A former Republican aide to two past GOP House Speakers said in an op-ed published Monday that a “self-serving” move by a small group of Republicans to potentially deny House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) the Speakership would make a “mockery” of the institution of Congress.
Brendan Buck, a communications consultant who previously worked for former Speakers John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), said in The New York Times op-ed that the “usual pageantry” and “fleeting” hope that the incoming Congress will be better than the last could be “immediately dashed” if the House fails to choose a Speaker on the first ballot.
Buck said a “small band of Republican misfits” have pledged to vote against McCarthy for the Speakership, and only five Republican votes against him are needed to deny him the role. He said McCarthy should do “all within reason” to secure the votes he needs to win on the first ballot.
“Otherwise, a self-serving power play by a small group of Republicans threatens to make a mockery of the institution and further cement the notion that the party is not prepared to lead,” Buck wrote.
McCarthy needs to win a majority of the House members present and voting to become Speaker, but the GOP’s narrow majority in the body means he cannot afford more than four votes with all 222 GOP members are voting.
A group of at least five Republicans have expressly said or strongly indicated they would not support McCarthy for Speaker, which would be enough to deny him victory at least on the first ballot. A larger number of Republicans have demanded McCarthy agree to certain rules to win their support.
McCarthy offered a series of concessions to his detractors in the House rules package proposed on Sunday, but it remains unclear if that will be enough to secure him the necessary support.
Buck noted that the last time the House did not choose a Speaker on the first ballot was a century ago and that it has happened only once since the Civil War. He said a failed vote would weaken McCarthy or whoever the next Speaker is.
“But no matter who ultimately emerges as the top House Republican, the prolonged spectacle would leave the Republican majority hopelessly damaged from the start, along with the institution of the House itself,” he said.
Buck said the House cannot conduct any other business until a Speaker is chosen, and the selection process can be time-consuming even when it goes smoothly.
He said the House would allow members to make speeches in favor of a candidate if McCarthy does not win on the first ballot, which he said could “unleash a circus” in which GOP opponents to McCarthy question his fitness for the job on the floor.
Buck also predicted that Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), who is mounting a bid against McCarthy, would not win the leadership role and instead another Republican would be elected if McCarthy fails.
“But the agitators’ objective isn’t to win the speakership for one of their own; it is to weaken Mr. McCarthy or whoever emerges as the next speaker of the House. The embarrassment indeed may be the point,” Buck wrote.
The latest figures follow a lightning counteroffensive in Ukraine’s northeast and south that won back large tracts of territory.
As many as 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in battle since Russia invaded the country nine months ago, according to an official in Kyiv.
The comments from Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, appeared to be the first update on the number of fighters killed since late August when the head of the armed forces said nearly 9,000 troops had died.
“We have official figures from the general staff, we have official figures from the top command, and they amount to (between) 10,000 and 12,500 to 13,000 killed,” Podolyak told Ukraine’s Channel 24 on Thursday.
“We are open in talking about the number of dead,” he added, saying more soldiers had been wounded than had died.
The number of military casualties has not been confirmed by Ukraine’s armed forces. Podolyak added that Zelenskyy would make the official data public “when the right moment comes”.
Ukraine’s military mounted a lightning counterattack in September that saw them win back swathes of territory in the northeast and south of the country, including the strategically-important city of Kherson which had been occupied by Russia shortly after its February 24 invasion.
Thousands more soldiers have been wounded on the battlefield [Leah Millis/Reuters]
With the weather turning colder, the most intense clashes are now taking place in the eastern region of Donetsk.
Earlier, United States President Joe Biden and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, who is in Washington, DC, promised to maintain support for Ukraine and condemned “Russia’s illegal war of aggression” against its neighbour.
Last month, the US’s top general estimated that Russia’s military had seen more than 100,000 of its soldiers killed or wounded in Ukraine, adding that Kyiv’s armed forces have “probably” suffered in a similar way.
Zelenskyy adviser Oleksiy Arestovych, speaking in a video interview on Wednesday, said the Russian death toll was about seven times that of Ukraine’s.
Both Russia and Ukraine are suspected of minimising their losses on order to avoid undermining the morale of their troops.
