The Rank Racism of Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon
INSIDE: Pam Bondi ... Todd Blanche ... Kate Marvel
When a Christian Nationalist Runs DoD
Military women and people of color somehow keep finding themselves in the crosshairs under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
A New York Times story out this morning is ostensibly about Hegseth personally striking four Army officers from the list for promotion to one-star generals: “Two of the officers targeted by Mr. Hegseth are Black and two are women on a promotion list that consists of about three dozen officers, most of whom are white men, senior military officials said.”
But a rancid anecdote within the story shows how explicitly racist things are within a Pentagon run by a Christian nationalist, especially if you’re Black and a woman.
It involves an unrelated fight last summer between Hegseth chief of staff Ricky Buria and Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll over the promotion of Maj. Gen. Antoinette R. Gant as commander of the Military District of Washington, a command which includes many ceremonial functions in the nation’s capital:
Mr. Buria told Mr. Driscoll that President Trump would not want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events, the officials said.
Mr. Driscoll was shocked. “The president is not a racist or sexist,” he told Mr. Buria, according to the officials. Mr. Driscoll then raised the issue with a senior White House official who agreed with his assessment of Mr. Trump.
For his part, Buria denies the NYT account as a “made up story.”
The coup de grace is the inclusion of this photo of Trump with Gen. Gant:
The Racism Comes Straight From the Top
Hegeth’s ‘Orwellian’ Attack on Anthropic
U.S. District Judge Rita Lin of San Francisco granted a preliminary injunction blocking the Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk and its demand that all federal contractors cease doing business with the AI company. The judge found that “these measures appear designed to punish Anthropic” for going public about its refusal to allow DoD to use its products “in fully autonomous lethal weapons or the mass surveillance of Americans.”
“Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government,” Lin wrote.
The judge delayed the effect of her ruling for seven days to allow the Trump administration to appeal it.
Four People Killed in Lawless Boat Strike
In the 47th known attack on alleged drug smuggling boats, the U.S. military killed four people in the Caribbean, bring the death toll in the lawless campaign to at least 163 people.
Senate Votes to End DHS Shutdown
Overnight, Senate Republicans and the Trump White House finally threw in the towel and passed a DHS funding bill that excludes ICE and some parts of CBP, acceding to the demands that Senate Democrats have been making for weeks, as TPM’s Emine Yücel reports.
Mass Deportation Watch
Bloomberg: DOJ Struggles to Convince Judges to End Foreign Student Lawsuits
WCHS: The state of West Virginia has stopped accepting new immigration detainees from ICE after a series of federal court rulings in the state that detainees were being held without lawful authority or due process. “Continued detention without individualized custody determinations, after this court’s repeated holdings that such detention violates the Fifth Amendment, will result in legal consequences,” U.S. District Judge Joseph R. Goodwin wrote in an order earlier this month.
Bloomberg: Top Prosecutor Defending Trump Policies Quits to Help Immigrants
Trump DOJ Drops Its Arguments in 2 Cases
It’s highly irregular for the Justice Department to make these kinds of humiliatingly walkbacks, but it’s happened twice this week, both times in cases related to immigration:
In the J.O.P. case that I covered extensively over the past few days, the Trump DOJ formally withdrew yesterday its now debunked argument that the number of wrongful deportations of asylum seekers in violation of a court-approved settlement agreement was relatively small.
In a Manhattan federal case challenging the policy of arresting migrants at immigrations courts, where the DOJ abandoned its position earlier this week after admitting to a huge factual error that it attributed to unnamed ICE attorney, the judge issued a preservation order against DOJ for “all communications between and among a member of the USAO staff and/or any defendant in this action or his or her predecessor, successor, subordinates or representatives, including the ‘assigned ICE counsel.’”
Maybe Bondi Didn’t Exactly Cave on USAs?
New reporting from the New Jersey Globe leaves the impression that the Trump DOJ pushed federal judges in the state to appoint career DOJer Robert Frazer as interim U.S. attorney. After a monthslong impasse during which the Trump DOJ refused to abide judges naming an interim U.S. attorney, this account casts Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche as telling judges what he wanted:
Blanche told Chief District Judge Renée Marie Bumb late last week that he wanted Frazer appointed to the role, according to several people familiar with the discussions.
Frazer was vetted by the White House for the post and offered assurances that he had voted for Trump all three times, according to the Globe.
Still, Frazer seems to have a good reputation within the office, something I’ve independently heard as well.
Trump DOJ Watch: Todd Blanche Edition
During an appearance at a CPAC event, Deputy AG Blanche:
bragged that every DOJ or FBI employee who worked on the criminal investigations of Donald Trump has been fired, resigned, or took early retirement. “There is not a single man or woman at the Department of Justice who had anything to do with those prosecutions,” he boasted, saying that the total number of people purged was over 200.
opened the door wide to having ICE officers at polling places.
Quote of the Day
Climate scientist Kate Marvel, on why she resigned on from NASA:
I was naive. I thought that the benefits of doing science would be self-evident. And I anticipated that our science—as people who look at the planet and see that it’s changing—would come under scrutiny and even attack because the implications are politically inconvenient. We’ve seen that before, and that’s what I expected. What I did not expect was that [the Trump administration] would go after pediatric cancer research first. That they would go after Parkinson’s research first. And they would go after vaccines, the greatest invention of humanity. And that has shocked me, the fact that science is under attack, not because its conclusions are necessarily politically inconvenient but because it is a way of telling the truth. That has been the most disorienting and frightening aspect of all of this.
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See You Back Here Monday
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Thanks for the Kate Marvel link. Yes, it is science and facts that they are trying to do away with, the process for learning how to question. There is a reason why M.D., and Ph. D.'s are respected.
March tomorrow, write postcards, remember to love what is loveable.
"Mr. Buria told Mr. Driscoll that President Trump would not want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events, the officials said."
I'm wondering if two males inserted between trump and Major General Gantt is adequate to calm trump's easily-ruffled sensibilities. Next up: Gen. Gantt receives a suggestion to perhaps stand well behind trump at the next official event...or just call in sick, to spare trump any discomfort.