For those folks who rely on only one news source which does not cover all aspects of real news - this is for you
Throughout now-president Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, it was clear that his support was coming from three very different factions whose only shared ideology was a determination to destroy the federal government. Now we are watching them do it. The group that serves President Donald Trump is gutting the government both to get revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law and to make sure he and his cronies will never again have to worry about legality. Last night, officials in the Trump administration purged the Federal Bureau of Investigation of all six of its top executives and, according to NBC’s Ken Dilanian, more than 20 heads of FBI field offices, including those in Washington, D.C., and Miami, where officials pursued cases against now-president Trump. Acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove, who represented Trump in a number of his criminal cases, asked acting FBI director Brian J. Driscoll Jr. for a list of FBI agents who had worked on January 6 cases to “determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.” Clarissa-Jan Lim of MSNBC reported that Trump denied knowing about the dismissals but said the firings were “a good thing” because “[t]hey were very corrupt people, very corrupt, and they hurt our country very badly with the weaponization.” Officials also fired 25 to 30 federal prosecutors who had worked on cases involving the rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and reassigned others. Bove ordered the firings. Career civil servants can’t be fired without cause, and these purges come on top of the apparently illegal firing of 18 inspectors general across federal agencies and a purge of the Department of Justice of those who had worked on cases involving Trump. Phil Williams of NewsChannel 5 in Nashville, Tennessee, reported on Friday that federal prosecutors were withdrawn from a criminal investigation of Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) for election fraud; Ogles recently filed a House resolution to enable Trump to run for a third term and another supporting Trump’s designs on Greenland. On Wednesday, federal prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss an election fraud case against former representative Jeffrey Fortenberry (R-NE). Trump called Fortenberry’s case an illustration of “the illegal Weaponization of our Justice System by the Radical Left Democrats.” That impulse to protect Trump showed yesterday in what a local water manager said was an “extremely unprecedented” release of water from two dams in California apparently to provide evidence of his social media post that the U.S. military had gone into California and “TURNED ON THE WATER.” In fact, water was released from two reservoirs that hold water to supply farmland in the summer. They are about 500 miles (800 km) from Los Angeles, where the fires were earlier this year, and the water did not go to Southern California. “This is going to hurt farmers,” a water manager said, “This takes water out of the summer irrigation portfolio.” But Trump posted that if California officials had listened to him six years ago, there would have been no fires. Shashank Joshi of The Economist called it “real ‘mad king’ stuff.” Trump’s loyalists overlap with the MAGA crew that embraces Project 2025, a plan that mirrors the one used by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to overthrow democracy in Hungary. Operating from the position that modern democracy destroys a country by treating everyone equally before the law and welcoming immigrants, it calls for discrimination against women and gender, racial, and religious minorities; rejection of immigrants; and the imposition of religious laws to restore a white Christian patriarchy. Former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson has been a vocal proponent of Orbán’s ideology, and J.D. Vance this week hired Carlson’s son, 28-year-old Buckley, as his deputy press secretary. Although Trump claimed during the campaign he didn't know anything about Project 2025, Steve Contorno and Casey Tolan of CNN estimate that more than two thirds of Trump’s executive orders mirror Project 2025. You can see the influence of this faction in the indiscriminate immigration sweeps the administration has launched, Trump’s announcement that he is opening a 30,000-bed migrant detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and officials’ revocation of protection for more than 600,000 Venezuelans legally in the U.S. and possibly also for Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. You can see it in the administration’s attempt to end the birthright citizenship written into the U.S. Constitution in 1868. It shows in the new administration's persecution of transgender Americans, including Trump’s executive order purging trans service members from the military, another limiting access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth, and yet another ordering trans federal prisoners to be medically detransitioned and then moved to facilities that correspond to their sex at birth, an outcome that a trans woman suing the administration calls “humiliating, terrifying, and dangerous.” The administration has ordered that federal employees must remove all pronouns from their email signatures and, as Jeremy Faust reported in Inside Medicine, that researchers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must scrub from their work any references to “[g]ender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female.” Faust