Cry Me a River for Pam Bondi
The parallels between President Trump’s firings of Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi are so striking that I was tempted to copy and paste the March 6 Morning Memo, and merely swap the names.
It’s not that there’s no news value in reporting Bondi’s ouster. It’s that the old journalistic tropes for cabinet shuffles not only don’t work when every department is being run directly out of the White House; instead, they actively mislead, blur, and obscure the truth of Trump’s iron (if erratic) grip on the Justice Department. What difference does it make, really, who runs these departments if they are at the beck and call of Stephen Miller all day. Said one former DOJ prosecutor:
The traditional journalistic approach to a sacking also hyper-personalizes the emotional experience and career prospects of the ousted official in a way that feels gross in the current moment. Bondi has decimated the historic foundations of the Justice Department, served as a willing cipher for President Trump’s campaign of retribution against his political foes, overseen the purging of career prosecutors and investigators, put hapless line attorneys in impossible positions in court, and defied court orders to the point that the government’s hard-earned presumption of regularity evaporated during her tenure.
But tell us more about how hard this all is on her:
- NYT: Bondi “grew emotional … in conversations with friends and colleagues after she realized she was out.”
- WSJ: “While Bondi has been stung by the dismissal she has been heartened by the support she has received and a flood of job offers …”
“It’s ALL so positive,” Bondi herself texted the WSJ.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, where palace intrigue entirely misses the point, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the president’s own criminal defense attorney who operationalized all of what Bondi presided over, was elevated to acting attorney general.
A lot of ink will be spilled on who will replace Bondi permanently, but so long as the DOJ is run out of the Trump White House, the attorney general is just window-dressing. And one thing remains depressingly true: Across two terms, each Trump attorney general has been worse than the last one.
Trump Wants a MAL Docs Redo?
In a lazy, sloppy, predetermined memo, the deeply compromised Trump DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel has concluded that the 1978 post-Watergate Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional and that Congress cannot force the president to surrender his records to the National Archives at the end of his administration.
The memo was written by the OLC head: 36-year-old T. Elliot Gaiser, a former law clerk to the 5th Circuit’s Edith Jones, D.C. Circuit’s Neomi Rao, and Justice Samuel Alito.
Violations of the Presidential Records Act were at the core of the Mar-a-Lago criminal case against the president, though the charges related the sensitivity of the documents in question and Trump’s alleged obstruction of the investigation.
Tina Peters Will Be Resentenced
A Colorado appeals court threw out the nine-year prison sentence — but not the conviction of election denier Tina Peters — and ordered her to be resentenced, ruling that the trial judge has improperly taken into account her improperly her repeated false claims about elections in violation of her First Amendment rights.
The Purges: Pentagon Edition
In his ongoing crusade to stack the Pentagon with white, male loyalists, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth:
- fired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, whose term typically wouldn’t have ended until 2027. The new acting chief of staff will be Gen. Christopher LaNeve, who was Hegseth’s military aide before being named the vice chief of staff, in a move seen as a prelude to canning George. In his year in office, Hegseth has now removed the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and the chiefs of staff of the Army, Navy and Air Force.
- forced out two other Army generals: Gen. David Hodne, who became the head of the service’s Training and Transformation Command in October, and Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., the chief of Army chaplains.
George had attempted to stand up to Hegseth over his decision to block the promotions of one-star general of two Black officers and two women officers, the NYT reports:
Two weeks ago, General George asked Mr. Hegseth to meet with him to discuss the removal of the four officers from the one-star list, as well as the general’s view that Mr. Hegseth was interfering unnecessarily in Army personnel decisions overall, the officials said. Mr. Hegseth refused to meet with General George about the matter, they said.
In other Pentagon news: Hegseth directed military commanders to allow troops to carry personal firearms on base.
Must Read
A truly insightful analysis by Garrett Graff on how DEI has become the stabbed-in-the-back excuse in the post-Global War on Terror era that left-behind POWs were in the post-Vietnam era (and before that Jews were in the German post-World War I era) — and how Pete Hegseth wholly subscribes to this mythos.
Mass Deportation Watch
- NYT: ICE Arrests the Head of Wisconsin’s Largest Islamic Group
- WaPo: Despite signaling change, ICE still arrests many immigrants with no record
- NYT: Lawsuit Challenges Warrantless Searches and Forced Entries by ICE
- WaPo: First group of 12 deportees from the US dumped in Uganda
Quote of the Day
Former senior State Department official Vali Nasr, now a professor at Johns Hopkins University:
To the Iranians, the Strait of Hormuz now matters more than the nuclear program. The nuclear program was symbolic, but didn’t provide them with any deterrence. Now, the only reason why they are surviving this war is because of the strait. The Iranian thinking is that, at the end, the strait must remain under their control because it is their only deterrence and only source of revenue.
Latest From the Middle East …
- Politico: ‘Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!’ Trump threatens Iran’s civilian infrastructure
- WSJ: Control Over Strait of Hormuz Will Determine Who Wins the War
- NYT: How Israel Is Taking Control of Southern Lebanon
Good Read
Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post: The Trump presidential library would be a giant tower of grift
A Special Ask
I’m hoping to catch you in a quiet moment on your Friday and make a special ask for you to take a minute to join TPM.
None of us here loves promoting our own stories let alone hawking the annual membership drive or touting the Journalism Fund. We’d all rather just be doing the work you’ve come to expect from us. Refining our craft, getting closer to the truth, moving the national conversation toward what really matters is infinitely rewarding.
But we have to attend to the business of the business, and practical realities force us a couple of times a year to make a concerted effort to pitch readers who aren’t members yet on joining TPM. If you’re a lurker — a regular Morning Memo reader who hasn’t take the plunge yet — make today the day.
Artemis II in Super Slo-Mo
National Geographic used it special high-resolution, slow-motion camera—the Ember s2.5k by Freefly Systems—to record Wednesday’s launch at 2,000 frames per second:
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