The White House late Friday fired the independent inspectors general of at least 14 major federal agencies in a purge that could clear the way for President Donald Trump to install loyalists in the crucial role of identifying fraud, waste and abuse in the government.
The inspectors general were notified by emails from the White House personnel director that they had been terminated immediately, according to people familiar with the actions, who like others in this report spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private messages.
The dismissals appeared to violate federal law, which requires Congress to receive 30 days’ notice of any intent to fire a Senate-confirmed inspector general.
Oversight of some of the government’s largest agencies was affected: the departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Labor, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Energy, Commerce, and Agriculture, as well asthe Environmental Protection Agency, Small Business Administration and the Social Security Administration….
Most of those dismissed were Trump appointees from his first term, which stunned the watchdog community.One prominent inspector general survived the purge — Michael Horowitz at the Justice Department, an appointee of President Barack Obama who has issued reports critical of both the Biden administration and Trump’s first administration.
Category Archives: authoritarian threats in US
“Many Jan. 6 Rioters Pardoned by Trump Attacked Police, Videos Show”
After Daniel Rodriguez pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer during the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021, he was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison by a federal judge who called him a “one-man army of hate.”
Two other men, Albuquerque Cosper Head and Kyle J. Young, were sentenced to more than seven years for their parts in the assault on the officer, Michael Fanone.
On Monday, President Trump pardoned all three of them, lumping them together with nearly 1,600 other people who had been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 riot and who he suggested had been victimized by a politicized prosecution. His grant of clemency comes despite a wealth of evidence about their crimes, including videos used against them by the Justice Department.
Some of the videos document the gruesome moment when Officer Fanone, who rushed to defend the Capitol on his day off, was dragged into the crowd by Mr. Head, beaten by Mr. Young and then attacked with a stun gun by Mr. Rodriguez.
Video from Officer Fanone’s body camera shows Mr. Rodriguez driving the stun gun into Officer Fanone’s neck, causing him to scream. Officer Fanone, who has since left the police force, sustained grievous injuries that day and suffered a heart attack.
Even some close allies of Mr. Trump had opposed granting clemency to those rioters found guilty of violent crimes, especially the more than 600 who were convicted of assaulting or resisting police officers. Of those defendants, nearly 175 used a dangerous or deadly weapon, prosecutors say.
Four years later, the violence they committed is still shocking — and the facts of what happened are right there in the images, many of them now iconic.
Here are some of the most egregious acts of violence that took place during the Capitol attack, as seen in videos….
“A Trump Executive Order Sets Out What Could Be a Road Map for Retribution”
Since his election victory, President Trump has said he would not seek retribution against his perceived enemies. “I’m not looking to go into the past,” he said last month on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Retribution will be through success.”
But in an executive order he signed on Monday night, Mr. Trump made clear that he has every intention to seek out and possibly punish government officials in the Justice Department and America’s intelligence agencies as a way to “correct past misconduct” against him and his supporters.
It would be justice, the order said, against officials from the Biden administration who carried out an “unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.”
This is what retribution could look like during the second Trump presidency: payback dressed up in the language of victimhood.
That executive order, titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” came amid a blizzard of other actions on Monday evening.
They included a highly unusual separate order that stripped the security clearances of dozens of former intelligence officials whom Mr. Trump has viewed as his political enemies. Another order gave the White House authority to grant immediate top-secret security clearance to any official for up to six months, circumventing the traditional background process managed by the F.B.I. and the intelligence community.
Taken together, these actions reveal the beginnings of a far more methodical approach by Mr. Trump to root out his perceived enemies within the government compared with his first term. Mr. Trump even used his Inaugural Address to raise the issue, saying that the scales of justice would be “rebalanced” after “the vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government.”
Charles Kupperman, a deputy national security adviser to Mr. Trump during his first term, said he viewed the executive order as the first step in an effort that could result in criminal investigations.
“It looks like the beginning of a retribution campaign because it’s backward looking,” Mr. Kupperman said. “He’s still grappling with the past four years, and this is not the right outlet for him to play this out. It plays to his MAGA base, but it’s not the right one for the country.”…
“There’s reason to be worried about the plethora of pardons from Trump and Biden”
Kyle Cheney for Politico:
Over a span of 12 hours, two presidents went on a clemency spree.
