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

Worse Than The Saturday Night Massacre

The mass resignations at the Justice Department mark the most serious crisis in its history, a darker moment than its previous low point during Watergate.

By this point, you know the gist of what happened. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York resigned Thursday afternoon rather than follow an order from Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove to drop the criminal case against NYC Mayor Eric Adams. Under Attorney General Pam Bondi, the case was kicked back to Main Justice to do the dirty work of dismissing the Adams case, but at least five senior attorneys also resigned rather than participating in the nakedly political scheme.

I’d argue that yesterday’s Valentine’s Eve Massacre is worse than 1973’s Saturday Night Massacre, not out of some prurient obsession with ranking political scandals but as a way of highlighting the seriousness of what is happening right now.

Unlike the Saturday Night Massacre, when the top officials at the Justice Department held the line and resigned rather than carry out President Nixon’s corrupt order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, here the higher-ups have acquiesced to and are furthering the corrupt scheme. This time, the resignations are coming from lower down in the chain of command because Bondi and Bove are doing President Trump’s bidding rather than holding the line in defense of the law, DOJ guidelines, and their own ethical obligations as lawyers.

All of this is happening in the broader context of political purges at DOJ and FBI even as Bondi and the White House tear down the walls meant to protect the Justice Department from improper political influence. The bad things are all happening, and they’re happening now.

Who Resigned

• Danielle R. Sassoon, 38, acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, a career prosecutor who has been with the office since 2016. She has sterling credentials: Harvard undergrad, Yale law, and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. She is a Federalist Society member who was named to the acting role just last month by the Trump administration to fill the post until Jay Clayton is confirmed.
• Kevin Driscoll, the acting head of the department’s Criminal Division who previously had been in the Public Integrity Section;
• John Keller, the acting head of the Public Integrity Section;
• Rob Heberle, a prosecutor in the Public Integrity Section;
• Jenn Clarke, a prosecutor in the Public Integrity Section;
• Marco Palmieri, a prosecutor in the Public Integrity Section.

The Thuggery

Bove’s letter responding to Sassoon’s resignation is as dastardly and villainous as anything I’ve ever seen come out of the Justice Department. It’s comic book villain material. Among the snarling remarks and acts of retaliation:

• Bove put on administrative leave at least two other line prosecutors in the U.S. attorneys office in Manhattan who had worked the Adams case, claiming without basis that the entire prosecution was politically motivated (improbably by a Democratic president against a Democratic mayor in a Democratic city).
• Bove threatened Sassoon and the line prosecutors with internal investigation, by both the attorney general’s bogus “weaponization” group and the Office of Professional Responsibility.
• Bove suggested that Sassoon’s oath to uphold the Constitution was superseded by “the policies of a democratically elected President and a Senate-confirmed Attorney General.

In her letter, Sassoon had revealed: (i) Bove cut her out of his negotiations with Adams’ lawyers of what she alleged was a quid pro quo arrangement; (ii) scotched one of the prosecutors from taking notes of the meeting with Adams’ lawyers; (iii) made his decision to drop the case despite knowing that a superseding indictment was in the works to add additional obstruction charges against Adams.

MUST READ: The Dueling DOJ Letters

Feb. 12: Danielle Sassoon’s letter to Bondi

Feb. 13: Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove’s response letter to Sassoon

The Other DOJ Travesty

In another flagrant disregard of the law, Attorney General Pam Bondi gave an affirmative green light to Google and Apple to ignore the plain language of the statutory TikTok ban upheld by the Supreme Court.

Emil Bove’s Dirty Secret: He Investigated Jan. 6

Former co-workers from Emil Bove’s brief time as an aggressive investigator of Jan. 6 spill the tea.

TPM Exclusive

TPM’s Josh Kovensky on the judicial branch scrambling to limit the spillover effects from Trump’s executive branch rampage on its own operations.

Will The Courts Stand Firm Against Trump Lawlessness?

Among the at least 70 lawsuits against the Trump administration and 14 court orders blocking executive actions, we’re tracking the most important rulings:

• USAID: In the first USAID case, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols extended his order blocking the Trump administration from pulling workers worldwide off the job.
• USAID: In a second USAID case, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ordered an end to the spending freeze.
• Trans Care: U.S. District Judge Brendan Hurson of Maryland blocked Trump’s executive order banning the federal government from offering gender-affirming care for trans kids.

