Nixon's "Enemies List" usually refers to the
names published in newspapers in 1973, even though there is only one short list
that can confidently be called a White House enemies list without quotes. Young
White House Aide John W. Dean III used the term "enemies list"
loosely in his testimony before Congress, giving an eager press license to use
the term for any of the names that came out of the "Opponents List and
Political Enemies Project."
In June 1974, Congress found no evidence that the IRS had
been used to harass people on these lists. Nixon DID harass people using the FBI and IRS, but not
as a result of inclusion on these lists.
Many people on the list, like Dan
Schorr, were harrassed, but Nixon didn't need a list to know that he
hated Dan Schorr. Others, like John Lennon, were not on any list, but were
still harassed by the FBI. Still others, like L. Ron Hubbard, falsely claimed
to be on the List and targeted by the FBI, but that was back when there was no
good way to search all the Watergate testimony in order to disprove his claim.
Thus, the "Enemies List" is more about bragging rights than political
victimization
To quote the late Yogi Berra, it’s deja vu all over again
It’s a well-known fact that Donald Trump is a vindictive and
nasty person. Although there are plenty of examples, the most disconcerting one
was listed in in Fred Trump III’s book, “All in the family”.
Donald Trump was one of the executors of his father’s estate When he tried to cheat Fred Trump and his sister Mary out of millions of dollars of their inheritance, they sued him. Not long after that, he cut off medical coverage for Fred’s young son, who needed expensive medical care to survive.
During
the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump made more than 100 threats to investigate, prosecute, imprison or
otherwise punish his perceived enemies, including political opponents and
private citizens.
President Biden’s staff is debating whether he should issue blanket pardons for a swath of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s perceived enemies to protect them from the “retribution” he has threatened after he takes office, according to people familiar with the discussion.
The idea would be to pre-emptively extend executive clemency to a list of current and former government officials for any possible crimes over a period of years, effectively short-circuiting the next president’s promised campaign of reprisals.
White House officials do not believe the potential recipients have actually committed crimes, but they have grown increasingly worried that Mr. Trump’s selections for top Justice Department positions indicate that he will follow through on his repeated vows to seek revenge. Even an investigation that results in no charges could drag on for months or years, costing those people hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and crippling their career prospects.
Now,
many of his targets are bracing for the possibility that the president-elect
will enact an agenda of "retribution," as Trump put it.
"It
would be naive and foolish for anyone not to take this seriously," said
Mark Zaid, an attorney who represents several people threatened by Trump.
"We have to prepare as much as we can for what might be coming."
Zaid has
represented many current and former government officials who work in national
security — people Trump often describes as members of the "deep
state" out to subvert his agenda. Zaid also represented a whistleblower, who raised
concerns about Trump's interactions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelynsky
in 2019. That whistleblower's disclosure helped lead to Trump's first
impeachment, and enraged the former — and future — president.
And
even if the Trump administration doesn't resort to criminal investigations of
their enemies, Zaid said he's concerned about the possibility of
politically-motivated IRS audits and firings of government employees.
Trump
tried to take away the protection of long-term federal employees in his first
term. He plans to do the same thing is his next term of office. Former aides close to President Trump
are working to revive and expand his signature proposal to upend the federal
civil service, according to a new report, and are working in conjunction with
the former commander in chief to quickly purge thousands of federal employees
if he were to return to office.
The plan, as detailed to Axios and
confirmed by Government Executive, would bring back Schedule F, a
workforce initiative Trump pushed in the 11th hour of his term to politicize
the federal bureaucracy. The former officials and current confidantes are,
through a network of Trump-loyal think tanks and public policy organizations,
creating lists of names to supplant existing civil servants. They have
identified 50,000 current employees that could be dismissed under the new
authority they seek to create, Axios reported and Government
Executive confirmed, though they hope to only actually fire a fraction
of that total and hope the resulting “chilling effect” will cause the rest to
fall in line.
In October 2020, just
before the presidential election, Trump signed his controversial executive
order creating a new class of federal employees excepted from the competitive
service. The order sought to remove career federal workers in “confidential, policy-determining,
policy-making or policy-advocating” jobs from the General Schedule into a new
job classification where virtually all of their civil service protections were
absent, essentially making them at-will employees. Although the Trump administration
began efforts to reclassify jobs into the new Schedule F, they ultimately were
unable to move any workers before January 2021, and President Biden quickly
signed an executive order rescinding the edict as one of his first
acts as president.)
https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2022/07/trump-reelected-aides-plan-purge-civil-service/374842/
Zaid
is not the only one worried about Trump's threats. Multiple sources declined to
comment for this story, because they are concerned that speaking out now would
make them a target.
Trump's
announcement that he would nominate Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida as attorney
general has only deepened those concerns.
Gaetz
is widely seen as a pro-MAGA hardliner and Trump loyalist. He actively
supported Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election and previously called for criminal investigations of Trump
critics, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former FBI
Director James Comey. On social media, he has said he would "abolish"
agencies like the FBI, which he would oversee as attorney general.
Gaetz's
nomination "seems to reflect an intent to make good on the retribution
threat," said Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor who served for
nearly 25 years at the Department of Justice.
Still,
McCord said she believes most career officials at the Justice Department will
resist efforts to pursue purely political charges.
"He
can direct his Department of Justice to open prosecutions, and if they are
baseless, I do think there would be career prosecutors who say: 'this is
baseless," said McCord, who is now executive director of the Institute for
Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law. "There may be a
few opportunists who want to use the moment to make a name for themselves and
perhaps, move up within the department, perhaps even get a political
appointment, hitch their wagon to Donald Trump. But I don't think that's the
vast majority."
