webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

mcentee

---

pow trifecta

SEE PJT 2025

how much ginni input?

derek harvey?

he got fired and then rehired b/c Doocey would not hire loons?

merri ok

---

an 10 24

John McEntee, who served as the Director of the Trump White House Presidential Personnel Office, in a 2023 video said the U.S. should have “male only” voting. The video (below) resurfaced Monday, drawing outrage. It went viral, with over one million views in just 24 hours.

McEntee is the co-founder of a dating app for Republicans and conservatives, backed by billionaire Peter Thiel, called Date Right Stuff.

He is also a senior advisor at The Heritage Foundation’s far-right Project 2025. He leads “the group’s efforts to compile a database of thousands of vetted conservatives to staff a new conservative administration,” The New York Times reported last week.

McEntee got his start in the White House as Trump’s “body man,” a personal aide, but was fired by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly in 2018 because he was “under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security for serious financial crimes,” CNN reported at the time.

After Kelly’s exit, Trump brought McEntee back into the White House, but as the head of the White House personnel office. He was charged with purging the Executive Branch of anyone who was not deemed sufficiently loyal to Donald Trump.

READ MORE: ‘Confident’ Harris Campaign Says All Swing States ‘In Play’ in ‘Extremely Close’ Race

“So I guess they misunderstood,” McEntee says in the video, one of his many that show him eating in a restaurant. “When we said we wanted mail-only voting, we meant male — M A L E.”

The short clip (below) ends with him smiling. It was originally posted to his Date Right Stuff dating app TikTok account last year, which is filled with dozens if not hundreds of short clips showing McEntee opining on social and political issues. It was reposted Monday to an account on X that bears his name but says it is a supporters’ account.

That video is captioned: “Sorry we want MALE only voting. The 19th might have to go,” although McEntee did not say that specifically in the video.

Monday was the 50th anniversary of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA), signed into law by Republican President Gerald Ford. TIME reports that before the law, “banks required women to have a male cosigner—typically a husband or father—on applications for credit cards, loans, and mortgages. It was an archaic policy in an archaic system that was designed to fail women—and for women to fail.”

MSNBC’s Jen Psaki profiled McEntee and his videos in July:

---

---

:{May 13, 2024 rww

Just as they prophesied Trump’s victory and collaborated in the 2020 attempted coup, the Trump wing of the New Apostolic Reformation is on the offensive once again, waging a campaign in counties they think will swing the 2024 presidential election.

True the Vote is enlisting private citizens to help it overwhelm under-staffed and under-resourced election offices with voter roll challenges ahead of election day.

Rep. David Zimmerman’s bill is the latest carefully spun attempt to inject a right-wing brand of Christianity into schools in hopes of bringing more children to Jesus. It has already happened in Texas and Florida.

The freshman member from Georgia doesn’t have much of a legislative record, but he sure can stir up trouble online.

Johnny McEntee, the former White House Trump aide closely linked to plans for radical federal government reform should Donald Trump win re-election, stoked outrage with a TikTok video in which he claimed to give unhoused people fake money, thereby to ensure their arrest.

As Donald Trump remarks on “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” perhaps the former president ought to just give up on pop culture references altogether.

---

Project 2025 senior advisor John McEntee on staffing the next Trump administration: "Sometimes experience is bad" | Media Matters for America

---

an 11 23

Staffers who worked for former President Donald Trump are reportedly now assembling a database of MAGA loyalists in preparation for an unprecedented purge of federal workers, should Trump win a second term in 2024.

According to a new Axios report, former Trump advisors Stephen Miller and Johnny McEntee are working alongside the Heritage Foundation — one of Washington, DC's most established conservative think tanks — to build "a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army" of approximately 54,000 people to quickly staff the federal government in key domestic policy roles. Axios cofounders Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen wrote that "social media histories are already being plumbed" to screen potential candidates.

"We're told immense, intense attention will be given to the social-media histories of anyone being considered for top jobs," VandeHei and Allen wrote. "Those queasy about testing the limits of Trump's power will get flagged and rejected."

VandeHei and Allen added that the undertaking involves "hundreds of people... spending tens of millions of dollars" in order to "rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents."

The effort to pre-screen potential federal workers under a second Trump term is a key part of Project 2025, which Heritage has spearheaded in coordination with dozens of other conservative organizations. Under Project 2025, executive power under a Republican administration would be drastically expanded, and the typically apolitical federal civil service — what Trump calls "the deep state" — would be packed full of far-right apparatchiks with the goal of governing to achieve conservative political goals. Heritage President Kevin Roberts told Axios that Project 2025 is "orders of magnitude" bigger than any other transition plan assembled by a party out of power.

Earlier this year the New York Times reportedthat one of the first priorities of Project 2025 would be to re-enact Trump's "Schedule F" executive order, which was issued just two weeks before the 2020 election and that President Biden rescinded just days after his inauguration. While presidents are usually able to appoint roughly 4,000 people to various administrative roles throughout the federal government, Schedule F would have bulldozed various legal protections for federal workers that would allow a president to replace approximately 50,000 additional staff across all federal agencies. The Times noted that Project 2025's goal of screening potential new staffers has been assisted with AI provided by tech giant Oracle.

Trump has indicated that if elected to a second term, he would carry out various acts of vengeance, including weaponizing the Department of Justice against his political opponents. The Times reported over the weekend that Trump would also greatly expand immigration crackdowns, enabling the Department of Homeland Security to carry out large-scale raids, detain immigrants at industrial-size camps and deport millions of immigrants every year.

READ MORE: 'Time to be very very afraid': Columnist warns Trump plans to carry out acts of vengeance in 2nd term

---

---

no lnx $

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/17/us/politics/trump-plans-2025.html

Donald J. Trump intends to bring independent regulatory agencies under direct presidential control.

Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025

The former president and his backers aim to strengthen the power of the White House and limit the independence of federal agencies.

Jonathan SwanCharlie Savage Maggie Haberman

By Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman

Published July 17, 2023

Updated July 18, 2023

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

:{:{}:

}:

Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.

He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.

He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”

“The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” said John McEntee, a former White House personnel chief who began Mr. Trump’s systematic attempt to sweep out officials deemed to be disloyal in 2020 and who is now involved in mapping out the new approach.

“Our current executive branch,” Mr. McEntee added, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”

Mr. Trump and his advisers are making no secret of their intentions — proclaiming them in rallies and on his campaign website, describing them in white papers and openly discussing them.

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House and now runs a policy organization, the Center for Renewing America.

The strategy in talking openly about such “paradigm-shifting ideas” before the election, Mr. Vought said, is to “plant a flag” — both to shift the debate and to later be able to claim a mandate. He said he was delighted to see few of Mr. Trump’s Republican primary rivals defend the norm of Justice Department independence after the former president openly attacked it.

A Divided Congress

[Under Scrutiny: A licensing agreement between Ford Motor and a major Chinese battery maker is facing questions by Republican lawmakers, who say the deal could make Ford reliant on a company with links to forced labor.

Air Travel: The House overwhelmingly passed bipartisan legislation to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration for the next half-decade, moving at a time of growing dysfunction and disruption in the system to make a number of changes that affect passengers.

Supreme Court Ethics Bill: The Senate Judiciary Committee approved legislation that would impose strict new ethics rules on the Supreme Court, moving over Republican objections to address revelations about justices receiving financial benefits from wealthy benefactors.

U.C. Berkeley: A House select committee is requesting more information about a partnership between the university and several Chinese entities that it said could help China gain access to cutting-edge research.]

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said in a statement that the former president has “laid out a bold and transparent agenda for his second term, something no other candidate has done.” He added, “Voters will know exactly how President Trump will supercharge the economy, bring down inflation, secure the border, protect communities and eradicate the deep state that works against Americans once and for all.”

The two driving forces of this effort to reshape the executive branch are Mr. Trump’s own campaign policy shop and a well-funded network of conservative groups, many of which are populated by former senior Trump administration officials who would most likely play key roles in any second term.

Mr. Vought and Mr. McEntee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 million presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election. The transition project, the scale of which is unprecedented in conservative politics, is led by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped the personnel and policies of Republican administrations since the Reagan presidency.

That work at Heritage dovetails with plans on the Trump campaign website to expand presidential power that were drafted primarily by two of Mr. Trump’s advisers, Vincent Haley and Ross Worthington, with input from other advisers, including Stephen Miller, the architect of the former president’s hard-line immigration agenda.

Some elements of the plans had been floated when Mr. Trump was in office but were impeded by internal concerns that they would be unworkable and could lead to setbacks. And for some veterans of Mr. Trump’s turbulent White House who came to question his fitness for leadership, the prospect of removing guardrails and centralizing even greater power over government directly in his hands sounded like a recipe for mayhem.

“It would be chaotic,” said John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump’s second White House chief of staff. “It just simply would be chaotic, because he’d continually be trying to exceed his authority but the sycophants would go along with it. It would be a nonstop gunfight with the Congress and the courts.”

The agenda being pursued has deep roots in the decades-long effort by conservative legal thinkers to undercut what has become known as the administrative state — agencies that enact regulations aimed at keeping the air and water clean and food, drugs and consumer products safe, but that cut into business profits.

Its legal underpinning is a maximalist version of the so-called unitary executive theory.

The legal theory rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other. Instead, the theory’s adherents argue that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete control of the executive branch, so Congress cannot empower agency heads to make decisions or restrict the president’s ability to fire them. Reagan administration lawyers developed the theory as they sought to advance a deregulatory agenda.

“The notion of independent federal agencies or federal employees who don’t answer to the president violates the very foundation of our democratic republic,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, adding that the contributors to Project 2025 are committed to “dismantling this rogue administrative state.”

Personal power has always been a driving force for Mr. Trump. He often gestures toward it in a more simplistic manner, such as in 2019, when he declared to a cheering crowd, “I have an Article 2, where I have the right todo whatever I wantas president.”

