#trump chief of staff mark meadows

[ceevee5]

#donald trump #mark meadows #his former chief of staff #us politics

[bikerpoliticalreport]

Trump: Leaked Bedminster Audio an ‘Exoneration’

 Former President Donald Trump is speaking out against CNN’s release of audio it obtained of him speaking with associates at his Bedminster golf club in July 2021 about a military document concerning Iran, saying the report exonerates him in the federal charges he is facing in connection to classified documents kept at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

   “The Deranged Special Prosecutor, Jack Smith, working in conjunction with the DOJ & FBI, illegally leaked and ‘spun’ a tape and transcript of me which is actually an exoneration, rather than what they would have you believe,” Trump said on his Truth Social page Monday night after the audio aired on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360.”

   “This continuing Witch Hunt is another ELECTION INTERFERENCE Scam. They are cheaters and thugs!” he wrote.

   The recording included details from a conversation special counsel Jack Smith used in his indictment accusing the former president of mishandling classified information, as well as some commentary that was not included in the indictment.

   The network has not said how it obtained the recording, and Smith’s office and the Department of Justice have not commented on the leak.

   The tape was said to have come from a July 2021 interview Trump gave to people who were working on the memoir of Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff. According to Smith’s indictment, a writer, a publisher, and two of Trump’s staff members were present and shown classified information about a plan of attack on Iran.

   At the time, Trump was reportedly angry about an article from the New Yorker concerning arguments that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley had made against a strike on Iran, and his concerns that Trump would escalate the situation.

   Smith’s office declined to comment to CNN about the audio release, but Trump’s campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, said in a statement that the tape “provides context proving, once again, that President Trump did nothing wrong at all.”

   Trump further railed against the indictment against him and about Smith early Tuesday, posting in an all-caps message on Truth Social a call for someone to “please explain to the deranged, Trump-hating Jack Smith, his family, and his friends, that as president of the United States, I come under the Presidential Records Act, as affirmed by the Clinton socks case, not by this psychos’ fantasy of the never used before Espionage Act of 1917.”

   He added that “Smith should be looking at crooked Joe Bidden [sic] and all of the crimes that he has perpetrated on the American public, including the millions & millions of dollars he extorted from foreign countries!”

   Most of the audio’s contents include conversation included in Smith’s indictment but also include the sounds of papers being shuffled.

   In the tape, Trump is also heard saying that he has a “big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him. They presented me this – this is off the record but – they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him.

   “This was done by the military and given to me,” Trump continues, before noting that the document remained classified.

   “See as president I could have declassified it,” Trump says. “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”

   “Now we have a problem,” a staffer responds, to which Trump is heard saying, “Isn’t that interesting.”

   In the indictment, there are ellipses in places where the recording shows Trump and his aide talking about Clinton’s emails and her former aide Anthony Weiner, whose laptop led the CIA to reopen its investigation into her handling of classified information before the 2016 presidential election.

   Last week, during an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier, Trump denied having classified documents with him during the meeting, reports The New York Times.

   “That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things. And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document. I didn’t have a document per se,” he said. “There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories, and articles.”

   The audio release comes as the information continues to grow concerning President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

   Last week, photos of Hunter Biden on his abandoned laptop show him at his father’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, on the day he included his father’s name in a 2017 WhatsApp message to threaten a Chinese business associate.

   The investigation is also continuing into allegations that several members of the president’s family were receiving bank transfer payments from foreign entities, with the House Oversight Committee, led by Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., investigating alleged influence peddling schemes by Joe Biden and his family.

#Donald Trump #ex former us president #CNN’s release of audio #Truth Social page #Anderson Cooper 360 #Mark Meadows #Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff #Mark Milley #Truth Social #Trump-hating Jack Smith #Espionage Act of 1917 #The New York Times #Fox News’s Bret Baier #President Joe Biden and his son Hunter

[follow-up-news]

