Tag: Trump abuse of power

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany Is Now Formally Moonlighting as a Trump Campaign Aide

Good government groups say it’s just one more example of the blurry lines between Trump’s White House and his political operation.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany appears to have taken on a new gig. In addition to her role as a government employee, she’s now serving as a senior aide on her boss’s reelection campaign.

In an appearance on Fox News on Tuesday morning, McEnany was introduced as “Trump 2020 senior adviser and White House press secretary.” A few hours later, Fox Business Network host Stuart Varney introduced McEnany by saying she is “serving now as adviser for the Trump campaign.”

McEnany’s dual roles for the White House and the Trump reelection campaign immediately set off alarm bells among good-government advocates, who said they represent yet another instance of the often blurry lines between the Trump administration and the president’s political operation. Continue reading.

Supreme Court declines to hear Democrats’ emoluments case against Trump

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The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to take up a case by 29 Senate Democrats who alleged that President Trump violated the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which prohibits self-dealing by federal officeholders.

The lawmakers had asked the court to review a February ruling by a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that the senators lacked the legal right to sue the president.

In their brief, the lawmakers had argued that Trump’s continued ownership of companies engaged in business with foreign governments amounted to accepting “unauthorized financial benefits from foreign states” in violation of the constitutional restriction. Continue reading.

How Trump amassed a red-state army in the nation’s capital — and could do so again

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The call that came into state capitals stunned governors and their National Guard commanders: The Pentagon wanted thousands of citizen soldiers airlifted to the nation’s capital immediately to help control crowds outside the White House in the wake of the death of George Floyd.

Presidents have routinely activated Guard troops to fight foreign enemies, and in extraordinary circumstances have federalized them to quell civil unrest, using the vast power of the commander in chief.

But the June 1 appeal to states was different. President Trump was drawing instead on an obscure law, changed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that made it easier for governors to voluntarily send guardsmen across state lines for counterterrorism missions. His action was not an order but a request, essentially inviting states to augment the D.C. National Guard, which he controls, in a potential clash with civilian protesters. Continue reading.

Trump DOJ Targets Democratic Governors For COVID-19 Outbreaks In Veterans Homes

“This really does smell,” said one former Civil Rights Division official who worries the Justice Department is weaponizing its power for political purposes.

President Donald Trump’s top civil rights official at the Department of Justice announced this week that he was considering launching investigations into how state-owned nursing homes responded to the coronavirus. The four states he targeted all have Democratic governors. This highly unusual public announcement of potential investigations raised alarm bells among Civil Rights Division alumni and Democrats that DOJ’s move was motivated by partisan politics. 

Eric Dreiband, the assistant attorney general running the Civil Rights Division, sent letters to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday, requesting documents and information under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA) about how public nursing homes in their states responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cuomo and Whitmer said in a joint statement that the inquiries were “nothing more than a transparent politicization of the Department of Justice in the middle of the Republican National Convention.” They called DOJ’s move a “nakedly partisan deflection” and questioned why Republican-run states that, based on federal guidelines, had similar rules about nursing home admissions were not being targeted. Continue reading.

Democrats say Pompeo’s speech to RNC is unethical, hypocritical, and possibly illegal

The secretary of State last month admonished his staff not to improperly participate in politics or campaigns in this election year

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s decision to address the Republican National Convention on Tuesday elicited outrage from Democrats and former U.S. diplomats, who said the potential 2024 Republican contender was being a hypocrite and causing serious harm to longstanding State Department norms around apolitical service.

Pompeo recorded his address to the RNC on Monday in Jerusalem from the rooftop of the famous King David Hotel, where he was traveling on official business. A State Department spokesperson said the actual recording of the remarks did not involve taxpayer resources.

He will be the first modern sitting secretary of State to address a national political convention, breaking with decades of bipartisan norms that “politics stops at the water’s edge.” Continue reading.

House panel to investigate Pompeo’s GOP convention speech

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A House Democrat announced Tuesday that he is launching an investigation into Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s expected speech to the Republican National Convention, raising concerns that the move is an illegal violation of the Hatch Act and a breach of State Department regulations.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs panel’s subcommittee on oversight and investigations, raised his concerns in a letter to Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun and requested information on the secretary’s planned remarks.

Pompeo is coming under scrutiny for taking time during official diplomatic travel in the Middle East to record remarks to be played at the GOP convention Tuesday night. Continue reading.

As the Postal Service is attacked by Trump, workers lament what’s been lost

Austin musician and concerned citizen Mike Hidalgo filed a Change.org petition to save the United States Postal Service in April, assuming he’d rack up about a thousand signatures or so. He wound up with about 300 times that. “I said to myself, ‘Whoa, I guess a lot of people care about this,’” Hidalgo tells Mic. “Then I asked myself: What can I do with this?” He decided to post updates directly on the petition, reasoning that arming its signatories with information about the dual financial and operational crises currently haunting the USPS was the best way to capitalize on the unanticipated response.

Presently, that response includes 1.5 million signatures and counting, which speaks to how strongly Americans feel about the Postal Service — and by extension how strongly they feel about the Trump administration’s stubborn-verging-on-impressive attempts at dismantling it.

The appointment in June of Louis DeJoy, erstwhile logistics career man and proud Trump ally, to the position of postmaster general sent the already hurting agency into urgent disarray after the announcement of new guidelines that essentially forbid employees from doing their jobs properly, including slashing overtime as well as branch hours. Crucially, if mail came into the office late, postal workers, who typically never leave letters behind and take as many tours as needed to make sure every parcel is delivered in a day, were ordered to leave it where it sits, leading to mail delays that stack up over time. Continue reading.

Federal judge halts Betsy DeVos’s controversial rule sending coronavirus aid to private schools

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A federal judge in Washington state temporarily blocked Education Secretary Betsy DeVos from enforcing a controversial rule that directs states to give private schools a bigger share of federal coronavirus aid than Congress had intended.

In a lawsuit filed by the state, U.S. District Judge Barbara J. Rothstein on Friday issued a preliminary injunction and castigated the Education Department over the July 1 regulation about the distribution of federal funds. The money, about $13.5 billion, was included for K-12 schools in Congress’s March $2 trillion-aid package — known as the Cares Act — to mitigate economic damage from the pandemic.

Rothstein slammed the Education Department for arguing that states would not suffer irreparable damage if forced to implement the rule and said there was cause to put a preliminary injunction on the rule while the broader issues are worked out. Continue reading.

Trump obliterates lines between governing and campaigning in service of his reelection

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Trailing in the polls and struggling to find a message, President Trump is leveraging one of the most powerful assets he has left — his White House office — in service of his reelection bid, obliterating the lines between governing and campaigning and testing legal boundaries in ways that go well beyond his predecessors.

In recent weeks, Trump has acknowledged he was opposed to funding for the U.S. Postal Service because he does not want the money used for universal mail-in voting. He sent Homeland Security authorities to quell social justice protests in what he termed “Democrat cities.” He signed a stream of executive orders that circumvented Congress and delivered overtly partisan speeches at official White House functions, including a 54-minute Rose Garden monologue blasting Democratic rival Joe Biden last month.

Trump also has used federal resources and personnel to re-create the enthusiasm of his campaign rallies that were curtailed by the coronavirus pandemic. He invited patrons at his private golf resort in Bedminster, N.J., to attend news conferences there, with many of them heckling reporters. And he held a campaign rally in Yuma, Ariz., last week with 200 off-duty Border Patrol union members, many wearing masks emblazoned with “TRUMP” and “MAGA.” Continue reading.