Clueless about the law and hungry for revenge, Donald Trump drives the DOJ toward a cliff we haven't seen since the days of Richard Nixon and Watergate

Donald Trump and Pam Bondi (Getty)

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) might be heading into its deepest period of crisis since the days of Richard Nixon, according to a report at Associated Press (AP). Under the "direction" of Donald Trump, who lacks the intellectual heft and the sturdy spine needed to oversee the justice apparatus of the world's foremost democracy, the DOJ appears to be spiraling into chaos -- and Trump has not even been in office for one month.

The department has been awash in controversy since Trump apparently pressured top officials last week to dismiss a criminal case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. The Adams case is emitting the stench of an unlawful quid pro quo, a term that became well known around the country when Karl Rove reportedly launched a baseless criminal case against Alabama's Democratic Governor Don Siegelman during the George W. Bush administration -- mainly, it seems, because Republicans could not figure out how to beat Siegelman at the ballot box. Perhaps figuring Siegelman would be less of a headache if he and codefendant Richard Scrushy were behind bars, the Bushies arranged for that to happen, with the assistance of former federal judge Mark Fuller (a Bush appointee,  who had ties to Bush-era criminals Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, plus slimy GOP Governor Bob Riley, who was Siegelman's chief political rival.  and wound up being forced off the bench after pleading guilty to beating his wife in an Atlanta hotel room.) How low did Rove go? He even acted like a jackass toward Siegelman's daughter, Dana, when the two ran into each other at the Democratic National Convention.

As for Donald Trump, his cluelessness about matters of law is driving the DOJ around some dangerous curves. The Eric Adams matter has been the source of heavy and unflattering news coverage in recent days. But Trump's struggles with justice issues go way beyond the Adams case. Here are two persistent problems that seem to be digging a hole for the president:

1. Criminal prosecutions must be based on a finding of probable cause, that an offense has been committed, and the accused committed it. Any attempt to prosecute a defendant based on Donald Trump's yearnings for revenge, and not probable cause, is unlawful. Let's consider our post dated 4/9/24 under the headline "Donald Trump's plot to prosecute Joe Biden without probable cause is based on a lie and ignorance, as MSNBC analyst Joyce White Vance makes clear":

Donald Trump and his allies are plotting to prosecute President Joe Biden if Trump wins the November election, according to a report from Axios. After months of Congressional inquiries, no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden has surfaced, so it is unclear what would form the basis of a Trump-fueled prosecution. But this much appears to be clear: Trump apparently wants to prosecute Biden because he believes Biden had him prosecuted -- even though Trump has offered no evidence to support that claim. One prominent legal analyst has stated that Biden did not have Trump prosecuted and could not have done so. Those matters come down to grand jurors.

Also, the Axios report suggests Trump has no problem violating roughly 40 years of U.S. policy that holds the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is to operate independently of the White House -- that presidents are not prosecutors, and they are to be excluded from decisions to charge or not charge suspected wrongdoers. . . . 

Almost every issue raised in the Axios article grows from the idea that Joe Biden is having Trump prosecuted. In Trump's brain, that has to be true because Trump cannot be responsible for anything that goes wrong. But this is a lie, one Trump apparently is convinced his MAGA followers are gullible enough to believe. But here is the truth, as stated by MSNBC legal analyst and former Alabama U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance, who wrote in a recent tweet:

"Joe Biden didn't indict Trump. Prosecutors must go before a grand jury, made up of citizens, including Republicans & Democrats. These citizens hear evidence & vote on whether a defendant should be charged. Different grand juries have now done that with Trump 91 times."

2. Trump can't resist exerting demands on the DOJ, mainly because he is desperate to extract revenge on his perceived political opponents. But that runs contrary to longstanding U.S. policy, as spelled out in the DOJ's Justice Manual. This is from Section 1-8.600 - Communication with the White House:

In order to promote and protect the norms of Departmental independence and integrity in making decisions regarding criminal and civil law enforcement, while at the same time preserving the President’s ability to perform his constitutional obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” the Justice Department will not advise the White House concerning pending or contemplated criminal or civil law enforcement investigations or cases unless doing so is important for the performance of the President’s duties and appropriate from a law enforcement perspective.

Is that how the White House and the DOJ are operating in the Trump administration? The answer appears to be no, as the AP's Eric Tucker and Alanna Durkin Richer report:

Pam Bondi had insisted at her Senate confirmation hearing that as attorney general, her Justice Department would not “play politics.”

Yet in the month since the Trump administration took over the building, a succession of actions has raised concerns the department is doing exactly that.

Top officials have demanded the names of thousands of FBI agents who investigated the Capitol riot, sued a state attorney general who had won a massive fraud verdict against Donald Trump before the 2024 election, and ordered the dismissal of a criminal case against New York Mayor Eric Adams by saying the charges had handicapped the Democrat’s ability to partner in the Republican administration’s fight against illegal immigration.

Even for a department that has endured its share of scandals, the moves have produced upheaval not seen in decades, tested its independence and rattled the foundations of an institution that has long prided itself on being driven solely by facts, evidence and the law. As firings and resignations mount, the unrest raises the question of whether a president who raged against his own Justice Department during his first term can succeed in bending it to his will in his second.

