Political Science: What happens if a president loses an election but won't leave the White House? (Trump)
- Thread starter playahaitian
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- Since the election, Trump has installed a group of hard-line officials at the Pentagon and the National Security Agency. Experts say it could be a prelude to punishing Iran, declassifying sensitive documents or withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.
UPDATE: Corporate law firm dumps Trump
On Wednesday, Popular Information exposed the corporate clients of Porter Wright, a prominent law firm assisting the Trump campaign's scorched-earth legal strategy to reverse the results of the 2020 election. Late Thursday, Porter Wright "abruptly withdrew from a federal lawsuit that it had filed on behalf of the campaign" in Pennsylvania. The decision was "especially remarkable" because Porter Wright had filed the federal lawsuit only a few days earlier.
The Trump campaign was not happy. "Leftist mobs descended upon some of the lawyers representing the president’s campaign and they buckled," Tim Murtaugh, the campaign's communications director, said in a statement.
The other major law firm scrutinized in Popular Information's reporting, Jones Day, said it would "not get involved in additional litigation in this election." But it continues to represent the Pennsylvania GOP in a case challenging thousands of absentee ballots. And some Jones Day lawyers are agitating for stronger action. "I believe the question is whether this firm should lend its prestige and credibility to the project of an administration bent on undermining our democracy and our rule of law," Parker A. Rider-Longmaid, a Jones Day attorney, wrote in an email to colleagues.
The Trump campaign was not happy. "Leftist mobs descended upon some of the lawyers representing the president’s campaign and they buckled," Tim Murtaugh, the campaign's communications director, said in a statement.
The other major law firm scrutinized in Popular Information's reporting, Jones Day, said it would "not get involved in additional litigation in this election." But it continues to represent the Pennsylvania GOP in a case challenging thousands of absentee ballots. And some Jones Day lawyers are agitating for stronger action. "I believe the question is whether this firm should lend its prestige and credibility to the project of an administration bent on undermining our democracy and our rule of law," Parker A. Rider-Longmaid, a Jones Day attorney, wrote in an email to colleagues.
Top US general stands firm amid Pentagon turmoil
The top US general is standing firm amid sweeping changes at the Pentagon which have seen senior officials replaced by Trump idealogues and alarmed senior defense officials.
www.cnn.com
Top US general stands firm amid Pentagon turmoil
By Ryan Browne and Barbara Starr, CNN
Updated 2:31 PM ET, Thu November 12, 2020
(CNN)The top US general is standing firm amid sweeping changes at the Pentagon which have seen senior officials replaced by Trump idealogues and alarmed senior defense officials.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley made clear his dedication to the constitution at an event Wednesday while standing beside the newly installed acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller.
"We are unique among militaries. We do not take an oath to a king or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual. No, we do not take an oath to a country, a tribe or religion. We take an oath to the Constitution. And every soldier that is represented in this museum, every sailor, airman, Marine, Coast Guardsman, each of us will protect and defend that document, regardless of personal price," Milley said during remarks at the opening of the US Army's museum.
While Milley routinely references the military's oath to uphold the Constitution, he chose to reinforce that message during his first public remarks following the major shakeup of the Pentagon's senior civilian leadership.
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Trump administration installs advocate for quick Afghanistan withdrawal at Pentagon
Speaking immediately following Milley's speech, Miller, who was named acting secretary Monday in a tweet by President Donald Trump that also fired his predecessor Mark Esper, joked, "thanks for setting the bar very high for the new guy to come in and make a few words, I think all I would say to your statements is amen, well done."
In the wake of Trump's dramatic purge of some of the senior-most civilian officials at the Pentagon who have been replaced with political loyalists and conspiracy theorists, all eyes are now focused on whether Trump will take any action against the uniformed military leadership, including Milley.
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The new appointments include Douglas MacGregor who once advocated for using lethal force to deter migrants from crossing the border illegally and Anthony Tata who once called Barack Obama a terrorist leader and suggested that a former CIA director was using a Cicero quote to activate a sleeper agent to kill the President.
While the military prides itself as being non-ideological, senior uniformed officers will have to work with new administration appointees who are fiercely committed to Trump's agenda.
In contrast to the politically appointed civilian leadership posts, many of whom have been pushed out or resigned in the last 48 hours, the military leadership historically continues on into the next administration.
All this comes as Trump refuses to concede the election to President-elect Joe Biden and the administration is yet to trigger the formal transition process.
Milley concerned about politicization
Prior to the election CNN reported that Milley was concerned about the military being politicized and ready to argue against the President invoking the Insurrection Act in the wake of any post-election civil unrest -- a move that could put military force on the streets against civilians.
Milley, who was appointed in October 2019, will officially leave office at the end of his term in 2023.
President Barack Obama appointed Gen. Joseph Dunford chairman in 2015 and Dunford served in the role during the first years of the Trump Administration until his term expired in 2019.
Trump administration removes senior defense officials and installs loyalists, triggering alarm at Pentagon
But Trump could choose to sack his top general before Milley's term is up in 2023.
Many of the Trump loyalists that have been installed at the senior most posts at the Pentagon come from the White House National Security Council staff and are expected to push the NSC's priorities at the Defense Department.
While several officials have lauded Miller's reputation and ability, several describe him as relatively inexperienced for someone taking on such a senior post, with one senior defense official describing him as a "tool" and "vassal of the NSC" put in place to execute the White House's agenda.
Knowledgeable sources told CNN's Jake Tapper Tuesday that the White House-directed purge at the Defense Department may be because now ousted Defense Secretary Mark Esper and his team were pushing back on a premature withdrawal from Afghanistan that would be carried out before the required conditions on the ground were met, and other pending security issues.
Milley has stressed Afghanistan withdrawal must be conditions based
Milley has also been relatively vocal in stressing that any withdrawals from Afghanistan should be based on conditions and done in a manner that does not threaten US security.
That stance saw the senior general become engaged in a war of words with the White House national security adviser Robert O'Brien who advocated for a more accelerated withdrawal from Afghanistan irrespective of conditions on the ground.
US military officials have long stressed that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is conditions based, with those conditions including the Taliban's breaking its ties to al Qaeda and making progress in peace talks with the Afghan government, two conditions that have yet to be met.
Trump fires Secretary of Defense Mark Esper
But despite the lack of progress, the Trump administration has already substantially reduced US troops in Afghanistan by more than 50%, bringing the number of US military personnel there down to about 4,500, the lowest levels since the earliest days of the post 9/11 campaign.
Milley has also indicated support for renaming bases named after Confederate officers and apologized for appearing in a photo-op with Trump following the forceful dispersal of peaceful protesters outside the White House, calling the move a "mistake" and saying his presence "created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics."
Trump has defended the photo-op and pushed back strongly against efforts to change the name of bases named after Confederate officers.
But while Trump could fire Milley in theory, his would be technically limited in who he could tap to replace him.
TRUMP WHITE HOUSE
- Trump's public schedules show little interest in work as he protests Biden's legitimate election
- Pence under the radar as Trump fights for power
- Trump administration removes senior defense officials and installs loyalists, triggering alarm at Pentagon
- MAP: Full election results
According to law, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force Gen. John Hyten would automatically serve as the acting chairman upon Milley's departure.
If Trump were to also dismiss Hyten, the President would then have to designate a member of the Joint Chiefs as acting chairman.
For his part, Milley appears to be carrying on with business as usual.
Shortly after Esper was fired on Monday, Milley held a secure video teleconference with the other members of the Joint Chiefs and the leaders of the Combatant Commands in the secure meeting room known as the "tank," according to a senior US military official.
The senior officials subsequently called their counterparts overseas to assure them that the US military mission continues and to assure them the Pentagon is maintaining its military stability around the world, the official said.
Acting secretary Miller has met with Milley and other top staff to give them his initial guidance to not expect "significant changes at this time," the official said.
Milley has also been carrying out normal business, meeting Tuesday with Qatar's Armed Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Ghanem bin Shaheen Al Ghanem at the Pentagon.
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There will be no lawsuits that will end in jail time for Trump. Once he was sworn into office he gained knowledge of all national secrets. He will get the same deal as Nixon, a presidential pardon given if he agrees not to tell national secrets.
John Bolton urges GOP leaders to explain to voters how 'Trump has lost the election' and that claims of voting fraud are 'baseless'
On Sunday, the former national security adviser called on leaders of the Republican party to come forward and recognize Joe Biden as the president-elect and inform voters on how claims of voting fraud are "baseless." I think this is a character test for the Republican party," he said on ABC's This Week. President Trump Tweeted on Sunday that he is not conceding.
On Sunday, the former national security adviser called on leaders of the Republican party to come forward and recognize Joe Biden as the president-elect and inform voters on how claims of voting fraud are "baseless." I think this is a character test for the Republican party," he said on ABC's This Week. President Trump Tweeted on Sunday that he is not conceding.
Will Trump Burn the Evidence?
How the President could endanger the official records of one of the most consequential periods in American history.
By Jill Lepore
November 16, 2020
Trump has made a habit of destroying documents and suppressing disclosure.
Donald Trump is not much of a note-taker, and he does not like his staff to take notes. He has a habit of tearing up documents at the close of meetings. (Records analysts, armed with Scotch Tape, have tried to put the pieces back together.) No real record exists for five meetings Trump had with Vladimir Putin during the first two years of his Presidency. Members of his staff have routinely used apps that automatically erase text messages, and Trump often deletes his own tweets, notwithstanding a warning from the National Archives and Records Administration that doing so contravenes the Presidential Records Act.
Trump cannot abide documentation for fear of disclosure, and cannot abide disclosure for fear of disparagement. For decades, in private life, he required people who worked with him, and with the Trump Organization, to sign nondisclosure agreements, pledging never to say a bad word about him, his family, or his businesses. He also extracted nondisclosure agreements from women with whom he had or is alleged to have had sex, including both of his ex-wives. In 2015 and 2016, he required these contracts from people involved in his campaign, including a distributor of his “Make America Great Again” hats. (Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign required N.D.A.s from some employees, too. In 2020, Joe Biden called on Michael Bloomberg to release his former employees from such agreements.) In 2017, Trump, unable to distinguish between private life and public service, carried his practice of requiring nondisclosure agreements into the Presidency, demanding that senior White House staff sign N.D.A.s. According to the Washington Post, at least one of them, in draft form, included this language: “I understand that the United States Government or, upon completion of the term(s) of Mr. Donald J. Trump, an authorized representative of Mr. Trump, may seek any remedy available to enforce this Agreement including, but not limited to, application for a court order prohibiting disclosure of information in breach of this Agreement.” Aides warned him that, for White House employees, such agreements are likely not legally enforceable. The White House counsel, Don McGahn, refused to distribute them; eventually, he relented, and the chief of staff, Reince Priebus, pressured employees to sign them.
Those N.D.A.s haven’t stopped a small village’s worth of ex-Trump Cabinet members and staffers from blabbing about him, much to the President’s dismay. “When people are chosen by a man to go into government at high levels and then they leave government and they write a book about a man and say a lot of things that were really guarded and personal, I don’t like that,” he told the Washington Post. In 2019, he tweeted, “I am currently suing various people for violating their confidentiality agreements.” Last year, a former campaign worker filed a class-action lawsuit that, if successful, would render void all campaign N.D.A.s. Trump has only stepped up the fight. Earlier suits were filed by Trump personally, or by his campaign, but, last month, the Department of Justice filed suit against Stephanie Winston Wolkoff for publishing a book, “Melania and Me,” about her time volunteering for the First Lady, arguing, astonishingly, that Wolkoff’s N.D.A. is “a contract with the United States and therefore enforceable by the United States.” (Unlike the suit against Trump’s former national-security adviser John Bolton, relating to the publication of his book, “The Room Where It Happened,” there is no claim that anything in Wolkoff’s book is or was ever classified.) And Trump hasn’t stopped: last year, he required doctors and staff who treated him at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to sign N.D.A.s.
Hardly a day passes that Trump does not attempt to suppress evidence, as if all the world were in violation of an N.D.A. never to speak ill of him. He has sought to discredit publications and broadcasts that question him, investigations that expose him, crowds that protest him, polls that fail to favor him, and, down to the bitter end, ballots cast against him. None of this bodes well for the historical record and for the scheduled transfer of materials from the White House to the National Archives, on January 20, 2021. That morning, even as President-elect Joseph R. Biden, Jr., is ascending the steps of the Capitol, staffers from the archives will presumably be in the White House, unlocking doors, opening desks, packing boxes, and removing hard drives. What might be missing, that day, from file drawers and computer servers at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is difficult to say. But records that were never kept, were later destroyed, or are being destroyed right now chronicle the day-to-day doings of one of the most consequential Presidencies in American history and might well include evidence of crimes, violations of the Constitution, and human-rights abuses. It took a very long time to establish rules governing the fate of Presidential records. Trump does not mind breaking rules and, in the course of a long life, has regularly done so with impunity. The Presidential Records Act isn’t easily enforceable. The Trump Presidency nearly destroyed the United States. Will what went on in the darker corners of his White House ever be known?
“The truth behind a President’s actions can be found only in his official papers,” Harry S. Truman said in 1949, “and every Presidential paper is official.” Truman became an advocate of archival preservation after learning about the fate of his predecessors’ papers. When George Washington left office, in 1797, he brought his papers back to Mount Vernon, but, loaned out, they were “extensively mutilated by rats and otherwise injured by damp”; eventually, they were carried by the historian Jared Sparks to Massachusetts, where Sparks threw out anything he didn’t like, scrapped what he found worthless, gave away much of the rest, and, beginning in 1837, published what he liked best as “The Writings of George Washington.”
For many years, there was no alternative for a departing President but to take his papers home with him; there wasn’t really any place to put them. Thomas Jefferson, “having no confidence that the office of the private secretary of the President of the U.S. will ever be a regular and safe deposit for public papers,” took pains to deposit many of his papers with his Cabinet departments. In 1810, Congress established a Committee on Ancient Public Records and Archives of the United States. It reported that the records of the federal government were “in a state of great disorder and exposure; and in a situation neither safe nor convenient nor honorable to the nation.” Congress took little action. In 1814, the congressional library burned to the ground.
Most of the papers of William Henry Harrison, the log-cabin candidate, succumbed to flames when that log cabin burned down. Those of both John Tyler and Zachary Taylor were largely destroyed during the Civil War. In 1853, when Millard Fillmore left the White House, he had his papers shipped to a mansion in Buffalo. He died in 1874, having made no provisions for the papers. When Fillmore’s only son died, in 1889, his will ordered his executors to “burn or otherwise effectively destroy all correspondence or letters to or from my father.” Only by the merest miracle were forty-four volumes of Fillmore’s Presidential-letter books found in an attic of a house, in 1908, and only because it was on the verge of being demolished.
