#wash made a deal with the chairman to get out of prison

[tvckerwash]

started a rvb rewatch and I'm remembering the pain of just how little there is to work with when it comes to ct and her personality while simultaneously being reminded about just how deeply she and wash mirror one another

[justreputationnoexplanation]

Made, Kept, and Fulfilled - RvB Bingo War

So this is another entry from me, this time for the Hurt/Comfort square. Still going for RED TEAM  (even if it a story about blues)

“We don’t need the act, you know.”

Wash started, turning his head towards the doorway, where Tucker stood, looking awkward and uncomfortable.

Wash opened his mouth, intending to ask what Tucker meant by that, but before he could, Tucker continued.

“Alright, Caboose does, and maybe the Reds, but don’t bullshit me, dude. We’ve crashed I don't even know where, Carolina’s gone, Church left us again, and we can’t get the radio working to call for help. This is one of the worst ways going back to Blood Gulch could have gone, and you are acting like everything is guaranteed to somehow work out okay. All optimistic about an imminent rescue, and we just have to ration supplies until it gets here, and try and make contact to speed it up.”

By this point, Tucker had fully stepped into the room, tone going from unreadable to angry.

“Caboose may be dumb enough to believe that at face value, but I’m not. Tell whatever lies and well-intentioned half-truths you want later, but here and now, be honest with me.”

Tucker moved closer to Wash, who stood up, trying to decide if he should move closer to Tucker to offer some form of comfort, or farther away to protect himself from Tucker’s angry words.

“How likely are we to actually be rescued? How likely is it that Church and Carolina come back? How likely is it that I ever get to even talk to my son again; because at this point I doubt if I’ll ever get to actually see him again? How fucking likely is it that all Junior will remember about me is that I kept breaking promises? That I never came back for him?” Tucker stopped then, out of breath from screaming.

“Tucker, I...” Wash began, but before he could continue, Tucker made a noise like a choked off sob, and stepped even closer to Wash, pulling him into a hug.

“I just want to see my son again. Is that so much to ask? Have I really not done enough, suffered enough, for the universe to even allow me that?” Tucker mumbled into Wash’s neck, words muddled with tears. Wash awkwardly placed his arms around Tucker’s shoulders, holding the other man close as he cried.

“Tucker, I can’t... I won’t promise that you will ever see Junior again, because I really don’t know if any of us will make it off of this planet alive, but I can promise that I will do everything in my power to see that you do.” Wash swore aloud, but in his head he vowed that no matter what he had to do, what he had to sacrifice, he would make sure Tucker got to go back to his son.

“Tucker! Tucker! Where are you?” Wash demanded over the radio as the pelican docked on the Staff of Charon. He leapt off the ship as soon as the doors were open, keeping his eyes peeled for any sign of enemies, or more importantly, any of the sim troopers.

As he took off down a corridor at the instruction of FILSS, his thoughts swirled in a panic.

As he rounded a corner he heard a group of familiar voices.

“Friendly heat signature detected.”

“Washington, thank god it's you and not more of them.” Grif groaned in relief from his position on the ground, leaning up against a wall holding his shoulder.

“Agent Washington! It is so good to see you!” Caboose said excitedly from next to Grif.

“I never thought I’d reach a point in my life where I was happy to see a dirty blue, but here we are.” Sarge chorused, stepping towards Wash.

“The others are scattered around this room and that one, except for Tucker. He went to go secure Hargrove, make sure the dirty bastard couldn’t escape. I figured I’d let him go at it themselves. Give Blue Team a taste of victory. Makes is all the better when they then lose to Red Team.” It was then that Wash noticed how Sarge favored his right side, and the blood that was just barely visible on his arm.

“Wash, we’ve got them, go help Tucker.” Carolina said, stepping up behind him and already beginning to coordinate getting the others off the ship and back onto Chorus.

Wash took off running at FILSS directions yet again, weaving through hallways to avoid any other soldiers that might slow him down. Finally he reached where Hargrove was supposed to be, and found Tucker standing over him, with Hargrove tied to a chair.

“You lying bastard! Why the hell should I believe anything you say? There is nothing you could do that would ever convince me to help you!” Tucker yelled at Hargrove, but spun around activating the sword when he heard Wash’s footsteps.

“Wash, you need to deal with him, because I might actually kill him, and that would be more than he deserves.” Tucker said, voice careful and measured, as though a raging inferno of emotion was just behind it.

“Alright.” Wash replied, moving toward Hargrove to drag him to standing.

“Come on, Chairman. There’s a whole planet full of people you failed to kill who I’m sure would love to meet you.” Wash threatened, pushing the older man to walk in front of him. Half way back to the hanger, they met Carolina and Kimball, who officially took the man into custody and had guards to escort him to a ship. Wash moved to follow, but Tucker grabbed his arm, looking at the ground. Once the others had moved farther away, he began to talk quietly, voice much less restrained that it had previously been.

“He said that he had captured Junior. That he had my son as prisoner. And if I helped him escape from the ship, helped him get into hiding, he would tell me where Junior was being held, but if, if I didn’t, he would have him killed. And that his body, my son’s body, would be the last thing I saw before I died.” At that, Tucker inhaled sharply, fighting to get the words out.

