DOGE2025 Is Getting the Catastrophic De-Ba’athification They Demanded

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There are two stories that attracted a lot of attention last week that offer the same lesson.

The first story is the report that after firing a bunch of people in charge of securing nuclear weapons, Trump’s minions have tried to rehire them, which was first reported by CNN.

Trump administration officials fired more than 300 staffers Thursday night at the National Nuclear Security Administration — the agency tasked with managing the nation’s nuclear stockpile — as part of broader Energy Department layoffs, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.

Sources told CNN the officials did not seem to know this agency oversees America’s nuclear weapons.

An Energy Department spokesperson disputed the number of personnel affected, telling CNN that “less than 50 people” were “dismissed” from NNSA, and that the dismissed staffers “held primarily administrative and clerical roles.”

The agency began rescinding the terminations Friday morning.

The other is that the USAID is trying to prevent anyone still at the now-shuttered agency from telling the press that the life-saving grants for which Marco Rubio issued waivers have not actually been reauthorized to operate, which Greg Sargent focused on after John Hudson disclosed a memo making the order.

A new internal memo circulating inside the U.S. Agency for International Development neatly captures this split. The Washington Post reports that the memo warns USAID employees not to communicate with the press about the shocking disruptions in humanitarian assistance that are being caused by the Trump-Musk attack on the agency, which are already producing horrific consequences. The memo said this transgression might be met with “dismissal.”

The memo claims to be correcting a “false narrative in the press” about the disruptions to that assistance. It notes that Secretary of State Marco Rubio last month issued a waiver to “lifesaving humanitarian assistance,” allowing it to continue despite the Trump-Musk freeze in agency spending. This has meant that this assistance has “continued uninterrupted and has never paused,” the memo claims, while warning recipients against any “unauthorized external engagement with the press.”

Now, at one level, this chaos is happening because many of the people enacting these cuts are DOGE boys with no idea what they’re looking at. Don Moynihan (who is an indispensable source on the policy issues of all this) uses the nukes case as one example to make the same point: because ignorant people were making the firing decisions, they eliminated a slew of critical positions.

Musk’s management style when it comes to downsizing has been to cut to the bone, and then hire back if he fired too many. This philosophy might make sense if you are running a social media company where its not a big deal if Twitter goes down for a couple of hours. It makes less sense where the a) failure of government systems has big and sometimes irrevocable costs, and b) it is not easy to replace expertise once you have eliminated it. On the latter point, many public jobs take time to develop knowledge of the policy domain, organizational practice and tasks. Those are not qualities that are easy to rebuild if you just spent a year training a new employee who has now been fired.

[snip]

Let me note that I feel like this lesson should not be necessary. We should not need to spell this one out. One measure of the collapse of the Soviet Union was that they could no longer afford to keep staff to secure nuclear warheads. Why would the US voluntarily downgrade it’s own capacity to manage its nuclear arsenal? And yet, DOGE fired 1 in 5 federal staff that manage the nation’s nuclear stockpile.

Have you heard about the National Nuclear Security Administration before? Probably not. It’s one of those jobs that we hopefully never need to think about, because if we do that means something has gone badly wrong. But it’s also one of those jobs that someone needs to ensure is staffed appropriately to make sure something does not go badly wrong. As a citizen, its fine if you are not aware of NNSA, but bear in mind that when the right attacks wasteful bureaucracy, these sort of invisible agencies performing important tasks are some of what they are talking about.

Apparently DOGE does not know much about the NNSA either. To be fair, when you have zero experience of government, why should you? But if you have zero experience of government, you should also probably not be in the position of firing 300 of the guys who take care of the nukes. CNN reported that the fired staffers included “staff who are on the ground at facilities where nuclear weapons are built. These staff oversee the contractors who build nuclear weapons, and they inspect these weapons.”

After enough members of Congress got upset, the firings were rescinded. Just one problem. DOGE made the firings effective the day they were received (no notice, not severance), immediately shutting down access to government emails. And they did not have contact information to tell NNSA employees they were unfired.

[snip]

Under Biden, the IRS had received long-awaited and much needed funds that allowed it to rebuild after a period of sustained downsizing, and was becoming more effective.
The IRS represented a very simple test for the credibility of DOGE. Was it really interested in efficiency and state capacity? If so, you support the tax enforcement, the biggest return on investment in government, generating somewhere between $5-9 for every additional $1 spent on enforcement.

Or did DOGE want to minimize parts of the state that bothered billionaires?

We have our answer. In the middle of tax season, the IRS was told to lay off thousands of workers hired as part of the rebuilding project.

Part of the DOGE hype is that after they fire everyone, they will figure out better ways to do the job using, uh, AI and such. But there is no second act where it gets better. They don’t have a plan to fix what they are breaking because they don’t understand or care about the damage they are doing. Breaking government is the point. It is not as if DOGE has some magical IRS plan up their sleeve. There is no plan.

The story is not just that these DOGE boys have no idea what they’re looking at, being so incompetent that the word “nuclear” doesn’t even spark their interest.

It’s that after ideologues fire competent bureaucrats, they’re often left without a way to turn the bureaucracy back on again when they realize they actually needed it.

Take the first example, the people ensuring the security of America’s nuclear arsenal. As NBC followed up, after Congressional lobbying and a press campaign convinced someone to reverse the NNSA firings, the DOGE boys had no easy way to contact those who had been fired to order them to return to work.

National Nuclear Security Administration officials on Friday attempted to notify some employees who had been let go the day before that they are now due to be reinstated — but they struggled to find them because they didn’t have their new contact information.

In an email sent to employees at NNSA and obtained by NBC News, officials wrote, “The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel.”

AP has a follow-up noting — among other things — that the key jobs were in Texas, Eastern Washington, South Carolina, and Tennessee. These are not just crucial jobs for national security, but many of them represent job losses in Republican areas.

Something similar has happened at USAID.

It shouldn’t have, because there, one key player shutting down the agency, Pete Marocco, actually worked at USAID in the first Trump term. The declaration he has submitted in multiple suits admitted he shut down already-committed funds on his own authority, without Marco Rubio’s involvement. He described that after he started firing administrators, administrators were unable to answer his questions, which he deemed insubordinate rather than just a natural consequence of firing the people who might be able to answer his questions. Nevertheless, his inability to get answers is what he used to justifying shutting everything down.

As a former USAID staffer, Marocco should have the competence to know better — but ProPublica describes why his own past insubordination may be a better explanation for his war against the agency.

The flood of USAID lawsuits has produced an associated flood of sworn declarations that describe, from the perspective of people involved, what is really happening.

For example, as part of a suit by the American Foreign Services Association, a program officer described that, even though she supervises 30 emergency food assistance programs, she had not (as of February 7) been able to get a waiver for any of them, resulting in food rotting in warehouses.

For example, while it was announced that most USAID funding would be frozen, a waiver is supposed to be available for life-saving humanitarian assistance, which would apply to the more than 30 emergency food assistance programs I support. Without my knowledge, the partners I manage, nearly all of which work on lifesaving, emergency food assistance, were sent email notices from their Agreement Officers directing them to fully or partially stop their work. As an Agreement Officer Representative for these awards, I am required to be copied on any communications, which never happened. While I tried to obtain a waiver for the programs I manage, there was no guidance on the process by which our patterns could obtain a waiver and none of the programs were ever formally approved to keep running. I am skeptical that the waiver actually exists. At this point, if a waiver does in fact exist, the implementation has been so chaotic with so many employees either furloughed or on administrative leave that as a practical matter it isn’t available to those who need it. While the programs I manage are under a stop work order, food commodities sit in warehouses rotting and scheduled food distributions to vulnerable populations do not happen and children miss follow-up appointments for treatment of severe malnutrition.

A contracting officer’s declaration in the same suit described the conflicting management orders, the lack of access to experts, and the technical access limits that made it impossible to implement the waiver program.

As a Contracting Officer, some of the awards on this list were perplexing and the sudden push to do this while nearly all of our counterparts with technical knowledge about where awards were in the waiver process and what the programmatic purpose of each award were locked out of the network and suspected to be on administrative leave.

There was an approved tab with one single PEPFAR award despite the fact that the Agency has many different PEPFAR awards and we were told a waiver had been granted for PEPFAR and Emergency Food Assistance. There were no Emergency Food Assistance awards on the approved tab. Concerns were raised by Contracting Officers and Regional Legal Officers alike who replied all to Matthew’s email with concerns. We asked for clarification on the reason for the contract terminations and for confirmation that OAA had consulted with OMB and made a determination consistent with the Executive Order on realigning foreign aid. If these awards had not received such a determination, the termination would be in violation of the executive order. We received no reply to those questions. A contracting officer replied all to the email asking if Congressional notification had been made on these terminations and noted that Congressional notification is required when a termination will involve reduction in employment of 100 or more contractor employees which these actions would likely result. It was also asked if USAID had taken steps to adhere to our Congressionally authorized and funded responsibilities on these terminations.

These emails received no reply from OAA leadership and our working level supervisors urged us to proceed with the terminations and meet the deadlines.

Subsequently at approximately 6PM that same day, Nadeem Shah, Deputy Director of Washington Operations for OAA, sent around an email entitled “PLEASE PAUSE ALL AWARD TERMINATIONS” asking staff to hold off on all award terminations in Matthew’s previous email.

[snip]

When my technical bureau’s access was supposedly restored yesterday, we quickly discovered that they do not have access to our Agency File system called ‘ASIST’ nor do they have access to our financial system in direct violation of the TRO issued the night of February 7, 2025. This makes it incredibly hard for them to provide programmatic information to help with the program review process. To date, the technical bureaus have not had any opportunity to provide any inputs or relevant information for the programmatic review. I am extremely concerned that Agency and State Dept leadership do not have the relevant information needed to thoroughly evaluate programming

Importantly, this seems to suggest that PEPFAR — one of the programs that Republicans have vociferously championed — was only partly restored because someone didn’t understand the multiple programs it involves.

Another staffer in the same AFSA lawsuit, a controller, described how bureaucratic and technical problems have prevented people from disbursing funds even for the programs that have gotten waivers.

9. On February 3, the situation changed yet again. As of that date, every time I tried to hit the “certify” button to begin a disbursement, I received an error message stating that I did not have authority to proceed. I contacted Phoenix Security to inquire if there was a technical problem in the system and was told “on Friday January 31, we were instructed to remove the ability to certify payments.” They did not indicate who instructed them, only stating “Unfortunately I am unable to reverse this decision.”

10. On February 5, all USAID controllers received another diplomatic cable indicating that USAID personnel could no longer process payments themselves but must request approval from a Senior Bureau Officer before forwarding the payment packages for processing. However, as of February 11, nobody can agree on who is the appropriate SBO for USAID payments and the State Department hasn’t processed a single payment based on the new procedure.

11. As of February 9, when I try to log into Phoenix, I receive a new error message stating that my sign-in attempt has failed. I have even less access to Phoenix after the February 7 court order than I did before that date.

12. I have been in touch with many colleagues and all report the same experience. To my knowledge, worldwide there are no USAID financial management personnel, including controllers, that can access Phoenix.

13. I have not been able to process payments under any of the waivers included in the January 24 cable, including legitimate expenses incurred prior to January 24 under existing awards or those for employee operating expenses. Though the waivers exist on paper, in reality all USAID funds have remained frozen because of technological barriers added to the system, I don’t know by whom. Phoenix will not let us disburse anything.

In a different USAID-related lawsuit by contract recipients, the head of a faith-based non-profit, Mark Hetfield, described how attempts to get waivers looked in practice.

