Category: Mar-a-Lago

Trump spent years exploiting immigrants he now claims are ‘poisoning’ our country

Posted on by Charles Jay

Former President Donald Trump used language right from Hitler’s playbook when he claimed that immigrants coming to the U.S. are “poisoning the blood of our country.” What’s particularly scary is just how many Trump supporters embrace his fascistic rhetoric about immigrants. Rolling Stone reported on the results of a University of Massachusetts Amherst poll that found that 35% of Trump’s 2020 voters agree with his dark message about the threat posed by immigrants.

But what they probably don’t realize is the total hypocrisy of Trump’s rhetoric. That’s because for decades, including during Trump’s presidency, his company relied on undocumented workers to fill jobs as housekeepers, waiters, groundskeepers, and stonemasons at his properties, The Washington Post reported.

RELATED STORY: Trump's attacking a military family because that's who he is

The newspaper wrote:

Using them brought a double advantage: Trump could reap the financial benefit of undocumented labor — the ability to pay his employees lower wages and fewer benefits — and the political benefit of attacking it.

The subject of immigration and the border crisis has become the hot button issue for Republicans. House Republicans narrowly impeached Cuban-born Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas Tuesday evening for allegedly failing to enforce immigration laws. But for decades, the Trump Organization ignored the employment eligibility of its workers.

RELATED STORY: House GOP votes to impeach Mayorkas, after failing first attempt

In December 2019, The Washington Post shared that its reporters had spoken with 48 undocumented immigrants who had worked for the Trump Organization at 11 of its properties, including five golf courses in New Jersey and New York and the Mar-a-Lago private club in Florida. Trump has said he was unaware that his properties had hired undocumented workers.

One of the undocumented workers, Sandra Diaz, an immigrant from Costa Rica who used a fake Social Security card to get hired, worked as Trump’s personal housekeeper at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey. She described her duties to The Washington Post as follows:

Moving quickly through the two-story house in the mornings, Diaz carried out Trump’s fastidious instructions. In his closet, she would hang six sets of identical golf outfits: six white polo shirts, six pairs of beige pants, six neatly ironed pairs of boxer shorts. She would smear a dollop of Trump’s liquid face makeup on the back of her hand to make sure it hadn’t dried out.

In late 2018, Diaz and her successor as Trump’s personal housekeeper at Bedminster, Victorina Morales, an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala, approached The New York Times through their immigration lawyer to talk about their experiences working at the Trump golf club.

Diaz, who worked at Bedminster from 2010-2013, is now a legal resident of the U.S., the Times reported. Morales was still working at Bedminster when she went public about her immigration status; she no longer works at the club and has filed an application for asylum status.

Morales told the Times that she could no longer keep silent because she felt hurt by Trump’s public  comments equating Latin American immigrants with violent criminals and by abusive comments from a supervisor at the golf club about her intelligence and immigration status.

“We are tired of the abuse, the insults, the way he talks about us when he knows that we are here helping him make money,” Morales told  The Times. “We sweat it out to attend to his every need and have to put up with his humiliation.”

That led to more reports in The Washington Post and other major news outlets. Here’s an interview the two women gave to NowThis News.

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After the women came forward, the Trump Organization began cracking down. It audited employees’ immigration papers and started using the federal E-Verify online system to check documents to confirm employment eligibility for new hires. Dozens of undocumented workers were either fired or quit in the runup to the 2020 election campaign.

In May 2019, CNN interviewed 19 of the undocumented immigrants who had worked at Trump golf clubs in New York and New Jersey:

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But after 2020, this story about undocumented workers at Trump properties simply faded away. It’s important to keep Trump’s hypocrisy in the forefront as he has made immigration the major issue of his 2024 presidential campaign and is dehumanizing immigrants with fascistic rhetoric worse than when he ran in 2016.

The New York Times reported that Trump plans to introduce even more draconian immigration laws if elected than he did in his first term, which was marked by such cruel policies as separating children from their parents at the border. Trump’s plans for a second term include: deporting millions of people who don’t have legal status, setting up massive camps along the border to hold people awaiting deportation, a renewed Muslim travel ban, and the end of birthright citizenship.

Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us, an immigration and criminal justice advocacy group, told The New York Times:

“Americans should understand these policy proposals are an authoritarian, often illegal, agenda that would rip apart nearly every aspect of American life — tanking the economy, violating the basic civil rights of millions of immigrants and native-born Americans alike.”

