Senior Trump Appointee Fired After Critical Comments

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A senior Trump administration official was fired following criticism in a private speech of President Donald Trump’s policies and his inner circle of advisers.

Craig Deare, whom Trump appointed a month ago to head the National Security Council’s Western Hemisphere division, was on Friday escorted out of the Executive Office Building, where he worked in Washington.

A senior White House official confirmed that Deare is no longer working at the NSC and has returned to the position he previously held at the National Defense University. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an incident not otherwise made public, and provided no further details.

But current and former administration officials say Deare’s termination was linked to remarks he made Thursday at a private talk at the Wilson Center, a Washington think tank. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

According to one person who attended the discussion, Deare slammed the Trump administration for its policies on Latin America, specifically its rocky start to relations with Mexico. That person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a private event.

Trump signed an order in the first week of his presidency to build a border wall with Mexico, jumpstarting a campaign promise. The move prompted Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto to cancel his trip to Washington in late January.

The person who attended the Wilson Center discussion also said that Deare openly expressed frustration over being cut out of most of the policy discussions about Mexico, saying that members of Trump’s inner circle, including chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, have not consulted with NSC directorates as the White House formulates policy.

Officials at the State Department have expressed similar sentiments regarding the president and his administration’s take on diplomacy. Last week, when the president met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, no one from the State Department had been involved in those talks. Instead, Kushner, who had little diplomatic experience, had a greater role in the meeting than Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Several staffers in the State Department have also been laid off.

Deare has been on the faculty of National Defense University in Washington since 2001. He joined the university’s College of International Security Affairs in 2010 and most recently served as dean of administration.

The person who attended the Wilson Center talk also noted that Deare made several remarks about how attractive Mr. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, appeared, remarks that person described as “awkward.” Mr. Trump has also made several remarks in the past about how attractive his eldest daughter is, once commenting on a television talk show, that “if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I would be dating her.”

Deare did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Officials with the Wilson Center also declined a request for information, saying the discussion was off the record.

Deare is the second senior NSC official to leave in under a week. On Monday, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, retired Gen. Michael Flynn, resigned after revelations that he discussed sanctions with a Russian diplomat before Trump was sworn in, then misled Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of those conversations.

(h/t CBS News)

Update

Since being fired from the National Security Counsel, Deare has been reassigned back to his old position at National Defense University.

Trump Attends Private Mar-a-Lago Event Without Telling Press Corps

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President Trump attended a private fundraiser at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Saturday evening, without informing the press corps that follows him and reports on his movements.

Trump made an unexpected stop at a fundraiser for Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute held at his resort in Palm Beach, Fla., the Washington Post reported.

The event was not on his schedule.

A video posted on Instagram shows Trump arriving at the private fundraiser, where he was met with cheers. More than 800 people attended the event, deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Sunday.

Trump has visited Mar-a-Lago for three straight weekends. Last weekend, Trump and Japanese Prime Minster Shinzo Abe scrambled to respond to a North Korean missile test while guests in the public dining room looked on.

Memberships for Trump’s resort have doubled to $200,000 a year since Trump won the election.

Students at Harvard Medical School demanded the Saturday fundraiser be held elsewhere last month. The students’ demands came right after Trump issued a controversial executive order on immigration and refugees, which the students argued threatened practicing doctors.

The cancer institute ended up holding the event since “contracts have been signed, and a large number of people have committed to attend,” the institute said in a statement.

(h/t The Hill)

Trump Cited a Nonexistent Incident in Sweden

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President Donald Trump cited a nonexistent incident in Sweden while talking about the relationship between terror attacks and refugees around the world during a rally in Melbourne, Florida, on Saturday.

“You look at what’s happening in Germany. You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden … Sweden … who would believe this? Sweden, they took in large numbers, they are having problems like they never thought possible. You look at what’s happening Brussels, you look at what’s happening all over the world,” Trump said.

No incident occurred in Sweden on Friday night.

However, Fox News host Tucker Carlson ran an interview on Friday night’s broadcast of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” with documentarian and media personality Ami Horowitz, who presented a clip from a new film documenting alleged violence committed by refugees in Sweden. The segment went on extensively about a supposed crime surge in Sweden and its links to immigrant populations.