11. On February 3, 2025, HIAS also received a revised “Notice of Suspension” for its work in Chad from PRM via email stating that HIAS should stop all work under the grant unless exempted from suspension as “existing life-saving humanitarian assistance” defined by the Department as “core life-saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence assistance, as well as supplies and reasonable administrative costs as necessary to deliver such assistance.” See February 3, 2025, Letter from Philip Denino, PRM Grants Officer, annexed to this declaration as Exhibit F. In his cover email, Mr. Denino stated that “PRM will follow up shortly to set up a meeting to discuss the specific HIAS programming in Chad that falls under the exemption for life-saving humanitarian assistance.” See February 3, 2025, Email from Philip Denino, annexed to this declaration as Exhibit G. That meeting with PRM took place the next day, February 4, during which HIAS and PRM staff discussed what activities would qualify as “lifesaving humanitarian assistance.” PRM asked HIAS to provide an overview of HIAS’ activities conducted in Chad pursuant to the award that HIAS deemed exempt from the 90-day suspension. HIAS prepared and sent the requested overview. See February 7, 2025, Email from Guillermo Birmingham to Philip Denino, annexed to this declaration as Exhibit H. However, after the meeting, Mr. Denino sent a follow up email indicating they he had been “given guidance that PRM will not be providing any additional information regarding the application of the waivers/exemptions to activities” and that he could only refer us to the revised Suspension Memo to guide us in resuming activities. See February 4, 2025, Email from Philip Denino to Guillermo Birmingham, annexed to this declaration as Exhibit I. Nor would we be able to receive funds to continue work under a waiver/exemption since all federal government payment portals were and are not functioning, making the purported waiver/exemption process cited in PRM’s revised Notice of Suspension useless.

12. On February 10, HIAS’ Chief Financial Officer again asked PRM for guidance on what would qualify as an emergency exemption from the indefinite suspension of PRM funds. In response, PRM’s Grants Officer stated, “I can’t provide guidance. It was determined much higher than me.” HIAS’ CFO then expressed concern to PRM that the lack of guidance coupled with the inability of aid organizations to access payments is making it impossible for organizations to provide the lifesaving humanitarian services identified by PRM as exempt in their revised Suspension Notice. See February 10, 2025, Email exchange between Guillermo Birmingham and Philip Denino, annexed to this declaration as Exhibit J.

He included a stack of backup, including the email instructing that Comptrollers were instructed not to provide any guidance on what was considered life-saving programming covered by the waivers.

Ultimately, USAID simply refused to tell grant recipients whether they had received a waiver or not, and if so for which parts of their programming. And it wouldn’t matter anyway because the computer systems on which it all runs are not functioning. State doesn’t want employees telling the press that life-saving grants haven’t been resumed, because Marco Rubio doesn’t want to confess to Republicans that he failed to deliver what he promised them.

Whether intentional at USAID or the inevitable outcome of arbitrary ignorance, the effect is the same.

It’s not just that the DOGE2025 attack on government has destroyed critical expertise. But absent that expertise, Trump’s minions are finding it difficult to reverse the ill effects of their initial assault, because the initial damage they do to both systems and expertise makes it far harder to reverse their initial failures.

Last July, JD Vance envisioned this process as a de-Ba’athification, which he imagined was targeted at a caricature of liberal culture, but which in reality targeted the civil service. Someone who served in Iraq really did set out to recreate the same insanely stupid policy decision that made Iraq a decade-long clusterfuck — he really did set out to launch that same kind of attack on his own government.

We’ve seen this movie before. It was, perhaps, Americas biggest failure ever.

Did Pam Bondi Bury the Election Day Bomb Threats?

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The other day, Pete Hegseth capitulated to Vladimir Putin, dealing away Ukraine’s future and leverage, making Neville Chamberlain look not only stronger, but better dressed, by comparison.

He tried to walk back his capitulation the next day.

Everything is on the table in his conversations with Vladimir Putin and Zelenskyy. What he decides to allow or not allow is at the purview of the leader of the free world of President Trump. So I’m not going to stand at this podium and declare what President Trump will do or won’t do, what will be in or what will be out, what concessions will be made or what concessions are not made.

Remember, in response to questions from Tammy Duckworth, Hegseth confessed he had never been part of international negotiations. In his first day and second days learning on the job, he failed every rule of negotiation.

I may return to Pete Hegseth’s predictable failures.

For now, though, I want to note all the things put in place before Trump seemingly turned on a dime, effectively demoting his Ukraine negotiator Keith Kellogg in favor of Marco Rubio, John Ratcliffe, Mike Waltz, and Steve Witkoff (who has been liaising with people like Mohammed bin Salman and — reportedly, Kirill Dmitriev from Mueller Report fame) and taking a much more pro-Russian stance in this negotiation.

Between Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, they have protected precisely the kind of interference and corruption with which Russia kicked off Trump’s political career ten years ago. These moves have been covered already (see this post from Casey Michel and this from Cyberscoop). But I want to look at the kinds of DOJ and CISA actions against which Trump’s team may be reacting, not least because this pivot from Trump did not happen until they were all in place.

Non-prosecution of FCPA: Start with the decision to first limit (in Bondi’s adoption) and then pause (in Trump’s adoption, in a later Executive Order) prosecution of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a law that prohibits businesses with a presence in the United States from engaging in bribery. Bondi actually put this provision in a memo otherwise eliminating approval requirements for investigations and prosecutions targeting trafficking, and with regards to FCPA, simply made using FCPA against traffickers the priority.

Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The Criminal Division’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Unit shall prioritize investigations related to foreign bribery that facilitates the criminal operations of Cartels and TCOs, and shift focus away from investigations and cases that do not involve such a connection. Examples of such cases include bribery of foreign officials to facilitate human smuggling and the trafficking of narcotics and firearms.

Trump, on the other had, halted its use for six months and then maybe another six months.

Most coverage of this move noted its use, under Trump, to penalize Goldman Sachs for bribing Malaysia’s 1MDB sovereign wealth fund, an investigation the aftermath of which sucked in Trump associate Elliott Broidy before Trump pardoned him. But it might be better to consider how such bribery statutes limit transnational investment companies like Trump’s own and Jared Kushner’s. That is, Trump’s intervention in FCPA might be personal to Trump.

Elimination of KleptoCapture Task Force: In the same memo, buried under a shift of focus for Money Laundering cases to traffickers and away from Trump’s buddies, Bondi also included this language about the KleptoCapture program that has been a key prong of Joe Biden and Merrick Garland’s response to the Ukraine invasion.

Money Laundering and Asset Forfeiture. The Criminal Division’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section shall prioritize investigations, prosecutions, and asset forfeiture actions that target activities of Cartels and TCOs.

Task Force KleptoCapture, the Department’s Kleptocracy Team, and the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, shall be disbanded. Attorneys assigned to those initiatives shall return to their prior posts, and resources currently devoted to those efforts shall be committed to the total elimination of Cartels and TCOs.

It’s not yet clear whether this means DOJ will start giving yachts back to the sanctioned Russian oligarchs that Biden seized them from.

But what this does imply is that the sanctioned oligarchs who had invested in property and other facilities in the US — people like Oleg Deripaska and Andrii Derkach, both of whom were identified to have ties to Russian influence operations in election years — might be free to invest in the US again.

Shift away from FARA: Buried in Section IV of a different memo innocuously titled “General policy regarding charging, plea negotiations, and sentencing,” are two paragraphs describing changes in the National Security Division’s focus.

Shifting Resources in the National Security Division. To free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion, the Foreign Influence Task Force shall be disbanded. Recourse to criminal charges under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and 18 U.S.C. § 951 shall be limited to instances of alleged conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors. With respect to FARA and § 951, the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, including the FARA Unit, shall focus on civil enforcement, regulatory initiatives, and public guidance.

The National Security Division’s Corporate Enforcement Unit is also disbanded. Personnel assigned to the Unit shall return to their previous posts.

Let’s take them in reverse order. The FARA statement basically says that only people akin to spies will be charged criminally with it; everyone else will be subject to the same civil sanctions DOJ used before the Paul Manafort case. That of course means Manafort’s ongoing work is in the clear (a point that Ken Vogel makes in a column hilariously titled, “Moves by Trump and Bondi Raise Hopes of Those Accused of Foreign Corruption“). It also makes things far easier for Pam Bondi’s former colleagues at Ballard Partners, the most powerful foreign influence peddlers under the first and undoubtedly the second Trump term. This will save Bondi’s friends a whole lot of money in compliance worries.

But here’s the problem with this move: Most of the people DOJ has charged with criminal FARA in recent years were being handled by foreign spies. FARA, as it was used under Mueller and since, was a way to neutralize people for being in the pay of foreign spies without having to prove — or having to declassify evidence to show — that they were themselves spies. It was a way to disable spying, even or especially if people receiving foreign money didn’t know they were being handled by spies.

But Bondi just said she won’t use that tool.

Elimination of FITF: I might have written this post weeks ago, except I keep staring at Bondi’s claim that the Foreign Influence Task Force (the website for which has been taken down) led to “abuses of prosecutorial discretion.” Now, Bondi often parrots the stupidest bullshit that Jim Jordan has floated (which includes a lot of false claims made by Matt Taibbi), and this may be an example — because FITF would not lead to prosecution of a US person, as I tried to lay out in this table (which first appeared in this post).

What the FITF did was to identify attempts by foreigners to clandestinely influence Americans (not just during elections). It played a key role in funneling intelligence to the private sector, especially social media companies. While the government has charged foreigners involved in such operations (such as the Iranians who hacked Trump’s campaign), Americans would almost always be victims.

Based on that assumption, I can only imagine Bondi’s reference to “abuses of prosecutorial discretion” pertains to one of three possible prosecutions:

  • The prosecution of Douglass Mackey for duping Hillary Clinton voters into “texting” their vote rather than voting in person, a prosecution that in later years might have arisen out of election protection efforts (the second row in this table) put in place in the wake of 2016.
  • A warning about the Andrii Derkach influence operation in 2020, which was managed by FITF, and which led the FBI to shut down some informants sharing information on Hunter Biden. Importantly, the entire right wing believes that a FITF staffer, Laura Dehmlow, should have breached the confidentiality of a non-public investigation in 2020 and told Facebook that the hard drive shared with New York Post derived from a Hunter Biden laptop in the FBI’s possession was “real” (notwithstanding that the FBI had not, and still has not, done the most basic things to test if it was packaged up). So it’s possible that Bondi believes, like Jim Jordan does, that the outcome of the Hunter Biden investigation would have been different if they could have relied more on the laptop.
  • The Tenet operation, in which the RT funded right wing propagandists Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, and Benny Johnson. The operation was exposed with an indictment of foreigners shortly before the pre-election halt to such actions, but not even Canadian Lauren Chen has been charged, much less the right wing bros. That indictment, for money laundering and FARA, might not be viable under Bondi’s new restrictions on other prosecutorial focus.

But there are a whole bunch of things you throw out with that bathwater. If the FITF is disbanded, then social media companies might not have discovered that Iran was adopting the identities of the Proud Boys to suppress turnout among people of color. There’s the ongoing Doppelganger effort to create counterfeit versions of real US and European media outlets to spread disinformation — such as an attack on USAID that Elon Musk spread just days ago.

Or there’s the multiple influence operations that Jack Posobiec has been party to, starting with PizzaGate (the weaponization of the Podesta emails stolen by the GRU), the GRU MacronLeaks operation, as well as a more recent FSB campaign. Posobiec’s centrality to all this — as well as his involvement in other kinds of rat-fucking — is particularly pertinent because Pete Hegseth at least invited Jack Posobiec to travel with him to the Munich Security Conference where he sold Ukraine out.

