Day by Day, Trump Brings DOJ More Fully Under His Thumb
INSIDE: Kash Patel ... Pete Hegseth ... Sarah Mullally
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
The Purges: DOJ Edition
The hits just keep coming at the Justice Department, including the FBI:
The firing of a second prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia has come to light. In addition to Michael Ben’Ary, career prosecutor Maya Song was terminated since Trump lawyer Lindsey Halligan became the new U.S. attorney. Song has been the top deputy to previous U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert, who was forced out by President Trump. Song had agreed to a demotion to a line prosecutor role, but was subsequently terminated anyway.
Amid speculation that the firing were related to internal resistance within the U.S. Attorney’s Office to the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, the WaPo notes a common thread connecting Ben’Ary and Song: They has worked as senior advisers to then-Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco during the Biden administration. Monaco, as the No. 2 at DOJ, oversaw the prosecutions of Trump, who last week demanded that Microsoft fire her as its president of global affairs.
FBI Director Kash Patel fired a new agent trainee at Quantico for having displayed a gay pride flag on his desk last year during a previous assignment as a FBI support staffer — before Trump became president. Patel called it “an inappropriate display of political signage in your work area,” in the email firing the trainee and ending his FBI career.
Patel Shuts Down FBI’s Anti-Extremism Project With ADL
In a bombastic social media post, Patel this week ended a training and intelligence-sharing partnership with the Anti-Defamation League. In the process, he smeared the ADL and former FBI Director James Comey, claiming “James Comey wrote ‘love letters’ to the ADL and embedded FBI agents with them – a group that ran disgraceful ops spying on Americans,” Patel posted. “That era is OVER. This FBI won’t partner with political fronts masquerading as watchdogs.”
Unpacking the Threat of Trump’s Domestic Terrorism Memo
Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck explains how President Trump’s executive action on domestic terrorism is both a stunt and a threat to constitutionally protected speech and political activity: “That’s why it’s so important for the groups the government targets … to fight back—and to not simply quietly acquiesce and cease engaging in constitutionally protected activity out of fear that they’ll be punished for doing so. And that’s why it’s so important to understand just how little [it] actually does to change the potential legal consequences those groups face.”
Clarification: The Trump executive action came via a presidential memo, not an executive order as I originally wrote.
A Warning From Chris Murphy
In a podcast interview with The New Republic’s Greg Sargent, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) warns that we are fast approaching the point where the space for meaningful political opposition to President Trump is constrained by authoritarian restrictions:
My belief has never been that he’s going to cancel the election in 2026 or 2028—he’s not going to do that. Turkey still has elections, Hungary still has elections, Russia still has elections. The leaders in those countries just constrain that space the opposition can operate in, such that they never have enough room to win a national election. If we are not already there, we are really, really close. Which is why the only way out of that is to make them pay a political price every time they ratchet up pressure on the opposition.
Mass Deportations Civil Rights Violations Watch
Evidence produced at a trial that ended this week showed that a transnational crime unit at DHS secretly targeted campus protesters, including Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was swept off a city street outside her Massachusetts home in March, an incident captured on video. The bench trial in front of U.S. District Judge William Young, which ended with his memorable ruling against the government, also revealed that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller spoke with senior officials at the State Department and DHS more than a dozen times in March to discuss student visa revocations, the WaPo reports.
Under intense pressure from the Trump administration, Apple has removed ICE tracking apps from its app store, including ICEBlock.
Chris Hayes went deep on “Kavanaugh stops” last night:
Will Universities Hang Together or Hang Separately?
The nine universities offered President Trump’s unlawful “compact” to secure federal funding in return for Trump-friendly policies are being closely watched ahead of the Oct. 20 deadline to accept it to see how they respond. In a bad sign, the chair of the University of Texas Board of Regents hailed the offer as an “honor.”
The nine schools are:
Brown
Dartmouth
MIT
Penn
UVa
Vanderbilt
Arizona
USC
Quote of the Day
“This is extortion, plain and simple.”–Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at UC Berkeley, on President Trump’s proposed “compact” with universities
NIH Whistleblower Fired
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has fired Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who was put on administrative leave in March along with two other institute directors. Marrazzo filed a whistleblower complaint three weeks before the date of her termination letter, and her lawyer is arguing the firing was retaliatory. The other two directors have since been terminated, too.
Trump Notifies Congress of ‘War’ With Drug Cartels
The Trump administration has notified Congress that the United States is in a formal “armed conflict” with drug cartels, adding what the NYT called “new detail to the administration’s thinly articulated legal rationale” for attacks on drug-smuggling boats on the high seas.
The legal rationale remained thin in a classified briefing of Senate Armed Services Committee briefing this week by Pentagon general counsel Earl Matthews, the WSJ reports (emphasis mine):
Matthews repeatedly referred to Trump’s designation of some Latin American drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, which he said granted the Defense Department unilateral authority to use military force against them, some of the people said. Matthews refused to provide a written justification for the strikes, which legal experts say is necessary for transparency and accountability.
Choice Detail on the Eisenhower Sword Fiasco
It’s still not totally clear if Todd Arrington’s refusal to break the law and hand over an Eisenhower sword for President Trump to give to King Charles was the main or even contributing factor in his firing as the director of the Eisenhower president library, but the way the request for the sword came to him is an eyebrow-raiser by itself:
The request for a gift for King Charles came from a State Department liaison who used the email address “giftgirl2025” and initially told the museum that they were looking for “like a sword or something,” according to a person familiar with the discussions.
I want to know more about “giftgirl2025.” My Signal information is below.
Hyper-Masculinity in the Age of Trump
NYT: “Pete Hegseth’s advocacy for service members accused of war crimes, and Trump’s pardons of them, have helped usher in an era of military aggression and disregard for the rule of law.”
Woman Named Archbishop of Canterbury For First Time
Sarah Mullally is the first woman to be named archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the Anglican Church worldwide.
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Has anyone told Pete Hegseth that real warriors don’t wear makeup?
Everybody knows that it’s going to get worse (yet more worse?) before it gets however slightly better, right?
And here’s all the credible hopium I can muster because it’s Friday: any improvement relies on enough progressive Democrats running and getting elected—legions of AOCs and Mamdanis. Not outliers but a lot of them. Short of that…