Trump Fires Top Official Over Loose Ties to “Anonymous” Author

The White House fired an official because he knew the guy who criticized President Donald Trump in the famous “Anonymous” op-ed in The New York Times seven years ago, The Washington Post reported Friday.

The executive director of the Office of Trade Relations at Customs and Border Protection, George E. Bogden, was abruptly asked to leave his post over apparent ties to Miles Taylor, the author of the anonymous 2018 op-ed, sources told the Post. Taylor was Trump’s chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security at the time, and the piece revealed he and his colleagues’ internal efforts to thwart parts of the president’s agenda. Taylor made his authorship public in 2020 after leaving his position as chief of staff.

The president has reportedly been obsessed with the op-ed ever since. Bogden was asked to step down from his role, despite his centrality to implementing the president’s absurd tariff scheme. Bodgen’s job was to listen to the trade industry’s complaints and grievances amidst the economic chaos spurred by Trump in recent weeks.

It’s unclear what merited Bogden’s ousting, and there are few ties connecting the two men other than a Facebook photo of Bogden at Taylor’s wedding in 2019, one year before Taylor had revealed he wrote the op-ed. Sources told the Post that Bogden and Taylor “have not been close,” and that “few Trump allies, including Bogden, were aware of Taylor’s role in writing the piece at the time it was published or by the time of the wedding.”

Another source familiar with the story told The New Republic that there was no evidence presented to Bogden other than the Facebook photo, making it seem more like collecting opposition research rather than an investigation.

Taylor’s humiliating revelation to the public clearly instilled a deep sense of paranoia in the president that hasn’t dissipated even seven years later. “From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions,” Taylor wrote at the time. “Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.”

As Trump works to rid his administration of any officials acquainted with Taylor, his firing of a years-long supporter like Bogden (while the president continues to defend a Cabinet member who shared national security information over text) is a stark reminder that the president values unwavering loyalty above all else.

This story has been updated.

In the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency, Elon Musk lost nearly twice as much money as he cut in government spending as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency.

Following a particularly humiliating earnings report from Tesla Tuesday, Musk told investors that starting in May, he would be reducing the amount of time he spends in the White House to pay more attention to his struggling electric car company.

In the first three months of the year, Tesla’s profits crashed 71 percent, falling to a mere $409 million, compared with $1.39 billion from the same quarter last year. The drop is undoubtedly a direct result of Musk’s entanglement with Trump’s administration, where Tesla has become a symbol of extreme cost-cutting measures that have led to sweeping layoffs and essential services being gutted.

During his time in the White House, Musk’s net worth has plummeted a whopping $122 billion, nearly twice as much as the $61.5 billion he was able to save the government, according to the Musk Watch DOGE Tracker, which tallies DOGE’s itemized cuts to contracts, grants, and real estate. Only $12.6 billion worth of cuts have actually been verified, according to the tracker.

DOGE still claims a far higher figure of $160 billion in estimated savings, but a closer look at Musk’s activities at DOGE show that the billionaire bureaucrat barely made a dent in the trillions of dollars he set out to slash in government spending.

“DOGE’s verified savings have been less than 1/10 of 1 percent of federal spending,” Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow and budget expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute told Axios Friday. “There have been embarrassing accounting errors, lots of public statements that turned out to be false or misleading, or actions slapped back by the courts.”

Reidl told Axios that Musk’s minute cuts will likely be offset by the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts at the IRS.

“The spending savings are so small that they will be undoubtedly overwhelmed by the significant tax revenue losses which result from gutting IRS tax enforcement,” she said. “It makes a mockery of claims that DOGE is really just about cutting deficits.”

Musk’s net worth began sinking last month after Trump failed to dispel rumors of a recession on the horizon, wiping out $29 billion of his ally’s own wealth. Things only got worse after Trump announced his sweeping “reciprocal tariff” policy at the beginning of April.

Sure, Musk was the biggest individual winner when Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs, sending Tesla stock shooting up 23 percent. But his time in the White House has taken a bite out of his wealth and done considerable damage to Tesla’s brand.

