These former Trump voters are determined to stop him. Here’s how

Posted on March 15, 2024 by Charles Jay

President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and their surrogates need to focus their time and resources on consolidating the Democratic base and touting the president’s accomplishments in office. Yet anti-Trump Republicans also have work to do when it comes to building support for Biden.

A group of anti-Trump Republicans are launching their second “Republican Voters Against Trump” campaign against the former president, planning to spend $50 million and use homemade testimonial videos from voters who supported Trump in one of both of his previous campaigns—but cannot vote for him in 2024.

Donald Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination Tuesday, despite his two impeachments and four criminal indictments. His true Achilles’ heel will be the significant number of Republican voters who refuse to support him.

Sarah Longwell, president and founder of the Republican Accountability PAC, issued this statement about the campaign:

“Former Republicans and Republican-leaning voters hold the key to 2024, and reaching them with credible, relatable messengers is essential to re-creating the anti-Trump coalition that made the difference in 2020.

“It establishes a permission structure that says that—whatever their complaints about Joe Biden—Donald Trump is too dangerous and too unhinged to ever be president again. Who better to make this case than the voters who used to support him?”

The campaign released this 67-second video accompanying the launch.

YouTube Video

A significant number of Republicans might be open to such a campaign. They include supporters of former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, whose strongest performance came in cities, college towns, and suburbs, and particularly among college-educated voters, according to CNN.

Haley won Vermont (50%) and Washington, D.C. (63%), and received more than 30% of the vote in New Hampshire, Virginia, South Carolina, Utah, Colorado, and Massachusetts. Haley also got 570,000 votes in three key swing states: Nevada, North Carolina, and Michigan, Reuters reported.

Remember how close the 2020 election actually was? Although Biden received 7 million more votes, just a small shift in votes could have given Trump the Electoral College victory.

According to a Council on Foreign Relations report, if Trump had picked up 42,921 votes in Arizona (10,457), Georgia (11,779), and Wisconsin (20,682), plus the one electoral vote in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which he lost to Biden by 22,091 votes, he would have won the Electoral College outright. If he’d lost Nebraska’s 2nd, the House would have then decided the election. Republicans held the majority of state delegations in the newly inaugurated Congress, and they undoubtedly would have chosen Trump.

However, Haley dropped out of the race last week, leaving no opposition for Trump. Yet in Tuesday’s primaries, she still received nearly 78,000 votes in Georgia—far more than the number of votes Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” in order to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory in the state. Haley also got 21% of the vote in Washington state.

It’s not yet known how much of Tuesday’s Haley support came from early votes cast before she quit the race, but in Georgia, The New York Times estimates that “less than 5%” of Election Day votes were cast for her. Protest votes for sure—but the reality is that over 13% of Peach State voters chose Haley—when they had her as a choice and when they didn’t.

Haley declined to endorse Trump when she dropped out of the race, saying instead that “it is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond who did not support him.” She added that “politics is about bringing people into your cause, not turning them away.”

And while Trump invited Haley supporters to join his right-wing MAGA movement, he also bashed many of her supporters as “Radical Left Democrats.”

Biden seized on the opportunity and commended Haley for being “willing to speak the truth about Donald Trump.”

“Donald Trump made it clear he doesn’t want Nikki Haley’s supporters. I want to be clear: There is a place for them in my campaign,” Biden said in a statement. “I know there is a lot we won’t agree on. But on the fundamental issues of preserving American democracy, on standing up for the rule of law, on treating each other with decency and dignity and respect, on preserving NATO and standing up to America’s adversaries, I hope and believe we can find common ground.”

Polls indicate that Biden could gain support among Haley voters. An Emerson College poll released after Haley quit the race found that 63% of her supporters back Biden and just 27% support Trump, with 10% undecided, The Hill reported.

A Washington Post/Quinnipiac University poll saw slightly different results.

Recent polling from Quinnipiac University found that about half of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters who supported Haley would vote for Trump, while 37 percent would vote for Biden. Twelve percent said they would abstain, vote for someone else or hadn’t yet decided what to do.

It’s clear that there’s room for Republican Voters Against Trump to break through. Longwell said her PAC has already raised $20 million and hopes to raise another $30 million before the November election, Forbes reported. Major donors include several anti-Trump billionaires—Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and a major Democratic donor; Seth Klarman, who runs the Boston-based Baupost hedge fund, and John Pritzker, a member of the family that founded the Hyatt hotel brand.

The RVAT campaign plans to deploy ads on television, streaming, radio, billboards, and digital media in critical swing states, focusing on Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Longwell is a longtime Republican strategist and former national board chair of the Log Cabin Republicans, the conservative LGBTQ+ organization. She was among the early Never Trumpers, refusing to endorse him in 2016. In 2018, she became a co-founder of the anti-Trump conservative news and opinion website The Bulwark.

In an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Longwell said Republican Voters Against Trump is building on experiences from the 2020 presidential race. In the 2022 midterms, the group also campaigned against MAGA extremists like gubernatorial candidates Kari Lake in Arizona and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania.

In 2020, Longwell said the group first ran traditional attack ads that really beat up on Trump and went viral. But the ads actually turned off and failed to persuade the center-right Republican voters they were trying to reach.

They had more success running personal testimonials from former Trump supporters. Longwell said such testimonials created a “permission structure” which showed there was a community of people who identified themselves as Republicans but were also anti-Trump.

