Trump administration

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      TikTok asks US court to intervene after Trump administration leaves app in limbo

      by

      [embedded content]
      The popular video-sharing app TikTok says its future has been in limbo since Donald Trump tried to shut it down earlier this fall and is asking a federal court to intervene.
      Trump in August signed an executive order to ban TikTok if it did not sell its US operations in 45 days. The move forced TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to consider deals with several American companies before ultimately settling on a proposal to place TikTok under the oversight of the American companies Oracle and Walmart, each of which would also have a financial stake in the company.
      But TikTok said this week it’s received “no clarity” from the US government about whether that proposal has been accepted.
      The deal has been under a national-security review by the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, which is led by the treasury department. The department didn’t return emailed requests for comment this week.
      “With the November 12 CFIUS deadline imminent and without an extension in hand, we have no choice but to file a petition in court to defend our rights and those of our more than 1,500 employees in the US,” TikTok said in a written statement Tuesday.
      Trump has cited concerns that the Chinese government could spy on TikTok users if the app remains under Chinese ownership. TikTok has denied it is a security threat but said it is still trying to work with the administration to resolve its concerns.
      The legal challenge is “a protection to ensure these discussions can take place”, the company said.
      The Trump administration had earlier sought to ban the app from smartphone app stores and deprive it of vital technical services. To do this, the US could have internet service providers block TikTok usage from US IP addresses, as India did when it banned TikTok, effectively making TikTok unusable.
      Such actions were set to take place on 20 September but federal judges have so far granted TikTok extensions.
      TikTok is now looking to the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit to review Trump’s divestment order and the government’s national-security review. The company filed a 49-page petition asking the court to review the decision, saying the forced divestment from TikTok violates the constitution.
      “The government has taken virtually all of the ‘sticks’ in the ‘bundle’ of property rights ByteDance possesses in its TikTok US platform, leaving it with no more than the twig of potentially being allowed to make a rushed, compelled sale, under shifting and unrealistic conditions, and subject to governmental approval,” the filing says.
      The US attorney general office did not immediately respond to request for comment. More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      End of Trump era deals heavy blow to rightwing populist leaders worldwide

      by

      As the Donald Trump era draws to a close, many world leaders are breathing a sigh of relief. But Trump’s ideological kindred spirits – rightwing populists in office in Brazil, Hungary, Slovenia and elsewhere – are instead taking a sharp breath.The end of the Trump presidency may not mean the beginning of their demise, but it certainly strips them of a powerful motivational factor, and also alters the global political atmosphere, which in recent years had seemed to be slowly tilting in their favour, at least until the onset of coronavirus. The momentous US election result is further evidence that the much-talked-about “populist wave” of recent years may be subsiding.For Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has yet to recognise Joe Biden’s victory, Trump’s dismissal struck close to home. “He was really banking on a Trump victory … Bolsonaro knows that part of his project depends on Trump,” said Guilherme Casarões, a political scientist from Getulio Vargas Foundation in Brazil.As the reality of a Trump-free future sunk in last Thursday, Bolsonaro reportedly sought to lighten the mood in the presidential palace, telling ministers he now had little choice but to hurl his pro-Trump foreign policy guru, Filipe Martins, from the building’s third-floor window.The election result represented a blow to Bolsonarismo, a far-right political project modelled closely on Trumpism that may now lose some of its shine. And on the world stage the result means Brazil has lost a key ally, even if critics say the relationship brought few tangible benefits. It brings an end to what Eliane Cantanhêde, a prominent political commentator, called Bolsonaro’s “megalomaniacal pipedream” of spearheading an international rightwing crusade. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Loser: Donald Trump derided defeat– now he must live with it