Mr. Trump made the remark in reference to his claimed ability to directly fire Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the Russia inquiry, which primed his hostility toward law enforcement and intelligence agencies. He also tried to get a subordinate to have Mr. Mueller ousted, but was defied.

Early in Mr. Trump’s presidency, his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, promised a “deconstruction of the administrative state.”But Mr. Trump installed people in other key roles who ended up telling him that more radical ideas were unworkable or illegal. In the final year of his presidency, he told aides he was fed up with being constrained by subordinates.

Now, Mr. Trump is laying out a far more expansive vision of power in any second term. And, in contrast with his disorganized transition after his surprise 2016 victory, he now benefits from a well-funded policymaking infrastructure, led by former officials who did not break with him after his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

One idea the people around Mr. Trump have developed centers on bringing independent agencies under his thumb.

Congress created these specialized technocratic agencies inside the executive branch and delegated to them some of its power to make rules for society. But it did so on the condition that it was not simply handing off that power to presidents to wield like kings — putting commissioners atop them whom presidents appoint but generally cannot fire before their terms end, while using its control of their budgets to keep them partly accountable to lawmakers as well. (Agency actions are also subject to court review.)

:{:{}:

}:

Presidents of both parties have chafed at the agencies’ independence. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal created many of them, endorsed a proposal in 1937 to fold them all into cabinet departments under his control, but Congress did not enact it.

Later presidents sought to impose greater control over nonindependent agencies Congress created, like the Environmental Protection Agency, which is run by an administrator whom a president can remove at will. For example, President Ronald Reagan issued executive orders requiring nonindependent agencies to submit proposed regulations to the White House for review. But overall, presidents have largely left the independent agencies alone.

Mr. Trump’s allies are preparing to change that, drafting an executive order requiring independent agencies to submit actions to the White House for review.Mr. Trump endorsed the idea on his campaign website, vowing to bring them “under presidential authority.”

Such an order was drafted in Mr. Trump’s first term — and blessed by the Justice Department — but never issued amid internal concerns. Some of the concerns were over how to carry out reviews for agencies that are headed by multiple commissioners and subject to administrative procedures and open-meetings laws, as well as over how the market would react if the order chipped away at the Federal Reserve’s independence, people familiar with the matter said.

The former president views the civil service as a den of “deep staters” who were trying to thwart him at every turn in the White House.Credit...John Tully for The New York Times

The Federal Reserve was ultimately exempted in the draft executive order, but Mr. Trump did not sign it before his presidency ended. If Mr. Trump and his allies get another shot at power, the independence of the Federal Reserve — an institution Mr. Trump publicly railed at as president — could be up for debate. Notably, the Trump campaign website’s discussion of bringing independent agencies under presidential control is silent on whether that includes the Fed.

Asked whether presidents should be able to order interest rates lowered before elections, even if experts think that would hurt the long-term health of the economy, Mr. Vought said that would have to be worked out with Congress. But “at the bare minimum,” he said, the Federal Reserve’s regulatory functions should be subject to White House review.

“It’s very hard to square the Fed’s independence with the Constitution,” Mr. Vought said.

Other former Trump administration officials involved in the planning said there would also probably be a legal challenge to the limits on a president’s power to fire heads of independent agencies. Mr. Trump could remove an agency head, teeing up the question for the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court in 1935 and 1988 upheld the power of Congress to shield some executive branch officials from being fired without cause. But after justices appointed by Republicans since Reagan took control, it has started to erode those precedents.

Peter L. Strauss, professor emeritus of law at Columbia University and a critic of the strong version of the unitary executive theory, argued that it is constitutional and desirable for Congress, in creating and empowering an agency to perform some task, to also include some checks on the president’s control over officials “because we don’t want autocracy” and to prevent abuses.

“The regrettable fact is that the judiciary at the moment seems inclined to recognize that the president does have this kind of authority,” he said. “They are clawing away agency independence in ways that I find quite unfortunate and disrespectful of congressional choice.”

Mr. Trump has also vowed to impound funds, or refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress. After Nixon used the practice to aggressively block agency spending he was opposed to, on water pollution control, housing construction and other issues, Congress banned the tactic.

On his campaign website, Mr. Trump declared that presidents have a constitutional right to impound funds and said he would restore the practice — though he acknowledged it could result in a legal battle.

Mr. Trump and his allies also want to transform the civil service — government employees who are supposed to be nonpartisan professionals and experts with protections against being fired for political reasons.

The former president views the civil service as a den of “deep staters” who were trying to thwart him at every turn, including by raising legal or pragmatic objections to his immigration policies, among many other examples. Toward the end of his term, his aides drafted an executive order, “CreatingSchedule F in the Excepted Service,” that removed employment protections from career officials whose jobs were deemed linked to policymaking.

:{:{}:

}:

Mr. Trump signed the order, which became known as Schedule F, near the end of his presidency, but President Biden rescinded it. Mr. Trump has vowed to immediately reinstitute it in a second term.

Critics say he could use it for a partisan purge. But James Sherk, a former Trump administration official who came up with the idea and now works at the America First Policy Institute — a think tank stocked heavily with former Trump officials — argued it would only be used against poor performers and people who actively impeded the elected president’s agenda.

“Schedule F expressly forbids hiring or firing based on political loyalty,” Mr. Sherk said. “Schedule F employees would keep their jobs if they served effectively and impartially.”

Mr. Trump himself has characterized his intentions rather differently — promising on his campaign website to “find and remove the radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education” and listing a litany of targets at a rally last month.

“We will demolish the deep state,” Mr. Trump said at the rally in Michigan. “We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive outthe globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. And we will throw off thesick political class that hates our country.”

[Jonathan Swan is a political reporter who focuses on campaigns and Congress. As a reporter for Axios, he won an Emmy Award for his 2020 interview of then-President Donald J. Trump, and the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award for “overall excellence in White House coverage” in 2022. More about Jonathan Swan

Charlie Savage is a Washington-based national security and legal policy correspondent. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, he previously worked at The Boston Globe and The Miami Herald. His most recent book is “Power Wars: The Relentless Rise of Presidential Authority and Secrecy.” More about Charlie Savage

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent and the author of “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. More about Maggie Haberman

A version of this article appears in print on July 17, 2023, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump and Allies Seeking Vast Increase of His Power. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

---

---

j6 ch 2

...2.2 The Plan Emerges

More than a month before the Presidential election, the media reported that the Trump Campaign was already developing a fallback plan that would focus on overturning certain election results at the State level. An article published on September 23, 2020, in The Atlantic explained, “[a]ccording to sources in the Republican Party at the State and national levels, the Trump Campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground States where Republicans hold the legislative majority.” 15 Ominously, the same reporting predicted, almost exactly, what would later come to pass: “With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask State legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly.” 16

Numerous senior Trump Campaign advisors—including Campaign Manager William Stepien, Deputy Campaign Manager and Senior Counsel Justin Clark, and President Trump’s lead attorney Rudolph Giuliani—all told the Select Committee that there was, indeed, a State-focused “strategy” or “track” to challenge the outcome of the election, which included pressing State legislators to challenge results in key States and to appoint new electoral college electors.17

“You know, in the days after election day, later in that first week, bleeding into the second, as our numbers and data looked bleaker, internally we knew that,” Stepien told the Select Committee.18 “As the AP [Associated Press] called the race, I think some surrounding the President were looking for different avenues to pursue.” That’s when Stepien remembered the concept first coming up.19

Those around President Trump were pushing this idea, and pushing it hard.

Just two days after the election, President Trump’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., forwarded to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows a suggestion that “State Assemblies can step in and vote to put forward the electoral slate[,] Republicans control Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, etc. we get Trump electors” and so “we either have a vote WE control and WE win OR it gets kicked to Congress 6 January . . .” 20 Chief of Staff Meadows responded: “Working on this for pa, ga and nc already.” 21

Within one week after the election, Meadows had also sent or received several other similar messages:

“The state legislature can take over the electoral process”—Mark Meadows’s text to Georgia State Senator Marty Harbin.22

“Agreed”—Mark Meadows’s text to a different sender, who suggested that the Trump Administration “should get that out there” if they were “seriously considering the state legislature strategy.” 23

“I will tell him”—Mark Meadows’s text to a sender who suggested President Trump “[s]tart building momentum for the state legislatures.” 24

“I love it”—Mark Meadows’s text to Representative Andy Biggs, who relayed what he acknowledged as a “highly controversial” idea to have “Republican legislature’s (sic)” “appoint a look doors (sic) [electors].” 25

“. . . Why can’t the states of GA NC PENN and other R controlled state houses declare this is BS (where conflicts and election not called that night) and just send their own electors… I wonder if POTUS knows this . . .”—former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry to Mark Meadows.26

Another White House official exploring such a plan less than a week after the election wasVince Haley, Deputy Assistant to the President for Policy, Strategy and Speechwriting. He suggested:

“. . . Imagine if every red state legislature slated zero electors. It would reveal that we are a red country. To do this we would have to jack this to the nth degree as a battle of tribes . . . .” 27

Haley pushed this strategy in several texts and emails, including to Assistant to the President and Director of Presidential Personnel Johnny McEntee,28 an individual Haley characterized as “a very trusted lieutenant” for President Trump, “a direct conveyor to Boss with ideas,” and “[a]t his side almost all the time.” 29

For Haley, however, purported election fraud was a way to justify President Trump-friendly legislatures changing the outcome of the election, but there were other reasons for doing so, too. Election fraud was “only one rationale for slating Trump electors,” Haley told McEntee, and “[w]e should baldly assert” that State legislators “have the constitutional right to substitute their judgment for a certified majority of their constituents” if that prevents socialism.30

Haley added, “[i]ndependent of the fraud—or really along with that argument—Harrisburg [Pennsylvania], Madison [Wisconsin], and Lansing [Michigan] do not have to sit idly by and submit themselves to rule by Beijing and Paris,” proposing that radio hosts “rally the grassroots to apply pressure to the weak kneed legislators in those states . . .” 31

McEntee replied “Yes!” and then: “Let’s find the contact info for all these people now.” 32 Hours later, Haley sent him names and—in most cases—cell phone numbers for top GOP legislators in six States, suggesting “. . . for POTUS to invite them down for a WH meeting . . .” 33 The President would later call several named in that message, including Rusty Bowers and Karen Fann in Arizona; Lee Chatfield and Mike Shirkey in Michigan; and Jake Corman in Pennsylvania.34

Others weighed in with the President about a State-focused plan, too. Some were already looking ahead to January 6th.

