Category: TrumpAdministration

Another book again confirms that Trump wanted the military to ‘just shoot’ BLM protesters

Posted on by Hunter

In news we already knew but now know more, er, knowingly, a new book by ex-Trump secretary of defense Mark Esper confirms that yes, Donald Trump really did want to "just shoot" Black Lives Matter protesters rallying near the White House during the 2020 protests. Specifically, Trump said he wanted the U.S. military to "beat the fuck" out of the protesters, and told Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Mark Milley and other top administration officials to "just shoot them" on several occasions. When Milley and then-attorney general Bill Barr resisted due to the blazing illegality of such an order and, let's assume, not wanting to spend the rest of their lives in prison on this bozo's behalf, Trump modified his proposal to "just shoot them in the legs or something?"

We knew these incidents had taken place because a previous book profiting off the slow death of democracy described them last year; Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender's 2021 book revealed them in similar detail, including Trump's demands to use military force, "beat the fuck" out of protesters, and "shoot them in the leg" or "maybe the foot."

That earlier book also gave us the heartwarming scene in which a fed-up Gen. Milley, tired of White House white nationalist Stephen Miller egging Trump on with claims that parts of the United States were now a "war zone" due to the protests, "spun around in his seat" and told Miller to "shut the fuck up, Stephen." There is no military medal awarded to generals who personally tell Stephen Miller to "shut the fuck up," but there ought to be. We're all perhaps a bit disappointed Milley didn't shoot Miller in the leg or "maybe the foot," but there you go. That's military discipline for you.

What Mark Esper's new book brings to the scene is confirmation by another participant that yes, all of this really did take place and they took place just as previous accounts said. Donald Trump wanted to use the military, and he specifically wanted to use the military to kill protesters or, after meeting resistance from the rest of his staff, shoot them "in the legs" so that they could no longer march against his self-imagined greatness. That Black Lives Matter protesters might have had a legitimate point to make never crossed his mind; that he, as president, was not allowed to simply murder protesters outright was something he struggled to understand even as the top officials who would have to order such murders tried to explain it to him.

Listen to Markos and Kerry Eleveld talk Ukraine and speak with Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler on how hitting back at Republicans helps win elections on Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast

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Truly, the worst president ever. Possibly the worst human being ever, though that's a value judgment—and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is making his own bid for both positions, so Trump may last as America's Worst President for no longer than George W. Bush did before him.

The purpose of Esper's book is self-redemption. Esper was Trump's secretary of defense during a time, post-impeachment, when Trump was widely purging the U.S. government of anyone thought to be disloyal, felt newly emboldened after Senate Republicans immunized him from the consequences of a Watergate-plus sized campaign of political corruption, and was increasingly deemed by many to be dangerously unstable—as he would go on to prove at numerous points during the 2020 campaign and post-election, culminating in an attempted coup. Esper was one of Trump's enforcers, as Trump attempted to do to the military what he was doing everywhere else, only to be replaced after Trump's November election loss with the more-toadying Christopher Miller.

Whatever career Mark Esper once had before Trump appeared on scene is now well and truly gone; he will remembered now alongside William Barr and other Republicans who protected Trump through years of corrupt, self-serving, often-delusional, nation-harming behaviors only to write up books afterwards mumbling that they were Actually against all of the outright evil things all along, or were against at least some vanishingly small number of them, and ought to still be served in public restaurants and invited to Washington parties.

If a sitting president of the United States repeatedly—no, incessantly—asks his staff to do criminal things, anything from the political extortion of an at-war government to further a propaganda effort to requesting that Americans protesting against him simply be murdered, refusing to do the murder part is not bold. Trump's vast and wide-ranging ignorance made him an incompetent leader during every national crisis he was faced with. He could not grasp security briefings, forcing staff to include frequent mentions of him to at least keep him reading; he was so obsessed with self-promotion that he altered government hurricane maps and promoted the altered forecasts rather than admitting to a piffling Twitter mistake; his prescriptions for dealing with pandemic continuously did active harm to the nation, even as his lack of focus made more organized and sensible responses impossible.

All of this was a pattern and was being warned of, incessantly, both long before and during every winter day leading up to a Trump-led attempted coup. His own staff knew of his history of demanding illegal or corrupt actions—and, after his election loss, much of his stalwart-Republican staff helped him take those actions. Some, like chief of staff Mark Meadows, may have played a more pivotal role in attempting to nullify the election than the buffoonish Trump could himself even manage.

