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Attention Deficit and Defiance Division of Labor: There’s Stuff Happening Where You’re Not Looking

Last week, I wrote a post about the five ways Trump is sabotaging America. Those included:

  • The original Project 2025 plan, an Orbanist plot to turn the US into an elected authoritarian government
  • DOGE [sic], which is often mistaken for Project 2025, but which is far more reckless and destructive and as such has created far more backlash than Project 2025 might otherwise have
  • Trump’s useful idiots, like the HHS Secretary who is barely responding to a Measles outbreak
  • The personalization of DOJ, protecting not only Trump, but also his favored criminals
  • Trump’s capitulation to Russia

As I’ve been puzzling through the, in my opinion, catastrophic distraction of Democratic in-fighting over how to respond to the SOTU, I came to realize one source of the general frustration. A lot of people still don’t understand there’s a natural division of labor in who should fight fascists how, one which is similar to those five areas of sabotage. As a result, there’s a demand that the national Democratic Party (appear to) take the lead on everything, a demand that invites those complaining to outsource their own agency completely, as if they simply hire people to do their politics for them every two or four years.

The demand that Hakeem Jeffries take the lead on issues that really aren’t central to his job breeds passivity and frustration and distracts from stuff being done by others better positioned to do so.

The national Dems are not the best suited for some of this, partly because civil society has more freedom and standing to sue, partly because within the Democratic party, local parties (and future candidates) should take the lead, and partly because polarization is going to be a big barrier to effective mobilization elsewhere. If a Black or Jewish Democrat from New York pushes an issue, those we need to mobilize will be far less likely to respond because their very identities have become defined in opposition to urban America (and all the euphemisms that entails). Moreover, the Democratic Party’s job is to shepherd legislation and win elections, and the fight against fascism is both broader than and more urgent than elections 20 months away.

I want to use this post to lay out what I mean by that, and also as a way to catalog some of what has been done, but also some areas where more needs to be done by precisely the kind of people who spent a week screaming at Democrats.

DOGE [sic]

I make a distinction here between combatting DOGE and other policy considerations. That’s true because — as has been true from the very start, civil society and Democratic Attorneys General and people who’ve been fired are better situated to fight DOGE in the courts, because they can get standing. On the legal front, there has been mixed success, with Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger giving up his termination challenge (but not before helping to save thousands of jobs and creating a precedent that reinforced other legal decisions) after an adverse ruling in the DC Circuit, but with others — most importantly two lawsuits representing USAID providers — surviving the first review from SCOTUS.

Tracking these lawsuits is as overwhelming for people as tracking the actual legal investigations into Trump was, with the result (I suspect) that people don’t see them. The good, the bad, and the promising — it’s all a blur. Plus, legal challenges are slow.

But we’re learning more and more from these lawsuits already, which is having a snowball effect, just a bit of which appears in this post (on this page, I’m tracking lawsuit declarations I find particularly interesting).

The most interesting developments this week may be several different lawsuits challenging DOGE on an Appointments Clause theory, basically that Elon is exercising the kind of authority that would require Senate confirmation.

New Mexico

Does 1-26

Japanse American Citizens

Because DOGE has been so disorganized, DOJ’s lawyers are being fed garbage to, in turn, feed courts in good faith. And then, over and over, Trump ends up saying things that debunk what the lawyers have been fed to say. Judges are beginning to get fed up, and are granting plaintiffs more discovery. Anna Bower has been tracking this Calvinball relentlessly.

The other civil society success — perhaps the biggest ones so far — are the calls, town halls, and protests that outside groups like Indivisible and Tesla Takedown have organized. These have significantly increased the discomfort of Republicans. While, thus far, that has led only to some pathetic meetings where they ask Elon to stop fucking everything up, the recent focus on the VA and Social Security may raise their discomfort further.

One thing that could be better organized, locally, would be to magnify the stories of those affected by DOGE cuts. As I said last week, rather than turning government workers into villains, DOGE had made the importance of government visible. And the people being arbitrarily and cruelly fired are the daughters and sons of communities that have a distorted understanding of government. This story-telling, done by word of mouth and local press, likely is better served if it has no overt tie to the Democratic party, because otherwise polarization may undercut the lessons of the firings. But it is the kind of thing that can be done in letters to the editor in local newspapers.

Journalists continue to track DOGE’s bullshit claims of savings (I’m attempting to track such debunkings here). Where we need to get better — and this is something people should do on calls to their members of Congress — is to emphasize the way Republicans have ceded the Federal government to Elon’s DOGE boys even though their claims of savings are fraudulent (to say nothing of the kind of past associations, such as ties to sketchy Russian NGOs, that would disqualify them in any half-serious background check). Think about ways to mock Republicans for being so stupid they keep falling for Elon’s bullshit claims, even as he confesses he keeps misplacing Ebola prevention and similar things.

Entitlements and Funding Government

DC Democrats have to do several things in the days — and it is just days — ahead. First, they have to optimize the outcome of a continuing resolution, either by withholding votes and making Republicans own a shutdown or by joining in a continuing resolution that limits Trump’s ability to ignore Congress’ appropriations (or better yet, adds weight to the legal challenges) going forward.

Republicans are attempting to get a year-long continuing resolution on their own. If they do, it’ll be a first, but could well be the source of contention going forward.

The other thing Democrats need to do is either save Medicaid (and Social Security) or make Republicans own any cuts too, as well as the tax cuts for people like Elon Musk. This provides the opportunity to sow dissension within the Republican party. Charles Gaba has calculations of how many people rely on Medicaid, by district, which can be useful when calling Members.

House Republicans only managed to pass a budget through a gimmick: by ordering House Energy and Commerce to come up with $880 billion in cuts, but without mentioning what those cuts will obviously be: Medicaid. But the Congressional Budget Office this week called that out, holding that the only way they can fulfill the terms of that budget is with the cuts they’ve tried to hide.