Crime rates in Sweden have stayed relatively stable, with some fluctuations, over the last decade, according to the 2016 Swedish Crime Survey.

This isn’t the first time that there has been a correlation between Trump’s statements and programming on cable news, of which he is a noted fan.

In late January, Trump tweeted about gun violence in Chicago shortly after after an “O’Reilly Factor” segment on the same topic, which cited the same statistics and even used the word “carnage,” a recent favorite noun of Trump’s.

In February, Trump declared in a tweet that he was calling “my own shots” in his administration shortly after MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough asked on air whether Trump’s chief White House strategist, Steve Bannon, was “calling the shots” in the White House.

(h/t Business Insider)

Media

Leaked Tape Reveals Trump Invited Club Guests To Witness Cabinet Interviews

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Newly leaked audio from a November party at President Trump’s Bedminster, N.J., golf club reveals then president-elect Trump touting to guests his scheduled interviews on premises with potential cabinet members and White House staff.

“We’re doing a lot of interviews tomorrow — generals, dictators, we have everything,” Trump says in the tape, obtained by Politico and published Saturday. “You may wanna come around. It’ll be fun. We’re really working tomorrow. We have meetings every 15, 20 minutes with different people that will form our government.”

We’re going to be interviewing everybody — Treasury, we’re going to be interviewing Secretary of State,” he continued. “We have everybody coming in — if you want to come around, it’s going to be unbelievable … so you might want to come along.”

The tape was recorded at the same New Jersey golf club where Trump interviewed several potential cabinet picks, including former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who was under consideration to be secretary of State.

The tape sheds some light on how Trump conducts himself at his clubs, just as he returns this weekend to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., for his third straight weekend.

Last weekend, Trump was criticized for handling a North Korea missile crisis in public at his Mar-a-Lago dining room. Guests at the club took photos of the meeting, and one person even shared a Facebook post of the person responsible for carrying “nuclear football“—  the black bag that contains the nuclear launch codes.

(h/t The Hill)

Media

Trump Is Going on Vacation for the Third Weekend in a Row

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President Donald Trump will reportedly return to his vacation home at his Mar-a-Lago Club for the third weekend in a row, the Palm Beach Post reports. This also means that Trump has spent most of his weekends as president so far at his vacation home — the two exceptions being his inauguration weekend in Washington, D.C., and the weekend of January 28.

What’s wrong with Trump taking so much time away from the White House? For one thing, traveling as the president doesn’t come cheap. While presidents do pay for their own lodging, Politico reports that weekend trips similar to the ones Trump has taken cost taxpayers more than $3 million due to the Secret Service detail and Air Force One expenses. That also doesn’t take into account the logistical challenges that come with presidential travel, including special advisories from the Federal Aviation Administration and other transportation departments.

In Trump’s case, it can also be risky to spend so much time in public when classified national security concerns come up and an action plan isn’t in place for dealing with them privately, The New York Times reports. This past weekend, Trump and Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe received word of a North Korean ballistic missile test while they were dining publicly at Trump’s club, according to CNN. Photos surfaced on Facebook, taken by a private citizen and Mar-a-Lago member, of the president and his team reading documents in a public part of club and using their cell phones to look at the material, a possible breach of security protocol. (Hackers can tap into phone cameras and see what’s on those pages, The Verge points out.)

On Monday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that “no classified material” was discussed in public view, according to The Washington Post. Democrats were quick to point out the disregard for proper protocol when discussing sensitive matters in public view. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California wrote in a tweet, “There’s no excuse for letting an international crisis play out in front of a bunch of country club members like dinner theater.”

Additionally, Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse and New Mexico senator Tom Udall publicly condemned Trump’s actions in a statement, according to The New York Times. The two senators said, “This is America’s foreign policy, not this week’s episode of Saturday Night Live. We urge our Republican colleagues to start taking this Administration’s rash and unprofessional conduct seriously before there are consequences we all regret.”

Ironically, early in his campaign, Trump specifically claimed that he wouldn’t vacation often if he were president. “I would rarely leave the White House because there’s so much work to be done,” Trump said in 2015. “I would not be a president who took vacations. I would not be a president that takes time off. You don’t have time to take time off.”