On November 8th, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich met President Trumpat the White House.35 Two days later, he sent a follow-up note to the President’s executive assistant titled “please give to POTUS[,] newt.” 36 It suggested that “[t]he only way Trump loses is rigged system” and added that President Trump could encourage “GOP legislatures elect not to send in electors,” forcing a House vote by State delegations on January 6th that Gingrich expected President Trump would win.37 Meadows replied: “Thanks Speaker.” 38

Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy had President Trump’s ear and reportedly spoke with him by phone at least four times before December.39 He forwarded a memo to other close advisors of the President recommending that the Trump team persuade one or more Republican-led chambers in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and even Minnesota to “pick a separate competitive State slate of Electors,” which the memo predicted might turn January 6th into “a cat-fight in Congress wherein VP Pence is Presiding.” 40

Attorney and conservative activist Cleta Mitchell was recruited by Mark Meadowsimmediately after the election to assist the Trump Campaign’s legal work.41 By November 5th, she emailed Dr. John Eastman of Chapman University,42 who would later play an outsized role pushing a theory about what Vice President Pence could or couldn’t do during the January 6th joint session of Congress that is detailed in Chapter 5 of this Report. In her email, Mitchell asked Eastman to write a memo justifying an idea that State legislators “reclaim” the power to pick electors and asked, rhetorically, “Am I crazy?” 43 Dr. Eastman wrote the memo, entitled “The Constitutional Authority of State Legislatures to Choose Electors,” and sent it along for sharing “widely.” 44

---

j6 ch 5

...Eastman himself pushed this cavalier attitude towards the courts and compliance with the law during a call with Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers on January 4th. During this call, just two days before the joint session, Eastman pressed Speaker Bowers to bring the Arizona House into session to certify Trump electors or decertify the Biden electors.75 Speaker Bowers responded as he had previously responded to similar entreaties by Giuliani and President Trump: by explaining that doing so would require him to violate his oaths to the U.S. and Arizona Constitutions and that he “wasn’t going to take such an action.” 76 Undeterred, Eastman still pushed Speaker Bowers to “just do it and let the courts sort it through.” 77

Ultimately, Representative Gohmert’s legal gambit failed; a U.S. district judge dismissed the case quickly.78 The judge’s ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court, which rejected Gohmert’s appeal without further consideration.79

Other Individuals Advising President Trump and His Campaign Also Advocated for a Role for the Vice President at the Joint Session.

Other individuals inside and outside the White House also advanced versions of the theory that the Vice President had agency in the joint session. The issue of Vice President Pence’s role came up during a December meeting in the Oval Office. Either President Trump or his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, tasked John McEntee, the director of the Presidential Personnel Office, with researching the matter further.80 Though McEntee was one of President Trump’s close advisors, he was not a lawyer and had no relevant experience. Yet, he wrote a one-page memo claiming that “the VP has substantial discretion to address issues with the electoral process.” 81

:{:{}:

}:

This wasn’t the only one-page analysis drafted by McEntee before January 6th.82 He later proposed a “middle path” in which he envisioned the Vice President accepting only half the electoral votes from six disputed States (specifically, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada).83 McEntee portrayed this as a way to avoid “disenfranchis[ing]” States while still achieving the desired result: delivering a second term to President Trump. McEntee conveyed this memo to the President with a cover note reading, “This is probably our only realistic option because it would give Pence an out.” 84 McEntee told the Select Committee that this judgment was based on his assessment that “it was, like, pretty obvious [the Vice President] wasn’t going to just reject . . . the electors or whatever was being asked of him at that time.” 85

Another advocate of a plan for the Vice President to play a role in the joint session was Jenna Ellis, a lawyer working for the Trump Campaign. She argued in two memos that Vice President Pence had the power to delay the counting of certified electoral votes. In the first memo, addressed to President Trump and dated December 31, 2020, Ellis advised that Vice President Pence should “not open any of the votes” from six States that “currently have electoral delegates in dispute.” 86 Ellis asserted that this “dispute” provided “sufficient rational and legal basis to question whether the [S]tate law and Constitution was followed.” Ellis proposed a delay of ten days, as the Vice President and Congress awaited a “response from the [S]tate legislatures, which would then need to meet in an emergency electoral session.” If any of the State legislatures “fails to provide a timely response, no electoral votes can be opened and counted from that [S]tate.” Ellis claimed that Vice President Pence would not be “exercising discretion nor establishing new precedent,” but instead “simply asking for clarification from the constitutionally appointed authority.” 87

Ellis sent the substance of this memorandum in an email to Fox News host Jeanine Pirro on January 1, 2021, under the subject line “Constitutional option.” 88 And, on January 4, 2021, she sent the same substance to Fox News contributor John Solomon under the subject line “Pence option.” 89

Ellis addressed a second memo, dated January 5, 2021, to Jay Sekulow, an outside attorney who represented President Trump during his first impeachment proceedings and in other litigation.90 Ellis again claimed that Vice President Pence had the power to delay the certification of the vote. Ellis recommended that the Vice President should, when he arrived at the first contested State (Arizona), “simply stop the count” on the basis that the States had not made a “final determination of ascertainment of electors.” “The [S]tates would therefore have to act.” 91

Sekulow clearly disagreed. “Some have speculated that the Vice President could simply say, ‘I’m not going to accept these electors,’ that he has the authority to do that under the Constitution,” Sekulow said during an episode of his radio show.92 “I actually don’t think that’s what the Constitution has in mind.” Sekulow added that the Vice President serves a merely “ministerial, procedural function.” 93

In addition, Herschmann discussed this memo with Sekulow. They agreed that Ellis did not have the “qualifications or the experience to be giving advice on this” or to be “litigating the challenges” that President Trump’s team was filing in court.94 Herschmann did not think that Sekulow shared the memo with the President.95

5.2 President Trump and his Allies Exert Intense Public and Private Pressure on the Vice President in Advance of the Joint Session of Congress on January 6th

...

---

---

am indep

ginni Thomas, wife of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is working hard on influencing Donald Trump's decisions on who to hire — and who to fire — according to a Sunday report from Axios.

Ginni Thomas' group Groundswell, a network of conservative activists, provided the Trump White House with a memo urging the administration to make personnel changes.

The memo was one of several the White House received, Axios reported, with the goal of ridding the administration of so-called "Never Trumpers" disloyal to the president and hiring only those who are loyal to him.

Thomas handed a list of names for potential hires directly to Trump in early 2019, sources close to Thomas said. The list included Fox News commentator Dan Bongino and an aide to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.

The new reporting about Thomas' involvement adds to the story Axios broke last week about the White House purging the administration of those officials deemed disloyal to Trump.

On Thursday, Trump's personal aide John McEntee reportedly asked each Cabinet agency to "identify political appointees across the U.S. government who are believed to be anti-Trump." Those individuals will be targeted either for removal or to be denied promotions.

Since he was acquitted by the Senate, Trump has moved to retaliate against some officials within the administration that cooperated with the congressional impeachment investigation.

Shortly after the acquittal, Trump had Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman fired from his position at the White House. Vindman had testified before Congress that he was concerned about Trump asking the Ukrainian government to open an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden, and he relayed those concerns to National Security Council lawyers.

After Vindman was fired, Trump suggested he should be punished further by the military.

Trump also removed Gordon Sondland,the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, from his post, and asked top Pentagon official John Rood to resign.

Sondland told Congress that "everyone was in the loop" regarding Ukraine, and Hood spoke out against Trump's plan to withhold military aid to Ukraine in order to pressure the country into investigating Biden.

According to Axios, McEntee will ramp up the purge of those perceived to be disloyal to Trump following the November election.

---

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/us/politics/trump-purge-ginni-thomas.html

nyt no lnx

Among Those Pressing Trump to Weed Out Disloyalty: Clarence Thomas’s Wife

A group led by Ginni Thomas has targeted officials in the administration, and lobbied for its own preferred choices. As the president’s distrust in those serving him has grown, so has its sway.

Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, has targeted officials at the National Security Council, the former head of the White House personnel office and other top White House aides for replacement.

By Maggie Haberman

Published Feb. 24, 2020

Updated May 3, 2021

For the past 18 months, Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, and other conservatives have plied the White House with memos and suggestions about which people to fire — and who should replace them.

President Trump has generally treated Ms. Thomas’s suggestions coolly, passing them off to advisers, according to people familiar with Ms. Thomas’s efforts. But since the end of the Senate impeachment trial, the president has become more distrustful of the people filling the ranks of government and has been giving those recommendations a closer look.

The memos from Ms. Thomas were first reported by Axios.

Among Ms. Thomas’s top targets have been officials at the National Security Council, the former head of the White House personnel office, Sean Doocey, and other top White House aides. Another target was Jessie K. Liu, who recently left her job as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia for a job in the Treasury Department that was later withdrawn by the White House.

Ms. Thomas, a politically active conservative who for nearly seven years has led a group called Groundswell, also successfully lobbied for a role for Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, the former attorney general of Virginia who is now the acting deputy secretary of homeland security.

Another conservative, Becky Norton Dunlop, an official at the Heritage Foundation, has also repeatedly passed names of possible appointments to personnel officials, administration officials said.

Mr. Trump recently shook up the personnel office, replacing Mr. Doocey with John McEntee, who was fired from his previous job at the White House, with a mandate to look for “bad” people, according to multiple administration officials.

