Transcription
Well, on a day when Donald Trump claims to have reached a deal to end his war in Iran, that is a complete failure of his original objective of Iran's, quote, unconditional surrender, the Trump White House has been rocked by stunning new reporting in the New York Times that some in the White House seem to consider so accurate that they are accusing New York Times reporters of having obtained audio recordings of White House Situation Room meetings.
Think about that. The White House is not condemning this new devastating reporting from inside the Trump White House as a pack of lies. Instead, they are, in effect, declaring it to be so shockingly 100% accurate that the reporters must have audio recordings of what was said in the White House.
Axios is reporting, top White House officials believe New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan obtained audio recordings of Situation Room meetings for their forthcoming book, Regime Change. No White House has ever made that accusation about a book sourced from inside that White House. And every presidential administration since Richard Nixon has had such books written, most of them by Bob Woodward. And there are always some people who try to cast doubt on some of the accuracy in those books. But the truth of it is that most of those books, especially the Woodward books, have been highly accurate, with White House meetings recreated through interviews, with White House meetings through interviews of participants in those meetings.
The White House is saying, think about this, that Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have gone so far beyond any other inside the White House book, especially any other inside the Trump White House book, and reached a level of what they think is such perfect accuracy that it's achievable only, only by reporters obtaining audio recordings.
Axios reported, quote, "Such a taped leak would be a shocking breach of one of the most secure settings on Earth. Independent recording devices in the Situation Room are forbidden." So that means White House sources suspect someone in Donald Trump's White House working for Donald Trump was improperly recording Situation Room meetings and then handing them over to the New York Times. Axios reports, "We're afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded," an administration source told us. That is the highest possible compliment that any White House has ever issued about any book written to expose the inner workings of that White House. It must all be on audio tape.
The book, Title Regime Change, will go on sale a week from now and can be pre-ordered online and ordered at your local bookstore and you can get your name on a list for it at your local public library and the White House is now promising you that this book is worth it. Much of what you will be reading has apparently been certified accurate by the Trump White House.
Maggie Haverman and Jonathan Swan have shared some of the reporting in their book in two breaking news articles for The New York Times. In today's edition, a report on the debate within the Trump White House led by Stephen Miller to suspend a constitutional right. Something so insane that even people in the Trump White House used the word insane to describe it. And now think about that one. How insane does something have to be for people working in the Trump White House to think that it is insane? They work for a man who says insane things every day that they accept and publicly support whenever called upon to do so. But privately, they thought Stephen Miller's idea was insane. That's their word for it.
Today's New York Times reports some figures in the White House privately called suspending habeas corpus insane. The legal doctrine of habeas corpus has its origins in the oldest English common law and actually predates the Magna Carta of 1215. It took written form in England in the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 during the reign of King Charles II. It prevents the government from arbitrarily imprisoning people without giving them a right to a hearing. It was something that, as Stephen Miller put it, "we're actively looking at."
The Constitution is clear and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended THAN IN A TIME OF INVASION. SO TO SAY THAT'S AN OPTION WE'RE ACTIVELY LOOKING AT.
The White House Staff Secretary William Sharve wrote a memo arguing against Stephen Miller's idea of suspending habeas corpus. The Times reports the memo this way, "The history of habeas corpus dates back to the very dawn of English common law." He recorded in his memo to Susie Wild's, "Denial of habeas corpus rights was a key grievance underlying the American Revolution and the right to apply to the federal courts for habeas corpus review dates to the beginning of the republic."
Stephen Miller wanted to suspend habeas corpus for immigrants in order to speed up what Donald Trump had promised would be the mass deportation of immigrants. Stephen Miller argued that the presence of undocumented immigrants in the country, even those who had been here for decades working harder at their jobs than Stephen Miller ever has, constituted an invasion. And therefore, habeas corpus could be suspended.
The Times reports habeas corpus had been formally suspended only four times, most recently after Pearl Harbor. In every case the country was at war or facing armed rebellion. Only Lincoln, at the start of the Civil War, had ever claimed the power without congressional authorization and only during a long congressional recess. Because habeas corpus was written into the body of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist Paper 84 that a Bill of Rights was therefore unnecessary. Hamilton said that the habeas corpus provision of the Constitution was enough to prevent the worst possible kind of tyranny. Alexander Hamilton wrote, "The practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been in all ages the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny."
And so it's Alexander Hamilton versus Stephen Miller in the Trump White House and as of tonight Alexander Hamilton is winning. But Stephen Miller has a huge advantage over Alexander Hamilton because Stephen Miller is still working in the Trump White House with the president and a vice-president who could not be more ignorant of our history. James David Vance proved that with this statement.
"If you go back to World War II, if you go back to World War I, if you go back to every major conflict in human history, they all end with some kind of negotiation." No. They didn't. World War II ended with zero negotiations. World War II ended the way Donald Trump claimed his war in Iran was going to end, unconditional surrender. Japan and Germany each signed unconditional surrender documents. Adolf Hitler killed himself rather than submit Germany to the unconditional surrender that he knew was coming. Every vice president, everyone prior to J.D. Vance has known that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt demanded the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan during World War II, and when FDR died in the final months of the war, his vice president then elevated to the presidency, Harry Truman accepted those unconditional surrenders without a word of negotiation with anyone about those.
That kind of statement by J.D. Vance demonstrating a complete ignorance of how World War II ended is the kind of thing that used to get you drummed out of American politics before Donald Trump's dumbing down of the Republican Party. And it tells you something about the quality of thinking that the vice president of the United States brings to his job.
In the report by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in today's New York Times, J.D. Vance began a White House meeting last year by arguing that it was time to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to deploy the American military to put down insurrections and rebellions inside the United States. He did this after Rene Goode and Alex Preddy were shot and killed by Donald Trump's federal agents in Minnesota when video recordings of the incidents showed that they did not pose any threats at all to the agents who shot and killed them.
The Times reports Mr. Vance got to the point, "They needed to invoke the Insurrection Act swiftly to crush the unrest in Minnesota. It would be painful in the short term," he said, "but the message it would send that paid agitators could not get away with disrupting ICE operations would make sure no one tried it again." There was no evidence that either Mr. Pretty or Ms. Good had been paid activists.
Once again it fell to William Sharf to make the point that the Insurrection Act, as the Times reports, simply did not fit the circumstances on the ground. And so yes, it is easy to imagine what goes on in the Trump White House. As easy out as we always thought it was. Discussions of trampling the Constitution, violating the law, and crushing our rights.
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report that the discussion that day of invoking the Insurrection Act to send American troops into the streets of Minneapolis and who knows where else in this country was inconclusive. The meeting broke up without a decision, a vague consensus to keep thinking about it, but it had been clarifying in its own way. Even after the administration's posture had helped escalate tensions in Minnesota. Even with the blowback mounting, the vice president and Mr. Miller were still searching for a reason to put federal troops on American streets. Just as the idea of suspending habeas corpus was set aside, but never fully abandoned by some inside the White House, the Insurrection Act, at least in the eyes of its proponents, would remain a loaded weapon and a West Wing eager to test the limits of presidential power. The Insurrection Act remains. A loaded weapon that some observers have suggested could be aimed at our polling places in swing states like Georgia that could go either way in the November election.