“Trump’s use of the FBI to pursue his obsession with the 2020 election is part of a pattern of the president transforming the federal government into his personal tool of vengeance.
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Georgia has been at the heart of Trump’s 2020 obsession. He infamously called Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, asking that Raffensperger “find” 11,780 more votes for Trump so he could be declared the winner of the state. Raffensperger refused, noting that repeated reviews confirmed Democrat Joe Biden had narrowly won Georgia.
Those were part of a series of reviews in battleground states, often led by Republicans, that affirmed Biden’s win, including in Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada. Trump also lost dozens of court cases challenging the election results and his own attorney general at the time said there was no evidence of widespread fraud.
His allies who repeated his lies have been successfully sued for defamation. That includes former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who settled with two Georgia election workers after a court ruled he owed them $148 million for defaming them after the 2020 election.
Voting machine companies also have brought defamation cases against some conservative-leaning news sites that aired unsubstantiated claims about their equipment being linked to fraud in 2020. Fox News settled one such case by agreeing to pay $787 million after the judge ruled it was “CRYSTAL clear” that none of the allegations were true.
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As part of his campaign of retribution, Trump also has spoken about wanting to criminally charge lawmakers who sat on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, suggesting protective pardons of them from Biden are legally invalid. He’s targeted a former cybersecurity appointee who assured the public in 2020 that the election was secure.
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“So much this administration has done is to make claims in social media rather than go to court,” Becker said. “I suspect this is more about poisoning the well for 2026.””
“Trump may have pardoned Cole last year as part of the sweeping clemency that he gave to Jan. 6 offenders on his first day back in office.
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Trump’s proclamation commuted the sentences of 14 individuals and also granted “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” This immediately covered roughly 1,500 people, including hundreds of defendants who were charged with assaulting or resisting law enforcement officers.
Lawyers for Cole did not respond to a question about whether they intend to argue that Cole is entitled to a pardon if convicted. But there are several legal and factual points that are worth zeroing in on if they pursue that strategy.
For starters, it does not matter whether Trump specifically intended to pardon the person who planted the pipe bombs. Under the law, it is the text of the pardon that matters — not the subjective intention of the president or the DOJ’s interpretation of it.
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Cheerleaders of the sweeping Jan. 6 pardon did not bat an eye when Trump knowingly freed people like Stewart Rhodes and Enrique Tarrio — leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, respectively, who were convicted at trial of a seditious conspiracy to prevent the transfer of power to Joe Biden. And they have remained silent as some of the people that Trump pardoned have gone on to commit more alleged crimes — a predictable development given the empirical evidence on recidivism rates among convicted felons. Some of these crimes have been explicitly political in nature, including threatening to kill House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
For all that’s happened in the last year, Trump’s Jan. 6 pardon remains one of his most stunning acts since he returned to office.”
“A man pardoned by President Donald Trump for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6 was arrested last week for allegedly threatening to kill House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries.”
If fired for appropriately investigating the president or his allies, then this is a great degradation of the rule of law. The U.S. cannot call itself a strong democracy when administrations can punish people for proper legal investigations. Future prosecutors and investigators will have to think twice before investigating any potential crimes by Trump or his friends.
“At least three federal prosecutors who worked on cases against Jan. 6 rioters were fired Friday by the Justice Department, according to more than half a dozen current and former officials familiar with the dismissals.
A copy of one of the dismissal letters seen by NBC News was signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, notifying the recipient that they were “removed from federal service effective immediately.” No reason for the removal was stated in the letter.”…”The Trump administration in late January fired probationary federal prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases and prosecutors who worked on former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into President Donald Trump. The administration also demoted some career prosecutors who worked on the Capitol siege investigation.Probationary workers are either recent hires or have taken new positions.The firings on Friday, though, marked the first time that career prosecutors who had worked Jan. 6 cases and who were past their probationary period of federal employment had been fired.”
“Trump’s Justice Department is trying to jail a guy for trespassing on federal property in order to mount an illegal protest — a nonviolent version of what the president pardoned 1,500 people for doing.”
When it comes to the Jan 6 rioters there’s an emphasis on what they did to police offers. That matters, but the most important part about the incident wasn’t the attack on the police, but the attack on United States democracy. The rioters attacked the legislature of the United States in their seat of power, and some did so with the intent of, at least temporarily, ending U.S. democracy by keeping a president who lost an election in power.