“We have seen now a punishing ruthlessness that acting department leadership and the attorney general are bringing to essentially subjugate the workforce to the wishes and demands of the administration, even when it’s obvious” that some of the decisions have all the signs “of corrupting the criminal justice system,” said retired federal prosecutor David Laufman, a senior department official across Democratic and Republican administrations.

He spoke not long after Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, Danielle Sassoon, resigned in protest following a directive from Emil Bove, the Justice Department’s acting No. 2 official, to dismiss the case against Adams.

In a letter foreshadowing her decision, Sassoon accused the department of acceding to a “quid pro quo” — dropping the case to ensure Adams’ help with Trump’s immigration agenda. Though a Democrat, Adams had for months positioned himself as eager to aid the administration’s effort in America’s largest city, even meeting privately with Trump at Trump’s Florida estate just days before the Republican took office. 

Multiple high-ranking officials who oversaw the Justice Department’s public integrity section, which prosecutes corruption cases, joined Sassoon in resigning.  

For those of us who lived through the '70s, all of that sounds positively Nixonian. But count me as one who is convinced Trump is capable of birthing a scandal that would make Watergate pale in scope and depravity. In fact, I would not be surprised if we already are in the early stages of such a scandal. Tucker and Richer write:

On Friday, a prosecutor involved in the Adams case, Hagan Scotten, became at least the seventh person to quit in the standoff, telling Bove in a letter that it would take a “fool” or a “coward” to meet his demand to drop the charges. (Bove and department lawyers in Washington ultimately filed paperwork Friday night to end the case).

“Even though there may not be more resignations, a clear message has been sent about the objectives and the expectations of the department,” said Alberto Gonzales, who served as attorney general under Republican President George W. Bush until his 2007 resignation in the wake of the dismissal of several U.S. attorneys.

“The purpose of the department is to ensure that our laws are carried out, that those who engage in criminal wrongdoing are prosecuted and punished,” Gonzales said. And to some it may appear “that if you have some kind of relationship with the White House, there may not be consequences for doing something that ordinary Americans engaged in similar conduct would be punished.” 

Bove, a former New York federal prosecutor himself who represented Trump in his criminal cases, pointedly made no assessment about the legal merits of the case against Adams. Bove cited political reasons, including the timing of the charges months before Adams’ presumed re-election campaign and the restrictions the case had placed on the mayor’s ability to fight illegal immigration and violent crime.

In a letter to Sassoon, Bove said case prosecutors would be subject to internal investigations.

Bondi defended the decision to drop the case, asserting in a Fox News interview Friday that Adams was targeted after he criticized the Biden administration’s immigration policies.

Do news reports support the assertions of Bondi and Bove regarding the Biden administration? If so, they are well hidden. This is from an account NPR: 

The Justice Department memo calling for charges against Adams to be dropped doesn't question the facts or merits of the case.

Instead it lays out two political reasons for the corruption case to be dropped. First, it echoes an unsubstantiated claim that former President Joe Biden and his administration may have used the prosecution to punish Adams, a fellow Democrat, for publicly criticizing Biden's immigration policies.

"It cannot be ignored that Mayor Adams criticized the prior administration's immigration policies before the charges were filed, and the former U.S. Attorney's public actions created appearances of impropriety," the memo said.

No evidence of the Biden team interfering in DOJ prosecutorial decisions was offered to support that assertion. In the memo, DOJ officials also said the case, if allowed to move forward, would hinder Adams from devoting his full attention to one of Trump's top policy initiatives: curbing "illegal immigration and violent crime" in New York City.

Adams has signaled growing openness to partnering with Trump administration officials on immigration enforcement in the city and has reportedly ordered NYC officials to avoid criticizing Trump or his policies.

Some critics, including city and state officials running against Adams in the mayor's race, condemned the DOJ move to drop charges and voiced alarm at growing ties between Adams and the Trump team.

Posting on social media, New York City comptroller Brad Lander blasted what he called "Adams' effort to get a pardon for his pay-to-play charges."

"Eric Adams sold out New Yorkers to buy his own freedom," wrote New York state Sen. Jessica Ramos on X. "Donald Trump may think this buys him access to terrorize our communities, but New Yorkers always stand up for one another."

It's unclear how this move by the DOJ will affect investigations and criminal cases against a wide array of Adams' political allies, donors and former members of his administrations. 

Critics are stunned when Trump's careless language turns into an apparent confession that Elon Musk and his DOGE goons are operating on shaky legal ground

Musk and Trump in the Oval Office (Getty)

Donald Trump's mouth has gotten him in trouble again, this time due to careless language that suggested Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are operating on shaky legal footing. Trump's words -- in the form of a standard word salad that passes for normal language in the president's world -- caught the ears of those who pay attention to what comes out of his mouth. Matthew Chapman, of Raw Story, explains under the headline ''Disgrace': Critics outraged by apparent confession at Trump's latest press conference":

President Donald Trump was finally confronted, at a joint press conference with the Japanese prime minister, about tech billionaire Elon Musk's rapid infiltration of government IT systems — in particular, access to the system that handles almost all payments for the Treasury Department and gives Musk and his engineering team theoretical access to huge troves of Americans' Social Security numbers and private financial information. 

