Trump may be busy watching Fox and poring over his Coronavirus Campaign Rally ratings, but he found the time to fire the Intelligence Community Inspector General who followed the rules and reported the whistleblower’s complaint to congress that led to his impeachment.
Atkinson’s decision set in motion the congressional probe that culminated in Trump’s impeachment and ultimate acquittal in a bruising political and legal drama that consumed Washington for months.
Trump formally notified the Senate and House Intelligence Committees of his intention to fire Atkinson, to take effect 30 days from Friday, according to two congressional officials and a copy of the letter obtained by POLITICO dated April 3.
“This is to advise that I am exercising my power as president to remove from office the inspector general of the intelligence community, effective 30 days from today,” the president wrote.
Trump said in the letter that he “no longer” has the fullest confidence in Atkinson. “As is the case with regard to other positions where I, as president, have the power of appointment, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, it is vital that I have the fullest confidence in the appointees serving as inspectors general,” he wrote. “That is no longer the case with regard to this inspector general.”
Trump added that he would be submitting a new nominee for the position to the Senate “at a later date.”
In an unusual rebuke of a president, Michael Horowitz, the chair of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, said in a statement: “Inspector General Atkinson is known throughout the Inspector General community for his integrity, professionalism, and commitment to the rule of law and independent oversight. That includes his actions in handling the Ukraine whistleblower complaint, which the then Acting Director of National Intelligence stated in congressional testimony was done ‘by the book’ and consistent with the law.”
Neither rain nor snow nor global pandemic will stop him from getting his revenge. Sure, they are botching the coronavirus response in every possible way, but it’s good to know they still have their priorities.
National security experts are appalled, pointing out that the whole point of this is to cripple oversight:
The Washington Post has published a long article looking at the failures (so far) leading the United States to be the first world country that has met the challenge of the coronavirus the worst.
I don’t think even the most skeptical of American power or dominance ever expected it to be this bad. But then, we never elected a celebrity clown to be president before either:
… the United States will likely go down as the country that was supposedly best prepared to fight a pandemic but ended up catastrophically overmatched by the novel coronavirus, sustaining heavier casualties than any other nation.
It did not have to happen this way. Though not perfectly prepared, the United States had more expertise, resources, plans and epidemiological experience than dozens of countries that ultimately fared far better in fending off the virus.
The failure has echoes of the period leading up to 9/11: Warnings were sounded, including at the highest levels of government, but the president was deaf to them until the enemy had already struck.
The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak of the coronavirus in China on Jan. 3. Within days, U.S. spy agencies were signaling the seriousness of the threat to Trump by including a warning about the coronavirus — the first of many — in the President’s Daily Brief.
And yet, it took 70 days from that initial notification for Trump to treat the coronavirus not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America’s defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens. That more-than-two-month stretch now stands as critical time that was squandered.
Trump’s baseless assertions in those weeks, including his claim that it would all just “miraculously” go away, sowed significant public confusion and contradicted the urgent messages of public health experts.
“While the media would rather speculate about outrageous claims of palace intrigue, President Trump and this Administration remain completely focused on the health and safety of the American people with around the clock work to slow the spread of the virus, expand testing, and expedite vaccine development,” said Judd Deere, a spokesman for the president. “Because of the President’s leadership we will emerge from this challenge healthy, stronger, and with a prosperous and growing economy.”
The president’s behavior and combative statements were merely a visible layer on top of deeper levels of dysfunction.
The most consequential failure involved a breakdown in efforts to develop a diagnostic test that could be mass produced and distributed across the United States, enabling agencies to map early outbreaks of the disease, and impose quarantine measure to contain them. At one point, a Food and Drug Administration official tore into lab officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, telling them their lapses in protocol, including concerns that the lab did not meet the criteria for sterile conditions, were so serious that the FDA would “shut you down” if the CDC were a commercial, rather than government, entity.