The apology letters that Donald Trump-allied lawyers Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro were required to write as a condition of their plea deals in the Georgia election interference case are just one sentence long. The letters, obtained Thursday by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through an open records request, were hand-written and terse. Neither letter acknowledges the legitimacy of Democrat Joe Biden’s win in Georgia’s 2020 election nor denounces the baseless conspiracy theories they pushed to claim Trump was cheated out of victory through fraud. “I apologize for my actions in connection with the events in Coffee County,” Powell wrote in a letter dated Oct. 19, the same day she pleaded guilty to six misdemeanors accusing her of conspiring to intentionally interfere with the performance of election duties. “I apologize to the citizens of the state of Georgia and of Fulton County for my involvement in Count 15 of the indictment,” Chesebro wrote in a letter dated Oct. 20, when he appeared in court to plead guilty to one felony charge of conspiracy to commit filing false documents. A spokesperson for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who brought the election interference case, declined Thursday to comment on the contents of the letters. Powell and Chesebro were among four defendants to plead guilty in the case after reaching agreements with prosecutors. They were indicted alongside Trump and others in August and charged with participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally keep the Republican in power. The remaining 15 defendants — including Trump, lawyer Rudy Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows — have all pleaded not guilty.

#georgia #sidney powell #kenneth chesebro #election interference

[robertreich]

5 Facts About Trump’s Indictments

Trump’s defenders are still lying about his indictments. Here are 5 crucial facts you can share with whoever in your life needs to hear them.

1. President Biden did not indict Trump.

Four different grand juries — made up of ordinary citizens — indicted Trump after being presented with evidence they found compelling enough to warrant criminal prosecution.

The reason we have grand juries is specifically to help make sure no one gets prosecuted out of a personal vendetta.

2. This isn’t about “free speech”

In all four cases, Trump has been indicted because of what he allegedly did, not what he said. Lots of crimes involve speech, but that doesn’t stop them from being crimes. Even Trump’s hand-picked attorney general, Bill Barr, recognizes this defense is nonsense.

3. It doesn’t matter whether Trump believed the election was stolen

There’s plenty of evidence that Trump knew he lost the election fair and square. His claims of massive fraud were rejected by his own campaign manager, White House lawyers, and his hand-picked Justice Department officials. 

And privately, Trump seemed to admit that he either knew or didn’t care that his claims were false, allegedly criticizing VP Pence for being “too honest,” and allegedly admitting to his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that he lost and wanted to cover it up.

But even if Trump really did believe the election was stolen, that doesn’t give him the right to allegedly commit a criminal conspiracy to try to steal it back.

4. Trump has received preferential treatment because of who he is.

Trump’s defenders complain about a two-tiered justice system.

They’re right about that, but not in the way they claim. Trump has been given special privileges most criminal defendants would never get.

In all four criminal cases, he has been released without bail. He has repeatedly been spared the indignity of a mugshot. He has not had his passport suspended or had limits placed on his ability to travel — even though two of his criminal cases involve direct threats to national security, and even though he has used social media to issue insults and threats against potential witnesses, behavior that would cause many criminal defendants to be held without bail pending trial.

5. Trump was in legal trouble long before entering politics

Some of Trump’s defenders claim the sheer number of criminal charges and civil suits he’s now facing is proof that he’s being targeted for political reasons. But you have to remember that Trump was the subject of about 4,000 legal actions before ever running for president. From his fraudulent Trump University scam to federal lawsuits over racist housing discrimination, Trump has spent his life in court because of his own shady behavior.

Trump is being prosecuted now because, as four grand juries have found, the strength of the evidence against him merits it. If we fail to hold him fully accountable under the law, the precedent will embolden future presidents to break the law, jeopardize national security, incite insurrections, and possibly even overturn an election.

The principle that no one is above the law is only true if we make it so.

#youtube #Donald Trump #Politics #Video #Videos #Republicans #Election #Joe Biden #United States

[reasonsforhope]

Donald Trump charged in Georgia for efforts to overturn the 2020 election

Link here, because WaPo's security measures stop Tumblr previews. Non-paywall link here.

"Former president Donald Trump and 18 others were criminally charged in Georgia on Monday in connection with efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, according to an indictment made public late Monday night [on August 14, 2023].

Trump was charged with 13 counts, including violating the state’s racketeering act, soliciting a public officer to violate their oath, conspiring to impersonate a public officer, conspiring to commit forgery in the first degree and conspiring to file false documents.

The Recap

The historic indictment, the fourth to implicate the former president, follows a 2½-year investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D). The probe was launched after audio leaked from a January 2021 phone call during which Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) to question the validity of thousands of ballots, especially in the heavily Democratic Atlanta area, and said he wanted to “find” the votes to erase his 2020 loss in the state.