Chester Arthur’s son had most of his father’s Presidential papers burned in three garbage cans. “The only place I ever found in my life to put a paper so as to find it again was either a side coat-pocket or the hands of a clerk,” Ulysses S. Grant once said. For years after Grant’s Administration, scholars were able to locate hardly any of his Presidential papers. In 1888, Congress urged the Library of Congress to collect the papers of the Presidents. In the eighteen-nineties, the library established a Manuscript Division, and a historian who later became its chief began lobbying for the establishment of a National Archives; meanwhile, the American Historical Association formed a Public Archives Commission. In 1910, after the commission reported that “many of the records of the Government have in the past been lost or destroyed,” the A.H.A. petitioned Congress to build a depository. Congress authorized the funds, but no plan was undertaken until after the close of the First World War.
Grover Cleveland, during his two terms, preferred to communicate in person, leaving no paper trail. He insisted that the records of his Presidency were his personal property and, in 1886, refused to turn over papers that the Senate had demanded: “if I saw fit to destroy them no one could complain.” (That is what, during the Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, came to be called “executive privilege.”) Cleveland’s contention became a convention: the President’s papers belong to the President, who can deny requests for disclosure not only from the public but from other branches of the federal government. William McKinley was assassinated in 1901; his secretary held on to his papers until 1935, when he donated them to the Library of Congress, where they remained under his, and later his son’s, tight control until 1954. In 1924, a raft of papers from the Taft, Wilson, and Harding Administrations were found in the attic of the White House. Warren Harding’s Presidency was riven by scandal; after his death, his wife told the chief of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress that she had destroyed all his papers, although she had burned only those she thought “would harm his memory.” Most of the rest she left to the Harding Memorial Association. The Library of Congress acquired a cache of those and other papers in 1972, on the condition that they be closed to the public until 2014. (They turned out to include a thousand pages of love letters between Harding and his mistress. “Won’t you please destroy?” he wrote her in one letter. She did not destroy.) Calvin Coolidge instructed his private secretary to destroy all his personal files; on Coolidge’s death, the secretary said, “There would have been nothing preserved if I had not taken some things out on my own responsibility.”
In 1933, Herbert Hoover laid the cornerstone of the National Archives Building. “This temple of our history will appropriately be one of the most beautiful buildings in America, an expression of the American soul,” he said. A granite, marble, and limestone monument with two forty-foot bronze doors behind seventy-two Corinthian columns, it was built at the height of the Depression, a massive public-works project. In 1941, with Hitler in power in Germany and Mussolini in Italy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke at its dedication:
Archives are ancient, but national archives, the official repositories of the records of a nation-state, date to the French Revolution: France established its Archives Nationales in 1790. Britain established what became a pillar of its National Archives in 1838. Newly independent nations have established national archives as part of the project of declaring independence: Argentina established what would become its national archive in 1821, Mexico in 1823, Brazil in 1838.
“And he claims he hasn’t been to the groomer since before quarantine.”
National archives uphold a particular vision of a nation and of its power, and, during transitions of power in nations that are not democratic, archives are not infrequently attacked. Most attacks involve the destruction of the evidence of atrocity. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888. Two years later, after a military coup, a minister of the new republic ordered the destruction of every document in any archive in the country which related to its history of slavery.
Richard Ovenden’s new book, “Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge,” is a litany of this sort of tragedy. “The preservation of information continues to be a key tool in the defense of open societies,” Ovenden, who runs the Bodleian Libraries, at Oxford, writes. unesco’s report “Lost Memory” is an inventory of inventories: a list of libraries and archives that were destroyed in the twentieth century, including the widespread devastations of the First and Second World Wars, the burning of some of the collections in the National Library in Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge, and the destruction of the National and University Library in Sarajevo, by the Bosnian Serb Army, in 1992. Libraries house books: copies. Archives store documents: originals. Archives cannot be replaced. As unesco’s report puts it, “The loss of archives is as serious as the loss of memory in a human being.”
All is not always lost. Officials of the British Empire set fire to entire archives as they left the colonies. In 1961, in Uganda, the objectives of what came to be known as Operation Legacy included the elimination of all documents that might “embarrass” Her Majesty’s government. Decades later, some three hundred boxes from Kenya and nearly nine thousand files from more than thirty other former British colonies, including Malta, Malaya, and the Bahamas, were discovered in a top-secret government fortress north of London. In 1992, guards from the former Soviet republic of Georgia burned to the ground the Central Archive of Abkhazia. But many of its documents had been microfilmed or photocopied, and these records were stored in other buildings. In 2005, Guatemalan officials conducting a safety inspection of a munitions depot came across the long-hidden records of the brutal force that was the National Police—an estimated eighty million pages, described by my Harvard colleague Kirsten Weld as “papers spilling forth from rusted file cabinets, heaped on dirt floors, in trash bags and grain sacks, shoved into every conceivable nook and cranny, moldy and rotting.” People have spent more than a decade preserving and organizing them.
Governments that commit atrocities against their own citizens regularly destroy their own archives. After the end of apartheid, South Africa’s new government organized a Truth and Reconciliation Commission because, as its report stated, “the former government deliberately and systematically destroyed a huge body of state records and documentation in an attempt to remove incriminating evidence and thereby sanitise the history of oppressive rule.” Unfortunately, the records of the commission have fared little better: the archive was restricted and shipped to the National Archives in Pretoria, where it remains to this day, largely uncatalogued and unprocessed; for ordinary South Africans, it’s almost entirely unusable. In the aftermath of the Trump Administration, the most elusive records won’t be those in the White House. If they exist, they’ll be far away, in and around detention centers, and will involve the least powerful: the families separated at the border, whose suffering federal officials inflicted, and proved so brutally indifferent to that they have lost track of what children belong to which parents, and how to find them.
In 1950, Truman signed the Federal Records Act, which required federal agencies to preserve their records. It did not require Presidents to save their papers, which remained, as ever, their personal property. In 1955, Congress passed the Presidential Libraries Act, encouraging Presidents to deposit their papers in privately erected institutions—something that every President has done since F.D.R., who was also the first President to install a tape recorder in the White House, a method of record-keeping that was used by every President down to Richard M. Nixon.
The Presidential libraries are overseen by the National Archives and Records Administration. They were intended to be research centers, and include museums; and they serve, too, as monuments. The Barack Obama Presidential Library is the first Presidential library whose collections will be entirely digital—they will be available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. But the Presidential library, which started with F.D.R., may well end with Obama.
Donald Trump, if he decides that he wants a Presidential library, is far more likely to build a Presidential museum, or even a theme park, and would most likely build it in Florida. “I have a lot of locations, actually,” Trump said on NBC last year. Last month, an anonymous group from New York published its own plans for a Trump library at djtrumplibrary.com. Its exhibits include a Criminal Records Room and a Covid Memorial, just off the Alt-Right Auditorium. But, long before Trump gets around to designing an actual Trump Library, he is likely to run afoul of a struggle over Presidential records that began with Watergate and Nixon’s tapes.
In 1974, a special prosecutor subpoenaed the Nixon Administration for the Watergate tapes. The White House refused to comply. The case went to the Supreme Court. In United States v. Nixon, the Court devised a balancing test that measured the argument for executive privilege against the judiciary’s interest in criminal justice, and ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes on July 24, 1974. Fifteen days later, Nixon resigned, and proceeded to sign an agreement with the General Services Administration that would have allowed him to destroy the records of his Presidency. Congress then passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, which prohibited Nixon from destroying the tapes. Nixon sued but, in 1977, in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, he lost. Still, his legal battles continued into the nineteen-nineties.
To avoid all this happening all over again with another President, Congress in 1978 passed the Presidential Records Act. It puts Presidential records in the public domain; the public can see those records five years after the President leaves office, though a President can ask to extend those five years to twelve for material deemed sensitive. No longer are Presidential papers the private property of the President. The act also directs every White House to “take all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of the President’s constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented and that such records are preserved and maintained as Presidential records.” What counts as “such records” has been much contested. The archivist of the United States is appointed by the President; the archivist cannot tell the President what to do or what to save but can only provide advice, which the President can simply ignore.
The Presidential Records Act was scheduled to go into effect on January 20, 1981, with the Inauguration of the next President, who turned out to be Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s Attorney General, Edwin Meese III, decided to help Nixon, who was still fighting in court for control of the archives of his Presidency. The Reagan Administration aided the efforts of Nixon’s lawyers, who argued that the archivist of the United States has no discretion in evaluating claims of executive privilege but must, instead, defer to them without review. In 1988, in Public Citizen v. Burke, the D.C. Circuit Court ruled against Nixon and the Administration. The next year, Reagan left office, and his staff packed up his papers.
Reagan’s was the first Administration to use e-mail. Preparing to leave the White House, people in the Administration tried to erase the computer tapes that stored its electronic mail. The correspondence in question included records of the Iran-Contra arms deal, which was, at the time, under criminal investigation. On the last day of Reagan’s Presidency, the journalist Scott Armstrong (formerly of the Washington Post), along with the American Historical Association, the National Security Archive (a nonprofit that Armstrong founded, in 1985), and other organizations, sued Reagan, George H. W. Bush, the National Security Council, and the archivist of the United States. That lawsuit remained unresolved four years later, in 1992, when C. Boyden Gray, a lawyer for the departing President, George H. W. Bush, advised him that destroying things like telephone logs was not a violation of the Presidential Records Act, because, he asserted, the act does not cover “ ‘non-record’ materials like scratch pads, unimportant notes to one’s secretary, phone and visitor logs or informal notes (of meetings, etc.) used only by the staff member.”
Non-record records that the Administration sought to destroy also included the White House’s digital archive of e-mail, a body of evidence that was the subject of yet another congressional investigation, this time into whether Bush had ordered the State Department to search Bill Clinton’s passport records as part of an effort to discredit him during the campaign. A federal judge placed a ten-day restraining order on the Bush White House, banning the destruction of any computer records. “History is full of instances where the outgoing President has decided to erase, burn or destroy all or substantially all Presidential or Executive Office of the President records before the end of his term,” the judge declared. But on January 19, 1993, the night before Clinton’s Inauguration, the Bush Administration deleted those computer files, in defiance of the court order. Near midnight, the office of the archivist of the United States, Don W. Wilson, a Reagan appointee, made an agreement with Bush, granting him control over all “Presidential information and all derivative information in whatever form” after leaving office.
Critics of the Presidential Records Act say that, along with the creation of independent counsels, it contributes to endless investigations and the politics of scandal. Lloyd Cutler served as counsel to both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. “Now every congressional committee asks for every scrap of paper under the sun,” Cutler said in an oral history conducted in 1999. “Independent counsels ask for every piece of paper under the sun. In this Administration, I would guess ten, fifteen lawyers are kept busy all the time digging up documents by the thousands, literally by the thousands. . . . It stops people from writing memos. Many people came to me and said, ‘Can they really look in my diary?’ I said, ‘I hope you don’t keep a diary. Sure, they can look at your diary.’ ” And so they stopped keeping diaries. And some of them started conducting government business using private e-mail accounts.
In some matters of secrecy, the Clinton Administration took its cue from the outgoing Bush Administration but promised to archive its e-mails properly. (A system was eventually set up so that if you tried to delete an e-mail you’d get a message that doing so was in violation of the Presidential Records Act.) Clinton claimed executive privilege again and again, to protect himself from congressional investigation; his staff argued that congressional Republicans were on a mission to destroy him, and so was Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel of the Whitewater investigation. Evading the Presidential Records Act became just another move in the partisan chess game.
Post-Watergate Presidential papers are seemingly more formal, more bureaucratic, less intimate, and less candid, as if the less control Presidents have over their archives, the less interesting those archives have become. “This is horseshit” is the sort of thing L.B.J. might scrawl on a memo (or any of us in a self-destructing text). You don’t see that as much anymore. Don Wilson, after leaving office, argued that the Presidential Records Act compromised the records of the Presidency. Records whose preservation was intended to aid historical research had become, instead, ammunition for prosecutors, creating “a climate for avoiding documentation or perhaps even destroying it.” Wilson told me, “Vice-President Cheney once said, when I asked him for his papers as chief of staff, ‘I didn’t keep any.’ ” And, as Columbia Law School’s David Pozen has argued, transparency does not always advance good government: it can interfere with the deliberative process, make deal-making impossible, and promote a culture of suspicion and mistrust.
Early in George W. Bush’s first term, his Administration disabled the automated e-mail archive system. Nearly all senior officials in the Bush White House used a private e-mail server run by the Republican National Committee. Then, between 2003 and 2009, they claimed to have lost, and later found, some twenty-two million e-mail messages. Nor has this practice been limited to the White House. Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail account on a private e-mail server to conduct official correspondence while serving as Obama’s Secretary of State violated the Federal Records Act, which allows the use of a personal account only so long as all e-mails are archived with the relevant agency or department; Clinton’s were not. “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn e-mails,” Bernie Sanders said to Clinton in 2015, during a primary debate, all Larry David-like. But, closer to Election Day, renewed attention on Clinton’s e-mails diminished her chances of defeating Trump.
The evidentiary shell game has been carried over from one Administration to the next. Reagan tried to protect Nixon’s executive privilege; Bush tried to protect Reagan’s. That so many staff members who served in earlier Republican Administrations serve again under later Presidents has made their commitment to defying the Presidential Records Act even more ardent. This was something keenly felt by George W. Bush, who, after all, was also concerned about protecting his father’s legacy (which is yet another argument against political dynasties).
In 2001, when the twelve-year restriction on the Reagan papers expired, they did not all become available to the public, because George W. Bush signed an executive order that had been drafted by his young associate counsel, Brett M. Kavanaugh. During the Clinton Presidency, Kavanaugh had served as an aide to Ken Starr. In that capacity, he had argued against executive privilege. But, in the second Bush Presidency, Kavanaugh favored executive privilege. Executive Order No. 13,233, Further Implementation of the Presidential Records Act, tried to extend executive privilege, in effect, indefinitely. Specifically, it granted to the current President the right to review the declassification of the records of his predecessors before their release to the public: “Concurrent with or after the former President’s review of the records, the incumbent President or his designee may also review the records in question, or may utilize whatever other procedures the incumbent President deems appropriate to decide whether to concur in the former President’s decision to request withholding of or authorize access to the records.” This, of course, allowed Bush to withhold from public view anything in his father’s papers that he did not wish to see enter the public record, including documents drafted by members of his own Administration who had served in his father’s Administration or in the Reagan Administration. As the archivist Bruce Montgomery observed, “In brief, the Bush order expanded executive privilege beyond the incumbent president to past presidents, their heirs, and even to vice presidents, seemingly in perpetuity.”
