What Happened Outside the Blanche Hearing Was More Important Than What Happened Inside

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

The Bizarre Todd Blanche Split Screen

Perhaps never before has a nominee for attorney general come before the Senate with as clear of a track record already doing the job as Todd Blanche.

But it turns out that GOP senators — the only ones who can block Blanche’s confirmation — don’t need to look that far back to assess his work.

An unpredicted confluence of events Wednesday produced an extraordinary split screen, with the Justice Department continuing to operate as a rogue federal law enforcement apparatus even as Blanche spent most of the day testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Each of these developments was significant news in their own right, but the timing was remarkable and accentuated the whistling-past-the graveyard approach of GOP senators to Blanche’s confirmation:

Scheming to Avoid Senate Confirmation of U.S. Attorneys

In Washington state, Blanche immediately fired the interim U.S. attorney who had just been unanimously appointed by the federal judges there less than an hour earlier. The firing of Roger Rogoff — at least the third such dismissal of judge-appointed interim U.S. attorneys — sets up the potential for the first litigation directly challenging the president’s power to fire court-appointed U.S. attorneys.

For months, there have been rumblings that the federal judges in Seattle were looking for an appointee who would be willing to file suit if fired and had gone as far as formally asking candidates about their willingness to do so. Rogoff has retained an employment law firm, and in interviews after he was fired indicated he was considering challenging his termination.

“The president gets to choose his US attorney, but only with the advice and consent of the Senate,” Rogoff told Bloomberg. “We have a situation that is untenable, not constitutional, and not legal.”

Separately, in the Eastern District of Virginia, where Blanche had previously fired a court-appointed interim U.S. attorney, he named a local attorney Theo Stamos as the new first assistant U.S. attorney, which effectively makes her the top federal prosecutor there because the U.S. attorney position remains vacant. Stamos, formerly elected county prosecutor as a Democrat, has no prior federal prosecution experience.

All of this scheming is part of the Trump administration’s effort to bypass Senate confirmation of U.S. attorneys in mostly blue states, where the Senate’s blue slip tradition gives home state senators of the opposing party an effective veto over U.S. attorney nominees. Historically, that has led to accommodations by both sides to find consensus candidates, but President Trump prizes loyalty above comity.

Running Air Force One Leak Probe Out of White House

President Trump’s freakout over the New York Times’ reports on the inadequacies of his beloved new Qatari-gifted Air Force One has inadvertently revealed the extent to which Blanche is content to let the White House run DOJ.

Not only was FBI Director Kash Patel running the investigation from the White House last Friday, as previously reported, he was doing so alongside Trump Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, CNN reports: “Patel posted up in an office next to Wiles’ for roughly seven hours, as the two established what one source referred to as a ‘war room’ in the West Wing.”

As part of the investigation, some officials were asked to turn over their phones to investigators on White House grounds, CNN reports. Investigators have even sought out Secret Service agents who accompanied Trump on the trip to the NATO summit in Turkey that exposed the aircraft’s lack of missile defense capabilities compared to its predecessors, per the NYT.

The NYT report mirrors CNN’s account in making the unprecedented revelation that Wiles is “personally” leading the investigation with Patel.

One of the first investigative steps — which Blanche personally approved, he testified at his confirmation hearing — was to subpoena four NYT reporters over two stories about the deficiencies of the aircraft. The NYT moved yesterday to quash those subpoenas in filings that remain under seal.

Blanche Direct Report and Top ‘Antifa’ Prosecutor Is a Jan. 6er

In an exclusive report, TPM’s Josh Kovensky revealed for the first time — more than five years after the fact — that an assistant U.S. attorney in a Trump 2020 baseball cap with a star-spangled face mask marched on the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The Trump DOJ confirmed that Brian W. Lynch “was present but never entered the capitol, left the grounds after a brief period, and did not commit and was never accused of any violation of law.”

One photo obtained by TPM shows Lynch in what Michael Romano, who was a deputy chief in the DOJ’s since-disbanded Capitol Siege Section, says was a restricted area around the Capitol:

Lynch was appointed earlier this year to co-lead Joint Task Force Vanguard, which is taking the lead at DOJ in targeting left-wing opponents of Trump in a sweeping administration-wide effort to inflate the threat of “antifa” and categorize political opposition, protest, and civil disobedience as “domestic terrorism.” It comes in response to Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum (NPSM-7) issued in September.