      by

      In the Manichean world of Donald Trump, there is one epithet more pathetic than any other: loser. He has used the term when describing fellow Republicans Mitt Romney and John McCain, critics such as Cher, his friend Roger Stone, and even American fallen heroes who died fighting for their country in France in 1918. Now he joins their ranks. He will forever carry around his neck the yoke of the one-term president, a burden shouldered in the last 40 years by just two other men – George HW Bush and Jimmy Carter.
      To make his humiliation complete, Trump lost to someone he denigrated as “the worst candidate in the history of presidential politics”. But in the end, after a nail-biting vote count, Joe Biden proved himself to be a more worthy opponent than that albeit by a thin margin than polls predicted.
      In 2016 Trump was a curiosity – the outsider who promised to take Washington by storm, the real estate magnate who said he would drain the swamp, the self-proclaimed billionaire who wouldn’t reveal his tax returns but would be the champion of “forgotten Americans”.
      Four years later, that unconventional mishmash of qualities had to some degree unraveled. He could no longer claim the mantle of the outsider – he was the incumbent of the most powerful office on Earth; the swamp looked more toxic than ever; and the forgotten Americans were hurting as never before while Trump himself was paying a paltry $750 a year in federal income taxes. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      The misinformation media machine amplifying Trump's election lies

      by

      The networks have made their calls, world leaders have begun paying their respects, and even Fox News and Rupert Murdoch’s other media outlets appear to have given up on a second term for Donald Trump. But in a video posted on Facebook on 7 November and viewed more than 16.5m times since, NewsMax host and former Trump administration official Carl Higbie spends three minutes spewing a laundry list of false and debunked claims casting doubt on the outcome of the presidential election.
      “I believe it’s time to hold the line,” said Higbie, who resigned from his government post over an extensive track record of racist, homophobic and bigoted remarks, to the Trump faithful. “I’m highly skeptical and you should be too.”
      [embedded content]
      The video, which has been shared more than 350,000 times on Facebook, is just one star in a constellation of pro-Trump misinformation that is leading millions of Americans to doubt or reject the results of the presidential election. Fully 70% of Republicans believe that the election was not “free and fair”, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted since election day. Among those doubters, large majorities believe two of Trump’s most brazen lies: that mail-in voting leads to fraud and that ballots were tampered with.
      Trump himself is the largest source of election misinformation; the president has barely addressed the public since Tuesday except to share lies and misinformation about the election. But his message attacking the electoral process is being amplified by a host of rightwing media outlets and pundits who appear to be jockeying to replace Fox News as the outlet of choice for Trumpists – and metastasizing on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.
      Since election day, 16 of the top 20 public Facebook posts that include the word “election” feature false or misleading information casting doubt on the election in favor of Trump, according to a Guardian analysis of posts with the most interactions using CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool. Of those, 13 are posts by the president’s own page, one is a direct quote from Trump published by Fox News, one is by the rightwing evangelical Christian Franklin Graham, and the last is the Newsmax Higbie video.
      The four posts that do not include misinformation are congratulatory messages by Barack Obama and Michelle Obama for Biden and Kamala Harris and two posts by Graham, including a request for prayers for Trump and a remembrance by Graham of his father, the televangelist Billy Graham.
      On YouTube, hosts such as Steven Crowder, a conservative YouTuber with more than 5 million followers, have also been pushing out content questioning the election results. A video from Crowder called Live Updates: Democrats Try to Steal the Election was viewed 5m times, and a nearly two-hour video headlined Fox News is NOT your friend has already racked up more than a million views. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Pompeo makes baseless claims about ‘smooth transition to second Trump administration’

