Trump Reminds Us How Hitler Did It

There are few Americans alive today who remember Hitler — the details are lost to the mists of time. But Donald Trump is bringing it all back to us with a fresh, stark splash of reality.

THOM HARTMANN

ALTERNET

 11/19/23

The Nazis in America are now “out.” This week, former Republican Joe Scarborough explicitly compared Trump and his followers to Hitler and his Brownshirts on national television. They’re here.

At the same time, America’s richest man is retweeting antisemitism, rightwing influencers and radio/TV hosts are blaming “Jews and liberals” for the “invasion” of “illegals” to “replace white people,” and the entire GOP is embracing candidates and legislators who encourage hate and call for violence.

Are there parallels between the MAGA takeover of the GOP and the Nazi takeover of the German right in the 1930s?

Both began with a national humiliation: defeat in war. 

— For Germany, it was WWI. 

For America it was two wars George W. Bush and Dick Cheney lied us into as part of their 2004 “wartime president” re-election strategy (which had worked so well for Nixon with Vietnam in 1972 and Reagan with Grenada in 1984).

— Hitler fought in WWI but later blamed Germany’s defeat on the nation being “stabbed in the back” by liberal Jews, their fellow travelers, and incompetent German military leadership.

Trump cheered on Bush’s invasion of Iraq, but later lied and claimed he’d opposed the war. Both blamed the nation’s humiliation on the incompetence or evil of their political enemies.

— The economic crisis caused by America’s Great Depression had gone worldwide and Hitler used the gutting of the German middle class (made worse by the punishing Treaty of Versailles) as a campaign issue, promising to restore economic good times.

Trump pointed to the damage forty years of neoliberalism had done to the American middle class and promised to restore blue-collar prosperity. 

— Hitler promised he would “make Germany great again.” 

Trump campaigned on the slogan: “Make America Great Again.”

Both tried to overthrow their governments by violence and failed, Hitler in a Bavarian beer hall and Trump on January 6th. Both then turned to legal means to seize control of their nations.

— Hitler’s scapegoats were Jews, gays, and liberals. “There are only two possibilities,” he told a Munich crowd in 1922. “Either victory of the Aryan, or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew.”

He promised “I will get rid of the ‘communist vermin’,” “I will take care of the ‘enemy within’,” “Jews and migrants are poisoning Aryan blood,” and “One people, one nation, one leader.”

Trump’s scapegoats were Blacks, Muslims, immigrants, and liberals.

He said he will “root out” “communists … and radical left thugs that live like vermin”; he would destroy “the threat from within”; migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”; and that under Trump’s leadership America will become “One people, one family, one glorious nation.”

Protester holding poster at the Women’s March in Helsinki. Photo credit: Alan / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED)

— Hitler called the press the Lügenpresse or “lying press.” 

Trump quoted Stalin, calling our news agencies and reporters “the enemy of the people.”

Both exploited religion and religious believers. 

— Hitler proclaimed a “New Christianity” for Germany and encouraged fundamentalist factions within both the Catholic and Protestant faiths. Every member of the Germany army got a belt-buckle inscribed with Gott Mit Uns (God is with us).

Trump embraced rightwing Catholics and evangelical Protestants and, like the German churches in 1933, has been lionized by their leaders.

— Hitler made alliances with other autocrats (Mussolini, Franco, and Tojo) and conspired with them to take over much of the planet. 

Trump disrespected our NATO and European allies and embraced the murderous dictator of Saudi Arabia, the psychopathic leader of Russia, and the absolute tyrant who runs North Korea.

Both Hitler and Trump had an “inciting incident” that became the touchstone for their rise to power.

— For Hitler it was the burning of the German parliament building, the Reichstag, by a mentally ill Dutchman. 

For Trump it is his claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him and the martyrdom of his supporters after their attempted coup on January 6th.

— Hitler embraced rightwing Bavarian street gangs and brawlers, organizing them into a volunteer militia who called themselves the Brownshirts (Hitler called them the Sturmabteilung or Storm Division).

Trump embraces rightwing militia groups and motorcycle gangs, and implicitly praises his followers when they attack people like Paul Pelosi, election workers, and prosecutors and judges who are attempting to hold him accountable for his criminal behavior.

While Trump has mostly focused his public hate campaigns against racial and religious minorities, behind the scenes he and his administration had worked hand-in-glove with anti-gay fanatics like Mike Johnson to limit the rights of the LGBTQ+ community.

His administration opposed the Equality Act, saying it would “undermine parental and conscience rights.” More than a third (36%) of his judicial nominees had previously expressed “bias and bigotry towards queer people.” His administration filed briefs in the landmark Bostock case before the Supreme Court, claiming that civil rights laws don’t protect LGBTQ+ people.

His Department of Health and Human Services ended Obama-era medical protections for queer people. His Secretary of Education, billionaire Betsy DeVos, took apart regulations protecting transgender kids in public schools. His HUD Secretary, Ben Carson, proposed new rules allowing shelters to turn away homeless queer people at a time when one-in-five homeless youth identify as LGBTQ+.

— German Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem begins with, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.” But, in fact, first Hitler came for queer people.

A year before Nazis began attacking union leaders and socialists, a full five years before attacking Jewish-owned stores on Kristallnacht, the Nazis came for the trans people at the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin.

In 1930, the Institute had pioneered the first gender-affirming surgery in modern Europe. It’s director, Magnus Hirschfeld, had compiled the largest library of books and scientific papers on the LGBTQ+ spectrum in the world and was internationally recognized in the field of sexual and gender studies.

Being gay, lesbian, or trans was widely tolerated in Germany, at least in the big cities, when Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, and the German queer community was his first explicit target. Within weeks, the Nazis began a campaign to demonize queer people — with especially vitriolic attacks on trans people — across German media.

German states put into law bans on gender-affirming care, drag shows, and any sort of “public display of deviance,” enforcing a long-moribund German law, Paragraph 175, first put into the nation’s penal code in 1871, that outlawed homosexuality. Books and magazines telling stories of gay men and lesbians were removed from schools and libraries.

Thus, a mere five months after Hitler came to power, on May 6, 1933, Nazis showed up at the Institute and hauled over 20,000 books and manuscripts about gender and sexuality out in the street to burn, creating a massive bonfire. It was the first major Nazi book-burning and was celebrated with newsreels played in theaters across the nation. It wouldn’t be the last: soon it spread to the libraries and public high schools.

