The Conversation -- March 21, 2025

Trump Reins in Musk. Maggie Haberman & Eric Schmitt of the New York Times: Donald “Trump on Friday rejected the notion that the billionaire Elon Musk should be given access to top-secret U.S. plans for a potential military conflict with China, even as he denied a report that such a briefing had been planned to be held at the Pentagon. 'We don’t want to have a potential war with China, but I can tell you, if we did, we’re very well equipped to handle it,' Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. 'But I don’t want to show that to anybody, but certainly you wouldn’t show it to a businessman who is helping us so much.' Mr. Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla and a part-time government staff member, visited the Pentagon on Friday and met privately with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The New York Times reported on Thursday that Mr. Musk was originally going to visit the Tank, a secure conference room at the building, for a briefing with top military leaders about the China war plan, according to two U.S. officials. The top-secret briefing was to include Adm. Christopher W. Grady, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, the head of the military’s Indo-Pacific Command; and Mr. Hegseth....

“But the Tank visit was called off after The Times’s report on the visit, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Instead, Mr. Musk, who has extensive business interests in China, met with Mr. Hegseth and Admiral Grady in the defense secretary’s office.... Mr. Trump made clear he had been caught by surprise by The Times’s report, saying he called his White House chief of staff and Mr. Hegseth to ask about it; he said they said it was 'ridiculous.' But he also said that Mr. Musk — who has extensive business in China — should not be made aware of such sensitive information. It was one of the first specific statements from the president about what he would consider a bridge too far for Mr. Musk, who has expansive potential conflicts of interest....”

Giselle Ewing of Politico: “... Donald Trump on Friday suggested that recent attacks on Tesla cars and property have been more harmful than the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, emphasizing that the alleged Tesla attackers should be considered 'terrorists.' Protesters across the country have made their outrage known against Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn efforts to shrink the federal government in recent weeks, targeting the electric car company, of which he remains CEO. While many of the protests at Tesla showrooms have remained peaceful, some have involved instances of vandalism and arson, including setting cars alight.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Obviously vandalism and arson are wrongful acts, but -- so far -- they have cause only property destruction, crimes that are not nearly as serious as unprovoked physical attacks on police officers committed during an attempt to overturn the results of a federal election. I hope most people are smart enough to figure that out.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs, et al., of the New York Times: “The Trump administration fired nearly the entire civil rights branch of the Department of Homeland Security on Friday, gutting a government office responsible for conducting oversight of ... [Donald] Trump’s immigration crackdown. The more than 100 staff members were told on Friday they would be put on leave for 60 days to find another job in the administration or be fired in May, according to five current and former government officials. Mr. Trump also closed the ombudsman for Citizenship and Immigration Services, another office responsible for scrutinizing the administration’s legal immigration policies. The moves were the latest attempt by Mr. Trump to root out civil rights divisions and oversight mechanisms across government agencies. But the shuttering of the Homeland Security Department’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties was particularly notable given the lack of transparency over the administration’s immigration crackdown.”

Justin Jouvenal, et al., of the Washington Post: “A federal judge sharply grilled a government attorney Friday about the Trump administration’s apparent disregard of his order to return deportation flights to the United States, a dispute that has sparked a high-profile showdown this week between the president and the judiciary. Before deputy assistant attorney general Drew Ensign even had a chance to address the court at a hearing, James E. Boasberg, chief justice for the U.S. District Court in D.C., dramatically scolded him over the government’s conduct in the case. Boasberg accused Ensign of using 'intemperate and disrespectful language that I can’t remember seeing from the United States' in court filings and questioned whether the attorney failed to show for a hearing Monday because he knew he had knowingly violated Boasberg’s order about getting the flights back.... Boasberg will have difficult choices to make if he decides to take a tougher line against the government. If the judge feels officials are continuing to disregard his orders, he could find them in contempt of court, but that’s a step federal judges rarely take against the executive branch.”

Sophia Cai, et al., of Politico: “The pervasive fear and anger that have been rippling through federal agencies over Elon Musk’s slashing approach to shrinking government deepened even further on Friday over the billionaire tech mogul’s threat to root out and punish anyone who is leaking to the media.... Following Thursday’s New York Times report that Musk was set to receive a Pentagon briefing about a confidential contingency plan for a war with China, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO posted on ... X that leakers 'will be found' and, he intimated, punished. 'I look forward to the prosecutions of those at the Pentagon who are leaking maliciously false information to NYT,' Musk wrote in his post. But Musk’s post is not having the chilling effect on leakers he’d intended.... 'We are public servants, not Elon’s servants,' said one Food and Drug Administration employee.... 'Leakers are patriots,' said one Agriculture Department employee.... 'He IS A LEAKER,' one senior Federal Aviation Administration official said of Musk in a Signal message. 'When you put hard drives on data systems at government agencies you are creating the biggest security breaches we have seen in years and years. Possibly ever.'”

~~~~~~~~~~

Rebecca Shabad, et al., of NBC News: “... Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to start dismantling the Education Department. 'It sounds strange, doesn’t it? Department of Education. We’re going to eliminate it,' Trump said in the East Room of the White House at a ceremony where he was flanked by children seated at school desks. Before he signed the order, Trump turned to the children and asked, 'Should I do this?'... Congressional approval would be needed to fully abolish the department. Trump said he hoped Democrats would vote in favor.... Immediately after the signing, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., the chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said on X that he will 'submit legislation' to accomplish Trump’s goal of shutting down the Education Department 'as soon as possible.'” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Nice going, Bill. The state you represent, Louisiana, is one of the five (one of the two, by some calculations) U.S. states with the highest levels of poverty, so most in need of federal funds that run through the Education Department. See also Ken W.'s commentary below.

Alan Feuer of the New York Times: “A federal judge in Washington edged closer on Thursday to holding the Trump administration in contempt for possibly having violated an order he issued last weekend pausing the deportation of scores of Venezuelan immigrants under a rarely invoked wartime statute. In an angrily written order, the judge, James E. Boasberg, told the administration to explain to him by Tuesday why officials had not violated his instructions when they allowed two flights of immigrants to continue on to El Salvador even after he directed the planes to return to the United States. Judge Boasberg also called out efforts by the Justice Department to repeatedly stonewall his attempts to get information about the timing of the flights. 'The government again evaded its obligations,' he wrote, adding that the Justice Department’s most recent filing about the flights was 'woefully insufficient.'” (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~

     ~~~ The very basis of Trump's assertion that he can deport suspected Venezuelan gang members under the Alien Enemies Act is a big fat lie: ~~~

     ~~~ Charlie Savage & Julian Barnes of the New York Times: Donald “Trump’s assertion that a gang is committing crimes in the United States at the direction of Venezuela’s government was critical to his invocation of a wartime law last week to summarily deport people whom officials suspected of belonging to that group. But American intelligence agencies circulated findings last month that stand starkly at odds with Mr. Trump’s claims, according to officials familiar with the matter. The document, dated Feb. 26, summarized the shared judgment of the nation’s spy agencies that the gang was not controlled by the Venezuelan government. The disclosure calls into question the credibility of Mr. Trump’s basis for invoking a rarely used wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to transfer a group of Venezuelans to a high-security prison in El Salvador last weekend, with no due process. The intelligence community assessment concluded that the gang, Tren de Aragua, was not directed by Venezuela’s government or committing crimes in the United States on its orders, according to the officials....” ~~~

~~~ Heather Cox Richardson: “On Monday, March 17, Acting Field Office Director Robert L. Cerna of ... [ICE's] Enforcement and Removal Operations ... told the court that 'The lack of criminal record does not indicate [deportees] pose a limited threat. In fact, based upon their association with TdA [-- a Venezuelan street gang --], the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.' [IOW, Cerna] asserts ... that a person’s lack of criminal record proves that they are more dangerous than people who do have a criminal record because their clean record simply shows that the government lacks a complete profile of their crimes. Wow.... In a webcast on Monday, Trump ally Steve Bannon defended the deportations: ... ' Big deal…. If there's some innocent gardeners in there [among the deportees]? Hey, tough break for a swell guy.'... The end to the due process of the law leads to situations where a government official can argue that the lack of a criminal record for someone perceived to be an enemy of those in power just proves that person is a criminal.” (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Wait, Steve. Exactly why is it okay to send an innocent gardener to an inhumane Salvadorian jail, but it's a travesty to send a guilty podcaster to a U.S. Club Fed? ~~~

~~~ Camilo Montoya-Galvez & Annabelle Hanflig of CBS News: "CBS News has obtained an internal government list of the names of the Venezuelan men the Trump administration deported to El Salvador as part of a secretive operation last week that has triggered a legal standoff in the U.S. and a debate around the world. On March 15, the U.S. government deported 238 male Venezuelan citizens on three flights to El Salvador, accusing them of being part of a transnational gang known as Tren de Aragua, which ... [Donald] Trump has labeled a foreign terrorist group and wartime enemy.... U.S. officials have said 137 of the Venezuelan men were treated as 'enemy aliens' and removed from the country under the 18th century [Alien Enemies Act]. The other 101 were deported under regular immigration procedures, the officials have said.... Family members and lawyers of deportees have said they only learned their loved ones or clients had been deported to the small Central American country through videos and photos posted by the Salvadoran government and news outlets." The article republishes the government's list of names. ~~~

     ~~~ Lilia Luciano of CBS News cites one deportee, Franco José Caraballo Tiapa, who has no U.S. criminal record, and outlines the perils Caraballo faces.

Devlin Barrett of the New York Times: “Trump administration lawyers have determined that an 18th-century wartime law the president has invoked to deport suspected members of a Venezuelan gang allows federal agents to enter homes without a warrant.... The disclosure reflects the Trump administration’s aggressive view of presidential power, including setting aside a key provision of the Fourth Amendment that requires a court order to search someone’s home. It remains unclear whether the administration will apply the law in this way.... Warrantless entries have some precedent in America’s wartime history, but invoking the law in peacetime to pursue undocumented immigrants in such a way would be an entirely new application, [experts say].... 'All such alien enemies, wherever found within any territory subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, are subject to summary apprehension,' the proclamation [Trump signed last week aimed at Venezuelan gang members,] said. Senior lawyers at the Justice Department view that language, combined with the historical use of the law, to mean that the government does not need a warrant to enter a home or premises to search for people believed to be members of that gang.” (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~

    ~~~ Marie: So here's how this goes: Trump says he can ignore the Fourth Amendment by (1) claiming war powers against people who come from a country with which we are not at war; THEN (2) declaring that these people are "alien enemies" who he can "summarily apprehend." IOW, whatever I say. "I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president." Trump is out of control, and so are his "loyal" lawyers. Not a Constitutional crisis yet, Chuck? ~~~

Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff & Teo Armus of the Washington Post: “A federal judge on Thursday ordered that a Georgetown University fellow in the United States legally who was detained by federal immigration authorities cannot be removed from the country, pending the outcome of a lawsuit seeking his release from detention. Federal judge Patricia Tolliver Giles in Virginia’s Eastern District did not rule on the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Indian national Badar Khan Suri, who was apprehended earlier this week for what a DHS spokesperson said was 'Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media.' The arrest, part of several recent Trump administration arrests of people with legal status that has included scholars from other universities who’ve opposed U.S. foreign policy on Israel, has further inflamed outrage from those who say such actions are a violation of the First Amendment that could have chilling effects on free speech.” (Also linked yesterday.)

Still planning a vacation in the U.S., Trump notwithstanding? You might want to think again. Bear in mind that we don't know if the particulars of this story are true, or if Becky there is a raging maniac who required heavy restraints. (She looks pretty sweet.) But ICE agents don't seem to be denying the family's allegations. ~~~

     ~~~ Julie Watson of the AP: “U.S. border agents handcuffed [Lennon] Tyler, a U.S. citizen, and chained her to a bench, while her [German] fiancé, Lucas Sielaff, was accused of violating the rules of his 90-day U.S. tourist permit, the couple said. Authorities later handcuffed and shackled Sielaff and sent him to a crowded U.S. immigration detention center. He spent 16 days locked up before being allowed to fly home to Germany. Since ... Donald Trump took office, there have been other high-profile incidents of tourists like Sielaff being stopped at U.S. border crossings and held for weeks at U.S. immigration detention facilities before being allowed to fly home at their own expense. They include another German tourist who was stopped at the Tijuana crossing on Jan. 25. Jessica Brösche spent over six weeks locked up, including over a week in solitary confinement, a friend said.... Sielaff, 25, and ... others say it was never made clear why they were taken into custody even after they offered to go home voluntarily.” ~~~

     ~~~ Nelli Bird of BBC News: "A tourist held in the US for 19 days was removed in chains like Hannibal Lecter, according to her parents. Becky Burke, 28, arrived home in Wales on Tuesday from her ordeal which began half way through a backpacking trip across North America. Parents Paul and Andrea Burke, of Portskewett, Monmouthshire, said their daughter was 'traumatised' after being taken in 'leg chains, waist chains and handcuffs'. The Northwest ICE Processing Center said in a statement: 'All aliens in violation of US immigration law may be subject to arrest, detention and, if found removable by final order, removal from the United States regardless of nationality.' It said that Ms Burke was repatriated to the UK on March 18 after being detained 'related to the violation of the terms and conditions of her admission'. Ms Burke's detention came as what her family think was a misunderstanding of her accommodation arrangements. She got free accommodation for helping host families 'around the house', which her father believes authorities may have suspected broke the terms of her tourist visa. The US State Department says people on visitor visas are prohibited from carrying out 'employment' during their stay." (Also linked yesterday.)

The zeal with which these guys are engaging in increasingly open, authoritarian behavior is unlike almost anything I’ve seen. Erdogan, Chavez, Orban — they hid it.... If even a dozen Republicans in Congress had the capacity to stand up to Trump, this would be a very different ballgame. Trump and Musk and Stephen Miller could not do this alone. They’re doing it with the full cooperation of the majority party in Congress. We’re in a bad place. -- Steven Levitsky of Harvard University ~~~

~~~ Amanda Taub of the New York Times: Donald “Trump’s intensifying conflict with the federal courts is unusually aggressive compared with similar disputes in other countries, according to scholars. Unlike leaders who subverted or restructured the courts, Mr. Trump is acting as if judges were already too weak to constrain his power. It is extremely rare for leaders to simply claim the power to disregard or override court orders directly, especially so immediately after taking office.... On Tuesday, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that Judge [James] Boasberg [-- who ordered the administration to turn around planes carrying deportees --] was a 'Radical Lunatic' and should be 'IMPEACHED,' because the judge 'was not elected President — He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING!'... (In fact, U.S. courts can and do order the return of aliens who have been wrongfully deported.)” (Also linked yesterday.)