notes that the requirements are vague and that because “most manuscripts include demographic information about the populations or patients studied,” the order potentially affects “just about any major study…including studies on Covid-19, cancer, heart disease, or anything else.” Those embracing this ideology are also isolationist. As soon as he took office, Trump imposed a freeze on foreign aid except for military aid to Israel and Egypt, abruptly cutting off about $60 billion in funding—less than 1% of the U.S. budget—to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides humanitarian assistance to fight starvation and provide basic medical care for the globe’s most vulnerable and desperate populations. The outcry, both from those appalled that the U.S. would renege on its promises to provide food for children in war-torn countries and from those who recognize that the U.S. withdrawal from these popular programs would create a vacuum China is eager to fill, made Trump’s new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, say that “humanitarian programs” would be exempted from the freeze, but that appears either untrue or so complicated to negotiate that programs are shutting down anyway. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) appears to be beside himself over this destruction. “Let me explain why the total destruction of USAID…matters so much,” he posted on social media. “China—where Musk makes his money—wants USAID destroyed. So does Russia. Trump and Musk are doing the bidding of Beijing and Moscow. Why?” “The U.S. is in full retreat from the world,” he wrote, and there is “[n]o good reason for it. The immediate consequences of this are cataclysmic. Malnourished babies who depend on U.S. aid will die. Anti-terrorism programs will shut down and our most deadly enemies will get stronger. Diseases that threaten the U.S. will go unabated and reach our shores faster. And China will fill the void. As developing countries will now ONLY be able to rely on China for help, they will cut more deals with Beijing to give them control of ports, critical mineral deposits, etc. U.S. power will shrink. U.S. jobs will be lost.” Murphy speculated that “billionaires like Musk who make $ in China” or “someone buying all that secret Trump meme coin” would benefit from deliberately sabotaging eighty years of U.S. goodwill on the international stage. And that brings us to the third faction: that of the tech bros, led by billionaire Elon Musk, who according to year-end Federal Election Commission filings spent more than $290 million supporting Trump and the Republicans in 2024. Musk appears to consider colonizing space imperative for the survival of humanity, and part of that goal requires slashing government regulations, as well as receiving government contracts that help to fund his space program. Before he took office, Trump named Musk and another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy, to an extra-governmental group called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but Musk has assumed full control of the group, whose mission is to cut the federal budget by as much as $2 trillion. Musk is interested in the government for future contracts, although a report from January 30, when Musk’s Tesla company filed its annual financial report, showed that the company, which is valued at more than $1 trillion and which made $2.3 billion in 2024, paid $0 in federal income tax. Today, Musk’s X social media company became a form of state media when the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said it would no longer email updates about this week’s two plane crashes—one in Washington, D.C., and one in Philadelphia—and that reporters would have to get their information through X. Musk’s goal might well be the crux of the drastic cuts to federal aid, as well as the attempt last week from the Office of Management and Budget to “pause” federal funding and grants to make sure funding reflected Trump’s goals. After a public outcry over the loss of payments to local law enforcement, Meals on Wheels for shut-ins, supplemental nutrition programs, and so on, the OMB rescinded its first memo, but then White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately contradicted the new memo, saying the cuts were still in effect. The chaos surrounding the cuts could have been designed to make it difficult for opponents to sue over them. This method of changing government priorities through “impoundment” is illegal. Congress—which is the body that represents the American people—appropriates the money for programs, and the president takes an oath to execute the laws. After President Richard M. Nixon tried it, Congress passed a 1974 law making impoundment expressly illegal. But the on-again-off-again confusion appeared at first to stand a chance of stopping lawsuits. It didn’t work: a federal judge halted the funding freeze, suggesting it was a blatant violation of the Constitution. But then, yesterday, Elon Musk forced the resignation of David A. Lebryk, the highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department. Lebryk had been at Treasury since 1989 and had risen to become the person in charge of the U.S. government payment system that disburses about $6 trillion a year through Social Security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, contracts, grants, salaries for federal government workers, tax refunds, and so on, essentially managing the nation’s checkbook. According to Jeff Stein, Isaac Arnsdorf, and Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post, Musk’s team wanted access to the payment system. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) demanded answers from Trump’s new Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, warning that “these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically-motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy. I am deeply concerned that following the federal grant and loan freeze earlier this week, these officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs. I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems.” Now, though, with Musk’s people at the computers that control the nation’s payment system, they can simply stop whatever payments they want to. Wyden continued by reminding Bessent that the press has reported that Musk has previously been “denied a high-level clearance to access the government’s most sensitive secrets. I am concerned that Musk’s enormous business operation in China—a country whose intelligence agencies have stolen vast amounts of sensitive data about Americans, including U.S. government employee data by hacking U.S. government systems—endangers U.S. cybersecurity and creates conflicts of interest that make his access to these systems a national security risk.” This afternoon, Wyden posted that he has been told that Bessent has given the Department of Government Efficiency full access to the system. “Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk's own companies. All of it.” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted: “This is more or less like taking the gold from Fort Knox and putting it in Elons basement. Anyone who gets a check from soc sec or anything else[,] he can cut it off or see all y[ou]r personal and financial data.” Pundit Stuart Stevens called it “the most significant data leak in cyber history.” All three of these factions are focused on destroying the federal government, which, after all, represents the American people through their elected representatives and spends their taxpayer money. Musk, who is an unelected adjunct to Trump, this evening gleefully referred to the civil servants in the government who work for the American people as “the opposing team.” But something jumps out from the chaos of the past two weeks. Instructions are vague, circumstances are chaotic, and it’s unclear who is making decisions. That confusion makes it hard to enforce laws or sue, although observers note that what’s going on is “illegal and a breach of the constitutional order.” Our federal government rests on the U.S. Constitution. The three different factions of Trump's MAGA Republicans agree that the government must be destroyed, and they are operating outside the constitutional order, not eager to win legal victories so much as determined to slash and burn down the government without them. Today, senior Washington Post political reporter Aaron Blake noted that while it is traditional for cabinet nominees to pledge that they will refuse to honor illegal presidential orders, at least seven of Trump’s nominees have sidestepped that question. Attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, now-confirmed defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, small business administrator nominee Kelly Loeffler, Veterans Affairs secretary nominee Douglas A. Collins, and commerce secretary nominee Howard Lutnick all avoided the question by saying that Trump would never ask them to do anything illegal. FBI director nominee Kash Patel just said he would “always obey the law.” — Notes: https://www.newsweek.com/jan-6-prosecutors-fired-trump-appointed-us-attorney-2024549 https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/21/debt-ceiling-treasury-dave-lebryk/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/01/31/elon-musk-treasury-department-payment-systems/ https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-01-31/trump-california-dams-opened-up  https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/trump-executive-order-trans-people-cruelty.html https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/31/politics/trump-policy-project-2025-executive-orders-invs/index.html https://abcnews.go.com/US/tucker-carlsons-son-buckley-joining-jd-vances-staff/story?id=118150708 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/trans-rights-skrmetti-trump/681485/ https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/01/politics/elon-musk-2024-election-spending-millions/index.html https://itep.org/tesla-reported-zero-federal-income-tax-in-2024/ https://thedesk.net/2025/02/ntsb-moves-plane-crash-press-updates-x-twitter/ https://www.npr.org/2025/01/23/nx-s1-5270572/birthright-citizenship-trump-executive-order Bluesky: wyden.senate.gov/post/3lh5ejpwncc23 joshtpm.bsky.social/post/3lh5foqmng22a shashj.bsky.social/post/3lh5hjuy7qc2v joshtpm.bsky.social/post/3lh5hsrjqos2q kevinmkruse.bsky.social/post/3lh5r5vtbvc2g qjurecic.bsky.social/post/3lh5nhzvqoc2v schwellenbach.bsky.social/post/3lh3assnvgk2x stuartpstevens.bsky.social/post/3lh5p2nvkp22t X: kendilaniannbc/status/1885426699539534152 steverattner/status/1885422469332303969 ChrisMurphyCT/status/1885715312185614505 kelseytuoc/status/1885509982550172059 brandonrichards/status/1885504376560902640 * * * * * * * * * |
IT'S A COUP--Trump Moves to Completely Take Over Government
February 2, 2025
By Connie Willis
Sorry to be the bearer of such bad news, but Trump is moving so fast to dismantle the federal government and the rule of law that it may all be over by Monday morning, so I have to report it today:
First, during the campaign, Trump assured us he had no intention of seeking retribution on his political enemies. Now he has:
--fired everybody who worked on the January 6 investigation.