“But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t betray Chorus, betray you guys. I might have condemned my son to death for this planet. What kind of father am I that I wouldn’t do anything to save him? What kind of man am I that I hesitated before saying no?” Tucker took his helmet off, and looked at Wash with tears in his eyes, a few spilling down on his cheeks. Wash took off his own helmet at this, hoping that that might make Tucker believe his next words.

“It makes you a father the Junior can be proud of. A father that would kill thousands of innocent people is not a good person. The fact that you were able to make the right call, objectively, even if you hesitated, proves that you are a good man. All that hesitation means is that you love your son. And I will help you find him, if that’s what needs to be done. The others can handle all the political stuff without us for a while.” Wash stepped forward, putting his hand on Tucker’s shoulder. Seeing that Tucker was slightly calmer and the glimmer of hope in his eye, Wash continued.

“But before we go on a wild goose chase, let's just confirm that he really is missing. Hargrove is a liar and a criminal, and he might have just told you the one thing he thought could convince you to betray us. Now, come on. We’ve got records to check and embassies to contact”

“Wash? Thanks. For everything. And for keeping your promise.”

With that, both men put their helmets back on, and began the trek back to the docking bay, and their possibly bigger journey of finding Junior.

“Father! Father! Blargh!” An overly excited and deep voice boomed from the entrance to the mess hall, breaking into a run as people turned to look at the part Sangheili-part human who proceeded to tackle one of their captains and heros.

“Junior! It’s so good to see you! God, I missed you!” Tucker exclaimed from the floor clinging to his son despite the awkward positioning.

“Captain Tucker! Sir are you alright? Who is this? Wait, he called you “Father”, does that mean this is Junior?” Lieutenant Palomo said in a single breath, standing up from his own seat across the table and coming around to the two Tucker men on the floor.

“Tucker! I was trying to find you, but I can see you don’t need me to tell you that Juniors transport arrived early.” Wash came running up to them smiling. He reached a hand down to both to help them up, and then almost fell down himself when Junior launched at him, pulling him into a tight hug.

“Thank you for assisting in reuniting me with my father.” He said as he pushed Wash back to arm's length, pausing to examine his face.

“Junior, mind letting go of Wash for a second?” Tucker asked, and as soon as Junior did so, Tucker pulled the other man in for a kiss.

It was going to be a tough time with that relationship, as both Palomo and the Reds, who had been observing from a nearby table, started hollering things along the lines of  “Fucking Finally” and “You cost me 10 dollars! Couldn’t this have waited until next Tuesday?” but it was probable that the relationship would last, as the loudest thing was Lavernius Tucker Junior’s exclamation of

“Bow chicka honk honk!”

A/N: Junior was not captured by Hargrove’s people, so they just had to call the place he was and have him be sent on to Chorus. I just didn’t feel like the call fit with the story, so I skipped over it. I also don’t really discuss what happened to Epsilon, so feel free to assume what ever you want about the fate of anyone after Charon.

[bountyofbeads]

I don't trust a word out of William Barr's mouth. He's just covering his ass after 5 prosecutors quit the Roger Stone case(3 left the Justice Department altogether) and blunt the damage to his reputation now and after he leaves the Trump administration. William Barr is a stain on the office he holds and the Justice Department in geberal. In a normal administration, he would be fired but in the Trump administration he's celebrated by Trump and his minions for being his 'Roy Cohen' and covering up for Trump's crimes. William Barr will never be able to wash away the filth of Donald Trump, no matter how much he tries. SHAME. SHAME. SHAME.

Barr pushes back against Trump’s criticism of Justice Dept., says tweets ‘make it impossible for me to do my job’

By Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky | Published February 13 at 5:49 PM EST | Washington Post |Posted Feb 13, 2020 |

Attorney General William P. Barr pushed back hard Thursday against President Trump’s attacks on the Justice Department, saying “I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody,” a remarkable public rebuke that could jeopardize his tenure as the nation’s top law enforcement official.

“I think it’s time to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases,” Barr said in an interview with ABC News, adding that such statements “about the department, about people in the department, our men and women here, about cases pending here, and about judges before whom we have cases, make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors and the department that we’re doing our work with integrity.”

Since becoming attorney general last year, Barr has routinely defended the president, much to the frustration of congressional Democrats and some current and former Justice Department officials who have expressed outrage over what they consider an erosion of the agency’s independence. Thursday’s interview marks not just a break from that practice, but the most forceful public pushback against the president by any sitting member of his Cabinet.

The comments are almost certain to anger the president, who has heaped criticism on a selection of current and former Justice Department officials over prosecutions and investigations involving the president’s former associates and alleged leaking by government officials. Barr said he was prepared to accept the consequences of speaking out against the president.

“I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me,” the attorney general said. He also noted that when he became attorney general last year, he pledged to resist intimidation from any quarter, whether Congress, the White House, or elsewhere.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Barr’s public rebuke of the president comes as the attorney general contends with worsening turmoil at the Justice Department, where current and former officials question whether Trump has bent the justice system to his will.

The attorney general has faced mounting scrutiny since Tuesday, when four prosecutors handling the case of President Trump’s longtime friend Roger Stone withdrew from the proceedings amid a dispute over how long he should spend in prison.

In a Monday court filing, the four prosecutors had recommended a prison sentence of seven to nine years, following extensive debate beforehand with their supervisors in the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Trump reacted angrily, tweeting Tuesday: “This is a horrible and very unfair situation. The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!”