Some administration aides have long been suspicious that people like Ms. Thomas and Ms. Dunlop are less interested in pro-Trump purity than in appointments for their own networks of friends. White House officials have privately questioned Ms. Thomas’s lobbying on personnel, and have saidMr. Trump — who is facing several decisions before the Supreme Court personally and in terms of administration policy — has made clear he is conscious of whom she is married to.

Still, in the last year, as Mr. Trump has grown more mistrustful of his government, the sway held by Ms. Thomas and her group has increased. Administration officials have routinely sent aides to attend weekly Groundswell meetings held at the offices of Judicial Watch, another conservative group led by a vocal defender of the president, Tom Fitton.

Image

Jessie K. Liu, who recently left her job as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia for a job in the Treasury Department that was later withdrawn by the White House, was a target of Ms. Thomas’s.

Mr. Trump was also given a memo about Ms. Liu that officials attributed to a Senate Judiciary Committee staff member named Barbara Ledeen, [// HR McMaster JOK] another member of Groundswell, though it was drafted with input from other conservatives. The memo mentioned the failure to prosecute Andrew G. McCabe, a former F.B.I. official whom Mr. Trump has repeatedly attacked, as a strike against Ms. Liu, as well as her signing the sentencing memo of Michael T. Flynn, a friend of Ms. Ledeen’s.

Ms. Ledeen and Ms. Thomas did not respond to requests for comment.

Ms. Ledeen also raised concerns with the staff of Senator Mike Lee,a Utah Republican, about Ms. Liu when she was nominated for the No. 3 job at the Justice Department in March 2019, according to three people familiar with the discussion. After Mr. Lee and others objected to Ms. Liu’s appointment, the White House withdrew her nomination.

:{:{}:

}:

Ms. Liu became a flash point again when she was nominated to the Treasury Department post. Someone provided Mr. Trump with a fresh copy of the memo attributed to Ms. Ledeen, according to a person familiar with the events.

And another memo Ms. Thomas passed along accused Mr. Doocey of obstruction related to State Department jobs, and claimed that he had surreptitiously switched one appointee for another for a foreign aid agency. That particular claim was demonstrably false, according to three people familiar with the memo.

The New York Times reported in January 2019 that Mr. Trump met that month with Ms. Thomas and a half-dozen of her members at what was at times a contentious meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. At that meeting, Ms. Thomas insisted that White House personnel were blocking appointments of supporters of the president, and handed him a list of suggested appointees.

Since the meeting, Ms. Thomas and her group have been pressing Mr. Trump to replace job holders they did not consider reliably conservative and have complained to White House staff that they were not getting enough attention from the personnel office.

Privately, officials in that office told associates that Ms. Thomas’s suggested hires could never survive proper vetting, including possibilities such as David A. Clarke, the former sheriff of Milwaukee County for a homeland security role, or theFox News guest Dan Bongino [GROUNDSWELL]for a counterterrorism post.

Despite her own history of supporting Senator Ted Cruz of Texas for the Republican presidential nomination and of trying to stop Mr. Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Ms. Thomas has presented herself to the White House as a barometer of who is sufficiently conservative and supportive of the Trump agenda, according to current and former administration officials.

Mr. Trump has alternately listened to and been dismissive of Ms. Thomas’s entreaties, according to people familiar with his thinking. But the White House has frequently sent administration officials to meet with members of Groundswell.

A person close to Ms. Thomas said she did not intend for Groundswell to be her alter ego, and that she merely saw herself as a launching point for conservative input at the White House.

One concern among White House officials has been that outsiders like Ms. Thomas and her allies do not understand how the personnel office functions.

In its previous iteration under Mr. Doocey, the office tried to serve as a buffer, getting input and at times pushback about possible hires from the White House Counsel’s Office, the Office of Political Affairs and cabinet secretaries. Mr. Doocey, who had told associates that his goal was to always try to shield the president from problematic appointments, reported directly to the chief of staff.

Mr. Trump would sometimes tell conservative activists such as Ms. Thomas that he could not fulfill their wishes because his aides were stopping him. He has said such things even when he agreed that certain recommendations did not make sense, essentially faulting aides for his own choices to avoid confrontation,according to people familiar with the discussions.

Mr. McEntee will report directly to Mr. Trump, giving Mr. McEntee more leeway but also denying the president that buffer when it comes to dealing with people who try to lobby him on personnel matters.

But it is unclear how much ideological purity Mr. Trump can achieve in his appointments, given how few Republicans supported his candidacy from its inception, the rivalries within his administration, and the stream of aides, consultants, advisers or friends who at some point have whispered in his ear that someone was trying to undermine him.

===

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/trump-johnny-mcentee-january-6-betrayal/620646/

no lnx grfx

Jonathan D. Karl is the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News. He is the author of Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show.

In late october 2020, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, was attending the confirmation hearing for Amy Coney Barrett when his cellphone rang. He answered with a whisper and walked out to the hallway to take the call. What was so urgent as to pull the chief of staff out of a Supreme Court confirmation hearing just two weeks before a presidential election?

On the line was Andrew Hughes, the top staffer at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Meadows had asked him to call because it had been brought to Meadows’s attention that a young assistant at HUD had been caught consorting with the enemy.

She had liked an Instagram post from the pop star Taylor Swift.

The first photo in the post was of Swift with the word vote superimposed on it in large blue letters. But a swipe revealed a second photo, of Swift carrying a tray of cookies emblazoned with the Biden-Harris campaign logo. “We really can’t have our people liking posts promoting Joe Biden,” Meadows told Hughes.

[This post is adapted from Karl’s forthcoming book.

Never mind that nearly 3 million other people had liked the post or that the young woman was a Taylor Swift fan who liked just about everything Swift had ever posted. To the enforcers of Trumpian loyalty, this was a sign of treachery in the ranks.

Those enforcers—including the eagle-eyed official who had first spotted the offending “like”—worked for the Presidential Personnel Office, a normally under-the-radar group responsible for the hiring and firing of the roughly 4,000 political appointees in the executive branch. During the final year of the Trump administration, that office was transformed into an internal police force, obsessively monitoring administration officials for any sign of dissent, purging those who were deemed insufficiently devoted to Trump and frightening others into silence. (Many sources for this story asked to remain anonymous so they could talk about sensitive personnel issues.) Some Trump aides privately compared the PPO to the East German Stasi or even the Gestapo—always on the lookout for traitors within.

The office was run by Johnny McEntee. Just 29 when he got the job, he’d come up as Trump’s body guy—the kid who carried the candidate’s bags. One of Trump’s most high-profile Cabinet secretaries described him to me as “a fucking idiot.” But in 2020, his power was undeniable. Trump knew he was the one person willing to do anything Trump wanted. As another senior official told me, “He became the deputy president.”

McEntee and his enforcers made the disastrous last weeks of the Trump presidency possible. They backed the president’s manic drive to overturn the election, and helped set the stage for the January 6 assault on the Capitol. Thanks to them, in the end, the elusive “adults in the room”—those who might have been willing to confront the president or try to control his most destructive tendencies—were silenced or gone. But McEntee was there—bossing around Cabinet secretaries, decapitating the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, and forcing officials high and low to state their allegiance to Trump.

When Trump wasn’t happy with the answers he was getting from White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, McEntee set up a rogue legal team.This back-channel operation played a previously unknown role in the effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the vote. Just days before January 6, McEntee sent Pence’s office an absurd memo making the case that Pence would be following Thomas Jefferson’s example if he used his power to declare Trump the winner of the 2020 election.

More than anyone else in the White House, McEntee was Trump’s man through and through—a man who rose to power at precisely the moment when American democracy was falling apart.

I first met johnny McEntee when I visited Trump Tower in 2015, not long after Trump announced he was running for president. McEntee was polite, earnest, and eager to please. He identified himself as Trump’s “trip director” and gave me a tour of the campaign headquarters. (He declined to comment for this story.)

McEntee was one of the first full-time staffers on the campaign, and he went everywhere Trump went. When Trump became president, McEntee had a workspace outside the Oval Office—right against the curved wall. The boss liked having McEntee around. A former quarterback for the University of Connecticut, he was good-looking and tall—but not too tall, about an inch shorter than Trump. During the first 14 months of the Trump presidency, McEntee did what he had done during the campaign: He carried Trump’s bags.

[Adam Serwer: If you didn’t vote for Trump, your vote is fraudulent

In March 2018, it looked for a moment like his Washington career was over. He was fired by then–Chief of Staff John Kelly after a long-delayed FBI background check revealed that he had deposited suspiciously large sums of money into his bank account. It turned out that the money was from gambling winnings. After Kelly himself was fired, McEntee returned to his old spot outside the Oval. It was January 2020, and he wouldn’t be just a body guy for long.

In mid-February, Trump called his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to a meeting. Ominous signs of the coming pandemic were beginning to emerge. Hundreds of Americans who had been evacuated from Wuhan, China, were in quarantine on military bases. The World Health Organization had just reported a frightening new development—a small number of COVID-19 cases in people who had never traveled to China. But the subject of the meeting wasn’t the virus. It was staffing. Trump, newly acquitted in his first Senate impeachment trial, was looking to make some changes.

“I want to put Johnny in charge of personnel,” the president told Mulvaney.

The director of presidential personnel is responsible for vetting and hiring everybody, including ambassadors, Cabinet secretaries, and top intelligence officials. McEntee had never hired anybody for anything. Now he was going to be in charge of perhaps the most important human-resources department in the world?

Mulvaney called his top deputy, Emma Doyle, who oversaw the current director of personnel, into the meeting. “Mr. President,” she said, “I have never said no to anything you’ve asked me to do, but I am asking you to please reconsider this. I don’t think it is a good idea.”

Doyle had spent a lot of time around the president, but she had never seen him as angry as he was about to become.

“You people never fucking listen to me!” Trump screamed. “You’re going to fucking do what I tell you to do.”