You do not get to say, "I worked for the man who soon afterward attempted to end United States democracy," and append "but was of course against the coup part," unless you can provide even a teaspoon of evidence of being "against" the government purges, political purges, manufacturing of hoaxes, flagrant daily lying, contempt for the American public, white nationalism, autocratic demands, and ingrained fascist beliefs that had been laying the groundwork for that outcome through Trump's whole long, crooked descent. There's now an entire cottage industry of hard-right Republican officials who helped Trump do extraordinarily bad and damaging things, but who are propping themselves up now on the pretense that, well, at least they did not support murdering protesters outright, or at least they did not support attempts to capture or murder Trump-opposed House and Senate leaders, or at least they did not help the rest of Trump's staff in schemes to declare that the vice president could scrub out the votes of whatever Americans he wanted to, in order to arrive at whatever election outcome the current leaders of government wished to announce.

You especially cannot respond to an attempt to overthrow democracy itself by demanding that Americans move on while your party allies write new election laws to get around the flaws of the first coup attempt and make a second one easier to muster. You don't get to say, "I am still a Republican," without adding, "even though the party both plotted an election-nullifying coup and is continuing to protect its plotters."

Take your books and shove them. Do something worthy of redemption before demanding it. William Barr, Mark Esper, the blizzard of propagandist-to-news-"analyst" career slides—Americans have every right to treat all of these people with contempt for their parts in normalizing horrific acts, bragging that they prevented even more horrific acts, and demanding the nation move on without any doled-out consequence or comeuppance. We've got library book bans now. We've got a party that has convinced the majority of American voters that our elections are illegitimate—based on a barrage of internet hoaxes and nothing more. White nationalism is now a party plank, such that even mentions of racism in American history are now fodder for public retaliation.

Stuff your books. Abandon your party or do your part to redeem it—or shut the fuck up, Stephen. Nobody has time to give you the attention you seek.

Rosen testifies behind closed doors on Trump administration coup attempt at Justice Department

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

The full scope of the Trump administration's efforts to nullify an American presidential election is just beginning to come into view. Trump and his top allies engaged in an orchestrated, three-pronged plan to use federal officials to cast illegitimate doubts on the integrity of the election, explicitly pressure state officials to "find" votes or otherwise alter vote totals, and counter the official congressional acknowledgement of the election's results with an organized mob assembled specifically to "march" to the Capitol and intimidate the lawmakers carrying out that constitutionally mandated process. It was an attempted coup by Trump and his deputies, one that Trump himself continued to press even after that coup had exploded into violence.

The New York Times is now reporting that Trump's acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, gave closed-door testimony to the Senate Judiciary on Saturday. The subject of the testimony was the interactions between Rosen and Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark as Clark attempted, on Trump's behalf, to press the Justice Department into issuing false claims suggesting that they were investigating election "fraud" of the sort that Trump's propagandists were claiming as the reason for Trump's loss. It was untrue, and the top two Justice officials rejected Clark's repeated proposals.

Transparently, it was an attempt by Clark and other Trump allies to throw the nation into chaos by claiming the election was so flawed that its results must be overturned—a claim which Trump's hard-right team believed would force the assembling Congress to erase the election's counted votes and, somehow, reinstall Trump as quasilegal national leader.

All three elements of the plan came perilously close to succeeding. All three were thwarted only because individuals remained in place who believed the plan to be insanity, sedition, or both. It is the efforts by Trump-aligned officials within the federal government, using the tools granted to them by government, that elevate the events culminating in violence on January 6 from insurrection to attempted coup.

In a pivotal decision, Rosen rejected Clark's attempt, leading to yet another internal administration crisis as Trump mulled whether to fire him and install Clark in his position so that the plan could be carried out.

In a Sunday CNN appearance, Senate Judiciary Committee member Sen. Dick Durbin said Rosen had described Trump as being directly involved in Clark's actions. "It was real, very real, and it was very specific."

Significantly, the Times reports that Rosen scheduled his testimony "quickly" so as to allow them to go forward "before any players could ask the courts to block the proceedings." That may be a self-serving interpretation of events. As emptywheel notes, Clark's efforts to overturn the election and Trump's aborted move to fire Rosen and install Clark as acting attorney general was the subject of news reporting in January, even before Trump's second impeachment trial took place. The Senate Judiciary began their requests for documents pertaining to the plan near-immediately, and have been battling the Department of Justice for testimony ever since.

A half-year delay in gaining testimony about a "very real" and "very specific" attempt to overthrow the duly elected next administration by coup does not make it sound like anyone involved is attempting to provide evidence "quickly."

