Trump Administration

Ex-CDC Chief: Trump Staffers Blocked COVID Briefings

ABC News reports: In closed-door testimony to House investigators released on Friday, Dr. Bob Redfield, former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, former President Donald Trump appointees repeatedly blocked his public health experts from briefing the American public. Redfield described, in detail, efforts by the CDC to speak publicly on what …

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CBS News Hires Former Trump Aide Mick Mulvaney

The Hill reports: Mick Mulvaney, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina and top aide to former President Trump, has been hired by CBS News to serve as a contributor, the network announced this week. Mulvaney appeared on CBS’s streaming service for the first time on Tuesday and was asked about President Biden’s recent budget proposal, the framework for which …

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US Paying $2M/Month To Protect Pompeo From Iran

The Associated Press reports: The State Department says it’s paying more than $2 million per month to provide 24-hour security to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and a former top aide, both of whom face “serious and credible” threats from Iran. The department told Congress in a report that the cost of protecting Pompeo and former Iran envoy Brian …

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US Census: We Undercounted Hispanics And Blacks

Roll Call reports: The 2020 census missed about one in every 20 Hispanic people in the country, according to estimates the Census Bureau released Thursday, following a count rocked by the coronavirus pandemic and Trump administration decisions. Black, Hispanic and Native American residents as well as young children also were undercounted in the census, which double counted the white population, …

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REPORT: Trump’s DHS Withheld Threats Of Capitol Riot

Law & Crime reports: In the waning days of Donald Trump‘s presidency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) identified specific threats ahead of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol but didn’t share that intelligence until days after the violent siege, according to a government watchdog report. The DHS Office of Inspector General released its report Tuesday more than a …

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Bill Barr To Publish “Vivid And Forthright” Memoir

ABC News reports: Former Attorney General William P. Barr has a memoir coming out March 8 titled “One Damn Thing After Another,” and billed by his publisher as a “vivid and forthright book” of his time serving two “drastically different” presidents, Donald Trump and George H.W. Bush. One of his most controversial actions involved special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of …

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Memo Cites Trump Admin Screwing With US Census

The New York Times reports: A newly disclosed memorandum citing “unprecedented” meddling by the Trump administration in the 2020 census and circulated among top Census Bureau officials indicates how strongly they sought to resist efforts by the administration to manipulate the count for Republican political gain. The document was shared among three senior executives including Ron S. Jarmin, a deputy …

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TONIGHT: Stephanie Grisham To Meet With Riot Panel

CNN reports: Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham will meet Wednesday evening on Capitol Hill with the select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, according to multiple sources familiar with the meeting. Grisham’s meeting with the committee came after the former White House aide and chief of staff to first lady Melania Trump had a phone call with committee …

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Esper Sues Pentagon For Blocking Parts Of Memoir

The New York Times reports: Former Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper on Sunday sued the agency he once led, accusing officials at the Pentagon of improperly blocking significant portions of an upcoming memoir about his tumultuous tenure under President Donald J. Trump. The allegations by Mr. Esper, whom Mr. Trump fired shortly after losing his re-election bid last November, are …

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House Panel Seeks Interview With Trump’s FDA Head

The Hill reports: The House subcommittee investigating the U.S. response to the coronavirus wants to question Stephen Hahn, former President Trump’s Food and Drug Administration commissioner, about attempts to improperly interfere with the agency’s review of COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccines. The committee on Monday sent a letter to Hahn asking him to sit for an interview on Dec. 16, and …

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REPORT: Pompeo Led Trump Admin Discussions On Kidnapping Or Assassinating Wikileaks’ Julian Assange

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 …

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Pence Op-Ed: Biden Broke Our Deal With The Taliban

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 …

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Fox Anchor Chris Wallace Grills Pompeo On Afghanistan: Do You Regret Giving The Taliban Legitimacy? [VIDEO]

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 …

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Trump Secretly Planned 35% Tariffs On Foreign SUVs

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 …

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Trump WH Drafted Insurrection Act During Protests

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 …

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DOJ Drops Trump-Era Criminal Probe Into Bolton’s Book

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 …

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Kushner To Pen “Definitive” Book On Trump Admin

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 …

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Emails Show Trump Pressured DOJ On Election Claims

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 …

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Trump Appointee To Step Down In DOJ Spying Scandal

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 …

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Trump’s DOJ Spied On His Own White House Counsel

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 …

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