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CNN's Elie Honig flagged a "highly abnormal" directive issued by Donald Trump's newly installed Attorney General.

Within hours of being sworn in, attorney general Pam Bondi established a "weaponization working group" to review criminal prosecutions and civil suits against Trump before he was re-elected, including two state cases in New York, and Honig expressed surprise by the move.

During an appearance on MSNBC on Thursday morning, former Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) made the case that it is time for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to step aside because he is not the man to lead the party during Donald Trump's second term.

Speaking with the hosts of "Morning Joe," Ryan expanded upon an X post he made about Schumer at a recent rally where the 74-year-old led the assembled Democrats in a tepid "We will win" chant.

A former counterterrorism official explained the risks created by Donald Trump's vendetta against the CIA and FBI, and said the president and his team had committed a major error.

The CIA sent an unclassified email to the White House containing the first names and last initials for all new hires over the last two years as part of an executive order aimed at slashing the federal workforce, and national security expert Phil Mudd told CNN said those disclosures could allow Chinese and Russian spies to identify those individuals.

Reacting to the swearing in of new Attorney General Pam Bondi on Wednesday, and the flurry of directives she issued hours later to DOJ staffers, MSNBC's Jonathan Lemire noted a significant change of venue and what it could mean.

Speaking with MSNBC "Morning Joe" co-host Willie Geist, Lemire pointed out that Trump invited Bondi to be sworn in using the Oval Office –– an unusual occurrence, he stated.

"Almost immediately after that swearing in ceremony, the attorney general got to work," Geist reported. "Bondi issued more than a dozen directives aimed at overhauling the Justice Department. In one memo, she created the, quote, 'weaponization working group' to review the cases brought up against President Trump, including the special counsel cases and the Manhattan hush money case."

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"Yeah, I mean, that message is pretty clear, and this is what Donald Trump promised," Lemire responded.

"We need to just talk about the setting for a second here," Lemire added. "It's not just that this is the first swearing in that President Trump attended. This was done in the Oval Office itself, these things do not tend to happen in the Oval Office."

"We have seen other cabinet secretaries, even just recent days, and certainly with previous presidents, they get sworn in executive chambers,' he elaborated. "I believe [DHS secretary] Kristi Noem was sworn in at Clarence Thomas' house. Even though there's a wide variety of settings, the Oval Office is unusual: message sent."

"Yeah, unusual message sent," co-host Joe Scarborough agreed.

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A CNN conservative compared Elon Musk's wide-ranging efforts to cut the federal workforce to a haphazard surgeon.

The tech billionaire and the quasi-governmental Department of Government Efficiency have offered buyouts to large swaths of the federal workforce, and Musk zeroed in on the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), putting a freeze on billions of dollars in humanitarian assistance to other countries, and conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg explained how that could come back to bite him.

A stammering and defensive response from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to a grilling on Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) minions taking control of the country's finances drew a brutal response on MSNBC on Thursday morning.

Late Wednesday, Johnson was grilled by Chard Pergram of Fox News and accused of handing over the power of House to control congressional funding to the unelected billionaire; in effect, ceding the chamber's Article 1 powers.

That led Johnson to attempt to explain, "What is happening right now is there is a gross overreaction from the media about what is happening. The executive branch of government in our system has the right to evaluate how executive branch agencies are operating and to ensure that not only the intent of Congress in funding mechanisms, but also the stewardship of precious American taxpayer dollars is being handled well. That's what they're doing by putting a pause on some of these agencies and by evaluating them, by doing these internal audits."

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After sharing the clip on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," co-host Joe Scarborough called out Johnson handing over his responsibilities to Musk.

"That's interesting. That's not a threat to Article 1?" Scarborough asked. "Listen, I'm a small government conservative, I'm all for audits, I'm all for going through things and see, you know, use best practices, see how you can save as much of the taxpayers dollars, you can save it, and running it efficiently, but he [Musk] went on X and basically decided he was going to shut down USAID, shutting down an entire department that was founded and authorized by the United States Congress. So this is a violation of Article One powers."

"Now, when they let an unelected bureaucrat shut down an entire agency because he doesn't like and he goes on, you know, midnight rants on X, that's that's one of the grossest retreats, one of the one of the most outrageous retreats from Article One power that I've seen in Washington in a very long time," he added.

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Hollywood actor Ben Stiller took to social media Wednesday to swat away what he called "lies coming from Russian media" — and promoted by Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor who was indicted along with Donald Trump and 17 others in Georgia's election interference case.

Powell – who has a history of promoting baseless conspiracies — shared a video Wednesday morning from a right-wing account with the watermark "E News" in which a narrator said the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, sponsored American celebrity visits to Ukraine following Russia's invasion.

The president of the conservative American Principles Project aimed at women's rights supporters in an eyebrow-raising rant Wednesday where he complained their goal is “to destroy gender.”

Terry Schilling, a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, delivered his theory on why “feminists on the left” have been “so egregious” on trans issues in a Wednesday appearance on the right-wing "War Room" podcast.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said she was pushing to abolish the Department of Education because "crazy insane women" ruined it.

During a Thursday interview on Real America's Voice, Greene defended her legislation to defund America's federal education agency.

CNN host Brianna Keilar forced Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX) to admit that some government employees should be allowed to work remotely as President Donald Trump's administration pushed to end the practice.

During a Wednesday interview on CNN, Keilar pointed out that many military spouses working from home were impacted by Trump's executive order pushing agencies to end telework.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt did not take kindly on Wednesday when a reporter asked her about Donald Trump's plans to occupy the Gaza Strip and spend billions remaking it into the "Riviera of the Middle East."

In a clip shown on CNN, Leavitt was asked how Trump's Gaza vision squares with the "America First" policies he rode to re-election.

James Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute, told CNN's Brianna Keilar on Wednesday that many Muslim voters are regretting the decisions they made in the 2024 presidential election.

As Keilar noted while interviewing Zogby, Trump received a major boost from Muslim voters in 2024 due to anger against the Biden administration for its role in helping the Israeli government's war in Gaza that has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians and that Zogby described to CNN as a "genocide."

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt asserted that President Donald Trump had a "humanitarian heart" when he proposed taking over the Gaza Strip and relocating Palestinians — which has been called "ethnic cleansing" by experts.

During Wednesday's White House press briefing, NBC's Garrett Haake asked Leavitt about Trump's plan to take ownership of Gaza. The day before, Trump had said the U.S. aims to "own' Gaza, and that Palestinians needed to leave their homes.