New Purges Continue to Hollow Out the Trump DOJ
INSIDE: Gregory Bovino ... Lisa Monaco ... Jim Comey
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Removing the Few Remaining Guardrails
While the Trump DOJ has been hijacked to target Donald Trump’s perceived foes with criminal investigation and prosecution, it continues to undergo a slow-motion purge of career professionals that is flying a little bit under the radar.
The purge of career people – in many cases in violation of laws and procedures meant to protect them from untoward political influence – is important in its own right. But it also contributes to the larger scheme of removing roadblocks and guardrails that might prevent or slow down even more radical abuses of office by Trump and the political appointees at the Justice Department.
Among the latest purge developments we’ve learned over in the past new days:
DC: A group of agents photographed kneeling with protestors in D.C. during the June 2020 Black Lives Matter protests over the police killing of George Floyd have been fired en masse. It’s not clear how many agent were fired, but it could be as many as 20. Some of them has already been reassigned earlier this year in what amounted to demotions.
Miami: Attorney General Pam Bondi summarily fired an up-and-coming assistant U.S. attorney in Miami reportedly over blog posts critical of President Trump written during his first term, before the AUSA joined the Justice Department. Will Rosenzweig was fired via email from Bondi while he was observing Rosh Hashanah; he didn’t notice anything was amiss until the next day when his office-issued mobile phone wasn’t working.
Sacramento: The acting U.S. attorney in Sacramento says she was fired by President Trump shortly after warning Border Patrol honcho Gregory Bovino that a court order prevented him from arresting people without probable cause in the Eastern District of California. Michele Beckwith was fired July 15 less than six hours after her warning to Bovino, according to documents reviewed by the NYT.
Trump’s Fave Border Patrol Guy Admits to Racial Profiling
Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander who is now running the Trump administration’s mass deportation operation in Chicago, admitted during an interview to detaining people on the basis of how they look, the Sun-Times reports:
“You know, there’s many different factors that go into something like that,” Bovino said. “It would be agent experience, intelligence that indicates there’s illegal aliens in a particular place or location.
“Then, obviously, the particular characteristics of an individual, how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?” he said to the reporter, a tall, middle-aged man of Anglo descent.
You’ll recall that Justice Brett Kavanaugh in one of the Supreme Court’s recent emergency docket rulings earlier this month condoned using apparent ethnicity and race as a factor in deciding which people to stop.
Quote of the Day
“I spoke to the governor, she was very nice. But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place … it looks like terrible.”–a befuddled President Trump, feebly trying to square the difference between the real world reports from Orgeon’s governor on a peaceful Portland and the propaganda he’d been fed before announcing a plan to send troops to the city he described as “War ravaged”
Picking Through The Comey Indictment
A few new tidbits:
WSJ: “Tensions over the case came to a head … after some administration officials, including Ed Martin, a Justice Department official pursuing cases of interest to Trump, privately told the president that the Justice Department was slow-walking cases against Trump critics, people familiar with the discussions said.”
Acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, with no prior experience as a prosecutor, stumbled through securing the Comey indictment, the NYT reports: “At one point, she entered the wrong courtroom. When she found the right one, she stood on the wrong side of the judge, then appeared confused about the paperwork she just had signed.”
Politico: “[T]he case against the former FBI director and longtime Trump nemesis may quickly end in disappointment — and even humiliation — for the prosecutor who was conscripted by the president to bring the charges.”
New Trump Targets Alert
With President Trump making threats to broaden the abuse of the Justice Department to target his political enemies with criminal investigation and prosecutions, two new targets stand out:
President Trump has turned his ire on former FBI Director Christopher Wray, his own appointee to the post who resigned immediately before Trump took office for a second term. In a Sunday phone call with NBC News, Trump sicced the Justice Department on Wray: “I would imagine. I would certainly imagine. I would think they are doing that,” Trump said when he was asked whether DOJ should investigate him. Trump connected his complaint about Wray to a bogus conspiracy theory that the FBI instigated Trump supporters to attack the capitol on Jan. 6.
In a social media post over the weekend, President Trump threatened the private sector job of former Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, who is now a top executive at Microsoft. The president said Microsoft “should immediately terminate” her employment. Monaco oversaw the two criminal investigations of Trump while the No. 2 at DOJ during the Bien administration. She has already been a named target of a Trump executive order stripping security clearances from people he perceived as enemies.