The conservative elite of Germany, particularly Fritz Thyssen, Hjalmar Schacht, and Gustav Krupp were early supporters of Hitler, as he promised to crush the German labor movement and cut their taxes.

Without the support of rightwing billionaires funding Cambridge Analytica and Trump’s campaign he never would have won the electoral college in 2016.

— Hitler couldn’t have risen to power without the support of the largest outlets in German media. Some treated him as “just another politician,” normalizing his fascist rhetoric. Others openly supported him.

After his failed beer hall putsch, he was legally banned from public speaking and mass rallies but, in 1930, German media mogul Alfred Hugenberg — a rightwing billionaire who owned two of the largest national newspapers and had considerable influence over radio — joined forces with Hitler and relentlessly promoted him, much like the Murdoch media empire and 1,500 billionaire-owned rightwing radio stations across the country helped bring Trump to power in 2016 and still promote him every day.

Hitler’s first major seizure of dictatorial power was his use of the Weimar law Article 48, which, during a time of crisis, empowered the nation’s leader to suspend due process and habeas corpus, turn the army’s guns on people deemed insurrectionists, and arrest people without charges or trial.

Its American equivalents are the State of Emergency Declaration and the Insurrection Act, both of which Trump has promised to invoke in his first days in office if he’s re-elected in 2024.

— Once Hitler had seized full control of the German government, he set about changing the nation’s laws to replace democracy with autocracy. His enablers in the German Parliament passed the “Enabling Act” that gave Hitler’s cabinet the power to write and implement their own laws.

Trump promises to use the theoretical “unitary executive” powers rightwing groups claim the president holds, but has never used in our history, to have his new cabinet rewrite many of our nation’s laws.  

— Hitler followed the Enabling Act, six months later, with the Act for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service which authorized him to gut the German Civil Service and replace career bureaucrats with toadies loyal exclusively to him. It was the end of any semblance of resistance to the Nazis or preservation of democracy within the new German government.

In his last three weeks in office, Trump issued an executive order called Schedule F that ended Civil Service protections for around 50,000 of America’s top government officials, including the senior levels of every federal agency, so he could replace them all with political appointees (Biden reversed it). The Heritage Foundation is reportedly now vetting over 50,000 people to fill these ranks if Trump is reelected and, as promised, reinstates Schedule F.

— The last bastion of resistance to Hitler within the German government was the judiciary, and Hitler altered the German Civil Service Code in January 1937, giving his cabinet the power to remove any judges from office who were deemed “non-compliant” with “Nazi laws or principles.”

When Judge Jon Tigar of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Trump’s new rules barring people from receiving asylum in 2018, Trump attacked Tigar as “a disgrace” and “an Obama judge.” He added that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is “really something we have to take a look at because it’s not fair,” adding, “That’s not law. Every case that gets filed in the Ninth Circuit we get beaten.”

— Because the German Supreme Court was still, from time to time, ruling against Hitler’s Gleichschaltung, or Nazification, of the German government and legal code, and he had no easy legal mechanism to pack the court or term-limit the justices, in 1934 he created an entirely new court to replace it, which he called the People’s Court.

Trump packed the US Supreme Court with rightwing ideologues, many of whom are heavily beholden to oligarchs and industries aligned with Trump and the GOP. If they continue to go along with him — and there’s little to indicate they won’t — he won’t need to create a new court.

— When Hitler took over the country in 1933, the military leadership was wary of him and his plans. While they shared many of his conservative views about social issues, most still held a strong loyalty to the German constitution.

It took him the better part of two years, with heavy support from his Brownshirts (who he’d by then integrated into the military) to purge the senior levels of the Army and replace them with Nazi loyalists.

The night before January 6th, newly-elected Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville (R) joined Trump’s sons to help organize the coup planned for the next day. As the Alabama Political Reporter newspaper reported at the time:

The night before the deadly attack on the US Capitol, Alabama Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville and the then-director of the Republican Attorneys General Association met with then-President Donald Trump’s sons and close advisers, according to a social media post by a Nebraska Republican who at the time was a Trump administration appointee. 

Charles W. Herbster, who was then the national chairman of the Agriculture and Rural Advisory Committee in Trump’s administration, in a Facebook post at 8:33 p.m. on Jan. 5 said that he was standing ‘in the private residence of the president at Trump International with the following patriots who are joining me in a battle for justice and truth.’ …

Among the attendees, according to Herbster’s post, were Tuberville, former RAGA director Adam Piper, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, adviser Peter Navarro, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, and 2016 deputy campaign manager David Bossie.

Tuberville is now holding open the top ranks of the US military, presumably so if Trump is reelected he can pack our armed forces with people who won’t defy his orders when he demands they seize voting machines and fire live ammunition at the inevitable protestors.

— When Hitler took power in 1933, he quickly began mass arrests of illegal immigrants, gypsies, union activists, liberal commentators and reporters, and (as noted earlier) queer people. To house this exploding prison population, he first took over a defunct munitions factory in Dachau; within a few years there were over a hundred of these camps where “criminals” were “concentrated and separated from society.” He called them concentration camps.

The New York Times reports that Trump is planning to “build huge camps to detain people,” and “to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget.”

How many people? “Millions” writes the Times. And not just immigrants: Trump is planning to send his enemies to them, too.

Will he succeed in getting around Congress? He did the last time, with money to build his wall taken from military housing.

So far, that’s as bad as it gets: what he has already promised. But these are early days.

— Hitler was unbothered by the deaths of German citizens, and was enthusiastic about the deaths of those he considered his enemies.

On April 7, 2020 all three TV networks, The New York Times and The Washington Post all led with the breaking story that Black people were dying at about twice the rate of white people from Covid. The Times headline, for example, read: “Black Americans Bear the Brunt as Deaths Climb.”

A month earlier Trump had shut down the country, but when this report came out he and Kushner did an immediate turnabout, demanding that mostly minority “essential workers” get back to work.

As an “expert” member of Jared Kushner’s team of young, unqualified volunteers supervising the administration’s PPE response noted to Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban:

The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.

It was, after all, exclusively Blue States that were then hit hard by the virus: Washington, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. And there was an election coming in just a few months.

