Turns out the sudden move by Loeffler and Perdue to try to discredit the Georgia election is a blackmail move by Trump to force them to back him or he’ll cut them off from his base in the runoffs:
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Postal worker admits fabricating allegations of ballot tampering, officials say
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From Professor Snyder who wrote the book “On Tyranny” and what are some obvious signs for T’s moves now, not conceding, calling election a fraud and R’s compliance as a move towards Authoritarianism.
DOD head fired Sec Esper
and fill ins with Trump loyalists.
Next do we think Sec Wray FBI or Sec Haspel CIA could be next…as has been rumored?
Begs the question WTF do we do now.
Timothy Snyder
@TimothyDSnyder
Levin Professor of History at Yale. Author of “Our Malady,” “The Road to Unfreedom,” “On Tyranny,” “Black Earth,” “Bloodlands,” and “Reconstruction of Nations”
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Trying to kick up dirt where there is none for election fraud. Just as in above, authoritarian moves…delegitimize the voting process.
Over the last several days, the president, members of his administration, congressional Republicans and right wing allies have put forth the false claim that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump and have refused to accept results that showed Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the winner.
But top election officials across the country said in interviews and statements that the process had been a remarkable success despite record turnout and the complications of a dangerous pandemic.
“There’s a great human capacity for inventing things that aren’t true about elections,” said Frank LaRose, a Republican who serves as Ohio’s secretary of state. “The conspiracy theories and rumors and all those things run rampant. For some reason, elections breed that type of mythology.”
Steve Simon, a Democrat who is Minnesota’s secretary of state, said: “I don’t know of a single case where someone argued that a vote counted when it shouldn’t have or didn’t count when it should. There was no fraud.”
“Kansas did not experience any widespread, systematic issues with voter fraud, intimidation, irregularities or voting problems,” a spokeswoman for Scott Schwab, the Republican secretary of state in Kansas, said in an email Tuesday. “We are very pleased with how the election has gone up to this point.”
The New York Times contacted the offices of the top election officials in every state on Monday and Tuesday to ask whether they suspected or had evidence of illegal voting. Officials in 45 states responded directly to The Times. For four of the remaining states, The Times spoke to other statewide officials or found public comments from secretaries of state; none reported any major voting issues.
Statewide officials in Texas did not respond to repeated inquiries. But a spokeswoman for the top elections official in Harris County, the largest county in Texas with a population greater than many states, said that there were only a few minor issues and that “we had a very seamless election.” On Tuesday, the Republican lieutenant governor in Texas, Dan Patrick, announced a $1 million fund to reward reports of voter fraud.
“Many of the claims against the commonwealth have already been dismissed, and repeating these false attacks is reckless,” said Jacklin Rhoads, a spokeswoman for Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who is Pennsylvania’s attorney general. “No active lawsuit even alleges, and no evidence presented so far has shown, widespread problems.”
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Note: There it is…lots of paper presented, and Kayleigh is using that as a way to seem convincing. However, there has been virtually no evidence. What a team of charmers.
Detroit is in Michigan’s Wayne County. In 2016, Donald Trump won 228,993 votes in the county to Hillary Clinton’s 519,444, giving her a 38.8-point victory. Last week, he fared better, winning 264,149 votes (a 15 percent increase) to Joe Biden’s 587,074 (a more modest 13 percent rise than Clinton’s). Trump still lost the county, but by only 37.9 points.
Unfortunately for his reelection chances, he fared much worse in other parts of the state. As of writing, he trails the president-elect by nearly 150,000 votes. Michigan is one of the three states he flipped in 2016 on his way to winning the White House; it’s now the state out of those three where he suffered the worst loss.
For some reason, though, Trump’s zombie campaign organization has decided that it will focus on Wayne County as it elevates its unfounded allegations of rampant voter fraud in the recent election, allegations that have been repeatedly rejected by state officials and for which no evidence has been presented.
On Tuesday night, the campaign sought to rectify that gap. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, donning her legally dubious Trump-campaign-worker hat, appeared on Fox News to inform host Sean Hannity that the campaign had collected hundreds of affidavits alleging improprieties in the vote in Wayne County.
She rifled through them in front of the camera, offering a taste of what the documents contained.
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McCabe reiterates FBI believed ‘the president might himself pose a danger to national security’
Also, warning, I am getting a really funky response from USAToday.com. Two browsers refuse to open it, with Chrome stating security issues, and “Is it Down For Me” also came back with an error when they tried.