Longwell acknowledged that about 70% of the GOP has gone “full MAGA”—they believe the 2020 election was stolen, but the remaining 30% are persuadable. “Some of those people are going to go home to Trump … They are sort of always Republicans,” Longwell said on “Morning Joe.”

“There is another group in that 30% that I think has already been voting for Joe Biden,” she added.

Then Longwell described a third group of right-leaning independents, or soft GOP voters, who are “double doubters.”

“They have a tough time voting for Democrats, but also don’t think Donald Trump is a Republican, not like the kind of Republicans of (Ronald) Reagan or John McCain or of Mitt Romney that they like, ...

”We think about this less like building a pro-Joe Biden coalition — because a lot of these people they don’t love Joe Biden — but what you can do is build an anti-Trump coalition.” She added that the goal is to get as many of them as possible to come around and vote for Biden.

Watch Longwell’s full MSNBC interview below.

YouTube Video

The RVAT testimonials do not promote Biden’s record in office, and the issue of abortion rights isn’t raised. Instead, the videos focus entirely on attacking Trump.

There are a lot more ways to criticize Trump this time around than during the 2020 campaign: the Jan. 6 insurrection, the threat he poses to democracy as a wannabe dictator, his softness on Vladimir Putin and willingness to abandon Ukraine, his four criminal indictments, and his mental fitness to be president, just to name a few. That has led some of the Republican voters to say that Joe Biden is the first Democrat they’ve ever supported.

Here are two of the testimonials posted on X, formerly known as Twitter:

Ethan from Wisconsin voted for Donald Trump in 2020 but will support Joe Biden in 2024 because he believes Donald Trump is not fit to be president: “January 6 was the end of Donald Trump for me.” pic.twitter.com/O1WlStOec5
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) March 13, 2024

Eric from Louisiana is a former Trump voter who will never vote for him again: “Biden versus Trump 2.0. I don’t think that’s most people’s dream race, but it is the easiest choice I’ve ever had, and I was a long-time Republican who never considered voting Democrat.” pic.twitter.com/g5h9eYCpfj
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) March 13, 2024

Longwell, writing for The Bulwark, said what she’d like to see next is former Trump appointees step up and come out in force against him—beyond essays in elite news outlets like The Atlantic or in an occasional interview on CNN. These include Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, White House chief of staff John Kelly, Attorney General William Barr, national security adviser John Bolton, and even Vice President Mike Pence.

What we have here is a parade of high-level, serious people (whatever you think about their politics) who served the guy and all came to the same conclusion, independently: He’s nuts."

If we want to stop a Trump restoration and the promised MAGA dictatorship, it’s going to require building a coalition of people who understand the stakes. And there are no messengers better equipped to convey the peril of a Trump presidency than those who lived it firsthand, on the inside.

Longwell said that, based on focus groups she’s conducted of Republican voters, “the reason they seem unbothered by Trump’s autocratic tendencies is that a lot of them don’t know about them” (although some are “perfectly fine with it”).

The people who served Trump directly need to go on the record, as loudly and frequently as possible, about exactly why he should never get near the White House again. … They could call this project Trump Officials Against Trump.”

[…]

We need former Trump officials—people of conscience, who have not acquiesced to the authoritarianism of it all—to stand as one and to speak plainly to the American people. Again and again, until every voter has heard their voices. … It’s time to go to work. Your country needs you.

In the 1980 and 1984 campaigns, we heard a lot about so-called “Reagan Democrats.” It’s hard not to wonder: How many “Biden Republicans” might be out there in 2024?

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Stability or chaos: The turnover rate in the Biden vs. Trump Cabinets speaks for itself

Posted on January 28, 2024 by Charles Jay

The success or failure of a presidency can often depend on the people chosen for Cabinet-level posts. President Joe Biden has just passed the three-year mark of his first term. His administration has been a model of stability and competence. This follows the four years of chaos and incompetence that marked Donald Trump’s miserable administration.

And that point is clear when you look at the turnover rate in both administrations among the 15 Cabinet members in the line of succession for the presidency as well as the nine additional Cabinet-level positions.

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a visiting fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, has written detailed analyses on overall staff turnover in the Trump administration and the Biden administration. There’s Biden, who kept his promise to make his Cabinet the most diverse in U.S. history with more women and members of color, all of whom had considerable political experience. His Cabinet includes Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay person to be a Cabinet-level secretary, and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve in a president’s Cabinet.

And so far only one Cabinet member has resigned—Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, the former Boston mayor, who stepped down in March 2023. A longtime Boston Bruins fan, Walsh accepted an offer to become executive director of the NHL Players’ Association. Julie Su is serving as acting labor secretary because the Senate has yet to confirm her nomination.

And just two of the nine additional Cabinet-level positions have seen change. Longtime Biden aide Ron Klain stepped down as White House chief of staff at the mid-point of Biden’s term, and was immediately replaced by Jeff Zients, who effectively ran Biden’s COVID-19 response operation. He remains in the post.

The second is Cecilia Rouse, the first Black woman to serve as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, resigned in March 2023 to return to Princeton University and resume her work as a professor of economics and public affairs. She was replaced by longtime Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein.

That means that 21 of 24 of Biden’s original appointees remain in their positions heading into the fourth year of his term. National Journal White House correspondent George E. Condon Jr. wrote:

In his three years in office, the president has been determined to keep his top team mostly intact, and that team in turn has been determined to avoid the leaks, backstabbing, and controversy that have led to purges and makeovers in almost all the nine presidencies Biden has witnessed in his half century in Washington.