Thousands of Ukrainian civilians have also been killed or maimed in the war, and are now facing a winter without heat, power or water after Moscow pounded the country’s power stations and energy infrastructure.
Otzma Yehudit leader Itamar Ben Gvir, set to be appointed to the newly created role of national security minister in the upcoming government, is reportedly expected to tap as his chief of staff an aide with a history of far-right settler activism that saw him be slapped with restraining orders and led the Shin Bet security service to describe him in the past as a danger to society.
Chanamel Dorfman, who has been referred to by Ben Gvir as his “righthand man,” has also in past called the Israel Police — over which Ben Gvir will preside in his new role — “antisemitic,” “rotten” and “a mafia.”
Ben Gvir, who leads the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, inked a deal Friday to join a government under presumed incoming prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party, becoming head of the brand new National Security Ministry, a planned portfolio that will include overseeing the police and Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
Dorfman is the most likely candidate to become Ben Gvir’s chief of staff at the new ministry, the Haaretz daily reported Sunday. It was unclear whether he would face difficulties obtaining the necessary security clearances.
A former Shin Bet official told the outlet that Dorfman had been a subject of the service’s investigations due to his involvement with the extreme-right hilltop youth — ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers who build illegal outposts in the West Bank and often clash with Palestinians and Israeli security forces — though he is not considered among the leaders of the movement.
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Dorfman, 27, has been active in the hilltop youth movement since he was a teenager.
As a minor, he was the subject of administrative restraining orders from the Israel Defense Forces Central Command, keeping him out of the West Bank due to allegations he was involved in rioting to protest the removal of illegal outposts.
He was reportedly arrested in 2012 on suspicion of directing activists at the Ramat Migron illegal outpost and using violence against security forces. However, with Ben Gvir as his legal representative, he successfully sued the state for damages over a strip search he underwent and was awarded NIS 28,000 ($8,182) in a preliminary hearing.
Settler activists rebuild one of the structures at the settlement outpost of Ramat Migron on August 16, 2022. (Jeremy Sharon/Times of Israel)
Dorfman was later arrested again and in 2013 sued the Shin Bet and police for damages over the conditions he was kept in. He also won that case, with the court awarding him NIS 10,000 ($2,922).
That year, he told a Channel 2 investigative program exploring the Jewish Department of the Shin Bet that he was willing to pay a “personal price” for his cause, including giving up his life.
Otzma Yehudit adviser Chanamel Dorfman (left) and Likud MK Yariv Levin sign a coalition agreement, November 25, 2022. (Courtesy)
In 2018, Shin Bet intelligence determined that Dorfman was planning to disturb the peace during a visit by then-US president Barack Obama. He was brought in for questioning and was released on the condition that he stay in the Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood on the outskirts of Jerusalem, where he lived at the time, for the duration of Obama’s visit. Ben Gvir petitioned the court to cancel the order as infringing on Dorfman’s freedom of expression. A confidential Shin Bet report submitted to the court at the time stated that “the police believe that this is not an innocent citizen who wants to express his opinion, but an instigator who can harm society as a whole.”
Dorfman was eventually ordered to stay at least 300 meters away from Obama’s route.
More recently, Dorfman has made inflammatory remarks about the Israel Police, which Ben Gvir will now be in charge of, including tweeting in 2021 that the force was “the most antisemitic in the world” after clashes between settlers and police at the hardline Yitzhar settlement.
Later the same year, he wrote that the police had “a culture of lies.”
In 2020, remarking on violent clashes between police and ultra-Orthodox Jews in the Mea Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem, Dorfman called the force “despicable” and “racist.”
In 2019, when the media reported on the police raiding a wedding held by so-called hilltop youth, he tweeted that police were “a mafia.”
Dorfman is married to the daughter of Bentzi Gopstein, head of the radical right-wing, anti-LGBT and anti-miscegenation Lehava organization. At his 2013 wedding, he danced with knives, Channel 12 has reported.
Otzma Yehudit adviser Chanamel Dorfman dances at his own wedding in 2013 with knives. (Screenshot: Channel 12 news; used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)
In 2012, aged 17, he attended a rally against African and illegal migrants in south Tel Aviv and was quoted by Haaretz as saying: “The only problem with the Nazis is that I was on the losing side.”
