Cue Up the Mother of All Confirmation Battles
INSIDE: Todd Blanche ... Sigal Chattah ... Kurt Olsen
Blanche Audition for AG Succeeds
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s elaborate audition to out-degenerate Pam Bondi has apparently won him President Trump’s nomination for the permanent position.
In his short time as acting AG, Blanche has re-indicted James Comey, indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, and turbocharged the South Florida investigation into a supposed “grand conspiracy” against Trump. Under his watch, the DOJ has targeted Fani Willis, Cassidy Hutchinson, E. Jean Carroll (where Blanche did recuse himself), and reporters in leak cases.
But that’s not even the worst of it.
In the course of unwinding the Jan. 6 seditious conspiracy prosecutions, Blanche created a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund to be dispensed at Trump’s discretion with no transparency of accountability while improbably settling Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS by releasing Trump from some $100 million in potential IRS claims for unpaid taxes.
It’s a helluva track record for the two months since Bondi was fired as attorney general.
Blanche’s nomination sets up a potentially epic confirmation battle in an election year. Democratic senators are highly incentivized not just to block Blanche but to make the confirmation hearings a bloodbath for the Trump DOJ and White House. They’re further bolstered by a trio of GOP senators who may be out for blood after trump torpedoed their reelections.
Buckle up.
Zombie Slush Fund Not Dead Yet
While official Washington rushed to treat as credible the assurances from the White House and DOJ that the slush fund is dead, President Trump said he wasn’t sure that it’s gone for good: “I love it,” he said. “I think it’s so important.”
The Senate is considering the reconciliation bill on immigration funding today, and a small number of GOP senators want to insert language in the bill barring the slush fund, especially after Blanche declined to commit to put it in writing that the slush fund is being permanently abandoned.
Stay tuned.
MUST READ
Most of Morning Memo’s focus on the politicization of the Justice Department has been concerned with the big-picture problems like loss of independence from the White House, defiance of court orders, and purges of DOJ personnel for political reasons.
But there’s another super important dynamic that Bloomberg’s Ben Penn captures in an extraordinarily well-reported piece on Sigal Chattah, the top federal prosecutor in Nevada: The ways in which unqualified partisan prosecutors can run amok, allegedly pursuing their own vendettas, doing favors for preferred former clients and friends, and blowing off ethics concerns flagged even by the low-bar Trump DOJ.
Chattah is one of the acting U.S. attorneys whom the Justice Department has tried to install on a semi-permanent basis, bypassing Senate confirmation:
The first-time prosecutor frequently sought status updates on cases despite warnings that she was disregarding recusals signed by the deputy attorney general’s office in Washington that barred her involvement in matters where she had conflicts of interest, said several individuals.
Chattah also took calls from outside attorney acquaintances and intervened in their pending matters opposite her office—seeking favorable outcomes for their clients. …
Unlike in other offices, the Nevada disruptions are frequently disconnected from Trump’s priorities and are instead largely of Chattah’s own making, added many lawyers familiar with the office—most of whom spoke anonymously to avoid retaliation or share sensitive deliberations.
Really worth a read.
Trump DOJ Watch: Only the Best People
Lindsey Halligan was the first or at least the most prominent example of Trump inserting White House political aides directly into prosecutor roles within DOJ that are connected to his desired retributive prosecutions. It hasn’t stopped:
On Monday, Kurt Olsen, the White House election security czar who aided Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, where the mother of all retributive investigations is being conducted into a “grand conspiracy” against Trump, Reuters reports. While it’s not confirmed that Olsen, who has no prosecutorial experience, is on the “grand conspiracy” team, he appeared in a photo of that team posted last month by Miami U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quinones, according to Reuters.
In a little-noticed report last month, CBS News confirmed that Trump ally and conservative firebrand Victoria Toensing was sworn in as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida. Toensing, a former federal prosecutor, is the wife of Joseph diGenova, who is leading the “grand conspiracy” investigation. “DiGenova declined to say whether she is working on the Brennan and grand conspiracy cases, but a source with direct knowledge confirmed she is,” CBS News reported.
With the prospect of judicial sanctions, several prosecutors who played a role in the Broadview Six case have hired attorneys of their own, the Chicago Tribune‘s Jason Meisner reports.