Matt
Gaetz, of course, is no longer a candidate, but Pam Bondi is an equally bad
choice.
For the crucially important post of attorney general, who is
responsible for overseeing the enforcement of the rule of law across the
nation, Trump first tapped former Florida representative Matt Gaetz, whose
association with drug use and sex trafficking forced him to withdraw, and then
named Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general who has insisted that the
legal cases against Trump are proof that the justice system has been
“weaponized” against Trump.
To head the FBI,
the bureau Trump has long insisted was persecuting him through its
investigation of the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives—ties
that Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee have confirmed in
detail—Trump has tapped loyalist and conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, who
has vowed to use the FBI to exact revenge on those Trump considers his enemies.
That Patel’s
appointment is designed to destroy the FBI is clear not least because
installing him would require Trump to fire current FBI director Christoper
Wray. FBI directors serve ten-year terms precisely so they are not tied to any
administration, and Wray was Trump’s own appointee in his first term.
Indeed, the idea that the FBI is insufficiently right wing for Trump’s new
administration speaks volumes: in its entire history, the FBI has never had a
Democrat in charge of it. Under Patel, the nation’s chief law enforcement
agency would be a tool of the president.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/12/03/nation/kash-patel-fbi-trump-plans/
You may
notice that the article about retribution was published by NPR – and Trump
plans to cut off funding for the organization in his next term.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/14/nx-s1-5183846/trump-presidency-retribution-enemies-threats
For the crucially important post of attorney general, who is
responsible for overseeing the enforcement of the rule of law across the
nation, Trump first tapped former Florida representative Matt Gaetz, whose
association with drug use and sex trafficking forced him to withdraw, and then
named Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general who has insisted that the
legal cases against Trump are proof that the justice system has been
“weaponized” against Trump.
To head the FBI,
the bureau Trump has long insisted was persecuting him through its
investigation of the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives—ties
that Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee have confirmed in
detail—Trump has tapped loyalist and conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, who has
vowed to use the FBI to exact revenge on those Trump considers his enemies.
For director of
the CIA, Trump has tapped unqualified loyalist attack dog John Ratcliffe; for
director of national intelligence, the person who oversees all American
intelligence agencies, Trump has tapped former representative Tulsi Gabbard,
whose ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin and Syrian leader Bashar
al-Assad make her loyalties suspect. Taken together, Trump’s appointments to
these powerful departments amount to an attempt to destroy the nation’s
fundamental institutions.
As Charlie Sykes
points out, Trump’s appointments are not only a “[m]assive Fuq U to
institutions…[b]ut also a huge FU to the Supreme Court because Trump doesn’t
think they will be a check on his campaign of lawless retribution.”
The Atlantic’s Nichols told MSNBC today that Trump’s appointees are “there
to build an authoritarian cadre and to put themselves beyond the reach of the
rule of law.”
With loyalty
trumping ability and merit under an autocrat, the quality of government officials
plummets. This pays off for an autocratic leader because
those appointed to serve in an autocratic government are usually unemployable
in a merit-based system, making them fiercely loyal to the leader who has
elevated them beyond their abilities.
Autocrats start by
rewarding family, and Trump has certainly followed that suit. After years in
which Republicans went after President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who was never a
government employee, over the weekend, Trump announced that he intends to appoint
his daughter Ivanka’s father-in-law, New Jersey real estate developer Charles
Kushner, as ambassador to France. In 2004, Kushner pleaded guilty to 16 federal
crimes and served time in prison before Trump pardoned him in 2020. Trump also
announced that he will appoint his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law,
Lebanese-born billionaire Massad Boulos, as White House senior adviser on Arab
and Middle East affairs.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-1-2024
In view of the fact that the Trump administration cannot be
trusted, it is no surprise at all that Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter, who
would definitely not get treated fairly by the justice department.
President
Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon of his son Hunter on Sunday night
after repeatedly insisting he would not do so, using the power of his office to
wave aside years of legal troubles, including a federal conviction for
illegally buying a gun and for tax evasion.
In a statement issued by the White House, Mr. Biden
said he had decided to issue the executive grant of clemency for his son “for
those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have
committed or taken part in during the period from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1,
2024.”
He said he made the decision because the charges
against Hunter were politically motivated and designed to hurt him politically.
“The charges in his cases came about only after
several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and
oppose my election,” Mr. Biden said in the statement. “No reasonable person who
looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter
was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.”
It was
a remarkable turnaround for a man whose presidency and five-decade career were
built in part on the idea that he would never interfere with the administration
of justice. In 2020, he made the case that former President Donald J. Trump
should be ousted from office to restore that kind of independence in America’s
democracy, and he argued the same in 2024.
But in his statement, Mr. Biden sought to make the
case for interfering after all, accusing his political enemies of going after
his son in ways that anyone else would not have been. He said that he still
believed in the justice system, but added, “I also believe raw politics has
infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice — and once I made
this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further.”
In fact, the president’s announcement came at the
same time that Mr. Trump made it clearer than ever that his second
term would be focused on retribution and revenge against Mr. Biden — with
Hunter Biden as a prime target. The president-elect on Saturday
said he would name Kash Patel, a loyalist who has vowed to go after Mr. Trump’s
enemies, as F.B.I. director.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/01/us/politics/biden-pardon-son-hunter.html
(The totally false story about Hunter's laptop is an example of how far Trump and his cronies are willing to go)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controversy
The next four years will be a difficult time for the country, and there are plenty of people who are feeling anxiety because of that. Our only hope is that the GOP only has a razor thin in the House of Representatives. If enough Senate Republicans “grow a pair” (as some have done with some of Trump’s nominees), we may survive as a country – but Kamala Harris would have been a far better choice.