A few hours later, Doyle was on Air Force One, along with McEntee, en route to a Trump rally in New Hampshire. She asked him about his interest in the position.

“People have been telling me I should do that for a long time,” McEntee told her. “I didn’t feel ready before, but I am 29 now and I’m ready.” He added, “I’m the only person around here that’s just here for the president.”

Mcentee told the president exactly what he wanted to hear: that his political problems were caused by people who pretended to support him but were really against him, the secret Never Trumpers right there in his administration.It was time to root out the “deep state.”

[Franklin Foer: L’etat c’est Trump

McEntee began scouring federal agencies for people who didn’t support all things Trump. Beginning in June 2020—in the middle of both the pandemic and the presidential campaign—the personnel office informed virtually every senior official across the federal government, regardless of how long they had worked in the administration, that they would need to sit down for a job interview.

A president has a right to expect that his political appointees support his policies and will work to carry them out. These are, after all, political appointees. But most of the people McEntee’s team questioned were already devoted to Trump; they were still putting their reputations on the line to work for him three and a half years into his administration. But that wasn’t enough for the loyalty enforcers.

McEntee’s underlings were, for the most part, comically inexperienced. He had staffed his office with very young Trump activists. He had hired his friends, and he had hired young women—as one senior official in the West Wing put it to me, “the most beautiful 21-year-old girls you could find, and guys who would be absolutely no threat to Johnny in going after those girls.”

“It was the Rockettes and the Dungeons & Dragons group,” the official said.

In fact, one McEntee hire was literally a Rockette; she had performed with Radio City Music Hall’s finest in the 2019 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The only work experience listed on her résumé besides a White House internship was a stint as a dance instructor. McEntee also hired Instagram influencers. Camryn Kinsey, for example, was 20 and still in college when McEntee gave her the title of external-relations director. In an interview with the online publication The Conservateur, she said, “Only in Trump’s America could I go from working in a gym to working in the White House, because that’s the American dream.” (Kinsey went on to work at the pro-Trump One American News Network.)

The interviews with McEntee’s team usually lasted about an hour. They included questions such as “Do you support the policies of the Trump administration and, if so, which ones?” That question was asked of Makan Delrahim, the head of the Department of Justice’s antitrust division. As the person carrying out the president’s antitrust policies, he found the question strange.

Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency and HUD were asked, “Do you support the president’s plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan?” It was a bizarre question, given that neither official had anything remotely to do with Afghanistan policy.

The DOJ spokesperson Kerri Kupec was asked, “What are your political inclinations?” A little amused, she responded, “Are you asking if I am Republican?”

McEntee’s enforcers scoured the social-media accounts and voting records of officials high and low. An office assistant at the DOJ was asked to explain why she had voted in a local Democratic primary a few years earlier. She explained that her parents had told her that’s where her vote would count most, because the Democratic primary winner was all but certain to win the general election. Nonetheless, after the interview, she was denied a promotion and raise that she had been eligible to receive.

Mcentee took a particular interest in one job category: White House liaisons to Cabinet agencies. Traditionally, the liaison job is a mid-level position, responsible for coordinating messages between the agencies and the White House. But McEntee didn’t want messengers. McEntee wanted people who would boss around the senior officials and report back to him.

In early November 2020, he installed a conservative activist named Heidi Stirrup as liaison at the DOJ. Stirrup was primarily known as an anti-abortion activist who had worked as a mid-level staffer for Republicans in Congress. She had no legal experience, but she was intensely loyal to Trump—and to McEntee. Her car was easy to spot in the DOJ parking lot; it was covered with Trump bumper stickers—unusual at a department where even the most political of political appointees try to appear to be above the fray.

A few days after the election, in her first full day in the office, she went in to meet a senior official on Attorney General Bill Barr’s team. It didn’t go well. “You need to wake up to the fact this election is being stolen!” she screamed. “It needs to be stopped!” (The Atlantic was not able to reach Stirrup for comment.)

Barr’s team saw Stirrup as more than just annoying; they worried she would snoop into DOJ investigations. This would have been highly unethical—the White House is not supposed to interfere in criminal cases.

[Jonathan D. Karl: Inside William Barr’s breakup with Trump

The next time Stirrup came around to berate the senior official, he asked her if she would like to deliver her message directly to the attorney general, and with that he brought her in to see Barr. Most people find Barr intimidating, but not Heidi Stirrup. “The election is being stolen,” she lectured him. “You need better people doing these investigations.” And she told him she had a list of people, presumably provided by McEntee, whom he needed to hire.

Barr later told me he’d never seen this kind of behavior. By the end of the week, he had ordered her banned from the DOJ building. Her pass was deactivated, and security was instructed not to let her in.

A similar run-in between a White House liaison and senior leadership had taken place at the Department of Homeland Security a few months earlier. McEntee had installed Josh Whitehouse, a 25-year-old Trump supporter from New Hampshire, atDHS, and Whitehouse immediately started throwing his weight around, often threatening to fire people (though he had no direct authority to do so).

Two people who worked with Whitehouse on the second floor of DHS headquarters told me his mood swings were so wild that they worried he could get violent. He was overheard screaming things into the phone such as, “If they don’t do this, I will literally go to their house and burn it down.” (Whitehouse said the quote sounded “exaggerated” and he didn’t think he had said it.) As one DHS official told me, “I was legitimately worried he was going to come and kill us.” When I asked Whitehouse about this comment, he told me, “They need help.” He added: “I can’t imagine anybody should be afraid of another person working there if they are in it for the right reasons and aligned with the agenda.”

In mid-August 2020, Whitehouse had a loud confrontation with Acting DHS Secretary Chad F. Wolf in front of several witnesses. It happened afterMiles Taylor, a former chief of staff at DHS, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post criticizing Trump. Taylor wrote that “the country is less secure as a direct result of the president’s actions” and that he would be crossing party lines to vote for Joe Biden.

There are plaques in the office that include the names of all the past secretaries of Homeland Security and their chiefs of staff, each engraved on a metal plate. After the op-ed, Whitehouse set out to remove Taylor’s name. He was in the process of unscrewing the plate when Wolf walked by.

“What are you doing?” Wolf asked him.

“I am removing the name of this traitor,” Whitehouse answered.

“Stop. That doesn’t belong to you. It doesn’t belong to me. And we don’t erase history here at the Department of Homeland Security.”

Whitehouse erupted at the Cabinet secretary: “Miles Taylor is a traitor! This just shows you don’t really support President Trump!”

By the fall, Whitehouse would be reassigned to a more important job: White House liaison at the Pentagon. When the move was announced, he told people,“I’m going to the Pentagon to fire [Defense Secretary Mark] Esper and those deep-state bastards!”

But before he left, he had one piece of unfinished business. At a moment when he saw that Secretary Wolf was out of the building, Whitehouse once again went over to the list of names. He removed Miles Taylor’s plate and flipped it over so the metal face was blank, before screwing it back into the wall.

In october 2020, Whitehouse helped the Presidential Personnel Office write a series of memos identifying nearly two dozen Pentagon officials they thought should be fired, each outlining transgressions allegedly made against Trump.

[Read: Top military officers unload on Trump

The memo on Esper, never before made public, provides remarkable insight into the degree to which McEntee’s team was calling the shots. It includes bullet points outlining Esper’s sins: He “bars the display of theConfederate flag” on military bases; “opposed the President’s direction to utilize American forces to put down riots”; “focused the Department onRussia”; was “actively pushing for ‘diversity and inclusion’”; and so on. The memo recommended that Esper be fired immediately after the election and replaced by Christopher Miller, then the director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

Trump followed the script. Six days after the election, Esper was fired and replaced by Miller. McEntee also selected Miller’s senior adviser, Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel and regular guest on Tucker Carlson’s show. As Axios’s Jonathan Swan first reported, McEntee gave Macgregor a handwritten to-do list for the new team at the Pentagon:

  1. Get us outof Afghanistan.
  1. Get us out of Iraq and Syria.

3. Complete the withdrawal from Germany.

  1. Get us out of Africa.

“This is what the president wants you to do,” McEntee told him.

Once he had cleaned up the Pentagon, McEntee turned his attention to the election, and the president’s efforts to overturn the results. He began providing legal advice. When White House Counsel Cipollone told Trump that Pence did not have the power to overturn the election, McEntee drafted his own constitutional analysis, withan assist from his own rogue legal advisers, directly contradicting Cipollone and every other serious expert in the country.

McEntee sent the memo via text message on January 1 to Pence’s chief of staff.  Here it is, in its entirety:

Jefferson Used His Position as VP to Win

·  The Constitution sets precise requirements for the form in which the states are to submit their electoral votes.

·  In 1801, the ballots of all states were in perfect conformity except Georgia’s.

·  Georgia’s submission dramatically failed to conform to the requirements.

·  VP Jefferson presided over the counting of the ballots even as he was one of the candidates.

·  Had the defective ballots been rejected, Jefferson would have most likely lost the election.

·  Senate tellers told Jefferson in a loud voice that there was a problem with the Georgia ballots.

·  Rather than investigating, Jefferson ignored the problems and announced himself the winner.

·  This proves that the VP has, at a minimum, a substantial discretion to address issues with the electoral process.

McEntee was no constitutional scholar and no historian. His bullet-point description was, not surprisingly, deeply flawed. Jefferson didn’t discard electoral votes, as Trump wanted Pence to do. He accepted electoral votes from a state that nobody had questioned he had won.

But the facts didn’t matter to McEntee. By distorting what happened in 1801, McEntee could turn up the pressure on Pence. Thomas Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence and one of those guys on Mount Rushmore. If it was okay for him to use his power as vice president to get himself elected president, how could it not be okay for Pence to use his power to reelect Trump now?

Trump may have embraced his body guy’s theory, but Pence didn’t. He refused to single-handedly overturn the election, preventing an even bigger disaster from taking place on January 6.

