Pam Bondi’s US Attorney Gambit Smacked Down by Judge as Unconstitutional
INSIDE: Alina Habba ... John Cornyn ... Alexander Butterfield
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Lawlessness and Disorder
In a searing ruling, a federal judge has rejected Attorney General Pam Bondi’s ham-handed workaround to the disqualification of Alina Habba as U.S. attorney for New Jersey.
The same outside judge who disqualified Habba, U.S. District Judge William Brann of the Middle District of Pennsylvania, ruled that Bondi’s appointment of a trio of DOJ attorneys to run the U.S. Attorney’s Office violates the Constitution and federal statute.
The triumvirate approach was yet another backdoor way of bypassing the Senate confirmation process for a permanent U.S. attorney and denying district judges the chance to exercise their statutory power to name interim U.S. attorneys.
“One year into this administration, it is plain that President Trump and his top
aides have chafed at the limits on their power set forth by law and the Constitution,” Brann wrote. “To avoid these roadblocks, this administration frequently purports to have discovered enormous grants of executive power hidden in the vagaries and silences of the code.”
What’s critical to understanding how these cases are playing out, not just in New Jersey but in other jurisdictions where Bondi is doing President Trump’s bidding on U.S. attorneys, is that the challenges are being brought in run-of-the-mill criminal cases. Defense attorneys are challenging the lawfulness and legitimacy of actions taken by federal prosecutors in leaderless U.S. attorney’s offices.
The unlawful workaround has created “a chaos that pervades criminal prosecutions” in New Jersey, Brann wrote, explicitly framed his ruling around the risk to public safety of invalidating criminal prosecutions en masse: “[W]hy does the fate of thousands of criminal prosecutions in this District potentially rest on the legitimacy of an unprecedented and byzantine leadership structure? The President doesn’t like that he cannot simply appoint whomever he wants.”
Jan. 6 Never Ends
In an expansion of the Trump DOJ’s unprecedented use of a criminal investigation to boost 2020 right-wing election conspiracy theories, the FBI served a federal grand jury subpoena last week on the Arizona state Senate for records relating to its “audit” of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County. While the Cyber Ninjas audit was bogus, it still found that Biden had won the state’s largest county.
“Because of that review, the state Senate retained election records that ordinarily would have been disposed of by now, according to a former staff member familiar with the matter,” the WaPo reports. “The person said those records include images of ballots and absentee envelopes, the tally of cast votes, and the server software.”
Adds ‘Insult to Injury’
Law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 are dismayed that, while the long-delayed plaque honoring them has finally been put on display, it is in a part of the building that is not accessible to the public. The plaque, which is mandated by law, was stymied by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and now hangs on the Senate side of the Capitol basically until the House GOP gets its senses back, whenever that may be, and a decision can be made on a more prominent place to hang it.
Immigration Appeals Gambit Blocked
Over the weekend, U.S. District Judge Randolph D. Moss of Washington, D.C., blocked the Trump administration’s unilateral effort to summarily dispense with thousands of immigration appeals.
“Under the new policy, all appeals would be automatically dismissed unless a majority of the Board of Immigration Appeals, the body that reviews decisions by immigration judges, voted to reconsider the case within 10 days,” the NYT reports.
How Many AEA Detainees Were There?
In a new status report in the original Alien Enemies Act case, the ACLU has alerted U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of Washington, D.C., that nearly one year since two flights of Venezuelan nationals took off for El Salvador’s CECOT prison, the Trump administration continues to give incomplete or conflicting data on how many AEA detainee there were:
Plaintiffs’ counsel received a class list of 137 class members from the Government …. Plaintiffs have some reason to believe the 137 is not exhaustive. Specifically, counsel notes that there are two individuals … who are not on the Government’s class list.
The new filing, which came the same day that the Trump administration asked Boasberg to stay his latest ruling in the case while it appeals that decision, also provided update figures on what the detainees wish to do to vindicate the due process rights they were initially denied. According to the filing, of the 91 former detainees who have shared their preferences with the ACLU :
22 want to return to U.S. to pursue their claims, knowing they’ll likely be detained once they arrive; and
68 want to pursue their claims through court filings remotely.
The ACLU continues to try to reach the approximately 50 other former detainees.
