Another Round of Trump DOJ Purges

U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan — who reportedly has U.S. marshals accompanying her for security protection within her own office — has fired two more career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia.

Beth Yusi and Kristin Bird received termination letters, CNN reports.

Yusi was the senior prosecutor in Norfolk who pushed back against the prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James, arguing the evidence was weak. Bird was Yusi’s deputy, but it’s not clear exactly why she was terminated, too.

“One source said that Halligan believed the attorneys to be leaking ‘unauthorized’ information to the press,” according to CNN, though none of this has been independently confirmed.

Meanwhile, Halligan is pushing prosecutors to “move quickly to charge another politically sensitive case: a Democratic state lawmaker who has been under investigation since the Biden administration, according to three people familiar with the discussions,”
MSNBC reported last week. The name of the Democratic target was not made publicly known.

Career prosecutors were “rattled” by the pressure from Halligan because it comes so close to next month’s elections in Virginia, according the MSNBC report.

Other nuggets from the MSNBC report:

• D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro fired the head of her office’s fraud and public corruption unit after he’d already resigned. “Career prosecutors in the office, already deeply disturbed by Pirro’s pressure to pursue what they considered specious cases in order to please the president, viewed the firing of [Jon] Hooks as gratuitously punitive,” MSNBC reported.
• Trump DOJ weaponization chief Ed Martin has been nagging Kelly O. Hayes, a career prosecutor who is the acting U.S. attorney in Maryland, to bring bogus mortgage fraud charges against Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA).
• In the Western District of Virginia, career prosecutors are “fearful of notifying Trump’s appointed leader of the office that they see no evidence to charge any members of former FBI Director Chris Wray’s leadership team with destroying documents, two people said.”

Even though so much has already happened at the Trump Justice Department since January, we are still closer to the beginning of the story of DOJ weaponization than we are to the end of it.

The Retribution: John Bolton Edition

Up to now, most of the reporting on the criminal case against former Trump national security adviser John Bolton has suggested that the investigation began in Trump I, was closed during the Biden administration, and was then revived in Trump II.

But new reporting reveals that there were two different criminal investigations of Bolton, which changes the sequence of events and bolsters the notion that the case was properly predicated in the beginning.

The Trump I case was in fact closed in June 2021 during the Biden administration, but a new investigation was commenced the very next month when Bolton notified the FBI that his email had been breached by suspected Iranian hackers, CNN reports: “Investigators have been laboring on this case since then after the FBI began assessing potential damage from the hack and raised questions about whether Bolton’s practice of sending diary entries from his personal email broke the law, according to people briefed on the probe.”

The Bolton indictment to which he pleaded not guilty last week grew out of this second investigation, which the NYT describes as “a yearslong investigation that gained momentum under the Biden administration.”

Trump Commutes Santos Prison Sentence

President Trump commuted the sentence of former Rep. George Santos (R-NY), the convicted fraudster and notorious fabulist who was immediately released from prison and took a victory lap on Sunday TV news shows.

2020 Election Still Not Over

WSJ: White House Hires ‘Stop the Steal’ Lawyer to Investigate 2020 Election Claims

Alien Enemies Act Fallout Continues

• WaPo: Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised to betray U.S. informants to get Trump’s El Salvador prison deal
• 60 Minutes did a segment last night centered on Erez Reuveni, the fired DOJ lawyer-turned-whistleblower who was at the center of the crucial first weekend of Alien Enemies Act litigation:

Social Security Whistleblower Comes Forward

In his first media interview, Charles Borges — the former chief data officer for the Social Security Administration — continues to assert his concerns about DOGE’s access to a critical database and to rebut administration claims to the contrary.

Mass Deportations Watch: Chicago Edition

• After losing at the 7th Circuit, the Trump administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to allow it to deploy the National Guard in Illinois. Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck describes the incredibly high stakes in the case:

[M]ore than any of the first 28 applications from the Trump administration, Trump v. Illinois is a make-or-break moment for this Court. For the Supreme Court to issue a ruling that allows the President to send troops into our cities based upon contrived (or even government-provoked) facts, even if it does so in a way that avoids formally upholding such conduct as a matter of law, would be a terrible precedent for the Court to set—not just for what it would allow President Trump to do now, but for the even more grossly tyrannical conduct it would allow him and future presidents (assuming we have any) to undertake later. If factually and legally unpersuasive domestic deployments of troops aren’t going to be a red line for the Supreme Court, what the heck will be?

