Good morning, everyone! I’m Thomas Lecaque, back from a summer away, and ready to throw myself headlong back into the daily struggle. This is the Axis Mundi Daily Brief, and it may be a Monday morning, but it was a doozy of a weekend. Let’s start with the small scale and make it big, much like your caffeine needs as the work week begins. On Meet the Press yesterday, Todd Blanche—our newly confirmed attorney general, Trump’s personal lawyer from spring 2023 onwards, and the lawyer for several people around Trump world before that, including Rudy Giuliani, Paul Manafort, Igor Fruman and Boris Epshteyn, so, that Todd Blanche—refused to say he would act independently of White House control. He of course followed that up with the claim that Trump has never demanded he prosecute specific people, which is a fascinating claim for anyone who has spent time on Truth Social—try not to be one of them, leave that to people who are paid to rot their brains—because Trump is constantly yelling about individuals who need to be prosecuted. Maybe he means Trump never said it in a formal memo. I could believe that, Trump prefers ranting during rallies and all caps social media posts to the formal work of governance.
The direct quotes are ““There’s a big difference between saying we will always do our job and investigate any case, and act independently of the White House,” and, when pressed by Kristen Welker to pledge his independence from Trump’s edicts, replied, “No, I’m not going to pledge that, and no attorney general should ever pledge that.” He said that Trump has never asked him to do anything illegal or unethical, and that reports of White House meddling in the Department of Justice were overhyped. Again, this sure seems like a question of what means of communication he’s using, because he repeatedly demanded the prosecution of people on social media, tagging his former attorney general (and former defense lawyer during his impeachment trial) Pam Bondi, before firing her in April. As the New York Times described it at the time,
The firing of Ms. Bondi, 60, ends a turbulent 14-month tenure as attorney general in which she tried desperately to appease a boss who demanded unimpeded control of the Justice Department to pursue politically motivated investigations against targets of his choosing, even when prosecutors warned that there was no evidence to do so.
In the process, Ms. Bondi surrendered much of the department’s historic independence and oversaw the exodus of experienced career officials, leaving the department’s public corruption and national security units, along with many local U.S. attorneys’ offices, weakened and demoralized.
Yet Mr. Trump remained annoyed by Ms. Bondi’s inability to secure indictments of people he referred to as “scum” during a speech in the department’s Great Hall about a year ago.
Now, look. I think a lot of us get upset with the New York Times, fairly often, because of their editorials and because of the way they frame issues. But they’re risk averse enough that we should probably think through the implications here. If Bondi was fired because she wouldn’t go far enough, while also surrendering most of the independence of the department, Todd Blanche refusing to even make the pretense of independence is a problem.
I think we sometimes look at these moments from the lens of just the corruption—and that matters. This is the most corrupt administration in a long time, and I think we might have to look back towards the Gilded Age to see worse. And having Trump’s personal lawyer… again… as the Attorney General has incredible implications on what will happen in Trumpworld for the next couple years. Rule of law and custom already don’t apply, as Trump and his family pillage the coffers of the country; I expect that to get significantly worse. Blanche disbanded the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, after all, to the benefit of not only his own holdings but Trump’s own. But the part that worries me more than that—which, unfortunately, remains small scale, it’s only (billions of dollars of) money—is what that means for the fascist part of Trumplandia’s agenda. Because violating the rule of law is not just about Trump’s personal kleptocracy. It’s about punishment, vengeance, and rewarding the fascists who follow him no matter what.
I’m not going to talk about the Epstein case today. That’s a topic too big to drop in and out of. But I do think we should talk about his proposed “anti-weaponization fund,” even though he said on Sunday on Fox News that it is dead and that Trump knows that—the agreement he made with Tillis and Cornyn to get their votes for his confirmation. The fund was initially order in a May memo for $1.776 billion dollars—and yes, that number matters—and was absolutely created to start by paying off January 6 insurrectionists and then anyone else Trumpland felt was “targeted” by Biden. Even if the fascist slush fund is dead, and I think that’s a real if once Tillis and Cornyn are out of the Senate, the attempt to legislate like that hits the perfect middle ground between personal corruption for Trump—like the lawsuit against the IRS—and support for far right ideas outside the confines of the law. If the Department of Justice is run by a man who acts like Trump’s personal enforcer instead of just his personal lawyer, is that not worse?
