Another Round of Trump DOJ Purges
U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan — who reportedly has U.S. marshals accompanying her for security protection within her own office — has fired two more career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia.
Beth Yusi and Kristin Bird received termination letters, CNN reports.
Yusi was the senior prosecutor in Norfolk who pushed back against the prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James, arguing the evidence was weak. Bird was Yusi’s deputy, but it’s not clear exactly why she was terminated, too.
“One source said that Halligan believed the attorneys to be leaking ‘unauthorized’ information to the press,” according to CNN, though none of this has been independently confirmed.
Meanwhile, Halligan is pushing prosecutors to “move quickly to charge another politically sensitive case: a Democratic state lawmaker who has been under investigation since the Biden administration, according to three people familiar with the discussions,”
MSNBC reported last week. The name of the Democratic target was not made publicly known.
Career prosecutors were “rattled” by the pressure from Halligan because it comes so close to next month’s elections in Virginia, according the MSNBC report.
Other nuggets from the MSNBC report:
- D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro fired the head of her office’s fraud and public corruption unit after he’d already resigned. “Career prosecutors in the office, already deeply disturbed by Pirro’s pressure to pursue what they considered specious cases in order to please the president, viewed the firing of [Jon] Hooks as gratuitously punitive,” MSNBC reported.
- Trump DOJ weaponization chief Ed Martin has been nagging Kelly O. Hayes, a career prosecutor who is the acting U.S. attorney in Maryland, to bring bogus mortgage fraud charges against Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA).
- In the Western District of Virginia, career prosecutors are “fearful of notifying Trump’s appointed leader of the office that they see no evidence to charge any members of former FBI Director Chris Wray’s leadership team with destroying documents, two people said.”
Even though so much has already happened at the Trump Justice Department since January, we are still closer to the beginning of the story of DOJ weaponization than we are to the end of it.
The Retribution: John Bolton Edition
Up to now, most of the reporting on the criminal case against former Trump national security adviser John Bolton has suggested that the investigation began in Trump I, was closed during the Biden administration, and was then revived in Trump II.
But new reporting reveals that there were two different criminal investigations of Bolton, which changes the sequence of events and bolsters the notion that the case was properly predicated in the beginning.
The Trump I case was in fact closed in June 2021 during the Biden administration, but a new investigation was commenced the very next month when Bolton notified the FBI that his email had been breached by suspected Iranian hackers, CNN reports: “Investigators have been laboring on this case since then after the FBI began assessing potential damage from the hack and raised questions about whether Bolton’s practice of sending diary entries from his personal email broke the law, according to people briefed on the probe.”
The Bolton indictment to which he pleaded not guilty last week grew out of this second investigation, which the NYT describes as “a yearslong investigation that gained momentum under the Biden administration.”
Trump Commutes Santos Prison Sentence
President Trump commuted the sentence of former Rep. George Santos (R-NY), the convicted fraudster and notorious fabulist who was immediately released from prison and took a victory lap on Sunday TV news shows.
2020 Election Still Not Over
WSJ: White House Hires ‘Stop the Steal’ Lawyer to Investigate 2020 Election Claims
Alien Enemies Act Fallout Continues
- WaPo: Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised to betray U.S. informants to get Trump’s El Salvador prison deal
- 60 Minutes did a segment last night centered on Erez Reuveni, the fired DOJ lawyer-turned-whistleblower who was at the center of the crucial first weekend of Alien Enemies Act litigation:
Social Security Whistleblower Comes Forward
In his first media interview, Charles Borges — the former chief data officer for the Social Security Administration — continues to assert his concerns about DOGE’s access to a critical database and to rebut administration claims to the contrary.
Mass Deportations Watch: Chicago Edition
- After losing at the 7th Circuit, the Trump administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to allow it to deploy the National Guard in Illinois. Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck describes the incredibly high stakes in the case:
[M]ore than any of the first 28 applications from the Trump administration, Trump v. Illinois is a make-or-break moment for this Court. For the Supreme Court to issue a ruling that allows the President to send troops into our cities based upon contrived (or even government-provoked) facts, even if it does so in a way that avoids formally upholding such conduct as a matter of law, would be a terrible precedent for the Court to set—not just for what it would allow President Trump to do now, but for the even more grossly tyrannical conduct it would allow him and future presidents (assuming we have any) to undertake later. If factually and legally unpersuasive domestic deployments of troops aren’t going to be a red line for the Supreme Court, what the heck will be?
- U.S. Judge Sara L. Ellis of Chicago has ordered federal officials into her courtroom today to answer questions about whether they violated a court her order by using tear gas against protesters and residents during the mass deportation operation.
- TPM’s Josh Kovensky: Chicago Protest Cases Collapse in Court
- NYT: The now-notorious immigration raid on an apartment building in Chicago swept up dozens of U.S. citizens who were detained in the middle of the night.
For the Record
U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli of Los Angeles has downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanor the charges against labor leader David Huerta arising from his arrest while he was protesting an immigration raid.
ICE Is ‘Unfettered and Unaccountable’
ProPublica: How Trump is Building a Violent, Shadowy Federal Police Force
The Lawlessness: Caribbean Edition
- Two people survived the sixth U.S. attack on an alleged drug-smuggling vessel in the Caribbean on Thursday, raising legal and logistical dilemmas for what to do with survivors of the lawless high seas attacks ordered by President Trump. Rather than deal with those consequences, Trump announced Saturday that the two survivors – who had been given medical treatment aboard the U.S.S. Iwo Jima, an amphibious assault ship – were being repatriated to their respective home countries of Colombia and Ecuador. The targeted boat was a semi-submersible, according to reports.
- On Friday, the U.S. conducted the seventh known attack on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Sunday, claiming the boat was associated with the National Liberation Army, a Colombian rebel group known as the E.L.N.
- The total announced death toll from the Caribbean strikes is now at 32.
- Colombian President Gustavo Petro accused the U.S. of murdering a fisherman in a mid-September attack on a boat in the Caribbean, claiming that the man’s damaged boat was adrift when he was attacked. In response to Petro’s claims, President Trump said he would cut U.S. aid to Colombia and impose new tariffs on it.
- WaPo: Officials and locals undercut Trump claims about Venezuela drug boats.
- INFOGRAPHIC: Where the U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean is happening
Weekend in Review: No Kings Protests
With President Trump responding to the mass protests against his regime by posting a AI-generated video of himself wearing a royal crown while piloting a fighter jet that drops payloads of excrement on protestors on American streets, Thomas Zimmer places it in the larger context of “a shrill and deranged … campaign to demonize the No Kings protests.”
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