--fired everybody who worked for Jack Smith.
--fired all the top officials at the FBI.
--fired every prosecutor who worked on any investigation into Trump.
--instituted a mass purging of professional law enforcement--dozens and dozens of agents.
--dropped charges against Republican Representatives Jeff Fortenberry and Andy Ogles. ("In a dictatorship there will be those who the law binds but does not protect and those who the law protects but does not bind.")
--Trump dismissed all 51 agents who said Hunter’s laptop was tampered with and contained Russian disinformation.
--Trump then signed an order preventing them all from entering federal buildings.
--88 FBI agents who worked on Trump cases were physically escorted out of Washington field offices this weekend.
--At least three different FBI senior officials, including Brian Driscoll, the acting FBI head, "forcefully resisted" the firings.
--Many government workers are surprised by the lengths Trump is going to to exact revenge. According to Mark Bergman, "the most common refrain I’m hearing from people who left but are still talking to people on the inside is: ‘I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t think it was going to be this bad.’ There’s certainly shellshock."
--There is now talk that Trump intends to fire 6000 people of the 13,750 employed by the FBI. And that those who aren’t will be told that they can only stay if they will carry out the orders of the President regardless of whether they’re lawful or not.
--"Dismissing potentially hundreds of FBI agents would severely weaken the Bureau’s ability to protect the country from national security and criminal threats and will ultimately risk setting up the bureau and its new leadership for the future."
--Jamie Raskin: "In another repulsive affront to the rule of law and our nation’s law enforcement officers, the Trump Administration today moved to fire scores of FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors simply for enforcing the law and impartially carrying out the largest criminal investigation in American history which they had been assigned to work on. On Day One, the unpopular President Trump pardoned the members of violent militias and street gangs who beat police officers to a pulp with pipes, flagpoles, and broken furniture when they attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to overturn the Presidential election Trump had lost by more than 7 million votes, 306-232 in the elector college. Today, shockingly but not surprisingly, Trump takes aim at the career FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors who investigated and prosecuted the violent insurrectionary assault on our police officers to block the peaceful transfer of power, as well as those FBI agents who were assigned to investigate Trump’s efforts to illegally retain classified records at his Mar-a-Lago club, defy judicial subpoenas, obstruct justice, conceal evidence, and lie to law enforcement...Trump doesn’t care about the requirements of democracy, national security, and public safety. His agenda is vengeance and retribution. If allowed to proceed, Trump’s purge of our federal law enforcement workforce will expose America to authoritarianism and dictatorship."
The other horror story is the scariest one yet. Trump has handed Elon Musk the car keys to our entire government:
--While Trump spent the weekend at Mar-a-lago golfing, Elon Musk and his cronies demanded (and forcibly took) access to all the federal employee data systems at the Office of Personnel Management.
--According to Reuters, "Elon Musk’s team has hijacked massive datasets of government worker dates of birth, home addresses, Social Security numbers, length of service, performance evaluations, revoking access of the OPM officials."
--The guy in charge, David Lebryk, the Acting Head of the Department, tried to fight them, then quit (or was removed) over their demand for access and his refusal. Update: According to the New York Times, he resisted, then was put on leave by Trump and then forced to resign Friday. (It’s a coup, people.)
--Senator Ron Wyden: "NEW: Sources tell my office that Treasury Secretary Bessent has granted DOGE ‘full’ access to this system. Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk’s own companies. All of it."
--Musk aides locked federal employees out of the system, which contains the personal data of millions of federal employees, including dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades, and length of service of government workers.
--Senior career employees have had their access revoked to the department’s data systems.
