Trump Appointee Has Unhinged Plan for Purging Government Workers

Donald Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Mike Waltz, wants to get rid of all the nonpolitical appointees and career intelligence officials on the National Security Council, so that the president-elect will be surrounded by loyalists and face absolutely no accountability once he’s in the White House.

Waltz told Breitbart News Thursday that he hopes to oust career intelligence officials from the FBI, CIA, and NSA, among other agencies, from the NSC. These officials traditionally help the president make informed decisions about foreign and domestic affairs.

“Everybody is going to resign at 12:01 on January 20,” Waltz said in a phone interview with Breitbart. “We’re working through our process to get everybody their clearances and through the transition process now. Our folks know who we want out in the agencies, we’re putting those requests in, and in terms of the detailees they’re all going to go back.”

Why does Waltz want them out? Well, they aren’t all Trumpers, for one thing, so they’d be more likely to push back on the president-elect’s stupider impulses to, say, try to acquire Greenland or something. More crucially, these detailees have the tendency to report up the chain of command on the White House’s activities, a totally normal thing to do, unless you’re trying to get away with something you don’t want anyone to know about. Officials doing their jobs properly can become a huge problem when it comes time for them to testify about stuff later on.

That’s what happened with Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, who joined the National Security Council as an expert on Ukraine in 2018. The next year, he testified about an “improper” phone call Trump made to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, pressuring the foreign leader to investigate Trump’s Democratic rivals.

According to Breitbart, “Waltz told Breitbart News that he is taking very serious steps to ensure that there are no more Vindmans.”

It’s not clear how serious Waltz’s threat is, but he shared the article in a post on X Friday, captioning it “Day 1.”

Vindman responded to Waltz’s comments in an X post of his own Friday, saying that ensuring only political loyalists could serve on the NSC set a “dangerous precedent.”

“Such an approach will have a chilling effect on senior policy staff across the government. Talented professionals, wary of being dismissed for principled stances or offering objective advice, will either self-censor or forgo service altogether,” Vindman said. “This undermines the very purpose of the NSC: to provide the president with the best possible advice as well as the coordinating team to advance U.S. national security interests.

“The implications of this loyalty-above-competence model are dire. By purging the NSC of apolitical, experienced professionals, Trump and Waltz are hollowing out the institutional expertise required to navigate complex global challenges,” Vindman wrote. “This will create a policy apparatus incapable of discerning sound policies from reckless impulses—or worse, one that actively disregards legal and ethical obligations to implement Trump’s personal whims.”

House Republicans have begun devising plans to slash health care and environmental protections as wildfires engulf Los Angeles County. 

The GOP is aiming to cut $5.7 trillion from the budget over the next 10 years, and is considering cuts to important government services like welfare, climate protections, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act to get there. They then want to use that money to pay for Trump’s draconian immigration plans and tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, according to Politico. 

These potential cuts are “not intended to serve as a proposal, but instead as a menu of potential spending reductions for members to consider,” one GOP source told Politico. But the specific policies on the list, such as Joe Biden’s beta version of the Green New Deal, electric vehicle tax credits, the  Affordable Care Act, and even food stamps, seem like cruelly ironic things to cut while the country experiences yet another horrifying climate disaster. 

“The Republican ‘menu’ cuts food and health care for low income people to put more money in the pockets of the rich,” said Aaron Fritschner, deputy chief of staff to Representative Don Beyer. “Even the item names are dystopian: $490B Medicare cut= ‘Strengthen Medicare For Seniors.’ Cutting food for low income people= ‘Ending Cradle-To-Grave Dependence.” 

The viability of these cuts remains to be seen, as Republicans have already experienced infighting over budget reconciliation. Speaker Mike Johnson has thus far agreed to $2.5 trillion in cuts. 

MAGA Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta announced Friday that it would be repealing all diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.

An employee memo from Meta’s vice president of human resources Janelle Gale, which was obtained by Axios, announced five major changes to Meta’s “hiring, development and procurement practices,” amid the shifting “legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States”—i.e., the return of Donald Trump.

Gale announced that Meta would scatter its DEI team, pull the plug on its equity and inclusion programs, roll back efforts to work with diverse-owned suppliers, and scrap its representation goals and “diverse slate approach” to hiring, which ensured that a diverse pool of candidates was considered for every open position.

“We believe there are other ways to build an industry-leading workforce and leverage teams made up of world-class people from all types of backgrounds,” Gale wrote in the memo.

Gale’s memo tops off a week of disturbing developments at the company, signaling a total meltdown on the part of “Zuckerbucks,” who seems to be giving in to his anti-woke fantasies in preparation for Trump’s return to the White House later this month. He even did a three-hour interview with Joe Rogan—marking his MAGA transformation as complete.

