I’m Haunted by What I Did as a Lawyer in the Trump Justice Department

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No matter our intentions, lawyers like me were complicit. We owe the country our honesty about what we saw — and should do in the future.

I was an attorney at the Justice Department when Donald Trump was elected president. I worked in the Office of Legal Counsel, which is where presidents turn for permission slips that say their executive orders and other contemplated actions are lawful. I joined the department during the Obama administration, as a career attorney whose work was supposed to be independent of politics.

I never harbored delusions about a Trump presidency. Mr. Trump readily volunteered that his agenda was to disassemble our democracy, but I made a choice to stay at the Justice Department — home to some of the country’s finest lawyers — for as long as I could bear it. I believed that I could better serve our country by pushing back from within than by keeping my hands clean. But I have come to reconsider that decision.

My job was to tailor the administration’s executive actions to make them lawful — in narrowing them, I could also make them less destructive. I remained committed to trying to uphold my oath even as the president refused to uphold his. Continue reading.

Trump calls Bolton ‘one of the dumbest people in Washington’ after former aide weighs in on martial law report

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President Trump blasted John Bolton as “one of the dumbest people in Washington” after his former national security adviser expressed alarm over a report that Trump considered a suggestion to implement martial law.

“What would Bolton, one of the dumbest people in Washington, know? Wasn’t he the person who so stupidly said, on television, ‘Libyan solution’, when describing what the U.S. was going to do for North Korea?” Trump asked in a tweet early Sunday. “I’ve got plenty of other Bolton ‘stupid stories.’”

Bolton on Saturday reacted to a report that Trump had discussed a proposal by the president’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, to “rerun” the presidential election under military supervision, calling it “appalling.”  Continue reading.

New study links psychopathic tendencies to racial prejudice and right-wing authoritarianism

Pathological personality traits are associated with prejudicial views, according to new research published in Personality and Individual Differences. The findings indicate that people with calloused, deceitful, and manipulative interpersonal styles are more likely to endorse right-wing authoritarianism and express hostile attitudes towards marginalized groups.

“My interest in the relationship between pathological personality traits, such as those captured by psychopathy, and prejudicial tendencies originated from my experiences working with offenders in the Arizona correctional system prior to graduate school,” said study author Sandeep Roy, a clinical psychology doctoral candidate at the University of North Texas.

“I noticed offenders who were elevated in psychopathic propensities, as measured by the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 2003), frequently used racial epithets to denigrate me and other staff. When I began studying this personality disorder more in my graduate training, I noticed a paucity of literature relating psychopathy to prejudice.” Continue reading.

Is Trump Cracking Under the Weight of Losing?

Getting the boot from the White House is an undeniable ego blow for a man who has never admitted defeat.

Donald Trump has never had a week like the week he just had. On the heels of the Supreme Court’s knock-back and the Electoral College’s knockout, some of his most reliable supporters—Mitch McConnell, Vladimir Putin, Newsmax—acknowledged and affirmed the actual fact of the matter. Trump is a loser.

Consequently, he is plainly out of sorts, say former close associates, longtime Trump watchers and mental health experts.

It’s not just his odd behavior—the testy, tiny desk session with the press, the stilted Medal of Freedom ceremony that ended with his awkward exit, the cut-short trip to the Army-Navy football game. It’s even more pointedly his conspicuous and ongoing absences. The narcissistic Trump has spent the last half a century—but especially the last half a decade—making himself and keeping himself the most paid-attention-to person on the planet. But in the month and a half since Election Day, Trump has been seen and heard relatively sparingly and sporadically. No–showing unexpectedly at a Christmas party, sticking to consistently sparse public schedules and speaking mainly through his increasingly manic Twitter feed, he’s been fixated more than anything else on his baseless insistence that he won the election when he did not. Continue reading.

A frustrated Trump redoubles efforts to overturn election result

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President Trump has intensified efforts to overturn the election, raising a series of radical measures in recent days, including military intervention, seizing voting machines and a 13th-hour appeal to the Supreme Court.