Lynch reports directly to Blanche.

Combined with the FBI’s apparent attempt to muddy the water in the fatal ICE shooting in Houston last week (see below), the series of developments yesterday made the Blanche confirmation hearing seem almost surreal, with Blanche assuring senators he would continue to always do the right thing even as wrongdoing was on full display outside of the committee room.

Trump Ritualistic Humiliation Syndrome

Jay Clayton is the Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney in Manhattan, a former chair of the SEC, and the president’s nominee as director of national intelligence, a role that, among many other sensitive duties, includes protecting U.S. elections from foreign interference.

In short, Clayton is a grown-ass man who should know better, but he, like so many Trump acolytes before him, willingly submits himself to the ritualistic humiliation that Trump inflicts on all his supporters: pretend that Trump won the 2020 election:

Quote of the Day

“This is a concerted effort of death by a thousand cuts. Every day is another battle, but the war that we’re fighting is to maintain our democracy.”—Ingham County, Michigan, Clerk Barb Byrum (D), on Trump’s expanding whole-of-government effort to target free and fair elections

Trump Out of the Loop on ICE Traffic Stops

After two fatal ICE shootings in two weeks, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and the acting director of ICE made the decision Monday evening to halt traffic stops by immigrant agents nationwide — but no one briefed President Trump on the decision, the WSJ reports: “He only caught wind of it from critical coverage on cable TV and furious outside allies, who took to social media to register their disapproval.”

That led to Trump’s social media post Wednesday morning overruling Mullin’s decision and resuming traffic stops — and Mullin’s ignoble social media post of his own last night, weakly declaring: “President Trump and I are on the same page.”

Beyond Gross

It appears that the FBI in Houston has taken unusual steps to muddy the waters around the fatal ICE shooting Monday of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.

Claiming to have observed on the day of the shooting what appeared to be baggies of meth in the work van that Salgado Araujo was driving when he was shot, an FBI agent on Tuesday — a week after the shooting — sought a search warrant from a federal magistrate.

The search warrant application, which includes photos of the alleged meth, appears relatively normal on its face and not obviously improper (although this line jumps out: “The United States is currently gathering all facts related to this incident, including what may have caused the occupants of the vehicle to flee.”)

Where things get weird is that the search warrant application, which was filed under seal as is normal, was very quickly unsealed, which led to widespread news coverage yesterday that the FBI had found suspected drugs in the van. It’s not clear from the public docket in the case how the search warrant application came to be unsealed.

More temperate news outlets — wary of being used to try to justify the use of force, however strained — were careful to note how unusual it was for a search warrant to be unsealed so quickly at this stage of a case:

• CNN: “While not unheard of, it is unusual for an FBI search warrant to be publicly available during an active and high-profile investigation of this nature.”
• NYT: “Search warrant applications are usually kept under seal. A review of other applications in the Southern District of Texas found that they are rarely unsealed so rapidly.”

What’s tricky about writing about this — and it was obviously difficult to navigate for other news outlets yesterday — was the presence of illegal drugs would not justify (i) the initial stop (ICE agents didn’t know about the alleged drugs and were in fact targeting another immigrant who was not even present in the van); or (ii) the use of deadly force.

Taken together, these developments reinforces a point I made Monday after the fatal ICE shooting in Maine: There is a widespread misimpression that the FBI is working to get to the bottom of these ICE shootings and charge immigration agents criminally, if warranted. That’s simply not true. The FBI is not only not investigating ICE, it’s actively investigating the people ICE shot.

‘ICE Is Out of Control’

Radley Balko: “In 20 years covering policing, I’ve never seen a government agency thumb its nose at the very concept of justice, rights and the rule of law the way D.H.S. and ICE have over the last 18 months.”

Because Iran Is Going So Well?

CBS News: “Military planners have in recent weeks examined a range of options for possible action against [Cuba], including an Army-led air assault involving thousands of U.S. soldiers to be carried out by the 101st Airborne Division, the only unit trained for such a task, according to multiple U.S. officials with knowledge of the discussions.”

We’re So Cooked: U.S. Mint Edition

Despite legal restrictions on placing the visages of living people on official currency, the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia will begin producing commemorative coins with President Trump’s mug emblazoned on them that will be available as soon as this fall.

“It won’t include any gold or precious metals but will have a gold-like finish,” the WSJ reports.

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