When a reporter asked Trump whether Musk and his "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) task force really needed that kind of access to Americans' sensitive data, the president replied, "Well, it doesn't, but they get it easily. I mean, we don't have very good security in this country and they get it very easily."

Commenters on social media were shocked by Trump's words — with many pointing out that this was essentially a confession that Musk's scheme isn't on strictly legal footing.

When news outlets, such as The Hill and Yahoo! News,  report that Trump and Musk "are violating the law right and left, that catches attention. But to hear it from Trump's own mouth, it creates a WTH moment. What kind of reaction did Trump's words draw? Chapman describes it:

"JFC," wrote social media influencer Art Candee.

"Oh, very reassuring…" wrote Republicans Against Trump.

"Trashing our security and the fbi on the national stage is a gift to enemies and a disgrace," wrote author and TV personality Lea Black. "The press should call him out."

"Cc: Every attorney in the country filing suit against DOGE," wrote Center for International Policy adviser and former Senate staffer Dylan Williams.

"'They get it very easily' because Trump gave them unfettered access 'at his insistence,' wrote technology attorney and New York University professor Michael Kasdan. "I hope this is used in Court against them all."

The original exchange can be viewed at this link. 

Court pushes back on Trump's attempt to cut funding for medical research -- a move that threatened life-saving studies and economies in blue and red states

(YouTube)

The Trump administration's losing streak in court continues, this time over its attempt to cut funding for biomedical research -- a move that would have threatened life-saving studies on cancer, heart disease, brain disorders, Alzheimer's, and a host of other health-related issues. From a report at CNN, under the headline "Trump tried massive cuts to health research; the swift legal response shows that courts aren’t holding back":

Among dozens of court cases challenging President Donald Trump’s policies, one case this week has moved faster than most.

In less than 24 hours, the American medical community and dozens of universities secured an early win in blocking the Trump administration’s effort to cut millions of dollars of federal funding supporting medical research.

After the Trump administration capped the amount of money research institutions receive from the government to support health research, 22 states plus health-care systems and universities from across the country filed multiple lawsuits on Monday to stop it.

By midnight, a federal judge issued a nationwide injunction blocking the cutbacks — marking one of the fastest-moving, most robust examples yet of the courts standing in the way of Trump’s efforts to overhaul the U.S. government.

As Trump and his DOGE chief, Elon Musk, have taken a sledgehammer to the federal government – stopping federal foreign aid, firing federal workers, ending government programs and even closing agencies altogether – the unprecedented executive actions have been met by nearly four dozen emergency lawsuits designed to slow or stop them.

So far, the lawsuits have been effective: The Trump administration was told in five different ways on Monday and once on Tuesday it must stop or pause the implementation of its policies.

That included federal judges blocking Trump’s ban on birthright citizenship, pausing its effort to offer “buyouts” to federal workers, restoring the flow of federal money to environmental and health-care programs, reinstating (at least temporarily) the top investigator for federal whistleblowers who had been fired, ordering some health-care data to be posted again to government websites, and blocking the attempt to cut federally subsidized medical research.

These early legal wins – even temporary ones – are quickly creating a new playbook for how Trump policies are tested and responded to. 

“What we’re seeing is an effort to arrogate control over federal spending on a scale we’ve never seen, and with callous disregard for the consequences. And the courts are responding in kind,” Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown University Law Center professor and CNN legal analyst, said Tuesday morning about Trump’s approach so far.

Often the judges sitting at the trial-court level have tried to preserve the status quo before irreversible harm could be done. Trump administration officials say they were expecting these early moves to be challenged in court, and in many cases, legal issues will be revisited in the days and months ahead, by multiple levels of courts, including potentially the US Supreme Court.

Trump officials, as well as the president, have bristled at some of the judicial rulings, with Vice President J.D. Vance and Musk both suggesting the administration should disregard court rulings, a scenario that has raised fears the country could be barreling toward a constitutional crisis.

Trump criticized the judges in a radio interview Monday, saying they made “very bad rulings” and that “they want to sort of tell everybody how to run the country.”

Trump seems to be saying that he, and he alone, should run the country -- never mind that our democracy is built on a "separation of powers" system that gives the legislative and judicial branches an equal say to that of the executive branch. For now, at least, Trump's view of how our government should function is taking its lumps in court. From CNN:

The cases so far have demonstrated how the Trump policies that startled Washington over the past four weeks could change American life – from reshaping the national approach to immigration to curtailing medical research and foreign aid programs. The research universities, for instance, said on Monday a loss of millions of federal dollars that supports their labs’ overhead costs would “devastate medical research.”

Lawmakers from both parties raised concerns that the cuts would hit their local economies, both in blue and red states.

Massachusetts took the lead in one of the challenges to the National Institutes of Health grant funding cuts, which had been announced by the Trump administration last Friday. The state was the first mover because of how deeply the policy would affect universities’ research programs there, slashing tens of millions of dollars in federal support for institutional overhead costs – but also because the state is among several Democrat-led states that are mounting some of the most significant challenges against the administration.

“We will not allow the Trump administration to play politics with public health,” Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell said at a press conference on Monday.

The response to medical funding cuts was one of many cases where Trump’s actions have been almost immediately challenged in court.