[David A. Graham: The new lost cause]

Since Trump left the White House, McEntee has kept a low profile. But he remains in close contact with Trump, and over the summer spent time at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, volunteering for his political operation,according to a Trump spokesperson.

People close to Trump say there is no doubt he is going to run for president again in 2024. I am not convinced he will run, but if he does, he will be the clear favorite to win the Republican nomination. The idea of him getting elected again, although highly unlikely, no longer seems impossible. If that happens, McEntee will probably play a key role right from the start. As one of Trump’s more levelheaded senior aides told me, “I shudder to think what the Cabinet would look like in a second term.” Johnny McEntee, I expect, is already working on his list of names.

This article has been adapted from Jonathan Karl’s forthcoming book, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show.

Jonathan D. Karl is the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News. He is the author of Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show.

---

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-white-house-purge/2020/11/13/2af12c94-25ca-11eb-8672-c281c7a2c96e_story.html

no lnx

Democracy Dies in Darkness

In Trump’s final days, a 30-year-old aide purges officials seen as insufficiently loyal

By Josh Dawsey, Juliet Eilperin, John Hudson and Lisa Rein

November 13, 2020 at 9:19 p.m. EST

Over the past week, President Trump has axed his defense secretary and other top Pentagon aides, his second-in-command at the U.S. Agency for International Development, two top Homeland Security officials, a senior climate scientist and the leader of the agency that safeguards nuclear weapons.

Engineering much of the post-election purge is Johnny McEntee, a former college quarterback who was hustled out of the White House two years ago after a security clearance check turned up a prolific habit for online gambling.

---

Personal goon squad': Why a newly reported memo by a Trump loyalist is 'cause of considerable alarm' for US democracy

Alex Henderson

   November 15, 2021

ABC News' Jonathan Karl has reported that on October 19, 2020, Trump loyalist John McEntee — then serving as White House director of presidential personnel — issued a memo listing reasons to fire then-Defense ESPER...

no lnx

'Personal goon squad': Why a newly reported memo by a Trump loyalist is 'cause of considerable alarm' for US democracy

Alex Henderson November 15, 2021

ABC News' Jonathan Karl has reported that on October 19, 2020, Trump loyalist John McEntee — then serving as White House director of presidential personnel — issued a memo listing reasons to fire then-Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper from the Trump Administration. Never Trump conservative Max Boot discusses Karl's reporting and that memo in his November 15 column for the Washington Post, explaining why McEntee's memo should be a "cause of considerable alarm" if Donald Trump runs for president in 2024.

Boot was highly critical of Esper in the past, describing him as a Trump enabler. But in light of Karl's reporting, the conservative columnist now believes he "may have been too harsh on" the former defense secretary — who Trump fired on November 9.

"Now that we have seen fresh evidence of how much Trump and his henchmen loathed Esper, he is rising in my estimation," Boot explains. "That evidence comes courtesy of ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl, who has unearthed a memorandum from Johnny McEntee, Trump's director of presidential personnel, listing 14 reasons for ousting Esper. That document was dated October 19, 2020. Three weeks later, Esper was fired by a Trump tweet."

:{:{}:

}:

Describing McEntee's memo as "both sinister and ludicrous," Boot notes that the Trump loyalist "was making the case for getting rid of a senior cabinet officer for insufficient loyalty to the president."

"This revealing and chilling document deserves to be read not as a historical curiosity, but as a terrible portent of what could be in store if Trump wins another term," Boot writes. "He appears determined to turn the military into his personal goon squad."

Boot goes on to note some of McEntee's reasons for wanting Esper fired. Esper, McEntee complained, "approved the promotion of Lt. Col. (Alexander) Vindman," a key witness during Trump's impeachment — and Esper "publicly opposed the president's direction to utilize American force to put down riots just outside the White House," McEntee wrote.

Boot observes, "This was a reference to Esper's brave decision in June 2020 to resist Trump's desires to deploy active-duty troops to suppress Black Lives Matter protests. [CAN'T WE SHOOT THEM IN THE LEG?] Esper acted after he and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had been lured by Trump into a bizarre photo op in Lafayette Square, which been cleared by force of peaceful protesters."

In the memo, Boot adds, McEntee (now 31) also wanted Esper fired for removing Confederate flags from military installations.

McEntee's memo, the Never Trump conservative warns, underscores the fact that a second Trump presidency —should he run in 2024 — would be disastrous for the United States.

"Trump would want to ensure that the 'guys with guns' are on his side," Boot warns. "If he wins a second term, Trump's next defense secretary — Johnny McEntee perhaps? — would almost certainly be somebody more devoted to him than to the Constitution. For anyone concerned about the future of U.S. democracy, that should be a cause of considerable alarm at a time when Trump and (President Joe) Biden are running almost neck and neck in polling matchups."

---

---

Trump’s relentless efforts to purge the federal government ofpeople who aren’t deemed sufficiently loyal to him will now be overseen by a lackey who once claimed that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was a practicing Satanist, according to Axios.

https://www.axios.com/white-house-office-personnel-management-john-gibbs-7333b9be-424a-454b-b395-6654d364b79b.html

Trump intends to nominate John Gibbs to run the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), according to two sources with direct knowledge of the decision, which remains closely held.

Why it matters: OPM is the HR department for the federal government's civil service. The agency has become a focus of the White House's efforts to install and reward Trump loyalists across the government.

Between the lines: Gibbs is a former conservative commentator who currently serves as a senior official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

White House response: Deputy press secretary Judd Deere told Axios that "the White House has no personnel announcements at this time."

Go deeper: Trump's loyalty cop John McEntee clashes with agency heads

---

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trump-is-working-behind-the-scenes-to-cripple-any-investigations-before-the-november-election-columnist

no lnx

Trump is working behind the scenes to cripple any investigations before the November election: columnist

[President of the United States Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a "Keep America Great" rally at Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, Arizona. ]

Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story April 11, 2020

According to columnist David Lurie, writing for the Daily Beast, Donald Trump’s purge of inspector generals in the government is an attempt to make sure that he is not be subjected to any embarrassing reports or investigations before the November election.

As Lurie notes, the president has enlisted former bodyman John McEntee, who was previously booted from the White House by former Chief of Staff John Kelly, to purge critics and those considered not loyal to Trump from their posts, and that inspector generals are at the top of the list.

“In the midst of a deadly pandemic, Donald Trump has expanded his war on oversight by attacking the governments’ inspectors general, compounding the damage already done by his unprecedented stonewalling of congressional oversight investigations,” Lurie wrote, before adding that Trump and McEntee are dead set on “targeting IGs as part of a broader effort to purge officials who aren’t sufficiently personally loyal to Trump.”

“That effort might help Trump delay any formal reviews of his failed leadership during the pandemic, or of his administrations’ disbursement of trillions in coronavirus-related spending, until after the November election,” he continued before highlighting the firing of Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general for turning over to Congress the whistleblower report on Trump’s attempts to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden.

Adding thatTrump’s “attacks on the government’s IG infrastructure have been so audacious that they have raised questions among at least some GOP legislators,” Lurie reports, “Additionally, Trump has taken a uniquely recalcitrant approach to congressional investigations. In the Ukraine matter, Trump defied long-standing precedent by refusing to voluntarily comply with nearly all congressional requests for information, and instructed current and former government officials to do the same.”

“In sum, it seems increasingly likely that Trump’s effort to stonewall and otherwise undermine institutional oversight of his own conduct, as well as that of the government officials that report to him, may well largely succeed, at least until after the election,”Lurie warned. ” Even without the ability to force the president’s loyal soldiers to comply with congressional subpoenas, a small number of courageous truth tellers were willing to come forward to tell the truth about Trump’s Ukraine misconduct.”

“Similarly, Trump’s efforts to fully obfuscate and deny the catastrophic nature of his response to the pandemic do appear to be failing,” he added. “Journalists, health-care workers, and state and local officials are seeking to ensure that many of the critical facts come to light. Hopefully, their efforts to inform the public will continue to bear fruit, and Trump will not succeed in hiding the truth. It is crucial that, when voters go to the ballot box (or mailbox) in November, the scope of Trump’s catastrophic failure is known, even if all of the relevant information has yet to be exposed.”

You can read more here (subscription required).

==

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/trumps-on-a-mission-to-corrupt-the-nations-intelligence-for-his-own-political-benefit

wa mo

no lnx

Trump’s on a mission to corrupt the nation’s intelligence for his own political benefit

Written by The Washington Monthly March 7, 2020

Flush with his impeachment acquittal victory, President Donald Trump has resurrected his nomination of Texas Congressman John Ratcliffe to become Director of National Intelligence.Ratcliffe’s initial nomination sank in July after it was revealed he had embellished his record as a U.S. Attorney by lying that he fought terrorism and rounded up hundreds of undocumented immigrants.

So, what motivates Trump to trot out the same damaged goods to head U.S. intelligence? This is, after all, a man whom former acting CIA director Mike Morell described as having “the least national security experience and the most partisan political experience of any previous director of national intelligence,” Even worse,  Ratcliffe has peddled the conspiracy theory that “there may have been a secret society of folks within the Department of Justice and the FBI” in 2016 who were working to prevent Trump from becoming president.

It’s not complicated. Trump prizes slavishness and intellectual dishonesty, or flat out derangement. All the qualities Ratcliffe seems to possess in abundance. Post-impeachment, Trump feels empowered to push the envelope even further than he already has to corrupt and subjugate the government apparatus to his own ends, with a key focus on the intelligence community.

Ratcliffe would succeed Vice Admiral Joseph Maguire, who was recently ousted as acting DNI by Trump after Maguire’s staff briefed the House Intelligence Committee on ongoing Russian election interference. To fill the gap, Trump has named one of his biggest loyalists, U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, as acting DNI.