Trump even invoked the Defense Production Act and issued an Executive Order requiring mostly minority slaughterhouse and meatpacking employees go back to work. It led to a half-million unnecessary American deaths and to this day neither Trump nor Kushner have ever apologized.

— In the final years of the Third Reich, Hitler authorized his “final solution to the Jewish problem” that included building death camps in countries outside Germany to methodically exterminate millions of people. These were different from the hundreds of prisons and concentration camps he’d built within Germany for “criminals and undesirables,” although at those camps people were often worked to death or slaughtered when the war started going south.

So far, Trump and his people haven’t suggested the need for death camps in America, although Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott seem particularly eager to see immigrants die either from razor wire or gunshot.

But, then, the Nazis never officially announced their external death camps either; like Bush’s criminal “black sites” overseas where hundreds of innocent Afghans and Iraqis were tortured to death, they figured they’d never be found out.

There are few Americans alive today who remember Hitler, and for most of us the details of his rise to power are lost to the mists of time. But Donald Trump is bringing it all back to us with a fresh, stark splash of reality.

When I lived in Germany I worked with several Germans who had been in the Hitler Youth. One met Hitler. They were good people, children at the time really, and were (they’ve all died within the last two decades) haunted by their experience.

It can happen here.

We’ve been sliding down this slippery slope toward unaccountable fascism for several decades, and this coming year will stand at the threshold of an entirely new form of American government that could mean the end of the American experiment.

To the extent that our Constitution is still intact, the choice for our democracy to rise or fall will be in our hands.  

Tag, you’re it!

Reprinted from The Hartmann Report with the author’s permission.

Thom Hartmann is a four-time Project Censored-award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of 34 books in print and the #1 progressive talk show host in America for more than a decade.

Photo credit: Illustration by WhoWhatWhy from Sashi Suseshi / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED) and Pacific Southwest Region 5 / Wikimedia (CC BY 3.0 DEED).

Florida Walks Back Order to Shut Down College Pro-Palestinian Groups

The change came after concerns were raised about "potential personal liability for university actors who deactivate the student registered organization," according to state officials.

EMMA CAMP | 11.14.2023 
REASON

(Paul Weaver/Sipa USA/Newscom)

Last month, Florida Governor and 2024 Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis ordered the derecognition of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters at public universities in Florida.

The announcement followed the release of a "toolkit" from the National SJP, which characterized Hamas' October 7th attack against Israel as "resistance," and stated that Palestinian students are "PART of this movement, not in solidarity with this movement."

While the state claimed the shutdown was justified by a Florida law barring "material support" for terrorist organizations, First Amendment groups were quick to point out that cracking down on pro-Palestine campus activity is illegal, even when student organizations express support for the actions of terrorist organizations like Hamas.

"The government cannot force public colleges to derecognize Students for Justice in Palestine chapters," wrote the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment nonprofit in an October press release. "This directive is a dangerous — and unconstitutional — threat to free speech. If it goes unchallenged, no one's political beliefs will be safe from government suppression."

Now it seems that Florida is thinking twice before cracking down on campus pro-Palestine activism.

Last Thursday, Ray Rodrigues, the Chancellor of the State University System of Florida announced that the system is holding off plans to forcibly shut down SJP chapters at the University of Florida and the University of South Florida, where the student group is active.

However, it doesn't seem like Florida is pausing attempts to crack down on First Amendment-protected speech because of a change of heart. Instead, Rodrigues said last week that he would hold off attempts to kick SJP chapters off-campus out of the concerns "about potential personal liability for university actors who deactivate the student registered organization," seemingly a reference to university officials who might end up facing civil rights lawsuits from SJP chapters.

Further, Rodrigues announced that he would attempt to compel an "affirmation" from the targeted SJP chapters, confirming that "they reject violence. That they reject they are a part of the Hamas movement. And that they will follow the law."

"While universities can ask all student groups to commit to following the law, they cannot force them to expressly renounce a particular ideology or otherwise express views they don't actually hold," wrote FIRE in a Friday press release. "Students shouldn't be compelled to disavow certain disfavored views in exchange for funding and recognition. Compelling speech violates the First Amendment."

These two Florida SJP chapters aren't the only pro-Palestine activist groups that have recently faced suppression. Last week, Columbia University suspended its SJP chapter, along with Jewish Voice for Peace, another pro-Palestine student group. A statement from the university cited the groups' repeated violations of "university policies related to holding campus events, culminating in an unauthorized event Thursday afternoon that proceeded despite warnings and included threatening rhetoric and intimidation."

EMMA CAMP is an assistant editor at Reason.

GW suspends pro-Palestine group over anti-Israel messaging

Tara Suter
Tue, November 14, 2023 



George Washington (GW) University has temporarily suspended a pro-Palestine group over its anti-Israel messaging on campus.

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) projected anti-Israel messages on a campus library last month, amid the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas. In a Tuesday statement emailed to The Hill, the university said it “determined that SJP’s actions violated university policies.”

“As a result, effective immediately, the university has prohibited SJP from participating in activities on campus,” the statement continued.

“SJP cannot sponsor or organize on-campus activities on university property or use university facilities, including indoor and outdoor spaces available for reservation through the university; this prohibition is in effect for the next 90 days,” the statement said. “Also effective immediately, SJP is prohibited from posting communications on university property through May 20, 2024.”

Last month’s projections, which garnered national attention and backlash, included messages such as “Divestment from Zionist genocide now” and “Free Palestine From the River to the Sea.” Politicians including Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) condemned the projections.

“As an alumni of @GWtweets they should launch an investigation. I look forward to seeing the University statement on this,” Moskowitz said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

A representative for the SJP told the student newspaper The GW Hatchet that GW’s decision to bar the group from campus organizing was not a surprise.

“We see this very clearly as being a political response to a growing wave of backlash and repression towards Palestinian organizing, but specifically the Palestinian student movement that’s been happening the past few weeks,” the representative said, according to the Hatchet.

The suspension of the SJP at GW also follows a similar decision by Columbia University, which last Friday suspended its SJP chapter through the fall semester.

The Hill has reached out to the student-run SJP group for comment.

George Washington University suspends SJP chapter after group projected 'Glory to our martyrs' onto building

Adam Sabes

FOX NEWS
Tue, November 14, 2023 


George Washington University suspended its Students for Justice in Palestine chapter after the group projected "Glory to Our Martyrs" on the side of a campus building.