“The brand damage caused by Musk in the White House/DOGE over the past few months will not go away,” said Wedbush Securities analyst and beleaguered Tesla bull Dan Ives, according to Axios.

It seems that Musk may not be long for Washington—Trump even referred to him in the past tense Thursday. His status as a special government employee is set to expire next month anyway. And he clearly isn’t getting along with members of the administration, publicly picking fights over the IRS with the treasury secretary and starting rows with Trump’s top trade adviser over tariffs.

But it’s too soon to rejoice at the permanent departure of the billionaire bureaucrat. He told investors that he’d be cutting down to one or two days a week but that he’d have to continue working with the White House at least until Trump’s term had ended. But if Musk is hoping for a brand reset, he may have another think coming. No amount of cutting days in the office can erase the image of Musk gleefully waving a chain saw around.

President Trump told Time magazine that he is essentially doing nothing to comply with the Supreme Court order to bring back wrongly deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the CECOT megaprison in El Salvador.

In an interview published Friday, Trump said he hadn’t asked Salvador President Nayib Bukele to release Abrego Garcia because “nobody asked me to ask him that question.”

Here is the transcript of that absurd moment.

In our interview last year, Mr. President, you committed to complying with all Supreme Court orders.

I said what?

You committed to complying with all Supreme Court orders—

Yeah.

When you and I spoke last April. Are you still committed to complying with all Supreme Court orders?

Sure, I believe in the court system.

The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that you have to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia. You haven’t done so. Aren’t you disobeying the Supreme Court?

Well, that’s not what my people told me—they didn’t say it was, they said it was—the nine to nothing was something entirely different.

Let me quote from the ruling. “The order properly requires the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.” Are you facilitating a release?

I leave that to my lawyers. I give them no instructions. They feel that the order said something very much different from what you’re saying. But I leave that to my lawyers. If they want—and that would be the Attorney General of the United States and the people that represent the country. I don’t make that decision.

Have you asked President Bukele to return him?

I haven’t, uh, he said he wouldn’t.

Did you ask him?

But I haven’t asked him positively, but he said he wouldn’t.

But if you haven’t asked him, then how are you facilitating his release?

Well, because I haven’t been asked to ask him by my attorneys. Nobody asked me to ask him that question, except you.

Do you believe he deserves his day in court?

I believe that they made him look like a saint, and then we found out about him. He wasn’t a saint. He was MS-13. He was a wife beater and he had a lot of things that were very bad, you know, very, very bad. When I first heard of the situation, I was not happy, and then I found out that he was a person who was an MS-13 member. And in fact, he had a tattooed right on his—I’m sure you saw that—he had it tattooed right on his knuckles: MS-13. No, I believe he’s a man who has got quite a past. This is no longer just a nice, wonderful man from Maryland, which people, which the fake news had me and other people for a period of time believing. Now, nobody believes that. And I think this is a very bad—I think this is another men [in] women’s sports thing for the Democrats.

Trump’s answers here convey both a disdain toward Abrego Garcia and an active ignorance of the critical situation he and the likely hundreds of other wrongfully detained migrants are in. The Supreme Court orders him unanimously to bring back Abrego Garcia, and he just shrugs his shoulders and tells Time that his lawyers said otherwise—“They feel that the order said something very much different from what you’re saying.… Nobody asked me to ask him that question, except you.”

In the same interview, Trump states again that he would “love to” send U.S. citizens to jails like CECOT if he could.

Donald Trump suggested Thursday that the fate of the world rested on the United States gaining control of Greenland.

During a press conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Trump made a dramatic claim as he dismissed a question about securing NATO backing in his outlandish bid for control of the world’s largest island.

“Greenland’s gonna be interesting, but that’s for another day,” Trump said. “I think we need that for international peace, and if we don’t have that it’s a big threat to our world. So I think that Greenland is very important for international peace.”

Trump has been outspoken about his pipe dream to acquire the Danish-controlled territory for its value as a geopolitical asset and mineral and oil resources. Crucially, Greenland is strategically significant to the United States because it sits between Russia and the eastern coast of the United States and is the fastest way from Europe to New York.

