Today on The BradCast: He hasn’t even been sworn in and he’s already violating federal law. Surprised? In this case, the law that he’s violating is one that he himself signed into law in 2019. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]
The flood of wholly-unqualified appointments to cabinet level posts and other top appointments, since Donald Trump barely won a plurality (not a majority) of the national popular vote two weeks ago, continues. You’re probably well familiar by now with the nominations of alleged child sex trafficker Rep. Matt Gaetz for U.S. Attorney General, the nation’s top law enforcement official, and of Fox “News” weekend host Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary.
Neither have any experience leading huge organizations (or even medium-sized ones) with millions of employees — or even any experience at all at the organizations they have been tapped by Trump to lead. And Hegseth, who was disqualified from serving in the National Guard during Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration as a potential “insider threat” due to his White Supremacist tattoos, was also revealed over the weekend by Washington Post to have paid off a woman to settle her accusations of sexual assault. He reportedly denies the rape allegation, if not the settlement.
The Trump Transition team claims they knew nothing about any of it when they selected Hegseth to head DoD. That should give you chills. Perhaps that’s because the Transition team hired a private firm to vet Trump’s nominees, rather than rely on the FBI, as they would be doing, had Trump complied with the bipartisan amendment to the Presidential Transition Act that he himself signed into law during his first term.
The measure also requires Presidential candidates to sign agreements with the White House and General Services Administration by October 1 before an election to begin the transition process with a publicly disclosed ethics policy and a public statement of how the future President plans to avoid conflicts of interest while serving, if elected. It allows for FBI vetting of incoming officials to grant access to classified documents and other material from the previous Administration at the nation’s 438 Executive Branch agencies that they will control. Signing the agreement, as required by law, also includes a vow that Transition teams may take no more than $5,000 from any one person for certain transition costs, and that they will publicly disclose the names of those donors, among other things.
Donald Trump has, so far, refused to sign any of those agreements, alarming ethics, national security and legal experts as he begins defying federal law (again) even before taking office for a second term as President.
Joining us to explain the national security and other serious consequences and ramifications of all of this is LISA GRAVES. She is uniquely qualified to discuss these issues, given her service in all three branches of the federal government, as a Former Deputy Asst. Attorney General at the U.S. Justice Dept.; former Chief Counsel for nominations in the U.S. Senate; and former Deputy Chief for the Article III Judges Div. of the U.S. Court system. She now heads up the government watchdog and political research organization, True North Research.
We’ve got a lot to discuss with Graves today, beginning with what alarms her most about Trump’s refusal to sign the Presidential Transition Act agreements. She identifies the avoidance of the FBI background investigation process as a “huge red warning flag.”
“He does not want his cabinet appointees to go through the regular clearance process. The FBI background process is a long-standing part of the process,” she tells me. It’s “designed to help look at whether you have any issues that could made you blackmailable. That’s part of it. For people who are seeking access to our most sensitive information, there are additional national security assessments. The investigators are looking at: do you have stability, trustworthiness, reliability, discretion. Do you have good character and judgment, honesty, and unquestionable loyalty to the United States to ensure that people who get positions of trust, with access to our most sensitive information, have unquestioned loyalty to the United States and not a foreign power.”
Graves argues that “many” of Trump’s nominees “have serious deficits in more than one of those categories.” She also tells me that Trump’s own “track record would raise serious concerns about his trustworthiness, his reliability, about his fitness for having access to information.”
As to Trump’s plans to force the U.S. Senate into recess, so that he may avoid the Constitution’s mandate for “advice and consent” on top-level appoints, she describes the scheme as “un-American, unconstitutional, and unprecedented.”
Tune in for much more insight from Graves on all of this on today’s program.
FINALLY TODAY… A few more items related to the U.S. House Ethics Committee’s ongoing deliberations into whether to release their report on the alleged paid sex trafficking by Gaetz of at least two different 17-year old girls. And then Desi Doyen joins us for details on Trump’s newly announced nomination of fracking company CEO and climate change denier Chris Wright as the next chief of the Dept. of Energy. She also has some thoughts on Trump’s Interior Dept. nominee, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, and on former Rep. Lee Zeldin who has been nominated to head the EPA, and how ALL of those men spell very bad news for our world’s quickly-worsening climate crisis…
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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gab13by13 (Democratic Underground)
About Those Bullet Ballots
Those of you comparing Democrats questioning the election to QAnon, I have a couple of questions for you.
Listening to Thom Hartmann, he had a guest on who was one of the computer experts who sent the letter to Kamala to audit the election.
This guy has built computer hardware.
Answer this question;
Nevada and Arizona had 5% and 7% of their total ballots, bullet ballots. Neighboring state Utah had way way less than 1%.
Occam’s Razor – if something stinks there’s good chance it’s rotten.
A hand count audit is the only thing that will convince me that this election was not stolen.
Don’t you dare compare me with QAnon. People don’t take the time to vote and only vote for 1 Republican on the ballot, that would be stupid.
Eric Jefferson @1 said:
Just to be clear, since details matter (even if annoying), we don’t know that those were “bullet ballots” yet. Rather, they may be ballots where the voter cast a vote for President, but not for the next highest race. They MAY have voted for other races on that ballot. We don’t yet know how many of them were actually “bullet ballots”, where ONLY one single vote (in this case, for President), was cast.
I have, as you probably know, been calling for hand-counts for years (decades, actually, now!) and, yes, while they can’t entirely rule out fraud, it is the best and easiest way to first check against the results to find out.
I wouldn’t compare you to “QAnon”. But I will note that, yes, people sometimes DO vote for a single candidate on a ballot. And that wouldn’t be hugely shocking in the case of the way Trump ran. That said, it doesn’t matter. Ballots should be tallied by human beings anyway to make reasonably certain the computer-reported results are accurate.
See more conversation on this from other readers and myself, in the these threads:
+ Computer Security Experts Ask Harris to Seek Hand-Counts Due to Voting System Breaches: ‘BradCast’ 11/14/24
+ Trump Already Violating Law (He Signed!) During Transition: ‘BradCast’ 11/18/24