The lawsuits that have been filed fall into several categories. They include questions about whether the president can halt funding approved by Congress or fire whole categories of federal workers, whether privacy protections can prevent Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing personal data held by the government, and whether the Trump administration’s social policies and immigration crackdown stretch beyond the limits of law and Constitution.

Republicans, as has become their custom, seem content to let Trump try whatever he wants. That has helped spark concern about how Team Trump might respond to court orders it dislikes:

One of the rulings that’s sparked the strongest reaction from Trump’s allies was when a federal judge this past weekend blocked DOGE from accessing a critical Treasury Department payment system, which the judge said risked “irreparable harm.”

The efforts from Musk’s team to access the Treasury’s payment system – which doles out trillions of dollars in government spending – prompted five former Treasury secretaries to write a joint op-ed on Monday saying they were so “alarmed about the risks of arbitrary and capricious political control of federal payments” and that, if pursued, Trump’s approach would be “unlawful and corrosive to our democracy.”

The backlash to the judge’s ruling on the Treasury system from both inside and outside the Trump administration – including from Trump and Vance – raised new concerns that the Trump White House will ignore court orders. . . 

Judges are already warning the administration not to ignore their rulings. On Monday, a federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the reinstatement of funding for environmental and health groups that was held up, writing that the administration violated the “plain text” of his earlier order unfreezing billions of dollars in federal aid.

And in a separate case Monday, in Washington, DC, federal employees told a judge that the administration had failed to reinstate USAID workers who were put on leave. A major hearing in that case is set for today.

A final note: The damage from Trump's attempted actions hardly would be limited to Massachusetts or the Northeast. In Alabama, a decidedly red state, the heart of its biomedical research enterprise is in Birmingham, where studies at the UAB Medical Center have replaced the declining steel industry as a driver of the economy. The harm to the city and state financial pictures would be severe if Trump had his way. (Full disclosure: In my capacity as an editor in UAB Communications, I frequently wrote about biomedical research at the university and was familiar with its impact on the statewide economy. Call me stunned that even a president as clueless as Trump would try to take a figurative dump on Birmingham, which has enormous potential to become a "New South" city.)

Birmingham and Alabama are not alone in feeling the threat. Across the South, the economies of urban centers -- Nashville, TN; Tampa, FL; Atlanta, GA, New Orleans, LA, Memphis, TN (home to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, an affiliate of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center) -- are heavily dependent on biomedical research. All four of the states mentioned above voted for Trump in 2024, so they are largely responsible for him being in office. One might think Trump would be at least a little concerned about threatening their economies. But he apparently is ill informed or simply does not care. Voters in Deep South states should remember that as the next four years. unfold.

Legal experts fire outrage at J.D. Vance after he falsely claims U.S. judges have no authority to keep the Trump administration within the boundaries of the law

Vance and Trump: Clueless in the capital (Getty)

 

Legal experts are putting heat on Vice President J.D. Vance -- essentially suggesting he needs a refresher course in constitutional law -- after he falsely claimed U.S. judges do not have the authority to keep the Trump administration in check. On top of that, we learned in recent days that President Donald Trump is clueless about the constitution he is sworn to uphold. How comforting.

From a report at The Guardian under the headline "Outrage after JD Vance claims judges are not allowed to check executive power; Vice-president accused of threatening constitution after saying judges have no right to restrain president’s agenda:

JD Vance, the US vice president, has been accused of threatening the US constitution after telling judges who have issued rulings temporarily blocking some of Donald Trump’s most contentious executive orders that they “aren’t allowed” to control the president’s “legitimate power”.

Vance’s intervention came after Judge Paul Engelmayer, a US district court judge, issued an injunction stopping Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) unit from accessing the treasury department’s central payment system in search of supposed corruption and waste.

Engelmayer’s ruling triggered an angry riposte from Vance, a graduate of Yale law school, who claimed judges had no legal right to restrain the president’s agenda and compared it to telling a military commander how to act on the battlefield.

“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” he wrote.

“If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

In fact, article III of the US constitution confers a power known as judicial review, which gives federal judges the authority to rule on cases involving the president, as well as other branches of government.

Vance’s comments drew widespread criticism.

Daniel Goldman, a Democratic representative from New York, responded on X: “It’s called the ‘rule of law’. Our constitution created three co-equal branches of government to provide checks and balances on each other (‘separation of powers’).

“The judiciary makes sure that the executive follows the law. If you do, then you won’t have problems.”

Quinta Jurecic, a fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank, told The New York Times: “What Vance’s wording suggests is that the executive could potentially respond to a court order by saying to the court, ‘You’re unconstitutionally intruding on my authority and I’m not going to do what you say.’

“At that point, the constitution falls apart.”

Trump has previously been happy to embrace rulings on his actions by judges if they ruled in his favor. He has frequently applauded Aileen Cannon, a Florida judge he appointed in his first presidency, for her orders restricting the investigation into him carried out by the former special counsel, Jack Smith.

The injunction against DOGE for seizing treasury information was granted after 19 attorneys general in Democratic states filed a lawsuit. It complained that Musk’s entry into the treasury system – which holds the bank accounts and social security numbers of millions of Americans – was unlawful. A hearing has been set for 14 February. The payments system processes trillions of dollars of government spending and handles multiple functions, including tax refunds, Social Security payments and benefits for Medicare and Medicaid.

