laverne cox

After a spat between the political leadership and top career officials, the Trump administration has carried out a massive shakeup of the federal government’s agriculture officials at the state level.

The Agriculture Department has reassigned or detailed out six of the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s state conservationists in the past few weeks, according to seven people familiar with the moves and internal communications seen by The Washington Sun.

The majority of the shakeup was precipitated by an unusually testy meeting, in which Trump administration political appointees castigated USDA’s state leaders for failing to serve the nation’s farmers, an issue heightened by President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the war with Iran.

In the meeting, NRCS Chief Colton Buckley told the agency’s top career officials that they needed to get funding out the door more quickly, according to two people familiar with the exchange. He then yelled and cursed at the staff.

Buckley even brought forms to the meeting to initiate the reassignment or firing of the executives and said he was prepared to sign them if they didn’t begin moving the funding with more haste.

One employee said Buckley was “verbally abusive” during the meeting.

The state conservationists pleaded with Buckley to recognize that the Trump administration’s repeated attempts to slash the federal workforce had left them without enough personnel to go any faster, the people said.

NRCS has shed nearly 3,000 employees under Trump, or around 24 percent of its workforce.

But the argument was lost on Buckley. As of early November, the chief has started the process of reassigning state leaders in Nevada, Oregon, Wyoming and Illinois. He previously forced out the head of the NRCS office in Texas and detailed out the leader of the office in Florida.

“This is unprecedented in NRCS history,” one employee said of the shakeup. “Trump’s tariffs hurt the farmers. [His workforce-reduction efforts] hurt the farmers, and career employees are being punished after being placed in a compromised position.”

The Department of Agriculture did not respond to a request for comment.

The message from agency leadership has been “spending more money faster,” one employee said. “We have little to no staff, and are being forced to take more money with no one to obligate contracts.”

Employees have been threatened and disciplined for missing deadlines, one field employee said, but that hasn’t stopped backlogs from piling up.

NRCS staff said state conservationists are just scapegoats. One partner to the agency said the official in their state was “just the most obvious person to throw under the bus.”

“Unless the next guy is going to pull about 20 foresters and engineers out of thin air, he’ll do about as well as she ever did,” they said.

What saved President Donald Trump from prosecution could end up biting him, leaving him open to potential criminal indictments.

In MS NOW’s Ask Jordan column, a reader posed the question: If a future Supreme Court reverses the ruling that a president is immune for crimes committed in office, could Trump be prosecuted?

MS NOW legal analyst Jordan Rubin, a former prosecutor, responded, “The Supreme Court can overturn any ruling it wants to.” That includes, he wrote, the 2024 presidential immunity ruling in Trump v. United States.

Rubin noted that Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who led the court’s three Democratic appointees in dissent in that case, recently said that she hopes the ruling will be overturned in her lifetime. The Obama appointee is the third-oldest justice on the court, at 72, behind GOP appointees Clarence Thomas (78) and Samuel Alito (76).

If a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028 and appoints replacements for Thomas and Alito, that would shift the court’s makeup from a 6-3 majority of GOP-appointed justices to a 5-4 majority of Democratic appointees.

In order to overturn a precedent, Rubin explained, the justices would have to take up a new case to use as a vehicle for doing so. But with presidential immunity, it’s unclear how the issue would find its way to this hypothetical Democratic-appointed majority. There aren’t a bunch of former presidents being prosecuted.

Yes, Trump is appealing his hush money conviction partly on immunity grounds, Rubin acknowledged, but that case concerns a narrow issue — namely, whether state prosecutors were improper in using evidence of Trump’s official acts to convict him of an unofficial act.

But if the case gets to a Supreme Court with a Democratic-appointed majority, the court could decide the narrower evidentiary issue while also taking the bigger step of overturning the underlying immunity precedent.

As for prosecuting Trump again, Rubin wrote that it seems like a long shot for a variety of legal and practical reasons. The Justice Department dropped the federal 2020 election interference case, based on its policy against prosecuting sitting presidents. So the question of whether Trump could be prosecuted after he leaves office in 2029 is not solely based on the question of immunity.

If a future DOJ were to attempt to resurrect Trump’s charges, one of the legal fights that would follow would be over whether the statute of limitations is forgiven, or whether the DOJ’s decision not to prosecute a sitting president is a windfall for the defendant.

