Tag: Trump White House

Judge rejects claims by Trump ex-adviser of FBI misconduct

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Monday flatly rejected a last-ditch bid by President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn to get the criminal charges to which he already pleaded guilty dropped, brushing aside his claims of misconduct by prosecutors and the FBI.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered Flynn to appear for sentencing on Jan. 28, concluding that the retired Army lieutenant general had failed to prove a “single” violation by the prosecution or FBI officials of withholding evidence that could exonerate him.

Sullivan’s 92-page ruling represented a major blow to Flynn, who has tried to backpedal since he pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about his conversations with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Flynn’s sworn statements in his plea agreement “belie his new claims of innocence,” Sullivan wrote.

Continue reading

Experts Say White House‘s Conway Response Raises Major Ethical Questions

The White House asserted this week that broad swaths of federal ethics regulations do not apply to people who work in the Executive Office of the President. Ethics experts say this sets the Trump White House apart from past administrations.

The administration‘s assertion was made in a letter that White House Deputy Counsel Stefan Passantino wrote regarding the controversy over White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway‘s recent ethical issues.

Passantino‘s letter said that “many regulations promulgated by the Office of Government Ethics (“OGE”) do not apply to employees of the Executive Office of the President.”

Continue reading

Trump Administration Resists Ukraine Disclosures Ordered by Court

After lawsuit, the Center for Public Integrity received heavily redacted documents, will ask judge to order full transparency

The Trump administration has refused to disclose how key officials at the Department of Defense and the White House Office of Management and Budget reacted to President Trump’s decision to halt military aid to Ukraine.

On Nov. 25, federal district court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the administration to produce records reflecting what these officials said to one another about the legality and appropriateness of Trump’s order. The Center for Public Integrity sought the information in Freedom of Information Act requests filed in late September.

On Thursday afternoon, however, as the House Judiciary Committee was preparing to vote on two articles of impeachment against Trump, Public Integrity received 146 pages of documents that had been almost completely redacted by the government. Every substantive exchange between officials at the agencies was blacked out. Public Integrity is planning to file a motion Friday challenging the government’s response.

Continue reading

White House tells Democrats it won’t cooperate in impeachment hearings

The Hill logoThe White House on Friday signaled it will not participate in future impeachment proceedings in the House and called on Democrats to end their impeachment inquiry.

White House counsel Pat Cipollone wrote in a letter to the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee that it would be a “reckless abuse of power” for House Democrats to adopt articles of impeachment and “would constitute the most unjust, highly partisan, and unconstitutional attempt at impeachment in our Nation’s history.”

The letter did not explicitly state that the White House would not participate in any House proceedings moving forward, but gave the indication that it would not cooperate and would instead shift its focus to defending President Trump in a potential Senate trial.

Continue reading

White House adopts confident tone after Pelosi signals go on impeachment

The Hill logoThe White House on Thursday appeared self-assured after Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) made clear a vote to impeach President Trump was all but inevitable in the House, with administration officials signaling they relish the looming fight in a Senate trial. 

The president and his allies have spent weeks hammering the same narrative about the House impeachment inquiry, dismissing it as a partisan “sham” that failed to produce evidence of wrongdoing.

The White House has refused to turn over documents, blocked witnesses and declined offers to participate. House Democrats have threatened to draft articles of impeachment accusing Trump of obstruction for defying congressional subpoenas.

Continue reading

Scoop: Sen. Cramer blocks Armenian genocide bill at request of White House

Axios logoThe White House directed Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) to block an effort by Sens. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Thursday to pass a resolution via unanimous consent formally recognizing Turkey’s genocide of the Armenian people, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Why it matters: This is the third time that the White House has directed a Republican senator to block the resolution, a symbolic measure already passed by the House that would infuriate Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

    • Cramer said on the Senate floor that he doesn’t think this is “the right time” to pass the resolution, noting that President Trump has just returned from meeting with Erdoğan at the NATO summit in London, and that the resolution could undermine the administration’s diplomatic efforts.

Continue reading

A look inside Trump’s anti-impeachment spin factory

Washington Post logoOn a recent Thursday morning, more than a dozen Trump administration officials watching television in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House spontaneously stood up and applauded.

President Trump had just yelled to reporters on the South Lawn, “I want nothing. I want nothing.” He had read from notes written in Sharpie in a small notebook, selectively quoting his own comments in a call with his ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, who had described the conversation in otherwise damning testimony to the House Intelligence Committee.

The clip played on a loop for the rest of the afternoon on cable news channels. It provided cause for celebration for the group of Trump staffers, who are part of a rapid-response operation set up just weeks ago to bend opinion against the effort to impeach the president.

Continue reading here.

Trump is surrounded by yes-men who are afraid to tell him ‘what he doesn’t want to hear’: Former economic adviser Gary Cohn

AlterNet logoThe United States’ last two presidents were criticized by some of their supporters for being overly deferential to advisors: there were liberals and progressives who believed that President Barack Obama became overly reliant on Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on economic policy and some conservatives who believed that President George W. Bush was too quick to defer to the neocon war hawks in his administration on foreign policy. But President Donald Trump has had the opposite problem: a tendency to grow angry and defensive when challenged by advisers — and Gary Cohn, Trump’s former chief economic adviser, fears that being surrounded by yes-men could prove problematic for Trump.

Trump’s administration, according to the Brookings Institution, has had an 80% turnover rate. Appearing on former Obama adviser David Axelrod’s podcast, “The Axe Files,” Cohn (who resigned from the Trump Administration in March 2018) asserted that Trump, at this point, might be lacking the constructive criticism he needs in the White House.

“We had an interesting nucleus of people when I was in the White House — the initial team,” Cohn told Axelrod during the interview. “We were not bashful. It was a group that was willing to tell the president what he needed to know, whether he wanted to hear it or not.”

Continue reading here.

Trump’s counsel says president won’t participate in House Judiciary’s first impeachment panel, calling it unfair

Washington Post logoAs the impeachment inquiry moves into a critical week, President Trump and his Republican allies are debating the degree to which the president should participate in a process they have spent more than two months attacking.

On Sunday evening, White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone told the House Judiciary Committee in a five-page letter that Trump would not participate in its first impeachment hearing, scheduled for Wednesday. The invitation from Chairman Jerrold Nadler “does not begin to provide the President with any semblance of a fair process,” Cipollone wrote.

Four constitutional scholars — three chosen by Democrats, one by Republicans — are expected to testify on the standards for impeachment. Nadler (D-N.Y.) told Trump he had until 6 p.m. Sunday to notify the committee that he or his attorneys would attend; he has given Trump until Friday to decide whether to participate more broadly in the impeachment process.

Continue reading here.

Lawmakers bypass embattled Mulvaney in spending talks

The Hill logoAs lawmakers negotiate the fiscal 2020 funding bills, one official is notably missing from the talks: acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. 

The former House member has flown under the radar during the recent spending talks, a shift from the budget and debt ceiling negotiations earlier this year where he emerged as a gadfly for lawmakers.

Two congressional sources, as well as key lawmakers, say they’ve had little to no contact with Mulvaney as part of the fiscal 2020 talks.

View the complete November 29 article by Jordain Carney on The Hill website here.