The ruling also provoked an outburst from Musk, the multibillionaire entrepreneur whose attempt to seize control of public spending has been denounced as a coup by Democrats.

“A corrupt judge protecting corruption. He needs to be impeached NOW!” posted Musk.

Trump joined the criticism, telling journalists onboard Air Force One en route to the Super Bowl in New Orleans on Sunday that “we’re very disappointed with the judges that would make such a ruling, but we have a long way to go”.

He indicated his administration was prepared to fight negative rulings. “No judge should frankly be allowed to make that kind of a decision. It’s a disgrace.”

Judges do not have authority to make decisions that go against the Trump administration? All Americans -- MAGA or otherwise -- should be concerned that we find ourselves with a president who is that clueless about the Constitution. And it should not come as a surprise to anyone. Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump said he intended to act outside the law, mainly by seeking revenge-driven prosecutions against his perceived enemies.

That is against the law, as we have reported on numerous occasions.  On top of that, it was well known on election day that Trump was a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, a confessed sexual abuser, Now we know Trump is clueless about the Constitution he is supposed to uphold, with news outlets reporting that we are headed for a constitutional crisis. Our nation is likely to pay a steep price if that unfolds.

Trump has been in a rush to throw out executive orders -- many that might not have grounding in the law -- and his frenzied state of mind now has led us to the edge of a cliff many of us have never seen before. And to think, he has not even been in office for a month. How much worse can things get on his watch? From The Guardian report: 

Engelmayer’s ruling is one of nine court orders issued against the administration in response to about 40 separate cases filed as the federal courts have emerged as the main bulwark against Trump’s headlong rush to remake the US government's federal bureaucracy and assert his vision of an imperial presidency.

Court orders have temporarily stayed Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship for children born to undocumented immigrants, as well as his effort to transfer transgender female inmates to male-only prisons. Judges have also delayed White House attempts to freeze up to $3tn in federal spending and uncover the identities of FBI agents who worked on the investigation into the January 6 insurrection, as well as DOGE’s efforts to cajole federal workers into submitting deferred resignations.

Last Friday, a Washington district court paused the attempt to put 2,200 staff from USAID, the foreign assistance agency, on administrative leave and recall its overseas workers within 30 days. The judge, Carl Nichols, also ordered the temporary reinstatement of 500 staff previously put on leave.

All of this raises these questions: What thought, if any, did Trump put into issuing these executive orders? Does he even care if his actions are unlawful? 

Football fans use the Super Bowl to stage protests against the efforts of Trump, Musk, and Vance to ransack our government and throttle privacy rights

Protesters rally against Trump at Super Bowl (Fox News)

If the United States ever is fortunate enough to get rid of Donald Trump once and for all, last week might be remembered as the time when Americans began to fight back against the most brazenly corrupt government most of us have seen in our lifetimes. Matthias Schwartz and Charlie Savage of The New York Times (NYT), provide details on a pivotal few days when our democracy seemingly was resuscitated and brought back to life. Under the headline "A Legal Counteroffensive to Beat Back Trump’s Government Purges; A raft of new lawsuits contend that President Trump and Elon Musk are breaking the law to ransack the F.B.I. and other federal agencies. The courts will now decide," Savage and Schwartz write:

Workers from across the federal government set off a legal counteroffensive against President Trump and Elon Musk last Tuesday (2/4/25), challenging the legality of efforts to raze their agencies, single them out publicly or push them out of their jobs.

The raft of lawsuits, filed by F.B.I. agents, public-sector unions, representatives of older Americans and liberal-leaning legal groups, hinges on fine points of law that deal with matters ranging from the privacy of taxpayer data to intricacies of federal rule-making. But together, they amount to the opening shots in an emerging legal battle over the constitutional order, checks and balances and the founders’ vision of the separation of powers.

It will be up to the courts to decide whether the president has the power to not only direct the executive branch, but also to forcefully recast it in his own image. It may also be up to the judicial branch of government to find a way to ensure that its own decisions are enforced.

How did the counteroffensive against unfettered Trumpism begin? It appears a sizable number of Americans decided they'd had enough and knew they had better push back before the president and his henchmen had done so much damage it could not be repaired. Has the push-back permanently turned the tide toward the rule of law? Probably not. But Trump, J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, and the gang now know they are in fight. And they have been unmasked as glorified know-nothings, who have no clue how the government works and quickly get their panties rumpled when someone figuratively smacks them across the kisser. (More on that in an upcoming post.) From the NYT report:

In short order on Tuesday, three government unions sued the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, or OPM — the federal government’s human resources division — to block an effort to convince roughly two million federal employees to resign from their jobs early.

Two groups of F.B.I. agents and bureau employees sued to block Mr. Trump from releasing the names of agents and staff members who participated in the investigations into the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, trying to head off what they fear is a looming purge.

Labor unions and a retirees’ group sued the Treasury Department to restrict access to sensitive Treasury systems that contain the private information of millions of Americans — and that the plaintiffs say may have already been compromised by Mr. Musk’s employees through what he has labeled the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Separately, a group of transgender plaintiffs led by advocacy organizations and the American Civil Liberties Union sued to block Mr. Trump’s order to defund gender-transition treatments for people under the age of 19. Two other pending lawsuits seek to block an executive order that would require the Bureau of Prisons to transfer trans female inmates to men’s prisons. On Tuesday evening, one of those suits won a temporary restraining order, signed by Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the District of Columbia. It bars the Justice Department from transferring trans women to men’s facilities or denying them gender-transition treatments, as mandated by one of Mr. Trump’s executive orders.

