Trump Takes His Corrupt Retribution Against The Justice Department
INSIDE: Jack Smith ... Stewart Rhodes ... Pete Hegseth
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨FIVE ALARM FIRE🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨
President Trump’s corrupt retribution against the Justice Department is now fully underway, with a series of moves over the past 24 hours that in any other era would be the defining political and legal story of the age. Today, it didn’t even make the front page of the New York Times.
Trump’s acting attorney general sacked the career prosecutors who worked on the Trump prosecutions. Among those let go were Molly Gaston, J.P. Cooney, Anne McNamara, and Mary Dohrmann, NBC News reported.
Trump’s acting U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., a political lackey from Missouri, launched an investigation of the prosecutors who brought the criminal charges against hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters.
DOJ’s most senior career official was sidelined by being moved to a department backwater. Separately, the DOJ official who oversaw the prosecution of public corruption, who had previously been reassigned to the same backwater, resigned rather than continue in a reduced role.
The corrupt wholesale cashiering of career prosecutors who worked on the Mar-a-Lago and Jan. 6 cases against Trump was the most egregious of the corrupt acts, in defiant violation of the civil service rules and the rule of law. But the most absurd development was acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin’s purported investigation into why DOJ had pursued obstruction charges against Jan. 6 rioters. While the Roberts Court ultimately cut prosecutors legs out from under them, the obstruction charge was ratified by multiple federal trial judges and the DC Circuit before the Supreme Court held otherwise.
If you were taking a measured approach to see how things played out once Trump took office, the waiting is over. It’s a five-alarm fire at the Justice Department. Ousting independent career prosecutors is just Step 1, a prelude to Step 2, which is using the Justice Department to protect Trump and his administration from accountability for their wrongdoing. Step 3 turns DOJ into a weapon against anyone who Trump perceives as less than fully loyal and obedient.
The retribution is being exacted precisely as promised. As Joyce Vance put it: “The real witch hunt is here.”
Jack Smith Lawyers Up
Former Special Counsel Jack Smith has retained private counsel: Peter Koski of Covington & Burling.
Stewart Rhodes Is Free To Roam The Capitol
A federal judge in DC lifted an earlier order barring Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes from coming to DC or visiting the Capitol with prior court approval, agreeing with the Justice Department that Trump’s commutation of Rhodes canceled any post-sentence supervision.
Pardoned Jan. 6 Rioter Killed In Police Shooting
“An Indiana man who was recently pardoned for his participation in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was shot and killed during a traffic stop by a sheriff’s deputy Sunday.”–NBC News
Quote Of The Day
“This raises an existential threat with respect to the primary independent oversight function in the federal government. We have preserved the independence of inspectors general by making them not swing with every change in political party.”–Mark Greenblatt, the Trump-appointed inspector general for the Interior Department, on the Friday night purge of inspectors general across government, including himself
Destruction Watch
OMB: White House pauses on all federal grants, loans and other financial-assistance programs pending further review. That last part is key: Trump is using the paralyzing freezes of various government operations to take extra-legal control of the decision-making over what is spent and how it is spent.
USAID: “The Trump administration has cleared out much of the leadership of the U.S. Agency for International Development, placing dozens of career officials on administrative leave Monday after accusing the agency of trying to ‘circumvent’ President Donald Trump’s executive order freezing all foreign aid, U.S. officials familiar with the matter said.”–WaPo
OPM: Schedule F is back with a vengeance.
Pointless Waste And Destruction
“The Trump administration has instructed organizations in other countries to stop disbursing H.I.V. medications purchased with U.S. aid, even if the drugs have already been obtained and are sitting in local clinics.”–NYT (emphasis added)
Sorry, It’s Time To Learn About The Impoundment Act
Let me get you started with Steve Vladeck’s latest: The Impoundment Crisis of 2025.
U.S. Gov’t Used To Perpetuate The Othering
Transgender Americans: In a new executive order, President Trump used demeaning fundamentalist Christian-inflected language that portends a purge of transgender people from the military:
Consistent with the military mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false “gender identity” divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service. Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life. A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.
Black Americans: The Trump administration has barred the State Department from commemorating Black history month.
Non-Confederate Americans: As he arrived at the Pentagon for his first business day on the job as defense secretary, Pete Hegseth want out of his way to revert to using the former name for the Army base in North Carolina:
Pure Chicken Shit
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) assured Pete Hegseth’s ex-sister-in-law that if she came forward with her damaging testimony against him it could convince senators to oppose his nomination, the WSJ reports. She came forward and then Tillis cast the deciding vote to confirm Hegseth.
They Know What It Meant
Elon Musk’s “My heart goes out to you” takes off as ironic far-right catchphrase.
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I guess it’s another way un neurodivergent fail: we could see how profoundly unfit for office Trump was (and how it worsened post-J6) in a way normal people couldn’t…
Anyway.
Struck me this morning that, to my very limited knowledge, Trump is the first person in history who sought to rule a nation to make it as awful as possible. Or, less hyperbolically maybe, to spend all his energies on vindictiveness and self-enrichment.
And yesterday’s “striking” was that he makes Hitler look classy (Holocaust notwithstanding).
And we freely chose him…
It’s all too amazing for my wiring…
The look on Musk's face hardly has the vibe of an affectionate "My heart goes out to you ".