Category: Verbatim

Would Patel Confirmation Make the Senate Culpable?

Buck Banks

“The only reason to nominate someone like Patel to run the FBI is to commit impeachable abuses of power. Trump makes no secret that this is, in fact, his purpose. Patel is similarly explicit on the point. Yet the Senate might very well confirm the man once Trump removes the incumbent FBI director and nominates Patel to replace him. … If it actually does so, would that constitute ‘consent’ to impeachable offenses?”

— Benjamin Wittes</h2>

In Trumplandia Denial Really Ain’t Just a River in Egypt

Buck Banks

The author of an email critical of Fox News host-turned-Trump Defense Secretary pick Pete Hegseth threatened New Yorker writer Jane Mayer that “if you print that, I will deny I wrote it,” and when Mayer reminded him “that it had been sent from the same personal e-mail account that he still uses,” the author wrote, “I don’t care. I’ll just say it never happened.”

— The New Yorker

Heilemann: Trump Cabinet Nominees Are Qualified, Not to Run the Government, But to Ruin It

Pensito Editors

“When people say these nominees are not qualified, they are perfectly qualified for what they are being put there for. They are being put there, not to run these departments, but to wreck these departments. By the standards of what Donald Trump and Steve Bannon and others are trying to do, deconsruct the administrative state. Steve Bannon quoted in the New York Times: ‘Donald Trump is a blunt force instrument applying blunt force trauma to the system.’ They want to destroy the system, not to build. So they’re very wll qualified for that.”

– John Heilemann, chief political columnist for Puck News,speaking on MSNBC

Trump’s Thanksgiving Message of Hope and Reconciliation

Buck Banks

President-elect Donald Trump offered his Thanksgiving greeting: “Happy Thanksgiving to all, including to the Radical Left Lunatics who have worked so hard to destroy our Country, but who have miserably failed, and will always fail, because their ideas and policies are so hopelessly bad that the great people of our Nation just gave a landslide victory to those who want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”