Oregon & Illinois Sue Trump & Senior Leaders Exit DOJ

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1:26T's and C's apply.

1:32This is Bloomberg Law with June Grosso from Bloomberg Radio. The place is burning down and they pretend like there's nothing happening. Facts on the ground in Oregon haven't changed. There's no need for military intervention in Oregon. There's no insurrection in Portland. There's no threat to national security. Oregon is our home. It is not a military target. President Trump still maintains that Portland is burning to the ground and is war ravaged. Despite what the governor of Oregon, Tina Kotick, has said, and despite the fact that a federal judge found over the weekend that there were no facts to support Trump's claims that anarchists and professional agitators were trying to burn the city down.

2:17Judge Karen Immergut, a Trump appointee, issued two orders in two days. The first blocked the Trump administration from deploying Oregon National Guard troops to Portland. But the judge said the administration directly contravened that order by calling up the California Guard. So she issued a second order blocking the administration from sending any National Guard troops into Portland. Oregon's Attorney General Dan Rayfield described the administration's actions as whack-a-mole, trying to use guard units from different states to get around court orders and the rule of law. The judge's order was not some minor procedural point for the president to work around like my 14-year-old does when he doesn't like my answers.

3:06Judge Immergut's ruling found that the Constitution leaves policing powers to state and local governments, while granting Congress the power to call up state militias to execute federal laws, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions. Quote, this is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law. My guest is constitutional law expert Harold Krent, a professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. So Hal, quite an opinion from a Trump appointee. And she said the administration had violated her order. It seems like this is a direct contravention of the order this court issued yesterday. Tell us what the Trump administration was trying to do here.

3:54The Trump administration, somewhat parallel to Los Angeles and perhaps to Chicago as well, is trying to send National Guard troops into Portland in what they think is an effort to restore order. And principally, the judge in Oregon said that there's been no basis shown for federalizing the National Guard. In other words, that President Trump lacks the authority under a statutory scheme to send National Guards into Portland because there's no insurrection, there's no invasion, there's no showing that there's a failure of general law enforcement. And so she then decided to ensure that not only was there no troops sent from Oregon, no troops sent from California, no troops sent from anywhere in order to ensure that the administration did not try to circumvent her order.

4:49Whether or not the government will comply with her order remains to be seen, but we're watching carefully. She said it was a direct contravention. But what had happened was she ordered that they couldn't send the Oregon National Guard troops into Portland. So the Trump administration then moved to call up the Texas National Guard and the California National Guard. Is that a direct contravention or were they trying to, you know, use a loophole? I think we're trying to use a loophole, and so I don't think it was any kind of contemptuous behavior. Certainly, it violated the spirit of the Oregon Court's order, but not the letter.

5:30And indeed, I think that the Oregon District Court's decision is iffy, to put it that way. It's true that the prerequisites for federalizing the National Guard have not been met statutorily, But the Supreme Court has recognized a kind of inherent protective power of the president to protect federal facilities at least. And so to the extent that the National Guard were used not for general law enforcement, certainly, but just to protect federal buildings in Portland, I think the president would be on stronger ground. Now, of course, there's no factual predicate for thinking that the federal buildings are in jeopardy in Portland or in Chicago.

6:15But that at least would be, I think, put the president on his strongest legal ground. I mean, the judge made a factual determination. She said the president's determination was simply unchathered to the facts. He has claimed that the city's overrun with agitators and insurrectionists who are responsible for burning the city to the ground and that Portland was war ravaged. So she's found that that's not true. Those facts that he suggested are not true. So then he doesn't have the power, does he? Yeah, the president's overreached, right? The president should have made a much more narrow cabin decision, stating that there was a potential or a real threat in his understanding to federal facilities in Portland and therefore needed to dispatch National Guard's troops in order to protect those buildings.

7:09But instead, he is, you know, ranted about Portland and anarchists for years and years. And he's just refreshing those means. And of course, the court in Oregon is much more familiar with what's going on in Oregon said, you know, if that's your factual basis, you're out of court. Why do you think the Trump administration is making these overbroad arguments about cities burning down and violence on the streets everywhere when there's no factual basis for it and there's video that shows there's no basis. Any violence, if there is any, seems to be limited to the areas around federal buildings with ICE facilities.

