RETRIBUTION: Donald Trump’s political purge of the government is well under way with firings and suspensions at several agencies just yesterday. 

  Trump fired at least a dozen Justice Department officials who worked under Special Counsel Jack Smith and were involved with prosecuting the President  on two indictments.  Acting Attorney General James McHenry said that the fired officials could not be trusted to “faithfully implement the president’s agenda.”

  An unnamed Justice official told NBC News that, “This action is consistent with the mission of ending the weaponization of government.”

  Trump was indicted by two separate grand juries for illegally holding secret documents as a civilian and attempting to overturn the 2020 election. The fired prosecutors were assigned to the cases. They have rights and protections  as civil servants, but the Trump way is to do things and say, “So sue me.”

  The Trump administration also placed as many as 60 senior officials at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) on administrative leave in response to what an official characterized as resistance to President Trump’s policy. A memo yesterday to USAID staff from acting administrator Jason Gray said that Trump officials “have identified several actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent” an executive order.

  In a slew of executive orders, Trump moved toward pushing openly transgender people out of the military, directed the Pentagon to end diversity programs, and ordered the reinstatement of service members ejected for refusing the coronavirus vaccine. 

  The President said, “To ensure that we have the most lethal fighting force in the world, we have to get trans gender ideology the hell out of our military.”

  And finally … for today anyway … Edward Martin Jr., the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, has appointed prosecutors in his office to review January 6^th riot prosecutions in a hunt for political bias against the defendants. Trump’s executive order says, “The prior administration and allies throughout the country engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.”  

WAIT, THERE’S MORE: 

— The Centers for Disease Control has been ordered by the Trump administration to immediately stop communications and cooperation with the World Health Organization. It’s an unexpectedly quick execution of Trump’s withdrawal from the WHO.

  The WHO and health organizations around the world share information about battling diseases. Right now the US is dealing with an outbreak of bird flu, which is decimating chicken stocks and raising the price of eggs following Trump’s campaign promise to lower egg prices. 

  Trump’s order pulling the US out of the Who cites “mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic” and “unfairly onerous payments from the United States.”

— A transgender woman serving in a federal prison has filed a lawsuit arguing that President Trump’s executive order directing the government to recognize only two unchangeable sexes requiring inmates like her to be housed in men’s prisons violates the Constitution and federal law.

— Under what has been nicknamed “pre-emptive compliance” …. read that has “fear” … under Trump’s federal hiring freeze, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation pulled job offers to more than 200 new examiners. The FDIC says its short of examiners. Under law, the FDIC is independent but they are complying with Trump’s command without being covered by it.

— The White House budget office ordered a pause in grants, loans and other federal financial assistance involving hundreds of billions of dollars in grants to state, local and tribal governments, as well small business loans, disaster relief,  education, and transportation.

ECON 101: Several US tech stocks and the NASDAQ took a dive yesterday with the release of a new Artificial Intelligence model by the Chinese company DeepSeek at what may be a fraction of the cost of US AI models. One of the companies hit hardest was NVIDIA, the darling of US AI chip makers.

  Industry experts at first were skeptical but DeepSeek released its programming as open source for anyone to examine. DeepSeek appears to have undermined the assumption that you need to spend a fortune to build smart artificial intelligence. US companies have already spent hundreds of billions of dollars. 

THE SPIN RACK: Federal authorities began major immigration raids in New York City this morning. — A 42-year-old man pardoned by President Trump for his involvement in the January 6^thinsurrection was shot and killed by an Indiana sheriff’s deputy on Sunday after he resisted arrest during a traffic stop, the Indiana State Police said. Matthew Huttle of Hobart, Indiana, was reported to be in possession of a gun at the time. — A weight thrown at a track and field competition by an athlete at an indoor high school meet in Colorado Springs on Sunday cleared safety barriers and killed a spectator. The competition is similar to the traditional hammer throw, which is a steel ball on a cable, but the weight throw object has only a short handle on a heavy ball.  — Workers at Whole Foods in Philadelphia voted to unionize, a first for the nutritionally-correct grocery chain.  

BELOW THE FOLD:  Two anti-oil protesters stopped a play in London’s West End featuring actor Sigourney Weaver and fired a confetti cannon because nothing is going to save the planet like interrupting an actor’s monologue.

-30-