionaires who know to stay on side.

Mass Deportation Watch

• A new “facilitate” case: U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal of Houston has ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of a man deported to Mexico and at risk of being sent on to Guatemala, where he fears persecution.

• Stressed the fuck out: Acting ICE chief Todd Lyons has been hospitalized twice for stress-related issues during Trump’s mass deportation push, Politico reports.

• Great read: In the first installment of a series about how brazenly DHS lies about its conduct, Radley Balko examines the January raid on the St. Paul home of 57-year-old Laotian immigrant ChongLy Scott Thao.

House GOP Revolts Over Senate DHS Bill

The House rejected the bipartisan Senate bill to partially fund DHS and put an end to the TSA nightmare at the nation’s airports, instead passing its own funding bill late Friday before recessing for Easter. The Senate had already left town for its two-week recess. In a new executive order, President Trump purported to have the authority to pay TSA workers, and the government appeared to be taking steps to issue paychecks even without congressional authorization.

The Corruption: DHS Edition

The DHS inspector general has searched and seized records and a computer in the office of Kara Voorhies, a FEMA contractor, as part of an investigation into a network of aides to former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and adviser Corey Lewandowski, the WSJ reports:

Another prong of the probe into Voorhies: her compensation. FEMA officials have been unable to locate her contract and investigators are still seeking it, according to people familiar with the matter. Senior FEMA officials were told that Voorhies was getting paid as much as $19,000 a week, some of the people said, which would amount to roughly $1 million a year.

Voorhies was brought into DHS by Lewandowski, who has told people close to him that “he expects the president would pardon him in the event of a criminal case stemming from the inspector general’s probe,” according to the WSJ.

Patel Phished

FBI Director Kash Patel personal Gmail account was hacked by a group linked to Iranian intelligence, Reuters reports. Patel emails from across a dozen years were posted on a website hosted by a computer server in Russia, the NYT reports.

The Retribution: Eric Swalwell Edition

The congressionally mandated release of the DOJ’s Jeffrey Epstein files has created a dangerous precedent that FBI Director Kash Patel is pressing to use as a political weapon against President Trump’s political foes.

Patel recently directed FBI agents in the San Francisco office to redact for potential public release the decade-old investigative files involving Trump nemesis Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and suspected Chinese intelligence operative Christine Fang (a.k.a. Fang Fang), even though the investigation turned up no evidence of wrongdoing, the WaPo reports. Swalwell is currently running for governor of California.

In a followup report, the NYT adds that the FBI is moving swiftly and that law enforcement officials fear the files full of personal and classified information could be released: “In recent days, scores of F.B.I. agents and other personnel in California were instructed to gather the documents on Mr. Swalwell and Ms. Fang, with the goal of working through the weekend to finish a review by early next week, the people said. Supervisors advised the agents to lightly redact the records to obscure some sensitive information and told them the files would be shared with senior administration officials in Washington.”

Jan. 6 Never Ends

• A federal judge in Georgia heard arguments and testimony Friday in Fulton County’s challenge of the FBI’s recent seizure of ballots and other materials from the 2020 election.

• Jan. 6 defendants have filed a class action lawsuit against the U.S. government in the Middle District of Florida for “indiscriminately” using force against a “peaceful crowd.”

Quote of the Day

“President Trump took on the fake news media and President Trump is winning. Look at the results so far. PBS defunded. NPR defunded. Joy Reid, gone from MSNBC. Sleepy-Eyed Chuck Todd, gone. Jim Acosta, gone. John Dickerson, gone. Colbert is leaving. CBS is under new ownership, and soon enough CNN is going to have new ownership as well.”—FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, bragging at CPAC about Republicans doing to corporate media what they have long falsely accused Democrats of doing

What a Personalist Regime Looks Like

• A rundown of everything that Trump has slapped his name on so far in his second term.

• Graphic of the day:

No Kings

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When a Christian Nationalist Runs DoD

Military women and people of color somehow keep finding themselves in the crosshairs under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

A New York Times story out this morning is ostensibly about Hegseth personally striking four Army officers from the list for promotion to one-star generals: “Two of the officers targeted by Mr. Hegseth are Black and two are women on a promotion list that consists of about three dozen officers, most of whom are white men, senior military officials said.”

But a rancid anecdote within the story shows how explicitly racist things are within a Pentagon run by a Christian nationalist, especially if you’re Black and a woman.

It involves an unrelated fight last summer between Hegseth chief of staff Ricky Buria and Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll over the promotion of Maj. Gen. Antoinette R. Gant as commander of the Military District of Washington, a command which includes many ceremonial functions in the nation’s capital:

Mr. Buria told Mr. Driscoll that President Trump would not want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events, the officials said.

Mr. Driscoll was shocked. “The president is not a racist or sexist,” he told Mr. Buria, according to the officials. Mr. Driscoll then raised the issue with a senior White House official who agreed with his assessment of Mr. Trump.

For his part, Buria denies the NYT account as a “made up story.”

The coup de grace is the inclusion of this photo of Trump with Gen. Gant:

The Racism Comes Straight From the Top

Hegeth’s ‘Orwellian’ Attack on Anthropic

U.S. District Judge Rita Lin of San Francisco granted a preliminary injunction blocking the Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk and its demand that all federal contractors cease doing business with the AI company. The judge found that “these measures appear designed to punish Anthropic” for going public about its refusal to allow DoD to use its products “in fully autonomous lethal weapons or the mass surveillance of Americans.”

“Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government,” Lin wrote.

The judge delayed the effect of her ruling for seven days to allow the Trump administration to appeal it.

Four People Killed in Lawless Boat Strike

In the 47th known attack on alleged drug smuggling boats, the U.S. military killed four people in the Caribbean, bring the death toll in the lawless campaign to at least 163 people.

Senate Votes to End DHS Shutdown

Overnight, Senate Republicans and the Trump White House finally threw in the towel and passed a DHS funding bill that excludes ICE and some parts of CBP, acceding to the demands that Senate Democrats have been making for weeks, as TPM’s Emine Yücel reports.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Bloomberg: DOJ Struggles to Convince Judges to End Foreign Student Lawsuits

• WCHS: The state of West Virginia has stopped accepting new immigration detainees from ICE after a series of federal court rulings in the state that detainees were being held without lawful authority or due process. “Continued detention without individualized custody determinations, after this court’s repeated holdings that such detention violates the Fifth Amendment, will result in legal consequences,” U.S. District Judge Joseph R. Goodwin wrote in an order earlier this month.

• Bloomberg: Top Prosecutor Defending Trump Policies Quits to Help Immigrants

Trump DOJ Drops Its Arguments in 2 Cases

It’s highly irregular for the Justice Department to make these kinds of humiliatingly walkbacks, but it’s happened twice this week, both times in cases related to immigration:

• In the J.O.P. case that I covered extensively over the past few days, the Trump DOJ formally withdrew yesterday its now debunked argument that the number of wrongful deportations of asylum seekers in violation of a court-approved settlement agreement was relatively small.

• In a Manhattan federal case challenging the policy of arresting migrants at immigrations courts, where the DOJ abandoned its position earlier this week after admitting to a huge factual error that it attributed to unnamed ICE attorney, the judge issued a preservation order against DOJ for “all communications between and among a member of the USAO staff and/or any defendant in this action or his or her predecessor, successor, subordinates or representatives, including the ‘assigned ICE counsel.’”

Maybe Bondi Didn’t Exactly Cave on USAs?

New reporting from the New Jersey Globe leaves the impression that the Trump DOJ pushed federal judges in the state to appoint career DOJer Robert Frazer as interim U.S. attorney. After a monthslong impasse during which the Trump DOJ refused to abide judges naming an interim U.S. attorney, this account casts Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche as telling judges what he wanted:

Blanche told Chief District Judge Renée Marie Bumb late last week that he wanted Frazer appointed to the role, according to several people familiar with the discussions.

Frazer was vetted by the White House for the post and offered assurances that he had voted for Trump all three times, according to the Globe.

Still, Frazer seems to have a good reputation within the office, something I’ve independently heard as well.

Trump DOJ Watch: Todd Blanche Edition

During an appearance at a CPAC event, Deputy AG Blanche:

• bragged that every DOJ or FBI employee who worked on the criminal investigations of Donald Trump has been fired, resigned, or took early retirement. “There is not a single man or woman at the Department of Justice who had anything to do with those prosecutions,” he boasted, saying that the total number of people purged was over 200.

• opened the door wide to having ICE officers at polling places.

Quote of the Day

Climate scientist Kate Marvel, on why she resigned on from NASA:

I was naive. I thought that the benefits of doing science would be self-evident. And I anticipated that our science—as people who look at the planet and see that it’s changing—would come under scrutiny and even attack because the implications are politically inconvenient. We’ve seen that before, and that’s what I expected. What I did not expect was that [the Trump administration] would go after pediatric cancer research first. That they would go after Parkinson’s research first. And they would go after vaccines, the greatest invention of humanity. And that has shocked me, the fact that science is under attack, not because its conclusions are necessarily politically inconvenient but because it is a way of telling the truth. That has been the most disorienting and frightening aspect of all of this.

Don’t Forget!

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See You Back Here Monday

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The Unforgiving Geopolitics of Oil and Gas

I wanted to use the occasion of the resignation of a prominent climate scientist from NASA, citing the Trump administration’s attacks on climate science, to note how Trump’s foreign misadventures are inextricably intertwined with his retrograde energy policy.

In the face of overwhelming evidence of catastrophic climate change fueled by manmade carbon emissions, Trump spent the first year of his second term decimating domestic wind and solar and doubling down on hydrocarbons, making the United State more — not less — dependent on global energy markets while exacerbating carbon emissions and delaying the inevitable energy transition.

It’s no coincidence that Trump’s two decapitation strikes — Venezuela and Iran — involve countries whose geopolitical significance results almost exclusively from their status as petro-states. Trump wanted to go back to the ways of the old economy, and he got exactly what he bargained for, whether he likes it or not. It’s a reminder — one we didn’t really need — that while the abundance of oil and gas has produced amazing riches and unprecedented global economic growth and development for more than a century, it has come at an enormous price.

From a long-term perspective, the ultimate price of our oil and gas dependence will be a centuries-long rise in global temperatures that is expected to threaten the pillars of civilization and imperil human survival. Nothing major. Alternative forms of energy promised not just to wean us from our dependency but to begin to unshackle us from the unforgiving geopolitics of oil and gas.