In the ABC News interview, Barr said he was surprised by prosecutors’ first filing in the Stone case.

He asserted said that Tim Shea, the U.S. attorney in D.C., had chatted with him briefly on Monday, before the Stone filing, and told him the prosecutors “very much wanted to recommend the seven to nine years to the judge.” But, Barr claimed that Shea told him “he thought that there was a way of satisfying everybody and providing more flexibility.”

“I was under the impression that what was going to happen was very much as I had suggested, which is deferring to the judge, and then pointing out various factors and circumstances,” Barr said.

Barr said when he first saw news reports Monday night of the recommendation that was filed, he thought “Gee, the news is spinning this, this is not what we were going to do.”

“I was very surprised,” Barr said. “And once I confirmed that that’s actually what we filed, I said that night, to my staff, that we had to get ready because we had to do something in the morning to amend that and clarify what our position was.”

Next came the president’s tweet complaining that Stone was being treated unfairly, which Barr said put him in an untenable position.

“Once the tweet occurred, the question is, ‘Well, now what do I do?’” Barr said. “And do you go forward with what you think is the right decision, or do you pull back because of the tweet? And that just sort of illustrates how disruptive these tweets can be.”

Barr insisted that Trump had “never” talked with him about the sentencing recommendation, and that he had “not discussed the Roger Stone case at the White House.”

Barr said Trump would be within his rights to ask for an investigation in an area that didn’t affect his personal interests — such as in a terrorism case, or fraud by a bank. But he said an attorney general would not listen to an order to investigate a political opponent.

“If he were to say go investigate somebody, and you sense it’s because they’re a political opponent, then an attorney general shouldn’t carry that out, wouldn’t carry that out,” Barr said.

Stone was convicted by a jury in November of obstructing Congress and witness intimidation, and prosecutors said he lied to protect Trump. The charges against Stone were the last filed by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as part of his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The new sentencing recommendation — signed by Shea, and a different career prosecutor — said the previous guidance “could be considered excessive and unwarranted under the circumstances.” Shea, a former close adviser to Barr at Justice Department headquarters, was installed at the U.S. Attorney’s Office last month.

Prosecutors and defense lawyers can only make recommendations about prison sentences. Stone is scheduled to be sentenced Feb. 20 by U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, whom Trump also targeted this week in tweets complaining about her treatment of Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman, and suggesting Jackson had, in another case, gone too easy on his Democratic rival in 2016, Hillary Clinton.

Kerri Kupec, a Justice Department spokeswoman, has said the agency decided before Trump’s Tuesday tweet to revise the sentencing recommendation, and that there were no discussions between the White House and Justice Department about Stone’s case in the days leading up to the prosecutors’ guidance.

Current and former Justice Department officials have expressed alarm about the sequence of events, questioning whether the department under Barr caved to the president’s whim on such a high-profile case.

On Wednesday, Trump praised the department’s change of course and singled out Barr specifically.

“Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Evidence now clearly shows that the Mueller Scam was improperly brought & tainted.”

Democrats called earlier this week for the inspector general to investigate the dispute surrounding Stone’s sentence recommendation.

______

Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.

*********

John Kelly just validated the argument that got Trump impeached

By Greg Sargent | Posted February 13 at 4:38 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 13, 2020 |

President Trump unloaded on his former chief of staff John Kelly on Thursday, claiming he couldn’t fire Kelly "fast enough” and that he was “in over his head” in the White House. Curiously, Trump also blasted Kelly by claiming that “he just can’t keep his mouth shut, which he has a legal and military obligation to do.”

It’s not clear what, precisely, Trump was referencing in bringing up Kelly’s supposed tendency to spill secrets. But it is clear that Trump was enraged because of this piece in the Atlantic, which reported on a talk that Kelly gave, in which he vividly demonstrated why Trump is unfit for the presidency.

In that talk, Kelly criticized Trump’s hate-rhetoric about immigrants and his handling of North Korea. Most importantly, he defended Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the former National Security Council official who powerfully testified against Trump’s corrupt call pressuring Ukraine to do his political bidding, as part of his extortion scheme. Trump has since ousted Vindman as punishment.

There’s been a lot of chatter about this Kelly episode, yet it seems to have largely avoided the most important point: Trump’s former chief of staff fully validated the case against Trump that got him impeached, in a way that has real significance, coming from someone who worked alongside Trump inside the White House for nearly two years.

INDEED, KELLY'S DEFENSE OF VINDMAN IS A BIG DEAL:

Although Trump has long insisted that his call to Zelensky was “perfect,” Kelly made clear that Trump indeed conditioned military aid on Zelensky’s help digging up dirt on the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

That amounted to a momentous change in U.S. policy toward Ukraine — one that Vindman was right to flag, because other federal agencies needed to know about the shift, Kelly said.

“Through the Obama administration up until that phone call, the policy of the U.S. was militarily to support Ukraine in their defensive fight against … the Russians,” Kelly said. “And so, when the president said that continued support would be based on X, that essentially changed. And that’s what that guy [Vindman] was most interested in.”

When Vindman heard the president tell Zelensky he wanted to see the Biden family investigated, that was tantamount to hearing “an illegal order,” Kelly said. “We teach them, ‘Don’t follow an illegal order. And if you’re ever given one, you’ll raise it to whoever gives it to you that this is an illegal order, and then tell your boss.’”

