Behold The Golden Age Of Public Corruption In America
INSIDE: Mahmoud Khalil ... Elon Musk ... Donald Trump
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
The Corruption: The Guardrails Are Gone
Attorney General Pam Bondi has eviscerated the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section, NBC News reports, in another sign that rampant unrestrained public corruption will be a defining feature of the Trump era.
We didn’t get here overnight. A social, political, and legal transformation over the past decade has removed many of the most important guardrails to contain public corruption. The 2016 Supreme Court decision in McDonnell v. United States was the most overt early sign that democracy’s endemic but manageable corruption was going to be allowed to run free.
The implications of that and similar subsequent decisions are hard to isolate from the wholesale corruption that Donald Trump brought to the table beginning that same year. But the rank corruption of his first term pales next to the structural changes he’s already wrought less than two months into his second term.
The Trump White House’s takeover of the Justice Department writ large is the greatest boon to public corruption, but there have been a series of particularly egregious actions – like Trump’s executive order crapping all over the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act – that have cleared the way for more wrongdoing and less accountability for wrongdoers.
Bondi’s decision to strip the Public Integrity Section bare leaves Main Justice’s experienced career prosecutors on the sidelines in public corruption cases, shifts the onus to bring (and not to bring) such cases to more politically malleable U.S. attorneys, and weakens the mechanism for ensuring nationwide consistency across investigations and cases.
Unrestrained public corruption creates its own perverse political culture. It feeds into cynicism and nihilism about government that in turn is exploited by figures like Trump to justify further weakening and undermining the rule of law. It’s a death spiral and we’re now firmly in the grips of it.
Ed Martin Threatens Another Dem In Congress
Acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin now appears to be harassing people involved in the first impeachment of Donald Trump, sending one his inappropriate letters of inquiry to Rep. Eugene Vindman (D-VA), the twin brother of former Trump national security aide Alex Vindman.
Martin purports to be seeking information about a company the brothers founded to help arm Ukraine against Russia and about the congressman’s personal financial disclosures, the WaPo reports.
Perkins Coie Sues Over Trump Executive Order
In a full-throated defense of itself and the legal profession, Seattle-based law firm Perkins Coie filed a federal lawsuit in Washington, D.C., to block President Trump’s executive order targeting it and its clients.
Appeals Court Judges Warn Of Threats To The Judiciary
Two GOP-appointees to the federal appeals court warned publicly of the increasing threats to judges not just as a safety concern but as an attack on judicial independence.
Judge Takes Up Mahmoud Khalil Case Today
U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman of Manhattan will hold a hearing this morning on the Trump administration’s detention of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a legal resident of the United States.
The first order of business will likely be whether Furman has jurisdiction over the case or whether the government spirited Khalil to Louisiana fast enough to avoid jurisdiction in the Southern District of New York.
The case has roiled Columbia University but has national implications for free speech, the rule of law, and the legal protections afforded green card holders.
Judge To Trump: What About The Appointments Clause?
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon of Washington, D.C., declined to block the Trump White House’s takeover of the U.S. African Development Foundation – but he zeroed in on the most concerning aspect of the episode: Whether President Trump can bypass the Senate in appointing a new board for the foundation after he fired the old one.
“Where is the president’s authority to appoint without Senate confirmation?” Leon asked during Tuesday’s hearing. “How is that possible?”
Leon quickly issued a ruling in the case denying a temporary restraining order but putting the government on notice he would expect testimony from the DOGE representatives dispatched to take over the foundation and strip it bare.
Document Destruction At USAID Paused For Now
A highly unusual email to remaining USAID workers with instructions to shred and burn classified materials and personnel records set off a scramble Tuesday to try to stop the destruction of documents.
Lawyers involved in some the pre-existing USAID lawsuits raced to obtain court orders to halt the shredding and burning of the documents, with a particular focus on those that would be relevant to the ongoing litigation over the purging of workers and the dismantling of the agency.
By the end of the day, the Trump administration had agreed to stop any further destruction of documents at USAID headquarters without first notifying opposing counsel and giving them a chance to take the matter before a judge. The administration denied it had destroyed any personnel records and said it would provide later today a sworn accounting of what exactly happened.
Sanctions Time
Acting OPM Director Charles Ezell is willing to endure promised sanctions by a federal judge in San Francisco rather than comply with a court order to provide testimony about the Trump administration’s purges of the federal workforce.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup had ruled Monday that Ezell couldn’t have his cake and eat it too by submitting a sworn declaration but declining to be cross-examined about it. “[T]he Trump administration Tuesday evening informed the court Ezell would not testify and withdrew his written declaration suggesting he did not order the probationary firings across government,” Government Executive reports.
