The Department of Justice appears to be struggling to keep up with the torrent of lawsuits sparked by Donald Trump’s sweeping actions to freeze funding to federal agencies, and significant errors have cropped up in one of their cases.
In a court filing made Monday, prosecutors were forced to correct two factual mistakes they’d made during a court hearing, according to ABC News.
The lawyers had claimed that only 500 USAID employees had been put on administrative leave, and that only their future contracts had been frozen. In reality, more than 2,100 employees were out of a job, and all future and existing contracts had been paused, the lawyers revealed in the filing.
“Defendants sincerely regret these inadvertent misstatements based on information provided to counsel immediately prior to the hearing and have made every effort to provide reliable information in the declaration supporting their opposition to a preliminary injunction,” the filing said.
The errors had downplayed the scale of the Trump administration’s illegal efforts to dismantle USAID without the permission of Congress.
Last week, some USAID employees received letters telling them they’d been placed on administrative leave with pay “until further notice,” according to correspondence reviewed by The Hill. Some didn’t immediately receive a letter because they had been locked out of the agency’s system. The USAID website was taken down, and when it was eventually restored, it only included a note announcing that employees had been placed on “administrative leave globally.”
In a separate legal battle, in which 19 states are suing to rip Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency goons away from Americans’ taxpayer records at the Treasury, DOJ lawyers made another mistake.
They referred to Marko Elez, the 15-year-old DOGE goon who resigned and was then rehired after his racist social media posts were discovered, as a “special government employee” within the Treasury.
In a filing Monday, lawyers said that Elez was a “Special Advisor for Information Technology and Modernization” at the Treasury, meaning he is a full-fledged employee subject to certain ethics requirements from which a “special government employee” would be exempt, according to ABC News.
Last week, DOJ lawyers also fumbled when asked whether they could ensure that a list of FBI agents who had investigated January 6 rioters would be kept confidential. They later said they had no “intention” to release the names. But Trump said Friday that he intended to “fire some of” the FBI personnel who’d been involved in the investigation, alleging that they were corrupt.
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