Daily Archives: June 29, 2022

Former President Donald Trump on Saturday extended his victory lap following the Supreme Courts decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which he said was made possible by the three conservative justices he nominated.

Mr. Trump called the ruling a victory for the rule of law and, above all, a victory for life.

I promised to nominate judges and justices who would stand up for the original meaning of the Constitution and who would honestly and faithfully interpret the law as written, the former president said at a campaign-style rally in Illinois. We got almost 300 federal judges and three great Supreme Court justices confirmed to do exactly that.

Mr. Trump nominated three of the six justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett who joined the majority in Fridays 6-3 ruling.

His remarks Saturday follow a similar sentiment conveyed in a statement by Mr. Trump through his political action committee soon after the ruling.

I did not cave to the Radical Left Democrats, their partners in the Fake News Media, or the RINOs who are likewise the true, but silent, enemy of the people, he said.

Democrats have turned the decision into a campaign rallying cry, urging voters to flood the polls and give Congress the needed votes to restore the protections from the Roe ruling.

Voters need to make their voices heard. This fall we must elect more senators and representatives who can codify the womans right to choose into federal law, President Biden said from the White House on Friday. Congress must act. With your vote, you can have the final word.

Mr. Biden lamented the ruling that overturned the 1973 Roe decision as an ideological remnant of his predecessor.

It was three justices, named by one president, Donald Trump, who was at the core of todays decision to upend the scales of justice and eliminate the fundamental rights of women in this country, he said.

Make no mistake, this decision is the culmination of a deliberate effort over decades to upset the balance of our law, he said. Its a realization of extreme ideology and a tragic error by the Supreme Court.

Mr. Trump on Saturday was unmoved by the threats of an energized Democratic base.

As for the Republican Party, we are today the party of life and we are the party of everyone, he said. Were the party of everyone.

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Donald Trump extends victory lap over Roe - Washington Times

WASHINGTON He flung his lunch across the room, smashing the plate in a fit of anger as ketchup dripped down the wall. He appeared to endorse supporters who wanted to hang his own vice president. And in a scene laid out by a former aide that seemed more out of a movie than real life, he tried to wrestle away the steering wheel of his presidential vehicle and lunged at his own Secret Service agent.

Former President Donald J. Trump has never been seen as the most stable occupant of the Oval Office by almost anyone other than himself, but the breathtaking testimony presented by his former aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, at Tuesdays House select committee hearing portrayed an unhinged commander in chief veering wildly out of control as he desperately sought to cling to power and egged on armed supporters to help make it happen.

The president that emerged from her account was volatile, violent and vicious, single-minded in his quest to overturn an election he lost no matter what anyone told him, anxious to head to the Capitol to personally disrupt the constitutional process that would finalize his defeat, dismissive of warnings that his actions could lead to disaster and thoroughly unbothered by the prospect of sending to Congress a mob of supporters that he knew included people armed with deadly weapons.

A president who liked to describe himself as a very stable genius was anything but that as Ms. Hutchinson observed in those final, frenzied days of his time in office. Hers was not a description that surprised many of those who worked for Mr. Trump and had seen him up close in the preceding four years, or for that matter, many who had known him in the decades that preceded his life in politics. But hearing her recount it all under oath, on live television, brought home how much Mr. Trump and his White House spiraled in its perilous last chapter.

This is f-ing crazy, Pat A. Cipollone, his White House counsel, declared at one point on Jan. 6, 2021, as Ms. Hutchinson recalled it, when Mr. Trump was busy castigating Vice President Mike Pence rather than trying to call off the attack on the Capitol.

Mr. Cipollone was not the only one who thought so. By Ms. Hutchinsons account, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other members of the Cabinet were so concerned about Mr. Trumps behavior that they discussed invoking the 25th Amendment, used to remove a president deemed unable to discharge his duties.

Mr. Trump, who regularly accuses his critics of being crazy and psycho, bombarded his new social media site during the hearing on Tuesday with posts assailing Ms. Hutchinson and denying the most sensational anecdote she provided to the committee.

Her Fake story that I tried to grab the steering wheel of the White House Limousine in order to steer it to the Capitol Building is sick and fraudulent, very much like the Unselect Committee itself, Mr. Trump wrote on his Truth Social website. Her story of me throwing food is also false.

A Secret Service spokesman said in a statement that the agency would respond on the record to the House committee about Ms. Hutchinsons account of what happened in the armored car.

