Tag: Trump abuse of the U.S. Constitution

Trump Justice Dept. effort to learn source of leaks for Post stories came in Barr’s final days as AG, court documents show

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Newly unsealed court documents show the Trump Justice Department sought a court order for the communications records of three Washington Post reporters in the final days of William P. Barr’s tenure as attorney general in 2020, as prosecutors sought to identify sources for three articles written in 2017.

The papers also reveal the service provider that was the recipient of the secret court order: Proofpoint Corporation, a firm that supplies data security services. Using Proofpoint as a means of trying to get the reporters’ email records suggests prosecutors were thinking creatively about where they might be able to find reporters’ data, beyond just standard email providers like Google or Microsoft. Representatives for Proofpoint did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In addition, the documents indicate the extent to which federal investigators strongly suspected the disclosures of classified information were coming from Congress. Continue reading.

CNN reporter targeted by Trump DOJ breaks her silence — and says she wants answers

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CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr on Monday broke her silence about revelations that the United States Department of Justice under former President Donald Trump issued sweeping subpoenas for her phone records.

While talking with hosts Briana Keilar and John Berman, Starr said she was “dumbfounded” by the broad scope of the subpoena issued for her records.

“We have no idea why the Justice Department snuck into my life,” she said. “They went out, in secret court proceedings last year, they went after some 30,000 of my emails and phone records, and not just my work email, my work phone, they went after my personal accounts, my personal email, and my personal phone… they wanted all of it. And I was not allowed to know about it.” Continue reading.

Supreme Court dismisses emoluments lawsuits against Trump as moot

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The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a pair of emoluments lawsuits against former President Trump, ruling that the cases are moot now that he has left office.

The two lawsuits, filed by the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the attorneys general for Washington, D.C., and Maryland, were part of a novel legal effort that alleged Trump violated the Constitution’s emoluments clauses by continuing to own his business empire while in office.

Before Trump came into office, the courts had never considered the question of what the foreign and domestic emoluments clauses prohibited, as few presidents had sought to test their boundaries. But Trump held office while also retaining private business interests that were unprecedented in modern times. Continue reading.

Top DHS officials Wolf and Cuccinelli are not legally eligible to serve in their current roles, GAO finds

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The top two officials at the Department of Homeland Security are serving unlawfully in their roles, the Government Accountability Office said Friday, dealing a rebuke to President Trump’s affinity for filling senior executive roles in his administration with “acting” leaders who lack Senate confirmation.

The GAO, an independent watchdog agency that reports to Congress, said Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy, are serving in an “invalid order of succession” under the Vacancies Reform Act.

Democrats in Congress called on the two men to resign, but DHS officials rejected the findings as “baseless.” Continue reading.

The twists and turns in Trump’s executive order on immigrants and the census

Washington Post logo“Although the Constitution requires the ‘persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed,’ to be enumerated in the census, that requirement has never been understood to include in the apportionment base every individual physically present within a State’s boundaries at the time of the census. Instead, the term ‘persons in each State’ has been interpreted to mean that only the ‘inhabitants’ of each State should be included.”

— President Trump, in a memorandum for Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on congressional apportionment, July 21, 2020

This artfully crafted statement serves as the basis for Trump’s executive order to remove millions of undocumented immigrants from the population data Congress uses to apportion House seats among the states.

But it gives a warped view of history to justify an enormous shift in political power. If carried out, the president’s order is likely to reduce seats in Congress for mostly Democratic states.

The Facts

The Constitution requires a nationwide population count every 10 years. Originally, that meant counting “the whole Number of free Persons,” adding “three fifths” of a person for each slave and “excluding Indians not taxed.”

Judge Orders Cohen Released, Citing ‘Retaliation’ Over Tell-All Book

New York Times logoA judge agreed that federal officials had returned Michael D. Cohen to prison because he wanted to publish a book this fall about President Trump.

When Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s one-time lawyer and fixer, met with probation officers this month to complete paperwork that would have let him serve the balance of his prison term at home, he found a catch.

