How The 2020 Big Lie Is Now Threatening a World-Class Research Center

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. The Destruction: NCAR Edition The Trump White House isn’t really doing much to disguise at least one of its motivations for moving to dismantle a critical scientific research center in Boulder: It wants to free Big Lie supporter Tina Peters from prison in Colorado. Colorado officials have refused to play along with President Trump’s purported pardon of Peters for her state conviction for tampering with election machines. While a presidential pardon for state crimes isn’t a real thing, the White House wants you to know that Colorado is paying a price for that perceived defiance: “Maybe if Colorado had a governor who actually wanted to work with President Trump, his constituents would be better served,” a senior White House official told NOTUS . If that doesn’t seem like a direct link to the Peters pardon, trust me. It’s the response the White House gave to multiple other outlets, including the NYT and WaPo , who linked Colorado’s rejection of the Peters pardon with the Trump administration’s plan to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research. It doesn’t have to be either/or. OMB Director Russ Vought may simply have seized on the Peters pardon as something near and dear to Trump’s heart and used it to justify disruption and chaos that he wanted to sow anyway. But the bottom line is here were are five years after the 2020 election subversion scheme and the drive to craft a revisionist history of that effort is jeopardizing an innocent bystander that provides critical research into atmospheric science. All of this is prompting a truly desperate response from scientific circles: WaPo : “The announcement drew outrage and concern from scientists and local lawmakers, who said it could imperil the country’s weather and climate forecasting, and appeared to take officials and employees by surprise.” Meteorologist Matt Lanza : “I cannot begin to tell you what a bad, bad, bad decision this is. Objectively so. This will absolutely cripple and devastate weather research in the U.S.” NYT : “The center, founded in 1960, is responsible for many of the biggest scientific advances in humanity’s understanding of weather and climate. Its research aircraft and sophisticated computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are widely used in forecasting weather events and disasters around the country, and its scientists study a broad range of topics, including air pollution, ocean currents and global warming.” The Destruction: CFPB Edition A glimmer of good news as the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a panel decision by Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao, both Trump appointees, that cleared the way for the dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The full appeals court will now consider the appeal. The Retribution: Letitia James Edition Disqualified interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan has made another mess of things, according to a new report from Politico. After a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, declined last week to re-indict...

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