Trumpian Chaos in Energy Markets

• WSJ: The liquid natural gas supply chain has been hit hardest by the Middle East conflict and will take much longer to recover than oil.

• Bloomberg: As part of its regular modeling of the effect of energy prices on economic growth, Trump administration officials are examining what a potential spike in oil prices to as high as $200 a barrel would mean for the economy,

• WSJ: Beginning on April 26, the U.S. Postal Service will impose an 8% surcharge on packages to cover the rising cost of fuel and transportation.

Nothing to See Here at All

Suspicious trading has been observed ahead of other big Trump policy announcements, but the anomaly was especially notable this week right before Trump backed off his threat to strike Iranian power plants:

The Latest From the Middle East …

• WaPo: The Pentagon is considering diverting Ukraine military aid to the Middle East, although a final decision to redirect the equipment has not yet been made.

• NYT: Under threat from Iranian counterattacks, many of the 40,000 American troops based in the Middle East have had to disperse to hotels and office spaces because the 13 U.S. bases in the region are “all but uninhabitable.”

• WaPo: Iraq accused the United States of killing seven members of the Iraqi military and injuring 13 others in a strike Wednesday that hit a clinic on a military base in western Anbar province. The Pentagon issued a carefully worded denial that put a lot of weight on the word “target”: “U.S. forces did not target a medical clinic in Iraq.”

The Long Tail of the Alien Enemies Act

• A Venezuelan national deported under the Alien Enemies Act has filed a new lawsuit against the United States allegeing that he was wrongly identified as a member of the Tren de Aragua gang on the basis of his tattoos and endured “physical and psychological torture, solitary confinement, inhumane living conditions, and deliberate indifference to medical care” while detained at CECOT.

• U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of D.C. dismissed a lawsuit from immigrant advocacy groups that challenged the legality of the agreement under which the United States paid for El Salvador to detain the Alien Enemies Act deportees at CECOT. In a highly technical ruling, Boasberg concluded that the groups lacked standing because even giving them what they sought would not redress the harms they continue to face:

At bottom, Plaintiffs describe real injuries stemming from an unprecedented detention arrangement between the United States and El Salvador. They have thus directed their challenge at the nonbinding diplomatic instrument that preceded the agencies’ actions. But, legally, the Agreement is not what authorized the Government to render Plaintiffs’ clients to El Salvador and to pay the Salvadoran government to detain them. Instead, that power comes from statutes that predate the Agreement and that would stay in force no matter how the Court decides this case. Even if the Court vacated the Agreement, then, the Government could keep using those same statutes to inflict the same injury on Plaintiffs. And, as a practical matter, vacating this nonbinding exchange of notes would not change the Government’s willingness or ability to do so. Because the relief Plaintiffs seek would not likely redress their injuries, the Court must dismiss their claims for lack of standing.

Trump’s Mass Detention Policy Upheld

The uber-conservative 8th Circuit Court of Appeals — which covers Minnesota — became the second appeals court to uphold the Trump administration’s ahistorical and unprecedented policy of mandatory immigration detentions without bond in the interior of the country. The two appeals court rulings (the 5th Circuit is the other) stand in contrast to the hundreds of district courts that have found the policy to be unlawful.

The unilateral policy change by the Trump administration, which flew in the face of decades of practice and was contrary to past interpretations of federal statutes, has done more than anything else to flood the federal courts with immigrant habeas cases. Minnesota federal courts have been especially hard hit because of Operation Metro Surge.

Massive DOJ Fuckup

In an extraordinary admission this week, the Trump DOJ told a federal judge it had repeatedly misrepresented the substance of an ICE memo throughout months of litigation over the arrests of migrants at immigration courts.

“We deeply regret that this error has come to light at this late stage, after the parties have expended significant resources and time to litigate this case and this court has carefully considered plaintiffs’ challenge to the 2025 ICE guidance,” the DOJ attorneys told the judge as they formally withdrew their prior arguments about a core aspect of the case.

The DOJ lawyers blamed an unnamed ICE lawyer for the error: “Based on our discussions with ICE today, this regrettable error appears to have occurred because of agency attorney error.”

The Corruption: Mike Flynn Edition

Former Trump National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators probing Russian interference in the 2016 election and was later pardoned by President Trump, will be paid $1.2 million in a corrupt bargain to settle his wrongful prosecution lawsuit.

The Trump I DOJ corruptly dropped the case against Flynn. Later, the DOJ under Biden successfully defended Flynn’s civil lawsuit. The Trump II DOJ — run out of the White House — is back to its old tricks. The president is looting the federal treasury to benefit his supporters, using DOJ to gussy it up with the language and procedural flourishes of a normal settlement of a legitimate legal dispute.

The Retribution: Letitia James Edition

Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte is at it again.

The Trump crony has sent two new criminal referrals against New York Attorney General Letitia James to U.S. Attorneys Jason Reding Quiñones of the Southern District of Florida and Andrew Boutros of the Northern District of Illinois.

The new bogus allegations are adjacent to his OG mortgage fraud allegations against James, which were dismissed and which two subsequent grand juries rejected. Pulte is now accusing James of homeowners insurance fraud for allegedly misrepresenting how properties in Florida and Illinois would be used.

Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

FBI ‘Shrink-Wrapped’ Good’s Car

In what may turn into a constitutional showdown over the 10th Amendment and whether the federal government can proactively shield its officers from state prosecutions by withholding evidence, the state of Minnesota sued the Trump DOJ and DHS to get evidence in the killings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti and the shooting of Venezuelan national Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis.

State investigators have been blocked by the Trump administration from investigating the three shootings by federal officers during Operation Metro Surge. In all three cases, federal officials wildly mischaracterized and misled the public about the circumstances of the incidents and made false accusations of wrongdoing against the victims. In each case, video evidence proved the government’s accounts to either be false or deeply strained. In the case of Sosa-Celis, criminal charges against him and a friend were later dropped, and the officers involved in the shooting are under criminal investigation for possible perjury.

In addition to Minnesota, represented by Attorney General Keith Ellison, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty and Drew Evans, the superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. In addition to DOJ and DHS, Attorney General Pam Bondi and the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security are named defendants.

The four-count lawsuit alleges that Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act (Counts I-III) and the 10th Amendment (Count IV). Among the allegations:

• Good: The car which she was driving when she was shot and killed, is sitting “shrink-wrapped” in an FBI storage facility in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota and “has never been examined or processed.” On March 18, the FBI told state investigators that it has been instructed to turn over evidence in the Good killing only to the DOJ inspector general and would not be providing them with any of the evidence it had collected.

• Pretti: The feds have not provided state investigators with “the identities of the masked federal agents,” Pretti’s cellphone, “which likely captures his interactions with federal agents in the moments before his death,” or the firearm taken off of him before he was shot.

• Sosa-Celis: The feds have denied state investigators the “names and statements from involved federal officials, the gun used in the incident, and the federal vehicle used in the incident.”

The lawsuit, which was filed not in Minnesota but in D.C., alleges that the decisions to cease routine cooperation and joint investigations was made at the highest levels of the DOJ and involved senior DOJ officials, and that DHS largely deferred to DOJ on gathering and sharing evidence.

“That’s where decisions not to share evidence are being made,” Ellison said at a Tuesday press conference in explaining why the lawsuit was filed in D.C.

Mass Deportation Watch

• NPR: It is already the deadliest year for immigrants in U.S. detention in more than two decades.

• NYT: A total of 125 former U.S. service members were arrested for immigration violations over the past year, and 34 of them were put into removal proceedings.

• Politico: In a new ruling, U.S. District Judge Dena Coggins of Sacramento ordered the Trump administration to return a DACA recipient who was deported to Mexico last month.

• NYT: The newspaper reviewed confidential State Department correspondence and a funding memo to get an inside look at how the Trump administration used financial pressure and political incentives to coax Cameroon into accepting third-country deportees — while looking the other way as strongman Paul Biya won a disputed election and cracked down on protestors.

Must Read

The lawless U.S. military campaign on drug cartels has moved from the high seas to the interior of Ecuador, where a coordinated joint strike scored a direct hit on a … dairy farm, the NYT reports from on the ground.

Not only does the new reporting suggest that Ecuadoran forces supported by the U.S. military hit the wrong target, but also that they staged elements of the attack for propaganda purposes:

[I]n early March, U.S. officials released a video of a massive explosion — capturing the destruction of what they said was a drug trafficker’s training camp in rural Ecuador. …

Village residents said Ecuadorean helicopters returned to the farm three days later, on March 6, and appeared to drop explosives on the farm’s smoldering remains. It was at that point, they said, that Ecuadorean soldiers recorded the footage that U.S. and Ecuadorean officials said captured the bombing of a traffickers’ compound.

Latest From the Middle East …

• WSJ: Saudi Arabia, U.A.E. Balk at Trump’s Peace Efforts

• WaPo: The Pentagon is deploying elements of the 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East. The reported number of paratroopers involved ranges from 1,000–3,000.

• WSJ: Israel Hits Russian-Iranian Weapons Smuggling Route in the Caspian Sea

Quote of the Day

“We’ve not seen anything like this — there’s been no disruption of this scale in the past. It’s every oil analyst’s study piece or worst nightmare — one that we never thought would happen.”—Gareth Ramsay, chief economist for BP, on the Iran war’s impact on energy markets

Trump Admin Downplays Anthropic Ban

In a hearing in federal court in San Francisco on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s existential attack on Anthropic as a “supply-chain risk,” U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin seemed poised to rule that banning the Pentagon from using its AI models appeared to be an effort to “punish” and “cripple” the company in violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment.

Government lawyers made an effort to minimize Hegseth’s sweeping declaration that no company doing business with the Pentagon can also do business with Anthropic, but the judge was skeptical of the litigation tactic.

NYT Accuses Pentagon of Defying Court

In its lawsuit against the Pentagon’s press restrictions, the NYT in a new filing accused the Trump administration of “contemptuously defying” a Friday court order in the case with a new round of retaliatory restrictions on Monday.

The Retribution: John Brennan Edition

In a closed-door session reported by Punchbowl, the House Intelligence Committee voted along party lines last evening to send transcripts of its interviews with former CIA Director John Brennan to the Trump DOJ for use in the mother-of-all investigation the investigators retributive prosecutions in the Southern District of Florida. Combined with the bogus investigation’s subpoena earlier this month of former FBI Director James Comey, the latest moves suggest charging decisions could be made soon, as CNN notes.