The Retribution: SPLC Edition
The Trump DOJ obtained a superseding indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center that keeps the same counts and defendants as the original indictment but tightens up some of its loose and problematic language.
The SPLC immediately asked the judge to investigate how it came to be that a MS Word draft of the superseding indictment was distributed by Main Justice to reporters on Tuesday evening before the superseding indictment was docketed on Wednesday:
In decades of collective practice, including serving as prosecutors at DOJ, none of the SPLC’s counsel has ever seen anything remotely like what DOJ did last night—distributing what turned out not to be the actual superseding indictment returned by the grand jury and docketed today, but one that has no indication of its finality, in native Word that could be edited and reposted, and before the actual returned charges were unsealed, to a group of journalists.
The SPLC wants the judge to issue a show cause order requiring Main Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Middle District of Alabama to explain their conduct and why they should not be sanctioned.
Picking Through the SCOTUS Carnage
The Supreme Court’s historically bad decision to allow Alabama to eliminate one of its two majority-Black congressional districts in time for the midterms, turning the 14th Amendment on its ear, continued to reverberate:
Former Alabama U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance: “The Roberts Court’s derogation of Americans’ voting rights, starting with Shelby County v. Holder, working its way up to Callais, and now, putting the final nail in the coffin in Milligan, will go down in history as a shameful failure.”
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern: “It is not a mere aftershock from Callais but a separate earthquake of the same or perhaps even greater magnitude.”
Chris Geidner: “This is truly one of the worst things the court has done — both in terms of legitimacy and in terms of the law — since I have been covering the court.”
Mullin Puts His Foot in It
In an exchange during his Senate testimony Tuesday that didn’t immediately garner much attention, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin seemed to inadvertently open the door to sending Kilmar Abrego Garcia to his preferred destination of Costa Rica rather than to Liberia or to one of the other African countries that the administration has sought to deport him to.
“Great, if he’s willing to do that, we’ll be happy to send him,” Mullin said under questioning from Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD).
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers didn’t miss the exchange and immediately notified the court in his habeas case.
It appears to be an inadvertent misstep by Mullin because he also testified that he was not aware that Abrego Garcia had agreed to be removed to Costa Rica or that Costa Rica has agreed to accept him.
4 House GOPers Break With Trump on Iran
The House voted 215-208 to curtail President Trump’s military adventurism in Iran. Four Republicans crossed the aisle to form a majority with Democrats: Reps. Tom Barrett (MI), Warren Davidson (OH), Brian Fitzpatrick (PA), and Thomas Massie (KY)
IMPORTANT
Last Friday, the Trump administration unveiled new proposed regulations that would require the approval of political appointees for all discretionary federal grants based on tight far-right political criteria.
The proposed regs would interject political appointees into scientific and health research, limiting “the subjects that they can explore, the foreign labs with which they may collaborate and even the conferences at which they can appear,” the NYT reports.
Scientist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein called it “the end of American science as we know it.”
To catch yourself up, I’d recommend Don Moynihan’s wide-ranging piece on the proposed regs and their intended impact: “The bottom line is that Russ Vought, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, wants to move scientific decisions away from the scientists and into the hands of political appointees. I don’t mean the big picture, strategic decisions of American science, which should be political, but the micro-decisions about what is and is not good research.”
The Purges: Schedule F Edition
In a culmination of the Schedule F push that began in his first term, President Trump has removed civil service protections for some 8,000 senior federal workers and made them at-will employees.
A Sea Change in Public Monuments
In retrospect, 2020 was the high water mark for removing public memorials to racists, traitors, European explorers, and other right-wing shibboleths. Since Trump’s reelection, the pendulum has swung in the other direction, with wink-wink re-namings of military bases, resurrected Confederate memorials, and, as the WSJ reports, the restoration of statutes that had been gathering dust in storage for the past six years.
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I got so excited seeing that three Senators screwed by Trump could block Blanche’s confirmation…
But that leaves 50 Rs plus Fetterman sooo…
This gets filed in The I’ll Believe it When I See it Dept.
Maybe report out that friendly little chitchat with Ghislaine