Ishan Tharoor of the Washington Post: “For the first time in more than two decades, [The V-Dem Institute] categorized more societies as autocracies than democracies. The United States is part of that story of democratic backsliding. The Trump administration’s stunning purge of federal bureaucracy, its pressure tactics on universities, and the dubious legality of its more brazen attempts to wield executive power are taking the country into uncharted territory.... '[Trump and his allies] are copying the path taken by other would-be dictators like Viktor Orban,' Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) told the Guardian last month.... 'You have a move towards state-controlled media. You have a judiciary and law enforcement that seems poised to prioritize the prosecution of political opponents. You have the executive seizure of spending power so the leader and only the leader gets to dictate who gets money.' Leaders like Orban, Netanyahu, Erdogan and Trump are unruffled by such criticism — and often feel validation because of it.”

Marie: After Donald Trump issued an order making it virtually impossible for a large law firm to represent anyone in any federal case, I wrote that Trump was one of the few people who could make me feel sorry for lawyers. Well, I don't feel sorry for lawyers anymore. In fact, these snivelling cowards make me sick: ~~~

     ~~~ More Chickens Come Home to Roost in Trump's Coop. Michael Schmidt of the New York Times: Donald “Trump and the head of the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP have reached a deal under which Mr. Trump will drop the executive order he leveled against the firm, Mr. Trump said on Thursday. In the deal, Mr. Trump said, the firm agreed to a series of commitments, including to represent clients no matter their political affiliation and contribute $40 million in legal services to causes Mr. Trump has championed, including 'the President’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, and other mutually agreed projects.'... The firm, Mr. Trump said, also agreed to conduct an audit to ensure its hiring practices are merit based 'and will not adopt, use, or pursue any DEI policies.' The deal materialized after the head of the firm, Brad Karp, went to the White House this week and had a face-to-face meeting with Mr. Trump to discuss a resolution....

“The White House said that Mr. Karp had acknowledged 'wrongdoing' by one of the firm’s former partners, Mark F. Pomerantz. Mr. Pomerantz had tried to build a criminal case against Mr. Trump several years ago while working at the Manhattan district attorney’s office.... Members of the legal profession said in interviews that ... it appears as if the firm — which is dominated by Democrats and has long prided itself in being at the forefront of the fight against the government for civil rights — was capitulating to Mr. Trump over an executive order that is likely illegal.... Last week, a federal judge in Washington ruled that a subsequent executive order Mr. Trump signed targeting the law firm Perkins Coie, which is also aligned with Democrats, was likely unconstitutional and issued a restraining order halting it.... The firm has long prided itself on breaking barriers and standing up to the government on issues like civil rights.” Politico's story is here. ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: This is a big firm (more than 1,000 lawyers), and it had the resources -- as smaller law firms do not -- to stand up to Trump & quash his unlawful order. Beating Trump in this particular intimidation/retribution campaign and protection racket would make the country safer for every person who had a grievance against the government that required legal representation to resolve it. ~~~

     ~~~ Scott Lemieux in LG&$: "Disgraceful, even if one doesn’t expect better of BigLaw right now[.]... The message here is clear: these shakedowns will work, so Trump will keep doing them."

Annals of Journalism, Ctd. Wherein the Verge Cops to Making a Common Mistake. Sarah Jeong of the Verge: “On Tuesday, the president of the United States fired the Democratic commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission in clear contravention of what has been the law since 1935. News outlets — including The Verge — all went up with their articles as fast as they could.... The blowback from readers was evenly distributed. 'This is wildly illegal,' one person wrote in The Washington Post’s comment section. 'Just say that. Don’t say the fired people said it was illegal. Say it as the Washington Post when you know it’s true. Democracy dies, thanks in part to this rag.' We also caught flack for our own headline, which put 'illegal' in quotation marks, attributing it to the Democratic commissioners.... What Trump did on Tuesday was wackadoodle beyond belief. It violated Supreme Court precedent from 1935 — Humphrey’s Executor v. US, a case that is literally about the limits of presidential power when it comes to firing FTC commissioners.”

MEANWHILE, the American taxpaper is paying Trump's personal lawyers, a/k/a the Department of Justice, to defend his bloody insurrection. The corruption of the DOJ is complete: ~~~

     ~~~ Alan Feuer of the New York Times: “The Justice Department made an unusual effort on Thursday to short-circuit a series of civil lawsuits seeking to hold ... [Donald] Trump accountable for his supporters’ attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Department lawyers argued in court papers filed to the judge overseeing the cases that Mr. Trump was acting in his official capacity as president on Jan. 6 and so the federal government itself should take his place as the defendant. That move, if successful, could protect Mr. Trump from having to face judgment for his role in the Capitol attack and from having to pay financial damages if he were found liable. The legal maneuver appeared to be Mr. Trump’s latest effort to use the powers of the Justice Department to his advantage by effectively having himself removed from the lawsuits, which were brought against him by groups of Capitol Police officers and lawmakers who claim they were injured when the mob stormed the building.” ~~~

President Trump delivered on his promise of maximum transparency by fully releasing the files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. -- White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt ~~~

~~~ William Wan, et al., of the Washington Post: “After the Social Security numbers of more than 400 former congressional staffers and others were made public in files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the White House acknowledged the breach Thursday and worked to mitigate the harm. The National Archives and Records Administration will scrub the files for Social Security numbers, and the Social Security Administration will issue new numbers to those exposed by the inadvertent release, a White House official said.... The National Archives will also offer credit monitoring services to those affected until they receive their new number....

“Many of those affected have gone on to become high-ranking officials in Washington, including a former assistant secretary of state, researchers in the intelligence world, State Department workers and prominent lawyers.... The Post discovered the Social Security numbers, birthplaces and birth dates of more than 100 staff members of the Senate Church Committee, established in 1975 to investigate abuses by America’s intelligence agencies and government. The Post also discovered more than 100 Social Security numbers of staff members of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which investigated the killing of Kennedy. At least one of them, an author and former law professor, had his number disclosed more than two dozen times.... Experts said the release of the information raises legal questions under the Privacy Act of 1974. ~~~

    ~~~ Question: Who is responsible? Who is directly responsible for this lawless, careless breach? Answer: “When Trump said Monday that the assassination-related files would be released the next day, he said he had directed staff not to redact them. 'I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything,' Trump told reporters during a visit to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. 'I said, “Just don’t.”’” ~~~

     ~~~ Sarah Nir & Maggie Haberman of the New York Times: “White House officials acknowledged on Thursday that it was only after the papers were made public that they began combing through them for exposed details.” This is an update of a story linked yesterday. ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: If you were a person old enough to have had a government job in 1975, would you want to be dealing with a new Social Security number now? -- especially now that Elon is gutting the Social Security administration staff and disallowing phone calls to the SSA? I don't think so. Neither does Rachel Maddow: ~~~

~~~ Could Not Have Happened to a More Deserving Person. Tom Sanders of the Daily Beast, republished by Yahoo! News: “Donald Trump’s former campaign lawyer is furious after his personal information and social security number were made public as part of this week’s release of unredacted JFK assassination files. 'It’s absolutely outrageous. It’s sloppy, unprofessional,' Joseph diGenova, a long-time Trump supporter who formerly served as the president’s lawyer on the campaign trail, told The Washington Post. 'It not only means identity theft, but I’ve had threats against me,' diGenova said.” (Also linked yesterday.)

~~~ The DOJ is working for President Musk, too: ~~~

     ~~~ Devlin Barrett of the New York Times: “In highlighting the Trump administration’s efforts to defend Elon Musk’s flagship company, Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday cited past arrests of people charged with trying to torch Tesla products. Announcing what she described as severe charges against people in Colorado, South Carolina and Oregon, Ms. Bondi said in a news release: 'Let this be a warning: if you join this wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties, the Department of Justice will put you behind bars.' Two of the three arrests, in fact, happened weeks ago, and the other happened one week ago. But Ms. Bondi’s statement underscored the extent to which the administration has publicly defended and embraced Mr. Musk, one of President Trump’s chief allies and the billionaire leading efforts to slash the federal bureaucracy.” ~~~

~~~ When a mere girl (Bondi) threatens to win a hand, Drunk Pete ups the ante: ~~~

     ~~~ ⭐President Musk To Get Top-Secret Military Briefing Today. Eric Schmitt, et al., of the New York Times: “The Pentagon was scheduled on Friday to brief Elon Musk on the U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China, two U.S. officials said on Thursday. Another official said the briefing would be China focused, without providing additional details. A fourth official confirmed Mr. Musk was to be at the Pentagon on Friday, but offered no details. Hours after news of the planned meeting was published by The New York Times, Pentagon officials and ... [Donald] Trump denied that the session would be about military plans involving China. 'China will not even be mentioned or discussed,' Mr. Trump said in a late-night social media post....

“Providing Mr. Musk access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded military secrets would be a dramatic expansion of his already extensive role as an adviser to Mr. Trump.... It would also bring into sharp relief the questions about Mr. Musk’s conflicts of interest as he ranges widely across the federal bureaucracy while continuing to run businesses that are major government contractors. In this case, Mr. Musk, the billionaire chief executive of both SpaceX and Tesla, is a leading supplier to the Pentagon and has extensive financial interests in China.” An Independent story is here. ~~~

     ~~~ Joshua Keating of Vox (March 18): Musk “is, in his own words, 'kind of pro-China.' China is vital to Musk’s car company Tesla as both a producer of vehicles and as a consumer market.... The symbiotic relationship between Tesla and China almost can’t be overstated.... Along the way, Musk has developed relationships with senior Chinese leaders, notably Premier Li Qiang, China’s No. 2 official, who reportedly offered him a Chinese green card during a meeting in 2019.” MB: Any chance Musk would be conveying those top-secret war plans to China? Nah! ~~~

     ~~~ Do check out Akhilleus's comment in today's thread if you're still thinking that maybe giving Elon top-secret war plans against China might be okay. ~~~

     ~~~ Trump just denied the Musk/China story. Then a few minutes later the WSJ confirmed it. Any guesses who’s governing the country right now? -- Josh Marshall in a BlueSky post ~~~

~~~ President Musk Threatens Pentagon Leakers. Csongor Körömi of Politico: “... Elon Musk has openly threatened Pentagon employees who may have leaked information that the tech billionaire was due to get a briefing on a potential American war with China.... After the [NYT] story went live, the planned meeting was confirmed by Pentagon officials and ... [Donald] Trump — but both denied that the session would discuss military plans involving China.... Musk ... called the New York Times 'pure propagand'” and issued a threat, saying he looks 'forward to the prosecution of those at the Pentagon who are leaking maliciously false information to NYT.' 'They will be found,' the tech billionaire warned.” ~~~

~~~ Over at Commerce, Howard Lutnick makes himself President Elon's Third Stooge: ~~~