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I can open it in Firefox…
But anytime things start to look weird on the internet - no access, down, etc, it feels weird, right?
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Here’s the response you get if you try to reach GSA.gov - Emily Murphy must be getting a LOT of calls per the The Lincoln Project.
She must feel that Biden as President-elect is not eligible. WTF
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I even tried deleting cookies. Oddly, one that came up when I looked was: www.cashnetusa.com.
Accessed 2 hours ago when I first had the issue.
Very strange.
https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ can’t reach it but two other down-checker sites can.
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Republicans are taking the cue to keep ‘unspoken standard.’ on T’s activities now - especially firing Sec DOD Esper etc. in the face of the Georgia runoffs. Allowing T to hollow up more of the defenses of this country and get his yes men in there…is beyond destructive.
“They see the extraordinarily high stakes in the Georgia Senate runoffs,” American Enterprise Institute congressional expert Norm Ornstein said Wednesday. “Creating a deep internal division in the party right now could jeopardize those seats, and the calculus they’ve made is that sticking with Trump is a better course of action at this stage.”
GOP leaders have set an “unspoken standard,” as it was put by one of several congressional Republican aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations, not to “rock the boat too much before Georgia.”
But the president’s decision to replace Defense Department leaders with Trump loyalists — including one person previously deemed too controversial for Senate confirmation — nonetheless has grievously upset most Republican members, the aides explained, particularly as it appears clear that Trump fired Esper in retribution for their policy differences.
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Here’s a primer from voting expert and writer, Ari Berman with Mary Harris of Slate- when it all comes down to the Statehouses, and the way the power is structured there. Think - redistricting (post 2020 census), gerrymandering, and non-citizen questions, judgeships, and balance of legislative power.
It’s the statehouses, stupid.
Republicans are complaining that something’s not quite right with the presidential election, but the very same ballots voters used to elect Joe Biden helped the GOP run up their numbers, not just in Congress but in a whole bunch of state legislature races. Democrats had hoped to take control of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Texas—and it didn’t happen. On Wednesday’s episode of What Next, I spoke with Ari Berman, a senior reporter at Mother Jones, about what’s happening in these states and how it may cement Republican power across the country for the next decade. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Mary Harris: We’ve talked a lot about down-ballot races and the Senate and the House on this show, but I’ve heard a lot less conversation about state legislatures. Do you think that’s a miss?
Ari Berman: I do think it’s a miss. We are heading into another redistricting cycle in 2021, and it’s the state legislatures that were elected in 2020 that are going to draw those maps for the next decade and determine which way all these pivotal swing states go. I think one of the biggest consequences of the 2020 election, which has not gotten much attention, is what happened in all of these different state legislative races.
Can you give me the 101 version of why we need to be paying attention?
Statehouses are important in a lot of different ways. They control voting laws. They control health care. They control environmental laws. But if you’re talking just about political power, state legislatures, with a few exceptions, are the ones that draw districts both for themselves and also for the House of Representatives. So the districts that these state legislatures are going to draw in 2021—which is when the next redistricting cycle happens—are going to determine who’s in control of these legislatures for the next decade. It’s also going to determine what the House of Representatives looks like for the next decade. State legislatures don’t get a whole lot of attention, but when it comes to how political power is distributed in America, they are incredibly, incredibly important.
Can you characterize how Democrats and Republicans went into this election thinking about the state legislatures? My impression is Democrats were pretty confident in how they’d do.
Democrats felt really good about their position with regard to picking up state legislative seats and chambers heading into the 2020 cycle. Republicans dominated the process in 2010, and they won the power to draw four times as many congressional districts as Democrats did. They basically held control of all of these key states, whether it was Wisconsin or Ohio or Pennsylvania or Florida, and they remain in control of all of those states now. Democrats felt like they had a good opportunity to pick up some serious gains. They thought maybe they could flip the Texas House of Representatives, maybe they could flip the Iowa House, maybe they could take back the North Carolina General Assembly, maybe they could win seats in Florida, maybe they could win seats in Pennsylvania. They really thought that they would be in a much better position. And it just didn’t turn out that way.
How would you characterize what happened instead?
Republicans basically held all of their vulnerable chambers and seats. And right now it looks like, with a few exceptions, the post-2020 redistricting cycle is going to look very similar to the post-2010 redistricting cycle, when Republicans dominated the process.
