Category: Trump Administration

Trump and his CFO Allen Weisselberg stay close as prosecutors advance their case

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Trump and his CFO Allen Weisselberg stay close as prosecutors advance their case

NEW YORK — If Donald Trump was looking for some good news on his 75th birthday last Monday, it arrived at 8:15 a.m. by way of a blue Mercedes slipping into Trump Tower’s private garage entrance on West 56th Street.

Behind the wheel was Allen Weisselberg, Trump’s longtime confidant and Trump Organization chief financial officer, whom the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has pressed to turn on the former president as they investigate Trump’s business dealings.

Every day that Weisselberg arrives for work at Trump Tower — as he did that day, steering in from his Upper West Side apartment across town — could be seen as a public signal that he is sticking with Trump and deflecting investigators’ advances. Continue reading.

Rudy Giuliani suspended from practicing law in New York

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Rudy Giuliani has been suspended from practicing law in the state of New York due to his false statements about the 2020 election, according to a court filing.

Driving the news: A New York court ruled that Giuliani made “demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump.”

  • “These false statements were made to improperly bolster respondent’s narrative that due to widespread voter fraud, victory in the 2020 United States presidential election was stolen from his client,” the court wrote. Continue reading.

Pelosi announces select committee to investigate Jan. 6 Capitol riot

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Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced Thursday that she will create a House select committee to investigate the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

Why it matters: The creation of a single Democratic-controlled special committee, which will consolidate several House investigations, comes after Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have established a bipartisan 9/11-style commission.

  • While Republicans would have had equal control over the blocked 9/11-style investigative commission, it’s unlikely they will have the same leverage over the House select committee investigation. Continue reading.

Trump demolished by conservative paper after new GAO report reveals his border wall failures

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Donald Trump’s record was again torched Saturday with some new Government Accountability Office (GAO) data showing that his administration fell far short of its claims about how much border wall it built — and that it fudged the numbers as well.

But as Trump prepares to tour some of the small amount of wall he did build, perhaps just as humiliating was the rough treatment he got from the conservative Washington Times. His home team newspaper greeted its readers Monday with this large, top-of-Page-1 headline reading:

“Trump’s claims on construction of border wall system undercut by GAO audit.” Continue reading.

Proud Boy recruits reveal the group revels in the glorification of rape and murder: report

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In interviews with USA Today’s Will Carless, three men with ties to the Wisconsin chapter of the far-right Proud Boys confessed that they expected something more along the lines of a drinking club when they joined up — only to find the organization riddled with racism, homophobia and some members glorifying murder and rape.

According to 40-year-old Army veteran Daniel Berry, a friend at a Wisconsin VFW recommended the Proud Boys to him by pointing out, “The group was vocal in its support for then-President Donald Trump, whom Berry had voted for. They called themselves ‘Western chauvinists’ and said they welcomed true men. That sounded about right for Berry, who considers himself a dyed-in-the-wool patriot,” so he checked them out and sent them an email.

What he found later — after being invited into a private chatroom — disgusted him. Continue reading.

Pennsylvania Senate GOP edges toward Arizona-style election audit

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A top Pennsylvania Republican says he supports an audit of the state’s presidential election results similar to a review being conducted in Arizona, raising the potential for other states to spend taxpayer money investigating former President Trump’s false claims of improprieties and fraud.

Pennsylvania state Sen. David Argall (R), who heads the Senate State Government Committee that has oversight of election administration, told reporters he supports another look at the Pennsylvania results.

“It’s a very careful recount, forensic audit, so yeah, I don’t see the danger in it,” Argall said during a forum with reporters from Spotlight PA, a consortium of media companies from across the state. “I just think that it would not be a bad idea at all to proceed with an audit similar to what they’re doing in Arizona.”  Continue reading.

Controversial St. Croix refinery ceases operations given ‘extreme financial constraints’

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Limetree Bay Refining, facing tens of millions of unpaid bills and multiple class-action lawsuits, leaves the island with an uncertain future

Limetree Bay, a massive oil refinery in the Caribbean, announced Monday that it is ceasing operations following a number of catastrophic errors that rained oil droplets on St. Croix, sent residents to emergency rooms after noxious gas releases and raised fears among homeowners that their drinking water was laced with toxic chemicals.

The plant, which had closed a decade ago under a previous owner after toxic spills helped push it into bankruptcy, was plagued with problems from the start after the Trump administration granted it permission to reopen in February.

“Limetree had a very high rate of environmental violations over a very short period of time,” said Judith Enck, a former Environmental Protection Agency official who monitored the plant under the Obama administration. “It was an environmental catastrophe unfolding in real time.” Continue reading.

Garland tries to untangle the Trump legacy at the Justice Department

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Three months into his new job, judge-turned-attorney-general Merrick Garland, who inherited a demoralized and politicized Justice Department, is facing criticism from some Democrats that he is not doing enough to quickly expunge Trump-era policies and practices.

On a host of issues ranging from leak investigations to civil and criminal cases involving former president Donald Trump, Garland has been beset by a ­growing chorus of congressional ­second-guessers, even as he insists he is scrupulously adhering to the principles of equal justice under the law.

How he charts his way through the current controversies and still-unresolved politically sensitive cases is likely to determine how much of a long-term impact the Trump presidency has on the Justice Department. Continue reading.

New book offers fresh details about chaos, conflicts inside Trump’s pandemic response

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At one point, the president mused about transferring infected American citizens in Asia to Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, as White House officials debated whether to bring infected Americans home for care, President Donald Trump suggested his own plan for where to send them, eager to suppress the numbers on U.S. soil.

“Don’t we have an island that we own?” the president reportedly asked those assembled in the Situation Room in February 2020, before the U.S. outbreak would explode. “What about Guantánamo?”

“We import goods,” Trump specified, lecturing his staff. “We are not going to import a virus.” Continue reading.

Feds investigating whether Roger Stone ‘radicalized’ Trump supporters who stormed Capitol: Report

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Roger Stone is reportedly under investigation for his role in planning the Jan. 6 insurrection to undo Donald Trump’s election loss.

Federal prosecutors are building a conspiracy case against right-wing militants who allegedly plotted the insurrection, and investigators are looking into the roles Stone and Alex Jones may have played in radicalizing Trump supporters who joined the assault on the U.S. Capitol, according to Los Angeles Times legal affairs columnist Harry Litman.

“I think they are leaving no stone unturned to kind of portray and determine the color of what happened here, were the insurrectionists influenced by staff, members of Congress, Trump loyalists like Roger Stone and Alex Jones,” Litman told MSNBC’s Zerlina Maxwell. “They’re really wanting to paint a full picture rather than — we see the biggest charges against some of the people, they are criminal conspiracy and insurrection, they pack plenty of wallop already, and that is the overall code they are going after but the picture deservedly is one of terrorism. These were domestic terrorists.” Continue reading.