Greenland is also located beside the Norwegian Sea, which connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Arctic Ocean and the Barents Sea, where the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet operates.

In March, Trump told NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte that he could be very “instrumental” in helping the U.S. acquire the semiautonomous territory from Denmark, which the U.S. desperately needed for “international security, not just security.”

Rutte responded by saying he wouldn’t drag NATO into the issue but that the island did have critical proximity to Chinese and Russian routes.

For now, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump appear as allies, as the president attempts to conduct Ukraine peace negotiations that will result in a fruitful deal for the U.S. and Moscow. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned during his visit in February that although there was a “nice ocean” between them, the U.S. might “feel” Russia’s war in the future.

Meanwhile, tensions with China have only continued to rise as Trump struggles to de-escalate his foolish trade war, which has seen tariffs on Chinese imports to the U.S. rise to 145 percent.

As preposterous as Trump’s dreams of acquiring the island are, the Trump administration has already set to work to make it a reality, holding multiple meetings of the White House National Security Council about the proposal and launching a massive public relations campaign intent on somehow convincing Greenlanders to annex themselves. In Greenland and Denmark, the reception to such efforts has been about as frosty as the icy tundra.

A group of Democratic lawmakers are demanding answers from nine major law firms that struck deals with Donald Trump’s administration to avoid being targeted by the president’s fury.

In a series of letters Thursday, 16 Democratic lawmakers warned the managing partners of several large law firms that the agreements they’d made with the Trump administration—offering millions of dollars in pro bono work on issues that support the president’s agenda, among other concessions—were unenforceable and potentially violated federal and state laws.

The 16 lawmakers that sent the letters included Representatives Dave Min of California, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Becca Balint of Vermont. They warned that by issuing executive orders targeting certain law firms, the Trump administration had used “coercive and illegal measures to target certain law firms and threaten their ability to represent and retain their clients.” In total, the law firms had pledged a whopping $940 million in pro bono work to the Trump administration.

The letters alleged that Trump’s scheme to blackmail firms into abolishing their DEI practices and cough up millions in free work could potentially violate federal laws against bribery, defrauding the public, and even racketeering. The deals could also potentially violate the Hobbs Act, according to lawmakers, which “prohibits obstruction, delay, or affecting commerce by extortion under color of official right.”

The deals potentially violated state laws and rules of professional conduct too, the lawmakers said.

Not every firm that struck a deal, or received a letter, had been openly targeted by the Trump administration. Several had preemptively approached the government to make concessions, according to statements from the firms. The lawmakers warned that the deals would have a “chilling effect” on “the availability of legal services for those clients and matters targeted by the Trump administration.”

The nine law firms that received letters were Allen Overy Shearman Sterling LLP; Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft LLP; Latham & Watkins LLP; Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP; Milbank LLP; Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP; and Kirkland & Ellis LLP.

In the letters, each firm was asked a series of questions about the details of their individual deals with the Trump administration, and how exactly they’d come about.

For example, Paul Weiss, the first law firm to bow to Trump, had agreed to acknowledge that one of its attorneys, Mark Pomerantz, had committed wrongdoing, according to the White House. Trump had targeted Pomerantz for his efforts to build a case against the president when Pomerantz served at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office—not illegal in the slightest. The lawmakers asked Paul Weiss to explain specifically what alleged “wrongdoing” Pomerantz had committed. Like many of the other firms, Paul Weiss had also offered millions in free legal services and revoked their hiring practices that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Other questions were the same for every firm. “Outside observers have also stated that these agreements represent a ‘Sword of Damocles,’ with a risk that the administration will again threaten to target firms with Executive Orders if they do not again yield to the President’s demands,” one question read, asking what the firm planned to do to “ensure that the administration will not be able to require more from the firm beyond the provisions currently in place?”

Earlier this week, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut penned letters to five major law firms that they accused of being “complicit in efforts to undermine the rule of law.”