A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
No-Bill for Assault With a Deli Weapon
A D.C. grand jury declined to indict the fired DOJ paralegal Sean Dunn who hurled a sandwich at a federal officer during protests against President Trump’s hyper-federalization of the nation’s capital, the NYT reports.
The incident outside a Subway location (it was reportedly a salami sandwich) came to represent both the intense local opposition to being targeted by Trump on the bogus pretext of out-of-control crime and the overall absurdity of the situation.
Failing to secure an indictment is a relatively rare occurrence because prosecutors control the entire process in front of a grand jury. With few exceptions, prosecutors are not in the business of bringing loser cases to grand juries.
This is the second case in the last week arising out of the Trumpian occupation of the District of Columbia where grand juries have declined to indict felonies. Three different grand juries declined to return indictments against Sidney Lori Reid, accused by prosecutors of injuring an FBI agent near the D.C. jail during the transfer of alleged gang members. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office eventually dropped the charge to a misdemeanor, which doesn’t require an indictment.
Prosecutors were seeking to indict Dunn on a similar assault charge that they failed to secure against Reid.
Footnote of the Day
U.S. District Judge Thomas Cullen of the Western District of Virginia, a Trump appointee sitting by assignment, in his order dismissing a Trump administration lawsuit against all the federal judges in Maryland:
Indeed, over the past several months, principal officers of the Executive (and their spokespersons) have described federal district judges across the country as “left-wing,” “liberal,” “activists,” “radical,” “politically minded,” “rogue,” “unhinged,” “outrageous, overzealous, [and] unconstitutional,” “[c]rooked,” and worse. Although some tension between the coordinate branches of government is a hallmark of our constitutional system, this concerted effort by the Executive to smear and impugn individual judges who rule against it is both unprecedented and unfortunate.
Hannah Dugan Loses Motion to Dismiss
Wisconsin state Judge Hannah Dugan lost her bid to dismiss the Trump administration’s criminal prosecution of her for allegedly interfering with immigration enforcement officers trying to detain an undocumented immigrant in her courthouse. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman of Wisconsin ratified an earlier similar decision by a federal magistrate.
A Possible Clue To A Trump U.S. Attorney’s Resignation?
Deep in a somewhat convoluted NYT report on yet another bogus Trump DOJ effort to re-litigate and seek retribution for the federal inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election is a potential clue as to why former state legislator Todd Gilbert abruptly resigned last week as acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, after only a month on the job, without offering any reason publicly:
The investigation is based in Charlottesville, Va., more than a hundred miles from where the events at issue took place, but officials have justified placing it with that office because of an F.B.I. document storage facility in Winchester, Va., according to people familiar with the matter who described the case on condition of anonymity to publicly discuss it.
The NYT story then goes on to note Gilbert’s resignation. While the NYT stops short of connecting the resignation to the investigation, the juxtaposition in the story is … glaring.
The Purges
- DOJ: Roughly 75% of career lawyers in the DOJ Civil Rights Division have left in recent months, Bloomberg Law reports, replaced by what Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon is calling “a new class of Civil Rights Warriors.”
- FEMA: The Federal Emergency Management Agency suspended the 36 employees who used their names when signing a letter to Congress this week warning that President Trump has gutted the government’s disaster response capabilities. A total of 182 employees signed the letter, but most did so anonymously.
Fox in the Hen House Alert
Heather Honey, a high-profile denier of Trump’s loss in the 2020 election and a protégé of Cleta Mitchell, has been appointed to a newly created senior position in the Department of Homeland Security, where she’ll help oversee the nation’s election infrastructure, ProPublica reports.
Corey Lewandowski Has Veto Power Over DHS Contracts
Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski is the last stop before six-figure contracts reach the desk of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem for her approval, Politico reports. Noem has imposed an unworkable, micromanager requirement that she personally approve contracts and grants of more than $100,000, creating a persistent bottleneck in the third largest Cabinet department.
The Trials and Tribulations of Lisa Cook
For your perusal:
- Charlie Savage notes what’s different about this case from the other independent agency cases so far in Trump II: “His attempt to fire Ms. Cook presents a new twist. It raises the question of whether he alone can decide whether there is cause to fire an official at an independent agency whose leaders are protected by law from arbitrary removal — or whether courts will be willing and able to intervene if judges believe his justification is a pretext.”
- Politico reports that the courts may be reluctant to dig too deeply into whether Trump’s pretext for firing Cook is bogus.
- TPM’s Kate Riga makes the important point that Trump has used the purported “for cause” firing of Cook as a fallback position that may avoid a direct confrontation with the Roberts Court, which has already endorsed this year the independence of the Federal Reserve.
- TNR’s Greg Sargent is zeroing in on the origin of the bogus allegations against Cook from Federal Housing Finance Agency chief Bill Pulte: “People with experience in mortgage law and governance tell me that Cook’s lawyer, well-known D.C. attorney Abbe Lowell, has a major opening in the coming litigation. He can use the discovery process to shed light on why Pulte targeted these mortgages and on any White House involvement in that.”
Thread of the Day
Putting the D’oh! in DOGE
After the Roberts Court cleared the way in June for DOGE to have access to the sensitive Social Security information of all Americans, DOGE staffers that same month uploaded a crucial Social Security database to a vulnerable cloud server, according to new allegations by whistleblower Charles Borges that were made public Tuesday.
Denmark Summons U.S. Ambassador After Espionage Claim
The Danish foreign ministry summoned the U.S. ambassador today after Denmark’s main public broadcaster reported that three American men linked to President Donald Trump’s administration were carrying out an influence operation in Greenland. The U.S. men were not named in the Danish report.
A 3-Hour Presser Only A Dictator Could Love
In an orgy of “flattery inflation,” President Trump’s Cabinet members tried to outdo themselves with over-the-top cultist praise for their leader while he preened, strutted, and projected for TV cameras for more than three excruciating hours Tuesday.
“It bore similarities … to meetings of ministers in other countries where leaders have sought to exert strong, personal control over large stretches of national life,” the WaPo reported.
For his part, Trump basked in the preposterous praise and further embraced the Roberts Court’s view of the unitary executive:
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