This year was the best opportunity for Democrats, because one of the things I heard all the time was Barack Obama wasn’t on the ballot in 2010, so it was really hard to increase turnout in an off-year election. Well, this year you had Joe Biden on the ticket, you had high Democratic turnout, and they were still unable to flip these state legislative chambers. So you just wonder, when are they going to get a better opportunity? Especially because the elections in 2022 are going to take place under new maps that Republicans are going to draw. You can be sure as hell that Republicans are going to do everything they can to try to entrench their power after 2020, just like they did after 2010. And the technology to do so is going to become even more sophisticated.
If you look back at the 2010 midterm elections, no state haunts the Democrats more than Wisconsin. The statehouse, the Senate, and the governorship all flipped red that year, giving Republicans total control over the 2011 redistricting cycle.
What happened after 2010, when Republicans took over, is they passed one of the most extremely gerrymandered maps in the country, which led to a situation where Republicans in Wisconsin have consistently gotten fewer votes than Democrats statewide, but they’ve retained huge majorities in the Legislature.
You realize just what an insurmountable barrier gerrymandering can be: Nobody I talked to believed that either body of the Legislature was in play, even though Wisconsin has a Democratic governor, even though it has a Democratic lieutenant governor, even though it has a Democratic senator, even though Joe Biden won the state**. If you think of Wisconsin as kind of a quintessential swing state, you would believe that the Legislature would also be in play. But it wasn’t. And that was pretty much the case for almost all of the swing states this time around.**
I do think it’s a really interesting tale of what happens when districts are gerrymandered like this, because the Democrats really did try to stage a comeback in Wisconsin. They elected a Democratic governor, Tony Evers. But from the beginning, he was fighting with the Legislature. Members were very comfortable finding ways to block his gubernatorial power. And so you can see this hardening of sides.
“Redistricting is the next huge fight that’s going to happen.” — Ari Berman
The first thing Republicans did after Evers was elected governor in 2018 was strip him of his power in key respects. They said that he couldn’t do all of these things that previous governors, whether they were Democrats or Republicans, had the power to do. That really set the tone for what Wisconsin was going to look like. All throughout his administration, they have not cooperated with him. They’ve challenged his ability, for example, to get COVID under control. They refused to postpone the presidential primary in April, leading to those disastrous images of people waiting in line for hours. And unfortunately, I think that’s a playbook Republicans are going to try to use against Joe Biden. If you paid attention to how Wisconsin Republicans treated Tony Evers after he won, you should not be at all surprised by the way that Republicans are treating Joe Biden right now: to try to delegitimize his election, not cooperate with him, and do everything they can to try to hamstring his ability to govern once he’s elected.
Wisconsin Republicans may have control of both legislative houses, but their efforts are going to be met with Evers and his veto power.
This is going to be a major fight because you have states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that have Republican state legislatures and Democratic governors, and traditionally, Democratic governors are able to veto redistricting mafias. That leads to compromise, or it goes to the courts. What Republicans in Wisconsin are definitely going to try to do is strip the governor of his ability to veto those maps they’ve already hinted at there. Conservatives have a 4–3 majority on the state Supreme Court, so if it goes to state court, they have an advantage here.
Redistricting is the next huge fight that’s going to happen. And it hasn’t really gotten a whole lot of attention because obviously we’re not in 2021 yet. But once we get the census data, they’re going to draw new districts.
You once talked about a state senator in Texas named Carol Alvarado. She’s in Houston, and she was worried about this election and what was coming down the pike in terms of gerrymandering. Do you want to talk about her and how meeting with her helped you think about what’s about to happen in Texas?
She was worried, but she was also pretty confident Democrats were going to take back the state House and have a seat at the table when it came to redistricting—but now they won’t. So it looks like there’s going to be more extreme gerrymandering in Texas in 2021 than there was even in 2011. And Republicans could do something potentially that they weren’t able to do in the last cycle: draw districts based on eligible voters, not total population, meaning they could try to exclude people like children or immigrants who are not eligible voters. Those immigrant communities are heavily concentrated in Democratic areas and places like Carol Alvarado’s district in the eastern part of Houston, which is a heavily Latino area.
Trump sort of opened the door to this, right?
There was an attempt by the Trump administration to add a question about citizenship to the U.S. census, which failed, but then Trump issued an executive order basically saying that he was authorizing the Census Bureau to estimate citizenship data through other means, through what they call administrative records, government records. So now the Census Bureau is in the process of basically estimating the level of citizens and noncitizens in the country. Then that data could be given to states like Texas, which could be able to potentially draw districts that exclude nonvoters from counting. Now, this is going to go to the Supreme Court. There’s no question about it. I’m not totally convinced it won’t be sympathetic to states like Texas.
