Trump’s Attorney General Purges Key Justice Department Officials

Two antitrust officials at the Justice Department have received their pink slips.

The fired officials, Roger Alford and Bill Rinner, were both responsible for preventing monopolies and investigating anticompetitive behavior amongst corporations. Their grounds for dismissal were not immediately apparent, though sources that spoke with CBS News Monday night claimed that their termination notices mentioned insubordination.

Alford and Rinner worked under Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater, the chief of the division. Alford was principal deputy assistant attorney general and Rinner was the deputy assistant attorney general, fronting merger enforcement. Slater had recently taken on lawsuits against several major companies, including Capital One, Apple, and Google.

Their department had become the subject of criticism from some business leaders and colleagues. Earlier this month, CBS News reported that internal friction within the team had led to conversations about potentially pushing staffers out. On July 17, Slater met at the White House with the Office of Budget and Management, the National Economic Council, and the Federal Trade Commission. Staffers at those agencies have started to question if Slater is truly prioritizing Donald Trump’s policies, or whether she is walking her own path.

Some of the team’s disagreements were sparked during investigations into T-Mobile and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, among others, according to sources that spoke with CBS.

Business leaders were reportedly unhappy with Slater after she warned them not to engage with the administration via Trump-aligned lobbyists and consultants. In one meeting between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and its prospective purchase Juniper Networks, Slater said that the businesses should only work through Justice Department officials, rather than outside consultants—for HPE, Trump allies Mike Davis and Arthur Schwartz, according to CBS News. Businesses raised concerns with the White House over conversations of that nature, with leaders wondering why the DOJ was instructing them on whom they could hire.

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy has responded to the deadly shooting in Midtown Manhattan with all the wisdom of a bumper sticker.

“We don’t need more gun control, we need more idiot control,” Kennedy said on Fox News’s Hannity Monday night. “And I don’t know exactly how to do that.”

Host Sean Hannity agreed with Kennedy, noting that New York already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country. But the assailant reportedly drove to New York from Nevada, where there are only minor restrictions on purchasing assault weapons. Upon arriving in New York, the shooter killed four people, including an off-duty police officer.

Republicans love to feign ignorance about solutions to gun violence after deadly shootings, but without essential idiot control laws, they still manage to find their way onto national television to blow hot air in the hopes of being reelected.

One thing is clear: People are far safer dealing with an idiot than an assailant armed with an M4 assault rifle.

On X Monday evening, Marjorie Taylor Greene castigated fellow MAGA Republican Representative Randy Fine for denying the starvation crisis in Gaza. She also notably joined the small cohort of members of Congress to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide.

Greene’s post came in reaction to a New Republic story on AIPAC hiding its endorsement of Fine, following his controversial comments last week in which he dismissed a report about the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, including children, as “Muslim terror propaganda.” “Release the hostages,” Fine wrote. “Until then, starve away.”

Greene questioned Fine’s commitment to his constituents in Florida’s 6th congressional district, citing his alleged decision to move with his wife to Washington, D.C., rather than, per Greene’s advice, to “live in the district he will represent.”

“I can only imagine how Florida’s 6th district feels now that their Representative, that they were told to vote for, openly calls for starving innocent people and children,” Greene wrote. “It’s the most truthful and easiest thing to say that Oct 7th in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned, but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza.”

Greene added that Fine’s statement, as “a Jewish U.S. Representative,” will only “cause more antisemitism.”

Greene joins only a handful of progressive lawmakers in condemning Israel for committing genocide. Several leading humanitarian organizations have already concluded that Israel’s war on Gaza amounts to genocide, including Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and, most recently, B’Tselem, a prominent Israeli human rights group.

Greene’s stance on Israel has radically changed since the period immediately after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack—at which time she smeared a pro-Palestinian protest on Capitol Hill as an “insurrection” and sought to censure Representative Rashida Tlaib on spurious allegations of antisemitism. (The resolution attacked Tlaib for allegedly sharing a social media post “blaming America for allowing the deaths of Palestinian babies at the hands of Israel.”)