Historians got angry. At a forum co-sponsored by the pen American Center, Lyndon Johnson’s biographer Robert Caro pointed out, “If you want to challenge the executive order, the historian must ask for specific, detailed things. The Johnson Library has thirty-four million pieces of paper. Unless you’ve been through it, you can’t possibly know what’s in there.” This raises another delicate point. An archive that holds everything is useless unless you can find your way around it, and that requires money. The entire budget of the National Archives is about the cost of a single C-17 military-transport plane. In 2018, when Trump nominated Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the National Archives, with its limited resources, processed twenty thousand pages of documents relating to his service in the independent counsel’s office during the Clinton Administration but was unable to get through all the requested documents from his work in the Bush Administration in time for the Senate to review them. In any case, Kavanaugh’s collection was vast: his records included more than six hundred thousand e-mails alone.
Barack Obama revoked Executive Order No. 13,233 on his second day in office. His Administration settled a suit filed by the National Security Archive against the Bush Administration, for its failure to release visitor logs. Obama’s White House published the logs of more than six million visitors, including the head of the National Security Archive. (Shaking his hand, Obama said, “You know, there’s gonna be a record of this.”) His Administration did not require corporate-style N.D.A.s. Nor had any President until Trump. I asked Don Wilson what he expected of the Trump papers, and he said, “What kind of record will we have other than what he dictates will be a record?”
The archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, has copies of three letters that he wrote, as a kid in the nineteen-sixties, framed on his office wall. One is to Eisenhower, asking for a photograph. The second is to John F. Kennedy, inquiring about the Peace Corps. The third is to Johnson: “Mr. President, I wish to congratulate you and our country for passing John F. Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill.” The originals of those letters ended up in the National Archives, preserved, long before the passage of the Presidential Records Act.
Ferriero, an Obama appointee, says that the P.R.A. operates, essentially, as an honor system. He wishes that it had teeth. Instead, it’s all gums. Kel McClanahan, a national-security lawyer, told me, “If the President wanted to, he could pull together all of the pieces of paper that he has in his office and have a bonfire with them. He doesn’t view the archivist as an impediment to anything, because the archivist is not an impediment to anything.”
After Trump’s Inauguration, in January, 2017, the National Archives and Records Administration conferred with the White House to establish rules for record-keeping, and, given the novelty of Trump’s favored form of communication, advised Trump to save all his tweets, including deleted ones. Trump hasn’t stopped deleting his tweets; instead, the White House set up a system to capture them, before they vanish. On February 22nd, the White House counsel Don McGahn sent a memo on the subject of Presidential Records Act Obligations to everyone working in the Executive Office of the President, with detailed instructions about how to save and synch e-mail. McGahn’s memo also included instructions about texting apps:
Ethically, if not legally, what records must be preserved by the White House and deposited with the National Archives at the close of Trump’s Presidency is subject to more dictates than those of the Presidential Records Act. In 2016, the International Council on Archives, founded with support from unesco in 1948, published a working document called “Basic Principles on the Role of Archivists and Records Managers in Support of Human Rights.” Essentially an archivists’ elaboration of the principles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it urges governments to preserve archives that contain evidence of violation of human rights.
The rules about record-keeping, like so much about American government, weren’t set up with someone like Trump in mind. It’s not impossible that his White House will destroy records not so much to cover its own tracks but to sabotage the Biden Administration. This would be a crime, of course, but Trump could issue blanket pardons. Yet, as with any Administration, there’s a limit to what can be lost. Probably not much is on paper, and it’s harder to destroy electronic records than most people think. Chances are, a lot of documents that people in the White House might wish did not exist can’t really be purged, because they’ve already been duplicated. Some will have been copied by other offices, as a matter of routine. And some will have been deliberately captured. “I can imagine that at State, Treasury, D.O.D., the career people have been quietly copying important stuff all the way along, precisely with this in mind,” the historian Fredrik Logevall, the author of a new biography of Kennedy, told me.
Other attempts to preserve the record appear to have been less successful. The White House’s P.R.A. guidelines, as worked out with the National Archives, forbade the use of smartphone apps that can automatically erase or encrypt text messages. It’s possible that the White House has complied with those guidelines, but there’s nothing that the National Archives could have done, or could do now, if it hasn’t. Watchdog groups sued, concerned about the use of such apps, but the Justice Department successfully argued that “courts cannot review the president’s compliance with the Presidential Records Act.” In 2019, the National Security Archive joined with two other organizations in a suit against Trump that led to a court’s ordering the Administration to preserve not only “all records reflecting Defendants’ meetings, phone calls, and other communications with foreign leaders” but records having to do with the Administration’s record-keeping practices. Earlier this year, the judge in that case dismissed the lawsuit: “The Court is bound by Circuit precedent to find that it lacks authority to oversee the President’s day-to-day compliance with the statutory provisions involved in this case.”
“I’m very worried,” Austin Evers, the executive director of the watchdog group American Oversight, told me. “There are a lot of senior officials in the Trump Administration who have been relying on impunity to sleep well at night, and I think it will dawn on them over the coming days and weeks that the records they leave behind will be in the hands of people they do not trust, including career public servants.” But, if Jared Kushner set a bonfire in the Rose Garden, Evers thinks that there would be repercussions. “The P.R.A. gets a bad rap,” he says. It’s difficult to enforce, but it’s not unenforceable. And if evidence of document destruction comes out, Evers says, American Oversight is poised to file suit: “We have litigation in the can.”
Aweek after Election Day, the House Oversight Committee sent strenuously worded letters to the White House and to dozens of federal agencies, warning them not to destroy or remove records during the transition. The letters were signed by the chairs of twenty other House committees. “That letter is the lifeguard whistle from the tower,” Tom Blanton, who runs the National Security Archive, told me.“ ‘Watch out, there are records drowning out there!’ ”
Trudy Peterson, who served as the acting archivist of the United States under Clinton, helped oversee the packing up of the Ford White House on the day of Carter’s Inauguration. Crowds were lining the streets, she recalled, while, inside, “people were packing up the President’s morning briefing. You have literally the hottest of the hot foreign-policy materials in your hands.” A convoy of trucks, under military escort, drove from Washington to Michigan. “In the mountains, we lost track of one of the trucks,” she told me. “For a matter of moments. But it stopped your heart.” Phillip Brady, who served under both Reagan and George H. W. Bush, once recalled what it was like to pack up. People from the White House counsel’s office, he said, “would again remind everyone that these are Presidential documents; you’re not permitted to walk out of the White House with them; these are things that become part of the permanent record.” Brady visited the archives at the Bush Library and rummaged through boxes with his name on them. “Some of the messages were a little more candid than you like to recall they were,” he said in an interview later. “Because of the hustle of the day, many times you’re writing notes to someone: ‘I think that’s a stupid idea.’ . . . An awful lot more is preserved than you would imagine.” That’s how it’s supposed to happen, anyway.
The memo that Don McGahn sent to executive-office personnel in February, 2017, came with a warning, about leaving the White House:
Custody of the records of the Trump White House will be formally transferred to the National Archives at noon on January 20, 2021, the minute that Biden takes his oath of office on the steps of the Capitol. Trump, defying tradition, is unlikely to attend that ceremony. It’s difficult, even, to picture him there. Maybe he’ll be in the Oval Office, yanking at the drawers of Resolute, the Presidential desk, barking out orders, cornered, frantic, panicked. Maybe he’ll tweet the whole thing. The obligation, the sober duty, to save the record of this Administration will fall to the people who work under him. It may well require many small acts of defiance.
The truth will not come from the ex-President. Out of a job and burdened by debt, he’ll want to make money, billions. He’ll need, crave, hunger to be seen, looked at, followed, loved, hated; he’ll take anything but being ignored. He may launch a TV show, or even a media empire. Will he sell secrets to American adversaries, in the guise of advice and expertise? It isn’t impossible.
“Will you shut up, man?” an exasperated Biden said to Trump during their Presidential debate. Donald J. Trump cannot shut up. Aside from the prospect of silencing former White House staffers, shredding papers, deleting files, and burying evidence, another danger, when the sun sets on the twentieth of January, won’t be what’s left unsaid, unrecorded, and unsaved but what Trump will be willing to say, still. ♦
www.newyorker.com
How the President could endanger the official records of one of the most consequential periods in American history.
By Jill Lepore
November 16, 2020
Trump has made a habit of destroying documents and suppressing disclosure.
Donald Trump is not much of a note-taker, and he does not like his staff to take notes. He has a habit of tearing up documents at the close of meetings. (Records analysts, armed with Scotch Tape, have tried to put the pieces back together.) No real record exists for five meetings Trump had with Vladimir Putin during the first two years of his Presidency. Members of his staff have routinely used apps that automatically erase text messages, and Trump often deletes his own tweets, notwithstanding a warning from the National Archives and Records Administration that doing so contravenes the Presidential Records Act.
Trump cannot abide documentation for fear of disclosure, and cannot abide disclosure for fear of disparagement. For decades, in private life, he required people who worked with him, and with the Trump Organization, to sign nondisclosure agreements, pledging never to say a bad word about him, his family, or his businesses. He also extracted nondisclosure agreements from women with whom he had or is alleged to have had sex, including both of his ex-wives. In 2015 and 2016, he required these contracts from people involved in his campaign, including a distributor of his “Make America Great Again” hats. (Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign required N.D.A.s from some employees, too. In 2020, Joe Biden called on Michael Bloomberg to release his former employees from such agreements.) In 2017, Trump, unable to distinguish between private life and public service, carried his practice of requiring nondisclosure agreements into the Presidency, demanding that senior White House staff sign N.D.A.s. According to the Washington Post, at least one of them, in draft form, included this language: “I understand that the United States Government or, upon completion of the term(s) of Mr. Donald J. Trump, an authorized representative of Mr. Trump, may seek any remedy available to enforce this Agreement including, but not limited to, application for a court order prohibiting disclosure of information in breach of this Agreement.” Aides warned him that, for White House employees, such agreements are likely not legally enforceable. The White House counsel, Don McGahn, refused to distribute them; eventually, he relented, and the chief of staff, Reince Priebus, pressured employees to sign them.
Those N.D.A.s haven’t stopped a small village’s worth of ex-Trump Cabinet members and staffers from blabbing about him, much to the President’s dismay. “When people are chosen by a man to go into government at high levels and then they leave government and they write a book about a man and say a lot of things that were really guarded and personal, I don’t like that,” he told the Washington Post. In 2019, he tweeted, “I am currently suing various people for violating their confidentiality agreements.” Last year, a former campaign worker filed a class-action lawsuit that, if successful, would render void all campaign N.D.A.s. Trump has only stepped up the fight. Earlier suits were filed by Trump personally, or by his campaign, but, last month, the Department of Justice filed suit against Stephanie Winston Wolkoff for publishing a book, “Melania and Me,” about her time volunteering for the First Lady, arguing, astonishingly, that Wolkoff’s N.D.A. is “a contract with the United States and therefore enforceable by the United States.” (Unlike the suit against Trump’s former national-security adviser John Bolton, relating to the publication of his book, “The Room Where It Happened,” there is no claim that anything in Wolkoff’s book is or was ever classified.) And Trump hasn’t stopped: last year, he required doctors and staff who treated him at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to sign N.D.A.s.
Hardly a day passes that Trump does not attempt to suppress evidence, as if all the world were in violation of an N.D.A. never to speak ill of him. He has sought to discredit publications and broadcasts that question him, investigations that expose him, crowds that protest him, polls that fail to favor him, and, down to the bitter end, ballots cast against him. None of this bodes well for the historical record and for the scheduled transfer of materials from the White House to the National Archives, on January 20, 2021. That morning, even as President-elect Joseph R. Biden, Jr., is ascending the steps of the Capitol, staffers from the archives will presumably be in the White House, unlocking doors, opening desks, packing boxes, and removing hard drives. What might be missing, that day, from file drawers and computer servers at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is difficult to say. But records that were never kept, were later destroyed, or are being destroyed right now chronicle the day-to-day doings of one of the most consequential Presidencies in American history and might well include evidence of crimes, violations of the Constitution, and human-rights abuses. It took a very long time to establish rules governing the fate of Presidential records. Trump does not mind breaking rules and, in the course of a long life, has regularly done so with impunity. The Presidential Records Act isn’t easily enforceable. The Trump Presidency nearly destroyed the United States. Will what went on in the darker corners of his White House ever be known?
“The truth behind a President’s actions can be found only in his official papers,” Harry S. Truman said in 1949, “and every Presidential paper is official.” Truman became an advocate of archival preservation after learning about the fate of his predecessors’ papers. When George Washington left office, in 1797, he brought his papers back to Mount Vernon, but, loaned out, they were “extensively mutilated by rats and otherwise injured by damp”; eventually, they were carried by the historian Jared Sparks to Massachusetts, where Sparks threw out anything he didn’t like, scrapped what he found worthless, gave away much of the rest, and, beginning in 1837, published what he liked best as “The Writings of George Washington.”
For many years, there was no alternative for a departing President but to take his papers home with him; there wasn’t really any place to put them. Thomas Jefferson, “having no confidence that the office of the private secretary of the President of the U.S. will ever be a regular and safe deposit for public papers,” took pains to deposit many of his papers with his Cabinet departments. In 1810, Congress established a Committee on Ancient Public Records and Archives of the United States. It reported that the records of the federal government were “in a state of great disorder and exposure; and in a situation neither safe nor convenient nor honorable to the nation.” Congress took little action. In 1814, the congressional library burned to the ground.
Most of the papers of William Henry Harrison, the log-cabin candidate, succumbed to flames when that log cabin burned down. Those of both John Tyler and Zachary Taylor were largely destroyed during the Civil War. In 1853, when Millard Fillmore left the White House, he had his papers shipped to a mansion in Buffalo. He died in 1874, having made no provisions for the papers. When Fillmore’s only son died, in 1889, his will ordered his executors to “burn or otherwise effectively destroy all correspondence or letters to or from my father.” Only by the merest miracle were forty-four volumes of Fillmore’s Presidential-letter books found in an attic of a house, in 1908, and only because it was on the verge of being demolished.
Chester Arthur’s son had most of his father’s Presidential papers burned in three garbage cans. “The only place I ever found in my life to put a paper so as to find it again was either a side coat-pocket or the hands of a clerk,” Ulysses S. Grant once said. For years after Grant’s Administration, scholars were able to locate hardly any of his Presidential papers. In 1888, Congress urged the Library of Congress to collect the papers of the Presidents. In the eighteen-nineties, the library established a Manuscript Division, and a historian who later became its chief began lobbying for the establishment of a National Archives; meanwhile, the American Historical Association formed a Public Archives Commission. In 1910, after the commission reported that “many of the records of the Government have in the past been lost or destroyed,” the A.H.A. petitioned Congress to build a depository. Congress authorized the funds, but no plan was undertaken until after the close of the First World War.
