My responsibility is to ensure that the position of the Department of Justice is not only legally defensible, but is informed by our best view of what the law is after consideration of all the facts. In addition, I am responsible for ensuring that the positions we take in court remain consistent with this institution’s solemn obligation to always seek justice and stand for what is right.
At present, I am not convinced that the defense of the executive order is consistent with these responsibilities nor am I convinced that the executive order is lawful.
Two hours later, she was fired.
Needless to say, this is rather unusual wording for an official statement.
Ironically, Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions questioned Sally Yates during her confirmation hearing asking, “Do you think the Attorney General has the responsibility to say to no to the President if he asks for something something improper? A lot of people have been defending the Lynch nomination by saying, ‘Well, he appoints somebody that’s going to execute his views. What’s wrong with that?’ But, if the views that the President wants to execute are unlawful, should the Attorney General or the Deputy Attorney General say no?” Yates was approved 84-12.
Yates’s replacement is Dana Boente, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. It was reported that Boente was not in the line of succession at DOJ headquarters. It appears he got the job because he is defending the ban in district court. He immediately rescinded Yates’s directive.
Trump filed with the FEC as a 2020 candidate for president on inauguration day. BY contrast, Obama did not file until 2011. The early date of this filing is unusual, and is believed to have implications on 501(c)(3)s campaign as they could now run afoul of campaign finance laws for mentioning a candidate.
This past Friday was Holocaust Remembrance Day. Normally, this is an apolitical event, but oddly the White House official statement did not mention Jews or antisemitism. The administration defended the statement by essentially stating that others were killed by the Nazis too. True, but not nearly at the same scale.
Steven Bannon run of Breitbart was marked with antisemitism, as is the altright movement. The Trump campaign’s slogan “America First” was the slogan used by Nazi apologists leading up to World War II. Trump’s campaign foreign policy advisor Joseph Schmitz (I do no know if he has current role in the White House) was accused of antisemitism and being a holocaust denier. He has picked white nationalists for high ranking jobs including Jeff Sessions for Attorney General. Finally, saying that Jews weren’t the target of the holocaust, is a tactic used by holocaust deniers for years.
A new executive order came out today listing the new makeup of the National Security Council. Most notably, the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs have been demoted to not attending, while White House Chief Strategist has been added as a principal member. Chief Strategist is a political position and is occupied by noted white supremacist and Breitbart publisher Steve Bannon. This is a highly unusual change, as the NSC has historically been viewed as “off limits” to political advisors. Bannon is particularly troubling in that beyond stoking racial and ethnic hatred, he is a noted Putin supported, and has has described himself as a “Leninist,” saying, “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
Protestors at JFK Airport courtesy of the AP Protests erupted at international airport terminals nationwide today to oppose the muslim ban. Terminal 4 at JFK was shutdown as well as the international terminal at SFO. Immigration lawyersappeared en mass at the terminals filing suits and writs of habeas corpus for all those detained. Throughout the day, there were reports on Twitter of people being detained or refused admission on to US bound flights by foreign stationed TSA officers.
Just now a federal judge in Brooklyn issued an emergency stay against the executive order allowing those that have already landed in the US with a valid visa to stay. This effects somewhere between 100 and 200 people. Those that are still abroad or pulled of flights before departing to the US are still out of luck.
Trump signed an executive order banning entry for 90 days for people from seven muslim majority countries.These countries are:
Iraq
Syria
Iran
Libya
Somalia
Sudan
Yemen
If you have a visa, it can’t be used. This includes green card holders from these countries, and and people on long term visas such as an H-1b or F-1.
The order also instructs the Department of Homeland Security to to conduct a 30 day review or other countries . The order also stops the entry of all refugees for four months.
The order has also suspended the entry by refugees from any country for four months, claiming that it is unsafe to allow their entry, even though it takes at least two years of screening before a refugee is allowed entry. If and when refugee entries restart, the total number of refugees that may be admitted has been halved to 50,000 per year, and that priority should be “provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion.” This is widely seen as his campaign promise to allow christians to flee war ravaged counties, but not muslims. The order explicitly bans all Syrian refugees.
As I was typing this, it broke that two Iraqis that were granted a special immigrant visa because of their cooperation with the US government during the Iraq occupation are suing the government after they were detained at JFK and denied entry.
I am very disturbed that this is applying to people that have valid visas and green card holders. I’ve worked with Iranians and Syrians. There’s nothing inherently dangerous about these people, and yet now they’re being treated like they are a unique persistent threat to the very country. It’s ludicrous. As of today, these people can leave the country.
The Trump administration announced that it is going to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. The purpose is to put pressure on sanctuary cities for not using local law enforcement to enforce immigration laws.
This tactic is clearly an attempt to whip up fears about immigrants, and to try and put pressure on local governments. Of course the reason why sanctuary cities exist is because it allows undocumented immigrants to approach the police about crimes without fear of being arrested themselves.
Career leadership at the State Department have resigned en masse since the appointment of Rex Tillerson. These are career officials, and not political appointees. The size of and suddenness of resignations that are unusual. From the Business Insider article linked prior:
Former State Department officials and foreign-policy professionals who spoke with Business Insider said that there is typically a high degree of turnover when new administrations are installed. But they all said that the abrupt and simultaneous exodus of senior management officials was unlike anything they’d seen before.