It’s worth noting that about 200 undocumented Polish construction workers laid the foundation for Trump’s real estate empire when they were hired in 1980 to demolish a department store on Fifth Avenue on the future site of Trump Tower. In August 2016, just months before the presidential election, Time Magazine reported about how the Polish workers were exploited, “putting in 12-hour shifts with inadequate safety equipment at subpar wages that their contractor paid sporadically, if at all.” Trump denied that he knowingly used undocumented workers, instead blaming the contractor. But documents reviewed by Time showed that Trump sought out the Polish workers for the demolition project when he saw them working on another job.

After a protracted legal battle, Trump settled a lawsuit in 1998 regarding the workers over union pension violations, agreeing to pay nearly $1.4 million. Time reported the settlement details in 2017 after going to court to get the records unsealed.

Time reported that in 1990, Daniel Sullivan, a labor consultant and FBI informant hired by Trump in 1980 to deal with the problem of the undocumented Polish workers, told People magazine:

“It was disgusting how he used people,” Sullivan said. “I said, ‘Don’t exploit them like that. Don’t try to f-ck these poor souls over.’ It baffled me then, and it makes me sick even now that he knowingly had these Poles there for the purpose of Trump Tower at starvation wages. He couldn’t give a sh-t because he’s Donald Trump and everybody is here to serve him. Over time he became more and more monstrous and arrogant. I asked myself, ‘How long is it going to take for all of this to catch up with him?'”

It certainly hasn’t so far.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who like other Republican politicians has bowed the knee to Trump, even brought up the issue of Trump’s hiring of undocumented immigrants to work at or construct some of his properties during a February 2016 Republican presidential debate. But that didn’t stop Trump from winning the nomination with his promise to build a wall along the southern border and have Mexico pay for it.

Someone has been poisoning our democracy, and it sure isn’t hard-working immigrants.

RELATED STORY: For Republicans, it's now 'Trump First, Putin Second, America Third'

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Details of Trump’s alleged money-for-secrets deal are revealed

Posted on by Mark Sumner

On Monday morning, Donald Trump called Australian billionaire and Mar-a-Lago member Anthony Pratt a “red haired weirdo” and declared that he never spoke to Pratt about submarines. That one-two punch of strangeness follows strong evidence that Trump did exactly what he’s saying he never did: shared sensitive information about American nuclear submarines with Pratt. That information has since been spread widely among foreign officials, possibly weakening America’s nuclear defense.

Now there’s a growing impression that not only did Trump provide Pratt with inside information on some of the most critical military secrets, Trump did so in response to the “red haired weirdo” opening up his extremely chunky wallet to slide money Trump’s way. That includes offering what amounted to an unlimited campaign contribution laundered through the Mar-a-Lago resort.

Trump is trying to distance himself from Pratt because the evidence of his wrongdoing with the Australian billionaire seems clear. But even as Trump’s squirming to get away from one crime, he may have committed another.

Anthony Pratt is one of the wealthiest men in Australia. Wherever you live in the world, there’s a fair chance that some of his products are in your home right now. That’s because what Pratt makes is primarily packing materials, and in this online-order/home-delivery world, he’s doing very well. Pratt and his family are worth an estimated $24 billion. That’s up by $5 billion in just the last three pandemic-centric years.  

After Trump won the 2016 election, Pratt invested heavily in his relationship with Donald Trump. He purchased a membership at Mar-a-Lago, bought high-cost tickets to spend holidays with Trump, and offered to provide an undefined level of funding for Trump’s reelection by renting an unlimited number of hotel rooms at Trump’s resort. Even after Trump lost the 2020 election, he and Pratt seemed to remain close, meeting at Mar-a-Lago and having lengthy conversations.

That Pratt would think it worth almost any level of investment to keep Trump in office makes sense. For a billionaire whose primary business is paper mills, the guy who blows most of the budget on tax cuts for the wealthy and who is devoted to destroying environmental regulations might just be the ideal leader. That Trump also so mismanaged a deadly pandemic that he helped accelerate the transition from in-person to online shopping is just a bonus.

But the thing that Trump and Pratt discussed that’s now the red-hot focus of special counsel Jack Smith isn’t whatever Trump may have promised Pratt about the Clean Water Act or undercutting health care. It’s submarines.

On Oct. 5, ABC News broke the story that Pratt had been interviewed by members of Smith’s team “at least twice” regarding conversations that he and Trump had concerning potentially classified information about the capabilities of American submarines. Pratt then went on to share what he had learned from Trump with “scores of others, including more than a dozen foreign officials.”