The university's SJP chapter projected a series of pro-Palestinian phrases onto the school's Gelman Library on Oct. 24, including "GW the Blood of Palestine is on your Hands" and "Your Tuition is Funding Genocide in Gaza."

In a statement at the time, George Washington University said the messages were "unauthorized" and violated university policy, adding "leadership intervened to ensure that these projections were removed."

The university shared a statement with Fox News Digital, which effectively suspends SJP for three months.

GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY STUDENTS PROJECT PRO-PALESTINIAN ACTIVISM ON SCHOOL LIBRARY

One sign read, "Glory to our martyrs" in support of Palestinians.

"After an investigation, the university determined that SJP’s actions violated university policies, including the Gelman Building Use Guidelines and the university’s policy against non-compliance, as SJP initially refused to comply with university officials’ directives to end the projections," reads the statement. "As a result, effective immediately, the university has prohibited SJP from participating in activities on campus.

READ ON THE FOX NEWS APP

"SJP cannot sponsor or organize on-campus activities on university property or use university facilities, including indoor and outdoor spaces available for reservation through the university; this prohibition is in effect for the next 90 days. Also effective immediately, SJP is prohibited from posting communications on university property through May 20, 2024," the university added. "After 90 days, there will be continued restrictions around SJP’s use of university facilities and hosted activities through the end of the academic year."

PLAYWRIGHT DAVID MAMET URGES JEWS TO STOP SUPPORTING DEMOCRATS, SENDING KIDS TO ‘ANTISEMITIC’ COLLEGES

Another sign read, "GW the Blood of Palestinians is on Your Hands."

The decision by George Washington University was made after an investigation "determined that SJP’s actions violated university policies, including the Gelman Building Use Guidelines and the university’s policy against non-compliance, as SJP initially refused to comply with university officials’ directives to end the projections."

In a statement to the university's student newspaper, the GW Hatchet, a representative for the SJP chapter said the group is disappointed but not surprised by the decision, stating the school has "unwavering support" towards Zionist students.

"Your Tuition is Funding Genocide in Gaza."

"We see this very clearly as being a political response to a growing wave of backlash and repression towards Palestinian organizing, but specifically the Palestinian student movement that’s been happening the past few weeks," the SJP representative said. "GW is continuously proving, as they have proven time and time again for many, many years, that they will always align with the Zionist lobby and against the right to free speech and the right to assembly of their own students."

NYC Columbia University faculty and students protest suspension of 2 far-left groups

Greg Wehner, Teny Sahakian

FOX NEWS
Wed, November 15, 2023 

Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters stood outside of Columbia University in New York City on Wednesday, holding signs while chanting and demanding the removal of Jewish people from Gaza, while others boycotted the suspension of two far-left student-led groups by the school's administration.

The "emergency protest" was shared on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, by groups such as WOLPalestine (Within Our Lifetime) and CUNYPalestine, noting the event was scheduled for Wednesday at 2 p.m.

"All Out for Gaza at Columbia University," the post read. "In solidarity with Columbia SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine) and JVP (Jewish Voices for Peace) who were recently unjustly suspended by the university administration.

COLUMBIA SUSPENDS ANTI-ISRAEL STUDENT GROUPS FOR ‘THREATENING RHETORIC AND INTIMIDATION’

Columbia University faculty members stand in front of a campus building with a list of demands from the university administration Thursday.

Last week, Columbia University suspended the far-left groups as official student groups through the end of the fall term, saying they had violated university policies.

Specifically, the university said the groups "repeatedly violated university policies related to holding campus events, culminating in an unauthorized event Thursday afternoon that proceeded despite warnings and included threatening rhetoric and intimidation."

It marked the second university at the time to act against SJP in recent days, with Brandeis University in Massachusetts banning the group earlier in the week for statements supporting Hamas. On Tuesday night, George Washington University also sanctioned SJP.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT PRAISES ‘PERSISTENCE’ OF STUDENTS ACCUSED OF ANTISEMITISM

Columbia University students and faculty protest the removal of two pro-Palestinian groups.

During Wednesday’s protest at 116th Street and Broadway near Columbia, people were heard chanting, "One, Two, Three, Four, Occupation No More. Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Israel is a terrorist state. Israel, you can’t hide."

Other chants shouted on the street included, "Israel Bombs. USA Paid. How many kids did you kill today?," and "Free, Free Palestine."

Protesters also held banners and signs that read, "Within our lifetime, United for Palestine," "Cease Genocide" and "Resistance until return, within our lifetime."

Columbia University students and faculty protest the removal of two pro-Palestinian groups.

Members of the faculty also protested the student groups getting kicked off campus.

The faculty was seen standing together with a list of demands from Columbia, including affirming their commitment to the First Amendment, overturning the suspension of the student groups and recognizing publicly that academic freedom protects all forms of political speech.

Like many other elite institutions, Columbia's response to the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas has been under the microscope. One professor went viral for decrying the response by the school to instances of campus antisemitism. A Jewish student was also attacked with a stick after objecting to a woman tearing down posters of Hamas hostages.

The New York Post reported last month more than 100 Columbia professors signed a letter defending pro-Palestinian students who had defended the Hamas attack on Israel and asked administrators to stop making statements "that favor the suffering and death of Israelis or Jews over the suffering and deaths of Palestinians."

Fox News Digital's David Rutz contributed to this report.

Demonstrators Rally at Columbia in Solidarity With Suspended Pro-Palestinian Groups

Storyful
Wed, November 15, 2023

A crowd of people rallied outside Columbia University in New York City on Wednesday, November 15, in a show of support for two political organizations that were recently suspended by the school.

Footage captured by Eric Blanc shows a crowd of protesters marching in the street, some of them holding a large banner that says “Free Palestine.”

The university temporarily suspended Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace last week, saying that the groups “violated University policies related to holding campus events” when they held an “unauthorized” event that “proceeded despite warnings and included threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” The groups are suspended through the end of the fall term, the university said.

“Suspension means the two groups will not be eligible to hold events on campus or receive university funding,” Columbia said in a statement.

The groups released a joint response on Instagram on Monday, calling the suspension “an attack on free speech to distract from and enable Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people.”