A National Journal review of past administrations found that one has to go back 171 years to find a more stable first-term administration.”

Condon wrote that Biden’s 87.5% retention rate in these top positions is topped in U.S. presidential history only by Franklin Pierce, elected in 1852, whose seven-member Cabinet remained intact during his four-year term. Condon added:

The contrast is particularly sharp compared with Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump, whose Cabinet chaos was matched by no president in almost two centuries. By the end of his term in office, only four of Trump’s original 15 Cabinet members remained and only one of nine Cabinet-level appointees had survived. His retention rate of 20.8 percent exceeded only the president whose picture he brought to the Oval Office—Andrew Jackson, who had only one of six Cabinet members remaining at the end of his first term.

In January 2023, midway through Biden’s term. Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware told NBC News, “Not one single member of the Cabinet has left in disgrace, is writing a tell-all book or has bad-mouthed the president. There are no leaks, no backbiting, nothing.”

Only recently has there been a major controversy surrounding a member of Biden’s Cabinet which is under investigation: Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was criticized for his failure to notify the White House, Congress, and the media about his hospitalization resulting from complications related to a procedure to treat prostate cancer.

And House Republicans have scheduled a Homeland Security Committee meeting for Jan. 30 to mark up articles of impeachment for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for his handling of border policy. Democrats have accused House Republicans of launching a “baseless political attack” instead of focusing on a bipartisan solution to the immigration crisis, Axios reported.

Presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky, author of “The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution,” told National Journal:

“Trump’s Cabinet chaos reflected the broader chaos in government. It’s a reason why most people elected Biden. It was because they felt like he would bring calmness and stability back to government and back to the nation.”

She added that this stability is one of the reasons why Biden “has been able to be effective.”

“Up to now, he’s not spending political capital or time on having to get new candidates appointed or finding replacements. It frees up mental space and bandwidth and political capital to get things done,” she said.

Trump promised to bring “the best and the brightest” to his administration. He also said he would run his administration like his business. Unfortunately, as shown in a New York civil lawsuit in which Trump faces up to $370 million in penalties, there was persistent fraud in his business dealings.

And, as The New York Times noted, Trump “created a cabinet of mostly wealthy, white men with limited experience in government, mirroring himself.”

Vox wrote in May 2017:

CEOs don’t persuade people; they dictate. And they fire those who refuse to carry out their demands. Even more importantly, a CEO of a privately held company (like the Trump organization) operates like a king over his personal fiefdom. His employees work for him; they have no higher obligation to shareholders.

And three years later, during the 2020 campaign, The Hill wrote about just how tumultuous the Trump administration had been:

Trump operates like the federal government is just a backdrop for a never-ending episode of “The Apprentice,” except that he dominates every scene. And, just like “The Apprentice,” Trump is constantly trying to make every scene more outrageous than the one before. After all, dull is death in the TV business.

Trump fired some Cabinet members he considered disloyal or incompetent by his standards. Others resigned because of differences over policy issues.

The turnover in the Trump administration began less than a month after his inauguration when national security adviser Michael Flynn was forced to resign following claims he misled the administration over his communications with Russia’s ambassador. In December 2020, Trump pardoned Flynn, who had twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

Trump then ran through three more national security advisers—H.R. McMaster, John Bolton, and Robert O’ Brien. Bolton, who was fired over policy differences, has warned that Trump could do “irreparable” damage to the country if elected president again.

There were four White House chiefs of staff under Trump: Reince Priebus, John Kelly, Mick Mulvaney, and Mark Meadows.

Meadows was among the 19 people indicted with Trump in the criminal racketeering case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis for allegedly conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

Kelly became an outspoken critic of Trump. CNN reported that Kelly told friends this about Trump:

“The depths of his (Trump’s) dishonesty is just astounding to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though it’s more pathetic than anything else. He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life,” the retired Marine general has told friends, CNN has learned.

Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon CEO, after he called the president “a moron.” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin called Trump “an idiot,” while Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said the president had “the understanding of a fifth or six grader,” according to Bob Woodward’s book “Fear: Trump in the White House.” Mnuchin was one of the few Cabinet members to survive four years in the Trump administration.

Three of Trump’s Cabinet members left after being linked to scandals involving misuse of government funds for personal purposes: Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, and Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin. Zinke, of Montana, is now a member of the House GOP caucus.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions was forced out in November 2018, because he recused himself and appointed a special counsel, Robert Mueller, to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. His successor, William Barr, resigned in December 2020 after debunking Trump’s baseless claims of widespread fraud in the presidential election.

And then, with just weeks left in Trump’s term, two more Cabinet members—Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos—were among the administration officials who resigned after the mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. Trump has since derisively referred to Chao, the wife of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, in social media posts as “Coco Chow,” which she criticized as an anti-Asian slur.

In July 2023, NBC News reached out to 44 of the dozens of people who served in Cabinet-level positions during Trump’s term, not all of whom responded. A total of four publicly said they support his reelection bid. Several were coy about where they stood. And there were some who “outright oppose his bid for the GOP nomination or are adamant that they don’t want him back in power.”

“I have made clear that I strongly oppose Trump for the nomination and will not endorse Trump,” former Attorney General Bill Barr told NBC News. Asked how he would vote if the general election pits Trump against President Joe Biden, a Democrat, Barr said: “I’ll jump off that bridge when I get to it.”

At the time, some former Cabinet members told NBC that they were supporting other candidates in the Republican primary. Former Vice President Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, challenged Trump for the nomination. Haley is hanging on in the primary race by a thread.