Secret Service officials who requested anonymity to discuss the potential testimony said that both Robert Engel, the head of Mr. Trumps protective detail, and the driver of Mr. Trumps sport utility vehicle were prepared to state under oath that neither man was assaulted by the former president and that he did not reach for the wheel. The officials said the two men would not dispute the allegation that Mr. Trump wanted to go to the Capitol.

Ms. Hutchinson did not witness the scene in the vehicle herself but said she was informed about it moments later by Anthony Ornato, the presidents deputy chief of staff and a former Secret Service agent, with Mr. Engel present in the room and not disputing it.

Either way, other veterans of the Trump White House who have broken with the former president said Ms. Hutchinsons testimony resonated with their own experiences. Mr. Trump was prone to temper tantrums, slamming his hands down on his desk and screaming at advisers he considered insufficiently loyal. As Ms. Hutchinson said, his destruction of dishware during an outburst following the election was hardly the first time he had taken his wrath out on the White House china.

His temper was scary. And swift, Stephanie Grisham, who served as his White House press secretary and communications director and as Melania Trumps chief of staff, said after the hearing on Tuesday. Hed snap and almost lose control.

She related a number of examples in her tell-all book published after she left office, and noted that when Mr. Trump descended into rage, his staff resorted to summoning an aide, nicknamed the Music Man, to play favorite show tunes they knew would soothe him, including Memory from the Broadway musical Cats.

June 28, 2022, 8:20 p.m. ET

Other presidents have exhibited erratic behavior behind the scenes, from Andrew Jackson to Lyndon B. Johnson. Richard M. Nixon threw an ashtray across the room upon learning of the Watergate break-in, and on another occasion was seen shoving his own press secretary. In the days of scandal that led up to his resignation, Nixon drank, talked to the paintings of past presidents and seemed so unstable that his defense secretary ordered generals not to carry out any orders he issued without checking with him or the secretary of state first.

Even so, its hard to imagine any other president accosting his own Secret Service agent, in a vain attempt to turn his vehicle toward the Capitol, so that he could march into the House chamber to object to his own election defeat.

We never know everything that goes on behind closed doors at the White House, and presidential history is replete with boorish behavior, said Jeffrey A. Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. But Im hard pressed to think of any previous instance when a president physically assaulted, or even threatened, someone charged with keeping them safe.

Mark K. Updegrove, president of the L.B.J. Foundation and author of Incomparable Grace, a new book about John F. Kennedy, said he was unable to come up with a historical comparison. Johnson and Nixon could be volatile emotionally, but nothing approaching physical violence, he said. Like almost everything else with Trump, this is utterly unprecedented.

One who might know would be John Dean, the White House counsel whose own testimony during the Watergate era helped bring down Nixon. Cassidys testimony makes clear that Trump is prone to tantrums, like an undisciplined child, he said after the hearing. I cant tell from her testimony if theyre controlled or uncontrolled. I suspect at his age theyre controlled tantrums.

Mr. Trumps mental state was a regular issue throughout his four years in office and the notion of declaring him unfit to serve through the application of the 25th Amendment came up inside his own administration even in its early months.

Bookshelves were filled with volumes speculating about his psychological health. His speech patterns were analyzed for signs of dementia. His own niece, Mary L. Trump, a clinical psychologist, declared that he had so many pathologies and demonstrates sociopathic tendencies. At one point during the 2020 campaign, he took a cognitive test to prove his mental acuity, reciting in order, Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.

Some advisers came to the conclusion that Mr. Trump deteriorated after losing the election to Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Nov. 3. Former Attorney General William P. Barr, whose public statement on Dec. 1 that there was no evidence the election was stolen prompted Mr. Trump to attack his lunch, told the House committee that the president seemed increasingly unbalanced.

I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has lost contact with hes become detached from reality, Mr. Barr testified.

The reality conveyed by Ms. Hutchinson, a top aide to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, became more disturbing on the day that Congress convened to count the Electoral College votes confirming Mr. Trumps defeat. He lashed out and gave every indication that he knew the crowd of supporters he had gathered on the Ellipse included some bent on violence. Told that some trying to attend his rally were armed, he snapped that the Secret Service should remove its magnetometers and let them in.

You know, I dont f-ing care that they have weapons, Mr. Trump said in Ms. Hutchinsons telling of the episode. Theyre not here to hurt me. Take the f-ing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here. Let the people in. Take the f-ing mags away.

