FBI Sues Trump’s DOJ in Stunning Double Whammy of Lawsuits

FBI agents who worked on cases related to the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection are suing to prevent Donald Trump’s new leaders at the Justice Department from retaliating against them.

Agents at the intelligence bureau filed two separate lawsuits on Tuesday against the Justice Department. The first class action lawsuit was filed in federal court anonymously and accuses the DOJ’s Trump-appointed leadership of putting together lists of agents who worked on cases seeking future punitive action for January 6, citing a survey being circulated in the bureau. The agents fear that Trump’s DOJ will make the lists public, or use them to punish agents they think are disloyal.

“Plaintiffs legitimately fear that the information being compiled will be accessed by persons who are not authorized to have access to it,” the lawsuit states. “Plaintiffs further assert that even if they are not targeted for termination, they may face other retaliatory acts such as demotion, denial of job opportunities or denial of promotions in the future.”

The lawsuit claims that the agents’ First Amendment rights were violated, as was the federal Privacy Act. It seeks to prevent the DOJ from collecting and circulating the identities of the FBI agents and other bureau employees in ways that could tie them to the January 6 cases, or to the case on Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents.

The FBI Agents Association, representing several other agents at the bureau, is also suing the DOJ over fears of retaliation for work relating to the January 6 attacks, fearing that their personal information will be exposed. In both lawsuits, agents fear that even if Trump doesn’t take direct action against them, his DOJ loyalists would be giving a hit list to the MAGA right, including the more than 1,500 January 6 defendants he pardoned.

Trump has targeted the bureau for revenge and tried to fire six senior agents last week. His nominee to run the law enforcement agency, Kash Patel, has already compiled an enemies list and refuses to answer questions about it. If Patel is confirmed, Trump will not only be able to take his revenge against those who investigated him and his supporters, but also protect his loyalists from prosecution when they break the law.

Trump is preparing an executive order to abolish the Department of Education—a move that will undoubtedly hurt teachers, students, and parents in red states the most.

The draft order will direct the department to slash spending and slash staff, according to The Washington Post. Such an aggressive decision on such a large scale would have sweeping consequences.

“The Dept of Education provides crucial funding for low-income public schools—eliminating it would result in the loss of 6% of teachers’ jobs nationwide,” former adviser for Barack Obama, Steven Rattner, wrote on X.

Rattner shared a chart based on data from the Center for American Progress on states’ K-12 education funding under Title I, the Education Department’s main federal program to help low-income students. Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Nevada, and Arizona—states that all went for Trump—are the most reliant on that funding, and the most likely to lose hundreds of teachers under Trump’s proposals. Many other red states are not far behind. This will likely lead to a devastating domino effect of educational instability in states that need it the most.

Donald Trump’s administration has removed thousands of pages of information from the U.S. government’s websites as part of its sweeping effort to remove references to diversity, gender, and environmental justice.

As part of the de-wokeification process, Trump’s administration has eviscerated more than 8,000 pages of materials just since Friday about a range of topics, from census methodology to resources about postpartum depression, according to an analysis from The New York Times.

The biggest targets have been the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Census Bureau, which each lost more than 3,000 pages.

In the past week, the CDC’s website saw the removal of resources about HIV and STI treatment guidelines, as well as a guide for young people seeking gender-affirming care.

Other information struck from the record included warning signs for Alzheimer’s disease, materials for overdose prevention training, and vaccine guidelines for pregnant people. The Times noted that the use of the phrase “pregnant people,” as opposed to “women,” may have contributed to the guidelines’ removal.

The CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index, which uses census data to determine how at risk someone is to experience a natural disaster through the lenses of geography, race, income level, and education, was also removed, according to The Guardian.

The National Institutes of Health removed a portal with information about maternal morbidity and mortality.

Some CDC files, not included in the Times’ analysis, were removed and then restored with information missing. The agency’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey data briefly disappeared, but then was restored with one of its gender columns missing and its data documentation deleted, the Associated Press reported.