Earlier this week, Zuckerberg announced that Meta will scrap its third-party fact-checking service in favor of community notes and allow for a larger range of opinions about issues such a immigration and gender. He also said that the company will raise the threshold for what posts need to be removed. The lack of digital guardrails now allows users to freely suggest that being gay is a mental illness, among other things that make it more disastrous to go online and dangerous to be offline.

Meta also announced that Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a close Trump ally, would be joining its board of directors. When Meta’s own employees complained about White’s hiring, the company purporting to be going all in on free speech censored them. A new era of internet speech is off to a great start, it seems!

But at the end of the day, Facebook is just a useless AI-generated content farm now, not a real website, Instagram is for ads, and Threads is for … no one? Maybe the people who are reading this article. The jury is still out on that one.

A federal judge on Friday held Rudy Giuliani in contempt for continuing to defame two Georgia election workers. 

In a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C. Judge Beryl Howell ripped into Giuliani for defaming Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss despite signing a previous agreement to stop doing so. This is the second time Giuliani has been found in contempt this week, after another judge ruled he was failing to comply with discovery requirements in the defamation case.

Friday’s proceedings concerned how Giuliani, despite losing the defamation case against him, continued to make false statements against the two women who served as poll workers in the 2020 election. 

“Mr. Giuliani engaged in the worst kind of defamation,” Howell said during the verdict, attacking him for playing the victim in the case. “It is outrageous and shameful.”

Even before proceedings began, Giuliani was on the offensive, attacking Howell as “bloodthirsty” and trying to speak over her. He even retweeted an attack on her after the courtroom was called to order. 

During the hearing, Freeman and Moss’s attorney noted that the massive $148 million judgment against Giuliani hadn’t stopped him from repeating his lies about the 2020 poll workers, and asked the judge to impose a $20,000 fine against Giuliani for every violation of the ruling. In response, Giuliani’s lawyer, Eden Quainton, tried to relitigate the entire defamation ruling against him—and Howell wasn’t having it. 

“I’m going to move on. This really is a waste of time,” Howell added as Quainton continued to claim that Donald Trump’s former attorney really believed what he was saying. She then called out Quainton’s client, pointing out that Giuliani hasn’t appeared to learn his lesson. 

“So what you’re saying is that this defamation is never going to stop. He believed it in 2020 when he made the original statements. He believed it all throughout the trial. He believes it today. That’s chilling,” Howell said. 

Giuliani keeps embarrassing himself further and further following his efforts to try to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results. He initially tried to get out of Friday’s court appearance by claiming his life was in danger due to terrorism threats. Despite being ordered to pay Freeman and Wandrea Moss $148 million, he’s been less than forthcoming, leading to a new trial and public outbursts. 

Unlike other Trump cronies, Giuliani isn’t getting any support from the president-elect or a plum job in the White House, either. It looks like the man once called “America’s mayor” may be close to rock bottom.

This story has been updated.

The Department of Homeland Security announced Friday that it will extend the temporary protected status of hundreds of thousands of South American immigrants living in the United States.

It’s a final Hail Mary by the Biden administration for undocumented immigrants, with little more than a week left on the clock before President-elect Donald Trump takes the White House.

The department noted that roughly 600,000 Venezuelans and more than 200,000 Salvadorans living in the U.S. would be permitted to stay for another 18 months, while the program maintaining their status faces an uncertain future under Trump.

Homeland Security cited “environmental conditions” in El Salvador, such as heavy storms, “that prevent individuals from returning,” as well as a “severe humanitarian emergency” in Venezuela under the “Maduro regime.” Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was sworn in on Friday for a third six-year term, despite a six-month-long election dispute and international condemnation.

The extension of temporary protected status stands in stark contrast to the proposed policies of Trump, who has made aggressive immigration reform a cornerstone of his second-term agenda. The forty-seventh president has effectively promised a full-throttled immigration crackdown, including attacking birthright citizenship and ordering high-profile ICE raids against undocumented immigrants, which he plans to initiate as soon as his first day in office.

On Wednesday, Trump’s longtime immigration adviser Stephen Miller previewed some of Trump’s forthcoming policies in a meeting with Senate Republicans, revealing the administration’s intention to leverage Title 42—a pandemic-era public health policy—to expel immigrants from the country before they can request asylum, continue construction on Trump’s border wall, and heavily wield the Immigration and Nationality Act in order to allow more state and local law enforcement to assist ICE.

Years of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric should be taken as a sign of his beliefs. During his recent presidential campaign, the MAGA leader leaned on appalling language that recalled Adolf Hitler’s fascistic verbiage designed to dehumanize his enemies. Trump referred to his political rivals—the GOP-anointed “Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs”—as “vermin” and claimed that immigrants are “destroying the blood of our country.”