Trail Notes
Fund and games / Military secrets / Shooting stars and stripes / D.C. street soldiers / Intelligence failure / Trump tall tales / Science setback / What gun problem?
Fund and games
A grift too far? So it seemed with Donald Trump’s $1.776 billion retribution slush fund, particularly after Judge Kathleen Williams announced that she was reopening the president’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to further investigate “grievous allegations” that the deal to resolve it by creating the “anti-weaponization” fund had been “premised on deception.”
But aside from the arrangement’s dubious legal standing, it reeked politically for Republicans in Congress. That was clear from the beatdown acting Attorney General Todd Blanche recently took from GOP senators when he went to Capitol Hill to defend the deal. Multiple Republicans recoiled from the toxic stench of stashing away nearly $2 billion of taxpayer dollars in a fund completely controlled by a Blanche-appointed commission to make multimillion-dollar payouts to anyone who could show they had been unfairly treated by Joe Biden’s Justice Department, including January 6 Capitol rioters who attacked police officers. It was one big ugly stick they would be handing Democrats.
So, when Blanche returned to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to testify at a House committee hearing, he appeared to promise that the Justice Department is “not moving forward with the fund, period,” although he declined to make a commitment in writing. That seemed more noteworthy a day later when Donald Trump said he wasn’t sure what would happen to the fund, which he described as “a beautiful thing.” Also not clear is whether deep-sixing the fund also means that the president and his family would lose their immunity from future IRS audits that the arrangement would have given them. According to The New York Times, that exemption would enable Trump to potentially avoid paying a $100 million penalty for writing off losses from one of his properties twice as well as other tax-evading indiscretions.
Military secrets
The Defense Department likes to portray itself as a uniquely transparent operation. Just this week, in fact, its acting press secretary, Joel Valdez, called it “the most transparent War Department in history.”
Funny he should say that because also this week, The Washington Post reported that the department has banned journalists from entering what has long been the press office where they could meet with public affairs officers and conduct interviews. Now the Pentagon has declared it a classified space, meaning no journalists. It’s the latest restriction on reporters’ access to anyone who can answer questions about military matters. Several months ago, the Pentagon announced that journalists would need escorts even in the building’s unclassified areas.
Shooting Stars and Stripes
Also this week, Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper that has long maintained editorial independence, sued the Defense Department to keep it from imposing restrictions it contends amount to censorship. It was the paper’s response to the department’s plan to “modernize” it and get rid of “woke distractions.”
D.C. street soldiers
The president keeps claiming that having National Guard troops walk around Washington, D.C., in packs of four or more has eliminated crime in the city. Here’s a shocker: It’s not true.
According to a new report by the nonpartisan Niskanen Center, the deployment of 2,800 soldiers in the city, which costs roughly $1.5 million a day, has had little impact on violent crime in D.C. They have reduced some “opportunistic” property crimes, such as thefts from cars. Researchers at the center say that’s because they are most often seen walking up and down the Mall; strolling around federal buildings, monuments and parks; and hanging around Metro stations. Trump plans to boost the deployment to 5,000 troops this summer.
Intelligence failure
When Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, slashed away at the federal government last year, a core part of its hacking orders was to jettison any program, any grant and any person with a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) connection. The Trump administration, we were told, would be a model of meritocracy. Only the best, most qualified people.
Somehow, we wound up with Kash Patel at the FBI, Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, and Kristi Noem at Homeland Security. And now Bill Pulte was named acting director of national intelligence on Tuesday to replace Tulsi Gabbard at the end of the month.
Pulte will remain head of Federal Housing Finance, but he’ll also oversee the country’s intelligence community, which is spread across 18 agencies. Not only does he have no intelligence experience, he also has never served in the military, in law enforcement, or in the diplomatic corps. He has, however, shown an affinity for going after Donald Trump’s perceived enemies, including Jerome Powell and Lisa Cook at the Federal Reserve, California Sen. Adam Schiff, and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Pulte’s track record as a Trump attack dog has already set off alarms about what he might do with access to the highest levels of U.S. intelligence. Not to worry, said White House spokesman Davis Ingle, “the president chooses the best and most talented people to serve in his cabinet.”
Trump tall tales
These days Donald Trump is a walking babble machine, but there was a time when he was more cogent in describing what he saw as a key to his success: “If you say something enough and keep saying it, they’ll start to believe you.” So it is with his revisionist view of what happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Once again, he shared a favorite fantasy of what happened that day: “People went there with love,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “There was so much love and friendship. It was amazing. People were crying.” Later, as you may remember, the rioters loved the hell out of the police defending the building while Trump watched the love-in on TV.
Another myth the president loves to share ad nauseum is the 2020 election was “rigged” and he actually won in a landslide—a curious claim given Biden got 7 million more votes. That suggests there was a helluva lot of rigging that, for all their efforts, Trump’s loyal band of election deniers has not been able to expose. No matter. During a recent podcast interview with The New York Post, Trump said 14 times that the election was rigged.
With the midterms approaching, expect him to beat that drum relentlessly. And, if he’s looking for a reason to send troops to polling places or even cancel the election—say, something like suspected foreign interference with voting machines—he now has, in Bill Pulte, just the guy who’s ready and willing to use his new position to help the president find one.
Science setback
In keeping with its doctrine that climate change is just another woke hoax, the Trump administration has begun dismantling a deep-ocean observation system that for the past decade has been monitoring coastal environments, underwater ecosystems, and currents that affect the planet’s climate. Scientists have been gathering data from those instruments submerged off the East and West coasts to better understand how the ocean is absorbing carbon pollution and track the growing threat of coastal flooding. But that research equipment will soon be gone, the latest example of the administration sidelining science.
“By dismantling such a system,” said Craig McLean, chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during Trump’s first term, “we push the United States back yet again into a rear seat in global scientific leadership.”
What gun problem?
When it comes enforcing gun laws, the Trump administration doesn’t appear to be much interested. Not only have many Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents been shifted to immigration enforcement duty, but a new analysis by ProPublica found that the agency referred 30 percent fewer cases to federal prosecutors last year than the year before. Further, the administration reversed a Biden crackdown on gun stores that violate the law. There’s been nearly a 70 percent reduction in the number of dealers losing their licenses.
Alabama race redistricting
The Supreme Court came through for the Trump administration once again on Tuesday when it gave its blessing to Alabama to hold an upcoming election using a congressional map that a lower court ruled discriminates on the basis of race. The ruling will allow state officials to utilize a map drawn in 2023 giving Republicans an advantage in six of the seven congressional districts by eliminating one district designed to provide an edge to minority candidates.
Missed messages
One of the primary responsibilities of a presidential library is to preserve White House records. Apparently, that doesn’t apply to the Trump Presidential Library. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request by The Washington Post, the library said it was unable to retrieve a single one of the more than 25,000 tweets Donald Trump posted during his first term. This snafu comes on the heels of the Trump administration insisting that it doesn’t have to abide by the Presidential Records Act, a law passed by Congress not long after the Watergate scandal. It requires public access to a president’s records after he leaves office.
Trump at work
Last month, Donald Trump posted 861 comments on his Truth Social platform, the most in any month since he started his second term. That’s an average of 27 personal attacks, AI graphics and provocative memes a day.
Randy Rieland, Money Trail’s “Trail Notes” columnist, is a former columnist at Smithsonian magazine, website director at the Discovery Channel, and senior writer at Washingtonian magazine.
Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.