Trump administration officials at the Pentagon invited a far-right activist, Jack Posobiec, to participate in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s first trip overseas, according to a planning document obtained by The Washington Post and people familiar with the decision, triggering alarm among U.S. defense officials worried about the military being dragged into partisan warfare.

Posobiec was in Ukraine yesterday — it’s not yet clear whether he traveled to Europe with the Defense Secretary.

The most charitable explanation for Bondi’s decision to shut down FITF is that she’s suffering from delusions that Jim Jordan passed on. But if she really understands what this program did, then she has deliberately chosen to make it easier for hostile countries, especially Russia, China, and Iran, to affect US elections.

Administrative Leave of CISA Election Security Staff: Which brings me to the most recent effort to help foreign adversaries, something done by Kristi Noem, not Pam Bondi. On Monday, 17 of the people who were involved in keeping the 2024 election secure were put on leave, citing a focus on election disinformation.

In recent days, 17 employees of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who have worked with election officials to provide assessments and trainings dealing with a range of threats — from cyber and ransomware attacks to physical security of election workers — have been placed on leave pending a review, according to a person familiar with the situation who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Ten of those employees are regional election security specialists hired as part of an effort to expand field staff and election security expertise ahead of the 2024 election. The regional staffers were told the internal review would examine efforts to combat attempts by foreign governments to influence U.S. elections, duties that were assigned to other agency staff, according to the person.

All were former state or local election officials who were brought in to build relationships across all 50 states and the nation’s more than 8,000 local election jurisdictions. They spent the past year meeting with election officials, attending conferences and trainings, and ensuring officials were aware of the agency’s various cybersecurity and physical security services.

[snip]

The other staffers placed on leave are current or former members of the agency’s Election Security and Resilience team, who were told the review was looking into agency efforts to combat misinformation and disinformation campaigns, according to the person familiar with the situation. The 10 election security specialists who worked with state and local election officials reported to a different team at CISA, the field operations division.

Now, the rationale offered for this decision is a review of CISA’s involvement in warnings about mis- and disinformation. As noted above, that’s not what CISA does. To the extent it shares information with social media companies, it is to provide correct information to make it easier for people to get quality information on voting.

But consider something that these 17 people might have been involved in: the effort, in real time, to respond to bomb threats called into electoral precincts in Democratic areas, many of which were sourced to Russian email domains. (Remember that Ohio Governor Mike DeWine attributed the bomb threats in Springfield — threats ginned up with the significant involvement of Jack Posobiec — to overseas actors.)

We still don’t know whether the bomb threats targeting Springfield and voting locations actually were Russian operations or whether they were funneled through Russia by American actors to obscure their origin. We still don’t have a report from the FBI explaining what happened.

And with the decision to shut down both the FITF and to pause CISA’s election protection work, we may never get it now. We may never learn whether Democratic precincts had to shut down due to Russian involvement or that of people laundering their work through Russia.

In the wake of Trump’s victory, key Putin advisor Nikolai Patrushev claimed that, to win, Trump “relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations.”

In his future policies, including those on the Russian track US President-elect Donald Trump will rely on the commitments to the forces that brought him to power, rather than on election pledges, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev told the daily Kommersant in an interview.

“The election campaign is over,” Patrushev noted. “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”

He agreed that Trump, when he was still a candidate, “made many statements critical of the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current administration.”

“But very often election pledges in the United States can iverge from subsequent actions,” he recalled.

When he gave that ominous warning, I concluded that Trump would soon sell out Ukraine and the rest of Europe. But that didn’t happen right away. Rather, for months, Trump feigned a hardline stance against Russia, all while teasing the number of calls he was having with Putin.

Until this week.

Trump didn’t move to “fulfill” the “corresponding obligations” he made to get help in the election, if indeed he did get help, until Pam Bondi instructed DOJ not to look for such things.

Rule of Law: Don’t Obey in Advance, But Also Don’t Give Up in Advance

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For some time, we’ve all been assuming that Trump will defy court orders reining in his assault on the government. And then, in the wake of Judge Paul Engelmayer’s order enjoining Scott Bessent from altering Treasury’s payment system before Friday, JD Vance ran his mouth, convincing everyone that that moment is already here.

Overnight, filings in at least two of the lawsuits against Trump’s attacks suggests that Trump is, at least for now, complying.

  • In the Rhode Island case in which states enjoined OMB from withholding government grants the government filed a response describing, among other things, how they’ve worked to ensure payments to Oregon continue.
  • In the New York lawsuit, also brought by states, DOJ asked for clarification of the scope of Engelmeyer’s order and opposed the breadth of it (noting, that there were contractors who did work on the system and also listing some senior Treasury officials, political appointees, who needed access). With that, Thomas Krause submitted a declaration saying he’s the only Special Government Employee who currently has permission to access the system (meaning they’re also complying with Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s order in DC), but also revealing that Marko Elez — the DOGE boy who was included in Kollar-Kotelly’s order — has not returned to Treasury. Krause even notes (as I did) that the order to destroy what Elez has done likely conflicts with the order Kollar-Kotelly issued.

DOJ is pushing at the terms of the orders limiting government actions. But it at least claims it is complying.

There is other conflicting evidence about implementation. I have also seen reports that USAID people stationed overseas were having their access to communications systems restored, in compliance with Carl Nicoles’ order. But WaPo reports that the Administration continues to process resignations in potential defiance of George O’Toole’s order halting the Fork in the Road program.

I don’t doubt that at some point Trump will defy the courts. But for a number of reasons, I suspect they won’t outright defy judges yet.

One main reason is obvious: Trump and Russ Vought want John Roberts to grant him the authority to — basically — neutralize Congress’ power of the purse. To do that, he needs a clean appellate record. So he has to go through the process of engaging in good faith (even while arguing, as he did in his response to the Engelmeyer order, for a maximal theory of Executive power).

Another reason likely has to do with Pam Bondi. She has her own malign goals for DOJ, such as a likely assault on medical abortion pills, both between and within states. Plus, she is pursuing Trump’s attacks on sanctuary states.

But to use DOJ for these policy purposes, there has to be a DOJ, with attorneys more competent and experienced in Federal litigation than Ed Martin, the Acting US Attorney in DC. With the possible exception of the birthright citizenship defense, DOJ has real AUSAs fighting these cases, AUSAs who are going to be unwilling to risk their bar license on frivolous legal arguments or lies.

Finally, I think DOJ is in a risky situation in its confrontation with attorneys and FBI personnel. Ben Wittes noted recently, the Administration needs the FBI, in ways it doesn’t need USAID personnel, at least not in the same potentially catastrophically visible way they need the FBI.

The FBI rank and file have power in this equation that other agencies, such as USAID, for example, do not have. The Trump administration does not need USAID. It wants to eliminate foreign aid anyway, so if the personnel at the aid agency get uppity, who cares? And if they quit? All the better.

The FBI is not that simple. For one thing, the administration does need law enforcement. If there’s a terrorist attack, and there will be, and the FBI is not in a position to prevent it or investigate it quickly and effectively, the administration will take the blame.

This administration also draws its legitimacy from backing the blue. Even in their war on the intelligence community, Donald Trump and his people always tried to distinguish between the rank and file and the “bad apples” who were running things. Waging a full-scale war against the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, a war that is all about targeting street agents for having done their jobs, is a dangerous game—far different from sacking an FBI director, or even two, who went to some elite law schools and served at the upper levels of the Justice Department.

Then there’s the problem of capacity. FBI agents are actually very hard to replace—good ones are, anyway. The physical demands are significant. Most have specialized education of one sort or another. And while people often imagine FBI agents as glorified cops who kick doors down, the truth is that a lot of agents have exquisitely specialized expertise. The training of a good counterintelligence agent takes many years. Some agents have specialized scientific training. There are even agents who specialize in art theft. Take out a thousand FBI personnel for political reasons, and you destroy literally centuries of institutional capacity. A good FBI agent is much harder to create than, say, a good assistant U.S. attorney.

The confrontation with FBI has allowed accidental hero, Brian Driscoll (who is only serving as Acting Director as opposed to Acting Deputy Director because the White House made an error), has played this well, including by raising his own profile and the successes of the FBI.

That hasn’t stopped DOJ from demanding loyalty pledges, in the form of treating the mob that violently attacked cops and the Capitol as more patriotic than the cops themselves or the Members of Congress who did their duty — effectively (though WaPo doesn’t make this clear) forcing FBI agents to disavow treating a violent attack as a crime. But that, in turn, risks real backlash.

To be sure, there’s a lot of garbage that’s being dealt here. DOJ told Colleen Kollar-Kotelly that DOGE at that point only had read-only access to Treasury data (which Anna Bower recognized as an attempt to parse). But a footnote in the overnight filing in New York confesses that’s false.

Since January 20, 2025, one other Treasury employee—Marco Elez—had “read only” access to or copies of certain data in BFS payment systems, subject to restrictions, and access to a copy of certain BFS payments systems’ source code in a “sandbox” environment. Krause Decl. ¶ 11. Mr. Elez resigned on February 6, 2025 and returned all Treasury and BFS equipment and credentials the same day. Id.

That footnote cites Krause’s declaration. But the bit about the sandbox copy is not in the cited paragraph.

Since January 20, 2025, one other Treasury non-career employee—Marko Elez—had access to BFS payment systems and payment data covered by the order. Mr. Elez resigned on February 6, 2025, and returned all Treasury and BFS equipment and credentials the same day. Treasury staff have quarantined and disabled access to all devices and accounts used by this individual, which can now only be accessed by civil servants with a need for access to perform their job duties within the BFS who have passed all background checks and security clearances and taken all information security training called for in federal statutes and Treasury Department regulations. Further, based on technical controls in place, BFS oversight of Mr. Elez’s work, instructions provided to Mr. Elez regarding proper data handling, and subsequent technical review of his activities, I currently have no reason to believe Mr. Elez retains access to any BFS payment data, source code, or systems. I am concerned that deleting the contents of these accounts and devices would violate Treasury’s document preservation duties in connection with related litigation entitled Alliance for Retired Americans, et al. v. Bessent, et al., Civil Action No. 25-0313 (CKK) (D.D.C.).

Similarly, an OPM suit may well prove that DOJ has misrepresented other claims to courts. And as the FBI lawsuits hung overnight, DOJ forced Driscoll to provide names of all the FBI Agents who worked on January 6 cases.

But these discrepancies may well be useful. At the very least, it provides cause for the AGs to insist that Krause appear before Judge Jeannette Vargas, the judge assigned to the case (who ordered the parties to try to clarify Saturday’s order) to explain what Elez was doing with his sandbox and why anyone should believe he hasn’t been rehired, somewhere, to play in his sandbox some more. That, in turn, would support the very cybersecurity arguments that various lawyers are trying to make. And it’ll advance the reporting already going on.

JD Vance might well like to simply ignore Engelmeyer’s order. Mike Davis might want Trump to appeal this immediately to SCOTUS. Trump might want to start siccing his mob on judges.

But there are good reasons to believe that that won’t happen, yet — at least not until Trump gets a few more of his national security and DOJ nominees through the Senate.

And until then, this legal process is a tool — a tool that can be used to buy time, but also a tool to use to hem in Trump’s mob.

Update: In RI, John McConnell issued what is likely the first, “no really, you have to follow my orders” order.

Update: DOJ has appealed McConnell’s order, even though it is not ripe.

Meanwhile DOJ has filed really long filings in DC in an attempt to persuade Carl Nichols to reverse his TRO in the USAID example, basically slandering unnamed professionals left and right. Things do look more dire, because Trump is basically refusing to fund blue states until SCOTUS tells him to–and maybe even not then. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans have simply capitulated to Trump’s insane nominees.