It’s not clear how many of these former Cabinet members will join the stampede within the GOP to endorse Trump now that he’s won the first two nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, especially since he’s been acting like a Mafia don in threatening Republicans who oppose him.

But on the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who was fired by Trump on Nov. 9, 2020, issued this warning about the former president in an interview on CNN.

“I do regard him as a threat to democracy, democracy as we know it, our institutions, our political culture, all those things that make America great and have defined us as, you know, the oldest democracy on this planet,” Esper said.

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One of Trump’s closest White House advisers admits that ‘it’s hard to describe how little he knows’

Posted on March 16, 2022 (Updated March 17, 2022) by Walter Einenkel

The disgraced former president’s top national security adviser has been doing a slew of interviews the past few weeks. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, John Bolton, like most former national security advisers, has found himself being asked for his opinion on rapidly changing events. John Bolton’s bona fides as a truly terrifying warmonger span decades, and he has been critical of Trump—for a price. Bolton says what most of us already know: Trump’s extortion attempts, in the form of holding back military aid from Ukraine in order to dig up dirt on then-candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter, is a big part of the reason Vladimir Putin did not invade Ukraine until now.

“He obviously saw that Trump had contempt for the Ukrainians. I think that had an impact,” Bolton told VICE earlier this month. Bolton goes on to detail a phone conversation Trump had with Vladimir Putin, shortly after Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected, during which Trump asked Putin how he felt about him. According to Bolton, Trump’s lack of knowledge and backbone in that conversation likely reinforced Putin’s belief that Trump didn’t have strong feelings in support of Ukraine’s leadership.

Trump’s choice to bring Bolton on to replace H.R. McMaster was considered ominous at the time, since Bolton’s No. 1 foreign policy idea has always seemed to be “invade everybody.” But Bolton was in the rooms where Donald Trump conducted foreign policy discussions and played little brother to Putin. “Trump had no idea what the stakes were in Ukraine,” Bolton said.

Related: John Bolton is a warmongering jackass who just happens to have information vital to the nation

Related: Trump is replacing National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster with warmonger John Bolton

Related: Lou Dobbs offers up conspiracy theory that John Bolton is working for the 'deep state'

Bolton also pointed out that Trump’s general dislike of NATO, and his work to undermine NATO, worked in favor of Putin’s position. Trump’s interest in Ukraine, according to Bolton’s book, only perked up in “the summer of 2019 when [Trump] realized that he could have the possibility of holding up the obligation and delivery of substantial security assistance [to Ukraine] in an effort to get access to the Hillary Clinton computer server that he felt was in Ukraine, finding out about Hunter Biden’s income in Ukraine, and all of these things in this spaghetti bowl of conspiracy theories. That was the first time he really focused.”

In fact, Bolton explained to VICE, Trump’s lack of curiosity for anything is profound. “It's hard for me to describe how little he knows,” Bolton tried to explain. This true mediocrity is why Trump’s reasoning for things is so whimsical and useless. He has no context or knowledge for much of anything. “He once asked [then-White House Chief of Staff] John Kelly if Finland was part of Russia. What he cared about was the DNC server, and Hunter Biden, and the 2016 election, and the 2020 election. That's what it was all about. And I think he had next to no idea what the larger issues were.”

As a result, Vladimir Putin didn’t have to be aggressive about much of anything regarding U.S. policy in the region. “I think one of the reasons that Putin did not move during Trump’s term in office was he saw the president’s hostility of NATO. Putin saw Trump doing a lot of his work for him, and thought, maybe in a second term, Trump would make good on his desire to get out of NATO, and then it would just ease Putin’s path just that much more.” In another interview, Bolton said of Trump’s threats to pull out of NATO, “I think Putin was waiting for that.”

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Bolton’s beef with Trump has also led him to rail against the right-wing narrative that Trump was tough on Putin, with the U.S. under Trump applying sanctions to Russia. “In almost every case, the sanctions were imposed with Trump complaining about it, saying we were being too hard,” told Newsmax when that ultra-right-wing outlet tried to get him to go along with the narrative that Biden was at fault for everything in the history of ever.

Bolton, in an interview with the Washington Post earlier in March, Bolton said that he believed Vladimir Putin’s lack of open invasion of Ukraine during the Trump administration was possibly predicated on the Russian dictator’s belief that Trump would pull the United States out of NATO during a second term in office.

Arguably the saddest exchange between Bolton and VICE’s interviewer is the one when Bolton says he is unsure what Trump would have done if Russia had invaded Ukraine when Trump was in office. He joked, “He never got that server! Those Ukrainians wouldn’t give him the server!” The interviewer remarked that Ukraine probably wished that this mythical server with Hillary’s secret plans existed so they could have ingratiated themselves to Trump. Bolton’s reply, also clearly joking (or half-joking, at least) sounds like something Trump and the MAGA world would have held up as proof, not the absurdist joke it would have been:

“They should have given him a server and said, ‘Hey, we found that—may have been erased, but here's the server.’”

Hillary Clinton has to be tired of waiting 4 years for the country to realize she was right

Posted on November 16, 2020 (Updated November 16, 2020) by Lauren Floyd

Hillary Clinton called it four years ago when she pointed out then-Republican nominee Donald Trump’s propensity to cry system rigging when he happened to face an undesired result. "You know, every time Donald thinks things are not going in his direction, he claims whatever it is is rigged against him," she said during the final presidential debate of 2016. "He lost the Iowa caucus. He lost the Wisconsin primary. He said the Republican primary was rigged against him. Then Trump University gets sued for fraud and racketeering; he claims the court system and the federal judge is rigged against him. There was even a time when he didn't get an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row and he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged against him. This, this is a mindset. This is how Donald thinks, and it's funny. But it's also really troubling."

