Federal Lawyer Quits, Warns Trump Admin Is Creating “a Shitty Country”

John Murdock, a top conservative lawyer at the Department of the Interior, has quit over what he calls an “assault on the rule of law.”

Murdock is stepping down after 18 years at the federal agency because, as he wrote in a bombshell resignation letter obtained by The Guardian and Public Domain, “We are headed in the wrong direction.” A self-described conservative Christian, Murdock’s resignation letter makes it clear that the Trump administration’s impact on the Interior Department, and its blatant disregard for environmental regulation, has gone too far.

“Simply going fast and breaking things is not, in my view, the solution,” Murdock wrote. “Flooding the zone with shit is a strategy for producing a shitty country.”

Murdock went on to list actions outside the Interior Department that most concerned him, both as a citizen and an attorney: “Masked federal agents; the abandonment of Afghan allies; pardons and payouts for rioters and those who supported them; the rapid dismantling of USAID; our military likely committing war crimes; plus, a president who demeans the dead and sees himself as Jesus comprise a partial list of the instances that have left my mouth agape.”

The longtime lawyer also cited specific experiences he had over the course of his career. He was especially concerned by a statement from Matt Giacona, the acting director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, who announced to the public that the Trump administration was “upholding the highest environmental standards” soon after completing a large oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico. The administration explicitly bypassed federal regulations in the Endangered Species Act, Murdock wrote, and Giacona lied about it with impunity. “I have seen my supervisors behave in ways that I would never have expected,” Murdock wrote.

In a response statement, a spokesperson for the Interior Department reaffirmed the agency’s devotion to Trump’s agenda. “One former employee’s personal disagreement with the Department’s policies does not transform lawful policy decisions into an ‘assault on the rule of law,’ nor does his inflammatory rhetoric make his opinion accurate,” the spokesperson said. “The Department stands firmly behind its work to implement President Trump’s agenda consistent with federal law.”

Murdock’s departure is the latest in a string of federal officials resigning in protest against the Trump administration. The Interior Department alone lost thousands of workers following Elon Musk’s DOGE escapades last year.

“I walk away from the stable salary and benefits of a government job and my retirement likely becomes less lucrative and more complicated,” Murdock wrote. But that calculation is worth it, he wrote—“I will preserve my integrity. Thankfully, the arithmetic is easy.”

In the early hours of President Donald Trump’s military campaign against Iran, Tehran targeted a makeshift tactical operations center in Kuwait, killing six U.S. military personnel and injuring more than 30 others. Not only did the Department of Defense fail to provide the personnel stationed there with the necessary tools to defend themselves, but multiple service members who were injured in the attack say their government also neglected them in the aftermath.

The Associated Press spoke to a group of nine service members who all claim that the U.S. military’s medical system failed them after they were injured in the deadly attack on March 1.

Army Lieutenant Colonel Arturo Lincón, a veteran of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, suffered extensive injuries from shrapnel, including to his left vertebral artery, which put him at risk for a stroke. However, his injuries were not considered serious enough to get him admitted to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Instead, he was dismissed to the Army barracks and instructed to schedule outpatient appointments.

“I was just kind of on my own, at least it felt like that,” Lincón told the AP. He underwent weeks of specialized outpatient care at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington. Months later, he is still struggling to receive traumatic injury benefits under the Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance.

Another service member, Major Stephen Ramsbottom, said he waited over four months to receive MRI results after he had shrapnel removed from his head. “I’ve had to build my own case for everything,” Ramsbottom told the outlet. “It’s very frustrating.”

While some of the most injured service members were evacuated within two days of the attack, others weren’t so lucky.

One group was not evacuated out of Kuwait for 10 days after the attack, including Chief Warrant Officer 4 Rodney Bearman, who had shrapnel embedded in his face and legs. When the soldiers were eventually evacuated, they were strapped to the floor of a cargo plane and taken to Germany. When the group arrived, Bearman said he learned that the military had not documented them as wounded in combat, so they would not receive medical treatment at Landstuhl. Bearman told the AP they were not documented as wounded in combat due to a coding error.