And states like Texas are changing demographically in a way Wisconsin is not: huge numbers of immigrants, noncitizens, lots of people becoming citizens every single day who are helping push the state blue eventually. I think in the states that are changing demographically, Republicans are probably going to be the most aggressive in trying to use this citizenship data to exclude nonvoters or noneligible voters from counting.
Alvarado is a woman of color. Did she worry these redistricting efforts would mean she could lose her seat, because there would just be less Latino representation?
She did. If you look at her district, so many people, whether they’re children or immigrants, are not eligible to vote. So her district could be submerged in a different district. She could be drawn out of a district and put in a district with another Democrat, or she could be drawn out of her district and put in a district with another Republican. But it would be hard for her to maintain her status if she were to lose so many constituents. So this is a real threat to Latino representation in a place like Texas. And I’m sure Texas Democrats are very, very nervous right now.
Is there a way to connect the dots between Trump’s refusal to concede and what’s happening at the state level? Are these actors kind of speaking to each other with how they’re behaving?
I do think they are. You’re seeing Republicans at the state legislative level raise a lot of the same false claims about irregularities that Trump is saying. It’s not getting as much attention because these people are not Donald Trump, but in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Michigan, Republicans are all calling on the election to be investigated, which is funny because they remain in control of all of these states at the state legislative level. So, again, if there were such irregularities there, how are they still in power? But you can imagine a situation next year where they start passing policies to make it more difficult to vote based on these totally baseless accusations of election irregularities. They could say we need to make it harder to vote by mail because Democrats use that more than Republicans did, or we need to cut back on early voting because that led to record turnout. New barriers to registering voters, things like that. I’m not saying they will do that, but I could very well see Trump’s rhetoric giving them an opening to say we need to tighten the election process to try to root out these “irregularities,” even if these irregularities don’t actually exist.
The Democrats seem to lack the organizational knowhow, the infrastructure to compete with Republicans in these states they see as battlegrounds. Is my perception right here or am I just being cynical?
I don’t know if that’s totally true when it comes to state legislative races, because Democrats raised more money than Republicans did with state legislative races. They had really high-profile figures like Eric Holder working on these races. I don’t think it was for lack of effort or for lack of organization. I just think these were really, really difficult places to win seats. And I think Democrats have a red America problem. It’s very, very clear they’re not competing as strongly as they should be in states that are red or haven’t flipped yet from red to purple. And a lot of the seats that needed pickup were in the redder parts of purple states. It was about the more conservative suburban areas, the rural areas? That’s where the Democratic Party really underperformed. Donald Trump ran up huge margins there. That was enough for Republicans to be able to hold control of all of these state legislative chambers.
You made a pretty good case that Democrats are stuck here—it’s hard to win back seats when your districts have been gerrymandered. Is there a path to change here, or are we really in the mud?
There’s been some progress. There are going to be states like Michigan that now have independent redistricting commissions, so there will be more states that draw districts in a bipartisan way or an independent way, which is going to be one positive going forward. I think Democrats are still going to try to pick up governor’s races, for example, where they’re statewide and don’t have to worry about gerrymandering, and they’re going to try to use that as a check. They’re going to keep putting attention on state courts, on state supreme courts, because those courts are going to oversee the redistricting process in many places. But I do think it’s going to be a lot more difficult for them to pick up state legislative seats in 2022, once these districts have been gerrymandered again. This is not going to be a two-year strategy for Democrats. They’re going to have to have a long-term strategy. They’re going to have to have a strategy for the next decade in terms of trying to win back some of these seats. That’s going to require a lot of patience and a lot of organizing and a lot of thinking about what to do here, because at the state legislative level, there’s not a quick, easy fix.
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Reminds me of the line in Forest Gump - “Stupid is as stupid does.”
Yes, Sideshow Rudy…just as off-kilter as he seems. Just plain off. So T gets what he deserves.
Trump puts Giuliani in charge of his lawsuits challenging the election results.
President Trump has put his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, in charge of his campaign lawsuits related to the outcome of the election, as well as all public communications related to them, four people familiar with the move said on Friday.
Mr. Trump turned to Mr. Giuliani earlier on Friday in reaction to the latest setback he faced in court, this one relating to votes in Maricopa County, Ariz., the people said.