Update: Above I noted that DOJ needs career AUSAs to make these arguments, at least for a while.

Well, in the USAID case, those career AUSAs just had to cop to two, um, errors. The bigger one was the central dispute at the hearing last week: Whether USAID had only frozen prospective contracts, or all of them

Additionally, although Secretary Rubio’s January 24, 2025 directive only froze future contract obligations, id. ¶ 3, payments on existing contracts were paused as well as part of efforts by agency leadership to regain control of the organization’s spending and conduct a comprehensive review of its programs. See id. ¶¶ 5–10. Counsel for Defendants was unaware of this development prior to the hearing. [my emphasis]

This implies that Peter Marocco froze existing contracts without the authority of Marco Rubio. And he’s accusing USAID personnel of being insubordinate.

It’s Still Not Clear Whether Elon’s DOGE Boys Are Reviewing, Taking, or Altering Government Networks

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The big news overnight in the legal fight to rein in DOGE is that SDNY Judge Paul Engelmayer has ordered Treasury to stop letting Elon Musk’s DOGE [sic] boys to snoop in Treasury’s payment system and destroy any copies of records already made from it. [docket]

the defendants are (i) restrained from granting access to any Treasury Department payment record, payment systems, or any other data systems maintained by the Treasury Department containing personally identifiable information and/or confidential financial information of payees, other than to civil servants with a need for access to perform their job duties within the Bureau of Fiscal Services who have passed all background checks and security clearances and taken all information security training called for in federal statutes and Treasury Department regulations; (ii) restrained from granting access to all political appointees, special government employees, and government employees detailed from an agency outside the Treasury Department, to any Treasury Department payment record, payment systems, or any other data systems maintained by the Treasury Department containing personally identifiable information and/or confidential financial information of payees; and (iii) ordered to direct any person prohibited above from having access to such information, records and systems but who has had access to such information, records, and systems since January 20, 2025, to immediately destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems, if any;

This order comes on top of Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s order limiting access to Treasury’s payment system to normal employees and two DOGE [sic] employees, but the latter for read-only access [docket]:

Mr. Tom Krause, a Special Government Employee in the Department of the Treasury, as needed for the performance of his duties, provided that such access to payment records will be “read only”;

Mr. Marko Elez, a Special Government Employee in the Department of the Treasury, as needed for the performance of his duties, provided that such access to payment records will be “read only”;

Anna Bower parsed how DOJ substantiated (or not) that this was really “read only” access. Which was part of what a bunch of Democratic Attorneys General, led by Tish James, pointed to to claim they still needed a TRO, over and above the one issued by Kollar-Kotelly.

The temporary restraining order entered yesterday by the D.C. District Court in Alliance for Retired Americans v. Bessent, No. 1:25-cv-313 (D.D.C.) (“ARA”), does not change this conclusion. That order continues to permit two SGEs affiliated with DOGE to have access to the BFS payment records and payment systems, restricts their access to “read only” just for payment records and not payment systems, and does not direct that any copies of data from the systems made since the Agency Action took effect be destroyed. ARA, Dkt No. 13.

Now, I’m somewhat skeptical that Engelmeyer’s order, as issued, is sustainable. He issued the order in advance of the assigned judge on the case, Jeannette Vargas, and before the government had a chance to respond to the lawsuit.

But the lawsuits to enjoin DOGE [sic] are playing catch-up to the known facts.

And the known facts get us much closer to the being able to prove that Elon and his DOGE [sic] boys are altering code, if not hacking it, rather than simply reviewing its data.

The suit and TRO before Judge Kollar-Kotelly, filed by several unions, is entirely privacy focused.

The state AGs’ suit and TRO, which establish standing by pointing to the billions of dollars of payments they get from the Feds, argues that Elon is attempting to intercept payments to entities Trump doesn’t like. It asserts a claim repeatedly backed in public reporting, but affirmatively denied before Kollar-Kotelly: that the DOGE boys — here, self-proclaimed eugenicist Mark Elez, have altered code.

5. As of February 2, 2025, the President and Treasury Secretary, directed Treasury to grant expanded access to BFS payment systems to political appointees and “special government employees” for reasons that have yet to be provided, although one apparent purpose, upon information and belief. Upon information and belief, one purpose is to allow DOGE to advance a stated goal to block federal funds from reaching beneficiaries who do not align with the President’s political agenda. For example, DOGE was tasked with freezing payments issued by the U.S. Agency for International Development (“USAID”) and sought access to BFS payment systems to accomplish that goal.5 Virtually unfettered access to BFS payment systems was granted to at least one 25-year-old DOGE associate, Mark Elez, who, on information and belief, had the authority to view or modify numerous critical files.6 Indeed, reports indicate that Elez had administrative privileges over the BFS payment system’s code, giving him the ability to alter user permissions and “read and write” code—even if the associate had “read-only” access to the system’s data.7 Elez has since resigned from DOGE after being linked to racist social media posts.8

6. Around the same time that DOGE associates were unlawfully granted access to BFS systems, Mr. Musk began publicly stating his intention to recklessly freeze streams of federal funding without warning. On February 2, 2024, Mr. Musk posted on X (formerly Twitter), an online social media platform, that DOGE is “rapidly shutting down” various “illegal payments” made by the government to grant recipients, including payments to Lutheran Family Services to provide services to migrant children.9 That same day, Mr. Musk posted that his team “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” Since then, Mr. Musk has unambiguously called for the cancellation of various streams of federal funding. For instance, on February 6, 2025, he alleged: “Billions of taxpayer dollars to known FRAUDULENT entities are STILL being APPROVED by Treasury. This needs to STOP NOW!”10 Mr. Musk has also made wild, unsubstantiated claims about the BFS payment system and suggested putting it on the blockchain.11

6 A 25-Year-Old With Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System | WIRED

7 https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-associate-bfs-federal-payment-system/

8 DOGE Staffer Resigns Over Racist Posts

9 Elon Musk on X: “The @DOGE team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments” / X

10 Elon Musk on X: “Billions of taxpayer dollars to known FRAUDULENT entities are STILL being APPROVED by Treasury. This needs to STOP NOW!” / X

11 Fatima Hussein, “Elon Musk’s task force has gained access to sensitive Treasury payment systems, sources say,” PBS News, Feb. 2, 2025, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/elon-musks-task-force-hasgained-access-to-sensitive-treasury-payment-systems-sources-say; Billy Bambrough, “‘This Needs To Stop Now’—Elon Musk Confirms Radical Doge U.S. Treasury Plan,” Forbes, Feb. 2, 2025, https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2025/02/02/this-needs-to-stop-now-elon-musk-confirmsradical-doge-us-treasury-plan/.

It cites Elon’s insane rants on Xitter as well.

In addition to the privacy concerns addressed in the union lawsuit, the AGs’ lawsuit raises concerns about appropriations (and separation of powers), but also cybersecurity, something not included in the union lawsuit.

139. The conduct of DOGE members presents a unique security risk to States and State residents whose data is held by BFS, given that DOGE employees have already reportedly set up an unauthorized commercial server at another federal agency without a privacy impact assessment as required by the 2002 E-Government Act. Access by DOGE employees to BFS is likely to present even greater risks to the security and privacy of States’ and their residents’ data.

140. Unsecure data is susceptible to cyber attacks and identity theft. Identity theft has a significant impact on States, beyond the financial well-being of its residents. It strains law enforcement resources, damages state economies through lost productivity and consumer confidence, and raises costs for the state to redress fraudulent claims made from stolen identities for unemployment and healthcare benefits. [my emphasis]

The AGs’ suit actually doesn’t cite a source for the claim that DOGE set up a commercial server at another agency. But I think the claim comes from a lawsuit Kel McClanahan filed against Office of Personnel Management, aiming to require it to stop the all-government email DOGE [sic] set up to offer its “Fork in the Road” severance offer. McClanahan first sued, with two plaintiffs who worked at government agencies, on January 27, for a violation of the E-Government Act. [docket]

In response, the government claimed that the main theory of injury, that the government had set up the all-government email without first doing a privacy assessment didn’t apply for employees, and was moot because it had since done one, which it included here. The privacy assessment claimed this was just a Office365 account.

1.3. Has a system security plan been completed for the information system(s) supporting the project? The Office 365 mailbox has been granted an Authorization to Operate (ATO) that includes a system security plan. The government computer storing the data is subject to standard security requirements, including limited PIV access.

And it claimed that the account included only employee data.

2.1. Identify the information the project collects, uses, disseminates, or maintains. GWES collects, maintains, and uses the names and government email addresses of federal government employees. GWES also collects and redistributes responses to emails sent to those addresses, which are limited to short, voluntary, non-identifying information. Specifically, GWES contains the following:

  • Employee Contact Data: GWES collects, maintains, and uses the names and government email addresses of federal government employees. Other identifying information is not used.
  • Employee Response Data: After an email is sent using Employee Contact Data, GWES collects, maintains, and redistributes short, voluntary responses.

It largely ignored McClenahan’s claim (based largely on Reddit posts) that DOGE had installed a separate server.

But other than speculation on social media, Plaintiffs provide no evidence that OPM took any of the actions that would trigger the PIA requirement under sections 208(b)(1)(A)(i)-(ii) of the E-Government Act. Moreover, Plaintiffs disregard entirely the fact that the E-Government Act does not require a PIA when an agency is seeking to collect information about “agencies, instrumentalities, or employees of the Federal Government.”

Since then, McClanahan filed an amended complaint, which added five more plaintiffs, none of whom are Executive Branch employees (for example, one works for the Library of Congress; another is a contractor), substantiating that some of the DOGE emails went to people outside the Executive Branch, and provided additional substantiation of the Reddit claims (including raising questions about whether this could even be Microsoft365).

30. Furthermore, prior to 20 January 2025, OPM lacked the technical capacity to send direct communications to all Executive Branch employees: But just days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, OPM did not have the capability to send a mass email of that scale, according to a person familiar with the matter. To send mass emails, the agency had used govDelivery, a cloud communications service provided by public sector IT company Granicus, a different person familiar said. The govDelivery contract had restrictions on the volume of emails available to send without incurring added costs, and the agency would not have been able to reach 2.3 million people, the approximate number of all civilian federal employees, the second person added. David DiMolfetta, OPM’s new email system sparks questions about cyber compliance Nextgov/FCW (Jan. 28, 2025), available at https://www.nextgov.com/digitalgovernment/2025/01/opms-new-email-system-sparks-questions-about-cybercompliance/402555/ (last accessed Feb. 3, 2025).

31. Additionally, OPM has used Microsoft Office 365 since at least 2021, including Outlook 365 for email. OPM, Privacy Impact Assessment for OPM – Microsoft Office 365 (May 13, 2021), available at https://www.opm.gov/information-management/privacy-policy/privacypolicy/office-365-pia.pdf (last accessed Feb. 3, 2025). Outlook 365 cannot send more than ten thousand emails per day. See Microsoft, Exchange Online limits (Dec. 11, 2024), at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/exchange-online-servicedescription/exchange-online-limits#sending-limits-1 (last accessed Feb. 3, 2025).

32. According to the FedNews Message, “Instead [of using the normal channels], an on-prem (on-site) email server was setup [sic]. Someone literally walked into our building and plugged in an email server to our network to make it appear that emails were coming from OPM. It’s been the one sending those various ‘test’ message[s] [discussed below].” FedNews Message.

33. This statement is supported by recent reporting:

A new server being used to control these [OPM] databases has been placed in a conference room that Musk’s team is using as their command center, according to an OPM staffer. The staffer described the server as a piece of commercial hardware they believed was not obtained through the proper federal procurement process.

