Trump drops a cabinet-level clusterbomb with Gaetz, Gabbard as latest picks

Trump drops a cabinet-level clusterbomb with Gaetz, Gabbard as latest picks

The gasps echoing across Washington on Wednesday proved that Donald Trump retains the capacity to shock. That’s just what he did with some boundary-busting cabinet picks. 

Members of his own party expressed astonishment at news of the president-elect’s choices to oversee law enforcement and national intelligence: Matt Gaetz for attorney general and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence.

The question is whether he will bypass standard procedures to install them in office, in an early test of the incoming president’s power over the country’s institutions.

A string of congressional Republicans expressed bewilderment, in particular, over news that the Justice Department could be entrusted to Gaetz, their firebrand colleague from Florida.

Gaetz did practise law before politics but is now best known as an ardent political pitbull for Trump. He has recently called for investigating Jack Smith, the special counsel who prosecuted Trump.

He has also been investigated for sex-trafficking involving a minor, illicit drug use, and accepting improper gifts, allegations he has denied.

Gaetz resigned from Congress just hours after getting the nomination, allowing a speedy replacement by special election in Florida. This is also reportedly a few days before an ethics committee was scheduled to release a report into his behaviour.

Republicans who heard the news during a meeting said there were audible murmurs of surprise. 

“Everybody was saying, ‘Oh my God,'” Republican Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho said, according to The Associated Press. “That was about as big a surprise as I’ve had in a long time.”

The choice now heads to the Senate. There, Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski called this an unserious nomination: “This one was not on my bingo card.”

North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis predicted a rough ride for Gaetz in the confirmation process, according to the congressional newsletter Punchbowl News.

However, the appointment was celebrated by hard-right Trump allies who expressed hope Gaetz would, in fact, crack down on the officials who investigated Trump. House Speaker Mike Johnson also credited Gaetz as extremely smart, and the kind of disrupter the Justice Department needs. 

Trump seeking to bypass the normal process

It’s now abundantly clear why the incoming president is pressing allies to shut down the Senate in early January and let him install them through so-called recess appointments. Lawmakers would have to co-operate with an extended recess.

Because under normal circumstances, it is highly uncertain, to put it mildly, that the Senate would give Gaetz control of the nation’s justice system and Gabbard its national secrets.

The standard rules would see them both undergo a memorable grilling in early January, in an attempt to get votes from the required 60 per cent of the Senate.

It’s part of the advise-and-consent role granted to the U.S. Senate over appointments as one of the very first articles of the U.S. Constitution over two centuries ago.

Now Trump has delivered the first major loyalty test of his second term. He’s already begun asking his party to shut down the Senate for a few days.

This would let him deploy a tactic used hundreds of times over the generations, with some caveats: It’s supposed to be used in emergencies, and has fallen into disuse, after the Supreme Court rebuked Barack Obama for abusing the process.

Acting while the Senate is out of session appears central to Trump’s strategy. It explains why one Republican lawmaker expressed certainty Gaetz will lead the Justice Department.

“Recess appointments,” Republican congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky told reporters Wednesday.

“He’s the attorney general. Suck it up!”

Gabbard another surprising pick

The appointment was considered so bizarre that few people were talking about Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii whom Hillary Clinton once referred to as a Russian asset; Gabbard reacted angrily, suing Clinton, but later dropped the suit.

Dating back to the civil war in Syria, through the war in Ukraine, Gabbard has echoed positions supportive of Russia, and has been critical of what she calls the U.S. deep state.

If confirmed, Gabbard would now lead that so-called deep state. Her career before politics included two decades in the military as a decorated combat veteran, where she served in Iraq. 

These nominations swiftly stifled chatter about an earlier unorthodox pick: Veteran and Fox News host Pete Hegseth for secretary of defence. 

He is the author of a recent book that has one entire chapter on how women should not serve in combat, and another chapter arguing vehemently against the rationale for rules of war including the Geneva Conventions.

By the end of Wednesday, almost nobody was talking about Hegseth.

The Gaetz and Gabbard news upended an already unusual day in Washington. The day began with Trump meeting congressional Republicans, accompanied by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

During that meeting Trump joked, as he has before, about running for a third term, currently outlawed under the U.S. Constitution: “I suspect I won’t be running again,” Trump told them. “Unless you say, ‘He’s so good, we’ve got to figure something else out.'”

Changing that rule would require a near-impossible constitutional amendment. 

Also on Wednesday, Trump returned to the White House for a meeting with President Joe Biden that, at least in public view, seemed positively warm.

The Democratic president congratulated his onetime Republican opponent and said he looks forward to a smooth transition. Trump said he appreciated the welcome in a world where “politics is tough.”

The White House press secretary later called the meeting cordial, gracious and substantive.

When asked how Biden could possibly sit cordially with a man he’s called a menace to democracy, Karine Jean-Pierre said he was doing the right thing.

In meeting Trump, Biden performed the democratic rituals denied to him four years earlier. After the 2020 election, Trump denied the results, sent a crowd to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and mused to friends for many months that he might, somehow, be restored to power.

“What we are showing the American people is how you do this,” Jean-Pierre said. “We are leading by example. That is quintessential Joe Biden.”

She said Biden respects the will of American voters. And, she said, of last week’s election: “The American people spoke.” 

In other news Wednesday, the American people will get Sen. Marco Rubio as secretary of state. He’s one of multiple more traditional Trump picks, hawkish in philosophy, someone who would have fit right into a Bush cabinet.

But Rubio isn’t the pick that sent shockwaves across the U.S. capital, not like the ones that could provoke a historic showdown in the weeks ahead.