Other failures cascaded through the system. The administration often seemed weeks behind the curve in reacting to the viral spread, closing doors that were already contaminated. Protracted arguments between the White House and public health agencies over funding, combined with a meager existing stockpile of emergency supplies, left vast stretches of the country’s health-care system without protective gear until the outbreak had become a pandemic. Infighting, turf wars and abrupt leadership changes hobbled the work of the coronavirus task force.
Even the president’s base has begun to confront this reality. In mid-March, as Trump was rebranding himself a wartime president and belatedly urging the public to help slow the spread of the virus, Republican leaders were poring over grim polling data that suggested Trump was lulling his followers into a false sense of security in the face of a lethal threat.
The poll showed that far more Republicans than Democrats were being influenced by Trump’s dismissive depictions of the virus and the comparably scornful coverage on Fox News and other conservative networks. As a result, Republicans were in distressingly large numbers refusing to change travel plans, follow “social distancing” guidelines, stock up on supplies or otherwise take the coronavirus threat seriously.
“Denial is not likely to be a successful strategy for survival,” GOP pollster Neil Newhouse concluded in a document that was shared with GOP leaders on Capitol Hill and discussed widely at the White House. Trump’s most ardent supporters, it said, were “putting themselves and their loved ones in danger.”
Trump’s message was changing as the report swept through the GOP’s senior ranks. In recent days, Trump has bristled at reminders that he had once claimed the caseload would soon be “down to zero.”
More than 7,000 people have died of the coronavirus in the United States so far, with about 240,000 cases reported. But Trump has acknowledged that new models suggest that the eventual national death toll could be between 100,000 and 240,000.
Beyond the suffering in store for thousands of victims and their families, the outcome has altered the international standing of the United States, damaging and diminishing its reputation as a global leader in times of extraordinary adversity.
“This has been a real blow to the sense that America was competent,” said Gregory F. Treverton, a former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the government’s senior-most provider of intelligence analysis. He stepped down from the NIC in January 2017 and now teaches at the University of Southern California. “That was part of our global role. Traditional friends and allies looked to us because they thought we could be competently called upon to work with them in a crisis. This has been the opposite of that.”
This article, which retraces the failures over the first 70 days of the coronavirus crisis, is based on 47 interviews with administration officials, public health experts, intelligence officers and others involved in fighting the pandemic. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and decisions.
Read the whole thing. It’s important to understand just how badly the administration screwed this up.
This thing would have been an unprecedented challenge no matter who was president. But this administration is the worst of all possible worlds and the scope of this failure is far beyond what we would have seen if any other president had been in office. The combination of narcissism, amateurism, ignorance and pig-headed arrogance of Donald Trump and his minions is also unprecedented and it has tipped this crisis into a full-fledged disaster in the United States.
President Donald J. Trump is seen through the window taking questions from the press during a coronavirus update briefing Wednesday, April 1, 2020, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in his daily coronavirus briefings presents as a man with a mission and information to relay. Our acting president looks like a man who enjoys hearing himself talk and needs to be the center of attention. The more Americans see of him at the White House’s daily coronavirus mini-rallies, the less they like him. New polling shows his response to the pandemic is damaging Donald Trump’s approval ratings.
A Kaiser Family Foundation poll released Thursday finds that among a host of pandemic information sources, Trump is the least trusted:
Public Policy Polling surveys in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina show Trump’s approval rating buried by governors whom voters overwhelmingly trust more:
Any boost Trump might have temporarily received in his overall approval numbers seems to be wearing off in these three critical swing states as well. Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan, and North Carolina in 2016 but even during the middle of a crisis he’s under water in all of them- his approval spreads in them are 45/51, 45/49, and 47/48 respectively.
Trump’s modest polling bump last week dissipated quickly and didn’t change the fact he continues to lose to Joe Biden in head-to-head polling. That’s because “The bumpers are not Trumpers,” Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report.
