Presumption of Irregularity

Attorney General Pam Bondi’s elaborate attempts to bypass Senate confirmation and federal judges in appointing U.S. attorneys blew up in spectacular fashion Monday in a sentencing hearing in a child pornography case.

A federal judge in New Jersey absolutely let rip in the hearing, first reported by the New York Times, over the leaderless U.S. Attorney’s Office there. After an outside-the-district federal judge ruled that Alina Habba’s appointment as interim U.S. attorney was legally invalid, Bondi named a trio of prosecutors to lead the office. The same outside judge ruled last week that the workaround was also invalid, but gave the administration a chance to appeal the ruling. But in the meantime, the outside judge warned, federal criminal cases across the entire state remained in jeopardy because of Bondi’s machinations.

The threat to the sanctity of real live criminal cases seemed to most raise the ire of U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi, a Biden appointee who happens to be the first Muslim federal judge. Monday’s hearing culminated with the judge:

• ordering the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s head of appeals to leave his courtroom under threat of being removed since he wasn’t an attorney of record in the case;
• summoning the trio of prosecutors to appear at a future hearing to testify about their roles (he later agreed to a Trump DOJ request to delay the followup hearing until May);
• raising the possibility in the hearing that Habba, who now supervises U.S. attorneys as a senior adviser to Bondi, was still running the office from the shadows (Habba denies this claim).

The transcript from the highly charged sentencing hearing is worth a look. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read. Quraishi, himself a former prosecutor in the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office, set the tone with hapless line prosecutor Daniel Rosenblum from the outset:

Further provoking Quraishi’s ire was the fact that the Trump DOJ apparently botched the child porn case by entering into a plea agreement with the defendant before it had finished gathering evidence from his phone.:

When new child porn images were discovered by investigators, DOJ was already locked into a plea deal that was seeking a sentence range of less than one-third of the advisory range, the judge said — although he got the prosecutor to admit that plea deal applied to charges related to only one minor and the newly discovered images showed different children.

What most stood out from the hearing transcript — aside from the blistering tone — was the judge’s linking of Bondi’s unlawful workarounds on U.S. attorneys with the risk to criminal cases, a point he returned to and for which Rosenblum was poorly positioned to answer. In summoning the trio of office leaders to testify, the judge warned he might seek further testimony from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and Habba.

Quraishi closed the hearing with a final admonishment for the U.S. Attorney’s Office: “You have lost the confidence and the trust of this court. 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.”

Correction: The original version of this item misidentified the assistant U.S. attorney thrown out of court as one of the trio of leaders of the USAO. It was the office’s head of appeals, who is not one of the trio.

Joe Kent Has ‘Reasons’ for Iran War Oppo

With DNI Tulsi Gabbard set to testify to Congress today, her Senate-confirmed right-wing deputy Joe Kent took the opportunity to resign over the Iran war while waving his hands about … the Jews.

There’s no “enemy of my enemy is my friend” analysis involved here when the motivating factor for opposing Trump’s foreign misadventure isn’t anti-interventionism but antisemitism.

Mullin’s Day in the Hot Seat

Today’s confirmation hearing for Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) as DHS secretary is a good opportunity to review what a strange dude he is, despite all the encomiums from fellow senators:

• TPM’s Hunter Walker: The ‘Cinematic’ And ‘Fantastical’ Life Of Trump’s DHS Pick
• WaPo: DHS pick Mullin boasts of ‘special assignments’ abroad but offers few details

2026 Ephemera

Despite claiming just a few days ago that he would make an endorsement in the Texas Senate GOP primary runoff and looking poised to back incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), President Trump let the deadline for withdrawing from the race pass without backing anyone, which has to be counted as a victory for state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R-TX).

Don’t Be Fooled

Brian Beutler on the Trump White House’s fake makeover:

What they seem to want, in other words, is to freeze their progress in place, dialing back the braggadocio, in the hope that voters sense the atmospheric differences between March 2025 and March 2026 and assume the worst is behind them.

In other words, they are hoping to salvage power through a change in rhetorical emphasis, without substantively backtracking. Their dog-and-pony approach is clearest in two realms of policy that held Trump’s coalition together: immigration and wellness pseudoscience. MAGA and MAHA.

‘A Hallmark Production in Bad Faith’ 

In a stinging ruling that found the Trump administration’s attempted shuttering of the Voice of America to be unlawful, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth of D.C. ordered more than 1,000 VOA employees back to work.

The VOA staff must be brought back by March 23 and international broadcasting must be resumed, Lamberth ordered.

The VOA saga has dragged out for a year. At its center has been Kari Lake, the Arizona election denialist installed to shut down government broadcasters. Lamberth had had enough: “The defendants’ persistent omission and withholding of key information in this case has been a Hallmark production in bad faith.”

Judge Edges Closer to Ballroom Decision

U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon of D.C. grilled Trump DOJ lawyers over the President’s vanity ballroom project in a hearing Tuesday. Leon didn’t buy the analogies the administration offered to previous modifications and alterations made to the White House over the years, rejecting them as not being of the same scale as the demolition of the East Wing and replacement with a monstrously out-of-proportion ballroom.

Leon had previously ruled that below-ground construction could continue while the case played out, then dismissed the challenge to the construction on procedural grounds. He allowed the challengers to refile and now faces an April deadline, when above-ground construction is scheduled to commence. Leon said he plans to rule by the end of March.