Among the information Trump is believed to have disclosed to Pratt are the exact number of nuclear warheads U.S. subs routinely carry, and how closely they can operate to Russian subs without being detected. Both pieces of information are critical in defining the capabilities of the U.S. submarine fleet.

If Trump was accurate in relaying the information to Pratt, and Pratt repeated it to the “scores” of people he claims, it represents what could be an unprecedented unmasking of America’s most secretive power. This leak could seriously affect how the U.S. operates on both a tactical and strategic level. There are few pieces of military information that have—or at least had—more value.

The New York Times story that Trump mentioned in his social media post ran on Sunday evening. It not only repeated the allegations of the earlier ABC News account but also expanded on them by showing how Pratt had kept money flowing to Trump’s campaign. That included offering to “book as many rooms as available” for any campaign event Trump wanted to hold at Mar-a-Lago.

On another occasion, Pratt gave Trump $1 million for tickets to a New Year’s Eve event at Mar-a-Lago even though the actual price of those tickets was “$50,000 or less.” That certainly looks as if Pratt simply stuffed $1 million into Trump’s pocket—a contribution that’s unlikely to have appeared on Trump’s campaign finance reports.

If what Pratt was after was access, he got it. Trump gave Pratt a seat in his motorcade, invited him to a state dinner, and toured one of his plants in Ohio. And in a series of recordings obtained by “60 Minutes Australia,” Pratt revealed that Trump talked about far more than submarines.

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According to Pratt, Trump also told him about his private phone conversations with Iraqi leaders following a U.S. missile strike. At a point when the strike had not even become public knowledge, Trump was happy to share how he had bullied Iraq’s then-President Barham Salih.

“I just bombed Iraq today,” Trump reportedly told Pratt. “And the president of Iraq called me up and said, ‘You just leveled my city.’ And I said to him, ‘Okay, what are you going to do about it?’”

Trump also talked to Pratt about the infamous call in which he attempted to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That call led to Trump’s first impeachment, but Trump dismissed his actions as trivial. “You know that Ukraine phone call?” he reportedly told Pratt. “That was nothing compared to what I usually do. That Ukraine phone call was nothing compared to what we usually talk about.” Which certainly raises questions about just how often Trump used his private phone calls with foreign leaders to extract personal favors.

Just to add a profound dollop of disgust on top of the flow of secrets, Pratt also says that Trump told his wife, Melania Trump, to strut around Mar-a-Lago in a bikini “so all the other guys could get a look at what they were missing.”

As has happened with so many others, Pratt notes how Trump operates “like the Mafia,” and likes to make statements that skate around the law. “He’s outrageous,” Pratt said of Trump. “He just says whatever the f*ck he wants. And he loves to shock people.”

Pratt repeatedly demonstrated his admiration for how Trump “... knows exactly what to say and what not to say so he avoids jail.” But that’s one place where Pratt was hopefully wrong. Trump seems to think so. That’s why his former pal has become a “red haired weirdo.”

Trump never hesitates to jettison anyone at any time when he thinks they’ve become a liability. He clearly feels that way about Pratt. However, it certainly seems this is another occasion when Trump has burned his bridges way, way too late to help.

And in the process of all this, there’s the strong possibility that Trump’s attack on Pratt violates a standing gag order already in place on the classified documents case. That’s because Pratt is on the list of witnesses, and Trump’s statements could easily be read as an attempt to influence Pratt’s testimony.

As the “60 Minutes Australia” piece says at the opening, Trump is in “a mess.” And he’s still making it messier.

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Hawley on new Trump indictment: ‘We cannot allow this to stand’

Posted on (Updated by Julia Shapero

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) slammed the new charges brought against former President Trump in the case over his handling of classified documents Thursday, arguing that “we cannot allow this to stand.” 

“It’s so brazen right now, what they’re doing,” Hawley said on Fox News. “It is really a subversion of the rule of law. I mean, they’re taking the rule of law, turning it on its head, and we cannot allow this to stand.” 

“The American people are not gonna be safe,” he added. “Our system of government is not gonna be safe if this is gonna be the new standard.”

The Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a superseding indictment Thursday evening, accusing the former president of attempting to delete surveillance footage at his Mar-a-Lago property. It also included an additional Espionage Act charge based on a military document that Trump boasted of having in a 2021 meeting. 

The new indictment added Carlos de Oliveira, the property manager of the Mar-a-Lago resort, as a co-conspirator, accusing him of working with Trump and the former president’s other co-defendant Walt Nauta to try to delete the surveillance footage.

