A lot has happened. Here are some of the things. This is the TPM Morning Memo.
The Destruction: NCAR Edition
The Trump White House is doing little to conceal at least one of its motivations for dismantling a crucial scientific research center in Boulder: It wants to free Big Lie supporter Tina Peters from Colorado prison.
Colorado officials refused to play along with President Trump’s so-called pardon of Peters. State conviction for tampering with electoral machines. Although a presidential pardon for state crimes is not a reality, the White House wants you to know that Colorado is paying the price for this sense of defiance: “Perhaps if Colorado had a governor who actually wanted to work with President Trump, its constituents would be better served,” a senior White House official told NOTUS.
If this doesn’t seem like a direct connection to the Peters pardon, believe me. That’s the response the White House gave to several other media outlets, including the New York Times and WaPo, which linked Colorado’s rejection of the Peters pardon to the Trump administration’s plan to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
It doesn’t have to be one or the other. OMB Director Russ Vought may have simply seized on Peters’ pardon as something near and dear to Trump’s heart and used it to justify the disruption and chaos he wanted to sow anyway.
But the bottom line is that we are five years after the 2020 election subversion plan, and the desire to write a revisionist history of that effort endangers an innocent bystander providing critical research on atmospheric science.
All this provokes a truly desperate reaction from scientific circles:
- WaPo: “The announcement sparked outrage and concern among local scientists and lawmakers, who said it could jeopardize the nation’s weather and climate forecasts, and appeared to surprise officials and employees. »
- Meteorologist Matt Lanza: “I can’t begin to tell you what a terrible decision this is. Objectively, it will absolutely cripple and devastate meteorological research in the United States.”
- NYT: “The center, founded in 1960, is responsible for many of the greatest scientific advances in humanity’s understanding of weather and climate. Its research aircraft and sophisticated computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are widely used to predict weather events and disasters across the country, and its scientists study a wide range of topics, including air pollution, ocean currents and global warming.”
The Destruction: CFPB Edition
A glimmer of good news as the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a decision by the panel of Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao, both Trump appointees, that paved the way for dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The full court of appeal will now consider the appeal.
The Punishment: Letitia James Edition
Disqualified Acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan has done more damage, according to a new report from Politico.
After an Alexandria, Va., grand jury last week declined to re-indict New York Attorney General Letitia James on trumped-up mortgage fraud charges, the grand jury forewoman introduced the bill in open court. Apparently, Halligan and his team did not want the failure or the details of the failed indictment made public, but the assistant U.S. attorney who signed the draft indictment was not present in court to stop it, according to an order issued in the case.
Prosecutors waited until the next day to ask a magistrate judge to seal court records, including the draft indictment, but he denied their request because the cat was already out of the bag.
This was the second time a grand jury had refused to re-indict James since the original indictment was dismissed because Halligan was not validly appointed as a U.S. attorney. During the go-around, prosecutors added a new third count of making a false statement to the proposed indictment. That apparently wasn’t enough to convince the grand jury.
As to why the grand jury foreperson did what he did, the district judge wrote: “The Court will not speculate as to why the grand jury disclosed the bill not in open court.” »
The Punishment: Jack Smith Edition
I understand the journalistic imperative to report what former special counsel Jack Smith told House Republicans in closed-door testimony yesterday, but the only important context here is that Smith is the target of retaliation by President Trump — and his Republican allies on the Hill are carrying his water.
If you need further proof, here’s part of how the retaliation machine works: Before Smith’s testimony, Trump’s DOJ and the FBI provided selective internal communications to Congress showing that some FBI agents had expressed concerns about the search at Mar-a-Lago in the summer of 2022. Those concerns were already flagged a long time ago, but that didn’t stop a senior Trump DOJ official from publicly claiming the document was filed as a “bombshell.”
For your radar…
Today is the deadline for federal law enforcement to send their intelligence files on “Antifa” and “Antifa-related” activities to the FBI for review by the Joint Terrorism Task Forces, WaPo notes, as part of the Trump White House’s widespread targeting of its political opposition.
Venezuela Watch
- The United States carried out its 26th illegal attack on a suspected drug smuggling boat in the Eastern Pacific, killing four people and bringing the total death toll in the high seas campaign to at least 99.
- The American army was taken by surprise by President Trump’s announcement of a blockade against Venezuela, reports the New York Times:
Mr. Trump’s announcement of a “blockade” took senior officials at the Pentagon and Southern Command in Florida by surprise. On Wednesday, they worked to understand the role of the U.S. military in the action, U.S. officials said.
Punitive And Performative
The Trump administration plans to significantly ramp up efforts to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship, according to internal guidelines obtained by The New York Times. The plan predicts a massive increase in the number of such cases every month, straining government capacity and increasing the risk of due process violations:
The guidance, issued Tuesday to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field offices, directs them to “provide the Office of Immigration Litigation with 100 to 200 denaturalization cases per month” in fiscal year 2026. If these suits are successful, it would represent a massive escalation of denaturalization in the modern era, experts say. For comparison, between 2017 and this year, a little more than 120 cases were filed, according to the Ministry of Justice.
It’s not at all clear that the plan is feasible, but maybe that’s not really the point.
Monitoring mass deportations
- A unanimous three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals said President Trump can keep the National Guard deployed in the nation’s capital while the case is appealed. The decision was based largely on D.C.’s status as a federal district and not a state. The panel questioned the deployment of out-of-state National Guardsmen into states without their consent, calling it “constitutionally troubling.”
- U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb of Washington, D.C., blocked a new Trump administration policy limiting visits by members of Congress to ICE detention centers, ruling that existing statutes intended such visits for monitoring purposes.
- Chris Geidner takes a look at Kavanaugh’s last 100 days of arrests.
The White Nationalist Presidency, Part One
Democratic Senators Tammy Duckworth (D) and Jacky Rosen (D) suspended the nomination of Admiral Kevin Lunday to lead the Coast Guard under its new workplace harassment policy, downgrading swastikas and nooses from symbols of hate to merely “potentially divisive.”
The White Nationalist Presidency, Part II
Madiba K. Dennie: How the Trump Administration is Quietly Re-egregating America’s Workforce
Dersh can’t stop Dershing
Alan Dershowitz delivered to the president in the Oval Office this week a draft of his upcoming book “Could President Trump Constitutionally Serve a Third Term?” and told Trump that the Constitution was unclear on the issue, the WSJ reports.
Quote of the day
Christopher Anderson, Vanity Fair photographer:
I’ll tell you a little anecdote: Stephen Miller was perhaps the most concerned about the portrait session. He asked me, “Should I smile or not smile?” and I said, “How would you like to be represented?” » We agreed to do a bit of both. And then when we’re done, he comes up to me to shake my hand and say goodbye. And he said to me, “You know, you have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be nice to people. And I looked at him and I said, “You know, you too.”
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