McIver charges ‘absurd': Former White House ethics lawyer
Former Obama-era White House ethics lawyer Norm Eisen called the criminal charge against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) 'absurd' and predicted it would 'not stand' up in court.
'We've all seen that video, and it's absurd to charge a member of Congress, Representative McIver, with doing anything other than doing her job,' Eisen, a frequent critic of President Trump's administration, said in an interview Monday night on MSNBC.
'Yes, it was an intense situation. There was no crime there,' he added.
Alina Habba, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, announced on Monday she is charging McIver for allegedly assaulting law enforcement while at an U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Newark earlier this month.
The announcement stems from a skirmish during McIver's visit to the Delaney Hall ICE detention center earlier this month alongside fellow New Jersey Democrats, Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman and Rob Menendez, and with Newark Mayor Ras Baraka (D), who was arrested on a misdemeanor trespassing charge, which Habba's office also announced Monday would be dropped.
McIver and allies have disputed the 'assault' characterization and argued the congresswoman would not have been granted access to the facility and given an hour-long tour of the center by administration officials had she first broken the law.
The announcement Monday also marks the first time Trump's Justice Department has criminally charged a sitting lawmaker during his second term.
Eisen, who has brought legal challenges against various moves by the Trump administration, slammed the federal government for pursuing the charges.
'The Department of Justice under Donald Trump and AG Pam Bondi is running amok,' he said. 'Donald Trump promised he'd be a dictator on day one. He kept going. This is the latest example.'
'No normal administration would do this, but the courts are going to have the last word with this. This will not stand,' Eisen added.
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Politico
24 minutes ago
- Politico
Jolly takes the plunge into wide open field
BREAKING LAST NIGHT — 'President Donald Trump on Wednesday issued a sweeping new travel ban for people from 19 countries, citing national security risks,' reports POLITICO's Myah Ward. The ban fully restricts people from Haiti and partially restricts entry for nationals of Cuba and Venezuela. Good morning and welcome to Thursday. Zero Democrats in statewide office. An electoral shortfall of 1.3 million voters. The home for much of President DONALD TRUMP's staff and his 'Winter White House.' The testing ground for MAGA. It's how Florida looks for Democrats. And running for Florida governor in that kind of environment, where fundraising is sputtering and the party has immense hurdles to overcome? Seemingly no one would rush to take that on. Except for DAVID JOLLY. The former Republican congressman, who was a politically independent voter since 2018 and registered as a Democrat in April, has officially filed to run for governor. The biggest challenger on the Republican side so far is Trump-endorsed Rep. BYRON DONALDS. But the Democratic field has been full of only crickets thus far. Those who openly expressed interest in running a year ago have since stepped back, underscoring just how bleak the landscape appears after Trump won Florida by 13 points in 2024. 'People who might have been very strong candidates would want to see the party infrastructure build up and be a better atmosphere to run,' said state Sen. TINA POLSKY (D-Boca Raton). 'But then it kind of takes someone maybe a little bit different, a little bit out of the norm — like David Jolly is — to upend the system. If anyone's going to do it, I think he has a better chance than a run-of-the-mill Democrat.' A lot could change ahead of the August 2026 primary. But the dearth of interest — or of candidates even at the very least floating trial balloons to gauge reaction — stands in contrast to what's happening at the national level, where Democratic hopefuls are already making moves to signal their 2028 presidential interest. The last time Florida had an open seat for governor, in 2018, seven Democrats competed for the nomination. But Jolly could help unify the party with an easy path to the nomination. He told Playbook in an interview that he's hoping the 2026 cycle will be a 'change election' in which voters are driven to outside-the-norm candidates given Trump's policies and how unaffordable Florida has become under GOP leadership. He said he's going to try to bring together not just Democrats but unaffiliated voters and Republicans. 'The ones we've spoken to have either indicated they're not running or they'll support us, either privately or publicly,' Jolly told Playbook of top Florida Democrats. 