Grover Cleveland, during his two terms, preferred to communicate in person, leaving no paper trail. He insisted that the records of his Presidency were his personal property and, in 1886, refused to turn over papers that the Senate had demanded: “if I saw fit to destroy them no one could complain.” (That is what, during the Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, came to be called “executive privilege.”) Cleveland’s contention became a convention: the President’s papers belong to the President, who can deny requests for disclosure not only from the public but from other branches of the federal government. William McKinley was assassinated in 1901; his secretary held on to his papers until 1935, when he donated them to the Library of Congress, where they remained under his, and later his son’s, tight control until 1954. In 1924, a raft of papers from the Taft, Wilson, and Harding Administrations were found in the attic of the White House. Warren Harding’s Presidency was riven by scandal; after his death, his wife told the chief of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress that she had destroyed all his papers, although she had burned only those she thought “would harm his memory.” Most of the rest she left to the Harding Memorial Association. The Library of Congress acquired a cache of those and other papers in 1972, on the condition that they be closed to the public until 2014. (They turned out to include a thousand pages of love letters between Harding and his mistress. “Won’t you please destroy?” he wrote her in one letter. She did not destroy.) Calvin Coolidge instructed his private secretary to destroy all his personal files; on Coolidge’s death, the secretary said, “There would have been nothing preserved if I had not taken some things out on my own responsibility.”
In 1933, Herbert Hoover laid the cornerstone of the National Archives Building. “This temple of our history will appropriately be one of the most beautiful buildings in America, an expression of the American soul,” he said. A granite, marble, and limestone monument with two forty-foot bronze doors behind seventy-two Corinthian columns, it was built at the height of the Depression, a massive public-works project. In 1941, with Hitler in power in Germany and Mussolini in Italy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke at its dedication:
Americans used to believe in those three things. Do they still?
Archives are ancient, but national archives, the official repositories of the records of a nation-state, date to the French Revolution: France established its Archives Nationales in 1790. Britain established what became a pillar of its National Archives in 1838. Newly independent nations have established national archives as part of the project of declaring independence: Argentina established what would become its national archive in 1821, Mexico in 1823, Brazil in 1838.
“And he claims he hasn’t been to the groomer since before quarantine.”
National archives uphold a particular vision of a nation and of its power, and, during transitions of power in nations that are not democratic, archives are not infrequently attacked. Most attacks involve the destruction of the evidence of atrocity. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888. Two years later, after a military coup, a minister of the new republic ordered the destruction of every document in any archive in the country which related to its history of slavery.
Richard Ovenden’s new book, “Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge,” is a litany of this sort of tragedy. “The preservation of information continues to be a key tool in the defense of open societies,” Ovenden, who runs the Bodleian Libraries, at Oxford, writes. unesco’s report “Lost Memory” is an inventory of inventories: a list of libraries and archives that were destroyed in the twentieth century, including the widespread devastations of the First and Second World Wars, the burning of some of the collections in the National Library in Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge, and the destruction of the National and University Library in Sarajevo, by the Bosnian Serb Army, in 1992. Libraries house books: copies. Archives store documents: originals. Archives cannot be replaced. As unesco’s report puts it, “The loss of archives is as serious as the loss of memory in a human being.”
All is not always lost. Officials of the British Empire set fire to entire archives as they left the colonies. In 1961, in Uganda, the objectives of what came to be known as Operation Legacy included the elimination of all documents that might “embarrass” Her Majesty’s government. Decades later, some three hundred boxes from Kenya and nearly nine thousand files from more than thirty other former British colonies, including Malta, Malaya, and the Bahamas, were discovered in a top-secret government fortress north of London. In 1992, guards from the former Soviet republic of Georgia burned to the ground the Central Archive of Abkhazia. But many of its documents had been microfilmed or photocopied, and these records were stored in other buildings. In 2005, Guatemalan officials conducting a safety inspection of a munitions depot came across the long-hidden records of the brutal force that was the National Police—an estimated eighty million pages, described by my Harvard colleague Kirsten Weld as “papers spilling forth from rusted file cabinets, heaped on dirt floors, in trash bags and grain sacks, shoved into every conceivable nook and cranny, moldy and rotting.” People have spent more than a decade preserving and organizing them.
Governments that commit atrocities against their own citizens regularly destroy their own archives. After the end of apartheid, South Africa’s new government organized a Truth and Reconciliation Commission because, as its report stated, “the former government deliberately and systematically destroyed a huge body of state records and documentation in an attempt to remove incriminating evidence and thereby sanitise the history of oppressive rule.” Unfortunately, the records of the commission have fared little better: the archive was restricted and shipped to the National Archives in Pretoria, where it remains to this day, largely uncatalogued and unprocessed; for ordinary South Africans, it’s almost entirely unusable. In the aftermath of the Trump Administration, the most elusive records won’t be those in the White House. If they exist, they’ll be far away, in and around detention centers, and will involve the least powerful: the families separated at the border, whose suffering federal officials inflicted, and proved so brutally indifferent to that they have lost track of what children belong to which parents, and how to find them.
In 1950, Truman signed the Federal Records Act, which required federal agencies to preserve their records. It did not require Presidents to save their papers, which remained, as ever, their personal property. In 1955, Congress passed the Presidential Libraries Act, encouraging Presidents to deposit their papers in privately erected institutions—something that every President has done since F.D.R., who was also the first President to install a tape recorder in the White House, a method of record-keeping that was used by every President down to Richard M. Nixon.
The Presidential libraries are overseen by the National Archives and Records Administration. They were intended to be research centers, and include museums; and they serve, too, as monuments. The Barack Obama Presidential Library is the first Presidential library whose collections will be entirely digital—they will be available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. But the Presidential library, which started with F.D.R., may well end with Obama.
Donald Trump, if he decides that he wants a Presidential library, is far more likely to build a Presidential museum, or even a theme park, and would most likely build it in Florida. “I have a lot of locations, actually,” Trump said on NBC last year. Last month, an anonymous group from New York published its own plans for a Trump library at djtrumplibrary.com. Its exhibits include a Criminal Records Room and a Covid Memorial, just off the Alt-Right Auditorium. But, long before Trump gets around to designing an actual Trump Library, he is likely to run afoul of a struggle over Presidential records that began with Watergate and Nixon’s tapes.
In 1974, a special prosecutor subpoenaed the Nixon Administration for the Watergate tapes. The White House refused to comply. The case went to the Supreme Court. In United States v. Nixon, the Court devised a balancing test that measured the argument for executive privilege against the judiciary’s interest in criminal justice, and ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes on July 24, 1974. Fifteen days later, Nixon resigned, and proceeded to sign an agreement with the General Services Administration that would have allowed him to destroy the records of his Presidency. Congress then passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, which prohibited Nixon from destroying the tapes. Nixon sued but, in 1977, in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, he lost. Still, his legal battles continued into the nineteen-nineties.
To avoid all this happening all over again with another President, Congress in 1978 passed the Presidential Records Act. It puts Presidential records in the public domain; the public can see those records five years after the President leaves office, though a President can ask to extend those five years to twelve for material deemed sensitive. No longer are Presidential papers the private property of the President. The act also directs every White House to “take all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of the President’s constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented and that such records are preserved and maintained as Presidential records.” What counts as “such records” has been much contested. The archivist of the United States is appointed by the President; the archivist cannot tell the President what to do or what to save but can only provide advice, which the President can simply ignore.
The Presidential Records Act was scheduled to go into effect on January 20, 1981, with the Inauguration of the next President, who turned out to be Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s Attorney General, Edwin Meese III, decided to help Nixon, who was still fighting in court for control of the archives of his Presidency. The Reagan Administration aided the efforts of Nixon’s lawyers, who argued that the archivist of the United States has no discretion in evaluating claims of executive privilege but must, instead, defer to them without review. In 1988, in Public Citizen v. Burke, the D.C. Circuit Court ruled against Nixon and the Administration. The next year, Reagan left office, and his staff packed up his papers.
Reagan’s was the first Administration to use e-mail. Preparing to leave the White House, people in the Administration tried to erase the computer tapes that stored its electronic mail. The correspondence in question included records of the Iran-Contra arms deal, which was, at the time, under criminal investigation. On the last day of Reagan’s Presidency, the journalist Scott Armstrong (formerly of the Washington Post), along with the American Historical Association, the National Security Archive (a nonprofit that Armstrong founded, in 1985), and other organizations, sued Reagan, George H. W. Bush, the National Security Council, and the archivist of the United States. That lawsuit remained unresolved four years later, in 1992, when C. Boyden Gray, a lawyer for the departing President, George H. W. Bush, advised him that destroying things like telephone logs was not a violation of the Presidential Records Act, because, he asserted, the act does not cover “ ‘non-record’ materials like scratch pads, unimportant notes to one’s secretary, phone and visitor logs or informal notes (of meetings, etc.) used only by the staff member.”
Non-record records that the Administration sought to destroy also included the White House’s digital archive of e-mail, a body of evidence that was the subject of yet another congressional investigation, this time into whether Bush had ordered the State Department to search Bill Clinton’s passport records as part of an effort to discredit him during the campaign. A federal judge placed a ten-day restraining order on the Bush White House, banning the destruction of any computer records. “History is full of instances where the outgoing President has decided to erase, burn or destroy all or substantially all Presidential or Executive Office of the President records before the end of his term,” the judge declared. But on January 19, 1993, the night before Clinton’s Inauguration, the Bush Administration deleted those computer files, in defiance of the court order. Near midnight, the office of the archivist of the United States, Don W. Wilson, a Reagan appointee, made an agreement with Bush, granting him control over all “Presidential information and all derivative information in whatever form” after leaving office.
Critics of the Presidential Records Act say that, along with the creation of independent counsels, it contributes to endless investigations and the politics of scandal. Lloyd Cutler served as counsel to both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. “Now every congressional committee asks for every scrap of paper under the sun,” Cutler said in an oral history conducted in 1999. “Independent counsels ask for every piece of paper under the sun. In this Administration, I would guess ten, fifteen lawyers are kept busy all the time digging up documents by the thousands, literally by the thousands. . . . It stops people from writing memos. Many people came to me and said, ‘Can they really look in my diary?’ I said, ‘I hope you don’t keep a diary. Sure, they can look at your diary.’ ” And so they stopped keeping diaries. And some of them started conducting government business using private e-mail accounts.
In some matters of secrecy, the Clinton Administration took its cue from the outgoing Bush Administration but promised to archive its e-mails properly. (A system was eventually set up so that if you tried to delete an e-mail you’d get a message that doing so was in violation of the Presidential Records Act.) Clinton claimed executive privilege again and again, to protect himself from congressional investigation; his staff argued that congressional Republicans were on a mission to destroy him, and so was Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel of the Whitewater investigation. Evading the Presidential Records Act became just another move in the partisan chess game.
Post-Watergate Presidential papers are seemingly more formal, more bureaucratic, less intimate, and less candid, as if the less control Presidents have over their archives, the less interesting those archives have become. “This is horseshit” is the sort of thing L.B.J. might scrawl on a memo (or any of us in a self-destructing text). You don’t see that as much anymore. Don Wilson, after leaving office, argued that the Presidential Records Act compromised the records of the Presidency. Records whose preservation was intended to aid historical research had become, instead, ammunition for prosecutors, creating “a climate for avoiding documentation or perhaps even destroying it.” Wilson told me, “Vice-President Cheney once said, when I asked him for his papers as chief of staff, ‘I didn’t keep any.’ ” And, as Columbia Law School’s David Pozen has argued, transparency does not always advance good government: it can interfere with the deliberative process, make deal-making impossible, and promote a culture of suspicion and mistrust.
Early in George W. Bush’s first term, his Administration disabled the automated e-mail archive system. Nearly all senior officials in the Bush White House used a private e-mail server run by the Republican National Committee. Then, between 2003 and 2009, they claimed to have lost, and later found, some twenty-two million e-mail messages. Nor has this practice been limited to the White House. Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail account on a private e-mail server to conduct official correspondence while serving as Obama’s Secretary of State violated the Federal Records Act, which allows the use of a personal account only so long as all e-mails are archived with the relevant agency or department; Clinton’s were not. “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn e-mails,” Bernie Sanders said to Clinton in 2015, during a primary debate, all Larry David-like. But, closer to Election Day, renewed attention on Clinton’s e-mails diminished her chances of defeating Trump.
The evidentiary shell game has been carried over from one Administration to the next. Reagan tried to protect Nixon’s executive privilege; Bush tried to protect Reagan’s. That so many staff members who served in earlier Republican Administrations serve again under later Presidents has made their commitment to defying the Presidential Records Act even more ardent. This was something keenly felt by George W. Bush, who, after all, was also concerned about protecting his father’s legacy (which is yet another argument against political dynasties).
In 2001, when the twelve-year restriction on the Reagan papers expired, they did not all become available to the public, because George W. Bush signed an executive order that had been drafted by his young associate counsel, Brett M. Kavanaugh. During the Clinton Presidency, Kavanaugh had served as an aide to Ken Starr. In that capacity, he had argued against executive privilege. But, in the second Bush Presidency, Kavanaugh favored executive privilege. Executive Order No. 13,233, Further Implementation of the Presidential Records Act, tried to extend executive privilege, in effect, indefinitely. Specifically, it granted to the current President the right to review the declassification of the records of his predecessors before their release to the public: “Concurrent with or after the former President’s review of the records, the incumbent President or his designee may also review the records in question, or may utilize whatever other procedures the incumbent President deems appropriate to decide whether to concur in the former President’s decision to request withholding of or authorize access to the records.” This, of course, allowed Bush to withhold from public view anything in his father’s papers that he did not wish to see enter the public record, including documents drafted by members of his own Administration who had served in his father’s Administration or in the Reagan Administration. As the archivist Bruce Montgomery observed, “In brief, the Bush order expanded executive privilege beyond the incumbent president to past presidents, their heirs, and even to vice presidents, seemingly in perpetuity.”
Historians got angry. At a forum co-sponsored by the pen American Center, Lyndon Johnson’s biographer Robert Caro pointed out, “If you want to challenge the executive order, the historian must ask for specific, detailed things. The Johnson Library has thirty-four million pieces of paper. Unless you’ve been through it, you can’t possibly know what’s in there.” This raises another delicate point. An archive that holds everything is useless unless you can find your way around it, and that requires money. The entire budget of the National Archives is about the cost of a single C-17 military-transport plane. In 2018, when Trump nominated Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the National Archives, with its limited resources, processed twenty thousand pages of documents relating to his service in the independent counsel’s office during the Clinton Administration but was unable to get through all the requested documents from his work in the Bush Administration in time for the Senate to review them. In any case, Kavanaugh’s collection was vast: his records included more than six hundred thousand e-mails alone.
