Tag: Trump demand for personal loyalty

CNN reporter targeted by Trump DOJ breaks her silence — and says she wants answers

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CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr on Monday broke her silence about revelations that the United States Department of Justice under former President Donald Trump issued sweeping subpoenas for her phone records.

While talking with hosts Briana Keilar and John Berman, Starr said she was “dumbfounded” by the broad scope of the subpoena issued for her records.

“We have no idea why the Justice Department snuck into my life,” she said. “They went out, in secret court proceedings last year, they went after some 30,000 of my emails and phone records, and not just my work email, my work phone, they went after my personal accounts, my personal email, and my personal phone… they wanted all of it. And I was not allowed to know about it.” Continue reading.

Apple Tells Ex-White House Counsel That Trump DOJ Sought His Records In 2018: Reports

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The reported disclosure reveals the Justice Department’s extraordinary move to investigate Don McGahn as he served as Trump’s top lawyer.

Apple informed former White House counsel Don McGahn and his wife last month that their records were sought by the Justice Department in February 2018 while McGahn was still serving as then-President Donald Trump’s top lawyer, The New York Times and CNN reported Sunday.

The U.S. government barred Apple from telling McGahn about the move at the time, two people briefed on the matter told the Times. The Justice Department’s move to subpoena information about McGahn and his wife was under a nondisclosure order until May, CNN reported. 

Apple’s reported disclosure exposes an extraordinary move by the Justice Department to subpoena records of a then-current White House counsel. Continue reading.

Activists and Ex-Spy Said to Have Plotted to Discredit Trump ‘Enemies’ in Government

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The campaign included planned operations against President Trump’s national security adviser at the time, H.R. McMaster, and F.B.I. employees, according to documents and interviews.

WASHINGTON — A network of conservative activists, aided by a British former spy, mounted a campaign during the Trump administration to discredit perceived enemies of President Trump inside the government, according to documents and people involved in the operations.

The campaign included a planned sting operation against Mr. Trump’s national security adviser at the time, H.R. McMaster, and secret surveillance operations against F.B.I. employees, aimed at exposing anti-Trump sentiment in the bureau’s ranks.

The operations against the F.B.I., run by the conservative group Project Veritas, were conducted from a large home in the Georgetown section of Washington that rented for $10,000 per month. Female undercover operatives arranged dates with the F.B.I. employees with the aim of secretly recording them making disparaging comments about Mr. Trump. Continue reading.

Internet erupts after Devin Nunes awarded the Medal of Freedom for ‘thwarting a plot to take down’ the president

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President Donald Trump, according to CNN’s Kaitlin Collins, has chosen Rep. Devin Nunes of California to receive the Medal of Freedom — and Collins describes Trump’s reasons for picking the far-right conspiracy theorist as a “doozy.” 

According to an official statement from the Trump White House, Nunes’ “courageous actions helped thwart a plot to take down a sitting United States president. He also forced the disclosure of documents that proved that a corrupt senior FBI official pursued a vindictive persecution of Gen. Michael Flynn — even after rank and file FBI agents found no evidence of wrongdoing.”

Here are some of the incredulous reactions that Twitter users have had to what Collins accurately described as a “doozy”: Continue reading.

Trump seeks to settle scores in final days

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President Trump is settling scores and taking steps to cement his agenda in his final 60-plus days in the White House, even as he refuses to concede an electoral loss to Democrat Joe Biden and his legal team flails at the results in nearly a half-dozen states.

Trump fired the administration’s top cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs on Tuesday evening, the latest example of Trump settling a score. He expressed displeasure that Krebs issued a statement that the 2020 election had been the most secure in history, a message that undercut Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about voting machine vulnerabilities and a “rigged” election.

The removal of Krebs followed the firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper and raises the prospect that Trump will remove more officials, such as CIA Director Gina Haspel and FBI Director Christopher Wray, while at the same time signaling that anything regarded as disloyalty to Trump will result in punishment. Continue reading.

