Trump administration

Subterms

    More stories

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump officials can testify to Congress about his role in Capitol attack, DoJ says

      by

      US Capitol attackTrump officials can testify to Congress about his role in Capitol attack, DoJ saysMove declines to assert executive privilege for then acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, clearing path for others to testify Hugo Lowell in WashingtonTue 27 Jul 2021 15.50 EDTLast modified on Tue 27 Jul 2021 17.26 EDTFormer Trump administration officials can testify to Congress about Donald Trump’s role in the deadly January attack on the Capitol and his efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election, the justice department (DoJ) has said in a letter obtained by the Guardian.The move by the justice department declined to assert executive privilege for Trump’s acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, clearing the path for other top former officials to also testify to congressional committees investigating the Capitol attack without fear of repercussions.The justice department authorised witnesses to appear specifically before the two committees. But a DoJ official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said they expected that approval to extend to the 6 January select committee that began proceedings on Tuesday.Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the House select committee, told the Guardian in a recent interview that he would investigate both Trump and anyone who communicated with the former president on 6 January, raising the prospect of depositions with an array of Trump officials.Rosen and Trump administration witnesses can give “unrestricted testimony” to the Senate judiciary and House oversight committees, which are scrutinising the attempt by the Trump White House to stop Congress certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 election win, the letter said.The justice department’s decision marks a sharp departure from the Trump era, when the department repeatedly intervened on behalf of top White House officials to assert executive privilege and shield them from congressional investigations into the former president.It also represents a significant move by the White House Office of Legal Counsel under Biden, which in authorising the decision, pointedly noted that executive privilege protections exist to benefit the country, rather than a single individual.Trump has argued that conversations and deliberations involving the president are always protected by executive privilege. He can sue to block any testimony, which would force the courts to decide the extent of such protections.But the justice department said in the letter that Rosen and Trump administration officials can testify to Congress about Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 election because of the extraordinary nature of the circumstances.In his last weeks in office, Trump pressured justice department officials to use the vast powers of the federal government to undo his defeat, asking them to investigate baseless conspiracies of voter fraud and tampering that they had already determined to be false.“The extraordinary events in this matter constitute exceptional circumstances warranting an accommodation to Congress,” Bradley Weinsheimer, a senior career official in the office of the deputy attorney general, said in the letter.The justice department told Rosen and Trump administration officials that they could appear before Congress as long as their testimony was confined to the scope set forth by the committees and did not reveal grand jury or classified information, or pending criminal cases.Rosen’s approval letter, which was sent on Monday night according to a source familiar with the matter, comes after the Senate judiciary committee asked to interview several Trump administration officials as part of their oversight efforts started in January.Negotiations for their testimony were stalled as the justice department weighed how much information former officials could reveal, concerned that many of the conversations were covered by executive privilege, which keeps executive branch deliberations confidential.The justice department ultimately relented after consulting with the White House Office of Legal Counsel, which said it would not be appropriate to assert executive privilege over the specific topics in question, according to the letter.“It is the executive branch’s view that this presents an exceptional situation in which the congressional need for information outweighs the Executive Branch’s interest in maintaining confidentiality,” wrote Weinsheimer, citing Richard Nixon and Watergate.The Senate judiciary committee chairman, Dick Durbin, said on Twitter that he was working to now schedule interviews with the officials. The panel is also still receiving materials and documents from the justice department, the source said.The 6 January special committee – everything you need to knowRead moreThe House oversight committee chairwoman, Carolyn Maloney, said in a statement that she was pleased with the decision: “I am committed to getting to the bottom of the previous administration’s attempts to subvert the justice department and reverse a free and fair election.”Trump exerted significant pressure on the justice department to help him remain president. In one instance, Trump schemed with Jeffrey Clark, the former head of the DoJ’s civil division, to force Georgia to overturn their election results, the New York Times reported.The Senate judiciary and House oversight committees opened wide-ranging investigations into Trump and the justice department shortly after, with Durbin also demanding materials from the National Archives for records and communications concerning those efforts.TopicsUS Capitol attackTrump administrationHouse of RepresentativesDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Hatchet Man review: Bill Barr as Trump loyalist – and fairly typical AG

      by

      BooksHatchet Man review: Bill Barr as Trump loyalist – and fairly typical AGElie Honig excoriates the man who ran interference over Russia. He might have considered attorneys general gone before

