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Trump’s Defense Secretary Fires Navy Chief Over Case of SEAL Accused of War Crimes Who the President Pardoned

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White House Claimed It Would Not Get Involved

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has asked for the resignation of Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer over reports he was strongly considering quitting over President Donald Trump’s interference in the case of a SEAL accused of multiple war crimes. Trump pardoned the alleged war criminal and took to Twitter to tell the Navy chief he should stop his plan to fire the SEAL and “Get back to business!”

“Unfortunately, as a result I have determined that Secretary Spencer no longer has my confidence to continue in his position,” Esper said, according to The Washington Post. “I wish Richard well.”

The firing comes after the White House let it be known it would not interfere in how the Navy decided to move forward against the Navy SEAL, Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher.

Secvretary Spencer “denied that he had threatened to resign but said disciplinary plans against Chief Gallagher would proceed because he did not consider Mr. Trump’s statement on Twitter to be a formal order,” The New York Times reported Saturday.

Read the full report at The Washington Post

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‘Orwellian Gaslighting’: Trump CIA Slammed for Retractions of ‘Biased’ Reports

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The Central Intelligence Agency has announced it is retracting certain findings that it now deems “biased,” across a range of reports on topics such as white supremacy, anti-LGBTQ attacks, and contraception.

But according to an MS NOW opinion piece, this is a case of the CIA “yet again spurning intelligence that doesn’t align with Donald Trump’s bigoted agenda.”

“Without providing any evidence,” MS NOW’s Ja’han Jones writes, a CIA news release “calls the reports ‘biased’ and gives credit to the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board — a group that is led by Trump ally Devin Nunes and includes people like far-right podcast host Katie Miller, the wife of Trump’s policy director.”

READ MORE: Trump Previews State of the Union Address in Wild and Rambling White House Remarks

Jones calls the group “a bunch of handpicked MAGA activists” who are “attempting to discredit analysis about white supremacy as the president presses forward with a racist agenda; they’re trying to discredit analysis about LGBTQ+ abuse and discrimination as he pushes policies that discriminate against some LGBTQ+ people; and they’re undermining an analysis about reproductive rights and health care access after the administration absurdly destroyed nearly $10 million worth of contraceptives for women in low-income countries.”

The CIA’s release stated that Director John Ratcliffe ordered retractions or revisions to 19 intelligence products that did not meet CIA and Intelligence Community “analytic tradecraft standards,” and “failed to be independent of political consideration.”

The release also stated that these now-retracted intelligence reports exhibited “substantial deviations from the President’s expectations that CIA’s workforce remains independent from a particular audience, agenda, or policy viewpoint.”

Ratcliffe said, “There is absolutely no room for bias in our work and when we identify instances where analytic rigor has been compromised, we have a responsibility to correct the record. These actions underscore our commitment to transparency, accountability, and objective intelligence analysis.”

According to Jones, Ratcliffe’s remarks reflect “Orwellian gaslighting.”

READ MORE: Judge Cannon Permanently Blocks Release of Jack Smith Classified Docs Report

 

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Trump Previews State of the Union Address in Wild and Rambling White House Remarks

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President Donald Trump gave angel families at the White House on Monday a small preview of Tuesday’s State of the Union address, while delivering a rambling, often off-script speech at an event where he hosted families of victims of foreign criminal organizations.

“It’s going to be a long speech because we have so much to talk about,” the president remarked.

“We have a country that’s now doing well,” he also said. “We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had, we have the most activity we’ve ever had. I’m making a speech tomorrow night, and you’ll be hearing me say that.”

During the approximately one-hour event, Trump mentioned “these crazy shooters” who go after “consequential” presidents, like Lincoln and JFK.

Trump attributed Kennedy’s being consequential to his “glamour.”

“So maybe I want to be a little bit less consequential,” he said. “Can we hold it back a little bit, please?”

“We had the greatest first term of any president in history,” Trump claimed. “Even radical left people have said that.”

READ MORE: Judge Cannon Permanently Blocks Release of Jack Smith Classified Docs Report

He also alleged that “25 million people” came into the U.S. under President Joe Biden. BBC News, which debunked Trump’s 25 million people claim in December, reported that the “number of migrant crossings at the US border did reach record highs under Biden but not to the level Trump – who has never provided a source for these claims – states.”