The extraordinary wave of pardons Monday — from Joe Biden as he left the White House and from Donald Trump as soon as he returned to it — demonstrate the potency of the Constitution’s pardon power, but also expose its perils, constitutional scholars say.
The pardon power — a relic of English monarchs that was adopted by America’s founders as a way to extend grace and mercy in exceptional circumstances — can’t be checked by Congress or the courts. And in a country gripped by political rancor, that power is increasingly prone to abuse, experts say.
Both presidents, on the same day, stretched the pardon power to new, questionable frontiers in wildly different ways.
“It was perhaps a constitutional mistake to give the president this one unchecked, unilateral power,” said Mark Rozell, a George Mason University expert on presidential power. “Madison believed that any power granted without institutional checks would be abused. The recent exercises of the pardon power by two presidents proves he was right.”
Biden kicked off the pardon binge when he granted preemptive clemency to political allies, including Gen. Mark Milley, a former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Covid czar Anthony Fauci, members of the Jan. 6 committee and, minutes before departing the White House, his own siblings and their spouses. In each case, Biden described them as potential targets of a vengeful Trump administration.
Trump, on the other hand, delivered massive blanket clemency to virtually all of the roughly 1,600 people who have been prosecuted in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, including hundreds of people who assaulted police and a dozen convicted of a sedition plot….
“Beneath a veneer of calm, Trump’s inauguration holds warning signs for US democracy”
Nick Riccardi for AP:
All the living former presidents were there and the outgoing president amicably greeted his successor, who gave a speech about the country’s bright future and who left to the blare of a brass band.
At first glance, President Donald Trump’s second inauguration seemed like a continuation of the country’s nearly 250-year-long tradition of peaceful transfers of power, essential to its democracy. And there was much to celebrate: Trump won a free and fair election last fall, and his supporters hope he will be able to fix problems at the border, end the war in Ukraine and get inflation under control.
Still, on Monday, the warning signs were clear…..
After giving a speech pledging that “never again” would the government “persecute political opponents,” Trump then gave a second, impromptu address to a crowd of supporters. The president lamented that his inaugural address had been sanitized, said he would shortly pardon the Jan. 6 rioters and fumed at last-minute preemptive pardons issued by outgoing President Joe Biden to the members of the congressional committee that investigated the attack.
“I did have a couple of things to say that were extremely controversial,” Trump told the crowd in the Capitol’s Emancipation Hall. It was the same space that had filled with rows of National Guard troops sleeping on the hard floors for weeks in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack.
Hours later, Trump followed through on a campaign promise to pardon those involved in the attack — some 1,500 of his supporters, including ones who had assaulted police officers. That came after an extraordinary pardon issued by Biden — announced by the White House as he greeted Trump at the inaugural ceremony — for several members of Biden’s extended family. The 11th hour Biden pardons were a response to Trump’s continual threats to carry out a campaign of retribution against his political opponents.
The head-spinning developments of Trump’s first day back in power suggested there will be no lack of controversy during his second term.
“The form is normal,” Rick Hasen, a University of California, Los Angeles law professor, said of Trump’s inaugural. “The substance is not.”
Hasen said the pardons of those who tried to violently overturn the results of the 2020 election were particularly worrying.
“It’s harder to imagine a greater affront to the rule of law than to give pardons to those who tried to overthrow the government,” he said.
Andy Craig, a fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, was aghast that Trump received the full, respectful pomp and circumstance of a peaceful transition that he tried to deny Biden. “This is a surreal situation in a lot of ways and I get there is no rulebook to follow, but I think people are frustrated, rightly so, with a tone deaf ‘everything is normal’ approach,” Craig said…
“Trump Grants Sweeping Clemency to All Jan. 6 Rioters”
It is hard to know what to even say about this affront to the rule of law and a reversing of the convictions of those who sought to overturn the results of a fair and legitimate election in 2020. Trump’s actions are as mind boggling and audacious as they are dangerous for our democracy and what it portends for the safety of future elections and peaceful transitions of power. Some coverage:
President Donald J. Trump, in one of his first official acts, issued a sweeping grant of clemency on Monday to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, issuing pardons to most of the defendants and commuting the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia, most of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
Mr. Trump’s moves amounted to an extraordinary reversal for rioters accused of both low-level, nonviolent offenses and for those who had assaulted police officers.