The Retribution: Federal Reserve Edition

In a sealed hearing earlier this month, a top deputy to D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro acknowledged that the Trump DOJ did not have evidence of wrongdoing in its retributive criminal investigation of the Federal Reserve, the WaPo reports, after reviewing unsealed transcripts of the hearing.

G.A. Massucco-LaTaif, Pirro’s new criminal division chief, defended the office’s subpoenas of the Fed during the hearing in front of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who ultimately quashed the subpoenas, ruling that prosecutors had provided him with “essentially zero evidence” of a crime and declined the opportunity to show him their evidence in private.

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Judges Appoint Interim NJ US Attorney

After a monthslong saga in which the Trump DOJ put at risk dozens of criminal prosecutions with brazenly unlawful efforts to install an interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Attorney General Pam Bondi finally stood down.

After conferring with DOJ leadership, the local federal judges exercised their statutory authority to name Robert Frazer, a longtime career federal prosecutor in New Jersey, as the interim U.S. attorney.

Bondi had immediately fired the previous interim U.S. attorney named by the judges there, and had quickly fired similar judge-appointed prosecutors in the Northern District of New York and the Eastern District of Virginia. But this time, the two sides worked out an arrangement of some kind, though it wasn’t clear why Bondi finally capitulated.

U.S. District Judge Matthew W. Brann, brought in from outside the district, had previously ruled that Trump’s original nominee for the permanent position, Alina Habba, was unlawfully serving as interim U.S. attorney and that Bondi’s naming of a “triumvirate” of three DOJ lawyers to jointly run the office was similarly unlawful. Brann had warned that Bondi’s shenanigans were putting federal criminal prosecutions across the state in jeopardy because criminal defendants were succeeding in challenging the legality of the actions by the leaderless U.S. Attorney’s Office.

In a notice to Brann of his appointment, Frazer said it “followed consultations between the District Court and the Department of Justice’s senior leadership.” Importantly, Frazer told Brann that the Justice Department “is prepared to seek superseding indictments” in cases where the unlawful leadership of the U.S. Attorney’s Office has called into question the legal viability of the prosecutions. A do-over, basically.

An absolutely blistering decision last week by U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi in one of the jeopardized prosecutions — a child porn case — may have been the final straw that forced Bondi to relent. Among other things, Quraishi’s ruling ordered the trio of lawyers purporting to lead the office to appear in court in the coming weeks to defend the legality of arrangement.

“You have lost the confidence and the trust of this court,” Quraishi told a DOJ lawyer. “You have lost the confidence and the trust of the New Jersey legal community, and you are losing the trust and confidence of the public.”

A week later, Bondi stopped the effort to bypass Senate confirmation and federal judges, and a legitimate U.S. attorney was appointed by the judges — at least in New Jersey. It’s not yet clear if this means Bondi is also relenting in other districts where interim U.S. attorneys have been contested.

SCOTUS Tackles Late-Arriving Ballots

• TPM’s Kate Riga: Fox News-Pilled SCOTUS Invents Wild Hypotheticals to Justify Curtailing Right to Vote by Mail

• Politico: Supreme Court worries Trump’s attack on late ballots could also threaten early voting

• Chris Geidner: The case “likely will come down to how Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett decide they would like to resolve the case.”

Voting Rights Watch

• Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, California, a Republican who is running for governor, has seized more than 650,000 ballots in a purported investigation of election fraud in the 2025 special election for Proposition 50, Democrats’ mid-decade redistricting vehicle.

• Republican Ben Ginsberg and Democrat Bob Bauer have launched the Bipartisan American Election Project to fight back against President Trump’s efforts to take election powers from the states and put them under federal control.

A (Exclusive) Play in Three Acts

The three-day evidentiary hearing that I covered in Baltimore over the Trump administration’s ongoing violations of a court-approved settlement agreement involving unaccompanied minors seeking asylum culminated yesterday with the Trump DOJ confirming to the judge that 91 additional instances of wrongful deportations had been discovered in recent days but not reported to opposing counsel or to the court.

U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher ordered the administration to investigate the circumstances of the deportations, the timing of the discovery, who was involved, and why the government had not disclosed them immediately.

Here’s the series of three exclusives from the hearing, which was only covered by TPM:

• Thursday: Trump Admin Wrongfully Deported More Than 100 Asylum Seekers

• Friday: Judge Orders DOJ to Get Answers On Wrongful Deportations

• Monday: Trump Admin Confirms 91 Wrongful Deportations of Asylum Seeker

Big Deal

Over the weekend, the Trump-controlled Merit Service Protection Board, historically an independent agency that protects civil service workers from retaliations, embraced President Trump’s unfettered interpretation of his Article II powers to affirm the firing of executive branch immigration judges, Bloomberg reported:

The two-member MSPB panel reversed an administrative judge’s decision that reinstated the fired DOJ employees. The board determined it lacks jurisdiction to intervene in the attorney general’s constitutionally protected terminations.

The decision strips immigration judges of civil service protections, but is also provides the legal basis to approve of Trump’s mass terminations of civil service workers without cause or due process:

The MSPB, a quasi-judicial executive branch agency conducting initial review of federal employees’ wrongful termination claims, had paused other similar cases, waiting until the late Friday decision on the immigration judges to weigh in on whether Trump has such authority to override statutory removal protections.

The MSPB is down to two GOP members and one vacancy. Trump purported to fire the Democratic MSPB chair Cathy Harris last year, and she appealed her case to the Supreme Court last week.

Latest From the Middle East …

• WSJ: The back-channel diplomacy behind Trump’s U-turn on attacking Iran’s power plants

• Reuters: Trump approved joint attack on Iran after call from Netanyahu

• Maps: How the Iran Conflict Is Widening

Pentagon Continues to Harass Reporters

It sure looks like the Pentagon already had a plan in place to retaliate against journalists if its restrictive press policies lost in court. After a judge Friday blocked the press restrictions in a lawsuit brought by the NYT, the Pentagon announced on Monday a new set of restrictions that includes moving all reporters out of correspondents’ corridor to an annex on the grounds and requiring authorized escorts of journalists who wish to go inside the Pentagon.

The Corruption: SEC Edition

Strong reporting from Reuters on last week’s resignation of SEC Enforcement Division Director Margaret Ryan:

• She “clashed with agency leaders over the direction of its enforcement program, including the handling of cases with ties to President ​Donald Trump and his family”

• She “wanted to be more aggressive in pursuing charges for fraud and other misconduct including in cases that touched the president’s circle, but faced resistance from SEC chair Paul Atkins and other top Republican political appointees.”

• “One case that sparked tension involved cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun, a major backer of the Trump ​family’s World Liberty Financial venture, and another involved Tesla boss Elon Musk …”

Ryan — a former Marine, military judge, and clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — had little experience in securities law, Reuters reports.

Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

Giant Oopsy in Protestor Prosecution

A new twist in the prosecution of anti-ICE protesters who entered a church in St. Paul, Minnesota in January: The Trump DOJ has dropped all charges against a woman who was mistakenly identified as a protestor but apparently wasn’t involved with the protest at all.

The charges were dropped with prejudice — meaning they cannot be refiled — Friday evening, which set off a vigorous reaction from attorney Abbe Lowell, who represents three journalists who were charged in the same case for covering the protest, including former CNN anchor Don Lemon.

In a new filing, Lowell accused the Trump DOJ of misleading the court by asking for an extension of discovery deadlines in the case, which the court partly granted, before revealing the charging goof to the judge, even though it already knew of its mistake.

In granting the extension earlier in the day, still unaware of the mistaken identity of one of the 39 defendants, the judge had chided the Trump DOJ for discovery delays in what has become a broader pattern of charging first and investigating later: “So, here we are, months into a case that the government had an intense appetite to initiate, but cannot seem to keep up the pace when it comes to discovery obligations. This is unacceptable.”

More Brutalization of Abrego Garcia

In another cruel development in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, the Trump administration swears that’s it for real this time in planning to deport the El Salvadoran national to Liberia.

It is yet another attempt by the Trump administration to reopen Abrego Garcia’s habeas case, which the judge has shut down repeatedly after evidence presented in court over multiple hearings showed the government had no real plan to deport him to a third country but was using the threat of removal as a pretext to keep him detained.

The wrongfully-deported-then-vindictively-indicted Abrego Garcia has said for months that he will agree to be deported to Costa Rica, but acting ICE Director Todd Lyons in a March 2 memo filed Friday in court formally rejected that option and declared Liberia (again) to be the only option.

In a weekend response to the new filing, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys asked the judge to pause the contempt of court and related proceedings in the original “facilitate” case while they fight the government’s latest move in the second case.

Back in Court Today

I’m back in federal court in Baltimore today for what will be Day 3 of what was supposed to be a one-day hearing in the wrongful deportation case of J.O.P. v. Department of Homeland Security. As I exclusively reported Thursday, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services witness testified that there were more than 100 previously unknown wrongful deportations in violation of the court-approve class action settlement involving unaccompanied minors seeking asylum.

In another exclusive report on Friday, I reported that the judge gave the Trump DOJ until today to get to the bottom of things, and for the first time raised concerns that either DOJ attorneys or agency attorneys (or both) had not been candid with the court. In response, DOJ trial attorneys told the judge the surprise testimony was news to them, too. Stay tuned …

Mass Deportation Watch

• NYT: Trump Friend Asked ICE to Detain the Mother of His Child

• Politico: “In dozens of cases over the past several weeks, Justice Department lawyers have declined to push back on detainees’ claims that they’re owed a chance to make a case for their release. In those cases, the administration has simply agreed to provide a bond hearing, or even outright release, telling judges that officials “do not have an opposition argument to present” or saying they couldn’t cobble together enough information to mount a defense.”

• NYT: How Corey Lewandowski Wielded Power Inside D.H.S.

• WSJ: Trump Administration Scrambles to Deploy ICE Agents at Airports as Lines Mount

46th Lawless Boat Strike

The death toll in the lawless U.S. campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats rose to at least 159 on Thursday after a strike in the eastern Pacific killed two people and left one survivor, who was turned over to the Costa Rican Coast Guard, according to the Pentagon. It was the 46th such strike on the high seas.