Hawley suggested that the DOJ is now “charging random people” following de Oliveira’s addition to the indictment and claimed that the new charges were brought in order to distract from Hunter Biden’s legal problems.

The plea deal that the president's son had reached with the DOJ over tax and gun charges was put on hold Wednesday, after the federal judge presiding over the case raised concerns about the agreement.

“Is it any coincidence that the DOJ rushes to add these new indictments today, after the Hunter debacle, after their own self-dealing and two-timing is exposed, after they tried to us the true extent of this plea deal,” Hawley said. 

“That gets blown up, and then it’s like, ‘Oh well, we’ve got to go indict Trump on something else,’” he added.

Schiff suggests DOJ’s detailed indictment proves Trump’s ‘maligned intent’

Posted on (Updated by Jared Gans

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said the Justice Department’s detailed indictment proves former President Trump had a “maligned intent” in keeping the documents that were taken from the White House to Mar-a-Lago after his presidency ended. 

Schiff told MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace in an interview on Friday that the indictment is “stunning” in the amount of detail that was included and the extent to which it demonstrates that Trump was not acting in good faith concerning the documents. 

“First of all, it’s stunning in its detail and in the degree to which it shows so clearly Donald Trump’s malign intent,” the lawmaker said. “The most difficult element, often, to prove is what did the defendant intend.” 

“But here Donald Trump has made so crystal clear in the conversations that are recorded, instructions that he gives to his aide to move the boxes, in his deceitfulness with his own attorneys, it’s just so graphic,” he added. 

Schiff, who served as an impeachment manager during Trump’s first impeachment trial, said the decision about whether Trump should be charged was not a difficult one for special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the investigation. He said the evidence included in the indictment is “so powerful that I don’t think special counsel had any choice but to go forward.” 

The indictment, which was unsealed on Friday, includes several examples of Trump allegedly trying to prevent federal authorities from obtaining the documents that were taken to Mar-a-Lago. On one occasion, he reportedly had an aide — who was also indicted in the case — move boxes of documents out of one room without informing his attorney who was looking for documents that needed to be turned over to comply with a subpoena that was issued. 

The document also includes a transcript of a conversation Trump had in which he asks his attorneys if they could just ignore the subpoena. 

Schiff said he was also “stunned” that the documents include information on military plans, the nuclear capabilities of U.S. enemies and the country’s vulnerabilities. 

“But I think this is the way of special counsel and a speaking indictment, letting all the American people know that this isn’t a paperwork violation,” he said. “These are national secrets that present real national security risks to the country.” 

The California Democrat said after Trump announced on Thursday that he had been indicted that the charges were “another affirmation of the rule of law.” 

“For four years, he acted like he was above the law. But he should be treated like any other lawbreaker. And today, he has been,” Schiff said.

After Arrest, Trump Perfectly Explains Why They Want Him Locked Up

Posted on by The Center Square

By Casey Harper (The Center Square)

President Donald Trump called the charges against him unprecedented election interference in a speech Tuesday night from his Mar-a-Lago home, just hours after pleading not guilty to nearly three dozen felony charges during his arraignment in New York City.

“I never thought anything like this could happen in America,” Trump told his supporters at his Florida residence. “The only crime that I have committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it.”

RELATED: With Assist From Manhattan DA, Trump Once Again Enjoys United GOP Support

Trump faces 34 charges related to allegations that he paid hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels through a lawyer seven years ago and covered it up as a legal expense before being elected president. Trump offered his “not guilty” plea during his arraignment before Judge Juan Merchan in Manhattan Criminal Court.

Trump began his speech by pointing to the string of investigations and impediments that Democrats and federal law enforcement threw at him, drawing a comparison between the unfounded accusations like the debunked Russian dossier and the current legal prosecution.

“From the beginning, the Democrats spied on my campaign, remember that?” Trump said. “They attacked me with an onslaught of fraudulent investigations. Russia, Russia Russia. Ukraine… Impeachment hoax number one, impeachment hoax number two. The illegal and unconstitutional raid on Mar-a-Lago right here.”

Trump was impeached twice by the then Democrat-controlled U.S. House during his presidency, but was acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate both times.

Trump also pointed to media reports that showed federal law enforcement working with social media companies to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story, which Trump said “exposes the Biden family as criminals” and would have swayed the election in his favor.

“And we remember the 51 intelligence agents who said Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation,” Trump said, pointing to an open letter signed by those agents making that assertion. “Russian disinformation, remember that? And that was all confirmed strongly by the FBI, when they all knew that it wasn’t Russian disinformation.”

