A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Clean Up On Aisle 47
Before we get into the latest legal developments in the wide-ranging effort to defend the rule of law and the constitutional order against President Trump’s attacks, a quick word on how sloppy the Trump White House has been.
Overnight, the Justice Department had to file two separate corrections in pending court cases to clean up misstatements of fact they made to federal judges in open court. It’s an excruciating thing for any lawyer to have to do, but especially for the Justice Department which has prided itself on being a reliable narrator and has earned, for better or worse, the benefit of the doubt in federal court.
The impact and significance of the admitted errors isn’t entirely clear yet, but they undermine the Justice Department’s credibility and make it clear to the judges involved that these are not careful, considered, prudent government actions that deserve to be treated as regular or normal.
In the Treasury-DOGE case, the Justice Department now says it was mistaken when it told the court that since-resigned DOGE associate Marko Elez was a special government employee. He was in fact a Treasury Department employee.
In the USAID case, the Justice Department admitted it was wildly wrong when it told the court that 500 employees were placed on leave. The actual number was 2,140. It also mistakenly told the court that only future USAID contracts had been frozen when in fact existing contracts had been frozen as well.
The pace of the destruction unleashed by the White House combined with its disorganization, its ham-handedness, and the lack of involvement from lawyers at the front end has created an enormous mess for the Justice Department to try to clean up in real time in court. It’s not been pretty.
Trump being sloppy and non-strategic is neither new nor a surprise, but it might provide an opening to fend off some of his worst actions in his first three weeks in office.
Judge: White House Failed To Comply With Order
U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr. (Rhode Island) found that the Trump White House was not complying with his order that blocked OMB’s funding freeze. At issue was the failure of funds to resume flowing in full. The judge reiterated his original order and singled out the funding of the National Institutes of Health and the Inflation Reduction Act to make sure it was clear that they were included in his order.
Still, reporting as recently as this morning has continued to suggest funds are being held up under the original OMB freeze:
- Popular Information: Trump maintains funding freeze at NIH, defying court order
- ProPublica: The Courts Blocked Trump’s Federal Funding Freeze. Agencies Are Withholding Money Anyway.
The Trump administration has appealed the TRO, even though they are not typically appealable.
Court Blocks NIH Funding Freeze
In a separate lawsuit in Massachusetts, U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley blocked the Friday change to the funding formula at NIH that so alarmed scientists, researchers, and universities.
Judge Orders Watchdog Reinstated
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson (DC) ordered Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger immediately reinstated to his job after he was quietly fired by President Trump on Friday night. The special counsel enforces federal whistleblower laws and the Hatch Act. The Trump administration appealed the judge’s ruling even though the temporary administrative stay she issued is typically not appealable.
Trump II Clown Show
- President Trump posted on social media that former acting DNI Ric Grenell is going to be the Kennedy Center’s interim executive director … except that the Kennedy Center doesn’t have an executive director position and it’s not clear on what authority, if any, the president is relying on to intervene directly in Kennedy Center affairs.
- WaPo: The 19-year-old Musk surrogate known online as “Big Balls” takes on news roles as a senior adviser at State and DHS.
- WSJ: Meet Steve Davis, the Musk deputy running DOGE.
The DOGE Raid On CFPB
Bloomberg (emphasis added):
Then, late Friday night, the DOGE staffers were granted access to all the CFPB’s data systems, including sensitive bank examination and enforcement records, according to five people familiar with the matter and emails seen by Bloomberg News. The people asked not to be identified, citing concerns over potential retribution. By Sunday, the agency was a skeleton, with its funding limited and activities suspended.
Quote Of The Day
“We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis right now. There have been so many unconstitutional and illegal actions in the first 18 days of the Trump presidency. We never have seen anything like this.”–Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at UC Berkeley, speaking Friday
Public Corruption Has Never Had It So Good
The new developments at the Justice Department aren’t merely warning signs, they don’t just “raise questions,” and they do not simply portend bad things to come. They are the bad things, and they are happening right now. This is it. This is the eye of the storm we warned about:
- Eric Adams: In a historically corrupt move, the Justice Department has ordered federal prosecutors in Manhattan to drop the public corruption case against NYC Mayor Eric Adams.
- READ: Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove’s atrocious memo ordering the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan to drop the Adams case, while admitting the decision was made “without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based.”
- FBI Purge: “The Trump administration has asked the FBI for a list of probationary employees and individual justifications for keeping anyone who has been at the bureau for less than two years, sparking a new round of fears within a bureau that has been rocked by the first three weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency.”–NBC News
In related news, President Trump pardoned disgraced former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D).
Corruption For America AND The World
When I saw initial reports that President Trump had issued a new executive order pulling back on enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, I had a notion that it would deprioritize it in favor of immigration enforcement or some such. But no! It’s a full-throated attack on the statute that is a cornerstone of anti-corruption efforts worldwide, bemoaning how it puts American business at a competitive disadvantage.
Trump halted all new FCPA enforcement for six months (with an option to extend for another six months) and ordered a review of all pending FCPA cases. But the kicker was in Trump’s description of bribery and other corrupt activity as “routine business practices in other nations” and his lament that the FCPA is an “excessive barrier” to U.S. commerce.
Trump Still Extorting Ukraine
President Trump claims he has demanded $500 billion in “rare earth” from Ukraine as compensation for U.S. aid to fend off the Russian invasion. “Otherwise, we’re stupid. I said to them we have to — ‘we have to get something. We can’t continue to pay this money,’” Trump said.
Hegseth Is On The Loose At The Pentagon
- Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is renaming Ft. Liberty back to Ft. Bragg, but the “Bragg” now refers not to the Confederate general it was originally named for but to an obscure Army private first class who fought in World War II.
- In an order Friday but not made public until Monday, Hegseth blocked transgender Americans from joining the military and halted gender-affirming care for current service members.
- President Trump ordered the immediate dismissals of the boards of visitors for all four military service academies.
- In response to President Trump’s anti-DEI executive order, the Defense Department has begun banning certain books in its school system serving military families.
PBS Under Pressure
PBS shutters its DEI office, forcing two DEI executives to leave. Bari Weiss’ Free Press suggests the move came after it contacted PBS about a tip it received from a “high-ranking” PBS executive that the public broadcaster was planning to move the two executives to a different department to “skirt” Trump’s DEI executive order.
What Can Be Done?
Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill, on setting realistic expectations and saving enough of the foundational bricks of democracy to be able to rebuild in the future:
The truth is that we will NOT be able to stop every terrible thing that this administration seeks to do. Elections really do have consequences – as many of us tried with tremendous urgency to make clear last year. But we can slow things down, win some battles, throw sand in the gears of others. If we save some lives, some jobs, some critical government agencies, some measure of press freedom, some medical and subsistence benefits, academic freedom for some schools and universities, and protect the dignity, safety and constitutional rights of some of our most vulnerable fellow Americans, it will be worth it.
And it will be from whatever remainder of democratic structure, values, and policies we are able to protect that we will have the space and platform on which to do the work of building an urgently needed new democracy in our country. So our fight today is worth it.
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