Barack Obama revoked Executive Order No. 13,233 on his second day in office. His Administration settled a suit filed by the National Security Archive against the Bush Administration, for its failure to release visitor logs. Obama’s White House published the logs of more than six million visitors, including the head of the National Security Archive. (Shaking his hand, Obama said, “You know, there’s gonna be a record of this.”) His Administration did not require corporate-style N.D.A.s. Nor had any President until Trump. I asked Don Wilson what he expected of the Trump papers, and he said, “What kind of record will we have other than what he dictates will be a record?”
The archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, has copies of three letters that he wrote, as a kid in the nineteen-sixties, framed on his office wall. One is to Eisenhower, asking for a photograph. The second is to John F. Kennedy, inquiring about the Peace Corps. The third is to Johnson: “Mr. President, I wish to congratulate you and our country for passing John F. Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill.” The originals of those letters ended up in the National Archives, preserved, long before the passage of the Presidential Records Act.
Ferriero, an Obama appointee, says that the P.R.A. operates, essentially, as an honor system. He wishes that it had teeth. Instead, it’s all gums. Kel McClanahan, a national-security lawyer, told me, “If the President wanted to, he could pull together all of the pieces of paper that he has in his office and have a bonfire with them. He doesn’t view the archivist as an impediment to anything, because the archivist is not an impediment to anything.”
After Trump’s Inauguration, in January, 2017, the National Archives and Records Administration conferred with the White House to establish rules for record-keeping, and, given the novelty of Trump’s favored form of communication, advised Trump to save all his tweets, including deleted ones. Trump hasn’t stopped deleting his tweets; instead, the White House set up a system to capture them, before they vanish. On February 22nd, the White House counsel Don McGahn sent a memo on the subject of Presidential Records Act Obligations to everyone working in the Executive Office of the President, with detailed instructions about how to save and synch e-mail. McGahn’s memo also included instructions about texting apps:
“I knew I loved you when I no longer found the sound of your eating excruciating.”
Ethically, if not legally, what records must be preserved by the White House and deposited with the National Archives at the close of Trump’s Presidency is subject to more dictates than those of the Presidential Records Act. In 2016, the International Council on Archives, founded with support from unesco in 1948, published a working document called “Basic Principles on the Role of Archivists and Records Managers in Support of Human Rights.” Essentially an archivists’ elaboration of the principles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it urges governments to preserve archives that contain evidence of violation of human rights.
The rules about record-keeping, like so much about American government, weren’t set up with someone like Trump in mind. It’s not impossible that his White House will destroy records not so much to cover its own tracks but to sabotage the Biden Administration. This would be a crime, of course, but Trump could issue blanket pardons. Yet, as with any Administration, there’s a limit to what can be lost. Probably not much is on paper, and it’s harder to destroy electronic records than most people think. Chances are, a lot of documents that people in the White House might wish did not exist can’t really be purged, because they’ve already been duplicated. Some will have been copied by other offices, as a matter of routine. And some will have been deliberately captured. “I can imagine that at State, Treasury, D.O.D., the career people have been quietly copying important stuff all the way along, precisely with this in mind,” the historian Fredrik Logevall, the author of a new biography of Kennedy, told me.
Other attempts to preserve the record appear to have been less successful. The White House’s P.R.A. guidelines, as worked out with the National Archives, forbade the use of smartphone apps that can automatically erase or encrypt text messages. It’s possible that the White House has complied with those guidelines, but there’s nothing that the National Archives could have done, or could do now, if it hasn’t. Watchdog groups sued, concerned about the use of such apps, but the Justice Department successfully argued that “courts cannot review the president’s compliance with the Presidential Records Act.” In 2019, the National Security Archive joined with two other organizations in a suit against Trump that led to a court’s ordering the Administration to preserve not only “all records reflecting Defendants’ meetings, phone calls, and other communications with foreign leaders” but records having to do with the Administration’s record-keeping practices. Earlier this year, the judge in that case dismissed the lawsuit: “The Court is bound by Circuit precedent to find that it lacks authority to oversee the President’s day-to-day compliance with the statutory provisions involved in this case.”
“I’m very worried,” Austin Evers, the executive director of the watchdog group American Oversight, told me. “There are a lot of senior officials in the Trump Administration who have been relying on impunity to sleep well at night, and I think it will dawn on them over the coming days and weeks that the records they leave behind will be in the hands of people they do not trust, including career public servants.” But, if Jared Kushner set a bonfire in the Rose Garden, Evers thinks that there would be repercussions. “The P.R.A. gets a bad rap,” he says. It’s difficult to enforce, but it’s not unenforceable. And if evidence of document destruction comes out, Evers says, American Oversight is poised to file suit: “We have litigation in the can.”
Aweek after Election Day, the House Oversight Committee sent strenuously worded letters to the White House and to dozens of federal agencies, warning them not to destroy or remove records during the transition. The letters were signed by the chairs of twenty other House committees. “That letter is the lifeguard whistle from the tower,” Tom Blanton, who runs the National Security Archive, told me.“ ‘Watch out, there are records drowning out there!’ ”
Trudy Peterson, who served as the acting archivist of the United States under Clinton, helped oversee the packing up of the Ford White House on the day of Carter’s Inauguration. Crowds were lining the streets, she recalled, while, inside, “people were packing up the President’s morning briefing. You have literally the hottest of the hot foreign-policy materials in your hands.” A convoy of trucks, under military escort, drove from Washington to Michigan. “In the mountains, we lost track of one of the trucks,” she told me. “For a matter of moments. But it stopped your heart.” Phillip Brady, who served under both Reagan and George H. W. Bush, once recalled what it was like to pack up. People from the White House counsel’s office, he said, “would again remind everyone that these are Presidential documents; you’re not permitted to walk out of the White House with them; these are things that become part of the permanent record.” Brady visited the archives at the Bush Library and rummaged through boxes with his name on them. “Some of the messages were a little more candid than you like to recall they were,” he said in an interview later. “Because of the hustle of the day, many times you’re writing notes to someone: ‘I think that’s a stupid idea.’ . . . An awful lot more is preserved than you would imagine.” That’s how it’s supposed to happen, anyway.
The memo that Don McGahn sent to executive-office personnel in February, 2017, came with a warning, about leaving the White House:
Custody of the records of the Trump White House will be formally transferred to the National Archives at noon on January 20, 2021, the minute that Biden takes his oath of office on the steps of the Capitol. Trump, defying tradition, is unlikely to attend that ceremony. It’s difficult, even, to picture him there. Maybe he’ll be in the Oval Office, yanking at the drawers of Resolute, the Presidential desk, barking out orders, cornered, frantic, panicked. Maybe he’ll tweet the whole thing. The obligation, the sober duty, to save the record of this Administration will fall to the people who work under him. It may well require many small acts of defiance.
The truth will not come from the ex-President. Out of a job and burdened by debt, he’ll want to make money, billions. He’ll need, crave, hunger to be seen, looked at, followed, loved, hated; he’ll take anything but being ignored. He may launch a TV show, or even a media empire. Will he sell secrets to American adversaries, in the guise of advice and expertise? It isn’t impossible.
“Will you shut up, man?” an exasperated Biden said to Trump during their Presidential debate. Donald J. Trump cannot shut up. Aside from the prospect of silencing former White House staffers, shredding papers, deleting files, and burying evidence, another danger, when the sun sets on the twentieth of January, won’t be what’s left unsaid, unrecorded, and unsaved but what Trump will be willing to say, still. ♦
Will Trump Burn the Evidence?
How the President could endanger the official records of one of the most consequential periods in American history.
Malcolm Nance: Trump's Talk Of 3rd Term Is A Serious Threat
"He really does believe he deserves a third term," the intelligence analyst said in suggesting an even more shameless power grab on MSNBC's "The ReidOut."
Malcolm Nance: Donald Trump’s Talk Of 3rd Term Is A Serious Threat
“He really does believe he deserves a third term,” the intelligence analyst said in suggesting an even more shameless power grab on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut.”
By Ron Dicker
Nance, MSNBC’s intelligence analyst, said on Monday that the president could maneuver to make himself “dictator for life.”
In an interview about the president’s “dictatorial impulse” on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut,” host Joy Reid called Trump a “baby Putin.” She asked Nance whether Trump’s grandiosity should be taken seriously.
Nance answered in the affirmative and addressed the president’s comments in Minden, Nevada, that he would “negotiate” to run again in 2024 because he was “entitled” to another four years, defying the Constitution.
“In his mind he really does believe he deserves a third term,” Nance said. “He has a whole cast of enablers who sit around and do nothing but tell him all day, every day, he’s right and Franklin Delano Roosevelt did it. And you control the United States and you have so many people that love you, it’ll be easy to pass a constitutional amendment making Donald Trump dictator for life. I think he really has that in his head.”
FDR’s four-term presidency (he died just months into his final stint) led to the ratification of the 22nd Amendment in 1951, limiting presidents to two terms.
“Trump is not joking about a 3rd term,” Nance tweeted after the show. “Ignore it at your peril.”
Trump loses lawsuit that sought to block Pennsylvania win for Biden
PUBLISHED SAT, NOV 21 20208:09 PM ESTUPDATED SAT, NOV 21 202011:46 PM EST
Dan Mangan@_DANMANGAN
KEY POINTS
President Donald Trump arrives aboard Air Force One at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport in Detroit, Michigan.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
A federal judge in Pennsylvania on Saturday dismissed a lawsuit by President Donald Trump’s campaign that sought to block that state’s certification of millions of voters, which is expected to confirm a win for President-elect Joe Biden there.
The judge’s scathing decision is a crippling blow to Trump’s already extremely long-shot bid to invalidate enough ballots in enough states to reverse the former Democratic vice president Biden’s victory in the national presidential election, whose outcome is determined by the Electoral College.
The Trump campaign and its allies now have lost or withdrawn more than 30 lawsuits that were part of that effort.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann, in his written decision, said that the campaign’s lawyers, led by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, failed to present “compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption” in their unprecedented bid to invalidate millions of ballots.
“Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by the evidence,” Brann fumed.
“In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”
At one point, the judge compared the lawsuit’s claim that voters had been denied equal protection in how their ballots were handled to “Frankenstein’s Monster,” since that claim was “haphazardly stitched together” from two different theories in an effort to avoid having them separately dismissed because of legal precedent.
Brann’s ruling, which was issued two days before Pennsyvalnia’s counties are due to ceritify their election results to Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, made moot the question of whether he would bother to hold an evidentiary hearing in the case.
The Trump campaign had claimed that voters in Pennsylvania were denied their constitutional right to equal protection under the law by the fact that some counties in the state, but not all, permitted voters who had mailed in their ballots to “cure” problems with those ballots by casting a provisional ballot.
The former New York City mayor Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, the Trump campaign’s other top lawyer, said they would seek an expedited appeal of Brann’s decision at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit.
They also said they believed his ruling would “help us in our strategy” to get their claims heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Although we fully disagree with this opinion, we’re thankful to the Obama-appointed judge for making this anticipated decision quickly, rather than simply trying to run out the clock,” Giuliani and Ellis said in a statement.
It was Ellis who on Tuesday, after Giuliani’s performance in court was criticized by a number of legal analysts, tweeted: “You media morons are all laughing at @RudyGiuliani, but he appears to have already established a great rapport with the judge, who is currently offering recommendations on martini bars for Team Trump in open court.”
Brann was nominated to his seat by President Barack Obama in 2012. But before that he was for years a Republican Party official in the Keystone State, and was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate’s Republican and Democratic and independent members.
Biden campaign spokesman Michael Gwin said, “Yet another court has rejected Trump and Giuliani’s baseless claims of voter fraud and their appalling assault on our democracy.”
“The judge’s ruling couldn’t be clearer: our people, laws, and institutions demand more — and our country will not tolerate Trump’s attempt to reverse the results of an election that he decisively lost,” Gwin said.
U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., in a statement called Brann a “longtime conservative Republican whom I know to be a fair an unbiased jurist.”
Toomey said that Brann’s ruling, along with “a series of procedural losses” for Trump’s campaign and allies in other courts, “confirm that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and will become the 46th President of the United States.”
“With today’s decision,” Toomey said, “President Trump has exhausted all plausible legal options to challenge the result of the presidential race in Pennsylvania.”
“I congratulate President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their victory. They are both dedicated public servants and I will be praying for them and for our country.”
WATCH NOW
VIDEO01:22
Michigan lawmakers deny meeting with Trump will change election outcome
Brann’s ruling came four days after Giuliani, arguing in a courtroom for the first time in decades, claimed without evidence that the Republican president had been the victim of “widespread national voter fraud.”
Mark Aronchick, an attorney for some of the county election boards whose voting processes were being questioned in the lawsuit, accused Giuliani of talking about “some fantasy world.”
“This just is disgraceful!” Aronchick said of Giuliani’s arguments during the hearing.
Brann seemed to say as much in his ruling.
“Plaintiffs ask this Court to disenfranchise almost seven million voters,” the judge noted.
“This Court has been unable to find any case in which a plaintiff has sought such a drastic remedy in the contest of an election, in terms of the sheer volume of votes asked to be invalidated,” Brann wrote.
“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption, such that this Court would have no option but to regrettably grant the proposed injunctive relief despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens.
“That has not happened,” Brann wrote.
Biden is currently projected to win 306 votes in the Electoral College, three dozen more than he needs to clinch a win in the White House race.
Trump has refused to concede the contest as he, Giuliani and other Trump surrogates falsely claim he won the election.
At stake in the lawsuit decided Saturday were Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes, which Biden is set to receive after winning 50% of the popular vote, compared to 48.8% for Trump. Biden holds a more than 80,000-vote margin over Trump in the current ballot count.
The court ruling came a day after Georgia certified its election results, which show a win for Biden there after a hand recount of ballots.
It also came a day after the Republican speaker of the Michigan state house and the GOP majority leader of that state’s Senate said that Biden’s victory in their own state appears legitimate.
The joint statement by Speaker Lee Chatfield and Majority Leader Mike Shirkey came after they visited the White House at Trump’s invitation, and where the president was expected to pressure them to take steps in the legislature to overturn the outcome of Michigan’s election, and approve a slate of electors who would vote for Trump in the Electoral College.
“We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan and as legislative leaders, we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors, just as we have said throughout this election,” the Michigan lawmakers said in a statement.
“Michigan’s certification process should be a deliberate process free from threats and intimidation,” the statement said.
