The Trump Department of Justice asserted in court Tuesday that, under its theories, the President’s removal power is so all-encompassing that he could fire all female agency heads, as well as those over 40 years old. The startling admission came in response to a federal judge’s hypothetical.
Continue reading “DOJ Asserts Trump Hypothetically Has Power To Purge All Female Agency Heads, Or Those Over 40”DC Metro Police Roust Staff of Indy Agency At DOGE’s Request
In the background over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to find out about the purported activities of the U.S. Marshals Service working at the behest of DOGE. When DOGE operatives took over the Foundation for African Development a couple of weeks ago, they reportedly made forced entry with the assistance of the U.S. Marshals. That’s not really what the Marshals do. They are housed within the Justice Department. But their job is to protect the federal judiciary and execute its orders. Special statutes exist that also allow them to enforce certain laws. But there was no court order here. So it didn’t really make sense.
When I poked around, it seemed like people just assumed they were Marshals. Or perhaps they identified themselves as such. But the more questions I asked, the less clear it was who they really were, notwithstanding the press reports that simply stated it as a fact. I put in a press request with the Marshals Service press office to confirm that these were in fact U.S. Marshalls. But I never heard back. Then yesterday there was a similar standoff at the U.S. Institute for Peace which ended with the Marshals again helping DOGE make forcible entry into the disputed premises. Or that’s what the initial reports in the Times said.
Continue reading “DC Metro Police Roust Staff of Indy Agency At DOGE’s Request”2020 Election Denier Ed Martin Is Now Using Trump’s DOJ To Investigate ‘Election Integrity’
President Trump’s nominee for D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin is using the Department of Justice to “investigate” one of Trump’s oldest, and most baseless grievances to date — the integrity of the country’s election system.
Continue reading “2020 Election Denier Ed Martin Is Now Using Trump’s DOJ To Investigate ‘Election Integrity’”Pentagon Removes Webpages Celebrating Racial Integration of the Armed Forces
Several webpages that celebrated the armed forces’ history of racial integration have been removed from Defense Department websites, TPM has found.
Continue reading “Pentagon Removes Webpages Celebrating Racial Integration of the Armed Forces”Showdown Between Trump And The Courts Comes To A Head
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Trump DOJ Gives Judge Runaround On Deportations
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg remained measured despite confronting a Trump Justice Department that was giving him the runaround.
President Trump’s constitution-shaking defiance of Boasberg’s order blocking deportations under the Alien Enemies Act could turn out to be one of the defining stories of our time. But the potentially titanic constitutional clash arrived in the form of penny-ante gamesmanship, unsubtle avoidance and misdirection, and less-than-stellar advocacy from the Justice Department.
A pattern has already developed of the highest echelons of the Justice Department plastering their names on important filings and even showing up to argue some cases themselves. But at the same time, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s department has swapped out lawyers, pushed attorneys with less experience in the case at hand in front of judges, and sent counsel into court unprepared to answer obvious questions.
Such was the case Monday when Judge Boasberg lamented that the government didn’t come prepared to provide the information he had set the hearing to obtain. In response, Boasberg set a new deadline for noon ET today for the government to answer some of his most basic questions. The hearing happened despite a last-minute effort by the Justice Department to cancel the hearing and a heavy-handed and sure-loser of a request to the appeals court to take Boasberg off the case entirely.
On top of the ill-preparedness and the gamesmanship, the quality of the Trump DOJ’s advocacy was poor. It’s not the first time that the Trump DOJ has brought a weak hand into court and tried to bluff its way through a hearing. The volume of legal challenges over the first two months, the speed of developments, and the apparent difficulty DOJ lawyers are having getting factual information from their government client have contributed to professionally humiliating moments that no previous Justice Department would have subjected its attorney to.
The contrast between the historically high stakes of these cases and the small ball being played by the Trump DOJ is striking. But there is a through-line that aligns the substance and the legal theatrics: In both, the Trump administration is sneering at the judicial branch and its status as a co-equal branch.
‘I Don’t Care What The Judges Think’
Acting ICE Director Tom Homan helpfully offering new evidence of the Trump administration defying court orders:
Homan: "We're not stopping. I don't care what the judges think. I don't care what the left thinks. We're coming."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 17, 2025 at 11:05 AM
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Judge Backs Off In Second Deportation Case
The federal judge who issued an order blocking the deportation of a Brown University medical school professor seemed satisfied by the government’s explanation about why she was deported anyway. U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin of Boston entered a minute order Monday that said in part:
The Court appreciates the prompt response by the government. Supported by an affidavit from the CBP Watch Commander, the government explains that CBP Officers at Logan did not receive notice of the Court’s Order from their legal counsel until after Dr. Alawieh “had already departed the United States” and that “[a]t no time would CBP not take a court order seriously or fail to abide by a court’s order.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration claimed that it refused Dr. Rasha Alawieh re-entry in the United States because she had attended the public funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last month while she was home in Lebanon. Customs officials apparently searched Alawieh’s phone and claimed she had deleted “sympathetic photos and videos” of prominent Hezbollah figures.
