Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 4, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
‘We’re Not Stopping’: Trump Border Czar Vows to Ignore Judges
[The Daily Beast, via MSN 03-18-2025]
Judges Who Rule Against Trump Become Target of New MAGA War
Malcolm Ferguson, May 2, 2025 [The New Republic]
At least 11 federal judges and their families have been threatened and harassed since they ruled against President Trump on issues of deportations, federal funding, and his war on “wokeness.”
The judges, under anonymity, told Reuters that they had received multiple intimidating calls and emails to their homes and offices. Some have been subject to the disturbing “pizza box” method, in which antagonists will anonymously send a pizza to the home of a judge or their relatives just to show that they know where they live.
This is only compounded by the countless attacks and doxxing attempts that people like Laura Loomer and Elon Musk have made on X. When U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled against Trump’s illegal deportation of 137 men under the Alien Enemies Act in March, Loomer and Musk shared photos of his daughter, while their army of keyboard warriors called for the execution or arrest of Boasberg and the rest of his family. Loomer did the same to Judge John McConnell after he blocked Trump from freezing education grants, posting a picture of his daughter who had worked for the Education Department. Loomer’s post conveniently omitted that McConnell’s daughter left the department before Trump was even inaugurated….
You Already Knew He’s The WORST President Ever— Did You Also Know He’s The Most Blatantly Corrupt?
Howie Klein, April 26, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
…On Thursday, Drew Harwell and Jeremy Merrill reported that shady characters have poured tens of millions of dollars into Trump’s meme coin since he advertised on Wednesday that top purchasers could join him for an “intimate private dinner” next month. “The holders of 27 crypto wallets have each acquired more than 100,000 $TRUMP coins, stakes worth about a million dollars each, since noon on Wednesday, when the team announced that the 220 top coin holders would be rewarded with a ‘night to remember’ on May 22 at the president’s Trump National Golf Club outside Washington. Crypto wallets are generally anonymous, making it challenging to identify who the purchasers were.”
They also advertised something so blatantly illegal that they partially removed it, no doubt at the insistence of White House lawyers: an offer of a tour of the White House for the 25 top $TRUMP coins purchasers. Now they’re just offering a tour but with no indication of what. This idea of offering direct presidential access to those who pay into a project benefiting the Trump personal bottom line would be enough to get him impeached if House Republicans weren’t so wedded to enabling his criminality. Not one House Republican has spoken out about this.
Harwell and Merrill wrote that “the biggest buyer acquired 2 million coins worth about $24 million.” That’s a substantial bribe, especially coming from a criminal in China who desperately needs a pardon from Trump. “Taken together, the 27 wallets acquired more than 8 million $TRUMP coins, worth about $100 million as of Thursday afternoon…
Howie Klein, May 2, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, was even stronger on the same particular crime: “Never before in American history have foreign governments, as well as people and corporations under investigation, so overtly and directly funneled vast sums to the president of the United States and his family. This is far more than is captured by the term ‘conflict of interest.’ It is foreign policy for sale and justice for sale. And, as one of the executives in the deal said, ‘it is only the beginning.’ With a president who has no regard for the basic norms of propriety, ethics, the law or the U.S. Constitution, the question is: Will the U.S. Congress permit this mockery of the American people? Or will it insist on the most minimal baseline standards, so that foreign governments cannot send money directly to the president and his family?”
How Trump Accidentally Sabotaged His Own Case Against Abrego Garcia
Greg Sargent, May 3, 2025 [The New Republic]
He has now said it right out in the open—not once but twice. In two major interviews, President Donald Trump openly declared that he has the power to bring the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States. And on both occasions, Trump said straight out that he is not doing so because administration lawyers have told him he doesn’t have to—or that he shouldn’t.
This has been widely seen as an admission that Trump is defying the Supreme Court, which has directed the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. Yes, it is that. But these two moments are also their own story. They offer a unique glimpse into the deep rot of bad faith infesting Trump and Stephen Miller’s broader project to expand the president’s removal powers into something extraordinarily vast and entirely unaccountable….
Public Records Wreckers: The consequences of gutting FOIA offices are both obvious and unknowable.