      I Alone Can Fix It review: Trump as wannabe Führer
      Lloyd GreenSun 18 Jul 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 18 Jul 2021 02.01 EDTIn his 22 months as attorney general under Donald Trump, Bill Barr played blocking back and spear-catcher for the 45th president.Landslide review: Michael Wolff’s third Trump book is his best – and most alarmingRead moreOnly when Trump tried to steal the election did Barr grow a conscience. Otherwise, he was a close approximation to Roy Cohn, Trump’s notorious and long-dead personal attorney. Cohn and Barr even attended the same high school and college. But in the end, much as Trump ditched Cohn as he lay dying of Aids, Trump discarded Barr.Elie Honig surmises that Barr’s quest for power and desire to turn the clock back on secular modernity girded his disdain for democratic norms and legal conventions that came to stand in his way.Honig is an ex-prosecutor who became a CNN commentator. His first book, subtitled “How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor’s Code and Corrupted the Justice Department”, catalogs Barr’s misdeeds across 288 pages, interspersed with flashbacks to Honig’s career as an assistant US attorney in the southern district of New York.Honig successfully prosecuted more than 100 members and associates of organized crime, including bosses and members of the Gambino and Genovese families. More recently, he drew a comparison between such “mafia cases” and Trump’s Goodfellas-tinged lexicon.“Calling somebody who provides information to law enforcement a ‘rat’ is straight up mob boss language,” Honig tweeted in late 2018.Suffice to say, the author’s anger toward Barr is real and Hatchet Man is thorough. Barr’s transgressions are laid out in black and white.In March 2019, less than two months after succeeding Jeff Sessions, Barr released his own preview of Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow – a preview notably untethered to fact. Later, Barr put his fingers on the scale in connection with the sentencing of Roger Stone and the early release of Paul Manafort. For a self-professed law-and-order AG, who also served under George HW Bush but who had never prosecuted a criminal case, these were unusual steps, to say the least.The federal bench came to question Barr’s credibility. In an opinion tied to the release of a memo related to Barr’s summary of the Mueller report, US district judge Amy Berman Jackson wrote that both Barr and the Department of Justice had been “disingenuous”.The Biden administration is appealing against the ruling. Preserving presidential authority takes precedence over the public’s right to know. Buffing DoJ’s halo can be left for another day.Another of Barr’s gambits, seeking to toss Michael Flynn’s guilty plea (for lying to the FBI while national security adviser) before he received a pardon, became a lightning rod. US district judge Emmett Sullivan questioned Barr’s legal gymnastics.“In view of the government’s previous argument in this case that Mr Flynn’s false statements were ‘absolutely material’ because his false statements ‘went to the heart’ of the FBI’s investigation, the government’s about-face, without explanation, raises concerns about the regularity of its decision-making process,” Sullivan observed.Yet as Trump-era books go, Hatchet Man fails to sizzle. It is short on news and does not entertain. Those with first-hand knowledge did not share it with Honig. Rather, his book is a lament and a prayer for an idealized version of Main Justice that seldom ever was.The power to prosecute and defend is a potent weapon and politics weighs in the balance. John F Kennedy tapped Bobby Kennedy, his brother, as attorney general. Richard Nixon placed John Mitchell, his law partner, in the job. Alberto Gonzales, George W Bush’s counsel since his days as Texas governor, held on until he was forced out. His tenure was a hot mess. The usual question for attorneys general is not whether they are “political” but rather “how political” they are.Under Barack Obama, Loretta Lynch declined to recuse herself from the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email use while attempting to steer James Comey from the shadows where he tried to do his work. The FBI director criticized Lynch’s attempt to recast the investigation as a “matter”.Seeing the hand of the Clinton campaign in this kerfuffle over semantics, Comey wrote that the FBI “didn’t do ‘matters’” and “it was misleading to suggest otherwise”.At the other end of the spectrum stands Edward Levi, attorney general under Gerald Ford. Appointed to clear the Augean stables after the Nixon years, Levi was a rarity. A University of Chicago professor, he named an independent counsel to investigate a mere rumor that Ford had received illegal contributions from maritime unions. A six-month investigation found no wrongdoing – and may have torpedoed Ford’s bid for a full term in power.Honig lauds Lynch’s trial experience. Levi’s grandson, Will Levi, was Barr’s chief of staff. It’s a small world, after all.An entire chapter of Hatchet Man, meanwhile, is devoted to Barr’s decision to inject the government into a defamation lawsuit brought against Trump by the writer E Jean Carroll.Frankly, We Did Win This Election review: a devastating dispatch from TrumpworldRead moreIn 2019, Carroll wrote that Trump sexually assaulted her more than two decades before. Trump said she was “totally lying” and that he knew “nothing about her”.After Carroll requested a DNA sample, Barr removed the lawsuit to federal court and claimed Trump’s comments were made within the scope of his official duties. Honig calls the government’s arguments “specious”. A federal trial judge agreed.Not surprisingly, the Trump administration appealed. More surprisingly, Merrick Garland, Biden’s attorney general, has declined to drop that appeal. In the words of one commentator: “There’s nothing new about the justice department protecting the executive branch and the president.”Honig writes that the DoJ “must enact new, on-the-books policies out of the ditch” Barr dug, in an attempt to restore post-Watergate norms. Call that wishful thinking. What ails the department is what ails America: division and political warfare. Another piece of legislation or a well-crafted executive order is not about to change that.
      Hatchet Man is published in the US by Harper
      TopicsBooksWilliam BarrUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS domestic policyPolitics booksreviewsReuse this content More

