Ryan Patrick to resign as US Attorney

As is customary when a new President of the opposing party takes office.

Ryan Patrick

U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Patrick said the acting attorney general asked him Tuesday to resign, a common occurrence when the occupant of the White House belongs to a different party than his predecessor.

Patrick got word on a joint call from acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson with other U.S. attorneys, nearly all of whom also have been asked to resign no later than Feb. 28. Patrick said he planned to finish out the month.

“This is not goodbye yet, as I have at least another 19 days representing the United States,” he wrote in an internal email to his staff.

Patrick said ethics rules don’t permit him to disclose where he’s headed next.

Dozens of Trump appointees were expected to leave posts across the country, according to news reports.

Patrick, the son of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, has been the top federal law enforcement officer in the Southern District of Texas since Jan. 8, 2018. He oversees an array of criminal and civil matters and supervises more than 200 attorneys and 500 staffers covering an area that stretches from near the Louisiana border to McAllen.

I don’t have an opinion about Ryan Patrick. Honestly, the fact that he mostly stayed out of the news is a positive as far as I’m concerned. I’m sure he’ll do fine with whatever comes next.

I’m much more interested in who will be nominated to replace him and the other US Attorneys in Texas. In particular, I hope we get nominees and get them confirmed a lot faster than we did with the Obama administration, where Senators Cornyn and Hutchison were basically allowed to have veto power over the process. That’s one of the lessons the Biden administration appears to have learned from that experience, and I’m here for it. Now please don’t make me have to write another post in a year’s time wondering where our damn US Attorneys are. TPM has more.

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30 Responses to Ryan Patrick to resign as US Attorney

  1. Bill Daniels says:

    Given the way so many Trump appointees have stabbed Trump in the back, the mass firing might not even be necessary. I wonder how many of the folks who are being blown out were secret resistance fighters, fighting against America First?

    Obviously, Patrick actually WAS pro-MAGA, so of course he would need to go.

  2. Ross says:

    @Bill, I haven’t met any Trump supporter that has a clue on making America great again. Trump supporters are mostly a bunch of mouth breathing racist assholes looking to stomp on minorities. Trump was the worst President in my lifetime, a crook, and married to a nasty woman. I can’t think of one good thing Trump did, since every action he took was designed to enrich him, his family, and his friends.

    As for stabbing Trump in the back, do you really believe that political appointees are supposed to have the President’s back? That’s a really stupid way of looking at things.

  3. Manny says:

    Good riddance another incompetent democracy-hating Republican/Trump lover.

  4. brad says:

    Always with the conspiracy theories Bill….love it.

  5. Bill Daniels says:

    Ross,

    ” I can’t think of one good thing Trump did…..”

    ~USMCA, passed in a bipartisan fashion
    ~other trade deals
    ~no new wars
    ~pulled out of Syria (no worries, Biden has already sent the troops back in
    ~draw down and plan for ending our longest war, the Afghan War
    ~making the country not only energy self sufficient for the first time in 70 years, but an actual net energy exporter
    ~brought back manufacturing
    ~spurred investment in the US by lowering the tax rate on repatriating foreign profits made by US companies. Double benefit as the taxpayers got a smaller portion of billions of dollars, vs. a large portion of nothing.
    ~Opportunity zones
    ~First Step Act (bipartisan prison reform)
    ~protecting our border and physically refusing entry to illegal aliens
    ~lowered ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions while simultaneously pulling the US out of the Paris Accords…..in other words, we lived up to the pollution part of the agreement, but stopped paying our taxpayer money to foreign countries, so they can use our own money against us to compete.

    That’s just stuff off the top of my head, Ross. None of that appeals to you? Letting black people out of prison? No new wars? Lowering pollution? Less competition for entry level jobs? None of this appealed to you, Ross? Nothing?

  6. Flypusher says:

    I’ll give Bill credit for one thing, he’s not hiding his authoritarianism. Note that it’s loyalty to Trump, not America, not the Constitution, that matters to him.