     ~~~ Justine McDaniel & Sabrina Rodriguez of the Washington Post: “Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged Fox News viewers Wednesday night to buy Tesla stock, an apparent violation of federal ethics rules that prohibit officials from endorsing products or businesses. His promotion of Tesla was the latest move by a Trump administration official to bolster support for Elon Musk’s car company as it becomes a target for voters upset about the sweeping, unprecedented cuts Musk is leading across the federal government through the U.S. DOGE Service. 'I think if you want to learn something on this show tonight, buy Tesla. It’s unbelievable that this guy’s stock is this cheap. It’ll never be this cheap again,' Lutnick said on Fox News. With only a few exceptions, the Code of Federal Regulations prohibits executive branch employees from using their public office 'for the endorsement of any product, service, or enterprise.' Employees are also generally barred from giving preferential treatment to an individual or organization. Those ethical rules, along with the tenet that officials shouldn’t use their public office for private gain, are central to American democratic norms, advocates for ethics in government said.” ~~~

~~~ In fairness to these Tesla enthusiasts, Musk makes a great driving machine: ~~~

     ~~~ Sean O'Kane of TechCrunch: “Tesla is issuing a recall for around 46,000 Cybertrucks sold to date because of an exterior steel trim panel on the side of the windshield that can peel off. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said in a filing that the piece can come off while in motion, which can create a hazard for the driver and other people on the road. The filing states that Tesla became aware of the problem in early January and has identified 151 warranty claims related to this panel coming off since then. The company is not aware of any resulting crashes or injuries, according to the filing. The problem with the panel occurs because the 'structural adhesive' that holds it in place on the vehicle is 'susceptible to environmental embrittlement,' according to the filing. Tesla will fix Cybertrucks covered by the recall at no cost to owners by using a 'different structural adhesive not prone to environmental embrittlement.' It will also use a nut to 'clamp' the steel panel to the vehicle structure.” (Also linked yesterday.)

David Fahrenthold, et al., of the New York Times: “Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency on Wednesday sharply cut back the number of federal real estate leases it claimed to have terminated, signaling that the group is losing at least some internal battles to get rid of government office space. For weeks, Mr. Musk’s group said on its website that it had terminated more than 700 leases, and saved more than $460 million in the process. But around 1 a.m. Wednesday, the group eliminated references to 136 of those cancellations. That reduced its savings by $140 million, or almost 30 percent of the total for lease cancellations it had claimed a day earlier. Mr. Musk’s team did not give a reason for the changes.... G.S.A. officials said they walked back some terminations because of 'feedback from customer agencies.'... Other agencies received help from Republican members of Congress, who lobbied to keep offices in their districts open.... Mr. Musk’s group [also] claimed credit ... for terminating contracts that were actually canceled under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and two that ended under President George W. Bush.”

“Keep Your DOGE Hands Off My Social Security." Kyle Cheney of Politico: “A federal judge has barred Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing sensitive systems at the Social Security Administration, saying the group appears to be on a 'fishing expedition' that could jeopardize the data of millions of people. 'The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion,' said U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander in a 137-page ruling. 'It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.' Hollander, an appointee of President Barack Obama, said the group’s broad access likely violated privacy laws. The Maryland-based judge ordered an immediate halt to the DOGE Social Security team’s access to any systems that contain sensitive data of Social Security recipients. She ordered Musk, DOGE and other affiliates to destroy any non-anonymized data they’ve obtained.” (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~

     ~~~ The AP's report is here. Judge Hollander's ruling, via Axios, is here. ~~~

     ~~~ Andrew Perez of Rolling Stone, republished by Yahoo! News: "Donald Trump’s interim Social Security chief [Lee Dudek] suggested Thursday night he will effectively turn off the agency that manages the essential safety net program for seniors and the disabled, if Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) can’t access the non-anonymized sensitive personal information and data of hundreds of millions of Americans, based on a judge’s order.... Dudek’s threat to block SSA employees from using the agency’s IT systems — a move that could halt Social Security payments — came in response to a judge’s temporary restraining order in a case brought by the AFL-CIO labor union.... [The judge's order requires] Musk and DOGE [to] comply with existing privacy laws. According to Dudek..., this requirement is a reason to threaten to halt the safety net program that 71 million Americans rely on for support."

Vjosa Isai of the New York Times: “Elon Musk has said that 'Canada is not a real country,' just one of his social media jabs at the U.S. neighbor. But people in Canada have done real damage to the vehicles and dealerships belonging to his electric car company, Tesla.... More than 80 Teslas had their tires punctured and bodies scratched at a lot in Hamilton, Ontario, the police said on Thursday. Several acts of vandalism against Tesla property have also been committed in the United States. Hamilton, west of Toronto, is the heart of Canada’s steel manufacturing industry and a battlefront in the country’s trade war with the United States....[Donald] Trump has imposed tariffs on steel and other Canadian products and Canada has responded by applying levies to $20.5 billion worth of exports from the United States. Mr. Trump has also claimed that Canada has long 'ripped off' the United States and wants to make it the 51st state. Canadians have responded with a grass-roots protest, changing how they shop, travel and think about their relationship with the United States, the country’s closest ally and trading partner.”

Drill, Baby, Drill. Jake Spring of the Washington Post: “The Interior Department on Thursday announced that it aims to open up millions of acres of near-pristine land in Alaska to oil drilling and allow for a new pipeline to be built across the state. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the department would allow oil and gas leases on 82 percent of the 23 million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, overturning protections that President Joe Biden finalized last year, and will reinstate a program to permit drilling in the 1.56 million-acre Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the country’s largest preserve of its kind.”

Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post: “The Trump administration has sidelined a senior Defense Department spokesman, defense officials said Thursday, ending a brief and tumultuous tenure in which he clashed with colleagues and journalists who cover the Pentagon, and aggressively defended the agency’s purge of government-produced content recognizing the contributions of minorities in the military. John Ullyot, a public affairs official who also held senior communications roles during ... Donald Trump’s first term in office, is expected to take another role within the Defense Department working on 'special projects.'... Ullyot’s removal followed an uproar Wednesday over the Pentagon’s removal of an online article about the military background of Jackie Robinson, who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball.... As news of the article’s removal drew widespread condemnation on social media, Ullyot released a statement ... that said in part..., 'Discriminatory Equity Ideology … Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services’ core warfighting mission.'”

A Government Lawyer Resigns. Tom Dreisbach of NPR: "A prosecutor with years of experience at the U.S. Department of Justice has resigned amid major changes..., telling NPR, 'It just was not a Department of Justice that I any longer wanted to associate with.' In a sharp resignation letter shared with NPR, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Murphy warned of the erosion of the Justice Department's independence from the president, writing to his coworkers, 'you serve no man.'... Murphy is a veteran prosecutor who ... most recently ... served in the Department of Justice's Capitol Siege Section, which prosecuted more than 1,500 people for crimes stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. When Trump took office, he immediately granted clemency to all of the Jan. 6 defendants — even the most violent offenders and those with lengthy criminal records — and his administration fired and demoted many prosecutors who worked on those cases. As a result, Murphy said, he simultaneously faced threats and harassment from Jan. 6 defendants, who were emboldened by their presidential pardons, while also having to fear retaliation from the administration."

[The Trump administration is running] a campaign to remove public access. And at the end of the day, American taxpayers paid for these tools. -- Jessie Mahr, Director of the Environmental Policy Innovation Center ~~~

~~~ Unseen Heroes. Austyn Gaffney of the New York Times: “Amid the torrent of executive orders signed by ... [Donald] Trump were directives that affect the language on government web pages and the public’s access to government data touching on climate change, the environment, energy and public health. In the past two months, hundreds of terabytes of digital resources analyzing data have been taken off government websites, and more are feared to be at risk of deletion. While in many cases the underlying data still exists, the tools that make it possible for the public and researchers to use that data have been removed. But now, hundreds of volunteers are working to collect and download as much government data as possible and to recreate the digital tools that allow the public to access that information. So far, volunteers working on a project called Public Environmental Data Partners have retrieved more than 100 data sets that were removed from government sites, and they have a growing list of 300 more they hope to preserve.”

Barbara Sprunt of NPR: "Colorado Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet stopped short Wednesday of calling on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to step down from leadership, but came pretty darn close. 'I do think on the leadership question, it's always better to examine whether folks are in the right place, and we're certainly going to have that conversation,' he said at a town hall in Golden." (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Chris Hayes suggested to Schumer this week that he (Schumer) was approaching the Trump juggernaut as he would handle a Mitt Romney presidency. That's right, I think. Schumer's Alfred E. Neuman attitude reminds me of John McCain, who, during the financial industry's meltdown in mid-September 2008, declared that the "fundamentals" of the U.S. economy were "strong." McCain's rival for the presidency, Barack Obama, responded, "It's not that I think John McCain doesn't care what's going on in the lives of most Americans. I just think doesn't know. He doesn't get what's happening between the mountain in Sedona where he lives and the corridors of Washington where he works." That was the moment Obama won the presidency. And McCain lost it.  

~~~~~~~~~~

Wisconsin. Money Corrupts. Absolutely Too Much Money Corrupts Absolutely. Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times: “Elon Musk is bringing back his most controversial gambit from the 2024 presidential election: paying voters as part of a plan to identify and turn out conservative-leaning ones. The super PAC that Mr. Musk founded to funnel his fortune into Republican causes, America PAC, said on Thursday that it was offering $100 to registered voters in Wisconsin who sign a petition 'in opposition to activist judges' or refer others to sign it. Mr. Musk has been using the group to spend millions of dollars to elect a conservative candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court in an April 1 election.... The purpose of the petition is multifaceted: Drive attention from the news media, increase awareness and voter registration among conservative voters, and help America PAC collect data on the most energized Wisconsinites who are likely to turn out for the conservative candidate, Brad Schimel.”

The Conversation -- March 20, 2025

Alan Feuer of the New York Times: “A federal judge in Washington edged closer on Thursday to holding the Trump administration in contempt for possibly having violated an order he issued last weekend pausing the deportation of scores of Venezuelan immigrants under a rarely invoked wartime statute. In an angrily written order, the judge, James E. Boasberg, told the administration to explain to him by Tuesday why officials had not violated his instructions when they allowed two flights of immigrants to continue on to El Salvador even after he directed the planes to return to the United States. Judge Boasberg also called out efforts by the Justice Department to repeatedly stonewall his attempts to get information about the timing of the flights. 'The government again evaded its obligations,' he wrote, adding that the Justice Department’s most recent filing about the flights was 'woefully insufficient.'”

Devlin Barrett of the New York Times: “Trump administration lawyers have determined that an 18th-century wartime law the president has invoked to deport suspected members of a Venezuelan gang allows federal agents to enter homes without a warrant.... The disclosure reflects the Trump administration’s aggressive view of presidential power, including setting aside a key provision of the Fourth Amendment that requires a court order to search someone’s home. It remains unclear whether the administration will apply the law in this way.... Warrantless entries have some precedent in America’s wartime history, but invoking the law in peacetime to pursue undocumented immigrants in such a way would be an entirely new application, [experts say].... 'All such alien enemies, wherever found within any territory subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, are subject to summary apprehension,' the proclamation [Trump signed last week aimed at Venezuelan gang members,] said. Senior lawyers at the Justice Department view that language, combined with the historical use of the law, to mean that the government does not need a warrant to enter a home or premises to search for people believed to be members of that gang.” ~~~

    ~~~ Marie: So here's how this goes: Trump says he can ignore the Fourth Amendment by (1) claiming war powers against people who come from a country with which we are not at war; THEN (2) declaring that these people are "alien enemies" who he can "summarily apprehend." IOW, whatever I say. "I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president." Trump is out of control, and so are his "loyal" lawyers. Not a Constitutional crisis yet, Chuck? ~~~

The zeal with which these guys are engaging in increasingly open, authoritarian behavior is unlike almost anything I’ve seen. Erdogan, Chavez, Orban — they hid it.... If even a dozen Republicans in Congress had the capacity to stand up to Trump, this would be a very different ballgame. Trump and Musk and Stephen Miller could not do this alone. They’re doing it with the full cooperation of the majority party in Congress. We’re in a bad place. -- Steven Levitsky of Harvard University ~~~

~~~ Amanda Taub of the New York Times: Donald “Trump’s intensifying conflict with the federal courts is unusually aggressive compared with similar disputes in other countries, according to scholars. Unlike leaders who subverted or restructured the courts, Mr. Trump is acting as if judges were already too weak to constrain his power. It is extremely rare for leaders to simply claim the power to disregard or override court orders directly, especially so immediately after taking office.... On Tuesday, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that Judge [James] Boasberg [-- who ordered the administration to turn around planes carrying deportees --] was a 'Radical Lunatic' and should be 'IMPEACHED,' because the judge 'was not elected President — He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING!'... (In fact, U.S. courts can and do order the return of aliens who have been wrongfully deported.)”

“Keep Your DOGE Hands Off My Social Security." Kyle Cheney of Politico: “A federal judge has barred Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing sensitive systems at the Social Security Administration, saying the group appears to be on a 'fishing expedition' that could jeopardize the data of millions of people. 'The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion,' said U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander in a 137-page ruling. 'It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.' Hollander, an appointee of President Barack Obama, said the group’s broad access likely violated privacy laws. The Maryland-based judge ordered an immediate halt to the DOGE Social Security team’s access to any systems that contain sensitive data of Social Security recipients. She ordered Musk, DOGE and other affiliates to destroy any non-anonymized data they’ve obtained.”

Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff & Teo Armus of the Washington Post: “A federal judge on Thursday ordered that a Georgetown University fellow in the United States legally who was detained by federal immigration authorities cannot be removed from the country, pending the outcome of a lawsuit seeking his release from detention. Federal judge Patricia Tolliver Giles in Virginia’s Eastern District did not rule on the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Indian national Badar Khan Suri, who was apprehended earlier this week for what a DHS spokesperson said was 'Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media.' The arrest, part of several recent Trump administration arrests of people with legal status that has included scholars from other universities who’ve opposed U.S. foreign policy on Israel, has further inflamed outrage from those who say such actions are a violation of the First Amendment that could have chilling effects on free speech.”

Marie: Here's Chris Hayes, expressing an opinion that jibes with my own. I am grateful that some prominent people like Hayes & Rachel Maddow are sounding the alarm. What disturbs me is that the overwhelming percentage of Americans don't agree:

For some reason, I happened upon a YouTube video of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker's June 2023 commencement speech at Northwestern (BTW, when Pritzker cites Dwight Schrute, he is quoting Rainn Wilson's character on "The Office"): ~~~

Barbara Sprunt of NPR: "Colorado Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet stopped short Wednesday of calling on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to step down from leadership, but came pretty darn close. 'I do think on the leadership question, it's always better to examine whether folks are in the right place, and we're certainly going to have that conversation,' he said at a town hall in Golden." ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Chris Hayes suggested to Schumer this week that he (Schumer) was approaching the Trump juggernaut as he would handle a Mitt Romney presidency. That's right, I think. Schumer's Alfred E. Neuman attitude reminds me of John McCain, who, during the financial industry's meltdown in mid-September 2008, declared that the "fundamentals" of the U.S. economy were "strong." McCain's rival for the presidency, Barack Obama, responded, "It's not that I think John McCain doesn't care what's going on in the lives of most Americans. I just think doesn't know. He doesn't get what's happening between the mountain in Sedona where he lives and the corridors of Washington where he works." That was the moment Obama won the presidency. And McCain lost it.  

