Senior Trump administration aide Stephen Miller has had his sights on control of the courts, reporter Jonathan Swan told MS NOW’s Ari Melber on Tuesday — but he wants to take things much farther than the Federalist Society, the infamous group shuttling right-wing lawyers to prestigious clerkships and judgeships.
This comes after Trump himself has turned on the Federalist Society, despite it doing substantial legwork to help him get his judges confirmed in his first term, and calling its longtime leader, Leonard Leo, a “sleazebag.”
During the panel discussion, Swan’s co-author, Maggie Haberman, noted how much greater Trump’s obsession has become with purging people he perceives as disloyal from government, like Inspector General Michael Horowitz. “On the other ones, it’s some mix of allies who have issues with specific people, his own personnel advisers … a small group within the White House who have specific interests either in the agency or they have looked at things in their vetting of what these inspectors general have done in the past.”
The bottom line, she said, is that Trump’s purges are “a mix of different factors, and I think that if we went down the list, or if we ever even got a full list, we would be able to go through it.”
“The other thing, Ari … which we get into in the book, is the long-range planning for this term,” said Swan. “Stephen Miller had really thought through what they were going to do in a few key respects. And one of them, which I think is very underreported … is stocking the administration with a new cast of lawyers, different types of lawyers.”
It’s in this context, he said, that the Federalist Society began to become persona non grata with MAGA.
“Many people, particularly left-of-center people, would view the Federalist Society as sort of Darth Vader. They stocked the Supreme Court in term one,” said Swan. “People like Stephen Miller view the Federalist Society as a bunch of squishes. And actually, what they wanted was lawyers who were going to be much more aggressive in their interpretations of the law, much more willing to push the envelope, and not just in the White House, but across the agencies.”
“So when you stock a government with a different type of lawyer, you get a different type of legal analysis, and that allows you to do far more than they could do in the first term,” said Swan. The upshot of this, he added, is that “they’re not getting the same sort of agency pushback that they were.”
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