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

‘My Offer Is This: Nothing’

The Trump administration took the extraordinary step of invoking the state secrets privilege rather than answer a federal judge’s questions about whether it violated his order blocking deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.

“The Executive Branch hereby notifies the Court that no further information will be provided in response to the Court’s March 18, 2025 Minute Order based on the state secrets privilege,” the administration asserted in a bumptious filing over the names of top DOJ officials.

Although it is a weak and probably not viable privilege claim, the state secrets invocation escalates President Trump’s series of attacks on the judicial branch and its independent sources of power under the Constitution. It did so with unusually sharp language that showcased a sneering contempt for the judiciary in refusing to even provide the allegedly privileged information to a judge for his review.

“The Court has all of the facts it needs” the administration argued as it objected to “[f]urther intrusions on the Executive Branch.” It asserted that it would no longer entertain “further demands for details that have no place in this matter.” It contended that the court “owes President Trump ‘high respect’ … but to this point has not” given it to him. The administration repeatedly stated that “there is no need for the requested disclosures” without engaging in actual argument.

Judge Boasberg, a former FISA court judge with deep experience in national security law, had already expressed skepticism in open court about the applicability of the state secrets privilege in this case. But the Trump DOJ forged ahead with a distinctly derisive tone:

“The information sought by the Court is irrelevant to plaintiffs’ claims and to the Executive Branch’s compliance with the Court’s operative order. The Court has already devoted more time to these inquiries than it did to evidence and argument on the issue of whether a class should be certified.”

At issue is whether the Trump administration complied with Boasberg’s order to stop deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, including flights of Venezuelan nationals alleged to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang from Texas to a prison in El Salvador. For more than a week, the Justice Department has dodged Boasberg’s demands for more information on the timing of the flights as he seeks to determine whether his order was violated.

“The need for additional information here is not merely ‘dubious,’ or ‘trivial,’ it is non-existent. The Executive Branch violated no valid order through its actions, and the Court has all it needs to evaluate compliance. Accordingly, the Court’s factual inquiry should end,” the Justice Department concluded.

The invocation of the state secrets privilege came at the end of a long day in the case that began with Boasberg issuing an opinion detailing the legal basis for his temporary restraining order barring the Alien Enemies Act deportations and included feisty oral arguments on the TRO before the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

Must Read

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg: The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans

‘Houthi PC Small Group’ Makes Headlines

• Politico: ‘Amateur hour’: Washington aghast at Trump administration’s war plan group chat
• WSJ: Top Trump Officials Debated War Plans on Unclassified Chat Shared With Journalist
• WaPo: Trump officials shared war planning in unclassified chat with journalist
• The Guardian: White House inadvertently texted top-secret Yemen war plans to journalist
• NYT: Hegseth Disclosed Secret War Plans in a Group Chat

A Denial For The Ages

"Nobody was texting war plans" — Pete Hegseth

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 24, 2025 at 7:15 PM

New Backstory On Student Deportations?

The WaPo has a new story out suggesting a possible precursor to the Trump administration’s targeting of pro-Palestinian international students at American universities. Back in February when the Trump Education Department launched its ‘antisemitism’ investigations at universities, it “told the attorneys working on the cases to also collect the names and nationalities of students who might have harassed Jewish students or faculty,” the newspaper reports.

Meanwhile, a Columbia University student and a Cornell University student are trying to evade being detained while they each sue the Trump administration to block their possible deportations, claiming they’re being retaliated against for participating in pro-Palestinian protests.

The Retribution: Hill Republicans Take Trump’s Cue

While Senate Republicans are blacklisting the lobbying clients of the law firms targeted by the President Trump’s executive orders, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan is considering punishing the judicial branch by cutting its funding.

No Law But Trump

“Mr. Trump’s tactics against Big Law and other legal institutions seem clearly aimed at demonstrating there is no law but whatever deal the president is personally willing to strike, indeed no law but Trump. Such a vision cannot be reconciled with the idea of individual rights nor with the idea that ordered rules, not raw power, constrain the behavior of the people and their governors alike.”–Deborah Pearlstein, visiting professor of law and public affairs at Princeton and the director of its Program in Law and Public Policy

The Imperative Of Solidarity

“Each time Trump succeeds in subordinating his target, his power ricochets far beyond the particular organization in question, affecting the risk-taking calculus of those who fear they might be added to his list. Acting in isolation, it is hard for a single news outlet, firm, or university to withstand an attack backed by the power of the state. Collectively, though, their extraordinary human, political, and financial resources are a force to be reckoned with. Trump currently seems to understand this better than they do.”–Rebecca Hamilton, an executive editor of Just Security and professor of law at American University Washington College of Law

The Destruction: Social Security

• WaPo: Long waits, waves of calls, web crashes: Social Security is breaking down
• Axios: Social Security rushing service cuts at White House request, sources say
• The NYT has this unbelievable anecdote:

In another instance, the Social Security Administration briefly ended a contract that had allowed parents of newborn babies in Maine to sign their children up for a Social Security number at the hospital, instead requiring them to do so in person at an office. Mr. Dudek said he had ordered the move after watching Janet Mills, Maine’s Democratic governor, clash with Mr. Trump at the White House. He quickly reversed that decision, as well as another to end electronic death reporting in the state.

