How The 2020 Big Lie Is Now Threatening a World-Class Research Center
INSIDE: Tina Peters ... Letitia James ... Jack Smith
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
The Destruction: NCAR Edition
The Trump White House isn’t really doing much to disguise at least one of its motivations for moving to dismantle a critical scientific research center in Boulder: It wants to free Big Lie supporter Tina Peters from prison in Colorado.
Colorado officials have refused to play along with President Trump’s purported pardon of Peters for her state conviction for tampering with election machines. While a presidential pardon for state crimes isn’t a real thing, the White House wants you to know that Colorado is paying a price for that perceived defiance: “Maybe if Colorado had a governor who actually wanted to work with President Trump, his constituents would be better served,” a senior White House official told NOTUS.
If that doesn’t seem like a direct link to the Peters pardon, trust me. It’s the response the White House gave to multiple other outlets, including the NYT and WaPo, who linked Colorado’s rejection of the Peters pardon with the Trump administration’s plan to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
It doesn’t have to be either/or. OMB Director Russ Vought may simply have seized on the Peters pardon as something near and dear to Trump’s heart and used it to justify disruption and chaos that he wanted to sow anyway.
But the bottom line is here we are five years after the 2020 election subversion scheme and the drive to craft a revisionist history of that effort is jeopardizing an innocent bystander that provides critical research into atmospheric science.
All of this is prompting a truly desperate response from scientific circles:
WaPo: “The announcement drew outrage and concern from scientists and local lawmakers, who said it could imperil the country’s weather and climate forecasting, and appeared to take officials and employees by surprise.”
Meteorologist Matt Lanza: “I cannot begin to tell you what a bad, bad, bad decision this is. Objectively so. This will absolutely cripple and devastate weather research in the U.S.”
NYT: “The center, founded in 1960, is responsible for many of the biggest scientific advances in humanity’s understanding of weather and climate. Its research aircraft and sophisticated computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are widely used in forecasting weather events and disasters around the country, and its scientists study a broad range of topics, including air pollution, ocean currents and global warming.”
The Destruction: CFPB Edition
A glimmer of good news as the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a panel decision by Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao, both Trump appointees, that cleared the way for the dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The full appeals court will now consider the appeal.
The Retribution: Letitia James Edition
Disqualified interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan has made another mess of things, according to a new report from Politico.
After a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, declined last week to re-indict New York Attorney General Letitia James on bogus mortgage fraud charges, the foreperson of the grand jury presented the no-true bill in open court. Apparently, Halligan and her team didn’t want the failure or the details of the failed indictment to become public, but the assistant U.S. attorney who signed the draft indictment wasn’t in court to stop it, according to an order issued in the case.
Prosecutors waited to the next day to ask a magistrate judge to seal the court records, including the draft indictment, but he denied their motion since the cat was already out of the bag.
This was the second time a grand jury has declined to re-indict James since the original indictment was dismissed because Halligan was not validly appointed U.S. attorney. In this go-around, prosecutors tacked on to the draft indictment a new third count of making a false statement. It apparently wasn’t enough to persuade the grand jury.
As to why the grand jury foreperson did what they did, the magistrate judge wrote: “the Court will not speculate why the grand jury disclosed the no bill in open court.”
The Retribution: Jack Smith Edition
I understand the journalistic imperative to report what former Special Counsel Jack Smith told House Republicans in closed-door testimony yesterday, but the only important context here is that Smith is being targeted for retribution by the President Trump – and his GOP allies on the Hill are carrying his water.
If you need additional evidence, here’s how the retribution machine works, in part:
Ahead of Smith’s testimony, the Trump DOJ and FBI supplied Congress with selective internal communications showing that some FBI agents expressed concerns about the Mar-a-Lago search in the summer of 2022. Those concerns have already been reported long ago, but it didn’t stop a senior Trump DOJ official from publicly trumpeting the document dump as a “bombshell.”
For Your Radar …
Today is the deadline for federal law enforcement to ship their intelligence files on “Antifa” and “Antifa-related” activities to the FBI for review by Joint Terrorism Task Forces, the WaPo notes, as part of the Trump White House’s broad targeting of its political opposition.
Venezuela Watch
The U.S. conducted its 26th lawless boat strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the eastern Pacific, killing four people and bringing the total death total in the high seas campaign to 99.
The U.S. military was blindsided by President Trump’s announcement of a blockade of Venezuela, the NYT reports:
Mr. Trump’s announcement of a “blockade” caught senior officials at the Pentagon and at Southern Command in Florida by surprise. On Wednesday, they scrambled to figure out the U.S. military’s role in the action, U.S. officials said.
Punitive and Performative
The Trump administration is planning to dramatically ramp up efforts to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship, according to internal guidance obtained by the NYT. The plan calls for a massive increase in the number of such cases each month, straining government capacity and heightening the risk of due process violations:
The guidance, issued on Tuesday to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field offices, asks that they “supply Office of Immigration Litigation with 100-200 denaturalization cases per month” in the 2026 fiscal year. If the cases are successful, it would represent a massive escalation of denaturalization in the modern era, experts said. By comparison, between 2017 and this year to date, there had been just over 120 cases filed, according to the Justice Department.
It’s not at all clear that the plan is feasible, but that may not really be the point.
Mass Deportation Watch
A unanimous three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals said President Trump can keep the National Guard deployed in the nation’s capital while an appeal of the case proceeds. The decision largely swung on D.C.’s status as a federal district, not a state. The panel called into question the deployment of out-of-state national guards to states without their consent, calling it “constitutionally troubling.”
U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb of D.C. blocked a new Trump administration policy limiting members of Congress from visiting ICE detention facilities, ruling that existing statutes provided for the visits for oversight purposes.
Chris Geidner takes a look at the last 100 days of Kavanaugh stops.
The White Nationalist Presidency, Part I
Democratic Sens. Tammy Duckworth (D) and Jacky Rosen (D) put a hold on the nomination of Adm. Kevin Lunday to lead the Coast Guard over its new workplace harassment policy downgrading swastikas and nooses from hate symbols to merely “potentially divisive.”
The White Nationalist Presidency, Part II
Madiba K. Dennie: How the Trump Administration Is Quietly Resegregating the American Workforce
Dersh Can’t Stop Dershing
Alan Dershowitz hand-delivered to the president in the Oval Office this week a draft of his upcoming book “Could President Trump Constitutionally Serve a Third Term?” and told Trump the Constitution wasn’t clear on the issue, the WSJ reports.
Quote of the Day
Vanity Fair photographer Christopher Anderson:
I’ll give you a little anecdote: Stephen Miller was perhaps the most concerned about the portrait session. He asked me, “Should I smile or not smile?” and I said, “How would you want to be portrayed?” We agreed that we would do a bit of both. And then when we were finished, he comes up to me to shake my hand and say goodbye. And he says to me, “You know, you have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be kind to people.” And I looked at him and I said, “You know, you do, too.”
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Sigh. So now the president has the power to fire any Civil Servant he doesn't like, and if the reason he doesn't like them is that they are female and/or minority, that's just OK. Why doesn't he just say that states that refuse to set up a system of "separate but equal" schools won't get funding for anything? These Extremes would probably overturn Brown v Board to accommodate him because Brown is just too DEI.
Katsas and Rao have won the DCC three-member appellate panel lottery multiple times this year, and have constantly headed-up 2-1 decisions going to the trump regime in a variety of appeals, many of which embed the "unitary executive" theory. But fortunately, when motions succeed on further appeal to the appellate court *en banc*, their rubbishy decisions are rightfully overturned.
But of course, next stop is Scotus, and we all know the game plan there.