Trump's Army

Because sending mercenaries to Afghanistan wasn't enough, they're now being unleashed on our own citizens.

When Americans worried about their nation veering toward dystopian authoritarianism, no one ever expected those nightmares to involve the Federal Protective Service. That’s in part because, before the post-apocalyptic images of officers in military gear waving flaming cans of smoke and wearing gas masks on the streets of Portland, Ore., few Americans knew the FPS existed at all. Yet the force — which languished for years within the Department of Homeland Security, with depleted ranks and a dwindling budget — has suddenly become central to the Trump administration’s plan to assert federal power in America’s cities, against the wishes of local officials, in a ploy to demonstrate President Trump’s “law and order” credentials and further his reelection campaign.

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DHS, run by Chad Wolf — a onetime Hill staffer turned lobbyist with no law degree, law enforcement experience or military background, who is in his eighth month as acting secretary — has become over the past two years a textbook example of what happens when legal structures built for good governance are hijacked. Now, the Trump administration has transformed federal building guards into an intimidating catchall invading army. [...] “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal,” as the journalist Michael Kinsley once quipped. “The scandal is what’s legal.”

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Most of the key decision-makers at DHS hold their jobs because the administration has thumbed its nose at the Senate’s constitutional advise-and-consent role and has left key vacancies open for so long that officials have had to legally relinquish their “acting” title and are now referred to as “senior officials performing the duties.” Like Wolf, Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli is also a temporary appointment, as is the general counsel, Chad Mizelle. The statutes that allow officials to serve in acting roles were crafted with the expectation that presidents would actually attempt to fill the jobs. But that’s not how Trump uses them.

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Wolf and Cuccinelli, two men never confirmed to lead DHS, turned to a man never confirmed as general counsel to back a dubious legal interpretation that allowed them to order the largest and third-largest federal law enforcement agencies, Customs and Border Protection and ICE, into Portland using powers never intended to turn the Federal Protective Service — an agency overseen by Randolph “Tex” Alles, who was never confirmed to his post, either — into the equivalent of all-purpose federal riot police.

  WaPo

Honestly, I didn't even know there was such an agency as the Federal Protective Service.

Now, after justifying the use of federal forces in Portland, the administration is expanding the model to Chicago and elsewhere. To execute its plan to suppress unrest — and provide striking images for Fox News — it found a statute titled “Law enforcement authority of Secretary of Homeland Security for protection of public property” (40 U.S. Code § 1315), which is normally used to empower and enlist help for the Federal Protective Service. In the course of protecting buildings, the empowered officers are allowed to investigate and make arrests for “any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States.”

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The Obama administration installed the building guards in DHS’s National Protection and Programs Directorate; then the Trump administration moved them again last year when that directorate was reorganized into the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The FPS’s roughly 1,300 officers are dwarfed by more than 13,000 contractors, who provide most of the security at federal buildings across the country.

Any bets on whether Erik Prince is making money in the deal?

Protests have been unfolding for weeks, and Portland residents have mostly gone about their normal daily lives, but suddenly the White House has decided a federal takeover is essential.

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DHS’s main law enforcement personnel, the Border Patrol agents and customs officers, were meant to be the federal equivalent of street cops, highly limited and narrowly focused. They were expressly denied the designation of “special agent,” which confers detective powers to workers in the FBI, Secret Service, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. (The line between cop and detective was so jealously guarded that DHS executives and ICE, which does have “special agents,” for years prohibited Customs and Border Protection from even investigating the misconduct of its own employees, instead insisting that such cases be turned over to them for follow-up.)

But it turns out, if you take the otherwise narrowly constrained men and women of CBP and ICE and declare that they’re helping guard statues and federal property, they suddenly become super cops, with broad powers even when off federal property. It’s a legal fig leaf, since no one really believes Trump is all that concerned with the graffiti on Portland’s Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse. But it’s enough to justify bashing protesters in the streets.

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Our system of government rests on a foundation of trust and respect — trust that the president will, as the Constitution requires, “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Congress can’t possibly write legislation and policies if the person executing and interpreting them isn’t fundamentally trustworthy and doesn’t share a commitment to American democracy.

The FBI takes its special-agent trainees to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington to teach that lesson. There, they learn how the Nazi Party used German laws (and orders from national leaders) to carry out crimes against humanity. The message is simple: Just because something is legal doesn’t make it justifiable.

Legal is all that it takes for today's GOP to justify what they do. And sometimes, they don't even bother with that much.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.