Most significantly of all, perhaps, is that the United States Senate could have investigated the Trump team's plot during the impeachment trial meant to gather evidence and come to judgment on Trump's behavior. For the second time, it did not do so. It avoided examining the evidence, rushing through the trial to again get to the inevitable close of having nearly all Republican lawmakers back Trump's actions, even after they had resulted in violence.

The job now falls to the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection: The moves Clark, Meadows, and other Trump officials made to falsely discredit the election results were intended to provide the backing by which willing insurrectionists could justify their demands that the Constitution be tossed aside for the sake of Trump's reinstallation. The job also falls to federal investigators who now need to examine—swiftly—the criminality of the schemes.

It was not, however, a "Trump" coup. Donald Trump, a known liar and semi-delusional blowhard, had few government powers that would allow him to singlehandedly erase state election counts or make official his declarations that he had lost, after a disastrous single term, only through "fraud" concocted against him. It required the cooperation of top Republican allies, of Republican Party officials, of lawmakers, and others that would press the false claims and work both within and outside of government to give them false legitimacy. It was a Republican coup, an act of sedition backed with specific acts from Mark Meadows, from Jeffrey Clark, from senators such as Josh Hawley, from state Republican officials who eagerly seized on the conspiracy claims specifically so that they could be used to overturn elections they had lost, and from everyday Republican supporters who decided that the zero-evidence nationalist propaganda they were swallowing up was justification enough to storm the U.S. Capitol by force in an overt attempt to erase a democratic election.

Here we sit, waiting with bated breath as evidence dribbles out describing the full scope of what the entire world saw in realtime, from last November to January: top Republican officials spreading knowingly false, propagandistic claims intended to undermine the integrity of our democratic elections so as to justify simply changing that election's results and declaring themselves the victors. It was a fascist act. It continues in the states, as state Republican lawmakers use the same brazenly false claims peddled by Clark to impose new hurdles to voting meant to keep at least some fraction of the Americans who voted against the party last time from being able to vote at all the next time.

A bit more urgency is required, here.

With a three-pronged plan, Trump’s White House tried to topple our democracy

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

America has not yet internalized what the last Republican administration did, during the last months of Donald Trump's term of office. The country seems rather insistent on not letting the full scope of it drift into their heads, and every new detail seems to be presented with enough context stripped out to keep it vague.

The new release of Justice Department notes documenting conversations between Trump and his acting attorney general put things in very plain terms. From late December to the violent culmination of events on January 6, the Trump White House engaged in a multi-pronged effort to topple the United States government.

It was intentional. It was supported by top White House aides. It had the explicit goal of nullifying a U.S. presidential election so that the Trump White House could, acting in plain defiance of the rules set out in the Constitution, maintain power. That Trump and his top allies had spent the previous twelve months combing through government to remove those seen as insufficiently "loyal" to the White House's increasingly law-bending edicts may or may not have been precursor, but there's not even a little question about what happened in the last days of December and early days of January.

According to notes taken by deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue, Trump asked acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen to "just say that the election was corrupt," then "leave the rest" to the White House and to Republicans in Congress. (Specifically mentioned by Trump in that call was, among others, Rep. Jim Jordan, who is now scurrying to evade questions about his communications with Trump on the day of the January 6 insurrection.) It was not once or twice: the Trump White House is said to have contacted Rosen and other officials "nearly every day" to pressure the agency to publicly cast doubts on the election.

Trump and others within the White House, including chief of staff Mark Meadows, also began calling Republican election officials in at least Arizona and Georgia to similarly pressure them to alter their vote totals in Trump's favor.

In conjunction with both those efforts, Trump was encouraging members of his base to show up for a "march" on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, scheduled to exactly coincide with the formal congressional acknowledgement of the electoral totals. Trump and his allies sought to assemble as large a crowd as possible, for the specifically cited purpose of pressuring the assembled Congress to overturn the election's outcome.

When the crowd turned violent, Trump did nothing. When Republican lawmakers called him personally to ask him for aid, he belittled and refused them.

The justification for each act was a propaganda campaign by Republican allies that fraudulently claimed non-Republicans had "stolen" the election from the party. Many of those claims were invented out of conspiratorial nothing (from Italian satellite links to ballots with "bamboo" in the paper); others were spiraled out from panicked claims about a somebody who saw a somebody with a something. Each of the propaganda claims were so brazenly false that courtroom judges drop-kicked them out out of evidence near-immediately.