“The candidates who win the most votes win elections and Michigan’s electoral votes. These are simple truths that should provide confidence in our elections.”
www.cnbc.com
PUBLISHED SAT, NOV 21 20208:09 PM ESTUPDATED SAT, NOV 21 202011:46 PM EST
Dan Mangan@_DANMANGAN
KEY POINTS
- A federal judge in Pennsylvania rejected a legal effort by President Donald Trump’s campaign to block that state’s certification of millions of voters
- The certification is expected to confirm a win for President-elect Joe Biden.
- The judge’s scathing decision is a crippling blow to Trump’s extremely long-shot bid to invalidate enough ballots in multiple states to reverse Biden’s victory in the national presidential election.
- “This Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by the evidence,” Judge Matthew Brann wrote in a ruling that the campaign says it will appeal, possible up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
President Donald Trump arrives aboard Air Force One at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport in Detroit, Michigan.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
A federal judge in Pennsylvania on Saturday dismissed a lawsuit by President Donald Trump’s campaign that sought to block that state’s certification of millions of voters, which is expected to confirm a win for President-elect Joe Biden there.
The judge’s scathing decision is a crippling blow to Trump’s already extremely long-shot bid to invalidate enough ballots in enough states to reverse the former Democratic vice president Biden’s victory in the national presidential election, whose outcome is determined by the Electoral College.
The Trump campaign and its allies now have lost or withdrawn more than 30 lawsuits that were part of that effort.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann, in his written decision, said that the campaign’s lawyers, led by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, failed to present “compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption” in their unprecedented bid to invalidate millions of ballots.
“Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by the evidence,” Brann fumed.
“In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”
At one point, the judge compared the lawsuit’s claim that voters had been denied equal protection in how their ballots were handled to “Frankenstein’s Monster,” since that claim was “haphazardly stitched together” from two different theories in an effort to avoid having them separately dismissed because of legal precedent.
Brann’s ruling, which was issued two days before Pennsyvalnia’s counties are due to ceritify their election results to Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, made moot the question of whether he would bother to hold an evidentiary hearing in the case.
The Trump campaign had claimed that voters in Pennsylvania were denied their constitutional right to equal protection under the law by the fact that some counties in the state, but not all, permitted voters who had mailed in their ballots to “cure” problems with those ballots by casting a provisional ballot.
The former New York City mayor Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, the Trump campaign’s other top lawyer, said they would seek an expedited appeal of Brann’s decision at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit.
They also said they believed his ruling would “help us in our strategy” to get their claims heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Although we fully disagree with this opinion, we’re thankful to the Obama-appointed judge for making this anticipated decision quickly, rather than simply trying to run out the clock,” Giuliani and Ellis said in a statement.
It was Ellis who on Tuesday, after Giuliani’s performance in court was criticized by a number of legal analysts, tweeted: “You media morons are all laughing at @RudyGiuliani, but he appears to have already established a great rapport with the judge, who is currently offering recommendations on martini bars for Team Trump in open court.”
Brann was nominated to his seat by President Barack Obama in 2012. But before that he was for years a Republican Party official in the Keystone State, and was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate’s Republican and Democratic and independent members.
Biden campaign spokesman Michael Gwin said, “Yet another court has rejected Trump and Giuliani’s baseless claims of voter fraud and their appalling assault on our democracy.”
“The judge’s ruling couldn’t be clearer: our people, laws, and institutions demand more — and our country will not tolerate Trump’s attempt to reverse the results of an election that he decisively lost,” Gwin said.
U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., in a statement called Brann a “longtime conservative Republican whom I know to be a fair an unbiased jurist.”
Toomey said that Brann’s ruling, along with “a series of procedural losses” for Trump’s campaign and allies in other courts, “confirm that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and will become the 46th President of the United States.”
“With today’s decision,” Toomey said, “President Trump has exhausted all plausible legal options to challenge the result of the presidential race in Pennsylvania.”
“I congratulate President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their victory. They are both dedicated public servants and I will be praying for them and for our country.”
WATCH NOW
VIDEO01:22
Michigan lawmakers deny meeting with Trump will change election outcome
Brann’s ruling came four days after Giuliani, arguing in a courtroom for the first time in decades, claimed without evidence that the Republican president had been the victim of “widespread national voter fraud.”
Mark Aronchick, an attorney for some of the county election boards whose voting processes were being questioned in the lawsuit, accused Giuliani of talking about “some fantasy world.”
“This just is disgraceful!” Aronchick said of Giuliani’s arguments during the hearing.
Brann seemed to say as much in his ruling.
“Plaintiffs ask this Court to disenfranchise almost seven million voters,” the judge noted.
“This Court has been unable to find any case in which a plaintiff has sought such a drastic remedy in the contest of an election, in terms of the sheer volume of votes asked to be invalidated,” Brann wrote.
“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption, such that this Court would have no option but to regrettably grant the proposed injunctive relief despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens.
“That has not happened,” Brann wrote.
Biden is currently projected to win 306 votes in the Electoral College, three dozen more than he needs to clinch a win in the White House race.
Trump has refused to concede the contest as he, Giuliani and other Trump surrogates falsely claim he won the election.
At stake in the lawsuit decided Saturday were Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes, which Biden is set to receive after winning 50% of the popular vote, compared to 48.8% for Trump. Biden holds a more than 80,000-vote margin over Trump in the current ballot count.
The court ruling came a day after Georgia certified its election results, which show a win for Biden there after a hand recount of ballots.
It also came a day after the Republican speaker of the Michigan state house and the GOP majority leader of that state’s Senate said that Biden’s victory in their own state appears legitimate.
The joint statement by Speaker Lee Chatfield and Majority Leader Mike Shirkey came after they visited the White House at Trump’s invitation, and where the president was expected to pressure them to take steps in the legislature to overturn the outcome of Michigan’s election, and approve a slate of electors who would vote for Trump in the Electoral College.
“We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan and as legislative leaders, we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors, just as we have said throughout this election,” the Michigan lawmakers said in a statement.
“Michigan’s certification process should be a deliberate process free from threats and intimidation,” the statement said.
“The candidates who win the most votes win elections and Michigan’s electoral votes. These are simple truths that should provide confidence in our elections.”
Trump loses lawsuit that sought to block Pennsylvania win for Biden
The judge's decision is a crippling blow to Trump's long-shot bid to invalidate enough ballots in multiple states to reverse Biden's victory.
RNC Backs Trump's Bogus Claims That He Won the Election
The Republican National Committee endorsed false claims that Trump won the presidential election in a "landslide."
www.rollingstone.com
RNC Backs Trump’s Bogus Claims That He Won the Election
“President Trump won by a landslide,” one of the president’s lawyers said in a video shared by the Republican National Committee
By
PETER WADE
President Donald Trump listens during an event in the briefing room of the White House in Washington, Friday, Nov. 20, 2020, on prescription drug prices. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
AP
Following the bizarre press event this week that saw Rudy Giuliani reference the movie My Cousin Vinny while hair dye streaked down his sweaty face, the Republican National Committee endorsed the wild statements made during Giuliani’s lie-filled press conference, falsely claiming that Trump not only won the presidential election, but he did so in a “landslide.”
The RNC left little doubt that the Republican party has gone full MAGA when it shared a video of one of the president’s lawyers, Sidney Powell, indignantly spreading misinformation about election fraud.
Speaking as though she has truth on her side — she does not — Powell spoke of patriotism while telling lies that could ultimately damage the nation.
“This is stunning, heartbreaking, infuriating and the most unpatriotic acts I can even imagine for people in this country to have participated in any way, shape or form. And I want the American public to know right now that we will not be intimidated,” Powell said.
“American patriots are fed up with the corruption from the local level to the highest level of our government. And we are going to take this country back. We are not going to be intimidated. We are not going to back down. We are going to clean this mess up,” Powell continued, “President Trump won by a landslide. We are going to prove it. And we are going to reclaim the United States of America for the people who vote for freedom.”
But neither Trump’s campaign nor the Republican Party has yet to produce any credible evidence of significant voter fraud or irregularities.
Undeterred, the RNC continued its attempts to overturn the election on Saturday by sending a letter to Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers requesting to halt certification to allow time for an audit to occur.
“To simply gloss over these irregularities now without a thorough audit would only foster feelings of distrust among Michigan’s electorate,” the letter read, according to Politico.
These latest shenanigans come after Trump’s seeming attempt to bully Republican members of Michigan’s legislature failed. The president met with Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield on Friday in the White House. But Trump’s con seemed to fall on deaf ears as both lawmakers concluded that they had “not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome.”
Trump’s enablers don’t seem to care if their dishonesty is obvious. On Friday, Kayleigh McEnany proved as much. During a White House briefing, the press secretary lied about the lack of a peaceful transition of power from former-president Obama to Trump in 2016. But during the president’s inauguration speech in January 2017, Trump not only thanked the former president and the out-going first lady, Michelle Obama, for the way they handled the transition, but Trump also emphasized how helpful the two were, calling them “magnificent.”
The next three weeks are a moment of truth for the Republican Party. |
As election officials in contested states certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, verifying that the vote count is accurate and complete, G.O.P. officials from state capitols to Congress will be forced to choose between the will of voters and the will of one man: President Trump. |
In pushing his false claims to the limit and forcing Republicans into acquiescence or silence, Mr. Trump has revealed the fragility of the electoral system — and shaken it. Above, supporters of the president in Atlanta on Saturday. |
Mr. Trump’s attempt to subvert the election results appears to be growing more futile by the day: Georgia became the first contested state on Friday to certify its vote for Mr. Biden. Michigan lawmakers said they would honor the outcome of the state’s election process after a White House meeting on Friday. The state’s deadline for certification is Monday. |
And as Mr. Trump brazenly seeks to delay the certification of the election, he is also mounting a similarly audacious bid to keep control of the Republican National Committee even after he leaves office. |
|
The Trump administration is using its last weeks to lock in many of the president’s policies and interfere with President-elect Joe Biden’s agenda. |
Top officials are racing against the clock to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, secure oil drilling leases in Alaska, punish China, carry out executions and thwart any plans that Mr. Biden may have to reestablish the Iran nuclear deal. In some cases, Mr. Trump’s government plans to act just days — or even hours — before Mr. Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20. |
But even as Mr. Trump refuses to accept the reality of his loss, the rest of the world — and Mr. Biden — is moving on. Everyone from world leaders to business executives have called the president-elect to congratulate him. |
"Barr says Justice Department found no evidence of voter fraud that would change election outcome, according to the AP" https://twitter.com/i/events/1333858768413548545?s=09
Rep. Mo Brooks plans to challenge Electoral College votes when Congress officially certifies Joe Biden’s victory, Politico reports
The Representative for Alabama's 5th congressional district told his colleagues that he plans to challenge the Electoral College votes when Congress officially certifies Joe Biden’s victory on January 6, but only if a Senate Republican will join him in the effort, according to POLITICO congressional reporter Melanie Zanona.
The Representative for Alabama's 5th congressional district told his colleagues that he plans to challenge the Electoral College votes when Congress officially certifies Joe Biden’s victory on January 6, but only if a Senate Republican will join him in the effort, according to POLITICO congressional reporter Melanie Zanona.
John Mulaney Was Investigated by the Secret Service After His SNL Monologue
By Megh Wright@megh_wright
When John Mulaney returned to host SNL right before the election on Halloween, he unintentionally sparked some controversy thanks to a joke in his monologue, in which he called the election an “elderly man contest” and argued that no matter who ended up winning, “nothing much will change in the United States.” There was more context to the joke than that, but still, people got mad! And while reflecting on the whole thing on last night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, Mulaney said the negative reaction was warranted. “I should have said ‘I very much want one to win over the other and there will be improvements if one wins.’ I deserve the backlash. I just forgot to do it,” he told Kimmel. “I forgot to make the joke good.” Just in case there was any confusion, Mulaney made it very clear to his critics that yes, he’s a Democrat who very much supported Biden: “I like people and I’m generally happy and not deeply angry, so I’m a Democrat.”
It turns out, though, that the election joke from October was not the most controversial SNL monologue joke Mulaney told in 2020. When he hosted the show on February 29, he made a leap year joke about how Julius Caesar became such a “powerful maniac” that he was stabbed to death by senators — after which Mulaney told the SNL audience, “That would be an interesting thing if we brought that back now!” Mulaney revealed to Kimmel that that punchline earned him a rare accomplishment: a Secret Service investigation. “I guess they opened a file on me because of the joke, and I have to say: Am I stoked there’s a file open on me? Absolutely. Did I enjoy it in the moment? Not so much,” he told Kimmel. Thankfully, Mulaney has since been cleared by the Secret Service — or at least he was told he had been cleared.
Later in the interview, Kimmel also asked Mulaney “what’s going on” with the recent news that he took a gig as a writer on Late Night With Seth Meyers. Mulaney offered a pretty thorough explanation about going crazy in quarantine and how he pitched the idea to Seth Meyers, but the whole thing is best summed up by something his psychiatrist told him: “Without external structure, I don’t have any confidence in you thriving.” Thankfully, Mulaney has found that much-needed structure: rambling to Meyers about ghosts and the royal family from the security of his Julian Casablancas trench coat. We all have to find sanity where we can get it these days.
By Megh Wright@megh_wright
When John Mulaney returned to host SNL right before the election on Halloween, he unintentionally sparked some controversy thanks to a joke in his monologue, in which he called the election an “elderly man contest” and argued that no matter who ended up winning, “nothing much will change in the United States.” There was more context to the joke than that, but still, people got mad! And while reflecting on the whole thing on last night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, Mulaney said the negative reaction was warranted. “I should have said ‘I very much want one to win over the other and there will be improvements if one wins.’ I deserve the backlash. I just forgot to do it,” he told Kimmel. “I forgot to make the joke good.” Just in case there was any confusion, Mulaney made it very clear to his critics that yes, he’s a Democrat who very much supported Biden: “I like people and I’m generally happy and not deeply angry, so I’m a Democrat.”
It turns out, though, that the election joke from October was not the most controversial SNL monologue joke Mulaney told in 2020. When he hosted the show on February 29, he made a leap year joke about how Julius Caesar became such a “powerful maniac” that he was stabbed to death by senators — after which Mulaney told the SNL audience, “That would be an interesting thing if we brought that back now!” Mulaney revealed to Kimmel that that punchline earned him a rare accomplishment: a Secret Service investigation. “I guess they opened a file on me because of the joke, and I have to say: Am I stoked there’s a file open on me? Absolutely. Did I enjoy it in the moment? Not so much,” he told Kimmel. Thankfully, Mulaney has since been cleared by the Secret Service — or at least he was told he had been cleared.
