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On the spectrum of Trump II depredations, it’s another symptom of the underlying disease of DOJ being run out of the White House. The only silver lining may be that the clumsy, pathetic way the DOJ conducted itself in this instance hastens the slow awakening of appeals courts judges.
The new reporting suggests the failure was on the WH end:
"Before Trump’s intervention, top department officials believed they had signoff from the White House Counsel’s Office and Trump’s top aides to drop the case. But Trump himself hadn’t been told of the decision, the people said..."
Did DOJ give the White House a heads-up in advance or was it freelancing? Was the White House Counsel’s Office involved from the get-go or did it fail to “manage up” (an impossible task with Trump)? Did Trump know in advance but change his mind because he disliked the optics?
“I never signed off on that,” Trump said in an Oval Office outburst.
Trump then directed WH officials to tell the DOJ to reverse itself, which White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed: “At the president’s direction, the Department of Justice quickly amended this filing.”
Within 24 hours, Pam Bondi’s DOJ went from moving to drop its appeal of the 4 law firms cases it had lost to telling the appeals court…never mind.
The reversal came after Trump blew his top upon learning from news reports that the administration would be dropping its appeals, according to the WSJ.
In the madcap world of the Trump II White House, you knew that President Trump had to be the cause of last week’s humiliating DOJ reversal of its appeal in the law firm executive order cases. And now it’s confirmed.
talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo...
Sometimes I dither about whether to renew a subscription when it comes due (thank you, email messages snoozed for 11 months). But I never consider cancelling TPM for even a second, and not a day goes by without reading Morning Memo.
If Morning Memo has helped you keep your wits about you, steady your balance, or make some sense of the senseless during the first year of the Trump II presidency, then please seriously consider becoming a TPM member during our annual membership drive: talkingpointsmemo.com/memberships
...by going over his head to the Court of Appeals while the probe was underway.
In short, Martin managed to get a 2d count lodged against himself in the course of unsuccessfully fighting off the 1st count. Well done, sir, well done.
More in today's Morning Memo: morningmemo.talkingpointsmemo.com
In a newly filed two-count disciplinary case against Martin in DC, half of the complaint is devoted to his unconstitutional pressure campaign against the Jesuit University and half to Martin’s ham-handed efforts to block the probe by threatening the bar’s disciplinary counsel and ...
Ed Martin already had plenty of trouble on his hands, all of his own making, when the DC bar disciplinary counsel last year began looking into his extortionist threat against Georgetown. But good ol’ Ed managed to make things a whole lot worse for himself.
talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo...
Sadly, it's not the deadliest U.S. military error in recent decades involving Iran: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Ai...
Just as true today as it was 10 years ago ... except the url is different now. talkingpointsmemo.com/memberships
The DC Bar charges against Ed Martin are very Ed Martin-y. After DCBar starts inquiry, Martin writes Chief Judge of DC Court of Appeals 3x ex parte—twice after being warned not to—& demands that DCBar counsel be suspended—triggering additional charges.
www.documentcloud.org/documents/27...
If Morning Memo has helped you keep your wits about you, steady your balance, or make some sense of the senseless during the first year of the Trump II presidency, then please seriously consider becoming a TPM member during our annual membership drive: talkingpointsmemo.com/memberships
“[W]hy does the fate of thousands of criminal prosecutions in this District potentially rest on the legitimacy of an unprecedented and byzantine leadership structure? The President doesn’t like that he cannot simply appoint whomever he wants.”
These challenges have created “a chaos that pervades criminal prosecutions” in New Jersey, Brann wrote, explicitly framed his ruling around the risk to public safety of invalidating criminal prosecutions en masse:
What’s critical to understanding how these challenges are playing out is that they are being brought in run-of-the-mill criminal cases, where defense attorneys are contesting the lawfulness and legitimacy of actions taken by federal prosecutors in leaderless U.S. attorney’s offices.
" ... at the limits on their power set forth by law and the Constitution,” Brann wrote. “To avoid these roadblocks, this admin frequently purports to have discovered enormous grants of executive power hidden in the vagaries and silences of the code.”
The triumvirate approach was yet another backdoor way of bypassing Senate confirmation for a permanent USA and denying district judges the chance to exercise their statutory power to name interim USAS.
“One year into this admin, it is plain that President Trump and his top aides have chafed ...
The same outside judge who disqualified Habba, U.S. District Judge William Brann of the Middle District of Pennsylvania, ruled that Bondi’s appointment of a trio of DOJ attorneys to run the U.S. Attorney’s Office violates the Constitution and federal statute.
In a searing ruling, a federal judge has rejected Attorney General Pam Bondi's ham-handed workaround to the disqualification of Alina Habba as U.S. attorney for New Jersey. "The President doesn’t like that he cannot simply appoint whomever he wants," he wrote. talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo...
In the original Abrego Garcia case, Judge Xinis today resumed her contempt of court inquiry into the govt's violation of her orders to facilitate his return. She wants briefing on 28 USC 1927, which could put Trump DOJ attorneys personally on the hook for excess costs, expenses, and attorneys’ fees:
Morning Memo, chronicling the depredations of the Trump II presidency each weekday:
morningmemo.talkingpointsmemo.com
In related news:
~In Texas, newly released video of the fatal ICE shooting of a U.S. citizen raises questions about the govt's claim that he “intentionally ran over” a federal agent.
~In Minnesota, federal agents lied about why they shot a Venezuelan man before their story fell apart.
Ten of those accused have pleaded guilty to lesser charges, the newspaper’s analysis found. Two of those accused — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — were shot dead by federal agents.
The bottom line: “Of the 279 people accused by officials on X of attacking federal officers in the past year, 181 were U.S. citizens, the Journal found. Close to half of those Americans were never charged with assault. None have been convicted at trial.”
It was a substantial undertaking, as the WSJ describes it: After reviewing more than 100,000 posts on X from 66 government and senior official accounts, it “identified 1,456 posts in which the government alleged an assault, impediment, attack or conspiracy or attempt to harm a federal officer.”
“Protesters, observers and passersby taken into custody by federal agents were declared terrorists and attackers in hundreds of social-media posts by U.S. officials and departments since the start of the immigration sweeps in cities,” according to the WSJ.