Navigator Research finds similar opinions in its survey:
Corona approval: Trump’s coronavirus approval is underwater, and down 12 points since early last week, from +10 (52–42%) to -2 (47–49%).
Early mishandling: A full 40% of 2016 Trump voters say he didn’t take coronavirus seriously enough early on, up 17 points since early last week.
Inadequate response: 51% of Americans say Trump isn’t doing enough right now, up 10 points (from 41%) since early last week.
Navigator reports a 12-point negative swing in registered voters’ perception of his honesty.
All of which leaves Republicans even more nervous about calls for allowing universal voting by mail this November. Politico reports Republicans have launched a multimillion-dollar effort to block pandemic-driven changes to voting rules. Their efforts are being coordinated at the state and local levels in Wisconsin, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Georgia:
The enterprise — which includes more than two dozen GOP officials, including lawyers dedicated entirely to litigation — shows how completely the pandemic has upended the 2020 election. While litigation over voting issues is not uncommon, the coronavirus — and the likely obstacles it will create for voting in November — has brought the issue to the forefront of the campaign.
The public health crisis is already injecting a huge X-factor into the election, with impossible-to-predict effects on voter turnout, and officials in both parties acknowledge the fights over voting laws could affect the outcome of the election.
“I think a lot of people cheat with mail-in voting,” Trump told reporters at the White House Friday without citing evidence. Ari Berman (Give Us the Ballot) rebuts that claim by stating the obvious:
The only people who cheated with mail ballots were Republicans in North Carolina https://t.co/BAisgfL8NX
“Trump doesn’t want to let people vote by mail during a pandemic but is fine with people getting coronavirus by going to DMV to get voter ID,” Berman added.
Sen. Michael Bennet (D) of Colorado responded in a tweet, “Mr. President, we’ve had vote by mail in Colorado for years. We don’t have fraud. But we do have the second highest turnout in America.”
Wow: Wisconsin’s Republican legislative leaders are not only refusing @GovEvers’s call to delay the election and mail every voter a ballot—they’re asking the Supreme Court to overturn two federal rulings giving voters extra time to return absentee ballots. https://t.co/hHoVUb5Yin
Which is why Trump and Republicans oppose it, believing the only legitimate democracy is democracy they can rig. Properly controlled, elections make fine window treatment for authoritarianism.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like. Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.
Today’s Coronavirus Campaign Rally. He seems to be upset and also incoherent.
Asked why he disregarded warnings from within his own administration about pandemics, Trump argues that nobody could've anticipated this particular pandemic pic.twitter.com/ivTFKVsMJ9
Trump claims the military was "literally" out of ammunition when he took office, which is one of his laziest and most egregious lies yet pic.twitter.com/qqhRveeHJB
Wow. Trump unloads on a reporter who dared to ask him about Kushner saying on Thursday that the federal ventilator stockpile is "our" stockpile & not the states'.
"When he says 'our,' he's talking about our country … it's such a basic, simple question. You oughta be ashamed." pic.twitter.com/HWWkTWs00e
He goes on spouting gobblydygook that makes no sense whatsoever. It’s stunning:
TRUMP: "We have a stockpile. It is a federal stockpile. We can use it for states, or we can use it for ourselves. We do use it for the federal government. We have a very big federal government." pic.twitter.com/1MdFHpP7Lz
Trump ends the press briefing with some thoughts on voting rights: "I think a lot of people cheat with mail-in voting. I think people should with ID — voter ID … you should have a picture for voting. It should be called voter ID." pic.twitter.com/0ehNlxao3H
Spencer Ackerman takes a little trip down memory lane to the glory days of the Bush administration when Don Rumsfeld was confronted with the fact that the troops in Iraq were dying for lack of life-saving equipment.
He points out that Defense Secretary Mark Esper just had his Rumsfeld moment:
Capt. Brett Crozier has a coronavirus outbreak aboard the aircraft carrier he commanded, the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt. It’s so intense that servicemembers in Guam scrambling to aid their shipmates have broken their own quarantines, set up sickbays in areas —like the ship itself—that can’t follow social-distancing guidelines, and feared that, in the words of one, “we’re fucked.”