So finally, let’s talk about Todd Blanche’s role in Minneapolis, a thing that is not just past but present, and a thing that goes beyond his responses to the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti this spring. Blanche was in charge when Minnesota officials were prevented from investigating Good’s killing, handing it over to the FBI. Bondi and Blanche openly blocked civil rights investigations into Jonathan Ross—the agent who killed Renée Good—and pushed conspiratorial investigations into Becca Good and local activist groups. Six federal prosecutors resigned after the DOJ investigated Becca Good instead of Ross. Trump ranted about “anarchists and professional agitators” in Minneapolis and that “THE DAY OF RECKONING AND RETRIBUTION IS COMING,” and the DOJ pushed onwards with criminal inquiries into Governor Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey. These are all things we know—this was January of this year, even if everything starts to feel like a decade ago these days—but these are all things that Todd Blanche was involved in when he has a boss who was, apparently, still attempting the Trump version of a middle ground (yes, I know how that sounds).
So the reason I think we need to keep talking about Minneapolis is that Trump isn’t done with them, and neither is Blanche, even if many of us have moved on to looking at other places. And if Blanche isn’t going to make even the pretense of judicial independence—Bondi at least pretended, and seems to have gotten fired for it—then the ways the law is being blatantly violated there, still, matters deeply. The Justice Department dismissed charges against James Patrick Lyon on Friday, whose case was set for trial starting Monday for five counts of making interstate threats to injure law enforcement officers, because they lacked evidence that he’d committed a crime—one of numerous cases dismissed because of basic investigative missteps. Of the 558 charges cases of assaulting immigration agents, the government has lost of dismissed nearly half of them; usually, the DOJ wins 90% of its criminal cases. They’re losing, because it’s not about the law, it’s about the threat. And newly released internal investigative reports from the Department of Homeland Security, reported on last week, show that those threats, alongside the blatant misconduct, went even further: a massive domestic spying campaign by the US government on prominent labor unions and left-leaning organizations in what was called “Operation Puppet Master” to try and prove a criminal conspiracy against ICE. This was released due to the DOJ filing charges against 15 people over alleged interference in Minnesota in January. DHS obtained financial records from unions like the Communications Workers of America and non-profits including the Sunrise Movement, years of wire transfer data, documented license plate information from attendees at a church. This is a big deal, because these are all First Amendment protected activities—freedom of speech, yes, and also freedom of assembly, where the government’s case seems to be guilt by association to surveil massive groups of people who have pushed back at various Trump agendas. And all of this was under Operation Metro Surge—which is also flailing—with the main accusation being that Direct Action Minnesota is “antifa” and consequently anyone associated with it, in any way, is part of a conspiracy against the government.
Why should you care? How do these things tie together? Well, let’s just start with something basic: Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi both got fired from their jobs for not going as far as Trump’s social media rants told them to. They’ve been replaced with two men, Markwayne Mullin and Todd Blanche, who have been very, very clear that they feel no compunction to engage in any restraint on any topic. Todd Blanche just said that he would not say that the attorney general would maintain independence from the White House’s agenda, and that Trump has never asked him to do anything illegal or unethical anyway—even if he believes that, imagine how much worse that is, a true believer running the DOJ arm in arm with Trump’s personal edicts? The government is already running their “antifa are domestic terrorists” campaign in court; if Blanche carries on the way he has been, with more power, no oversight, and more help from other departments, this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
I don’t have an action item, there’s no easy solution here. But the media cycle tends to bounce around. All eyes were on Minneapolis in January, and it was good, and it made a difference—Trump hates failure, but Trump hates a negative medica cycle even more. But we moved on to other topics, even though ICE and the DOJ never left Minneapolis. The case in Minneapolis happening right now needs to be a bigger news story than it is, because it’s the government violating our rights on a massive scale in the name of Trump’s personal whims and hatreds—and it is up to all of us to pay attention.
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