Caleb Ecarma & Judd Legum, Musk associates given unfettered access to private data of government employees Musk Watch (Feb. 3, 2025), at https://www.muskwatch.com/p/muskassociates-given-unfettered (last accessed Feb. 3, 2025).

34. Upon information and belief, this server and/or other systems linked to it are retaining information about every individual with a Government email address.

The amended complaint argues that the privacy impact was factually and legally insufficient.

39. Neither Biasini nor Hogan were OPM employees prior to 20 January.

40. Biasini worked at the Boring Company prior to 20 January. It is not currently known if he still works there.

41. Hogan worked at Comma.ai prior to 20 January. It is not currently known if he still works there.

42. The GWES PIA was both factually inaccurate and legally inadequate.

[snip]

54. Upon information and belief, OPM has not ensured review of a PIA for any of these systems by any legally sufficient Chief Information Officer or equivalent official.

55. OPM has not published a legally sufficient PIA or made such an assessment available for public inspection for any of these systems.

In other words, as these twin lawsuits against Treasury get closer to arguing that Elon is not looking for savings but instead altering the payment system, McClanahan continues to chase proof that Elon’s DOGE [sic] boys have added their own server which, by dint of sending emails to everyone (including people not employed by the Executive branch) with a .gov address, is collecting information on everyone with a .gov address.

Meanwhile, several other developments get closer to showing that Elon is hacking the government, not assessing it.

First, late this week, OPM removed access by some DOGE [sic] boys to more sensitive OPM systems.

Directives from the agency’s interim leadership issued late this week indicated that DOGE representatives should be withdrawn from two principal systems containing personally identifiable information for millions of federal employees, according to communications reviewed by The Post and people familiar with the developments who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

Those systems are called Enterprise Human Resources Integration and Electronic Official Personnel Folder. They hold sensitive information about employees of most federal agencies, including addresses, demographic profiles, salary details and disciplinary histories.

The Post reported Thursday morning that DOGE agents had gained access to those systems along with “administrative” access to OPM computer systems. That allowed them sweeping authority to install and modify software on government-supplied equipment and, according to two OPM officials, to alter internal documentation of their own activities.

Meanwhile, both Wired and WaPo have stories describing how a Booz Allen analyst described the DOGE [sic] access as an ““unprecedented insider threat risk;” the analyst was promptly fired.

The review, delivered Monday to Treasury officials by a contractor that runs a threat intelligence center for Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, said that DOGE’s access to the payment network should be “immediately” suspended. It also urged Treasury to scour the payments system for any changes approved by affiliates of DOGE, which is overseen by billionaire Elon Musk, the correspondence shows. DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency.

A Treasury employee told The Post that the threat center is run by Booz Allen Hamilton, a large federal contractor. The company confirmed it runs the threat center, which it said is embedded within Treasury.

Late Friday, after this article appeared, Booz Allen said it had “removed” a subcontractor who wrote the warning and would seek to retract or amend it. “The draft report was prepared by a subcontractor to Booz Allen and contained unauthorized personal opinions that are not factual or consistent with our standards,” company spokesperson Jessica Klenk said. Booz Allen won more than $1 billion in multiyear U.S. government contracts last year.

In a separate communication a week ago, a high-ranking career official at Treasury also raised the issue of risks from DOGE access in a memo to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, including the potential breach of information that could lead to exposure of U.S. spies abroad, according to five people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect government deliberations. The memo included recommendations to mitigate risks, which Bessent approved, said another person familiar with the matter, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity.

And while the focus at Treasury has been on eugenicist Marko Elez, whom Elon has pushed to be reinstated, closer scrutiny into Edward “Big Balls” Coristine — who is at OPM and possibly HHS — has described he has ties to hackers. Brian Krebs, who was targeted by some people in that crowd, described screen shots that suggest Coristine may have been fired for leaking internal documents to a competitor.

Wired noted that Coristine only worked at Path for a few months in 2022, but the story didn’t mention why his tenure was so short. A screenshot shared on the website pathtruths.com includes a snippet of conversations in June 2022 between Path employees discussing Coristine’s firing.

According to that record, Path founder Marshal Webb dismissed Coristine for leaking internal documents to a competitor. Not long after Coristine’s termination, someone leaked an abundance of internal Path documents and conversations. Among other things, those chats revealed that one of Path’s technicians was a Canadian man named Curtis Gervais who was convicted in 2017 of perpetrating dozens of swatting attacks and fake bomb threats — including at least two attempts against our home in 2014.

And Krebs provides chatlogs showing some of Coristine’s former associates are taking notice.

The Com is the English-language cybercriminal hacking equivalent of a violent street gang. KrebsOnSecurity has published numerous stories detailing how feuds within the community periodically spill over into real-world violence.

When Coristine’s name surfaced in Wired‘s report this week, members of The Com immediately took notice. In the following segment from a February 5, 2025 chat in a Com-affiliated hosting provider, members criticized Rivage’s skills, and discussed harassing his family and notifying authorities about incriminating accusations that may or may not be true.

Bloomberg matched Krebs’ reporting on the reason for Coristine’s firing from Path.

“Edward has been terminated for leaking internal information to the competitors,” said a June 2022 message from an executive of the firm, Path Network, which was seen by Bloomberg News. “This is unacceptable and there is zero tolerance for this.”

A spokesperson for the Arizona-based hosting and data-security firm said Thursday: “I can confirm that Edward Coristine’s brief contract was terminated after the conclusion of an internal investigation into the leaking of proprietary company information that coincided with his tenure.”

Afterward, Coristine wrote that he’d retained access to the cybersecurity company’s computers, though he said he hadn’t taken advantage of it.

“I had access to every single machine,” he wrote on Discord in late 2022, weeks after he was dismissed from Path Network, according to messages seen by Bloomberg. Posting under the name “Rivage,” which six people who know him said was his alias, Coristine said he could have wiped Path’s customer-supporting servers if he’d wished. He added, “I never exploited it because it’s just not me.”

Bloomberg tied Coristine’s past even more closely to organized abuse campaigns.

JoeyCrafter was a member of Telegram groups called “Kiwi Farms Christmas Chat” and “Kiwi Farms 100% Real No Fake No Virus,” both referencing an online forum known for harassment campaigns. Typically, the site has been used to share the personal information of a target, encouraging others to harass them online, in-person, over the phone or by falsely alerting police to a violent crime or active shooter incident at their home.

This is the kind of DOGE boy Elon has thrown at government networks — and thus far, Republicans don’t seem to give a damn that Trump has given these DOGE [sic] boys access to data on virtually all Americans, employee or no.

One thing is clear, however: There’s not a shred of evidence these boys are doing what Elon claims they’re doing.

Most of these new facts — the seeming proof that OPM isn’t doing what it claimed, the insider threat warning, the ties to hackers — are not in the AGs’ suit. And by the time the suits catch up to the facts, the complaints may look quite different.

Update: Corrected that none of the OPM plaintiffs are employees of US Courts (though they did get an email).

Some of the Ways Trump’s Immigrant Invader Damaged America in Just Two Weeks

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I think one effect of Trump’s attempt to wow journalists with the appearance of action is to hide how many major fuck-ups and failed promises Trump has had in his first two weeks (like the serial confession that Trump and Stephen Miller lied to voters about how many criminal aliens there are and Trump’s equivocations about multiple of the tariffs he will set).

But one locus of many of the worst failures comes from this unelected immigrant.

Among the things that African immigrant Elon Musk has done in the last few weeks was:

Forced FAA’s head, Michael Whitaker, out days before a fatal crash. As the Verge explained, Elon took Whitaker out because he deigned to regulate Musk’s companies.

But Musk’s efforts to get Whitaker were well known even before Trump’s victory in November. He has complained many times about the FAA, lashing out in September after the agency levied a $633,000 fine for launching missions with unapproved changes. (Musk is worth over $400 billion, making him the richest man in the world.)

The FAA has also fined Starlink, after the SpaceX subsidiary failed to submit safety data before launching satellites in 2022. In a House hearing, Whitaker explained that the FAA’s civil penalties were “the only tool we have to get compliance on safety matters.”

On X, Musk complained that the FAA was “harassing SpaceX about nonsense that doesn’t affect safety while giving a free pass to Boeing even after NASA concluded that their spacecraft was not safe enough to bring back the astronauts.” He also claimed that humans would never land on Mars without “radical reform at the FAA.” In September, he wrote “he needs to resign” about Whitaker.

Elon also pushed out the guy who manages America’s checkbook, David Lebryk, in whom a lot of the confidence of investors and businessmen is invested.

The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department is departing after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.

David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades, announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues obtained by The Washington Post. President Donald Trump named Lebryk as acting secretary upon taking office last week. Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.

Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration.

[snip]

Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.

Musk’s flunkies, including one 18-year old with only a high school diploma, have also been installed in the Office of Personnel Management [corrected] — the government’s HR department.

Sources within the federal government tell WIRED that the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—essentially the human resources function for the entire federal government—are now controlled by people with connections to Musk and to the tech industry. Among them is a person who, according to an online résumé, was set to start college last fall.

Scott Kupor, a managing partner at the powerful investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, stands as Trump’s nominee to run the OPM. But already in place, according to sources, are a variety of people who seem ready to carry out Musk’s mission of cutting staff and disrupting the government.

Amanda Scales is, as has been reported, the new chief of staff at the OPM. She formerly worked in talent for xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, according to her LinkedIn. Before that, she was part of the talent and operations team at Human Capital, a venture firm with investments in the defense tech startup Anduril and the political betting platform Kalshi; before that, she worked for years at Uber. Her placement in this key role, experts believe, seems part of a broader pattern of the traditionally apolitical OPM being converted to use as a political tool.

Sources say that Riccardo Biasini, formerly an engineer at Tesla and most recently director of operations for the Las Vegas Loop at the Boring Company, Musk’s tunnel-building operation, is also at the OPM as a senior adviser to the director. (Steve Davis, the CEO of the Boring Company, is rumored to be advising Musk on cuts to be made via DOGE and was integral in Musk’s gutting of Twitter, now X, after his takeover of the company in 2022.)

According to the same sources, other people at the top of the new OPM food chain include two people with apparent software engineering backgrounds, whom WIRED is not naming because of their ages.

One thing they’ve done is set up a government-wide email function.

Last week, many federal workers received test emails from the email address [email protected]. In a lawsuit filed last night, plaintiffs allege that a new email list started by the Trump administration may be compromising the data of federal employees.

In their attempts to set up agency- and government-wide emails, Elon’s unelected bureaucrats seem to have taken security filters off at least NOAA’s email system, resulting in noxious spam being sent.

After setting up the government-wide email, someone sent out an email similar to the one Elon sent out when he gutted Xitter, attempting to fool government workers into accepting something misleadingly labeled a buy-out, one not authorized by statute or appropriation.

In a separate email sent on Tuesday entitled “Fork in the Road,” most federal workers were effectively offered an eight-month severance package to leave their jobs, simply by sending [email protected] a message with the word “Resign” in the subject line between now and February 6. Military personnel, postal workers, and national-security and immigration officials are not eligible.

The executive branch has no authority from Congress to offer a mass buyout to federal workers. In fact, the OPM website clearly states that the limit for incentive packages for voluntary resignations is $25,000, far less than eight months’ pay for the average federal worker. Some employees can’t even be offered that.

