Political Wire - More than 230 doctors, nurses and health care professionals are calling
on Donald Trump to release his medical records, arguing that he should
be transparent about his health “given his advancing age,” CBS News reports.
Newsweek - A former aide to Donald Trump issued a warning about the National Guard being deployed against American citizens during an interview with CNN, saying that Americans should take Trump's words seriously.
In an interview with FOX News' Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, Trump responded to Joe Biden saying he's not confident the transfer of power after the election will be peaceful due to Trump previously disputing the results of the 2020 election...
Mark Esper, Trump's former secretary of defense, spoke to CNN's Kaitlan Collins about Trump's comments. "I think we should take those words seriously," he said. When
asked if he feared that Trump would try to utilize the military against
US citizens, Esper said, "Yes, I do of course because I lived through
that and I saw over the summer of 2020 where President Trump and those
around him wanted to use the National Guard in various capacities and
cities such as Chicago, Portland, and Seattle."
The comment relates to an allegation from his 2022 book A Sacred Oath that Trump made remarks about invoking the National Guard or the military to "shoot protestors" at the George Floyd marches in 2020.
Time - Locked
away in a classified safe on the White House grounds is a stack of
papers crafted over decades with the hope that no one would ever use
them. It lists the extraordinary powers a President may be authorized to
use in the event of a nuclear attack or other massive catastrophe.
Among the select few who have been granted access to the nation’s most
closely held secrets, the pages are known as the Presidential Emergency
Action Documents, or PEADs. Some simply call it the “Doomsday Book.”
Over
the decades, the book has come to include ready-made orders to suspend
habeas corpus, the ancient and bedrock principle that those arrested
appear before a judge, put parts of the country under military control,
impose martial law, block Americans from traveling overseas, and
restrict telecommunications, according to conversations with national
security officials and analysis of documents obtained through Freedom of
Information Act filings by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit
law and policy institute. The public doesn’t know the extent of those
presumed powers or the situations under which a President might claim
the authority to deploy them. Successive administrations have refused to
let Congress see the documents, arguing that they are confidential
legal advice for the President. When Donald Trump was in the Oval
Office, members of his national security staff actively worked to keep
him from learning the full extent of these interpretations of
presidential authority, concerned that he would abuse them.
Now
some former Trump advisors are raising the alarm about the dangers of
Trump having access to the Doomsday Book in a second term. The former
officials—which include Mark Harvey, who oversaw the Doomsday Book while
on Trump’s National Security Council, and Miles Taylor, a former chief
of staff for Trump’s Department of Homeland Security—worry that Trump
would use the powers in situations that fall far short of the crises
they were drafted to address. Trump has a history of testing the limits
of presidential powers, and in a second term would be free of many of
the guardrails that restricted his first one. The Supreme Court ruled in
July that Presidents have partial immunity for official actions.
Trump’s senior advisors have a plan to purge the federal service of
people unwilling to carry out his orders. “He’s going to be surrounded
by a set of people that would say, ‘You have the power to do this,’”
says Harvey. “Frankly, if he says, ‘Yes,’ and there are people that go
do it, what’s to stop him?”