Otzma Yehudit responded Sunday in a statement, saying remarks attributed to Dorfman from his youth were “false” and that he was in the process of suing Channel 13 news and its reporter Yossi Eli for making similar claims.
The statement referred to the Haaretz report on Dorfman as “recycled and false materials from the time when Otzma Yehudit members were minors.”
Dorfman did not issue a separate response.
The Haaretz report came after earlier this month, Channel 13 revealed that Dorfman had helped establish an organization that donates money to incarcerated Jewish terrorists and extremists, including former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin Yigal Amir.
Dorfman filed the application for the group, Shlom Asiraich, to be recognized as a non-governmental organization in Israel two years ago and is listed on the form as the group’s legal adviser, the network revealed in an exposé.
Netanyahu and his Likud party led a bloc of right-wing and religious parties to victory in the November 1 elections. In addition to reaching an agreement with Otzma Yehudit, Likud has also made a deal with the extreme-right, anti-LGBT Noam party, whose sole MK Avi Maoz will head a new department responsible for the Jewish identity of the country.
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Russian president Vladimir Putin is “living in fear for his life” as his army retreats, a senior Ukrainian military aide said.
Earlier this month, Russia announced it was withdrawing from the Kherson region, marking one of the most embarrassing defeats for Mr Putin and a potential turning point in the war which has reached its ninth month.
The loss of Kherson, the only regional capital Russia had captured in the conflict, dealt a heavy blow to plans to establish a land corridor to Crimea and secure a water supply to the Russian-controlled peninsula.
“[Putin] is very afraid because there is no forgiveness in Russia for tsars who lose wars,” Oleksiy Arestovich, an adviser to the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff, told The Times.
“He is fighting for his life now. If he loses the war, at least in the minds of the Russians, it means the end. The end of him as a political figure. And possibly in the physical sense.”
Ukraine’s victory over Kherson came after a series of humiliating retreats by Kremlin forces in the Kharkiv and Donbas regions.
“This has forced even people who are very loyal to Putin to doubt that they can win this war,” Mr Arestovich said.
He said Kherson’s liberation had triggered renewed Russian strikes on the country’s infrastructure and plans for a fresh offensive from Belarus, a Russian ally to the north of Ukraine. Mr Putin’s troops advanced on Kyiv from Belarus during the early stages of the war, but were forced to retreat after stiff resistance.
Ukrainian authorities have begun evacuating civilians from recently liberated sections of the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions, fearing a lack of heat, power and water due to Russian shelling will make living conditions too difficult this winter.
Resident have been evacuated from liberated Kherson due to strikes on energy infrastructure
(Getty Images)
The World Health Organisation (WHO) says millions of people in Ukraine will face “life-threatening” conditions over the coming months, with residents of the southern regions urged to move to safer areas in central and western parts of the country.
Mr Arestovich reiterated Ukraine’s aim to recapture all of its land seized by Russia, including Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that was annexed by the Kremlin in 2014.
Meanwhile, Mr Putin this week touted Russia’s Arctic power at a flag-raising ceremony and dock launch for two nuclear-powered icebreakers that will ensure year-round navigation in the Western Arctic.
Presiding via video link from the Kremlin at the launch ceremony in the former imperial capital of St Petersburg in northern Russia, Mr Putin said such icebreakers were of strategic importance for the country.
“Both icebreakers were laid down as part of a large serial project and are part of our large-scale, systematic work to re-equip and replenish the domestic icebreaker fleet, to strengthen Russia’s status as a great Arctic power,” Mr Putin said.
Vladimir Putin is under mounting pressure after the loss in Kherson
(AP)
The Arctic is taking on greater strategic significance due to the climate crisis, as a shrinking ice cap opens up new sea lanes. Vast oil and gas resources lie in Russia’s Arctic regions, including a liquefied natural gas plant on the Yamal Peninsula.
Mr Putin smiled as the Yakutia nuclear icebreaker was launched into the water in the docks and stood as the Russian national anthem graced the raising of the Russian flag on the Ural icebreaker which will begin work in December.
The Russian president also announced plans to meet the mothers of reservists called up to fight in Ukraine.