Willis’s investigation quickly expanded to other alleged efforts by Trumpor his supporters, including trying to thwart the electoral college process, harassing election workers, spreading false information about the voting process in Georgia and compromising election equipment in a rural county. Trump has long decried the Georgia investigation as a “political witch hunt,” defending his calls to Raffensperger and others as “perfect.”

The Details

“Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump,” the indictment states.

A total of 41 charges are brought against 19 defendants in the 98-page indictment. Not all face the same counts, but all have been charged with violating the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Willis said she has given those charged until Aug. 25 to surrender.

Among those charged are Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who served as Trump’s personal attorney after the election; Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows; and several Trump advisers, including attorneys John Eastman, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro...

Prosecutors brought charges around five subject areas: false statements by Trump allies, including Giuliani, to the Georgia legislature; the breach of voting data in Coffee County; calls Trump made to state officials, including Raffensperger, seeking to overturn Biden’s victory; the harassment of election workers; and the creation of a slate of alternate electors to undermine the legitimate vote. Those charged in the case were implicated in certain parts of what prosecutors presented as a larger enterprise to undermine the election."

-via The Washington Post, August 14, 2023

#trump #donald trump #trump indictment #fani willis #district attorney #united states #us politics #good news #2020 election #january 6 #georgia #fulton county #criminal justice #racketeering #rudy giuliani #sidney powell #john eastman #fuck trump

[wilwheaton]

Why did Mr. Meadows squander his career, his reputation and possibly his liberty by casting his lot with Mr. Trump? He once seemed an unlikely casualty of Mr. Trump’s wrecking ball — he was a savvy politician who knew his way around the corridors of power. In fairness to Mr. Meadows, three of his predecessors also failed as Mr. Trump’s chief. “Anyone who goes into the orbit of the former president is virtually doomed,” said Jack Watson, Jimmy Carter’s former chief of staff. “Because saying no to Trump is like spitting into a raging headwind. It was not just Mission Impossible; it was Mission Self-Destruction. I don’t know why he chose to do it.” In their motion to remove the Fulton County case to federal court, the lawyers for Mr. Meadows addressed Mr. Trump’s now infamous Jan. 2, 2021, call with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger — during which Mr. Meadows rode shotgun as the president cut to the chase: “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes ….” Addressing Mr. Meadows’s role, his lawyers wrote: “One would expect a chief of staff to the president of the United States to do these sorts of things.” Actually, any competent White House chief of staff would have thrown his body in front of that call. Any chief worth his salt would have said: “Mr. President, we’re not going to do that. And if you insist, you’re going to make that call yourself. And when you’re through, you’ll find my resignation letter on your desk.” Mr. Meadows failed as Mr. Trump’s chief because he was unable to check the president’s worst impulses. But the bigger problem for our country is that his failure is a template for the inevitable disasters in a potential second Trump administration.

 Mark Meadows Is a Warning About a Second Trump Term

[soberscientistlife]

Former President Donald Trump's final chief of staff in the White House, Mark Meadows, has spoken with special counsel Jack Smith's team at least three times this year, including once before a federal grand jury, which came only after Smith granted Meadows immunity to testify under oath, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The sources said Meadows informed Smith's team that he repeatedly told Trump in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election that the allegations of significant voting fraud coming to them were baseless, a striking break from Trump's prolific rhetoric regarding the election.

HOT DAMN!

[saywhat-politics]

A judge had ruled that the former aides must testify even though Trump asserted executive privilege.

Former President Donald Trump is appealing a judge's order that one of his former chiefs of staff and other top aides must testify before the federal grand jury investigating the Jan. 6 riot, a source familiar with the matter confirmed Wednesday.

U.S. Court Judge Beryl Howell's ruled this month that Mark former chief of staff Meadows and other aides, including Dan Scavino and Stephen Miller, must testify despite Trump's invocation of executive privilege.

[malspinningyarns]

I know we are still freaking out about SCOTUS and Roe, but there was also a surprise January 6th Committee Hearing Today!

Their witness was Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s executive assistant Cassidy Hutchinson and, whew boy, was information dropped.