The fact that he then told them to march to the Capitol, knowing they were armed, did not daunt him in the least, as far as she could tell.

He wanted to go with them and told the crowd that he would, even though advisers had pronounced it a phenomenally bad idea. Were going to get charged with every crime imaginable if he headed to the Capitol, Mr. Cipollone had warned a few days earlier.

When Mr. Trump climbed into the armored presidential sport utility vehicle after his speech on the Ellipse, the Secret Service began to take him back to the White House, prompting him to erupt. Im the f-ing president. Take me up to the Capitol now, he ordered.

Robert Engel, the lead agent, told him he had to go back to the West Wing. At that point, according to the account Ms. Hutchinson later heard, the president reached up toward the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel. Mr. Engel grabbed his arm. Sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel, the agent reportedly said. Were going back to the West Wing. Were not going to the Capitol.

According to the version relayed to Ms. Hutchinson, Mr. Trump then used his free hand to lunge toward the agent at his clavicle. But it did not make a difference.

The president was taken back to the White House, where he watched the action of the rest of the day on television upset not at the violence unleashed in his name but at its failure to change the election outcome.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.

Excerpt from:

Donald Trump: A President Untethered - The New York Times

A video of then-President Donald Trump's motorcade leaving the Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse is displayed as Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top aide to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, testifies about Trump's actions on that day. Shawn Thew/Pool/Getty Images hide caption

A video of then-President Donald Trump's motorcade leaving the Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse is displayed as Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top aide to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, testifies about Trump's actions on that day.

Former President Donald Trump intended to go to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, after his speech calling for his supporters to march there and became "irate" when told he couldn't, according to testimony Tuesday from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide.

Trump told the rally at the Ellipse that day he would go to the Capitol and Secret Service and National Security Council staff communicated about "clearing a route," according to messages shown by the committee. In the communications, security personnel used the code name "Mogul" for Trump.

The president was under the impression that he would be taken to the Capitol following his speech, said Hutchinson, who was then a top aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

When he learned there were no security assets and Trump would have to return to the White House, the president grew "irate" and attempted to grab the steering wheel of "The Beast," the president's armored vehicle. Hutchinson did not witness the altercation, but heard it from others and those who were there did not dispute the account, she said.

"'I am the effing president, take me up to the Capitol now!'" Hutchinson testified that Trump said.

Trump talked about walking to the Capitol, where he might give a speech or enter the House chamber. And when staff stopped those plans, Trump attempted to grab the steering wheel of the vehicle to direct it that way, she said.

Hutchinson also testified that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy contacted her during the rally and asked for her to make sure that Trump didn't come to the Capitol.

Trump responded to Hutchinson's testimony, posting on Truth Social, the social media platform he controls: "Her Fake story that I tried to grab the steering wheel of the White House Limousine in order to steer it to the Capitol Building is "sick" and fraudulent, very much like the Unselect Committee itself - Wouldn't even have been possible to do such a ridiculous thing."

Earlier Trump had posted about the witness: "I hardly know who this person, Cassidy Hutchinson, is, other than I heard very negative things about her (a total phony and "leaker"), and when she requested to go with certain others of the team to Florida after my having served a full term in office, I personally turned her request down. Why did she want to go with us if she felt we were so terrible? I understand that she was very upset and angry that I didn't want her to go, or be a member of the team. She is bad news!"

The rest is here:

Former President Donald Trump lunged at his driver on Jan. 6 - NPR

A noose is seen on makeshift gallows as supporters of US President Donald Trump gather on the West side of the US Capitol in Washington DC on January 6, 2021.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds | AFP | Getty Images

When former President Donald Trump heard his supporters chanting "hang Mike Pence" during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, White House aides said he told them the vice president "deserves" it, according to a former White House aide who testified Tuesday to what she saw and heard during the weeks surrounding the attack.

The jaw-dropping remarks came during the sixth public hearing by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol by a violent pro-Trump mob.

Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top aide to then-chief of staff Mark Meadows, in sworn testimony recounted her experience witnessing Meadows and another top official, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, discussing Trump's reaction as the riot unfolded.

At the White House, Cipollone told Meadows, "The rioters have gotten to the capitol, Mark. We need to go down and see the president now," Hutchinson testified.

Meadows replied, "He doesn't want to do anything, Pat," Hutchinson said.

Cipollone shot back, essentially saying that something must be done or "people are going to die and the blood's going to be on your effing hands," Hutchinson said.