--Musk’s team moved in, installed sofa beds, and is working around the clock to do whatever it is they’re doing. Nobody knows what that is because there is no oversight. One official said, "We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems. That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications."
--According to the New York Times, Musk and his people have been caught plugging in external hard drives inside the OPM, Treasury Department, and GSA. They attached the hard drives to the systems, giving them access to all that data and making it possible to take all that data with them. It also gives them the ability to erase data, redirect funds, and steal data.
--Not only that, but they’ve got access to all the files that handle the sending out of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid payments ($6 trillion dollars worth.) Is this not only a power grab, but a money grab, and they’re going to magically "vanish" everybody’s Social Security payments?
--The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins: "This man is in regular secret contact with Vladimir Putin. Get his grasping mitts off the U.S. Treasury and NOW."
--This data also includes all the information about government contractors that compete directly with Musk’s companies.
--At the same time they have been holding meetings with various departments to discuss codes and projects with people who have no official access to any of this.
--All of the people Musk has got working there are his hand-picked buddies from his own businesses, including one twenty-year-old and one eighteen-year-old.
--In the meantime, OPM has sent out memos encouraging civil servants to consider buyout offers to quit and take "a dream vacation."
--And then yesterday (note that this is all happening on a weekend when it’s harder to get to the courts to stop it) the brand new Treasury Secretary granted Musk and his thugs full access to all the data. New York Times: "Treasury Secretary gave representatives of DOGE full access to OPM. It gives the Trump administration another mechanism to attempt to unilaterally restrict disbursement of money approved for specific purposes by Congress."
--"Representatives for the Treasury Department, DOGE, and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment."
--Adam Cohen: "If Elon Musk and his unsanctioned team of techno-thieves and pirates are interfering with any payments designated by Congress, that’s a flat-out crime."
-- As David Burback said, "This sounds like a bad movie. It’s so hard to believe but does seem to actually, possibly be happening that the core of U.S. government private information on U.S. citizens and businesses and confidential government operations is being carted off by unvetted, malevolent, possibly foreign actors."
--News Eye: "The world’s richest man has been given full access to the federal treasury, which controls trillions in payments and holds sensitive personal data on millions. This is happening. This is a state coup."
And now today:
--As we find out more, it just gets worse and worse. Josh Marshall at Talking Points memo says the people accessing the databases are refusing to ID themselves except by first name. They seem to be Peter Thiel and Elon Musk proteges, but it’s not even clear they’re U.S. citizens.
--Musk not only locked regular employees out of the databases and computer systems but out of their own offices.
--They could have messed with the systems functioning OR erased data OR redirected funds OR otherwise mucked these systems up, through ignorance, incompetence, or malice.
--Daily Kos: "Musk’s people tried to steal data or whatever their business was, clandestinely? Why? There are laws and regulations about protecting personal privacy. Most likely explanation, they were acting illegally and they knew it."
--According to the New York Times; "Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency full access to the federal payment system late Friday...handing Elon Musk and the team he is leading a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending."
--Musk is issuing stop payments on his own initiative. (He has NO authority to do that and no government authority of any kind.)
--Elon Musk now has absolute control over his own contracts and those of people who would dare to compete with his products.
--Senator Ron Wyden: "These payment systems simply cannot fail and any politically motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy."
--Josh Marshall also says the Musk takeover is considerably worse than is being reported by the press.
--They are reviewing the U.S. federal budget and deciding which parts aren’t necessary, and will unilaterally cut those funds.
--According to the New York Times, they have begun demanding access to data and systems at other federal agencies.
--"The United States is now run by a ketamine addicted dictator from South Africa."
--Bowie Maroney: "Musk is raping and pillaging our government agencies."
--swmmckay: "This form of coup was not on my radar. I hope the nation survives long enough for Nuremburg-style trials."
--Trump just fired the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (So people won’t have any recourse to get their money back?)
--Katie Mack: "If they were doing this to a single bank they would be immediately arrested but the Treasury of the entire United states doesn’t even have a guard at the door?"