Since then, Greene has become a frequent critic of Israel, even introducing a bid earlier this month to cut funding for Israel’s missile defense system, in which she was joined only by four progressives and fellow Republican Thomas Massie.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump’s Justice Department is moving to retaliate against one of the federal judges who stood up to Trump’s extrajudicial deportations.

Judge James Boasberg first appeared on the MAGA radar in March after blocking the Trump administration’s invocation of the wartime 1798 Alien Enemies Act to indiscriminately deport men Trump claimed were Tren de Aragua gang members to El Salvador. The administration ignored Boasberg’s order, and he claimed to have found probable cause for contempt on the administration’s part, although the D.C. Circuit Court has paused proceedings. Boasberg’s principled opposition quickly made him a villain to Trump, culminating in the DOJ’s most recent attack on him.

“Today at my direction, @TheJusticeDept filed a misconduct complaint against U.S. District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg for making improper public comments about President Trump and his Administration,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote Monday on X. “These comments have undermined the integrity of the judiciary, and we will not stand for that.”

While Bondi has yet to actually specify what “improper public comments” Boasberg made to elicit such an attack, both her chief of staff and the right-wing Federalist have reported that this huge, inappropriate mistake Boasberg made was simply expressing his (valid!) concern that the Trump administration was liable to “disregard rulings of federal courts leading to a constitutional crisis,” while at a judicial conference.

So Trump and Bondi are trying to sanction Boasberg for sharing his expert opinion, one of the primary functions of a federal judge.

Trump has called for Boasberg’s impeachment since March when he first ruled against the president’s deportations, and has continued to slander any judge who dares to rule against him as some radical, activist Obama judge. The targeting of Boasberg is unfortunately par for the course now, as judges will have to consider either capitulating to Trump or risking their safety, reputation, and livelihood.

Public interest in the president’s reported connections to Jeffrey Epstein is apparently boggling the Trump mediasphere.

Speaking with Newsmax host Katrina Szish on Monday, attorney David Schoen—who has represented both Epstein and Donald Trump—claimed that the nation’s ongoing fascination with the scandal was an invention of “competing agendas” on both sides of the political aisle.

“Just explain this to me because you, again, you’re a former Epstein lawyer,” Szish said. “Why, then, are people so obsessed? And I’m not just talking about one side of the party or on one side of party lines or others. Overall, people are obsessed. What will it take to get this story—I’m just going to say to go away because it doesn’t seem like there’s anything there?”

But Schoen’s response included an unexpected dig at some of the president’s longest allies.

“On the left, New York Times and the Democratic Party, the hypocrisy is outrageous, as I’ve said, but they want to continue to sow as much dissension as they can and distract from the accomplishments of the Trump administration,” Schoen said.

“On the other side, you’ve got, you know, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, conspiracy theorists, who will never be satisfied by anything,” he continued. “If there were a smoking gun, [Ghislaine] Maxwell says, for example, that some young woman was with, fill in the blank, some famous and wealthy person. They’ll say, well, there must be more. That can’t be all of it.”

Greene has not taken kindly to the Trump administration’s lack of transparency surrounding the Epstein files. So far, the longtime QAnon conspiracist has attacked Trump and joined hands with a dozen other lawmakers in a bipartisan effort—H.Res.581, dubbed the Epstein Files Transparency Act—to make the Epstein case files publicly available.

“If you tell the base of people, who support you, of deep state treasonous crimes, election interference, blackmail, and rich powerful elite evil cabals, then you must take down every enemy of The People,” Greene wrote on X earlier this month. “If not. The base will turn and there’s no going back.

“Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies,” she continued. “They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.”

Speaking with reporters last week, Greene claimed that “almost 100 percent” of the call volume at her office has been inquiries about Epstein since the start of the month, when the Justice Department released a memo saying there was no Epstein “client list.”

In Trump’s attempt to subdue mounting anger from his base over the Epstein fiasco, he has instead pushed MAGA conservatives toward an uncomfortable choice: Either trust the new narrative cooked up by Epstein’s associates, such as his attorney or longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell, or side with the Republicans who have since denounced Trump as a liar.