Tag: Trump smallness

Senate GOP calls grow to give Biden access to intelligence briefings

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Several Senate Republicans are joining calls for President-elect Joe Biden to get access to intelligence briefings, in a break with the Trump administration.

Most GOP senators aren’t yet ready to say Trump lost reelection but, in a potential hat tip to the inevitable outcome, they are publicly calling for Biden to get access to the sort of intelligence briefings that will help him hit the ground running in January. 

“I would think, especially on classified briefings, the answer is yes,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). Continue reading.

Biden behaves as the incoming president, even as Trump balks at giving up power

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WILMINGTON, Del. — President-elect Joe Biden sought to project the authority of an incoming president Monday as he dealt with matters domestic and international, even as the defeated incumbent continued to balk at turning over the reins.

Biden began taking calls from foreign leaders, speaking Monday with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He also was weighing whom to appoint to top White House positions, with several of his longtime advisers expected to take senior roles. And he turned his attention to the coronavirus, dispatching a key aide to brief Senate Democrats this week and making a strong pitch to Americans of every ideology to follow public health recommendations.

Biden urged Americans to wear masks, at one point holding one up during a speech in Wilmington, and sought to depoliticize the act of putting one on. Continue reading.

Why Donald Trump’s Refusal to Give Biden Keys to Office Space Matters

As Joe Biden stood on stage on Saturday night and watched the drones dance overhead, spelling out B-I-D-E-N and P-R-E-S-I-D-E-N-T E-L-E-C-T, a different kind of tango was taking place here in Washington. A political appointee answerable to President Donald Trump appeared unwilling to give the next commander-in-chief the keys to basic office space as required by law.

The General Services Administration is the federal government’s de facto real-estate firm. It provides incoming administrations with the basics — like office space and computers — to make the transition between election results and Inauguration Day as easy as possible. But the current head of the GSA, a former senior aide on Capitol Hill who was appointed by Trump, has said she has not seen any certification outside of the media that Biden won, thus she has no obligation to contradict her boss, who says he has. GSA aides say they are merely following precedent set in 2000, when there was a dispute and a recount.

That means the Biden team could be without a physical base in the capital until the Electoral College votes on Dec. 14. More importantly, it suggests that staffers in the Trump Administration may not start talking to their successors until every last effort can be made by Trump to stay in power through litigation. So far, most Republicans seem unwilling to openly break with Trump and acknowledge that their former Senate colleague and the former Vice President has prevailed. Although Trump is going to be a one-term President, he still amassed 70 million votes, making him a powerful voice inside the GOP for the rest of his days. Continue reading.

Trump accuses hospitals of hoarding ventilators

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump accused hospitals on Sunday of hoarding ventilators that are in scarce supply across the United States as the coronavirus spreads, adding any hospitals not using the devices must release them.

Trump, whose critics have accused him of trying to deflect blame over his handling of the crisis, did not cite any evidence to back his accusation that hospitals were hoarding the devices. It was also unclear which medical facilities he was referring to.

“We have some healthcare workers, some hospitals … hoarding equipment including ventilators,” Trump said at the White House following a meeting with corporate executives, including from U.S. Medical Group. Continue reading.

Trump plots post-Mueller payback

President Trump and his allies on Monday sought to exact political revenge on congressional Democrats and the news media, seizing momentum generated by the end of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

The clear signal from Team Trump is that they think they can go on offense by using Mueller’s findings to jam Democrats and juice Trump’s base in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential race.

A summary of the special counsel’s conclusions released Sunday by Attorney General William Barr said that Mueller had not found enough evidence to prove a conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Moscow. The special counsel did not make a determination on if the president had obstructed justice.

View the complete March 25 article by Jordan Fabian on The Hill website here.

John Brennan: President Trump’s Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash

The following commentary by John O. Brennan, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was posted on the New York Times website August 16, 2018:

That’s why the president revoked my security clearance: to try to silence anyone who would dare challenge him.

Former CIA Director John Brennan, Credit: Greg Nash

When Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s internal security service, told me during an early August 2016 phone call that Russia wasn’t interfering in our presidential election, I knew he was lying. Over the previous several years I had grown weary of Mr. Bortnikov’s denials of Russia’s perfidy — about its mistreatment of American diplomats and citizens in Moscow, its repeated failure to adhere to cease-fire agreements in Syria and its paramilitary intervention in eastern Ukraine, to name just a few issues.

When I warned Mr. Bortnikov that Russian interference in our election was intolerable and would roil United States-Russia relations for many years, he denied Russian involvement in any election, in America or elsewhere, with a feigned sincerity that I had heard many times before. President Vladimir Putin of Russia reiterated those denials numerous times over the past two years, often to Donald Trump’s seeming approval.

Russian denials are, in a word, hogwash.

View the complete article here.

At Fort Drum Event, Trump Boosts McSally, Does Not Mention McCain

The following article by Niels Lesniewski was posted on the Roll Call website August 13, 2018:

Arizona GOP Senate candidate among lawmakers highlighted in New York’s North Country

Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., received a boost from President Donald Trump. Credit: Bill Clark, CQ Roll Call file photo

Arizona politics headed eastward to New York’s North Country on Monday, as President Donald Trump signed a Pentagon policy bill there named after one of his frequent nemeses, Republican John McCain, who went unmentioned by the president, and singled out for praise a woman seeking to become McCain’s Senate colleague: Rep. Martha McSally.

McSally made the trip across the country to the Army’s Fort Drum and was  rewarded with a shout-out from Trump, although not an endorsement.

That was more than McCain got. Despite the Fiscal 2019 defense authorization bill being named after the senior Arizona senator and Armed Services Committee chairman, and who is fighting cancer back in the Grand Canyon State, the president made no mention of McCain.