13 Trump Officals Violated the Hatch Act in 2020

The federal Office of Special Counsel has found that 13 high-level Trump Administration officals illegally used their government positions for political activities, campaigning for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. In addition to frequent offender Kellyanne Conway (previously caught in 2018 and 2019), the high-level officials include Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, his acting homeland security chief Chad Wolf, his Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette, Secretary of Everything Jared Kushner, national security adviser Robert O’Brien, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, White House adviser Stephen Miller, White House deputy press secretary Brian Morgenstern, Mike Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short, White House communications director Alyssa Farah, and US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.

The Hatch Act is designed to prevent government officials from using their offices for political purposes, but as the OSC report observes, “the Hatch Act is only as effective as the White House decides it will be. Where, as happened here, the White House chooses to ignore the Hatch Act’s requirements, then the American public is left with no protection against senior administration officials using their official authority for partisan political gain in violation of the law.”

Read the full OSC report here.

More:

“Probe finds Trump officials repeatedly violated Hatch Act,” Jill Colvin, Associated Press

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Who Clogged the Afghan Refugee Pipeline? Stephen Miller.

The airlift of endangered Afghan refugees from Taliban-controlled Kabul is hampered by a lengthy and convoluted visa process, which had a backlog of 20,000 applicants before the fall of the corrupt Karzai government. In 2018 the Pentagon urged the Trump administration to expedite Special Immigrant Visas for Afghan nationals who had assisted US and NATO forces, but this was denied.

Olivia Troye, homeland security and counterterrorism advisor to former Vice President Mike Pence, says all efforts to fast-track Afghan visas were sabotaged by Stephen Miller, racist and Islamophobe-In-Residence at the Trump White House. This was confirmed by Elizabeth Neumann, a former senior DNS official. Matt Zeller, Afghanistan combat veteran and former CIA officer, says Stephen Miller “should be held accountable for war crimes” for his refugee visa obstruction.

More:

“Pence aide blames Stephen Miller for ‘devastating’ visa system for Afghans,” Maureen Groppe, USA Today

“Stephen Miller peddled ‘racist hysteria about Afghanistan’ and gummed up refugee process: Ex-Pence adviser,” Raw Story

Stephen Miller Contracts COVID-19, Just Like Humans Do

Senior Trump Advisor and venomous, loathsome lizard-person Stephen Miller has contracted Coronavirus. He has spent 5 days in isolation, perhaps at the National Zoo Reptile House, and is probably being treated by the Official White House Herpetologist.

More:

“Top Trump adviser Stephen Miller tests positive for coronavirus,” Maanvi Singh, The Guardian

“Stephen Miller tests positive for COVID-19, the disease that killed his grandmother,” The Forward

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Doc Retweeted By Trump Says Government is Run by Reptilians

Government Lizard People: seeing is believing.

President Donald Trump retweeted Houston physician Stella Immanuel last week, a fellow fancier of debunked “miracle coronavirus cure” hydroxychloroquine. The good doctor also believes there are Lizard People among us:

“In a 2015 video, Immanuel, who leads a religious group called Fire Power Ministries, said: ‘There are people ruling this nation that are not even human,’ describing them as ‘reptilian spirits’ who are ‘half human, half ET.'”

— “Aliens and ‘reptilians’: US viral video doctor’s odd beliefs,” France 24

That explains why Trump spokes-creatures like Stephen Miller focus our fears on ethnic minorities to distract us from their own space alien invasion.

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Ideological Purge at DHS

Right-Wing ideologue and White House Rasputin Stephen Miller, grandson of immigrant refugees, hates immigrants so much he wants to close both U.S. borders and all ports of entry. Recently, he helped close the careers of the Trump Administration’s top-ranking DHS officials.

At a college student, Mr. Miller defended Western Civilization as coordinator of an islamophobic project sponsoring “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” on college campuses. He graduated and worked for Congresscreature Michele “Crazy Eyes” Bachmann, who (surprise!) championed a southern border wall. Noted islamophobic loon David Horowitz introduced Stephen Miller to Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, and it was a Nativist match made in heaven. He became the senator’s communications director and helped defeat a major immigration reform bill. Mr. Miller entered the 2016 Trump campaign as Steve Bannon’s typist, and was promoted to Chief Troll after writing the sulfurous Trump Convention speech.

Stephen Miller has written those Trump speeches that sound like dystopian sci-fi and the fear-mongering sermons of Medieval crusader-priests. As Senior Policy Advisor, he is credited (if that’s the word) for the Administration’s Family Separation policy. Mr. Miller’s other talents tend towards backstabbing and lurking in the corridors of (white) power. His monomaniacal ideological fixation makes him easy to understand, even for President “Best Brain” Trump, and the two share a taste for chaos. His policies – from the Muslim Ban to baby-snatching — may have failed, but Stephen Miller is now the last xenophobe standing.