Heather Cox Richardson: “On Monday, March 17, Acting Field Office Director Robert L. Cerna of ... [ICE's] Enforcement and Removal Operations ... told the court that 'The lack of criminal record does not indicate [deportees] pose a limited threat. In fact, based upon their association with TdA [-- a Venezuelan street gang --], the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.' [IOW, Cerna] asserts ... that a person’s lack of criminal record proves that they are more dangerous than people who do have a criminal record because their clean record simply shows that the government lacks a complete profile of their crimes. Wow.... In a webcast on Monday, Trump ally Steve Bannon defended the deportations: ... ' Big deal…. If there's some innocent gardeners in there [among the deportees]? Hey, tough break for a swell guy.'... The end to the due process of the law leads to situations where a government official can argue that the lack of a criminal record for someone perceived to be an enemy of those in power just proves that person is a criminal.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Wait, Steve. Exactly why is it okay to send an innocent gardener to an inhumane Salvadorian jail, but it's a travesty to send a guilty podcaster to a U.S. Club Fed?

Sean O'Kane of TechCrunch: “Tesla is issuing a recall for around 46,000 Cybertrucks sold to date because of an exterior steel trim panel on the side of the windshield that can peel off. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said in a filing that the piece can come off while in motion, which can create a hazard for the driver and other people on the road. The filing states that Tesla became aware of the problem in early January and has identified 151 warranty claims related to this panel coming off since then. The company is not aware of any resulting crashes or injuries, according to the filing. The problem with the panel occurs because the 'structural adhesive' that holds it in place on the vehicle is 'susceptible to environmental embrittlement,' according to the filing. Tesla will fix Cybertrucks covered by the recall at no cost to owners by using a 'different structural adhesive not prone to environmental embrittlement.' It will also use a nut to 'clamp' the steel panel to the vehicle structure.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: So if I read Tesla's plan correctly, in combination with Akhilleus's post this morning, this means that Elon -- that is, the NUT -- himself will be clamping steel panels to 46,000 defective Cybertrucks. That should keep him so busy he might not have time to chainsaw any more federal programs.

Could Not Have Happened to a More Deserving Person. Tom Sanders of the Daily Beast, republished by Yahoo! News: “Donald Trump’s former campaign lawyer is furious after his personal information and social security number were made public as part of this week’s release of unredacted JFK assassination files. 'It’s absolutely outrageous. It’s sloppy, unprofessional,' Joseph diGenova, a long-time Trump supporter who formerly served as the president’s lawyer on the campaign trail, told The Washington Post. 'It not only means identity theft, but I’ve had threats against me,' diGenova said.”

Still planning a vacation in the U.S., Trump notwithstanding? You might want to think again. Bear in mind that we don't know if the particulars of this story are true, or if Becky there is a raging maniac who required heavy restraints. (She looks pretty sweet.) But ICE agents don't seem to be denying the family's allegations. ~~~

     ~~~ Nelli Bird of BBC News: "A tourist held in the US for 19 days was removed in chains like Hannibal Lecter, according to her parents. Becky Burke, 28, arrived home in Wales on Tuesday from her ordeal which began half way through a backpacking trip across North America. Parents Paul and Andrea Burke, of Portskewett, Monmouthshire, said their daughter was 'traumatised' after being taken in 'leg chains, waist chains and handcuffs'. The Northwest ICE Processing Center said in a statement: 'All aliens in violation of US immigration law may be subject to arrest, detention and, if found removable by final order, removal from the United States regardless of nationality.' It said that Ms Burke was repatriated to the UK on March 18 after being detained 'related to the violation of the terms and conditions of her admission'. Ms Burke's detention came as what her family think was a misunderstanding of her accommodation arrangements. She got free accommodation for helping host families 'around the house', which her father believes authorities may have suspected broke the terms of her tourist visa. The US State Department says people on visitor visas are prohibited from carrying out 'employment' during their stay."

~~~~~~~~~~

We’ve never seen a president so comprehensively attempt to arrogate and consolidate so much of the other branches’ power, let alone to do so in the first two months of his presidency. -- Stephen Vladeck of Georgetown Law

Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power. -- JD Vance, last month ~~~

~~~ L'État, C'est Moi. Erica Green, et al., of the New York Times: “Nearly two months into his second term, Mr. Trump is trying to consolidate control over the courts, Congress and even, in some ways, American society and culture. Congress ... has ceded some of its core duties to Mr. Trump, handing off elements of the legislative branch’s spending authority to the White House and standing aside as congressionally chartered agencies are shuttered. The president has threatened to 'lead the charge' against the re-election of the rare Republican who dares challenge his agenda, and the party has bent to his will at every turn. Mr. Trump has dismantled independent measures of checks and balances, fired inspectors general and installed loyalists at the Justice Department willing to carry out his campaign of retribution. He has targeted private law firms with connections to those he views as political enemies and cowed previously skeptical or hostile business leaders into pledging public support, even as he has imprinted his 'MAGA' stamp on the private sector by trying to dictate hiring practices. His efforts to reshape institutions in his image have not been limited to the government and policy. Mr. Trump has tried to spread his influence through the arts, as well, by making himself chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

“But Mr. Trump’s latest target — the judiciary — has been described by constitutional scholars and historians as perhaps the most alarming power play to date.... He has applied the same logic of fairness to court cases that he has to presidential elections: They’re fair if he wins but not if he loses.”

Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times: “You can ask ... not whether an action is constitutional, but whether it sits opposed to constitutionalism itself. You can ask, in other words, whether it is anti-constitutional.... An anti-constitutional act is one that rejects the basic premises of constitutionalism. It rejects the premise that sovereignty lies with the people, that ours is a government of limited and enumerated powers and that the officers of that government are bound by law. The new president has, in just the first two months of his second term, performed a number of illegal and unconstitutional acts. But the defining attribute of his administration thus far is its anti-constitutional orientation.... To assert, against the plain text of the Constitution, the power to seize appropriations and destroy the work of the legislature is to break a core premise of constitutionalism. It is anti-constitutional.... According to the Justice Department, the president of the United States has an 'inherent' power to summarily deport any accused member of Tren de Aragua ... without so much as a hearing.... There is nothing in this vision of presidential power that limits it to foreign nationals. Who is to say, under the logic of the Department of Justice, that the president could not do the same to a citizen?” Thanks to RAS for the link. This is a gift link. (Also linked yesterday.)

Michael Bender, et al., of the New York Times: Donald “Trump plans to sign an executive order on Thursday instructing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin dismantling the agency, according to two White House officials. The department cannot be closed without the approval of Congress, which created it. But the Trump administration has already taken steps to narrow the agency’s authority and significantly cut its work force while also telegraphing plans to try and shutter it. The White House officials ... said the order instructed Ms. McMahon to return authority over education to the states.... The federal government accounts for about 10 percent of total school funding, but that is distributed by the Education Department largely according to federal law — not the discretion of the president.... Closing the department would not by itself revoke the various laws that established federal funding for public schools and underserved school districts or for specific student populations, including those with disabilities.... No modern president has ever tried to unilaterally shut down a federal department.” The NPR story is here. See related story linked below under “California.” ~~~

~~~ Here's one thing that happens when the POTUS* is undereducated, incurious and narrowminded: ~~~

~~~ Trump University. Alan Blinder of the New York Times: The ideal of traditional universities “is under siege, as ... [Donald] Trump ties public money to his government’s vision for higher education. That vision is a narrower one. Teach what you must, defend 'the American tradition and Western civilization,' prepare people for the work force, and limit protests and research.... The outcome of this clash over the purpose of higher education stands to shape American culture for a generation or more. If the president realizes his ambitions, many American universities — public and private, in conservative states and liberal ones — could be hollowed out, imperiling the backbone of the nation’s research endeavors. Two months into Mr. Trump’s term, universities are laying off workers, imposing hiring freezes, shutting down laboratories and facing federal investigations.... Much of Mr. Trump’s higher education agenda during his first term empowered for-profit colleges. Now, though, Mr. Trump is taking clearer aim at the cultures and missions of major nonprofit universities.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Remember those Irish monks, laboring over parchment in remote monasteries, to preserve the remnants of ancient civilizations? American civilization is gonna be needing some of those folks now. (Some candidates for the monastic jobs? Maybe people like journalists who managed to save Jackie Robinson's memory from the Trumplodytes -- story linked below.)

Mattathias Schwartz & Abbie VanSickle of the New York Times: Donald “Trump’s angry call on Tuesday for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against his administration on deportation flights has set off a string of near-instant social media taunts and threats, including images of judges being marched off in handcuffs.... At a moment when the judiciary is weighing pivotal decisions on the legality of Trump administration policies, the potential for violence against judges seems to be rising. 'I feel like people are playing Russian roulette with our lives,' said Judge Esther Salas of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, whose 20-year-old son was shot and killed at her home in 2020 by a self-described 'anti-feminist' lawyer.... The threats and intimidation may have not become actual violence, but they appear to be mounting, as Mr. Trump, his advisers and his supporters are questioning almost daily the legitimacy of the American legal system.” (Also linked yesterday.) (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~

     ~~~ And look who dug into his ultra-deep pockets to encourage the harassment: ~~~

     ~~~ Maggie Haberman, et al., of the New York Times: “Elon Musk has made the maximum allowable donation to Republican members of Congress who support impeaching federal judges who are impeding actions taken by ... [Donald] Trump.... Mr. Musk has given the maximum hard-dollar donations he could to the campaigns of seven Republicans who have either endorsed judicial impeachments or called for some form of 'action' in response to recent rulings against the Trump administration, including a weekend decision by Judge James E. Boasberg of Federal District Court in Washington. The combined federal limit for primary and general elections is $6,600.... Mr. Musk contributed on Wednesday to Representatives Eli Crane of Arizona, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin and Brandon Gill of Texas. He also donated to Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, according to two of the people briefed on the matter.” (Also linked yesterday.) The Independent's story is here.

Ken Vogel & Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times: “Mr. Trump and his allies are aggressively attacking the players and machinery that power the left, taking a series of highly partisan official actions that, if successful, will threaten to hobble Democrats’ ability to compete in elections for years to come.... Executive actions intended to cripple top Democratic law firms. Investigations of Democratic fund-raising and organizing platforms. Ominous suggestions that nonprofits aligned with Democrats or critical of ... [Mr.] Trump should have their tax exemptions revoked.... Executive actions intended to cripple top Democratic law firms. Investigations of Democratic fund-raising and organizing platforms. Ominous suggestions that nonprofits aligned with Democrats or critical of ... [Mr.] Trump should have their tax exemptions revoked.... So far, the attacks have been diffuse and sometimes indiscriminate or inaccurate.... Inside the administration..., a small group of White House officials has been working to identify targets and vulnerabilities inside the Democratic ecosystem, taking stock of previous efforts to investigate them.... But using the levers of government to target the opposition has long been considered an abuse of power, sometimes leading to prosecution. Mr. Trump himself was impeached in 2019 for pressuring the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens.” (Also linked yesterday.)

Starving Americans So the Rich Can Enjoy Tax Breaks. Marcia Brown of Politico: “The Agriculture Department has halted millions of dollars worth of deliveries to food banks without explanation, according to food bank leaders in six states. USDA had previously allocated $500 million in deliveries to food banks for fiscal year 2025 through The Emergency Food Assistance Program. Now, the food bank leaders say many of those orders have been canceled. The halting of these deliveries ... comes after the Agriculture Department separately axed two other food programs, ending more than $1 billion in planned federal spending for schools and food banks to purchase from local farmers.” MB: Well, you know, it's springtime. Can't people start foraging?

Lauren Aratani of the Guardian: “The Department of Justice removed 11 guidelines for US businesses on compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), including some that deal with Covid-19 and masking and accessibility. The ADA was signed into law in 1990 and is the key civil rights law that protects Americans with disabilities from discrimination. Updates have already been made to the ADA.gov website to reflect the removal of the guidances. Multiple pages were removed from the ADA’s archive website, including one page that explained how retail businesses are required to have accessible features and another on customer service practices for hotel and lodging guests with disabilities.”

The Manner of Their Vindictive Stunts Is Childish. Karoun Demirjian & Mattathias Schwartz of the New York Times: “Pete Marocco, the State Department official who oversaw the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the main government agency distributing foreign aid, announced in an email on Tuesday night that he would be replaced at the agency by two officials who had been involved in making the cuts. Mr. Marocco said in the email that he would remain at the State Department as director of foreign aid, but that two other officials would handle what remains of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Those officials are Jeremy Lewin, who has been working for the cost-cutting task force led by the billionaire Elon Musk, and Kenneth Jackson, a State Department official who was named the acting president of the U.S. Institute of Peace this week.... On Tuesday, a federal judge found that the efforts to shutter U.S.A.I.D. were most likely unconstitutional.” (Also linked yesterday.)