Here are some tweets:

(I’d greatly appreciate if someone could write out these Tweets bc I’m on mobile)

Basically the rundown:

Trump knew people with weapons were at the Capitol on Jan 6th

CoS Meadows also knew there were armed people and did not look up from his phone when an alarmed Hutchinson told him what was happening

He also shut the car door on her 2X when she tried to give him security updates during the rally at the Eclipse over a period of at least 25 minutes

Trump was mad that his crowd size wasn’t big enough for the rally photo op because security wouldn’t let people with weapons through and people didn’t want their weapons to be confiscated. Trump wanted the MAGS to be taken down because he knew “the people weren’t there to hurt [him]”

The non-Rudy lawyers practically begged Hutchinson not to let Trump join the riot at the Capitol because they could get in trouble for multiple crimes.

When Trump was told in the car by security that they were not going to the Capitol, but were going back to the White House, Trump first tried to take the wheel of the car and then TRIED TO CHOKE HIS HEAD OF SECURITY WHO WAS TRYING TO STOP HIM

Back at the WH, 45 threw a hissy fit that included throwing his lunch at the wall. Apparently, this was a continuous behavior of his

Trump agreed with the rioters call to hang Mike Pence and that they “were not doing anything wrong”

Multiple lawyers, Congress people, FOX News hosts, Ivanka, Don Jr tried to get Meadows to get Trump to do something but Meadows said that Trump “didn’t want to see anyone”

Only the threat of cabinet members invoking the 25th amendment made him agree to tweet out the video telling rioters to go home and that “we love you”

During the Jan 7th statement, Trump wanted to pardon the rioters but WH lawyers said “absolutely not”

A lot of people in Trumpworld pleaded the 5th for every single question they were asked, including General Flynn when asked if he believed in the peaceful transfer of power

The committee ended the hearing with depositions from people they interviewed, basically saying they’ve been threatened by people in Trumpworld to not say anything, which is witness tampering

It was wild.

#scotus #congress #us congress #january 6th #january 6th committee #politics #us politics #treason #congressional hearing #twitter

[simply-ivanka]

Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato’s first transcribed interview with the committee was conducted on January 28, 2022. In it, he told Cheney and her investigators that he overheard White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows push Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to request as many National Guard troops as she needed to protect the city.

He also testified President Trump had suggested 10,000 would be needed to keep the peace at the public rallies and protests scheduled for January 6, 2021. Ornato also described White House frustration with Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller’s slow deployment of assistance on the afternoon of January 6, 2021.

Not only did the committee not accurately characterize the interview, they suppressed the transcript from public review. On top of that, committee allies began publishing critical stories and even conspiracy theories about Ornato ahead of follow-up interviews with him. Ornato was a career Secret Service official who had been detailed to the security position in the White House.

#trump #trump 2024 #ivanka #president trump #repost #america first #americans first #america #donald trump #democrats

[xxx0oo0xxx]

To summarize The Federalist;

Liz Cheney and the J6 committee "falsely claimed they had “no evidence” to support Trump officials’ claims the White House had communicated its desire for 10,000 National Guard troops."

In truth, an early transcribed interview conducted by the committee "included precisely that evidence from a key source."

That key source, Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato, said he overheard White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows push DC Mayor Muriel Bowser to request as many National Guard troops as needed to protect DC on Jan. 6.

Ornato also testified that Trump suggested 10,000 troops to keep the peace at public rallies and protests scheduled for Jan. 6, 2021 - and that the White House was frustrated with Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller's slow deployment of assistance on the day of the riot.

Ornato's testimony was corroborated by Kash Patel, the former chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense.

According to The Federalist, this information was suppressed.

Hemingway writes that the committee not only mischaracterized the interview, they also suppressed the transcript from public review.

[cogitoergofun]

A pro-Trump group that organized the “Save America” rally in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, lied to federal officials about President Donald J. Trump’s plans to call on the crowd to march to the Capitol, where the protest over his election loss turned into a violent riot, according to a new inspector general investigation.

Nearly three years after the mob laid siege to Congress, halting the certification of Mr. Trump’s electoral defeat and injuring more than 150 police officers, the Interior Department’s inspector general on Monday released a 47-page report examining the permitting process that allowed tens of thousands of Trump supporters to gather in Washington before the violence.

The report found that Women for America First, which organized a rally at the Ellipse about two miles from the Capitol on Jan. 6, “intentionally failed to disclose information” to the National Park Service “during the permitting process regarding a march to the U.S. Capitol.”