The war has killed and wounded tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides, according to the United States, and the Russian invasion has triggered the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis.
The meeting with soldiers’ mothers, first reported by the Vedomosti newspaper, was confirmed by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Russia celebrates Mother’s Day on 27 November.
“Indeed, such a meeting is planned, we can confirm,” Peskov told reporters when asked if Mr Putin was to hold a meeting with families of the mobilised.
“Such a meeting is in preparation.
“The president often holds such meetings, they are not all public. In any case, the president receives first-hand information about the real state of affairs.”
Former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows must testify before a Georgia grand jury investigating Republican efforts to reverse the 2020 presidential election results in the state, a South Carolina judge ruled Wednesday.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) has said that her inquiry is examining “the multistate, coordinated efforts to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere.” Because Meadows does not live in Georgia, she could not subpoena him to testify but filed a petition in August for him to do so.
South Carolina Circuit Court Judge Edward Miller ruled Wednesday that Meadows must comply with a subpoena as his testimony is “material and necessary to the investigation and that the state of Georgia is assuring not to cause undue hardship to him.”
The ruling was confirmed Wednesday by Jeff DiSantis, a spokesman for Willis. DiSantis said Meadows would not be called until after the midterm elections.
An attorney for Meadows said Wednesday there is a possibility of an appeal or additional legal action.
“There may be additional proceedings before the trial judge before any decision is made about an appeal,” said Meadows’s lawyer, George J. Terwilliger.
Meadows, who served four terms as a congressman from North Carolina before becoming Trump’s White House chief of staff, has helped promote Trump’s baseless claims that widespread voter fraud delivered the presidency to Joe Biden. Meadows has said he now lives in South Carolina, though he registered to vote in 2020 using the address of a North Carolina mobile home.
In her petition seeking Meadows’s testimony, Willis noted Meadows’s participation in a telephone call Trump made on Jan. 2, 2021 to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) asking him to “find” 11,780 votes that would enable him to defeat Joe Biden in the state.
‘I just want to find 11,780 votes’: In extraordinary hour-long call, Trump pressures Georgia secretary of state to recalculate the vote in his favor
Willis wrote that she was also interested in testimony regarding a Dec. 21, 2020, meeting Meadows attended at the White House with Trump and others “to discuss allegations of voter fraud and the certification of electoral college votes from Georgia and other state.”
Willis also noted in the petition that on Dec. 22, 2020, Meadows “made a surprise visit” to the Cobb County Civic Center in Marietta, Ga., where the Georgia Secretary of State’s office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation were conducting an absentee ballot signature match audit.
There, Meadows “requested to personally observe the audit process but was prevented from doing so because the audit was not open to the public,” Willis wrote.
Meadows had sought to kill the Georgia subpoena citing executive privilege and making the argument that the special Georgia grand jury is conducting a civil inquiry and is not a criminal proceeding that would require his testimony. Willis has said that the investigation — being conducted by a special grand jury — is criminal in nature.
Meadows’s South Carolina lawyer, James W. Bannister, argued in court filings that the subpoena was moot because the September date on which his testimony was originally sought has passed.
The Meadows ruling came Wednesday as another prominent Republican, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), has appealed to the Supreme Court to block a request for his testimony.
Graham has argued that he is protected from having to testify by constitutional protections provided to lawmakers conducting official business.
Justice Clarence Thomas on Monday put a temporary hold on an order that Graham appear. The brief order appears to be an attempt to maintain the status quo as Graham’s petition to the Supreme Court advances. Prosecutors face a Thursday deadline for responding to Graham’s request, which usually means the full court will consider the issue.
Last week, a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit turned down an attempt by Graham to block a subpoena from Willis in which the lawmaker claimed a sitting senator is shielded from testifying in such investigations.
Despite resistance from Graham, Meadows and others, the Georgia grand jury has heard testimony from prominent Trump advisers, including lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman. Requests for testimony are pending from former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser.
Many Georgia Republican officials have already testified. The list includes Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) and his staff, Georgia Attorney General Christopher M. Carr (R), state lawmakers and local election workers. The state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, filed a 121-page motion in August seeking to kill a subpoena requiring his testimony. The judge overseeing the inquiry agreed to delay the governor’s appearance until after the 2022 election. Kemp is seeking reelection.