RELATED: Trump Campaign Warns Gag Order Would ‘Backfire’

The indictment was unsealed after Tuesday’s arraignment. It alleges Trump falsified business records related to the hush money scheme and can be read in full here.

Trump blasted New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Letisha James, attorney general for New York, both of whom promised to go after Trump while on the campaign trail.

“We have a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris and now receives money from the Biden-Harris campaign, and a lot of it,” Trump said.

Trump’s speech hit political notes as well. He attacked President Joe Biden on the Afghanistan withdrawal, the border, the loss of energy independence, rising crime, and more.

Trump surrendered to New York Police before the arraignment after a grand jury voted to indict him last week, the first time a current or former president has been charged with a crime. Trump is also the 2024 Republican frontrunner for president.

During his speech, Trump also blasted the the investigation into his possession of classified documents from his time at president, arguing that he had the power as president to declassify them. He said Biden had classified documents as well from his time in the Obama administration but did not have the power to declassify as vice president.

Syndicated with permission from The Center Square.

The post After Arrest, Trump Perfectly Explains Why They Want Him Locked Up appeared first on The Political Insider.

Trump responds to Biden classified document discovery, asks when FBI will raid his ‘many homes’

Posted on (Updated by Julia Mueller

Former President Trump responded Monday to the breaking news that the Justice Department is reviewing classified documents from President Biden’s tenure as vice president that were found last fall in a private office Biden had previously used.  

“When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House? These documents were definitely not declassified,” Trump said on his Truth Social account, sharing an article on the document discovery from CBS News.  

The Obama-Biden era documents were found by the president’s attorneys while clearing out an office he used when he served as an honorary professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, according to Biden’s special counsel Richard Sauber.

Biden’s legal team notified the National Archives, which took possession of the materials, Sauber said. The documents are now reportedly being looked at by the U.S. attorney general for Chicago, with cooperation from the White House.  

Trump was referring to the FBI’s execution of a search warrant last summer at his Mar-a-Lago residence, where investigators found more than a hundred classified documents kept past his time in the White House.  

Trump is now under investigation for his handling of the classified materials.  

“We were told for months that this was treasonous… grounds for impeachment... & meriting the death penalty, yet I have a feeling nothing will happen!?” wrote Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. on Twitter, retweeting the CBS article.  

Notably, Biden’s team notified the Archives and turned over the documents upon discovery, while Trump apparently kept classified materials even after requests from the Archives to return them.  

The Presidential Records Act requires that presidential and vice presidential records be turned over to the National Archives at the end of a given administration for preservation and to protect classified material.

Kash Patel given ‘limited immunity’ after repeatedly using 5th Amendment to evade testimony

Posted on (Updated by Mark Sumner

Kashyap Patel, former aide to Devin Nunes turned one of Donald Trump’s closest advisors, has been granted limited immunity to secure his testimony before the grand jury investigating the theft of classified documents and their illegal retention at Mar-a-Lago.

The Wall Street Journal reports that in an earlier appearance before the grand jury, Patel repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment, making it impossible to gain meaningful information. Attorneys for the Department of Justice attempted to get the presiding judge to force Patel to provide information relevant to the investigation, and argued that none of the questions they were asking were directed at surfacing any criminal action by Patel, but the judge ruled that Patel could not be made to testify without immunity on the basis of possible future action. Now Patel will get that immunity and will make a second appearance before the grand jury.

When headlines announce that someone will testify on a grant of immunity, it is generally taken to mean that some kind of deal has been reached. That is not the case here. Patel does not want to testify. He remains a hostile witness. He’s just not being given any choice. And the fact that the DOJ is willing to give him immunity to hear what he has to say shows that this investigation has just one real target.

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Patel is the only person who claims to be a witness to Trump declassifying the documents found at Mar-a-Lago. Speaking to Breitbart News, Patel said, “I was there with President Trump when he said, ‘We are declassifying this information.’”

It’s a fair bet that this unique claim was one of the first things that Patel was asked about when he was brought before the grand jury. And one of the first issues was he pulled out the Fifth Amendment. Now he will be facing that question again, and will have nowhere to hide. It’s a good bet that his answer will not match what he told Breitbart.

That is, if Patel chooses to answer at all. The fact that he declared he didn’t have to testify under the protection provided by the Fifth Amendment is interesting just in itself. Because it means that Patel did not try to slip testimony on the basis of executive privilege.

That could mean that the questions Patel was being asked all concerned issues that arose after Trump left office. Or it might mean that Patel was saving that executive privilege claim in his other pocket, for just this occasion.