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The Retribution: Colorado Edition

This is all so bonkers that I want to give it a little extra attention in today’s Morning Memo.

The nonprofit consortium that runs the National Center for Atmospheric Research has sued the Trump administration to block its effort to tear apart the premier U.S. weather and climate lab — and it fronted the wacky Tina Peters connection in its lawsuit.

The Trump administration’s attack on NCAR is part of broader campaign of retribution against Colorado, the lawsuit alleges, for: (i) failing to end mail-in voting; and (ii) imprisoning former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters, a Big Lie obsessive, for her conviction for tampering with voting machines to try to prove that Trump’s loss in the 2020 election was a fraud.

The idea that Trump’s devotion to the Big Lie would — through a campaign of retribution — end up threatening a national laboratory that has done cutting-edge weather and climate research for years is mind-boggling on its own — a telling anecdote of the Trump II years.

But the attack on NCAR is just one of the retributive acts the administration has taken against Colorado. The list of others that appear in the lawsuit is remarkable, too. The lawsuit calls it “a widespread and coordinated campaign of punishment and coercion” against Colorado for refusing “to accede to attempts to infringe upon its sovereignty.” Among the examples in the lawsuit, all from December:

• The U.S. Department of Transportation announced the termination of $109 million in transportation funding for Colorado … and only Colorado;
• The U.S. Department of Agriculture ordered only Colorado to “participate in a SNAP ‘pilot project’ requiring the State to recertify eligibility and conduct in-person interviews for more than 100,000 Colorado households in five counties within a mere 30 days during the winter.” The threatened sanctions for failure to complete the task included removing Colorado from SNAP. Minnesota was the only other state whose participation in SNAP was targeted.
• FEMA denied two disaster relief assistance requests from Colorado related to devastating wildfires and flooding.
• Trump vetoed a bipartisan bill to fund a Colorado water project.

The case was assigned to senior U.S. District Judge Robert E. Blackburn, a George W. Bush appointee.

Accused Hill Pipe Bomber Claims Pardon

The man accused of placing pipe bombs at the Capitol Hill headquarters of both major political parties on the eve of the Jan. 6 attack is now claiming that he is covered by President’s Trump’s mass pardon of Jan. 6 defendants. In a new filing, Brian Cole Jr. is seeking to have the criminal charges against him dismissed on the grounds that the presidential pardon stripped the court of jurisdiction to try him on Jan. 6-related charges.

Trump DOJ Watch

• So many federal grand juries in D.C. have declined to indict Trump DOJ targets that U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge in D.C., has issued a new standing order requiring prosecutors to report to the court in writing when a grand jury fails to indict, Politico reports.
• Facing a staffing shortage of its own, the Trump DOJ is going to start hiring prosecutors directly out of law school, waiving a long-standing rule that applicants must have at least one year of legal practice under their belts before they will be hired as federal prosecutors, Bloomberg reports.

Trump’s Begging Yields Nothing on Iran

• WSJ: U.S. Allies Rebuff Trump’s Demand for Help Opening Strait of Hormuz
• Politico: Europe rejects Trump’s demand to help clean up Hormuz mess

Latest From the Middle East …

• The regime in Iran is consolidating its power and will emerge from the conflict with the United States intact and possibly even emboldened, according to U.S. intelligence assessments.
• Russia is the clear winner after two weeks of open conflict in the Middle East.
• Israel issued its most sweeping evacuation order for southern Lebanon since 2006 as it launched a new ground invasion there.

DHS AWOL After Iran Attack

Despite three possible terrorist attacks — in Texas, Virginia, and Michigan – with potential ties to the U.S.-Israel attack on Iran, the Department of Homeland Security has not issued an updated National Terrorism Advisory since the most recent one expired in September or published its annual Homeland Threat Assessment since President Trump took office, the WaPo reports.

Trump’s New Colonialism

• Cuba: “I think Cuba sees the end. All my life I’ve been hearing about the United States and Cuba,” President Trump riffed on Monday. “When will the United States do it? I do believe I’ll be the honor of — having the honor of taking Cuba.”
• Venezuela: In a social media post, Trump took credit for Venezuela having made the finals of the World Baseball Classic and raised the prospect of making it the 51st state.
• Zambia: The Trump State Department is considering withholding lifesaving assistance to people with HIV to force Zambia to sign a deal giving the United States more access to its critical minerals, the NYT reports.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Pro-Palestinian demonstrator Leqaa Kordia was finally released after a year in ICE custody.
• A rookie ICE agent who had been on the job less than a month made a paperwork mistake that kept a California man detained for days.
• Customs and Border Protection commander Gregory Bovino will soon retire.

For Your Radar …

• The Supreme Court will bypass the appeals courts and directly take up the Trump administration’s revocation of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians, with an expedited briefing schedule that includes oral arguments late next month.
• The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals let the Trump administration’s third-country removals continue while appeals proceed in the key challenge to the draconian policy.

Judge Blocks RFK Jr’s Vax Recs

U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy of Boston blocked HHS’s new stripped-down childhood vaccine recommendations, finding that the Trump administration had violated procedural safeguards that fundamentally represented “an abandonment of the technical knowledge and expertise.”

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