    The fools who stormed the Capitol are getting a harsh lesson in the school of hard knocks about how loyalty only flows one way in Trumpworld. Any “stab in back” Trump gets he will have earned 100x over.

  7. Bill Daniels says:

    LOL, Fly!

    Authoritarianism? Who is “cancel culturing” anything pro-America and America First? It’s the newly in control leftists. Conservatives, libertarians, populists, and Trump supporters are being deplatformed, vilified, and destroyed. I guess this is what your version of “unity” looks like?

    Assimilate to the Borg, or be destroyed? Shit, you aren’t even letting people assimilate, just going for the personal destruction first. Remember Kavanaugh? Personal destruction. That’s all gone into warp drive now.

    I also fondly remember being told that executive orders are a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. Creepy Uncle Joe has literally flooded the country with job killing and sovereignty killing EO’s. I guess EO’s aren’t totalitarian anymore, somehow.

  8. Ross says:

    Bill, trade deals? Trump did nothing good for trade. He mostly just pissed off trading partners and screwed up supply chains. He was totally clueless about business and how it works.

  9. Manny says:

    I would gladly be allowed to be canceled by Off the Kuff to get rid of the inbred racist, bigot, misogynist, low life that goes by Bill Daniels.

  10. Manny says:

    ~USMCA, passed in a bipartisan fashion – very little substantive change from what existed before and had to give in to Pelosi.

    ~other trade deals, what other trade deals

    ~no new wars
    But with three months left in his first term, Mr. Trump has not welcomed home the last American soldier from anywhere. While he has withdrawn thousands of troops from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, thousands more still risk their lives there — a source of clear frustration for a president hoping to impress voters with unequivocal, unprecedented results.

    And though his defenders insist he deserves credit for avoiding any major new U.S. interventions, making him the first president in decades to do so, Mr. Trump has deployed thousands of additional soldiers to the Persian Gulf in response to growing tensions with Iran, which some analysts warn could spill into a hot war if he is re-elected. He has also done little to scale down major American military bases in places like Qatar and Bahrain.

    ~pulled out of Syria (no worries, Biden has already sent the troops back in
    ~draw down and plan for ending our longest war, the Afghan War

    See prior statement as to how Trump didn’t do anything

    ~making the country not only energy self sufficient for the first time in 70 years, but an actual net energy exporter

    Well, he’s incorrect,” said economist Edward Hirs, energy fellow at the University of Houston. “We are not energy independent. We consume roughly 20 million barrels of crude oil each day. We only produce about 12.5 million barrels of crude oil each day.”

    ~brought back manufacturing

    “The Trump administration has taken credit for ‘reshoring’ manufacturing jobs, but the data show that isn’t true. Nearly 1,800 factories have disappeared under Trump between 2016 and 2018,” said Scott. “Additionally, the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods rose significantly between 2016 and 2019. In fact, the real U.S. trade deficit has increased in every year since 2016, reducing GDP growth by roughly 0.25% annually over the past three years. Compounded with the devastation left by the coronavirus pandemic, the blue collar manufacturing workers need serious help from policymakers.”

    ~spurred investment in the US by lowering the tax rate on repatriating foreign profits made by US companies. Double benefit as the taxpayers got a smaller portion of billions of dollars, vs. a large portion of nothing

    No proof that it occurred

    ~Opportunity zones – make Jarad rich scheme

    ~First Step Act (bipartisan prison reform)

    That was a congressional initiative, that Trump took credit for

    ~protecting our border and physically refusing entry to illegal aliens,

    However, Trump still has not reached anywhere near the level of interior removals as the early Obama administration, according to Cato’s analysis of data through 2018.

    ~lowered ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions while simultaneously pulling the US out of the Paris Accords…..in other words, we lived up to the pollution part of the agreement, but stopped paying our taxpayer money to foreign countries, so they can use our own money against us to compete.