      by

      The secretary of state, Mike Pompeo has predicted “there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration” on a day when US allies offered their congratulations to the president-elect, Joe Biden.
      Pompeo made his remarks to reporters at the state department on Tuesday, and gave a slight smile after referring to a “second Trump administration” – leaving it unclear whether he was joking.
      He did not refer to the fact that Biden has been projected as the winner, and held a lead of 4.7m nationwide in the vote count so far, while being ahead in the four critical battleground states.
      Instead, Pompeo focused on the various legal challenges being pursued by the Trump administration, none of which so far have been found to have any merit.
      “We’re ready,” Pompeo went on. “The world is watching what’s taking place. We’re gonna count all the votes. When the process is complete, there’ll be electors selected. There’s a process – the constitution lays it out pretty clearly. The world should have every confidence that the transition necessary to make sure that the state department is functional today, successful today and successful with a president who’s in office on January 20 a minute after noon, will also be successful.”
      The state department is not currently communicating with the Biden team and all government agencies have been told to proceed with their budgets as if Trump had been re-elected, to the outrage of Democrats.
      “Secretary Pompeo shouldn’t play along with baseless and dangerous attacks on the legitimacy of last week’s election,” said Eliot Engel, the Democratic chairman of the House foreign affairs committee. “The state department should now begin preparing for President-elect Biden’s transition.”
      Pompeo said he was receiving “calls from all across the world”, but did not say who from. The leaders of America’s main allies, including Canada, the UK, France, Ireland and Germany have congratulated Biden in phone calls on Monday and Tuesday.
      “They understand that we have a legal process. They understand that this takes time,” the secretary of state said, comparing the situation now to the 2000 election. In 2000, George W Bush was leading by 537 votes in Florida, when the supreme court intervened to stop vote counting. Biden is ahead by tens of thousands of votes in four states.
      Echoing Trump’s line – which has become the party line for Republicans – Pompeo said: “We must count every legal vote, we want to make sure that any vote that wasn’t lawful ought not be counted – that dilutes your vote, if it’s done properly. Got to get that right. When we get it right, we’ll get it right. We’re in good shape.”
      When a journalist asked whether Trump’s refusal to concede discredits US promotion of democratic norms abroad, Pompeo replied irritably: “That’s ridiculous and you know it’s ridiculous, and you asked it because it’s ridiculous.”
      He added: “We want the law to be imposed in a way that reflects the reality of what took place, and that’s what I think we’re engaged in here in the United States and it’s what we work on every place all across the world.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      US records seventh consecutive day of more than 100,000 new Covid cases