He also attacked Barack Obama on Twitter multiple times during his presidency for taking vacations. “Obama’s motto: If I don’t go on tax payer funded vacations & constantly fundraise then the terrorists win,” Trump tweeted in August 2014.

“While our wonderful president was out playing golf all day, the TSA is falling apart, just like our government! Airports a total disaster!” he posted in May 2016.

So far, the White House hasn’t commented on Trump’s multiple weekend trips to Mar-a-Lago.

(h/t Teen Vogue)

Trump son-in-law tells Time Warner of CNN concerns

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President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, recently met with CNN’s parent company Time Warner and mentioned the cable news network’s coverage of the administration as slanted.

During the meeting at the White House, Kushner expressed concerns about what the administration considers is CNN’s unfair coverage of the President to Gary Ginsberg, Time Warner’s executive vice president of corporate marketing and communications, two persons familiar with the situation said. One of the persons said that topics of the discussion included Israel and Kushner made a joking reference to CNN’s perceived anti-Trump coverage.

Trump disparaged CNN during his press conference Thursday while taking a question from CNN’s senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta noting “the hatred coming from other people on your network.”

The president has made clear his disdain for CNN. A month ago, during Trump’s first full press conference after being elected, he called CNN a peddler of “fake news” because the network had produced a story reporting that the U.S. intelligence officials had presented Trump and President Obama with a “dossier” of unverified, but potentially compromising information about the president-elect that Russian operatives claimed to have.

What makes the CNN-Time Warner situation so sticky is AT&T’s pending $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner. During the campaign, Trump criticized the merger because the resulting company would have too much market power. “AT&T is buying Time Warner, and thus CNN, a deal we will not approve in my administration,” he said in October.

However, post-election meetings with administration officials left AT&T executives with confidence about passage, The Financial Times reported in December, citing persons familiar with the situation.

Trump and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson did not discuss the merger when they met last month, the company said. But Stephenson last week told CNBC he expects the deal to pass Justice Department scrutiny and close by the end of the year. And the subject of the merger reportedly did not arise during Kushner’s recent meeting with Time Warner, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the meeting.
AT&T, Time Warner and CNN declined comment on the meeting.
But two CNN analysts — Republican strategist and commentator Ana Navarro and Van Jones, a former adviser to President Obama — responded to the report on Twitter. Navarro noted that Kushner “who’s supposed to achieve Middle East peace, is complaining about me to CNN,” in a tweet.
Jones used some lyrics from Drake’s song Energy — “Got a lotta people tryna drain me of this energy.” — then added, “But y’all know @CNN has our backs. Do you? RT if yes! (@jaredkushner, u can RT, 2!).”
Both sides in this situation should tread carefully, says John Coffee, a law professor and and director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School. “Time Warner is extremely vulnerable to pressure in this context — although the slightest application of pressure would backfire explosively,” he said. “Trump really cannot afford another fiasco right now when his administration keeps stumbling over itself. Thus, we may be witnessing another self-inflicted wound that is about to occur.”

(h/t USA Today)

 

Trump yells at CIA director over reports intel officials are keeping info from him

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CBS News has learned that on Thursday, an angry President Trump called CIA Director Mike Pompeo and yelled at him for not pushing back hard enough against reports that the intelligence community was withholding information from the commander-in-chief.

The agency then drafted a strongly worded statement rebutting the claim. “We are not aware of any instance when that has occurred,” read Pompeo’s statement. “It is CIA’s mission to provide the President with the best intelligence possible and to explain the basis for that intelligence. The CIA does not, has not, and will never hide intelligence from the President, period.”

The White House also denied the report. The president “did not yell at the CIA director,” a White House spokesperson wrote Saturday in an email to CBS News.

This story has been updated with responses from the CIA and the White House.

CBS News has learned that on Thursday, an angry President Trump called CIA Director Mike Pompeo and yelled at him for not pushing back hard enough against reports that the intelligence community was withholding information from the commander-in-chief.

The agency then drafted a strongly worded statement rebutting the claim. “We are not aware of any instance when that has occurred,” read Pompeo’s statement. “It is CIA’s mission to provide the President with the best intelligence possible and to explain the basis for that intelligence. The CIA does not, has not, and will never hide intelligence from the President, period.”