Most of us are seeing the “really troubling” part now amid Trump’s effort and Republican leaders’ collective blind eye to discrediting Trump’s election loss to President-elect Joe Biden. Former national security advisor John Bolton said Sunday on ABC's "This Week," Trump isn’t exactly acting out of character, so it’s time for other Republicans to start setting a better example. “It's critical for other Republican leaders to stand up and explain what actually happened: Donald Trump lost what, by any evidence we have so far, was a free and fair election,” Bolton said.

#MarchForTrump #TrumpConcede #MillionMAGAMarch She warned us. Just sayin pic.twitter.com/kbeX7O9L1r
— sketchy_Jeff (@sketchy_jeff) November 14, 2020

I remember with great detail when the former secretary of state had to concede the 2016 election to a reality TV star. I can't imagine the humility that took, but she did it. Trump at least gets to concede to a former vice president, but he’s making no such concession by his account. He’s instead taken to his usual name-calling and alleging that the election was “rigged” against him.

Rudy will be interviewed by @MariaBartiromo at 10:00 A.M. NOW! https://t.co/ExPIgqtIAV
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2020

“John Bolton was one of the dumbest people in government that I’ve had the ‘pleasure’ to work with,” the president tweeted Sunday. “A sullen, dull and quiet guy, he added nothing to National Security except, ‘Gee, let’s go to war.’ Also, illegally released much Classified Information. A real dope!”

NEW: Former National Security Adviser John Bolton urges GOP leadership to "explain to our voters... that in fact Trump has lost the election and that these claims of election fraud are baseless." https://t.co/z6SZ06zbP3 pic.twitter.com/GyXya7xYAv
— ABC News (@ABC) November 15, 2020

That “dope” has been through five presidential transitions, Bolton pointed out on Twitter. “...and every day that he delays under the pretense that he's simply asking for his legal remedies ultimately is to the country's disadvantage,” Bolton said of the president.

In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Bolton also negated the previously floated theory that accepting the election results would cost Republican leaders too high a political price. "Well, I have trust in the Republican voters. I believe that if their leaders explain to them that Trump lost fair and square, and that the facts do not support his claims that the election was stolen, that they will come to accept it,” Bolton said. “But if they only hear from Donald Trump it’s not unnatural for them to think, ‘since nobody else on our side of the aisle is disagreeing that what he’s saying is accurate,’ and I think that lays the basis for real distrust in the system, casting doubt on the integrity of our electoral system, the constitutional process.”

Fmr. US national security adviser John Bolton says history will remember Donald Trump "as a failed President." "He missed a huge... range of opportunities internationally for the United States because he couldn't focus his attention long enough to develop coherent policies." pic.twitter.com/dVEHaLloXk
— CNN (@CNN) November 15, 2020

Bolton’s not wrong, a bit hypocritical considering he wasn’t exactly willing to take a step outside of party lines to divulge details that could’ve been useful during Trump’s impeachment hearings. Then, he was perfectly content solely dangling knowledge of the president’s alleged quid pro quo to promote sales of his book, but now he’s calling on the same Republicans he mimicked in cowardice to risk themselves to acknowledge the truth. Something in me says it just doesn’t work that way, but I’ll admit it would be nice. "We need Republicans to tell the truth too,” Bolton said. “It's not that hard." Apparently, it is.

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Bolton claims he wanted to release information during impeachment, was blocked by White House

Posted on September 23, 2020 by Mark Sumner

John Bolton wrote a book. That seems kind of hard to remember now, but you may recall it as the one that came out just before the one from Donald Trump’s niece that confirms Trump as “the dumbest student” his school had ever seen, and before the book by Bob Woodward that explains how Trump knew about the deadliness of COVID-19, but decided to ignore it because he thought it would be a political “win.” But it was definitely after the 40-something other books (not kidding) about Trump. Somewhere in there.

Once upon a time—with that time being, unbelievably enough, the first month of this interminable year—what Bolton had to say might have mattered. With multiple witnesses at Trump’s impeachment having parts of the story about the effort to extort lies from the government of Ukraine, Bolton was uniquely positioned to fill in critical gaps. His testimony might have carried weight and had historical significance. Senate Republicans eventually voted that they didn’t want to hear from Bolton, or from anyone else, but well before that the former national security adviser made it clear that he wasn’t interested in talking anyway. He was saving it all for his book, where it wouldn’t do a damn thing for the nation but could earn him a tidy profit. Bolton, through his personal decisions, made himself into a minor footnote.

Even so, it seems that the effort to suppress his book went deeper than has been known, and included interfering with a routine investigation. Because thanks to men like Bolton, there are no rules.

Bolton’s book was originally slated to appear in March. That was then pushed back to May, and eventually slid into June. The biggest reason for the slide was that even though the manuscript had been sitting with the White House for months, the publisher could not get a signal that the book did not contain classified information. Such investigations are routine, and usually result in either a thumbs-up or a list of information that needs to be removed or edited before publication.