--And we are finding out what they intend to do with all that data. Mike Flynn--WTF? MIKE FLYNN IS IN ON THIS?--just tweeted that Musk is shutting down the entire Lutheran Services chain of senior living facilities in North Dakota, calling them nothing but money laundering. (They’re going to defund nursing homes and throw old people out on the streets to save money. Of course they are. And they’re going to decide. Even though that’s totally illegal--only Congress can decide what funding goes to. And none of these people have any government authority. And once again, WHAT THE HELL IS MIKE FLYNN DOING INVOLVED WITH ALL THIS?)
--And surprise, surprise, now there are issues with the Social Security website. People are unable to access their own accounts. And all the communications networks of the OMB are suddenly offline.
--Elon Musk, meanwhile, is tweeting that he is cutting $4 billion a day. (How? By slashing programs and sending the money directly to his own bank accounts?)
--This is also a major national security threat.
--THIS IS A COUP! There is no other way to look at it. Musk has taken control of the entire U.S. Treasury payment system. He has no authority to do any of this. He is not an elected official, his "department" doesn’t exist, and what he is doing is blatantly illegal. And terrifying. This is just as much a forcible takeover of the government as the January 6th attempt on the Capitol. And this time there are no Capitol police to stop them.
--Daily Kos: "Last week they tried to freeze all payments and lost bigly in the courts, so now they decided to just seal all the money. Billionaires are now in control of the government. We no longer have a democracy as of now."
--Kara Swisher called it "Hostile takeover of the federal government by a private citizen of unlimited means with no restrictions and no transparency."
--Ruth Ben-Ghiat: "This is a national emergency."
What you can do:
--Contact the Treasury Department directly and demand that Secretary Scott Bessent immediately revoke Musk’s access to these systems. Phone number: 202-622-2000.
--Trudy Gonzales: "If you ae worried your Social Security, Medicare, or VA disability check won’t be coming out due to Elon Musk’s access to Treasury department systems, CALL CONGRESS 1-202-224-3121 ASAP."
(Note: All this carnage, isn’t even counting the trade war Trump started yesterday by slapping tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, which I’ll report on tomorrow. If we still have a country left by then.)
Best line of the day, from Tea Pain: "Name one thing Trump has done since elected that Vladimir Putin wouldn’t approve of."
---
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I don’t want to be an alarmist—I try to avoid that—but as I’m writing this, it looks like we are in the middle of a five-alarm fire. It’s day 13 of Trump 2.0. From day one, it was clear that Donald Trump was not playing by normal American constitutional rules. Of course, it has long been obvious that he didn’t intend to play by the rules, but any pretense of lawfulness was stripped away when he tried to cancel birthright citizenship with an executive order that ran afoul of the clear language in the Constitution, as confirmed in short order by two federal judges. In the following days, it became more clear that we were not okay, that nothing was right. During his second week in office, Trump illegally fired 18 inspectors general, the people who ferret out corruption, waste, and fraud in federal agencies. It sounds like, under Trump, there will be no more of that. No independent inspectors general to poke around. Trump has made it clear that personal loyalty to him is more important than principle. Government employees, including those with civil service protections, now serve at his pleasure. That message was driven home on January 31, when something commenters referred to as a “Friday night massacre” took place. But that historical reference to Watergate lacked resonance. In 1973, the Saturday Night Massacre took place when Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor investigating Richard Nixon, refused to drop a subpoena for the Nixon White House tapes, whose existence he had learned of when an aide, Alex Butterfield, revealed their existence during testimony before a Senate Committee investigating the Watergate break-in. Nixon sent out the order to Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. On October 20, 1973, Richardson refused the president’s order and resigned on the spot. Nixon turned to Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, ordering him to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus also refused and resigned. It fell to Solicitor General Robert Bork to fulfill Nixon’s order, but by then, the damage to Nixon was done. Nothing of that sort happened last night.