There is nothing that needs teasing out, here. The Trump White House plan was in full view. Donald Trump and his top allies engaged in a multi-pronged, extended, pre-plotted campaign to overthrow the next constitutionally appointed U.S. presidency by falsely claiming the election was invalid; by pressuring the Department of Justice to issue statements further casting doubt on the election's integrity; by calling key election officials and asking them to change reported vote totals on Trump's behalf; by using conspiratorial claims to gather a mob of enraged would-be "patriots" convinced that direct action was needed to "stop the steal" from happening; by asking that crowd to march the Capitol; by rebuffing efforts, during the mob's attack, to call off the now-violent mob.

It was an act of plain sedition, pre-planned and premeditated and orchestrated from inside Trump's own inner circle. It was backed by a majority of House Republicans, multiple of which were in communication with Trump and dozens of whom were allied with the effort to falsely dispute the election's results.

Donald Trump and his top aides engaged in a multipart plan to overthrow the United States government so as to retain power. Put that in your head and let it stew there, because there's simply no denying that it's true.

The new notes from the Department of Justice represent, by themselves, an act of official corruption easily besting Nixon's worst. Asking the Department of Justice to falsely cast doubts on the integrity of a U.S. election that booted you from power is by itself an act that would demand impeachment, if Senate Republicans were not themselves so corrupt as to have allied with the idea. Calling a Georgia election official to ask that official to "find" new votes is a demand that should yet land Trump in prison for a decade or longer. Pointedly ignoring lawmakers asking for assistance as his enraged allies broke through windows and sought out his enemies is the stuff of terrorism, not mere corruption.

It is the three-pronged plan that elevates Trump and his top Republican allies from merely corrupt to outright seditionists. It was a plan intended to erase a U.S. presidential election. It sought out allies in the Department of Justice who would publicly discredit the election, allies in state governments who would change the vote totals, and a public mob that would disrupt the vote count and intimidate public officials into approving a Trump return to power.

It was all one plan, not three. Discredit the election using false claims; use the same false claims to stoke a public anger deep enough to justify tossing out the rule of law, in the name of restoring "order."

It was an attempted fascist takeover, and many of its top orchestrators are still featured prominently on the Sunday news shows. Parts of it came very close to succeeding; had different Republican officials been in different offices, it seems quite possible now that Trump's White House could have found state or county allies willing to alter votes in the manner they were requested. Parts of it were seemingly asinine, inventions of deranged and desperate minds; one has a hard time believing that a congressional declaration that Trump was "somehow" still president would be treated as legitimate by the press, the military, or the public at large, if the declaration had come from lawmakers being literally held hostage by a mob demanding they do so.

It was still an attempt, though. Trump and others within the White House engaged in weeks of effort in attempts to enlist both accomplices within government and a paramilitary force outside it. Trump is a traitor to his country. Any outcome that does not see him rotting in prison for his acts will itself be an affront to our would-be democracy.

Gordon Sondland sues government, Mike Pompeo for impeachment-related legal fees

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

Remember when it was conclusively proven that Donald Trump did a crime? No, not that one, the other one. No, between those two. We're talking about the confirmation, by multiple witnesses called before the House to testify on presidential acts, that Donald Trump slow-walked both military and diplomatic aid to Ukraine, which was fighting off a Russia-backed insurrection after Russian troops invaded and proclaimed ownership of Crimea, because Donald Trump was demanding the Ukrainian government do him specific favors to aid his upcoming campaign.

In a move eerily similar to the Trump campaign's 2016 dalliances with Russian espionage and propaganda campaigns, this time it was Rudy Giuliani, not Paul Manafort, who acted as courier looking to boost the effectiveness of Russian disinformation campaigns looking to damage Trump's most-feared Democratic election opponent. Pro-Russian Ukrainians laundered anti-Biden materials through Giuliani, who broadcast even the weirdest and most ridiculous ones (Secret servers! Russia was unfairly blamed for 2016 election hacking when actually it was Democrats hacking themselves the whole time!) into Donald Trump's own incomprehensibly hollow head; Donald Trump then insisted that Ukrainian government officials announce that they were investigating these very stupid claims, lending them official credence, in exchange for Trump (1) meeting with the Ukrainian president as show of support for the nation's battle against Russian occupation and (2) agreeing to release his hold on congressionally mandated military aid that Trump and his top officials had no legal authority to block in the first place.

During House impeachment investigations, Trump ally, donor, and ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland testified through only a little flopsweat that yes, there was a "quid pro quo" demand from the White House that the Ukrainian government promote the Trump-backed anti-Biden hoax before Trump would agree to meet with the Ukrainian president—a clear abuse of governmental powers to gain something of value to Trump personally. Sondland was one of the few pro-Trump witnesses to even agree to appear before Congress; other key witnesses to the events, including William Barr and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, refused to testify or to produce subpoenaed documents.

