Tag: The Trump Administration

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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.

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Congress Elections GOP January 6

Aide To Mark Meadows Directly Implicates ‘Several’ Members Of Congress In Attempted Election Coup

Today’s public hearing of the January 6 House Select Committee expanded the conspiracy that had already been laid out in previous hearings, and we learned that Republican members of Congress were indeed part of the conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Cassidy Hutchinson was a top aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and the committee played portions of her videotaped testimony in which she named Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and “several members of Congress” who in late November and early December took part in a plan to draw up a slate of alternate electors who would go against the will of the voters and suggest that failed former president Donald Trump should remain in office.

Several members of Congress. Who might they be? We don’t know yet, and Hutchinson didn’t name them in the portion of her testimony that was broadcast today. But the fact there are multiple Republicans tells us that we do indeed have a conspiracy to commit a criminal act against the United States, which is a very serious offense.

The House Select Committee knows the names, and it’s safe to bet they will be laying them out in the days ahead or in their final report, which will be released before the midterm elections in November.

Just for fun, let’s speculate who might be on that list of “several.”

  • Rep. Jim Jordan (OH)
  • Rep. Andy Biggs (AZ)
  • Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA)
  • Sen. Ted Cruz (TX)
  • Sen. Josh Hawley (MO)

Once those names are made public, criminal referrals can be made to the Justice Department, provided they haven’t already been.

There’s going to be some sleepless nights ahead for several in the GOP.

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Capitol Insurrection January 6

Meet The Former Trump Aide Some Are Calling ‘The Next John Dean’ For The January 6 Hearings

When the House Select Committee on January 6, 2021 begins their public hearings next Thursday evening, June 9, one of the names you’ll probably hear quite often is Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as a top aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

Hutchinson is being billed as “the next John Dean,” a reference to the former Nixon administration White House counsel who blew the whistle on Watergate and the cover-up that eventually led to Richard Nixon’s resignation on August 4, 1974.

Dean, you may recall, famously told the Watergate committee that he had informed Nixon:

“I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that if the cancer was not removed the president himself would be killed by it.”

What Cassidy Hutchinson knows could well prove to be just as explosive as what Dean said nearly 50 years ago, the Washington Post reports:

Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, has sat for multiple depositions with investigators — more than 20 hours — and is expected to play a starring role in the hearings, according to people familiar with the matter. Hutchinson, people familiar with the committee said, has provided extensive information about Meadows’s activities in trying to overturn the election.

Meadows, through his lawyer, declined to provide comment.

The Washington Post reported late last month that Hutchinson had told the committee that Meadows remarked to others that Trump indicated support for hanging his vice president after rioters who stormed the Capitol on that day started chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!”

How important is Hutchinson’s testimony? So much so that Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who also served as counsel to House Democrats for Trump’s first impeachment trial, notes:

“Cassidy Hutchinson might turn out to be the next John Dean.”

Hutchinson also took extensive notes of what happened inside the White House on the day the Capitol was stormed by thousands of pro-Trump supporters, and those documents could prove incredibly damaging to Meadows and Trump, both of whom are facing indictment by the Justice Department for their role in Jan. 6:

Hutchinson has recalled for the committee various episodes in the chaotic scramble to sustain Trump’s election-fraud falsehood.A former mid-level aide,she kept detailed schedules of movements in the West Wingand had extensive conversations with Meadows.

Court filings show Hutchinson detailinga meeting in the lead-up to Jan. 6 between Meadows and House Republican lawmakers in which they discussed delaying the Joint Session of Congress — or altogether preventing the counting of electoral votes — so that state legislatures could select different electors.

The Jan. 6 committee will hold six public hearings, with the first and last ones being in primetime, which is certain to make for riveting television and sleepless nights for the Donald and many of his former advisers.

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Donald Trump Fox News The Trump Adminstration

Enraged Trump Denies He Flushed Documents Down The Toilet: ‘Who Would Know That?!’

During a Saturday morning phone-in interview with the hosts of “Fox & Friends,” failed, one-term, twice-impeached former President Donald Trump denied a report from Maggie Haberman of the New York Times that he had flushed documents down toilets at the White House while he was still in office, but offered zero proof to rebut what Haberman claimed.

Co-host Will Cain teed up the subject for the loser ex-president:

“There’s a national conversation that seems to be completely out of touch with the American people at every step of the way, and I think one of those examples might be the latest obsession President Trump, which is, again, and always seemingly about you. Maggie Haberman of the New York Times has a book out she has been discussing on CNN and the other platforms. The big take away is that you have ripped up papers and flushed them down the toilet. What is your reaction on what you’re hearing on other mainstream media channels in this book by Maggie Haberman?”

Rather than use facts to counter Haberman, Trump turned to his usual rhetoric about “fake news” and how everything it the fault of the media:

“Yeah it’s fake news and she’s a fake writer. She got a Pulitzer Prize for Russia, Russia, Russia, and then they found out it was a hoax. And so did others. Frankly the ones that get Pulitzer Prizes they happen to work around you and around Pete. And I will tell you, it’s a disgrace.”

The Russia story, it should be noted, was NOT a hoax. Several members of the Trump 2016 campaign were in close touch with Russian nationals and had in-person meetings to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

Trump then focused in on Haberman’s upcoming book, Confidence Man (which is the perfect title for a book about Con Man Don), which you can rest assured he wouldn’t read even if he had an advance copy:

“But, no, it’s a totally false story. She made it up. I don’t believe they have sources. Who is going to be a source for that anyway? Who would know that? There is no source. They make it up. You know, they oftentimes, these fake writers like her, they act like they know me like she knows me. I haven’t spoken to her in a very, very long time. She knows me no better than any other writer. They write books like they know and then they make things like that up. There would be no way of her knowing if it were the fact. There would be no way of her understanding that or knowing it. But it’s a totally fake story made up by her.”

There was also the obligatory attempt by the failed former president to blame every problem in the world on the news media:

“As much of the news is, I will tell you, this country we have to get honest reporting. Because if we don’t get honest reporting. It’s really leading us down a bad path. And it’s really leading us down a path of anger.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaKxg06zzrE

Where exactly are we supposed to get that “honest reporting”? From Fox? Even Fox admits its hosts shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Is Newsmax “honest reporting”? Hardly! What about One America News (OAN)? All they do is push one conspiracy theory after another.

Want to know how you can tell the revelation of Toiletgate from Haberman is true? You need look no further than the anger coming from Trump and his surrogates in response to the report.