Musk Watch
NYT: “Elon Musk has signaled to President Trump’s advisers in recent days that he wants to put $100 million into groups controlled by the Trump political operation, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.”
Wired: “Sources also tell WIRED that Musk has wanted a government shutdown—an aim that runs contrary to the White House’s stated desire to avoid one—in part because it would potentially make it easier to eliminate the jobs of hundreds of thousands of federal workers, essentially achieving a permanent shutdown.”
NBC News: “President Donald Trump turned the South Lawn of the White House into a temporary Tesla showroom Tuesday in a conspicuous favor to his adviser Elon Musk, the car company’s billionaire CEO.”
The Purges
DoE: The Trump administration is purging the Department of Education of half of its staff in the largest
NASA: The space agency has begun purging scientists ahead of a Trump administration deadline.
NOAA: The Trump administration began cutting the chronically understaffed NOAA workforce by 10%, or more 1,000 people.
HHS: The Trump Administration is shuttering half dozen regional legal offices at HHS that target fraud.
EPA: The EPA plans to close all of its environmental justice offices, according to an internal memo obtained by the NYT.
The Destruction
“The whole system of finding, diagnosing and treating tuberculosis — which kills more people worldwide than any other infectious disease — has collapsed in dozens of countries across Africa and Asia” since President Trump froze foreign aid, the NYT reports.
Johns Hopkins University is planning layoffs after the Trump administration cancelled $800 million in grants to the school, mostly through USAID, the WSJ reports.
The Trump administration is considering cancelling the government’s lease of the main support office for the Mauna Loa Observatory, which maintains the longest continuous record of measurements of atmospheric CO2 and contributed the data for the Keeling Curve, Reuters reports.
The Trump administration has slashed the GSA division in charge of preserving and maintaining some 26,000 pieces of public art, the WaPo reports.
CDC Nominee Trafficking In Anti-Vax Disinformation
Dave Weldon, President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the CDC, was still pushing the debunked link between vaccines and autism as recently as last month in a meeting with Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), she told Bloomberg.
Quote Of The Day
“Johns Hopkins has bet very heavily on a century and a quarter of partnership with the federal government. If the federal government decides it doesn’t want to know things anymore, that would be bad for Johns Hopkins and devastating for Maryland.”–Dr. Theodore Iwashyna, a critical-care physician at Johns Hopkins University
House-Passed CR Heads To The Senate
With a Friday deadline to fund the government, the GOP-controlled House passed a continuing resolution to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year. Attention now turns to the Senate, where Democrats are divided over whether to filibuster the CR and shut down the government to try to extract some concessions from the Trump White House.
The Scale Of The Trump Carnage Is Staggering
I find it useful to use longtime foreign policy and national security reporters whose voices are familiar as a gauge for how far and fast things are eroding:
In a span of only 50 days, President Trump has done more than any of his modern predecessors to hollow out the foundations of an international system that the United States painstakingly erected in the 80 years since it emerged victorious from World War II. …
But perhaps the more remarkable thing is that Mr. Trump is eroding the old order without ever describing the system he envisions replacing it with. His actions suggest he is most comfortable in the 19th-century world of great-power politics, where he, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China, negotiate among themselves, and let lesser powers fall in line.
Here’s the big question: As Trump takes the wrecking ball to the old version of American foreign policy, what does he intend to construct in its place? His career shows little evidence of strategic thinking. He has been a disrupter and dealmaker rather than a builder. His first term was marked by constant changes in personnel and policies, with few enduring achievements. …
Trump seems to envision a new balance of power with three poles: the United States plus Russia and China, whose leaders he sees as kindred spirits. The rest of the world, including the United States’ oldest allies, must fend for itself.
Neo-Manifest Destiny: Go North, Young Man
President Trump’s saber-rattling, bullying, expansionist rhetoric toward Canada might offer a glimpse of the ultimate destination for the runaway MAGA train: a neocolonial world with geographic spheres dominated by the United States, China, and Russia.
But, as sobering as that prospect is, it comes with an insane level of stupidity and ignorance, not the least of which is a 21st century president cosplaying as William McKinley, the last president of the 19th century who oversaw American expansionism abroad at the height of the last Gilded Age:
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Gosh, if I didn’t know, I might think I was reading The Onion.
Bad keeps getting worse.
Chronicles of our democratically elected fascism….
"When you take away that artificial line that looks like it was done by a ruler..."
That "artificial line" is the 49th parallel of latitude.