Trump could also try to pardon himself before he leaves office. If the courts were to approve the self-pardon, then that would moot any other issues.

In reality, Rubin concluded, Trump’s victory in the 2024 election may have saved him. But a future Supreme Court could reverse the immunity ruling so that future presidents won’t have that advantage.

The Justice Department returned to court Friday in the ongoing battle over the East Potomac Park golf course. It didn't go well as Justice Department lawyers tried to play coy with their answers to the judge's questions.

The case heated up this week after a whistleblower revealed that the administration was destroying documents containing conversations about all D.C. construction projects involving the president. It was among the first things Judge Ana Reyes raised Friday, Lawfare's Molly Roberts reported in her running account of the hearing.

She asked the room whether they knew what a "zeptosecond" was. It's the shortest measurement of time ever recorded in a lab. She explained that if she finds out that documents were destroyed, she will start proceedings on "sanctions or contempt in a zeptosecond."

Judge Reyes has appointed a special master to investigate whether the DOJ lied to the court about what was unfolding in the case. On Thursday, the DOJ submitted a filing expressing its opposition to the special master.

Reyes has started asking at the beginning of each hearing whether anyone needs to correct the record because they may have inadvertently made false statements to the court.

She then began a conversation with Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Adam R.F. Gustafson about the design of the golf course. They said repeatedly that they can't fully answer what the final design will be.

"I understand the government's argument that as a matter of law...a million things have to happen," the judge said, according to Roberts' account. She asked them to put that aside. "The Department of Interior has filed a submission with the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) that has an attached design to it."

Gustafson held up the image but brushed past it, saying that it's the same design that the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) is using. It's also the same design that Trump posted on Truth Social. Yet, Woodward wouldn't say whether it is the final design.

Roberts paraphrased what Reyes said, "That is what I want to avoid today. Here is what I want: Yes or no, the championship-style course by Tom Fazio ... assuming you get the necessary approvals, is that what we're going with?"

Gustafson said that it's the plan for now. Gustafson then appeared to irritate the judge even further, asking her to repeat her question.

Judge Reyes told Gustafson that it would "behoove" him to listen. She asked if there had been any pushback to the plan.

Gustafson responded, "I can't say that I've polled the public on this, your Honor."

That didn't go over well. She said that it would have been a "ridiculous question for me to ask." So, she encouraged Gustafson, "When I ask questions, why don't you actually listen to my question and assume that I'm not asking an idiotic question?"

Gustafson said that his "understanding is really limited to what has happened in the courtroom." He's not aware of what the people think about the golf course because "I don't have a television."

So, the judge asked the courtroom to raise their hands if they have strong feelings about the golf course.

"Turn around, sir," she said.

Hundreds of arms were raised, Roberts said. The majority of the people in the room.

Former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor has been in the sight lines of MAGA for years since he penned an anonymous tell-all editorial about President Donald Trump.

The latest allegations came from Stephen Miller's spouse, Katie Miller, who alleged, "Miles Taylor cheated on his wife with the Secretary’s Executive Assistant while he was Deputy Chief of Staff of the Department of Homeland Security.”

Taylor wrote on his Substack Friday that it appears Miller meant his first wife, as he and his current wife weren't together until after he left the administration.

"The number of falsehoods packed into one sentence is almost comical," Taylor said. "I wasn’t married for most of the time I was deputy chief of staff… Hannah was never the Secretary’s executive assistant (and I had to stop and think about who was)… and I had precisely zero romantic relationships with anyone inside the Department during my time there. That didn’t slow down the claim as it traveled through X at tabloid speed."

His wife, he said, had a good sense of humor about it, saying she wished they'd been together two years earlier.

These attacks go back to Taylor's recent question about Trump's ballroom and whether the president would return the $25 million given to partially fund the project from Nvidia, which is falling under serious scrutiny after the CEO was outed for having a relationship with a suspected Chinese spy.

The Nvidia scandal has rocked Washington this week. Contributing writer to The Atlantic, Derek Thompson summed it up by explaining: "1. Jensen Huang is sleeping with a Chinese spy. 2. Nvidia has been selling chips to Chinese AI companies for years through a Singapore intermediary overseen by that Chinese spy. 3. Nvidia’s lawyers pushed back on a federal investigation into this illegal scheme. 4. The White House knew all of the above and did absolutely nothing."

