Washington (CNN)Public health experts reacted with alarm after President Donald Trump held an indoor rally with thousands of maskless supporters at a packed arena in Nevada amid the deadly coronavirus pandemic.
But many Republicans on Capitol Hill had a different view.
“No, it doesn’t,” said Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, when asked if the rally troubled him at all. Continue reading.
Installed by Trump himself, the bombastic spokesman seized control of Covid-19 messaging, with disastrous results.
After it became clear in mid-April that his administration’s response to Covid-19 was threatening his reelection, President Donald Trump considered a leadership shake-up within a health department whose rivalries and battles with the White House had hampered efforts to contain the virus.
Instead, Trump made a different move: He personally intervened to place his campaign aide Michael Caputo — a confidant of disgraced operative Roger Stone who had himself come under scrutiny for his ties to top Russian officials — as assistant Health and Human Services secretary for public affairs. Trump — not HHS Secretary Alex Azar — approached Caputo about the job, and Caputo has repeatedly emphasized that he works for the president, health officials told POLITICO.
Trump’s calculation seemed clear: If he couldn’t easily move aside the health professionals who led the agencies, he could dramatically alter what the public learned about their work on the coronavirus. Continue reading.
A new report from the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday found that Attorney General Bill Barr has been pressuring federal prosecutors to bring aggressive charges against violent protesters across the United States, a push that some experts fear could have the effect of chilling constitutionally protected free speech.
The report explained:
In a conference call with U.S. attorneys across the country last week, Mr. Barr warned that sometimes violent demonstrations across the U.S. could worsen as the November presidential election approaches. He encouraged the prosecutors to seek a number federal charges, including under a rarely used sedition law, even when state charges could apply, the people said.
This demonstrates that Barr seeks to use the heavy hand of the federal government against the protests. It’s notable that while President Donald Trump and the attorney general have been clearly outraged by violence that has emerged from the protests — the vast majority of which have been peaceful — the federal government has done little to address the actual substance of the demands for racial justice from protesters. Continue reading.
To read Part 1 of this article, go here.
None of the founders of the country conceivably imagined that if the Attorney General is indeed the creature of the President, he would be ill-equipped to investigate, much less prosecute the President or his associates for wrongdoing, either before or during his presidency. It obviously didn’t occur to Hamilton, Madison or Jay that we might one day have a rogue President like Donald Trump with a life history of being one step ahead of the law, and little or no regard for presidential or constitutional norms.
Barr enjoys the dubious decision of being the most controversial Attorney General in history. He testified in his confirmation hearings that he would make law enforcement decisions based on the facts and the law “not on politics.” But, he quickly broke his promise and emerged as a political apparatchik, leaving a trail of decisions favorable to Trump and his political cronies that appear to have ignored both the facts and the law, and raise serious questions as to whether he has any independence from the President at all. Indeed, Barr not only embraced, but bedded down with, the controversial doctrine of the unitary executive. In a devastating Washington Postop-ed, Obama Attorney General Eric Holder found Barr “unfit” to hold the office because he failed to distance himself from the President:
Barr made the outlandish suggestion that Congress cannot entrust anyone but the President himself to execute the law. In Barr’s view, sharing executive power with anyone ‘beyond the control of the President,’ [emphasis Holder’s]… presumably including a semi-independent Cabinet member’ [the Attorney General], contravenes the Framers’ clear intent to vest that power in a single person.’ This is a stunning declaration … revealing of Barr’s own intent: to serve not at a careful remove from politics, as his office demands, but as an instrument of politics — under the direct “control” of President Trump.
The union argues that this unilateral change by USPS managers violates their collective bargaining agreement
The Postal Service last month abruptly ordered its police officers to stop investigating mail theft that occurs away from post office property, the Postal Police Officers Association alleged Monday, suing Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to block a change they say could erode the safety of mail carriers and delivery.
“The Postal Service’s sudden change is unwarranted, impermissible, and contrary to the language of the statute and also to collective bargaining promises it has made to the officers’ union,” the association said in its lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Washington D.C.
Per the union, USPS implemented the change on Aug. 25, a day after DeJoy testified to Congress amid mounting concerns that policy changes he implemented were delaying mail service and could jeopardize record numbers of mail-in ballots expected in the presidential election. Continue reading.