 Credit: Eric Blanc via Storyful

Hundreds of Brown U faculty call on university to drop charges against student protesters
Amy Russo, Providence Journal
Tue, November 14, 2023 
]

Nearly 200 Brown University faculty members are calling for charges to be dropped against 20 students who were arrested for trespassing during a pro-Palestine protest last week. Yet, as of Monday afternoon, the charges had not been dropped.

The letter, published Monday in the Brown Daily Herald and first reported by The Public's Radio, demanded the university "insist that all legal charges against the students be dropped immediately" and that they be exempt from any school discipline. The letter also asks that the school consider the students' demands that it divest from weapons manufacturers amid the Israel-Hamas war. (A 2020 report from the school's Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies, which was made up of faculty, students and alums, identified multiple companies from which it wanted the school to divest. Those included Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, among others.)

More: Brown student activists, seeking divestment, arrested at sit-in. What we know

The students, who were arrested the night of Nov. 8 during a peaceful sit-in at University Hall, were part of a group called BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now, and called not only for the divestments but for their school to promote an end to the war.

University spokesman Brian Clark said "Brown issued multiple trespass warnings and ultimately moved forward in arresting" the students, as they were in a non-residential school building past operating hours.
Brown declines to respond to letter via media

What does Brown have to say about the letter? Not much, at least to the media.

"In general, as it relates to letters and petitions, I can share that the university remains committed to engaging directly with students, faculty and staff who are in touch with the university to share their ideas or concerns, and we do so routinely," said university spokeswoman Amanda McGregor. "But we do not have a practice of responding through news media to such concerns – rather, we value direct dialogue and engagement with students, alumni, faculty and staff on matters of interest to the community."

McGregor confirmed that the charges against the students remained in place. She said she would not speculate on whether they might be dropped.

It was not immediately clear who would have the decision-making power to drop the charges.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Brown University faculty urge school to drop charges against students

Hundreds Stage Anti-War Sit-In at Oakland Federal Building

Storyful
Tue, November 14, 2023 

A number of protesters were arrested after hundreds of people occupied the Oakland Federal Building Conference Center on November 13, and called for a ceasefire in Gaza, local media reported.

Video posted to Facebook by the Center for Jewish Nonviolence shows protesters gathered inside the rotunda and chanting “Let Gaza live”.

The Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) Bay Area said in a post to X “We are not leaving, we demand an end to this bloodshed, we will not see Jewish grief used to perpetuate genocide.” Credit: Center for Jewish Nonviolence via Storyful
Video Transcript

[CLAPPING]

- Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live.

Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live.

Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live.

Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live.

Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza live. Let Gaza--


Violent incidents over Israel-Hamas war at top Canadian college leads to arrest, police investigation

Peter Aitken

FOX NEWS
Tue, November 14, 2023
Dueling protests in support of the Palestinian and Israeli peoples at Concordia University in Montreal last week resulted in multiple injuries and an arrest after a student assaulted a security guard amid a violent clash.

Student group Jews on Campus told CBC that it tried to hold a peaceful demonstration in support of the hostages taken by Hamas, but then a crowd "chanting pro-Palestinian slogans" surrounded the demonstration. The "productive" effort "started to turn," according to one witness.

The pro-Palestinian crowd allegedly called the Jewish students "murderers" and a fight broke out, although it was not clear who threw the first punch. The witness described the situation as "very scary as a Jewish person on campus."

Pro-Palestinian students claimed that they submitted evidence to the police that pro-Israel protesters "attacked" them while they sold the keffiyeh - or head scarf - as a fundraiser for Palestinian people in Gaza.

The incident prompted alumnus Lawrence Muscat, a senior vice president at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, to demand the university scratch his name from their list, blasting the school for having "failed to protect Jewish students."

"No, I don’t want to meet with your President and fundraisers in D.C.," he wrote on social media platform X, stressing that the school "will not get a penny from me."

Concordia University is seen on a nearly empty St-Catherine Street in Montreal on Friday, March 27, 2020.

"At the same time, I am more than happy to support any Canadian charitable organization that holds Concordia accountable and works to protect Jewish students," he continued. "Hit me up, I’m ready."

Montreal police deployed to the school around 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday last week, leading to the arrest of a 22-year-old student who had allegedly assaulted a 54-year-old security guard during a violent clash between the opposing protests, CBC reported.

Police released the student on condition that they promise to appear in court. Officers remained on the scene until 4:15 p.m.

A second security guard and student were injured by assaults during the violence, but neither the guards nor the student sustained life-threatening injuries.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators attend a protest at Columbia University in New York City on Thursday, Oct. 12, 2023. Dueling demonstrations for both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli student groups were hosted on the campus amid calls for global protests regarding the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

"I believe that the overwhelming majority of our community shares my complete abhorrence of these incidents and is appalled by them," Concordia President and Vice Chancellor Graham Carr wrote in an email to the student body and wider university community.

"A university, including ours, is a place where academic freedom, and the respectful, civil exchange of thoughts and ideas is valued above all else," Carr wrote. "One source of pride for Concordia’s community is our cultural diversity and our desire and willingness to learn from others whose experiences and knowledge differ from our own."

"But under no circumstances can we, as a community, tolerate the reprehensible acts of hate and violence that occurred today," he added.

Carr stressed that the university body must "be accountable for our actions and our words whether in the classroom, in meetings or in other university spaces."

"I am deeply saddened and disgusted that the actions of a few individuals have now brought us to the point that we arrived at today," he lamented. "The vast majority of Concordians, irrespective of their political and ideological views, have worked diligently to maintain calm and to uphold the integrity of university life even at a moment when events elsewhere are creating extreme levels of anxiety and tension."

However, the altercation was just one of three separate incidents reported at the university on Wednesday in which "violence or incitement to violence" took place, Carr admitted, including a social media post that could "reasonably be construed as inciting violence" and the discovery of swastikas in a university building.

An anti-Israel protester in Cambridge on Monday shouted slurs at the pro-Israel counter-protesters, calling them "pigs" and "Nazis."

University campuses across both the U.S. and Canada have grown increasingly tense as students remain divided over the current war in Gaza, where the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) press on toward the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza - the largest hospital in the strip. The IDF and Israeli officials have repeatedly claimed that the hospital sits atop a Hamas terrorist command center. Israeli forces have exposed several weapons and supplies deployed at schools or stored under hospitals as they enclosed on Al-Shifa.