That didn’t happen in this case. As the book rolled on toward its final publication date, Trump accused Bolton of knowingly including classified information. The William Barr Justice Department trotted off to do what they always do: act as Trump’s personal attorneys in court. That attempt to block release of the book eventually failed—not least of all because Barr moved at a point where the book was literally on the shelves of bookstores nationwide. However, the judge did have harsh words for Bolton, suggesting that he could forfeit that much-desired profit and possibly face additional penalties for the release of confidential information.

But now it seems that it wasn’t just Barr who was responsible for putting the book on hold. Because other members of Trump’s team interfered with the routine security clearance review of the book, purposely holding the book up to diminish its impact. Meaning that even as they were taking Bolton to court for moving ahead without getting clearance, they were also making sure that he never got clearance.

Bolton’s attorneys made this claim in a letter to the court on Tuesday. As The New York Times reports, Bolton now claims that he wanted to release one portion of his book—a portion relevant to the impeachment trial—at that time. But White House aides blocked the security review even though Bolton didn’t believe that there was any classified material in the section.

At the heart of this appears to be a lawyer named Michael Ellis who was a former assistant to (of course) Rep. Devin Nunes. Despite no background or training in security reviews, Ellis directed the official in charge of the security review to put a freeze on Bolton’s manuscript while he conducted “his own review of the book.” It was Ellis who then claimed that the book was “replete” with classified information. Ellis’ review then became the basis of the Department of Justice claims against Bolton.

No one is crying for John Bolton. Or his mustache. And at this point, the idea that he might have released some information at the time of the impeachment except for some maneuver by the White House dodges the fact that Bolton could have stepped in front of every news camera in the country and told everyone what he knew. However, the attempt to stifle Bolton is just another example of the lengths that the Trump White House has gone to to silence dissent, and the willingness of every Republican involved to throw “normal process” in the waste bin.

Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into John Bolton over his anti-Trump book

Posted on September 16, 2020 by Mark Sumner

Donald Trump is good for literature. Actually … that’s overstating it. A lot. But Trump is certainly good for publishers, and for dramatic titles. In one-word titles alone, it’s possible to build a pretty decent description of Trump using Rage, Unhinged, Disloyal, Fear, Hoax. You certainly don’t have to go to Insane Clown President, but … that’s also not a bad description.

The last few weeks have seen Trump’s leveraging his family to fight—and fail—to stop the publication of a book by his niece Mary Trump, and books by former Trump attorney Michael Cohen and former journalist Bob Woodward. The trio of tomes are all hot off the presses and still in the headlines. But it requires rewinding to June 20 (also known as March the 121st , in pandemic dating) to find the focus of Trump’s current disloyal, unhinged, rage hoax. That was the date that a federal judge dismissed attempts by the White House to block publication of John Bolton’s book detailing his time as Trump’s national security adviser.

During that court case, the judge pointed out multiple times that Trump was attempting to block a book that had already been printed, distributed to warehouses, was on the shelves at thousands of stores, and had already been read by hundreds of critics and journalists. Open barn door? Meet horse. But the judge did not address claims from the Department of Justice that Bolton may have violated national security, though he noted if it was true, Bolton could lose all the profits from the book deal that kept him conveniently mum during Trump’s impeachment. And now the Justice Department has announced an investigation into Bolton because … sure, why not?

The book has been on the stands for four months and is no longer hanging onto a slot in even an extended list of best sellers. There’s nothing to be gained by going after Bolton other than the demonstration that people like Roger Stone, convicted of multiple crimes, get to walk away for being Trump’s pals, while people like Bolton get the weight of the DOJ tossed their way for the crime of insufficient toadying.

But it’s hard to feel like there’s a good guy on either side of this case. After all, Bolton failed to come forward when his testimony mattered, what he ultimately revealed was confirmation of things that had already been stated, and … he’s John Bolton. The best possible ending for this story is that both Trump and Bolton come out with their sub-mud reputations sullied by whatever it is that’s worse than mud.

According to The New York Times, a team within the DOJ has convened a grand jury to hear evidence about Bolton’s use of classified information in his book, aka I couldn’t think of a title so I just stole a line from Hamilton. Bolton has denied that he published classified information. Trump has argued back that Bolton is “a dope” and “incompetent” and “a washed up creepster who … should be in jail” for “trying to make me look bad.” It’s unclear if the grand jury will reward these rubber-meets-glue arguments with an indictment, but it would probably be pretty interesting—and kind of hilarious—to hear the presentation.

And yes, to be honest it’s clear that the White House purposely refused to provide Bolton with responses on the classification of his submitted manuscript simply in an effort to delay publication and provide Trump with leverage to do exactly what he’s doing right now: conduct a political persecution of a perceived enemy. Bolton shouldn’t face charges for purely political reasons, if for no other reason than on a “first they came for John Bolton, and ...” basis. Still, every DOJ official tied up with going after John Bolton could be busy persecuting a human being instead, so let’s hope this takes some time. And please, if someone is going to leak classified information, how about the transcripts for the presentation to the grand jury?

Trump’s attempt to block release of John Bolton’s book denied by federal judge

Posted on June 20, 2020 by Mark Sumner

Judge Royce Lamberth has denied Donald Trump’s attempt to block the release of John Bolton’s book. In the ruling, Lamberth says that the presentation from William Barr’s DOJ team failed to “established that an injunction is an appropriate remedy.”