Eileen Sullivan & Isabelle Taft of the New York Times: “In interviews, more than a dozen fired probationary workers described a kind of purgatory in which information about their livelihoods and what might happen next was difficult, if not impossible, to come by.... In some cases, fired employees say they have received emails informing them of their reinstatement. Some have seen back pay appear in their bank accounts. But more than a dozen federal agencies ... have reinstated employees and immediately placed them on administrative leave.... The firings and subsequent re-hirings have caused widespread confusion for workers who want to know when and if they will get their jobs back, and how long they might get to keep them. They also have questions about unemployment benefits.” ~~~

      ~~~ Marie: What a surprise: it turns out that reinstating employees is a lot harder than firing them & goose-stepping them out the door. That is, a Musky chainsaw massacre is a lot easier to accomplish than finding all the thousands of body parts & stitching them back together as originally designed. But, hey, the richest man in the world getting to play with a real chainsaw & a metaphorical woodchipper is so much fun. Driving a Tesla on the White House lawn. Pontificating at Cabinet meetings. Sleepovers at a Mar-a-Lardo bungalow and slumber parties in the Executive Office Building. Woo-woo! Almost as good as blowing up taxpayer-funded SpaceX rockets and watching debris fall back to earth.

Aaron Blake of the Washington Post: “From the start of his second term..., Donald Trump and his administration signaled a willingness — even a desire — to flout the law in their quest to overhaul the federal government. And while the wheels of justice turn slowly, less than two months later a procession of judges have already ruled the administration has done exactly that. In more than a dozen cases — and in three major rulings this week alone — a federal judge has ruled that the administration either has violated the law or has probably done so. The total works out to one such finding about every four days.” ~~~

~~~ Stephen Vladeck in a New York Times op-ed: “The courts can do only so much when the goal of imposing a policy isn’t to win as much as it is to break things and, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 'The Great Gatsby,' to 'let other people clean up the mess they had made.' For all of the judicial interventions we’ve seen in the first eight weeks of the new Trump administration, alarmingly little has changed on the ground.... It seems that chaos and disruption are themselves key to ... [Donald] Trump’s objective.... Even if the courts rule again and again against Mr. Trump, voiding unlawful immigration arrests and releasing individuals from unlawful immigration detention doesn’t undo the harm they suffered from being arrested and detained in the first place.... Likewise, ordering the government to turn back on spending taps that it has unlawfully frozen can’t undo the damage suffered by recipients deprived of mission-critical funding in the interim.... There is no entity in the United States against which it is more difficult to obtain damages than the federal government.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: The Fitzgerald characters who made the mess were Tom and Daisy Buchanan. They were, like the couple Donald and Elon, the very rich. They "smashed up things ... and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness." Sounds familiar (although Tom & Daisy were the "beautiful people" of their day, and no one would say that of Don and Elon.

David Wallace-Wells of the New York Times: “... measles eradication programs [are] believed to be responsible for 60 percent of global improvements in childhood survival from vaccination over the last 50 years. One hundred million lives were saved worldwide by those vaccines, The Lancet calculated last year — two million lives, on average, every year. That is an awful lot of lives for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new secretary of health and human services, to dismiss with a wave of his hand, instead choosing to sit down at Steak ’n Shake to celebrate the company’s new beef-tallow fries — recalling that, in his childhood, 'everybody got measles,' and implying that immunity from those infections was preferable to the kind you get from a shot.... Mehmet Oz is about to be confirmed as the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, for instance, though only 21 percent of the health recommendations he offered on his television program were judged by a group of researchers to have even 'believable' evidence to support them.... [We are living in] a new age of public-health libertarianism, which is to say, a pretty explicit war on all the things that make health a 'public' good, sustained by mutual aid....” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: IOW, the leader of the nation's public health system does not believe in public health, and he has come to eradicate the concept altogether.

Pranshu Verma of the Washington Post: “The Trump administration’s move to shut down an internet freedom project that helped millions of people in China access the open web has stirred concern from lawmakers, including Republicans, who argue the nonprofit is a crucial tool to counter the rise of Beijing. The Open Technology Fund (OTF), launched in 2012, was intended to allow people who live under repressive regimes to circumvent restrictions and access the internet. An early backer of the encrypted messaging app Signal and the anonymous internet browser Tor, the OTF became the world’s largest funder of products that allow people to freely access the web. As of February, OTF funding provided tools to more than 6 million people in China and 18 million individuals in Iran, giving them the ability to circumvent government restrictions on the internet to access news sites, secure messaging services and social media platforms such as Reddit, the messaging app Telegram and X.... But ... Donald Trump’s executive order Friday stripping independent agencies, including the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) — where nearly all of the OTF’s $43.5 million annual funding comes from — to the 'maximum extent' possible essentially terminated the group’s budget.”

Derek Hawkins of the Washington Post: “A federal judge on Wednesday denied an emergency request by the U.S. Institute of Peace to temporarily stop Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service from dismantling the independent organization after DOGE staffers raided its headquarters with help from federal and local law enforcement officers this week. U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell said during a court hearing that the plaintiffs — several ousted USIP board members who sued in their official capacities — did not show they would be irreparably harmed if they were not reinstated and DOGE staffers were allowed to remain in the institute’s offices. The judge sharply criticized the Trump administration for enlisting the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, the FBI and D.C. police to assist in the takeover of the institute. She said she was denying the plaintiffs’ request for a temporary restraining order because there was 'confusion in the complaint on a number of levels.'”

Talia Minsberg, et al., of the New York Times: “The release of about 64,000 documents about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Tuesday started a race to find a revelation, as journalists, historians and amateur sleuths scoured the pages in hopes of finding something, anything, that could be considered consequential. Instead, the big reveal was that there wasn’t much of a reveal at all. Here are the biggest takeaways of the blockbuster that wasn’t.” This is a gift link. An AP story is here. ~~~

     ~~~ There is nothing Trump can do right. Nothing! ~~~

President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency. Today, per his direction, previously redacted JFK Assassination Files are being released to the public with no redactions. Promises made, promises kept. -- Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, in a social media post

People’s private information should be kept private. -- Judy Barga, whose Social Security number was released

I kinda think Judy would make a more prudent DNI than Tulsi. -- Marie Burns ~~~

~~~ SNAFU. Sarah Nir of the New York Times: “In the 64,000 pages of documents released this week regarding the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, there appeared to be no redactions, those blacked-out sections that typically dot sensitive material, even once it is declassified, to mask confidential or compromising data. Critics said that failure was evidence of an F.B.I. rush to vet material released after a president's demand. And it exposed at least one C.I.A. agent’s complete personnel file and the Social Security numbers for hundreds of other people. They belonged to congressional staff members, intelligence researchers, a former ambassador and scores more. Many of them are still alive, and they discovered on Wednesday that the White House had leaked their personal information to the world.... Administration officials knew before the documents went out that releasing them without redactions would mean some personal information would be exposed....”

Kyle Cheney & Josh Gerstein of Politico: “A Georgetown University researcher, who was studying and teaching on a student visa, has been detained by federal immigration authorities amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on student activists whom the government accuses of opposing American foreign policy, according to court papers. Masked agents arrested Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national and postdoctoral fellow, outside his home in the Rosslyn neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia, on Monday night, his lawyer said in a lawsuit fighting for his immediate release. The agents identified themselves as being with the Department of Homeland Security and told him the government had revoked his visa, the lawsuit says.... Suri has no criminal record and has not been charged with a crime, his petition says.... Suri’s lawyer, Hassan Ahmad, argued in his petition that Suri is being punished because of the Palestinian heritage of his wife — who is a U.S. citizen — and because the government suspects that he and his wife oppose U.S. foreign policy toward Israel.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Millions of Americans, including many numbskulls who voted for Trump, “oppose U.S. foreign policy toward Israel.” ~~~

~~~ AND This. Robert Mackey of the Guardian: “France’s research minister said a French scientist was denied entry to the US this month after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration. 'I learned with concern that a French researcher' on assignment for the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) 'who was traveling to a conference near Houston was denied entry to the United States before being expelled', Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister of higher education and research, said in a statement on Monday to Agence France-Presse published by Le Monde. 'This measure was apparently taken by the American authorities because the researcher’s phone contained exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration’s research policy,' the minister added. 'Freedom of opinion, free research, and academic freedom are values ​​that we will continue to proudly uphold. I will defend the right of all French researchers to be faithful to them, while respecting the law,' Baptiste said.” ~~~

~~~ AND This. Chris Lunday of Politico: “The German government has sharpened its travel advice for the United States.  According to its website, Berlin’s Foreign Office now warns its citizens that tougher immigration enforcement under ... Donald Trump could land travelers in detention or see them face deportation. It updated the guidance after several German nationals were detained at U.S. entry points, some held for days before being sent back. Officials now explicitly warn that even minor infractions — such as overstaying a visa or misstating travel plans — could trigger immediate deportation or a ban on future entry.”

Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post: “The Trump administration is evaluating plans for the Pentagon to take control of a buffer zone along a sprawling stretch of the southern border and empower active-duty U.S. troops to temporarily hold migrants who cross into the United States illegally, according to five U.S. officials familiar with the deliberations.... In effect, the move would turn the buffer zone into an expansive satellite military installation, potentially allowing a greater portion of the Defense Department’s mammoth budget to pay for President Donald Trump’s border crackdown while creating new legal jeopardy for those caught trying to slip into the country from Mexico.... Any move to militarize the southern border’s buffer zone is certain to raise questions about whether employing the military in this way runs afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law that prohibits active-duty troops from most law enforcement missions.” The Guardian's story is here.

From the "Journalism Matters" file: ~~~

~~~ Here was the Guardian story RAS linked Wednesday morning: “An article history detailing Jackie Robinson’s military career has seemingly been taken down on the Department of Defense’s website as a purge of articles considered to be related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) continues. Robinson, who Donald Trump last month described as helping 'drive our country forward to greatness', is widely considered a national hero in the US. He broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947 when he suited up for the Brooklyn Dodgers; he went on to be elected to his sport’s Hall of Fame.... Robinson had a striking military career. After a successful battle to train as an officer, Robinson was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1943 and assigned to a tank regiment. However, in 1944 the driver of an army bus ordered Robinson to sit at the back, a directive Robinson refused. Robinson was court martialed and acquitted, then served as an athletics coach before being honorably discharged in November 1944.” (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~

     ~~~ Oh! New Lede Wednesday afternoon:  “An article detailing Jackie Robinson’s military career has been restored to the Department of Defense’s website amid a purge of material considered to be related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).... Pentagon press secretary John Ullyot said that 'everyone at the Defense Department loves Jackie Robinson'. He added that the defense department regularly checks for material than may have been removed in error.” MB: Uh-huh. Kinda like when Robinson was court-martialed, then acquitted. ~~~

~~ BUT Drunk Pete's Not Done. Josh Marcus of the Independent: “The Defense Department has taken down or plans to delete thousands of websites to comply with Donald Trump’s order eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work from the federal government, including removing pages dedicated to topics like remembering the Holocaust and the September 11 terrorist attacks. Pages already taken down include an article about the experience of Holocaust survivor Kitty Saks, who later immigrated to the U.S., and an Air Force Academy cadet majoring in history describing his experience taking scholarly visits to concentration camps in Europe, according to a CNN analysis.... Other Defense Department takedown targets bear little obvious connection to DEI, including pages about 9/11, veterans suicide prevention, and stopping sexual assault.”

Jess Bidgood of the New York Times: “When he took the stage in downtown Eau Claire, Wis., on Tuesday night to rev up Democrats ahead of a critical State Supreme Court race, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said he didn’t think name-calling would help things. Then he called Elon Musk a 'dipshit' and, later, a 'South African nepo baby' with the power to cut government programs. The crowd roared. Mr. Walz, his party’s nominee for vice president last year, is one of several Democrats who have referred to Mr. Musk’s immigrant background as they ramp up attacks on the billionaire’s powerful role in the Trump administration. At times, their language, casting Mr. Musk as a foreign outsider, has echoed aspects of ... [Donald] Trump’s own xenophobic insults of his political foes — although Mr. Trump’s remarks were typically directed toward elected officials of color, not white billionaires.” (Also linked yesterday.) A Minnesota Star Tribune story is here.

Michelle Cottle of the New York Times: “For Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a Democrat who may just hold the key to his party winning back the House in 2026, the path to victory starts with understanding how Americans live their lives, down to the most personal details. 'A lot of communities divide the world between when you shower: before work or after work,' he told me.... Many who shower later — working-class folks living paycheck to paycheck — have tuned out Democrats, he said. 'They’re not listening to us because they don’t believe that we respect them and see them.'... 'We need to stop defending government and instead go back to our roots of government reform,' he told me.... From a different corner of the Democratic tent, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sees Mr. Crow’s blue-collar, heartland upbringing as a boon to growing the party.” (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: I was surprised last week when Rachel Maddow let on she didn't know who Jason Crow was, as he's been on my radar since he served as an impeachment manager against Trump in 2019. A Crow/AOC ticket (in that order, I think) would be great. They're young, they're smart, they're attractive, they're personable, they're knowledgeable, they're brave.  

