A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

A Permanent Coverup Mechanism

In highly unusual public statements about an unprecedented breach of national security at the highest levels of the U.S. government, Attorney General Pam Bondi not only shut the door on investigating whether criminal laws were broken in the Signal group chat fiasco but actively engaged in political attacks and rhetorical spin to defend the Trump administration and assail its critics.

The attorney general, who wears dual hats as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and as a member of the intelligence community, categorically dismissed the prospect of even investigating the matter during public remarks Thursday morning. Bondi quickly pivoted to regurgitating right-wing talking points about the prior mishandling of classified information by Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton:

REPORTER: The Signal chat controversy — is DOJ involved? If so, why? If not, why not? BONDI: It was sensitive info, not classified. What we should be talking about is it was a very successful mission… if you want to talk about classified information, talk about what was at Hillary Clinton's home

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 27, 2025 at 12:33 PM

By last evening, in a friendly appearance on Fox News, Bondi was lambasting U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who is overseeing a civil lawsuit seeking to preserve the Signal chat as official government records. In an extraordinary move, Bondi attacked three DC federal judges by name as unable to be impartial or objective before singling out Boasberg for his role in the Signal case:

Bondi has now made public statements assessing the facts and the law of the Signal case while resisting calls for an investigation. These are simply astounding actions by a sitting attorney general.

“The Justice Department’s approach thus far stands in contrast with its customary role of examining serious national-security breaches,” the WSJ reported in the most understated possible way.

The abiding concern all along has been that Trump would place loyalists at the Justice Department in part to protect himself and his administration from legal consequences for their wrongdoing – a permanent coverup mechanism to ignore, bury, and disregard executive branch lawlessness. Pam Bondi is eagerly filling the role of a loyalist attorney general. This is what it looks like.

Signal Group Chat Fiasco: Don’t Delete Your Messages

• U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe “to preserve all Signal communications between March 11 and March 15.”
• President Trump is unwilling to fire officials involved in the Signal group chat “because doing so would be a tacit admission of fault and seen as handing a victory to the Atlantic magazine,” The Guardian reports.
• Israel complained privately after HUMINT it provided for the anti-Houthi airstrike was included in the Signal group chat among U.S. officials.

CORRECTION

The original version of yesterday’s Morning Memo incorrectly described the prisoners who appeared behind DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in her propaganda video as Venezuelan detainees deported under the Alien Enemies Act. They were in fact El Salvadoran prisoners held in the same prison. The mistake was mine.

Tufts Student Whisked To Louisiana Despite Court Order

• A federal judge’s order barring the transfer of detained Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk out of Massachusetts came too late, the Trump administration said. Ozturk is now at a detention facility in Louisiana.
• Ozturk’s student visa was unilaterally revoked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who revealed that he has revoked some 300 visas for participating in pro-Palestinian activities on campus:

Marco Rubio on Rumeysa Ozturk: "We revoked her visa … once you've lost your visa, you're no longer legally in the United States … if you come into the US as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don't want it. We don't want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 27, 2025 at 1:29 PM

The Latest On Trump’s Attack On Higher Ed

• The University of Michigan, a national leader in diversity efforts in higher ed, is shuttering its DEI offices.
• Case Western Reserve University, Ohio’s largest private university, has shut down its DEI office under pressure from the Trump administration. 
• The Trump DOJ has launched an anti-DEI investigation into admissions policies at Stanford, UC-Berkely, UCLA, and UC-Irvine.

Trump Targets WilmerHale In New EO

President Trump’s retribution spree continued with an executive order targeting law firm WilmerHale, which at one point employed former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who led the investigation into Trump’s relationship with Russia in the 2016 campaign and its aftermath. In a statement, WilmerHale indicated it will challenge the executive order, which is similar in form and substance to the other Trump executive orders targeting the legal profession.

In other developments:

• Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom is in talks with the Trump White House to avoid being targeted by an executive order of its own.
• The WSJ looks at the Perkins Coie’s decision to fight back against the Trump executive order targeting it.
• Former Perkins Coie Bab Bauer partner examines the deal that the Paul Weiss firm struck with the Trump White House to get the president to rescind the executive order against it:

Paul Weiss disregarded the lawlessness of Trump’s actions, which is lawlessness of a particularly pernicious kind: punishing lawyers for representing clients or causes personally offensive to this president. Perhaps a different kind of business might sensibly conclude that it should do what it could to placate a hostile administration. But a law firm, in this instance a leading one, is not any kind of business: It is a professional association with obligations not only to its clients, but to the legal system itself.