The Purges

• Government-wide: Some 200,000 government workers on probationary status are being purged.
• CFPB: Dozens of workers fired in after-hours blitz.
• CFPB: Acting head Russell Vought established a “tip line” to snitch on financial regulators who are still doing their jobs despite a White House “stand down” order.
• U.S. Forest Service: Some 3,400 federal employees still within their probationary period purged across every level of the agency beginning yesterday.

Trump II Clown Show

• The Senate confirmed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was the sole Republican to vote no.
• The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced Kash Patel‘s nomination as FBI director despite his potential perjury problem.

The Corruption

WSJ: How the Trumps Turned an Election Victory Into a Cash Bonanza

‘You’ve Blown a Hole in the Family’

The NYT goes inside Rupert Murdoch’s succession drama after obtaining some 3,000 documents from a court case in Nevada.

Quote Of The Day

“Hegseth is going to be a great defense secretary, although he wasn’t my choice for the job. But he made a rookie mistake in Brussels and he’s walked back some of what he said but not that line. I don’t know who wrote the speech — it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.”–Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), lamenting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s remarks taking NATO membership for Ukraine off the table and saying it cannot return to its pre-2014 borders

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Enjoy your long weekend. Morning Memo will be back Tuesday.

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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.

As Bad As It Gets

The dangerous co-optation of the Justice Department by the Trump White House continues in ways both substantive and symbolic.

On the substantive side, NBC News’ Ryan Reilly is reporting that some holdover U.S. attorneys are being fired not by the Justice Department but directly by the White House. Removing U.S. attorneys at the start of a new administration is normal; the White House doing the firings directly is not normal.

Tara McGrath, the Biden-appointed U.S. attorney in San Diego, announced yesterday was her last day on the job. Her office’s press release explicitly noted the White House’s involvement: “As a Presidential appointee, Ms. McGrath was informed of her termination in a communication from the White House, at the direction of the President of the United States.”

Of even deeper concern, Trump defense counsel Todd Blanche refused yesterday during his confirmation hearing for deputy attorney general to commit to recusing himself from matters involving the cases against Trump.

Among the examples of symbolic erosion was the image of Attorney General Pam Bondi last week, on just her second day on the job, doing a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity from the White House lawn (a good catch by former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance). Most attorney generals kept their distance from the White House. Given the furor around the likelihood that Bondi would not maintain any firewall between Trump and the Justice Department, this provocative location was a choice:

This is in addition to all of the other degradations of the DOJ over the past three weeks: dropping the Jan. 6, Mar-a-Lago, and Eric Adams cases; investigating the investigators and reporting on it directly to Stephen Miller; purging the Jan. 6 prosecutors and the FBI; and the list goes on.

The Path To American Authoritarianism

If you read one think piece this week, make it this one by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way in Foreign Affairs:

U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties. …

But authoritarianism does not require the destruction of the constitutional order. What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. …

Competitive authoritarianism will transform political life in the United States. … Americans will still be able to oppose the government, but opposition will be harder and riskier, leading many elites and citizens to decide that the fight is not worth it. A failure to resist, however, could pave the way for authoritarian entrenchment—with grave and enduring consequences for global democracy.

IMPORTANT

Trump’s acting solicitor general says the administration is taking the position that laws protecting the independence of the NLRB, FTC, and Consumer Product Safety Commission are unconstitutional and will urge the Supreme Court to overrule any conflicting precedent.

The Lastest Significant Court Rulings

• OSC: After the DC Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a premature appeal by the Trump administration, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson issued a temporary restraining order that keeps the fired Hampton Dellinger in place as U.S. special counsel. But the appeals court dissenter suggested he would ultimately rule against Dellinger on the merits.
• Spending Freeze: U.S. District Judge John McConnell of Rhode Island held in place his order blocking the OMB’s spending freeze while the Trump appeals.
• Fork in Road: U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole, Jr. of Massachusetts ruled that the challengers to the Trump administration’s “deferred retirement” offer to federal workers lacked standing to sue and lifted his order blocking the initiative, at which point the Trump administration claimed victory and quickly stopped accepting new resignations.