The math is impossible. And because it is impossible, Republicans will have a very hard time not taking each other out (or creating useful defections). Meanwhile, they’ll be doing that while justifying tax cuts for the richest man in the world.

Thus far, Trump’s threats have kept Republicans unified. But that may well break down in days ahead (and if it doesn’t, Democrats have to be prepared to make Republicans own the consequences).

DOJ

From the start, I’ve thought two things might lead the corrupt incompetence at DOJ to blow up on itself (on top of the aforementioned good faith lawyers being stuck telling fictions to courts). First, unless key lawyers were willing to tell really outrageous lies in court, reality would debunk many of the conspiracy theories that have been fueling right wing fever dreams for years. And second, their own conflicts would begin to blow up in their faces.

This week, Kash Patel had to quietly debunk a conspiracy theory that George Papadopoulos has been spinning for years, that a female Special Agent who was part of an effort to learn of his ties to Russia was a (sexual) honey pot.

Kash, now the boss of the Agent, had to defend her for simply doing her job.

More spectacularly, Pam Bondi bolloxed an effort to politicize the Jeffrey Epstein files, in part because she stupidly thought the White House wouldn’t worry about such releases, in part because she (unknowingly, apparently) released stuff that was already public, and in part because she created dissension among the propagandist ranks.

When more than a dozen MAGA-aligned activists and social media influencers gathered at the White House last week, they had no idea they were about to be handed binders titled “Epstein Files: Phase 1”– and neither did senior White House officials who organized the event, according to multiple sources familiar with the event.

Attorney General Pam Bondi and her team did not inform White House officials in advance that she planned to distribute the binders, which contained almost no new information regarding convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein — and now the move has ruffled feathers among those closest to President Donald Trump, including his senior White House staff, sources tell ABC News.

The move faced widespread criticism, not only from Democrats but also from some of the president’s most loyal supporters.

White House staff moved quickly to try and contain the fallout, privately reaching out to influencers who were critical of Bondi and the move online, according to sources.

Update, March 9: More on the way MAGAts are turning on Bondi.

There are a hundred ways reality — as documented in files to which Kash and Bondi now have unfettered access — conflicts with the conspiracy beliefs of these people. Unless they get better at managing expectations of the mob, we should expect similar embarrassing concessions in days ahead, concessions that piss off the most committed MAGAts and make them distrust their own.

More interesting are developments in the corruption of Emil Bove and Ed Martin.

Three entities asked for scrutiny of Bove for the way he coerced lawyers to dismiss the Eric Adams case when serving as Acting Deputy Attorney General (now that Todd Blanche has been confirmed on a party line vote, Bove becomes PADAG, basically the guy running DOJ day to day).  A group of ethics experts have asked Judge Dale Ho to consider Bove’s actions as he decides how to resolve that case. Jamie Raskin and Jasmine Crockett wrote Pam Bondi with a series of questions, including whether Bove destroyed evidence (the notes of a January 31 meeting). And Senate Judiciary Dems asked the NY Bar to conduct a misconduct inquiry into Bove. (At least one NGO already filed a bar complaint.)

Then, later in the week, Senate Judiciary Dems filed a bar complaint against Acting DC US Attorney Ed Martin for representing January 6 defendants at the same time as approving the dismissal of their cases. That, too, follows a previous bar complaint (filed in Missouri) for Martin’s conflicts. But (in addition to some of Martin’s other wildly partisan actions) it adds a bit: that Martin allegedly had private conversations with pro se January 6 defendant William Pope, who is still trying to get files he’s sure must exist; this is another conspiracy theory that may blow up in wildly interesting ways, now that Martin has access to all these files.

What I noticed the Court in ECF No. 391 was a completely true and factual statement regarding U.S. Attorney Ed Martin’s telling me that the files I now have are no longer considered sensitive for me to possess. However, since a dubious representative of the government, AUSA Jennifer Leigh Blackwell, is now claiming the opposite of what I truthfully reported to the Court in ECF No. 391 (while she is signing under Mr. Martin’s name), this is essentially a government attack on my integrity. Because AUSA Blackwell has attacked me and because the entirety of her filing (ECF No. 392) is so at odds with President Trump’s directive and the current policy of Department of Justice, I suspect she filed her own rogue and unhinged ranting rather than consulting the official position of the government and her boss, Ed Martin.

This is the kind of complaint that could be written on a near-daily basis about Martin. He recently wrote Georgetown Law imagining he could dictate what a private Catholic university teaches, which elicited a superb response. It’s the kind of thing that lefty pundits should be focused on instead of screaming at each other. It is far more urgent to make Ed Martin’s shenanigans an anvil around Pam Bondi’s DOJ than it is to fight about the stupidest way to distract from Trump imploding.

Plus, that’s not the only trouble Martin has caused.

In the early days of Trump’s attack on DEI, Trump’s flunkies adopted two claims from Elon: That the Biden Administration had misstepped when it appropriated $20 billion in funds to green lenders. And that New York City had spent $80 million on luxury hotels to house migrants.

I’ve already written about the former case: how Bove and Martin forced Denise Cheung out at DC USAO because she found a Project Veritas video insufficient evidence to obtain criminal process clawing back funds. Martin kept trying, in the kind of judge shopping that can really piss off judges. Meanwhile, Mark Zaid, who represents the guy in the PV video, says that his client had nothing to do with the disbursements that EPA has attempted to clawed back. Lee Zeldin is trying to get EPA’s Acting Inspector General to find him an excuse for all this now, which seems rather late given that funds have already been frozen. (Senate Dems also sent Zeldin a letter debunking his claims last month.)

Meanwhile, even as Judge Jennifer Rearden this week denied New York City’s bid to get the $80 million back while the two sides fight about it [docket], one of the people Kristi Noem fired and accused of acting unlawfully, Mary Comans, has sued.