Trump Takes Aim At Other Targets In Fresh Batch Of EOs

In addition to the Wilmer Hale executive order, President Trump issued new executive orders targeting federal worker unions and whitewashing U.S. history.

Trump Bids To Wield Power Over Elections

Election law expert Rick Hasen digs into Trump’s executive order on elections.

DOGE Watch

• “A federal judge in Maryland admonished the Trump administration for trying to rush her into lifting restrictions on an Elon Musk team seeking access to the private Social Security Administration information of millions of Americans,” Bloomberg reports.
• Rather than mounting a concerted legislative effort to block DOGE’s rampage, Republican lawmakers are scrambling to make personal appeals to head off DOGE cuts, the NYT reports.
• In a Fox News interview, Elon Musk made the preposterous claim that DOGE’s $1 trillion in spending cuts won’t harm federal services

The Purges

• Gov’t wide: Internal White House document shows the Trump administration is preparing to cut between 8 and 50 percent of the workforces of federal agencies, the WaPo reports.
• DHS: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he is axing 10,000 workers in his department.
• NWS: The union that represents workers at the chronically understaffed National Weather Service warns that the Trump administration could shed as much as one-quarter of the agency’s workforce.

Ban On Trans In Military On Shaky Ground

The Trump administration’s ban on trans service members has been blocked for the second time, when a federal judge in Washington state intervened yesterday shortly after the DC Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay on an earlier court ruling that blocked the ban. Notably, even though the appeals court was siding with the Trump administration, it used unusual language to suggest the Pentagon should not take any adverse action against trans personnel while they sorted things out. Chris Geidner has the play by play in real time from yesterday (scroll down past the first section).

Vances Visit U.S. Base In Greenland

After widespread local revulsion over their planned visit to Greenland today, Vice President JD Vance and his wife Usha will now only stop at a U.S. military base. The cultural exchanges that were originally part of the trip have been jettisoned.

So Damn Sad To Witness

Canada is reorienting itself to the fact that its southern neighbor is no longer a benign presence:

Carney: "The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 27, 2025 at 3:57 PM

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A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

Editor’s Note: While Morning Memo has mostly focused on the legal and historical implications of the Trump administration’s lawless detention and deportation policies, today’s Morning Memo contains disturbing video and images of what is happening on the ground.

Trigger Warning: Noem’s Propaganda Video

In a bewildering move that could undermine some of the Trump administration’s legal arguments, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem made a highly publicized visit to the prison in El Salvador where her department deported Venezuelan nationals under the Alien Enemies Act.

But things only got worse.

In a stunning departure from humanitarian norms, Noem was photographed and filmed in front of prison cells packed with shaved-headed prisoners. Here’s an AP mashup of her trip that includes footage of her recording a direct-to-the-camera propaganda video:

Here’s the video Noem produced, with tattooed prisoners used as props:

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem uses prisoners in El Salvador as a prop for an official government video.

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— Molly Ploofkins (@mollyploofkins.bsky.social) March 26, 2025 at 10:34 PM

Correction: Noem shot the video in front of El Salvadoran prisoners, not the Venezuelan detainees housed elsewhere in the prison. I regret the error.

‘You’re Here Because of Your Tattoos’

As TPM’s Josh Kovensky reported earlier this week, some of the Venezuelan nationals deported under the Alien Enemies Act were initially detained on the basis of their tattoos, many of which were innocuous and not Tren de Aragua gang symbols. Now Mother Jones has a new report zeroing in on the tattoos as the pretext for detention.

Appeals Court Stands Up For Judicial Branch

In one of the most significant appeals court rulings so far in President Trump’s second term, the D.C. Circuit let stand the order blocking further deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.

In the 2-1 decision, a George Bush I appointee vigorously defended a role for the judiciary in reviewing Alien Enemies Act cases. The ruling, while not a final decision on the merits, also called into question numerous aspect of the government’s case and set the stage for a full ventilation of the issues raised by the Trump administration’s conduct.

The case now returns to U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who is separately considering whether the Trump administration violated the terms of his order.

More Foreign Students Whisked Off American Streets

A Tufts University PhD candidate on a student visa was detained outside of Boston and whisked to a detention facility in Louisiana – despite an emergency court order not to take her out of Massachusetts without notice.

Rumeysa Ozturk is a Turkish citizen who had been outspoken in her support for Palestinians. The pattern of detentions shows the Trump administration is targeting foreign students for their pro-Palestinian political views. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed Ozturk was detained under the same law used to detain Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist.

The incident was caught in a disturbing video:

Meanwhile, a doctoral student at the University of Alabama was also detained by federal authorities. It’s not clear on what grounds Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian citizen, was detained or what his legal status was at the time he was picked up off campus.