Stephen Miller Wouldn’t Let His Own Great-Grandparents Into the US

After cutting the number of U.S. refugees in half last year, White House Senior Advisor Stephen Miller wants to slash it even more. The US resettled about 97,000 refugees in 2016, slightly under the 100,000 limit. In 2017 the country admitted 33,000 refugees, well under the 44,000 cap, an historic low. That’s not low enough for Stephen Miller; he wants 2018 refugee admissions limited to 15,000. Indications are that the Trump Administration will ultimately lower the refugee cap to 22,000. This is in the face of a global refugee crisis, the worst since World War II. Jennifer Arangio, a senior White House official, annoyed Mr. Miller and cronies by advocating honoring US international refugee agreements, and was fired late last month.

Stephen Miller’s maternal great-grandparents, Wolf and Bessie Glotzer, arrived in New York in 1903 as refugees from anti-Jewish rioting in Belarus. They were broke, didn’t speak English, and were “chain migrants,” joining Wolf’s brother-in-law, Schmuel Levine, a Russian army draft dodger, who had come to the US before them.

Think Stephen Miller would have let people like that enter the country? Even his own uncle doesn’t think so.

More:

“Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle.” David S. Glosser, Politico

“White House Weighs Another Reduction in Refugees Admitted to U.S.,” Julie Hirschfeld Davis, New York Times

Related:

“Stephen Miller, meet your immigrant great-grandfather,” Rob Eshman, Jewish Journal

“Trump Administration Rejects Study Showing Positive Impact of Refugees,” Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Somini Sengupta, New York Times

“How Would Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Have Affected His Own Team?” Jennifer Mendelsohn, Politico

“There’s no [US] immigration crisis, and these charts prove it,” Christopher Ingraham, Washington Post

“Inside Stephen Miller’s hostile takeover of immigration policy,” Nahal Toosi, Politico

“’There Won’t Even Be a Paper Trail’: Has Stephen Miller Become a Shadow Master at the State Department?” Abigail Tracy, Vanity Fair

More:

“Trump aide Stephen Miller condemned by childhood rabbi,” Andrew Gumbel, The Guardian

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Son and Grandson of Immigrants Wants to Halt Immigration

Donald J. Trump, grandson of an unskilled Bavarian draft dodger and son of a Scottish domestic servant, wants Congress to pass laws that would have barred his own ancestors from moving to the United States. Mr. Trump’s thoughts on immigration are informed by White House resident troll Stephen Miller, whose immigrant great-grandfather, a refugee from Belarus, flunked the U.S. Citizenship Test.

Clearly, this is a case of pulling in the Ellis Island gangplank after your own folks have landed.

More:

“The story of Donald Trump’s grandfather, who came to the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor,” Kristine Phillips, Washington Post

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Obsequious Factotum Stephen Miller

Right-Wing ideologue and Trump staffer Stephen Miller took umbrage last weekend  when CNN’s Jake Tapper wouldn’t let him hijack an interview to give a big, televised, wet kiss to a single viewer, Donald Trump. Mr. Tapper cut him off and called him “obsequious,” a “factotum.” Millions reached for Merriam-Webster. After years as a fawning neo-fascist toady, Stephen Miller (Steve Bannon’s typist) was recently promoted to obsequious factotum after writing the sulfurous Trump Convention speech.

Mr. Miller denied being escorted out of the CNN studios by security after the aborted interview,, despite evidence suggesting otherwise.

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Trump Immigration Policy

Yesterday President Donald Trump announced his new immigration policy, which would restrict legal entry to the United States to highly-skilled, rich people who already speak English. If that policy had been in place in the past, Friedrich Trump, the president’s German-speaking grandfather, would never have landed in America, and his Scottish immigrant mother, a domestic servant, would have been denied entry. They were “legal” immigrants for the simple fact that they arrived at a time when there was no “illegal immigration” (for white people, anyway).

More recently, while Donald Trump’s two immigrant wives spoke some functional English when they arrived in the US, they were relatively unskilled, unless pouting and walking on a runway counts.

Even Trump policy advisor Stephen Miller, the anti-immigrant zealot and poetry-hating pest, is descended from low-skilled, impoverished  immigrant great-grandparents fleeing anti-semitic violence in Belarus. They arrived in New York Harbor aboard the German ship S.S. Moltke in 1903, the same year the plaque bearing the Emma Lazarus poem describing their plight was installed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, which welcomed them to the United States.