That same day Defendant DHS publicly issued a press release falsely stating that Ms. Comans had been fired “for circumventing leadership to unilaterally make egregious payments for luxury NYC hotels for migrants.” The release also noted that “[u]nder President Trump and Secretary Noem’s leadership, DHS will not sit idly and allow deep state activists to undermine the will and safety of the American people.” Because of the issuance of the press release and other steps undertaken by the Defendants, Ms. Comans’ actions were widely, publicly and falsely condemned as “illegal” and “criminal” by rightwing influencers, to include Elon Musk, on various social media platforms and news outlets, such as shown below:

In a declaration Comans submitted on February 26 in the Does 1-26 suit, Mary Comans debunked much of what DHS has publicly claimed about the clawback, which means Comans’ lawsuit is likely to surface these issues. I had noticed this myself, but in between her healthy obsession about the lies the Administration tells about Elon’s role on DOGE, Anna Bower wrote it up here. Comans is also represented by Mark Zaid; you can support his work helping fired government workers tell the truth about what happened here.

Yesterday, Marisa Kabas reported that the top lawyer at FEMA was forced out, possibly because he refused to sign a declaration retconning this clawback.

Joshua Stanton had served as Acting Chief Counsel at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for less than one week when he was placed on administrative leave Wednesday and reportedly escorted out of the building. Why?

According to people at FEMA privy to the details of Stanton’s dismissal—which was first reported by me via Bluesky Wednesday afternoon—Stanton was asked sometime this week to write a memo stating that the mid-February seizure of $80 million from the city of New York meant for migrant shelters had legal justification; this was despite the fact that it almost certainly did not. The money that was taken back was lawfully obligated by FEMA pursuant to congressionally allocated funds. Stanton reportedly refused to write such a memo, The Handbasket has learned, and then he was put on leave. It’s not clear at this point if the refusal to write the memo is the reason he was placed on leave.

In other words, between the public ousters and and the problematic legal claims, Trump’s flunkies may soon find themselves unable to defend past false claims they made in ways that could blow up in spectacular fashion (as I’ve suggested, the same is true for Pete Marocco, who just got enjoined in an awesome new lawsuit, but I’ll come back to that).

Corruption

There’s one area that has always been difficult to grab a hold of: Trump’s corruption. There has always been so much that it’s hard to focus on any one bit. That’s been even more true now that Pam Bondi has made it clear she’ll never prosecute Trump for bribery. And it has been matched by Elon.

I’m going to catalog just some of the coverage from recent weeks.

First, Wired reported that in addition to all the known kickbacks Trump got before he became President (from tech executives and media outlets), he continues to engage in pay-to-play with a price tag of $5 million for a face-to-face meeting.

Business leaders can secure a one-on-one meeting with the president at Mar-a-Lago for $5 million, according to sources with direct knowledge of the meetings. At a so-called candlelight dinner held as recently as this past Saturday, prospective Mar-a-Lago guests were asked to spend $1 million to reserve a seat, according to an invitation obtained by WIRED.

[snip]

It’s unclear where the money is going and what it will be used for, but one source with direct knowledge of the dinners said “it’s all going to the library,” as in the presidential library that will ostensibly be built once Trump leaves office. MAGA Inc spent over $450 million to elect Trump in 2024, though Trump is not legally permitted to run for a third presidential term in 2028.

Also this week, Public Citizen started tracking what it calls “corporate clemency” — all the corporations whose legal troubles have been dismissed in bulk or specifically.

Now, just over one month into Trump’s second term, it’s clear that the permissive approach to corporate crime and misconduct is returning with a vengeance.

Whole categories of enforcement have come to a screeching halt, including:

  • All Consumer Financial Protection Bureau cases, seven of which the Trump administration has already moved to dismiss,
  • Justice Department cases brought by the Civil Rights and Environment and Natural Resource divisions, Investigations and cases under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and
  • Equal Employment Opportunity Commission cases defending transgender and gender non-conforming workers from workplace abuse and discrimination, six of which the administration has already moved to dismiss, and
  • An increasing number of Securities and Exchange Commission cases against cryptocurrency corporations, two of which have been paused and four of which the administration has moved to dismiss.

Meanwhile Forbes’ Zach Everson has been pulling at some strings on a Nasdaq-listed firm with suspect trading just before Don Jr and Eric Trump were named as advisors. He first laid out the trading pattern.

Between Feb. 12 and Dec. 29, 2024, trading in Dominari Holdings—a Nasdaq-listed firm that specializes in wealth management, investment banking, sales and trading, asset management and capital investment—averaged 11,500 shares a day, never exceeding 71,000 shares, with a price range of $1.10 to $3.20.

On Dec. 30, trading shot up to 358,000 shares, kicking off a surge that saw daily volume average 1.2 million shares a day through Feb. 10, 2025—when it skyrocketed to 23.7 million shares—as the stock price climbed from $0.83 to $6.50.

On Feb. 11, an hour before markets opened, Dominari Holdings announced that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump had joined its advisory board and acquired an undisclosed amount of shares in the company, sending the stock to a 52-week high of $11.33.

The price peaked at $13.58 two days later but has since fallen, closing at $6.74 on Tuesday.

Then Everson showed how little evidence there is that the board existed before Trump’s sons joined it.

[B]etween June 10, 2021, when the company was named AIkido Pharma, and Feb. 12, 2025, the day after the Trumps’ involvement was announced, Dominari Holdings did not submit a filing to the SEC on that mentioned an advisory board or board of advisors, except for references in the chief operating officer’s bio stating he had been a member for three months in 2022.

An online search failed to provide evidence of the advisory board’s prior existence: it is not mentioned on any website—including Dominari Holdings’ own—prior to Feb. 11, in a search on Google.

Dominari Holdings also did not file its advisory board agreement with the SEC until Feb. 12, a day after announcing the Trumps’ membership.