On Monday, Crozier requested what he called an “extraordinary measure.” He needed to offload his crew except for the most essential personnel needed to maintain the ship’s nuclear reactor and the safety of its weapons systems; isolate his 4,800 sailors, and treat the 93 sailors (and counting) infected with COVID-19; and disinfect the entire ship before it can resume operations. Doing otherwise, Crozier wrote, “is an unnecessary risk and breaks faith with those Sailors entrusted to our care. … Sailors do not need to die.”We’ve already lost more people in America than the whole Iraq war and it’s only been a month.— Josh Manning, former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst
Crozier’s plea was a watershed. Aircraft carriers are the most tangible symbol of American power in existence. Stopping their operations concedes that COVID-19 has overwhelmed the military. And what Crozier said has resonance beyond the deck of the Theodore Roosevelt. He tacitly called the Pentagon into question for prioritizing readiness— that is, placing soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines and coast guardsmen into training exercises and, when deployed, operations—before the novel coronavirus is contained.
“We’ve already lost more people in America than the whole Iraq war and it’s only been a month,” said Josh Manning, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst and Iraq war veteran. Pentagon leaders are “in denial of the severity of the problem that faces them, so they try to diminish it, undersell it and make themselves less culpable for these unspeakable acts against the people who signed up to serve this country. That’s not what leadership is supposed to be.”
[…]
Esper’s response was dismissive. In a Tuesday interview hours after Crozier’s letter surfaced in the San Francisco Chronicle, Esper told CBS that he hadn’t “had a chance to read that letter, read in detail.” Still, he said, “I don’t think we’re at that point” of needing to evacuate the ship as Crozier urged. Esper simultaneously conceded that U.S. adversaries were “not at this time” taking advantage of coronavirus.
Acting Secretary Thomas Modly fired Crozier the next day offering a Trumpian defense:“I can assure that no one cares more than I do about [sailors] safety and welfare,” he told reporters, blaming Crozier for a “breakdown in the chain of command.” He admitted that they were having “discussions” about pausing operations in order to prevent more outbreaks.
But before that, they have a ridiculous Trump distraction mission to carry out:
. Yet hours later, Esper stood beside President Trump to endorse a new Navy-centric mission. Destroyers, close-to-shore Littoral Combat Ships, surveillance aircraft and other military assets will now accelerate maritime narcotics interdictions off the coast of northern South America. “Transnational criminal organizations continue to threaten our security,” Esper said, contradicting his comments to CBS the day before.
In an indignant tone that Rumsfeld would have recognized, Esper derided “this narrative out there” holding that “we should just shut down the entire United States military and address the problem that way. That’s not feasible. We have a mission.”
[…]
For some post-9/11 veterans, Esper’s position was reminiscent of the disregard they remembered their old leadership displaying toward them. Trump has likened the response to coronavirus to a “war,” and they recognize this kind of war intimately.
“Rummy and Esper seemingly have a direct connection of indifference,” said Joe Kassabian, an Afghanistan war veteran, author and co-host of the Lions Led By Donkeys military podcast. “Like who the fuck are we prepping for war with that makes having a goddamn plague ship at sea a good idea? The captain of that ship clearly was worried about the health and welfare of his crewmates but the military doesn’t give a shit.”
Kassabian observed that on Army installations, leadership was still making time for drug tests, physical training, and other routines that jeopardized social distancing. Amidst the routines, Army leadership has been improvising against coronavirus as its base commanders struggle to impose quarantines for returning servicemembers who, in early cases especially, were treated with disregard that Esper himself resolved to fix. Last week, the Army halted most training—only to reverse course. At the same time, Esper said pausing those routines would come at commanders’ discretion, rather than his own direction. His directives during March reluctantly put more and more military activity on ice, and all after the curve swelled: military rates of infection now exceed civilian rates.
