Welcome to Talking Feds, a roundtable that brings together prominent former federal officials and special guests

for a dynamic discussion of the most important political and legal topics of the day.

I'm Harry Littman. Fuck it. Release them all. With those words, newly

reinstated President Donald Trump abruptly ended any deliberation over which non-violent

January 6 offenders to pardon and instead unleashed them all on the country, to the disgust and

outrage of constituencies from D.C. trial

judges to law enforcement officers whom the marauders had battered. It was the most repugnant act

in a five-day-long blitzkrieg during which Trump issued a flurry of executive orders

curated from the pages of Project 2025.

The sweeping directives were united by themes of self-aggrandizement, vengeance against perceived

enemies, the rollback of liberal state landmarks dating back to LBJ and the Great Society,

and the smothering of oversight moving forward.

And they were reinforced by a wave of internal agency directives, most notably within the

Department of Justice, that gutted longstanding practices and purged a hit list of career

officials deemed disloyal to the new regime.

Trump capped his first week in office, cowling the Senate into narrowly confirming Pete Hegseth

to run the Department of Defense, notwithstanding a list of egregious shortcomings, and followed

this up after we taped with a coordinated

dead-of-night purge of about 17 inspectors general across the run of federal agencies.

And as with many, if not all of his constitutional assaults, it was unclear whether any of the

traditional institutional checks, Congress, the courts,

the media, or even the American people had the resolve or capacity to stop him.

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