Trump has been nominating,
and the Senate has been confirming,
one pliant and obsequious instrument of the president’s pleasure after another.
This is nowhere more true than in appointments to the Department of Justice.
To understand Martin’s danger, it is important to understand how the department in which he would serve as a confirmed official has been operating in Trump 2.0.
At Attorney General #Pam #Bondi’s swearing-in ceremony, she pledged to
“not let [Trump] down”
and to “make [him] proud.”
In her introduction of President Trump before his speech in the Great Hall at the Justice Department,
she called Trump
“the greatest president in the history of our country”
and proclaimed that the department was
“so proud to work at [his] directive”
and would “never stop fighting for” Trump.
She has portrayed Justice Department attorneys as the president’s lawyers.
Bondi signaled fierce loyalty to Trump at her confirmation hearing but nonetheless pledged that,
“If confirmed, I will fight every day to restore confidence and integrity to the Department of Justice
and each of its components.
The partisanship, the weaponization, will be gone. America will have one tier of justice for all.”
In office Bondi has done precisely the opposite
—aggressively so.
She has engaged in a range of politicizing actions,
including dropping the Eric Adams prosecution,
withdrawing charges against and pulling back from investigations of other Trump-allied current or former officials, halting prosecution of a Trump family crypto partner,
and firing or demoting career attorneys who worked on cases involving the president.
She established a “Weaponization Working Group”
that is going after the president’s perceived enemies
and must report on its progress to the White House quarterly.
(Martin is a member of the group.)
The weaponization group is implementing the president’s core philosophy:
“If they screw you, screw them back ten times as hard.”
The goal may be to eliminate future weaponization against Trump interests;
but the tactics are weaponization on a scale never before imagined.
At the same time, Bondi, the chief legal officer of the executive branch after Trump,
is stewarding the rule of law in a disastrous fashion.
She has facilitated the elimination of DOJ independence from the White House,
despite pledges to the contrary.
Her lawyers have been unprepared in court and shown courts unprecedented disrespect.
They have sought to defend the president’s plainly lawless extortionate actions against law firms,
among other lawless executive actions.
Bondi and her lawyers are not restoring confidence and integrity in the department
—they are weakening them.
Bondi had signaled a pro-Trump agenda during her confirmation process,
but now we know the scale on which she is using the department to do the president’s political and personal bidding.
The Senate’s enabling of these actions in confirming Bondi is the proper background to assess Martin’s nomination
... after band-aid "deployment" (IOW, scp binaries to the prod jail).
I suspected a deadlock caused by pthread mutexes. Wasted quite some time looking into that. Then I finally realized communication over the pipes was stalled.
despite a US judge’s ruling to halt the flights on Saturday 
“Oopsie … Too late,” Bukele posted online, followed by a laughing emoji.
whether the deportation flights had ignored Judge Boasberg’s order to turn around. 