The White House also denied the report. The president “did not yell at the CIA director,” a White House spokesperson wrote Saturday in an email to CBS News.

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal had reported that U.S. intelligence officials have kept information from Mr. Trump because they feared it could be leaked or compromised.

CIA spokesman Dean Boyd denied Friday that there was a conversation between Pompeo and Mr. Trump about the article.

“There was no conversation between the CIA Director and the President about the Wall Street Journal article either before or after CIA issued its statement about the article,” Boyd said. “The CIA issued its statement on its own accord because the story was inaccurate and we felt the need to defend the integrity of our officers and institution.”

The reality is, insiders say, that there has been a “chill” in the information flow. Intelligence sources say the agency is intent on protecting information, and if there are concerns it could be compromised, it will be withheld.

The ongoing investigation into whether Trump associates coordinated with the Russians remains a concern for some who handle sensitive data. It can be inferred that there is a lack of trust, and because the CIA has had a role in uncovering signs of Russian cyber intrusions, there are also concerns that sensitive information could be shared with adversaries.

(h/t CBS News)

China Grants Trump a Trademark He’s Been Seeking For a Decade

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The Chinese government has granted President Trump and his business something they had been seeking for more than a decade: trademark protection for the use of the Trump name in the construction industry.

Trump fought unsuccessfully in Chinese courts for years to try to gain control of the trademark, but his fortunes changed suddenly last year during the latter stages of his campaign for the White House.

China’s trademark review board announced in September it had invalidated a rival claim for the Trump trademark, clearing the way for Trump to move in. In November, soon after the election, it awarded the trademark to the Trump Organization. The trademark was officially registered this week after a three-month notice period for objections expired.

The sequence of events makes some ethics experts uncomfortable: Chinese authorities reversed their position as Trump’s political star rose.

“China is going to want concessions from Mr. Trump, and this is now the first in what will be a series of efforts to influence him,” said Norman Eisen, a White House ethics counsel under President Obama. Eisen is part of a group that has sued Trump for violating the foreign emoluments clause of the Constitution by accepting foreign payments through his business ventures.

But Trump Organization attorneys told CNN that it was simply trying to protect the Trump trademark from someone who had been improperly squatting on it, and that any accusation that President Trump could be compromised by the trademark decision granted by the Chinese government is completely baseless and shows a disregard for the facts.

It is difficult to assess the value of the new trademark. It covers construction-related services, not for Trump’s core hospitality and real-estate businesses.

But even if construction-related services are not a core business for the Trump Organization, the company places a great value on anything with the Trump brand.

“The Trump brand is key to the value of the Trump Organization’s assets,” Sheri Dillon, a Trump lawyer, said last month.

Trump can also argue that he’s a lot more famous in China now than he was when he first started the trademark battle there in 2006, giving him a stronger claim to the Trump name. Trump already holds dozens of trademarks in China and is seeking dozens more.

“The Trump Organization has been actively enforcing its trademark rights in China for more than a decade and its latest trademark registration is a natural result of those efforts — all of which took place years before President Trump even announced his candidacy,” said Alan Garten, the Trump Organization’s chief legal officer.

The ethics concerns are fueled by Trump’s decision not to completely sever ties with his company.

Before taking office, he bucked the advice of ethics lawyers who urged him to avoid conflicts by selling off his vast business interests and putting the money in a blind trust. Instead, he pledged to place his assets in a trust run by his adult sons.

Trump talked tough on China in his campaign rhetoric, but so far hasn’t followed through on his threats to label it a currency manipulator on his first day in office, or to impose heavy trade tariffs.

China legal experts say they think Trump’s political ascendancy most likely played a role in the trademark decision.

“I’ve got clients who have fought these same cases time and time again without success. For this rapid turn of events, it does seem to be more than just a coincidence,” said Dan Plane, a China intellectual property expert in Hong Kong. “What’s striking about the Trump decision is the timing. I think it’s reasonable to assume that politics played a part — without Trump even necessarily asking for it.”

The Chinese Embassy in Washington told CNN that the case was handled in compliance with China’s trademark law.