The Never Ending Jan. 6 Revisionism: False Flag Edition
In a weekend social media post, President Trump embraced and reiterated the bogus claim that the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was fomented by the FBI.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson apparently got the memo and spewed the baseless conspiracy theory Sunday on national TV:
Johnson comment comes as he has created a revisionist Jan. 6 committee to rewrite the history of the attack, saying in the same TV interview that it’s “a committee investigating the previous committee.”
SCOTUS Hands Trump Huge Win on Lawless Rescission
In a stunning win for President Trump, the Supreme Court on Friday used its emergency docket to clear the way for him to continue to withhold billions of dollars in foreign aid despite congressional authorization of the monies. The decision implicitly ratified the president’s use of a pocket rescission, the refusal to spend the money before it expires tomorrow at the end of the fiscal year.
In the second fiery-for-her dissent of the week, Justice Elena Kagan noted that the court’s decision meant the foreign aid monies will now never reach the intended recipients and castigated the administration’s position that it would suffer irreparable harm by … following the law:
[T]hat is just the price of living under a Constitution that gives Congress the power to make spending decisions through the enactment of appropriations laws. If those laws require obligation of the money, and if Congress has not by rescission or other action relieved the Executive of that duty, then the Executive must comply. It cannot be heard to complain, as it does here, that the laws clash with the President’s differing view of “American values” and “American interests.” That inconsistency, in other words, is not a cognizable harm, to be weighed in the equitable balance. It is merely a frustration any President must bear.
Against Hopium and Doomerism
Binary categories of “Winning/losing” – or “weak/strong” – are just not very helpful right now. They tend to reproduce mood swings more than they help generate plausible analysis. Every Trumpian embarrassment (remember the “Liberation Day” tariff debacle?) is destined to cause a new round of “Trump is weak, he is losing” pieces; every authoritarian escalation is accompanied by a chorus of “Democracy is dead, Trump won” post-mortems. My point is not merely to say that the truth lies “in the middle” (it might be far closer to one end of the spectrum than to the other) – but to remind us all that we must consider the bigger picture and how the many different actions and reactions are connected.
New Banned Words
The Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy has added “climate change,” “green” and “decarbonization” to its “list of words to avoid,” according to a Friday email obtained by Politico.
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As always a useful memo. Thank you. And some thoughts... First, I’m not sure if your use of “Hopium” was intended as a direct criticism of Simon Rosenberg…but it came off like that. Second: While I understand the peril of the binary, human beings are so often reward driven. Those who are unused to having to fight for their rights, or indeed their lives, may need the kind of optimistic encouragement Zimmer, and you, seem to disaparage in this piece. New to activism folks often want encouragement that their actions make a difference. I see that as part of the role of people like Kuo, Rosenberg and Hubbell, Solnit and HCR. Telling people that fighting fascism is necessary, and that sometimes there are wins, is essential IRL to gathering new folks to the opposition. There is a vacuum left by the absence of a strong opposition leader who can break through; we have no Churchill, FDR, Havel, Navalny or MLK Jr. at the moment. Newsom, Murphy or Pritzger have their moments, then fade. Those opposing this regime who are at what feels like the 25th mile of a marathon (even though it’s only the fifth) need to have a cheering section and a bottle of water. Having read comments on so many of the current political posts, the complexities of Zimmer’s piece are all true, as well as beautifully and clearly expressed, but may be too much for many outside the Beltline. Just imho.
The Thomas Zimmerman quote is very apt to the moment. Instant gratification amongst us is as deeply embedded as it was for the “sunshine patriots” known to Thomas Paine. Bending the arc of history is seldom accomplished but remains a hope spoken by a man, who, when he died had a 31% approval rating. Importantly, corporate media framed a laundered narrative of bothsiderism, whataboutism, to promote Trump, who would deliver their mergers despite the antitrust laws. Defeating Trump last year would not have ended the MAGA movement which has always been predominant in Americas history. And future election victory followed by appeasement and hesitancy will not end the MAGAs. In other words, it is likely that there will always be a struggle for democracy. And there always has been that struggle. Now though, it’s called a horse race, aided and abetted by a barrage of corporate media/DC insider blather.