White House press secretary Sean Spicer suggested Tuesday that if federal employees refuse to follow President Donald Trump’s “orders,” they should expect to be fired.
Responding to a question on fired Acting Attorney General Sally Yates’ letter to Justice Department lawyers ordering them not to defend Trump’s travel ban, Spicer said it “is the right of every American to express their idea and opinion.” But he insisted that Yates’ letter went further than that.
“There’s a difference when she, as the acting attorney general, is not only responsible but required to execute lawful orders and defiantly says no,” he said. “As someone who was chosen to lead a department, she was rightfully removed.”
Spicer said the position of acting attorney general is “given to somebody who is supposed to execute orders that are handed down to them properly,” and said that was “100 percent done” in the case of Trump’s executive order temporarily barring visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
“So is the President laying down a marker now to all of his cabinet secretaries and all of his other officials to say, ‘If I give you a directive and do you not follow it you’re gone’?” a reporter pressed.
“I think that that kind of comes with the job, right?” Spicer responded. “Every one of the appointees understand that they serve at the pleasure of the President.”
He said Trump was “very clear” about his agenda during his campaign and transition to the presidency.
“It is his job to lay that vision out and that the people that he nominates and announces as staff members or cabinet-level members or agency heads, their job is to fulfill that,” Spicer said. “And if they don’t like it, then they shouldn’t take the job.”
After Yates told DOJ lawyers not to defend the order, the White House announced that it had fired her in a statement that accused her of having “betrayed the Department of Justice.”
Watch his response below:
Trump claimed the OLC reviewed the Muslim ban. That’s a lie, and without that the acting AG had to determine for herself whether or not the EO was lawful.
Then the only recourse is violence.
Jeff Sessions: Understood Sir.
It hasn’t taken me long to learn to hate this spiteful little shitheel of a lackey with the heat of a billion sons.
I don’t know what we’re going to do, but we need to come up with the equivalent of blowing up the death star and FAST.
We can’t hope that some GOP assholes will suddenly grow a spine and save us. They won’t.
Spicer and Trumpenfuhrer are such insipid fools!
They have no idea that the institutional staff at all these agencies, the ones farther down the food chain, are the ones who can and will gum up the works if they disagree with his policies and directives. And its not even the matter many republiscums complain about (hard to fire). It’s that they are usually so experienced they can slow down, divert, modify, not enact or otherwise stop EO’s and no one is the wiser as to how things have bogged down.
Just wait, as we’ll see massive yet under the radar objections to many things the short-fingered vulgarian wants.