“This is unusual because it seems to be hitting the management folks, who are the skeleton of what delivers our foreign policy in the field,” Ambassador Richard Boucher, who served as State Department spokesman for Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, told Business Insider.
“These are the people who maintain the embassies and ensure diplomats’ security around the world, vet visa applicants, et cetera,” Boucher said.”They’re the support apparatus the administration has to go through if they want their new policies to be delivered and implemented.”
Eliot Cohen, a top official in George W. Bush’s State Department and a professor at Johns Hopkins University, told Business Insider that he had “never heard of anything like this before.”
Saturday, Sean Spicer held his first press conference as White House Press Secretary. Unfortunately, just like everything else in the Trump Administration so far, it played out in the nightmare scenario.
Spicer took no questions, and began a tirade against the press. Most notably, he asserted — contrary to all evidence — that the press was lying about the size of the crowd that came to view the inauguration, saying “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”
This is straight up 1984 bullshit, and it’s not hard to see why Trump would assert these lies. He’s like a four year-old, he wants to be the best, and he says he’s the best, even when it’s obvious he isn’t.
In the lead up to the inauguration, reports were coming out that it was going to be a bust. First there was the reports that the inauguration committee was having trouble booking acts. By itself, this isn’t terribly surprising. Most A-list artists are Democrats, cease-and-desist letters issued by a famous musician to either the RNC or a Republican candidate’s campaign committee to stop using their songs is a quadrennial tradition. The ultimate lineup was panned — which again wasn’t surprising — but the lineup was very weak. Toby Keith is perfectly fine, and Lee Greenwood singing “God Bless The USA” is du rigor, but the rest were nobodies and has beens. Look 3 Doors Down took time out of their grueling casino tour to play the inauguration.
Then there were the reports that the number of charter bus permits were down compared to Obama’s 2009 inauguration. (393 applications versus 1200 permits in 2009, and 900 in 2013).
Finally, the day came, and well, it was underwhelming. It wasn’t even close to Obama’s first inauguration, or even his second. Instead it was on par with (albeit slightly lower than) a typical second inauguration.
2009 and 2017’s inauguration crowds at approximately noon. (Reuters)
Prior to the parade, Katy Tur of NBC drove the entire parade route and noticed entire stands being empty.
The DC Metro tweeted out ridership numbers that showed that Trump’s inauguration was below the ridership at 11 am than George W. Bush’s second inauguration, and less than half that of Obama’s first inauguration. Ultimately, DC Metro counted 570,557 rides for inauguration day this year, which is below an average Wednesday.
Even the roll-out was bizarre. When the @POTUS Twitter account changed hands, the background image was changed to Obama’s 2009 inauguration in stead of a generic photo. The ruse was quickly discovered, and the photo was changed twice more during the day. In all honesty, the image was probably picked because its a Getty inauguration photo, and they didn’t want to wait for a new photo, but it was awkward.
The awkwardness continued into the night when pastry chef Duff Goldman noticed that the cake at the Salute To Our Armed Services Ball was identical to the cake he made in 2013 for the Commander in Chief’s Ball. This was confirmed when 2017’s baker Tiffany MacIsaac told the Washington Post that she was asked to duplicate the cake.
Earlier in the day, Trump visited CIA headquarters, supposedly to mend fences with the CIA and the intelligence community after vilifying the IC, and claiming they were making up the alleged connection to Russia in the DNC hacks during the election (more on that in a later post), and then leaking the report outlining the evidence of the hacks and the supposed FSB blackmail sex tape of Trump paying Russian prostitutes to urinate on the bed where Obama had previously slept. While there, Trump meandered into talking about himself and how many people attended the inauguration, saying:
It looked, honestly, it looked like a million-and-a-half people,. Whatever it was it was, but it went all the way back to the Washington Monument. And I turned on — by mistake, I get this network, and it showed an empty field and it said we drew 250,000 people. Now that’s not bad, but it’s a lie. We had 250,000 literally around, you know, in the little bowl that we constructed. That was 250,000. The rest of the, you know, 20-block area all the way back to the Washington Monument was packed.
So we caught them. And we caught them in a beauty and I think they’re going to pay a big price.
He also stated that he was on the cover of Time magazine more than anyone in the history of the magazine. Again, that’s false. He was on it 11 times. 10 times during and immediately following the election, and only once before. Richard Nixon was on the cover 55 times.
Ironically, this speech at the CIA actually hurt the relationship with CIA, since it was all about Trump, and not about the CIA.
It was after this, speech that Spicer met the press and claimed an asserted that Trump’s inauguration was largest ever viewed.
On Sunday, Reince Preiebus went on Fox News Sunday to defend the lie and assert a completely fictitious narrative about the size of the crowds. Most bizarrely, Kellyanne Conway went on CNN and claimed that Spicer wasn’t lying, but rather giving “alternative facts”.
In the hours since the the reversal of the House GOP Caucus on the rules about the Office of Congressional Ethics, a counter narrative has begun to be spun in the press. The narrative is that the House GOP reversed course due to a tweet from Donald Trump instead of bipartisan publicoutcry.
A new executive order came out today listing the 
Fascism Watch 