The Ground Game, Ep. 18 - A Systemic Attack on America (w/ Brad Moss)

On the DOGE-ification of national politics, true conservatism and whether the executive of Boeing should now be allowed to run the Pentagon

For Episode 18, Patrick brings on veteran national security lawyer (and Illinois native) Brad Moss to cut through the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency and explain what’s really happening in the second Trump term.

(Tom is out for today’s show accomplishing some work for once in his life and will return promptly. In the meantime, make sure to send Patrick a care package, or even just like, subscribe, share and eliminate thousands of jobs … oh, no, not that last one. Comment! That’s the one.)

When in trouble, as the song goes, get lawyers, guns and money. Well, we’ve got a smart lawyer, at least. Moss is a federal employment and national security lawyer who works with superlawyer Mark Zaid, who has been targeted by the White House for his work representing fired workers.

The secretive White House staff working at “Doge” may have potentially secured highly sensitive private data of every American as part of it’s busting into agencies and departments in what, as Moss notes, amounts to an “attack” on the American system unlike any perhaps since the Civil War.

The thinking from the White House seems to be, as Patrick notes, there’s no repercussions for breaking any laws regarding the executive branch because by the time the judicial branch catches up, it will be far too late.

At a time when the White House is attacking professional reporters and attempting to force journalists to use its preferred titles and nouns, independent journalism is more important than ever. Make sure to support us by subscribing to The Ground Game Pod and sharing with your friends, family and anyone trying to get a sense of just what the heck is going on.

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Show Notes

Patrick opens the show with an important monologue on what it means to be truly conservative, “We believe in doing things the right way.”

“It’s this anarchistic blow up the government sort of thing.”

Dems need to start taking the fight to oligarchs and tell the personal story of people losing their farms

Patrick is on an island as a true conservative, if you’re feeling that and you’re with him, hop in the comments and let him know.

Brad Moss

As the old song says, send lawyers, guns and money. We’ve at least got a lawyer to talk with us

“This is quite possibly the greatest and most systemic attack” on the American system after World War II

“No one truly knows what we will look like after this”

Is any of this legal? No. Look back to Bill Clinton with the line-item veto

“You don’t just get to refuse to pay bills. … They’re just going in there and saying we don’t like these things and shutting it off”

On the “irony” of “strict adherence” to the Constitution while Trump tries to make Congress a “subordinate” of the executive branch

Trump just wants imagery and optics, he doesn’t want to deal with the details

Is it legal to just fire workers? This is contingent on the civil service laws

“Trump is starting with the ‘low-hanging fruit’ firing probationary employees”

“He’s pushing this with the idea, ‘Go ahead and try to stop me, it will take time to work its way through the courts’”

“Can someone who makes so much money from the government be employed by the government at the same time? … The ethics of it are insane”

Ethics laws “are premised on one idea: That the chief executive would care about them.”

What the president says is, “‘If he says there’s no conflict of interest, I trust him’”

The privacy protections of Americans’ sensitive data is also premised on the idea the president would care

For the White House staff who may have broken into classified and national security data, “there are laws that would prohibit it, but the president is the ultimate decider … he can grant access to classified data to anyone he wants, he could grant it to you right now”

… And more