A Grim Sign Of The Times
Brown University is cautioning international students and staff to postpone travel abroad
‘Speech Acts And Keyboard Acts’
Timothy Snyder, on the Alien Enemies Act deportations:
The individuals involved are declaring their power to define reality, independently not only of judicial but of all verification. There is no basis for this deportation beyond speech acts and keyboard acts. The words (“foreign alien terrorists,” “monsters”) are doing the work. There are no procedures between the movement of mouths and the movement of bodies. If members of the executive branch are allowed to issue truth claims that have the consequence that human beings leave the United States, we are in a dictatorship. If we accept that the executive branch can simply deport anyone they call a “foreign alien terrorist,” then none of us has any rights.
The Constitution Is Not In Crisis. It’s Under Attack.
The problem with the language of “crisis” is that it simply doesn’t prepare supporters of the republic for the reality of the situation, which is a series of long fights, some high profile and some not, many of which will have unclear and complicated outcomes. …
The worst temptation — and I think a “crisis” framework encourages it by treating single conflicts as the final battle until it’s over and the next final battle approaches — is for supporters of the republic to declare defeat and even to mock those still fighting.
The Retribution
- In apparent compliance with the unprecedented Trump executive orders targeting three major law firms, the EEOC has sent letters to 20 big law firms inquiring about their use of DEI in hiring.
- President Trump declared he was pulling Secret Service protection from President Biden’s children Hunter and Ashley. The retaliatory move came after a New York Post story Saturday about Hunter Biden vacationing in South Africa with his Secret Service detail.
MUST READ
With apparent help from the FBI and DC police, DOGE took over the independent U.S. Institute of Peace on Monday in a surreal scene that spilled out onto city sidewalks:
Mr. Musk’s team did not get into the building until officers from Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department showed up, Ms. Lin said. Institute officials had called the police to report that Department of Government Efficiency members were trespassing, she said, but the police instead cleared institute leaders from the building.
The takeover backed by law enforcement was reminiscent of an earlier standoff with the U.S. African Development Foundation.
The Purges
- IRS: “The Trump administration is set to cut more than 20 percent of the staff at the taxpayer help branch of the IRS,” the WaPo reports.
- EPA: “The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate its scientific research arm, firing as many as 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists,” the NYT reports.
- Gov’t-wide: Under court order, the Trump administration has moved to reinstate at least 24,000 federal probationary employees, but U.S. District Judge William Allsup of San Francisco is demanding that the government confirm by today whether those reinstated employees are being immediately placed on administrative leave en masse, as some new reports have suggested. Allsup said that such a move would be in violation of the preliminary injunction he issued ordering their reinstatement.
The Destruction Of Social Security
- Judd Legum: Memo details Trump plan to sabotage the Social Security Administration
- NYT: Social Security Employees Warn of Damage From DOGE
The Corruption
- NYT: Elon Musk’s Starlink Expands Across White House Complex
- WSJ: IRS Retreats From Some Audits as Agency Slashes Workforce
BRIGHT RED BLINKING LIGHT
Acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin announced a new push to investigate election fraud cases, creating a new office called the “Special Unit Election Accountability,” Reuters reports.
Pentagon Sends People Of Color Down The Memory Hole
- Axios: Navajo Code Talkers disappear from military websites after Trump DEI order
- WaPo: Amid ‘DEI’ purge, Pentagon removes webpage on Iwo Jima flag-raiser who was Native American
The Trump II Clown Show
After sacking the governing boards of the service academics, President Trump is now stacking them with a mix of people that includes loyalists, conspiracists, and right-wing media figures. Among the notables:
West Point: retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn; Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-TX); Steve Bannon’s daughter Maureen Bannon; Medal of Honor winner David Bellavia; and retired Army Major Gen. Dan Walrath
Naval Academy: Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT); former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer; Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX); and former Trump co-defendant Walt Nauta.
Air Force Academy: Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL); Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk; and former deputy national security adviser Dina Powell.
