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Analysis: Why Democrats are warning about Trump giving illegal orders | CNN Politics

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Analysis: Why Democrats are warning about Trump giving illegal orders | CNN Politics

President Donald Trump has yet again suggested that his political opponents deserve to be executed. And yet again, he’s basing this argument on a rather novel legal theory and a dubious interpretation of the facts.

A half-dozen congressional Democrats cut a video this week urging members of the military not to obey unlawful orders that Trump might issue. Trump then responded by issuing a series of social media posts suggesting these members had committed sedition and possibly even deserved to die.

Trump went from saying they should be arrested, to re-posting someone who said George Washington would “HANG THEM,” to saying “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt clarified Thursday that Trump does not, in fact, want members of Congress put to death.

But she otherwise stood by the idea that these members were acting dangerously and undermining the commander in chief. She said the members were urging members of the military to “defy the chain of command.”

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“They are literally saying to 1.3 million active-duty servicemembers to defy the chain of command – not to follow lawful orders,” Leavitt said.

But that is not what they were literally saying.

In fact, the members were not urging anyone to disobey “lawful orders.” They explicitly referred in the video only to unlawful orders – and repeatedly so.

The other problem is that “defying the chain of command” isn’t just something military servicemembers are allowed to do in such cases; it’s something they’re often required to do.

The section of Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice dealing with failing to obey orders states that members can only be sanctioned for disobeying lawful orders. And servicemembers are generally obligated to not follow orders that are “manifestly unlawful.”

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If there’s a potentially more legitimate objection to Democrats’ video, it’s that they’re erecting a straw man – basically that they’re inventing out of whole cloth the prospect of Trump issuing illegal orders, in order to make military servicemembers hesitant to abide his orders.

This is the argument that some of Trump’s allies have gone for on Fox News.

“If you can’t name the unlawful orders that these guys are bringing up in their video, you know, that just shows me that you don’t have the courage to even call out what you’re talking about,” Republican Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona said.

Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum in a separate segment pressed Democratic Rep. Jason Crow, one of the lawmakers in the video, repeatedly on the same subject.

“What specific order from the commander in chief that we are asking our military to carry out are you objecting to?” MacCallum said. “This is very, very vague.”

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But it’s not as if this is a prospect Democrats have invented out of whole cloth. Trump has given them plenty to work with, including some things Crow mentioned in the interview.

Trump has repeatedly proposed doing things – with the military and otherwise – that appear to be illegal. People who served with him have said he suggested illegal action. And Trump is certainly testing the bounds of the law with his use of the military even as we speak.

The big example right now is Trump’s strikes on alleged drug vessels in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean – strikes that have killed more than 80 people without a legal process.

CNN has reported that both the United Nations and top allies like the United Kingdom regard the strikes as illegal extrajudicial killings. Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has echoed those claims, while other GOP senators have questioned their legality as well. The administration has also declined to publicly detail its legal justification, even as the Justice Department has produced a classified legal opinion authorizing the strikes. It has released survivors of the strikes who, if they had been kept in US custody, could have forced it to defend itself in court. Also, a top commander who CNN has reported raised questions about the legality of the strikes is now retiring early.

There is a very real question about whether the servicemembers involved in those strikes are carrying out illegal orders. And the administration has proactively avoided a more robust legal process that could settle that question.

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But that’s hardly all. Here are some other key data points:


  • During the 2016 campaign, Trump floated having the military torture people and kill terrorists’ families. When it was posited that troops would not follow such illegal orders, Trump responded: “If I say do it, they’re gonna do it.” (He later backed off, saying he would not order people to violate international law.)

  • In 2020, Trump told Iran that the United States was prepared to strike Iranian cultural sites, which would likely have been considered a war crime if carried out.

  • In 2018, Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, said publicly after his departure that Trump had repeatedly tried to do illegal things.

  • In 2019, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen resigned after clashing with Trump over his repeated desires to do things she thought might be illegal.

  • Former Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper has said Trump in 2020 floated having the military shoot racial-justice protesters demonstrating near the White House in the legs.

  • A series of judges this year have indicated the administration has flouted or violated court orders with its deportations or its use of the National Guard on domestic soil.

  • Those National Guard deployments represent an extraordinary use of the military, the legality of which is still being sorted out in courtrooms across the country.

  • Trump has repeatedly flirted with a scenario in which the laws don’t apply to him because he is all-powerful and doing good things for the country.

It’s certainly provocative for Democrats to raise this issue like they have. But it’s not as if they’ve conjured it out of thin air.

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Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

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Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

At least two structural columns buckled and failed in a 37-story office tower in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, prompting evacuations of nearby streets and buildings. While city officials asserted that the tower was in no danger of collapsing completely, outside engineers said further failures in the structure could not be ruled out.

A pair of columns that failed completely were part of the tower’s existing structure. A New York Times review of images and videos from inside the building has found that several floors were added atop these columns.

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City officials said in a news conference on Tuesday that the building was continuing to move, while they simultaneously assured the city that the building would not suffer “total collapse.” “The way this building is constructed, it’s a steel-frame building,” John Esposito, a chief in the Fire Department in New York, said at the afternoon news conference. “So, it would not be a total collapse. It would be more of a localized collapse.” Still, he said, “that remains our concern, that it’s moved.”

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Engineers said that the movement itself was cause for concern. In a properly designed steel building, they said, loads should redistribute quickly to surviving structural supports if columns failed.

Joe DiPompeo, a former president of the Structural Engineering Institute at the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that if the structure had been overloaded, he would expect any movement “to happen very quickly,” rather than gradually.

“Generally when a column buckles, it’s a sudden failure,” Mr. DiPompeo said. He said that a full collapse remained unlikely given the redundancies built into the building codes.