Earlier, two federal employees, using pseudonyms, sued OPM to block the agency’s access to the email address that sent the governmentwide resignation offer, which was similar to one Mr. Musk had sent to Twitter’s employees after acquiring the company.

The White House press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Collectively, the legal actions seek to check what the plaintiffs see as an unlawful effort — often helmed by Mr. Musk, an unelected billionaire with no formal position — to subvert long-established civil-service protections and to grab from Congress its constitutionally mandated control of federal spending.

But they are being pursued against a darkening backdrop of fear and possible intimidation.

“I would argue that there is the potential for physical harm,” Kelly McClanahan, a lawyer for the two federal workers, argued in a hearing on Tuesday, pleading that his clients needed to remain anonymous or risk reprisals from supporters of Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk. “They have a history of putting people on blast, of tweeting out their names.”

Musk seems to have put himself on center stage, which likely will not sit well with the famously self-involved Trump. We likely will be treated to a series of Truth Social rants from Trump over the next 24 hours or so, designed to put the spotlight back where he thinks it belongs. Savage and Schwartz report:

At the heart of much of the action is Mr. Musk’s new organization, which is not a department or official division but which has amassed extraordinary power in a matter of weeks, ostensibly to cut costs and reorder the government. An executive order calling for “DOGE teams” to be inserted within each federal agency claims its mission is “to implement the president’s DOGE agenda by modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”

On Monday, Mr. Musk appeared to take credit for shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development, a 63-year-old agency that funds health and development initiatives around the world. “We spent the weekend feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper,” he wrote in a social media post.

Federal employees and their lawyers say Mr. Musk’s staff, some of whom are in their late teens or early 20s, have seized the controls of some of the most sensitive data and information systems at the heart of the federal bureaucracy. These include an official email address that can contact almost all of the government’s two million employees and a system at the Treasury that issues many payments from across the federal government.

Both are the focus of two of the lawsuits. According to one suit, Mr. Musk’s reach at Treasury means his group can access “names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, birth places, home addresses and telephone numbers, email addresses and bank account information about millions of individuals.”

White House officials have repeatedly said the claim is overblown. In a letter to Congress, the Treasury Department said the Musk group’s access to payment systems was “read-only.”

Another one of the lawsuits, organized by Democracy Forward, a liberal-leaning legal nonprofit, argued that the push for governmentwide resignations is illegal. In their complaint, the plaintiffs argue that the effort ignores civil service rules and promises to reward employees who resign with money that hasn’t yet been appropriated by Congress for that purpose.

In other words, Trump is trying to run roughshod over the legislative and judicial branches of government. That is the move of a wannabe dictator, who wants to consolidate as much power as possible for himself in the executive branch. So much for checks and balances and the separation of powers. White right-wingers, who largely are responsible for putting Trump back in the White House -- and I still can't figure how any sentient being thought voting for Trump was a good idea -- should be careful what they wish for. If Trump has created this much chaos in roughly three weeks, imagine how much damage he can do in, say, six months?

Here's a suggestion: If you really think a dictatorship is the way to go, try moving to Hungary or Russia or China -- and don't leave a mess for the rest of us to clean up. How big could the mess wind up being? History provides clues. From The NYT piece: 

In an interview, Skye Perryman, Democracy Forward’s chief executive, accused Mr. Musk and his group of seeking to undo the merit-based system that has been the foundation of the civil service for more than a century, and return the country to a corrupt era when government jobs were handed out as political favors.

“This effort is seeking to revert us back to an unworkable system known as the spoils system,” she said, “one that the country abandoned in the 1800s, because it was not delivering for people.”

A third lawsuit seeks a restraining order to stop the Office of Personnel Management from sending out governmentwide emails from HR@opm.gov until the agency has completed a required privacy assessment. That lawsuit claims that DOGE is planning to conduct mass firings, and that it has brought in outside email servers that are potentially vulnerable to foreign hackers.

The individuals in the cases related to the F.B.I. and transgender care also filed under pseudonyms. One of the lawyers echoed the worry that releasing the plaintiffs’ names could bring harm to those who use established legal channels to challenge Mr. Trump’s policies.

“It is clear that the threatened disclosure is a prelude to an unlawful purge of the F.B.I. driven solely by the Trump administration’s vengeful and political motivations,” Chris Mattei, a lawyer for the F.B.I. Agents Association, said in a statement. “Releasing the names of these agents would ignite a firestorm of harassment toward them and their families, and it must be stopped immediately.”

What started the flood of lawsuits? One of Trump's legal "wizards," naturally. Savage and Schwartz write:

The lawsuits came in response to a demand by Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, that the F.B.I. compile and turn over a list of everyone who worked on the Capitol riot cases. That group, the lawsuits estimated, could include as many as 6,000 agents.