“”If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned,” J.D. Vance, now the vice president, said last week. But that “obvious” caveat was notably missing from the indiscriminate pardons Trump actually issued, which he claimed were necessary to remedy “a grave national injustice” and start “a process of national reconciliation.”
Such a reconciliation is impossible when the president is willing to excuse political violence as long as it is perpetrated by his supporters.”
“Just over a week ago, soon-to-be-Vice President JD Vance opined that nonviolent trespassers prosecuted for entering the Capitol on January 6, 2021, should be pardoned — but that day’s violent rioters “obviously” should not be.
Trump had other ideas when he issued his sweeping clemency for those he called the “J6 hostages.” He did separate out 14 members of two far-right groups, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who had been convicted of seditious conspiracy, commuting their sentences instead of giving full pardons. But “all other individuals convicted” of offenses related to the Capitol chaos that day received full unconditional pardons — including those who assaulted police officers, and including the Proud Boys’ leader, Enrique Tarrio.
Trump, it has always been clear, was “delighted” by the storming of the Capitol on January 6; he doesn’t care that his supporters assaulted police, terrorized members of Congress, and threatened to hang his own vice president. What mattered to him was that they were his supporters. So he handed them a get-out-of-jail-free card, even to those who violently tried to overthrow democracy.”
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Trump’s Day 1 executive orders were most numerous and detailed on the topic of immigration. The president revived previous hard-line administration policies, such as a refugee admissions freeze, deportation orders, and border wall construction. He also rolled back some Biden policies intended to let more migrants come in legally if they followed an orderly process, ending Biden’s “parole” program and shutting down an app created for migrants to schedule appointments to make asylum requests.
But on some fronts, Trump’s orders already went much further than he did in his first term and showed a newly emboldened willingness to defy legal caution. For instance:
He ordered that the US military would now be responsible for the “mission” of closing the border.
He used a public health emergency rationale to shut down the asylum system even though there’s no public health crisis at the moment.
He ordered that federal prosecutors recommend the death penalty for any unauthorized immigrant convicted of a capital crime.
He fired several top officials in the US immigration court system, including the system’s acting head.
And he declared that despite what the Constitution says, birthright citizenship would no longer apply to children born in the US to unauthorized immigrants or visa-holders (unless one parent was a US citizen or lawful permanent resident).”
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“Though Trump fired some federal employees Monday, the first day did not seem to bring a mass firing of federal bureaucrats, but the groundwork was laid for something like that to happen in the future.
First off, Trump restored what was previously known as his “Schedule F” executive order, issued in late 2020 shortly before he left office (it was never really implemented and Biden soon revoked it). The idea behind Schedule F — now rebranded as “Schedule Policy/Career” — is to reclassify various important civil servant jobs as exempt from civil service hiring rules and protections, making it easier for those workers to be fired.
Secondly, Trump took aim at part of the federal workforce known as the Senior Executive Service (SES). These are, basically, the top jobs at agencies in the civil service, which liaise with the political appointees to run things. Trump’s order demanded plans from his agencies for making SES more “accountable” (easier to fire). His order also said hiring for SES jobs would now be done by panels composed mostly of political appointees, rather than civil servants as is currently the case.
Third, the Office of Personnel Management issued a memo letting agencies hire unlimited “Schedule C” appointees — another class of political appointees that don’t go through the civil service hiring process. And fourth, another order instructed Trump appointees to come up with plans for reforming the civil service hiring process itself.
Altogether, this shows an intense focus from Trump’s people on wresting agency authority away from civil servants and toward greater numbers of political appointees — and though mass firings haven’t happened yet, it may be only a matter of time.”
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“A Trump order Monday made the unexpected announcement that, in fact, an existing part of the executive branch — the US Digital Service, set up during the Obama administration to modernize government IT — would become the US DOGE Service.
Now, this executive order laid out a surprisingly limited mission of “modernizing federal technology and software,” rather than DOGE’s previously announced remit of overhauling government spending, regulations, and personnel. Liberals on social media crowed at this apparent demotion for Musk.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Reports on Musk’s planning, and public statements from people in contact with his team, suggest they are planning to go very big indeed, in ways that haven’t yet been revealed. With a new report that Musk is likely to get a West Wing office, it’s hard to believe he’s scaled back his grand ambitions.”