Note that Kelly is flatly agreeing that Trump conditioned official acts — in particular, hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine — on getting the Ukrainian president to carry out his dirty political deeds, and implicitly agreeing that U.S. policy was subverted to this end, in a way that abandoned an ally at a moment of extreme vulnerability.

What’s more, Kelly isn’t merely defending Vindman by claiming Trump shouldn’t have ousted him out of revenge, which is an easy position to take. Kelly also is standing by Vindman’s decision to report what he heard, in defiance of the president, on the grounds that he had witnessed wrongdoing.

Trump, of course, has entirely denied this account in every conceivable way, claiming his conduct in the Ukraine extortion scheme was entirely above reproach and was only about protecting the American taxpayer from sinking money into a corrupt country. That’s of course ludicrous, as Kelly demonstrated.

Kelly might not have been there at the time. But this still matters. Here we have a man who worked alongside Trump for nearly two years casually declaring that of course the most damning account of Trump’s corruption is obviously the correct one — it makes perfect sense to his longtime adviser, who saw him up close daily — and of course all the people around him who grew alarmed enough to report that corruption were absolutely right to do so.

What’s more, in this context, Trump’s fury at Kelly becomes more significant. Trump raged at Kelly for showing disloyalty — for failing to praise him sufficiently and for spilling secrets. This is a window into what Trump expects from those who work for him: Not only are they supposed to carry out his corrupt directives — recall that Trump ordered homeland security and border officials to break the law — but they are also adamantly not supposed to rat out his corruption.

This is the Trump family ethic. As Donald Trump Jr. made clear after Vindman’s ouster, that ethic is that anyone who is prepared to rat out the boss’s corruption should have been fired a long time ago, anyway:

Obviously Kelly failed our country in all kinds of ways, and obviously there’s a heavily self-serving dimension to him suddenly speaking about this so belatedly. But nonetheless, having Trump’s own chief of staff validate the entire narrative that got Trump impeached — for which Senate Republicans acquitted Trump only after closing their ears to any further witness testimony to it — is not nothing.

It will be heard by plenty of independents across the country — and, hopefully, by many still inside the bureaucracy as well.

*********

Pentagon to divert $3.8 billion from its budget to build more of Trump’s border barrier

By Paul Sonne and Nick Miroff | Published February 13 at 6:27 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted Feb 13, 2020

The Defense Department said it is diverting $3.83 billion from elsewhere in its budget to build ­177 more miles of President Trump’s border barrier, setting in motion a broader White House plan to take some $7.2 billion from the Pentagon budget this year for the project without congressional approval as Trump heads into the election.

The Pentagon informed Congress on Thursday of its plans to divert the $3.83 billion from the purchase of aircraft and other equipment and instead use the funds for the construction of border barriers. The Pentagon is moving the money using an obscure counternarcotics law that allows the Defense Department to build fencing for other federal, state and local agencies in known drug-smuggling corridors.

According to budget documents reviewed by The Washington Post, the Pentagon is pulling the funding from two F-35 fighter jets and two Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft for the Marine Corps; one P-8A reconnaissance aircraft for the Navy; and four C-130J transport planes and eight MQ-9 Reaper drones for the Air Force.

In addition, funding will be diverted from programs to update Humvees and trucks for the Army, buy $1.3 billion in “miscellaneous” new equipment for the National Guard and Reserves and develop certain U.S. Navy vessels. The Pentagon told Congress the funding is either in excess of the military’s needs or is not yet needed given the timeline of the programs in question.

The $7.2 billion the White House is targeting in the Pentagon budget this year would give Trump enough money to complete nearly 900 miles of new barriers by 2022, a plan that allows him to campaign for reelection on his signature immigration initiative — and the budget to pay for it.

Robert G. Salesses, deputy assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense integration, said he was aware of discussions to take more money from the Pentagon budget apart from the $3.83 billion announced Thursday but that no decisions had been made.

The latest diversion of Pentagon funds, Salesses said, comes in response to a request the Department of Homeland Security made in mid-January. The $3.83 billion, he said, will pay for the construction of 177 miles of 30-foot bollard-style barriers on federally controlled land in six border sectors: San Diego, El Centro, Yuma, Tucson, El Paso and Del Rio. It will be contracted through the Army Corps of Engineers.

“It’s clear that we are meeting the requirements that have been identified by the president to accelerate and build the border barrier as quickly and as effectively as we can,” Salesses said.

Critics from both parties say Trump’s move over the past two years to take what now amounts to nearly $10 billion appropriated by Congress for the military has set a dangerous precedent in executive overreach, which could open the door for a future administration to defy Congress’s constitutionally mandated power of the purse. Trump regularly said on the campaign trail that Mexico would pay for his border wall.

“Congress has repeatedly voted in a bipartisan way to refuse funding the President’s wasteful, ineffective border wall,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement. “This latest effort to steal Congressionally-appropriated military funding undermines our national security and the separation of powers enshrined in our Constitution.”

Even Republicans who support increased border security have bristled at the questionable way Trump is deriving funds to see through one of his primary campaign promises.

Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Tex.), the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, criticized Thursday’s move, emphasizing that Congress has the constitutional responsibility to determine how defense dollars are spent.