And they effectively erased years of efforts by federal investigators to seek accountability for the mob assault on the peaceful transfer of presidential power after Mr. Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. As part of his pardon order, Mr. Trump also directed the Justice Department to dismiss “all pending indictments” that remained against people facing charges for Jan. 6.
Sitting in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump said he hoped that many of the defendants could be released from prison as early as tonight.
“They’ve already been in jail for a long time,” he said. “These people have been destroyed.”
The pardons Mr. Trump issued — “full, complete and unconditional,” he wrote — will touch the lives of about 1,000 defendants accused of misdemeanors like disorderly conduct, breaching the Capitol’s restricted grounds and trespassing at the building. Many of these rioters have served only days, weeks or months in prison — if any time at all.
The pardons will also wipe the slate clean for violent offenders who went after the police on Jan. 6 with baseball bats, two-by-fours and bear spray and are serving prison terms, in some cases of more than a decade.
Moreover, Mr. Trump pardoned Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, who was serving a 22-year prison term after being convicted at trial of seditious conspiracy — a crime that requires prosecutors to prove that a defendant used violent force against the government.
Mr. Trump’s actions drew an immediate firestorm of criticism, not least from some of the investigators who had worked on Jan. 6 cases.
“These pardons suggest that if you commit acts of violence, as long as you do so on behalf of a politically powerful person you may be able to escape consequences,” said Alexis Loeb, a former federal prosecutor who personally supervised many riot cases. “They undermine — and are a blow to — the sacrifice of all the officers who put themselves in the face of harm to protect democracy on Jan. 6.”
In a separate move, Mr. Trump commuted the prison sentences of five other Proud Boys, some of whom had been convicted at trial with Mr. Tarrio. He also commuted the sentences of Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, and eight of his subordinates.
Altogether, the commutations erased more than 100 years of prison time for the 14 defendants, almost all of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy….
More:
Trump Crushes Justice Department’s Biggest Investigation In an Instant
The effort to prosecute the violent mob that ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and the leaders of far-right groups who egged them on, represented the biggest and most logistically complex investigation in the history of the Justice Department.
President Donald J. Trump erased it in an instant on Inauguration Day.
Mr. Trump has denounced the Jan. 6 prosecutions as part of a Democratic witch hunt. In reality, they were initiated and overseen by his handpicked U.S. attorney in Washington and the F.B.I. director. They had the support of many Republicans, including Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who said, “Those who planned and participated in the violence that day should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Mr. Trump’s decision to offer full pardons to nearly all of the almost 1,600 rioters and rally organizers implicated in the breach of the Capitol was expected. Still, it sent a shock wave among current and former prosecutors who believe his release of prisoners, whom he calls “hostages,” undermines the rule of law.
“It’s a gross misuse of the pardon power, and says that Trump is willing to meddle in a process that helped strengthen the rule of law,” said Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney in Alabama during the Obama administration.
Trump Commutes Sentence of Stewart Rhodes, Founder of Oath Keepers Militia
When Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia, appeared in court in 2023 to be sentenced on sedition charges stemming from the storming of the Capitol, he angrily declared himself a “political prisoner,” echoing language that President Trump has also used to describe those involved with the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
And on Monday, when Mr. Trump commuted Mr. Rhodes’ 18-year prison term to time served, he effectively validated the far-right leader’s belief that his criminal prosecution was a kind of political persecution, as he had defiantly claimed.
Mr. Rhodes, who spent more than a decade running the Oath Keepers before his arrest in 2022, was in the Federal Correctional Institute in Cumberland, Md., when his grant of clemency was handed down. It remained unclear when he might be freed.
While Mr. Rhodes never entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, prosecutors said he oversaw a large contingent of Oath Keepers as they concocted “a plan for an armed rebellion to shatter a bedrock of democracy” — the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. Prosecutors also said he was on the Capitol grounds as military-style “stacks” of his militia’s members made their way into the building and other armed members stood ready as a “quick reaction force” at a hotel in Virginia in case things went wrong.