7:54Why not limit it to what's provable? I mean, there is a political question underlying your statement and maybe a psychological one as well. Is President Trump doing this to inure the American to the site of federal troops on their streets? If so, incredibly frightening, because it may mean that he's planning to use federal troops for other purposes, such as, you know, during, I move the day, but during the midterms. Or alternatively, is this just something that he can help his base with by suggesting he's strong and he cares about people and he's going to send troops wherever it's needed to protect against lawlessness.

8:38I don't know which it is, but certainly this has been a consistent team with his. He wants to send troops to be toughed, to be seen as the law and order president, even if troops aren't needed and even if that violates statutes and even if it undermines the tradition in our country of not having a standing army or even the National Guard being used for general law enforcement purposes. The Oregon AG described this as a whack-a-mole with different states' guard units being used to get around the court's order. The judge, she expressed frustration with the Justice Department's lawyer, Eric Hamilton, saying he was missing the point of her earlier order.

9:22And she said, quote, Mr. Hamilton, you're an officer of the court. Do you believe this is an appropriate way for you to deal with my order or with an order you disagree with? Yeah, I mean, to be fair, I think that the Justice Department was reading the order narrowly, which it's entitled to do. And the order banned the Oregon National Guard from being federalized. It didn't talk about the Texas National Guard or the California National Guard. And maybe that was just a failure of litigation. And that loophole has been closed forthwith. Certainly, again, it was against the spirit of the rule. There's no question about it, what the government did, but I don't think it's contemptuous.

10:01And explain the judge's ruling about why the deployment likely violated Oregon's 10th Amendment rights. Well, the Oregon governor is put in control of the National Guard of Oregon. And so here there is, we have the president who's ordering the Oregon National Guard into active duty, despite the fact that the governor who's in charge of it, commander of it, has declined to do so. Therein lies the Tenth Amendment struggle because seemingly the president has asserted the governor's authority to be, in effect, the head of the troops, National Guard, at least within Oregon. On Sunday, California Governor Gavin Newsom filed a separate lawsuit to prevent Trump from sending his state's National Guard to Oregon.

10:53So the National Guard is under the control of the governor of the state. So does the president have the authority to take that National Guard out of the control of the governor of the state and send them to another state? Yeah, I mean, I think that obviously we don't have precedence on that power. And certainly, I would think in an emergency, perhaps the authority might exist in the present to order a state's National Guard into active duty, even if the governor didn't want to. And this seems like a far stretch. And that's why the 10th Amendment issue arises, because here there is a claim that the California National Guard is needed in a different state.

11:39And that seems to directly cut against, unless there's a national emergency or an insurrection, the idea of ordering one state's guard to go into another state, particularly without the approval of the governor, seems to be directly contrary to the regime of militias, which has long been supervised by state governors from the revolutionary time onward. Representative Adam Smith, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, has said that he couldn't remember another time when one state's National Guard was deployed to another state over the objections of both governors involved. So no precedent.

12:19It's unprecedented. It's unprecedented here. And it seems to be directly an affront to the 10th Amendment, which lodges responsibility in states to their governors and to their elected representatives. But there's just hasn't been a lot of precedents on point. So obviously the courts are going to have to weigh in. Donald Trump's deranged depiction of Chicago as a hellhole, a war zone and the worst and most dangerous city in the world was just complete B.S. He clearly has decided to declare war on a great American city that has the lowest homicide rate in 60 years in a state that has record employment and near record tourism.

13:06That's Governor J.B. Pritzker as Illinois becomes the latest state to sue the Trump administration over its plans to send National Guard troops into one of its cities against the wishes of state and local officials. I've been talking to Professor Harold Krent of the Chicago-Kent College of Law. So, Hal, tell us what's happening in your city. Are there troops there yet? I don't think they're there yet. The attorney general has already filed suit. The mayor of Chicago has made a vaguely worded statement like we must resist with all force, but no one knows what that means. So tensions are heightened, and we will expect to see National Guard troops from Texas, evidently, who will be coming to Chicago nearby.

13:54And again, yes, there has been problems with some kind of ICE enforcement. ICE has killed somebody in Chicago. They've arrested other people in trying to make these raids, but there has been no complete falling apart of any kind of ordinary law enforcement. And indeed, there's been some evidence that ICE itself has instigated the protests by the manner in which they are trying to conduct raids. So, again, this is, I think, for show. The president wants to be seen as tough. And if he wants to send troops into Chicago, he's bygone. He's going to do it. And Governor Abbott of Texas is willing to comply.

