US secretary of state pushed back against criticism of the military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Blinked said the Biden administration inherited Donald Trump's deal with the Taliban but no plan for carrying it out
Continue reading...Category Archives: Trump administration
Trump team thought UK officials ‘out of their minds’ aiming for herd immunity, book says
Trump officials tried to convince him to take threat seriously and British experts ‘oddly pessimistic’ on defeating virus, says book
US officials thought their British counterparts “were out of their minds” in aiming for herd immunity as part of Boris Johnson’s initial policy on dealing with the coronavirus, according to a new book about the global response to the pandemic.
As the scale of the threat became increasingly clear in January and February 2020, officials in Donald Trump’s administration were trying to convince him to take the threat seriously, despite personal reassurances he had been given by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, that it was under control.
Continue reading...What I learned from an unlikely friendship with an anti-masker
Frank’s views were disturbing, a brazen assertion of white privilege. But with our fates more clearly tied together than ever, I needed to understand him
On 11 March 2021, I took a selfie at the Baltimore Convention Center and pressed send. I’d just received my first dose of a Covid vaccine. “Feels pretty momentous,” I texted an acquaintance. “It was exactly one year ago that our university shut down.” Frank wrote back immediately from his small town in southern Michigan. “Momentous, yes. But not for the reasons you subscribe to,” he wrote.
Related: Battle for the Soul: can Joe Biden beat Trump’s Republicans in the war of words?
Continue reading...‘A madman with millions of followers’: what the new Trump books tell us
Books show how close the US came to disaster, and document an unprecedented moment in US history that is not yet over
This week, the Guardian reported that what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents describe Donald Trump as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual”. Vladimir Putin, the documents say, therefore decided to assist Trump’s rise to power in 2016 as a way to weaken America.
Related: Frankly, We Did Win This Election review: a devastating dispatch from Trumpworld
Continue reading...Drunken Giuliani urged Trump to ‘just say we won’ on election night, book says
As key states started to slip away from Trump, Rudy Giuliani repeatedly urged former president to lie, according to new book
A drunken Rudy Giuliani repeatedly urged Donald Trump to “just say we won” on election night last November, according to a new book, even as key states started to slip away from the president and defeat by Joe Biden drew near.
Related: Landslide review: Michael Wolff’s third Trump book is his best – and most alarming
Continue reading...US halts all federal executions amid review of capital punishment
Attorney general orders temporary pause following historic use of death penalty under Trump administration
The US attorney general has imposed a moratorium on all federal executions while the justice department reviews its policies and procedures on capital punishment. Civil rights and criminal justice advocates have been pushing for a halt following a wave of controversial executions under the Trump administration.
Citing the disproportionate impact of capital punishment on people of color, and deep controversy over the drugs used to put people to death, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, ordered a temporary pause on scheduling executions.
Continue reading...‘Pure insanity’: emails reveal Trump push to overturn election defeat
- White House chief of staff pushed debunked conspiracy claims
- House committee releases emails sent to justice department
- US politics – live coverage
Donald Trump tried to enlist top US law enforcement officials in a conspiracy-laden and doomed effort to overturn his election defeat, a campaign they described as “pure insanity”, newly released emails show.
Related: White House unveils first national strategy to fight domestic terrorism
Continue reading...Pelosi: ‘beyond belief’ that Trump DoJ chiefs didn’t know of secret subpoenas
House speaker says reported seizure of Democrats’ private phone data undermined ‘rule of law’
The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said on Sunday it was “beyond belief” that the three top justice department officials of Donald Trump’s administration had been unaware of secret subpoenas seeking private data from the former president’s political opponents.
Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first pick as attorney general, his successor, William Barr, and the long-serving deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein have all claimed to have no knowledge of the alleged attempts by their department to harvest information covertly from leading Democrats during the investigation into whether Donald Trump and his campaign utilized links with Russia during the 2016 election, according to CNN.
Continue reading...Global standing of US fails to regain ground lost by Covid response, poll shows
Biden faces the challenge of repairing transatlantic ties damaged by Trump as president embarks on first European tour
The United States’s reputation as the leading global power has suffered in France and Germany because of Washington’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic that has killed nearly 600,000 Americans, according to a new poll of views in 11 countries.
Related: US's global reputation hits rock-bottom over Trump's coronavirus response
Continue reading...Did Jordan’s closest allies plot to unseat its king?
Alleged sedition and a royal family feud may have been driven by a broader plan to reshape the Middle East
The phone call that shook the Jordanian government came in the second week of March this year. On the line to the General Intelligence Directorate (GID) in Amman was the US Embassy, seeking an urgent meeting about a matter of national importance. The kingdom’s spies were startled. Danger was brewing on the home front, they were told, and could soon pose a threat to the throne.
Within hours, the GID had turned its full array of resources towards one of the country’s most senior royals, Prince Hamzah bin Hussein, a former crown prince and half-brother of the king, whom the Americans suspected was sowing dissent and had begun rallying supporters. By early April, officials had placed Hamzah under house arrest and publicly accused the former heir and two close aides of plotting to unseat King Abdullah.