Younger generations, particularly Gen Z, have shown significantly greater support for the Palestinians leading to a headache for university leadership on any given campus as they find themselves under pressure to address antisemitism on campuses, particularly by rich donors who have either threatened to pull funding or have already declared they will not be giving any money going forward.

Columbia University in New York City announced last week that it would suspend two student groups - Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace - from the campus until the end of term for alleged violations of school policies following intense backlash from some faculty members and donors over the handling of protests on campus.

Harvard President Claudine Gay released a statement Thursday condemning antisemitism and called out the pro-Palestinian rallying cry "from the river to the sea" as crossing the line.

"Our community must understand that phrases such as ‘from the river to the sea’ bear specific historical meanings that to a great many people imply the eradication of Jews from Israel and engender both pain and existential fears within our Jewish community. I condemn this phrase and any similarly hurtful phrases," Gay wrote.

The international community has heavily polarized over Israel's operations in the strip, which the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry claimed has led to the deaths of over 11,000 people. The Biden administration has repeatedly cast doubts on the accuracy or veracity of the numbers, with critics noting that the ministry does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths in its count.

Fox News Digital's Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.

University of Pennsylvania students gather for pro-Palestine demonstration

WTXF

FOX NEWS
Tue, November 14, 2023

PHILADELPHIA - Students at the University of Pennsylvania came together Tuesday to voice their support for Palestine amid the ongoing conflict between Hamas and Israel.

The rally comes days after UPenn officials addressed antiemetic messages that were projected against a campus building, and hateful emails that targeted members of the school's Jewish community.

The statement signed by UPenn President Mary Elizabeth Magill, condemned the antisemitic acts and words and acknowledged the amount of hurt and fear it is causing for their Jewish students, staff and faculty.

"At a time when campuses across the country are being targeted with these types of threats, my first and highest priority is the safety and security of our community," said President Magill. "Threats of violence are not tolerated at Penn and will be met with swift and forceful action."

Miranda Sklaroff, a UPenn Graduate student, is a Jewish community member who voiced her support Tuesday for Palestine and called for peace. Sklaroff said it was her "Jewish principals" that motivated her to "side with the oppressed."

"To me, my Jewish principals have always made me want to side with the oppressed, want peace, and want to see the divine in everyone," Sklaroff said.

Supporters of Palestine at UPenn believe the school is minimizing their efforts, so they've started a coalition called "Freedom School of Palestine." The group, according to a student who did not want to be identified, is designed to be a "platform where we can elevate Palestinian voices."

FOX 29 reached out to UPenn about Tuesday's demonstration and the school reiterated its past remarks about supporting "the exchange of ideas" on campus.

Trump administration considered ideological ‘screenings’ of noncitizens

ICE examined implications of expelling foreign nationals from the US for their political beliefs, unsealed documents show

Erum Salam

THE GUARDIAN

Mon 6 Nov 2023 

During Donald Trump’s presidency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) considered the implications of expelling foreign nationals from the US for their political beliefs, newly unsealed documents have revealed.

The two memos were written and revised by the US immigration enforcement agency and top White House lawyers in the Trump administration and recently obtained by Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute via a Freedom of Information Act (Foia) lawsuit filed in 2017.

The memos examined intentions to perform ideological screenings on foreign nationals in the US, but ultimately concluded such a plan would be illegal to implement.

The first memo addresses constitutional constraints on what the former US president in 2016 called the “extreme vetting” of noncitizens through the use of ideological “screenings tests”.

“It seems likely that at least a large fraction of those aliens located in the United States who would be the subject of the vetting would be able to assert various constitutional rights. We therefore recommend assessing proposals being considered on the assumption that the aliens within the United States are generally protected by the constitution,” it read.

One constraint in particular explored what could happen in the case of mistakenly including an individual on a watchlist. “There may also be claims against programs related to vetting that are targeted against particular individuals or groups, alleging that the targeting itself is on an impermissible basis,” the memo stated.

The second memo addressed more specifically, people who “endorse or espouse terrorism”. It concluded that allowing for the exclusion or removal of these people would be unconstitutional, since a person cannot be targeted based on seemingly expressing support for terrorist-related activity due to their first amendment rights.

The memo reads: “The security-related inadmissibility ground for endorsing or espousing terrorist activity targets speech that demonstrates a degree of public approval or public advocacy for terrorist activity. Depending on an alien’s immigration status, contacts with the United States, and location, first amendment concerns may limit use of this inadmissibility ground.

“In cases involving aliens within the United States interior – lawful permanent residents either inside or outside the United States, or aliens outside the United States who have significant US contacts, first amendment protections could apply.”

The lawsuit was born in the aftermath of then president Trump’s announcement of “extreme vetting” immigrants to the US and the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” – a move that drew the ire of the Muslim American community and civil rights groups.

The goal of the Foia lawsuit was to explore how this policy could be legally justified, lawyers from the Knight First Amendment Institute said.

Under US law, non-US citizens have constitutional rights, including the right to free speech found in the first amendment of the US constitution.

If the policy explored in the memos had gone into effect during Trump’s time in office, foreign student visa holders and other foreign nationals could have been at risk of deportation for expressing attitudes that did not align with those of the US government – a gross violation of the first amendment right to free speech, say legal experts.

Trump vows to expand Muslim ban and bar Gaza refugees if he wins presidency

Carrie DeCell, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute and a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School, said the memos’ revelation is significant in that it lays out in detail why such a policy would be unconstitutional.

DeCell said: “These memos make it clear that government lawyers themselves have carefully considered whether proposals to remove people from the country based on their political speech [and] proposals removing people for endorsing terrorism are constitutional, and they concluded that, in many contexts, the answer is likely no.”

The news of the memos and its conclusions comes at a time when Republican politicians have called for the expulsion of some foreign nationals in the US who have been protesting against the Israeli war in Gaza in the wake of a Hamas attack on Israel that killed 1,400 people and saw more than 220 hostages taken. The Israeli military assault on Gaza has now killed more than 9,000 people, many of them children, according to local officials

In an address to his supporters in Iowa last month, Trump, who is the leading Republican presidential candidate for 2024, brought up the idea again and said if he returns to the White House, he would revoke student visas of “radical, anti-American and antisemitic foreigners”.