The Trump administration has not said it intends to release the identities of the law-enforcement officials. The information the F.B.I. provided on Tuesday identified employees by their workplace IDs, their title at the time of the relevant investigation or prosecution and the date of the last action related to the investigation, among other details, but not their names.

The administration’s demand, however, for names of people who worked on the cases has stoked the belief that it may move to fire them en masse.

Marko Elez, one of Elon Musk's "boy toy engineers," gets exposed touting racist views and eugenics, leading him to resign as an invader of the U.S. Treasury Dept.

Elon Musk and Marko Elez (TYR Digital; Getty Images, Threads, Unsplash)

Marko Elez, perhaps the most prominent member of Elon Musk's "youth corps of engineers" at DOGE, has resigned after old social-media posts resurfaced of him espousing racist views and touting eugenics, according to a report at The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Under the headline "Employee has links to a deleted social-media account that advocated for racism and eugenics," The WSJ's Katherine  Long reports:

A staffer for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency whose access to U.S. Treasury payment systems was approved by a federal judge on Thursday (2/6/25) has links to a deleted social-media account that advocated for racism and eugenics. The 25-year-old employee, Marko Elez, resigned Thursday after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to the account.

 

The deleted profile associated with Elez, who was embedded in the Treasury Department to carry out efficiency measures, advocated repealing the Civil Rights Act and backed a “eugenic immigration policy” in the weeks before President Trump was inaugurated.  

“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” the account wrote on X in September, according to a Wall Street Journal review of archived posts. “Normalize Indian hate,” the account wrote the same month, in reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley. 

After The Journal inquired about the account, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said that Elez had resigned from his role.

In recent days, Elez had emerged at the center of a legal battle over access to sensitive taxpayer information and systems the Treasury Department uses to process trillions of dollars in payments annually.

Thursday morning, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that Elez could continue to access the department’s payment systems, but limited his ability to share the data. Elez resigned later that same day.

Elez didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.

After Musk and his team pushed for access to the U.S. Treasury Department payment system, Elez became a prominent figure in the ensuing controversy. From The WSJ report:

Elez attended Rutgers University, where he majored in computer science. As a sophomore, he co-founded a company, Unimetrics.io, that aimed to connect high-schoolers with mentors who could help burnish their college applications. 

Elez went on to work for Musk at SpaceX, Starlink, and X, where he focused on artificial intelligence, according to archives of his personal website.   

Musk personally urged people to apply to DOGE on X in December, promising long hours and little pay in exchange for the chance to fundamentally remake the federal government. Some of those who answered the call appear to be young Musk loyalists, steeped in internet culture, who share his world-view.

The account, @nullllptr—a misspelling of a keyword in the C++ programming language—was deleted in December, but hundreds of brash, sometimes-sophomoric posts have been archived. The user appeared to have a special dislike for Indian software engineers. “99% of Indian H1Bs will be replaced by slightly smarter LLMs, they’re going back, don’t worry guys,” the user posted in December.

That seems to be an indication Elez supports Donald Trump's deportation policies, suggesting Elez was a highly political figure from the outset. His posts from 2024 and early 2025 indicate that Elez was attuned to controversial political issues:

“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” @nullllptr posted in July. In June, the user weighed in on the conflict in the Middle East, offering some sympathy for Israel but also posting, “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”

 

If Elez was "racist before it was cool," does that mean he knew Trump, Musk, and others surrounding the Trump presidency held racist sentiments? That appears to be the case, especially since the last sentence in the above paragraph sounds like something Trump would say:

The deleted @nullllptr account previously went by the username @marko_elez, a review of archived posts shows. The user behind the @nullllptr also described themselves as an employee at SpaceX and Starlink.

 

Elez currently operates another X account, which also has the username @marko_elez; the two accounts often interacted with the same users and posted similar content, including posts complimentary of Musk and SpaceX, archives show."

Evidence suggests Elon Musk and his youthful "corps of engineers" have broken into U.S. Treasury system without background checks and security clearances

Elon's "little boys" (Mint)

 

Members of Elon Musk's "youth corps of engineers" have been rewriting U.S. Treasury Department code, which could block payments and reduce visibility into what has been blocked, according to a report at The New Republic (TNR). One expert says they have created a "backdoor into the U.S. Treasury," creating security vulnerabilities that could be "incredibly dangerous.  Under the headline "The Real Threat of Elon Musk’s Treasury Takeover Exposed; Musk’s team is rewriting code in the U.S. Treasury system, "Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling writes:

Elon Musk’s team of coders are creating a “backdoor” into the U.S. Treasury system, according to legal and I.T. professionals.

“Pushing live production code cooked up by some young coders over a week of [sleepless] nights in place of a legacy system that is fundamental to the operation of the US government is against every programming best practice,” University of Kansas law professor Corey Rayburn Yung posted on BlueSky.

Highlighting a Talking Points Memo piece about how Musk’s team is implementing untested code into the U.S. Treasury to create new paths that “block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked,” Yung warned that the world’s richest man was creating a “backdoor into the US Treasury.”

“This is incredibly dangerous both because of its intended use (by Elon and Trump) and the risk of other actors exploiting a major security vulnerability to cause a massive disruption to the US government,” Yung continued.

“There’s clearly no QA process, live testing with mocks, technical support for bugs, etc.,” Yung said. “This is insane. It’s the coding equivalent of hammering a complex, fragile machine until it does what you want.”

