Category: The Trump Adminstration

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Crime The Trump Adminstration

Legal Expert: Grand Jury Subpoena For Stephen Miller Should Have Him Very Worried

Former Trump administration adviser Stephen Miller was informed via subpoena this week that a grand jury investigating the ex-president’s Save America PAC wants him to testify under oath, and that could be big trouble for Miller, according to a former federal prosecutor.

Glenn Kirschner was asked for his thoughts on the grand jury subpoena for Miller during an appearance on MSNBC Sunday and said Miller will have two choices when he testifies: Flip on Trump of perjure himself.

“I think one thing we should pay attention to is the difference between a January 6th congressional subpoena, and there have been, I think, more than 1000 witnesses at last count interviewed by the January 6th Congressional committee. The difference is between that kind of a subpoena and a federal grand jury subpoena, which is what now Stephen Miller has had placed in his hands.”

Kirschner then explained what he meant:

“Because you can play some games trying to avoid a congressional subpoena and Congress does not have the same tools to enforce its subpoenas and compel testimony,. But I’ll I tell you what: the Department of justice does.”

“Things have just gotten real for Stephen Miller and anybody else who has a federal grand jury subpoena. I have to believe at the end of the day he will testify truthfully and if not he’ll be looking at a perjury charge in contempt or obstruction of justice charge.”

And what if Miller does tell what he knows?

“If he testifies truthfully about what Donald Trump has done, that could spell additional trouble for Trump.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXWx0HAwAAU&feature=emb_logo
 

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Crime The Trump Adminstration

Steve Bannon Forced To Surrender To Authorities On Criminal Charges In New York: Report

 

Already facing a two-year prison term in federal prison after being found guilty for contempt of Congress, Steve Bannon, a former political strategist for failed ex-president Donald Trump, will surrender to New York authorities on Thursday for his role in an alleged scheme to defraud contributors to a $25 million fundraising effort for building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

According to The Washington Post:

The precise details of the state case could not be confirmed Tuesday evening. But people familiar with the situation, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sealed indictment, suggested the prosecution will likely mirror aspects of the federal case in which Bannon was pardoned.

In that indictment, prosecutors alleged that Bannon and several others defrauded contributors to a private, $25 million fundraising effort, called “We Build the Wall,” taking funds that donors were told would support construction of a barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Shortly after news broke of the latest indictment against Bannon, he lashed out in statement which reads in part, “The Soros-backed DA has now decided to pursue phony charges against me 60 days before the midterm election because WarRoom is the major source of the MAGA grassroots movement. The SDNY did the exact same thing in August 2020 to try to take me out of the election. It didn’t work then, it certainly won’t work now.”

Ironically, Bannon was pardoned by Trump on federal charges connected to the “We Build the Wall” fundraising scheme, but that pardon doesn’t protect him from being indicted and put on trial in New York. Bannon pleaded not guilty to those charges, which included allegations that he had personally pocketed $1 million of the donated funds.

Bannon may also be in further legal jeopardy for his role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. His name has come up frequently during the public hearings being conducted by the House Select Committee investigating Jan. 6.

Here’s more on Bannon’s contempt of Congress conviction:

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Donald Trump Jared Kushner The Trump Adminstration

Jared Kushner Is Asked If He’d ‘Work For Trump Again’ – His Response Is Incredibly Revealing

You’ve probably heard or read that former Trump administration senior adviser Jared Kushner (a.k.a) Mr. Ivanka Trump has a “memoir” out about all of the great things (ha!) he accomplished while serving in the White House.

In order to sell more copies of his book, Jared showed up on Fox News for an interview with Bill Hemmer and Dana Perino and was posed this question:

“Would you work for Trump again?”

If you think you’ve heard non-responsive replies before, you ain’t heard nothing until you get a load of the word salad that came from Jared:

“Working for him was an honor. I write in the book about how it was a different experience. I’m very proud of the things I got done. It is a big toll, working in Washington…I don’t want people who are from the private sector to be scared to go to Washington. I think that that’s what our founders wanted. They wanted people to leave their farm, go and serve, then go back to their farm. It takes a big toll, but you can get a lot of things done…”

What?! Even Bill Hemmer couldn’t resist reminding Kushner:

“That is not an answer.”

And that led to even more bullshit from Jared, who opined on the matter with this:

“We need not the career political class who have been doing it for 30 years. We need people with different perspectives, outsider approaches, people with real life business experience coming to Washington. That’s what President Trump did. He brought a lot of people like him, but now he’s got a lot of very qualified people with him who I think could help him do things in ways he didn’t have in the beginning of his first term. So for me right now, I’m enjoying my life in the private sector and loving the time with my kids.”

