What happened
The Justice Department has reportedly demoted conservative activist Ed Martin (pictured above) from his role as President Donald Trump’s “weaponization czar,” leading a working group to investigate and punish alleged cases of prosecutorial overreach against Trump and his allies. Martin will remain the DOJ’s pardon attorney but “lost his title as an assistant attorney general” and is being relocated to a different office, “pulling him away” from the “most powerful figures” in the Justice Department, The Washington Post reported.

Who said what
Martin played an “important role in the largely unsuccessful prosecutions of Trump’s political foes,” including New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, said the Post. But he has “at times clashed” with Deputy Attorney General Blanche “over his lack of productivity on the working group and his controversial social media posts,” said CBS News. “For his part, Martin felt Justice Department leaders had marginalized him,” The Wall Street Journal said. 

Martin “continues to do a great job” as pardon attorney, a Justice Department spokesperson said yesterday, declining to comment on the reported demotion. People close to Martin said they believed “Blanche’s move to marginalize him was intended to prompt his resignation,” The New York Times said, and Martin has “told people in his orbit that he is considering leaving, possibly for an as-yet-undetermined position in the White House.”

What next?
It was “not clear what purpose the task force” will have with Martin “out of the picture,” the Times said. But his demotion does not “signal a pullback from the department’s campaign to investigate, humiliate and punish targets singled out” by Trump, “whose thirst to seek revenge against his perceived political enemies remains unslaked after a year in office.” 

What happened
President Donald Trump said yesterday he did not plan to completely tear down the Kennedy Center, but he needed to close it down for two years for renovations so extensive that the steel structure will be “fully exposed.” Trump’s Sunday evening post announcing the July 4 closure and rebuilding of the performing arts center “sent shock waves through the center, Washington and the broader arts world,” The Washington Post said. Even some of Trump’s handpicked board members “were blindsided.”

Who said what
“I’m not ripping it down,” Trump told reporters. “I’ll be using the steel,” the “structure” and “some of the marble,” and when it reopens, “it’ll be brand new and really beautiful.” He put the cost at about $200 million. Trump’s “very specific ideas about what he wants to do to the building” do not “align with the building’s current state,” CNN said. Many people “fear another East Wing situation, with Washington one day waking up to a demolition beyond anything residents had contemplated.”
 
Trump presented his decision to close the living memorial to President John F. Kennedy as a “pragmatic one that was reached with the help of experts,” but it “struck his critics as little more than a face-saving maneuver, since the place has been in a downward spiral ever since he named himself chairman,” The New York Times said. In recent months, “artists stopped performing,” ticket sales “nose-dived,” then Trump “put his name on the building and hosted the honors himself” and “ratings plummeted.”

What next?
Previous “large-scale renovations” to the Kennedy Center, including a $175 million remodel finished in 2019, were done “without shutting down the entire center,” Philip Kennicott said at the Post. So the planned two-year closure “suggests either that Trump doesn’t know how to sustain a viable performing arts center” or “has plans to remake it into something unrecognizable.”