September 12, 2020
Last night, at about 10:30, reporter Dan Diamond posted another blockbuster story in Politico. Political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services have been altering the weekly scientific reports issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) following the course of the coronavirus pandemic. They believe the reports are undermining Trump’s cheery pronouncements about the disease, and claim there is a “deep state” at the CDC determined to hurt the president.
Since 1981, career scientists have compiled weekly Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports to inform Americans about trends in disease. These records are not controversial. But in April, Trump passed over scientists to install one of his campaign advisers as assistant secretary of HHS for public affairs. Michael Caputo was a long-time Republican operative, an associate of Roger Stone who had worked for Russia’s Gasprom Media to improve the image of Vladimir Putin in the US.
Caputo promptly began trying to change the CDC reports on Covid. Although he has no background in medicine or science, he and his team claim that the scientists are exaggerating the dangers of Covid-19. An aide, Paul Alexander, wrote an email to CDC Director Robert Redfield calling for retroactive modifications to two reports, saying, “CDC to me appears to be writing hit pieces on the administration.” Alexander, recruited by Caputo from his position as an assistant professor of health research at Hamiliton’s McMaster University in Canada, has demanded that the CDC stop issuing reports until he is given the right to review them before publication and to make line edits. Continue reading.
On 9/11, many political officials—people like Donald Trump and Mike Pence—make appearances around the country. They make speeches and take solemn photographs near memorials. They make it a point to remind people how brave our country’s police and fire departments and other first responders are. Now The New York Daily News has a depressingly explosive story about the Trump administration’s way of remembering.
According to the report, millions of dollars have been withheld from the Fire Department of New York’s (FDNY) World Trade Center Health Program, a program that was set up exclusively for them and which “tracks and treats FDNY firefighters and medics suffering from 9/11 related illnesses.” How much money? Where has it gone? Why have they done it? All of these questions have been pursued since the beginning of the Trump administration when the program’s director, Dr. David Prezant, first started seeing hundreds of thousands of dollars being “docked” by the U.S. Treasury.
Prezant says there has never been an explanation, never even a warning that this money, which goes to serve the men and women who have suffered and continue to suffer from serious medical issues on behalf of serving our country, was being withheld. It is important to note here that more people have died from 9/11-related illnesses than died on 9/11. No fewer than 200 firefighters have died due to their exposure to the tragedies of 9/11. Continue reading.
The suit alleges that the committee was aware it was being overcharged for services at Trump’s Washington hotel and still spent over $1 million
A judge denied a bid Wednesday to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee and the Trump Organization misused nonprofit funds to enrich the president’s family business.
The suit, brought by Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine in January, alleges that the president’s inaugural committee was aware that it was being overcharged for services at Trump’s Washington hotel in 2017 and still spent over $1 million at the hotel, including money for a private party for Trump’s three older children.
The inaugural committee argued in part that Racine’s office failed to show a violation of the Nonprofit Act and does not allege that the committee is “continuing to act” in a manner that violates the law, court papers say. Continue reading.
Democratic lawmakers and legal experts accused Attorney General William Barr of unethically acting as President Donald Trump’s “personal henchman” after the Justice Department on Tuesday moved to take over the president’s defense team in a defamation case brought by journalist and author E. Jean Carroll, who has accused Trump of raping her in the 1990s.
In a claim that baffled and alarmed observers, Justice Department lawyers said in new court filings that the federal government’s intervention in the case is justified because Trump was acting in “within the scope” of his official capacity as president when he accused Carroll of lying about the rape.
Robbie Kaplan, Carroll’s attorney, called the Justice Department’s argument “shocking” in a statement late Tuesday, saying it “offends me as a lawyer, and offends me even more as a citizen.” Continue reading.
Donald Trump has turned the Gish gallop into the Trump torrent, spewing out both lies and scandal at a rate that seems to make the national media incapable of maintaining a thought for long enough to have an impact. At the moment, there’s a lot of focus on Trump’s calling military veterans “losers” and “suckers,” on his denigration of John McCain, and on how he turned up his nose at having veterans march in his dictator-style military parade because “nobody wants to see” the wounded and amputees.
But this too shall pass. Jared Kushner may have once advised Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman to keep his head down until a little thing like a brutal international assassination of a journalist blows over, but Donald Trump has a different strategy—he’ll just find something worse to talk about. And if you think there can’t possibly be anything worse … you’ve clearly been asleep for the last four years.
So, before the current outrage is replaced by the newer, more disgusting outrage, here’s a quick reminder of what Trump has done, in order of most outrageous… Continue reading.