The question about returning the money bothered Miller so much, "that she answered it with a fabricated and tawdry story about my time at DHS, as if that might distract from the corruption in plain view."

He thinks the real issue is Miller is miffed over Taylor's attacks on her husband, the new chief of staff to Trump. He called it "a new stage of desperation."

"First, they tried treason. In April 2025, the president signed an executive order directing the government to investigate me, and told reporters he thought I was guilty of treason," Taylor recalled. "My offense was exercising my First Amendment rights. A White House official explained the thinking to Rolling Stone at the time: 'Donald Trump needed to send a message.' Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan later reported in their book Regime Change that Stephen Miller was one of the individuals behind the retaliation orders directed at me and Chris Krebs. (Notably, Katie Miller celebrated the night it was signed, calling me a 'traitor' and writing that 'bad people always have a day of reckoning')."

Now she's going after him personally.

The purpose is to scare critics into silence: if you speak out, you'll face the full weight of the White House.

"I hate to disappoint them, but it isn’t working," Taylor explained. "And it won’t. Whatever window they had — in the dark early days of 2025 when law firms and universities were flagellating themselves in front of the president to avoid his punishment — closed a long time ago. The country has turned against this president. People are furious about the corruption, and they’ve stopped being afraid to say it."

As the Trump administration desperately clings to whatever power and influence it had before Nov. 3 they only humiliates itself further.

"I learned a long time ago that what is right and what is easy are almost never the same thing, and I’ve stopped lamenting the labor it takes to follow an ethical lodestar. I’ve come to rejoice in it," Taylor closed.

A conservative lawyer and staunch advocate for President Donald Trump is warning his fellow Republicans in Congress that they may be putting themselves in jeopardy if they try to block legitimate investigations into corruption in the Trump administration.

In a Townhall column on Friday, Josh Hammer, a senior counsel at the Article III Project, a conservative, pro-Trump legal organization, slammed Democrats’ stated intentions to investigate the White House when they take power in Congress in January. Hammer, a columnist, did admit that corruption is a legitimate concern.

“Congressional Republicans risk obstructing investigations on such grounds at their peril,” he wrote.

The midterm elections last week left Republicans with Democrats in control of both chambers. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee, told the administration to “lawyer up” the night of the elections. Garcia said his committee plans to investigate the “Trump Crime Family,” as he puts it, corporate corruption, abuses at the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the administration’s handling of the Epstein files. Garcia has told the administration’s new chief of staff, Stephen Miller, to lawyer up.

Hammer also cited a post on X in which Rep. Analilia Mejia (D-N.J.) said Democrats would throw around subpoenas like Mardi Gras beads.

But Hammer also said that Democrats were mostly just out to make the administration’s life miserable. He agreed with the administration’s lawyer, Will Scharf, who said in a letter to Garcia that investigations by Congress must be for a valid legislative purpose. Scharf, in the letter, warned that failing to identify one would be an abuse of power.

Hammer, a former clerk at a federal appeals court who has gone on to become a pundit, argued that Congress should do its work within the bounds of the Constitution. He said the Constitution envisioned only “few and defined” federal powers, according to a statement by James Madison in Federalist No. 45. He also noted Chief Justice John Marshall’s 1819 statement in McCulloch v. Maryland that Congress’s ends must be legitimate. Investigations to fundraise or to boost cable ratings do not count, he argued.

Hammer also said that the executive and legislative branches should settle subpoena disputes through the usual process of negotiation, citing a 1977 ruling by the federal appeals court in Washington.

Hammer noted that Democrats also campaigned on addressing affordability and the cost of living. He urged them to use Congress to pass laws that would make life better for regular Americans. The Framers gave Congress a Commerce Clause, Hammer said, but not one for retribution.

Garcia himself has linked his planned investigations to Democrats’ messaging on affordability. He has said families have to decide whether to buy gas or groceries while the well-connected line their own pockets.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared on "Squawk Box" Friday and quickly threw President Donald Trump's Commerce Secretary under the bus.

Speaking to Co-host Joe Kernen, Bessent said that the Commerce Department was clearly responsible for the delay in labeling the AI chip manufacturer Nvidia and its customer Megaspeed as possible national security threats.

