Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The DOJ is now going to be MAGA or else:

The Justice Department is firing more than a dozen key officials who worked on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team prosecuting President Donald Trump, after Acting Attorney General James McHenry said they could not be trusted in “faithfully implementing the president’s agenda,” Fox News Digital has learned. 

McHenry has transmitted a letter to each official notifying them of their termination, a Justice Department official exclusively told Fox News Digital.

It is unclear how many officials received that letter. The names of the individuals were not immediately released. 

“Today, Acting Attorney General James McHenry terminated the employment of a number of DOJ officials who played a significant role in prosecuting President Trump,” a DOJ official told Fox News Digital. “In light of their actions, the Acting Attorney General does not trust these officials to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda.” 

These are all non-partisan, career prosecutors who were assigned the job. They are not people who are supposed to be enacting anyone’s agenda. Or they weren’t anyway. Now, everyone in the government is required to be a MAGA hat wearing freak or they’re out.

How about this?

Edward R. Martin Jr., interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., has asked two top prosecutors in his office to undertake an internal review of its handling of Capitol riot prosecutions, a move that follows a White House executive order to the Justice Department and intelligence agencies to hunt for political bias in their ranks.

In an email to staff Monday morning, Martin stated that he had appointed Denise Cheung, chief of the Criminal Division, and Jon Hooks, chief of the Fraud, Public Corruption and Civil Rights section, to lead a “special project” investigating the office’s charging of more than 250 Capitol riot defendants with obstructing an official proceeding of Congress, a statute the Supreme Court ruled last June was too broadly applied.

“Obviously, the use was a great failure of our office … and we need to get to the bottom of it,” Martin wrote in the email, saying he expected a preliminary report by Friday. A copy of the email was viewed by The Washington Post.

[…]

Martin’s tasking of two of the highest-ranking supervisors in the office of 300 federal prosecutors — the nation’s largest U.S. attorney’s office — to carry out the review is likely to stoke criticism from Democrats that he is helping the Trump administration sow discord in the office, divert prosecutorial resources and punish prosecutors making reasonable legal judgments. Prosecutors’ use of the obstruction statute was approved by nearly all judges who reviewed it before it reached the high court.

All the lower court judges and out of three appellate judges backed the DOJ’s use of the statute. Only the rank partisans on the Supreme Court believed it was overreach and we know why.

It will be interesting if the DOJ tells their prosecutors to go soft in political cases against Democrats going forward. Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Here’s the piece de resistance. Martin himself is an insurrectionist:

But his focus on prosecutors’ charging decisions is likely to cheer President Donald Trump and other right-wing supporters who have called for prosecutors to be prosecuted. Martin, 54, was a “Stop the Steal” organizer for Trump after his 2020 election loss and a board member of a nonprofit group that raised money for Jan. 6 defendants as victims of political persecution; he was a defense attorney for three such defendants, including a Kansas City Proud Boys leader who pleaded guilty to assaulting police with an ax handle.

Wow. Just wow. I guess the idea of conflict of interest has been completely abandoned for all time. (Well, unless it’s a Democrat being accused, of course.)

And then there’s this:

The Trump administration on Monday ordered former staff members for as many as 17 fired inspectors general to immediately arrange for the return of work laptops, phones, parking decals and ID cards — even as questions remained over whether President Trump broke the law in dismissing independent watchdogs.

Some of the fired officials were seeking to raise alarms about what had happened. Among them was Mark Greenblatt, whom Mr. Trump had appointed as the inspector general of the Interior Department five years ago and who had led an interagency council of the watchdog officials until the new year.

“This raises an existential threat with respect to the primary independent oversight function in the federal government,” Mr. Greenblatt said in an interview. “We have preserved the independence of inspectors general by making them not swing with every change in political party.”

He left the DOJ IG, Michael Horowitz, in place, likely because he’d been quite good to him during his first term. All the rest are gone.