Trump and his allies faced no repercussions, however. Senate Republicans near-unanimously refused to hear testimony or evidence in the resulting impeachment trial, because they are corrupt. Only days after those Republicans dismissed the impeachment trial against Trump, Trump fired Sondland and other witnesses who testified to his actions, beginning a large-scale purge of any government officials deemed to be unwilling to cover up future Trump corruption. It was a fascist act from a fascist administration backed, then and now, by a fascist party.

Trump once-ally Gordon Sondland is now suing both the U.S. government and Mike Pompeo. His claim? That Pompeo assured him that the U.S. State Department would cover the legal expenses he incurred in preparing for his congressional testimony, back when Pompeo (himself hiding from Congress) and other Trump allies still believed Sondland would refuse to acknowledge Trump's extortive would-be deal. When he came back from testifying, however, Pompeo demanded his immediate resignation, Trump fired him after he refused to give it, and Pompeo's State Department stiffed him, leaving him with $1.8 million in legal bills.

Or, in other words, the same thing happened to him that has happened to everyone else who ever tried to attach themselves to Trump. Who would have thunk it.

Pompeo, for his part, is scoffing at the lawsuit. Democrats have for some reason declined to enforce Pompeo's testimony now that Pompeo no longer has the whole of Trump's government stonewalling that testimony on his behalf, and Pompeo is currently preparing to jet off to Israel to attend a party honoring an Israeli intelligence official and, presumably, commit another crime or two while he has the chance. He remains of the belief that he is still a force to be reckoned with in Republican politics, despite being made to look like a chump throughout Trump's incompetent reign and despite newer-generation fascist blowhards like Ron DeSantis running circles around him when it comes to kissing Trump's ass and getting Americans pointlessly killed.

Will Sondland get his money back? Who knows. Not from Pompeo, that's for sure. We'll see whether the new Biden administration decides that a Pompeo promise ought to be honored even when Pompeo himself never intended to do so, or whether maybe all involved believe that if you staked nearly $2 million on a promise from Trump's crooked inner circle than maybe that's your problem and not ours.

Yevgeny Vindman receives Army promotion after Pentagon wipes retaliatory Trump claims from record

Posted on by Hunter

During the first of what would become two distinct Donald Trump impeachment trials, Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman became an important witness for doing what none of Trump's surrounding Republican partisans could muster: giving a full, under-oath accounting of the events surrounding Trump's linkage of congressionally mandated military aid to an at-war Ukraine to a brazenly corrupt pressuring of that government to announce an investigation of Rudy Giuliani-pushed conspiracy theories against Trump's presidential election opponent.

For that testimony, both Alexander Vindman and his brother Yevgeny, also a lieutenant colonel, faced the retaliation of the crooked White House. Alexander chose early retirement after Trump and cronies booted him from his post, forcibly escorted from the White House, and blocked him from further military promotion. Yevgeny filed a complaint charging that the White House's identical retaliations against him were spurred not just for his own cooperation with impeachment investigators but his own whistleblower reports against previous episodes of administration crookedness, a complaint that was backed by House Democrats and which is still being probed by the Pentagon's office of inspector general.

There is now at least some small amount of good news to report. Now that conservatism's least-organized organized crime family has been expelled, Army. Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman has been selected for the promotion he was previously due, and will now become a full colonel.

It wasn't necessarily going to turn out this way. Trump's team of crooks retaliated against each of the witnesses against them, in the Vindmans' cases penning new performance reviews designed to squash any military attempt to promote them. While there has yet to be any consequences for those retaliation efforts, the Vindman promotion is a signal that the Pentagon powers-that-be do indeed consider those reviews to have been retaliatory, rather than accurate. And that's a ... surprising amount of common sense from inside the military bureaucracy.

Indeed, Politico reports that Army assistant deputy chief of staff Maj. Gen. Michel Russell determined the evaluations to be "not objective," and in January those retaliatory reviews were wiped from Vindman's record.

As for brother Alex, he remains retired. In a Monday op-ed endorsing defamation lawsuits against conservative media liars, he writes that he made a mistake when he "did not respond forcefully to the threats and defamation" against him by Trump proxies, and that he "should have sued those who amplified [Trump's] campaign of defamation."

"When Fox News stars and more fringe networks like Newsmax and One America News Network make baseless and outrageous claims about “stolen elections,” “communist Democrats,” and “fascist main-stream media,” they are building on lies about individuals,” Vindman wrote. “They are galvanizing extremism on the back of defamation. Too many of those defamed individuals, including myself, have allowed extremist claims to go unanswered."