Published at Fri, 01 Nov 2024 08:11:21 +0000

Israeli aid agency says it has allowed supplies into Gaza, blaming delays on humanitarian groups

An Israeli government agency tasked with co-ordinating aid deliveries to Gaza is rejecting figures reported by international organizations on the number of supply trucks entering the war-torn enclave, a day after Israel failed to meet the United States’ deadline to allow in more humanitarian assistance.

Shimon Friedman, a spokesperson for the agency, said COGAT oversees and co-ordinates with each aid truck entering any of the five crossings into the Gaza Strip, including the Kissufim crossing that opened Tuesday. 

“The only organization really with a full view of what is coming into the Gaza Strip is COGAT, and the numbers are not what they are representing,” he told CBC News Wednesday, referring to international organizations.

Instead, Friedman placed the blame on those same organizations, saying they aren’t “doing enough to pick up that aid and distribute it.”

The Biden administration had set a minimum requirement of 350 supply trucks being allowed entry into Gaza each day, something that a 19-page report published Tuesday by eight aid groups, including Oxfam, Save the Children and the Norwegian Refugee Council, alleges Israel has failed to do.

The report said just over 1,000 total trucks had crossed into Gaza, an average of just 42 trucks a day, according to figures reported during the last week of the 30-day U.S. review period, which ended on Tuesday.

Israel says more aid trucks entering Gaza

But Friedman denied the figures, saying COGAT sees around 50 trucks entering the north and between 100 to 150 trucks entering the southern enclave each day. He told CBC News that there are between 700 and 900 aid trucks waiting on the Gazan side of the Kerem Shalom border crossing.

“That means aid that has come in through Israel, gone through security inspection,” he said. “The international organizations need to pick it up and distribute it — and it’s just sitting there.”

He noted that Israel has placed restrictions on closed trucks entering Gaza, asking international groups to use “open” trucks and accusing Hamas and other militant groups of using closed trucks to move people rather than supplies.

COGAT said humanitarian organizations involved in the report had not co-ordinated with, or sought information from, the military before filing the report and thus had produced a conclusion based on “partial information.”

The U.S. deadline expired just days after global food security experts said there was a “strong likelihood that famine is imminent” in parts of northern Gaza.

“Israel not only failed to meet the U.S. criteria that would indicate support to the humanitarian response, but concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in northern Gaza,” aid groups said in the Tuesday report. “That situation is in an even more dire state today than a month ago.”

The IDF rejected that assertion as it pressed its military offensive against Hamas militants in the area. It said Tuesday it had allowed hundreds of packages of food and water into Jabalia and Beit Hanoun, two areas under siege in the far north of Gaza. The Palestinian civil defence agency said three trucks carrying flour, canned food and water reached Beit Hanoun.

It was only the second delivery allowed into the area since the beginning of October. A smaller shipment was let in last week, though not all of it reached shelters in the north, according to the UN.

Ceasefire efforts stall

Efforts by Arab mediators, Qatar and Egypt, backed by the United States, have so far failed to end the war in Gaza, with Hamas and Israel trading the blame for the lack of progress.

Speaking on Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Israel “has accomplished the goals that it set for itself” by taking out Hamas’s leadership and ensuring the group is unable to launch another massive attack. “This should be a time to end the war,” he said.

“We also need to make sure we have a plan for what follows,” he said, “so that if Israel decides to end the war and we find a way to get the hostages out, we also have a clear plan so that Israel can get out of Gaza and we make sure that Hamas is not going back in.”

Meanwhile, Israeli military strikes killed at least 22 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, as Israeli forces deepened their incursion into Beit Hanoun town in the north, forcing most remaining residents to leave.

Residents said Israeli forces besieged shelters housing displaced families and the remaining population, which some estimated at a few thousand, ordering them to head south through a checkpoint separating two towns and a refugee camp in the north from Gaza City.

Men were held for questioning, while women and children were allowed to continue toward Gaza City, residents and Palestinian medics said.

Northern Gaza incursion deepens

Israel’s campaign in the north of Gaza, and the evacuation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the area, has fuelled claims from Palestinians that it is clearing the area for use as a buffer zone and potentially for a return of Jewish settlers.

“The scenes of the 1948 catastrophe are being repeated. Israel is repeating its massacres, displacement and destruction,” said Saed, 48, a resident of Beit Lahiya, who arrived in Gaza City on Wednesday.

“North Gaza is being turned into a large buffer zone, Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing under the sight and hearing of the impotent world,” he told Reuters via a chat app.

Saed was referring to the 1948 Middle East Arab-Israeli war which gave birth to the state of Israel and saw the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their home towns and villages in what is now Israel.

The Israeli military has denied any such intention, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he does not want to reverse the 2005 withdrawal of settlers from Gaza. Hardliners in his government have talked openly about going back.

It said forces have killed hundreds of Hamas militants in Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun during its new military offensive, which began more than a month ago. Hamas and the Islamic Jihad armed wing claimed killing several Israeli soldiers during ambushes and anti-tank rocket fire.

Attacks across Gaza Strip continue

Medics said five people were killed in an Israeli strike that hit a group of people outside Kamal Adwan Hospital near Beit Lahiya, while five others were killed in two separate strikes in Nuseirat in central Gaza Strip where the army began a limited raid two days ago.

In Rafah, near the border with Egypt, one man was killed and several others were wounded in an Israeli airstrike, while three Palestinians were killed in two separate Israeli airstrikes in Shejaia suburb of Gaza City, medics added.

Later on Wednesday, an Israeli strike on a house in western Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip killed eight people, medics said.

Hamas-led gunmen attacked Israel last October, killing some 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

More than 43,500 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza over the past year, Palestinian health officials say, and much of Gaza has been reduced to a wasteland of wrecked buildings and piles of rubble, where more than two million Gazans are seeking shelter in makeshift tents and facing shortages of food and medicines.

Published at Wed, 13 Nov 2024 14:28:21 +0000