Meadows and Cipollone both walked toward the Oval Office dining room. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, then called asking for Meadows, Hutchinson testified. She said she went to the dining room to give the phone to Meadows, who took the call with the door ajar. Hutchinson said that in the background, she could hear conversations about the chants of "hang Mike Pence" that had sprung up among some of the rioters.

Hutchinson said she returned to her desk and Meadows and Cipollone appeared minutes later.

"I remember Pat saying something to the effect of, 'Mark, we need to do something more. They're literally calling for the vice president to be effing hung,'" Hutchinson testified.

"Mark had responded something to the effect of, 'You heard him, Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn't think they're doing anything wrong,'" Hutchinson said.

She told the committee, "I understood 'they're' to bethe rioters in the Capitol that were chantingfor the vice president to be hung."

Trump, who was responding to Hutchinson's testimony in real time on his social media platform Truth Social, angrily lashed out following her recollections from inside the White House.

"I NEVER SAID, 'MIKE PENCE DESERVES IT (to be hung)," Trump wrote. "Another made up statement by a third rate social climber!"

Hutchinson's counsel said in a statement to NBC News that while the former White House aide "did not seek out the attention accompanying her testimony today, she believes that it was her duty and responsibility to provide the Committee with her truthful and candid observations of the events surrounding January 6."

"Ms. Hutchinson believes that January 6 was a horrific day for the country, and it is vital to the future of our democracy that it not be repeated," read the statement from her counsel Jody HuntandWilliam Jordan of law firm Alston and Bird.

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Trump chief of staff said the president thought Pence 'deserves' chants of 'hang Mike Pence' on Jan. 6, ex-aide testifies - CNBC

The chair of the January 6th committee, Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, was born into segregation in the Delta town of Bolton, Mississippi, population five hundred and twenty-one, a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, Ku Klux Klan, and lynching, as he said during the first hearing. The vice-chair, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, is twenty years younger and the daughter of Vice-President Dick Cheney; she had spent most of the Trump years occupying the third-ranking position in the Republican House leadership, until she was forced to step down in May, 2021, having repeatedly criticized Trump and voted for his impeachment. The scene is straight out of a John Grisham thriller: the slow-speaking Southern judge with a long historical memory, the sharp female prosecutor who is turning against her former political patrons. This is what justicesimple, crowd-pleasing justiceis supposed to look like.

In its focus on the period between the Presidential election on November 3, 2020, and the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the committee has built an account in which successive advisers to the Presidenteach of them representing a portion of his partyturn away from him in disgust, as he tries to sell the badly organized fiction of a stolen election. Those with him on November 3, 2020 were already a self-selecting group of loyalists, given how much of the Party refused to work for Trump in the first place, and how many of his early aides burned out and left. In November, most of the Trump White House lawyers and campaign staff, who saw no major fraud in the election, had consolidated around Team Normal, as the political aide Bill Stepien termed it in his testimony; the Trump camp was arranged around Team Rudy, a few lawyers allied with the former New York mayor Giuliani, who were searching for evidence of fraud that never turned out to be there. In every scene recreated in the hearing room, every heated Oval Office session recounted by a lawyer, every memo highlighted and projected on a screen above the dais, the central question is: Who was with Trump, and who was against him?

But this alignment had a political valence as well. In December, as Trump continued to pursue his election-fraud claims, his Attorney General, Bill Barr, the embodiment of the conservative legal establishments truce with the President, resigned. In Congress, the Republicans clearly with Trump were the members of the right-wing House Freedom Caucusmost prominently, Rep. Jim Jordan, of Ohio, Rep. Paul Gosar, of Arizona, Rep. Louie Gohmert, of Texas, and Rep. Scott Perry, of Pennsylvaniawhose line to the President ran through the White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, formerly the chair of the House Freedom Caucus. The Committee etched another dividing line: among the lawyers, it was Team Normal versus Team Rudy, but among the politicians it was Team Republican Party versus Team Freedom Caucus.