Patel first gained the favor of Donald Trump by helping former congressman Nunes write a memo that put FBI sources and methods at risk in an effort to undercut the investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Patel became a frequent visitor to the White House and joined Rudy Giuliani in Ukraine in attempting to find dirt on Hunter Biden. As his “Ukraine whisperer,” Trump made Patel an aide to the National Security Council. Trump considered Patel his Ukraine expert during the efforts to blackmail the Ukrainian government that led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Patel next helped get Sec. of Defense Mark Esper fired by declaring Esper’s refusal to send the army against Black Lives Matter protesters “disloyal” to Trump. Trump rewarded Patel’s own loyalty by making him chief of staff to the new Secretary of Defense. Patel was reportedly Trump’s pick to head the CIA—a sharp rise from a congressional aide in just three years—when a little matter of getting tossed from the office got in the way. 

During his time in Washington, Patel developed a well-earned reputation as a man who would cut any corner, and stab any back, to get closer to Trump. As a Pentagon official told The Washington Post last year, Patel was simply “a direct threat to lawful government.” 

He also wrote the “worst children’s book of all time,” in which he is the heroic defender of good king Donald.

More recently, Patel has been in the news as one of Trump’s chief spokesmen on the classified documents that the FBI removed from Mar-a-Lago following a warranted search. Unsurprisingly, Patel has been the leader of the “Trump declassified them all, so he did nothing wrong” choir.

However, no matter how many times Trump has made that claim in public, he hasn’t done so in court. He hasn’t done it, because he knows that it’s a lie. As a quick check of just one recent and relevant case shows… “declassification, even by the President, must follow established procedures.” Declassification of highly compartmentalized documents regarding the nuclear capacity of another nation must follow lengthy and detailed steps leading to declassification, none of which involves Trump “just thinking about it.” 

The immunity grant for Patel took effect on Wednesday, signaling that his testimony before the jury has either already happened, or will happen soon. As with all grand jury testimony, it’s unlikely that any of it will be made public. However, should that jury issue indictments, Patel is likely to be given the opportunity for an encore.

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Cheney: ‘Any interaction’ Trump has with Jan. 6 committee will be under oath, subject to perjury penalties

Posted on (Updated by Julia Shapero

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) emphasized on Saturday that “any interaction” former President Trump has with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol will be “under oath and subject to penalties of perjury.”

Cheney, who serves as the vice chair of the committee, has remained tight-lipped about many aspects of the panel’s investigation into the Jan. 6 riot, as have her fellow committee members.

In a Saturday interview with Texas Tribune CEO Evan Smith, Cheney declined to specifically say whether the panel would like to hear from the former president, instead noting that if it does he will be required to tell the truth.

Cheney, a prominent Trump critic, did not otherwise hold back in speaking against the former president, however, calling him “fundamentally destructive” for the Republican Party. The congresswoman pointed to responses from her fellow members of the GOP to presidential records being recovered from the former president's Mar-a-Lago home as the latest example.

“You look at how many senior Republicans are going through contortions to try to defend the fact that the former president had stored in a desk drawer apparently, in an unsecure storage room, in a resort … documents that had the highest classification markings,” Cheney told Smith at the Tribune’s annual festival.

Despite her views on the former president, Cheney told Smith she does not regret voting against Trump’s first impeachment based on the evidence. She also noted that those proceedings have informed her current work on the Jan. 6 Committee.

“They would have had more Republican votes if they had enforced their subpoenas, and that is certainly a lesson that we have taken into [the] Jan. 6 Select Committee’s work,” Cheney said.

The Jan. 6 Committee has taken a strong stance on enforcing its subpoenas, referring several Trump allies for criminal contempt of Congress.

Cheney said she would "do everything I can" to ensure Trump is not the Republican nominee for president in 2024.

"And if he is the nominee," she added, "I won’t be a Republican.”

Former White House lawyer warned Trump legal peril was possible if records went unreturned

Posted on (Updated by Brandi Buchman

A new report suggests former White House counsel Eric Herschman warned Donald Trump in late 2021 that if he failed to return presidential records or classified materials he had retained after leaving office, the 45th president could face serious legal trouble. 

The New York Times was the first to report the development, citing three unnamed sources familiar with the matter. 

Herschmann was no longer working for Trump by the time this conversation reportedly occurred in December 2021. An exact date for the meeting was not confirmed. Trump had been out of the White House for almost a year by that point, however, and though it is unclear whether Herschmann was aware of precisely what records Trump had retained, he still felt the need to offer the caveat. Trump’s response to Herschman’s warning was allegedly “noncommittal” but courteous.