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Engineers often refer to the most dangerous possibility as a progressive collapse, a process in which structures near the initial failure become overstressed and also fail, potentially bringing down the building if the sequence continues. While unlikely, it cannot be ruled out, Mr. DiPompeo said.

Footage recorded from inside the building shows at least two structural columns appear to have failed completely, Mr. DiPompeo said. Other nonstructural, interior walls — or at least the metal “studs” that were in place to hold them up — also appear to have deformed.

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“The only way that really happens is if the floor above them dropped. It looks like the floor above could have dropped a foot or two, which is obviously not a good situation,” Mr. DiPompeo said.

@fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

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Image from @fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

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Image from @Bogs4NY via X

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The 37-story building is in the process of being converted from office space into residential units. Four new floors and a large vertical portion were added onto the existing building in recent months. The vertical portion consists of a stack of over a dozen new floors cantilevered out over the existing building below.

Engineers said that there was nothing inherently wrong with adding residential floors or the cantilevered section above the columns that failed, as long as the original structure and the modifications had properly accounted for the added weight and wind loads.

“The cantilever alone doesn’t change anything,” Mr. DiPompeo said, but it does put additional load on the columns underneath — a factor that should have been reflected in the design.

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Nathan Berman, managing principal and founder of MetroLoft, the developer overseeing the conversion, said on Tuesday that “this incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap.”

He said two columns near the northwest corner of the tower had bent under the weight of additions to the building above, most likely because those columns had not been properly reinforced, though he said an investigation would determine the cause. The rest of the columns, he said, “picked up the weight.” He estimated the affected floors above the failed columns had sagged by a maximum of four inches.

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Mr. Berman said that he expected the problems to be fixed and the project to be completed with, at most, a slight delay.

On Tuesday evening, installation of temporary shoring was set to begin shortly, in order to help stabilize the 20th and 21st floors of the building.

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DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote

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DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote

The Justice Department sent letters warning election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia that they could face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting, a spokesperson for the Justice Department confirmed Tuesday.

The letters, signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads up the department’s Civil Rights Division, give states five days to explain how they will comply with federal voter eligibility laws and how they will maintain “clean voter lists.”

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“The Department sent these letters to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, asking for voluntary compliance in a timely manner with their obligations under federal law to ensure only citizens vote in federal elections,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement.

Noncitizen voting in federal elections is extremely rare, but Trump and his administration have falsely portrayed it as a widespread issue.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar and Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson are among those who said they received the letters from the Justice Department.

The letters say state election officers “could be criminally prosecuted for aiding and abetting” noncitizen voting. They further specify that any election officer who knowingly retains noncitizens on a statewide voting registration list or who facilitates noncitizens’ receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability.

“An intentional act that is aimed at diluting the votes of citizens could also constitute a violation” of federal law, the letters said.

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Henderson wrote on social media that the threats constitute “truly bizarre behavior.”

“Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution,” she wrote. “I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts.”

The letters are the latest move in the Justice Department’s campaign to assert more federal control over state elections.

While some states have complied with the administration’s demands that they hand over voter roll data, the Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for resisting. So far, 11 different federal courts have dismissed the Justice Department’s efforts to seize voter rolls.

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Reigning champion Argentina escapes with remarkable World Cup victory over Egypt

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Reigning champion Argentina escapes with remarkable World Cup victory over Egypt

Lionel Messi #10 of Argentina celebrates scoring his team’s second goal during their World Cup match against Egypt in Atlanta on Tuesday.

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They looked beaten. And out. Argentina, the defending World Cup champion and No. 1-ranked team, was down 2-0 late against Egypt.

Then, in a span of 13 remarkable minutes, Argentina scored not once, not twice, but three times, capping a comeback for the ages and leaving Egypt stunned and shellshocked.

For much of the game in Atlanta, Egypt was in control, hobbling Argentina early. The Egyptian attack began almost immediately with a stunning header goal delivered by Yasser Ibrahim in the 15th minute. After that, Egypt’s defense closed ranks, making it practically impossible for Argentina to equalize.

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It was downhill from there for the Argentines: team captain Lionel Messi failed to convert a penalty kick, and in the 67th minute, Egypt got a second goal from Mostafa Ziko (after an earlier Egyptian goal had been disallowed after a video review). It looked like Argentina was finished. On the brink of elimination.

But no one told the Argentine players that.

In the 79th minute, Lionel Messi began doing his thing. He fired a cross near the Egyptian goal, and Cristian Romero headed it in. Messi was not done. Four minutes later, he powered a shot past the Egyptian keeper. It was his eighth goal of this tournament, the most of any player. The score was 2-2.

Then, in stoppage time, yet another Argentina header and another goal, this time from Enzo Fernandez.

“This is the World Cup for you,” said Messi after the game. “It wasn’t easy to come back from two goals down. But as I always say, this group never gives up. We always try to fight until the end.”

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French referee François Letexier speaks with Egypt forward Mohamed Salah during the World Cup Round of 16 match between Argentina and Egypt in Atlanta.

French referee François Letexier speaks with Egypt forward Mohamed Salah during the World Cup Round of 16 match between Argentina and Egypt in Atlanta.

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Afterward, Egypt coach Hossam Hassan complained about the French referee and the officiating. “I am not convinced. I am not convinced with this outcome. I’m not convinced with the way things unfolded during this match,” said Hassan in a post-match news conference. “We have been treated unfairly today. We have suffered injustice.”

“We would have deserved to earn this win, but we are leaving with honor, with pride, regardless of this defeat,” said Hossan.

African soccer teams have been the stars of this World Cup. Morocco has yet to lose a game. Cape Verde qualified for the first time in its history and stymied Spain, Uruguay and Saudi Arabia. Argentina barely beat them in a nail-biter of a match.

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