Category: 2020 Election

‘It’s a cover-up’: White House accused of hiding Mnuchin’s role in recruiting postmaster general

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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday accused the Trump White House of covering up the role Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin played in recruiting Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Republican donor with no prior experience working for the U.S. Postal Service.

In a letter to Robert Duncan, chairman of the USPS Board of Governors, Schumer wrote that as part of his investigation into DeJoy’s selection and unanimous appointment in May, his office “learned of the role Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had with the Postal Board of Governors, including through meetings with individual governors as well as phone calls with groups of governors, which has not been previously disclosed by the board.”

“This administration has repeatedly pointed to the role of [executive search firm] Russell Reynolds to defend the selection of a Republican mega-donor with no prior postal experience as postmaster general while at the same time blocking the ability of Congress to obtain briefings from the firm and concealing the role of Secretary Mnuchin and the White House in its search process,” the New York Democrat wrote. Continue reading.

Why Bannon’s Arrest Has Trump Quaking In His Golf Shoes

Thursday’s arrest of Steve Bannon, the last manager of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, carries powerful messages that strike fear in The Donald. The arrest of Bannon and three others on fraud charges grows from a pair of 2019 DCReport articles by Grant Stern.

If federal prosecutors can flip Bannon, a 66-year-old man ill-suited by health or personality to prison life, it would be devastating for Trump. Although the president enjoys immunity from federal indictment, that privilege ends the moment his presidency does.

Subpoenaed records are virtually certain to result in the indictment of Trump.

The Bannon arrest also helps explain why Trump tried, and failed, to install his own man in the federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan: Bannon’s fraud case involving a $25 million charity scam to build a wall on the Mexican border. Continue reading.

‘Are you really going to impeach me?’: How the Ukraine bombshell unfolded over 48 hours and laid bare Trump’s fixation with Biden

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Just after 8 a.m. on Tuesday, September 24, 2019, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was in her Georgetown apartment, getting ready for the day that was going to be like no other in her long career. This was the day she would formally, officially, finally announce that the House was opening the impeachment inquiry against President Trump.

The California Democrat had resisted calls for impeachment from the left flank of her party for months. As the speaker, the one making the decision, Pelosi had to keep calibrating the risks. There was a risk to doing something, and a risk to doing nothing. She didn’t want to tolerate presidential misconduct. But she also didn’t want the House, or her party, to be seen as taking away the voters’ power to decide Trump’s fate. An impeachment couldn’t be personal, she kept telling her leadership team, or about policy differences. It had to be careful, fair, and easy for the American people to understand to avoid a severe backlash in an already deeply divided nation. As much as many of Trump’s actions appalled her, she had not seen an ironclad, public-unifying offense among them.

But now she had come to believe that Trump had abused his power on a July 25 phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, in which he had suggested Ukraine open investigations that would benefit Trump personally — including one into his chief political rival, former vice president Joe Biden. Continue reading.

Former Postal Governor Tells Congress Mnuchin Politicized Postal Service

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WASHINGTON — The former vice chairman of the U.S. Postal Service’s board of governors accused Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Thursday of trying to engineer a hostile takeover of the service, telling lawmakers that Mr. Mnuchin required members of the independent board to “kiss the ring” before they were confirmed and issued demands that agency officials believed were “illegal.”

In scathing testimony delivered before lawmakers in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, David C. Williams, a former Postal Service inspector general who resigned as vice chairman in protest in April, said the Trump administration appeared to want to turn the agency into a “political tool.” The Treasury Department, he said, was maneuvering to use its lending authority to strong-arm the agency to adopt policies that would be “ruinous,” like raising prices and cutting back crucial services.

“If this is the beginning of what the president promised, it’s the end of the Postal Service,” Mr. Williams said in his first public comments since his resignation. Continue reading.

Biden speaks from a place Trump doesn’t know — the heart

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President Trump has tried every dirty trick in the book — and a few new ones — to cast doubts about the workings of Joe Biden’s brain. But Trump has been focusing on entirely the wrong organ. Biden’s appeal is from the heart.

The Democratic presidential nominee, in the most crucial speech of his long career in public service, had no problem clearing the low bar Trump had set. The evening began with a clip of Biden quoting Kierkegaard and ended with him quoting the Irish poet Seamus Heaney.

But the power of Biden’s acceptance speech — and the power of his candidacy — was in its basic, honest simplicity. The rhetoric wasn’t soaring. The delivery was workmanlike (he botched an Ella Baker quote in his opening line). But it was warm and decent, a soothing, fireside chat for this pandemic era, as we battle twin crises of disease and economic collapse and we only see each other disembodied in boxes on a screen. Biden spoke not to his political base but to those who have lost loved ones to the virus. Continue reading.

The Republican Embrace of QAnon Goes Far Beyond Trump

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As the president all but endorses the internet-driven conspiracy theory, it is shifting from the fringes of the internet to become an offline political movement.

