In legal news, the Washington Post ran a more encouraging story yesterday headlined, “
Judge denies request by U.S. Institute of Peace to stop DOGE takeover.” The case related to the Moose story that I reported earlier this week, the one where the 78-year-old president of the so-called Institute for Peace barricaded himself in his office and gorged on Domino’s stuffed-crust pizza deliveries until the police escorted him out.
After being unceremoniously ejected from his Cold War-era offices, Moose and his dark legions of progressive lawfare lawyers sued, of course, seeking a TRO reinstating Moose and ejecting DOGE instead.
USIP’s lawyer complained to the judge that DOGE is “moving with lightning speed.” He added dejectedly that, if DOGE staffers continue at this rate, they will soon “reduce this organization to rubble.” Well,
hopefully.
Judge Beryl Howell (Obama appointee) was, as they say,
not amused by DOGE’s heavy-handed tactics, especially in recruiting the FBI and the DC police department to help the cost-cutting team scrape off USIP’s bureaucratic crustaceans. “I’m very offended by how DOGE has operated at the institute,” Judge Howell sniped from the bench.
But in the end, the seasoned jurist properly found there was no sufficient reason to grant the TRO. “My concern about how this has gone down cannot sway me in my consideration of factors of the TRO.” Specifically, she said that the plaintiffs — ousted USIP board members who sued in their official capacities — “did not show they would be irreparably harmed if they were not reinstated and DOGE staffers were allowed to remain in the institute’s offices.”
She piled on, saying there was also “confusion in the complaint on a number of levels.” It’s a bad sign for your entire case when the judge calls your complaint “confused.” It’s even worse when she refers to layers of confusion.
It was great to see an Obama judge even-handedly applying the law, but one hidden nugget quickly became the most interesting part of the story. We learned more about the unprecedented warp speed at which the Trump team is running. the Journal reported, “A cybersecurity expert” —meaning, a hacker— “had driven from Georgia to DC in the middle of the night at DOGE’s request to help DOGE staffers access the institute’s computer systems.”
DOGE called in a hacker in the middle of the night! That, friends, is not the speed of government. It’s not really even the speed of business. This is something completely different.
This is the speed of war.
You can’t fight entrenched administrative power with press conferences and think tank reports. You can only fight it by showing up in the middle of the night, locking the doors, and hacking the systems. What we are seeing is political shock and awe.
Florida edges toward major tax reform; DC judge denies USIP’s TRO; DOGE moves at war speed; AI judges are cold, humans are mushy; and JFK files may be Trump’s greatest chess move ever; more.
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