~~~~~~~~~~

Attempts to appease those who have been explicit about their intent to destroy higher education as we currently know it are politically naïve. -- Brian Soucek of UC Davis Law ~~~

~~~ California. Vimal Patel of the New York Times: “The University of California said on Wednesday that it would stop requiring the use of diversity statements in hiring.... Diversity statements typically ask job applicants to describe in a page or so how they would contribute to campus diversity. The move away from them, by one of the biggest higher education systems in the United States, comes as the Trump administration escalates an attack on higher education over diversity programming.... The Education Department sent letters last week to 60 colleges warning of 'potential enforcement actions' if they didn’t protect Jewish students. Four of the University of California system’s 10 campuses — Berkeley, Davis, San Diego and Santa Barbara — received the letters.... [The UC system president Michael Drake] painted a bleak picture about the university’s finances.”

We Don't Like Libruls in North Dakota. Karen Zraick of the New York Times: “A North Dakota jury on Wednesday awarded damages totaling more than $660 million to the Texas-based pipeline company Energy Transfer, which had sued Greenpeace over its role in protests nearly a decade ago against the Dakota Access Pipeline. The verdict was a major blow to the environmental organization. Greenpeace had said that Energy Transfer’s claimed damages, in the range of $300 million, would be enough to put the group out of business in the United States.... Greenpeace said it would appeal. The group has maintained that it played only a minor part in demonstrations led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. It has portrayed the lawsuit as an attempt to stifle oil-industry critics. The nine-person jury in the Morton County courthouse in Mandan, N.D., about 45 minutes north of where the protests took place, returned the verdict after roughly two days of deliberations.” The Guardian's story is here.

~~~~~~~~~~

Canada/E.U. Matina Stevis-Gridneff of the New York Times: “Canada is in advanced talks with the European Union to join the bloc’s new project to expand its military industry, a move that would allow Canada to be part of building European fighter jets and other military equipment at its own industrial facilities. The budding defense cooperation between Canada and the European Union, which is racing to shore up its industry to lower reliance on the United States, would boost Canada’s military manufacturers and offer the country a new market at a time when its relationship with the United States has become frayed. Shaken by a crisis in the two nations’ longstanding alliance since ... [Donald] Trump’s election, Canada has started moving closer to Europe. The military industry collaboration with the European Union highlights how traditional U.S. allies are deepening their ties without U.S. participation to insulate themselves from Mr. Trump’s unpredictable moves.” (Also linked yesterday.) 

Middle East. Ephrat Livni of the New York Times: Donald “Trump said on Wednesday that the Iran-backed Houthi militant group in Yemen would be 'completely annihilated' by U.S. military strikes and warned Tehran to 'immediately' stop supplying it with military equipment and general support and 'let the Houthis fight it out themselves.' His remarks, posted on social media, came as the U.S. military continued a wave of attacks on Houthi targets in Yemen as part of what American officials said was an effort to stop the militant group’s attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea. 'Tremendous damage has been inflicted,' Mr. Trump said of the effects of the strikes, which began on Saturday. He added: 'Watch how it will get progressively worse. It’s not even a fair fight, and never will be. They will be completely annihilated!'”

Ukraine, et al. Michael Birnbaum & Lizzie Johnson of the Washington Post: “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky agreed Wednesday to a partial ceasefire with Russia focused on 'energy and other civilian infrastructure.' Zelensky, who spoke after an hour-long phone call with ... Donald Trump, said it was a first step in what the Ukrainian leader said he hoped would be 'lasting peace' more than three years after his country was invaded by Moscow.... Both Trump and Zelensky characterized their conversation as positive.... Still, the conversation between Trump and Zelensky and the timing was just the most recent evidence of how Ukraine has been relegated to the back seat in talks about its future.”

The Conversation -- March 19, 2025

Ken Vogel & Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times: “Mr. Trump and his allies are aggressively attacking the players and machinery that power the left, taking a series of highly partisan official actions that, if successful, will threaten to hobble Democrats’ ability to compete in elections for years to come.... Executive actions intended to cripple top Democratic law firms. Investigations of Democratic fund-raising and organizing platforms. Ominous suggestions that nonprofits aligned with Democrats or critical of ... [Mr.] Trump should have their tax exemptions revoked.... Executive actions intended to cripple top Democratic law firms. Investigations of Democratic fund-raising and organizing platforms. Ominous suggestions that nonprofits aligned with Democrats or critical of President Trump should have their tax exemptions revoked.... So far, the attacks have been diffuse and sometimes indiscriminate or inaccurate.... Inside the administration..., a small group of White House officials has been working to identify targets and vulnerabilities inside the Democratic ecosystem, taking stock of previous efforts to investigate them.... But using the levers of government to target the opposition has long been considered an abuse of power, sometimes leading to prosecution. Mr. Trump himself was impeached in 2019 for pressuring the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens.”

Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times: “You can ask ... not whether an action is constitutional, but whether it sits opposed to constitutionalism itself. You can ask, in other words, whether it is anti-constitutional.... An anti-constitutional act is one that rejects the basic premises of constitutionalism. It rejects the premise that sovereignty lies with the people, that ours is a government of limited and enumerated powers and that the officers of that government are bound by law. The new president has, in just the first two months of his second term, performed a number of illegal and unconstitutional acts. But the defining attribute of his administration thus far is its anti-constitutional orientation.... To assert, against the plain text of the Constitution, the power to seize appropriations and destroy the work of the legislature is to break a core premise of constitutionalism. It is anti-constitutional.... According to the Justice Department, the president of the United States has an 'inherent' power to summarily deport any accused member of Tren de Aragua ... without so much as a hearing.... There is nothing in this vision of presidential power that limits it to foreign nationals. Who is to say, under the logic of the Department of Justice, that the president could not do the same to a citizen?” Thanks to RAS for the link. This is a gift link.

Mattathias Schwartz & Abbie VanSickle of the New York Times: Donald “Trump’s angry call on Tuesday for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against his administration on deportation flights has set off a string of near-instant social media taunts and threats, including images of judges being marched off in handcuffs.... At a moment when the judiciary is weighing pivotal decisions on the legality of Trump administration policies, the potential for violence against judges seems to be rising. 'I feel like people are playing Russian roulette with our lives,' said Judge Esther Salas of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, whose 20-year-old son was shot and killed at her home in 2020 by a self-described 'anti-feminist' lawyer.... The threats and intimidation may have not become actual violence, but they appear to be mounting, as Mr. Trump, his advisers and his supporters are questioning almost daily the legitimacy of the American legal system.” ~~~

     ~~~ And look who dug into his ultra-deep pockets to encourage the harassment: ~~~

     ~~~ Maggie Haberman, et al., of the New York Times: “Elon Musk has made the maximum allowable donation to Republican members of Congress who support impeaching federal judges who are impeding actions taken by ... [Donald] Trump.... Mr. Musk has given the maximum hard-dollar donations he could to the campaigns of seven Republicans who have either endorsed judicial impeachments or called for some form of 'action' in response to recent rulings against the Trump administration, including a weekend decision by Judge James E. Boasberg of Federal District Court in Washington. The combined federal limit for primary and general elections is $6,600.... Mr. Musk contributed on Wednesday to Representatives Eli Crane of Arizona, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin and Brandon Gill of Texas. He also donated to Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, according to two of the people briefed on the matter.”

From the "Journalism Matters" file: ~~~

~~~ Here was the Guardian story RAS linked this morning: “An article history detailing Jackie Robinson’s military career has seemingly been taken down on the Department of Defense’s website as a purge of articles considered to be related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) continues. Robinson, who Donald Trump last month described as helping 'drive our country forward to greatness', is widely considered a national hero in the US. He broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947 when he suited up for the Brooklyn Dodgers; he went on to be elected to his sport’s Hall of Fame.... Robinson had a striking military career. After a successful battle to train as an officer, Robinson was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1943 and assigned to a tank regiment. However, in 1944 the driver of an army bus ordered Robinson to sit at the back, a directive Robinson refused. Robinson was court martialed and acquitted, then served as an athletics coach before being honorably discharged in November 1944.” ~~~

     ~~~ Oh! New Lede this afternoon:  “An article detailing Jackie Robinson’s military career has been restored to the Department of Defense’s website amid a purge of material considered to be related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).... Pentagon press secretary John Ullyot said that 'everyone at the Defense Department loves Jackie Robinson'. He added that the defense department regularly checks for material than may have been removed in error.” MB: Uh-huh. Kinda like when Robinson was court-martialed, then acquitted.

Their Vindictive Stunts Are Almost Childish. Karoun Demirjian & Mattathias Schwartz of the New York Times: “Pete Marocco, the State Department official who oversaw the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the main government agency distributing foreign aid, announced in an email on Tuesday night that he would be replaced at the agency by two officials who had been involved in making the cuts. Mr. Marocco said in the email that he would remain at the State Department as director of foreign aid, but that two other officials would handle what remains of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Those officials are Jeremy Lewin, who has been working for the cost-cutting task force led by the billionaire Elon Musk, and Kenneth Jackson, a State Department official who was named the acting president of the U.S. Institute of Peace this week.... On Tuesday, a federal judge found that the efforts to shutter U.S.A.I.D. were most likely unconstitutional.”

Jess Bidgood of the New York Times: “When he took the stage in downtown Eau Claire, Wis., on Tuesday night to rev up Democrats ahead of a critical State Supreme Court race, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said he didn’t think name-calling would help things. Then he called Elon Musk a 'dipshit' and, later, a 'South African nepo baby' with the power to cut government programs. The crowd roared. Mr. Walz, his party’s nominee for vice president last year, is one of several Democrats who have referred to Mr. Musk’s immigrant background as they ramp up attacks on the billionaire’s powerful role in the Trump administration. At times, their language, casting Mr. Musk as a foreign outsider, has echoed aspects of ... [Donald] Trump’s own xenophobic insults of his political foes — although Mr. Trump’s remarks were typically directed toward elected officials of color, not white billionaires.”

Michelle Cottle of the New York Times: “For Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a Democrat who may just hold the key to his party winning back the House in 2026, the path to victory starts with understanding how Americans live their lives, down to the most personal details. 'A lot of communities divide the world between when you shower: before work or after work,' he told me.... Many who shower later — working-class folks living paycheck to paycheck — have tuned out Democrats, he said. 'They’re not listening to us because they don’t believe that we respect them and see them.'... 'We need to stop defending government and instead go back to our roots of government reform,' he told me.... From a different corner of the Democratic tent, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sees Mr. Crow’s blue-collar, heartland upbringing as a boon to growing the party.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: I was surprised last week when Rachel Maddow let on she didn't know who Jason Crow was, as he's been on my radar since he served as an impeachment manager against Trump in 2019. A Crow/AOC ticket (in that order, I think) would be great. They're young, they're smart, they're attractive, they're personable, they're knowledgeable, they're brave.  

Canada/E.U. Matina Stevis-Gridneff of the New York Times: “Canada is in advanced talks with the European Union to join the bloc’s new project to expand its military industry, a move that would allow Canada to be part of building European fighter jets and other military equipment at its own industrial facilities. The budding defense cooperation between Canada and the European Union, which is racing to shore up its industry to lower reliance on the United States, would boost Canada’s military manufacturers and offer the country a new market at a time when its relationship with the United States has become frayed. Shaken by a crisis in the two nations’ longstanding alliance since ... [Donald] Trump’s election, Canada has started moving closer to Europe. The military industry collaboration with the European Union highlights how traditional U.S. allies are deepening their ties without U.S. participation to insulate themselves from Mr. Trump’s unpredictable moves.”

~~~~~~~~~~

The Trump/Musk administration had a very bad year in court yesterday: ~~~

     ~~~ See Akhilleus's comment, down the page, in yesterday's thread. ~~~

~~~ Alan Feuer & Zolan Kanno-Youngs of the New York Times: “The Trump administration has asked a federal judge to dissolve the orders he put in place this weekend barring it from deporting people suspected of belonging to a Venezuelan street gang from the country under a rarely invoked wartime statute called the Alien Enemies Act. The Justice Department also doubled down on its efforts to avoid giving the judge, James E. Boasberg, the detailed information he had requested about the deportations. It complied — but only in part — with his instructions to provide specific data about when two flights, with the people accused of being gang members, took off from the United States for El Salvador. Taken together, the twin moves — made in separate sets of court papers filed on Monday and Tuesday — marked a continuation of the Trump’s administration’s aggressive attempts to push back against Judge Boasberg, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, who temporarily halted one of ... [Donald] Trump’s signature deportation policies.

“The Justice Department has now effectively opened up two fronts in the battle: one challenging the underlying orders that paused, for now, the deportation flights altogether and another seeking to avoid disclosing any information about two flights this weekend that could indicate they took place after the judge’s orders stopping them were imposed.... Judge Boasberg on Tuesday ordered the Justice Department to send him a sealed declaration by Wednesday at noon detailing the times the planes took off, left U.S. airspace and landed.” (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~

In the fair administration of justice, no man can be judge in his own case, however exalted his station, however righteous his motives. -- Justice Potter Stewart, majority opinion, Walker v. City of Birmingham (1967)

If anyone is being detained or removed based on the administration’s assertion that it can do so without judicial review or due process, the president is asserting dictatorial power and ‘constitutional crisis’ doesn’t capture the gravity of the situation. -- Jamal Greene of Columbia Law

I think it’s more useful to say that this is moving us into a completely different kind of constitutional order, one that’s no longer characterized by laws that bind officials and that can be enforced. The law, in other words, becomes a tool to harm enemies, but not to bind those who govern.... ~~~ Aziz Huq of University of Chicago Law ~~~

~~~ Adam Liptak of the New York Times: “Over the weekend, the Trump administration ignored a federal judge’s order not to deport a group of Venezuelan men, violating an instruction that could not have been plainer or more direct. Justice Department lawyers later justified the administration’s actions with contentions that many legal experts said bordered on frivolous. The line between arguments in support of a claimed right to disobey court orders and outright defiance has become gossamer thin, they said, again raising the question of whether the latest clash between ... [Donald] Trump and the judiciary amounts to a constitutional crisis. Legal scholars say that is no longer the right inquiry. Mr. Trump is already undercutting the separation of powers at the heart of the constitutional system, they say, and the right question now is how it will transform the nation.” ~~~

~~~ Joe Perticone of the Bulwark: "... Donald Trump took another step in an openly fascist direction over the weekend when he skirted a federal court order to cancel or turn back deportation flights carrying alleged gang members who had not received any due process to El Salvador, where they were imprisoned at a high-security facility designed to house terrorists.... Legal scholars were flabbergasted and the judge seemed unimpressed [by the administration's excuses]." ~~~

~~~ Alan Feuer, et al., of the New York Times: “The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have been waging a multifront attack on the federal judge who is deciding whether the president may use a wartime statute to deport people suspected of belonging to a Venezuelan street gang. Lawyers for the Justice Department began the week by trying to kick the judge, James E. Boasberg, off the deportation case and then filed court papers declaring he had no authority to stop flights of immigrants from leaving the country under the law, known as the Alien Enemies Act. On Tuesday, Representative Brandon Gill, Republican of Texas, filed articles of impeachment against the judge, accusing him of having abused his power. That same day, Mr. Trump himself endorsed the idea of impeachment, calling Judge Boasberg, a centrist Democrat who lived with Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh while they were at Yale Law School, a 'Radical Left Lunatic.'... The attacks have continued as Fox News hosts, Attorney General Pam Bondi and an angry chorus of Mr. Trump’s supporters online have gone after Judge Boasberg, calling him a hack, a rogue and a terrorist sympathizer, among other things.” An Axios report on Brandon Gill's impeachment articles is here. ~~~

     ~~~ Trump Can't Help Himself. From a Washington Post livebog: “... Donald Trump leveled a fresh attack early Wednesday on a federal judge who ordered the government not to use a controversial wartime authority to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process. In a social media post, Trump called U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg 'a Radical Left Lunatic Judge' who 'wants to assume the role of President.' In a television interview that aired Tuesday night, Trump also criticized Boasberg and others who have ruled against the administration. He spoke hours after Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. issued a rare public statement rejecting calls for Boasberg’s impeachment and asserting the independence of the judiciary. Trump’s comments are part of a pattern of casting doubts on the credibility of the courts.”

