A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
The Trump II Cancer Metastasizes At DOJ
I hate to break it to you, but the failure of Ed Martin’s nomination to be D.C. U.S. attorney has not produced an outcome that looks appreciably better. That’s not to say Martin’s nomination should not have been opposed or that it’s pointless to fight the good fight. It’s merely to try to preserve a little sanity by acknowledging that in the dystopian Trump II world things can always get worse and often do.
Instead of being a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney, Martin will now hold three significant roles at Main Justice that don’t require Senate confirmation:
- associate deputy attorney general;
- U.S. pardon attorney (the previous U.S. pardon attorney was fired after refusing to go along with restoring Mel Gibson’s gun rights following a domestic violence conviction); and
- director of the Weaponization Working Group.
Don’t let the Orwellian name of that last role, which has never existed at the Justice Department until this presidency, confuse the issue. Martin will be taking his bag of tricks as acting U.S. attorney – politicization, intimidation, and threats – to lead the weaponization of the Justice Department.
With the blessing of the President through his weaponization executive order and of Attorney General Pam Bondi through her weaponization memo executing that order, Martin will be at the epicenter of turning the Justice Department itself into a threat to the rule of the law.
Don’t Normalize Jeanine Pirro
I’m still shook by how otherwise reasonable people treated Pam Bondi’s nomination as attorney general as normal, calling her qualified and a more traditional pick for the office. That was on the basis of her having served as Florida state attorney general and, critically, her having replaced the insanely unqualified and unfit Matt Gaetz as nominee. Those two attributes alone should not have been enough to obscure all of the other ways in which Bondi was not normal, including her deeply alarming confirmation hearing, but they did.
The same dynamic is at play with Trump’s decision to replace Martin with Jeanine Pirro, the unhinged Fox News personality. This line from the WSJ story on Pirro is literally true but you can see the bar-lowering already underway: “Still, Pirro, who has experience as a prosecutor, is a more conventional choice than Martin, 54, who was a lightning rod from the outset.”
Pirro hasn’t been a prosecutor in two decades. Since then, she became a unsuccessful political candidate then a right-wing media personality whose brain has pickled in the Fox News ecosystem. Her whole TV schtick is as an over-the-top, indiscriminate bomb-thrower, and I’ll concede it may not be a schtick. These are not the attributes one looks for in a prosecutor, let alone the top federal prosecutor in the nation’s capital.
Fun fact: In the waning minutes of his first term, Trump pardoned Pirro’s ex-husband Albert, who had been convicted in 2000 on federal tax charges while they were still married and she was still Westchester County district attorney.
Is Pirro’s Appointment Valid?
By swapping out Martin for Pirro before the end of Martin’s 120-day maximum tenure as an acting official, President Trump appears to be taking the position that he can avoid Senate confirmation indefinitely via a rotating cast of D.C. U.S. attorneys. This is a complicated and tricky area of law, with two different authorizing statutes, so I’m not going to unpack it all here. But the NYT briefly touches on the issue and the risk it poses of criminal defendants challenging their prosecutions on the grounds that Pirro is not validly appointed.
DOJ Weaponization Fully Underway Now
New York Attorney General Letitia James appears to be the highest profile initial target of the new Trump-directed DOJ. Federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into mortgage loan fraud allegations that have circulated online among Trump allies for months:
- A federal grand jury has been empaneled in the Eastern District of Virginia and begun issuing subpoenas (one of James’ properties is in Norfolk);
- FBI agents in Virginia and New York are involved in the investigation;
- To give you some sense of the tone and tenor of things, this is what U.S. Attorney John A. Sarcone III of the New York Northern District – whose office is not handling the case – had to say about it on the record: “Unlike Letitia James, who unethically ran around the state campaigning on getting Donald Trump … my office conducts itself in a manner that is proper and professional.”
Trump Hijacks DOJ’s Voting Rights Section
Devastating news in this Associated Press exclusive: “The Justice Department unit that ensures compliance with voting rights laws will switch its focus to investigating voter fraud and ensuring elections are not marred by ‘suspicion,’ according to an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press.”
Quote Of The Day
For many American citizens and organizations, then, the cost of opposition has risen markedly. Although these costs are not as high as in dictatorships like Russia — where critics are routinely imprisoned, exiled or killed — America has, with stunning speed, descended into a world in which opponents of the government fear criminal investigations, lawsuits, tax audits and other punitive measures and even Republican politicians are, as one former Trump administration official put it, “scared” out of their minds “about death threats.”
–political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt
Good Read
TPM’s Josh Kovensky: Inside One Venezuelan’s Last-Minute Escape From a Flight to CECOT
The Damage SCOTUS Has Done
The Supreme Court’s decision to allow President Trump’s purge of trans service members to proceed while the legal challenge is on appeal is already producing the easy-to-predict and hard-if-not-impossible-to-reverse result: “The Pentagon will immediately begin moving as many as 1,000 openly identifying transgender service members out of the military and give others 30 days to self-identify under a new directive issued Thursday.”
The Purges
- Library of Congress: President Donald Trump fired Carla Hayden as the Librarian of Congress. She was the first woman and first African American to hold the position.
- FEMA: Cameron Hamilton was fired as the acting administrator of FEMA one day after he took issue with eliminating the agency in an appearance before Congress.
A Creole Pope
Of all the deeply resonant chords struck by the elevation of the first American to lead the Roman Catholic church, none hits quite like his mother being the product of a Creole family from New Orleans:
The pope’s maternal grandparents, both of whom are described as Black or mulatto in various historical records, lived in the city’s Seventh Ward, an area that is traditionally Catholic and a melting pot of people with African, Caribbean and European roots.
The grandparents, Joseph Martinez and Louise Baquié, eventually moved to Chicago in the early 20th century and had a daughter: Mildred Martinez, the pope’s mother.
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