He also vowed to bar refugees from Gaza, cut off any funding to Palestinians and expand a Muslim ban he tried to implement during his first term that targeted immigrants from several majority-Muslim countries.

Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis, who is also vying for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, also expressed support for deporting international students who he believed support Hamas. DeSantis took action against protesters in his state by banning Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a popular pro-Palestinian student organization, from Florida’s university system.

DeSantis said: “You don’t have a right to be here on a visa. You don’t have a right to be studying in the United States.”

Another Republican presidential candidate, the South Carolina senator Tim Scott, said on an episode of the Sean Hannity radio show: “If any of those students on college campuses are foreign nationals on a visa, they should be sent back to their country.”

Experts fear that such remarks – and the existence of the Ice memos – reveal a continuing desire by rightwing Republicans to bring about such a policy, despite the clear problems outlined in the memos.

They also fear that aside from targeting potential extremists in the US, such a policy would risk also sweeping up many people simply expressing support for Palestinian rights or criticizing Israeli actions or many other political opinions that might be at odds with US government policy.

DeCell said it was a cautionary tale to those considering similar policies.

“These memos speak to the vagueness of the proposals that former President Trump and other Republican candidates have been putting forward to revoke student visas or remove people from the country based on their political speech.”

Americans seem alarmingly open to Trump's 'revenge' campaign: ABC's Jon Karl

Brad Reed

RAW STORY
November 6, 2023

WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 15: Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at the Pray Vote Stand Summit at the Omni Shoreham Hotel on September 15, 2023 in Washington, DC. The summit featured remarks from multiple 2024 Republican Presidential candidates making their case to the conservative audience members.

 (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images).


ABC News' Jonathan Karl on Monday expressed alarm that American voters seem open to giving former President Donald Trump a second term despite his overtly authoritarian calls to enact revenge against a wide array of public figures.

Appearing on "Good Morning America," Karl outlined the dramatic stakes when it comes to the 2024 election.

"I don't think voters have come to terms with what he is talking about doing," he said. "He's talking about a campaign of revenge and retribution... He wants to go out and prosecute his political opponents. Not just Democrats, but people who served him. John Kelly, his former chief of staff, Mattis, his former defense secretary, Bill Barr, his former attorney general."

Karl then questioned Americans whether unhappiness with gas prices was really worth enabling this kind of raw authoritarianism.

"Are voters really ready to sign up for that?" he asked. "He's talking about invoking the Insurrection Act on day one, using American troops on the streets of U.S. cities, something he tried to do when he was president last time but he was stopped by his own people."

Karl concluded with an ominous warning that "this would be a very radical Trump presidency, much more so than even the first one."

Watch the video below or at this link.

Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term

Advisers have also discussed deploying the military to quell potential unrest on Inauguration Day. Critics have called the ideas under consideration dangerous and unconstitutional.


By Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett
Updated November 6, 2023
Washington Post

Former president Donald Trump at the courthouse in Manhattan on Oct. 17. 

(John Taggart for The Washington Post)

Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.

In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.

In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family. The former president has frequently made corruption accusations against them that are not supported by available evidence.

To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations. Critics have called such ideas dangerous and unconstitutional.

“It would resemble a banana republic if people came into office and started going after their opponents willy-nilly,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a constitutional law professor at the University of Virginia who studies executive power. “It’s hardly something we should aspire to.

Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act, according to a person involved in those conversations and internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post. The law, last updated in 1871, authorizes the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.

The proposal was identified in internal discussions as an immediate priority, the communications showed. In the final year of his presidency, some of Trump’s supporters urged him to invoke the Insurrection Act to put down unrest after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, but he never did it. Trump has publicly expressed regret about not deploying more federal force and said he would not hesitate to do so in the future.

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung did not answer questions about specific actions under discussion. “President Trump is focused on crushing his opponents in the primary election and then going on to beat Crooked Joe Biden,” Cheung said. “President Trump has always stood for law and order, and protecting the Constitution.”

The discussions underway reflect Trump’s determination to harness the power of the presidency to exact revenge on those who have challenged or criticized him if he returns to the White House. The former president has frequently threatened to take punitive steps against his perceived enemies, arguing that doing so would be justified by the current prosecutions against him. Trump has claimed without evidence that the criminal charges he is facing — a total of 91 across four state and federal indictments — were made up to damage him politically.

“This is third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’” Trump said at a campaign stop in New Hampshire in October. “And that means I can do that, too.”

Special counsel Jack Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Biden have all said that Smith’s prosecution decisions were made independently of the White House, in accordance with department rules on special counsels.

Trump, the clear polling leader in the GOP race, has made “retribution” a central theme of his campaign, seeking to intertwine his own legal defense with a call for payback against perceived slights and offenses to right-wing Americans. He repeatedly tells his supporters that he is being persecuted on their behalf and holds out a 2024 victory as a shared redemption at their enemies’ expense.

‘He is going to go after people that have turned on him’

It is unclear what alleged crimes or evidence Trump would claim to justify investigating his named targets.

Kelly said he would expect Trump to investigate him because since his term as chief of staff ended, he has publicly criticized Trump, including by alleging that he called dead service members “suckers.” Kelly added, “There is no question in my mind he is going to go after people that have turned on him.”

Barr, another Trump appointee turned critic, has contradicted the former president’s false claims about the 2020 election and called him “a very petty individual who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s.” Asked about Trump’s interest in prosecuting him, Barr deadpanned, “I’m quivering in my boots.”

“Trump himself is more likely to rot in jail than anyone on his alleged list,” said Cobb, who accused Trump of “stifling truth, making threats and bullying weaklings into doing his bidding.”

Milley did not comment.

Then-White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly listens as then-President Donald Trump leads a working lunch with governors in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in 2018. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Other modern presidents since the Watergate scandal — when Richard M. Nixon tried to suppress the FBI’s investigation into his campaign’s spying and sabotage against Democrats — have sought to separate politics from law enforcement. Presidents of both parties have imposed a White House policy restricting communications with prosecutors. An effort under the George W. Bush administration to remove U.S. attorneys for political reasons led to high-level resignations and a criminal investigation.

Rod J. Rosenstein, the Trump-appointed deputy attorney general who oversaw the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian interference in the 2016 election, said a politically ordered prosecution would violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under law and could cause judges to dismiss the charges. That constitutional defense has rarely been raised in U.S. history, Rosenstein said.