Latest From the Middle East …

You can select from the individual bullet points below, or down a straight shot of absurdism, no chaser, over at Gold and Geopolitics:

• President Trump’s sole military objective in Iran now appears to be reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which is to say, returning to the status quo that existed before he launched his elective war. That is easier said than done.

• If the U.S. were to succeed in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, the region’s oil and gas infrastructure remains seriously, though not irreparably, damaged by three weeks of air strikes.

• Iran’s first ever use of intermediate ballistic missiles Friday to target the U.S.-U.K. Diego Garcia military base, some 2,500 miles away, puts much of Europe within range of Iranian missile strikes.

Judge Blocks Pentagon Press Limits

In a lawsuit brought by the NYT, U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman of D.C. struck down the Trump Pentagon’s restrictions on journalists as unconstitutional, ruling: “Those who drafted the First Amendment believed that the nation’s security requires a free press and an informed people and that such security is endangered by governmental suppression of political speech. That principle has preserved the nation’s security for almost 250 years. It must not be abandoned now.”

Robert Mueller, 1944-2026

Garrett Graff memorializes the man who will be most remembered for his stint as special counsel in Trump I, while Marcy Wheeler takes the occasion of his death to refresh already-stale memories of his Russia investigation.

Trump DOJ Watch

• The WSJ examines the threats and bare-knuckle tactics of Mike Davis, who had no prior antitrust experience, but has positioned himself as MAGA’s antitrust fixer, threatening the top DOJ antitrust official Gail Slater — “If you don’t approve this settlement, I will destroy you. I will destroy your job at the DOJ” — according to deposition testimony by her deputy, a claim Davis denies. Neither Slater nor her deputy are any longer at the Justice Department.

• A new hire in the decimated Trump DOJ’s Civil Rights Division hire resigned from his Alabama law firm over a Facebook post following George Floyd’s murder, Chris Geidner reports.

The Corruption: Colorado Edition

In a corrupt bargain, President Trump has lured a GOP challenger out of the GOP primary for the CO-03 district by offering her and her husband roles in his administration, CNN reports. The move to sideline Hope Scheppelman was a triple flip-flop-flip by Trump, who had originally backed Rep. Jeff Hurd (R-CO), but pulled his support last month and threw his endorsement to Scheppelman before Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) convinced him there’s no playing around with such tight margins in the House.

Putting the White in White Nationalism

• Elon Musk gave a 💯 to a tweet on his X platform that concluded: “White solidarity is the only way to survive.”

• President Trump had installed on the White House grounds early Sunday morning a replica of a statue of Christopher Columbus that protesters in Baltimore tore down and dumped into the city’s Inner Harbor in the summer of 2020, the NYT reports. According to the WaPo, a panel affixed to the base of the sculpture reads: “Destroyed July 4, 2020. Resurrected 2022.”

The Absurdism: Hungary Edition

Fearing that next month’s election won’t go Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s way, Russian intel considered a plan to boost his prospects by staging an assassination attempt, according to an internal Russian intel report obtained and authenticated by a European intelligence service and reviewed by the WaPo. Russia denied the allegation.

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Trump Admin Wrongfully Deported More Than 100 Asylum Seekers

The big news coming out of yesterday’s hearing in federal court in Baltimore was that more than 100 asylum seekers have been wrongfully deported in violation of a court-approved settlement agreement involving unaccompanied minors.

I happened to be the only journalist in attendance at the evidentiary hearing in front of U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher, who thankfully denied an uncontested last-minute request to seal the hearing. My full write-up is here.

My interest in this case has frankly less to do with the immigration issues at stake, though they’re undoubtedly important in their own right, and more to do with that fact that this case is an important front in the ongoing battle between the Trump executive branch and judicial branch.

The case — awkwardly styled as J.O.P. v. Department of Homeland Security — is one of the “facilitate” cases, a progeny of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation case. In the early stages of the case, Judge Gallagher closely modeled U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis’ handling of the Abrego Garcia case, which was blessed by the Supreme Court. As in that other Maryland case, wrongful deportations in violations of court orders have been followed by stonewalling from the Trump administration.

Since then, the J.O.P. case has evolved away (at least for now) from the narrower issue of “facilitating” the return of wrongfully deported people to a broader inquiry into why the wrongful deportations continue to happen, to the tune of somewhere in the “low 100s” of people out of a class of litigants that numbers, by the government’s estimate, between 70,000 and 75,000 people. But one thing remains the same: The Trump administration continues to use the Justice Department to stonewall federal judges by producing witnesses who can’t competently testify on the issues before the court.

That would have been the main news coming out of yesterday’s hearing, where a frustrated judge continued to call out the administration for not giving her witnesses who could testify based on their personal knowledge about what happened that led to deportations in violation of the settlement agreement.

We’re back at it again today, after a stern order from Gallagher for the government to do better today. I’m heading into court now. Stay tuned.

‘Go Big and Go Loud’

Our old friend Aakash Singh, a top official in Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s office who made an important cameo in the Abrego Garcia criminal case, is back in a well-reported NYT story on the Trump administration’s targeting of anti-ICE protestors:

In a conference call in late January, the official, Aakash Singh, laid out the department’s basis for prosecuting demonstrators: National Security Presidential Memo 7, a sweeping directive issued by President Trump last September. It expanded the definition of domestic terrorism to include not only violent crimes like assault, but also relatively minor ones, like revealing the personal details of agents or getting in the way of immigration enforcement.

Mr. Singh said that “coordinators” in U.S. attorneys’ offices responsible for charging protesters under NSPM-7 should be “hounding” federal agents to make cases, according to people familiar with his remarks. He also suggested that the department wanted headlines along with indictments, promising that officials in Washington would be “blasting out” prosecutors’ work.

“Go big,” Mr. Singh said, “and go loud.”

The Retribution: Trump DOJ Edition

• Axios: Former FBI Director James Comey has been subpoenaed in the mother of all “investigate the investigators” retributions down in South Florida.

• NYT: Two anonymous former FBI agents who were fired for their work on the Jan. 6 investigation of Trump are suing over their wrongful terminations, claiming they were targets of “political retribution.”

Utterly Insane

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything as tortured, corrupt, and upside down as President Trump’s attempt to save his own political skin by lifting sanctions on Iran so that it can sell its oil and stabilize energy prices while simultaneously conducting a war against Iran.

Since I was in court most of the day yesterday, I don’t have a fine-grained read on how this new development is playing in the public sphere. But this is truly one of the most eye-popping things I’ve seen in the Trump II presidency.

Shoring up your adversary in an armed conflict you initiated in a desperate attempt to mitigate the consequences of your elective war may forever stand as the paramount example of Donald Trump putting his personal and political interests above the national interest.

Trump’s election year self-bailout is bolstering a key economic lifeline for Iran — and inevitably boosting its war-fighting capabilities — while U.S. service members are actively in harm’s way in the air and at sea. Anything to drive down gas prices ahead of the midterm elections.

Latest From the Middle East …

• WSJ: U.S. War Planes and Helicopters Kick Off Battle to Reopen Hormuz

• In the face of overwhelming evidence, President Trump backtracked from his wild claims that Israel had attacked Iran’s South Pars Gas Field without his knowledge.

• The WSJ charts the critical energy assets hit in the Middle East conflict, including most recently a major Kuwaiti oil refinery

For Your Climate Change Radar …

In what could be the seminal challenge to President Trump’s attempt to wreck U.S. climate policy, a coalition of states and cities has sued to reinstate the EPA’s endangerment finding on greenhouse gas emissions.

Judge Blocks RFK Jr’s Anti-Trans Finding

U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai of Oregon blocked HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s December declaration that providers of gender-affirming care for minors “do not meet professionally recognized standards.”

The Corruption: Trump Coin Edition

I don’t want to lose sight of the fundamental lawlessness of putting Trump’s visage on a U.S. coin, but it also represents a pristine illustration of the absurdism that a personalist regime fosters.

Just take a look at the abject devotion of the Trump-appointed members of U.S. Commission of Fine Arts as they talk about their very special big boy’s need to have the biggest coin … at least the 3 inches that is the current largest coin, via the AP:

Some commissioners noted Trump’s fondness for big things as they advocated for the largest size coin. …

“I think the president likes big things,” said Commissioner James McCrery II, who was the architect on Trump’s design proposal for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom addition to the White House.

[Commissioner Chamberlain] Harris told McCrery she agreed with him. She works in the White House as a special assistant to the president and deputy director of the Oval Office.

“I think the larger the better. The largest of that circulation, I think, would be his preference,” Harris said, speaking of Trump.

Stay Tuned Later Today!

A quick heads up that TPM’s Josh Marshall and Joe Ragazzo will be doing a Substack Live today for Morning Memo readers to discuss some of the big trends and stories right now in the news business. If you’re among the 20,000 people who subscribe to receive Morning Memo as an email, you’ll get an automatic alert when their Substack Live begins.

While it’s crucial to sign up new members during our annual membership drive, we also use it as an opportunity to peel back the curtain on TPM so you can see who we are and what we’re about.

If you’re thinking about becoming a TPM member, their conversation may answer your questions about how TPM works and where your money goes. If you already a TPM member (thank you!), you’ll get insight into what TPM has done and is doing to continue to grow and succeed as a reader-supported news outlet.

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Denial and Self Pity

With oil briefly topping at over $119 per barrel, Israel attacking Iranian oil facilities, and Iran retaliating against LNG facilities in Qatar, while the Strait of Hormuz remains bottled up except for select Iranian-approved shipments, President Trump is on social media offering his hot takes like an online troll — and with about as much credibility

After disparaging Israel’s earlier attack on oil tanks in Tehran, Trump took to social media last evening to distance himself from the latest Israeli attack, on the South Pars Gas Field in Iran. The post is a mix of special pleading, dubious assertions, and self pity. Trump pretends to calm the waters by pouring oil on them while simultaneously threatening to light the oil on fire:

More importantly, however, there’s reporting that Trump is full of shit when he claims the United States knew nothing about the impending Israeli attack. Under the headline “Israel strikes Iran natural gas facility in coordination with U.S.”, Axios’ Barak Ravid reports that the Israeli strike was done not just with the knowledge of the Trump administration but with its approval.

“The Israeli officials said the strike was coordinated with and approved by the Trump administration,” Ravid reports. “A U.S. Defense official confirmed that.”

The coordination took place between the White House and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, according to officials Ravid spoke to. “The U.S. was aware, but was not part of the attack,” a source told him.