14:34So there's no Tenth Amendment violation there with using Texas National Guard troops. What's the basis of Illinois' suit against the deployment? There are several bases, but they first would say that the statutory prerequisites are not met in terms of federalizing National Guard in terms of there's no invasion, there's no absence of general law enforcement, there's no insurrection. And so then I think the issue will likely boil down to whether there is some kind of protective power inheriting the presidency that can allow the president to send troops at least for the narrow purpose of defending federal facilities.

15:12This really gets us back to what Judge Breyer said in the California litigation, that if there is this protective power, it's very limited. It's limited to protecting federal facilities, and it cannot be used to justify a broader federal presence in terms of general law enforcement, in terms of accompanying ICE officers along the way, etc., etc. So we may get involved in that, but that's down the road because first there's the question of authorization. And, you know, again, President Trump is being too broad. He's saying there's lawlessness in Chicago, and that justifies him using the Texas National Guard.

16:00And that's if there's a factual predicate there to be decided. I'm sure the judges here will hear the evidence. And they're very unlikely to back President Trump in his broad assertions. Did he also call up the Illinois National Guard? He has not done that yet, to my knowledge. He has threatened to. And, of course, Governor Pritzker has not only said that he would do it over his objection, but at the same time, he also said that President Trump has not even called him to ask for permission. So that may have happened on the line. Maybe it's already happened, but not to my knowledge. Has the Supreme Court even come close to resolving something similar in this sort of frame or not even close?

16:45And there are some vague similarities of what's happened under the Militia Acts back 200 years ago. And the Supreme Court has said that there is a protective power to some extent in the president to protect federal officials, federal facilities. But nothing on this order, nothing on this extent. So this clash that President Trump has introduced in Oregon, Los Angeles, and in Chicago is really unprecedented. And the courts are going to have to make a very difficult decision in saying that it's pretty clear that the statutory prerequisites have not been met. So I think we'll have to grapple with to what extent there's an implicit inherent authority of the president to protect federal officials and federal facilities and how far that extends.

17:32So very difficult issues for the courts to sort through. And obviously, we just had a beginning of that with the judges in California and Oregon. So last Tuesday, Trump said when he was addressing the military officers in Quantico that America's under invasion from within and he wants to use dangerous American cities run by Democrats as training grounds for the armed forces. Besides being frightening, does he have any authority to do that? Well, what frightens me about that statement is this is a training ground for what? Is this a dress rehearsal for a full-scale attack on Democratic strongholds?

18:15Is this a rehearsal for getting us all prepared to see federal troops during the midterm elections? I mean, what is he actually preparing the military for? I don't know, but obviously this definitely cuts against our traditions, our norms about not having a standing army. And that's why we were afraid of having a standing army, because we wanted to not see federal troops in the streets of all of our cities, both because of the respect given to states and state law enforcement and because of the dangers of having federal troops in civilian roles. There's a hearing date in the Illinois case on Thursday.

18:58We'll see what happens then. Thanks, Hal. That's Professor Harold Krent of the Chicago-Kent College of Law. Support for the show comes from Public.com. If you're actively involved in your portfolio, you probably catch yourself repeating the same actions. Buying the dip, manually sweeping idle cash, putting on a hedge. On Public, you can now create AI agents that handle all these tasks on your behalf. Just describe what you want to do in plain English. Like, if the VIX hits 25, buy a put option on the S &P 500. Or, if my cash balance goes above$20 ,000, move the excess into my direct index. You approve of the workflow and your agent handles the risk.

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20:49Subscribe to Bloomberg Daybreak for a precise, thoughtful take on the stories that matter. Listen to Bloomberg Daybreak each morning on Apple, Spotify or anywhere you listen. At least a third of senior career leaders have left the Justice Department since the start of President Donald Trump's second term, taking with them centuries of combined expertise. That's according to a Bloomberg Law analysis. The departures, both voluntary and involuntary, represent an unprecedented level of departures in recent memory. with the divisions enforcing civil rights, immigration, and environmental laws among the hardest hit.