    Covid 19 deserves credit for that

  11. Flypusher says:

    Cut the melodrama Bill. Righties love to play the victim. And the hypocrite. All those platforms are private companies. Trump was cut major slack on Twitter- he flouted its TOS for years. Twitter should have cracked down long ago, but it liked all the traffic, so they’re hypocrites too. Don’t like people like Dorsey or Zuckerberg making those calls? What’s your solution? Make platforms a public utility? Even then there will need to be rules and equitable enforcement of those rules.

    As for what is “pro-American”, we absolutely do not have the same definition. Just cut the crap and say pro-Trump, because we all know that’s what you really mean.

    I remember when cancel culture went by the name of “consequences”. Be a dick in public or online, reap what you have sown. Funny how I still keep hearing so many, many howls of “I HAVE BEEN SILENCED!!!”

    As for unity, there can be no unity with anyone who denies reality, embraces the big lie, and takes the hypocritical stance of “consequences for thee, but not for me.” If you support the attacks of 1/6 or want to sweep them under the rug, you deserve vilification.

    Actually if you want to look at authoritarian hallmarks that should alarm people, it’s scapegoating, telling a big lie, and trying to overturn the results of a fair and free election you should mention. As for EOs, these are nothing new. They are the result of decades of Congress ceding it’s power to the executive branch. I’d be perfectly fine with reversing that. That’s up to Congress.

  12. Robbie Westmoreland says:

    Bill Daniels with the Dolchstoßlegende, participating in the big lie, way to stick to the formula! That’s dedication right there.

    Ryan Patrick did a pretty decent job as US Attorney. I wonder what he’d have done if he’d been in the position of prosecuting his father.

  13. Lobo says:

    Déjà vu alert: Dolchstoßlegende and the Storm

    Stab-in-the-back was a major theme in Hitler’s propaganda and a tool to whip up passion for revenge.
    See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth

    That said, FDR famously used the metaphor too, but in relation to an act by a foreign nation (Italy), rather than to denounce perceived or real internal enemies and blame them for defeat: “On this tenth day of June 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of his neighbor.”

    An while we are on the topic of historical precedents, Der Stürmer was a virulently anti-Semitic weekly tabloid in Germany during the interwar years and through the end of WWII, and served as a major instrument of NAZI propaganda. Remember that the next time you see the “We are the Storm” motto.

    We are the Storm –> Storming of the Capitol

    Bottom Line: Words matter. Rhetoric has consequences.

  14. David Fagan says:

    Oh, Lobo, I caution you in the “words matter” declaration. I’ve been there, done that. Conclusion: consider your audience and adjust your efforts (how much work you want to invest and what do you reap) accordingly.

    I have seen you work pretty hard at making a point. In the end, do people better themselves for the dialogue?

  15. Bill Daniels says:

    LOL at the peanut gallery. If everything is literally Hitler and the Nazis, then nothing is. Have we never heard the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf? Y’all aren’t even going “6 degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon” here, you’re just full on calling everyone you don’t like Nazis. Great ad hominem plan. I’m especially disappointed at Wolf for going in on that. I expected better from you, Wolf. You usually make compelling arguments, even when I don’t agree with you.

  16. Lobo says:

    Re: In the end, do people better themselves for the dialogue?

    I don’t know, but I am an optimist. I reckon that perhaps some lurkers may benefit from parts of the “dialogue” conducted by the usual suspects here, so that it won’t be a total waste of time trying to elevate the level of discourse and provide some food for thought that wouldn’t otherwise be part of the daily fare, or even on the menu.

    But you are right, there is no readily apparent payoff to justify the effort.

    In that vein, I commend Mr. Kuff for his endurance. So many other blogs have faltered and disappeared, incl. some that still have now-dead links in the right-hand column.