“It’s always galling to see military leaders put party before their duty. Rumsfeld did that back in 2004 and Esper seems to be doing the same thing now. There’s a raw vileness to it when it comes from someone who wore the uniform, as Rumsfeld and Esper did,” said Matt Gallagher, an Iraq veteran and writer whose second novel, Empire City, will be released next month. “It’s one thing when a political suit does it, Republican and Democrat, you come to expect it, but when they’re veterans themselves, it brings the old term blue falcon to mind.”
Esper’s response to the outbreak on the Roosevelt was a microcosm of “the broader parallel between 9/11 and America’s response to the coronavirus,” Gallagher continued: “It’s part of a long and undistinguished tradition of our political leaders reacting to a crisis instead of anticipating one, and not being careful and deliberate in the aftermath of one, instead of reactionary and loud.”
Bush faced a crisis and he screwed it up in grand fashion, on many levels. Obama faced a crisis and did a pretty good job, at least compared to the rest of the world. And now there’s Trump. Can you see the pattern here?
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” ―George Orwell, 1984
The Trump administration on Friday changed its description of the Strategic National Stockpile on a government website after journalists noted that it contradicted a claim Jared Kushner had made about the program.
Kushner on Thursday evening offered a novel argument about the national stockpile. He said some states still had stockpiles that they hadn’t been employing for the coronavirus outbreak and that localities should go to them first. And then he suggested that the national stockpile wasn’t even meant for them.
“And the notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile,” Kushner said. “It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use.”
Is “our stockpile” to be used for some nation that doesn’t include the states? Who is it for do you suppose? Does this even make sense?
Kushner is a moron and doesn’t know what he’s saying any more than Dear Leader does. But that doesn’t mean the federal government isn’t working overtime to cover for him:
As reporters quickly noted, that didn’t match with how the Department of Health and Human Services was describing the program. On its website, it said, “Strategic National Stockpile is the nation’s largest supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out.” It continued to say, “When state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency.”AD
That language suddenly disappeared from the site Friday morning, as journalist Laura Bassett noted, and was replaced with something de-emphasizing the size of the stockpile and its role in helping states. The new description cast it as a “short-term stopgap.”
“The Strategic National Stockpile’s role is to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies,” it now says. “Many states have products stockpiled, as well. The supplies, medicines, and devices for life-saving care contained in the stockpile can be used as a short-term stopgap buffer when the immediate supply of adequate amounts of these materials may not be immediately available.”
The Pentagon fired the Navy Captain who begged for help for his crew that was stuck in a floating coronavirus petrie dish for telling the truth. And now they’re going full Orwell by changing the definition of our long-standing federal agencies in order to comport with idiotic statements by Trump’s slow son-in-law whom he’s inexplicably allowed to use the entire Executive Branch as his personal sandbox.
Keep your eyes wide open over the next few months. It’s going to get worse.
This piece by David Roth in TNR about Trump’s overwhelming unfitness and the media’s ongoing desire to see it otherwise is elegantly written and well worth reading in its entirety. He examines several notorious examples, including the current crisis, and concludes with this:
Trump’s careening and chaotic approach to the world has not been tempered or focused or in any way changed as a result of him assuming the highest office in the land. If there is any true and essential thing about Trump beyond his reflexive cruelty and wild avarice, it is that there is nothing in the world, government epidemiologists very much included, that could or would ever cause him to change. To change, or grow, or even learn something new would to some extent be an admission of defeat for someone who lives so deliriously, delusionally in the moment.