    • 200 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      I Alone Can Fix It review: Donald Trump as wannabe Führer – in another riveting read

      by

      BooksI Alone Can Fix It review: Donald Trump as wannabe Führer – in another riveting read Gen Mark Milley saw that the US was in a ‘Reichstag moment’ – four days before the Capitol riot. With this and much more startling reporting, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker of the Washington Post deliver the goods once againLloyd GreenFri 16 Jul 2021 07.37 EDTLast modified on Fri 16 Jul 2021 08.24 EDTCocooned at his resorts, the Trump Organization indicted, Donald Trump has come to embrace the insurrection.Trump told chief of staff Hitler ‘did a lot of good things’, book saysRead more“Personally, what I wanted is what they wanted,” he tells Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker of the Washington Post.Five people died after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on 6 January, seeking to overturn the election.Last week, Trump declared: “These were peaceful people, these were great people.”So much for blaming Antifa. Think Charlottesville redux, on a larger stage. Or something even more ominous.In their second book on the Trump presidency, Leonnig and Rucker report that on 2 January 2021, two months after election day and as Trump still refused to concede defeat, Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told aides: “This is a Reichstag moment.”He was referring to the fire at the German parliament on 27 February 1933, an incident seized as a pretext by Hitler to begin arresting opponents and to consolidate his power.“The gospel of the Führer,” the authors quote Milley as saying.According to the general, the US under Trump was experiencing its own version of the late Weimar Republic, complete with modern-day “Brownshirts”. A graduate of Princeton and Columbia, Milley was not alone in seeing shadows of the past slither into the daylight.Trump, Leonnig and Rucker quote a senior official as saying, is a “guy who takes fuel, throws it on the fire, and makes you scared shitless”, then says “‘I will protect you.’“That’s what Hitler did to consolidate power in 1933.”This is a blockbuster follow-up to A Very Stable Genius, in which Leonnig and Rucker chronicled the chaos of Trump’s first three years in office. I Alone Can Fix It pulls back the curtain on the handling of Covid-19, the re-election bid and its chaotic and violent aftermath.The pair are Pulitzer winners, for investigative reporting. Their book is essential reading. They have receipts, which they lay out for all to see.Of Covid, they capture Marc Short, Vice-President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, telling folks in February 2020: “It’s not that bad.” The families of more than 600,000 dead Americans would probably disagree. (Short later contracted the virus.)Feeling burned by the authors’ first book, this time Trump sat for a two-and-a-half-hour interview. At the end of it, he let it be known – with a “twinkle in his eye” – that “for some sick reason” he “enjoyed it”.Much as he claims to hate the media and the elite, Trump craves their attention. Much as he believes in his own power of persuasion, Leonnig and Rucker were not converted.Trump’s hubris shines through. But for the pandemic, he claims re-election was inevitable. It’s a salesman’s pitch but one sufficiently rooted in reality. He also claims America’s two greatest presidents could not have defeated him. That is just surreal:
      I think it would be hard if George Washington came back from the dead and he chose Abraham Lincoln as his vice-president, I think it would have been very hard for them to beat me.”
      Before Covid, the economy was humming. Trump had taken down Qassem Suleimani, a top general in Iran’s Quds force, and the public approved.Joe Biden lost nominating contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. His first win was on 29 February, days after the stock market’s Covid-induced crash, assisted by James Clyburn of South Carolina, dean of the Congressional Black Caucus and House majority whip.On the relationship between Covid and Trump’s defeat, Leonnig and Rucker describe Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s now former prime minister, sharing his thoughts with Tony Fabrizio, a pollster who worked for him and Trump, in early 2020.Netanyahu said: “The only thing that can beat President Trump is coronavirus.”With analytic capacity Trump could never muster and a sense of history he lacked, Netanyahu added: “If you don’t understand what a pandemic is and the mathematics behind how this will spread if we don’t contain it, it will collapse economies, and that changes the ball game tremendously.”In August, Trump reamed out Fabrizio after he warned the president the electorate was “really fatigued”. Trump bellowed: “They’re tired? They’re fatigued? They’re fucking fatigued? Well, I’m fucking fatigued, too.”The book’s rawest revelations concern 6 January. At best, Trump was blasé about Mike Pence’s plight, presiding over confirmation of Biden’s win, stuck inside the Capitol as halls and offices were plundered. Like Nero watching Rome burn, Trump fiddled in front of his TV.As for the rioters, Trump now claims he and they are one: “They showed up just to show support because I happen to believe the election was rigged at a level like nothing has ever been rigged before.”On 6 January, James Lankford of Oklahoma argued against certification, citing constituents’ concerns about voter fraud. He failed to mention it was Trump who spread that very concern.Hours later, however, the senator voted to certify. Months earlier, Tulsa was the venue for Trump’s infamous comeback rally, a flop which cost Brad Parscale his job as campaign manager and Herman Cain his life.Landslide review: Michael Wolff’s third Trump book is his best – and most alarmingRead moreLiz Cheney also makes a telling appearance in Rucker and Leonnig’s story. In a 7 January call with Gen Milley, the Wyoming congresswoman unloaded on Jim Jordan, a hard-right Ohio representative and Trump favorite, as a “son of a bitch”.Stuck with Jordan during the Capitol siege, Cheney discounted his expressions of concern, saying: “Get away from me. You fucking did this.” Cheney is now a member of the House select committee charged with investigating the riot.Leonnig and Rucker also quote Doris Kearns Goodwin: “There is nothing like this other than the 1850s, when events led inevitably to the civil war.”Politicians and acolytes make pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s mecca in Palm Beach. Each dusk, Leonnig and Rucker write, he receives a standing ovation.Just the way he likes it.
      I Alone Can Fix It is published in the US by Penguin and in the UK by Bloomsbury
      TopicsBooksPolitics booksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsUS elections 2020US Capitol attackreviewsReuse this content More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Landslide review: Michael Wolff’s third Trump book is his best – and most alarming