  17. Bill Daniels says:

    Kuff not only has the most in depth info and commentary on political issues, but he runs his blog like a classical liberal……providing for a free and fair exchange of ideas from the posters, most of whom, are regulars. And yes, lurkers can see the discourse, the exchanges, and make their own determinations of the various positions and ideas tendered by Kuff and the usual suspects who post here.

    I suspect his blog flourishes while others founder, for both of those reasons…..content, and the fact that it’s not an echo chamber. Kuff has earned the rewards of his successful blog.

  18. Flypusher says:

    We have the unprecedented action of a sitting President who tried to overturn the results of an election he LOST. That’s not crying wolf, that’s pulling the fire alarm because someone started a fire. Telling big lies, and Undermining the free press and faith in democracy is exactly what Nazis and other authoritarian types do, and pointing that out is accurate, not ad hominem. Even Mike Godwin concurs.

  19. Manny says:

    David, you are too stupid to realize what points Lobo is making. Stupidity and racism go hand in hand.

    Real men quit their jobs, grow some David.

  20. David Fagan says:

    Manny, you are so sweet, thank you, but I will not join Q conspiracy tactics that repetition will evoke belief. I do not agree with racism and hope for a day that racism does not overshadow dialogue. Labeling someone a racist creates your own enemy that you create and that only you, Manny, are fighting by yourself. Though others may make the same mistakes, I believe you and others and all people have the qualities of understanding to move forward and past this historic human obstacle.

  21. Manny says:

    Grow some David

  22. David Fagan says:

    Manny, I also am not part of your ‘experiments’.

    Manny = Q

  23. Manny says:

    Yes, you are David; your responses provide data on the best way to upset Trump lovers. The next election is in two years; you must prepare in advance. You surprised me when you jumped in when you were not mentioned, which suggests that I am in your mind, among some other things.

    Do you even know what Q stands for, David?

  24. David Fagan says:

    Q=Manny

  25. Bill Daniels says:

    David,

    You really shouldn’t beat up on Manny. Your White supremacist comments are the reason why Manny and other non Whites treat their dogs so poorly. A liberal professor wrote a whole book about why non Whites treating their dogs atrociously is the fault of White people:

    https://newspunch.com/being-kind-to-dogs-is-racist-university-professor-says/

    “Yet, in her recent book The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals, Katja Guenther claims that dogs are being killed because of “capitalism, anthroparchy, white supremacy and patriarchy.” She argues that allowing dogs to sleep inside is a privilege reserved for the white and wealthy and that policies against keeping dogs chained up in backyards are intended to oppress people of color by imposing “middle-class norms of animal keeping in which companion animals are considered family and treated accordingly,” which ignore the fact that people of color “are themselves trapped in poverty, may have few options for legitimate income generation and possibly rely on their dogs for … status.””

    Apparently, treating your doggie humanely, as a member of the family, is, in practice, acting White.

  26. Manny says:

    At least we treat our dogs better than the white trailer trash treat their mothers. Did v ou beat her Bill?

  27. Manny says:

    Bill, your prior posting indicates that you hate women, misogynists. Here is a link about white trailer trash;

    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/2/11/2015296/-Trump-s-army-of-misogynists-had-special-plans-for-any-women-they-found

    Can provide more links about your kind of people, if you request it.

  28. Manny says:

    For those that don’t know Bill the article, he cites in no way draws the conclusion that Bill the white trailer trash does. To quote from the article;

    Evidence shows that dogs in inner cities are neither disproportionately dangerous nor poorly treated. People in inner cities live with dogs for the same reasons as the suburban wealthy: they want companionship and social connection. Guenther’s book perpetuates unsubstantiated prejudices about the inability of people of color to provide appropriate care for their animals. And she denies their individuality by referring to all Asians, Latinos and black people as “the collective Black.”

  29. Manny says:

    Bill, we treat our dogs better than your kind treat your mothers and wives. My dog is inside the house at the moment.

  30. Manny says:

    Bill both my parents are in a mausoleum, where is your mother outside in the rain and cold?

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