Trump’s bizarre, blustering approach during the first months of the coronavirus crisis was not so much tactical as it was instinctual—the decision to bloviate and lie and pick weird fights all day long in hopes of Making the Numbers Go Up—and to do that every single day, was less a decision than it was simply Trump doing the only thing he knows how to do. In the same way, his unwillingness to direct ventilators or personal protective equipment toward states that don’t yet need them reflects his lifelong incapacity to understand the relationship between things done today and things that happen tomorrow. He has always lived in a sort of weightless suspension between his last lie and his next one. He’s focused on nothing more than whatever is in front of him at that moment, inhabiting no identifiable reality but the one blurring in front of his nose. Trump understands the scope of his job, and it seems likely that this is what appeals to him about it. But it’s fundamentally not in him to grasp the scale of it.
“The grim-faced president who appeared in the White House briefing room for more than two hours beside charts showing death projections of hellacious proportions was coming to grips with a reality he had long refused to accept,” Peter Baker wrote in the Times on Wednesday. As it happened, Trump’s sobriety didn’t even get all the way through the press conference, which saw him pointing to the specious miracle cures that have beguiled him over the weeks since he grudgingly admitted that Covid-19 was not under control. “I knew everything,” Trump responded when asked if he knew how bad the situation could become back when he was still claiming there would soon be zero cases of the virus in the U.S. “I knew it could be horrible. And I knew it could be maybe good.”
It is not news, at this point, that Trump is fundamentally incapable of doing any of the important and urgent things required of him as president in this moment. Baker, in the allusive and opaque house style of Times political reportage, doesn’t quite suggest that Trump has developed that capacity. Instead, he does what the political press has done with Trump from the first moments he came onto the political scene—they described not what he does, but how he appears. “Experts have been warning of a possibility like this for weeks,” Baker allowed. “But more than ever before, Mr. Trump seemed to acknowledge them.”
It’s hard to imagine any person less well suited to a long, multifront campaign like this than a man incapable of comprehending the idea of “two weeks from now.” But in some sense, the idea of a “new” Trump isn’t wrong. He is new every morning, awakening into the same sour dream; the future and the past are both gaudy, gilded blanks. When Trump speculated, weeks into the pandemic, that the virus might “vanish like a miracle”—or when he boosts some unproven gimmick cure, or when he attempts to strong-arm a rampaging pandemic into an end-date with his signature hardball deal-smithing, or when he accuses governors seeking respirators in anticipation of a coming surge of political calculation or corruption—he is revealing the only plan he has ever really had, which comes from the only person he trusts, which is that tomorrow might somehow just be different. People are dying behind this faith today, but it goes without saying that none of their names will be etched into eternity. He can really only remember one name, and eternity is just some other time.
He cannot change. He certainly doesn’t want to. And judging by his sycophants, henchmen, accomplices and Jared, his cult doesn’t want him to either.
Democrats in Congress are rightly discussing the necessity of forming a commission, modeled on the 9/11 commission, to investigate what went so wrong with the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. David Ignatius reported:
When America has recovered from the coronavirus crisis and people are back to work, Rep. Adam B. Schiff thinks Congress should consider a 9/11-style independent commission to examine why the nation was so unprepared for the pandemic.
Schiff, a California Democrat, told me in an interview Monday that his staff has already started working on a discussion draft modeled after the 9/11 Commission, and that he would be talking about the possibility with others in Congress. And he said the House Intelligence Committee, which he chairs, has begun reviewing the committee’s intelligence materials on the pandemic.
“We will need to delay the work of the commission until the crisis has abated to ensure that it does not interfere with the agencies that are leading the response,” Schiff explained in an email. “But that should not prevent us from beginning to identify where we got it wrong and how we can be prepared for the next pandemic.”
I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that President Trump doesn’t think it’s necessary. At yesterday’s Conornavirus Campaign Rally he said:
I want to remind everyone here in our Nation’s Capitol, especially in Congress, that this is not the time for politics, endless partisan investigations, here we go again. They’ve already done extraordinary damage to our country in recent years. You see what happens, it’s a witch hunt and witch hunt after witch hunt and in the end the people doing the witch hunt have been losing. They’ve been losing by a lot. And it’s not any time for witch hunts, it’s time to get this enemy defeated.
