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Pirro In, Martin Out, Sort Of – Hot on the heels of former Fox News host Pete Hegseth’s star turn as Defense secretary, President Trump on his Truth Social has appointed the right-wing news outlet’s Jeanine Pirro to be interim US attorney for Washington, D.C. Trump did not indicate whether he would nominate Pirro, former district attorney for Westchester County, New York and up to now co-host of Fox News’ The Five, for Senate confirmation, USA Today reports.
Trump has pulled Ed Martin’s nomination to the role from the Senate after Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), said he would not support Martin because as US attorney for the District of Columbia, he prosecuted January 6 rioters over the attack on the US Capitol. Trump later made Martin, via Truth Social, director of the Weaponizing Working Group and associate deputy attorney general for the Justice Department’s pardon attorney.
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Gates Keeping – In a worldwide media tour touting the acceleration of his plan to give away his fortune as co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates told The New York Times Magazine and Financial Times that Department of Government chief Elon Musk bears responsibility for the ravages of gutting the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and its decades of fighting such diseases as measles, HIV and polio.
“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” Gates said of Musk.
Gates, who says he will give away his $200 billion to such causes over the next 20 years (with his hope that at 70, he will live to see it all given away), questioned Musk’s 2012 commitment to a non-binding Giving Pledge, in which the Tesla/SpaceX/Starlink CEO and X-Twitter owner would shed at least half his fortune.
Meanwhile, White House spokesman Harrison Fields defended Musk’s work with DOGE, saying “Elon Musk is a patriot working to fulfill President Trump’s mission to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse.”
Jessica Riedl writes in The Atlantic that Musk, whose initial promise to cut $2 trillion out of the federal budget has been recalculated to a still “highly improbable” $150 billion, argues convincingly that DOGE was never about saving taxpayer money. Rather, it was about giving the White House cover to “purge and intimidate” the civil service and return the federal government under President Trump to the Spoils system.
--Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa