Pam Bondi Finally Relents in US Attorney Fiasco

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Judges Appoint Interim NJ US Attorney

After a monthslong saga in which the Trump DOJ put at risk dozens of criminal prosecutions with brazenly unlawful efforts to install an interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Attorney General Pam Bondi finally stood down.

After conferring with DOJ leadership, the local federal judges exercised their statutory authority to name Robert Frazer, a longtime career federal prosecutor in New Jersey, as the interim U.S. attorney.

Bondi had immediately fired the previous interim U.S. attorney named by the judges there, and had quickly fired similar judge-appointed prosecutors in the Northern District of New York and the Eastern District of Virginia. But this time, the two sides worked out an arrangement of some kind, though it wasn’t clear why Bondi finally capitulated.

U.S. District Judge Matthew W. Brann, brought in from outside the district, had previously ruled that Trump’s original nominee for the permanent position, Alina Habba, was unlawfully serving as interim U.S. attorney and that Bondi’s naming of a “triumvirate” of three DOJ lawyers to jointly run the office was similarly unlawful. Brann had warned that Bondi’s shenanigans were putting federal criminal prosecutions across the state in jeopardy because criminal defendants were succeeding in challenging the legality of the actions by the leaderless U.S. Attorney’s Office.

In a notice to Brann of his appointment, Frazer said it “followed consultations between the District Court and the Department of Justice’s senior leadership.” Importantly, Frazer told Brann that the Justice Department “is prepared to seek superseding indictments” in cases where the unlawful leadership of the U.S. Attorney’s Office has called into question the legal viability of the prosecutions. A do-over, basically.

An absolutely blistering decision last week by U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi in one of the jeopardized prosecutions — a child porn case — may have been the final straw that forced Bondi to relent. Among other things, Quraishi’s ruling ordered the trio of lawyers purporting to lead the office to appear in court in the coming weeks to defend the legality of arrangement.

“You have lost the confidence and the trust of this court,” Quraishi told a DOJ lawyer. “You have lost the confidence and the trust of the New Jersey legal community, and you are losing the trust and confidence of the public.”

A week later, Bondi stopped the effort to bypass Senate confirmation and federal judges, and a legitimate U.S. attorney was appointed by the judges — at least in New Jersey. It’s not yet clear if this means Bondi is also relenting in other districts where interim U.S. attorneys have been contested.

SCOTUS Tackles Late-Arriving Ballots

• TPM’s Kate Riga: Fox News-Pilled SCOTUS Invents Wild Hypotheticals to Justify Curtailing Right to Vote by Mail
• Politico: Supreme Court worries Trump’s attack on late ballots could also threaten early voting
• Chris Geidner: The case “likely will come down to how Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett decide they would like to resolve the case.”

Voting Rights Watch

• Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, California, a Republican who is running for governor, has seized more than 650,000 ballots in a purported investigation of election fraud in the 2025 special election for Proposition 50, Democrats’ mid-decade redistricting vehicle.
• Republican Ben Ginsberg and Democrat Bob Bauer have launched the Bipartisan American Election Project to fight back against President Trump’s efforts to take election powers from the states and put them under federal control.

A (Exclusive) Play in Three Acts

The three-day evidentiary hearing that I covered in Baltimore over the Trump administration’s ongoing violations of a court-approved settlement agreement involving unaccompanied minors seeking asylum culminated yesterday with the Trump DOJ confirming to the judge that 91 additional instances of wrongful deportations had been discovered in recent days but not reported to opposing counsel or to the court.

U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher ordered the administration to investigate the circumstances of the deportations, the timing of the discovery, who was involved, and why the government had not disclosed them immediately.

Here’s the series of three exclusives from the hearing, which was only covered by TPM:

• Thursday: Trump Admin Wrongfully Deported More Than 100 Asylum Seekers
• Friday: Judge Orders DOJ to Get Answers On Wrongful Deportations
• Monday: Trump Admin Confirms 91 Wrongful Deportations of Asylum Seeker

Big Deal

Over the weekend, the Trump-controlled Merit Service Protection Board, historically an independent agency that protects civil service workers from retaliations, embraced President Trump’s unfettered interpretation of his Article II powers to affirm the firing of executive branch immigration judges, Bloomberg reported:

The two-member MSPB panel reversed an administrative judge’s decision that reinstated the fired DOJ employees. The board determined it lacks jurisdiction to intervene in the attorney general’s constitutionally protected terminations.

The decision strips immigration judges of civil service protections, but is also provides the legal basis to approve of Trump’s mass terminations of civil service workers without cause or due process:

The MSPB, a quasi-judicial executive branch agency conducting initial review of federal employees’ wrongful termination claims, had paused other similar cases, waiting until the late Friday decision on the immigration judges to weigh in on whether Trump has such authority to override statutory removal protections.

The MSPB is down to two GOP members and one vacancy. Trump purported to fire the Democratic MSPB chair Cathy Harris last year, and she appealed her case to the Supreme Court last week.

Latest From the Middle East …

• WSJ: The back-channel diplomacy behind Trump’s U-turn on attacking Iran’s power plants
• Reuters: Trump approved joint attack on Iran after call from Netanyahu
• Maps: How the Iran Conflict Is Widening

Pentagon Continues to Harass Reporters

It sure looks like the Pentagon already had a plan in place to retaliate against journalists if its restrictive press policies lost in court. After a judge Friday blocked the press restrictions in a lawsuit brought by the NYT, the Pentagon announced on Monday a new set of restrictions that includes moving all reporters out of correspondents’ corridor to an annex on the grounds and requiring authorized escorts of journalists who wish to go inside the Pentagon.

The Corruption: SEC Edition

Strong reporting from Reuters on last week’s resignation of SEC Enforcement Division Director Margaret Ryan:

• She “clashed with agency leaders over the direction of its enforcement program, including the handling of cases with ties to President ​Donald Trump and his family”
• She “wanted to be more aggressive in pursuing charges for fraud and other misconduct including in cases that touched the president’s circle, but faced resistance from SEC chair Paul Atkins and other top Republican political appointees.”
• “One case that sparked tension involved cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun, a major backer of the Trump ​family’s World Liberty Financial venture, and another involved Tesla boss Elon Musk …”

Ryan — a former Marine, military judge, and clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — had little experience in securities law, Reuters reports.

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