The president’s advisers had warned him that they were likely to lose in that case, and he faces increasingly dim hopes of overturning the election results. Nonetheless, Mr. Trump has been trying every possible option to change the outcome and trying to get what he sees as “fighters” making his case, often conflating a media strategy with a legal one.
But the involvement of Mr. Giuliani, who held a widely mocked news conference in front of a landscaping company in Philadelphia last weekend in which he claimed widespread fraud, has vexed people on the campaign and in the White House.
A half-dozen other Trump advisers have described Mr. Giuliani’s efforts as counterproductive and said that he was giving the president unwarranted optimism about what could happen. Those advisers have said that they are concerned Mr. Giuliani is damaging not only Mr. Trump’s remaining legal options, but his legacy and his future opportunities in politics as he considers another campaign in 2024.
A campaign spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Giuliani did not respond to a message seeking comment.
In an Oval Office meeting with aides on Thursday, Mr. Trump put Mr. Giuliani on speakerphone so the others could hear him. He angrily accused the aides of not telling the president the truth, according to people briefed on the meeting. Justin Clark, the deputy campaign manager, pushed back aggressively on Mr. Giuliani, said the people briefed on what took place.
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Interview by CNN’s Chris Cuomo with Ex FBI head, Andrew McCabe discusses what sorts of classified information on T. McCabe says there is some very scandalous intel on T, but revealing it would affect their sources and methods in collecting. Whether Trump would release it, who knows? Trump wants to clear his name from any Russia scandal…
McCabe was also asserting that if Trump fired CIA head Gina Haspel, then McCabe would have to reveal the predicate for the Russia investigation…hmmmmmm
Former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe has warned that classified intelligence from bureau’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign ties to Russia could contain information that would “risk casting the president in a very negative light”.
Mr McCabe has been at the centre of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, in which a Republican-controlled panel is reviewing the FBI’s recision to initiate the investigation.
He testified before the panel on Tuesday and told lawmakers that officials had a “duty” to carry out the investigation due to the information they had collected. Mr McCabe personally approved the decision to investigate Mr Trump for possible obstruction of justice.
In an interview with CNN on Friday night, Mr McCabe was asked what the risks were if more information from the Russia investigation was to be declassified.
CNN anchor Andrew Cuomo said Mr Trump was told by Devin Nunes, a close ally of the president’s and former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, that if more previously unreleased information comes out, the more it will appear that the president was “framed”.
“From your knowledge, is there anything that could come out that people would look at and say, ‘wow, I can’t believe they ever included the president in this analysis, he and his people clearly did nothing’?” asked Mr Cuomo.
Mr McCabe replied: “There is some very, very serious, very specific, undeniable intelligence that has not come out, that if it were released, would risk compromising our access to that sort of information in the future.
“I think it would also risk casting the president in a very negative light - so, would he have a motivation to release those things? It’s almost incomprehensible to me that he would want that information out, I don’t see how he spins it into his advantage, because quite frankly, I don’t believe it’s flattering.
Asked if Mr McCabe thought there was more “bad stuff” about Mr Trump that wasn’t already publicly known, he replied: “There is always more intelligence, there is a lot more in the intelligence community assessment than what is ever released for public consumption.
“The original version of that report was classified at the absolute highest level I have ever seen. We’re talking about top secret, compartmentalised code word stuff, and it would be tragic to American intelligence collection for those sources to be put at risk.”
The FBI has been accused by the Senate Judiciary Committee of going “rogue” with the Russia investigation, with one senator describing it as the “biggest scandal in the history of the FBI” on Tuesday.
Mr Trump has repeatedly railed against the FBI for the investigation and maintained there was “no collusion” between his 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.
Video of Cuomo/McCabe
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Some of the purges going on in the WH, which are being commandeered by T loyalist and new fix-it guy Patrick McEntee
Over the past week, President Trump has axed his defense secretary and other top Pentagon aides, his second-in-command at the U.S. Agency for International Development, two top Homeland Security officials, a senior climate scientist and the leader of the agency that safeguards nuclear weapons.
Follow the latest on Election 2020
Engineering much of the post-election purge is Johnny McEntee, a former college quarterback who was hustled out of the White House two years ago after a security clearance check turned up a prolific habit for online gambling.
A staunch Trump loyalist, McEntee, 30, was welcomed back into the fold in February and installed as personnel director for the entire U.S. government. Since the race was called for President-elect Joe Biden, McEntee has been distributing pink slips, warning federal workers not to cooperate with the Biden transition and threatening to oust people who show disloyalty by job hunting while Trump is still refusing to acknowledge defeat, according to six administration officials.