During the presentation on Friday, Lamberth repeatedly pointed out that the book was, in fact, already published, printed, in the hands of reviewers, and stacked up in both warehouses and bookstores. Digital versions have also been produced, along with audiobooks. He asked the DOJ “what do you want me to do about it?” and got back a fumbling response about possibly blocking the release in ways that seemed about as well thought out as most things emerging from this White House. In his ruling, Lamberth makes it clear that he was unimpressed: “For reasons that hardly need to be stated, the Court will not order a nationwide seizure and destruction of a political memoir.”

None of this makes Bolton’s book worth buying. The former National Security Advisor’s demonstrated cowardice and greed in refusing to testify before the House impeachment proceedings showed clearly enough that he placed potential profits infinitely above the good of the nation.

Over the next few days, as the embargo is released, all the “good parts” of Bolton’s book will be made public in any case—including information this morning that makes it clear that Donald Trump was mad at the U. S. attorney who Barr is trying to kick out in part because that attorney screwed up a scheme between Trump and a Turkish bank. And no one really wants to read John Bolton’s opinion on anything. Ever.

Lamberth’s ruling makes it clear that Bolton may have violated national security and that he, “stands to lose his profits from the book deal, exposes himself to criminal liability, and imperils national security.” However, none of that means that this last second maneuver can stop the release of the book.

So Trump loses. Barr loses. And Bolton also loses. That’s a good ruling.

The ruling from judge Lamberth just establishes—again—how willing Bill Barr is to use the Justice Department as if it is Trump’s private law firm. And how amazingly incompetent Barr is in just about every instance. But it also shows that Bolton’s cowardly action is unlikely to net him a dime. You have to like that.

Senate Republicans recommit themselves to Trump—no matter how much he endangers the country

Posted on June 19, 2020 by Kerry Eleveld

Sure, Donald Trump is unfit. Sure, Trump may have begged yet another country—China—to help him win reelection. Sure, Trump is emotionally damaged and intellectually addled, according to a written account by his former national security adviser John Bolton.

But does that matter to the Senate Republicans who cosigned Trump's presidency by saving him from conviction without hearing from a single witness? Are you high? No effing way do they have the integrity required for a little self-examination, according to CNN reporting. They're in the tank for Trump—always have been, always will be, no matter what.

Wanna give Senate Republicans the boot? Give $2 right now to say “Bye Felicia” this November.

Asked whether Senate Republicans should have sought to secure Bolton's testimony now that his book is out, the ever-reflective Sen. Ron Johnson responded, "No," adding, "We never should have had an impeachment trial."

Of course, that's not what Bolton said. Based on Trump's persistent pattern of placing his own personal and electoral needs over duty to the country, Bolton said Trump should have been investigated and impeached for more, not less. Trump engaged in "obstruction of justice as a way of life," as Bolton said, referring to his interventions in criminal investigations for personal favors.

Still, Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado, who's likely one of the top two most-endangered GOP senators seeking reelection, had the nerve to speak up and blame House Democrats for not taking Bolton to court over this unwillingness to testify. "The House didn't think it was important," Sen. Gardner quipped. What a weasel. Bolton, who's no hero, did publicly express his willingness to testify in front of the GOP-led Senate—the Republican caucus just refused to hear from him, or any other witnesses for that matter.

The sole Republican senator to express regret about not hearing from Bolton also voted in favor of having witnesses at the trial. “I wish we had a trial with the people testifying under oath,” Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah told reporters.

But most Republicans did the only logical thing one could do in the face of a 500-page manuscript documenting the myriad ways in which Trump is selling out and endangering the country: They refused to comment.

Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, however, really went the extra mile, affirming that he's more convinced than ever that Trump's the right guy for the job despite begging China to buy more agricultural products in order to secure his reelection. "Different people use different sales techniques," Barrasso offered. Whether they’re legal or not apparently isn’t relevant. "Every president has, one way or another, thought they ought to be reelected. I think President Trump should be reelected. I support his reelection, I'm for it."

Do Republicans even know the Constitution exists? They are proving themselves more useless by the day, and have no business stewarding the country.

Trump’s lawsuit against John Bolton is pointless, incompetent, and weak

Posted on June 17, 2020 by Mark Sumner

A million years ago, in the time before the coronavirus pandemic—a time also known as January—former National Security Advisor John Bolton had a chance to do this nation a solid. In both the House and the Senate, testimony in Donald Trump’s impeachment made it clear that Bolton was a key witness to the events during which Trump had attempted to suborn false statements from the Ukrainian government in an attempt to get a political edge over Joe Biden. Bolton then exacerbated the calls for his appearance at the hearings by leaking excerpts from an upcoming book and promising that there was blockbuster info both in connection to Ukraine and to Trump’s other foreign entanglements.

Even with Republicans putting on a genuinely history show of cowardice in voting to listen to no witnesses at all, Bolton had an opportunity. He didn’t have to testify in the Senate, he just had to … testify. He could have gone on any news show in America and made a genuine impact by revealing the information he knew about Trump’s lies, attempted bribery, incompetence, and profiteering. Instead, Bolton stayed silent, choosing to wait for the moment when his book was released to maximize his own profits while simultaneously assuring that he would not be there when his nation needed him most. So now Bolton’s book is here. Or almost here. Because despite months of review and revision to remove anything that could be considered classified, Donald Trump has now declared that everything is considered classified. Every single word that ever dropped from Trump’s lips has been retroactively classified by Trump. And now he’s suing Bolton to block the release of his book.