“I was ticked at the governor of Maine for not being real cordial to the president,” Mr. Dudek said in the interview. “I screwed up. I’ll admit I screwed up.”

The Corruption

• Personnel: President Trump announced he’s making Alina Habba, who was sanctioned and reprimanded while representing him personally, the acting U.S. attorney in New Jersey. She will replace John Giordano, who had been in the role for a mere three weeks and is being nominated for ambassador to Namibia.
• Favors: Boeing wants the Trump DOJ to let it out of its Biden-era agreement to plead guilty plea in the 737 MAX case, the WSJ reports. The deal with the Biden DOJ was sabotaged in December by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor of Texas who balked at a DEI provision in the agreement that applied to the court appointment of an outside monitor. In short: A notorious right-wing judge blocked a plea deal over DEI late in Biden’s term, which kicked the can down the road until a much-more malleable Trump DOJ was in office and now Boeing is trying to back out of its agreement to plead guilty.
• Leverage: The Trump administration is using its anti-DEI executive order as a sword to go after federal contractors who previously submitted government-required anti-discrimination plans. “What’s unusual is that the office will look for evidence of unlawful practices in the plans that contractors had been required to submit before Trump took office to demonstrate they didn’t discriminate in their hiring and promotions,” the WSJ reports.

Good Read

NYT: In His Second Term, Trump Fuels a ‘Machinery’ of Misinformation

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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.

Where Will It Stop?

The Trump administration seized on the capitulation by the Paul Weiss law firm to expand and intensify its attack on the legal profession late Friday. The Trump White House issued a new presidential memoranda – inartfully and misleadingly titled “Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court” – that directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to go after lawyers and law firms that challenge the administration in court.

The escalation of the attacks on lawyers is happening in parallel with Trump’s attacks on individual federal judges and more broadly on the judicial branch’s constitutional powers.

As the White House celebrated its successful bullying of Paul Weiss and as some of the nation’s leading law firms meekly scrambled to avoid being Trump’s next target, the president upped the ante by demanding that his attorney general seek sanctions and disciplinary actions against lawyers opposing the administration who violate the law or ethical standards. But the real thrust of the memo was to give Trump a mechanism for continuing to undermine, weaken, and intimidate the legal profession.

As The Guardian noted, Trump directed Bondi in the memo to report directly to him any lawyers litigating against the government “who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States or in matters before executive departments and agencies of the United States,” an arguably loser standard than the one imposed by the cannons of legal ethics:

The memo, as a result, created a formal mechanism for Trump to unilaterally decide whether to impose politically charged sanctions through executive orders that strip lawyers of the security clearances they need to perform their jobs or prevent them from working on federal contracts.

In another clear sign that Trump is looking for payback against lawyers and law firms, he ordered Bondi to review cases against the federal government all the way back to the beginning of his first term to punish anyone “filing frivolous litigation or engaging in fraudulent practices.”

The implication of the Trump memo is that other lawyers and law firms will find themselves in the crosshairs of a retaliatory executive order targeting them the same way he has singled out Covington & Burling, Perkins Coie, and Paul Weiss.

Goof Of The Day: A Freudian Slip

In seeking to recuse U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell from hearing Perkins Coie’s case challenging the executive order the law firm is being targeted by, the Trump DOJ made a telling mistake. In a filing Friday, the government wrote: “Fair proceedings free from any suggestion of impartiality are essential to the integrity of our country’s judiciary …”

God knows we don’t want even a “suggestion of impartiality” in our nation’s courts.

It’s NEVER Enough

In a desperate attempt to restore $400 million in federal funding that President Trump is lawlessly withholding, Columbia University agreed to make a number of invasive concessions to how the university is run – and now those concessions are already being deemed insufficient by a Trump DOJ official.

“I will tell you right now that Columbia has not in my opinion — and the opinion of the Department of Justice — has not cleaned up their act,” said Leo Terrell, a senior Trump DOJ lawyer. “They’re not even close, not even close to having those funds unfrozen.”