Sinking Trump seeks to squash GOP dissent

The Hill logoPresident Trump is seeking to squash lingering dissent within the GOP, lashing out at Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and former Bush administration official Tom Ridge after the two offered implicit and explicit criticism of the president.

The intraparty spats come as some cracks show in Trump’s typically overwhelming support among Republicans.

Polls show Trump trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden by significant margins in some key battleground states, raising fears among some Republicans that the party will lose both the White House and Senate in November. A new poll on Thursday showed Trump 13 points behind Biden in Florida. Continue reading.

Trump team launches a sweeping loyalty test to shore up its defenses

Political appointees across the Trump administration are being subjected to unusual interviews to gauge their support for the president.

In the middle of a devastating pandemic and a searing economic crisis, the White House has an urgent question for its colleagues across the administration: Are you loyal enough to President Donald Trump?

The White House’s presidential personnel office is conducting one-on-one interviews with health officials and hundreds of other political appointees across federal agencies, an exercise some of the subjects have called “loyalty tests” to root out threats of leaks and other potentially subversive acts just months before the presidential election, according to interviews with 15 current and former senior administration officials.

The interviews are being arranged with officials across a wide range of departments including Health and Human Services, Defense, Treasury, Labor and Commerce and include the top tier of Trump aides: Senate-confirmed appointees. Officials are expected to detail their career goals and thoughts on current policies, said more than a dozen people across the administration with knowledge of the meetings. Continue reading.

Trump Lashes Out at Fauci Amid Criticism of Slow Virus Response

New York Times logoThe president retweeted a post calling for the government’s top infectious disease specialist to be fired after the doctor acknowledged that shutting down the country earlier could have saved lives.

WASHINGTON — President Trump publicly signaled his frustration on Sunday with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s top infectious disease expert, after the doctor said more lives could have been saved from the coronavirus if the country had been shut down earlier.

Mr. Trump reposted a Twitter message that said “Time to #FireFauci” as he rejected criticism of his slow initial response to the pandemic that has now killed more than 22,000 people in the United States. The president privately has been irritated at times with Dr. Fauci, but the Twitter post was the most explicit he has been in letting that show publicly.

The message Mr. Trump retweeted came from a former Republican congressional candidate. “Fauci is now saying that had Trump listened to the medical experts earlier he could’ve saved more lives,” said the tweet by DeAnna Lorraine, who got less than 2 percent of the vote in an open primary against Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month. “Fauci was telling people on February 29th that there was nothing to worry about and it posed no threat to the US at large. Time to #Fire Fauci.” Continue reading.

Sen. Graham Wants Senate To Absolve Trump Of Pandemic Failure

Republicans are deflecting criticism from Trump’s failure to respond to the coronavirus and focusing blame on China.

From the April 9 edition of Fox News’ “Hannity”:

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): So the first thing I want to do is get the United States Senate on the record where we — we don’t blame Trump, we blame China — the Chinese government’s responsible for 16,000 American deaths and 17 million Americans being unemployed. It’s the Chinese government and the way they behave that led to this pandemic. This is the third one to come out of China.

I want to make our response to this so overwhelming that China will change its behavior. I want to get the medical supply chain back into the United States, and I want to stop [sic] canceling some debt that we owe to China because they should be paying us, not us paying China. So, I think you’re going to see a bipartisan push back against China to punish them so severely to deter them in the future.

View the post here.

Federal officials fired by Trump face tough road in court

The Hill logoPresident Trump’s recent shake-up of agency watchdogs has his critics fuming, but legal experts say that federal officials fired for even apparently political reasons have little legal recourse.

Trump’s firing of intelligence community watchdog Michael Atkinson last Friday was widely seen as payback for his handling of the Ukraine whistleblower complaint that sparked the president’s impeachment by the House.

Legal experts, though, say that those ousted by Trump’s recent moves against inspectors general at multiple federal agencies and by his broader post-impeachment purge would be unlikely to win if they sued the U.S. government. Continue reading.