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DeSantis will speak at the Florida Professional Firefighters convention in Palm Beach Gardens at 9:45 a.m. Have a tip, story, suggestion, birthday, anniversary, new job, or any other nugget that Playbook should look at? Get in touch at: kleonard@ ... DATELINE TALLAHASSEE ... FLORIDA'S NEW EDUCATION COMMISSIONER — 'The state Board of Education on Wednesday unanimously backed Anastasios Kamoutsas, the governor's deputy chief of staff who has long played a key behind the scenes role, to lead the agency. Kamoutsas, in accepting the position, pledged to follow through on Florida's reforms on parental rights and school choice that have thrust the state into the national spotlight,' reports POLITICO's Andrew Atterbury. 'During his time with the agency, Kamoutsas, who is known as 'Stasi,' helped the state carry out policies bolstering parental rights, quashing 'wokeness' in education and battling with school districts that pushed pandemic student masking.' 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The state would pay $93.6 million to Weyerhaeuser Forest Holdings, Inc. for an easement over 61,389 acres in Baker and Union Counties. And the state would pay Blackbottom Holdings LLC $24.3 million for an easement over 14,743 acres in Baker and Bradford counties. The Tampa Bay Times reported that the Cabinet also will consider a proposal by Cabot Citrus Farms, a golf course developer, to sell 340 acres in Hernando County near where it sought to acquire state forest land in a controversial 2024 trade deal that was recently scrapped. — Bruce Ritchie BALLOT INITIATIVE LATEST — 'A federal judge on Wednesday placed a temporary halt on part of a new law tightening Florida's control over ballot initiatives. But he refused to press pause on the entire measure,' reports POLITICO's Arek Sarkissian. 'A group called Florida Decides Health Care filed a lawsuit in Tallahassee federal court about a month ago challenging a new state law. 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Yahoo
29 minutes ago
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Calmes: The 'Trump Doctrine' revealed
'I run the country and the world,' President Trump boasted to reporters for the Atlantic in April, by way of explaining how his current presidency differs from his first. Even for the clinically braggadocious Trump, that was a mouthful. Yes, alas, he does run the country, with a bold recklessness like no president before him, and often lawlessly. He's virtually unchallenged by a supposedly co-equal Congress run by obeisant fellow Republicans who are scared of him and his voters, and he's only partly limited by federal courts that are constrained, as he's not, by fealty to the slow and deliberative rule of law. But Trump running the world? That's hardly clear. As often as not, the world seems to be running him. Yes, Trump is wielding power and forcing global leaders and foreign economies to react to his diktats. He's inflicting incalculable damage: by his hostility to the United States' longtime democratic allies and to the 80-year-old international structure that's bound them; by his shameful deference to the world's dictators; by his global trade war; and not least, by his near-wipeout of U.S. humanitarian aid resulting in the confirmed deaths of uncountable numbers of the globe's poorest people. Yet there is no peace between Ukraine and its Russian invader, despite then-candidate Trump's frequent claims he'd settle the worst European conflict since World War II even before he got to the White House. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doubling down on his scorched-earth war in Gaza, though Trump told his pal Bibi last year to end the killing, before Trump took office. Talks with Iran are reported near collapse on a deal to prevent the country from building nuclear arms, replacing the Obama-brokered pact that was doing just that before Trump scrapped it. And despite White House bluster in April about cutting 90 trade deals in 90 days, as nations pleaded for relief from Trump's tariffs, no final agreements have been announced by the self-described artist of the deal. For more than a century, as the United States evolved from an isolated giant buffered by two oceans into the world's superpower, people here and abroad have looked to American presidents' early actions and pronouncements to discern a guiding doctrine. After all, not just Americans but all the globe's residents have a stake in U.S. policies — as HIV-infected children in Africa, Ukrainian soldiers, foreign traders and consumers, and many others are sadly finding. A Trump Doctrine is easily discernible in the president's foreign policy record: It's 'Me, Myself and I.' Aside from his vague 'America First' (white) nationalist sloganeering, Trump speaks and acts in ways that