Thursdays hearing centered on a dramatic Oval Office meeting on January 3rd, three days before the insurrection. One attendee was a lawyer at the D.O.J. named Jeff Clark, who helped lead the departments environmental division. Clark had met Trump through Rep. Perry, of the Freedom Caucus, and made clear that he would back the Presidents claimsClark had gone so far as to draft a D.O.J. letter, at Trumps urging, asking the Georgia state legislature to adopt a fake set of electors rather than those fairly won by President Biden. Also at the meeting were acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen and acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, who had been running the D.O.J. since Barrs departure, and had refused to send Clarks letter. According to the testimony that Rosen and Donoghue gave on Thursday, the President asked why he should not replace Rosen with Clark, given that Rosen would not do what his Commander-in-Chief wanted. Donoghue told the committee that he had said that Clark was not qualified to either run the Department of Justice or investigate an election-fraud claimhe had never even tried a case. Clark protested that he had led very complicated environmental appeals. In one of the all-time Oval Office disses (assuming it really happened; we only have Donoghues word here), Donoghue said, Thats right. Youre an environmental lawyer. Go back to your office and well call you when theres an oil spill. Trump did not make Clark acting Attorney General; Donoghue advised him that if he did all of his Assistant Attorneys General would resign en masse. Trumps own Department of Justice was against him. What he still had were the Freedom Caucus andseventy-two hours latera mob.

Trumps instincts are not especially sharp these days, and he seemed to recognize very belatedly that the events of January 6th not only put him in legal jeopardy but political peril, too. For a half decade, part of his pitch has been that, however reluctant the Republican establishment seemed, however disgusted it pretended to be with him, it would always come home to him in the end. But, the same week that the January 6th committee emphasized how even the Trump diehards in the White House, in the days before the riot, were fed up with him, a poll of Republican primary voters in New Hampshire put him behind Ron DeSantis. Brit Hume of Fox News emphasized on air that, if the hearings mean Trump does not run in 2024, then the committee will have done the Republican Party a great service, because many Republicans think they cannot win with Trump at the head of the ticket. Speaking with a conservative talk-radio host last week, the former President said that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthys decision to boycott the January 6th committee was very, very foolish since that step had allowed Trumps opponents to pick the members of the committee by themselves, and to shape the story as they saw fit. McCarthy did not respond. He has long bowed to Trump, but he has also been an antagonist of the Freedom Caucus, not a member. Is he still on the former Presidents side?

At some points during the hearings, a slight suspension of narrative disbelief has been required. Among the many former Trump staffers who have been obviously disgusted by him, none has been so disgusted as the White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, who often appears by Zoom with a black baseball bat mounted on the wall behind him, emblazoned with the word JUSTICE. (Next to the baseball bat is a large painting of a panda.) Thursdays committee hearing featured Herschmanns description of a conversation with Jeff Clark, the environmental lawyer with dreams of fake electors from Georgia. Herschmann said, When he finished discussing what he planned on doing, I said, Good, fuckingexcuse meeffing A-hole, congratulations. You just admitted that your first step or act youd take as Attorney General would be committing a felony and violating Rule 6C. Some suppressed inner lawyer in me rebelled: Was that a word-for-word renactment, complete with subsectional citation? Was it not just a little self-aggrandizing? But the Mississippi judge and the Washington prosecutor let it slide. They have allowed the Republicans who broke with Trump to tell the story, and have praised them as heroes. Their bravery is a high moment in the sordid story of what led to January 6, Rep. Adam Kinzinger said, on Thursday, speaking of Rosen and Donoghue. As Grisham might have recognized, justice is not the only process under way.

Toward the end of Thursdays hearing, Herschmann and several other White House aides (among them, Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Meadows, and John McEntee, the head of the Office of Presidential Personnel) testified that several members of Congress had contacted the Presidents advisers to see whether he might premptively pardon them, to protect them from any prosecution for their role in January 6th. Rep. Mo Brooks wrote a letter to the White House not only formally requesting a pardon but asking for an all-purpose pardon for the hundred and forty-seven members of the House of Representatives who objected to the certification of the election. But, for the most part, the committee has cast ordinary Republicans as the heroes. The villains were the sixjust sixmembers of Congress who had reportedly requested pardons for themselves: Brooks (who lost a primary for Senate in Alabama); Rep. Matt Gaetz, of Florida (who is facing a federal probe for sex trafficking); Rep. Andy Biggs, of Arizona; Rep. Perry, of Pennsylvania; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia; and Rep. Louie Gohmert, of Texas. It was a sign of just how small the caucus of dead-enders was, and of what political line the hearings have offered to draw for Republicans: civil society on one side, and on the other, the former President, a few lawyers, a half-dozen members of Congress, the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, the mob.

Original post:

Who Was Willing to Stand with Donald Trump? - The New Yorker