“The re-programming announced today is contrary to Congress’s constitutional authority, and I believe that it requires Congress to take action,” Thornberry said in a statement.

On Monday, the White House released its budget request for 2021, which included $2 billion in border wall funds, far less than what Trump is planning to take from defense funding.

The Trump administration is making the moves without approval from Congress, which under the U.S. Constitution is given the power to appropriate federal funds. Some U.S. states and advocacy groups are challenging the legality of the administration’s plans in federal courts.

While lower courts have temporarily halted the use of military funds, the Supreme Court and a federal appeals court in a separate case have allowed the Trump administration to go forward with the transfers — and barrier construction — while litigation is pending.

Last year, Trump bypassed Congress to take $6.1 billion from the Pentagon budget for the border project.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which is challenging the legality of the administration’s actions on border barrier funding in court, said it would move to stop the latest transfer of military funds.

“Multiple courts have ruled that it is illegal for Trump to pillage military funds for his xenophobic border wall,” said Dror Ladin, an attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project. “Not one court has given his unlawful power grab the stamp of approval. We’ll be back in court to block these additional, unauthorized transfers.”

To take the funding, Trump used the counternarcotics law, as well as another little-known statute in U.S. code that allows the Pentagon, in the event of a national emergency requiring the deployment of troops, to divert military construction funds to pay for infrastructure needed by those forces.

About 5,000 troops — including National Guard and active-duty forces — remain deployed to the U.S. southern border. The Joint Chiefs of Staff determined last year that the construction of border barriers would support those troops — the active-duty component of which is deployed under a national emergency Trump declared early last year.

The Pentagon suggested the ­$3.6 billion in military construction funds it diverted to border barriers last year would be “backfilled” by Congress, potentially leading to no delays in the projects that were defunded. But the money wasn’t replenished, so the projects are de facto canceled until they receive funding.

The White House is expected to take a similar amount again this year from military construction funds, but Pentagon officials have not said which projects Congress has approved would be defunded to free up that money. The Pentagon’s civil works budget could also be diverted to pay for barrier construction.

Salesses said he wasn’t aware of plans to tap the Pentagon’s civil works budget. He declined to comment on discussions about taking money from the military construction budget again this year.

Salesses said the Pentagon has been given the authority by Congress to move around $6 billion within its budget this year under a process known as reprogramming.

The defense secretary must determine the money is going to a higher-priority matter than what it was appropriated for initially, and in this case Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper did so, Salesses said.

Salesses said at the instruction of the president, the administration is progressing rapidly toward fulfilling DHS’s plan to build 722 miles of border barriers over 10 years at a cost of approximately $18 billion.

“This will obviously meet a lot of those goals that were set,” Salesses said, citing “significant national security challenges on the southwest border of the United States.”

The top Pentagon official said he didn’t anticipate receiving more requests from DHS for funding from the Defense Department budget for the border barrier next year, as a result of the accelerated progress already made.

Projects whose funding was pulled last year include the restoration of U.S. military facilities destroyed by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, installations the U.S. military said it would build in Europe to help deter Russia and schools on U.S. military bases in the United States and abroad.

In a letter to the Pentagon’s acting comptroller, Rep. Peter J. Visclosky (D-Ind.), chairman of the House subcommittee on defense appropriations, said his subcommittee rejected the Defense Department’s latest request to reallocate the funds.

The Pentagon has previously said that by law it doesn’t need approval from Congress to move funds when the amount is lower than the reprogramming cap. It does have a duty to inform Congress, as the Pentagon did Thursday.

In earlier administrations, Defense Department officials typically sought approval from leaders of the relevant congressional committees as a matter of course for large reallocations, even if the approval wasn’t technically required by law.

In his letter to the acting comptroller, Visclosky said that with its unilateral action, the Defense Department was continuing to breach “the historic and unprecedented comity” that has existed between his committee and the Pentagon.

*********

Former White House chief of staff John Kelly takes issue with Trump for ousting Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, among other things

By John Wagner and Josh Dawsey | Published February 13 at 3:09 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted Feb 13, 2020

Former White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly laid bare an array of misgivings Wednesday night about President Trump’s policies and actions, including his ouster of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the former National Security Council aide and impeachment witness.

Vindman, who raised concerns about a July phone call in which Trump pressed Ukraine's leader for investigations that could benefit him politically, “did exactly what we teach them to do,” Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, told an audience at the Drew University Forum lecture series in Morristown, N.J.

Over the course of 75 minutes of remarks and questions and answers, Kelly, who left the White House early last year, also defended the news media, questioned Trump’s handling of North Korea, criticized Trump for intervening in a military justice case and took issue with his descriptions of immigrants, according to accounts in the Atlantic and local news media that were confirmed by a person with knowledge of the event.

Trump took aim at Kelly on Twitter on Thursday morning, saying Kelly “misses the action & just can’t keep his mouth shut.”

“When I terminated John Kelly, which I couldn’t do fast enough, he knew full well that he was way over his head,” the president tweeted.

Trump also claimed that Kelly’s “incredible” wife had once told him that Kelly respected him and would only speak well of him in the future. “Wrong!” Trump said.

Kelly declined to comment on the tweets.

The president and Kushner grew disenchanted with Kelly after he tried to restrain some of the president’s impulses and put limitations on what members of the president’s family could do in the White House.