The way OPM purports to get around this is by defining this as “deferred resignation.” The resignation of the federal worker would be set at September 30, and they will retain full pay and benefits until then and be exempt from return-to-office requirements that are part of one of the Trump executive orders. (This is also a way to not unlawfully reduce salary outlays in federal appropriations for the current fiscal year.) “I understand my employing agency will likely make adjustments in response to my resignation including moving, eliminating, consolidating, reassigning my position and tasks, reducing my official duties, and/or placing me on paid administrative leave until my resignation date,” reads the sample resignation letter. In this sense it is just a future setting of an end date of employment, though the strong implication is that those employees will have nothing to do for the next eight months.

[snip]

This was an Elon Musk operation, through and through. In fact, the “Fork in the Road” email had the same title as one that Elon Musk sent to Twitter when he took over there, informing workers to be “extremely hardcore” or take the resignation offer. The Twitter emails even included the same ask of workers to reply with their decision.

All this access — and almost certainly, some shitty AI — is where the big lie Karoline Leavitt told in her first presser came from.

MS. LEAVITT: There was notice. It was the executive order that the president signed.

There’s also a freeze on hiring, as you know; a regulatory freeze; and there’s also a freeze on foreign aid. And this is a — again, incredibly important to ensure that this administration is taking into consideration how hard the American people are working. And their tax dollars actually matter to this administration.

You know, just during this pause, DOGE and OMB have actually found that there was $37 million that was about to go out the door to the World Health Organization, which is an organization, as you all know, that President Trump, with the swipe of his pen in that executive order, is — no longer wants the United States to be a part of. So, that wouldn’t be in line with the president’s agenda.

DOGE and OMB also found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza. That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money.

Jesse Watters picked up Leavitt’s lie, which in turn led Trump to parrott Watters’ expanded version of it.

It’s possible flunkies installed by African immigrant Elon Musk mistook Africa for the Middle East (of which only Jordan gets contraceptives), because Africa receives condoms from the US (as part of the important PEPFAR anti-AIDS program that even Republican Senators were demanding be resumed when it got shut down).

And this is just what we already know! While it hasn’t been confirmed, I’d bet a good deal of money that Elon’s flunkies were behind shutting down the Medicaid portals early in the week, something that affected health care for people throughout the country.

It has been spectacular failure after failure.

And many of them were directly caused by the immigrant demanding that we get rid of unelected bureaucrats taking democracy away.

Confirming Kash Patel Will Get Senators “Drug through the Streets”

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When Kash Patel boosted the J6 Choir claiming the video of those housed in DC Jail in March 2023 was proof of a two-tier system of justice, he was suggesting that someone who brought a crowbar — which he called a “weapon” — to the Capitol while promising to drag members of Congress through the streets, then assaulted cops protecting Congress, should not be detained while awaiting trial for assaulting cops.

That’s the significance of Ryan Nichols’ inclusion in the footnote Jack Smith put in his report, listing the identities of some of the J6 Choir members Trump had endorsed.

Nichols was in jail because of the threats he posed to members of Congress.

I’m hearing that Pence just caved. I’m hearing reports that Pence caved. I’m telling you if Pence caved, we’re gonna drag motherfuckers through the streets. You fucking politicians are going to get fucking drug through the streets. Because we’re not going to have our fucking shit stolen. We’re not going to have our election or our country stolen. If we find out you politicians voted for it, we’re going to drag your fucking ass through the streets. Because it’s the second fucking revolution and we’re fucking done. I’m telling you right now, Ryan Nichols said it. If you voted for fucking treason, we’re going to drag your fucking ass through the streets. So let us find out, let the patriots find out that you fucking treasoned this country. We’re gonna drag your fucking ass through the street. You think we’re here for no reason? You think we patriots are here for no reason? You think we came just to fucking watch you run over us? No. You want to take it from us, motherfucker we’ll take it back from you.

And even then, he didn’t remain in prison for the period before he pled guilty.

Nichols challenged his treatment in the DC jail, complaining about the seizure of his discovery and claiming that his incarceration was exacerbating his known PTSD diagnosis. He was further involved in an altercation in September 2022, after which he was segregated, then moved to another facility. He had repeated diagnosis issues with his health care. So in November 2022, Judge Thomas Hogan released Nichols from custody, and he remained out until he pled guilty on November 7, 2023.

But ultimately, Reagan appointee Royce Lamberth sentenced Nichols to what would have been three more years in prison — a total of 63 months and (because Nichols refused to cooperate with Probation on his finances) a record $200,000 fine, one the pardon will presumably wipe away entirely.

Nichols blamed his untreated PTSD for his actions. But Nichols’ sentencing memo revealed a 2019 arrest for assault causing bodily harm that resulted in diversion, one that belies his defense attorney claim he had never been violent before January 6. And prosecutors’ sentencing memo raised all the conspiracy claims Nichols made — many of the same claims that Kash Patel has made about him and others — raising some question about his remorse for his actions.

In addition, although Nichols “agreed with the conduct described in the Statement of Offense” in his presentence interview, PSR ¶ 50, in a post circulated after the plea hearing, members of Nichols’ defense team refers to him as a “political prisoner.” Exhibit J (Substack blog post authored by defense team law clerk present at counsel table for the plea hearing titled “Ryan Nichols: Political Prisoner Of His Own Country”); see also Exhibit K (GiveSendGo page titled “Free My Patriot Prisoner” with messages attributed to Nichols, his wife, and his father prior to the defendant’s plea). Even prior to Nichols entering his plea, his attorney was tweeting statements that directly contradicted the statement of offense in this case. See Exhibit M (October 30, 2023, twitter post from Nichols’ lead counsel).12 These statements threaten “public trust in the rule of law and the criminal justice system [, which] is paramount in the context of January 6 cases.” United States v. Nester, 22-cr-183 (TSC), ECF No. 113 at 6 (internal citation omitted). While the government does not attribute counsel’s statements to the defendant himself (nor does it base its recommendation on such bombastic rhetoric), this Court must appropriately assess whether the defendant has independently accepted responsibility for his criminal conduct. Pleading guilty is not simply the same as accepting the consequences and showcasing remorse under these trying and unique circumstances.

12 The government also notes that, in the months leading up to his plea, Nichols was claiming in public court filings that, in effect, “shadowy teams of plainclothes government agents orchestrated the attack [on the Capitol], leaving a far larger number of innocent Americans to take the fall.” ECF 266 (Order Denying Defendant’s Motion for Disclosure) at 13; see also ECF 244 (Motion for Disclosure), 245 (Supp. Motion for Disclosure), and ECF 251 (Reply to Government’s Opposition to Motion for Disclosure)

The sentence Judge Lamberth imposed in May 2022, 63 months, was about 75% of the government ask of 83 months. While Nichols had a lot of heartfelt things to say about his actions, Judge Lamberth noted that Jan6ers had repeatedly reneged on their statements of remorse, which the recent statements laid out in the government sentencing motion addressed.

Importantly, Nichols himself noted that the solitary confinement to which he was subjected was a COVID protocol, not anything specifically targeting Jan6ers.

I spent months in solitary confinement for 23 to 32-plus hours at a time due to COVID protocols, only allowed out for one hour to shower or make a phone call just to be locked in that 10-by-7-foot cell for another 23 to 32-plus hours at a time. Mental torture is an understatement. I heard grown men screaming and crying out for their mothers, me included. Many nights, I cried myself to sleep. With no court dates, no discovery, and no ending in sight, I felt hopeless and my mental health spiraled out of control. Eventually, I decided that, maybe, I needed to seek professional help. I put in a mental health request, and two weeks later I was back on Zoloft. Though this certainly helped control my mind and get my emotional imbalance in alignment, the solitary confinement was still overwhelming.

And he expressed empathy with the incarceration of people of color.

Your Honor, I know, after almost two-and-a-half years of incarceration, how terrible jail and prison is. The entire atmosphere is violent, dark, and unforgiving. For the majority of my life, I’ve heard, but never been able to empathize with, people of color when they testified to the harsh environment and treatment within the jail and the prison system. Make no mistake, I am now a witness to their testimony. Being in jail and prison is a living hell of eternal separation from the light. Sometimes it feels like not even God himself can penetrate those walls.

Nichols’ PTSD and other maladies did make incarceration onerous. The DC jail treated him just as shitty as it treats everyone else. And he was released because of it.

But that’s not a proof of a two-tier system of justice. That’s proof that America’s prisons suck, and that Jan6ers had more success in using that to get released than others.

Ultimately, though, Patel is claiming that one can get in your truck with guns in the back, drive to DC, threaten to drag people like Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley through the streets because they certified Joe Biden’s win, spray cops with toxic chemicals, and then call on the mob to grab more weapons to break into the Capitol, and not be assigned to pre-trial detention. That’s what Nichols did: He directly threatened Senators, both Republicans and Democrats. The notion that Nichols was improperly detained suggests one can assault cops after threatening the members of Congress they’re protecting with impunity.

And that’s what the aspiring FBI Director has said: that people can threaten to assault the very people who are rushing to confirm him with impunity.

Trump’s Slop and Ouch First Week

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Trump’s failson practically wet himself with a Tweet bragging about what CIA Director John Ratcliffe accomplished on his first day at the office.

Given John Brennan’s 2023 testimony that stood by the opinion expressed in the letter, Jr’s claim he “lied” may well be legally actionable (and Brennan said then, as he did the other day, that the only reason he retained his clearance was for intelligence officials to be able to consult with him). Plus, many if not most of the people from whom Ratcliffe “strip[ped] security clearances” didn’t have them; the most impotent kind of signaling possible. But it worked for Trump’s failson!

Jr also makes a big deal of the fact that John Ratcliffe, without explaining the meaning of a “low confidence” assessment, released a report that his predecessor, William Burns, ordered up.

Jr was, like mediocre men are wont to do, grading Ratcliffe on a curve. And that was his idea of a big win.

Trump has overtly pitched a claim he’s engaged in Shock and Awe (and, given the widespread adoption of the term, seems to be pushing a similar campaign to the press). While the attention on Trump’s attack on rule of law and marginalized people is absolutely merited, in addition to wowing a captive press, Trump’s declaration of Shock and Awe has shifted the focus away from ways that Trump has affirmatively hurt Americans, including, undoubtedly, a great number of his own supporters, what I’m dubbing his Slop and Ouch campaign.

Trump halt on NIH funding literally shut down cancer treatment already in process (ironically, since Trump claimed he was attacking Joe Biden’s “cancer” when signing many of his Executive Orders). Cancer doesn’t doesn’t discriminate against MAGAts. Shutting down cancer trials may literally be taking away a Trump’s supporter’s latest hope of a cure.

Trump’s attacks on Biden’s efforts to lower drug prices may lead to higher costs for generic prices and could even lead to higher prices for diabetes drugs (setting aside any impact threatened tariffs on Denmark would have on Ozempic prices).

Trump reversed access to wind power, which has become cheaper than fossil fuels. This will force American consumers to pay more for dirtier fuel. Foreign competitors are already licking their lips about the competitive advantage it gives them.

Trump’s attack on programs focused on environmental justice will harm poor rural communities.

And after spending four years declaring one after another infrastructure week only to have Joe Biden deliver it right away, Trump is threatening the funding for bridge and road projects already underway. He’s taking away what he promised — but failed to deliver — during his first term.

His rescission of job offers throughout government (though Veterans groups were able to get a reversal on VA care) has left thousands stuck with their lives in limbo, with movers arriving but no job to move to on the other end.

Trump’s attack on public health even as Avian Flu threatens to snowball will exacerbate the already increasing price of eggs — which Trump himself made a key campaign plank.