‘Blindsided’ Nia Long breaks her silence after learning her Boston Celtics coach fiancé cheated on her with an aide
Ime Udoka’s fiancé Nia Long was reportedly blindsided by his reported affair
Long, 51, acted on the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and is the mother of Udoka’s son
This week, Udoka was suspended a year for violating unspecified team rules
Reports claim he had a consensual affair with a female member of the team staff
Long reportedly moved to Boston just weeks ago and was unaware of the affair
Her spokesperson said Long is seeking privacy and is concerned for her family
Click here for all your latest international Sports news from DailyMail.com
By Jennifer Smith, Chief Reporter For Dailymail.Com
Published: | Updated:
Fresh Prince of Bel Air actress Nia Long has broken her silence today after learning that her Boston Celtics fiancé, Ime Udoka, cheated on her with one of his staffers.
The starlet told TMZ in a statement that she was left ‘blindsided’ by the affair, that comes as she relocates to Boston to be with her longtime beau.
Long, 51, and Udoka, a former NBA player turned coach, have been together for more than a decade.
They became engaged in 2015 but have never married, though they share a ten-year-old son. She also has another son from a previous relationship.
This week, their family bliss was destroyed when the Boston Celtics suspended Udoka for violating ethics rules by having a consensual affair with the unnamed staffer.
Nia Long with fiance Ime Udoka in 2017. He has been suspended as the head coach of the Boston Celtics for an inappropriate relationship with a female staffer, despite being engaged to Long
Long, 51, and Udoka, 45, have been together for over a decade. They are shown together at the Barclays Center in New York last August
Udoka and Long with their son, Kez, in 2018. He is now ten. She also has an older son, Massai, from a previous relationship (shown together)
It’s believed that is how Long discovered the infidelity.
‘The outpouring of love and support from family, friends and the community during this difficult time means so much to me,’ Long said through her spokeswoman.
‘I ask that my privacy be respected as I process the recent events.
‘Above all, I am a mother and will continue to focus on my children,’ she said.
Udoka, the Celtics’ second-year head coach with a once-sterling reputation, was suspended for all of the upcoming season on Thursday over ‘multiple’ unspecified violations of team rules.
In a statement on Thursday night, he said: ‘I want to apologize to our players, fans, the entire Celtics organization, and my family for letting them down.’
He also suffered a ‘significant financial penalty’, though the amount has not been disclosed.
The 45-year-old is said to have had an improper relationship with a female member of staff.
That woman has not been named. In the team statement naming assistant Joe Mazzulla as interim coach, Boston said Udoka’s future would be determined ‘at a later date.’
Long became a household name with her role in the Fresh Prince of Bel Air as Lisa Wilkes, Will Smith’s girlfriend.
WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump told his top White House aide that he wished he had generals like the ones who had reported to Adolf Hitler, saying they were “totally loyal” to the leader of the Nazi regime, according to a forthcoming book about the 45th president.
“Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Mr. Trump told John Kelly, his chief of staff, preceding the question with an obscenity, according to an excerpt from “The Divider: Trump in the White House,” by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, published online by The New Yorker on Monday morning. (Mr. Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Ms. Glasser is a staff writer for The New Yorker.)
The excerpt depicts Mr. Trump as deeply frustrated by his top military officials, whom he saw as insufficiently loyal or obedient to him. In the conversation with Mr. Kelly, which took place years before the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the authors write, the chief of staff told Mr. Trump that Germany’s generals had “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.”
Mr. Trump was dismissive, according to the excerpt, apparently unaware of the World War II history that Mr. Kelly, a retired four-star general, knew all too well.
“‘No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,’ the president replied,” according to the book’s authors. “In his version of history, the generals of the Third Reich had been completely subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military. Kelly told Trump that there were no such American generals, but the president was determined to test the proposition.”
Much of the excerpt focuses on Gen. Mark A. Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the country’s top military official, under Mr. Trump. When the president offered him the job, General Milley told him, “I’ll do whatever you ask me to do.” But he quickly soured on the president.