This feels not dissimilar to some of the shenanigans relating to the funding of Truth Social (while several of his associates were criminally prosecuted, one is attempting to get an SEC action against him thrown out) or Trump’s Meme Coin, below.

Then, even as Trump has rolled out a crypto strategic reserve (one that many crypto experts hate and one that failed to rally the market), there have been several developments that show how he intends to permit corruption (his own, and others’) via cryptocurrency.

As I keep noting, the SEC, for example, has paused its suit against World Liberty Financial investor Justin Sun, anticipating a settlement. As Judd Legum describes, this follows the Chinese-linked businessman’s multi-million “investment” in Trump’s crypto currency.

In March 2023, the SEC charged Sun and three of his companies, accusing him of marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a crypto token. The SEC accused Sun of wash trading, which involves buying and selling a token quickly to fraudulently manufacture artificial interest.

[snip]

Sun’s purchase put millions in Trump’s pocket. WLF was entitled to “$30 million of initial net protocol revenue” in a reserve “to cover operating expenses, indemnities, and obligations.” After the reserve was met, a company owned by Trump would receive “75% of the net protocol revenues.” Sun’s purchase covered the entire reserve. As of December 1, this amounted to $18 million for Trump — 75% of the revenues of all other tokens sold at the time. Sun also joined WLF as an advisor. While the purchase benefited Trump, WLF tokens are essentially worthless for Sun, as they are non-transferable and locked indefinitely.

Nevertheless, Sun has since invested another $45 million in WLF, bringing his total investment to $75 million. This means Sun’s purchases have sent more than $50 million to Trump, Bloomberg reported. Sun has also continued to shower Trump with praise. On January 22, Sun posted on X, “if I have made any money in cryptocurrency, all credit goes to President Trump.”

And, as Chris Murphy laid out, he used his Doge Coin to bilk his rubes, again.

Both of these are ways for foreigners to launder cash to Trump. Now that the bribery is happening in plain sight, we need to hammer home the implicatioms of that: If you can’t explain why Trump betrayed America and all her alliances, you cannot rule out old-fashioned bribery, not least given the impossibly lucrative deals Russia first dangled to get Trump’s interest.

And then there’s Musk, who happens to be included in Kirill Dmitriev’s current dangles before Trump.

Dmitriev has called for the Trump administration and Russia to start “building a better future for humanity,” and to “focus on investment, economic growth, AI breakthroughs,” and long-term joint scientific projects like “Mars exploration,” even posting a highly produced computer graphic, on Elon Musk’s X social media platform, showing an imagined joint US-Russia-Saudi mission to Mars, on board what appears to be a Space X rocket.

With Musk, it’s a two-edged sword. There are the legal investigations that stand to be dismissed, as two of the items on Public Citizen’s tracker have been.

And Elon Musk, the CEO of Neuralink, SpaceX, Tesla, X (formerly Twitter), and xAI, which started the Trump administration collectively facing 17 federal investigations.

  • Neuralink faces a USDA investigation into alleged misconduct related to the treatment of test monkeys and an SEC investigation alleging unspecified misconduct.
  • SpaceX has been in the process of negotiating a resolution with the EPA over repeated pollution discharges in Texas, an FAA lawsuit alleging multiple safety violations involving rocket launches in Florida, and an NLRB complaint alleging the company illegally fired workers who criticized Musk. The Trump administration dismissed a DOJ civil rights lawsuit against SpaceX alleging discrimination against asylees and refugees in hiring.
  • Tesla faces a criminal fraud investigation by the DOJ over exaggerated claims about the “full self-driving” capability of vehicles’ “Autopilot” mode, a related SEC investigation into whether exaggerated claims about “full self-driving” vehicles misled investors, a joint investigation by the DOJ and SEC into Tesla’s plans to construct a private residence for Musk, an EEOC investigation into alleged racial discrimination and workplace retaliation at a Tesla factory in California, four NHTSA investigations into vehicle problems, and seven open NLRB cases alleging unfair labor practices and covering up to 140,474 employees. An OSHA investigation into a worker’s death at a Tesla factory in Texas was closed in January, though no announcement as to whether a citation was issued has been disclosed.
  • X (formerly Twitter) faces an SEC lawsuit against Musk alleging misconduct related to the CEO’s $44 billion takeover of the company and an NLRB case alleging unfair labor practices.
  • xAI faces an EPA investigation into air pollution concerns related to its “Colossus” supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee. [my emphasis]

Musk’s conflicts are something that NYT has also tracked well.

Congressman Greg Casar has been pushing to get details of the death of the Tesla worker, Victor Joe Gomez Sr., released, with a fair amount of coverage in the Texas press.

But even as Casar is having to fight for details that should be readily available, and even as Musk’s private businesses continue to experience spectacular failures, even as Elon cuts off Ukraine, Trump’s government is sneaking deals to Starlink on the side, both in the form of FAA funds and rural broadband.

The degree to which Trump is selling out government, a story fundamental to the story of DOGE, is being covered, though (with the exception of Musk’s conflicts) often by less mainstream outlets: Wired and Forbes and Bloomberg and Judd Legum and American Prospect (NPR got the exclusive on the Public Citizen report).

This is undoubtedly an area where Gerald Connolly needs to pick up the slack from where Jamie Raskin left off with his move to House Judiciary. Or perhaps Casar, newly elected Progressive Caucus Chair and a Member of DOGE on Oversight, can take the lead.

But this is an area where a story in plain sight needs to be tied back to the destruction of government by the same corrupt people.

Trump is destroying government. But he is getting paid handsomely at the same time. At one level or another, Trump is destroying America because he is getting paid to do so. The better we can convey that, the greater likelihood that some of the rubes who got ripped off on the Doge Coin will come to understand they’ve been betrayed.

Russia

Any pushback on Trump’s capitulation to Russia has been distracted by everything else, starting with Trump’s equivocating trade war with our closest trading partners.