Ex-Proud Boys Leader, Pardoned by Trump, Helped Initiate Capitol Riot
By including Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, in his extraordinary pardons for the events of Jan. 6, 2021, President Trump granted clemency on Monday to a man whom prosecutors have described as a savvy, street-fighting extremist who helped his compatriots in “Trump’s army” initiate an assault on the Capitol.
Mr. Tarrio, 42, was serving a 22-year prison term after being convicted of seditious conspiracy and other felonies for his role in the Capitol attack. His was the longest sentence handed down against any of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with Jan. 6.
A representative for Mr. Tarrio said he had been released from a federal prison in Louisiana and was expected to return to Miami, his hometown, on Tuesday afternoon.
Even before Jan. 6, Mr. Tarrio was among the best-known far-right figures in the country, having been involved in violent protests going back to the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017. Rarely seen without his sunglasses and baseball cap, he took control of the Proud Boys the next year after the group’s founder, Gavin McInnes, stepped aside.
But Mr. Tarrio is arguably better known for the part he played in supporting Mr. Trump during the 2020 election — and in the chaotic months after he lost the race. The Proud Boys were thrust into the heart of that campaign two months before Election Day when Mr. Trump, at one of the presidential debates, called out the group by name, telling its members to “stand back and stand by.”
Mr. Tarrio responded immediately on social media, “Standing by, sir.”
In December of that year, Mr. Tarrio responded to a message that Mr. Trump himself posted on social media, summoning his supporters to Washington on Jan. 6 for what he said would be a “wild” protest. The day after, Mr. Tarrio established a crew of “hand-selected members” for the rally, court papers said, known within the Proud Boys as the Ministry of Self-Defense.
“For Those Deemed Trump’s Enemies, a Time of Anxiety and Fear”
As Donald J. Trump returns to office, the critics, prosecutors and perceived enemies who sought to hold him accountable and banish him from American political life are now facing, with considerable trepidation, a president who is assuming power having vowed to exact vengeance.
Mr. Trump has promised to investigate and punish adversaries, especially those involved in his four prosecutions and the congressional investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Those threats, along with his stated intention to grant clemency to at least some of those who carried out the Jan. 6 assault, have many in Washington and elsewhere on edge, fearing not just government action against them but that the telegraphing of his wishes has created an environment of unpredictable, free-range retribution by his supporters.
Michael Fanone, a former police officer who was among those attacked by the pro-Trump crowd on Jan. 6, 2021, has been an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump. He said he feared that the violence and threats that have already been directed at him and his family — including his mother — will only get worse after Mr. Trump returns to office….
“Biden warns of the rise of a new American ‘oligarchy'”
WaPo:
President Joe Biden used his final address from the Oval Office to deliver a somber warning about the threat posed by the “dangerous concentration of power” in the hands of wealthy and well-connected individuals, a thinly veiled reference to billionaire technology executives who have been increasingly signaling their desire to work closely with President-elect Donald Trump.
“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” Biden said during his farewell speech, days before he steps down from a four-year presidency and a lifetime in public office. “We see the consequences all across America, and we’ve seen it before.”
Biden likened the current crop of tech moguls to the “robber barons” of the 19th century, men like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. Recalling President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address warning about the military-industrial complex, Biden decried a “tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers to our country.”…
Tech executives have been visiting and dining with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate and donating millions to his inaugural committee. Tech moguls Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are planning to attend Trump’s inauguration Monday, with prime seating on the dais that illustrates deepening ties between the nation’s top technology leaders and the incoming administration. (Bezos, the founder of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)…
“‘I Think Things Are Going to Be Bad, Really Bad’: The US Military Debates Possible Deployment on US Soil Under Trump”
Michael Hirsh for Politico Magazine:
According to nearly a dozen retired officers and current military lawyers, as well as scholars who teach at West Point and Annapolis, an intense if quiet debate is underway inside the U.S. military community about what orders it would be obliged to obey if President-elect Donald Trump decides to follow through on his previous warnings that he might deploy troops against what he deems domestic threats, including political enemies, dissenters and immigrants.