Kelly has criticized Trump pointedly and repeatedly in private for months but has only said negative things publicly at paid speaking engagements. He has not done a television interview. When Kelly left the White House, he promised Trump he would not write a book while the president was still in office, and Trump signaled in return that he would not attack Kelly.

Kelly has described Trump as amoral and a deeply flawed man in private, saying he only obsesses about his news coverage and thinks very little about what matters to the United States when making decisions. He has told associates that Trump is naive when it comes to foreign policy because he only cares about what foreign leaders think of him and what makes him look strong in the moment, people who have heard his comments say.

Kelly was not immediately available for comment Thursday.

Vindman, an expert on Ukraine policy, was escorted out of the White House complex last week following Trump’s acquittal in a Senate impeachment trial, which focused on Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukraine to investigate former vice president Joe Biden at a time when U.S. military aid was being withheld.

Vindman, who listened in to Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, was right to having notified his superiors after hearing something “questionable,” Kelly told an audience of about 300 at the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown.

“He did exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave,” Kelly said, according to the account by the Atlantic. “He went and told his boss what he just heard.”

Kelly said that for Vindman, it amounted to hearing “an illegal order” when Trump told Zelensky he wanted to see an investigation of Biden and his son Hunter Biden, who had sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.

“We teach them: Don’t follow an illegal order,” Kelly said. “And if you’re ever given one, you’ll raise it to whoever gives it to you that this is an illegal order, and then tell your boss.”

During the event, Kelly also took issue with Trump’s repeated characterizations of the media as “the enemy of the people.”

“The media, in my view, and I feel very strongly about this, is not the enemy of the people,” he said, according to the Morristown Daily Record. “We need a free media. That said, you have to be careful about what you are watching and reading, because the media has taken sides. So if you only watch Fox News, because it’s reinforcing what you believe, you are not an informed citizen.”

Kelly also questioned the utility of Trump’s two summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in a bid to get the isolated nation to give up its nuclear arms.

“He will never give his nuclear weapons up,” Kelly said of Kim. “President Trump tried — that’s one way to put it. But it didn’t work. I’m an optimist most of the time, but I’m also a realist, and I never did think Kim would do anything other than play us for a while, and he did that fairly effectively.”

Responding to another audience question, Kelly took issue with Trump’s pardon last year of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was convicted of war crimes on charges of killing an Iraqi teenager and later posing with the corpse for a photograph.

“He was not a guy who represents our military in any way, shape or form,” Kelly said, according to MorristownGreen.com. “The military legal justice system worked; he was found guilty of certain things. He should have been ashamed of himself, and he should have been sent home.”

“So the idea that the commander in chief intervened there, in my opinion, was exactly the wrong thing to do,” Kelly said, generating applause from the crowd.

Kelly, who served as secretary of homeland security until July 2017, defended the Trump administration's efforts to reduce border crossings.

But he said most migrants are looking for jobs and a better life in the United States, and he took issue with how Trump characterized them in his presidential announcement speech in 2015 and on subsequent occasions.

“In fact, they’re overwhelmingly good people,” Kelly said, according to the Atlantic’s account. “They’re not all rapists, and they’re not all murderers. And it’s wrong to characterize them that way. I disagreed with the president a number of times.”

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Trump to headline a $580,600-per-couple fundraiser, the most expensive of his reelection bid

By Josh Dawsey and Michelle Ye Hee Lee | Published February 13 at 6:34 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 13, 2020 |

President Trump will be the guest of honor at a Saturday fundraiser at the palatial Palm Beach estate of billionaire Nelson Peltz. Trump’s fellow guests: donors who gave $580,600 per couple to support the president’s reelection, making it the most expensive such fundraising event since Trump took office.

The dinner, taking place just a few miles from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, shows how enthusiastically Trump has embraced big-dollar fundraising in his bid for a second term — a dramatic about-face from 2016, when he criticized the influence of wealthy donors on the politicians who court them.

It also shows the special access enjoyed by many of Trump’s wealthiest donors, including business executives and lobbyists, who get the chance to air their grievances with the president’s tariffs or promote their pet projects, often while dining on Trump’s favorite foods.

Since October 2017, Trump has attended at least 48 intimate gatherings with the Republican Party’s elite donors, including dinners or roundtable discussions, according to a Washington Post analysis of his fundraising schedule. Tickets to these events can range from $50,000 to six figures per person.

Republican officials note that previous presidents also raised large amounts from wealthy people and that President Barack Obama regularly held small dinners with top donors.

“President Trump is the most accessible president in history, both with the press and with supporters. These roundtables, which previous presidents attended as well, are an opportunity for our supporters to get an update on the campaign and his record as president, all things the president discusses publicly all the time,” said Mike Reed, a spokesman for the RNC.

But they go against the president’s rhetoric from the 2016 campaign, when he rode a populist wave into Washington vowing to “drain the swamp.” Back then, he denounced the chase for wealthy backers and criticized his opponents for doing so, saying it made candidates beholden to donors and declaring it was “not going to happen with me.”

“Somebody gives them money — not anything wrong — just psychologically when they go to that person, they’re going to do it,” he said in a January 2016 CNN interview. “They owe them.”

He has repeatedly said that New York politicians are indebted to him because he gave them large checks.

