You Will Anyway: Clean out your desk

Monday, November 11, 2024

Clean out your desk

A conservative lawyer working on Donald Trump’s transition, Mark Paoletta, offered a stark warning to career Justice Department lawyers Monday that those who refuse to advance Trump’s agenda should resign or face the possibility of being fired.

“Once the decision is made to move forward, career employees are required to implement the President’s plan,” Paoletta wrote in a post on X responding to a POLITICO story detailing widespread fear among DOJ lawyers about being asked to advance or defend policies they consider unethical or illegal.

“If these career DOJ employees won’t implement President Trump’s program in good faith, they should leave,” Paoletta said.

[...]

Paoletta recited a laundry list of Trump goals, including mass deportations, ending birthright citizenship, issuing pardons and commutations to Jan. 6 defendants, reversing “lawfare and persecution of political opponents,” and “holding accountable those who weaponized their government authority to abuse Americans.”

Paoletta, a former counsel to Vice President Mike Pence and to the Office of Management and Budget during the first Trump administration, is playing a role in drafting potential changes in Justice Department policy to be put into effect after Trump is sworn in as president in January.

Politico

The Trump transition team is divided into two sides. The personnel side, helmed by New York financier Howard Lutnick, is working to identify candidates for high-ranking positions in a second Trump administration. The policy side, helmed by Trump’s former small business administrator, Linda McMahon, works on the substantive priorities that federal agencies would tackle. Paoletta is working with the policy side.

[...]

Mark Paoletta, a well-connected conservative lawyer and close friend of Justice Clarence Thomas, is helping Donald Trump’s transition team craft the policy playbook for the Justice Department.

[...]

Earlier this year, Paoletta called Thomas “our greatest living American.” He also wrote a book on Thomas.

Politico

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

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

"It takes only a bit of knowledge of history to realize how dangerous it is to think that the people who run the country know what they are doing." -- Howard Zinn

"It’s not about not having something to hide; it’s about having something to lose. What we lose when we’re under observation is our humanity...Rights are inherent to our nature, they’re not granted by governments, they’re guaranteed by governments. They’re protected by governments." -- Edward Snowden

"Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause.” -- Howard Zinn

"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

"We should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace [Stasi style] mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.” ~ Edward Snowden

"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

"News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising." ~ LACUNA

"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

"There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack." ~ Molly Ivins

"The brain of our species is, as we know, made up largely of potassium, phosphorus, propaganda, and politics, with the result that how not to understand what should be clearer is becoming easier and easier for all of us." ~ James Thurber

"The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plane....When you hold up your arm and swear to uphold the Constitution, you don’t say, 'Except in wartime.'" -- George McGovern

"I’ll believe that corporations are people when Texas executes one." ~ Bill Moyers

"When did hope become a political dynamic? Hope is right below wishful thinking and right above performing a rain dance on the scale of activity." ~ Rich Hall

Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

------
ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

------
GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

------
GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

------
PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.