Will Royce, Andrea Beaty, May 1, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Ten months ago, Roman Jankowski sent dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), among other agencies. He was one-third of a three-man fishing expedition spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and the Daily Caller to dig up dirt on civil servants, particularly if they were the type to use phrases like “climate equity” or “voting.” ….
Today, Jankowski oversees FOIA compliance for DHS as its chief FOIA officer. His agency receives more public records requests than any other by a wide margin. And instead of gumming up FOIA administration from the outside, Jankowski now works for an administration that is attacking FOIA by firing many of the federal employees who respond to those requests, precisely what his records requests sought to facilitate….
While the administration staunchly refuses to be “maximally transparent,” groups like Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) are trying to get answers. CREW is currently suing the Trump administration for refusing to comply with its FOIA requests on DOGE’s activities. To prop up their argument that DOGE and Musk aren’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act, the administration has claimed that Musk doesn’t work for DOGE—despite Trump’s personal posts and a basic comprehension of daily news contradicting that idea—and that the roughly 100 operatives under Musk’s direction are not acting independently from the office of the president.
The Democracy Index
Joyce Vance, Joshua Kolb, Lily Conway, and Bri Murphy, May 02, 2025
This week, the Trump DOJ was dealt two significant blows by two Republican-appointed district court judges. On Thursday in Texas, Trump-appointee Fernando Rodriguez, Jr., ruled that the Trump Administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act—a 1798 law that allows the government to detain and deport noncitizens from the country during wartime—was improper and unlawful. Rodriguez, Jr., ruled that Trump’s proclamation “exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms.”
Earlier in the week, Judge Royce Lamberth of the District of Columbia, who was appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan, lambasted the Trump Administration, preventing Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty from being decimated and ruling that “It is hard to fathom a more straightforward display of arbitrary and capricious actions than the Defendants’ actions here.” Lamberth then took an extraordinary step back from the particulars of the case to strongly defend the independence of the judiciary in our constitutional system, writing: “By enjoining the defendants’ efforts to dismantle the plaintiff networks, actions which I perceive to be contrary to the law, I am humbly fulfilling my small part in this very constitutional paradigm—a framework that has propelled the U.S. to heights of greatness, liberty and prosperity unparalleled in the history of the world for nearly 250 years. If our nation is to thrive for another 250 years, each co-equal branch of government must be willing to courageously exert the authority entrusted to it by our Founders.”
Beyond the judiciary, institutions that bent the knee to Trump faced setbacks while those that held resolutely against intimidation were rewarded. Notably, Microsoft, one of the largest companies in the world, dropped the law firm Simpson Thacher—among the shops that caved and made a deal with the Trump White House—and signed up Jenner Block, one of the three law firms that challenged Trump’s Executive Order in court. The cowardly firms that acquiesced cited, as their prime justification, their obligation to their clients to maintain good relations with the government. That was always a false choice, but it was also foolhardy in the long run—after all, what client wants a lawyer who will be intimidated by its bad-faith adversary?
That is indeed courageous, a fact that can be quantified. In the law firms’ litigation against the Trump Administration, hundreds of firms banded together to sign an amicus brief defending their colleagues and decrying the president’s Executive Order. The first amicus brief a couple weeks ago, supporting Perkins Coie’s lawsuit, secured about five hundred firms; this week, another amicus brief in the Jenner Block suit garnered around eight hundred signatories.
Men DOGEbags at Work
‘There’s Never Been a More Blatant Corporate Incursion Into the Public Sector Than DOGE’
[FAIR, via Naked Capitalism 05-02-2025]
Jeff Hauser is the executive director of the Revolving Door Project:
“We, in general, track corporate influence in politics, with a particular focus on the executive branch. And there has never been a more blatant corporate incursion into the public sector than DOGE, which reflects the privatization of our domestic policy, and increasingly our foreign policy as well, by people who are not even bothering to give up any of their private sector ties, and actually join the government for a few years—which we’re not fans of; we believe in career civil servants. But these people aren’t even doing that much. They’re just continuing to run, say, Tesla and SpaceX while running large swaths of the government, and never having been put before the Senate for nomination.”
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