Late last month, as the Texas Republican Party was shifting into campaign mode, it unveiled a new slogan, lifting a rallying cry straight from a once-unthinkable source: the internet-driven conspiracy theory known as QAnon.

The new catchphrase, “We Are the Storm,” is an unsubtle cue to a group that the F.B.I. has labeled a potential domestic terrorist threat. It is instantly recognizable among QAnon adherents, signaling what they claim is a coming conflagration between President Trump and what they allege, falsely, is a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophile Democrats who seek to dominate America and the world.

The slogan can be found all over social media posts by QAnon followers, and now, too, in emails from the Texas Republican Party and on the T-shirts, hats and sweatshirts that it sells. It has even worked its way into the party’s text message system — a recent email from the party urged readers to “Text STORM2020” for updates. Continue reading.

Biden vows to lead America out of ‘season of darkness’

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Former Vice President Joe Biden said he’d lead the country out of what he called a “season of darkness” and vowed to “draw on the best” of what America has to offer as he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination on Thursday night, setting up a general election battle with President Trump in November.

In his speech, Biden blasted Trump as a president who has sowed chaos and division. He cast himself as the candidate who would unite Republicans and Democrats, while leading the country out of the COVID-19 pandemic, economic downturn and racial turmoil.

“The current president has cloaked American anger for far too long. Too much anger, too much division. Here and now, I give you my word – if you entrust me with the presidency, I’ll draw on the best of us, not the worst,” Biden said. “I’ll draw on the light, not the darkness. It’s time for us, for we the people to come together. And make no mistake, we can and will overcome this season of darkness in America. We’ll choose hope over fear, facts over fiction, fairness over privilege.” Continue reading.

Postmaster general eyes aggressive changes at Postal Service after election

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Louis DeJoy is said to be looking at policies that could lead to slower delivery in parts of the country — and higher prices

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has mapped out far more sweeping changes to the U.S. Postal Service than previously disclosed, considering actions that could lead to slower mail delivery in parts of the country and higher prices for some mail services, according to several people familiar with the plans.

The plans under consideration, described by four people familiar with Postal Service discussions, would come after the election and touch on all corners of the agency’s work. They include raising package rates, particularly when delivering the last mile on behalf of big retailers; setting higher prices for service in Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico; curbing discounts for nonprofits; requiring election ballots to use first-class postage; and leasing space in Postal Service facilities to other government agencies and companies.

DeJoy, a former logistics executive and ally of President Trump, envisions aggressive cost-cutting maneuvers that he and other conservatives say are necessary to strengthen the agency’s financial footing. But they also would represent the biggest reshaping of the agency in generations and would likely draw severe criticism from people and organizations that rely on the mail service for timely delivery, particularly in less populated regions of the country. Continue reading.

A judge asked Trump to prove claims about mail-in votes and fraud — it didn’t go well

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President Donald Trump has been obsessed with the idea that mail-in voting encourages voter fraud, and his campaign has filed lawsuits against Pennsylvania and other states because of their plans to encourage voters to use mail-in ballots in November’s election. Journalist Richard Salame, in The Intercept, reports that in response to the Pennsylvania lawsuit, Trump’s campaign was asked to show proof that voting by mail encourages voter fraud — and it was unable to.

Salame notes that Trump’s campaign is “suing Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar and each of the state’s county election boards to prevent election administrators from providing secure drop boxes for mail-in ballot returns.” Two of the groups that support voting by mail in Pennsylvania, Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future and the Sierra Club, asked the Trump campaign to demonstrate that there is a connection between mail-in voting and voter fraud — and Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan granted their motion, asking the campaign to “produce such evidence in their possession, and if they have none, state as much.”

The Trump campaign produced a 524-page document in response to Ranjan’s request, and The Intercept obtained a copy. According to Salame, the document “contains a few scant examples of election fraud” — but none of them actually involve mail-in ballots. Continue reading.

Trump proposed trading ‘poor’ Puerto Ricans for Greenland after Hurricane Maria devastation: Ex-DHS official

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A former Homeland Security official said this week that in addition to suggesting the U.S. sell Puerto Rico as the island territory was struggling to recover after Hurricane Maria, President Donald Trump proposed “trading” the territory for another island he had previously expressed interest in—Greenland.

Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff to former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen from 2017 to 2019, told MSNBC that the president derided Puerto Rico as “dirty” and the people living there as “poor” a year after the hurricane devastated the island.

“The president’s talked before about wanting to purchase Greenland, but one time before we went down, he told us not only did he want to purchase Greenland, he actually said he wanted to see if we could sell Puerto Rico. Could we swap Puerto Rico for Greenland,” Taylor, who has endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 election, told MSNBC Wednesday. “Because in his words Puerto Rico was dirty and the people were poor.” Continue reading.