     ~~~ Marie: Say, you know who first appointed Boasberg, the “Radical Left Lunatic Judge,” to a federal bench? Why, the same guy who nominated Sam Alito to the Supreme Court: George W. Bush. ~~~

~~~ Jazmine Ulloa & Zolan Kanno-Youngs of the New York Times: “... beyond the Trump administration’s evident animus for the judge and the court, more basic questions remain unsettled and largely unanswered: Were the men who were expelled to El Salvador in fact all gang members, as the United States asserts, and how did the authorities make that determination about each of the roughly 200 people who were spirited out of the country even as a federal judge was weighing their fate? The Trump White House has said that most of the immigrants deported were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which, like many transnational criminal organizations, has a presence in the United States.... But officials have disclosed little about how the men were identified as gang members and what due process, if any, they were accorded before being placed on flights to El Salvador, where the authoritarian government, allied with Mr. Trump, has agreed to hold the prisoners in exchange for a multimillion-dollar payment.... Lawyers and legal experts said that even under wartime conditions, detainees are entitled to due process.... A growing chorus of families, elected officials and immigration lawyers have begun coming forward in the news media to reject or cast doubt on the allegations.” ~~~

~~~ Zach Schonfeld of the Hill: “Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare public statement Tuesday pushing back after ... [Donald] Trump called to impeach a federal judge that ruled against his administration in a high-profile deportation case. 'For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose,' Roberts said. The chief justice’s statement came hours after Trump called for impeaching U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, an appointee of former President Obama who blocked the administration’s plans to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to swiftly deport Venezuelan migrants. 'This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!! WE DON’T WANT VICIOUS, VIOLENT, AND DEMENTED CRIMINALS, MANY OF THEM DERANGED MURDERERS, IN OUR COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!' Trump wrote.” Update: The Washington Post's report is here. (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Well, gosh, some might say that Trump himself is a VICIOUS, VIOLENT, AND DEMENTED CRIMINAL. And I'm sure I don't want him in our country. ~~~

~~~ Marianne LeVine & Adriana Usero of the Washington Post: “... the White House X account on Monday posted a video of migrants being handcuffed and sent away, to the soundtrack of the 1998 Semisonic hit 'Closing Time,' a song that’s often associated with the end of a party. 'You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here @CBP,” the White House posted, with musical note emojis.... The video was also posted on Team Trump’s TikTok and reposted by the official account for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, with the caption: 'It’s closing time. We are making America safe again.'... But some immigration experts ... described the use of humor as dehumanizing by minimizing the impact and repercussions of the government’s aggressive actions. They added that images of migrants in shackles boarding deportation flights contribute to Trump’s broad portrayal of undocumented immigrants as criminals, even though there’s little evidence that they commit crimes at a higher rate than U.S. citizens.”

David Nakamura of the Washington Post: “... Japanese American community leaders say they fear Trump’s actions could lead to abuses similar to those that took place during one of the darkest chapters of the nation’s history. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s use of the law, in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese military’s bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, led to the arrest of 31,000 Japanese, German and Italian nationals in the United States and Latin America. Many were later found to have been improperly arrested, jailed and, in some cases, repatriated.... Several months after invoking the Alien Enemies Act, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the removal of anyone deemed a threat from the West Coast to 'relocation centers' — paving the way for the U.S. government to incarcerate 120,000 people of Japanese descent, including more than 70,000 American citizens. Decades later, the United States would issue formal apologies and pay reparations to those who had been incarcerated under both the Alien Enemies Act and the executive order.... Descendants of Japanese detainees under the Alien Enemies Act described their relatives being taken away with no warning and little explanation, denied access to lawyers or contact with their families.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: As far as I can tell at this point, Trump already has abused the law, first by invoking a law during peacetme that is designated for use only against agents of wartime enemies, and second, by whisking away individuals to a third country with nary a whiff of due process.

Dave Philipps of the New York Times: “A federal judge blocked the Trump administration on Tuesday from banning transgender people from serving in the military. In a forcefully written opinion that rebuked the president’s effort, U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes issued an injunction that allows trans troops to keep serving in the military, under rules that were established by the Biden administration, until their lawsuit against the Trump administration’s ban is decided. 'The ban at bottom invokes derogatory language to target a vulnerable group in violation of the Fifth Amendment,' Judge Reyes wrote. The government had argued that courts must defer to military judgment, but in a 79-page opinion, the judge said the government had thrown together a ban based on next-to-no evidence and that 'the law does not demand that the Court rubber-stamp illogical judgments based on conjecture.'” Politico's story is here. Judge Reyes' opinion, via the courts, is here.

Zach Montague of the New York Times: “Efforts by Elon Musk and his team to permanently shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development likely violated the Constitution 'in multiple ways' and robbed Congress of its authority to oversee the dissolution of an agency it created, a federal judge found on Tuesday. The ruling, by Judge Theodore D. Chuang of U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, appeared to be the first time a judge has moved to rein in Mr. Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency directly. It was based on the finding that Mr. Musk has acted as a U.S. officer without having been properly appointed to that role by ... [Donald] Trump. Judge Chuang wrote that a group of unnamed aid workers who had sued to stop the demolition of U.S.A.I.D. and its programs was likely to succeed in the lawsuit. He agreed with the workers’ contention that Mr. Musk’s rapid assertion of power over executive agencies was likely in violation of the Constitution’s appointments clause. The judge also ordered that agency operations be partially restored, though that reprieve is likely to be temporary. He ordered Mr. Musk’s team to reinstate email access to all U.S.A.I.D. employees, including those on paid leave. He also ordered the team to submit a plan for employees to reoccupy a federal office from which they were evicted last month, and he barred Mr. Musk’s team from engaging in any further work 'related to the shutdown of U.S.A.I.D.'” The AP story is here.

Zack Colman of Politico: “A federal judge temporarily blocked the Environmental Protection Agency’s attempt to recoup $20 billion in Biden-era climate grants — dealing the latest judicial setback for ... Donald Trump’s attempt to assert unilateral control over spending. Tuesday’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan prevents EPA from reclaiming money it had deposited at Citibank for the groups Climate United, Coalition for Green Capital and Power Forward Communities. But the decision did not revive those groups’ ability to draw from the funds, postponing that decision until after further court proceedings. The EPA 'gave no legal justification for the termination' of the contracts, wrote Chutkan, an appointee of President Barack Obama, saying the administration had only 'vaguely' outlined its allegations that the grant program was marked by waste and potential conflicts of interest. The fight over the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund has become a major front in Trump’s battle to claw back hundreds of billions of dollars in former President Joe Biden’s climate and clean-energy agenda — with the administration seeking to override the spending decisions of past Congress that Trump disagrees with, despite decades of accepted legal tradition suggesting that this would violate the Constitution.”

David Folkenflik of NPR: "Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty sued the Trump administration on Tuesday to try to block it from terminating all federal funds for the U.S.-backed broadcaster. In a federal lawsuit, the network argues that the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) has violated the Constitution and federal laws by withholding money Congress expressly allocated for the broadcaster. USAGM disburses funds to U.S.-backed international networks, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, that serve foreign lands without a free or robust press.... The lawsuit names USAGM and two officials, Senior Adviser Kari Lake and Acting Chief Executive Victor Morales." Related Reuters story linked below.

Julian Mark, et al., of the Washington Post: “... Donald Trump on Tuesday fired the only two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, handing the remaining Republican commissioners exclusive control over the agency that oversees antitrust and consumer protection laws and serves as the U.S. government’s primary regulator of the tech industry. Commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter announced their dismissals on the social media site X on Tuesday evening, with both calling their firings illegal. 'The law protects the independence of the Commission because the law serves the American people, not corporate power,' Slaughter wrote in a statement posted to X. Bedoya indicated that he intends to sue over his firing, writing, 'I’ll see the president in court.'... Tuesday’s dismissals are the latest instance of Trump removing Democratic members of independent agencies without cause, an approach likely to be the subject of Supreme Court review as multiple cases move through the court system. The firings also cast uncertainty over the future of the agency’s ongoing cases against tech giants, including a landmark antitrust case against Amazon and a probe into Microsoft’s deals with OpenAI.” Politico's opinion is here. ~~~

     ~~~ Scott Lemieux in LG&$: "... the law is not at all ambiguous. The controlling precedent is a 9-0 opinion whose literal holding is that the president cannot fire a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission without cause. I would say that John Roberts’s concern must be reaching Susan Collins levels if he probably wasn’t licking his chops at the opportunity to use Trump’s lawlessness as a vehicle to say it doesn’t apply (presumably through an Alito opinion holding that being nominated by a Democratic president is always sufficient cause.)"

Courtney Kube & Gordon Lubold of NBC News: "For nearly 75 years, it has been a distinctly American responsibility to have a four-star U.S. general oversee all NATO military operations in Europe — a command that began with then-World War II hero and future president Dwight D. Eisenhower. But the Trump administration, according to two defense officials familiar with the planning and a Pentagon briefing reviewed by NBC News, is ... undertaking a significant restructuring of the U.S. military’s combatant commands and headquarters. And one of the plans under consideration ... would involve the U.S. giving up the role of NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe.... The general now in this role, who also serves as the head of U.S. European Command, has been the primary commander overseeing support to Ukraine in its war against Russia."

Michael Martina & Shoon Naing of Reuters: "U.S. lawmakers and rights advocates say the Trump administration's drive to dismantle U.S. government-funded news outlets, including Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, is a major blow to Washington's hard-earned soft power globally at a time when Beijing is rushing to expand its sphere of influence.... Trump ordered the gutting of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, VOA's parent agency, forcing a termination of grants to outlets under it. They include Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which broadcasts across Eastern Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, as well as Radio Free Asia, whose coverage extends across Asia, including China and North Korea.... Trump's domestic critics call it a strategic blunder in U.S. competition with China, which has poured billions of dollars into pushing Beijing's narrative around the globe. 'The only people cheering for this are adversaries and authoritarians around the world, certainly in places like China and North Korea, where press freedoms are nonexistent,' Raja Krishnamoorthi, the Democratic ranking member of the U.S. House of Representative's select committee on China, told Reuters. The move also drew criticism from the Republican chair of the House Select Committee on East Asia and Pacific, Young Kim, while Michael McCaul, the Republican former chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, praised the RFA for transparent reporting and countering Chinese Communist Party propaganda."

Ian Shapira, et al., of the Washington Post: “The perpetual hunt for clues about ... the shooting of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas — took a turn Tuesday night with the release of more than 31,000 pages from the National Archives. The dissemination of the records, ordered by ... Donald Trump, is the latest in a string of disclosures since the 1990s that have tweaked how the nation and its historians view Kennedy’s killing. The vast majority of the National Archives’ 6 million pages of records related to the murder has already been declassified, according to the agency’s website. The newest batch of records can be found on the agency’s webpage under the headline, 'JFK Assassination Records - 2025 Documents Release.' The page features a table listing more than 1,100 entries of hyperlinked PDF files. A Post analysis shows that, based on their document identification numbers, none of the files released Tuesday are new. But many of the redactions have been unmasked. Most of the National Archives’ online records related to the assassination are available on the website of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, named after a deceased Dallas legal secretary who became one of the earliest researchers into the assassination.”

Eric Berger of Ars Technica: "For those of us who have closely followed the story of astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams over the last nine months..., the final weeks before the landing have seen it take a disturbing turn. In February..., [Donald] Trump and the chief executive of SpaceX, Elon Musk, began to say that the two astronauts were 'stranded' in space because the Biden administration did not want to bring them home. 'They got left in space,' Trump said. 'They were left up there for political reasons,' Musk concluded. Just what those political reasons were was never specified.... The reality is that NASA set a plan for the return of Wilmore and Williams last August.... NASA — not the Biden administration... -- decided the best and safest option was to keep Wilmore and Williams in orbit until early this year. Musk knew this plan. He had to sign off on it. And still, the lies came.... One of the common refrains about spaceflight for decades and decades is that it is nonpartisan." ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: It has not been clear to me whether Musk was (a) just an ignorant bro making up stuff because he didn't really understand the negative, often terrible, effects of his chainsaw government massacre plan, or (b) lying about it all. Given his remarks re: the astronauts and his specific knowledge of their situation, I believe I'll assume he's lying.

This Looks Ominous. Rachel Siegel of the Washington Post: “On Monday, the Federal Housing Finance Agency overhauled the boards of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two national mortgage behemoths that are expected to exit government control during ... Donald Trump’s second term. The sudden shake-up installed FHFA Director Bill Pulte as chairman of the two companies and fired the majority of their existing board members, shrinking both boards in the process. Pulte also added new board members, including Christopher Stanley, a SpaceX engineer who’s also part of Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service effort to cut spending. The moves didn’t usher in rapid changes, and the companies were already under government control since the housing meltdown of 2008. But the shift did mark a notable kickoff in the highly anticipated showdown over Fannie and Freddie’s fates. Stanley’s new role also inserts DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, within the mortgage industry’s top tier, where housing experts say he could push to access personal information about borrowers and others. The stakes are high because the multibillion-dollar firms are essential to the funding of 30-year mortgages and together guarantee about half of existing home loans.”

Karen DeYoung & Derek Hawkins of the Washington Post: “DOGE ... on Monday took over the U.S. Institute of Peace after threatening its officials with criminal prosecution. Its president was removed from its headquarters with the assistance of the office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, the FBI and D.C. police. In seizing control of the 40-year-old Washington institution, founded and funded directly by Congress and employing about 600 people here and overseas, DOGE emptied the building and installed DOGE agent Kenneth Jackson as acting USIP president. Jackson is also titled as a board member of several other far smaller agencies similarly emptied, and he was nominated by Trump as a senior official at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Amid the many sagas of DOGE activities over the past two months, the USIP story marks the most aggressive.”

Lisa Rein & Justine McDaniel of the Washington Post: “The Social Security Administration on Tuesday announced new measures that will require millions of Americans who file for benefits by phone to verify their identity using an online system or provide documentation in person at a field office. The change is expected to disrupt agency operations just as the Trump administration, driven by billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, is racing to downsize Social Security — cutting 7,000 jobs, consolidating programs, and closing dozens of regional and local offices. Because millions of elderly and disabled customers the agency serves lack computers to authenticate their identity — and have limited mobility to access in-person help — the change will create hardships, a top agency official acknowledged last week in an internal memorandum. Acting commissioner Leland Dudek, in a call with reporters Tuesday as the changes were announced, said the tighter requirements to 'identity-proof' telephone claimants are essential to fighting fraud.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Yeah, well, anything to make life harder for us moochers. (Oh, wait. We paid for Social Security all of our working lives. So anything to make life harder for us suckers.)

Andy Kroll of ProPublica: “On Feb. 20, nearly 7,000 probationary employees at the Internal Revenue Service began receiving an unsigned letter telling them that they had been fired for poor performance. Trump administration lawyers insist that the IRS and other federal agencies have acted within their authority when they ordered waves of mass terminations since Trump took office. But according to previously unreported emails..., a top lawyer at the IRS warned administration officials that the performance-related language in his agency’s termination letter was 'a false statement' that amounted to 'fraud' if the agency kept the language in the letter.... Joseph Rillotta, a senior IRS lawyer, wrote that 'no one' at the IRS had taken into account the performance of the probationary workers set to be fired.... If the falsehood wasn’t removed, Rillotta said he would file a report with the inspector general for the IRS.... The emails reveal that in the hours before the IRS sent out its Feb. 20 termination letter, a fierce dispute played out at the agency’s highest levels.... The IRS sent out the Feb. 20 termination notice with the disputed language in it.... In fact, many of the [fired] employees had received laudatory reviews with no hint of any concerns.”

Ana Swanson of the New York Times: “The Trump administration plans to confront countries around the world with a reciprocal tariff 'number' on April 2, a figure that will reflect what the White House considers the cost of foreign trade barriers, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday. Mr. Bessent said the administration would then carry out negotiations with those countries with the aim of lowering those barriers or putting the reciprocal tariff into place. 'What’s going to happen on April 2 — each country will receive a number that we believe that represents their tariffs,' Mr. Bessent said in an interview on Fox Business on Tuesday morning.... He and his advisers have said that his so-called reciprocal tariffs will aim to match the tariffs that other countries charge on American exports, while also taking into account other practices the United States deems unfair, like taxes or currency manipulation.” MB: IOW, they're treating these tariff considerations like a game: “Come on down, Brazil! We've got your number!”

My, What a Busy, Busy Lady. Kyle Cheney & Megan Messerly of Politico: “The person the White House identified last month as the leader of DOGE — despite public evidence that Elon Musk is calling the shots — has been working simultaneously at the Department of Health and Human Services since February. The Trump administration acknowledged Amy Gleason’s dual role in a court filing the Justice Department initially attempted to submit under seal, until a judge ordered its public release this week. The filing shows that Gleason, despite claiming responsibility as DOGE’s leader, was detailed to HHS last month and formally hired by the department as a 'consultant/expert' on March 4, while retaining her status as a DOGE employee as well.... Gleason and the Trump administration did not disclose her split role despite numerous questions from federal judges fielding dozens of lawsuits against DOGE related to its chain of command and whether Musk was exerting an unconstitutional level of authority over the operation.... Tuesday’s public acknowledgment adds to a tangle of conflicting statements from the Trump administration about who is really running DOGE and whether Gleason herself is more of a figurehead for Musk, who ... Donald Trump has repeatedly described as DOGE’s leader.”

Apoorva Mandavilli of the New York Times: “Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official, has an unorthodox idea for tackling the bird flu bedeviling U.S. poultry farms. Let the virus rip. Instead of culling birds when the infection is discovered, farmers 'should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it,' Mr. Kennedy said recently on Fox News. He has repeated the idea in other interviews on the channel. Mr. Kennedy does not have jurisdiction over farms. But Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, also has voiced support for the notion.... Yet veterinary scientists said letting the virus sweep through poultry flocks unchecked would be inhumane and dangerous, and have enormous economic consequences.... If H5N1 were to be allowed to run through a flock of five million birds, “that’s literally five million chances for that virus to replicate or to mutate,” Dr. [Gail Hansen, a former state veterinarian for Kansas,] said. Large numbers of infected birds are likely to transmit massive amounts of the virus, putting farm workers and other animals at great risk.”

Constituents Go After Trump's Enablers. Hannah Knowles of the Washington Post: “Around the country, a beleaguered Democratic resistance was stirring to life. Voters outraged at ... Donald Trump and his empowerment of billionaire Elon Musk were holding protests and venting at their Republican representatives in Congress — packing into public listening sessions even in solidly red districts and causing such a stir that GOP leaders this month urged tele-town halls instead. Angry constituents and liberal groups such as Indivisible — founded after Trump’s first election in 2016 — have only been emboldened, seeing an opening for new activism and attacks that Republicans are “hiding.” With House members back home in their districts this week, Democrats have organized their own town halls across the country while taunting top GOP targets.” ~~~