“The Chinese trademark review board does not make its decisions publicly available, so we don’t know on what basis they made their decision,” said Matthew Dresden, an international trademark attorney. “I think these decisions were not made in a vacuum.”

The White House declined to comment, referring the question to the Trump Organization.

Another interpretation of the decision may simply be that China is becoming more responsive to Western companies that want to protect their trademark. In December, China’s top court found in favor of U.S. basketball start Michael Jordan, ruling that a Chinese company sportswear company, Qiaodan, had to stop using the Chinese characters that rendered the name Jordan.

“You could say there’s a nice ray of sunshine, that perhaps things are changing for foreign brands,” said Plane. “But [the Trump decision] really was a bit of a bolt out of the blue, particularly in relation to the case’s history and the decision’s timing.”

One remaining question is whether Trump will continue to find favor in future Chinese trademark decisions.

“If there’s a consistent pattern where you have ‘wins’ in every case to which Trump’s name is attached when normally, those cases would be non-starters for anyone else, then yes, I think there’s a real concern about his being given something that others wouldn’t receive,” Plane said.

(h/t CNN)

 

Trump Tweets: The Media is the ‘Enemy of the American People’

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President Trump blasted the media as “the enemy of the American people” in a tweet Friday, calling out several outlets specifically.

“The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” he wrote.

He had posted and then quickly deleted a slightly different version of the tweet just a few minutes earlier, which omitted ABC and CBS. He also included the word “SICK!” at the end of the original post.

The tweet came one day after Trump held an adversarial and lengthy news conference, in which he berated the media as “very fake news” and dismissed news reports about his and his associates’ ties to Russia as a “ruse.”

About an hour later, he posted a second tweet criticizing the media’s coverage of the press conference.

“‘One of the most effective press conferences I’ve ever seen!’ says Rush Limbaugh. Many agree.Yet FAKE MEDIA calls it differently! Dishonest,” Trump wrote.

Trump has long had an antagonistic relationship with the press, and often labels news stories he sees as unfavorable as “fake news.” Trump’s campaign issued a survey to supporters on Friday, asking them to gauge the trustworthiness of the media.

The news outlets singled out in Trump’s Friday afternoon tweet are not new targets for the president. He has often lambasted CNN and The New York Times, referring to them as “failing” and out of touch with voters.

In a rare interview with The New York Times last month, Chief White House Strategist Steve Bannon, the former chair of the far-right Breitbart News, called reporters the “opposition party” and said “the media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”

“They don’t understand this country,” Bannon said. “They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

Trump echoed Bannon’s comments shortly after, telling “The Brody File” that “the media is the opposition party in many ways.”

(h/t The Hill)

 

 

 

Administration Fires HUD Official Who Once Criticized Donald Trump

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The Trump administration fired a top aide to Housing and Urban Development secretary nominee Ben Carson Thursday, after discovering that he once wrote columns critical of Donald Trump.

The New York Times reported that Shermichael Singleton, 26, was escorted out of HUD headquarters by security officials. The Huffington Post also confirmed the incident with an agency civil servant who said they were shocked and dismayed by the firing.

Singleton was one of the few black Republicans in the Trump administration. He has worked on other GOP campaigns, including Carson’s 2016 bid.

But he also wrote pieces that criticized Trump. In March 2016, for example, he wrote a column for The Hill that lamented Trump’s rhetoric toward people of color:

I would like to see nothing more than a Republican win the White House this November, but I have to seriously ask myself if Trump is capable of doing just that. I have attempted to remain hopeful and a part of me will continue do so, but Trump’s antics make it impossible for any Republican — particularly a minority — to defend him, which can only mean bad things for the future of the GOP.

Officials noticed the pieces during the vetting process, according to The New York Times, and asked him about them. Although Singleton said he regretted writing it, officials told him he would not get a permanent position at HUD because of them.

Trump has not taken well to people who once criticized him. Elliott Abrams, a veteran Republican national security official, was taken out of consideration for a top job at the State Department after the president found out that he had opposed him during the campaign. Trump did so over the objections of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who wanted Abrams on his team.

Singleton did not return a request for comment. HUD confirmed to the Times that as of Thursday, he is no longer working at the agency.

(h/t Huffington Post)

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