Later in the interview, Kimmel also asked Mulaney “what’s going on” with the recent news that he took a gig as a writer on Late Night With Seth Meyers. Mulaney offered a pretty thorough explanation about going crazy in quarantine and how he pitched the idea to Seth Meyers, but the whole thing is best summed up by something his psychiatrist told him: “Without external structure, I don’t have any confidence in you thriving.” Thankfully, Mulaney has found that much-needed structure: rambling to Meyers about ghosts and the royal family from the security of his Julian Casablancas trench coat. We all have to find sanity where we can get it these days.
There has been one successful coup in the United States. It foreshadowed the rise of Donald Trump
In his failed efforts to overturn the 2020 election result, Donald Trump has been accused of attempting to subvert the will of the American people by instigating a coup d'etat—an act of overthrowing or usurping lawful government powers by employing...
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There has been one successful coup in the United States. It foreshadowed the rise of Donald Trump
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Tuesday November 24, 2020 · 10:05 AM EST
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White-supremacist vigilantes in Wilmington, North Carolina.
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In his failed efforts to overturn the 2020 election result, Donald Trump has been accused of attempting to subvert the will of the American people by instigating a coup d'etat—an act of overthrowing or usurping lawful government powers by employing unlawful or illegal means.
What many Americans may not realize is that Trump’s motives and actions, and those of the Republican Party enabling him had their genesis in a far earlier, successful coup executed over 120 years ago. Then, white citizens conspired against a municipal government in Wilmington, North Carolina.
It’s one of the primary reasons Republicans like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and his ilk are so vehemently angry about re-examinations of American history from a racial perspective. Cotton’s war on the devastating analysis contained within The New York Times’ praised and influential “1619 Project,” for example is not simply about what such fresh looks at “established” history reveal about the pervasiveness and longevity of racism in this country. Instead, their rage is fueled by what deeper looks at racism—and the nation’s long history of it—reveal about the character and motivations of the perpetrators themselves. Since race-based bigotry is impossible to defend from any rational standpoint, stories and myths to mask it are the only strategy.
As for those motivations, it can be deceptively easy to assume that racism is rooted simply in discrimination on the basis of skin color. At its most basic level, that is certainly what it is—it provides an explanation even a child can understand: Others are “bad” because they “look different.”
But “looking different” is just a foundational element for racism. It’s what comes next that matters, when the implications of looking different are weighed and contemplated within the lizard brain of those so predisposed. These same types of people have continually, through the centuries, made up a huge cross-section of America. From the nineteenth-century southern inheritors of the beaten Confederacy, known then as the Democrats, to what they swiftly transformed themselves into a century later during the Civil Rights era—the same people we now know as the modern Republican Party. Today’s Republicans are simply the latest heirs to the same racist legacy post-Reconstruction that brought us Black Codes, Jim Crow, and “Separate but Equal”: It’s a legacy that now manifests itself in the coordinated effort to restrict voting among Black people and anyone who isn’t white that is voter suppression.
Out of the many acts of terroristic violence perpetrated against African Americans since active hostilities concluded in the Civil War, what occurred in Wilmington over a few days in November 1898 was not unique in its lethal character. Some 60 (probably more) Black citizens were massacred at the hands of an angry mob of white supremacists. Similar incidents of racist violence had peppered the South for decades, fueling the inception of such domestic terrorist groups as the Ku Klux Klan. But the parallels with the modern goals of the Republican Party—specifically the political reasons for the massacre, coupled with what sparked the event itself—echo today in the strategy and motives underlying the Trump campaign’s efforts to delegitimize the 2020 election.
What motivated that 1898 Wilmington coup, known as the Wilmington Insurrection—or its longtime whitewashed historical descriptor, the “Wilmington Race Riot”—were the same things that motivate Trump and the GOP today: white power, white insecurity, and white fear. All of those put together led to a sustained campaign of voter intimidation that directly prefigures the GOP’s modern-day voter suppression script.
David W. Blight is Sterling professor of American History at Yale University. Writing for the New York Review of Books, Blight, in reviewing David Zucchino’s recent book, Wilmington’s Lie, explains what happened in Wilmington at the conclusion of the nineteenth century, and why it happened. In fact, it was this country’s only successful coup d’etat, an unlawful and violent revolt by white Americans seeking to usurp power through intimidating and suppressing the black vote and thereby eliminating its impact in “a multi-racial government in the South’s most progressive Black-majority city.”
It’s an ugly story, but parts of it will seem very ... familiar.
As Blight emphasizes, “The Democrats of 1898 in North Carolina had the same aims, and some of the same methods, as today’s Republican vote suppressors, scheming and spending millions of dollars to thwart the right to vote with specious claims about “voter fraud.”
Despite the North’s victory in the Civil War and despite Emancipation, North Carolina, like other Southern states in the years immediately following the war, began implementing Black Codes, which in essence reverted Blacks to near-slave status, and refused to ratify the 14th Amendment—granting African Americans citizenship and equal protection under the law. Those circumstances changed, at least on paper, when the state held a constitutional convention in 1868 under Reconstruction, granting blacks the right to vote. As Blight notes, from that day forward, Blacks were viewed by the state’s white supremacists as an existential menace, a “contagion to be wiped out.” The supremacist-dominated “Democrats” quickly regained the governorship, and began systematically imposing legal and procedural “ruses,” all with the specific intent of disqualifying Black voters.
Despite these efforts, Black citizens continued to assert and increase their political participation and power in North Carolina, particularly in the second Congressional district, which encompassed Wilmington, which had elected several Black aldermen and employed several Black policemen. The district itself also voted in its first Black representative, George H. White.
As Blight explains, this situation was unheard of and intolerable to many highly placed and powerful North Carolinians, including the owner-editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, the chair of the Democratic Party, and Alfred Waddell, another avowed white supremacist, propagandist “orator” and congressman. Waddell would, through his fiery speeches, evoke racist sentiments “that had working-class white men on their feet with their Winchester rifles held high.”
Waddell had help from a homegrown base of gun-toting racists who wore specific garb to identify themselves. They called themselves the “Red Shirts,” recognizable by their clothing, which was specifically intended to make the united racists both visible and intimidating.
Blight explains that the instigators of this concerted backlash against Black participation in democracy propagated a belief system that permeated much of the attitudes of the post-Civil War generation—that their (supposed) birthright had been threatened by freed slaves, who they believed had further “degenerated” by becoming “aggressive” toward white women. Everyone knows there has never been an excuse quite as handy and self-serving for white supremacists as defending the honor—and so-called chastity—of “their” white women. According to Blight, quoting historian Joel Williamson, “These lethal concoctions of race and sex in the minds of radical racists formed a ‘psychic core’... of a new, violent redemption.”
As Blight notes, such an association “drove political organization and white frenzy more than some [modern] readers may grasp.” Because It meant that Black men who were permitted the privilege of voting—or worse, governing—could compete for white women’s affections, a prospect which drove these insecure men into a frothing, uncontrollable rage. It was a rage that white supremacist demagogues played up to the hilt.
In Wilmington, the spark that ignited this teeming mass of ginned-up anger was a man named Alexander Lightfoot Manly. The mixed race and well-educated grandson of a former North Carolina governor and one of his enslaved women, Manly nonetheless identified as Black. He founded the City of Wilmington’s only Black daily, and in 1895 published a column challenging the prevailing idea that any sexual union between white women and Black men could only be classified as “rape.” In the summer of 1898, responding to pro-lynching rant by the wife of another white supremacist congressman, he published a fateful editorial.
As described by D.G. Martin, in a piece written for the local CBS Radio affiliate, WCHL:
As noted by Blight, Manly also embellished his language with a taunt, writing that racist whites shouldn’t expect their daughters to “remain pure” while the white men around them continued “debauching” Black women.
This type of “insolent” attitude, coming from a Black man, was absolutely stupefying to white supremacists. Quoting Zucchino, Blight emphasizes that “A Black man had mocked the myths that had sustained whites for generations, piercing the buried insecurities of Southern white men.” Responding to a frenzied push among the white population to lynch Manly and destroy his newspaper, the white supremacists who had been egging on anger against Blacks convinced white voters to express their fury on Election Day: Nov. 8, 1898.
And they did just that, establishing a template for what we now know as systematic, intimidating voter suppression.
One local white woman who kept a diary during the election noted that the whole effort was designed to intimidate Black (men) into “never vot[ing] again.” As a result, the white supremacist-inspired effort succeeded in winning the Democrats the election, and its instigators immediately instituted measures to force out the current government. The state’s media immediately praised the remarkable election results—lauding the coup and praising its leaders, while ignoring the concerted suppression and intimidation that caused it all.
Two days later, on Nov. 10, 500 white men gathered at the town’s armory and began their rampage, killing Blacks indiscriminately and destroying Black homes and Black-owned businesses. Their initial target was Alexander Manly. Upon being informed that Manly had escaped, they set fire to his newspaper office, posing for the picture that is at the top of this post. Blacks were shot in the back, many killed on their knees or in other humiliating positions. Many of the remaining Black residents fled into surrounding woods or swamps. No one was punished or prosecuted for these murders. The police chief, board of aldermen and mayor of Wilmington were summarily removed, essentially at gunpoint, and replaced by white supremacists, including Waddell—who was declared the new mayor.
As Blight notes, the impact of the Wilmington Massacre (he calls it a “pogrom”) was felt statewide, and determined the fate of North Carolina for decades to come. The coup leaders in Wilmington immediately began propagating the false story that Blacks had instigated the violence; those responsible for the actual violence went on to prominent political careers. In the state capital of Raleigh, Blight writes, “a wave of disfranchisement and other Jim Crow laws flowed from the state legislature,” and it would be decades before the state began to “unlearn” the lessons of that massacre.
And as the years passed, the mythology of a “virtuous” white supremacy and the “unworthiness” of the Black vote continued to be passed down from generation to generation, sometimes blatant, sometimes hidden, but always present, like a shadow, waiting patiently for yet another cynical demagogue to awaken and tap into the fears, grievances, and insecurities of another willing audience of pathetic, small-minded white men.
Too Early To Celebrate President Trump’s White House Exit? Not For Spike Lee, Who Only Laments: “This Guy Still Has The Nuclear Codes”
By Damon Wise
Damon Wise
editor
More Stories By Damon
December 9, 2020 12:58pm
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Hollywood campaigned hard for President Donald Trump’s ouster, but most have been holding back the spirit of celebration until he’s finally shown the door on January 20. Spike Lee is popping the cork early.
It’s been a good year for director, who took the number one slot for Netflix streamers with his acclaimed summer hit Da 5 Bloods and promptly followed it with one of the fall’s most ubiquitous festival bookings: his live performance film of David Byrne’s Broadway show American Utopia. The events of early November 7 were just the icing on the cake—the day the 2020 election was called in Joe Biden’s favor, much to the dismay of President Donald Trump. “Oh, I’m on Instagram popping a bottle of prosecco,” Lee tells Deadline in an upcoming edition of our print publication AwardsLine. “OK, it wasn’t champagne, it was handed to me. But it was a glorious day. It’s very sad that this guy is still saying that he won and trying to dismantle democracy and his gangsters, co-conspirators, won’t acknowledge it, a lot of them. I would say [his presidency] was a goddam shame and history is not going to be very kind to Agent Orange.”
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'Da 5 Bloods': Read The Screenplay For Spike Lee's Vietnam War Tale
Lee’s disdain for Trump should be well documented by now: Trump makes a grim cameo at the incendiary climax of Lee’s 2018 Oscar-winner BlacKkKlansman and is witheringly referred to as “President Bone Spurs” in Da 5 Bloods. Joking aside, however, Lee warns that it’s still too soon to be complacent about the president’s defeat.
“Look, here’s the thing,” he says. “No matter how bad we talk about Agent Orange, it’s even a more condemning comment on Americans as a country that 70 million people voted for that guy. That’s a comment on an America that is OK with the president saying all Mexicans are rapists, murderers and drug dealers. That’s 70 million people who believe it’s OK if you separate mothers from their newly born sons and daughters, many still breastfeeding, and not putting anything in place that could reconnect parent with child. There are presently over 500 children where this current administration cannot find their parents. The UN should look into that shit. That’s one of the highest immoral acts: separating mother from infant child. Who does that? Nazis? Slave owners? That’s fuckin’ shameful. That’s a fuckin’ disgrace, and a terrible mark on American democracy.”
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Lee says that he sees this alarming trend as inevitable, the long-term outcome of Trump’s divisive and inflammatory policies, which predate his 2016 election win by some years. “It’s my belief, and a lot of other people’s belief, that what you’ve seen with the rise of Agent Orange was a reaction, a direct reaction to eight years of Obama—Agent Orange, who started that lie from the get-go that my dear brother, number 44, Barack Hussein Obama was not an American citizen. People forget about that, man. That was a big thing, that birther thing. People are forgetting about that. The election, this recent election, is a direct reaction to the last years of holy hell with Agent Orange.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lee doesn’t see the transition being handled peacefully. “This guy is still in office and he still has the nuclear codes,” he says, “and it’s highly conceivable that he’s going to start another war. This guy is not going to go out with a whimper, he’s going to go out with a bang. I’m a realist. I just hope that the generals gave him a fake code.” He laughs uproariously. “Gave him the bogus, fugazi numbers. Gave him numbers he can remember, like, one, two, three, four.”
Being a realist, however, doesn’t make him a pessimist—asked for his hopes for the new year, he replies, “That the world becomes humane. That everybody, those who want to, takes the vaccine, and we learn from the mistakes that were made during this pandemic.” He also enthuses about his next project: a musical about Viagra, how it was invented and how it came to market. “It’s a great story. I’ve been wanting to do a musical for a long time, I just didn’t have the idea, with the exception of making my second film School Daze [1988] into a Broadway musical. So when the script was brought to my attention, it was the right script at the right time. I mean, I know I’ve had musical elements—there’s a great musicality—in my films. I’m talking about a straight-up all-singing all-dancing musical. God willing, that’s what this next film is going to be.”
By Damon Wise
Damon Wise
editor
More Stories By Damon
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December 9, 2020 12:58pm
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Hollywood campaigned hard for President Donald Trump’s ouster, but most have been holding back the spirit of celebration until he’s finally shown the door on January 20. Spike Lee is popping the cork early.
It’s been a good year for director, who took the number one slot for Netflix streamers with his acclaimed summer hit Da 5 Bloods and promptly followed it with one of the fall’s most ubiquitous festival bookings: his live performance film of David Byrne’s Broadway show American Utopia. The events of early November 7 were just the icing on the cake—the day the 2020 election was called in Joe Biden’s favor, much to the dismay of President Donald Trump. “Oh, I’m on Instagram popping a bottle of prosecco,” Lee tells Deadline in an upcoming edition of our print publication AwardsLine. “OK, it wasn’t champagne, it was handed to me. But it was a glorious day. It’s very sad that this guy is still saying that he won and trying to dismantle democracy and his gangsters, co-conspirators, won’t acknowledge it, a lot of them. I would say [his presidency] was a goddam shame and history is not going to be very kind to Agent Orange.”