Now, he has adopted a take-all-comers approach to raising money — from wealthy backers and low-dollar givers alike — and has built a historically large reelection money machine that has allowed his campaign to leap ahead as Democratic presidential candidates squabble over the appropriate role of wealthy donors in politics.

The president and the Republican Party have assembled a formidable war chest, with about $200 million on hand as of last month for the general election fight, party officials said.

Those who seek to reduce the role of wealthy donors in politics said Trump’s embrace of the world of wealthy political donors contradicts his promise to his voters, and fuels the same frustrations they were rejecting when they elected him.

“He’s undercutting the spirit of the energy that he’s helping foment, by hanging out with and possibly doing the bidding of the wealthy and special interests,” said Nick Penniman, founder and chief executive of ­Issue One, a bipartisan group working to reduce the influence of wealthy interests on politics.

“You’ve got to wonder now if the Trump presidency is the continuation of the kind of oligarchy that many people think is taking over in America, or whether or not it is a corrective measure like many people thought it would be,” Penniman added.

A spokeswoman for Peltz’s company — he is an investor worth $1.7 billion, according to Forbes — did not respond to requests for comment. His 13-acre beachfront estate lined with hedges is worth $94.9 million, according to the Palm Beach Post.

An invitation obtained by The Washington Post for the $580,600 dinner says the price includes a photo with the president and lists other GOP bigwigs expected to be in attendance.

The dinner is expected to attract about 30 people and raise more than $5 million for the president and his committee. Others on the guest list are Ike Perlmutter, a Trump friend and chairman of Marvel Entertainment, and Louis DeJoy, fundraising chair for the 2020 Republican convention, according to a person with knowledge of the gathering, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the event is private.

Though it is the most expensive such event Trump has headlined for the party, other pricey gatherings are planned as the election nears.

Interviews with people who have attended these fundraisers say the president is highly engaged, conversational and charming. Trump often asks the guests what they need from the administration — but not before ticking off dozens of accomplishments in extended opening remarks.

The conversations are often held over a meal of the president’s favorite dishes, such as New York strip steak with a dessert of two scoops of vanilla ice cream, served on ornate place settings. Unlike many politicians who leave their food untouched, attendees say Trump usually eats.

The roundtables are typically side events to less expensive fundraisers involving a larger group of people. The president often arrives through a side door reserved for him, greets the crowd leisurely, takes photos and then veers off to a smaller room for an intimate roundtable with the top-tiered donors, said one donor who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private settings.

Dan Eberhart, a donor who has attended several roundtables featuring the president, recalls one gathering where Trump made a show of praising an attendee wearing a Trump-branded tie.

Though Trump appears to enjoy himself, he has complained about visiting so many houses of people he did not know, an official said. Since then, more events have taken place at a friend’s home or at one of his properties, the person said. Trump considers Peltz a friend.

But the opportunity to have close interactions with the president is a particular perk enjoyed by attendees with agendas.

“Trump wants to talk about the news of the day and personalities,” Eberhart said. “The donors want to talk about policies and what’s affecting them.”

At a Texas roundtable at the stately Belo Mansion in Dallas, donor Doug Deason, the organizer of the event and several others, said supporters spoke with the president about energy and oil policy while offering support for his deregulation agenda. The room was packed with Texas Republican business figures.

“People say, look, these kinds of regulations are kicking my butt. And then Trump responds that he understands and is ideologically with you,” Eberhart said.

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, the two indicted associates of presidential lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani who discussed the Ukrainian ambassador, gained access to the president at two separate such events in 2018 after promising to donate $1 million. Trump later fired the ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, who became a central figure in the impeachment. Their company ended up donating $325,000 to the super PAC supporting the president’s reelection.

Some donors disputed the idea that attendees at these gatherings have special pull with the president.

“I just don’t see it. [Administration officials] pay more attention to maybe the Chamber of Commerce [and other business groups], pay more attention to the source of actual votes, than they do to some individual who’s giving a lot of money,” said the donor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.

One lobbyist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, said he told several clients that it did not make sense to pay for the events — because it would not solve their political issues and would put them on the radar screen for news coverage.

Donors who turn up regularly at these events say they have developed a camaraderie. But every once in a while, a new donor attends and asks a question that is “annoying” to the rest because it relates too specifically to that person’s business, said one donor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private settings.

“What do I care about the drilling rights in freaking Kansas, or a particular permit, or something? These are broader audiences and broader participants,” the donor said.

“There’s always someone in the group who is asking him to stop tariffs,” Deason said. “They’ll say, no, you’re killing me on this. A lot of people are worried about themselves and they are worried about their particular industry. A lot of people are concerned about how this or that might affect them.”

Trump often refers such requests to his staff and senior aides. Senior staffers sometimes interject and offer to talk to the donors later.

“What he doesn’t like is someone pushing for a contract for a particular company,” Deason said of Trump. “It just really frustrates him.”

On a recording of one of the fundraisers released by a lawyer for Parnas last month, a steel executive can be heard pressing the president on removing tariffs. Another donor can be heard pitching the president on his Korean golf course for a potential summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Guests are not allowed to bring their phones in anymore, GOP officials said, for fear that they will record the discussion.

Aside from a cursory Secret Service check, the White House does not vet guests, campaign and White House officials said.