Perhaps you find yourself bedeviled trying to following the Middle East conflict in a serious and sober way while the President is poorly play-acting as commander in chief.

Latest on the Middle East …

• WSJ: Escalating Attacks on Gulf Energy Assets Plunge Iran War Into New Phase

• WaPo: Pentagon seeks more than $200 billion in budget request for Iran war

• WSJ: Short-range U.S. missiles are likely being launched from Persian Gulf countries, though none of them has admitted to allowing their land or airspace to be used to attack Iran.

Quote of the Day

“We’re over here just grinding away on banger memes, dude. There’s an entertainment factor to what we do. But ultimately, it boils down to the fact that no one has ever attempted to communicate with the American public this way before.”—a senior White House official involved in producing TikTok-style mash-up videos to promote the Iran war

Joe Kent Under FBI Investigation

Joe Kent, the right-wing influencer who just resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center over the Iran war, was already under FBI investigation for allegedly improperly sharing classified information, Semafor reports.

While the investigation, which predates his resignation, doesn’t appear to have been in retaliation for his opposition to the Iran war, the revelation of the investigation “came after a coordinated Trump administration effort to discredit Mr. Kent as untrustworthy and disloyal,” as the NYT put it.

‘Just the Beginning’

A top Pentagon official told Congress this week that the Trump administration’s campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats is “just the beginning” of a war against Latin American drug cartels which could include unilateral strikes on foreign territories.

Sobering Read

A years-long NYT investigation uncovered credible allegations that United Farm Workers co-founder Cesar Chavez groomed and sexually abused girls who worked in the labor movement.

Following yesterday’s publication of the investigation, 95-year-old Dolores Huerta — who co-founded the UFW with Chavez — came forward to say she too had been sexually abused by him in two encounters. “Both encounters led to pregnancies, which she hid,” the NYT reports. “She later arranged for the children to be raised by other families.”

Jeffrey Epstein Watch

• Democrats on the House Oversight Committee stormed out of a Capitol Hill meeting with Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche after Bondi would not commit to complying with a subpoena for her sworn testimony about the Epstein files.

• In a letter, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) accused Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche of blocking the Drug Enforcement Administration from releasing an unredacted document from the Epstein files about an investigation involving drug trafficking and money laundering, Bloomberg reports.

• British authorities are seeking the cooperation of the Justice Department as they pursue Epstein-related investigations of Prince Andrew and former ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police told Politico.

The Corruption: Pardon Edition

• NYT: Across his two terms, President Trump has granted clemency to more than 70 allies, donors and others convicted in fraud cases, three dozen of those since returning to office.

• CBC: Canadian crypto fugitive Andean Medjedovic paid far-right hoaxsters Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman a $300,000 retainer to seek a presidential pardon.

US Downgraded in Democracy Index

The Swedish research group Varieties of Democracies Institute has downgraded the United States in its annual democracy index: “The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history.”

Correction

Yesterday’s Morning Memo misidentified the assistant U.S. attorney thrown out of court by U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi as one of the trio of leaders of the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office installed by Attorney General Pam Bondi. It was in fact the office’s head of appeals, who is not one of the trio.

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Presumption of Irregularity

Attorney General Pam Bondi’s elaborate attempts to bypass Senate confirmation and federal judges in appointing U.S. attorneys blew up in spectacular fashion Monday in a sentencing hearing in a child pornography case.

A federal judge in New Jersey absolutely let rip in the hearing, first reported by the New York Times, over the leaderless U.S. Attorney’s Office there. After an outside-the-district federal judge ruled that Alina Habba’s appointment as interim U.S. attorney was legally invalid, Bondi named a trio of prosecutors to lead the office. The same outside judge ruled last week that the workaround was also invalid, but gave the administration a chance to appeal the ruling. But in the meantime, the outside judge warned, federal criminal cases across the entire state remained in jeopardy because of Bondi’s machinations.

The threat to the sanctity of real live criminal cases seemed to most raise the ire of U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi, a Biden appointee who happens to be the first Muslim federal judge. Monday’s hearing culminated with the judge:

• ordering the U.S. Attorney's Office's head of appeals to leave his courtroom under threat of being removed since he wasn’t an attorney of record in the case;

• summoning the trio of prosecutors to appear at a future hearing to testify about their roles (he later agreed to a Trump DOJ request to delay the followup hearing until May);

• raising the possibility in the hearing that Habba, who now supervises U.S. attorneys as a senior adviser to Bondi, was still running the office from the shadows (Habba denies this claim).

The transcript from the highly charged sentencing hearing is worth a look. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read. Quraishi, himself a former prosecutor in the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office, set the tone with hapless line prosecutor Daniel Rosenblum from the outset:

Further provoking Quraishi’s ire was the fact that the Trump DOJ apparently botched the child porn case by entering into a plea agreement with the defendant before it had finished gathering evidence from his phone.:

When new child porn images were discovered by investigators, DOJ was already locked into a plea deal that was seeking a sentence range of less than one-third of the advisory range, the judge said — although he got the prosecutor to admit that plea deal applied to charges related to only one minor and the newly discovered images showed different children.

What most stood out from the hearing transcript — aside from the blistering tone — was the judge’s linking of Bondi’s unlawful workarounds on U.S. attorneys with the risk to criminal cases, a point he returned to and for which Rosenblum was poorly positioned to answer. In summoning the trio of office leaders to testify, the judge warned he might seek further testimony from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and Habba.

Quraishi closed the hearing with a final admonishment for the U.S. Attorney’s Office: “You have lost the confidence and the trust of this court. You have lost the confidence and the trust of the New Jersey legal community, and you are losing the trust and confidence of the public.”

Correction: The original version of this item misidentified the assistant U.S. attorney thrown out of court as one of the trio of leaders of the USAO. It was the office’s head of appeals, who is not one of the trio.

Joe Kent Has ‘Reasons’ for Iran War Oppo

With DNI Tulsi Gabbard set to testify to Congress today, her Senate-confirmed right-wing deputy Joe Kent took the opportunity to resign over the Iran war while waving his hands about … the Jews.

There’s no “enemy of my enemy is my friend” analysis involved here when the motivating factor for opposing Trump’s foreign misadventure isn’t anti-interventionism but antisemitism.

Mullin’s Day in the Hot Seat

Today’s confirmation hearing for Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) as DHS secretary is a good opportunity to review what a strange dude he is, despite all the encomiums from fellow senators:

• TPM’s Hunter Walker: The ‘Cinematic’ And ‘Fantastical’ Life Of Trump’s DHS Pick

• WaPo: DHS pick Mullin boasts of ‘special assignments’ abroad but offers few details

2026 Ephemera

Despite claiming just a few days ago that he would make an endorsement in the Texas Senate GOP primary runoff and looking poised to back incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), President Trump let the deadline for withdrawing from the race pass without backing anyone, which has to be counted as a victory for state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R-TX).

Don’t Be Fooled

Brian Beutler on the Trump White House’s fake makeover:

What they seem to want, in other words, is to freeze their progress in place, dialing back the braggadocio, in the hope that voters sense the atmospheric differences between March 2025 and March 2026 and assume the worst is behind them.

In other words, they are hoping to salvage power through a change in rhetorical emphasis, without substantively backtracking. Their dog-and-pony approach is clearest in two realms of policy that held Trump’s coalition together: immigration and wellness pseudoscience. MAGA and MAHA.

‘A Hallmark Production in Bad Faith’

In a stinging ruling that found the Trump administration’s attempted shuttering of the Voice of America to be unlawful, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth of D.C. ordered more than 1,000 VOA employees back to work.

The VOA staff must be brought back by March 23 and international broadcasting must be resumed, Lamberth ordered.

The VOA saga has dragged out for a year. At its center has been Kari Lake, the Arizona election denialist installed to shut down government broadcasters. Lamberth had had enough: “The defendants’ persistent omission and withholding of key information in this case has been a Hallmark production in bad faith.”

Judge Edges Closer to Ballroom Decision

U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon of D.C. grilled Trump DOJ lawyers over the President’s vanity ballroom project in a hearing Tuesday. Leon didn’t buy the analogies the administration offered to previous modifications and alterations made to the White House over the years, rejecting them as not being of the same scale as the demolition of the East Wing and replacement with a monstrously out-of-proportion ballroom.

Leon had previously ruled that below-ground construction could continue while the case played out, then dismissed the challenge to the construction on procedural grounds. He allowed the challengers to refile and now faces an April deadline, when above-ground construction is scheduled to commence. Leon said he plans to rule by the end of March.

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The Retribution: Colorado Edition

This is all so bonkers that I want to give it a little extra attention in today’s Morning Memo.

The nonprofit consortium that runs the National Center for Atmospheric Research has sued the Trump administration to block its effort to tear apart the premier U.S. weather and climate lab — and it fronted the wacky Tina Peters connection in its lawsuit.

The Trump administration’s attack on NCAR is part of broader campaign of retribution against Colorado, the lawsuit alleges, for: (i) failing to end mail-in voting; and (ii) imprisoning former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters, a Big Lie obsessive, for her conviction for tampering with voting machines to try to prove that Trump’s loss in the 2020 election was a fraud.

The idea that Trump’s devotion to the Big Lie would — through a campaign of retribution — end up threatening a national laboratory that has done cutting-edge weather and climate research for years is mind-boggling on its own — a telling anecdote of the Trump II years.

But the attack on NCAR is just one of the retributive acts the administration has taken against Colorado. The list of others that appear in the lawsuit is remarkable, too. The lawsuit calls it “a widespread and coordinated campaign of punishment and coercion” against Colorado for refusing “to accede to attempts to infringe upon its sovereignty.” Among the examples in the lawsuit, all from December:

• The U.S. Department of Transportation announced the termination of $109 million in transportation funding for Colorado … and only Colorado;

• The U.S. Department of Agriculture ordered only Colorado to “participate in a SNAP ‘pilot project’ requiring the State to recertify eligibility and conduct in-person interviews for more than 100,000 Colorado households in five counties within a mere 30 days during the winter.” The threatened sanctions for failure to complete the task included removing Colorado from SNAP. Minnesota was the only other state whose participation in SNAP was targeted.

• FEMA denied two disaster relief assistance requests from Colorado related to devastating wildfires and flooding.

• Trump vetoed a bipartisan bill to fund a Colorado water project.

The case was assigned to senior U.S. District Judge Robert E. Blackburn, a George W. Bush appointee.