~~~ The Piedmont Raging Grannies are looking for North Carolina Sen. Thom Tilllis, who never holds or shows up for town hall meetings (via Rachel Maddow, last night): ~~~

Chuck's Rose-Colored Glasses. Martin Pengelly of the Guardian: “Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader, insisted Republicans would move on from Donald Trump and go back to a past version of the party even as Trump’s return to power loomed last year, according to the authors of a new book on politics during the Biden administration. The revelation comes ... amid serious Democratic backlash against Schumer for failing to provide stiff enough resistance to Trump’s actions. Schumer told Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater: 'Here’s my hope … after this election, when the Republican party expels the turd of Donald Trump, it will go back to being the old Republican party.'” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Chuck still doesn't see any urgency to the present situation. He told Chris Hayes of MSNBC last night that the country was not yet in a Constitutional crisis. The Trump/Musk administration is usurping the powers of the other two branches of government, is openly defying the courts and defiling judges, and it is ignoring and/or defying relatively straightforward laws. That's a Constitutional crisis, Chuck.

Delger Erdenesanaa of the New York Times: “With the addition of 2024, yet another record-hot year, the past 10 years have been the 10 hottest in nearly 200 years of record-keeping, the World Meteorological Organization reports.... It marks the first time since record keeping began that all of the 10 hottest years have fallen within the most recent decade. 2024 was the single warmest year on record, surpassing even 2023’s wide lead over other recent years. The planet’s surface was approximately 1.55 degrees Celsius warmer than its average during a reference period that approximates the preindustrial era, from 1850-1900.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Minnesota. Cole Premo of CBS News: "Police in the Twin Cities say a Minnesota Republican state senator has been arrested for allegedly trying to solicit sex from a minor. According to Bloomington police, detectives communicated with the man, identified as 40-year-old Justin Eichorn of Grand Rapids, who thought he was talking with a 16-year-old girl. Eichorn was most recently one of the authors of a bill by Minnesota Senate Republicans to define 'Trump derangement syndrome' as a mental illness. The detective arranged to meet Eichorn Monday on the 8300 block of Normandale Avenue, police say, and Eichorn later arrived in a pickup truck. He was then arrested without incident. Eichorn was booked into jail Tuesday night and is being held without bail. Felony charges of soliciting a person under 18 years old to practice prostitution are pending from the Hennepin County Attorney's Office." Minnesota Senate Republicans and House Republican Speaker Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, and Leader Harry Niska, R-Ramsey, called for Eichorn's resignation. Thanks to RAS for the link.

Ohio. Anumita Kaur of the Washington Post: “A state appeals court overturned Ohio’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth, preserving access to such treatments in Ohio and the latest development in a year-long battle over the law. A three-judge panel on the 10th District Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that the ban is 'unconstitutional on its face' and imposed a permanent injunction on the statute — which means families of transgender children will be able to access gender-affirming medical treatments, such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy, within the state.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Turkey. Ben Hubbard & Safak Timur of the New York Times: “The mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, one of Turkey’s most prominent opposition politicians, was arrested on Wednesday morning on charges related to corruption and terrorism, the city’s prosecutor’s office said.... Mr. Imamoglu has been seen as a likely contender in the next presidential election, scheduled for 2028, although early elections are likely. Mr. Imamoglu and other opposition figures have accused President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government of seeking to exclude him from politics so that he cannot run in the election, possibly against Mr. Erdogan.... Critics have long accused Mr. Erdogan, Turkey’s predominant politician for more than two decades and its president since 2014, of using state institutions, including the courts and the security services, to undermine his political rivals.”

Ukraine/Russia, et al. Putin Rolls Trump. David Sanger & Paul Sonne of the New York Times: “President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia agreed for the first time on Tuesday to a limited cease-fire that would stop strikes on energy infrastructure, as long as Ukraine does the same, the Kremlin said in a statement. But in a two-and-a-half-hour phone call with ... [Donald] Trump, the Russian leader declined for now to agree to a broader 30-day halt in fighting that U.S. and Ukrainian officials had proposed, meaning that the attacks on Ukrainian civilians, cities and ports will continue as the two sides vie for territory and an upper hand in negotiations.... Privately, some administration officials acknowledged that Mr. Putin appeared to be stalling, agreeing to just enough to appear to be engaged in peace talks, while pressing his advantage on the battlefield. A cease-fire for energy targets would ... come as a relief to the Kremlin: Ukraine has conducted extensive strikes on oil and gas facilities deep into the Russian heartland, jeopardizing Moscow’s most crucial stream of state revenue.... The result of the call seemed to fall well short of what Mr. Trump had been hoping for....” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: So the only "concession" the fake author of "The Art of the Deal" got out of Putin improves Russia's position against Ukraine. See also Patrick's & Akhilleus's comments in yesterday's thread. ~~~

~~~ Edward Wong & Robert Jimison of the New York Times: “The State Department has ended funding for the tracking of thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia, and American officials or contractors might have deleted a database with information on them, according to a letter that U.S. lawmakers plan to send to Secretary of State Rubio on Wednesday. The work on the abducted children by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab was frozen when ... [Donald] Trump signed an executive order in late January halting almost all foreign aid spending. Since then, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and an official under him, Pete Marocco, have ended the vast majority of foreign aid contracts, including the one to the Yale lab.... The congressional letter, organized by Representative Greg Landsman, Democrat of Ohio, said 'the foreign aid freeze has jeopardized, and may ultimately eliminate, our informational support of Ukraine on this front.'... 'We have reason to believe that the data from the repository has been permanently deleted,' [the letter] said. 'If true, this would have devastating consequences. Can you please update us as to the status of the data from the evidence repository?' A person familiar with the work of the Yale Center said the details in the letter were accurate.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: So it appears that on top of everything else, Elon threw data on thousands of abducted children "into the woodchipper." And he thinks that's funny.

News Lede

AP: “Stuck in space no more, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams returned to Earth on Tuesday, hitching a different ride home to close out a saga that began with a bungled test flight more than nine months ago. Their SpaceX capsule parachuted into the Gulf of Mexico in the early evening, just hours after departing the International Space Station. Splashdown occurred off the coast of Tallahassee in the Florida Panhandle, bringing their unplanned odyssey to an end.”