Trump Tantrum Led To Reversal on Law Firm Appeals
A lot has happened. Here are some of the things. This is the TPM Morning Memo.
“I never signed this”
Uh.
In the crazy world of the Trump II White House, you knew President Trump had to be the cause of last week’s humiliating Justice Department reversal of its appeal in the law firm’s executive orders cases. And now it’s confirmed.
In 24 hours, Pam Bondi’s Justice Department went from deciding to drop its appeal of the four law firm cases it lost to telling the appeals court… too bad.
The reversal came after Trump exploded over news reports that the administration would drop his appeals, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“I never signed that,” the president said, as quoted by the WSJ, during an outburst in the Oval Office over his displeasure with Justice Department leadership.
Trump then ordered White House officials to tell the Justice Department to reverse its decision, which White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed: “At the President’s direction, the Justice Department quickly amended this record. »
There has been much speculation about the exact sequence of events. Did the DOJ notify the White House in advance or was this independent work? Was the White House Counsel’s office involved from the start or did they fail to “manage” (an impossible task with Trump)? Did Trump know this in advance but changed his mind because he didn’t like the optics?
The new report doesn’t specifically answer these questions, but it suggests that the failure was due to the White House Counsel’s Office and West Wing aides, or at least that’s the DOJ’s view:
Before Trump’s intervention, senior department officials believed they had approval from the White House counsel’s office and top Trump aides to drop the case. But Trump himself was not informed of the decision, the people said, and has a long-standing modus operandi in legal matters: never voluntarily drop a case. Many other White House aides have wanted this problem to go away for months.
In the spectrum of Trump II’s depredations, this is another symptom of the underlying disease of the Justice Department, which is run out of the White House as President Trump’s personal attorney, not the Office of the President or the public trust it represents. The only silver lining may be that the clumsy and pathetic way the DOJ has behaved in this case is accelerating the slow awakening among judges on appeals courts to the reality of the Trump II threat.
Latest news from the Middle East…
- Although the pace of Iranian retaliatory strikes appears to be slowing, Iran has still managed to inflict substantial damage over the past 24 hours, including forcing Iraq to suspend all operations at its oil terminals, striking container ships off the coast of Iraq and Dubai, and targeting fuel tanks in Bahrain.
- The United States is responsible for a Tomahawk missile strike on a school in southern Iran, according to a US military investigation. The strike that killed at least 175 people, including many children, was the result of a “targeting error” based on old data, the New York Times reports.
- “The Iranian drone attack in Kuwait that killed six U.S. service members was more serious than previously revealed, with dozens of injuries including head trauma, shrapnel and burns,” reports CBS News.
- The conflict in Lebanon has left more than 600 dead, while Israel continues to fight against Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy.
The incompetence is astounding
Rushing to respond to the entirely predictable impact of his attack on Iran on global oil prices, President Trump made an impromptu policy announcement that the US government would support insurers transiting the Strait of Hormuz, but as the WSJ reports, the administration had no idea what it was proposing:
U.S. officials have been calling London insurers and brokers to try to understand how the market works, industry insiders said. Some received calls requesting confidential Lloyd’s market data that participants were reluctant to share.
Insurance market experts tell WSJ that insurers are still ready to provide shipping through the Strait of Hormuz but shippers, of course, are not ready to risk the lives of their crews.
OH MY EYES!
After Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s aides found photos taken of him during a March 2 briefing on the Iranian attack “unflattering,” they barred press photographers from attending his next two briefings, WaPo reports. So we’ve rounded up 10 choice photos of Hegseth that they don’t want you to see. Yeah, I don’t understand either.
Quote of the day
“In the past, propaganda served the purposes of war; today, war serves the purposes of propaganda.”John Gantz
The pace of mass deportations slows
Since the height of Operation Metro Surge, the torrent of emergency habeas cases has slowed significantly, from a peak of around 300 to 400 per day, from January 16 to February 17, to closer to 200 per day in early March, according to a Politico analysis that tracks with a separate NYT analysis the recent decline in immigration-related arrests. Even the new lower figure is “astonishing” compared to historical averages, Politico reports.
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