      by

      BooksLandslide review: Michael Wolff’s third Trump book is his best – and most alarming Fire and Fury infuriated a president and fueled a publishing boom. Its latest sequel is required reading for anyone who fears for American democracyLloyd GreenMon 12 Jul 2021 19.00 EDTThe 45th president is out of office and Michael Wolff has brought his Trump trilogy to a close. First there was Fire and Fury, then there was Siege, now there is Landslide. The third is the best of the three, and that is saying plenty.Frankly, We Did Win This Election review: a devastating dispatch from TrumpworldRead moreThree years ago, Trump derided Fire and Fury as fake news and threatened Wolff with a lawsuit. Now, Trump talks to Wolff on the record about what was and might yet be, while the author takes a long and nuanced view of the post-election debacle. Wolff describes Trump’s wrath-filled final days in power.Aides and family members have stepped away, leaving the president to simmer, rage and plot with Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and other conspiracy theorists, all eager to stoke the big lie about a stolen election. Giuliani calls Powell “crazy”. Powell holds Giuliani in similar regard. “I didn’t come here to kiss your fucking ring,” she tells the former New York mayor.Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is elsewhere, hammering out the “Abraham Accords”, seeking to leave his mark on the world with some sort of step towards Middle East peace. Hope Hicks, a favorite Trump adviser, has gone. Two cabinet secretaries of independent wealth, Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, say adiós. As with hurricanes and plagues, the rich know when to head for high ground.Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s fourth and final press secretary, is awol. Even Stephanie Grisham, Melania Trump’s ultra-loyal chief of staff, has resigned rather than bear witness to the president’s implosion in the aftermath of the deadly assault on the US Capitol.Wolff’s interview with Trump is notable. It is held in the lobby at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida resort to which Trump retreated. The club’s “throne room”, in the author’s words, is filled with “blond mothers and blond daughters, infinitely buxom”. Fecundity and lust on parade. A palace built in its creator’s image.The interview is an exercise in Trumpian score-settling. He brands Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor brutally fired from the transition in 2016, a “very disloyal guy” – apparently as payback for a debate preparation session that stung Trump with its ferocity, laying bare his vulnerabilities as others watched.Christie told Trump what he didn’t want to hear about his handling of Covid-19. He bandied about expressions such as “blood on your hands” and “failure”. He also reminded Trump that while Hunter Biden, his opponent’s scandal-magnet son, was a one-off, there was a whole bunch of Trump kids to target. Their father was unamused.Turning to the supreme court, Trump lashes out at Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts, the chief justice. Trump accuses Kavanaugh of lacking courage and vents his “disappointment” in his most controversial pick for the bench. Under Roberts, the justices refused to overturn the election. So Trump had little use for them. He also takes aim at the Republican leader in the House. Apparently, Kevin McCarthy’s abject prostration still left something to be desired.Trump calls Andrew Cuomo, now New York’s governor but once, in a way, Trump’s own lawyer, a “thug”. He has kind words for Roy Cohn, another Trump lawyer, before that an aide to Joe McCarthy in the witch-hunts of the 1950s who wore that four-letter word far better. But he’s long dead. Bill Barr, the attorney general who made the Mueller report go away but wouldn’t back the big lie and resigned before the end, fares badly.Trump laments four years of “absolute scum and treachery and fake witch-hunts”. Introspection was never his strongest suit. “I’ve done a thousand things that nobody has done,” he claims. Landslide homes in on the bond between Trump and his supporters. Wolff sees that the relationship is unconventional and organic. Trump was never just a candidate. He also led a movement: “He knew nothing about government, they knew nothing about government, so the context of government itself became beside the point.” The bond was rooted in charisma. Trump was “the star – never forget that – and the base was his audience”.Landslide acknowledges that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election were born of his disregard for democratic norms and inability to acknowledge defeat. His legal and political arguments wafted out of the fever swamps of the fringes. As drowning men lunge for lifebelts, so Trump, Giuliani and Powell clung on.Wolff is open to criticism when he argues that the path between the 6 January insurrection and Trump is less than linear. Those who stormed the Capitol may well have been Trump’s people, Wolff argues, but what happened was not his brainchild. Six months ago, Trump also put distance between himself and the day’s events. Not any more.Trump has embraced the supposed martyrdom of Ashli Babbitt, the air force veteran who endeavored to storm the House chamber, where members were sheltering in place.“Boom,” he said on 7 July. “Right through the head. Just, boom. There was no reason for that. And why isn’t that person being opened up, and why isn’t that being studied?”Nightmare Scenario review: Trump, Covid and a lasting national traumaRead moreBeyond that, ProPublica has produced a paper trail that supports the conclusion senior Trump aides knew the rally they staged near the White House on 6 January could turn chaotic. What more we learn will depend on a House select committee.Wolff also fails to grapple with the trend in red states towards wresting control of elections from the electorate and putting them into the hands of Republican legislatures.Trump’s false contention that the presidential election was stolen is now an article of faith among Republicans and QAnon novitiates. Ballot “audits” funded by dark money are a new fixture of the political landscape. Democracy looks in danger.Trump tells Wolff his base “feel cheated – and they are angry”. Populism isn’t about all of the people, just some of them. As for responsibility, Trump washes his hands. On closing Wolff’s third Trump book, it seems possible it will not be his last after all. All the trauma of 2020 may just have been prelude to a Trump-Biden rematch.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationMichael WolffUS politicsRepublicansUS elections 2020newsReuse this content More