Mr. Cohen was already out on furlough because of the coronavirus. But to remain at home, he was asked to sign a document that would have barred him from publishing a book during the rest of his sentence. Mr. Cohen balked because he was, in fact, writing a book — a tell-all memoir about his former boss, the president.

The officers sent him back to prison. Continue reading

Appeals court rejects Trump effort to throw out emoluments case

The Hill logoA federal appeals court on Thursday ruled against President Trump, refusing to throw out a lawsuit alleging that he’s violated the Constitution’s emoluments clauses.

The decision from the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals keeps the case alive, rejecting the president’s efforts to preserve immunity from the suit, which was filed by the attorneys general from Washington, D.C., and Maryland.

The court did not rule on the merits of the case against Trump.

The majority in the 9-6 decision dismissed his lawyers’ argument that violations of the constitutional provisions are not grounds for a lawsuit. Continue reading.

Trump Organization Seeking Aid From U.K., Ireland For Golf Resorts

Donald Trump’s dual roles as a president and a private businessman with his hand out to foreign governments raise ethics concerns.

In yet another mind-blowing business situation for an American president, Donald Trump’s company is seeking handouts from foreign governments for three struggling golf resorts.

The Trump Organization is after aid from the British and Irish governments to cover most of the wages of employees who have been furloughed because of COVID-19 lockdowns, Bloomberg reports.

Ironically, the 2,000 Trump employees laid off in his own country won’t get the same government help. Continue reading.

Donald Trump’s Debt to China

Earlier this week, the right-leaning commentator Walter Russell Mead published a column in the Wall Street Journal arguing that Donald Trump’s best chance of being reëlected in November is to run against China. “With the economy in shambles and the pandemic ravaging the country, making the election a referendum on China is perhaps Mr. Trump’s only chance to extend his White House tenure past January 2021,” Mead wrote. This strategy would enable Trump to exploit a coronavirus-related distrust of China, Mead added, and it would create problems for Democrats which would include, but also go beyond, Hunter Biden’s business ties to the Middle Kingdom. Plenty “of other senior Democrats have made money (in China), supported trade policies that gave away too much without holding Beijing accountable, or praised China’s government in ways that would make painful viewing in a campaign ad today,” Mead said.

The column sounded cynical, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. Trump’s campaign has already released an ad highlighting Hunter Biden’s connection to a Chinese bank, and Trump said last weekend that if Joe Biden was elected foreign countries such as China and Mexico would “own” him. On Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo upped the ante, blaming China for the global covid-19 death toll. In an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, he said, “China caused an enormous amount of pain, loss of life, and now a huge challenge for the global economy and the American economy, as well, by not sharing the information they had” about the virus. Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas and a longtime China hawk, called for a big military buildup in East Asia. “The Chinese Communist Party will try to exploit the world’s weakness in the wake of a virus it unleashed,” Cotton claimed on Thursday. “We cannot allow it to succeed.”

With criticisms of Trump’s handling of the pandemic growing and new opinion polls showing him trailing Biden in several key battleground states, we are sure to see more of these diversions. But adopting a China campaign strategy would also present a number of problems for Trump, beginning with the fact that Hunter Biden’s investment partnership isn’t the only American business that received funding from Chinese entities. In 2012, the Bank of China, a commercial bank owned by the Chinese state, provided more than two hundred million dollars in loans to a New York office building that Trump co-owns, Politico reported on Friday. The loans will come due in 2022, “in the middle of what could be Trump’s second term,” the timely article noted. Continue reading.

Trump escalates fight against press with libel lawsuits

The Hill logoThe Trump campaign’s libel lawsuits against The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN mark a dramatic escalation in the president’s long fight with the media.

Legal experts have said the suits are dead on arrival, failing to meet the high bar to prove defamation of a public figure, but they fear an environment in which powerful elected officials try to use the courts to intimidate the press.

“The concern here is not that one of these suits would win on the merits — it’s the chilling effect that it has on public discussion of political affairs,” Jonathan Peters, the Columbia Journalism Review’s press freedom correspondent and a University of Georgia media law professor, told The Hill.  Continue reading.