      by

      [embedded content]
      The coronavirus pandemic continues to surge in the US, after the country recorded a seventh consecutive day of more than 100,000 new cases.
      Monday also saw the US surpass 10m total cases – the highest number in the world, by far – and reach a death toll of 238,256. There were 111,433 new cases on Monday and 590 new deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
      Hospitalisations were also rising, with more than 59,000 nationwide, reported the Covid Tracking Project, which saw the biggest single-day increase since 10 July. It found South Dakota had the highest hospitalisation rates in the US and said Illinois had reported more than 10,000 cases for four days straight.
      Joe Biden, the president-elect, has warned the US is “facing a very dark winter” and that even with Pfizer’s announcement that it has a vaccine it believes is 90% effective, 200,000 more lives could be lost in the next few months.
      Alex Azar, secretary of health and human services, said on Tuesday the federal government will have enough of the vaccine by the end of December “to have vaccinated our most vulnerable citizens”. By the end of January, he told NBC, there will be enough for all healthcare workers and first responders, with March or early April targeted for a general vaccination programme.
      Experts say cases could rise exponentially in the coming weeks. Michael Osterholm, director of the Centre for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and a member of Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board, told CNN: “We are watching cases increase substantially in this country far beyond, I think, what most people ever thought could happen.
      “It will not surprise me if in the next weeks we see over 200,000 new cases a day.”
      On Tuesday, Donald Trump tweeted purported quotes from a Fox Business journalist and his former White House doctor turned congressman-elect, Ronny Jackson, crediting the president with the possible arrival of a vaccine. He also retweeted a post describing Biden as an “ambulance chaser”.
      Pfizer senior vice-president Kathrin Jansen told the New York Times the company did not participate in the government’s Operation Warp Speed or take any of its money.
      The Food and Drug Administration said it had issued an emergency use authorisation for Eli Lilly’s monoclonal antibody therapy, called bamlanivimab, to treat mild to moderate cases in adults and children over 12.
      On Tuesday, Osterholm told CBS a “perfect storm” was forming and that hospitals were “about to be overrun”.
      “We’re going to see by far the darkest days of this pandemic between now and next spring when the vaccine becomes available,” he told CBS.
      Top US infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci told MSNBC he expects the FDA will probably put in for an emergency use authorisation of the Pfizer vaccine in the next week to week and a half. Providing it goes through, he said, doses should be available for highest-priority people in December.
      Asked if he would take the vaccine if it was approved by the FDA, he said he would.
      “I’m going to look at the data, but I trust Pfizer. I trust the FDA,” Fauci said. “These are colleagues of mine for decades, the career scientists. If they look at this data, and they say this data is solid, let’s go ahead and approve it, I promise you, I will take the vaccine, and I will recommend that my family take the vaccine.”
      He also reiterated the importance of wearing a mask, saying: “You protect others. Their mask protects you, and your mask also protects you.”
      Public health officials believe the federal government has not done enough to encourage Americans to take a vaccine or prepare them for what to expect.
      “This needed to happen yesterday,” Daniel Salmon, director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told USA Today. “It’s like watching a train wreck happen.”
      Across the US, states are struggling. In El Paso, Texas, officials have six mobile morgues and have requested four more, CNN reported. The state was approaching 1m infections. In Ohio the chief medical officer, Dr Bruce Vanderhoff, warned of an “unprecedented spike” in hospital use and a growing demand on staff.
      “If we don’t control the spread of this virus, we won’t be able to care for those who are acutely ill without postponing important, but less urgent, care,” he said. “We anticipate that this kind of shift could happen in a matter of weeks if trends don’t change.”
      In Utah, the governor Gary Herbert, warned of a “dire situation” in hospitals, declared a state of emergency, issued a mask mandate and restricted social gatherings.
      “This is a sacrifice for all of us,” he said. “But as we slow the spread it will make all the difference for our overworked healthcare workers, who desperately need our help.”
      In California, cases are at their highest levels in months, a rise that the governor, Gavin Newsom, said could be linked to Halloween. The positivity rate in the state is 3.7% – a jump from 2.5% in just over three weeks – and hospitalisations have risen by more than 28% in two weeks.
      Newsom said people were starting to “take down their guard, take off their masks, begin to mix outside their households. We’re seeing some early indication related to Halloween. I’m very sober about that.” More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      DoJ officials condemn Barr's approval of voter fraud inquiries without evidence

      by

      Current and former US Department of Justice (DoJ) officials have reacted with anger and dismay to the latest move in support of Donald Trump by William Barr, the attorney general who has stoked further discord around the president’s refusal to concede electoral defeat by approving federal investigations into voter fraud, despite little evidence of any wrongdoing.
      Barr’s two-page memo, delivered to the 93 US attorneys across the country on Monday, was immediately condemned by senior figures inside and outside the DoJ.
      In the most dramatic response, the top DoJ official in charge of voter fraud investigations, Richard Pilger, resigned from his post, telling colleagues he did so because of the “ramifications” of Barr’s move.
      In a statement, Pilger pointed out that for the past 40 years the justice department had abided by a clear policy of non-intervention in elections, with criminal investigations only carried out after contests were certified and completed.
      Barr’s memo tears up that rule by giving federal prosecutors the go-ahead to investigate what he called “apparently-credible allegations of irregularities”. His action was specifically aimed at closely fought presidential contests in swing states with prolonged vote counts caused by the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic.
      Complaints about unsubstantiated irregularities have been received by the justice department from three states: Nevada, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
      Outside the DoJ, there was widespread unease that Barr has once again mobilised the might of the justice department in a politicised direction. The memo was interpreted as casting doubt on the propriety of the election, which on Saturday was called for Joe Biden following his victory by a clear and growing margin in Pennsylvania.

