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Category: Law/Crime

DOGE operative given access to Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency

DOGE operative given access to Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency

Nextgov/FCW reports: Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old staffer in billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency with a reported history of interacting with hacking groups, has been given physical access to building facilities at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Coristine is listed with a DHS email address and has been seen inside CISA, according to a person familiar with the matter and a directory image viewed by Nextgov/FCW. It is not clear what systems he had access to. CISA and…

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Trump once championed hiring of military spouses. Now they are getting fired

Trump once championed hiring of military spouses. Now they are getting fired

CNN reports: The Trump administration’s swift, sweeping cuts to the federal workforce is set to derail the livelihoods of potentially thousands of military families. The turmoil within the military community caused by the recent firings of probationary employees, looming terminations and a rolling series of deadlines for federal employees to return to work should not be surprising. For decades now, the federal government has marketed itself as the employer of choice for military spouses, who are unemployed at five times…

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DOGE’s millions: As Musk and Trump gut government, their ax-cutting agency gets cash infusion

DOGE’s millions: As Musk and Trump gut government, their ax-cutting agency gets cash infusion

By Avi Asher-Schapiro, Andy Kroll and Christopher Bing This story was originally published by ProPublica While Elon Musk and his underlings demand budget cuts and layoffs across the federal government, funding for their agency — the Department of Government Efficiency — has soared to nearly $40 million, ProPublica found in a review of Office of Management and Budget records. Billionaire investor Musk has called DOGE “maximally transparent.” President Donald Trump has said that some 100 people work for the group,…

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The DOGE sysadmins alone know what they are doing

The DOGE sysadmins alone know what they are doing

Zeynep Tufekci writes: [Thomas Jefferson] feared that an elected authoritarian would not just pulverize the institutions meant to limit his power, but take them over to wield as weapons, thus further entrenching himself. Even Jefferson couldn’t have imagined a future in which the arsenal being deployed included centralized databases with comprehensive records on every citizen’s employment, finances, taxes and for some, even health status. After a judge blocked a Trump executive order, Elon Musk shared a post with his more…

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How aspiring strongmen consolidate power: Fire civil servants; dismantle government departments

How aspiring strongmen consolidate power: Fire civil servants; dismantle government departments

A leader bent on expanding his own power would see the government’s bureaucracy as a key target. Andry Djumantara – iStock/Getty Images Plus By Erica Frantz, Michigan State University; Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Yale University, and Joe Wright, Penn State With the recent confirmations of Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – two of the most controversial of President Donald Trump’s high-level administration nominees – the president’s attempt to remake government as a home for political loyalists continues. Soon after coming…

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Trump’s confidential plan to place Ukraine in a legal stranglehold

Trump’s confidential plan to place Ukraine in a legal stranglehold

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reports: Donald Trump’s demand for a $500bn (£400bn) “payback” from Ukraine goes far beyond US control over the country’s critical minerals. It covers everything from ports and infrastructure to oil and gas, and the larger resource base of the country. The terms of the contract that landed at Volodymyr Zelensky’s office a week ago amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity. It implies a burden of reparations that cannot possibly be achieved. The document…

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The 50-year-old law that might, eventually, stop DOGE

The 50-year-old law that might, eventually, stop DOGE

Wired reports: As Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency rampages through the US government, its access to sensitive data is alarming federal agencies and Americans who interact with them. In the month since the Trump administration began its purge of federal workers, opponents fighting DOGE in court have been pinning their hopes of stopping the world’s richest man on a 50-year-old law. In just a few weeks, DOGE staffers have accessed federal employee records at the Office of Personnel Management, government payment data at the Department of the…

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Elon Musk is an outlaw

Elon Musk is an outlaw

Mother Jones reports: According to Elon Musk’s posts on X, the social media platform he acquired through allegedly illegal tactics, Musk is discovering lawbreaking everywhere as he rampages through government. “Career Treasury officials are breaking the law every hour of every day,” he claimed. USAID, the agency that has saved millions of lives under its mandate from Congress? “A criminal organization.” The federal bureaucracy? “Unconstitutional.” But as elementary school kids have known for time immemorial, whoever smelt it, dealt it….