Accused Hill Pipe Bomber Claims Pardon

The man accused of placing pipe bombs at the Capitol Hill headquarters of both major political parties on the eve of the Jan. 6 attack is now claiming that he is covered by President’s Trump’s mass pardon of Jan. 6 defendants. In a new filing, Brian Cole Jr. is seeking to have the criminal charges against him dismissed on the grounds that the presidential pardon stripped the court of jurisdiction to try him on Jan. 6-related charges.

Trump DOJ Watch

• So many federal grand juries in D.C. have declined to indict Trump DOJ targets that U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge in D.C., has issued a new standing order requiring prosecutors to report to the court in writing when a grand jury fails to indict, Politico reports.

• Facing a staffing shortage of its own, the Trump DOJ is going to start hiring prosecutors directly out of law school, waiving a long-standing rule that applicants must have at least one year of legal practice under their belts before they will be hired as federal prosecutors, Bloomberg reports.

Trump’s Begging Yields Nothing on Iran

• WSJ: U.S. Allies Rebuff Trump’s Demand for Help Opening Strait of Hormuz

• Politico: Europe rejects Trump’s demand to help clean up Hormuz mess

Latest From the Middle East …

• The regime in Iran is consolidating its power and will emerge from the conflict with the United States intact and possibly even emboldened, according to U.S. intelligence assessments.

• Russia is the clear winner after two weeks of open conflict in the Middle East.

• Israel issued its most sweeping evacuation order for southern Lebanon since 2006 as it launched a new ground invasion there.

DHS AWOL After Iran Attack

Despite three possible terrorist attacks — in Texas, Virginia, and Michigan – with potential ties to the U.S.-Israel attack on Iran, the Department of Homeland Security has not issued an updated National Terrorism Advisory since the most recent one expired in September or published its annual Homeland Threat Assessment since President Trump took office, the WaPo reports.

Trump’s New Colonialism

• Cuba: “I think Cuba sees the end. All my life I’ve been hearing about the United States and Cuba,” President Trump riffed on Monday. “When will the United States do it? I do believe I’ll be the honor of — having the honor of taking Cuba.”

• Venezuela: In a social media post, Trump took credit for Venezuela having made the finals of the World Baseball Classic and raised the prospect of making it the 51st state.

• Zambia: The Trump State Department is considering withholding lifesaving assistance to people with HIV to force Zambia to sign a deal giving the United States more access to its critical minerals, the NYT reports.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Pro-Palestinian demonstrator Leqaa Kordia was finally released after a year in ICE custody.

• A rookie ICE agent who had been on the job less than a month made a paperwork mistake that kept a California man detained for days.

• Customs and Border Protection commander Gregory Bovino will soon retire.

For Your Radar …

• The Supreme Court will bypass the appeals courts and directly take up the Trump administration’s revocation of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians, with an expedited briefing schedule that includes oral arguments late next month.

• The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals let the Trump administration’s third-country removals continue while appeals proceed in the key challenge to the draconian policy.

Judge Blocks RFK Jr’s Vax Recs

U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy of Boston blocked HHS’s new stripped-down childhood vaccine recommendations, finding that the Trump administration had violated procedural safeguards that fundamentally represented “an abandonment of the technical knowledge and expertise.”

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Weak and Cornered

The foolery reached new heights over the weekend as President Trump veritably begged other nations, including rival China, to rescue him from his self-own in the Strait of Hormuz.

In social media posts and news interviews, the president concocted new and implausible rationales on the fly for why other nations owed it to him to pitch in to thwart Iran’s stranglehold on the vital shipping channel.

The headlines are almost comical:

• WaPo: Trump urges world to help open Strait of Hormuz

• Politico: Trump demands ‘about 7′ countries join coalition to police Iran’s Strait of Hormuz

• WSJ: White House Tries to Build Coalition on Iran to Address Energy Crisis

• Bloomberg: Trump Floats Xi Summit Delay If China Doesn’t Help in Hormuz

• NYT: Nations Respond With Caution to Trump’s Call to Send Warships to Strait of Hormuz

While accurate, the headlines don’t quite do justice the mix of magical thinking, narcissistic indignation, and pseudo-economics Trump spent the weekend trafficking in:

Trump, who was reportedly warned in advance by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about the eminently foreseeable Iranian response of closing the strait, is left to grovel on the international stage, though in classic Trump fashion he compensates for his weakness by berating, lashing out, and threatening other countries.

With oil executives warning the White House that oil prices are not likely to retreat anytime soon and the crisis is likely to worsen, it is slowly dawning on Trump that he has an election year nightmare on his hands.

Trump’s invitation for China to assert itself more vigorously in the Middle East and to take on more of the U.S. Navy’s century-plus duty of keeping shipping lanes free and open is a huge capitulation to the rival already eager to flex its own Navy. No U.S. interest is too valuable for Trump to forsake it for his own political expediency.

When Trapped, Trump Punches Down

Trump and his coterie lashed out on the home front, too, with news outlets being the easy and obvious target of his scorn.

• An especially peevish Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth railed against CNN Friday, saying he couldn’t wait for the tech oligarch David Ellison to take over its corporate parent.

• FCC chair Brendan Carr, always looking for a chance to curry favor with Trump, launched a new wide-ranging threat against the public broadcast licenses of news outlets who report “fake news” about the U.S.-Israel attack on Iran.

• Trump seized on Carr’s threat to accuse out-of-favor news outlets of “TREASON” in a social media post: “you can say that those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information!” Given the way Trump runs the Justice Department from the White House and how DOJ has responded to past calls from Trump to pursue prosecutions, these are not idle threats from a lonely old man spending his Sunday evening on social media.

The authoritarian impulses, themselves noteworthy and with few historical precedents in the United States, are clearly the default fallback position in a global energy crisis, where gas prices are spiking and there are few viable options for Trump to take decisive action to fix the problems he created. With no easy way out that doesn’t involve a debilitating loss of face, Trump is left to punch down at other targets like the press to try to maintain his aura of power and invincibility.

Boasberg Quashes Subpoenas of the Fed

In a remarkably direct and uncluttered ruling, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of Washington, D.C., found that U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro subpoenaed the Federal Reserve for the improper purpose of harassing and pressuring Chair Jay Powell into lowering interest rates or resigning.

In finding that the subpoenas were “pretextual,” Boasberg said the Trump DOJ “produced essentially zero evidence” of any crime by Powell and offered only “thin and unsubstantiated” justifications for the subpoenas:

In sum, the President spent years essentially asking if no one will rid him of this troublesome Fed Chair. He then suggested a specific line of investigation into him, which had been proposed by a political appointee with no role in law enforcement, who hinted that it could be a way to remove Powell. The President’s appointed prosecutor promptly complied. Those facts strongly imply that this investigation was launched for an improper purpose, as were the resulting subpoenas.

Trump reacted to the ruling with a predictable social media attack on Boasberg.

Trump DOJ Drops Flag Burner Case

The Trump DOJ moved to dismiss the criminal case against a veteran who burned an American flag in D.C. in protest of Trump’s executive order that purported to punish flag burning. The motion to dismiss was filed ahead of today’s deadline for the government to respond to the vindictive prosecution claim raised by the defendant.

The Secret Police Playbook

A really smart piece from two experts on the underlying dynamics that can turn a professional law enforcement organization into a secret police force, with a special focus on Trump’s transformation of ICE.

For Your Radar …

If the Trump administration’s threats to break up the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder have seemed more subdued lately, don’t be fooled. Proposals from institutions that want to take over management of the center’s research portfolio and various facilities were due Friday. It’s not clear when a final decision on NCAR’s fate will be made.

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Mr. Magoo as Commander-in-Chief

In a move rich in historic irony, President Trump has temporarily lifted sanctions on Russian oil in a desperate effort to ease global oil prices sent skyrocketing by his poorly planned attack on Iran.

Trump’s gift to Vladimir Putin to get his own ass out of the sling is both a huge concession to Russia and an unmistakeable admission that the economic reverberations from the elective war in Iran are having acute downstream political effects on Trump and Republicans in an election year.

Trump, the gift that keeps on keeping to Putin, was first elected with extensive help from Russia, endured one Russia-related impeachment, and has virtually abandoned Ukraine in its defense of Russia’s invasion. The sanctions were originally opposed to punish Russia for the Ukraine invasion. With his strange attraction to Putin’s Russia as backdrop, Trump is lurching toward Russia anew, this time as a pressure relief valve with the Strait of Hormuz bottled up by the threat of Iranian missiles, drones, and mines.

The gambit to free up Russian oil to calm volatile crude markers, which experts say won’t necessarily be effective, came as CNN reported that the Trump administration had failed to plan for the potential closing of the Strait of Hormuz, even though the risk of such retaliation from Iran has been “a bedrock principle of US national security policy for decades,” as one former U.S. official put it.

“Top Trump officials acknowledged to lawmakers during recent classified briefings that they did not plan for the possibility of Iran closing the strait in response to strikes, according to three sources familiar with the closed-door session,” according to CNN.

Administration officials “believed closing the strait would hurt Iran more than the U.S.,” CNN reported, which colored their view of the risks to world oil supplies.

Beyond the irony of freeing Russia from the doghouse of international opprobrium to save his own skin, the oil supply fiasco is another in a long line of examples of Trump simply failing to grasp — let alone care about — core U.S. national interests.

JD Vance Scampers for Political Cover

With JD Vance’s political prospects jeopardized by the Iran war, a subset of Trump White House officials let Politico know that JD Vance opposed the operation behind the scenes even though he has supported it in public: “Vance is ‘skeptical,’ is ‘worried about success’ and ‘just opposes’ the war on Iran, a senior Trump official said via text message.”

The Latest From the Middle East …

• Four U.S. service members were killed when their KC-135 refueling aircraft crashed in western Iraq while supporting the U.S. attack on Iran.

• The U.S. has been carrying out airstrikes against pro-Iranian militias in Iraq since the war began on Feb. 28.

• For the third time in 10 days, NATO shot down an Iranian missile targeting Turkey.

• Two people were killed in a presumably Iranian drone strike in Oman. Al Jazeera has a running tracker on death tolls by country, which provides a good overview of the sweep of the regional conflict.

Two Apparent Terrorist Attacks at Home

• Virginia: An Army lieutenant colonel was killed and another person critically wounded in a shooting at Old Dominion University in Norfolk. The alleged shooter was released from prison in 2024 after serving nine years of an 11-year sentence for attempting to support the Islamic State. He was apparently killed by students, though authorities provided few details. “He was not shot,” an FBI agent said at a press conference.