Even the title of Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened, suggests that Bolton was witness to a crime. And he’ll share the salacious details with the rest of us … for a price. On the one hand, there would be a definite satisfaction if Bolton, who found he liked teasing the nation more than providing vital testimony, never got to profit from his book. His abdication of his responsibilities, not just as a former government official, but as a citizen, was so egregious that watching Bolton and Trump locked in a fruitless legal snarl from now until both have shuffled off, would seem like justice of a sort.

As The New York Times reports, Trump’s suit claims that Bolton has broken an agreement for review of the manuscript and that he’s unilaterally deciding that it’s okay to go forward with the material in the book. Bolton handed over draft copies of the manuscript for review in 2019, and Bolton made changes in response to a set of initial requests. But after that, the response from the Trump White House was to simply not respond. Bolton never got the standard written release to mark the end of the review.

The suit charges Bolton with “breach of contract” in proceeding with publication and distribution of the book without securing that White House approval. Since the Justice Department now acts as Donald Trump’s personal law firm, the DOJ has asked a federal judge to both claw back Bolton’s payment for the book, and tell Bolton to get Simon & Schuster to pull copies from the shelf. The fact that the suit doesn’t name the publisher directly is an indication of just how fragile Trump’s suit really is. There are a semi-infinite number of previous cases that can be referenced when it comes to trying to block the publication of material that’s deemed to be classified, and very few of them are helpful to Trump’s position. So instead the suit skates around trying to extract either money or action directly from the publisher and attempts to both go after Bolton’s pocketbook and force him to act to block sales of the book.

On the one hand, the careful tiptoe made by the DOJ in framing the suit to skirt the publisher is a sign that even William Barr understands how tenuous this attempt to block the book really is. On the other hand, the suit includes claims that Bolton leaked classified information. Leaking classified information is a federal crime. Bolton hasn’t been charged with that crime, but including that claim in the lawsuit certainly suggests that if he doesn’t agree to a further delay of the book, those charges could appear.

But … overall the effort from the DOJ seems to be halfhearted. Everything points to this being more an exercise in Barr making Trump happy than a serious attempt to block publication. Simon & Schuster has actually printed and distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of Bolton’s book to warehouses, and even book stories, across the nation. There’s not so much as a request for a restraining order—even a temporary order—that would stop the publisher from simply giving stores the thumbs-up to begin sales.

Trump’s suit seems to be a good deal of smoke, but there’s little sign it contains any fire. Bolton’s book is going to be released. That doesn’t mean it should be bought.

John Bolton speaks in public at critical moment… to deliver a commercial for his unpublished book

Posted on February 18, 2020 by Mark Sumner

For the first time since House managers asked that he be called as a witness in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, a call that Senate Republicans immediately shut down, former national security adviser John Bolton has given a public interview. And the information produced in this appearance isn’t something that should be shocking to most Americans: John Bolton is a jackass.

Bolton’s appearance on Monday at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, was technically to be a discussion of threats to national security. But, as might be expected, most of the questions he was asked concerned Bolton’s time in the Trump White House and the issues that led to Donald Trump’s impeachment. Bolton was given multiple opportunities to speak about Trump’s actions involving Ukraine, or what he knew about the scheme against Joe Biden, or how Trump’s political hit squads smeared and removed the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. And through it all, Bolton had one mustache-twirling response: Buy my book.

That Bolton’s manuscript continues to be held by the White House on claims that it includes highly classified information is itself news. And it’s an issue of genuine concern. Of all the mistakes that Bolton might make, mishandling classified information seems highly unlikely. That the pages have been parked somewhere in a White House sub-basement for this long without even a suggestion as to the exact objections to releasing it is a pretty good indicator that the holdup has nothing to do with Bolton inadvertently revealing something critical to national defense, and everything to do with his being critical of Trump. On that point, what’s happening with Bolton demands not just sympathy, but also attention and demands for more information.

As CNN reports, Bolton talked repeatedly about the "censorship" being applied to his book, about his desire to get events and statements before the public, and about concerns that history be accurately recorded.

That’s all fine. But it’s the way Bolton responded to any factual questions that went instantly beyond off-putting and straight into infuriating. The response to any attempt to solicit information from Bolton or to get him to confirm any item that came up in the House hearings or Senate trial of Trump was never anything more than some variation on “Wait for the book.” The evening was far more a promotion for a book no one can buy than it was a musing on national security.

The highlight in a frustrating list of frustrations may have come when Bolton was asked whether he considered Trump’s July 25 call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “perfect,” as Trump has so often called it. "You'll love Chapter 14," said Bolton. It went that way throughout the evening.

Bolton did make broad statements on some topics, such as when he said that he saw from the beginning that Trump’s policies toward North Korea were going to fail. On his signature issue of Iran, Bolton predictably felt that Trump had not applied enough “pressure.” He didn’t quite shout, “Bomb, bomb, bomb” … he only implied it.

But much of the interview devolved into an ouroboros that went from how terrible it was that Bolton’s book was being held to how much he wanted everyone to have access to that sweet, sweet history that’s … in the book. Of course, that history was also in Bolton’s head, and he could have relayed the critical issues to the American public at any moment by just opening his mustache prop and explaining what he knew. Only then, who would buy the book?

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has the ability not just to declassify anything he wants, but also to slap a top-secret classification on anything, up to and including the contents of his taco salad. Whether or not Bolton’s book ever appears, or appears only after adjustments to explain that Trump is the bestest, smartest, handsomest scratch-golfing genius ever, remains an open question.

Bolton has another interview to give on his tour to promote a book that might never come out. Don’t count on it being any more informative.