“Never did I think that if I was wounded that these things would happen,” said Bearman. “Some sacred trust that I thought would never be broken was broken.”

The military also failed to provide timely evaluations of the soldiers. Some soldiers told AP they they only learned they had traumatic brain injuries after they returned back to the United States. Many of the troops who spoke to AP did not know the severity of their own TBIs.

“It’s disappointing but not surprising,” said Dr. James Kelly, chief medical scientist at the Invisible Wounds Foundation, a group that studies brain injuries in the military. “In a war scenario, it goes on a fair bit.”

It seems that the Department of Defense’s failing medical system is the system working as it was designed: The Pentagon has shuttered large military hospitals in the Middle East and regularly redeploys troops after they receive a mild TBI diagnosis.

The Pentagon downplayed the severity of the retaliatory strike, and U.S. Central Command initially claimed that only five service members had been seriously wounded. The day after it happened, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called the deadly strike in Kuwait “a squirter,” and later complained that reporting on the troops killed was a ploy to make the president look bad.

The Trump administration has detained more than 500 U.S. citizens since it began its mass deportation initiative, a ProPublica investigation has found.

Trump officials have insisted that U.S. citizens are not at risk under the president’s agenda. “We have said it a million times: ICE does NOT arrest or deport U.S. citizens,” former DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement last October.

But that was a lie. A ProPublica story published Tuesday tracked every instance of an immigration agent holding a U.S. citizen during the second Trump administration.

They found 506 such cases, including at least 70 children and teenagers, and more than 100 Americans who were detained after federal agents questioned their citizenship status—nearly all of whom were people of color. ProPublica acknowledged that this total is likely an undercount.

At least 63 Americans were detained while they were recording and documenting their arrest, and 36 were refused the right to contact their lawyers or family for more than a day. Roughly a dozen U.S. citizens were deported, according to the report. Most of them were children.

“Of the more than 300 Americans we tracked as detained for allegedly assaulting or obstructing agents, we found fewer than half were actually charged in federal court, and many of those cases were dropped or dismissed,” ProPublica noted.

The nonprofit newsroom’s findings call into question practically every public assurance DHS has made. Instead, it’s become increasingly clear that federal immigration agents have run roughshod over the U.S. Constitution as they face mounting pressure from the Oval Office and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to deport as many people as possible.

Miller has framed immigration as an “invasion.” He has advocated to end habeas corpus for immigrants; promoted large-scale raids at workplaces, churches, and neighborhoods; threatened the futures of immigrants who do not “self-deport”; and encouraged the White House to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deploy troops to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Miller was fundamental in crafting some of the more draconian policies of Donald Trump’s first term, including separating families at the border, terminating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, and the executive orders that amounted to Trump’s Muslim ban.

In May 2025, Miller issued another tyrannical order to his ICE underlings: a minimum quota of 3,000 arrests per day. “President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every day,” Miller told Fox News at the time.

But that goal proved unsustainable, particularly after reports began to circulate that ICE agents had never been so miserable. Agents complained that the massive quota pushed them to detain noncriminal immigrants. The Justice Department walked back Miller’s directive in August that year, though even the loosened reins didn’t stop agents from arresting dozens of citizens.

During Operation Midway Blitz in September 2025, DHS pledged that ICE had “significant protections in place to ensure U.S. citizens are not arrested, detained, or mistakenly removed,” noting that there would be “no administrative arrests of U.S. citizens.” Something entirely different happened on the ground: At the height of the federal encroachment, agents detained more than 120 citizens across the state, according to the ProPublica report.

Darius Reeves, who ran ICE offices around the East Coast for roughly eight years before he retired in 2025, told ProPublica that he had “never seen so many U.S. citizen encounters in all my years.”

“It’s an embarrassment,” Reeves said.