• Michigan: An armed man rammed his vehicle through the doors of a Michigan synagogue and drove down the hall in what is being treated as targeted attack. Security guards opened fire, and one security guard was injured by the car. The attacker died in the attack, though authorities aren’t clear on how the man died. His car caught fire in the building, and 30 law enforcement officers were treated for smoke inhalation. No one else was injured in what is being treated as a terrorist attack.

ICYMI

With many of President Trump’s retributive prosecutions flailing, prosecutors in Miami are under increasing pressure to make something stick against former CIA Director John Brennan in the pre-eminent investigate the investigators charade, CNN reports.

DOJ officials and U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones made a push in January to bring a case against Brennan, according to CNN, but some career prosecutors resisted the pressure. They view the case as “relatively weak” and are “struggling to delay bringing the case to a grand jury.”

‘President Trump’s Justice Department’

In a press release yesterday, DOJ gave away the game, describing itself as “President Trump’s Justice Department,” which Chris Geidner believes is the first time DOJ has used such a headline in the Obama, Trump, or Biden administrations.

Quote of the Day

“When I read that, I think, what is this? Is this Turkey? Is this Tunisia? Is this Hungary? Is this Poland? No, it’s the United States where these impeachment calls are coming out.”—Judge M. Margaret McKeown, a senior judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, on calls by President Trump and congressional Republicans to impeach judges for their rulings

It’s at Least as Bad as You Expected

The folks at 404 Media has been going through the videos of some of the DOGE bro depositions. Here’s a pungent sample:

Florida Passes Proof-of-Citizenship Law

The Florida legislature passed and Gov. Ron DeSantis supports a bill requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. The bill would make Florida the most populous state with a proof-of-citizenship requirement, a GOP obsession that seeks to use the false claim of widespread illegal voting by noncitizens to make it harder for citizen, especially minorities, to vote.

2026 Ephemera

Democrats have flipped 28 GOP-held seats in state legislatures across the country over the past 14 months, Politico reports.

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See You Back Here Monday

‘I Never Signed Off On That’

Duh.

In the madcap world of the Trump II White House, you knew that President Trump had to be the cause of last week’s humiliating DOJ reversal of its appeal in the law firm executive order cases. And now it’s confirmed.

Within 24 hours, Pam Bondi’s Justice Department went from moving to drop its appeal of the four law firms cases it had lost to telling the appeals court ... never mind.

The reversal came after Trump blew his top upon learning from news reports that the administration would be dropping its appeals, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“I never signed off on that,” the WSJ quotes the president as saying in an Oval Office outburst over his displeasure with DOJ leaders.

Trump then directed White House officials to tell the Justice Department to reverse itself, which White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed: “At the president’s direction, the Department of Justice quickly amended this filing.”

There’s been considerable speculation over the exact sequence of events. Did DOJ give the White House a heads-up in advance or was it freelancing? Was the White House Counsel’s Office involved from the get-go or did it fail to “manage up” (an impossible task with Trump)? Did Trump know in advance but change his mind because he disliked the optics?

The new reporting doesn’t precisely answer those questions, but it suggests the failure was with the White House Counsel’s Office and West Wing aides, or at least that’s the DOJ perspective:

Before Trump’s intervention, top department officials believed they had signoff from the White House Counsel’s Office and Trump’s top aides to drop the case. But Trump himself hadn’t been told of the decision, the people said, and has a longstanding modus operandi in legal matters: never drop a case willingly. Many other White House aides have wanted the issue to go away for months.

On the spectrum of Trump II depredations, it’s another symptom of the underlying disease of DOJ being run out of the White House as the personal attorney of President Trump, not of the Office of the Presidency or of the public trust it represents. The only silver lining may be that the clumsy, pathetic way the DOJ conducted itself in this instance hastens the slow awakening of appeals courts judges to the reality of the Trump II threat.

Latest From the Middle East ...

• While the pace of Iranian retaliatory strikes seems to be slowing, it still managed to inflict substantial damage over the past 24 hours, including forcing Iraq to suspend all oil terminal operations, striking container ships off Iraq and Dubai, and targeting fuel tanks in Bahrain.

• The U.S. was responsible for a Tomahawk missile strike on a school in southern Iran, a U.S. military investigation has preliminarily found. The strike that killed at least 175 people, many of them children, was the result of a “targeting mistake” based on old data, the NYT reports.

• “The Iranian drone attack in Kuwait that killed six U.S. service members was more severe than has previously been revealed, with dozens suffering injuries including brain trauma, shrapnel wounds and burns,” CBS News reports.

• The spillover conflict in Lebanon has claimed more than 600 lives there, as Israel continues to battle Iran’s proxy Hezbollah

The Incompetence Is Staggering

Racing to respond to the utterly predictable impact of its Iran attack on global oil prices, President Trump made the impromptu policy announcement that the U.S. government would backstop insurers shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, but as the WSJ reports, the administration had little idea what it was proposing:

U.S. officials called London insurers and brokers, trying to figure out how the market operates, industry insiders said. Some have received calls asking for confidential data on the Lloyd’s market that participants have been reluctant to share.

Experts on the insurance market tell the WSJ that insurers are still willing to underwrite shipping through the Strait of Hormuz but that shippers, understandably, aren’t willing to risk the lives of their crews.

OH MY EYES!

After aides to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth found the photos taken of him at a March 2 press briefing on the Iran attack to be “unflattering,” they barred news photographers from his subsequent two briefings, the WaPo reports. So we put together 10 choice Hegseth photos that they don’t want you see. Yeah, I don’t get it either.

Quote of the Day

“In the past, propaganda served the purposes of war; now war serves the purposes of propaganda.”—John Ganz

Mass Deportation Pace Slows

Since the pinnacle of Operation Metro Surge, the torrent of emergency habeas cases has slowed considerably from a peak of about 300 to 400 per day, from Jan. 16 to Feb. 17, down to closer to 200 a day in early March, according to an analysis by Politico which tracks with a separate NYT analysis on the recent decline in immigration arrests. Even the new lower number is “astonishing” compared to historical averages, Politico reports.

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It's Not the Crime, It's the Clowning

Then-acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin already had plenty of trouble on his hands, all of his own making, when D.C. Bar disciplinary counsel last year began looking into his extortionist threat against Georgetown University. But good ol’ Ed, with characteristic aplomb, managed to make things a whole lot worse for himself.

In a newly filed two-count disciplinary case against Martin in DC, half of the complaint is devoted to his unconstitutional pressure campaign against the Jesuit University and half to Martin’s ham-handed efforts to block the probe by threatening the bar’s disciplinary counsel and by going over his head to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals while the probe was still underway.

In short, Martin managed to get a second count lodged against himself in the course of unsuccessfully fighting off the first count. Well done, sir, well done.

Morning Memo covered last March the details of Martin’s anti-DEI-fueled threat to Georgetown Law School Dean William M. Treanor. (He subsequently upped the ante by threatening Georgetown’s president and board of directors, too, according to the bar complaint.) So let me zero in on Count II, which is where the real comedy is.

Martin went nuclear on the disciplinary counsel right off the bat, according to the complaint:

That letter earned Martin an admonishment from the chief judge, who told him in a follow-up letter that the judges couldn’t meet with him ex parte — that is, without disciplinary counsel present — and that he needed to go through the normal bar disciplinary process.

A week later, Martin cc’ed the chief judge on an email to the disciplinary counsel, which earned him another admonishment from the chief judge:

A month later, after allegedly failing to respond to communications from the disciplinary counsel, Martin sent yet another letter to the chief judge, now taking aim at the disciplinary counsel himself:

That earned Martin a third admonishment from the chief judge.

For his efforts, Martin was hit with the second count in the bar complaint accusing him of (i) improperly communicating ex parte with a judge during a proceeding; and (ii) engaging in conduct that seriously interferes with the administration of justice.

Again, Martin was the acting U.S. attorney in D.C. while all this was going on. He remains the U.S. Pardon Attorney. He wore numerous other hats over the past year, including director of the Trump DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group, Special Attorney for Mortgage Fraud, and assistant attorney general. Apologies if I left out any other titles.

The Trump DOJ came to Martin’s defense after the bar complaint was filed. You’ll recall that the Trump administration is promulgating a new rule that purports to subordinate state bar investigations of DOJ attorneys to the attorney general’s own investigation. Stay tuned.

A New Vindictive Prosecution Claim

The parent company of Smartmatic — the voting machine company falsely reviled by MAGA conspiracists after the 2020 election which has pursued defamation claims against Fox News and right-wing Trump allies — is raising a compelling new claim of vindictive prosecution in a corporate bribery case where it was added as defendant last fall by the Trump DOJ.

Three things that make the Smartmatic vindictive prosecution claim stand out, as it argues in its new filing seeking to get the indictment in federal court in Miami dismissed:

• Smartmatic cooperated with the investigation of its executives in the Philippines, where the alleged 2016 scheme took place, and wasn’t charged when the Biden administration initially brought the prosecution in 2024. Smartmatic was added to the case in a superseding indictment last fall.

• The Trump administration has notoriously abandoned enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practice Act in cases like this, but it made a notable exception for Smartmatic, the first company indicted under the federal law in 15 years.

• Fox News, which is still fighting off a billion-dollar defamation claim from Smartmatic, has allegedly used the criminal charges to try to gain leverage in the civil lawsuit.

Among the other defendants in Smartmatic’s defamation lawsuits: Newsmax, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, a former Fox personality, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Mike Lindell.

Jan. 6 Never Ends: Arizona Edition

In a highly unusual development, Homeland Security Investigations is conducting its own investigation of the 2020 election results in Arizona, The Atlantic is reporting. This is in addition to the bogus conspiracy-fueled DOJ probe that led to a grand jury subpoena of state Senate records of its “audit” the 2020 election in Maricopa County. Here’s the key paragraph from The Atlantic in full:

Arizona’s acting special agent in charge for HSI, Matthew Murphy, told the state attorney general’s office [last month] that his office was now probing the 2020 election in Arizona, according to a person familiar with the details of the meeting. A state investigator asked why the government was scrutinizing the results, given that they had already been litigated and investigated. Murphy made clear that he was acting on “direction from D.C.,” the person told us, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The HSI investigation in Arizona, which has not previously been reported, comes as the FBI has embarked on a separate election probe in the state. “This is not a joint investigation” with HSI, a person familiar with the FBI investigation told us. HSI headquarters and the Office of the Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice are coordinating the investigation, which is focused on identifying alleged voter-fraud activity and related potential enforcement actions, according to a person familiar with the effort.