General Milley’s frustration with the president peaked on June 1, 2020, when Black Lives Matter protesters filled Lafayette Square, near the White House. Mr. Trump demanded to send in the military to clear the protesters, but General Milley and other top aides refused. In response, Mr. Trump shouted, “You are all losers!” according to the excerpt. “Turning to Milley, Trump said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?’” the authors write.
After the square was cleared by the National Guard and police, General Milley briefly joined the president and other aides in walking through the empty park so Mr. Trump could be photographed in front of a church on the other side. The authors said General Milley later considered his decision to join the president to be a “misjudgment that would haunt him forever, a ‘road-to-Damascus moment,’ as he would later put it.”
A week after that incident, General Milley wrote — but never delivered — a scathing resignation letter, accusing the president he served of politicizing the military, “ruining the international order,” failing to value diversity, and embracing the tyranny, dictatorship and extremism that members of the military had sworn to fight against.
“It is my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm to my country,” the general wrote in the letter, which has not been revealed before and was published in its entirety by The New Yorker. General Milley wrote that Mr. Trump did not honor those who had fought against fascism and the Nazis during World War II.
Donald Trump, Post-Presidency
The former president remains a potent force in Republican politics.
“It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order,” General Milley wrote. “You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that.”
Yet General Milley eventually decided to remain in office so he could ensure that the military could serve as a bulwark against an increasingly out-of-control president, according to the authors of the book.
“‘I’ll just fight him,’” General Milley told his staff, according to the New Yorker excerpt. “The challenge, as he saw it, was to stop Trump from doing any more damage, while also acting in a way that was consistent with his obligation to carry out the orders of his commander in chief. ‘If they want to court-martial me, or put me in prison, have at it.’”
In addition to the revelations about General Milley, the book excerpt reveals new details about Mr. Trump’s interactions with his top military and national security officials, and documents dramatic efforts by the former president’s most senior aides to prevent a domestic or international crisis in the weeks after Mr. Trump lost his re-election bid.
In the summer of 2017, the book excerpt reveals, Mr. Trump returned from viewing the Bastille Day parade in Paris and told Mr. Kelly that he wanted one of his own. But the president told Mr. Kelly: “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade. This doesn’t look good for me,” the authors write.
“Kelly could not believe what he was hearing,” the excerpt continues. “‘Those are the heroes,’ he told Trump. ‘In our society, there’s only one group of people who are more heroic than they are — and they are buried over in Arlington.’” Mr. Trump answered: “I don’t want them. It doesn’t look good for me,” according to the authors.
The excerpt underscores how many of the president’s senior aides have been trying to burnish their reputations in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack. Like General Milley, who largely refrained from criticizing Mr. Trump publicly, they are now eager to make their disagreements with him clear by cooperating with book authors and other journalists.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who never publicly disputed Mr. Trump’s wild election claims and has rarely criticized him since, was privately dismissive of the assertions of fraud that Mr. Trump and his advisers embraced.
On the evening of Nov. 9, 2020, after the news media called the race for Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Pompeo called General Milley and asked to see him, according to the excerpt. During a conversation at General Milley’s kitchen table, Mr. Pompeo was blunt about what he thought of the people around the president.
“‘The crazies have taken over,’” Mr. Pompeo told General Milley, according to the authors. Behind the scenes, they write, Mr. Pompeo had quickly accepted that the election was over and refused to promote overturning it.
“‘He was totally against it,’ a senior State Department official recalled. Pompeo cynically justified this jarring contrast between what he said in public and in private. ‘It was important for him to not get fired at the end, too, to be there to the bitter end,’ the senior official said,” according to the excerpt.
The authors detail what they call an “extraordinary arrangement” in the weeks after the election between Mr. Pompeo and General Milley to hold daily morning phone calls with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, in an effort to make sure the president did not take dangerous actions.
“Pompeo and Milley soon took to calling them the ‘land the plane’ phone calls,” the authors write. “‘Our job is to land this plane safely and to do a peaceful transfer of power the 20th of January,’ Milley told his staff. ‘This is our obligation to this nation.’ There was a problem, however. ‘Both engines are out, the landing gear are stuck. We’re in an emergency situation.’”