Claiming that he “won in a landslide,” Trump said that the “one thing that I regret, about the election and the process, ’cause it’s a much bigger, more important, you look at what we’re doing throughout the world. We’re respected like we’ve never been before.”

“But the one thing that I can’t do anything about is that [Biden] allowed 25 million people, many of these murderers, drug lords, criminals, people from mental institutions, they emptied their mental institutions,” Trump claimed in a long statement.

“All over the world?” he continued. “Not just in South America. They emptied their jails. Many of them from all over the world. Why? Why would we do this? And they walk in, nobody even asks for, like, do you have an identification? Do you have an ID? Um… It’s so crazy. You know, the mayor of New York, and he’s a very nice person. I met him, but his ideology’s not too good. But, uh.. We’re having a massive snowstorm right now. And I’ve heard that he’s asked people to come out and help shovel the snow. Okay, so you get a shovel and you start shoveling, right? What the hell you’re not gonna help too much, but you can help. And hello, darling. Are you? No, right behind you. Look, my friend, right? Are you okay? Yes, you. Are you okay? Are you okay? Good. Good. Good. Are your eyes okay? I gave her money to get her eyes fixed. A lot of money to get her eyes fixed. That doctor ripped me off, but that’s okay.”

READ MORE: ‘Did Not Rule Against Trump’s Tariffs’: Bessent Offers Alternative Interpretation

Addressing his polling numbers, Trump denied he is at forty percent approval (latest polls show even less, with a new CNN poll at 36 percent), saying his numbers were “much higher,” and insisted that he has a great deal of “silent support.”

“I’d love to run against anybody,” he continued. “The real polls say you kill everybody — wouldn’t even be close.”

He also insisted that his second term is “much more powerful” than it would have been had he won in 2020, “because there would be nothing to compare it to. Now they compare it to Biden and that horrible, horrible administration.”

“It just amazes me that there’s not more support out there,” he told the families. “We actually have a silent support, it’s silent — that’s how I won I guess — probably 85 million votes. They say 78 million, 79 million. They cheated at this election too, it was just too big to rig. Too big to rig. But they cheated like hell.”

 

READ MORE: MAGA Existed Before Trump — It Isn’t Going Away When He Leaves Says Op-Ed

 

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MAGA Existed Before Trump — It Isn’t Going Away When He Leaves Says Op-Ed

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President Donald Trump did not create the spirit of “MAGA,” which is at the core of his Make America Great Again movement, but he did “recognize the sentiment, brand it, and give it a rallying cry,” according to an opinion piece in The Hill that suggests that when Trump is gone, MAGA will remain.

“The slogan didn’t invent a movement; it catalyzed one,” wrote Colin Kelly. “It pulled together a fragmented set of conservative circles and gave them a single banner. In that sense, MAGA didn’t emerge from Trump’s imagination — Trump emerged from the cultural terrain MAGA had already shaped.”

Trump’s MAGA slogan “suggested that electing Trump was the only path to restoration,” Kelly also wrote. “And it offered something more personal: supporting Trump would make you great again, too.”

READ MORE: Judge Cannon Permanently Blocks Release of Jack Smith Classified Docs Report

He warned that because the MAGA movement has “intensified” without expanding its base of supporters, “our politics increasingly resembles a kind of rhetorical civil war.”

Kelly says that MAGA’s concerns — including the erosion of the traditional family, undocumented immigrants, the economic decline of rural America, and “the sense that Christian religious values are increasingly dismissed in public life” — are “real.”

He suggests engaging with the “most reasonable” GOP voters, whom he described as those “who may feel culturally displaced but are not committed to perpetual conflict.”

Kelly concluded by writing that acknowledging the concerns of these voters “does not require abandoning the pursuit of civil rights, justice, or equal participation in our system, but rather, it “simply means recognizing that a healthy democracy must be able to hold multiple priorities at once.”

READ MORE: ‘Did Not Rule Against Trump’s Tariffs’: Bessent Offers Alternative Interpretation

 

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