In a separate piece, TNR reports it is not clear if Musk, and his youthful helpers, have passed background checks or received security clearances. Houghtaling reports:

Musk was appointed as a “special government employee” by the White House, but on Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt couldn’t explain whether he had received security clearance or a background check to operate within the federal government.

A special government employee is “anyone who works, or is expected to work, for the government for 130 days or less in a 365-day period,” according to the Justice Department.

To help him, Musk has tapped a group of college students between the ages of 18 and 25, several of whom have little other professional experience than interning for him at SpaceX or Neuralink.

It is not clear if the college students have received proper background checks or security clearances. Are they essentially "breaking and entering" into a government system? That's what it sounds like. Houghtaling writes:

Musk and his staffers at the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have had seemingly unfettered access to federal databases containing Social Security numbers, home addresses, medical histories, and other sensitive data.

Last week, Musk’s team was spotted installing a commercial email server into the Office of Personnel Management, in what many considered to be a massive security risk. The server gave the uncleared team potential access to onboarding, job performance reviews, and government employee health care details, which could violate HIPAA laws.

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and economic-policy expert Lindsay Owens have compared the Musk team's actions to a "coup." 

Mint.com provides background on Musk's youth corps. The Daily Beast also has background.

Marko Elez, Elon Musk protege, has gained access to systems that control $5.45 trillion in federal payments, including Social Security checks, tax returns, and more

        

Marko Elez (The Economist)

 

A member of Elon Musk's youth corps of  "engineers," 25-year-old Marko Elez, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the U.S. government, according to a report at WIRED. Under the headline "A 25-Year-Old With Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System; The Bureau of the Fiscal Service is a sleepy part of the Treasury Department. It’s also where, sources say, a 25-year-old engineer tied to Elon Musk has admin privileges over the code that controls Social Security payments, tax returns, and more," Vittoria Elliott, Dehruv Mehrotra, Maria Feiger, and Tim Marchman write:

Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a secure mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy.

Despite reporting that suggests Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force has access to these Treasury systems on a “read-only” level, sources say Elez, who has visited a Kansas City office housing BFS systems, has many administrator-level privileges. Typically, those admin privileges could give someone the power to log in to servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to.

“You could do anything with these privileges,” says one source with knowledge of the system, who adds that they cannot conceive of a reason that anyone would need them for purposes of simply hunting down fraudulent payments or analyzing disbursement flow.

"Technically I don't see why this couldn't happen," a federal IT worker tells WIRED in a phone call late on Monday night, referring to the possibility of a DOGE employee being granted elevated access to a government server. "If you would have asked me a week ago, I'd have told you that this kind of thing would never in a million years happen. But now, who the fuck knows."

What kind of problems could arise from such an intrusion, especially by a young man who might not know as much as he thinks he knows about federal systems? The scope of possible damage is enough to make the head swim. The WIRED team writes:

A source says they are concerned that data could be passed from secure systems to DOGE operatives within the General Services Administration. WIRED reporting has shown that Elon Musk’s associates—including Nicole Hollander, who slept in Twitter’s offices as Musk acquired the company, and Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who now runs a GSA agency, along with a host of extremely young and inexperienced engineers—have infiltrated the GSA and  attempted to use White House security credentials to gain access to GSA tech, something experts have said is highly unusual and poses a huge security risk.

Elez, according to public databases and other records reviewed by WIRED, is a 25-year-old who graduated Rutgers University in 2021 and subsequently worked at SpaceX, Musk’s space company, where he focused on vehicle telemetry, starship software, and satellite software. Elez then joined X, Musk’s social media company, where he worked on search AI. Public Github repositories show years of software development, with a particular interest in distributed systems, recommendation engines, and machine learning. He does not appear to have prior government experience.

Elez did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House and Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Broadly speaking, the US government pays out money in one of two ways. Agencies like the Department of Defense and the US Postal Service are legally authorized to originate, certify, and issue payments on their own. The vast majority of payments, though—including federal tax returns, Social Security benefits, Supplemental Security Income benefits, and veteran’s pay—flow through the Federal Disbursement Services, which according to Treasury records paid out $5.45 trillion in fiscal year 2024. The Bureau of the Fiscal Service, a nonpartisan body, is charged with directing this money appropriately, moving it from government accounts to recipients. The Payment Automation Manager and the Secure Payment System are the mechanisms through which the money is paid out.

Control of those mechanisms could allow someone to choke off money to specific federal agencies or even individuals, a fear that Democrats have expressed about DOGE. On Monday, Senate Democrats warned of DOGE’s encroachment into the payment system. “Will DOGE cut funding to programs approved by Congress that Donald Trump decides he doesn’t like,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. “What about cancer research? Food banks? School lunches? Veterans aid? Literacy programs? Small business loans?”

The fight over whether DOGE could access Treasury systems led to a previously reported standoff between acting Treasury secretary David Lebryk and Musk’s associates. Lebryk was placed on administrative leave last week and subsequently resigned.

“Lebryk’s resignation set an example,” a source tells WIRED. “Any idea of resistance or noncompliance seems to be fading in the wake of that, and everything I have heard from leadership suggests they intend to give the ‘DOGE’ operatives what they are asking for.”