What Trump Might See in Lee Zeldin
Retaliation attack dog?
President Trump fired Pam Bondi as attorney general Thursday, just hours after reports began surfacing suggesting he may have informed her before his national address on Iran Wednesday night that she was being fired. She will be replaced for now by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, another former Trump personal lawyer. Several media outlets report that he could appoint the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, to permanently replace Bondi.
Trump has reportedly been angry with Bondi for several reasons for months, including how she handled the release of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s files. But her main source of frustration was that she had not made enough progress in investigating and prosecuting her alleged political enemies, NBC News reported.
According to him, that’s the role of the Justice Department, after all.
Specifically, he was reportedly frustrated with how she handled the impending release of records related to a decade-old investigation into Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat who has become one of Trump’s most vocal critics in the House and is running for governor of California. By Semafor:
Trump was also frustrated with Bondi because he believes she may have alerted California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell to the administration’s efforts to release files from an investigation into her relationship with a suspected Chinese spy, one of the sources told Semafor.
Bondi reportedly begged Trump to keep his job, but Trump considered the alleged offense unforgivable. The two reportedly had a “difficult” conversation on Wednesday evening and Trump confirmed reports of her firing in a Truth Social article on Thursday, saying she was leaving the administration for an unspecified job in the “private sector.” Other reports indicate she could be given another position in the administration or that Trump could appoint her as a judge. Regardless, he plans to appoint his EPA administrator to take over.
CNN reports that Zeldin and Trump have “remained close” since Zeldin lost his 2022 bid for New York governor to Democrat Kathy Hochul and left Congress. Zeldin made regular appearances at Mar-a-Lago during Trump’s campaign for the 2024 White House, according to CNN.
But Trump’s interest in tapping the EPA chief to replace Bondi could be rooted in more than camaraderie, if reports about the reason for Bondi’s firing are true — that she hasn’t made enough progress in Trump’s political revenge death march.
Zeldin demonstrated from the start of Trump’s second term that he was willing to use his position at the EPA to carry out Trump’s retaliatory work, whether it made sense or not. Let me unpack an episode from February last year that TPM covered closely. This was exactly when the Trump administration began to dissolve the long-standing firewall between the Justice Department and the White House, in a scandal that seems quaint by today’s standards.
Denise Cheung was a federal prosecutor in charge of the criminal division of the Washington, DCUS Attorney’s Office who offered her resignation to then-acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin after being pressured by Martin to open a grand jury investigation into a conspiracy theory pushed by Zeldin about Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency grants.
In his resignation letter, Cheung said there was not enough evidence to open an investigation into Zeldin’s belief that the Biden administration’s EPA improperly distributed climate funds to nonprofits before the start of Trump’s presidency. When he took over as head of the EPA, Zeldin immediately moved to cancel some $20 billion in grants already allocated to climate projects by President Biden’s EPA. At the time, he said he discovered evidence in an “extremely disturbing video” that he said suggested the funds were improperly paid into bank accounts at the end of Biden’s term. In fact, the video shows a former Biden-era EPA employee talking about distributing climate funding to “nonprofits, states and tribes” before Trump returned to office.
The video was directed and produced by none other than Project Veritas, a known purveyor of misinformation and conspiracy theories. It was also the only purported evidence used by Zeldin to justify his decision to freeze $20 billion in climate subsidies and demand an investigation.
It appears those demands were abandoned with Cheung’s resignation — or perhaps later, with Martin’s ouster — but Zeldin managed to keep those $20 billion in climate funds frozen for more than a year while lawsuits over Zeldin’s decision to cancel the funds remain tied up in court.
Trump: Federal government can’t fund social safety net because ‘we fight wars’
Congressional Republicans are salivating over another potential opportunity to cut welfare programs in order, they say, to fund Trump’s war in Iran — even though they don’t actually need to cut Medicaid to offset the costs of one-time spending, which Emine Yücel lays out here. Trump seems to agree with them.
In a speech to a private group gathered for an Easter lunch at the White House on Wednesday, Trump said it was “not possible” for the federal government to fund Medicaid, Medicare and other child care programs. He argued that states should actually “take care of” this funding themselves and that the federal government should continue to focus on military funds. Per NBC News:
He went on to say that he told Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget: “Don’t send money for child care, because America can’t take care of it. It has to be up to one state. We can’t take care of child care. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of child care. You have to let one state take care of daycare, and they should pay for that too.”
Nobody is safe
By The Guardian:
Donald Trump has privately asked Cabinet members in recent weeks whether he should replace his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, expressing frustration over protecting a former lawmaker who undermined his rationale for war with Iran, according to two people briefed on the discussions.
It’s not really surprising that Trump is also losing patience with Gabbard, who, in my opinion, went out of her way to make clear that she personally did not agree with many of Trump’s decisions regarding his war in Iran during her recent testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
You can read about it here: Gabbard distances herself from her own testimony on Iran.
In case you missed it
Morning memo: Trump: Bring Iran “back to the stone age where it belongs”
New edition of La Franchise released this afternoon: Democrats immediately sue to block Trump’s disturbing new ‘citizenship list’ executive order
TPM Coffee: What the difference between conspiracies and conspiracy theories tells us about American history and today
Yesterday’s most read story
Supreme Court Decides Who’s Really American in Blockbuster Arguments
What we read
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Chicago authorities warn of possible measles exposure at O’Hare
“What did he just say?” The Iranian Republican Party’s concerns grew after Trump’s speech.