Grenell’s Trumpist antics as U.S. envoy have already made him a pariah in Berlin. But now, he has gotten the ball rolling in doing his master’s bidding and cleaning house: In just two weeks on the job, he has fired DNI principal executive and veteran CIA officer Andrew Hallman and hiredKash Patel as “senior advisor.” Patel is an NSC staffer and formerDevon Nunes aidewith little grounding in the intelligence community. Worse yet, Patel has already played a disgraced role in American history. He presented himself, falsely, as a Ukraine expert to the president and fed him disinformation that led to Trump’s impeachment-prompting attempt to extort Ukrainian president Zelensky. Grennell also dismissed chief of staff Viraj Mirani, continuing Trump’s purge of qualified and experienced IC officials.

Topping off Trump’s appointments of credentials-lite “yes-men,” is that of Michael Ellis, another Nunes acolyte, as the NSC’s director for intelligence. Ellis was behind the decision to bury the transcript of Trump’s infamous July 25, 2019 call to President Zelensky in a super-secret code word server. 

:{:{}:

}:

At the same time, Trump has imposed McCarthy-like loyalty-testing of federal employees through his hand-chosen grand inquisitor, 29-year-old John McEntee, the president’s former body man who was fired last year for a gambling addiction. Along with his deputy, a college student, McEntee is reportedly concentrating the hunt on allegedly anti-Trump political appointees. My contacts inside the government report the working level has not yet been targeted. “But our antennae are up,” said one national security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In other words, the president is turning paranoia into personnel policy. An expert in the politicization of intelligence, American University professor Joshua Rovner calls Trump’s moves “manipulation by appointment.” He told me in an interview that he worries that Ratcliffe “would perpetrate real damage to the intelligence community.”

Stephen Slick, a 27-year CIA senior operations officer who now heads the University of Texas at Austin’s intelligence studies program, told me Trump’s bid to coerce political loyalty from government agencies and civil servants that are charged with pursuing the truth puts the country in danger.  “If the president succeeds in his project to diminish the fundamental non-partisan character of American intelligence and law enforcement, we will become increasingly vulnerable to miscalculation or catastrophic surprise,” he said.

Of course, we know the consequences of manipulated intelligence. George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein in 2003, based on faulty intelligence, led the country into a chaotic war that destabilized the Middle East. Thus far, that overseas adventure has cost more than $2 trillion and almost 4,500 American service members’ lives. Roughly 32,000 soldiers have been wounded.

The Trump White House’s intimidation is already having a deleterious impact. Last month, agency chiefs declined to participate in briefing the House Intelligence Committee in the public segment of the annual Worldwide Threat Assessment hearing, fearing that doing so would attract the president’s ire.

Trump’s constant attacks against the intelligence community fit into his wider war on truth itself.His mission is twofold: to shield the public from intelligence that potentially could damage him politically, and to control the flow of information emanating from the agencies. That Trump’s goals fit neatly with those of Vladimir Putin could be a mere coincidence, or perhaps something more insidious. Eventually, that truth will come out.

Meanwhile, the Vichy GOP acts as Trump’s enabler.Based on the past behavior of Republicans in Congress, it seems obvious that they won’t stand up to the president now, even with the nation’s national security on the line.

Having served for many years as a State Department diplomat, and as a Pentagon intelligence analyst, I am of the conviction that Trump knows full well what he is doing. He may, typically, not have a detailed plan, but his ultimate objective is clear. And the country will be the worse for it.

---

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/relentless-corruption-and-sheer-madness-are-donald-trumps-super-powers/

no lnx

random 220 what fresh hell

Relentless corruption and sheer madness are Donald Trump’s super powers

President Donald J. Trump delivers his State of the Union address Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2020, in the House Chamber in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)

Written by Joshua Holland / Raw Story February 16, 2020

This article was paid for by AlterNet subscribers. Not a subscriber? Try us and go ad-free for $1. Prefer to give a one-time tip? Click here.

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

Seven days after he took office, Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13769 which barred migrants from a handful of Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. Hundreds of travelers were detained as they arrived here and tens of thousands of people had their visas suddenly revoked. For many Americans, it was clearly a bridge too far. Some had hoped that he would grow into the job, or that his bigoted campaign rhetoric would give way to a more responsible tone after he won, and the Muslim ban was evidence that those hopes had been misplaced as Trump moved to codify xenophobia.

With minimal organizing, thousands of people took to the nation’s airports to protest the policy.

Today, three years and three weeks later, Trump is crowing on Twitter about a New York Times story detailing how he’s basing his re-election campaign on his simmering resentments and paranoia. He is using customs and immigration enforcement to openly extort New York state into dropping investigations into his personal businesses. He’s brazenly retaliating against his own regime officials for testifying in his impeachment hearings. Meanwhile, his Attorney General, hand-picked after writing a brief arguing that it’s kosher for a president to exercise his or her powers toward corrupt purposes, is overruling career prosecutors to grant leniency to Trump’s henchmen when their crimes are unearthed. While federal investigators look at potential crimes committed by Trump’s personal attorney as he sought to fabricate a scandal about one of Trump’s Democratic foes, others within the agency are simultaneously colluding with that very attorney to advance that effort. Our nation’s top law enforcement agency has adopted a relentless focus on finding support for the president’s* unhinged conspiracy theories.

As Trump rants and raves, there are no crowds gathering spontaneously outside of US Attorney’s offices around the country to protest Bill Barr’s unprecedented corruption of the Department of Justice, . We may be outraged, but we seem to run out of gas. Trump’s behavior is so consistently venal and outrageous that we’ve become inured to it. Abuses of power that would be huge scandals under any other president of either party elicit ritualistic condemnations, but are ultimately just Trump being Trump.

:{:{}:

}:

Overwhelming our sense of decency with a constant stream of outrageous comportment is Trump’s super-power. It’s impossible to even keep up.

:{:{}:

}:

:{:{}:

}:

David Axelrod

@davidaxelrod

In this crazy world, almost nothing is said about the fact that @realDonaldTrump is rehiring his 29-yr-old former body man, forced from the WH earlier for failing a vet & with no personnel background, to direct hiring ACROSS THE ENTIRE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT!https://www.axios.com/johnny-mcentee-white-house-d1c29eee-8b0a-4c4d-8ba4-9355f3c27f4f.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top …

Johnny McEntee

Ex-Trump aide John McEntee to lead White House office of personnel - Axios

He's been hand selected by Trump, who sees him as the ultimately loyalist.

axios.com

9,798

4:49 AM - Feb 14, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

6,101 people are talking about this

*****

---

---

wiki 7 22

john David McEntee II (born May 9, 1990) is an American political advisor who served as Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office in the Trump Administration. McEntee began as a body man and personal aide to the president until he was dismissed by White House chief of staff John Kelly in March 2018. McEntee had failed a security clearance background check and was under investigation by the Homeland Security Department for possible financial crimes relating to gambling.[1][2][3][4] After Kelly was dismissed in December 2018, Trump rehired McEntee and named him Director of the Office of Presidential Personnel in February 2020.[5][6][7][8] Trump assigned McEntee the task of identifying for removal political appointees and career officials who were insufficiently loyal to the president.[9][10][11]

Early life, family and education

McEntee was raised in a Roman Catholic family in Fullerton, California.[12] His father is John D. McEntee, a producer/manager who books celebrities for private and corporate functions, as well as for resorts including the MGM Resorts, Caesars Palace, and Venetian Properties.[13] His cousin, Zac McEntee, was the Deputy Chief of Staff[14] for Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.[12]

He attended St. Angela Merici Parish School in Brea, California. Later, he attended Servite High School in Anaheim, where he played quarterback on the varsity football team. As a senior, he threw for 1,525 yards with seven touchdown passes and rushed for four touchdowns.[15]

McEntee was a redshirt his first year at the University of Connecticut. Thereafter, he saw limited playing time in his first two full seasons of play. In 2011, he was the team's starting quarterback and played all 12 games in 2011, leading the team to a 5–7 season. As the team's quarterback, McEntee passed for over 150 yards in seven games, passed for over 200 in four games, and reached a season and career-high of 300 yards against Western Michigan University, where he also had a career high of four touchdown passes and 22 completions.[16] His 335 pass attempts was eighth in school single-season history and his 172 completions was tenth. He finished the season throwing for 12 touchdowns with 8 interceptions.[17] McEntee completed his communications degree in the spring of his senior year, but he was thereafter no longer the starting quarterback for his final season in 2012, playing sparingly in three games.[17][18][12]

Career

By 2015, McEntee worked as a production assistant for Fox News, focusing on the channel's social media accounts.[12] He successfully lobbied for a job on the Trump campaign, joining as a volunteer in July of that year, later being promoted to a full-time position as trip director.[19] McEntee was responsible for executing the campaign's rallies while traveling with the candidate and coordinating the campaign's travel for all staff.

