Trump administration

Subterms

    More stories

    • 213 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Does Melania Trump's revamp of the White House Rose Garden have a hidden agenda? | Arwa Mahdawi

      by

      Say what you like about Melania Trump, she has done an incredible amount during her time in the White House. She renovated the bowling alley; she revamped the Red Room; she broke ground on a private tennis pavilion. Now, the indefatigable first lady is trying her hand at horticulture: on Monday, Trump announced that she is overseeing a renovation of the White House Rose Garden. “Planting a garden involves hard work and hope in the possibility of a bright future,” she explained.More than 150,000 Americans have died with Covid-19 and the pandemic is nowhere near under control in the US. Nearly half of adult Americans are jobless and 28 million are facing eviction. Heavily armed citizen militias are patrolling US cities and protesters are facing off against federal troops in Portland, Oregon. The US is a huge bin fire and Trump is weeding while it burns. Is the woman completely tone-deaf or is there a strategy behind her sudden passion for gardening?One school of thought is that she has looked at the 2020 election polls, realises her days at the White House are numbered and is rapidly legacy-building – or, perhaps more accurately, legacy-plagiarising. The image-obsessed Trumps have not exactly been subtle about their attempts to portray the first lady as a latter-day Jackie Kennedy, with Donald Trump once announcing: “We have our own Jackie O – it’s called Melania, Melania T.”Trump – or, as her husband likes to call her, “it” – has already mimicked Jackie O’s fashion choices, but now she is appropriating her floral ones: a White House statement about the plans noted that the rose garden will be restored to the design first implemented during the Kennedy administration.The first lady’s attempts to restore the past seem to be working, albeit not in the way she may have intended – shortly after the rose garden renovations were announced, “Marie Antoinette” started trending on Twitter. While Melania T may be attempting to channel Jackie O, it looks as though she can’t help giving off strong Marie A vibes. More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      'We just keep fighting': behind an urgent, inspiring film about the ACLU

      by

      If there was ever any doubt that Donald Trump would cement a campaign heralded by calling Mexicans rapists into policy, it was dispelled on 27 January 2017, when, to cap his first week in office, the president issued an executive order barring entrance from a slew of Muslim-majority countries. The so-called “Muslim travel ban” immediately roiled the country’s airports, as travelers were detained and families indefinitely separated in the midnight hours after the ban’s announcement. At the same time, protesters gathered outside the federal courthouse in Brooklyn; as depicted in early scenes from The Fight, a new documentary on the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a crowd cheered as lawyers got to messy, long-haul business of going to judicial war.Actor Kerry Washington, most recently of Hulu’s Little Fires Everywhere and a producer on The Fight, watched on TV as the deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants Rights Project, Lee Gelernt, exited the courthouse to chants of “ACLU! ACLU!” and declared a temporary victory: those detained by the new administration in airports would not be deported. Gelernt’s breathless recounting of the injunction’s relief had the feel of a post-championship court-side interview, and it caught Washington’s eye. “They are going to be on the frontlines of all the most important battles that we’re going to be facing to defend our civil rights and civil liberties,” she recalled thinking to the Guardian. “Who’s going to be in the trenches with these guys capturing this war movie that’s unfolding in front of us?”In the crowd at the Brooklyn courthouse that night was Elyse Steinberg, a documentary film-maker captivated by the same determined exhilaration on Gelernt’s face. “When Lee got his victory and he emerged from the steps and I saw him with his fists raised high,” she told the Guardian, “I just felt like this is the film that we needed to make. We needed to be with the ACLU and the lawyers in this epic battle for civil liberties that was going to be raging for the next four years.”In the three and half years since Steinberg stood outside the courthouse, the ACLU has held the legal line against the civil rights assaults of the Trump administration, work that The Fight depicts as variously harried and routine for the Manhattan-based team of lawyers and deeply consequential for the clients they represent. The Fight, co-directed by Steinberg, Josh Kriegman and Eli Despres follows four pivotal court cases central to combatting the Trump administration’s racist, Maga-exclusive agenda: the separation of migrant families at the southern US border and the horrific, indefinite detention of children without their parents; a policy which allowed the Office of Refugee Resettlement to deny abortion access to an undocumented woman detained by Ice; the addition of a citizenship question to the decennial US census; and the blanket ban of transgender people from serving in the US military.In each case, The Fight reveals the work of an ACLU attorney, particularly under an administration whose policies are often enacted without regard for bureaucratic chaos, to be mostly a scramble: hustling through briefs, cramming in a hotel room the night before argument, hungrily reading just-downloaded PDFs. The moments of mundane work dilemmas – Gelernt finding a single workable outlet at Starbucks to charge his dying phone, the LGBT & HIV project attorney Joshua Block fussing with uncooperative Microsoft Word dictation, the voting rights lawyer Dale Ho accidentally misreading a consequential decision or saying goodnight to his kids during another long day on the road – paint a fuller picture of the work. They take the ACLU staff “from being these larger than life Avengers legal superheroes, which is what they are, to also being husbands and wives and moms and dads, regular folks who have figured out how to use their talent for good in the world”, said Washington.The unglamorousness of the hustle, or of the reproductive rights lawyer Brigitte Amiri’s celebratory “train wine” on the Amtrak back to New York after a favorable hearing, contrast sharply with the stakes of the court cases at hand. “If I’m not going to be a civil rights lawyer right now, in this moment, then…when?” says Ho as he worked on a census decision which, had it been in favor of the administration, would have inaccurately skewed fair representation in Congress and federal funding for a decade to come. Amiri’s case – in which the federal government unlawfully barred an unidentified, undocumented asylum claimant for obtaining an abortion was “a harbinger of things to come”, she told the Guardian, as it preceded several states passing abortion restrictions or outright bans in 2019. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Attorney general will defend aggressive US response to Portland protests