Continue reading...Trump DoJ seized Washington Post reporters’ phone records, paper says
Newspaper ‘deeply troubled’ by revelation that records were secretly obtained over three months in 2017
The phone-call records of three reporters with the Washington Post were secretly obtained by officials with Donald Trump’s justice department over a period of three months in 2017, the newspaper reported.
Related: The sleazy, sordid Matt Gaetz scandal: are the walls now closing in on him?
Continue reading...Trump’s border wall hits a wall as Pentagon cancels parts funded from its budget
Defense department will cancel all construction paid for with military funds originally intended for other purposes
The US Department of Defense said on Friday it was cancelling the construction of parts of former president Donald Trump’s border wall with Mexico that were being built using military funds.
All unobligated money was being returned to military, the Pentagon said.
Continue reading...Restorationists urge Jill Biden to erase Melania Trump’s Rose Garden makeover
A petition, signed by more than 54,000 people, calls on Biden to return the garden to its ‘former glory’ as Jacqueline Kennedy designed
Efforts to erase the Trump family legacy have reached the White House potting sheds and nurseries with Jill Biden being urged to restore the mansion’s garden to a state that predates ex-First Lady Melania Trump’s 2019 makeover.
An online petition calling on the first lady to return the Rose Garden to its “former glory” has been signed by more than 54,000 people. The petition says Biden’s predecessor “had the cherry trees, a gift from Japan, removed as well as the rest of the foliage and replaced with a boring tribute to herself”.
Continue reading...Trump delayed $20bn in aid to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, report finds
Funding was ‘unnecessarily delayed’ by bureaucratic obstacles, after hurricane killed thousands of people in 2017
The Trump administration delayed more than $20bn in hurricane relief aid for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, according to a report by the housing department’s office of the inspector General.
The efforts to deliver recovery funding to the island were “unnecessarily delayed by bureaucratic obstacles”, according to the 46-page report. The hurricane, which hit the island in 2017, killed thousands of people and left thousands more without electricity or water for months.
Continue reading...‘Clear the Capitol’: Pence plea amid riot retold in dramatic Pentagon document
Previously undisclosed internal report reveals how officials sought to re-establish order during 6 January attack
A previously undisclosed document prepared by the Pentagon for internal use reveals dramatic new details about how authorities sought to quell the attack on the Capitol on 6 January and re-establish order – and how such help took agonising hours in coming.
Related: Why aren't we calling the Capitol attack an act of treason?
Continue reading...‘Momentous error’: Italian businessman mistakenly blacklisted by Trump to sue
Alessandro Bazzoni’s bank account was closed after he faced sanctions in a case of mistaken identity
A small business owner in Italy is preparing to sue the US Treasury after accidentally being put on a sanctions blacklist before Donald Trump left the presidency.
Alessandro Bazzoni, who owns a graphic design company in Sardinia, has been unable to trade since 19 January, when his business was slapped with sanctions as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on blacklisted Venezuelan crude oil.
Continue reading...Suspected Russian hackers gained access to US homeland security emails
Intelligence value of SolarWinds hacking of then acting secretary Chad Wolf is not publicly known
Suspected Russian hackers gained access to email accounts belonging to the Trump administration’s head of homeland security (DHS) and members of cybersecurity staff whose jobs included hunting threats from foreign countries, the Associated Press (AP) has learned.
The intelligence value of the hacking of then acting secretary Chad Wolf and his staff is not publicly known but the symbolism is stark. Their accounts were accessed in what is known as the SolarWinds intrusion, throwing into question how the US government can protect individuals, companies and institutions if it can’t protect itself.
Continue reading...‘Blindsided’: Biden faces tough test in reversing Trump’s cruel border legacy
As unaccompanied children reach the US, Republicans seek political gain. The White House has a fight on its hands
Lauded for his human touch, Joe Biden is facing an early political and moral test over how his government treats thousands of migrant children who make the dangerous journey to America alone.
Related: Is there a crisis at the border? Advocates in Texas say it's 'political manipulation'
Continue reading...Ex-Covid tsar urges Donald Trump to tackle Republican vaccine hesitancy
- Adm Brett Giroir says Trump’s leadership ‘matters a great deal’
- Poll found 49% of Republican men would refuse vaccine
Donald Trump’s former coronavirus testing tsar has urged the former president to address Covid vaccine hesitancy among Republicans, even as the man who some say has assumed Trump’s platform and megaphone, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, criticized vaccine outreach by the Biden administration.
Several recent surveys have shown vaccine hesitancy is highest among Republican men. Public health experts are scrambling to respond.
Continue reading...Trump coronavirus coordinator, Deborah Birx, takes job at air purifier business
Birx, who was criticised for not standing up to Trump over Covid, takes job with Texas company that says its purifiers clean virus from the air
Dr Deborah Birx, the former Trump White House coronavirus taskforce coordinator, is taking a private sector job, joining a Texas manufacturer that says its purifiers clean Covid-19 from the air within minutes and from surfaces within hours.
Birx will join Dallas-based ActivePure as chief scientific and medical adviser, she and the company said on Friday.
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