Archibald Cox issued a statement on his way out the door that included these memorable words, “Whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people.” Ten days later, on October 30, 1973, Nixon’s impeachment began, and a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, was appointed in November. Later that month, a federal judge ruled Cox’s dismissal violated the rules covering special counsels. By comparison, there hasn’t been much of a furor this weekend. Trump’s now-former lawyer, Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, issued the orders to remove FBI officials. Bove wrote in a memo, “The FBI — including the Bureau’s prior leadership — actively participated in what President Trump appropriately described as ‘a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated on the American people over the last four years’ with respect to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” It’s outrageous. But, there hasn’t been much in the way of public outrage. By the end of the day on Friday, the purge extended to senior FBI officials, including about a half-dozen executive assistant directors, some of the Bureau’s top managers who oversee criminal, national security, and cyber investigations. There were also reports of firings of senior FBI leaders, including the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s field office in Washington, D.C., and special agents in charge of field offices across the country, including Miami and Las Vegas. The special agent in charge of the Las Vegas FBI Office said, “I was given no rationale for this decision, which, as you might imagine, has come as a shock.” This situation might seem reminiscent of the George W. Bush administration’s midterm firing of its own U.S. Attorneys, but there’s a big difference. The U.S. Attorneys were political appointees who served at the president’s pleasure. These FBI employees are career. They have civil service protections, and although they can be demoted, they cannot be fired without cause. Lawsuits might expose that, but so far, a number of the impacted FBI executives seem to be taking the option of retiring ahead of their firing date, which preserves their pensions and other retirement benefits. DOJ’s acting leadership also instructed the FBI on Friday to turn over information about “all current and former bureau employees who ‘at any time’ worked on January 6 investigations,” according to an email acting FBI director Brian Driscoll sent out. The email included an attachment from Emil Bove suggesting those employees’ records would be reviewed to determine “whether any additional personnel actions”—i.e., more firings—“are necessary.” The FBI is one of the four law enforcement components of the Justice Department. Its director takes orders from the attorney general and the deputy attorney general. You would have to be asleep at the switch to miss the fact that this looks like an effort to take revenge on every FBI employee involved in a Trump prosecution or a January 6-related prosecution. Prosecutors who worked on those cases were fired during the week as well. In the case of the Bush U.S. Attorneys, some, but not all of the firings allegedly involved either interfering with prosecutions of Republican politicians or failure to investigate Democratic politicians and efforts to protect the voting rights of Democratic-leaning voters. Even though these were employees who could be fired at will by the president without cause, the Justice Department Inspector General’s Report on the matter concluded that the dismissals were “arbitrary,” “fundamentally flawed,” and “raised doubts about the integrity of Department prosecution decisions.” Actions like this do more than just punish; they instill fear in the ranks of people who need to keep their jobs. And the last thing we need with Trump in charge of a Justice Department that is willing to do his bidding and let him use the power of prosecution as a political tool. Friday night, there wasn’t much more than a whimper from the public. Americans didn’t take to the streets. Nothing like the pink pussy hats of 2016 was evident. Some people talked about how horrible it was, but for the most part Americans went about their business. It was a win for Donald Trump, or at least, it wasn’t the loss it should have been. Presidents are supposed to follow the law and honor their oaths. Bill Clinton was investigated while in office and interviewed by Justice Department lawyers. He was impeached. But he didn’t fire the agents and the prosecutors. Not Donald Trump. He is an anti-president who does not uphold the law, and there is no telling where it will end. Once disobedience to the law is on the table, even adherence to absolutes—like the two term limit on holding the office of the presidency—fall into question. As James Romoser, POLITICO’s legal editor wrote yesterday, “when rulers consolidate power through a cult of personality, they do not tend to surrender it willingly, even in the face of constitutional limits. And Trump, of course, already has a track record of trying to remain in office beyond his lawful tenure.” Romoser concludes, as did I earlier in the week, that the possibility Trump will seek and secure a third term shouldn’t be dismissed with a hand wave, as some commentators have. He’s the anti-president, after all. During Kash Patel’s confirmation hearing to head the FBI this week, he testified under oath that he wasn’t aware of any plans to punish agents involved in the Trump cases. He said, “no one will be terminated for case assignments.” He also said that “All FBI employees will be protected against political retribution.” Donald Trump made a liar out of him. But it’s the American people who will end up paying for it. We’re in this together, Joyce |