Even Perino seemed tired of the back-and-forth at that point, remarking:

“I’m taking it as a no.”

About the only work Jared, Ivanka, or any of the other Trump family members will likely be for the old man in the future is making sure he has some money in his commissary account so he can buy Little Debbies and ramen soup kits at whatever federal prison he’s shipped to.

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Donald Trump Military The Trump Adminstration

Navy Vet: Trump Wanted Military To Swear An ‘Oath To Him’ And Perform Illegal Acts If He Ordered Them

Theodore Johnson is Navy veteran who is currently a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice who writes for The Bulwark that former president Donald Trump believed that being commander-in-chief meant members of the military “swore an oath to him personally” and he could order them to do whatever he wanted, even if such orders were unconstitutional or illegal.

Johnson says he came to those conclusions after reading two recent news stories:

  • The release of a draft resignation letter from Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
  • Trump’s insistence that he was allowed to keep thousands of classified and top-secret documents at his Mar-a-Lago golf resort

These historic occurrences speak to just how deeply Trump believed the military not to be an instrument of national power but an apparatus for personal use. Milley composed his resignation draft after being asked to participate in Trump’s ego-stroke theater — first by conducting a military show of force against Americans upset about George Floyd’s killing days earlier and then being unwittingly drafted into Trump’s infamous march across Lafayette Square after it was forcibly cleared of protesters. Regarding the classified material squirreled away in Mar-a-Lago, the underlying explanation from Trump and his supporters appears to amount to little more than that it was his to do with as he pleased without any regard to the potential damage to our national security interests.

Those events, Johnson continues, made it clear exactly what Trump believed when it came to a president’s power over U.S. armed forces:

These occurrences bring to the fore a troubling issue usually lurking in the background of civil-military relations: When a president believes his interests supersede the nation’s — or, worse, that his interests become the nation’s — the democratic principle of ‘civilian control of the military’ exposes the armed services to co-option as a partisan tool for domestic politics.

There have also been reports that Trump considered using the military to disperse protesters after the May 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by police officers, which leads Johnson to conclude:

“Civil-military relations mostly held during the Trump presidency, a testament to the resilience of the institution and to our democracy. But dangers remain. If our country’s toxic polarization, hyperpartisanship, and intentional stoking of social tensions for political ends are not sufficiently addressed, we may find ourselves dangerously close to the precipice once more—and if Trump or someone following the Trump model comes to power again, we may well tumble over the edge.”

If Donald Trump happens to wind up in the White House again, this country will quickly become an authoritarian police state and the Constitution will no longer be the controlling document of our republic. All of us, as citizens and voters, must make sure that doesn’t happen.

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Crime Donald Trump Espionage National Security The Trump Adminstration

18 Former Trump Officials Say His ‘Standing Order’ On Declassifying Top Secret Documents Is BS

According to disgraced, one-term former president Donald Trump, he had a “standing order” that stipulated any classified documents he took from the Oval Office to the White House residence residence, meaning it wasn’t improper or illegal for him to have thousands of top secret files at his Mar-a-Lago resort because he had already declassified them.

But 18 former officials who served in the Trump administration, no order was ever issued and the ex-president is lying yet again, according to a report from CNN.

“Nothing approaching an order that foolish was ever given,” said John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff for 17 months from 2017 to 2019. “And I can’t imagine anyone that worked at the White House after me that would have simply shrugged their shoulders and allowed that order to go forward without dying in the ditch trying to stop it.”

Mick Mulvaney, who succeeded Kelly as acting White House chief of staff, also dismissed the idea and told CNN he was “not aware of a general standing order” during his tenure.

A senior White House official dubbed Trump’s assertion of automatic declassification “total nonsense,” adding, “If that’s true, where is the order with his signature on it? If that were the case, there would have been tremendous pushback from the Intel Community and DoD, which would almost certainly have become known to Intel and Armed Services Committees on the Hill.”

Another fact that directly undercuts Trump’s claim of a “standing order” of declassification according to David Laufman, the former chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence division, is that “Programs and officials would have been notified. There is no evidence they were.”

Multiple sources said they believed that Trump’s claim the documents were declassified was nothing more than a transparent attempt to try to defend himself for taking the documents to Mar-a-Lago.

“There is a process to declassify, the president can’t just wave a magic wand,” a former senior Trump White House official said.

Meanwhile, Trump and his ragtag collection of so-called “attorneys” are trying to get the affidavit used to obtain the search warrant unsealed without any redactions, a move that could threaten the lives of federal law enforcement officials and jeopardize the ongoing Justice Department investigation of whether or not the former president violated the Espionage Act.

A federal magistrate said Thursday that the DOJ has until Thursday, Aug. 25 to submit a redacted version of the affidavit which he will then rule on.