Today, with the popularity of President Donald J. Trump and his administration dropping, Trump’s disastrous performance at the United Nations, the return of comedian Jimmy Kimmel to the airwaves, and the Tuesday’s election in Arizona of Democratic representative Adelita Grijalva, who will provide the final signature on a discharge petition to demand a floor vote in the House over releasing all the government files on convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the administration appears to be making a dramatic push to seize complete control of the government.
Last night, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought tried to jam the Democrats into passing the Republicans’ continuing resolution to fund the government. Officials leaked a memo to Politico, Punchbowl News, and Axios—publications that focus on events concerning Capitol Hill—saying that if the Democrats refuse to pass the Republicans’ measure, the administration will try to fire, rather than furlough, large numbers of federal employees.
Such a move would be challenged in the courts, and the government has been forced to rehire many of the people it forced out earlier this year after those firings left agencies badly understaffed. But the threat is not idle; Vought is a Christian nationalist who has called for a “radical Constitutionalism” that demolishes the modern American state and replaces it with a powerful executive.
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) responded: “Listen Russ, you are a malignant political hack. We will not be intimidated by your threat to engage in mass firings. Get lost.” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement: “Donald Trump has been firing federal workers since day one—not to govern, but to scare. This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government. These unnecessary firings will either be overturned in court or the administration will end up hiring the workers back, just like they did as recently as today.”
Trump appears focused on September 30, when the government funding crisis will hit, and the days after it. Although courts have ruled that he does not have the power to impose tariffs willy-nilly, today Trump announced new tariffs of 100% on pharmaceuticals, 50% on kitchen and bathroom cabinets, 30% on upholstered furniture, and 25% on “Heavy (Big!) Trucks” beginning on October 1. On social media, he claimed such tariffs were necessary “for National Security and other reasons.”
Today, James LaPorta of CBS News reported that the National Archives and Records Administration improperly released Democratic representative Mikie Sherrill’s full military records to an ally of her Republican opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, in the New Jersey governor’s race. The two candidates are tied, and Ciattarelli appears to be trying to link Sherrill to the 1994 Naval Academy cheating scandal involving more than 100 midshipmen.
Sherrill had an unblemished career in the Navy and as a midshipman, LaPorta notes. She did not turn in her cheating classmates, but she was never accused of cheating herself. The unredacted release of Sherrill’s records appears to violate the 1974 Privacy Act. Sherrill said: “That Jack Ciattarelli and the Trump administration are illegally weaponizing my records for political gain is a violation of anyone who has ever served our country. No veteran’s record is safe.”
While the National Archives maintained the release was a mistake and apologized for it, the administration’s influence in the Department of Justice tonight could not be explained away.
Days after Trump demanded that the Department of Justice move “now” to prosecute those he perceives to be his enemies, a federal grand jury has indicted former FBI director James Comey for allegedly lying to Congress and obstructing an investigation. Comey was an early casualty of Trump’s first administration, fired after he refused to kill the FBI investigation of the ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives.
Over last weekend, Trump exploded at then–acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Erik Siebert, a career prosecutor, after Siebert concluded there was not enough evidence of a crime to charge Comey for allegedly lying to Congress or New York attorney general Letitia James for alleged mortgage fraud.
On Monday Trump replaced Siebert with White House aide and Trump’s former personal lawyer Lindsey Halligan, and yesterday three sources told Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MSNBC that they expected Halligan to try to get a grand jury to indict Comey before the five-year statute of limitations on lying to Congress runs out next Tuesday.
Tonight the DOJ delivered an indictment against Comey.
“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump,” Comey said tonight in a video. “But we…will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either. Somebody that I love dearly recently said that fear is the tool of a tyrant, and she’s right, but I’m not afraid, and I hope you’re not either. I hope instead you are engaged, you are paying attention, and you will vote like your beloved country depends upon it, which it does. My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system. I’m innocent. So let’s have a trial and keep the faith.”
The DOJ was busy today. It also sued six states—California, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania—to force them to hand over their voter rolls and information identifying those voters. Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket notes that state officials from both Democratic and Republican governments have questioned why the government wants that information. This lawsuit comes after a nearly identical lawsuit the DOJ filed last week against Maine and Oregon.
Democratic secretary of state Tobias Read of Oregon called the lawsuits an attempt by President Donald Trump “to use the DOJ to go after his political opponents and undermine our elections.”
Tara Copp, Dan Lamothe, Alex Horton, Ellen Nakashima, and Noah Robertson of the Washington Post reported today that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered about 800 of the military’s top generals and admirals, along with their senior enlisted advisors, to come to the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, next week. Such a demand is highly unusual, and no one knows why Hegseth has made it.
In The Bulwark, Mark Hertling, who was commander of U.S. Army Europe from 2011 to 2012, noted that the demand “is baffling and the cost will be staggering.” Instead of using the Pentagon’s secure video teleconferencing system, the personnel will require flights and accommodations that will cost millions, while the lost focus and readiness will affect their mission.
Hertling points out that “[a]dversaries and allies are watching. This sudden, global, emergency recall of America’s top brass is a flashing red light to them: Something must be wrong inside the Pentagon.”
Both Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance tried to downplay the meeting. “Why is that such a big deal?” Trump asked reporters. Vance incorrectly said the meeting is “not particularly unusual,” and said: “I think it’s odd that you guys have made it into such a big story.”
This evening, Trump signed a memorandum targeting activists and nonprofits as part of what he called a “terror network” that he claims is fueling violence, especially against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. He and his allies claim that “radical left Democrats,” or “Radical Left Terrorists,” are behind that violence, although, as scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder notes, the majority of political violence in the U.S. comes from the right.
“Titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” the memo alleges that “common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
The document gives law enforcement wide latitude to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and individuals” engaged in behavior the administration opposes, as well as nonprofit organizations that fund them. It also orders law enforcement to “question and interrogate” people “regarding the entity or individual organizing such actions and any related financial sponsorship of those actions prior to adjudication or initiation of a plea agreement.”
Former federal prosecutor Daniel Richman, who teaches at Columbia Law School, told Robert Tait and Aram Roston of The Guardian that an executive order cannot create new crimes, and Timothy Snyder noted that the memo nonetheless “undoes the basic tradition of American liberty and law, which is…that we are individuals to be judged on the basis of what we do as such. This memo, quite to the contrary, begins from the premise that the world is governed by mysterious, invisible entities to which individuals can be arbitrarily associated by the power of the government, thereby making those individuals guilty and subject to prosecution and punishment.” It makes responsibility collective, thus enabling the government to target everybody. “The groups that will…be targeted will be groups that are concerned with things like counting the votes, human rights, freedom of speech, and the rule of law.”
All this, said Snyder, is both a “big lie” and a cliché. Authoritarians always say the country is facing an emergency and that their opponents are “terrorists.” It’s a cliché to say “there’s a mysterious, bottomless, organization that we have to chase to the ends of the Earth and break all the rules to find. That’s what they always say.”
Snyder noted that Congress can pass laws to rule such behavior illegal, courts can find actions illegal and protect victims, commentators can describe reality, and citizens can say they “don’t want to be subject to an imagined emergency based on a big lie that does away with the essence of American liberty and law.” He concluded: “This has been done before. It can be stopped.”