I don’t know what to say about any of this. The Republicans in Congress are completely docile and the Democrats aren’t much better, at least not yet. The media is reporting this but then it goes into the bonfire of other Trump atrocities and we’re on to something else.

At this point, I’m not sure I can even imagine anymore what might be a breaking point. I have to believe there will be something or I’ll go mad. Will a Democratic rout in 2026 even do it? I’m not sure and the way Trump is going I can’t help but wonder what they’re planning to do with elections. Why would they even think of allowing them to be free and fair?

Maybe that’s too dark. It’s just the first full week and they’re feeling drunk with power. Perhaps this will calm down and it will be the usual Trump blather and bullshit. But I am not sanguine.

As Tim Miller points out in this video,(warning, it’s on X) this indicates that one of the best line of attack against Trump is this oligarchy he’s assembled and which he personally adores. As that 12% approval indicates, there’s a split somewhere in the Trump coalition and it’s pretty clear that it’s between the Wall Street types and the MAGA populists, many of whom are listening to the likes of Steve Bannon. This is a very rich political vein to mine.

Only the best boot-lickers need apply:

Job-seekers hoping to join the new Trump administration are facing a series of intense loyalty tests, with White House screening teams fanning out to government agencies to check for “Make America Great Again” bona fides and carefully parsing applicants’ politics and social media posts.

President Donald Trump has long said he believes the biggest mistake he made during his first term was hiring what he considered to be the wrong kinds of people. Now, aides are working aggressively to ensure the government is filled only with loyalists.

Negative social media posts have been enough to derail applications. Those seeking jobs have been told they will have to prove their “enthusiasm” to enact Trump’s agenda and have been asked when their moment of “MAGA revelation” occurred. One federal employee said they briefly considered buying Trump’s crypto meme coin in case the president’s team asked about their voting record.

I wonder if they looked at this?

Donald Trump is a con artist — and he cannot be our nominee. #NeverTrump https://t.co/3ZYQZraCfNhttps://t.co/8wm9ToY7El

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 27, 2016

I have to say that this made me laugh out loud:

The intense screening has led some federal workers to question whether Trump’s team cares more about loyalty than competence. There is concern that his team is ousting foreign policy and national security diplomats and others who could offer the administration expertise and institutional knowledge at a time of conflict worldwide.

Gee, ya think? Is there anyone who believes that fervent MAGA true believers are the smartest and most experienced people America can find?

An application form on the Trump transition website, for instance, asks candidates, “What part of President Trump’s campaign message is most appealing to you and why?” according to a link obtained by The Associated Press.

It also asks how they had supported Trump in the 2024 election — with choices including volunteering, fundraising, door-knocking and making phone calls — and to submit a list of their social media handles.

One official said he and several colleagues from various agencies had been told that even if they passed the initial vetting process to be admitted into the applicant pool, they would still need to prove their bona fides and convince interviewers of their “enthusiasm” to put in place Trump’s policies, including by providing references from people whose loyalty had already been established.

This official said one colleague who made it to the interview stage was asked when that person’s moment of “MAGA revelation” had occurred.

And look who’s doing the vetting? Shades of the Imperial Life In The Emerald City.

I guess this is what a MAGA meritocracy looks like.

Aerial footage showed tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians carrying their belongings as they made their way along the seafront of Wadi Gaza, on foot, to the north of the enclave. https://t.co/4LnfclDDB3 pic.twitter.com/H31Zl3aSAF

— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) January 27, 2025

They’re going home.

Judd Legum notes on BlueSky that Trump’s latest obscene comments about Gaza are actually all about:

On Saturday, Trump announced the he favored the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza.

“You’re talking about a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Trump said.

What is motivating this ugly proposal?

Follow.

The.

Money. 

Trump discussed his vision for Gaza on his first day in office, suggesting Gaza could be an ideal for luxury redevelopment. “Gaza is interesting. It’s a phenomenal location. On the sea, the best weather, you know, everything’s good,” Trump said.

