We’ve got a potentially big news day tomorrow – mostly focusing on congressional testimony. At 9:30 AM and 10 AM Attorney General Bill Barr and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin will appear before the the respective subcommittees of the House Appropriations subcommittee. They both have a lot we’d like answered on the Mueller Report and President Trump’s taxes. But it’s possible they’ll punt, arguing that that’s not what these hearings are about. These are appropriations hearing, budgeting and management of their departments.
Meanwhile the House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing about White Nationalism. That’s also at 10 AM.
The witness list for the White Nationalism hearing is as follows. Read More
There’s always something more going on when we have these periods of maximal chaos coming out of the White House. There’s a lot of stuff contained in this article that just dropped from CNN. But there’s a remarkable passage. When he was at the border last week Trump reportedly told agents to stop allowing migrants to come across the border. After the President left, supervisors had to tell the agents that if they followed the President’s order they’d be breaking the law. Read More
This is a nugget of reporting from Maggie Haberman of the Times about the departure Kirstjen Nielsen from the Department of Homeland Security.
People close to her say one reason – perhaps not only one – is that she was aware how awful life would/will be for her on the outside after defending his policies for a long tome. https://t.co/XghCBWhNNw
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) April 8, 2019
Whether this is true or not I do not know. Read More
A Secret Service agent testified that while he was interrogating Yujing Zhang at Mar-a-Lago another agent took one of her thumb drives and put it in his laptop. It immediately began installing malware.
It sounds like there may be a broader round of firings at DHS, in addition to Secretary Nielsen’s ouster. And the Secret Service is part of DHS, albeit quite independent within it. But not that the head of the Secret Service getting fired comes just after the revelations about security at Mar-a-Lago. Makes me wonder whether it is over laxity or because the incident itself and the Secret Service’s aggressiveness somehow embarrassed the President.
Late Update: NBC’s Pete Williams says an administration official says the firing was “not based on any single precipitating even” and that the decision was made 10-14 days ago, i.e., before the Mar-a-Lago security breach.
I am … very skeptical of that account.
Sounds like there might be a generalized Millerite purge at DHS. Not just Nielsen.
In this unfolding story I would like to point out that – moving along from “total exoneration” – President Trump this weekend called the people who ran the Special Counsel’s Office “dishonest and treasonous.” Total exoneration ain’t all its cracked up to be, it seems.
As we await Bill Barr’s ‘redactions’ of the Mueller Report, I wanted to pass on to you this note from a TPM Reader and member of the appellate bar. It may seem deep in the weeds at first. But it’s a window into Barr’s conduct so far that I was not at all aware of, or rather I knew the bare facts but hadn’t at all understood the implications. They bear directly on Barr’s subservience to the White House and current approach to executive power …
The focus on Barr and what he has done/is doing regarding the report has been fantastic.
But there is another, overlooked data point that makes clear that we should be very suspicious about how Barr approaches his responsibilities as AG – including his redactions to the Mueller report and his supervision of the ongoing Trump investigations in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere.
The Administration’s decision a few weeks ago to change its position and argue that the entire Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional didn’t get the attention it deserves. It is a shocking breach of the Justice Department’s duty to make reasonable arguments in support of the constitutionality of federal laws. There many such reasonable arguments in support of the ACA – as numerous conservative scholars have explained in blog posts and briefs since the DoJ announcement; it is the position that the Administration is now endorsing that is entirely unreasonable.
Any student of Jewish history and anti-Semitism will tell you that philo-semitism is often just a slight distance from anti-Semitism. President Trump is a good example of this. This weekend he spoke at the Republican Jewish Coalition, a Jewish Republican activist group. He was a big hit, not surprisingly. But he repeatedly talked about Jews as though they were a monolith not giving him enough credit for helping Israel or indeed actually Israeli citizens. Read More
“He stated that he was a patriot, that he loves the President, and that he hates radical Muslims in our government.” – Criminal complaint against Patrick W. Carlineo, Jr., charged with making death threats against Rep. Ilhan Omar.