More firings are expected, White House and agency officials said, including a top cybersecurity official whose agency on Thursday disputed Trump’s unfounded claims of election fraud. While the motives are not always clear — is the White House pursuing last-minute policy goals or simply punishing disloyalty? — critics say the dismissals threaten to destabilize broad swaths of the federal bureaucracy in the fragile period during the handover to the next administration.
McEntee is not just firing people. The Pentagon general counsel this week hired former Republican operative and political appointee Michael Ellis as general counsel of the National Security Agency, making him a civilian member of the senior executive service. That gives Ellis civil service protections that will make it hard for Biden’s team to push him out. Several officials said McEntee also wants to help campaign allies secure jobs in the White House.
Some officials said they worry the new hires could destroy briefing documents prepared for the incoming Biden administration. Others criticized McEntee’s choices for key government roles.
“Johnny is loyal to a fault to the president, but doesn’t have the basic understanding of how departments operate and what skills are required to hold certain Cabinet-level positions,” said one senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. “It’s actually hampered the president by putting unqualified people throughout senior roles.”
McEntee declined to comment through a White House spokesman. In a statement, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said: “John McEntee has supported the President’s initiative from day one and does an outstanding job working to help make sure our administration implements the Trump agenda. He’s a valuable asset to our team and no doubt the unfair criticisms being directed his way are from individuals who don’t know the facts.”
Some Trump allies applauded McEntee’s performance.
“Conservatives believe that the president was not well served by the original people staffing [the White House Personnel Office]. They systematically excluded strong Trump supporters,” said Cleta Mitchell, a partner at the law firm Foley & Lardner and a prominent conservative activist.
Of McEntee, she said: “I wish he had been there in the beginning.”
The post-election firings are the culmination of a months-long crusade by McEntee, who reports directly to the president and sits just outside the Oval Office. Obsessed with leaks and mistrustful of veteran government officials who have served multiple administrations, Trump has complained that he finds it more difficult to deal with the federal bureaucracy than with foreign leaders.
“I’ve fired some. I say, some, just get rid of them,” Trump told donors last month in Nashville. “We have some pretty deep-seated people, and we got rid of a lot of them.”
The president has long relied on McEntee, who worked for Trump at his organization in New York and on his presidential campaign. After the 2016 election, according to a tell-all book by Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former aide to the first lady, McEntee happened to be delivering a turkey sandwich when Winston Wolkoff informed Trump that his inaugural committee was a “s— show.”
“Donald grabbed the [sandwich] bag and told the kid to sit down. ‘You’re in charge of the inauguration now,’ he said.”
McEntee soon became the president’s trusted personal aide, accompanying him on the golf course, watching TV off the Oval Office and carrying his large box of papers on Air Force One. Officials described him as jovial and omnipresent, but not particularly influential.
In 2018, McEntee was ousted by then-Chief of Staff John Kelly, who discovered his gambling habit. Kelly had McEntee immediately escorted out of the West Wing, a move that enraged many Trump loyalists.
“The president values him as a very trusted, very loyal man,” said Chris Ruddy, a close Trump friend.
Trump rehired McEntee in the weeks after the impeachment process, when Trump had been frustrated to see federal officials testify against him, and granted McEntee wide latitude to make personnel changes. McEntee quickly made aggressive moves, replacing longtime staff in the personnel office with a coterie of aides in their 20s and purging officials viewed as insufficiently loyal.
“I’m only here for the president,” McEntee said, according to one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share a private conversation. And, he said, “I’m not afraid to fire people.”
Other senior aides say McEntee has offered to fire people they wanted gone. The moves created a toxic culture across the government, officials said, and several Cabinet members have complained to Trump about McEntee.
McEntee’s office soon launched an interview process to suss out disloyalty, asking: “Who on your team is good? Who on your team is bad? Who is not working to serve the president’s agenda? Who brought you into the administration? What do you think of a particular policy?” said one administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal questioning.
People familiar with the interviews said Trump appointees wanted names of people perceived as disloyal. One Environmental Protection Agency employee was asked his opinion on pulling troops out of Afghanistan. “I work at the EPA,” the official said, startled.
Another official said she was asked her opinion about the president’s proclamation on transgender troops. And one senior government appointee was asked by McEntee where he gets his news. (He said his answer — Fox News — seemed to meet with McEntee’s satisfaction.)