On Sunday, Trump said in a radio interview that he had spoken with Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) about challenging the electoral vote count when the House and Senate convene on Jan. 6 to formally affirm President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

“He’s so excited,” Trump said of Tuberville. “He said, ‘You made me the most popular politician in the United States.’ He said, ‘I can’t believe it.’ He’s great. Great senator.” Continue reading.

Trump wants Supreme Court to overturn Pa. election results

WASHINGTON — Undeterred by dismissals and admonitions from judges, President Donald Trump’s campaign continued with its unprecedented efforts to overturn the results of the Nov 3. election Sunday, saying it had filed a new petition with the Supreme Court.

The petition seeks to reverse a trio of Pennsylvania Supreme Court cases having to do with mail-in ballots and asks the court to reject voters’ will and allow the Pennsylvania General Assembly to pick its own slate of electors.

While the prospect of the highest court in the land throwing out the results of a democratic election based on unfounded charges of voter fraud is extraordinary unlikely, it wouldn’t change the outcome. President-elect Joe Biden would still be the winner even without Pennsylvania because of his wide margin of victory in the Electoral College. Continue reading.

Front-line essential workers and adults 75 and over should be next to get the coronavirus vaccine, a CDC advisory group says

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These include police and firefighters, teachers, day-care staff, grocery store workers and prison guards

NOTE: This complete article is provided free for all to read by The Washington Post.

Grocery store employees, teachers, emergency workers and other people on the front lines of America’s workforce should be next to get the coronavirusvaccine, along with adults ages 75 and older, a federal advisory panel said Sunday.

The recommendations, which came two days after regulators authorized a second coronavirus vaccine, will guide state authorities in deciding who should have priority to receive limited doses of shots made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. More than 2.8 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine have been distributed, and 556,208 of those shots were given as of 2 p.m. Sunday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The groups designated Sunday include about 49 million people, some of whom could begin getting shots early in the new year. The priorities represent a compromise between the desire to shield people most likely to catch and transmit the virus, because they cannot socially distance or work from home, and the effort to protect people who are most prone to serious complications and death. Continue reading.

Congress clinches sweeping deal on coronavirus relief, government funding

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Congressional leaders on Sunday reached a mammoth deal to fund the government and provide long-sought coronavirus relief as lawmakers race to wrap up their work for the year. 

The deal will tie a $1.4 trillion bill to fund the government until Oct. 1 to roughly $900 billion in coronavirus aid. In order to give Congress time to process and pass the agreement, the House and Senate passed a one-day stopgap bill on Sunday.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced the deal from the Senate floor on early Sunday evening.  Continue reading.

Trump’s increased absences have associates worried about his declining mental state: report

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According to a series of interviews conducted by Politico’s Michael Kruse, associates and critics of Donald Trump have taken note that he is rarely seen in public since his re-election bid failed and he became a one-term president, with some worried his mental state may be in decline at the prospect of leaving the Oval Office.

Under a headline reading “Is Trump cracking under the weight of losing,” Kruse wrote that the combination of silence from the president between rants on Twitter could be a sign that the president is having trouble coping.

According to Kruse, Trump’s demeanor and recent actions are setting off alarms. Continue reading.

A President Who Can’t Put Aside Grudges, Even for Good News

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The past week served as a preview of Mr. Trump’s post-presidency: no leadership on debates within his party, but keen attention to waging personal vendettas and cultivating his supporters.

It was among the most consequential weeks of President Trump’s tenure: Across the country, health care workers began receiving a lifesaving coronavirus vaccine. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers closed in on a deal for economic relief aimed at averting a deeper recession. And on Friday, federal regulators authorized a second vaccine.

Yet Mr. Trump was largely absent from those events. It was Vice President Mike Pence who held a call with governors on Monday to hail a “medical miracle,” and who received the Pfizer vaccine at week’s end on live television. Legislative leaders were the ones working late into the nights on a stimulus deal eventually reached on Sunday.

All the while Mr. Trump was conducting a Twitter-borne assault on Republicans for not helping him overturn the election results, even warning Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, to “get tougher, or you won’t have a Republican Party anymore.” By this weekend, the president was considering naming a conspiracy theorist as special counsel to investigate voting fraud, for which there’s no evidence, asking his advisers about instituting martial law and downplaying a massive hack his own secretary of state attributed to Russia. Continue reading.