Trump said that Gaza has “really got to be rebuilt in a different way” and that he “might” be interested in helping.

In a 10/7/24 interview w/Hugh Hewitt, Trump expounded on his vision for Gaza as a luxury resort. “It could be better than Monaco… It has the best location in the Middle East.” 

Trump’s policy of relocating Gazans and redeveloping the country matches a vision floated by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, last year.

Although not in the White House, Kushner continues to advise Trump and “has been advising Steve Witkoff… on his new job as special envoy to the Middle East.” 

In a February 15, 2024, interview at Harvard’s Middle East Initiative, Kushner described Gaza’s “waterfront property” as “very valuable.” Kushner said Israel should seek to “move people out” and then “clean it up.”

Pausing here to say if you are interested in accountability journalism about this administration, don’t rely on an algorithm controlled by a MAGA billionaire who works for this administration

Kushner said that the US should pursue “diplomacy” with Egypt and Jordan to convince them to accept more Palestinians.

Kushner criticized Biden for not pressuring Egypt, Jordan, and other countries more aggressively to facilitate a “solution.”

That’s exactly what Trump says he’s doing now. 

If Palestinians are removed from Gaza and the land is absorbed by Israel, both Kushner and Trump could benefit financially from its redevelopment.

Kushner just invested a portion of funds he collected from Saudia Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE to develop a new Trump Tower in Belgrade

The new hotel and residential tower is a partnership between the Trump Organization and Kushner’s Affinity Partners. It is located on a site that was bombed extensively by NATO in 1999 and has since been vacant. The Serbian government owns the property. 

Isn’t that special?

There is zero doubt in my mind that Trump sees this as a real estate deal and that he and Kushner have dollar signs in their eyes. But they also want the Palestinians out completely. Kushner in particular seeks to ensure that there is no two state solution ever and they think they can get it done by throwing money around to the Arab states surrounding Israel. If they can make a profit at it all the better.

JD Vance: “I want more babies in the United States of America.” pic.twitter.com/Ghg22KjWX6

— Media Research Center (@theMRC) January 24, 2025

That’s JD Vance telling the “March For Life” rally “I want more babies in the United States of America” And he’s going to get them even if it means forcing 10 year old rape victims to go through childbirth.

This is just heartbreaking. Imagine the trauma made all the more traumatic by sadists who want to punish little girls for being raped:

At least 100 Texas children aged 17 and younger got abortions in other states during the first year after Texas banned the procedure, including six aged 11 and under, according to the latest state data available.

The total is a nearly ninefold jump in the number of children getting out-of-state abortions from five years earlier and comes as virtually all abortions have ground to a halt in Texas under a ban that makes no exception for fetal abnormality, rape, or incest. Texas’ age of consent, when a person may legally consent to engage in sexual activity, is 17.

[…]

In the years before the abortion ban took effect in August 2022, between 1,000 and 1,400 Texas minors received abortions in the state annually. There were none in 2023, data from Texas’ Health and Human Services department shows. At least 105 Texas children got an abortion out of state in 2023, the majority of them between the ages of 16 and 17.

The annual data, which was released this fall, is likely an undercount. Texas receives information about out-of-state abortions from a national data exchange called the State and Territorial Exchange of Vital Events, or STEVE, but an HHS spokesperson said not every state provides data on abortions.

The out-of-state data also only covers the first half of 2023. HHS officials did not respond to questions from Hearst Newspapers about why the rest of the data is missing or when it may be published. Data on out-of-state abortions from 2024 have not yet been released.

Look at this bullshit:

John Seago, president of Texas Right to Life, did not dispute the data and said that while it’s a “terrifying situation” when a very young person becomes pregnant and represents on many levels a “breakdown in protecting this minor,” the best outcome is a birth, no matter the age or circumstance.

“That doesn’t mean this individual needs to be a parent,” he said. “However, we can’t ignore what abortion is. It is using violence to take the life of a human being.”