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Trump Admin Ups Defiance Of Court Over Alien Enemies Act Removals
The Trump administration escalated its defiance of constitutional government on Monday as a judge sought details on a case addressing federal authorities’ removal of dozens of people from the country over the weekend without due process.
Continue reading “Trump Admin Ups Defiance Of Court Over Alien Enemies Act Removals”Trump’s Cronies Line Up To Help Him Defy The Judiciary
Donald Trump’s administration has openly crossed a big red line — one we’ve been tracking for some time now, as Trump and his allies openly question the judiciary’s authority to block Trump’s various lawless executive actions. The Trump administration had already slipped out of compliance with some court orders blocking executive actions, but up until this weekend, much of that was chalked up to the chaos of the DOGE rampage through much of the federal government, and of the Trump administration more generally. It was unclear how much was pointed defiance, and how much incompetence.
Continue reading “Trump’s Cronies Line Up To Help Him Defy The Judiciary”The Brave New World of Oligarch Lordships—Apparently They’re AWESOME!
A couple weeks ago, the clarion of digital wrongdoing in the second Trump administration, Wired, published an article entitled ‘Startup Nation’ Groups Say They’re Meeting Trump Officials to Push for Deregulated ‘Freedom Cities’. I wrote about these guys, or one subset of them, in early January. Dryden Brown is chief of a startup called Praxis, which is in the “business” of founding new sovereign “start up societies.” On paper, he claims to have raised half a billion dollars for his company. But, actually, those are commitments contingent on his founding a new sovereign state. So that’s kind of like a lot of richies committing money to your new unicorn farm contingent on your finding two unicorns. In any case, Dryden had been focused on finding a chunk of land to found a new “network state” in the Mediterranean after getting bounced out of Africa. But once Donald Trump started making noises that Greenland might be on the market, he flew to Greenland to meet with officials and see if he could buy it.
In any case, that’s our boy Dryden. This new piece in Wired is about Trey Goff, the “chief of staff” of a thing called “Prospera,” which is a sorta, kinda “network state” recently established in Honduras, which the current government of Honduras is already trying to abolish. Prospera and a few other “network states” in the making are based on laws for “Special Economic Zones” which exist in some countries. The conceptual structure stems from certain duty-free areas that exist in certain countries, free ports of various kinds which have long existed and have often, but not always, been tied up with the history of European colonialism and, of course, the Special Administrative Regions of China, Hong Kong and Macau. U.S. urban policy has a sort of pale version of this in “enterprise zones” where businesses starting up in a certain area get certain tax benefits or expedited regulatory review. If you read about “Prospera,” a decent amount of at least the surface appeal is having these kind of boutique nerdvilles where tech micro-bros can high five each other because, like, if you want to buy a croissant at the coffee shop you have to pay in bitcoin. Stuff like that. The “government,” very much by design, follows the structure of venture investing, with different classes of stock and thus voting power. All that fun stuff.
Continue reading “The Brave New World of Oligarch Lordships—Apparently They’re AWESOME!”Senate And House Dems Condemn Trump’s Destructive Enemies Speech At DOJ
Senate and House Democrats railed against President Donald Trump’s Friday speech at the Department of Justice, calling out Trump’s unreserved politicization of the DOJ and his administration’s ongoing efforts to tear down the department’s independence from the White House.
Continue reading “Senate And House Dems Condemn Trump’s Destructive Enemies Speech At DOJ”Sovereignty Where Ya Can Find It: More Notes on Saving the American Republic
The primary drivers in the creation of the federal Constitution — James Madison and Alexander Hamilton — saw the several states more as problems to be solved or perhaps obstacles to be worked around than critical features of the new American national government they hoped to create. But that’s not how things worked out. The United States does in fact have a federal system, which chief justice of the Supreme Court Salmon P. Chase, just after the Civil War in 1869, described as an “indestructible Union composed of indestructible States.” That is a critical, central fact for anyone thinking about how to defy, delay and undo Donald Trump’s lawless effort to remake the American Republic into an autocracy.
In unitary states, lines of authority go from president or prime minister down to local officials. That’s not true in our federal system. The federal law is superior to state law. But governors don’t work for presidents. Nor do any other officials in state governments, whether they’re governors to state attorneys general or county commissioners or mayors. (The very important exception to this rule are the state National Guards, which in certain circumstances can be federalized and put at the command of the president — a key and potentially ominous detail we’ll return to.) What this means is that there are great stores of legitimate political power and authority in the United States which exist independent of the federal government and the power of the president. Inferior to that power, yes. But independent of it still. And that’s critical.
Continue reading “Sovereignty Where Ya Can Find It: More Notes on Saving the American Republic”