      Vanita Gupta, a former head of the civil rights division of the DoJ under Barack Obama, denounced Barr’s tactics as “scaremongering”.
      “Let’s be clear, this is about disruption, disinformation and sowing chaos,” she said on Twitter:
      Gupta, now chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said Barr’s aim was “stoking division, polarization and lies”, in order to “undermine confidence in outcome with Trump voters and ultimately a Biden administration”.
      Other former prosecutors, legal scholars and election experts debated how serious Barr’s move was likely to be. Steve Vladeck, a specialist in national security law at the University of Texas, stressed that the DoJ had no power to block states from certifying election results – only judges could do that.
      But Vladeck went on to describe the Barr memo as “ominous” in that it “perpetuates the illegitimacy narrative” that has been embraced by Trump and senior Republicans in the hope of clouding Biden’s victory.
      Preet Bharara, who Trump fired in 2017 as US attorney for the southern district of New York, gave a similarly nuanced response. For now, he said, he was “more disgusted than scared” by Barr’s intervention.
      “But stay tuned.”
      Barr specifically refers in his memo to the 40-year-old non-intervention policy over which he has now run roughshod. He denigrates it as a “passive and delayed enforcement approach”, and says it was never a “hard and fast rule”.
      Later in the letter, he softens his advice to federal prosecutors, urging them to follow “appropriate caution” in line with the DoJ’s commitment to “fairness, neutrality and non-partisanship”.
      “Specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries,” he says.
      Those sentences prompted some speculation that Barr was merely going through the motions to placate Trump. The president has by all accounts been on the warpath since the election was called for Biden, ordering his administration to take any action to forward the lie that the election has been stolen.
      But such a theory of Barr’s conduct is countered by the fact that this is not the first time he has attempted to push prosecutors into intervening in the election. Three weeks before election day, he made a similar gambit to lift the decades-old restriction on intervening in the middle of a race.
      Having been appointed by Trump to be the nation’s most senior prosecutor in February 2019, Barr has shown himself willing to side openly with the president in apparent breach of the time-honoured independence of his office. One notable example was his handling of the publication of the Mueller report into collusion between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, which was criticized as spin on behalf of the president.
      More recently, Barr has mirrored Trump’s attempts to sow doubt on the election. In particular, the attorney general has intensified baseless claims from the White House about rampant fraud in mail-in voting – a form of electoral participation that has long been practiced by some states and that was widely used this year.
      Barr went as far as to lie on live television about an indictment for an electoral crime in Texas. Officials were forced to retract the statement, as the supposed incident never took place.
      Doubts about Barr’s intentions were heightened after it was reported that a few hours before the letter to prosecutors was disclosed, he met with Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate majority leader.
      McConnell has remained in lockstep with Trump, showing no sign he is prepared to break with a president whose resistance to accepting defeat shatters a norm of a peaceful transition of power that has been central to US democracy since 1800.

      McConnell, who is likely to continue to control the Senate for the Republicans unless Democrats can win two runoff elections in Georgia in January, has declared his loyalty to Trump.
      He said: “President Trump is 100% within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.” More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      'Whoa': Fox News cuts off Kayleigh McEnany for 'illegal votes' spiel – video

      by

      Fox News has cut away from a briefing held by the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, during which she repeated Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat in the presidential election and doubled down on allegations of voter fraud, for which there is scant if any evidence.
      Speaking to media on Monday night in a ‘personal capacity’ during what she said was a campaign event at the Republican National Committee headquarters, McEnany said Republicans want ‘every legal vote to be counted, and every illegal vote to be discarded’, prompting the conservative Fox News network to stop broadcasting the briefing.
      The Trump campaign and Republicans have brought numerous lawsuits alleging election irregularities. Judges have already tossed out cases in Georgia and Michigan
      How Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in the fight for America’s soul – video  More