Of the more than 3,000 articles removed from the Census Bureau site, most were filed under research and methodology, but other areas with missing pages included data stewardship and documentation for several data sets. On Monday, users hoping to retrieve data on certain topics from the census were greeted by a response that said the area was “unavailable due to maintenance,” according to the AP.

But that wasn’t all.

More than 1,000 pages were removed from the website for the Office of Justice Programs, a research and grant-making organization that works to provide local and state law enforcement with resources and training. All state-level data on hate crimes was removed from the Justice Department’s website (the months after Trump’s first election saw a significant spike in hate crimes, according to FBI data).

The Food and Drug administration removed nearly 100 pages, including 60 that mentioned expanding diversity in drug trials. The Department of the Interior deleted several pages mentioning “environmental justice.” Head Start, the IRS, and several other agencies also saw hundreds of pages scrubbed out of existence. There are links to archived versions of some of these pages here.

The Trump administration is deporting its first round of immigrants to Guantánamo Bay on Tuesday. 

“A flight is expected to transport migrant detainees to Guantanamo Bay today, a U.S. official tells CBS News,” Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News wrote on X Tuesday. “This would be the first migrant detainee transfer since Pres. Trump directed officials to expand detention space at Guantanamo to hold as many as 30,000 migrants.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later confirmed the news, saying on Fox Business that the flight was already underway.

“President Trump is not messing around, and he’s no longer going to allow America to be a dumping ground for illegal criminals from nations all over this world,” Leavitt said.

This sets in motion the executive order Trump signed last week, which makes the infamous detention center a holding facility for detained immigrants. 

“We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people, some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back,” Trump told reporters last week. “So we’re gonna send them out to Guantánamo. This will double our capacity immediately, and tough, that’s a tough place to get out of. Today’s signing brings us one step closer to eradicating the scourge of migrant crime in our communities once and for all.”

This news comes hours after Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that  El Salvador had agreed to detain prisoners from the United States, including American citizens, in its super-jail. Both Guantánamo Bay and El Salvador’s prisons are notorious for rampant human rights violations, including but not limited to mental and physical torture, sexual violence, and forced labor. 

One of Elon Musk’s handpicked operatives for his fake “Department of Government Efficiency” has been given complete access to critical payment systems at the Department of the Treasury, despite being only 25 years old.

Marko Elez, whose total work experience consists of working for Musk’s companies SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter), has administrator privileges on systems that are responsible for 95 percent of payments made by the U.S. government including Social Security checks, tax refunds, and virtually all contract payments, Wired reports. This contradicts earlier reports that Musk’s henchmen only had “read-only” access to Treasury data.

Wired, citing two unnamed sources, reports that Elez has the ability to write code on the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which control government payments that amount to more than a fifth of the U.S. economy. Elez’s level of access could allow him to bypass security measures and possibly cause irreversible damage to these systems. Talking Points Memo further reports that Elez has already used his power to significantly rewrite code for the payment systems.

“You could do anything with these privileges,” one source with knowledge of the systems told Wired, adding that they couldn’t see a reason that such access was necessary for hunting down fraud or assessing how payments are disbursed, as DOGE claims it is doing.

“Technically I don’t see why this couldn’t happen,” a federal IT worker told the magazine Monday regarding whether a DOGE worker would get such a level of government access. “If you would have asked me a week ago, I’d have told you that this kind of thing would never in a million years happen. But now, who the f*** knows.”

Musk and his cronies have already taken control of federal workers’ private data by installing an illegal commercial server at the Office of Personnel Management, giving them access to databases containing federal employees’ Social Security numbers, home addresses, medical histories, and other sensitive personal information. Senior government officials at OPM have even been locked out of employee databases.

Many, if not most, of Musk’s associates that he’s used in his government takeover are young and inexperienced young men between the ages of 19 and 26, like Elez. Whether the tech mogul or the people doing his bidding even have proper security clearances is not known, which would definitely make their efforts illegal, if they weren’t already. But with Donald Trump taking over federal law enforcement and prosecutors threatening critics of DOGE, who, if anyone, will take action?