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Judge Tanya Chutkan needs more evidence to justify a temporary restraining order on Musk

Judge Tanya Chutkan needs more evidence to justify a temporary restraining order on Musk

Politico reports: U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Monday appeared poised to reject an effort to immediately bar Elon Musk and his allies from accessing data or causing firings across a broad swath of the federal government. The judge said an effort by Democrat-led states lacked enough concrete evidence to justify that extraordinary restriction. Chutkan, a Washington-based appointee of former President Barack Obama, agreed that Musk’s operations through the “Department of Government Efficiency” were taking place in troubling secrecy. And…

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Trump administration wants to help get ‘king of toxic masculinity’ Andrew Tate out of Romania

Trump administration wants to help get ‘king of toxic masculinity’ Andrew Tate out of Romania

Gizmodo reports: Off in the depths of the QAnon and PizzaGate corners of the internet, conspiracists swear Donald Trump is quietly preparing charges to bring down notorious sex trafficking circles operated by celebrities. Back in reality, the Financial Times reports the Trump administration is pressuring Romanian authorities to let Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan Tate travel freely despite facing charges of sexual misconduct and human trafficking. Per the report, Trump officials have been pushing for Romania to return the Tates’ passports and lift…

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Trump adopts view of legal impunity invoked by neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Behring Breivik

Trump adopts view of legal impunity invoked by neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Behring Breivik

In his 1500-page manifesto, “A European Declaration of Independence,” Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who murdered 77 people on July 22, 2011, in the section headed “Because our survival depends on it,” writes, “He who saves his country, violates no law,” which has been attributed (without evidence) to Napoleon. Donald Trump has now emphatically made the same declaration. The New York Times reports: President Trump on Saturday posted on social media a single sentence that appears to encapsulate his…

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DOJ’s independence is threatened as Trump’s team asserts power over cases and staff

DOJ’s independence is threatened as Trump’s team asserts power over cases and staff

The Associated Press reports: Pam Bondi had insisted at her Senate confirmation hearing that as attorney general, her Justice Department would not “play politics.” Yet in the month since the Trump administration took over the building, a succession of actions has raised concerns the department is doing exactly that. Top officials have demanded the names of thousands of FBI agents who investigated the Capitol riot, sued a state attorney general who had won a massive fraud verdict against Donald Trump…

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What happens if Trump administration officials repeatedly and defiantly ignore court orders?

What happens if Trump administration officials repeatedly and defiantly ignore court orders?

Trevor W. Morrison and Richard H. Pildes write: For an official to stand in continued, open defiance of a court order, he might have to defy the entire judicial system. At that point, there is no question we would be in a constitutional crisis, and the courts could well run out of options. Here, the resolution of an ultimate confrontation between the branches, which would dominate the news, would also depend on the response of a range of actors in…

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New lawsuits accuse Musk of violating the Constitution’s rules about the appointment of federal officers

New lawsuits accuse Musk of violating the Constitution’s rules about the appointment of federal officers

Politico reports: Elon Musk’s efforts to disrupt and dismantle the federal government at the behest of Donald Trump have already sparked a legion of lawsuits. Now the legal challengers are setting their sights on a new target: Musk himself. Two new cases accuse the ultra-wealthy CEO of illegally amassing too much government power without the accountability typically required of high-level executive branch officials. They are seeking court orders that would force Musk to halt the cost-cutting and information-gathering activities he…

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The opposition is growing: Trump is getting substantial pushback, both from the courts and elsewhere

The opposition is growing: Trump is getting substantial pushback, both from the courts and elsewhere

Quinta Jurecic writes: During his first term in office, Donald Trump loved to complain about judges on social media. Reliably, whenever his agenda was held up in court or his allies faced legal consequences, he would snipe online about “so-called judges” and a “broken and unfair” legal system. Now, in Trump’s second term, this genre of cranky presidential post has returned. A judge who blocked the administration’s mass freeze of federal-grant funding is “highly political” and an “activist,” according to…

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Ambitious and ‘rigorously honest’ prosecutor, Danielle Sassoon, quits rather than do Trump’s bidding

Ambitious and ‘rigorously honest’ prosecutor, Danielle Sassoon, quits rather than do Trump’s bidding

The New York Times reports: Danielle R. Sassoon shot like a laser through the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, with stints fighting violent crime and securities fraud as well as handling appeals before she was elevated, at age 38, to be its interim head. There, just weeks into her tenure running the country’s most prestigious federal prosecutor’s office, she encountered an obstacle that threatened to stall her rapid rise: the desire of President Trump’s administration to drop corruption charges against New…

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