Biden’s defense secretary wipes slate clean, dismissing hundreds from Pentagon advisory boards

Posted on by Hunter

In the last months of Donald Trump's maladministration, Trump's teams shifted from their prior obsession of rooting out supposed "disloyal" government workers and devoted themselves to burrowing conservatism's most tawdry cronies into whatever parts of government they could not easily be dislodged from.

Devin Nunes ally-turned0Trump co-conspirator Michael Ellis was to be installed as top National Security Agency attorney—presumably as reward for his role in hiding evidence during Trump's previous impeachment scandal, and previous to that his efforts, with Nunes, to discredit federal investigations into the Trump campaign's 2016 ties to Russian election hacks. Ellis was immediately put on administrative leave by President Joe Biden while the new administration probes the bizarre circumstances of his installation, including a last-minute order by then-acting defense secretary Christopher Miller ordering officials to immediately seat him in the very last days before Trump's departure.

Trump allies were especially brazen in installing hyperpartisan loyalists into government-run media, with a Steve Bannon ally and like-minded extremists running roughshod over rules intended to bar political interference with Voice of America and other outlets, then rescinding the rules outright. Biden immediately demanded the resignation of head crony Michael Pack.

It’s Trump's installation of loyalists to Defense Department advisory boards, again with the help of the inexplicably aggressive Miller, that may have been the most craven of all. Among those tapped to advise the Pentagon, a position that of necessity may at points involve discussions of classified material, were fringe Trump campaign figures Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie. The notion of giving either of them access to national security secrets, much less the notion that both of them together had two beans’ worth of expertise on how the Pentagon should conduct its affairs, is hard to defend.

On Monday, newly installed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made the executive decision that he was not going to waste the time or capital required to extract those and others of Trump's numerous last-minute burrowers from their new positions of would-be power. Instead, reports The Wall Street Journal, he swiftly announced the dismissal of all members of multiple Pentagon advisory boards, removing hundreds of members in a clean sweep. Austin simultaneously ordered a review of dozens of boards in coming months to determine which "provides appropriate value," suggesting that some boards may not be coming back.

The Journal quotes a defense official to report that Austin believed "this was the most fair, most equitable way" to resolve matters after the last administration’s acts. It's also by far the speediest, allowing Pentagon officials to vet would-be new board members without having to forcibly extract Trump's worst and most cynically unqualified hires from existing boards.

This is a needed move. There's no way around it. In the weeks leading up to a violent insurrection by Trump supporters, then-acting defense secretary Miller in particular made numerous inexplicable decisions to Trump's benefit, from committing himself to Trump's burrowing of clearly unqualified allies into national security positions to his specific orders barring the National Guard from responding to a violent attack on the Capitol. His refusal to quickly provide assistance even as lawmakers had to flee an assassination-minded mob was so unfathomably incompetent as to border on tacit support for the coup.

Each of the Trump administration's defense and national security actions in the last weeks of their tenure must be examined, investigated, and likely undone. This is now not a mere issue of partisanship, but a national security threat.

Cartoon: ‘EZ-Leave!’ To Show You Care

Posted on by Mark Fiore

Vimeo Video

Now that President Trump has become the first president in the history of the United States to be impeached twice, more of his Republican allies will no doubt slink away. Resignations have already been piling up from the cabinet level on down since Trump incited a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol building.

Betsy DeVos, Elaine Chao and Mick Mulvaney, among others, have just had it up to here with this president. Why, some switch must have flipped and made Trump a madman, right? (Mulvaney even said that today’s Trump is not the one he knew eight months ago.)

I’m happy complicit Republicans are finally trying to un-complicit themselves, I just wish they had found their spines when Trump tried to get Ukraine’s president to dig up dirt on Joe Biden or when the administration separated thousands of children from their families or right after the “both sides” comment about Charlottesville or . . .

Enjoy the cartoon, cross your fingers for an impeachment conviction and visit me over on my Patreon pages if you can help support my work — and get behind-the-scenes goodies for yourself!

Biden calls out Trump appointees for refusing to brief transition in ‘key national security areas’

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

We're on the cusp of January here, and President-elect Joe Biden is still being forced to call out the Trump-run federal government for refusing to provide national security briefings to his team. The Office of Management and Budget and the Defense Department, specifically, are refusing to provide briefings in "key national security areas."