Though ironically, the line from Elissa Slotkin, hailing Ronald Reagan, to which many objected was a longer play on Trump’s attempt to compare himself with Reagan, a comment on Trump’s capitulation.

President Trump loves to promise “peace through strength.” That’s actually a line he stole from Ronald Reagan. But let me tell you, after the spectacle that just took place in the Oval Office last week, Reagan must be rolling over in his grave. We all want an end to the war in Ukraine, but Reagan understood that true strength required America to combine our military and economic might with moral clarity.

And that scene in the Oval Office wasn’t just a bad episode of reality TV. It summed up Trump’s whole approach to the world. He believes in cozying up to dictators like Vladimir Putin and kicking our friends, like Canada, in the teeth. He sees American leadership as merely a series of real estate transactions.

As a Cold War kid, I’m thankful it was Reagan and not Trump in office in the 1980s. Trump would have lost us the Cold War.

But while Americans are distracted by Trump’s erratic trade wargaming and the Democrats’ own infighting, the rest of the world is stepping up, most famously in this speech from center-right French politician Claude Malhuret.

There is dissension in Europe: While Giorgia Meloni is joining other European countries, she refuses to be led by France.

I’ve heard of non-public discussions among American national security types and members of Congress. And even Lindsey Graham, who shamelessly betrayed Volodymyr Zelenskyy after the ambush in the Oval Office, is pushing for Trump to demand something from Russia, too.

Thus far, the response to Trump’s capitulation to Russia has been muted. But it is also a topic that unites strange bedfellows, which showed up in the town halls last week.

Trump and his Russian handlers believed this would be easy. Thus far, it doesn’t look it’ll work out that way.

Attention

This post links almost 100 links (thanks, in part, to the linking ethics of Public Citizen and Everson). That’s a testament to the flood of information out there, much of it promising, about efforts to fight back against fascism. That flood is a response to Trump’s own flood. The two together have the means to overwhelm.

I won’t defend everything Jeffries said (or was portrayed as saying, by outlets whose bread and butter lies in stoking dissension among Democrats) this week. But much of what he said and did appear to be guided by a view on attention that is, in my opinion, quite right: Trump always camouflages what he does, including some fundamental weaknesses, with a flood the zone strategy.

Congressman Jeffries said Trump’s many actions to date, including mass firings of federal workers, freezing federal funds approved by Congress, and steps to eliminate critical agencies, are part of a larger strategy to “flood the zone” and distract from actions that Jeffries and other Democrats consistently say will devastate millions of Americans.

“[It’s] designed to create the appearance of inevitability [and] the notion that Donald Trump is unstoppable–he ain’t unstoppable,” said Jeffries, who noted, “Not a single bill connected to Trump’s Project 2025 agenda has passed the House because it’s unified Democratic opposition.” He continued, “But we’re supposed to believe it’s all inevitable…He’s invincible…Show me the evidence.”

This is a war for attention. Trump’s success at that war is the primary reason he won the election — and he was helped then, as now, by the fact that the primary counter-flood Democrats cared to mount was to attack each other.

Similarly, no matter what you think about Slotkin’s response (which was in any case not beset by weaknesses of presentation virtually all of these are) she also said something important. Rather than doom scroll on Bluesky, pick an issue, and start building from the bottom up.

Three, organize. Pick just one issue you’re passionate about — and engage. And doom scrolling doesn’t count. Join a group that cares about your issue, and act. And if you can’t find one, start one.

Some of the most important movements in our history have come from the bottom up.

You don’t have to, nor should you, wait for DC to lead the movement you want. Pick a corner of it and take action.

Leadership

I end with this: We’re seeing that happen around the country, as evidenced by three stories from recent days.

There’s the testimony of Meirav Solomon’s in yesterday’s sanctuary city hearing. Solomon challenged the notion that you shut down antisemitism by policing campuses. Indeed, she focused instead on Trump’s cuts to Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. She pointed to the antisemitism of, “the President’s close advisors [who] raise their arms in fascist salutes.”

We must be honest about the most urgent threat to the Jewish community. It is not student protestors but the bloody legacy of Pittsburgh and Poway, Charlottesville and the Capitol Riot.

There’s how a community responded when the school board of a predominantly white community north of Pittsburgh voted against a young adult book about the Tulsa riots, Angel of Greenwood. The community came together to bring its author, Randi Pink, to town to speak to both students and the community more generally.

After the school board voted against adding Pink’s book to the Pine-Richland School District’s ninth-grade curriculum, the community decided it was time to act.

Macmillan, the publisher of “Angel of Greenwood,” sent Pine-Richland students 100 copies of the book to distribute to the community. Pink also traveled from her small town outside of Birmingham, Alabama, to come to Richland to meet with the community that had so fiercely supported her work.

“The supporters in the community were relentless in making sure I got there. Some people put in $5, $10, even $600. I waived my fee, but the community said, ‘Absolutely not. We’re going to pay you.’ I’m a single mother, so I had to bring my babies with me,” she said. “They said, ‘we’re going to pay for all your way.’

“They galvanized around me. I support them very much for that.”

[snip]

Students and parents raised nearly $6,000 for Pink to come to Pennsylvania, where the author held two talks — one for students of the school district to ask questions and the other was open to all community members.

[snip]

“If more of us are brave enough to step into communities and say, ‘You know what? Let’s just talk. I think we will get a whole lot further like that in all aspects of society.”

There’s Zooey Zephyr, the Montana legislator whose speech in support of drag shows turned the tide against anti-trans votes, as told by Erin Reed.

Something remarkable happened in Montana today. As has become routine, anti-trans bills were up for debate—the state has spent more than half of its legislative days this session pushing such bills through committees and the House floor, with Republicans largely voting in lockstep. But something changed.