No, they don’t need to be a parent, but it’s still necessary for a 10 year old rape victim to go through nine months of pregnancy and childbirth. The cruelty is beyond comprehension.

And it appears that it’s just going to get worse as the right wingers stifle information all over the country and move to outlaw the abortion pills.

With all else that’s going on, we shouldn’t forget that the war on women continues and it includes a war on little girls.

This is Elon Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman in front of the office of Technocracy, Inc. before he was arrested for being a Hitler sympathizer in Canada. Note the map behind him, which is the same as this official map of the “Technate of America.” Does that ring any bells?

Elon Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman was arrested in Canada in 1940 for being a leader of the fascist movement “Technocracy, Inc.” that wanted to make “technocrats” dictators of society.

h/t @jim-stewartson.bsky.social

From Sen. Brian Schatz

Schatz: The drumbeat below all of this has to be, not just that prices aren’t going down, but specifically that the policy of the Trump Administration and Congressional Republicans is to rip regular people off. They’re transferring wealth from regular working people, the elderly,… pic.twitter.com/mVTGrLuf7H

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 27, 2025

Schatz:

The drumbeat below all of this has to be, not just that prices aren’t going down, but specifically that the policy of the Trump Administration and Congressional Republicans is to rip regular people off.

They’re transferring wealth from regular working people, the elderly, students, the disabled, from Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, Social Security—all of that.

They’re cutting all those programs, cutting all those benefits, and taking the money saved to shove it to the wealthiest corporations and the wealthiest individuals that have ever walked this planet.

On some level, we want to keep it extremely simple: They’re ripping you off.

We have to make it clear that this is all about the corruption feeding the Billionaire Boys Club that Trump so desperately needs to be a part of.

They were both Democrats until five minutes ago. What could be worse than that?

Among the most shocking actions taken by President Trump and the Republicans in the first week of his administration, and there were many, confirming a totally inexperienced, 44 year old, weekend TV show host with extreme character flaws and a penchant for war criminals as Secretary of Defense was one for the books. Pete Hegseth will be in charge of the world’s most powerful military and the country’s largest bureaucracy and he is completely unqualified in every way. But he is a Trump loyalist and it says something about the president’s coterie of followers that Hegseth is the best he could do.

There was some slight discomfort among a few GOP Senators. Three actually voted against him, including Mitch McConnell of Kentucky the former majority leader. He and Lisa Murkowski, R-Ak., and Susan Collins, R-Me., voted no, which required the Vice President to cast the tying vote. There were others who had expressed reservations but who came home in the end, likely because Hegseth is a true blue MAGA warrior with the full backing of the hardcore base which made its wishes known in no uncertain terms. You can tell that it left a bad taste in some of the Senators’ mouths but they weren’t willing to poke those bears.

There are a couple of nominations coming up this week that may give them an opportunity to pretend to themselves that they actually have some integrity and try to salvage some self-respect. There will be hearings for former Congresswoman from Hawaii, Tulsi Gabbard and Anti-Vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr for their nominations for the Director of Intelligence and Secretary of Health and Human Services respectively. Neither of them have relevant experience for those positions and they both have some unique characteristics that are disqualifying in themselves.

Gabbard is a shocking choice for this particular job sitting atop the entire Intelligence Community because of the fact that she’s literally suspected of being sympathetic to America’s adversaries, particularly Russia. Perhaps her most famous act as a politician was to travel to Syria under false pretenses to meet clandestinely with its president, the recently deposed Bashar al-Assad, a dictatorial monster who was waging war on his own people. Assad is now in exile in Russia, the country whose talking points Gabbard has been using for the last couple of years to attack the US, most pointedly for allegedly causing the war in Ukraine. To say she is a bizarre choice for a top Intelligence job is an understatement and it’s causing some severe consternation among America’s allies.