At one event, Deason said he encouraged the president to tell Immigration and Customs Enforcement to ease off Iraqi Christians in Michigan, arguing that it could hurt his election chances in a reelection year. Deason said he encouraged Trump to be more positive toward Hispanic audiences in his tweets.

But the tone at the events is predominantly jovial. He often calls out noteworthy donors — such as oil magnate Harold Hamm, or Paul Singer, a New York billionaire who originally did not support him — for being so rich. Deason said that White House staffers on several occasions made a slashing sign for the president to wrap up but that Trump wanted to keep talking. “He would say, ‘One more question, one more question,’ ” Deason said.

Eberhart, a mining executive, said that the opportunity to speak directly to the president was just an added bonus for being a donor to the party and that he would have given money anyway.

“I want that ideology to prevail,” he said. “It’s very energizing to be in the room with the people who have momentum on the causes you believe in.”

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Pelosi says Barr ‘deeply damaged the rule of law’ through handling of Stone case

By Felicia Sonmez | Published February 13 at 5:56 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 13, 2020 |

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) took aim Thursday at Attorney General William P. Barr, accusing him of having “deeply damaged the rule of law” by withdrawing the Justice Department’s sentencing recommendation for President Trump’s longtime friend and associate, Roger Stone.

“What a sad disappointment to our country,” Pelosi said of Barr, who Trump nominated to lead the Justice Department in late 2018. “The American people deserve better.”

She called on Republicans in the Senate to speak out and launch a probe into the matter.

“This all must be investigated,” she said. “The American people must have confidence in our nation’s system of impartial justice.”

A jury convicted Stone in November on charges of witness tampering and lying to Congress about his efforts to gather damaging information about Trump’s 2016 presidential election opponent Hillary Clinton.

On Tuesday, Trump criticized as unduly harsh the initial sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years made by front-line prosecutors. Shortly thereafter, the Justice Department signaled that it would seek a more lenient sentence for Stone, a move that prompted all four career prosecutors to withdraw from the case and one to resign from the government.

Trump congratulated Barr for “taking charge” of the matter and has since begun targeting U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who will determine Stone’s fate when he appears in her courtroom next week.

Pelosi’s criticism of Barr comes one day after the House Judiciary Committee announced that the attorney general is expected to testify March 31 regarding his handling of the Stone case and other recent incidents that it said “raise grave questions” about his leadership.

In a floor speech earlier Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called for Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to defend Jackson against Trump’s efforts to delegitimize her.

Roberts, Schumer noted, had previously issued a rare rebuke of Trump’s criticism of an “Obama judge” who ruled against the administration.

“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts had said in his November 2018 statement. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

Schumer said Thursday that “now would be the time for Chief Justice Roberts to speak up” in defense of Jackson.

“Now would be the time for the chief justice to directly and specifically defend the independence of this federal judge,” he said. “I hope he will see fit to do that and to do it today.”

Schumer and the nine other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee also wrote a letter to the panel’s chairman, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) on Thursday asking him to immediately launch an investigation into alleged political interference at the Department of Justice in the wake of the Stone news.

“The Justice Department’s mission ‘to ensure fair and impartial justice for all Americans’ requires that its prosecutorial decisions remain free from political influence. It’s becoming clear that this is not happening,” the 10 senators wrote. “That’s why the Judiciary Committee should investigate involvement of political appointees in this and other cases and hear directly from Attorney General Barr.”

At her news conference, Pelosi directly criticized Trump, arguing that he “thinks he’s above the law.”

“This is an abuse of power that the president is again trying to manipulate federal law enforcement to serve his political interests,” she said.

She described the decision by the four prosecutors to withdraw from the Stone case as “an act of courage” and said that Republicans must not be silent on the matter.

“Where are the Republicans to speak out on this blatant violation of the rule of law?” Pelosi asked. “AG Barr has deeply damaged the rule of law by withdrawing the DOJ’s sentencing recommendation.”

A Justice Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Later Thursday, in an interview with ABC News, Barr pushed back against Trump’s criticism of the Justice Department, saying that he is “not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody.”

Certain presidential statements and tweets, Barr said, “make it impossible for me to do my job.”

One judge who did weigh in Thursday was Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell of Washington. In a statement, Howell responded to Trump’s attacks on Jackson and defended the integrity of the courts.

“The Judges of this Court base their sentencing decisions on careful consideration of the actual record in the case before them; the applicable sentencing guidelines and statutory factors; the submissions of the parties, the Probation Office and victims; and their own judgment and experience,” Howell said. “Public criticism or pressure is not a factor.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), meanwhile, pointed the finger at Democrats in a floor speech Thursday morning in which he accused them of violating the country’s “norms and traditions” by voting to impeach Trump.

“It was they who included political bloodlust at the expense of our institutions,” he said. “There has been much discussion about the foreign adversaries who seek to reduce the American people’s faith in our democracy and cause chaos and division in our country. Rightly so, but we must also demand that our own political leaders exercise some self-restraint and not do the work of our adversaries for them.”

Democrats have repeatedly accused McConnell of violating norms by blocking President Barack Obama’s 2016 Supreme Court nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, until after that year’s presidential election, ultimately costing Garland a spot on the court.

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Robert Barnes, Spencer S. Hsu, Ann E. Marimow and Matt Zapotosky contributed to this report.

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