A week ago, transgender Representative Zooey Zephyr delivered a powerful speech against a bill that would create a separate indecent exposure law for transgender people. Since then, momentum on the House floor slowed. Today, two of the most extreme bills targeting the transgender community came up for a vote. Transgender Representatives Zooey Zephyr and SJ Howell gave impassioned speeches—this time, they broke through. In a stunning turn, 29 Republicans defected, killing both bills. One Republican even took the floor to deliver a scathing rebuke of the bill’s sponsor.

You reclaim America not in DC, but in talks on campuses, in Montana, and Pittsburgh.

That is happening. You just need to know where to look.

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Two Weeks of Work: Hampton Dellinger

In this post, I used Kel McClanahan’s lawsuit against OPM, claiming the email via which Elon Musk sent out his five bullets email was added without proper privacy review, as an example of the added benefits that lawsuits can have, whether or not they succeed. (Though Elon’s email has raised the likelihood the lawsuit will succeed, because it has undermined DOJ’s claims about the email thus far.)

Another example of Hampton Dellinger’s decision to sue to get his job back. In the end, SCOTUS will likely let Trump fire Dellinger. But before SCOTUS does that, Dellinger has made a record of problems with the DOGE firings and gotten at least six of the firings halted for 45 days.

As the timeline below notes, Trump tried to fire Dellinger on February 7. Three days later, on February 10, he sued and asked for a restraining order, preventing Trump from removing him. Judge Amy Berman Jackson first paused, then granted the TRO; because she restored the status quo, Dellinger regained access to his office. Trump appealed, ultimately to the Supreme Court, but after delaying a week, on February 21, they deferred the decision until today (when ABJ has a hearing scheduled and is expected to make a decision that can formally be appealed).

Even as that happened, starting on February 12, Trump started his purge of people he claimed were probationary.

At least six of the people fired brought claims before the Office of Special Counsel, Dellinger’s office, claiming that the mass firings were not permissible. Some also argued they weren’t probationary (remember that some agencies tried to retroactively change the probationary period from one to two years). Others claimed they were not provided treatment to which veterans are entitled.

On Monday, word started leaking today that Dellinger was asking the MSPB to reinstate those six employees. Citing that, Dellinger provided a public statement explaining that some of the firings violated employment law.

OSC does not typically comment on stay requests while they are awaiting a decision by the MSPB.  Consistent with OSC’s past practice, Special Counsel Dellinger did not comment publicly on the pending request prior to its apparent disclosure by one of the agencies named as a respondent. Because his stay requests are now being publicly discussed, the Special Counsel provides the following statement.

“Since the Civil Service Reform Act was passed in 1978, the merit system principles have guided how federal government agencies hire, manage, and, if necessary, remove federal employees. These principles establish that all federal employees, including those in a probationary status, should be evaluated based on individual performance.”

Dellinger also released a redacted version of one of his requests, sent on February 21, for the Merit Systems Protection Board to stay the termination of six employees, with descriptions of all six employees. As one example, one of the employees is a disabled veteran whose supervisor had, the day he was fired, talked about what an exceptional employee he was.

Complainant served as a probationary Program Support Assistant in the competitive service with ED. Ex. 1, Complainant Declaration, ¶¶ 3-4. Complainant was hired with a 100% disabled veteran’s preference after 14 years with the Army. Id., ¶ 5. Throughout his tenure, he received consistent praise from leadership, and there is no evidence of any performance issues. Id., ¶ 9. However, on February 12, 2025, Complainant was issued a termination notice that stated, in relevant part:

I regrettably inform you that I am removing you from your position of Program Support Specialist with the agency and the federal civil service effective today.

Ex. 2, ED Notice. Earlier that same day, Complainant s supervisor had commended his exceptional performance, praising his dedication and calling him a perfect fit for the team. Ex. 1, ¶ 11.

Several of their supervisors tried to overrule the firings. That’s one thing Dellinger used to substantiate his finding that this was a Reduction in Force finding, not termination because of performance.

As Dellinger laid out, Reductions in Force have their own requirements, even for probationary employees.

Because 1) agencies are prohibited from circumventing the requirements set forth in the RIF statute and regulations, which apply equally to probationary employees, 2) the evidence indicates that Agencies improperly terminated Complainants without reference to those requirements, and 3) the violation denied Complainants both substantive and procedural rights, OSC has reasonable grounds to conclude that Agencies have engaged in prohibited personnel practices.

Agencies must follow the RIF statute and regulations when the employee’s release is required for reasons including lack of work, shortage of funds, and reorganization. See 5 C.F.R. § 351.201. The regulations define a reorganization as “the planned elimination, addition, or redistribution of functions or duties in an organization.” 5 C.F.R. § 351.203. The Federal Circuit has “defined a ‘reduction in force’ as an ‘administrative procedure’ by which agencies eliminate jobs and reassign or separate employees who occupied the abolished positions.” See Tippins v. U.S., 93 F.4th 1370, 1375 (Fed. Cir. 2024). OPM’s website similarly explains that, “An agency is required to use the RIF procedures when an employee is faced with separation or downgrading for a reason such as reorganization, lack of work, [or] shortage of funds….”16

Each agency has the right to decide whether a RIF is necessary and when the RIF will take place. However, agencies do not have discretion to bypass RIF procedures when they are reorganizing or reducing the size of components based on lack of work or budgetary concerns.

Employees removed in an RIF get additional benefits, including notice.

Yesterday, the MSPB granted those stays. Dellinger issued a statement calling on agency heads to rescind unlawful terminations.

“I am very grateful the MSPB has agreed to postpone these six terminations,” said Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger. “These stays represent a small sample of all the probationary employees who have been fired recently so our work is far from done. Agency leaders should know that OSC will continue to pursue allegations of unlawful personnel actions, which can include asking MSPB for relief for a broader group of fired probationary employees. I urge agency leaders to voluntarily and immediately rescind any and every unlawful termination of probationary employees.”