On Nov. 18, two weeks after the election, Trump confirmed he plans to declare a national emergency and use the military for the mass deportations of illegal immigrants.One fear is that domestic deployment of active-duty troops could lead to bloodshed given that the regular military is mainly trained to shoot at and kill foreign enemies. The only way to prevent that is establishing clear “rules of engagement” for domestic deployments that outline how much force troops can use — especially considering constitutional restraints protecting U.S. citizens and residents — against what kinds of people in what kinds of situations. And establishing those new rules would require a lot more training, in the view of many in the military community….
“Republicans Saved Democracy Once. Will They Do It Again?”
Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Joseph Wright and Erica Frantz in POLITICO Magazine:
n the coming weeks and months, after Donald Trump takes the oath of office for the second time, Democrats are going to take every opportunity to mobilize voters and coordinate with civil society groups to thwart anti-democratic actions and win power back. Elected Democrats will vote against Trump’s proposed legislation and try to block his executive orders in court. That, after all, is what opposition parties and civil societies are supposed to do.
But this time it’s Republicans who will bear primary responsibility for protecting U.S. democracy.
We’ve studied democratic erosion in countries around the world, and our research has found that the most important bulwark against an elected leader undermining democracy doesn’t come from opposition parties or pro-democracy activists. It comes from the ruling party — and particularly the powerful elites in that party — and their efforts to constrain their own leader.
The danger to democracy is particularly acute in political systems led by parties where leaders wield disproportionate influence relative to the political parties that back them — as is now the case in the Republican Party. Our data on all democratically elected leaders around the globe in the 30 years since the end of the Cold War show that where leaders dominate the parties they lead, the chances of democratic backsliding increase, whether it’s through gradual democratic decay or a rapid collapse.
In the United States, we tend to assume that constitutional checks and balances, including the powers vested in Congress or the Supreme Court, play the central role in constraining a rogue executive and any power grab they might attempt. But we’ve found that institutions can do so only if the members of the president’s party inside those institutions are willing to use their authority in the face of executive abuses or overreach….
“Experts: Trump’s use of consumer fraud law to sue Des Moines Register unlikely to succeed”
Legal experts representing different ends of the political spectrum say the recent lawsuit by President-elect Donald Trump against the Des Moines Register is based on a strained interpretation of Iowa law and is unlikely to find success in court.
Trump filed suit Dec. 16 against the Register, its parent company Gannett and longtime Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, alleging violations of the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act. The complaint centers on a poll published by the Register in early November that understated Trump’s support, showing Vice President Kamala Harris with a 3-point lead over Trump in Iowa just days before Trump went on to win the state by 13 points.
Trump’s suit alleges the poll was fraudulent and an attempt at election interference. The Register has said it stands by its work.
Several experts who have reviewed Trump’s petition say his legal theory is a stretch. Samantha Barbas, a professor and First Amendment expert with the University of Iowa College of Law, said Iowa’s consumer fraud law is a poor fit for Trump’s complaint.
The Iowa Consumer Fraud Act “is meant to protect people who buy goods or services, not people who consume news and other sorts of information,” Barbas said. “So this is completely far-fetched, in my opinion, and other than Trump’s lawsuit here, and he has a similar case going on in Texas, I’m not aware of parties that have used a consumer fraud statute to punish or sue newspapers for information they don’t like.”…
Eugene Volokh, a UCLA professor and fellow with the free market-oriented Hoover Institution, wrote Dec. 18 for the libertarian-leaning publication Reason that “the First Amendment generally bars states from imposing liability for misleading or even outright false political speech, including in commercially distributed newspapers — and especially for predictive and evaluative judgments of the sort inherent in estimating public sentiment about a candidate.”
Volokh cited a 2020 case from Washington state courts, where a group sued Fox News alleging that its statements by its show hosts, including Sean Hannity, dismissing or minimizing the COVID-19 pandemic violated that state’s consumer protection laws. Both the district judge and appellate courts in Washington rejected that claim, finding that statements of opinion on a topic of public concern are core First Amendment-protected speech.“There are some historically recognized exceptions to First Amendment protection for knowing falsehoods, such as for defamation, fraud, and perjury. But those are deliberately exceptions,” Volokh wrote. “Defamation is limited to knowing (or sometimes negligent) falsehoods that damage a particular person’s reputation. Fraud is limited to statements that themselves request money or other tangibly valuable items. Perjury is limited to lies under oath in governmental proceedings. There is no general government power to punish political falsehoods outside these narrow exceptions.”…
“This company rates news sites’ credibility. The right wants it stopped.”