But there’s more to Gabbard than just that, although it should be enough. She was born into what most people would call a cult and remains a member as is her husband and most of her closest aides. According to The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey, that relationship is the one “throughline” in her politically peripatetic career. Following the tenets of the “Science of Identity Foundation”, an offshoot of the Hari Krishnas led by a man named Chris Butler, she started out as a conservative anti-gay politician but soon morphed into a progressive, Bernie Sanders star in the Us Congress followed by her bizarre turn as a pro-Assad advocate and an eventual falling out with the Democratic party. After that she went on Fox news, as one does, charming the MAGA faithful and endorsed Donald Trump. And here she is today about to become America’s top Intelligence official.

But who is Gabbard, really? She’s only been a Republican for a few years now. She ran for president on the Democratic ticket in 2020! Can MAGA really trust someone with that history? The National Review doesn’t think so, calling her “an atrocious nominee who deserves to be defeated.” She does not appear to be the type of nominee to inspire the sorts of threats and intimidation that Hegseth did so if any GOP Senators feel the impulse to try out a little independence, this one is probably pretty safe from MAGA horde.

And that probably goes double for Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who ran in the 2024 election as a Democrat before switching opportunistically to Independent and then endorsing Trump in exchange for favors which turned out to be a cabinet position. It’s hard to imagine that Trump actually cares that much if he’s the HHS Secretary and may even be hopeful that the Senate will save him since it’s clear that he’s going to be nothing but trouble.

By this time, most people are aware that Kennedy is a crank and a weirdo who believes that vaccines have caused a Holocaust among children and has admitted to picking up a dead bear and leaving it in Central Park as a joke — when he was over 60. Among other looney conspiracy theories he pushes, he told Joe Rogan that “Wi-Fi radiation” could be causing autism, food allergies, asthma, eczema or other chronic conditions saying “I think it degrades your mitochondria and it opens your blood-brain barrier.” He directly had a hand in the deaths of dozens of Samoan children by pushing bogus anti-vax ideas.

He even contradicts germ theory, suggesting that if the body is healthy it cannot be damaged by microbes. These ideas are downright medieval and he has no business being in government in any capacity much less overseeing the public health agencies, Medicare and Medicaid. It is an abomination that he has even been nominated.

And now it turns out that he appears to be corrupt as well, having made millions from getting a piece of the action from anti-vax suits brought by a couple of law firms with which he’s been affiliated. He says he has no intention of foregoing that money as the HHS Secretary even though he would have direct control of the nation’s vaccine policy.

Kennedy is a member of the most famous Democratic Party family in America. He was a member himself until five minutes ago. He is pro-choice, which is generally a deal breaker in GOP politics and that has brought out at least some token opposition from outside groups including one led by former Vice President Mike Pence. He’s assured all the GOP Senators that he won’t let his life-long liberal affiliations get in the way of Donald Trump’s agenda but if any of them have even the slightest concerns for the health of the American people (or even themselves and their families) surely they can find the tiny bit of courage it would take to tell Trump that they just can’t vote for a pro-choice nominee.

All of this is assuming any but Murkowski, Collins and McConnell, all of whom have indicated they won’t vote for either of these absurd nominees, give a damn. There is little reason to think they care about anything but keeping their seats. But if they do have a tiny bit of integrity left, Gabbard and Kennedy offer a way for them to oppose them. All they have to do is say they just can’t vote for a Democrat. Surely, the MAGA mob will understand that and let them off the hook.

Salon

For your consideration, some light reading

Let’s start this morning with an aside.

Trump The Ignorant’s longstanding claim that the U.S. is “the only country in the world” that awards citizenship to persons born within its territory is not true. The years have not informed the “stable genius” otherwise. Donald Trump thus signed a disputed executive order on Day One of his second term purporting to revoke the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment.

It is an institution with English roots and a U.S. tradition before Americans codified it in 1868. Nativist radicals like Trump, his coterie, and his cult now wish its destruction. We’ll see them in court. A federal judge on Jan. 22 temporarily enjoined the order for fourteen days.