Mass Deportation Watch

• WaPo: White House tells House GOP to avoid mass deportation talk ahead of midterms

• CBS News: DOJ’s Alex Pretti shooting probe excludes prosecutors who specialize in civil rights cases, sources say

• Politico: Judges say ICE, DOJ leaders are putting rank-and-file lawyers in ‘an impossible position’

Pam Bondi Moves Onto Military Base

Attorney General Pam Bondi joins the growing list of Trump II officials who have moved to military housing in the D.C. area due to threats against them, the NYT reports.

You Don’t Say?

TPM’s Josh Kovesnky has reported extensively on the Trump DOJ’s use of Kyle Shideler of Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy as an expert witness in the Texas “antifa” case. Now The Intercept reports that on cross examination during the trial Shideler admitted that he “provided language that prosecutors used” in the indictment in the first-ever domestic terrorism case against a purported antifa cell. “I told them what I believed to be an accurate definition of antifa, and they used it,” Shideler said.

‘You Go to War With the Army You Have’

• ProPublica: The US Built a Blueprint to Avoid Civilian War Casualties. Trump Officials Scrapped It.

• Politico: Hegseth gutted offices that would have probed Iran school strike

• MSNow: DOJ losing experienced counterterrorism minds at a critical time

• CNN: How Trump and Musk’s spending cuts are hampering US government readiness amid the Iran war

Whoa If True

The inspector general for the Social Security Administration is investigating whether a then-DOGE employee took possession of two highly sensitive databases (and kept one on a thumb drive) and planned to use them at his new job with a federal contractor, the WaPo reports.

The allegations against the unnamed DOGE bro came from an anonymous whistleblower who has subsequently spoken to the WaPo, which also reviewed the whistleblower’s written complaint, which was filed with the inspector general in January :

According to the complaint, he allegedly told the whistleblower that he needed help transferring data from a thumb drive “to his personal computer so that he could ‘sanitize’ the data before using it at [the company.]” The engineer told colleagues that once he had removed personal details from the data, he wanted to upload it into the company’s systems. He told another colleague, who refused to help him upload the data because of legal concerns, that he expected to receive a presidential pardon if his actions were deemed to be illegal, according to the complaint.

Before the inspector general began investigating the claims, the Social Security Administration itself dismissed them as “false based on evidence and investigations by all involved.”

When GOP Senators Actually Try

Enough opposition emerged among Senate Republicans, led by Sen. John Curtis (R-UT), to sink the nomination of political commentator Jeremy Carl as assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs. Carl wrote a 2024 book titled “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart” and claimed that it is white people who have faced persistent discrimination and been “erased” from American history, Politico reports. Carl withdrew his candidacy while lamenting the lack of unanimous support from Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Lawlessness and Disorder

In a searing ruling, a federal judge has rejected Attorney General Pam Bondi’s ham-handed workaround to the disqualification of Alina Habba as U.S. attorney for New Jersey.

The same outside judge who disqualified Habba, U.S. District Judge William Brann of the Middle District of Pennsylvania, ruled that Bondi’s appointment of a trio of DOJ attorneys to run the U.S. Attorney’s Office violates the Constitution and federal statute.

The triumvirate approach was yet another backdoor way of bypassing the Senate confirmation process for a permanent U.S. attorney and denying district judges the chance to exercise their statutory power to name interim U.S. attorneys.

“One year into this administration, it is plain that President Trump and his top
aides have chafed at the limits on their power set forth by law and the Constitution,” Brann wrote. “To avoid these roadblocks, this administration frequently purports to have discovered enormous grants of executive power hidden in the vagaries and silences of the code.”

What’s critical to understanding how these cases are playing out, not just in New Jersey but in other jurisdictions where Bondi is doing President Trump’s bidding on U.S. attorneys, is that the challenges are being brought in run-of-the-mill criminal cases. Defense attorneys are challenging the lawfulness and legitimacy of actions taken by federal prosecutors in leaderless U.S. attorney’s offices.

The unlawful workaround has created “a chaos that pervades criminal prosecutions” in New Jersey, Brann wrote, explicitly framed his ruling around the risk to public safety of invalidating criminal prosecutions en masse: “[W]hy does the fate of thousands of criminal prosecutions in this District potentially rest on the legitimacy of an unprecedented and byzantine leadership structure? The President doesn’t like that he cannot simply appoint whomever he wants.”

Jan. 6 Never Ends

In an expansion of the Trump DOJ’s unprecedented use of a criminal investigation to boost 2020 right-wing election conspiracy theories, the FBI served a federal grand jury subpoena last week on the Arizona state Senate for records relating to its “audit” of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County. While the Cyber Ninjas audit was bogus, it still found that Biden had won the state’s largest county.

“Because of that review, the state Senate retained election records that ordinarily would have been disposed of by now, according to a former staff member familiar with the matter,” the WaPo reports. “The person said those records include images of ballots and absentee envelopes, the tally of cast votes, and the server software.”

Adds ‘Insult to Injury’

Law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 are dismayed that, while the long-delayed plaque honoring them has finally been put on display, it is in a part of the building that is not accessible to the public. The plaque, which is mandated by law, was stymied by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and now hangs on the Senate side of the Capitol basically until the House GOP gets its senses back, whenever that may be, and a decision can be made on a more prominent place to hang it.

Immigration Appeals Gambit Blocked

Over the weekend, U.S. District Judge Randolph D. Moss of Washington, D.C., blocked the Trump administration’s unilateral effort to summarily dispense with thousands of immigration appeals.

“Under the new policy, all appeals would be automatically dismissed unless a majority of the Board of Immigration Appeals, the body that reviews decisions by immigration judges, voted to reconsider the case within 10 days,” the NYT reports.

How Many AEA Detainees Were There?

In a new status report in the original Alien Enemies Act case, the ACLU has alerted U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of Washington, D.C., that nearly one year since two flights of Venezuelan nationals took off for El Salvador’s CECOT prison, the Trump administration continues to give incomplete or conflicting data on how many AEA detainee there were:

Plaintiffs’ counsel received a class list of 137 class members from the Government …. Plaintiffs have some reason to believe the 137 is not exhaustive. Specifically, counsel notes that there are two individuals … who are not on the Government’s class list.

The new filing, which came the same day that the Trump administration asked Boasberg to stay his latest ruling in the case while it appeals that decision, also provided update figures on what the detainees wish to do to vindicate the due process rights they were initially denied. According to the filing, of the 91 former detainees who have shared their preferences with the ACLU :

• 22 want to return to U.S. to pursue their claims, knowing they’ll likely be detained once they arrive; and

• 68 want to pursue their claims through court filings remotely.

The ACLU continues to try to reach the approximately 50 other former detainees.

More Evidence U.S. Struck Iranian School

Markings on purported fragments of a missile that struck an elementary school in southern Iraq last week indicated it was a U.S.-made weapon, according to a NYT analysis.

Meanwhile, President Trump continued his one-man disinformation campaign to blame Iran for the incident, preposterously claiming that the Islamic republic has its own U.S.-made Tomahawk missiles.

Narrator, with a heavy sigh: Iran does not possess Tomahawks.

A Chilling Read

The WSJ has an in-depth report on the last days of the Iranian missile frigate that became the first combat kill by a U.S. submarine since World War II.

U.S. Confirms Military Ops in Ecuador

Last week’s reporting that the Trump administration had expanded its lawless campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats to include land-based operations in Ecuador was murky about the level of direct U.S. involvement against drug traffickers. But now the Trump administration has sent a notice of the Ecuador operation to Congress under the War Powers Act.

The operations against drug traffickers, rebranded by the Trump administration as narco-terrorists, were reportedly advised and supported by U.S. Special Forces. But the War Powers Act notice would seem to confirm a more direct, if still unspecified, level of U.S. involvement, which would be consistent with President Trump’s repeated promises that the U.S. would be taking it to the drug cartels on land not just at sea.

LOL … Sob

News that President Trump is withholding his expected endorsement of Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) over state Attorney General Ken Paxton in the GOP primary runoff for Senate in Texas as a way of leveraging Senate Republicans into passing the SAVE Act is on the hand a comical conundrum. Sit back and pass the popcorn.

On the other hand, the ridiculousness of the situation highlights the extent to which nothing matters to Trump as much as prevailing in the midterms, by hook or by crook. “It will guarantee the midterms,” Trump told House Republicans, who have already passed two versions of the SAVE Act. “If you don’t get it, big trouble, my opinion.”

For what it’s worth, Paxton — on the verge of losing Trump’s endorsement last week after he finished second to Cornyn in Tuesday’s election — engineered this conundrum for the GOP by promising to drop out of the race if the Senate passed the SAVE Act.

Senate GOP leaders have been unsuccessful in puncturing the right-wing myth that they can overcome a Democrat filibuster through clever parliamentary maneuvering and pass the bill. In short, it’s a self-made clusterfuck that epitomizes the fever dreams and magical thinking of the Trump II presidency.

Be the Next Alexander Butterfield

More than half a century later, Alexander Butterfield, who died yesterday at 99, still stands as an exemplar of honesty and candor against one’s own interest for revealing in the summer of 1973 the existence of a taping system in the Nixon White House. Butterfield’s revelation blew open the slow-rolling Watergate scandal, which had commenced the previous summer with the break-in at DNC headquarters and would culminate the following summer with Nixon’s resignation.

Butterfield’s role has always been a little more complicated than that though. He wasn’t exactly a whistleblower in the classic sense: someone who comes forward to volunteer previously unknown information, often at great personal risk. Rather, he was the Federal Aviation Administration chief who, by virtue of being a former Nixon White House aide, was a Watergate witness. What set Butterfield apart was that when he asked about the taping system, he told the truth, at some personal and political risk. He didn’t participate in the coverup.

In some ways, that’s a low bar. If you’re looking for more inspiration, I have often found it in the person of Donald G. Sanders, the Republican staff attorney who first sussed out from Butterfield the existence of the taping system, in a closed-door interview three days before his public testimony to the Senate Watergate committee.

Both figures stand in sharp contrast to the current political moment.

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