WaPo:
When veteran newsmen L. Gordon Crovitz and Steven Brill started their news site rating company, they were prepared for the inevitable cries of bias from both sides.
What they didn’t anticipate was that NewsGuard, their company of some 50 employees, would become the target of congressional investigations and accusations from federal regulators that it was at the vanguard of a vast conspiracy to censor conservative views.
Since 2018, NewsGuard has built a business offering advertisers nonpartisan assessments of online publishers — backed by a team of journalists who assess which sites are reputable and which can’t be trusted. It uses a slate of nine standard criteria, such as whether a site corrects errors or discloses its ownership and financing, to produce a zero to 100 percent rating.
Crovitz, a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal and a Republican, and Brill, a left-tending independent who founded Court TV and the American Lawyer magazine, engaged with publishers wanting to understand subpar ratings, sometimes wrangling for hours by phone over the details of a site’s correction policy.
But conservatives now question the company’s premise. Brendan Carr, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, accused the company of facilitating a “censorship cartel,” in a November letter to leading tech platforms. Noting that key legal protections depend on tech executives operating “in good faith,” Carr continued: “It is in this context that I am writing to obtain information about your work with one specific organization — the Orwellian named NewsGuard.”…
NewsGuard, backed by legal experts, argues that Carr’s letter may violate the First Amendment by threatening the speech rights of private companies.
“The only attempt to censor going on here is by Brendan Carr,” Crovitz said in an interview.
“Trump signals plans to use all levers of power against the media”
WaPo:
For many years, Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to sue the press but often didn’t follow through. When he did, he almost always lost.
But Trump’s recent settlement with ABC News and a cascade of lawsuits and other complaints against media entities from him and his allies signal a ramped-up campaign from the president-elect. Together, the action has spurred concerns that his efforts could drastically undermine the institutions tasked with reporting on his coming administration, which Trump has promised will take revenge on those he perceives as having wronged him….
The pressure from Trump and his allies on the media is already growingand willcontinue to intensify, according to two Trump aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive internal deliberations.
In the two months before the presidential election, Trump attacked the media more than 100 times in public speeches or other remarks. The week before Election Day, Trump threatened to sue the New York Times, his campaign lodged a Federal Election Commission complaint against The Washington Post and he sued CBS News for editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris in a way he said was deceptive. Those media outlets have defended their work.
On Monday, he filed a consumer fraud suit against pollster J. Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register over an outlier poll it ran showing Trump trailing Harris in the presidential race in Iowa, a conservative state that he went on to win by 13 percentage points. The complaint does not hinge on a defamation claim — public figures must cross a high legal threshold to prove that they’ve been libeled — but rather a perceived violation of the state’s consumer protection statute….
“The concern here is that we might be seeing a confluence of forces — legal, political and social — that work together to erode the confidence we once had in the vibrancy of the American press,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a First Amendment expert and law professor at the University of Utah. “Settlement decisions aren’t made in a vacuum. Each major decision to settle sends a signal about the broader climate for the press. It can spur other public figures to sue over perceived slights and pressure other media outlets to self-censor.”…
“Trump Moves to Replace Officials Whom New Presidents Traditionally Leave Alone”
Charlie Savage for the NYT:
President-elect Donald J. Trump has moved to install loyalists in jobs that Congress did not intend for new presidents to replace at the start of their terms, eroding a traditional constraint on executive power even before he takes office.
In announcing his choices for roles in his administration, Mr. Trump has declared his plan to replace officials in three positions — so far — that do not traditionally turn over as part of a transition: the director of the F.B.I., the commissioner of the I.R.S. and the director of Voice of America, an overseas news service.
Under federal law, none are supposed to be treated like ordinary political appointees whom incoming presidents immediately replace with their own selections as a matter of course. While Mr. Trump has the legal power to do so, he is violating a norm of self-restraint that past presidents, including himself, adhered to.
Particularly striking is Mr. Trump’s plan to oust and replace the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, and the I.R.S. commissioner, Danny Werfel, in light of his repeated vow to use the levers of government to pursue his adversaries….