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The warning likely didn’t come as a total surprise.

By the time Herschmann had offered his input, the National Archives had already informed Trump that it was missing a number of original documents from his time in the White House.

Some two dozen boxes of presidential records that were meant to go to the Archives in January 2021 didn’t. Instead, they were shipped off to Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. This happened against the advice of Pat Cipollone, another White House attorney under Trump. 

By January, the former president handed over some 15 boxes to the Archives from those he had sent to Mar-a-Lago. There were 184 classified records inside, But by May 2021, the National Archives was still trying to find other key records that appeared to be missing. Gary Stern, the Archives lead counsel, fired off letters to Trump’s attorneys and emphasized that all presidential records must be accounted for.

A back-and-forth over the documents continued. By the autumn of 2021, according to sources who spoke to The Washington Post, former deputy White House counsel Pat Philbin told the Archives that it was Mark Meadows, Trump’s onetime chief of staff, who had reassured him the documents Trump took were only inconsequential news clippings and nothing more.

But the Archives believed there was more than news clippings missing. The Archives had already informed Trump’s team by then that it was looking for specific records, like his letters with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, a letter left for him by former President Barack Obama, and, among other things, the National Weather Service map from 2019 that Trump drew on with a Sharpie marker when falsely proclaiming that Hurricane Dorian was going to hit Alabama after the National Weather Service had reported otherwise.  

Around the time Herschmann reportedly offered his warning to Trump in December 2021, Trump’s team informed the Archives it had 12 boxes at Mar-a-Lago waiting to be picked up. The Archives went to retrieve them in mid-January 2022. Archive aides found 15 boxes and within weeks of reviewing all that Trump had kept, the Archives asked the Justice Department to get involved.

Many of the records that the Archives found inside the boxes at Mar-a-Lago were labeled classified. The agency was unsure to what extent documents were mishandled and an investigation got underway. This June Trump remitted more classified documents through his attorneys but it was suspected by investigators that there were more records yet to be unearthed at Mar-a-Lago. 

They were right. 

A search warrant was issued to the FBI, and on Aug. 8, agents picked up more than 100 new documents with classified or sensitive markings from Mar-a-Lago. The FBI said it seized roughly 11,000  documents without classified markings altogether. In its warrant, authorities cited a possible violation by Trump of the Espionage Act and noted that “evidence of obstruction” into the investigation for the classified records also likely existed. 

Trump has spent every week since tossing out excuse after excuse for his retention of the classified records. He has also insisted that he had stand-alone power to declassify documents.

This is not possible according to most legal and national security experts in the U.S. 

This has not stopped Trump from claiming the investigation into the missing classified records is a “witch-hunt” or yet more political persecution against him by the “deep state.”

Herschmann’s legal relationship with Trump has never been dull, to say the least. 

Herschmann defended Trump during the former president’s first impeachment trial for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress and left a lucrative partnership at the law firm Kasowitz Benson Torres to do it. Financial disclosures from 2020 show Herschmann was earning just over $3.3 million when he took on the advisory role for Trump. 

When Trump and his personal attorneys and advisers like Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman pushed to overturn the results of the 2020 election ahead of Jan. 6, Herschmann was one of the few resistant voices inside Trump’s immediate orbit.

Upon cooperating with the Jan. 6 committee’s probe, Herschman said under oath that he had candidly warned officials about the legal danger underpinning schemes to overturn the election results.

One of those warnings went to Jeffrey Clark, a mid-level lawyer and former Trump lackey at the Department of Justice.

Clark, Herschmann testified, had revealed a plan to him that would see Clark installed as attorney general with Trump’s blessing if only Clark could get letters sent off to swing state legislatures falsely claiming that voter fraud had altered election results.

“I said good… fucking a-hole… congratulations. You’ve just admitted your first step or act you’d take as attorney general would be committing a felony in violation of Rule 6 (c),” Herschmann recalled telling Clark. 

Herschmann was subpoenaed by a federal grand jury this summer along with former White House lawyers Pat Cipollone and Patrick Philbin. According to the Times, Herschmann engaged with Trump’s attorneys Evan Corcoran and John Rowley, asking for guidance on how he might field questions that could run afoul of executive privilege or attorney-client privileges. 

Herschmann was told to assert executive privilege broadly. Corcoran then allegedly told him not to worry because a “chief judge” would “validate their belief that a president’s powers extend far beyond their time in office.”