The day after Dellinger recommended those stays, Democracy Forward provided OSC a list of those original six agencies, plus thirteen more that used standard letters for firing its people, asking that all those firings be stayed too.

  1. U.S. Department of Education
  2. U.S. Department of Energy 3
  3. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
  4. U.S. Office of Personnel Management
  5. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Rural Development
  6. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
  7. AmeriCorps
  8. U.S. Department of Homeland Security
  9. U.S. Department of Interior
  10. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
  11. Export-Import Bank
  12. Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service
  13. General Services Administration
  14. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
  15. Institute of Museum and Library Services
  16. Internal Revenue Service
  17. National Archies and Records Administration
  18. National Science Foundation
  19. Surface Transportation Board

Dellinger’s success at reviewing and staying these six people’s termination matters for a whole bunch of reasons, even if he is removed today or in days ahead.

First, by labeling this an RIF (and releasing that decision publicly), it’ll help lawsuits designed to reinstate larger number of people get standing that otherwise would have to go through this process (which is the basis on which courts have rejected some unions’ efforts to slow the DOGE).

Establishing the import of benefits tied to RIFs is particularly important because, as Wired reported, DOGE appears to be trying to automate mass firing even further.

Finally, recall that the day after Trump fired Dellinger, he named Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins Acting Special Counsel. The VA has been among the most aggressive in firings, carrying out a second round of firings in recent days, for a total of 2,400 people.

Had Dellinger not gotten the slight reprieve on his own firing, it would have left one of the people most aggressively pursuing Trump’s purge in charge.

Again, I think it likely SCOTUS will let Trump fire Dellinger in short order.

But the fight was worth it.

Update: In a Northern CA lawsuit on behalf of the fired workers, Judge William Alsup is asking the government to answer two questions in advance of a hearing today that get at the same issue Dellinger raised.

1. To what extent did OPM or individuals within OPM direct other agencies to terminate probationary employees based on performance or misconduct? If any such direction (or advice) is in writing, please provide the documents to the Court.

2. How can an agency lawfully terminate a probationary employee on the basis of “performance” if that employee’s performance was in fact satisfactory?

Update: Having just listened to the hearing, ABJ sounds like she’s going to extend the TRO for a few days so she can rule on the merits. It further sounds she’ll say the Special Counsel is so unique that the President can only fire him for cause.

Timeline

[docket]

February 7, 2025: Sergio Gor fires Hampton Dellinger

February 10, 2025: Dellinger sues and moves for a TRO; Amy Berman Jackson issues an administrative stay

February 11, 2025: Trump names Doug Collins Acting Special Counsel; appeals stay

February 12, 2025: DC Circuit denies appeal of stay; ABJ issues a TRO; Trump appeals; Trump starts mass firings of probationary employees

February 13, 2025: Trump appeals stay to SCOTUS

February 15, 2025: DC Circuit denies appeal; ABJ consolidates preliminary injunction

February 16, 2025: Trump appeals stay to SCOTUS

February 21, 2025: SCOTUS defers appeal

 

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“Nefarious”: Chuck Grassley Panics at Possibility that Gary Shapley’s Allegations Might Be Scrutinized

Chuck Grassley continues,with the desperation and recklessness that may come from being the oldest member of Congress, to try to find something scandalous in the Hunter Biden investigation that won’t fizzle upon closer scrutiny.

I’m not sure precisely what the first complaint is about. Since Kenneth Polite resigned as Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division in July, Nicole Argentieri has been Acting Assistant Attorney General at the Criminal Division. Before that she had been Polite’s Principal Deputy. Prior to returning to DOJ (she worked for a time as an AUSA in EDNY), she was a partner at O’Melveny & Myers in New York. I’m not sure if that’s what Grassley is complaining about. In any case, since David Weiss is Special Counsel, it wouldn’t matter, as AAG CRM would have little to no involvement.

Grassley’s other complaint is that Hampton Dellinger, current AAG for Legal Policy, just got nominated to be the other kind of Special Counsel, the guy in charge of Whistleblower Protection Act and Hatch Act violations. Almost a decade ago, both Dellinger and Hunter Biden had ties to Boies Schiller. Dellinger and Hunter attended the same dinner in March 2014.

The Office of Special Counsel would have even less role in overseeing Special Counsel David Weiss’ activities than Argentieri would. He would, however, have a role in deciding whether Gary Shapely was really a whistleblower or was, instead, a partisan leaker, leaking protected IRS and grand jury information. He would have a role in reviewing whatever it is that Shapley was hiding when he refused to turn over his emails in March 2022 and tried to hide in October 2022, as concerns about leaks accelerated. He would have a role in deciding whether those things undercut his claims, now, to be a whistleblower using the proper channels.

That is, Grassley isn’t worried about the prosecution of Hunter Biden with his latest complaint. He’s worried about any scrutiny of Gary Shapley (and Joseph Ziegler).

And that’s why I find the following details interesting.

In a September 3, 2020 email, Joseph Ziegler included the investigation into Hunter Biden — pursued by Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson — in his agenda for a meeting that day.

A memo that may have been written by Gary Shapley in December 2020 complains that investigators were not sharing details of the investigation with members of Congress.

The USAO and FBI received congressional inquiries concerning this investigation and have repeatedly ignored their requests, openly mocking the members of Congress who made the requests.

Chuck Grassley was one of those members of Congress. That December 2020 memo is also where the claim that a leak that month came from DOJ rather than investigators.

Another monthly memo Shapley submitted, this one from May 2021, again complained that investigators weren’t compromising the investigation so as to share details with members of Congress.

The USAO and FBI received congressional inquiries concerning this investigation and it’s believed they have ignored their requests.

Chuck Grassley was one of those members of Congress.

In April 2022, Bill Haggerty asked Merrick Garland about the Hunter Biden investigation, to which he responded that Weiss was supervising the investigation and “he is in charge of that investigation; there will not be interference of any political or improper kind.”