      by

      US attorney general William Barr will defend the aggressive federal law enforcement response to civil unrest in America in a highly anticipated hearing on Tuesday, arguing that “violent rioters and anarchists have hijacked legitimate protests” sparked by George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police.Barr will tell members of the House Judiciary Committee that the violence taking place in Portland, Oregon, and other cities is disconnected from the death of Floyd, which he described as a “horrible“ event that prompted a necessary national reckoning on the relationship between Black men and law enforcement.“Largely absent from these scenes of destruction are even superficial attempts by the rioters to connect their actions to George Floyd’s death or any legitimate call for reform,” Barr will say of the Portland protests, according to a copy of his prepared remarks released by the Justice Department on Monday.Barr will also touch on other controversies that have shadowed his tenure, including his handling of the investigation into Trump campaign ties to Russia, which he derisively refers to as “the bogus ‘Russiagate’ scandal”.According to his prepared remarks, Barr will try to differentiate recent protests in cities like Portland and Seattle and the demonstrations that erupted following the death of George Floyd in May.The attorney general will acknowledge to lawmakers that Floyd’s death struck a chord in the Black community because it reinforced concerns that Blacks are treated differently by police. But he will also condemn Americans who he says have responded inappropriately to Floyd’s death through what he said was rioting and anarchy.Civil unrest escalated in Portland after federal agents were accused of whisking people away in unmarked cars without probable cause. The US agents, drawn mainly from border patrol, were dispatched to the city by Donald Trump ostensibly to protect the courthouse. But they have succeeded in inflaming the situation.Washington DC was stunned in June when peaceful protesters were violently cleared from the streets by federal officers using tear gas ahead of a photo op by Trump in front of a church, where Barr had accompanied him.The attorney general has defended as necessary the broad use of law enforcement power to deal with the situation, but the department’s internal watchdog has opened investigations into use of force and other tactics by agents in both cities.The hearing on Tuesday marks Barr’s first appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, bringing him face-to-face with a panel that voted last year to hold him in contempt and is holding hearings on what Democrats allege is politicization of the Justice Department under his watch. It comes during a tumultuous stretch in which Barr has taken a series of actions cheered by Trump but condemned by Democrats and other critics.Barr makes reference in his prepared statement to that antagonistic relationship, saying that “many of the Democrats on this committee have attempted to discredit me by conjuring up a narrative that I am simply the president’s factotum who disposes of criminal cases according to his instructions. Judging from the letter inviting me to this hearing, that appears to be your agenda today.”Beyond the federal response to the demonstrations, Barr is also expected to be pressed in detail about his intervention in criminal cases arising from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.The hearing will provide Barr with a forum to offer his most detailed account to date for his actions in the criminal cases, which he has said were taken in the interests of justice and without political pressure.Those include the Justice Department’s decision to drop the prosecution of former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn (a request now tied up in court) and his firing last month of the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, whose office oversaw investigations into allies of the president.Barr also pushed for a more lenient sentence for Trump ally Roger Stone, prompting the entire trial team’s departure. That decision was at the center of a separate hearing before the same committee last month, when one of the prosecutors alleged that politics from Justice Department leadership had influenced the handling of the sentence.In the past, Barr has said that Flynn, who pleaded guilty as part of Mueller’s probe to lying to the FBI, should never have been charged and that the original sentencing recommendation for Stone – also charged in the Mueller investigation – was excessive. Barr’s opening statement does not delve into the details of the case, though he will insist Tuesday that Trump has not attempted to interfere in those decisions and has “played a role properly and traditionally played by presidents”. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      US attorney general may be using Assange case for political ends, court told