The delays have been going on since before Christmas, and now Biden's calling it "nothing short" of "irresponsibility." He's also making sure to pin the blame squarely on "political leadership" while still praising the cooperation of career officials.

If Donald Trump, who is at this point in the throes of full-on delusion over his election loss, refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the next president, that is his own problem. For Trump appointees to take action to willfully block the next president from obtaining information about the nation’s current national security concerns, however, yet again crosses over into national betrayal. It is unquestionable that the delay in transferring national security information may impede the next administration's ability to respond to crisis. For Defense Department hacks, in particular, to bury national security needs under those of Trump's own ego is unforgivable.

The Washington Post reports that after Defense Department claims that the Biden team had agreed to put off all transition meetings until after the holidays, which the Biden team calls a lie and which when dealing with national security concerns seems like an implausible stance to begin with, there have been no transition meetings since Dec.18.

At this point merely firing these authoritarian-minded little pissants seems insufficient. Even if Donald Trump cannot muster an ounce of integrity or pretended-at leadership, that does not excuse the staff that have helped him corrupt our government on his own behalf.

It is most likely that these moves are mere petty tweaking from Trump political hires who do not particularly care if their moves do or don’t harm national security. That has been the way of things since long before impeachment, and has been an ironclad rule ever since.

But it is also possible that the resistance from the Defense Department, in particular, is an intentional effort to hide possible Trump-ordered actions in his last days in office. We are dealing with a man who at this point is deep in the throes of rage and would-be sabotage. It would not be implausible for Trump to order an attack on Iran with the explicit intent to foment a military conflict with the nation in the first days of Biden's presidency. It would not be implausible for Trump's loyalist hacks—remember, he has in recent months cleaned out Pentagon leadership and elevated sycophants, part of yet another purge that saw even the ultra-reliable toady William Barr expelled for insufficient corruption—to be hiding any number of other last-minute schemes from the incoming administration.

Who knows. Thanks to a seemingly unending list of Republican go-alongs, we may be in for at least one more corrupt and nation-betraying surprise before Trump finally flees.

Mike Pompeo is now brazenly campaigning for Trump using his federal post

Posted on by Hunter

Prior to ex-House Republican Mike Pompeo becoming Trump's secretary of state, it was generally understood that U.S. secretaries of state were not allowed to use the tools of their office for rank partisan politicking. Using government resources to campaign is illegal; turning the top diplomatic job in the country into a tool of partisanship damages U.S. credibility abroad by signaling, to world counterparts, that the U.S. diplomat is In This For Themselves.

All of that is gone now because Donald Trump simply chose to ignore those constraints, and Republicans—with the singular exception of one Mitt Romney, exactly once—wholeheartedly adopted the same merging of party and state as the new way things are done. This was helped along immensely by Trump's surrounding of himself with hard-right ex-House Republicans contemptuous of the rules from the outset. Mike Pompeo is a poster child for this. He continues to assist Trump in the cover-up of a criminal Ukrainian extortion scheme—one timed to allow Russian incursions into that country to proceed and be solidified while much needed U.S. aid was used to pressure for Trump reelection favors. He continues to abet Trump's incompetent dismantling of U.S. foreign policy infrastructure.

And, of course, Pompeo is using his State Department role to campaign aggressively for Trump and Republicans throughout the country. The premise is that key Trump-supporting demographics and swing states just happen to need conservative foreign policy priorities explained to them by, literally, the top U.S. diplomat—one who admittedly has little else to do since all such policy decisions have been stripped from him and his government agency in favor of the new policy, Whatever Trump Last Said. The reality is that Pompeo is touring the country giving campaign speeches to, as the AP reports, a white evangelical church in Plano, Texas; the hard-right Value Voters Summit; and other appearances in Wisconsin, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, and of course his home state of Kansas. Pompeo has famously been eyeing higher office himself—a plan that briefly looked scuttled when Pompeo was implicated in impeachable crimes, but one Pompeo appears to be inching back to with hopes that voters no longer remember or resent him for that now that the Trump administration has delivered at least a half-dozen other scandals and death-dealing clusterfucks for them to chew on instead.

The important thing to remember here is that Pompeo is crooked. He is crooked in the William Barr way, and fairly precisely: He has been caught directly assisting in Trump's impeached-for acts; he has been caught in a campaign to cover up those acts and his involvement for Trump's benefit and his own; he has done each of these things in service of elevating Republican power regardless of legality or institutional norms; and he makes no particular effort to hide the use of his office as explicitly partisan, to be used for shoring up allies and punishing enemies.