A WSJ headline captured the higher education dynamic right now: “Universities Sprint from ‘We Will Not Cower’ to Appeasing Trump.”

The Retribution

• Trump has repeatedly floated sending American prisoners to serve prison sentences outside the country.
• Trump demands that Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) apologize — or the state will face consequences.

Trump Targets Pro-Palestinian Student Activists

The Trump administration has targeted another pro-Palestinian student activist with the threat of deportation. In the latest case, Momodou Taal, a doctoral candidate at Cornell with a student visa, was ordered to surrender to ICE after he had preemptively filed a lawsuit contesting Trump’s executive order to “combat antisemitism” and any forthcoming efforts to target him. In a court filing over the weekend, the Trump administration confirmed that the State Department has unilaterally revoked Taal’s student visa under a little-used provision that has suddenly become a giant loophole to avoid due process.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration seems to be trying to sidestep the First Amendment issues in its deportation case against Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil by finding a new basis for his removal. The government now alleges that Khalil wasn’t fully forthcoming in his application last year to become a permanent U.S. resident.

Boasberg Takes Trump DOJ Lawyer To The Woodshed

A reminder that there are two separate elements to the Alien Enemies Act case that U.S. District Judge James Boasberg is handling: (i) whether the government violated his order halting AEA deportations, including turning planes around that were already en route to El Salvador; and (ii) whether the AEA deportations are lawful at all. Interwoven in both elements of the case are extreme claims from the Trump administration that the judiciary has little to no jurisdiction or power here.

As to whether the Trump administration violated his order, Boasberg lit into a DOJ lawyer in open court Friday. “I will get to the bottom of whether they violated my order, who ordered this and what the consequences will be,” Boasberg said from the bench. Among the consequences could be a contempt of court finding.

On the substance of the AEA deportations, Boasberg took a lot of time at the hearing, for the public’s benefit, to examine the issues in the case and mull their implications. “The policy ramifications of this are incredibly troublesome and problematic and concerning,” Boasberg said.

Meanwhile, after a NYT report on the U.S. intel community’s recent assessment of Tren de Aragua’s limited capacity undercut the administration’s position in the case, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that the Justice Department was opening an investigation into a “selective leak.”

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals hears arguments this afternoon on the Trump administration’s attempt to overturn Judge Boasberg’s order blocking any more deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.

The Destruction

• IRS: In the wake of the DOGE attack of the IRS, government officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, a loss of more than $500 billion in federal revenues  
• DHS: The Trump administration shut down three DHS watchdog agencies responsible for conducting oversight of President Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown.
• USIP: The NYT has a tick-tock on the takeover and shutdown of the U.S. Institute of Peace.
• SSA: DOGE’s multi-prong assault on the Social Security Administration is restricting the public’s access to services even as benefits claims boom.

Official Backs Off Threat To Shutdown Social Security

It took TWO letters Friday from U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander of Maryland before Leland Dudek, the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, backed off his claims that her order keeping DOGE out of people’s personal data would force him to shut the agency down.

IMPORTANT

A few key developments that you might have missed from last week:

• IRS: “The Internal Revenue Service is nearing an agreement to allow immigration officials to use tax data to confirm the names and addresses of people suspected of being in the country illegally, according to four people familiar with the matter, culminating weeks of negotiations over using the tax system to support President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign,” the WaPo reported. 
• OPM: “President Trump on Thursday issued a presidential memorandum aiming to expand the power of the Office of Personnel Management to fire federal employees, alarming experts and federal employee groups, Government Executive reported.
• DOGE Watch: “Federal agencies must now allow any officials designated by the president or agency leadership to have complete access to unclassified records, data, software systems and IT systems, President Donald Trump declared in an executive order late Thursday night,” FedScoop reported.

The Purges

• SBA: The Trump administration plans to cut more than 40% of the workforce at the Small Business Administration.
• BLS: The Trump administration has disbanded two expert committees on economic statistics

What Is DOGE?

NYT: Trump says one thing, government lawyers say another.

Elon Musk Watch

• Politico: Musk’s X suspends opposition accounts in Turkey amid civil unrest
• WSJ: Musk Political Group Takes on Local Races and New Targets
• NYT: Musk Is Positioned to Profit Off Billions in New Government Contracts

‘Highly Aggressive’

In his strongest public comments yet, Prime Minister Múte Egede excoriated the Trump White House for dispatching top American officials – including national security national security adviser Michael Waltz and second lady Usha Vance – to visit Greenland this week.

“What is the national security adviser doing in Greenland?” Egede asked. “The only purpose is to demonstrate power over us.”

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