Insiders Describe the Trump FBI Clown Show in Vivid, Buffoonish Detail
INSIDE: Dan Bongino ... Charlie Kirk ... Bari Weiss
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Desperate to Keep His Job, Patel Did the White House’s Bidding
A new lawsuit containing devastating allegations about the clownish politicization of the FBI calls into serious question whether the bureau — under the nominal control of Kash Patel — is up to the task of investigating a major case like the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Hours before Patel befooled himself by live-tweeting the serial apprehension then release of two different people mistakenly believed to be Kirk’s assailant, three fired senior FBI officials described in vivid detail a bureau nearly crippled by the social media obsessions of Patel and his top deputy Dan Bongino.
The three men — former acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll Jr., Steven Jensen, and Spencer Evans — sued in federal court in D.C., claiming their terminations were political retaliation in violation of the First and Fifth Amendments and unlawful under other various protections for FBI employees. The named defendants are Patel, Attorney General Pam Bondi, the FBI, the Justice Department, the Executive Office of the President, and the United States.
The entire complaint is worth a read to appreciate the buffoonish of Patel and Bongino, but also of a White House that variously:
used an inexperienced 29-year-old staffer to vet candidates to lead the FBI;
refused to fix a clerical error that made Driscoll the acting director instead of the acting deputy director.
But the overall impression left by the lawsuit is far worse: an FBI supine to the Trump White House, led by feckless loyalists who easily wilt under pressure from the likes of deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
With striking specificity that suggests Driscoll kept contemporaneous notes, the lawsuit recounts numerous episodes in which Patel and Bongino claimed they were under pressure from the White House and MAGA trolls on social media. Patel even went so far as to admit that the purges of FBI officials are illegal, will result in lawsuits, and force him to be deposed, the lawsuit alleges.
“Patel explained that he had to fire the people his superiors told him to fire, because his ability to keep his own job depended on the removal of the agents who worked on cases involving the President,” the lawsuit alleges.
Putting pliant doofuses in charge of the FBI strengthens White House control of federal law enforcement, which Trump has long threatened and has now begun to use to exact retribution against political foes.
Kirk Gunman Still on the Loose
A manhunt continues this morning for the gunman who assassinated 31-year-old conservative activist Charlie Kirk on a university campus in Utah. Two different men were initially detained in connection with the shooting but were later released. Video from the scene appears to show the gunman on the roof of a nearby building immediately after a single shot struck Kirk in the neck.
Trump Threatens Broad Retaliation for Kirk Killing
The mix of public and social media reaction to the Kirk assassination is nearly unbearable to observe. Outside of the hotheaded reactions, it was striking that some mainstream news outlets veered into lionizing Kirk despite his extreme politics. At MSNBC, commentator Matthew Dowd was fired for inartful on-air comments that noted Kirk’s extremism, despite his apology that he hadn’t intended to blame Kirk for his own shooting.
All of that, though — even the wave of right-wing threats of retaliation — paled next to the president of the United States making a televised address from the Oval Office attacking the “radical left” and suggesting he would use the power of the federal government to go after his political foes as payback for Kirk’s death:
One Trump dynamic on display here is that when bad things happen on his watch he reasserts some semblance of control by raging louder. Powerless to events, he projects power with anger, reactivity, and threats. Even when he is the one in charge, he becomes the complainer-in-chief, Karen-ing his way to the front of the line to see the manager. It suits the media of TV and social media, even if in the real world it tends to emphasize weakness and ineptitude.
Trump DOJ Retreats From Bogus Claim in Court
When Kirk was assassinated, I was listening in on a federal court hearing in D.C. on the Trump administration’s aborted Labor Day removals of hundreds of unaccompanied Guatemalan children. The most newsworthy development to come out of the hearing on a preliminary injunction was the Trump DOJ retreating from its prior position that the parents of the children had requested their repatriation.
In what is now a predictable pattern from the administration, DOJ official Drew Ensign made certain factual representations during an emergency hearing over the Labor Day weekend. Those representations later turned out to be false, misleading, or incomplete. A different DOJ lawyer showed up in court with a modified position so the judge can’t take Ensign to task.
In yesterday’s hearing, U.S. District Judge Tim Kelly noted how the government’s representations have “evolved.” Kelly didn’t immediately rule, but he seemed inclined to issue a preliminary injunction barring removals of minor children without giving them the due process required under the law. He seemed mostly interested in determining how broadly he can legally craft such an injunction.
More Bad Facts in U.S. Attack on Venezuelan Boat
The NYT (and later the WSJ) reported that in the moments before the U.S. Navy attacked an alleged drug-running boat off the coast of Venezuela it had appeared to turn back toward shore, further undermining the shaky legal claim that the United States was acting in self-defense.
There was already enough wrong with this incident, as Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman writes in a new piece for Just Security: The Many Ways in Which the September 2 Caribbean Strike was Unlawful … and the Grave Line the Military Has Crossed.
Quote of the Day
“This situation brings us the closest we have been to open conflict since World War II.”– Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, on the first time NATO planes have engaged Russia over allied airspace
Purge Watch
On a 2-1 vote, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overruled the district court and reinstated Shira Perlmutter as the register of copyrights at the Library of Congress while the appeal of her case continues.
Greg Sargent: The judge used Trump’s own tweet against him to buttress the case that he unlawfully fired Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook.
Bari Weiss in Line for Major Role at CBS News
Indebted to the Trump White House for facilitating its acquisition of CBS, the merged company’s new owner is poised to buy Bari Weiss’ Free Press and give her a prominent role as editor in chief or co-president of CBS News, the NYT reports.
The Topsy Turvy Epstein Scandal
The first casualty of the renewed, through-the-looking-glass version of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal ends up being … the British ambassador to the United States.
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
Nice reporting. I appreciate you calling out the mainstream media for their supposedly fair and balanced reporting. I’m pretty sure that firing the voices that call it as they see it and hiring ones that placate the administration won’t make any media organizations more palatable to anyone but the truly biased viewers. It appears that Woody Allen was right, commentary and dissent have merged to become dysentery.
Do I like Morning Memo? It is the one review of the news available to me that I believe is credible and read avidly each and every day. Thank you, today, for tying the ridiculous and ultimately devastating destruction of the FBI to the difficulty of tracking down Kirk's killer. By the way, I was not aware of Kirk, and I consider myself a widely read person and what Trump would probably call a far left liberal. Perhaps I read about Kirk in the aftermath of the election as an orhanizer of young me, but he wasn't a personality I ever followed. I suspect this is true of most people in my political category, so accusing us of plotting his death is as wacky as Trump usually is.