reflect little appreciation for the national interest or democratic ideals. He's all about himself and his interests — increasingly, that literally means his business interests. Trump's foreign policy is strictly transactional, motivated by what's in it for him, personally and politically. Which is why, contrary to past presidents for decades, Trump twice now has made his first foreign trip as president not to allies in Europe or North America who share America's values, but to autocratic Saudi Arabia. There, and in the smaller, oil-rich Middle Eastern monarchies he also visited last month, Trump is plainly comfortable, amid the opulence and the shared language of deal-making. In fact, Trump explicitly told reporters soon after his inauguration that he'd likely travel first to Saudi Arabia — if it agreed in advance to spend about $500 billion in the United States. Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman gamely offered $600 billion over four years. Ultimately, Trump came home from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates boasting of bagging $5 trillion — that's trillion, with a T — or maybe $7 trillion, he said, along with a Qatari royal jet for his own use. What details there were suggested that the trade deals for which the president was taking credit — no surprise here — included some commitments dating to the Biden administration. In any case, Americans shouldn't necessarily count on the promised investments: Saudi Arabia's MBS similarly vowed to spend up to $600 billion in the United States back in 2017, when Trump first took office. Yet a study by the Arab Gulf States Initiative concluded that over Trump's first term, U.S. exports to Saudi Arabia totaled $92 billion — below the $110 billion in exports during the preceding four years under President Obama. But here's what you can count on: As the Wall Street Journal has reported, the Trump family business is signing more deals internationally than ever before, mostly in the Middle East but also in India and eastern Europe, for 12 projects including residential high-rises, luxe hotels and golf courses. Beyond real estate, there's the Trumps' $2-billion cryptocurrency deal with the United Arab Emirates state fund. America First? 'We're the hottest brand in the world right now,' son Eric Trump, who runs the Trump Organization, told the Journal. That's good, I guess, because the American brand under Trump has hit the skids. The other noxious sign of Trump's personalization of foreign policy: his constant references to foreign leaders in terms of his own relations with them. Trump's problem is that his supposed friends — the Saudis' MBS, Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping — have ideological and national interests that, unlike for Trump, transcend their personal feelings and stakes. And so MBS resists making peace with Israel, as Trump wants, if Israel won't support a Palestinian state. And Netanyahu vows he'll never do so. Xi has avoided taking a phone call with Trump to talk U.S.-China trade. Meanwhile, Putin plays Trump along in the U.S.-sponsored peace talks with Ukraine; he doesn't want peace, he wants all of Ukraine. Only Trump, then, was surprised by Putin's murderous air attacks in recent weeks. 'I've always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him,' Trump posted. 'He has gone absolutely CRAZY!' The Kremlin dismissed Trump as 'emotional.' That's what happens when you think you run the world, and the world has other ideas. @Jackiekcalmes @ @jkcalmes If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Yahoo
29 minutes ago
- Yahoo
How Dems will run on GOP's tax-and-spending bill
House and Senate Democrats' campaign arms teamed up on new internal polling that surveyed almost 20,000 voters to test how lawmakers can run on Republicans' sprawling tax-and-spending bill in 2026. The results: 'Messages that highlight GOP plans to cut key programs like Medicare and Medicaid … are consistently the most effective,' the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee wrote in a memo shared with Semafor. The firm that conducted the polling, Blue Rose Research, also found that only one in four voters think the bill will 'help them and their families.' The polling serves as a useful road map for how Democrats in both chambers plan to keep talking about the legislation over the next two years. Most have already seized on similar talking points even as GOP colleagues argue that changes to the programs are necessary to protect their integrity and reduce the deficit. 'Both House and Senate Republicans' cutting health care and food assistance programs, all to benefit the wealthy over working families is a potent negative attack,' the DCCC and DSCC wrote. 'Given these findings, it is key that both House and Senate Democrats continue to implement this message as far and wide as possible.'