More Evidence U.S. Struck Iranian School
Markings on purported fragments of a missile that struck an elementary school in southern Iraq last week indicated it was a U.S.-made weapon, according to a NYT analysis.
Meanwhile, President Trump continued his one-man disinformation campaign to blame Iran for the incident, preposterously claiming that the Islamic republic has its own U.S.-made Tomahawk missiles.
Narrator, with a heavy sigh: Iran does not possess Tomahawks.
A Chilling Read
The WSJ has an in-depth report on the last days of the Iranian missile frigate that became the first combat kill by a U.S. submarine since World War II.
U.S. Confirms Military Ops in Ecuador
Last week’s reporting that the Trump administration had expanded its lawless campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats to include land-based operations in Ecuador was murky about the level of direct U.S. involvement against drug traffickers. But now the Trump administration has sent a notice of the Ecuador operation to Congress under the War Powers Act.
The operations against drug traffickers, rebranded by the Trump administration as narco-terrorists, were reportedly advised and supported by U.S. Special Forces. But the War Powers Act notice would seem to confirm a more direct, if still unspecified, level of U.S. involvement, which would be consistent with President Trump’s repeated promises that the U.S. would be taking it to the drug cartels on land not just at sea.
LOL … Sob
News that President Trump is withholding his expected endorsement of Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) over state Attorney General Ken Paxton in the GOP primary runoff for Senate in Texas as a way of leveraging Senate Republicans into passing the SAVE Act is on the hand a comical conundrum. Sit back and pass the popcorn.
On the other hand, the ridiculousness of the situation highlights the extent to which nothing matters to Trump as much as prevailing in the midterms, by hook or by crook. “It will guarantee the midterms,” Trump told House Republicans, who have already passed two versions of the SAVE Act. “If you don’t get it, big trouble, my opinion.”
For what it’s worth, Paxton — on the verge of losing Trump’s endorsement last week after he finished second to Cornyn in Tuesday’s election — engineered this conundrum for the GOP by promising to drop out of the race if the Senate passed the SAVE Act.
Senate GOP leaders have been unsuccessful in puncturing the right-wing myth that they can overcome a Democrat filibuster through clever parliamentary maneuvering and pass the bill. In short, it’s a self-made clusterfuck that epitomizes the fever dreams and magical thinking of the Trump II presidency.
Be the Next Alexander Butterfield
More than half a century later, Alexander Butterfield, who died yesterday at 99, still stands as an exemplar of honesty and candor against one’s own interest for revealing in the summer of 1973 the existence of a taping system in the Nixon White House. Butterfield’s revelation blew open the slow-rolling Watergate scandal, which had commenced the previous summer with the break-in at DNC headquarters and would culminate the following summer with Nixon’s resignation.
Butterfield’s role has always been a little more complicated than that though. He wasn’t exactly a whistleblower in the classic sense: someone who comes forward to volunteer previously unknown information, often at great personal risk. Rather, he was the Federal Aviation Administration chief who, by virtue of being a former Nixon White House aide, was a Watergate witness. What set Butterfield apart was that when he asked about the taping system, he told the truth, at some personal and political risk. He didn’t participate in the coverup.
In some ways, that’s a low bar. If you’re looking for more inspiration, I have often found it in the person of Donald G. Sanders, the Republican staff attorney who first sussed out from Butterfield the existence of the taping system, in a closed-door interview three days before his public testimony to the Senate Watergate committee.
Both figures stand in sharp contrast to the current political moment.
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Thank you, David, for noting the passing of Alexander Butterfield, who was but one of the hundreds of Nixon Administration people involved in the Watergate scandal, and one of the very few who managed to emerge with his dignity intact. I remember vividly his testimony before the Senate Watergate/Irvin Committee, which in the figurative sense was a true bombshell in the way it exploded across millions of TV screens, unexpected as it was — at least to the viewing public. And important to note, he was one of several Republicans who sucked it up and told the goddam truth when called upon, in blinding contrast to the ne'er-do-wells, poltroons, and cultists compromising the vast number of GOPers in and out of Congress today.
Thank you David, especially for Alexander Butterfield.
I'm hoping someone in the current regime, will have enough personal honor, to step forward with receipts and expose Trumpgate.
I am continually dismayed that Trump can chit chat with the Murder Hornet of Russia, Putin from his Florida patio, on his cell phone.