After Trump won the 2016 election, McEntee was asked to join his staff as an aide, serving as his body man.[2] McEntee accompanied President Trump on all trips, most notably the President's trip to Saudi Arabia in May of 2017, where John McEntee "Man in red tie" and Ivanka Trump "#Trump's_daughter" were the most trending hashtags in the country.[20]

McEntee's service in the White House ended on March 13, 2018 when he was fired due to an "unspecified security issue" that was later revealed to be a problem with gambling debts and an inability to obtain a necessary security clearance.[21][9]

McEntee was immediately hired by Trump's 2020 reelection campaign as a senior adviser for campaign operations. In January 2020, McEntee returned to the White House where he shared some of his former "body man" duties with Nick Luna, the Director of Oval Office Operations.[22] McEntee's role was director of the Office of Presidential Personnel,[6] reporting directly to the President. He was tasked with identifying and removing political appointees and career officials deemed insufficiently loyal to the administration, despite having no previous personnel or people management experience.[22][9][10][11][23] His reappointment was controversial given the circumstances of his dismissal.[24][7][8][25]

On November 9th, 2021, John McEntee was issued a subpoena to testify by the House January 6th commission.[26]

Jonathan Karl, the ABC News chief White House correspondent for the duration of the Trump administration, wrote a November 2021 profile of McEntee, characterizing him as particularly powerful because "Trump knew he was the one person willing to do anything Trump wanted." Karl observed that McEntee hired his young friends and, as one senior White House official said, "the most beautiful 21-year-old girls you could find," including Instagram influencers and a dance instructor. Karl characterized McEntee's power late in the Trump presidency:

McEntee and his enforcers made the disastrous last weeks of the Trump presidency possible. They backed the president’s manic drive to overturn the election, and helped set the stage for the January 6 assault on the Capitol.Thanks to them, in the end, the elusive “adults in the room”—those who might have been willing to confront the president or try to control his most destructive tendencies—were silenced or gone. But McEntee was there—bossing around Cabinet secretaries, decapitating the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, and forcing officials high and low to state their allegiance to Trump.[27]

McEntee also sent a series of bullet points via text message toPence's chief of staff to incorrectly assert that Thomas Jefferson "Used His Position as VP to Win" the 1801 election, which McEntee claimed "proves that the VP has, at a minimum, a substantial discretion to address issues with the electoral process."[28]

In popular culture

In 2011, while he was a college football player, McEntee starred in a viral YouTube video that featured him throwing football trickshots.[4][12] The video was later featured on CNN.[29] Within 48 hours of posting, the video had generated nearly 7 million views and was featured on the homepage of Yahoo.[30]

Personal life

mcEntee is Roman Catholic.[12]

Reference

---

ggl 7 22

John McEntee (political aide) - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › John_McEntee_(politi...

JOHN MCENTEE TRUMP from en.wikipedia.org

John David McEntee II (born May 9, 1990) is an American political advisor who served as Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office in the ...

President: Donald Trump

Education: University of Connecticut (‎BA‎)‎

Political party: Republican

Born: May 9, 1990 (age 32); Fullerton, Californ...‎

Early life, family and education · ‎Career

The Man Who Made January 6 Possible - The Atlantichttps://www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2021/11

JOHN MCENTEE TRUMP from www.theatlantic.com

Nov 9, 2021 — The office was run by Johnny McEntee. Just 29 when he got the job, he'd come up as Trump's body guy—the kid who carried the candidate's bags.

How a no-name 'idiot' gained Trump's trust, rose to power ...https://nypost.com › 2021/11/09 › book-reveals-how-jo...

JOHN MCENTEE TRUMP from nypost.com

Nov 9, 2021 — With the White House in disarray in Trump's final year in office, Johnny McEntee, 29, emerged seemingly out of nowhere to become head of the ...

Videos

PREVIEW

8:37

How One Man Went From Carrying Trump's Bags To 'Deputy ...

YouTube · MSNBC

Nov 9, 2021

2:40

Trump's personal aide John McEntee fired for 'serious ...

MSNBC News · MSNBC.com

Mar 13, 2018

1:34

Longtime Trump aide John McEntee fired

CNN

Mar 13, 2018

Mar 3, 2020 — John McEntee, 29, is the new director of the Presidential Personnel Office. His job is to identify staffers who aren't loyal to President ...

In Trump's final days, a 30-year-old aide purges officials ...https://www.boston.com › news › johnny-mcentee-trump

JOHN MCENTEE TRUMP from www.boston.com

Nov 13, 2020 — Engineering much of the post-election purge is Johnny McEntee, a former college quarterback who was hustled out of the White House two years ago ...

Ex-Trump aide John McEntee to lead White House office of ...https://www.axios.com › Politics & Policy

Feb 13, 2020 — Trump sees McEntee as the ultimate loyalist, and he has assigned him the powerful role of picking personnel across the federal government. · The ...

How Johnny McEntee, a 'f--king idiot,' came to be known as ...https://theweek.com › donald-trump › how-johnny-mce...

Nov 9, 2021 — Johnny McEntee, a political appointee who rose in the ranks after carrying the ex-president's bags, was a Trump man "through and through," ...

Anthony Scaramucci hired Trump's former body man ... - CNBChttps://www.cnbc.com › 2020/08/31 › anthony-scaram...

Aug 31, 2020 — John McEntee, the former body man for President Donald Trump who was later fired, went to work for Anthony Scaramucci's SkyBridge during his ...

---

NOT SURE WHY THIS IS HERE....

Speaking of the DOJ, an agency “anti-human trafficking grant program is facing internal complaints, after two nonprofits were denied funding in favor of two less established groups whose applications were not recommended by career DOJ officials.” According to Reuters, “the awarding of more than $1 million total to the two groups, Hookers for Jesus in Nevada and the Lincoln Tubman Foundation in South Carolina, has triggered a whistleblower complaint filed by the Justice Department’s employee union to the department’s Inspector General.”

*****

In related news, the FBI is revamping its efforts to curb homegrown terrorism after years of criticism that it downplayed or turned a blind eye to violent right-wing extremism. As part of those efforts, reports The Daily Beast, the FBI will now focus on “abortion violent extremism.” But they mean terrorists on “both sides” of the debate, despite the fact that the FBI could point “to just one episode of pro-choice-inspired terrorism—one that did not involve an actual act of violence, but rather a threat in an online comments section.”

*****

It’s hard to say whether these people are just trolling us at this point…

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference on Friday in an encounter the American side apparently wanted to keep under wraps.

The State Department made no announcement of the meeting, which took place in Lavrov’s own dedicated meeting room at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, where the major annual conference of politicians, policymakers and security experts is held. Pompeo’s aides also did not provide any readout after the meeting ended.

Russian journalists traveling with Lavrov were aware of the meeting in advance, and wrote about it afterward.

*****

Probably not…

Something strange happened in mid-December involving Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch.

Late last year, the U.S. government signaled that it was about to level a new round of sanctions targeting people and entities linked to Deripaska, according to two Western officials with knowledge of the communication. Back in April 2018, the U.S. sanctioned the oligarch, who once lent millions of dollars to convicted Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort as part of a decades-long relationship between the two men. Over the following months, Deripaska’s allies made a deal with Treasury to limit Deripaska’s control over the companies in exchange for sanctions relief…. In the year since then, it’s been all quiet on the Deripaska sanctions front.

Until December, that is. What’s strange is that despite the signal, Treasury didn’t follow through and the sanctions—which would have targeted the unnamed people and entities because of their proximity to Deripaska—didn’t materialize. It’s been two months since the U.S. indicated that the new sanctions were about to come out, and there’s been no movement from Treasury on the oligarch. The two months of inaction has stirred suspicions of political interference in the sanctions process.

*****

Return on investment…

:{:{}:

}:

“Trump has proposed a 25 percent cut to the signature military fund designed to offset Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, according to the Defense Department’s budget documents unveiled Monday.”

Rep. Val Demings

@RepValDemings

Today Senate Republicans blocked THREE election security bills.

Two would require that illegal foreign election interference be reported to the authorities.

The other would make voting machines harder to hack.

All blocked.

52.5K

11:15 AM - Feb 11, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

34.9K people are talking about this

*****

We are fortunate that these malignant and corrupt ideologues aren’t more competent…

Caitlin McCoy

@CaitlinMcCoy_

The final rule that went to OMB last month is "...sprinkled with glaring numerical and spelling errors (such as “Massachusettes”), with 111 sections marked 'text forthcoming.' The cost-benefit analysis showed that consumers would lose more money than they would gain." YIKES.https://twitter.com/CoralMDavenport/status/1228065396554653696 …

Coral Davenport

@CoralMDavenport

The Trump administration has rolled back nearly 100 environmental rules. But Trump's attempt to take down his top regulatory target, the US's largest #climate change rule, are in meltdown. "They look like they’re headed to a legal train wreck."https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/climate/trump-fuel-economy-rollback.html …

9

2:29 PM - Feb 13, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See Caitlin McCoy's other Tweets

*****

Type Investigations has an important story about how the Bureau of Land Management has, “over the past several years, ignored longstanding requirements that stem from the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act; approved mines and drilling without adequate review, turning the region into a ‘clearinghouse for federal permits’; and taken personnel off mining inspections in order to expedite development.”

*****

This will disappear down the memory hole in short order….

“A White House memo justifying the U.S. strike that killed Iranian military leader Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani in January makes no mention of an imminent threat, which was President Trump’s rationale for the attack.

*****

Children aren’t born into this world harboring bigotry.

Since Trump’s rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.

*****

Last week, we mentioned that a 65-degree temperature recorded at Antarctica’s Trinity Peninsula set a new record for the continent.

That record appears to have held up for four days. This week, “a weather research station on Seymour Island in the Antarctic Peninsula registered a temperature of 69.3 degrees (20.75 Celsius) on Feb. 9.”

*****

And we leave you this week with a couple of pieces of good news, via the courts…

Washington Monthly

@monthly

#BREAKING:The D.C. Circuit Court just shot down Trump’s Medicaid work requirement. Last week, @r_m_larochelle & @lsdeprez wrote about this move as part of the administration's war on the social safety net. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/02/07/donald-trumps-assault-on-the-social-safety-set/ …

Donald Trump

Donald Trump’s Assault on the Social Safety Net

It's a policy of death by a thousand cuts.

washingtonmonthly.com

27

9:11 AM - Feb 14, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

16 people are talking about this

Stephen Wolf

?

@PoliticsWolf

Whoa, this is a major win for Native American voting rights in North Dakota.The GOP passed a voter ID law that blatantly excluded most tribal-issued IDs, but the backlash against it helped activists raise money to provide free IDs in 2018 & Native turnout hit historic highs https://twitter.com/kira_lerner/status/1227989452838010880 …

Kira Lerner

?

@kira_lerner

New: The North Dakota secretary of state settled two lawsuits brought by Native American tribes over the state’s strict voter ID law. The state agreed to accept tribal IDs and allow people who don’t have a residential address to vote https://campaignlegal.org/press-releases/secretary-state-agrees-settle-voter-id-lawsuits-entering-consent-decree-north-dakota …

---