The Jan. 6 hearings on Capitol Hill have revealed that a number of the former president’s top aides pushed back privately against Mr. Trump’s election denials, even as some declined to do so publicly. Several, including Pat A. Cipollone, the former White House counsel, testified that they had attempted — without success — to convince the president that there was no evidence of substantial fraud.
In the excerpt, the authors say that General Milley concluded that Mr. Cipollone was “a force for ‘trying to keep guardrails around the president.’” The general also believed that Mr. Pompeo was “genuinely trying to achieve a peaceful handover of power,” the authors write. But they write that General Milley was “never sure what to make of Meadows. Was the chief of staff trying to land the plane or to hijack it?”
Gen. Milley is not the only top official who considered resignation, the authors write, in response to the president’s actions.
The excerpt details private conversations among the president’s national security team as they discussed what to do in the event the president attempted to take actions they felt they could not abide. The authors report that General Milley consulted with Robert Gates, a former secretary of defense and former head of the C.I.A.
The advice from Mr. Gates was blunt, the authors write: “‘Keep the chiefs on board with you and make it clear to the White House that if you go, they all go, so that the White House knows this isn’t just about firing Mark Milley. This is about the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff quitting in response.’”
The excerpt makes clear that Mr. Trump did not always get the yes-men that he wanted. During one Oval Office exchange, Mr. Trump asked Gen. Paul Selva, an Air Force officer and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, what he thought about the president’s desire for a military parade through the nation’s capital on the Fourth of July.
General Selva’s response, which has not been reported before, was blunt, and not what the president wanted to hear, according to the book’s authors.
“‘I didn’t grow up in the United States, I actually grew up in Portugal,’ General Selva said. “‘Portugal was a dictatorship — and parades were about showing the people who had the guns. And in this country, we don’t do that.’ He added, ‘It’s not who we are.’”
Peter Navarro, the oft-combative former Trump adviser already facing a fall trial on charges of contempt of Congress, was sued by the government Wednesday over his refusal to turn over private emails he allegedly used to conduct White House business during the Trump administration.
Navarro, according to the court papers filed by the Justice Department on behalf of the National Archives, “has refused to return any Presidential records that he retained absent a grant of immunity for the act of returning such documents.”
The lawsuit charges the economic adviser “is wrongfully retaining Presidential records that are the property of the United States, and which constitute part of the permanent historical record of the prior administration.”
A lawyer for Navarro did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
More than 1,000 election-worker threats reported in past year, official tells Senate committee
The court filing says the controversy surrounding Navarro’s emails began when a congressional committee reviewing how the government handled the coronavirus pandemic discovered that Navarro, who often played an outsize role in the Trump White House’s public discussion of the pandemic response, had used a private email account to conduct government work. From the National Archives’ point of view, those emails were official government records.
After more than a month of discussions about the subject with government lawyers, Navarro’s attorney told officials that they estimated between 200 and 250 documents could be considered presidential records.
Separately, Navarro has sparred repeatedly with government officials since his arrest in June on charges of contempt of Congress for allegedly refusing to provide testimony or documents to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.
Navarro publicly denounced the agents who arrested him, and is due back in court next week as he prepares for a November trial on contempt charges. Another former Trump adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, was convicted last month in a similar case.
A Trump administration aide who met with the House Jan. 6 committee this week unleashed a 27-minute inflammatory tirade, calling the lawmakers’ investigation into the Capitol riot racist against White people and using sexist slurs to describe his former colleagues who also testified.
Garrett Ziegler, a former aide to President Donald Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, revealed on his Telegram page that he appeared Tuesday before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Hours later, Ziegler said without evidence that he was being targeted due to his race and posted a lengthy audio file calling the probe “a Bolshevistic anti-White campaign.”
“If you can’t see that, your eyes are freaking closed,” Ziegler said. The CEO of the Anti-Defamation League noted that Ziegler’s words are “often used as a code for Jews.”
“They see me as a young Christian who they can try to basically scare, right? And so, today was just a lot of saying that I invoke my right to silence,” Ziegler said, while insisting he is “the least-racist person that many of you have ever met, by the way. I have no bigotry.”
Ziegler also lashed out at former White House colleagues Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and Alyssa Farah Griffin, an ex-White House communications director, who have both testified before the committee.