“These were some really heavy-handed interviews,” one administration official said.
Since the election, the pace of removals seems to have accelerated. Some of the removals appear to create opportunities for policy gains in the waning days of the Trump administration.
For example, the White House on Nov. 6 abruptly removed Michael Kuperberg, the career climate scientist who has for five years overseen the National Climate Assessment, one of the most important federal documents in the battle against climate change**. In his place, the White House is detailing** David Legates, a meteorologist who claims that excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is good for plants and that global warming is harmless. Legates was appointed in September to a top post at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The White House is also assigning Ryan Maue, a meteorologist who had worked for the libertarian Cato Institute and questioned whether climate change impacts would be as catastrophic as many scientists have projected, to help oversee the report.
According to people familiar with the matter, the moves would fulfill a promise by White House officials to take steps to install like-minded staffers at NOAA and the U.S. Global Change Research Program.
Myron Ebell, a climate change contrarian at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who is close to the administration, called McEntee “a very strong supporter of the Trump agenda, and so he moved to get Trump people into political positions. It took him a while to get to NOAA, because it’s probably not at the top of their list. They’re going to get the National Climate Assessment started in the right direction.”
“Better late than never is a good way to describe it,” said James Taylor, president of the conservative Heartland Institute.
At the Department of Homeland Security, McEntee’s office is determined to get all disloyal employees removed in upcoming days, three people familiar with the matter said. Trump has long chafed at the agency.
At the Pentagon, recently fired Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper mostly stayed quiet as a series of mid-level political appointees were ushered out by the White House over the past year. But other more senior officials, including Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Joe Kernan and acting undersecretary of defense for policy James Anderson, continued to stay on — until Esper was fired this week and the relative top cover that he had provided disappeared.
And at USAID, a top official, Bonnie Glick, was removed abruptly to make way for a Trump loyalist after she had been supportive of transition planning, including the preparation of a 440-page manual for the next administration.
In some cases, the rush to oust political appointees has been confoundingly haphazard. Neil Chatterjee, who was demoted Nov. 5 from his post chairing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said in an interview Friday that it is unclear whether the White House actually took the necessary steps to remove him from his post.
“Here’s the crazy thing: I don’t actually know that I’ve been demoted,” said Chatterjee, who was appointed by Trump to a five-year term on the independent commission in 2017 and remains a member of the five-person panel.
The president must sign a legal designation for a new FERC chair, he said, and typically the White House makes a public announcement. Instead, he said, three officials from McEntee’s office sent “a one-sentence email” to the commission’s executive director and human resources chief saying that another Republican commissioner, James Danly, would replace Chatterjee in the top spot.
“We still have no record evidence that the designation was signed. But what’s stranger is there’s been no public announcement from the White House,” said Chatterjee, who only learned about his ouster when Danly called him the evening of Nov. 5.
It is unclear why the White House moved to oust Chatterjee, a former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and a longtime supporter of fossil fuels. However, he has taken steps to allow regional power administrators to put a price on carbon dioxide emissions linked to climate change and pushed back against a recent White House ban on diversity training for federal employees.
“No one from the White House has actually spoken to me about this,” Chatterjee said. “So I can only speculate as to why I was demoted.”
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I do believe I’ve found the location where Rudy intends to litigate all of this:
A Distinctive Location - An Outstanding Menu
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Barramundi Spanish Chorizo and Cherry Tomato Risotto Eggplant Parmagiana Lamb Roulade Lamb Souvlaki Pizza Warm Tandoori Salad "Friendly staff. Great service. Delicious food. The pork belly, salt and pepper calamari and pumpkin pizza were amazing! Nothing was too much trouble. Highly recommend it. We'll definitely be back." - Jessica
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Looks like the Newsmax switch for Trump and his enthusiasts is in the works.
For nearly two years, allies of President Trump have been exploring ways to build up a formidable competitor to Fox News. One target they recently zeroed in on: the fledgling pro-Trump cable channel Newsmax TV.
Hicks Equity Partners, a private-equity firm with ties to a co-chair of the Republican National Committee, has held talks in recent months about acquiring and investing in Newsmax, according to people familiar with the matter, part of a larger effort that could also include a streaming-video service.
Newsmax’s viewership has risen sharply since Election Day, as it wins over viewers loyal to Mr. Trump who are frustrated that Fox News and other networks have declared Democrat Joe Biden the president-elect. Newsmax hosts have promoted Mr. Trump’s claims that the election was stolen. No evidence of significant fraud has emerged or been presented.