In September 2022, Chuck Grassley claimed to have whistleblower information that Tim Thibault shut down an investigative lead on the Hunter Biden investigation. Reports of Thibault’s own testimony, among other details, reveal that this pertained to using Peter Schweitzer as an FBI informant — a more problematic choice to be an FBI informant than using Christopher Steele (since Steele was not a known partisan propagandist), and therefore a wild backflip on Grassley’s earlier concerns about dodgy informants. And Thibault had actually approved keeping Schweitzer as a source, until an FBI agent closer to the case alerted him to problems with doing so. Thibault was retaliated against as a result, in significant part because of Grassley’s misrepresentation of what happened.

I’ll return to the way that Shapley ignored warnings going back months before October 2022 that David Weiss wouldn’t charge Hunter for 2014 and 2015. I’ll return to the way that Shapley ignored warnings that the case would not be charged until after November 2022, and possibly not even until 2023.

What we now know is that the key detail in his otherwise unreliable report from the October 7 meeting — that David Weiss said he “is not the deciding person” on whether to charge Hunter Biden — is not corroborated by any other witness who attended that meeting. Darren Waldon, his supervisor, described that what Weiss actually said pertained to a description of process, “the process in order to get the case indicted and subsequently prosecuted.”

Shapley made claims that were not backed even by his own handwritten notes.

And yet that is the core of his claim to be a whistleblower: That’s the basis of Gary Shapley’s first publicly claimed reason for coming to Congress — the October 7, 2022 meeting, which Shapley’s attorney Mark Lytle publicly released (in such a way that journalists all knew it pertained to Hunter Biden) in April: the claim that what David Weiss said on October 7 conflicted with what Merrick Garland had told Bill Haggerty in April 2022.

Shapley’s October 7 memorialization, which doesn’t match his own notes and hasn’t been corroborated by other witnesses, is the basis of Gary Shapley’s claim to be a whistleblower, a claim that might be reviewed by Office of Special Counsel.

We also know that Gary Shapley only claims — in a really weird memorialization, provided in lieu of original notes, that writes out “REDACTED” — to have formally become a whistleblower on January 4, 2023, the day Republicans took over the House.

In that memorialization, Shapley clearly states that his lawyer has already “participated in calls and/or meetings” with “the Congressional Judiciary committees.”

In the memorialization (again, provided in lieu of Shapley’s notes, which have shown discrepancies in the past), Shapley predicted that,

there may be allegations against him, that he believes will be nefarious, from DOJ/USAO and that he hoped the agency would support him during that. [Michael Batdorf] stated that he had not heard of an any allegations made against Shapley.

We also know that on January 25, Shapley asked to take leave so he could — among other things — meet with congressional committees and Inspectors General, a request Michael Batdorf said should not come out of his paid leave. By the time of Shapley’s first (known) testimony in May, he had not yet personally met with any Inspectors General investigators; rather, his attorneys had made disclosures to them. And, as noted, the first formal outreach to Congress was on April 19.

In that letter on April 19, Mark Lytle made absolutely not mention of earlier outreach to the Judiciary Committees.

Despite serious risks of retaliation, my client is offering to provide you with information necessary to exercise your constitutional oversight function and wishes to make the disclosures in a non-partisan manner to the leadership of the relevant committees on both sides of the political aisle.

My client has already made legally protected disclosures at the IRS, through counsel to the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, and to the Department of Justice, Office of Inspector General.

That is, the claims that Lytle made in that April 19 letter seem to conflict with what Shapely wrote on January 6.

In any case, what was Shapley doing in the two months he was taking leave when he was not yet known to have formally reached out to Congress?

In July, immediately after testimony from Ziegler — who was attending to Congress’ interest in this investigation in 2020 — and Shapley — who was furious that investigators weren’t compromising the investigation to meet the interests of Congress that same year, Chuck Grassley burned what Republicans all claim had been a credible FBI informant in order to feed the conspiracy theories.

Chuck Grassley is worried that a guy who had dinner with Hunter Biden nine years ago might become Special Counsel. He’s worried about that, but not that one of his former staffers went from OSC to the Merit System Protection Board to serving as Gary Shapley’s PR person months after (per Shapley’s own memorialization) he was already reachng out to Congress.

Leavitt began his investigative career working on the Senate Judiciary Committee staff of Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), where he helped whistleblowers expose schemes like Operation Fast and Furious, the gunwalking scandal that armed the murderers of a U.S. Border Patrol Agent. He also served as Senator Grassley’s chief whistleblower policy advisor, leading the introduction of the first Senate resolutions recognizing National Whistleblower Appreciation Day and the establishment of the Senate Whistleblower Protection Caucus.

In 2015 Leavitt joined the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee staff of Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). There he worked with dozens of whistleblowers from the U.S. Secret Service to break news of high-profile misconduct and security breaches. He also investigated Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while Secretary of State, the FBI’s failure to hold her accountable, and politicization at the FBI. He negotiated the passage of the FBI Whistleblower Protection Act of 2016.

In 2017 Leavitt was appointed as Principal Deputy Special Counsel at the Office of Special Counsel, where he helped reform OSC’s whistleblower disclosure program and directed a reorganization of OSC’s intake and investigative process. He also served as Acting Special Counsel. In late 2018 Leavitt was appointed as the General Counsel of the Merit Systems Protection Board, and for three years served as the acting head of that agency. In 2022 the U.S. Senate confirmed him with bipartisan support as the Republican Member of the Board, a position he held for one year.

Chuck Grassley seems to be panicked that a very carefully orchestrated effort to retroactively pitch Shapley as a whistleblower using formal channels might face real scrutiny.

Given that both Zeigler and Shapley seemed to have more concern about Congress’ efforts than the formal investigation starting before Joe Biden became President, that’s not all that surprising.

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