Trump Administration

Yahoo News reports: In 2017, as Julian Assange began his fifth year holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London, the CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation. Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far …

From a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Mike Pence: When Mr. Biden became president, he quickly announced that U.S. forces would remain in Afghanistan for an additional four months without a clear reason for doing so. Once Mr. Biden broke the deal, the Taliban launched a major offensive against the Afghan government and seized Kabul. They knew there was no …

The Daily Beast reports: Wallace pointed out that a number of critics have said that Trump cutting a deal with the Taliban without the Afghan government even being involved was “hugely demoralizing” and led to the current chaos. (Notably, just weeks before the 2020 election, the Taliban endorsed Trump for president in the hopes he would “wind up U.S. military …

Bloomberg News reports: The U.S. Commerce Department released a report this week on proposed auto tariffs that the Trump administration refused to make public. The agency, under former President Donald Trump, kept the 2019 document private and was sued for holding back the information. The DOJ in January 2020 said the White House could use executive privilege to decline its …

The New York Times reports: Responding to interest from President Donald J. Trump, White House aides drafted a proclamation last year to invoke the Insurrection Act in case Mr. Trump moved to take the extraordinary step of deploying active-duty troops in Washington to quell the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd, two senior Trump administration officials said. The …

Law & Crime reports: Dropping both a criminal inquiry and a civil lawsuit, the Justice Department has closed the book on whether former President Donald Trump’s ex-National Security Advisor John Bolton’s memoir illegally disclosed classified information, his aide confirmed on Wednesday. “The Room Where It Happened,” depicted the 45th president as a man regularly seeking to do favors for “dictators …

The Guardian reports: Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former president Donald Trump and a senior adviser in his administration, has secured a book deal to recount Trump’s presidency. Broadside Books, a conservative imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, announced that Kushner’s book will come out in early 2022. Kushner has begun working on the memoir, currently untitled, and is expected to write …

CNN reports: New emails show how former President Donald Trump’s White House assistant, chief of staff and other allies pressured the Justice Department to investigate claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election — and how Trump directed allies to push then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen [photo] to join the legal effort to challenge the election result, according to a …

The New York Times reports: John Demers, the head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, is expected to step down at the end of next week, according to a person familiar with the matter, a departure that was arranged months ago but now comes amid widespread backlash over investigations into leaks of classified information that began under the Trump …

The New York Times reports: Apple told Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel to former President Donald J. Trump, last month that the Justice Department had subpoenaed information about an account that belonged to him in February 2018, and that the government barred the company from telling him at the time, according to two people briefed on the …

CNN reports: Ex-top Trump Justice Department official Rod Rosenstein has told people in recent days he was not aware of a subpoena that targeted the data of Democratic members of Congress while he was deputy attorney general, a source familiar with Rosenstein told CNN on Saturday. The attorney general at the time of the Apple subpoena, Jeff Sessions, was recused …

The New York Times reports: As the Justice Department investigated who was behind leaks of classified information early in the Trump administration, it took a highly unusual step: Prosecutors subpoenaed Apple for data from the accounts of at least two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, aides and family members. One was a minor. All told, the records of at …

Politico reports: Don McGahn is slated to testify before Congress today (sadly, behind closed-doors). It comes more than 25 months after House Democrats first sought to subpoena the former White House counsel for testimony related to his interviews with Robert Mueller that focused on the Russia interference probe and possible obstruction by Donald Trump. The White House sought to block …

The New York Times reports: The Trump Justice Department secretly seized the phone records of four New York Times reporters spanning nearly four months in 2017 as part of a leak investigation, the Biden administration disclosed on Wednesday. It was the latest in a series of revelations about the Trump administration secretly obtaining reporters’ communications records in an effort to …

Axios reports: The White House has a simple message for Trump appointees venting to the media about losing their jobs since President Biden took office: get over it. The White House has been methodically clearing house, a practice former President Trump followed when he was elected — most prominently at the State Department. The aim is to install staff more …

CNN reports: The White House has ousted several members of a prestigious arts commission in the nation’s capital, the latest move in the Biden administration’s purge of Trump-era appointees from government agencies and boards. Justin Shubow [photo], who was appointed in 2018 and later elected chairman, received a letter from the White House on Monday requesting he resign from the …

The Washington Post reports: President Donald Trump’s former ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, is suing former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and the U.S. government for $1.8 million to compensate for legal fees incurred during the 2019 House impeachment probe. The suit, filed Monday in federal court in the District of Columbia, alleges that Pompeo reneged on his …

The Washington Post reports: An obscure security unit tasked with protecting the Commerce Department’s officials and facilities has evolved into something more akin to a counterintelligence operation that collected information on hundreds of people inside and outside the department, a Washington Post examination found. The Investigations and Threat Management Service (ITMS) covertly searched employees’ offices at night, ran broad keyword …

NBC News reports: Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos must testify in a class-action lawsuit about her handling of student loan forgiveness claims, which involved delays in the administration’s decision-making and ultimate denial of a significant number of the applications, a federal judge ruled. In a 12-page ruling, Judge William Alsup denied a motion to quash a subpoena for the Cabinet …

The Washington Post reports: The Trump Justice Department secretly obtained Washington Post journalists’ phone records and tried to obtain their email records over reporting they did in the early months of the Trump administration on Russia’s role in the 2016 election, according to government letters and officials. In three separate letters dated May 3 and addressed to Post reporters Ellen …