He used sexist and offensive slang words to describe them and said they are “just terrible.”
The audio circulated online late Wednesday after it was posted by the Republican Accountability Project, a group previously dedicated to opposing Trump. The House committee plans to hold its eighth public hearing this summer on Thursday.
Garrett Ziegler, a former Trump WH aide, lost his mind after his interview with the @January6thCmte yesterday.
He accused the committee of being “anti-white” and referred to his female colleagues who spoke out against Trump as “thots and hoes.” pic.twitter.com/S7wOdH3tY1
— The Republican Accountability Project (@AccountableGOP) July 20, 2022
Griffin has not publicly commented but reshared a post from ADL leader Jonathan Greenblatt on Twitter that called Ziegler’s language offensive.
This is the kind of offensive language we typically associate with right-wing extremists, not former officials who had access to the Oval Office.
— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) July 20, 2022
In the clip, Ziegler said he was speaking from Illinois and had received a subpoena on April 28 but didn’t “throw a tantrum” about it. He said flying in to Washington for the hearing was “a pain” and that he found the whole experience “so one-sided” and lacking a Republican presence. Committee members “loathe my former boss and by extension me,” he added.
He added that he invoked his right to silence “over 100 times” in response to questions from the committee.
Who is Cassidy Hutchinson?
Hutchinson appeared before the committee in late June in an explosive and vivid day of testimony. She testified that Trump knew his supporters were carrying weapons the day of the riot but urged them to go to the Capitol anyway.
She also said she had cleaned up Trump-strewn ketchup off a White House wall and pleaded with Meadows to get off his phone and help quell the Capitol riot, among other claims. Trump has dismissed her testimony as “fake” and “fraudulent.” The former president has also called the committee a “Kangaroo Court.”
Visual: Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony from the Jan. 6 hearing
CNN first reported news of the Ziegler audio clip, prompting a reply from him online: “Total liars! I cherish women,” he said.
Ziegler also posted on Trump’s social media platform Truth Social that the media reports were “hit pieces” and “vicious” — and repeated his misogynistic insults of Hutchinson.
Even a day after Jan. 6, Trump balked at condemning the violence
Trump condemned the Jan. 6 attack in a three-minute speech the evening of Jan. 7 after aides told him that members of his Cabinet were discussing invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
However, according to individuals familiar with the work of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, he struggled to do so.
WASHINGTON, July 10 (Reuters) – Donald Trump’s former close adviser Steve Bannon has told the congressional panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol that he is ready to testify, a change of heart days before he is due to be tried for contempt of Congress.
In a letter to the committee seen by Reuters, Bannon’s lawyer Robert Costello, wrote to say the former president would waive the claim of executive privilege which Bannon had cited in refusing to appear before the committee. read more
Bannon, a prominent figure in right-wing media circles who served as Trump’s chief strategist in 2017, is scheduled to go on trial July 18 on two criminal contempt charges for refusing to testify or provide documents. read more
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The letter from the lawyer said Bannon preferred to testify publicly, but Representative Zoe Lofgren, a committee Democrat, told CNN that ordinarily the committee takes a deposition behind closed doors.
A video of Steve Bannon, talk show host and former White House advisor to former President Donald Trump, is seen displayed on a screen, during the third of eight planned public hearings of the U.S. House Select Committee to investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S. June 16, 2022. REUTERS/Sarah Silbiger/File Photo
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“This goes on for hour after hour after hour. We want to get all our questions answered. And you can’t do that in a live format,” Lofgren said. “There are many questions that we have for him.”
Throughout the House of Representatives committee hearings, videotaped snippets of closed-door testimony by witnesses under oath have been shown to the public.
Trump has been chafing that none of his supporters have testified in his defense at the committee hearings which, separate from the trial, are focused on the attack by Trump supporters seeking to stop the certification in Congress of Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden in the November 2020 election.
In a letter from Trump to Bannon seen by Reuters, Trump said he was waiving executive privilege because he “watched how unfairly you and others have been treated.”
The House panel is due to hold public hearings on Tuesday and Thursday this week. read more
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Reporting by Richard Cowan; Editing by Howard Goller
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