• U.S. Judge Sara L. Ellis of Chicago has ordered federal officials into her courtroom today to answer questions about whether they violated a court her order by using tear gas against protesters and residents during the mass deportation operation.
• TPM’s Josh Kovensky: Chicago Protest Cases Collapse in Court
• NYT: The now-notorious immigration raid on an apartment building in Chicago swept up dozens of U.S. citizens who were detained in the middle of the night.

For the Record

U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli of Los Angeles has downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanor the charges against labor leader David Huerta arising from his arrest while he was protesting an immigration raid.

ICE Is ‘Unfettered and Unaccountable’

ProPublica: How Trump is Building a Violent, Shadowy Federal Police Force

The Lawlessness: Caribbean Edition

• Two people survived the sixth U.S. attack on an alleged drug-smuggling vessel in the Caribbean on Thursday, raising legal and logistical dilemmas for what to do with survivors of the lawless high seas attacks ordered by President Trump. Rather than deal with those consequences, Trump announced Saturday that the two survivors — who had been given medical treatment aboard the U.S.S. Iwo Jima, an amphibious assault ship — were being repatriated to their respective home countries of Colombia and Ecuador. The targeted boat was a semi-submersible, according to reports.
• On Friday, the U.S. conducted the seventh known attack on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Sunday, claiming the boat was associated with the National Liberation Army, a Colombian rebel group known as the E.L.N.
• The total announced death toll from the Caribbean strikes is now at 32.
• Colombian President Gustavo Petro accused the U.S. of murdering a fisherman in a mid-September attack on a boat in the Caribbean, claiming that the man’s damaged boat was adrift when he was attacked. In response to Petro’s claims, President Trump said he would cut U.S. aid to Colombia and impose new tariffs on it.
• WaPo: Officials and locals undercut Trump claims about Venezuela drug boats.
• NYT infographic: Where the U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean is happening

Weekend in Review: No Kings Protests

President Trump responded to the mass protests against his regime by posting a AI-generated video of himself wearing a royal crown while piloting a fighter jet that drops payloads of excrement on protestors on American streets. Thomas Zimmer places this provocation in the larger context of “a shrill and deranged … campaign to demonize the No Kings protests.”

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Three-Time Loser

In a closely watched case, a federal jury acquitted a woman Thursday on charges of assaulting a federal law enforcement officer over the summer during a transfer of detainees to ICE outside of the D.C. jail.

Federal grand juries had declined three times to indict Sydney Reid on felony charges for the incident. Rather than dropping the case, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro charged it as a misdemeanor and took it to trial. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said it may have been the first time any criminal defendant has been charged federally in D.C. with misdemeanor assault on a federal officer, WUSA’s Sophie Rosenthal reports.

While the case has widely been seen as an example of jury nullification, it’s more accurately categorized as on overcharged case. The evidence against Reid was weak, but that didn’t matter. Pirro had ordered her prosecutors to impose the stiffest federal charges possible during Trump’s retaliatory surge of law enforcement into D.C. Some federal judges have balked at some of the cases that have wound up in federal court that might normally have been pursued in D.C. Superior Court — or not pursued at all.

For prosecutors, seeking maximum charges has made winning cases harder. But in Reid’s case, prosecutors did themselves no favors.

Prosecutors — and the two federal officers who were the purported victims in the case — were late in turning over discovery. Some discovery was never turned over at all, leading to admonitions from Judge Sooknanan during trial this week. “These are games,” Sooknanan told prosecutors at one point.

The discovery failures by prosecutors ultimately led Sooknanan to give a curative instruction to the jury:

Before the jury even got the case, Sooknanan acquitted Reid of the misdemeanor as to one of of the federal officers because of insufficient evidence she’d assaulted him. The officer in question had testified to the grand jury that Reid has initiated physical contact, but video of the incident showed that wasn’t true, Sooknanan said in court.

That left the jury to decide whether Reid had assaulted the other officer, the sole witness for the prosecution. That officer didn’t turn over some of her text messages about the case until the first day of trial, and even then one was missing. “The missing message was only discovered in the middle of cross-examination,” WUSA reported.

The prosecutor argued that the missing message was the result of a mistake the officer made while screenshotting the messages. But Judge Sooknanan was out of patience. “That seems to be a common theme with all your witnesses. Did they lie, or did they continuously make mistakes?” Sooknanan told the prosecutor.

