Former US president Donald Trump claims he can declassify top secret documents just ‘by thinking about it’
On Sunday, GOP Senator Rick Scott of Florida refused to condemn the former president.
“I can never respond to why anyone says what they said, but here’s they way I looked at it is, I think what the president is saying is, you know, there’s been a lot of money spent over the last two years,” he told CNN.
Other Republican Senators, like Susan Collins of Maine, say the tone of violent rhetoric in US politics is ratcheting up, to the point where she’s worried a member of Congress might get assassinated.
Meanwhile, historians are arguing Mr Trump may seek “revenge” against rivals and former allies like Florida governor Ron DeSantis if he’s re-elected president in 2024.
The debate on violent words in politics follows another campaign-style rally from Mr Trump, who visited Michigan on Saturday.
In his speech, he lashed out at journalist Maggie Haberman of The New York Timesand praised people like conservative activist Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who lobbied to overturn the 2020 election result.
Trump-endorsed candidate for Nevada governor disavows Big Lie about 2020 election
During a debate on Sunday, Joe Lombardo, a Republican gubernatorial candidate for Nevada who has been endorsed by Donald Trump, disavowed Mr Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
“It bothers me,” he said.
“I’m not shying away from that,” he added. “I don’t stand by him in that aspect.”
On the whole though, Mr Lombardo said he still stands by Mr Trump.
“You’re never going to agree with anybody 100% and everything they do. Even in my own party, there’s people that don’t agree with 100% of what I present forward, but you know, you gotta look at the totality of the person and their leadership,” the candidate concluded.
Former White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin is one of few Republicans who has called out Donald Trump for comments he made about Mitch McConnell and his wife that struck many observers as violent and racist.
Mitch McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao served as transport secretary in the Trump administration
“This isn’t some crazy person on the internet, this is the GOP front-runner for President if the Party doesn’t wake up & demand better,” Ms Farah wrote on Twitter on Saturday. “He’s not even trying to hide the racism at this point. Just despicable.”
Other Republicans, like Florida Senator Rick Scott, have declined to criticise the president.
‘It never ever OK to be racist,’ GOP senator Rick Scott says when pressed
Why aren’t Florida Republicans voting for Hurricane Ian relief?
Representative Matt Gaetz voted against legislation that would have provided relief for victims of Hurricane Ian, which left a path of devastation in the congressman’s home state of Florida.
The House of Representatives voted 230 to 201 on a continuing resolution to keep the government open until 16 December on Friday. The continuing resolution also gives the Federal Emergency Management Authority the power to spend money through the Disaster Relief Fund.
DRF pays for repairs and restoration of infrastructure damaged by natural disasters, hazard mitigation initiatives, financial assistance to survivors and Fire Management Grants for large forests or grassland wildfires, according to FEMA.
Only 10 Republicans voted against the continuing resolution in the House on Friday. The bill passed the Senate on Thursday with Florida Senator Rick Scott voting against it. Senator Marco Rubio, the Sunshine State’s other US senator, was not present to vote for it.
Eric Garcia has the details for The Independent.
Rick Scott also voted against it and Marco Rubio was not not present
What Maggie Haberman says Trump learned from the 1990s tabloid world
So much of what Donald Trump did as president was unprecedented, but according to reporter Maggie Haberman, the former president is actually much the same as he’s always been.
Ms Haberman, who has covered Mr Trump for since the 1990s, first as a reporter for New York tabloids, and now for the New York Times, says the former president still acts like he’s a big shot real estate developer with city officials lining up to help him.
“Donald Trump is generally the same, depending on the context,” Ms Haberman, author of the forthcoming Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, told CBS News. “And he tended to treat the White House as if he was still in a real estate office dealing with local county leaders, as if it was still 1980.”
This perspective made Mr Trump unable to confront losing the election, Ms Haberman continued.
“Whether it was his father helping navigate systems for him or helping him financially, or elected officials lining up for him, he always believed things would work out,” she said. “And after November 3, 2020, it became clearer with each passing day that that was not going to happen, and he did not know how to handle it.”
The former president saw the White House the “ultimate vehicle to fame,” she went on, just like tabloids where he was once a fixture.
