Tag: Trump White House

Capitol Hill ‘furious’ after Trump’s State Department abruptly cancelled briefing ‘required by law’: report

AlterNet logoSecretary of State Mike Pompeo is receiving heat after the State Department stood-up Congress one day after damning text messages showed associates of Rudy Giuliani targeted an American ambassador, according to a new report.

“The State Department abruptly canceled a classified congressional briefing Wednesday that was supposed to focus on embassy security, a House aide said, infuriating Capitol Hill staffers seeking answers on alleged Iranian threats to U.S. missions overseas,” Politico reported Wednesday.

“The cancellation also coincides with documents suggesting that associates of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani put the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine under surveillance,” Politico noted. Continue reading.

Former White House official drops the hammer on Mike Pompeo after ‘two-bit criminals’ stalked Ukraine ambassador

AlterNet logoAddressing a House document dump that provided more evidence in Donald Trump’s still-growing Ukraine scandal, a former White House official claimed on CNN that to all appearances White House foreign policy has been being conducted by “two-bit mobsters.”

“New Day” hosts John Berman and Alisyn Camerota skipped over Tuesday night’s Democratic debate to point to notes and texts from Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas that indicated that former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was being stalked with hints of personal threats.

“These new text messages were provided to Congress by Giuliani’s foreign associate Lev Parnas,” host Camerota explained. “To dig up dirt on the Bidens and to take down Marie Yovanovitch. The materials include this letter to Ukraine’s president, and in it Giuliani requested a meeting indicating he is working with the U.S. president’s knowledge and consent. That this is the first where Giuliani links efforts to President Trump. There is also this note in Vienna that mentions to get Zelensky to announce an investigation of the Bidens.” Continue reading.

Kushner’s Global Role Shrinks as He Tackles Another: The 2020 Election

New York Times logoIvanka Trump’s husband will now supervise her father’s re-election campaign, but he continues to weigh in with advice to the president on a range of other matters.

WASHINGTON — When senior administration officials gathered in the Situation Room on Tuesday for a meeting to discuss the repercussions of the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Vice President Mike Pence had a seat at the table. So did Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser, and Mark T. Esper, the defense secretary.

But the White House aide whose portfolio is the Middle East was notably absent from the meeting.

Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, was sitting for a photo shoot for a planned Time magazine cover story. He was also absent from the Situation Room later in the day when it was clear Iran was launching an attack on American forces and the same officials rushed back, joined by Mr. Trump and West Wing aides like Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff, and Stephanie Grisham, the press secretary. Continue reading.

Democrats ‘utterly unpersuaded’ by evidence behind Soleimani strike

The Hill logoDemocrats said Wednesday that the Trump administration failed to present evidence supporting the claim that a top Iranian general killed in a U.S. drone strike was planning an imminent attack.

The frustration boiled over after back-to-back closed-door briefings on the strike that killed Iranian Quds Force leader Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said the evidence represented a “far cry” from an imminent attack, while Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) called the briefing “sophomoric.”  Continue reading.

White House silent as Saudi government reveals Oval Office meeting with Trump and Jared Kushner

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner apparently had a meeting on Monday with Saudi Arabia’s vice minister of defense even though the White House never made any announcement of the meeting.

Writing on Twitter, Saudi defense official Khalid bin Salman revealed that he met with Trump and Kushner “to deliver a message from the Crown Prince, and review aspects of our bilateral cooperation, including efforts to confront regional and international challenges.”

CBS News White House reporter Kathryn Watson says that the meeting with the Saudis “wasn’t on the president’s public schedule yesterday” and wonders, “would we have known about the meeting if the Saudis didn’t promote it?” Continue reading.

‘We’re ready to go’: Trump legal team readies for Senate trial’s start

But they are unsure whether the want to bring in the president’s top House allies.

President Donald Trump’s lawyers have their strategy in place for the upcoming Senate impeachment trial. All they need now is a start date.

Coordinating over the past month, the White House counsel’s office and the president’s team of private lawyers have prepared a detailed legal brief pushing back against last month’s House-passed impeachment articles that seek Trump’s removal from office for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

That document, according to a person familiar with the Trump legal strategy, is modeled after one that President Bill Clinton’s lawyers submitted at the start of his 1999 Senate impeachment trial — which ended a month later with his acquittal. Continue reading.

 

Pompeo decides against run for U.S. Senate seat in Kansas

Washington Post logoSecretary of State Mike Pompeo has decided not to run for the open U.S. Senate seat in Kansas this year, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Pompeo told Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Monday that he would remain at the State Department, three days after U.S. forces struck and killed a prominent Iranian general, triggering uncertainty in the region.

The two people spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly about the matter. Continue reading.

Live updates: Defense Secretary Esper says U.S. has made no decision to leave Iraq

Washington Post logoDefense Secretary Mark T. Esper said Monday that the United States has not made any decision to leave Iraq, shortly after the U.S. military said in a letter to Iraqi officials that U.S. forces would be relocating “to prepare for onward movement.”

On Sunday, Iraqi lawmakers passed a nonbinding resolution calling for foreign troops to withdraw.

In the letter, released Monday, Marine Corps Brig. Gen. William H. Seely III said that U.S. forces “respect your sovereign decision to order our departure.” A U.S. military official confirmed the letter’s authenticity. Continue reading.

Mick Mulvaney can run, but he can’t hide

AlterNet logoFirst, some good news: Donald Trump’s acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, seems to be sweating his own legal exposure in the Ukraine scandal, which suggests that the impeachment story is far from over.

To be clear, there’s good reasons to despair that Trump or anyone in his administration will ever face real justice for the scheme to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into publicly supporting debunked Trumpian conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party and specifically about former Vice President Joe Biden, the current frontrunner in the Democratic presidential primary. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has gleefully flaunted the fact that no amount of evidence of Trump’s guilt will move Senate Republicans to convict him, or even to pretend to hold a real Senate trial.

And yet, the fat lady isn’t singing. On Sunday, the New York Times published a lengthy investigative report on the six-week period during which Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine as part of his extortion scheme. In the typical New York Times fashion, the piece carries way too much Trump water by exaggerating the possibility that he had a non-extortionate purpose for his actions. But even that doesn’t muddy the waters too much. The pattern of behavior shows not only that Trump was extorting Zelensky, but that he was directly and perhaps obsessively involved in running the scheme. Continue reading

Trump is already searching for his next secretary of state

Washington Post logoSecretary of State Mike Pompeo says he isn’t running for Senate next year. Those close to him say he hasn’t made a final decision yet. But that hasn’t prevented a barely concealed competition from breaking out within the administration over who might replace him as the nation’s top diplomat. President Trump has fueled the fire by sounding out lawmakers and officials as he considers his options.

Pompeo has plenty of time to decide whether to run before the official filing deadline in June. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is pushing him hard to jump into the Kansas Senate race, several officials and GOP lawmakers told me, out of fear former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach might win the primary and then lose the general election to a Democrat. Pompeo is also mulling a run for president in 2024, and McConnell has argued the Senate would be a perfect perch from which to do that.

Trump said last month that Pompeo came to him and told him he wanted to stay. But Trump also hedged by saying that if there’s any danger the GOP could lose that seat, Pompeo might change his mind and “would win in a landslide because they love him in Kansas.” Pompeo himself, meanwhile, is sending mixed signals. This month he began posting from a new personal Twitter account with Kansas farmland in the banner photo.