The Purges Are Ongoing

• CNN: Scores of firings have begun at federal agencies
• WaPo: Musk team kicks off federal layoffs as White House eyes big cuts
• NYT: Trump Tests Legal Limits in Pushing out Federal Employees

What Federal Workers Can Do To Protect Themselves

In the face of the Trump II purge of the federal workforce, Protect Democracy has created a resource for federal workers on what to do, what rights they have, and what sources of support exist outside of government.

Understanding ‘Structural Deregulation’

Jody Freeman and Sharon Jacobs revisit their 2021 Harvard Law Review article distinguishing standard regulation from what they warned at the time was the threat of a president engaging in the structural deregulation we’re now witnessing:

By contrast, structural deregulation is more radical—it cuts at the core of agency expertise and competence and harms agencies in systemic ways that are hard to challenge and difficult to reverse, by tearing at institutional memory and corroding agency culture. It can happen relatively quickly and indiscriminately. Structural deregulation erodes an agency’s leadership, staffing, resource base, expertise, and reputation—which agencies require to accomplish their statutory tasks. Even when rules and laws are designed to prevent it, by the time the legal system catches up with structural deregulation, the damage may already be done.

EXCLUSIVE

TPM’s Josh Kovensky reports on how the judicial branch has been caught up in the Trump administration’s headlong rush to terminate thousands of leases of government office space.

Why DOGE Is Unconstitutional

This is coming from Alan Charles Raul, a former Reagan and Bush I official:

The radical reorganization now underway is not just footfaulting over procedural lines; it is shattering the fundamental checks and balances of our constitutional order. The DOGE process, if that is what it is, mocks two basic tenets of our government: that we are a nation of laws, not men, and that it is Congress which controls spending and passes legislation. The president must faithfully execute Congress’s laws and manage the executive agencies consistent with the Constitution and lawmakers’ appropriations — not by any divine right or absolute power.

Elon Musk Watch

• NYT: State Dept. Plans $400 Million Purchase of Armored Tesla Cybertrucks
• WSJ: Musk’s X Agrees to Pay About $10 Million to Settle Trump Lawsuit
• NYT: With Attack on Consumer Bureau, Musk Removes Obstacle to His ‘X Money’ Vision

Elon Musk As Content Creator

Tressie McMillan Cottom is really onto something with her thesis that Elon Musk is a skilled content creator supplying the content machine Trump has built:

It is fast becoming clear that this content-driven chaos is going to be the M.O. of Trump 2.0. Trump may have learned in his first term that there is a political price for not feeding your loyalists enough content. Governance got in the way of the content machine he built on the campaign trail. Since then, he has had four years to refine his strategy. Chaos is central to his deployment of unchecked executive power. But chaos has to be tended like a fire. It needs the right amount of constant oxygen to keep it going.

That is Musk’s utility to Trump. He is willing to fill in for Trump by consistently producing DOGE’s bureaucratic takeovers as content.

If you are confused when you see Musk narrating a serious civic affair like a video game side quest, understand that you are not the intended audience. What looks like chaos to you is actually clarifying content to someone else.

Trump’s War On DEI Is Really A War On Civil Rights

Jamelle Bouie:

Trump’s war on D.E.I. is a war on the civil rights era itself, an attempt to turn back the clock on equal rights. Working under the guise of fairness and meritocracy, Trump and his allies want to restore a world where the first and most important qualification for any job of note was whether you were white and male, where merit is a product of your identity and not of your ability. As is true in so many other areas, the right’s accusation that diversity means unfair preferences masks a confession of its own intentions.

Gabbard Confirmed As DNI

Sen. Mitch McConnell was the lone Republican to vote against the confirmation of former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence.

Trump’s Kennedy Center Takeover Is Complete

After President Trump ousted President Biden’s appointees to the Kennedy Center board of trustees, the newly constituted board elected Trump as its chairman; terminated the performing arts institution’s longtime leader, Deborah Rutter; and replaced her with the oleaginous Ric Grenell.

House GOP Finally Unveils Its Big Bill

Massive Medicaid cuts are firmly in the crosshairs, even as House Republicans try to obscure it.

Quote Of The Day

I usually let the quote of the day speak for itself, but when the United States abandons the post-World War II security arrangement in Europe at the same time President Trump is undermining Ukraine’s defense of Russia’s invasion, it’s worth noting that this may be the most historically significant news of the past 24 hours:

“I’m … here today to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States from being the primary guarantor of security in Europe.”–Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at NATO headquarters

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