“Making prosecutorial decisions in a nonpartisan manner is essential to democracy,” Rosenstein said. “The White House should not be meddling in individual cases for political reasons.”

But Trump allies such as Russ Vought, his former budget director who now leads the Center for Renewing America, are actively repudiating the modern tradition of a measure of independence for the Department of Justice, arguing that such independence is not based in law or the Constitution. Vought is in regular contact with Trump and would be expected to hold a major position in a second term.

“You don’t need a statutory change at all, you need a mind-set change,” Vought said in an interview. “You need an attorney general and a White House Counsel’s Office that don’t view themselves as trying to protect the department from the president.”

A fixation on prosecuting enemies

As president, Kelly said, Trump would often suggest prosecuting his political enemies, or at least having the FBI investigate them. Kelly said he would not pass along the requests to the Justice Department but would alert the White House Counsel’s Office. Usually, they would ignore the orders, he said, and wait for Trump to move on. In a second term, Trump’s aides could respond to such requests differently, he said.

“The lesson the former president learned from his first term is don’t put guys like me … in those jobs,” Kelly said. “The lesson he learned was to find sycophants.”

Although aides have worked on plans for some other agencies, Trump has taken a particular interest in the Justice Department. In conversations about a potential second term, Trump has made picking an attorney general his number one priority, according a Trump adviser.

“Given his recent trials and tribulations, one would think he’s going to pick up the plan for the Department of Justice before doing some light reading of a 500-page white paper on reforming the EPA,” said Matt Mowers, a former Trump White House adviser.

Jeffrey Clark, a fellow at Vought’s think tank, is leading the work on the Insurrection Act under Project 2025. The Post has reported that Clark is one of six unnamed co-conspirators whose actions are described in Trump’s indictment in the federal election interference case.

Clark was also charged in Fulton County, Georgia, with violating the state anti-racketeering law and attempting to create a false statement, as part of the district attorney’s case accusing Trump and co-conspirators of interfering in the 2020 election. Clark has pleaded not guilty. As a Justice Department official after the 2020 election, Clark pressured superiors to investigate nonexistent election crimes and to encourage state officials to submit phony certificates to the electoral college, according to the indictment.

In one conversation described in the federal indictment, a deputy White House counsel warned Clark that Trump’s refusing to leave office would lead to “riots in every major city.” Clark responded, according to the indictment, “That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

Clark had dinner with Trump during a visit to his Bedminster, N.J., golf club this summer. He also went to Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday for a screening of a new Dinesh D’Souza movie that uses falsehoods, misleading interviews and dramatizations to allege federal persecution of Jan. 6 rioters and Christians. Also attending were fringe allies such as Stephen K. Bannon, Roger Stone, Laura Loomer and Michael Flynn.

“I think that the supposedly independent DOJ is an illusion,” Clark said in an interview. Through a spokeswoman he did not respond to follow-up questions about his work on the Insurrection Act.

Clark’s involvement with Project 2025 has alarmed some other conservative lawyers who view him as an unqualified choice to take a senior leadership role at the department, according to a conservative lawyer who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks. Project 2025 comprises 75 groups in a collaboration organized by the Heritage Foundation.

Project 2025 director Paul Dans stood by Clark in a statement. “We are grateful for Jeff Clark’s willingness to share his insights from having worked at high levels in government during trying times,” he said.

After online publication of this story, Rob Bluey, a Heritage spokesman, said: “There are no plans within Project 2025 related to the Insurrection Act or targeting political enemies.”

How a second Trump term would differ from the first

There is a heated debate in conservative legal circles about how to interact with Trump as the likely nominee. Many in Trump’s circle have disparaged what they view as institutionalist Republican lawyers, particularly those associated with the Federalist Society. Some Trump advisers consider these individuals too soft and accommodating to make the kind of changes within agencies that they want to see happen in a second Trump administration.

Trump has told advisers that he is looking for lawyers who are loyal to him to serve in a second term — complaining about his White House Counsel’s Office unwillingness to go along with some of his ideas in his first term or help him in his bid to overturn his 2020 election defeat.

In repeated comments to advisers and lawyers around him, Trump has said his biggest regrets were naming Jeff Sessions and Barr as his attorneys general and listening to others — he often cites the “Federalist Society” — who wanted him to name lawyers with impressive pedigrees and Ivy League credentials to senior Justice Department positions. He has mentioned to several lawyers who have defended him on TV or attacked Biden that they would be a good candidate for attorney general, according to people familiar with his comments.

The overall vision that Trump, his campaign and outside allies are now discussing for a second term would differ from his first in terms of how quickly and forcefully officials would move to execute his orders. Alumni involved in the current planning generally fault a slow start, bureaucratic resistance and litigation for hindering the president’s agenda in his first term, and they are determined to avoid those hurdles, if given a second chance, by concentrating more power in the West Wing and selecting appointees who will carry out Trump’s demands.

Trump speaks with staff members backstage following a campaign event at the Kingswood Arts Center on Oct. 9 in Wolfeboro, NH. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Those groups are in discussions with Trump’s campaign advisers and occasionally the candidate himself, sometimes circulating policy papers or draft executive orders, according to people familiar with the situation.


“No one is opposed to them putting together ideas, but it’s not us,” a campaign adviser said. “These groups say they’ll have the whole transition planned. Some of those people I’m sure are good and Trump will appoint, but it’s not what is on his mind right now. I’m sure he’d be fine with some of their orders.”

Trump’s core group of West Wing advisers for a second term is widely expected to include Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s hard-line immigration policies including family separation, who has gone on to challenge Biden administration policies in court through a conservative organization called America First Legal. Miller did not respond to requests for comment.

Alumni have also saved lists of previous appointees who would not be welcome in a second Trump administration, as well as career officers they viewed as uncooperative and would seek to fire based on an executive order to weaken civil service protections.

For other appointments, Trump would be able to draw on lineups of personnel prepared by Project 2025. Dans, a former Office of Personnel Management chief of staff, likened the database to a “conservative LinkedIn,” allowing applicants to present their resumes on public profiles, while also providing a shared workspace for Heritage and partner organizations to vet the candidates and make recommendations.


“We don’t want careerists, we don’t want people here who are opportunists,” he said. “We want conservative warriors.”


Marianne LeVine and Karen DeYoung contributed to this report.