The Cato Institute, the D.C.-based, Koch-funded think tank, features on its landing page this morning “There Is No Good Reason to Revoke Birthright Citizenship.” The practice stems from as early as Calvin’s Case in 1608:

In 1869, the British jurist Lord Chief Justice Alexander Cockburn summed up English law as:

By the common law of England, every person born within the dominions of the Crown, no matter whether of English or of foreign parents, and, in the latter case, whether the parents were settled or merely temporarily sojourning, in the country, was an English subject, save only the children of foreign ambassadors (who were excepted because their fathers carried their own nationality with them), or a child born to a foreigner during the hostile occupation of any part of the territories of England. No effect appears to have been given to descent as a source of nationality.

That was the aside.

David J. Bier, Director of Immigration Studies at Cato, testified before the House Judiciary
Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement last week on the same day as the judge’s order (C-Span). He described an immigration system left “in shambles” by the first Trump administration and improved by Joe Biden, thus drawing the ire of Republican members.

I was invited by @HouseJudiciary to testify at a hearing on "restoring enforcement of immigration law." They should have picture and picture to allow you to see the members' faces. Few ever heard these facts. My written testimony had pages of charts to back it up. pic.twitter.com/mj61P54V8U

— David J. Bier (@David_J_Bier) January 22, 2025

Since Republican members doubted data in his presentation, Bier decided to present them Sunday in a long thread on X as he had in a Substack on Jan. 16. (“Biden Didn’t Cause the Border Crisis“).

Bier told the committee:

“President Trump abused his authority to cut legal immigration from abroad by nearly 80 percent.”
“Refugees by 92 percent.”
“He shut down asylum for legal crossers.”
“He removed requirements to target public safety threats. As a result, he released twice as many convicted criminals from detention as President Biden.”
“He forced US attorneys to prioritize misdemeanor family separation prosecutions of parents over sex offenders.”
“By the time President Biden took office, the US immigration system was in shambles. Immigration courts, consulates, ports of entry—all shuttered. Even detention centers were at half capacity.”

There’s more (with charts) you can review at the links above.

The other posting I invite you to review comes from historian Heather Cox Richardson.

Abraham Lincoln, then 28, in his 1838 Lyceum speech, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” warned of the sort of men who, “Having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane,” thus “make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation.”

(You don’t need a weatherman to know which way this wind blows.)

The Lyceum speech argued for the defense of American institutions and law while arguing that bad laws should be repealed. “But the underlying structure of the rule of law, based in the Constitution,” Richardson recounts, “could not be abandoned without losing democracy.”

Lincoln didn’t stop there. He warned that the very success of the American republic threatened its continuation. “[M]en of ambition and talents” could no longer make their name by building the nation—that glory had already been won. Their ambition could not be served simply by preserving what those before them had created, so they would achieve distinction through destruction.

For such a man, Lincoln said, “Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.” With no dangerous foreign power to turn people’s passions against, people would turn from the project of “establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty” and would instead turn against each other.

And hand men of cruel ambition the power to do it, Lincoln didn’t say.

The passions that gave birth to the American experiment must fade, Lincoln said, and they had. To sustain it would require “general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.”

Lincoln would face in just over 20 years a different kind of passion, one fed not by a thirst for national liberation but by the need of a regional privileged class to maintain the bondage of a permanent underclass and its own cultural and political supremacy. That passion has not faded in over a century and a half and may yet unmake “the proud fabric of freedom” for us all.

Lincoln invoked the name of Washington as inspiration for maintaining what the Revolution had birthed. Don’t expect to hear Trumpists invoke Lincoln’s name as inspiration for saving the constitution and laws they mean to destroy.

As Stan Lee would say, “‘Nuff said.”

They ain’t foolin’
And if you fool around with them
You’re gonna get yourself a schoolin’

“Beware” — Morry Lasco, Dick Adams, Fleecie Moore (1946)