"I can tell you there was coordination," Bessent said, citing the Treasury Department, The Department of Defense, U.S. Trade Representative and State Department. "They were in favor of putting Megaspeed on the entity list for months. But Commerce has the pen. Commerce BIS (Bureau of Industry and Security) has the pen, and you will have to ask them about their internal processes."

Co-host Rebecca Quick asked whether he was "frustrated" and if he thinks there will be tighter controls on these chips in the future.

"Well, Becky, I am frustrated when President Trump made it very clear that China should not receive any Nvidia chips above H-100s. And so any leakage is very frustrating because it hurts our great companies in the AI race and gives the Chinese an advantage," said Bessent.

Kernen asked if that meant that Treasury would take over the matter if Commerce refuses to act to regulate the chip manufacturers, but Bessent said the Trade Commission would likely be the one to put restrictions on.

Bessent wouldn't confirm or deny the conversation in the Situation Room with Lutnick about the other branches demanding he enforce rules on these companies and flag them as a national security concern. He also wouldn't say what he would do if he were the commerce secretary.

"I'm going to say the Treasury secretary, Treasury [Department] and my deputy have been pushing for this for months. At the deputy level," Bessent said.

Kernen asked if Congress should step in and act in the absence of regulations, but Bessent returned to Lutnick.

"Yeah, Joe, I think we have all the authorities that we need. They just need to be implemented," Bessent said. "And what I would say is up to the H-100, that's not a technological advantage."

When asked about the economy, he maintained the status quo was the smart move. "I'm quite confident that the economy is in very good shape, and there's nothing that's setting off any alarm bells for me right now."

Lutnick has been under pressure to explain how these chips were able to be exported to a company linked to a Chinese spy.

- YouTube youtu.be

The president has a secret escape hatch that’s carried him through numerous scandals, and it isn’t his lawyers or his wealth.

Donald Trump has survived in the political arena because he can convince people that every politician in Washington is corrupt. Historian Timothy Snyder says Democrats have a small window to break the spell, and he revealed the strategy to get it done.

The On Tyranny author, in an interview with Public Notice’s Aaron Rupar, says corruption is currently at the top of a lot of people’s minds. He points out that the majority of people believe that the system is broken, but they think that Trump is more corrupt than the presidents who came before him.

This is where Snyder thinks the problem lies. Trump’s staying power has been predicated on the idea that all politicians are corrupt. The moment you get the electorate to believe that every single person in Washington is corrupt, Trump can position himself as the one who is better at the game.

In Snyder’s view, Trump’s pitch is something of a confession: everyone lies, everyone is corrupt, but he is just better at it and more charming about it.

To stop Trump from escaping the noose, Snyder says that Democrats need to move fast, and do it publicly. Snyder is calling for “ostentatious investigations” and legislation that would limit the role of money in politics. He emphasizes that the public needs to see the action, and not just hear about the reforms being done behind closed doors.

Timing is everything, Snyder said to Rupar. He believes that Democrats need to be on the move in November and January. If they’re not, by the spring he expects the public to be back in the mindset of believing the whole political class is corrupt, and Trump knows exactly how to survive it.

"As far as an emergency brake, I agree with you. I would just say you pull the emergency brake and then you jump out of the car and you get another one because the task is not fixing what we have at this point. The task is building something different," he said.

Snyder has been hammering this idea for a few months now. Back in June, he appeared on The PoliticsGirl podcast and was rather direct about it. “Giving billions of dollars of tax money to his friends is not popular,” he said.

Snyder has pointed to a country like Hungary, where Orbán’s government was defeated after the opposition successfully linked the public’s anger about corruption to a larger narrative. This is the strategy that Snyder thinks Democrats should adopt, instead of just promising to bring the electorate back to normality.

The advice is being put to the test now. Democrats took both houses of Congress in the Nov. 3 elections, and the campaign focused on voters’ frustration with the cost of living and perceptions of public corruption. House Democrats have said that they will engage in very aggressive oversight of Trump’s family, business and administration. “There is a cost to corruption,” said House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries to the media before the elections.

Snyder’s legislative strategy may not come to fruition, as Trump has said he will veto any bill led by a Democrat. This leaves investigations, which are something the electorate can see, as something Democrats can pursue on their own. If Snyder is right, the window to act is already closing.

In the two years since President Donald Trump launched a barrage of aggressive tariffs on America's trading partners worldwide, fear of a stock market reaction has been the chief brake on his agenda, and the midterms may have just changed that.