Reid issued a statement after the jury verdict:

To sum it up, Pirro lost three times:

• three grand jury no bills;
• one acquittal by the judge;
• one acquittal by the petit jury.

Juries are doing their jobs, but it should never come to this.

The Bolton Indictment Is Still Crooked

As expected, the federal indictment of John Bolton in Maryland was more solid, evidence-based, and plausible than the bogus charges wielded against the other indicted Trump nemeses, James Comey and Letitia James. There’s no evidence that career prosecutors balked at the charges, and the acting U.S. attorney in Maryland is herself a career prosecutor.

In addition, Bolton comes off in the indictment as downright dumb in additional to careless and even reckless in how he allegedly handled classified information, sharing while Trump’s national security adviser more than 1,000 pages of “diary-like” entries with two family members, reported by the WSJ to be his wife and daughter. This alleged exchange is peak WTF:

But plausible criminal charges by themselves do not eliminate the stink that Trump has put all over this investigation. I’d go further than Joyce Vance, who writes that Trump has “undercut the integrity of the criminal justice system.” John Bolton would not have been indicted but for his role as a critic of Trump. The investigation, which began in Trump I, had been closed under the Biden administration, but was revived once Trump took office again. It’s a travesty of justice that this case is being brought at this time in this way.

The WaPo drops a little tidbit in its story on the indictment:

John Eisenberg, head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, was at the White House on Wednesday, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to discuss it publicly. His division has been involved in the Bolton investigation, which is typical for cases involving classified documents.

In Trump I, Eisenberg was a deputy White House counsel and legal advisor to the National Security Council, starting before Bolton arrived, who was involved in some key first term moments. The WaPo story implies but doesn’t outright say that Eisenberg was briefing the White House on the Bolton indictment. But at this point, I’m not sure fleeting accounts of DOJ officials being sighted at the White House carry the same weight as they used to. As Morning Memo has noted repeatedly, the Justice Department is being run out of the White House.

The same day Eisenberg was at the White House, Attorney General Pam Bondi, deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel together made an Oval Office appearance with President Trump in which he publicly called for them to target former Special Counsel Jack Smith, former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, and former deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco.

Mass Deportation: Chicago Edition

The Trump administration’s assault on Chicago — which lives in the Republican mind as a post-apocalyptic hellscape beset by urban (read: Black) violence and decay — is running hard up against federal judges:

• A three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals consisting of Trump, Obama, and Bush I appointees unanimously upheld a district court injunction barring the deployment of the National Guard in Illinois.
• U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis of Chicago said she will order federal immigration enforcement officers to wear and use body cams.
• U.S. District Judge Georgia Alexakis of Chicago ordered prosecutors to ship back from Maine on a flatbed trailer the vehicle of a Border Patrol agent involved in a hotly contested incident in which he shot a woman after their vehicles collided earlier this month. Defense attorneys demanded that it be returned to the Chicago area so that they can examine it.

Trump’s Venezuela Misadventure

In the latest developments:

• Adm. Alvin Holsey is stepping down as head of the U.S. Southern Command after less than a year in what is typically a three-year term. Holsey has overseen the buildup of forces in the Caribbean and the unlawful U.S. attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats. Holsey’s impending departure comes after he “raised concerns about the mission and the attacks on the alleged drug boats,” the NYT reports.
• Only one of the 27 people killed in the U.S. high seas attacks in alleged drug-smuggling boats has been tentatively identified publicly. “[D]espite the mounting death toll, no authority has come forward to publicly release the names of any of the dead,” the NYT reports.
• Analysis by the WaPo shows that the U.S. military’s elite Special Operations aviation unit has likely been operating in Caribbean waters off the coast of Venezuela in recent days.
• Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is making a show of deploying his forces to fend off any U.S. attack.

Thread of the Week

The federal budget apparatus is exceedingly complicated and byzantine, but one of the reasons for that is the constitutional structure that is meant to keep the power of the purse from becoming a tyrannical tool. Now President Trump and his OMB are tearing at the fabric of those constitutional restraints in new and dramatic ways:

Propagandist-in-Chief

The drumbeat of stuff like this out of the White House is constant and never-ending, polluting the political atmosphere with a steady stream of propaganda and disinformation:

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