21:30They include at least 107 career Justice Department senior managers in the span of eight months. That's out of roughly 320 career leadership positions, immediately below presidential appointees included in a government directory. The loss of so many senior managers, many of whom have spent their entire careers rising through the department's ranks could take generations to rebuild. The Justice Department is also losing many more trial attorneys and other career employees. Joining me is Bloomberg Law Reporter Suzanne Moniak. Suzanne, tell us about all these departures.

22:12Suzanne Monyak:We've seen just an unprecedented amount of attrition of the career workforce this year, really across the government, but we've really seen it in a significant number at the Department of Justice. We used a federal directory posted by the Office of Personnel Management that has, you know, hundreds and hundreds of career managers at the Justice Department. We focused on those who went through the career appointed process, and that's where we found that over a third of those who were in place in January in those career leadership positions are no longer there. And these include really broad types of positions.

22:45Suzanne Monyak:These include supervisors, you know, lead attorneys, managing attorneys, people in higher level positions. It's some senior executive service, but some other high level positions as well, who've, you know, been there for years and years, some of them who, you know, keep work running at the Justice Department. Were these voluntary departures? Were they fired? It's been a real mix. There have been examples of career managers at DOJ who have been fully fired, some of whom are now contesting those terminations. A number of them chose to leave. Either some may have taken the deferred resignation policy, that fork in the road offer that was available across the government.

23:23Suzanne Monyak:Others may have just left for another job. And some were kind of left under what I might describe as more duress. Some people were forcibly reassigned or demoted, for example, to positions that they didn't want to be in, and so then felt kind of moved to leave the department. So while technically not fired, were removed from their positions. One prominent example of that was the Sanctuary Cities Task Force. That sort of became a place where we saw some longtime career people get forcibly reassigned into. And at this point, all of those people who were reassigned into that task force, which was for the stated purpose of cracking down on so-called sanctuary jurisdictions who don't want to cooperate with federal immigration authorities, all of the people in that task force have since left.

24:03These are the career officials who get a job at the Department of Justice, work their way up and stay at the Department of Justice.

24:11Suzanne Monyak:Yes, it is very uncommon to see this amount of attrition when political administrations change. I spoke to a number of former officials for this story. And, you know, many describe career people as the types of people who stay across political administrations, which is kind of their very purpose. When a new administration comes in, they're going to appoint a lot of people who are their choices. There's going to be a lot of political appointees. But the real role of the career civil servant, the career workforce, the civil servants are to kind of, you know, help keep things moving. You know, there's going to be a bunch of new people who don't know what they're doing.

24:41But you'll have that career workforce in place always to, you know, understand how the department runs. Yeah, you talked to someone who was a political appointee who said, we took a lot of our direction from the career staff to do our jobs.

24:56Suzanne Monyak:Absolutely. I think that's exactly the type of example, because when a new political appointee comes in, you know, they may be very qualified, but they're just going to be new to that work, potentially, if they don't have that exact background themselves. And, you know, political appointees I spoke to, former political appointees really said that they relied on that career workforce to have that expertise so that, you know, they could go to someone and, you know, ask them how something works and how to do something and just to kind of know that they have experienced people working for them. Tell us how many people left or part of their reason was because of the executive order calling to prioritize accountability among the senior executive service.

25:35Suzanne Monyak:Sure. So that was an executive order at the beginning of this administration that kind of gave us a little bit of a signal that the Trump administration was going to be taking a hard look at the senior executive service. that maybe they were distrustful of that group of people, even though historically that's just been a group of people who've been here in high-level career leadership positions that are nonpartisan for many years. Obviously, you can't say for sure exactly how many people might have left because they read that order and worried for their career trajectory. But I think the Trump administration has done a lot very broadly that has made career managers think twice about how long they might be able to stay in their roles, whether that's pivoting priorities of the department in terms of like litigating priorities or just, you know, generally making workers feel unstable and like they're going to be laid off.

26:27Suzanne Monyak:I mean, we've seen broad reductions in force throughout the government this year. It was the civil rights division that was hit the hardest. 76 percent of career managers departed. Yes, that's what we found going through all of the career manager directory. We found that that division within the Justice Department had the highest share of career managers leaving this year. That was similarly a mix. Many of those people had been demoted and left after that. Some did leave on their own. And that was an example of a division that really did take a hard turn in a different direction ideologically this year.