      by

      The US attorney general, William Barr, may be using Julian Assange’s extradition case in the UK for political ends, the WikiLeaks founder’s defence team alleged during a court hearing at which he appeared by video link from prison for the first time in months.It was a fact that Donald Trump had described the defence case as “a plot by the Democrats”, Edward Fitzgerald QC told the hearing at Westminster magistrates court.Fitzgerald said a new superseding US indictment, produced months after the start of attempts in the UK to secure his extradition, had been “sprung” on his defence team.The indictment, which had not yet been formally laid before the court, supersedes previous indictments brought in February and which related to 2010 and 2011.A US grand jury had previously indicted Assange on 18 charges – 17 of which fall under the Espionage Act – around conspiracy to receive, obtaining and disclosing classified diplomatic and military documents.The details in the new indictment – publicised last month by the US Department of Justice – focus on conferences in 2009 in the Netherlands and Malaysia at which US prosecutors say Assange tried to recruit hackers who could find classified information, including in relation to a “most wanted leaks” list posted on the WikiLeaks website.The hearing on Monday was the latest in a series of administrative hearings. Chaotic arrangements meant journalists, legal observers and some lawyers had difficulty accessing it remotely to listen in. The full hearing of the extradition case has been postponed until September due to the Covid-19 pandemic.Wearing a beige sweater and a pink shirt, Assange eventually appeared from Belmarsh prison after an earlier attempt was aborted.Fitzgerald told the hearing it would be improper if the new indictment led to the postponement of the hearing until after the November presidential election in the US.Judge Vanessa Baraitser told the hearing that the deadline had arrived for any further evidence before the extradition hearing, aside from psychiatric reports. She said she expected all parties to attend the hearing in September in person.Outside the court, the WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, Kristinn Hrafnsson, said: “The ‘new’ superseding indictment actually contains nothing new. All the alleged events have been known to the prosecution for years.“It contains no new charges. What’s really happening here is that despite its decade-long head-start, the prosecution are still unable to build a coherent and credible case. So they’ve scrapped their previous two indictments and gone for a third try.”US Department of Justice authorities have said: “The new indictment does not add additional counts to the prior 18-count superseding indictment returned against Assange in May 2019. It does, however, broaden the scope of the conspiracy surrounding alleged computer intrusions with which Assange was previously charged.” More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      'These are his people': inside the elite border patrol unit Trump sent to Portland

      by

      ‘These are his people’: inside the elite border patrol unit Trump sent to Portland

      Federal officers use chemical irritants and projectiles to disperse Black Lives Matter protesters on 24 July 2020, in Portland.
      Photograph: Noah Berger/AP

      Bortac, a quasi-militarised outfit equivalent to the Navy Seals, has been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan
      by Ed Pilkington

      Main image:
      Federal officers use chemical irritants and projectiles to disperse Black Lives Matter protesters on 24 July 2020, in Portland.
      Photograph: Noah Berger/AP

      In January 2011, James Tomsheck, then a top internal affairs investigator inside US Customs and Border Protection, attended a meeting of about 100 senior CBP leaders in a hotel in Irvington, Virginia.
      Amid the sanitized splendor of the hotel ballroom, he vividly recalls hearing the nation’s then highest-ranking border patrol agent, David Aguilar, laying out his vision for the future. Border patrol, the former CBP deputy commissioner said, was to become the “marine corps of the US federal law enforcement community”.
      Another leading CBP figure remarked that border agents were not required to adhere to the same constitutional restraints on the use of force as other law enforcers. “We are not cops,” he said.
      Fast forward to this month, when Tomsheck absorbed with mounting foreboding the images of federal officers – led by border patrol agents – wielding teargas and flash bangs against protesters in Portland, Oregon.
      As news circulated of demonstrators being shot in the face with “less lethal” munitions, and of unidentified masked agents in camouflage strong-arming civilians into unmarked vans, the nightmare scenario Tomsheck had heard expressed by his bosses almost a decade ago – of border patrol becoming a nationwide militarized force operating outside constitutional constraints – was becoming real.
      “Border patrol has always seen itself as a militarized force, and that aspiration is now being enabled by the current administration,” Tomsheck told the Guardian.
      On Thursday, Trump ramped up his threat to send border patrol agents into US cities to tackle what he claims is an epidemic of violence and anarchy sweeping urban areas. He told Fox News he was prepared to send in 75,000 federal officers, warning: “We’ll go into all of the cities, any of the cities. We’re ready.” More