And because he is choosing to pursue his deportation policy in the stupidest way possible, it is creating problems. HCI detained three people in a Newark raid with out a warrant, reportedly including a Puerto Rican and a veteran. And Mexico refused a landing request for a deportation flight on a military plane (it accepted four others that were on chartered flights, which cost less to run and may have greater capacity; also, Colombia has since blocked a military transport flight); military flights to Guatemala avoided Mexican airspace, suggesting Mexico refused overflight requests as well. Trump is also claiming repatriation flights are instead deportation flights in false claims that he’s delivering on his promise of mass deportation. And the single stay stats many are boasting about aren’t higher than some days during 2022. Despite his claims of Shock and Awe, Trump has had to lie to support his claims he succeeded in doing the one thing he has prioritized most.

And all that’s before the inflationary effect of deporting those who pick America’s food and build her homes.

None of this takes away from the grave damage Trump did in his first week, particularly to those like Trans people and migrants he is trying to treat as unpersons.

I don’t mean to minimize the ways this is going to get far worse. It will get far worse. It will devastate the lives of a lot of vulnerable people.

There’s nothing good about the fact that, in addition to all the people Trump has deliberately targeted for cruelty, Trump has also inflicted real damage on his own supporters. But it’s a sign of one direction where this could head, particularly as a dumbing down of government hires in favor of sycophants starts degrading efficacy.

An ideology that places grievance above all else — an ideology that is willing to hurt America if that’s what it takes to reverse the successes of the Biden Administration — is an ideology guaranteed to impose pain far beyond those targeted for spectacle and cruelty.

Underneath Trump’s Shock and Awe that is doing grave damage to the Constitution and Trump’s marginalized targets, there’s a Slop and Ouch that targets everyone this side of his billionaire friends. And that needs to remain visible, too.

The Stephen Miller EOs

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At least in response to questioning from journalists yesterday, Trump had — or feigned — a very limited understanding of some of the Executive Orders he has signed in the last two days. For example, he couldn’t explain why he had pardoned Danny Rodriguez, who nearly killed Michael Fanone. And he explained the Enrique Tarrio pardon by pointing to the Proud Boy leader’s burning of a BLM flag, which (along with his attempted possession in DC of unlawful weapons) was punished separately from Tarrio’s seditious attack on the Capitol.

With Trump, one should always start with the assumption he’s engaged in a con, but it really is possible he only vaguely understands some of what he just signed.

That, plus the number of typos and other sloppy errors commentators have noted in the EOs, makes me wonder whether Stephen Miller drafted everything and decided, in real time, which Executive Orders to hand to Trump to sign, like a gamer might deploy his favorite Magic Card deck. In a piece on Vivek Ramaswamy’s purge from DOGE [sic], for example, WaPo reveals that, “Draft executive orders favored by Musk were implemented, and those put forward by Ramaswamy’s team that Musk had ignored in recent weeks are unlikely to be issued.” Who knows? Maybe there’s even an EO with all the January 6 pardons that only commuted the sentences of those who assaulted cops or were deemed to be terrorists, rather than granting (in many cases) full pardons.

There are at least two Executive Orders that have Stephen Miller’s name all over them which deserve closer scrutiny: One claiming to “restor[e] freedom of speech and end[] federal censorship,” and another claiming to end[] the weaponization of the federal government.”

Both have the same structure. They order the Attorney General (and the Director of National Intelligence, in the weaponizing EO) to go chase down conspiracy theories spawned by Jim Jordan: that the Federal government is infringing on free speech and weapon or targeting Joe Biden’s opponents. Here’s how it looks in the latter case:

The Department of Justice even jailed an individual for posting a political meme. And while the Department of Justice has ruthlessly prosecuted more than 1,500 individuals associated with January 6, and simultaneously dropped nearly all cases against BLM rioters.

[snip]

(a) The Attorney General, in consultation with the heads of all departments and agencies of the United States, shall take appropriate action to review the activities of all departments and agencies exercising civil or criminal enforcement authority of the United States, including, but not limited to, the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission, over the last 4 years and identify any instances where a department’s or agency’s conduct appears to have been contrary to the purposes and policies of this order, and prepare a report to be submitted to the President, through the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and the Counsel to the President, with recommendations for appropriate remedial actions to be taken to fulfill the purposes and policies of this order.

(b) The Director of National Intelligence, in consultation with the heads of the appropriate departments and agencies within the Intelligence Community, shall take all appropriate action to review the activities of the Intelligence Community over the last 4 years and identify any instances where the Intelligence Community’s conduct appears to have been contrary to the purposes and policies of this order, and prepare a report to be submitted to the President, through the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and the National Security Advisor, with recommendations for appropriate remedial actions to be taken to fulfill the purposes and policies of this order. The term “Intelligence Community” has the meaning given the term in section 3003 of title 50, United States Code. [my emphasis]

These orders will give Pam Bondi cover to conduct an investigation without the predicate otherwise required, and do so outside the normal institutions (like DOJ’s Inspector General and DOJ and FBI’s Offices of Professional Responsibility; to say nothing of Trump-appointed judges who already debunked the EO’s claim about selective prosecution of January 6ers) that afford targets some due process.

The scope of this review is very strictly the last four years. Thus, it will exclude a great deal of weaponization Bill Barr engaged in (including the Brady side channel via which Joe Biden was criminally framed) and even every single one of the notices regarding misstatements about voting means, time, or location that Barr’s DOJ authorized in the 2020 election, which were one main focus of the Twitter Files. It will ignore that the investigation into Douglass Mackey — the reference to an individual who posted a political meme, above — in chatrooms to which Stephen Miller was, at the very least, adjacent (and Don Jr was in), was almost entirely conducted during the first Trump Administration.

It will likewise exclude the far greater threats to free speech going forward. Donald Trump’s threat to send Mark Zuckerberg to prison for the rest of his life? Issued before Trump returned to government. Brendan Carr demanding that CBS platform right wingers, while ignoring Fox’s production of exclusively right wing content? Officially government, as of Monday, but therefore outside the scope of the four year review. And Stephen Miller coaxing Zuckerberg to making his platforms amenable to genocide again? Not yet a government action.

Take special notice, too, that the SEC and FTC are included among the agencies where Bondi is instructed to go find weaponization. Again, that picks up a Jim Jordan crusade, one targeted at regulatory agencies holding Elon Musk accountable for agreements the company he bought had already entered into, to say nothing of Elon’s efforts to tank Xitter’s own stock. Sure, some of this is Miller’s means to undermine the legitimacy of the January 6 investigation, but it’s also a personal sop to the richest man in the world.

And after Pam Bondi conducts an investigation into things that aren’t crimes via means that evade normal due process? She writes a report and gives it to … Stephen Miller, who among other things has been cultivating first Elon and then Zuck to platform Nazis.

When Jim Jordan conducted these crusades, he was shielded by Speech and Debate from adhering to basic facts. These EOs are an attempt to create space for Bondi to similarly escape the kinds of evidentiary rules and basic due process that limited Trump’s prior attempts to target his enemies.

If they find something, Miller will feed them to Trump to make issue of. If they don’t (there are few real complaints about the January 6 investigation, aside from the shitty DC jail and difficulties created by COVID; and for much of Biden’s term, the agencies of interest to Miller for engaging in government speech were constrained by lawsuits by Miller’s allies), then Miller can just burn the report in the same fireplace Mark Meadows use to use.

In other words, these two EOs (I’m sure there are other similar ones) claim to attack the politicization of government by ordering Pam Bondi to politicize DOJ.

Trump Puts Violent Criminals Back on the Streets

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Somehow, the headlines describing that Trump pardoned most of those convicted or charged for January 6 forgot to mention hundreds of them were convicted of violent assaults on cops.

The grant of clemency is actually somewhat interesting. Contrary to reports, almost everyone got pardoned. The exceptions — those whose sentences were commuted, rather than pardoned, are many of the top Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.

  • Stewart Rhodes
  • Kelly Meggs
  • Kenneth Harrelson
  • Thomas Caldwell
  • Jessica Watkins
  • Roberto Minuta
  • Edward Vallejo
  • David Moerschel
  • Joseph Hackett
  • Ethan Nordean
  • Joseph Biggs
  • Zachary Rehl
  • Dominic Pezzola
  • Jeremy Bertino

But the list is inconsistent. For example, Jeremy Bertino cooperated against the others (but has not yet been sentenced). He got a pardon with everyone else. But others (like Joshua James, who pled guilty to sedition) who cooperated are not on this list, and as a result will get a full pardon.

If this were reported correctly, it would exacerbate the anger a good number of Trump allies must feel right now: A number of Republicans, including even Mike Johnson, spoke out against pardoning the violent cop assailants. Trump ignored them all.

Ah well, I know it was a busy day, but you’d think you could get the headline right. Most of the people freed are not pre-trial defendants. They’re convicted criminals, hundreds for assaults on cops, many who pled guilty, just let out the door as one of Trump’s first acts as President.

Update: Trump put Ed Martin, someone involved in Stop the Steal, in charge of the DC US Attorney’s Office.

Update: In an Executive Order prioritizing the death penalty, Trump called for the death penalty for those who succeed in murdering cops.

(b) In addition to pursuing the death penalty where possible, the Attorney General shall, where consistent with applicable law, pursue Federal jurisdiction and seek the death penalty regardless of other factors for every federal capital crime involving:

(i) The murder of a law-enforcement officer; or

Yesterday, Danny Rodriguez was freed for nearly murdering Michael Fanone.

Trump also ordered DOJ to prioritize violent crime, like those committed by hundreds of the people he freed yesterday.

Sec. 6. Prosecuting Crime to Protect Communities. (a) The Attorney General shall appropriately prioritize public safety and the prosecution of violent crime, and take all appropriate action necessary to dismantle transnational criminal activity in the United States. [my empahsis]

Meanwhile, DOJ is issuing orders to halt the prosecution of people accused of violent crime.

I further direct the Attorney General to pursue dismissal with prejudice to the government of all pending indictments against individuals for their conduct related to the events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.  The Bureau of Prisons shall immediately implement all instructions from the Department of Justice regarding this directive. [my emphasis]

Update: Via Harry Dunn, here’s all the automated notices that Aquilino Gonell has gotten telling him that people he testified against — all of whom assaulted him — have been released.

Update: Elevating Critter7’s link to the most recent update from DC USAO on the investigation. It says 174 people were charged with using a deadly weapon or causing serious bodily harm to a cop.

  • Approximately 608 charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement agents or officers or obstructing those officers during a civil disorder, including approximately 174 defendants charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer;

[snip]

Of those who pled guilty to felonies, 172 pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement; 130 pleaded guilty to obstructing law enforcement during a civil disorder (riot); 69 pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement with a dangerous or deadly weapon; and 4 pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy– conspiring to use force against the United States. Some of these defendants pled guilty to one or multiple felony charges related to their conduct.

Found! Dozens of Damning Documents about Trump’s Hoarding of Classified Documents!

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In an interview with Marc Elias the other day, Dan Goldman made a number of alarming claims. He said that before the release of Jack Smith’s January 6 report, “we didn’t really know about … the extensive litigation that the Special Counsel had to go through just to get this evidence.” That is, Goldman admitted that he missed the unsealing, in October, of the very documents Jack Smith cited to describe that process (which I wrote about at the time). Goldman missed the opportunity to make a stink about this before the election.

Goldman also wondered “if Elon Musk and X, while he has owned it, has ever not cooperated in the same way [as they did in response to a warrant for Trump’s Twitter account] in a different case.” We know the answer to that: according to an opinion Chief Judge Boasberg unsealed (and first spotted by Kyle Cheney, who played a key role in liberating the Executive Privilege dispute), from January to March of last year, Xitter refused to turn over mere subscriber records in what sounds like a leak investigation.