MUST READ

With the Trump DOJ making a ham-fisted attempt to disqualify her from an important case, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell took the opportunity to school President Trump on the independent judiciary and to rebuke the Trump DOJ for its “ad hominem attack.”

“This strategy is designed to impugn the integrity of the federal judicial system and blame any loss on the decision-maker rather than fallacies in the substantive legal arguments presented,” Howell wrote in her opinion declining to recuse herself from overseeing the lawsuit by the law firm Perkins Coie challenging Trump’s executive order targeting it.

EXCLUSIVE

The NYT reports that the federal judiciary has created a new “Judicial Security and Independence Task Force” composed of federal judges that is expected to hold its first meeting within the next 10 days.

BOOM: The Atlantic Has The Receipts

In response to the Trump administration’s campaign of lying and obfuscation over the Signal group chat fiasco, The Atlantic published the messages themselves.

In other developments:

• The information Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth disclosed in the Signal chat was highly classified at the time he wrote it, CNN reports.
• A watchdog group is seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent destruction of the Signal messages. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg was assigned the case.
• National security adviser Mike Waltz, who mistakenly invited The Atlantic executive editor Jeffrey Goldberg to the group chat left his Venmo friends list public, Wired discovered.

The Rule Of Law Doesn’t Even Get A Funeral

The WSJ, on the Signal group chat fiasco:

In past years, such a breach would likely have given rise to a separate and more thorough investigation by the FBI and Justice Department’s national security division to assess the extent of the potential harm and whether any laws were violated. But top Justice Department officials appear not to be mounting such an inquiry.

The Autocratic Legal Playbook

UCLA law professor Scott Cummings, with a reminder on where we are:

To understand what action to take requires clarity about the democratic assault now being advanced with brutal efficiency against the United States. Trump and his legal team have carefully studied how democracies die. And they have learned the key lesson: democratic backsliding occurs when elected leaders claim a mandate to erode the pillars of democracy—free and fair elections, fundamental rights, and checks and balances—to enlarge executive power.

The “autocratic legal playbook” is the strategic roadmap to this consolidation. The targets are well-established: capture the courts; erase internal pockets of independence within the public bureaucracy; silence sources of free thought and expression in universities, civil society, and the media; replace independent public prosecutors and government lawyers with loyalists; and disable legal resistance by coopting law firms and the professional bar.

The Five Pillars Of Trumpian Repression

Benjamin Wittes has categorized the authoritarian moves by Trump so far, and they fall into similar themes as the above “autocratic legal playbook”:

1. attack on the government’s own power to spend money;
2. internal retributions and restructurings within government itself—most importantly, in the power agencies: DoD, FBI, and DOJ;
3. the overt creation of a zone of impunity for political allies and friends;
4. non-criminal legal pressures on a variety of universities, law firms, news media outlets, and others;
5. willingness to deploy liberally overt threats of criminal investigation or prosecution.

Trump II Clown Show

TPM’s Hunter Walker on how L. Brent Bozell III, Trump’s new pick to be ambassador to South Africa, actively opposed the fight to end apartheid.

The Destruction

• NYT: U.S. to End Vaccine Funds for Poor Countries
• Politico: Documents reveal scope of Trump’s foreign aid cuts
• WaPo: Trump officials working to strip FEMA’s role in disaster recovery by Oct. 1
• NYT: Trump Administration Abruptly Cuts Billions From State Health Services

WARNING: GOP’s Funny Math Ploy

Republicans on the Hill intend to rely on never-before-used magic math to make passing its massive bill containing major elements of President Trump’s agenda possible with only a majority vote in the Senate.

With everything else going on, it’s been difficult to sustain a focus on this crucial bit of chicanery. The funny math would dramatically reduce the cost of extending the Trump tax cuts and lower size of the spending cuts needed to offset it. All of which would facilitate passing the mega bill via a simple majority vote in a reconciliation package.

The key obstacle to this tactic is the Senate parliamentarian, who is expected to rule soon on whether this scheme passes muster under Senate rules.

The larger historical context should be clear by this point: The GOP touts policies like tax cuts and purports to have staunch principles like deploring deficit spending that don’t add up and aren’t popular so when push comes to shove they change the rules, fuzz the math, and otherwise obscure the disconnect between what they say and what they actually do.

Quote Of The Day

NPR CEO Katherine Maher on a tweet she posted in 2020 calling Trump a fascist and a sociopath: "I regret those tweets. I would not tweet them again today. They represented a time where I was reflecting on something I believe that the president had said rather than who he is."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 26, 2025 at 1:47 PM

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