The White House pressured the FBI to investigate anti-ICE protesters in Los Angeles in violation of the Constitution, a whistleblower alleges.

A former supervisory intelligence analyst in the bureau’s field office in Los Angeles, Jill Fields, made a formal complaint to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Trump administration’s response to the protests around federal buildings last year, NBC News reports.

After President Trump saw a TikTok video of people using megaphones to alert the public about immigration agents, their legal rights, and the legal requirement of judicial warrants, he ordered FBI Director Kash Patel to investigate those organizers, according to the complaint. A person whose name was redacted in Fields’s letter told her that “the President wants this investigation.”

The protests came in response to stepped-up ICE activity across Los Angeles early last year. Fields’s complaint states that the FBI’s L.A. agents were pulled from active drug cartel cases to provide “optics” and “make a show for the president,” in the words of one of her supervisors.

When Fields spoke to a senior bureau official who dealt with privacy and civil liberties issues, that agent shared her concerns but said she planned to resign. Fields would later resign herself after she was removed from leading three programs, which she believes was retaliation. The FBI created a chilling effect within the workforce” and “signaled to other employees that raising constitutional or legal concerns could carry professional consequences,” Fields wrote.

The Justice Department called Fields’s complaint politically motivated and said that the Constitution does not protect violence, even though her letter only mentioned investigation of peaceful protesters.

“Under President Trump, the Department of Justice will continue to vigorously uphold the First Amendment rights of all Americans and restore the rule of law,” a DOJ spokesperson told NBC News. “The DOJ and FBI have a responsibility to investigate any potential violations of federal law, and conspiracies to impede federal law enforcement and assaults on federal officers are against the law.”

Ultimately, Trump’s efforts to charge protesters in Los Angeles only resulted in dropped cases, and his decision to send federal troops to the city was shot down in federal court. But Trump wasn’t deterred from ramping up immigration enforcement in other cities across the country, such as Minneapolis and Chicago, and he continues to press on with his mass deportation efforts, defying the Constitution and federal courts every day. It remains to be seen if Democrats will put a stop to his policies if they take control of Congress after the midterms.

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is taking action to strip 40 naturalized Americans of their citizenship.

According to a DOJ press release published Monday, the department has filed “denaturalization actions” against these individuals after they were accused of “serious offenses,” including “acting as an agent for a foreign government, committing voluntary manslaughter, and aggravated sodomy against a special-needs man.” The press release goes on to list the names, ages, countries of origin, and alleged crimes that each foreign-born citizen committed.

This move comes in the final months of a year that the president has spent doggedly pursuing his mass deportation agenda, which has included expanding denaturalization efforts so that no one born outside of the U.S.—not even those with legal status—feels safe. Reporting from The New York Times in April revealed that the Department of Justice was targeting 384 naturalized Americans from whom it wanted to revoke citizenship, an attempt to denaturalize Americans at a level not seen since the early nineteenth century. A DOJ official at the time told the Times that the department’s April effort was only “the first wave.”

“Today’s announcement marks the largest denaturalization effort in modern history,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Monday. “From an individual convicted of espionage to others convicted of sexual offenses against minors, these defendants concealed critical facts from the U.S. government and represent serious criminal offenders.”

“Every single one of these individuals lied their way into U.S. citizenship,” Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate added in the release. “This administration will continue to pursue the largest denaturalization effort in department history to restore trust and integrity in U.S. citizenship. Our message is clear: The United States will not tolerate deception in the naturalization process.”

This is indeed a massive escalation in the Trump administration’s denaturalization crusade. In comparison, an average of just 15 denaturalization cases were filed per year from 2017 to 2025.

The 40 foreign-born American citizens now in danger of losing their citizenship originally came from countries including Mexico, Colombia, Pakistan, Haiti, Nepal, and Ghana. For the millions of naturalized Americans living in the U.S. today, the message is clear: Your citizenship may not be safe.