Much later in the interview (after 19:00), Goldman said,

Volume Two of the report is going to provide a lot more information that we don’t know. The litigation in the January 6 case, including the memo outlining all of the evidence, has been so extensive that, as we see from Volume One, there really isn’t that much that we didn’t know. There was also an entire Congressional Committee that did this investigation. This has been exhaustively investigated. And yes they did get more evidence because they had grand jury power. They got more witnesses to speak than the January 6 Committee did. But we’ve known about that.

We know very little about what the back-and-forth was with the National Archives, the FBI, Donald Trump and his team, others. And one of the things that has jumped out at me in that case is that in one of the filings, the Department of Justice, Special Counsel, said, that there evidence includes why Donald Trump retained the information illegally, and what he was planning to do with it. [my emphasis]

From there, Goldman went on to call for Merrick Garland to dismiss the case, which I’m not sure Garland can do without some judge going along (which was the hold up in the Mike Flynn case).

Now, as I have laid out, Jack Smith eschewed the opportunity to make new information available in Volume One of the report. For example, he didn’t explain why an investigation into Trump’s fundraising and spending ended without charges. Based on what we’ve seen in Volume One, I doubt we’d get the kinds of details Robert Hur provided in his 388-page report, describing every document that wasn’t charged and why not. I doubt we’d learn why the FBI believed there was a tie between a grant of clemency for Roger Stone and a document, classified Secret, about Emmanuel Macron, both found in Donald Trump’s own desk drawer. I doubt we’d learn why Trump compiled low-level classified information into a document with messages from a book author, a religious leader, and a pollster.

And I doubt we’d learn what Trump was planning to do with those classified documents.

I want to see the report. But I doubt it’ll include what Goldman hopes it will.

But it is also the case that we have already gotten a great deal of additional information about the investigation.

It’s not the case, for example, that “we know very little about what the back-and-forth was with the National Archives, the FBI, Donald Trump and his team, others.” This filing describes that process at length, relying on both dozens of documents that Trump himself liberated and 302s from those involved, including a key White House Office of Records Management official and Mark Meadows. This section describes Meadows’ involvement, which (along with actions taken by a former Trump White House Counsel, probably Pat Philbin) led to the involvement of Biden White House Counsel Jonathan Su, the basis of Trump’s bogus claim that Biden’s White House pushed the investigation into Trump.

A succession of Trump PRA representatives corresponded with NARA without ever resolving any of NARA’s concerns about the boxes of Presidential records that had been identified as missing in January 2021. By the end of June 2021, NARA had still received no update on the boxes, despite repeated inquiries, and it informed the PRA representatives that the Archivist had directed NARA personnel to seek assistance from the Department of Justice (“DOJ”), “which is the necessary recourse when we are unable to obtain the return of improperly removed government records that belong in our custody.” Exhibit B at USA-00383980; see 44 U.S.C. § 2905(a) (providing for the Archivist to request the Attorney General to institute an action for the recovery of records). That message precipitated the involvement of Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff, who engaged the Archivist directly at the end of July. See Exhibit 4 Additional weeks passed with no results, and by the end of August 2021, NARA still had received nothing from Trump or his PRA representatives. Id. Independently, the House of Representatives had requested Presidential records from NARA, further heightening the urgency of NARA obtaining access to the missing boxes. Id. On August 30, the Archivist notified Trump’s former Chief of Staff that he would assume the boxes had been destroyed and would be obligated to report that fact to Congress, DOJ, and the White House. Id. The former Chief of Staff promptly requested a phone call with the Archivist. Id.

[snip]

Fall passes with little progress in retrieving the missing records. In September 2021, one of Trump’s PRA representatives expressed puzzlement over the suggestion that there were 24 boxes missing, asserting that only 12 boxes had been found in Florida. Exhibit 7 at USA00383682, USA-00383684. In an effort to resolve “the dispute over whether there are 12 or 24 boxes,” NARA officials discussed with Su the possibility of convening a meeting with two of Trump’s PRA representatives—the former Chief of Staff and the former Deputy White House Counsel—and “possibly” Trump’s former White House Staff Secretary. Id. at USA-00383682. On October 19, 2021, a call took place among WHORM Official 1, another WHORM employee, Trump’s former Chief of Staff, the former Deputy White House Counsel, and Su about the continued failure to produce Presidential records, but the call did not lead to a resolution. See Exhibit A at USA-00815672. Again, there was no complaint from either of Trump’s PRA representatives about Su’s participation in the call. Later in October, the former Chief of Staff traveled to the Mar-a-Lago Club to meet with Trump for another reason, but while there brought up the missing records to Trump and offered to help look for or review any that were there. Exhibit C at USA-00820510. Trump, however, was not interested in any assistance. Id. On November 21, 2021, another former member of Trump’s Administration traveled to Mar-a-Lago to speak with him about the boxes. Exhibit D at USA-00818227–USA-00818228. That individual warned Trump that he faced possible criminal exposure if he failed to return his records to NARA. Id

[my emphasis, links added]

Exhibit D, cited to support a description of a former Trump official who warned that Trump faced criminal exposure, links to this complete 302, from someone whose potty mouth resembles Eric Herschmann. It describes a bunch of things:

  • How on November 21, 2021, he warned Trump to give the documents back: “Don’t give them a noble reason to indict you, because they will.”
  • How a “total moron” who resembles Boris Epshteyn insinuated himself with Trump with claims of voter fraud and subsequently tried to use something, perhaps claims fed to credulous reporters that he was serving a legal function, to cover for his past activities ( a document Trump himself liberated shows call records between this person resembling Epshteyn and a person resembling Chief of Staff designate Susie Wiles).
  • A February 2022 call in which someone resembling Tom Fitton told Trump he didn’t have to send documents back because of Fitton’s “Clinton Socks” ruling,
  • A prediction that Walt Nauta would be pardoned if he were charged with lying to the FBI.

But it also describes an extended description of someone “unhinged” and “crazy” who first got access to the White House through the Member of Congress he worked for, who started the “declassified everything” claim when it first started appearing in the media, which is when Kash Patel made the claim.

Another dispute — about whether Jay Bratt threatened to retaliate against Stanley Woodward if he didn’t get Walt Nauta to cooperate — includes a long discussion about Kash’s testimony. It revealed how Kash tried to delay compliance with a grand jury subpoena indefinitely by hiring a lawyer already busy defending a January 6 seditionist, and when Kash did first testify, the aspiring FBI Director pled the Fifth repeatedly.

On Monday, September 19, 2022, the FBI personally served witness Kashyap “Kash” Patel with a grand jury subpoena, commanding him to appear on September 29, 2022. Prior to engaging with counsel, Patel contacted government counsel on Friday, September 23, 2022, to request a two-week extension. The government agreed to that extension and set his appearance for October 13, 2022. Thereafter, [Stan] Woodward contacted government counsel on September 27, 2022, explaining that he had just begun a lengthy jury trial–United States v. Rhodes et a., No. 22-cr-15 (D.D.C.)–but that Patel had retained him. On September 30, 2022, Woodward request an addition indefinite extension of Patel’s grand jury appearance until some point after the Rhodes trial concluded. (Ultimately, the verdict in the trial was not returned until November 29, 2022, approximately six weeks after Patel’s already-postponed appearance date of October 13, 2022.) The government was unwilling to consent to the indefinite extension that Woodward sought. Woodward, for his part, declined various alternatives offered by the government, including scheduling Patel’s grand jury appearance for Friday afternoons, when the Rhodes trial was not sitting, and a voluntary interview by prosecutors and agents over a weekend.

On October 7, 2022, Patel (through Woodward) filed a motion to quash his grand jury appearance, arguing that requiring Patel to appeal pursuant to the grand jury’s subpoena would violate his constitutional rights by depriving him of his counsel of choice, i.e., Woodward, who was occupied with a jury trial elsewhere in the courthouse. The Court denied the motion to quash on October 11, 2022, see In re Grand Jury No. 22-03 Subpoena 63-13, No. 22-gj-41, Minute Order (Oct. 11, 2022), and required Patel to appear as scheduled on October 13. See id. (“Mr Patel requests a delay of some unspecified time period in his testimony because his counsel, Stanley Woodward, will be engaged in the United States v. Rhodes trial, Case No. 22-cr-15, scheduled to last several weeks, with no promises as to when his counsel will still have time available. Mr. Patel retained Mr. Woodward on the attorney’s first day of jury selection in Rhodes when such circumstance made fully apparent that counsel would be unavailable during Mr. Patel’s scheduled grand jury testimony. In addition, the government has already demonstrated flexibility in meeting Patel’s scheduling needs . . . . Testifying before a grand jury is not a game of find-or-seek-a-better-time or catch-me-if-you-can, and a witness cannot indefinitely delay a proceeding based on his counsel’s convenience. . . .”).

Patel appeared before the grand jury on October 13, 2022, where he repeatedly declined to answer questions on the basis of the rights afforded to him by the Fifth Amendment. Thereafter, the government moved to compel Patel’s testimony. The Court granted the government’s motion to compel, contingent on the government offering statutory immunity. [my emphasis]

This is the same kind of extended discussion of the delays that Trump and his flunkies created that Goldman claimed, incorrectly, first became available in Volume One of Smith’s report.  And it (plus details of Tim Parlatore’s efforts to stall ongoing searches) has been public since April.

Other disputes provided a bunch more information, including pictures, of where and how Trump stored the documents he withheld, including one of this box, in which Trump was storing a document classified Formerly Restricted (that is, a document pertaining to nuclear weapons), along with nine other documents, underneath a Christmas pillow and some bubble wrap (I annotated the photo to show that the documents charged in Counts 12 through 21 were found in it).

Here are discussions of what was hidden under the bubble wrap.

I tried to put these pictures in context in this post and this post.

A passage in the 193-page 302 transcript from Chamberlain Harris (focusing on how she scanned documents including sensitive White House schedules) describes that the door to the storage closet had only the kind of lock you’d find in a residential bathroom — a pinhole they’d open with a tiny flat screwdriver.

Person 10 [Harris]: They used to unlock it for me, because you could lock it from the inside.

Mr. Thakur: Okay. This is obviously after a lock was placed there, they would unlock it for you?

Person 10: No, this was before.

Mr. Thakur: Okay. So are you talking about a lock to another door, or?

Person 10: It’s a door with a pinhole in it.

Mr. Thakur: A door with a pinhole?

Person 10: Like, I don’t know, a circle doorknob?

SA 41: Kind of like what you would find on residential door inside of a home? So it might have a lock like that one on one side of it then other side, rather than an actual place for a key, it’s sort of like a —

Person 10: Yeah.

SA 41: — very tiny screwdriver?

Person 10: Um-hmm.

SA 51: I see. But that was only on the inside of the door. So you — reasonably couldn’t lock it from the outside unless they used that little pin to reengage the lock from the outside?

Person 10: You would just lock it when you left.

Finally, also in April, we got both the interview transcript and grand jury transcript from Walt Nauta.

In other words, there’s far, far more that got released as part of litigation in the documents case than the January 6 case.

And Dan Goldman, whose job it is to oversee such investigations, seemingly knows about none of that: Not the description of how the aspiring FBI Director stalled the investigation. Not the document claiming that the “declassify everything” claim Kash first made was a lie. And not the description of the back-and-forth with NARA that Goldman says he wants.

It’s all there in the docket. And has been (for the most part) since April.

If you want to know how Democrats failed to make more of a political case against Trump during the election, you can start with the fact that Dan Goldman — one of the Democrats’ most forceful voices on rule of law, a former TV personality, and a member of the House Judiciary Committee — knows almost nothing about what was made public in either of the federal cases against Donald Trump and as a result did little to make a big deal of that before the election.