These partisan investigations, in the middle of a pandemic, is really a waste of vital resources: time, attention. We want to fight for American lives, not waste time. Everyone knows it’s ridiculous. We want to focus on this country.
As you probably noticed, the idea is not to do this in the middle of the pandemic, but afterward. In fact, it’s unlikely it would be done until Trump is removed from office after the November election. But needless to say, that doesn’t matter. The 9/11 Commission was convened just a little over a year after the attacks. It will have to be done regardless of who is sitting in the White House.
A key Senate committee is vowing to press forward with its investigation targeting former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, despite logistical challenges posed by the global coronavirus pandemic.
The probe, which Democrats vigorously oppose, has fueled tension among the Senate’s ranks, even breaking out into a rare and previously unreported verbal altercation between senators during a classified briefing.
The Senate Homeland Security Committee’s Republican-led inquiry was entering a critical phase last month when senators dropped all nonessential work to focus on delivering economic and medical relief as the coronavirus reached a crisis point in the United States. The Senate is not due back in Washington until April 20 at the earliest.
“While the chairman is primarily focused on the once-in-a-generation crisis we’re experiencing, our oversight staff is continuing to push ahead with their work. Nothing has changed in our long-term plans for our investigations,” said Austin Altenburg, a spokesman for the committee’s chairman, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.).
In fact, a Senate staffer working on the probe explicitly told one witness’ legal team several weeks ago — just before the wave of lockdowns — that the coronavirus pandemic would not impede the committee’s probe, according to a source familiar with the matter.
As if that hasn’t been completely litigated already.
President Donald Trump’s political operation is launching a multimillion-dollar legal campaign aimed at blocking Democrats from drastically changing voting rules in response to the coronavirus outbreak.
In the past several weeks, the reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee have helped to oversee maneuvering in a handful of battleground states with an eye toward stopping some Democratic efforts to alter voting laws, and to bolster Trump. The mobilization is being closely coordinated with Republicans at the state and local levels.
The Trump campaign and RNC are actively engaged in litigation in Wisconsin, where the parties are at loggerheads over an array of issues including voter identification, and in New Mexico, where the battle involves vote-by-mail. The skirmishing has also spread across key states like Pennsylvania and Georgia, where the well-organized Trump apparatus has fought over changes that could sway the outcome of the election.
The enterprise — which includes more than two dozen GOP officials, including lawyers dedicated entirely to litigation — shows how completely the pandemic has upended the 2020 election. While litigation over voting issues is not uncommon, the coronavirus — and the likely obstacles it will create for voting in November — has brought the issue to the forefront of the campaign.
Naturally Trump said the quiet part out loud:
During an appearance on Fox News this week, Trump pushed back against an effort by House Democrats to secure billions of dollars for election assistance in the coronavirus relief package. The bill Trump ultimately signed included $400 million, a fraction of what Democrats had been seeking.
“The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,” Trump said.
So let’s not hear anymore lugubrious whining about “playing politics” during the pandemic, especially coming from Trump during his Daily Coronavirus Campaign Rally where he brags about his “ratings.” Please.
Following up on Tom’s post below, I note that General Honore discussed the Defense Logistics Agency, which I noted in an early post seemed to be non-existent in this response.
It’s a 26,000 person agency called the “Defense Logistics Agency” which Honore says would normally be enlisted to deal with getting supplies where they need to go. Obviously. They are the experts.
The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) is a combat support agency in the United States Department of Defense, with more than 26,000 civilian and military personnel throughout the world. Located in 48 states and 28 countries, DLA provides supplies to the military services and supports their acquisition of weapons, fuel, repair parts, and other materials. The agency also disposes of excess or unusable equipment through various programs.
Through other U.S. federal agencies, DLA also helps provide relief supplies to victims of natural disasters, as well as humanitarian aid to refugees and internally displaced persons.
This agency has been around since WWII. They have done supply logistics for wars and disaster relief all over the world. It seems to be pretty good at what it does.