It is unclear whether Hicks Equity’s talks with Newsmax will move forward. The discussions show the belief among some investors and allies of Mr. Trump that there is room to mount a real challenge to Fox News, which has dominated the conservative media landscape for two decades.
Mr. Trump and Fox News have had a complicated relationship. The network’s opinion hosts are highly supportive of the president. He devours Fox content, tweets about it and is influenced by it in policy and personnel decisions, aides say. Yet he spars with the network when he feels it is criticizing or undermining him.
The election’s aftermath has stoked those tensions: Mr. Trump has criticized Fox News on Twitter while promoting segments on the network favorable to him and heaping praise on Newsmax and One America News Network, another small right-wing channel.
Creating a television network to rival Fox News, which has led the cable-news ratings for years, is a longshot. Newsmax’s average prime-time audience jumped 156% to 223,000 viewers during the week of the election, according to Nielsen data, and last Thursday crossed one million from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m., about half of Fox’s audience during the time period. Sustaining those gains when interest in the election subsides won’t be easy. Fox averaged nearly six million prime-time viewers during the week of the election, about 22% higher than the previous four weeks.
The cable-TV business as a whole is under pressure as consumers increasingly “cut the cord.” Big media conglomerates are generally in a better position to weather that storm than smaller or independent competitors, because they have more leverage to extract monthly fees from distributors.
Wall Street Journal parent News Corp NWS 3.56% and Fox News-parent Fox Corp. share common ownership.
In an interview, Newsmax Media Chief Executive Chris Ruddy said he has had many discussions with interested parties over the years looking to buy or invest in Newsmax. “Newsmax never had any deal with the Hicks group, and if it’s true they were using our name for the purposes of capital fundraising, that is wholly inappropriate,” he said.
A spokeswoman for Fox Corp. had no comment. The company’s chief executive, Lachlan Murdoch, said on a recent earnings call that the company “loves competition.”
The Trump campaign declined to comment. The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.
People close to Mr. Trump say he is focused on the results of the election, and his pending litigation about it, and there are no signs he is taking any steps of his own to launch a network.
If Mr. Trump wanted to create his own media business from scratch, the most likely avenue would be a subscription streaming service, some industry executives said, and he could likely create a viable business, though perhaps not one with the scale of a TV network. “I think for someone like Trump it’s an easy million,” said Chris Balfe, a partner at the digital media consulting firm Red Seat Ventures, referring to the number of subscribers Mr. Trump could launch with. Typical industry prices for such services can run from roughly $6 to $10 a month.
Fox News already has a streaming-video service, Fox Nation, that offers a combination of opinion programming and entertainment. The network declined to say how many subscribers Fox Nation has, but has said 80% of people who sample the service convert to paying customers.
Trump supporters’ dissatisfaction with their media choices after the election have created opportunities on digital platforms as well. Libertarian-leaning social-media platform Parler became the most downloaded app on both Android and Apple devices for most of last week thanks to conservatives’ anger at Facebook and Twitter.
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Wrong sentiment here Jim Jordan. Health trumps everything you idiot.
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Sen Graham pressuring GA Sec of State Raffensperger to throw out ballots which may not have matching signatures. Graham is denying he was implying this of course.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger stood firm Monday on his account that Sen. Lindsey Graham had hinted that he should try to discard some ballots in Georgia, where a recount is underway after the state went for President-elect Joe Biden in the presidential election.
"He asked if the ballots could be matched back to the voters," Raffensperger told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on “The Situation Room” Monday evening. “And then he, I got the sense it implied that then you could throw those out for any, if you look at the counties with the highest frequent error of signatures. So that’s the impression that I got.”
He later added, "It was just an implication of, ‘Look hard and see how many ballots you could throw out.’ "
Raffensperger’s comments come after he told The Washington Post on Monday that Graham had cast doubt on Georgia’s signature-matching law in a conversation on Friday, and had also floated the possibility that biased poll workers could have counted ballots with inconsistent signatures.
Graham, a South Carolina Republican who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also inquired if Raffensperger could discard all mail-in ballots from counties that had shown higher rates of unmatched signatures, the Republican secretary of state told the Post on Monday.
There has been no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, and fraudulently altering a federal election vote tally is a federal crime.
Graham denied Raffensperger’s claim on Monday, telling CNN that he had said he wanted to understand the process for verifying the signatures on mail-in ballots. He said President Donald Trump did not urge him to make the call.
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