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 offenderKellyanne 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.”
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
1,058 rule changes, adjustments to asylum officers’ guidelines, modifications of enforcement norms, and other bureaucratic changes to the immigration system by the Trump administration cut the number of legal immigrants to the U.S. nearly in half, says Lucas Guttentag, who maintains the Immigration Policy Tracking Project.
More:
“The Race to Dismantle Trump’s Immigration Policies,” Sarah Stillman, The New Yorker
“Dismantling and Reconstructing the U.S. Immigration System: A Catalog of Changes under the Trump Presidency,” Sarah Pierce and Jessica Bolter, Migration Policy Institute
“Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and top Justice Department officials moved forward with a “zero tolerance” immigration policy in 2018 aware that it would forcibly split up families and were unprepared for the impact, according to anew report by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General.
Sessions’ office was a ‘driving force’ in pushing for the Department of Homeland Security to begin referring adults who entered the U.S. illegally with children to be prosecuted by the Justice Department, according to the report. The Trump administration policy, which lasted from April to June 2018, resulted in the separation of more than 5,000 families — with hundreds that still have not been reunited.”
— “Jeff Sessions’ DOJ was ‘driving force’ behind family separation policy, IG report finds,” Sabrina Rodríguez, Politico
More:
“Justice Department Knew 2018 Border Policy Would Separate Children From Families,” Dustin Jones, NPR News
“Senior U.S. Justice officials pushed family separations, watchdog finds,” Mimi Dwyer, Reuters
“Justice officials respond to report on family separation by blaming Trump, expressing regret,” Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff, NBC News
Members of outgoing president Donald Trump’s pet Space Force will be issued a nifty official lapel pin to wear on their U.S. Air Force uniforms. That will differentiate them from other flyboys until their capes come back from the tailor. Space Force members, heretofore called “Space Cadets” perhaps, will henceforth be known as “Guardians,” Viceroy Vice President Mike Pence decreed.
“Will ‘Guardian’ be implemented into the rank structure,” asks Gizmodo’s Tom McKay, “like, does someone get promoted from Guardian to Sentinel to Space Paladin to Tython, The Secessionist King Of Mars or something?”
“When U.S. Customs and Border Protection holds migrant children in custody, the child’s detention is supposed to be safe and short. That’s true whether the child is with a parent or without one.
But new data shows that over the last four years, detention times lengthened as the number of children held at the border soared to almost half a million. The detentions, which include both unaccompanied children and children with their families, peaked last year at over 300,000, with 40 percent held longer than the 72-hour limit set by a patchwork of legislation and a court settlement.”
— “500,000 Kids, 30 Million Hours: Trump’s Vast Expansion of Child Detention,” Anna Flagg and Andrew R. Calderón, The Marshall Project
Related:
“Judge blocks border officials from expelling unaccompanied migrant children,” Stef W. Kight, Axios
“White House killed deal to pay for mental health care for migrant families separated at border,” Jacob Soboroff, Julia Ainsley and Geoff Bennett, NBC News
Trump COVID-19 advisor Scott Atlas, MD, is not an epidemiologist or an infectious disease expert. He’s a renowned expert in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Dr. Atlas has no pandemic expertise and hasn’t practiced medicine in 10 years, but he’s a fellow in Health Care Policy at Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution and bloviates on Fox News, so he’s the go-to White House medico. When it comes to coronavirus, Dr. Atlas wants to let lots of people get it to bring about “herd immunity.” Real pandemic experts estimate it would require the deaths of 2 million Americans to achieve “herd immunity” in the U.S.
It turns out he also told Bob Woodward the reason for this great success:
“There were three phases. There’s the panic phase, the pain phase and then the comeback phase. That doesn’t mean there’s not still a lot of pain and there won’t be pain for a while, but that basically was, we’ve now put out rules to get back to work. Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors. They’ve kind of — we have, like, a negotiated settlement.”
Military troops in the Space Force will someday deploy to orbit, one of the service’s top operations officials said Sept. 29.
‘At some point, yes, we will be putting humans into space,’ Maj. Gen. John E. Shaw, head of the Space Force’s Space Operations Command and part of U.S. Space Command leadership, said during a conference organized by the AFWERX innovation group. ‘They may be operating command centers somewhere in the lunar environment or someplace else.’
Space Force officials, wary of being confused with NASA, usually shy away from questions about whether military personnel will go to the Final Frontier themselves. Experts have split on whether a Space Force astronaut corps is a good idea in the next couple of decades, if at all.
— “Space Force Will Eventually Put Troops in Orbit, Ops Boss Says,” Rachel S. Cohen, Air Force Magazine
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