While Barr pressures his underlings into producing documents meant to portray Trump's detractors and investigators as the "true" criminals of Russian election hacking while undermining further investigations into Trump and all allies, Pompeo weaves through the country on a heavy campaign schedule to tell conservative audiences that they should "go to the polling place and express your preference" for his hard-right claims and declarations, as AP quoted him telling his Texas audience.

Without dwelling on it: Again, Mike Pompeo using his government perch to address the Republican National Convention—from Israel, no less—was such a grotesque insult to supposed diplomatic nonpartisanship that it would have likely ended with Pompeo's removal from his post during any of the last half-century's worth of presidencies. Republican lawmakers, however, are embracing Pompeo's acts as they are Trump's, and Barr's. There is no Republican caucus demanding Trump adhere to the rule of law, or the Hatch Act, or basic expected decencies.

The whole point of immunizing Trump during impeachment was to enable further corruption. It was the expected outcome. It clearly worked, as Trump's rapid gutting of oversight offices and inspectors showed. We are now at a point where Trump and Barr are openly crafting plans to eliminate votes if the November elections do not go his way, and continue eliminating votes for as long as it takes until the Republican Party can claim a crooked victory.

The reasons are not just to retain power, though; Trump's team and Trump's allies need a victory for more personal reasons. There has been a mountain of criminal acts, cover-ups, ethical violations, and rank corruption from Barr, from Pompeo, from Trump himself, and other Trump cabinet members past and present. The moment they lose power, there is a danger that the remaining shards of true, neutral law enforcement will come for them—and those ex-officials will no longer have means to block those investigations.

Every investigation currently being blocked and corrupted can only be blocked or corrupted so long as the corrupters remain in power. Republicans like Pompeo, still identified as having played a role in international extortion whether his Republican Senate allies are supportive or are not, has no time to worry about laws or norms as he scurries around the country to protect himself from the consequences of his own corruption.

House Democrats summon Trump Postmaster General to explain sabotages, may return from recess early

Posted on by Hunter

The sudden collapse of the United States Postal Service's ability to do their core job—deliver mail—is now so widespread a problem as to be stoking widespread public outrage. This may finally result in substantive congressional action—sort of. Perhaps.

House Democrats are now asking (but not subpoenaing) Trump Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to appear before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on August 24th to explain his actions. DeJoy, who remains heavily invested in for-profit competitors to the USPS even as he guts federal mail delivery capabilities, was previously scheduled to appear on September 17; moving his appearance up by several weeks is an indication that Congress no longer thinks waiting until mid-September is defendable. Democrats ask that DeJoy confirm his plan to appear by tomorrow; DeJoy has also been asked to deliver requested documents by Friday, August 21.

The House is putting off the "urgent" hearing until August 24 "to give Committee Members adequate notice to prepare for your testimony" but also "to avoid conflicting with the Republican convention" beginning later that evening." Which is nice, given that DeJoy is a Republican megadonor who no doubt needs to (virtually) mingle at the now-virtual gathering.

While House Democrats' non-subpoena-based request for DeJoy's testimony gives mixed signals as to just how "urgent" Congress believes the intentional pandemic sabotage of the USPS truly is, there are other signs Congress may begin to move more rapidly. CNN reports that House Democrats are "seriously" considering calling the House back into session "as early as" this week to take actions to protect post offices. "Members are getting heavily criticized in their districts during this recess period for not coming back and trying to do something," notes CNN.

It is not clear what remedies may be plausibly available to the House. The Republican-held Senate is likely to continue to back Trump's sabotages of the USPS, moves he has explicitly said are meant to harm mail-in voting efforts, for the same reason the Senate refused to examine impeachment charges against Trump for using federal funds to extort a foreign nation into providing election help: to assist their own re-elections.

But that's becoming a more and more dangerous move to make. The United States Postal Service is one of the government services Americans most interact with, and the sabotage is creating nationwide problems that Americans are now witnessing in large numbers. Urgently needed medication taking weeks to arrive; "overnight" deliveries of live animals being delayed by over a week; checks, bills, and packages that once took mere days to ship now delayed for a month, or longer; it is untenable for both businesses and individuals. And people are getting furious.

Republican estimations that restricting vote-by-mail will prevent more Americans from casting ballots than are spurred in anger to vote against Republican incumbents come hell or high water or pandemic—it is certainly an all-or-nothing play.

Democrats are also requesting Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, currently engaged in an intentional effort to pipeline Russian election disinformation to benefit Trump, to summon DeJoy to testify about USPS sabotage to his own controlling Senate committee. Johnson, however, is a traitor to this nation, and is therefore certain to refuse.