Republican Rep. Don Bacon, who is retiring, has been more open to dissent. He was one of six Republicans to join Democrats in voting to repeal Trump's tariffs on Canada in February, a rare rebuke of the president's trade policy. Bacon told CNN he wasn't sure whether the appetite of Republicans to oppose the president's trade agenda had increased as a result of the midterms.

"It should," he said. "Trump's tariffs killed the GOP this election."

Despite a consistent stream of polling data showing Americans' hostility towards Trump's tariffs, Republican lawmakers have largely stayed quiet on the issue, viewing the political fallout from opposing the president as too great. Last week's election results may well have just demonstrated that there is a significant political cost to that silence. Democrats have made major gains at the polls, flipping seats in historically Republican states that have been badly hit by the tariffs, from agricultural states such as Iowa and Kansas to the northern border states of Maine and Michigan.

"Many Republicans were kind of whistling by the political graveyard by ignoring the tariff issue, but now it's come front and center," said Brian Darling, a Republican strategist and former counsel to Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Nationally, two-thirds of voters said Trump's tariffs had hurt the national economy, according to the results of CNN's Voter Poll.

Some Republicans have already begun to acknowledge that their approach to the tariffs may have come at a political cost. Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, whose state saw significant Democratic gains in the election, pointed to voter frustration at the cost of living as a key factor in the outcome.

"Tariffs have made everything too expensive," Cruz wrote in a post on X last week. "Understandably, people were pissed off, and elected Republicans didn't do enough to address their very real pain," he added.

Cruz has, however, remained a staunch backer of Trump's tariff agenda in Congress.

Even if Republicans are willing to risk the wrath of the president, they face another huge hurdle: his veto power. Democrats and their independent allies currently hold 55 of the 100 Senate seats and 255 of the 435 House seats. Even if they voted unanimously, they would still need at least 12 Republicans in the Senate and 35 in the House to override a presidential veto.

"I'll become Mr. Veto," Trump declared in an Election Day interview on the New York Post's Pod Force One prior to the results being in.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is under increased scrutiny for refusing to act on AI chip maker Nvidia, and now his fellow employees in President Donald Trump's administration say he's got to go.

It was reported this week that members of President Donald Trump's Cabinet were briefed on the spy that chip maker Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admitted to having an extramarital affair with. New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman then reported that the president also received a briefing on the matter twice. Trump previously denied he knew anything about it.

To make matters worse, a bombshell report revealed that Lutnick blocked any investigation into Nvidia, in which his old company, now run by his sons, holds a significant stake, about $1.2 billion, according to CBS News.

Things finally got so bad that other Cabinet officials had to intervene and demand action, Axios reported.

Huang and Trump have built a close relationship as Trump continues to take advantage of the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act. There's now a fear about whether Huang's relationship with Alice Huang (also known as Huang Le), resulted in intelligence being obtained for China and Lutnick, along with Trump, allowed it to happen.

Politico Playbook reported Friday that the "knives are out" after his "lax oversight" and ignored warnings, all while he gave Nvidia unusually favorable access.

Ultimately, Lutnick had the authority and warning signs to tighten enforcement but instead gave Nvidia a pass and resisted restrictions. Whether that reflects a defensible policy choice, mismanagement, favoritism or misconduct remains to be seen, but it has been enough for top Trump officials to call for his ousting.

Politico said that seven current and former administration officials said the Nvidia scandal is significant enough to undermine Lutnick's position in the administration. Trump maintains that he has "complete confidence" in Lutnick.

Meanwhile, Congress is now looking to Lutnick and Democrats haven't even taken over the House and Senate. Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott (R-S.C.) called on Lutnick and Huang to testify as soon as next month. Lutnick's office said he will.

"Huang’s downfall has also significantly ramped up the legislative prospects for curbs on semiconductor exports to China," Playbook reported, citing a piece by Oliver Ward and colleagues. "It’s a dramatic reversal from the more lax approach the White House previously took."

The Guardian reported Thursday evening that Trump officials are now discussing whether Lutnick must go.

Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) said that Lutnick’s delay in enforcing controls on Huang's mistress' company “raises the question of whether the commerce department is acting in the best interests of the American people.”

He was one of several Republicans. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) similarly said that there was a growing agreement among the caucus that it's time for Congress to step in if Lutnick refuses.