ADVERTISEMENT
SCROLL TO CONTINUE READING
RELATED STORY
'Da 5 Bloods': Read The Screenplay For Spike Lee's Vietnam War Tale
Lee’s disdain for Trump should be well documented by now: Trump makes a grim cameo at the incendiary climax of Lee’s 2018 Oscar-winner BlacKkKlansman and is witheringly referred to as “President Bone Spurs” in Da 5 Bloods. Joking aside, however, Lee warns that it’s still too soon to be complacent about the president’s defeat.
“Look, here’s the thing,” he says. “No matter how bad we talk about Agent Orange, it’s even a more condemning comment on Americans as a country that 70 million people voted for that guy. That’s a comment on an America that is OK with the president saying all Mexicans are rapists, murderers and drug dealers. That’s 70 million people who believe it’s OK if you separate mothers from their newly born sons and daughters, many still breastfeeding, and not putting anything in place that could reconnect parent with child. There are presently over 500 children where this current administration cannot find their parents. The UN should look into that shit. That’s one of the highest immoral acts: separating mother from infant child. Who does that? Nazis? Slave owners? That’s fuckin’ shameful. That’s a fuckin’ disgrace, and a terrible mark on American democracy.”
ADVERTISEMENT
SCROLL TO CONTINUE READING
Lee says that he sees this alarming trend as inevitable, the long-term outcome of Trump’s divisive and inflammatory policies, which predate his 2016 election win by some years. “It’s my belief, and a lot of other people’s belief, that what you’ve seen with the rise of Agent Orange was a reaction, a direct reaction to eight years of Obama—Agent Orange, who started that lie from the get-go that my dear brother, number 44, Barack Hussein Obama was not an American citizen. People forget about that, man. That was a big thing, that birther thing. People are forgetting about that. The election, this recent election, is a direct reaction to the last years of holy hell with Agent Orange.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lee doesn’t see the transition being handled peacefully. “This guy is still in office and he still has the nuclear codes,” he says, “and it’s highly conceivable that he’s going to start another war. This guy is not going to go out with a whimper, he’s going to go out with a bang. I’m a realist. I just hope that the generals gave him a fake code.” He laughs uproariously. “Gave him the bogus, fugazi numbers. Gave him numbers he can remember, like, one, two, three, four.”
Being a realist, however, doesn’t make him a pessimist—asked for his hopes for the new year, he replies, “That the world becomes humane. That everybody, those who want to, takes the vaccine, and we learn from the mistakes that were made during this pandemic.” He also enthuses about his next project: a musical about Viagra, how it was invented and how it came to market. “It’s a great story. I’ve been wanting to do a musical for a long time, I just didn’t have the idea, with the exception of making my second film School Daze [1988] into a Broadway musical. So when the script was brought to my attention, it was the right script at the right time. I mean, I know I’ve had musical elements—there’s a great musicality—in my films. I’m talking about a straight-up all-singing all-dancing musical. God willing, that’s what this next film is going to be.”
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Why the Texas lawsuit to overturn the 2020 election may be the most outlandish effort yet
Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on Dec. 10 urged the Supreme Court to reject a lawsuit filed by Texas to overturn the results of the election. (Reuters)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/amber-phillips/
By
Amber Phillips
Dec. 10, 2020 at 4:16 p.m. EST
This is a lawsuit that seems both like President Trump’s last major attempt to get the courts to overturn his loss — and like it’s destined to flop. That’s the consensus of numerous legal experts on a recently filed lawsuit by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) alleging rampant fraud in four states that numerous other court cases have so far failed to prove.
Paxton alleges “the 2020 election suffered from significant and unconstitutional irregularities” in four states that swung from President Trump in 2016 to President-elect Joe Biden in 2020: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia.
And he asks the Supreme Court to allow state legislatures to pick electors in those states instead. That part of the equation is now familiar, given Trump is also trying to pressure state lawmakers to overturn election results.
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The Washington Post reports that Trump has become enamored with the suit. He, through a personal lawyer rather than the administration, has joined in. He talks to his advisers about it; he’s tweeted about it. Republican attorneys general from 17 other states have already joined in.
Not all Republicans, however, are on board. Sen Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), an occasional Trump critic, singled out Paxton’s own legal troubles back home and said this, in part, in a statement about the lawsuit: “It looks like a fella begging for a pardon filed a PR stunt.” (Paxton is facing indictment on securities fraud charges and says he has not discussed a pardon with the White House).
But more than 100 House Republicans signed on to a brief supporting the effort.
All these Republicans are setting themselves up for a quick failure, legal experts who have spoken to The Fix and other Post reporters say.
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It’s a legitimate question what right Texas even has to bring such a lawsuit against other states. (Lawsuits between states are rare.) The Supreme Court could dismiss it out of hand for that reason, if it offers a reason at all.
And then you get into the substance of it, which is more like a Newsmax reel than actual legal arguments, said Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola Law School and host of the legal podcast “Passing Judgment.”
“It’s all of the Hail Mary pass lawsuits strung together, in the erroneous hope that somehow lining them all up will make them look more impressive,” she said. “It’s procedurally defective. It’s substantially defective. And I think the Supreme Court will have not only no appetite for it, but it will actively nauseate them.”
Given the court this week already quickly threw out another lawsuit to overturn results in Pennsylvania, it’s more likely than not that the court will do the same here, even with three Trump appointees on the court.
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Here are the most spectacular allegations in the lawsuit, which could be Trump’s last chance to try to use the courts to turn his loss into a win.
The allegation: These states expanded absentee ballot use in a pandemic
Paxton argues that it was unconstitutional for state election officials, like secretaries of state, to expand mail voting, because the legislatures get to decide how to run elections. Despite there being no evidence that mail-voting leads to statistically significant fraud, he says that these states changed or modified their rules to allow more voting by mail due to the pandemic opened the door to fraud. And he uses hyperbole to make his point: “Absentee and mail-in voting are the primary opportunities for unlawful ballots to be cast,” he says, alleging that “created a massive opportunity for fraud.” (It’s true that in voting by mail, the ballot is filled out in private, which opens up more potential avenues for fraud. There’s just no evidence it actually happens. But well before 2020, five states conducted their elections by mail for years, with no evidence there was large-scale fraud.)
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Paxton ignores that Wisconsin and Michigan already had programs set up to vote by mail before the pandemic. Wisconsin has allowed people to vote absentee without an excuse since 2000.
The allegation: These states enforced their rules about where poll workers could watch counting
Paxton strings together half a dozen examples he says demonstrate “rampant lawlessness” in the vote-counting process: poll workers not allowed to watch ballot counting (because election officials had said they were violating covid-19 restrictions); “suitcases full of ballots being pulled out from underneath tables after poll watchers were told to leave”; and he dips his toe into the conspiracy theory that Dominion voting machines might not have worked as they were supposed to.
Much of that evidence has been reviewed and thrown out by various courts. And even if some poll workers were asked to leave, does that mean tens of thousands of votes for Trump were counted for Biden? In Pennsylvania, Trump’s lawyers were forced to admit they did have poll workers in the room watching counted ballots, even as they tried to file a lawsuit arguing the opposite.
The allegation: That states counted votes as they came in
Paxton pulls an accusation straight out of Trump’s Twitter feed — not even something Trump’s lawyers dared make in a courtroom — that it was odd that Biden took late-night leads in states after Trump initially was leading.
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We’ve explained this. Trump’s voters, following his own lead, largely voted in person. In-person votes are quicker for officials to count than mailed ballots. Biden’s voters largely voted by mail. Those take more time to tally. So as election officials worked throughout the night, they started adding the mailed votes to the vote count in their states. Paxton is literally arguing that the Supreme Court overturn an election because states counted their votes. (In a separate part of the lawsuit, he even acknowledges the partisan difference in how people voted: “Democrat voters voted by mail at two to three times the rate of Republicans.”)
The Trump team throws in the towel on proving voter fraud
The allegation: That Biden did better in 2020 than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 in these states
Paxton alleges that “the statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in these four states collectively is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000.” It’s unclear, even in the lawsuit, where and how he got that number, says The Post’s Philip Bump.
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And we’ve been over the “How could Biden have done better than Clinton?” claim, too. It’s a derivative of the argument that Biden didn’t perform well compared to Hillary Clinton in cities except for four big ones in states he happened to win — Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia.
The Fix’s Aaron Blake calls this allegation “the epitome of bad faith, poor research and our inability to rid our political discourse of a patent falsehood.”
Biden did get more votes than Clinton in many metro areas. And he actually did worse than Clinton in Philadelphia.
Biden won these four swing states not by massive fraud, but by learning the lessons from Clinton’s 2016 campaign and not being overconfident about polling showing him doing well in these states. He campaigned successfully to take away Trump’s support particularly in suburban areas.
Bottom line: Biden got more votes where he needed to win the electoral college, just like Trump did in 2016.
Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on Dec. 10 urged the Supreme Court to reject a lawsuit filed by Texas to overturn the results of the election. (Reuters)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/amber-phillips/
By
Amber Phillips
Dec. 10, 2020 at 4:16 p.m. EST
This is a lawsuit that seems both like President Trump’s last major attempt to get the courts to overturn his loss — and like it’s destined to flop. That’s the consensus of numerous legal experts on a recently filed lawsuit by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) alleging rampant fraud in four states that numerous other court cases have so far failed to prove.
Paxton alleges “the 2020 election suffered from significant and unconstitutional irregularities” in four states that swung from President Trump in 2016 to President-elect Joe Biden in 2020: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia.
And he asks the Supreme Court to allow state legislatures to pick electors in those states instead. That part of the equation is now familiar, given Trump is also trying to pressure state lawmakers to overturn election results.
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The Washington Post reports that Trump has become enamored with the suit. He, through a personal lawyer rather than the administration, has joined in. He talks to his advisers about it; he’s tweeted about it. Republican attorneys general from 17 other states have already joined in.
Not all Republicans, however, are on board. Sen Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), an occasional Trump critic, singled out Paxton’s own legal troubles back home and said this, in part, in a statement about the lawsuit: “It looks like a fella begging for a pardon filed a PR stunt.” (Paxton is facing indictment on securities fraud charges and says he has not discussed a pardon with the White House).
But more than 100 House Republicans signed on to a brief supporting the effort.
All these Republicans are setting themselves up for a quick failure, legal experts who have spoken to The Fix and other Post reporters say.
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It’s a legitimate question what right Texas even has to bring such a lawsuit against other states. (Lawsuits between states are rare.) The Supreme Court could dismiss it out of hand for that reason, if it offers a reason at all.
And then you get into the substance of it, which is more like a Newsmax reel than actual legal arguments, said Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola Law School and host of the legal podcast “Passing Judgment.”
“It’s all of the Hail Mary pass lawsuits strung together, in the erroneous hope that somehow lining them all up will make them look more impressive,” she said. “It’s procedurally defective. It’s substantially defective. And I think the Supreme Court will have not only no appetite for it, but it will actively nauseate them.”
Given the court this week already quickly threw out another lawsuit to overturn results in Pennsylvania, it’s more likely than not that the court will do the same here, even with three Trump appointees on the court.
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Here are the most spectacular allegations in the lawsuit, which could be Trump’s last chance to try to use the courts to turn his loss into a win.
The allegation: These states expanded absentee ballot use in a pandemic
Paxton argues that it was unconstitutional for state election officials, like secretaries of state, to expand mail voting, because the legislatures get to decide how to run elections. Despite there being no evidence that mail-voting leads to statistically significant fraud, he says that these states changed or modified their rules to allow more voting by mail due to the pandemic opened the door to fraud. And he uses hyperbole to make his point: “Absentee and mail-in voting are the primary opportunities for unlawful ballots to be cast,” he says, alleging that “created a massive opportunity for fraud.” (It’s true that in voting by mail, the ballot is filled out in private, which opens up more potential avenues for fraud. There’s just no evidence it actually happens. But well before 2020, five states conducted their elections by mail for years, with no evidence there was large-scale fraud.)
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Paxton ignores that Wisconsin and Michigan already had programs set up to vote by mail before the pandemic. Wisconsin has allowed people to vote absentee without an excuse since 2000.
The allegation: These states enforced their rules about where poll workers could watch counting
Paxton strings together half a dozen examples he says demonstrate “rampant lawlessness” in the vote-counting process: poll workers not allowed to watch ballot counting (because election officials had said they were violating covid-19 restrictions); “suitcases full of ballots being pulled out from underneath tables after poll watchers were told to leave”; and he dips his toe into the conspiracy theory that Dominion voting machines might not have worked as they were supposed to.
Much of that evidence has been reviewed and thrown out by various courts. And even if some poll workers were asked to leave, does that mean tens of thousands of votes for Trump were counted for Biden? In Pennsylvania, Trump’s lawyers were forced to admit they did have poll workers in the room watching counted ballots, even as they tried to file a lawsuit arguing the opposite.
The allegation: That states counted votes as they came in
Paxton pulls an accusation straight out of Trump’s Twitter feed — not even something Trump’s lawyers dared make in a courtroom — that it was odd that Biden took late-night leads in states after Trump initially was leading.
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We’ve explained this. Trump’s voters, following his own lead, largely voted in person. In-person votes are quicker for officials to count than mailed ballots. Biden’s voters largely voted by mail. Those take more time to tally. So as election officials worked throughout the night, they started adding the mailed votes to the vote count in their states. Paxton is literally arguing that the Supreme Court overturn an election because states counted their votes. (In a separate part of the lawsuit, he even acknowledges the partisan difference in how people voted: “Democrat voters voted by mail at two to three times the rate of Republicans.”)
The Trump team throws in the towel on proving voter fraud
The allegation: That Biden did better in 2020 than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 in these states
Paxton alleges that “the statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in these four states collectively is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000.” It’s unclear, even in the lawsuit, where and how he got that number, says The Post’s Philip Bump.
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And we’ve been over the “How could Biden have done better than Clinton?” claim, too. It’s a derivative of the argument that Biden didn’t perform well compared to Hillary Clinton in cities except for four big ones in states he happened to win — Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia.
The Fix’s Aaron Blake calls this allegation “the epitome of bad faith, poor research and our inability to rid our political discourse of a patent falsehood.”
Biden did get more votes than Clinton in many metro areas. And he actually did worse than Clinton in Philadelphia.
Biden won these four swing states not by massive fraud, but by learning the lessons from Clinton’s 2016 campaign and not being overconfident about polling showing him doing well in these states. He campaigned successfully to take away Trump’s support particularly in suburban areas.
Bottom line: Biden got more votes where he needed to win the electoral college, just like Trump did in 2016.
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