The judge presiding over the classified records matter ended up being a Trump appointee: Judge Aileen Cannon. 

So far, Cannon has ruled in favor of Trump and to some outrage from seasoned jurists and prosecutors. 

On Sept. 15, Cannon rejected the Department of Justice’s request to keep investigating Trump’s handling of classified records while an independent “special master” or arbiter, was assigned to review records. Andrew Weismann, a former attorney who worked on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, for one, has dubbed Cannon’s decision as profoundly “stupid” and “partisan.”

The special master’s role primarily involves filtering through documents seized by the FBI to determine what may be privileged versus what may be personal. The special master, in this case, is the mutually agreed-upon appointment of Raymond Dearie, a semi-retired judge from New York.  Trump proposed Dearie serve in the role first and the Department agreed. Dearie is widely regarded as a neutral choice for arbiter. Dearie is now reviewing a total of 11,000 documents found at Mar-a-Lago. 

Despite having his preferred special master appointed and his appointed judge presiding, Trump is still backpedaling. Though he initially claimed publicly that he had the power to declassify documents all by his lonesome and could take taxpayer-owned records wherever he pleased, in court, he has refused to elaborate on this so-called declassification. In a letter to Dearie on Monday, Trump’s attorneys argued that they could not discuss Trump’s declassification claims because it would force the former president to expose a defense he may use against “any subsequent indictment.” 

RELATED STORY: Special master follies: Trump doesn’t want to talk about declassifying documents

New Poll Shows GOP Still Behind Trump In 2024, Even If He’s ‘Charged With A Crime’

Posted on by Becky Noble

It seems that no matter what Democrats, the media, the deep state, whatever you want to call it, throws at former President Donald Trump, it just doesn’t work. And the FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-A-Lago estate is no exception. The results of a new poll should make even more steam emerge from the top of Democrat heads, and just make them try even harder to “get Trump.” 

RELATED: Pentagon Halts Deliveries Of Newest F-35 Fighter Jet Because They Used Parts From China

The Latest Poll

According to a new NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist National poll, among Republicans, 61% say Trump should make another run for the White House. However, “90% of Democrats, 26% of Republicans, and 67% of independents – do not want Trump to run for president in 2024.”

If Trump is charged with a crime, 65% of those polled do not want him to run.

The poll also addressed the FBI Mar-A-Lago raid, and what Americans might think about whether Trump engaged in any illegal activities. Of those polled, 44% believe that Trump did something illegal by possessing the documents in question found at Mar-A-Lago.

Another 17% believe that Trump’s actions may have been unethical but not illegal. One in four Republicans believe he committed acts that were either illegal at 5%, or unethical at 20%.

Of those Americans polled, 29%, including 63% of Republicans don not believe Donald Trump did anything wrong.

RELATED: Media Running New ‘Leaked Info’ From Anonymous Sources That Trump Had Files On Foreign Nation’s Nuclear Capabilities

Anti-Trump Brigade May Have Had Their ‘Jump The Shark’ Moment

The other thing that the powers that be don’t quite seem to understand, is that everything they throw at Trump just seems to energize his base even more. And they may have done themselves in with the Mar-A-Lago raid.

Immediately following the raid, Trump met with members of the House Study Committee in New Jersey. One of those members in attendance was Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN). Banks told Fox News, “He didn’t seem defeated in the least bit—he was very fired up, very upbeat.”

Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY) tweeted out, “Thrilled to report he’s feeling better than ever despite the Democrats’ endless smears against him. Trump 2024!”

Tenney also stated in an interview with Real America’s Voice that the actions of the FBI and DOJ amounted to a “fourth impeachment,” and that, “They’re going to try to attempt to stop him from running for president. And that’s really what it’s about. Because they’re afraid he will get out there and he will run and he will win.”

RELATED: MSNBC Guest Roland Martin Says Trump Voters Are ‘Evil’: ‘We Are At War With These People’

Latest Developments

On Monday, the Trump legal team won a request for a special master to review seized documents, being concerned that federal officials would, “impugn, leak, and publicize select aspects of their investigation.”

The media of course wasted no time in pointing out that Judge Aileen Cannon was a Trump-appointed judge.

One day later, an outrageous leak from the Department of Justice stated that several of the documents taken contained information about a foreign nation’s military and nuclear capabilities.

At a recent rally in Pennsylvania, Trump stated that FBI agents not only rummaged through former First Lady Melania Trump’s closet, but also went through 16-year-old Barron Trump’s bedroom.

It is actions like that that will keep a large swath of Republicans rooting for Donald Trump.

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