Attorney General Rob Bonta sues Donald Trump again over ‘reckless’ directives
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WIND AND WRONGFUL FIRINGS — BONTA FILES TWO MORE TRUMP LAWSUITS
Via William Melhado...
Attorney General Rob Bonta and his team were busy last week putting together two more lawsuits against the Trump administration — bringing the total number of complaints filed against the federal government to 18.
One of Monday’s lawsuits centered around President Donald Trump’s directive to halt wind energy projects. In January, the president directed federal authorities to stop issuing new approvals for permits and leases for offshore and onshore wind projects. The Trump administration cited an array of environmental, commercial and national safety issues as the reason for the order.
Bonta’s office said federal agencies have stopped approval processes for renewable energy projects. California has five offshore wind leases, Bonta’s announcement noted. The lawsuit, filed in a federal district court in Massachusetts, seeks to block the president’s directive from delaying wind energy production.
“This reckless directive will not only reverse America’s progress in clean energy initiatives, but our communities will also suffer the economic consequences of the President’s misguided lawlessness,” Bonta said in a statement. “The President has promised that his actions would lower energy costs, but instead, energy prices have only gone up and will continue to skyrocket.”
White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement that voters elected Trump to “restore America’s energy dominance.”
“Instead of working with President Trump to unleash American energy and lower prices for American families, Democrat Attorneys General are using lawfare to stop the President’s popular energy agenda,” Rogers said.
In a second complaint filed Monday, this one in a federal district court in Rhode Island, Bonta and 19 other attorneys general claimed the Trump administration unlawfully terminated roughly 10,000 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services employees.
In March, HHS Director Robert F Kennedy Jr. announced a restructuring plan that would result in downsizing the department by tens of thousands of federal employees.
Bonta argued that the Trump Administration does not have the authority to withhold funds Congress allocated to the department. By firing these employees, closing regional offices and condensing HHS divisions, Bonta said Kennedy has prevented the department from fulfilling its “regulatory and enforcement functions.”
Bonta requested a federal judge “undo the mass firings, reverse the illegal reorganization, and restore the critical health services that millions of Americans depend on.”
At this rate, Bonta is poised to out-litigate his predecessor, Xavier Becerra, who managed to get in 122 lawsuits against the federal government during Trump’s first four years in office.
OH, CANADA
Via Lia Russell...
After suing the White House over Donald Trump’s tariffs, Gov. Gavin Newsom went on an international media tour last week to double down on his campaign to shore up the Golden State’s overseas trade relationships.
Newsom spoke to BBC Newsnight, CTV News in Canada, and Nikkei Asia over the weekend on everything from the tariffs to Kamala Harris’ impending electoral plans to whether his late-hour support for Joe Biden doomed the Democrats in the 2024 election.
On Monday, the governor said that California had posted another record-breaking tourism year in 2024 — but also that state officials anticipated almost a 10% drop in international travelers this year due to the tariffs and overall global declining opinion towards the U.S.
Newsom told Nikkei Asia’s Yifan Yu he was worried the tariffs would lead to less investment from countries like Japan, one of the biggest boosters in California.
“The direct and indirect economic costs to the state of California is in the billions and billions of dollars,” he said, not to mention reputational damage. “That’s why we’re trying to step up and push back against (Trump’s policies).”
He also compared Trump to an “apex predator” in an interview with CTV News’ Vassy Kapelos, and chastised congress members for remaining silent: “We have one branch of government right now, it’s the rule of Trump.”
And in his interview with BBC Newsnight’s Paddy O’Connell, he said the checks and balances Congress provided against Trump had been “completely disrupted.”
“The Speaker of the House of Representatives has been nowhere to be found, as it relates to oversight on a spectrum of issues, but especially on tariffs,” he said, referring to Rep. Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana.
Newsom told O’Connell he had seen Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff the day before she gave a speech in San Francisco warning that Trump was creating a constitutional crisis, but that she had not shared whether she would run for president in 2028 or governor in 2026.
The governor denied ever witnessing Biden faltering before the disastrous June 2024 debate performance that led to the former president stepping down and Harris picking up his campaign.
“I never had, period, full stop, and I would be lying to you — and I won’t lie to you — as it relates to the direct engagement I had with Joe Biden, that ever suggested a cognitive decline to the degree that we saw at that debate night.”
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“If Trump is serious about doing this, it’s just one more step in his dismantling of democracy — a domestic gulag right in the middle of San Francisco Bay.”
- State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, in response to Trump wanting to reopen Alcatraz
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