William Barr says Trump is going overboard on executive privilege claims
Former Trump administration Attorney General William Barr is one of a number of legal observers saying Donald Trump is probably going too far by claiming executive privilege prevents investigators from examining his efforts to keep White House documents and overturn the 2020 election results.
“There is a decent argument” that making such privilege claims infringes on the powers of current preisdent Joe Biden, Mr Barr told The New York Times on Sunday.
Others interviewed by the Times said such privilege claims are in a legal grey area, as no current or former president has ever invoked executive privilege to stop other members of the executive branch, in this case the Justice Department, from accessing documents.
“This is tricky stuff,” Mark J Rozell, a George Mason University professor and author of Executive Privilege: Presidential Power, Secrecy and Accountability. “That gets to the point where the Trump era changed things and raised these kinds of questions that before were unthinkable to us.”
Even Republicans are worried about violent political rhetoric
Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine warned about increasing violent threats against lawmakers in an interview with The New York Times, the day after Donald Trump made what some interpretted as a death threat against Senator Mitch McConnell.
The Republican senator spoke about her concerns in the wake of a man smashing a brick through her home in Bangor, Maine, and as political figures like Donald Trump and his supporters deploy increasingly incendiary language.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if a senator or House member were killed,” he said. “What started with abusive phone calls is now translating into active threats of violence and real violence.”
The threat against Ms Collins came amid escalating threats against lawmakers. In 2018, after she voted to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, she received a message that featured a beheading.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has also received numerous threats
Michael Fanone tears into Trump and ‘weasel’ GOP in profane Rolling Stone interview
Michael Fanone, a former Washington, DC, police officer who was seriously injured during the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, slammed Donald Trump and his GOP enablers in a profane new interview in Rolling Stone, ahead of the release of his forthcoming memoir.
The former officer and current CNN contributor said that since January 6, he’s been “waging a one-man war against Donald Trump and the f***ing people that refuse to accept reality” about what happened at the Capitol.
Among that group, Mr Fanone said, is House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, who the former officer said lied and equivocated during a meeting with him and the mother of officer Brian Sicknick, who was killed on January 6, about forming a bipartisan January 6 committee.
In the interview, Mr Fanone described, that “weasel b**** named Kevin McCarthy, with his fake f***ing spray-on tan, whose f***ing claim to fame, at least in my eyes, is the fact that he amassed a collection of Donald Trump’s favorite-flavored Starburst, put them in a Mason jar, and presented them to f***ing Donald Trump. What the f***, dude?”
The former officer also claimed that “history is going to s*** on Mike Pence’s head.”
National Archive says it is still missing some Trump administration records
The National Archives and Records Administration sent a letter to Congress saying that it is still missing records from the Trump administration, despite the FBI’s execution of a search warrant at former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.
Acting Archivist of the United States Debra Streidel Wall sent a letter to House Oversight & Government Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney. “While there is no easy way to establish absolute accountability, we do know that we do not have custody of everything we should,” the letter stated.
The letter was in response to one sent by Ms Maloney asking the agency to “conduct an urgent review of presidential records from the Trump Administration to identify any Presidential record” that might still be outside of its control and to seek a written certification from Mr Trump that he had surrendered all presidential records or classified materials; had not made any copies and hadn’t transferred them to anyone but NARA or the Department of Justice.
Eric Garcia has the full story.
Letter says ‘we do know that we do not have custody of everything we should’
Will Trump exact revenge against Ron DeSantis?
Mary Trump, niece of former president Donald Trump, has predicted that the former president will take revenge against Florida governor Ron DeSantis if Mr Trump secures another term in the White House.
Mr Trump is perhaps most responsible for Mr DeSantis’s political rise, but the Florida governor now threatens to overshadow the former president as both men jockey for position ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
Trump once endorsed DeSantis, but relationship has soured
GOP senator Rick Scott’s awkward interview
Sen Rick Scott, chair of the GOP Senate’s campaign arm, refused to confront former president Donald Trump over recent attacks againt Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his wife, Elaine Chao, who served as Mr Trump’s transportation secretary.
‘It never ever OK to be racist,’ GOP senator Rick Scott says when pressed