According to the investigation, Women for America First, which is run by Amy and Kylie Jane Kremer, a conservative mother-and-daughter team, repeatedly told Park Service officials there would be no march to the Capitol while privately planning for one.

When shown private text messages indicating there would be a march, a park ranger involved in the permitting process told investigators it “bl[ew her] mind,” the report said. The Park Service had repeatedly asked Women for America First whether there would be a march, and the organization “was just adamant there was gonna be no march.”

A White House liaison to the rally organizers sent a text message on Jan. 3 to Women for America First regarding a demonstration at the Ellipse. “POTUS expectations are intimate and then send everyone over to the Capitol,” the message said, according to the report.

Katrina Pierson, a Trump spokeswoman, had sent an email on Jan. 2, 2021, with nearly identical language.

Also on Jan. 3, Women for America First, which had received a permit on Jan. 1 for a 5,000-person rally, expanded the number of attendees to 30,000 while continuing to deny to Park Service officials that there would be a march.

On Jan. 4, Kylie Jane Kremer wrote in a text message: “POTUS is going to have us march there/the Capitol.” She added: “It can also not get out about the march because I will be in trouble with the National Park Service and all the agencies, but POTUS is going to just call for it ‘unexpectedly.’”

Shown the texts by the inspector general’s office, a National Park Service permit specialist put it this way: “So, um, basically she lied to all of us,” according to the report.

The inspector general report builds on evidence released by the now-defunct House Jan. 6 Committee. During a hearing last year, the panel detailed Mr. Trump’s efforts to gather his backers in Washington for a final, last-ditch effort to overturn his loss. It also described how he tried to make the march on the Capitol appear spontaneous even as he and his team intentionally assembled and galvanized the crowd to disrupt Congress’s certification of his electoral defeat.

Since the Capitol attack, Mr. Trump and his defenders have described the violence as a freewheeling, peaceful protest gone awry. His former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, even claimed that Mr. Trump “ad-libbed” his remarks at the Ellipse calling for a march to the Capitol. But the report is further evidence that the former president and his supporters planned in advance to direct the crowds to Capitol Hill and worked to hide their intentions.

[gwydionmisha]

#Donald Trump #Mark Meadows #Cassidy Hutchinson #News

[politicalprof]

[tomorrowusa]

Today is January 1st. There are just 309 days until Election Day.

We can't rely on a clever legal gimmick or some preternatural force to prevent a Trump victory. We have to do it ourselves with our organizing and our votes.

Three young women who worked in the Trump White House had a conversation with ABC's Jonathan Karl before the end of 2023. Sarah Matthews, Cassidy Hutchinson, and Alyssa Farah Griffin went on to testify before the House January 6th Committee. The trio said that a second Trump term would be even worse than the first.

Former aides warn of 'running out of time' to prevent Trump re-election

All three gave testimony to the US House committee investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat as well as the 6 January 6 Capitol attack staged by his supporters. And they warned in an unprecedented television interview on Sunday that time was short to prevent a second Trump administration in which they insist his behavior would be much worse. “People in general have short memories, and might forget the chaos of the Trump years,” Sarah Matthews, a former deputy White House press secretary who resigned on the day of the deadly Capitol riot, said on ABC’s This Week. “They also might not just be paying attention to what he’s saying now – and the threat to democracy that exists. It does really concern me if he makes it to the general [election] that he could win. I’m still hopeful that we can defeat him in the primaries, but we’re running out of time.” [ ... ] Hutchinson, ex-aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, said voters needed to believe Trump when he said he would be a dictator on his first day back in the White House. “The fact that he feels that he needs to lean into being a dictator alone shows that he is a weak and feeble man,” she said. Matthews, meanwhile, said Trump had already signaled what his second administration would look like. “We don’t need to speculate because we already saw it play out,” she said.

The three former staffers know that Trump's dictator and vermin rantings are not just talk. Sarah Matthews, Cassidy Hutchinson, and Alyssa Farah Griffin should be taken more seriously than some blowhard on Fox News who's attempting to dismiss Trump's Hitlerian references.

#donald trump #far right #january 6th #sarah matthews #cassidy hutchinson #alyssa farah griffin #jonathan karl #trump is “a weak and feeble man” #the danger of a trump second term #republicans #election 2024

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]