In this week’s episode, Adam Piper, Executive Director of the Republican Attorneys General Association, sits down with Arthur and Ryan to talk about how state attorneys general are leading the party in new directions. We discuss their antitrust lawsuit against Google, their legal challenges regarding the election in Pennsylvania, and what’s likely to happen in a Biden/Harris admin. In the intro, we talk about Sen. Rubio and the likely future for immigration policy over the next four years.

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In May, former U.S. special operations soldier Jordan Goudreau led an attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan government of Nicolas Maduro. The plan was for 300 heavily armed volunteers to sneak into Venezuela, raid military bases, and inspire a popular rebellion that would lead to Maduro’s arrest. Instead, the embarrassingly amateurish plot was quickly foiled.

The bizarre tale raised a lot of serious questions about the competence of Pompeo’s State Department and the Trump administration’s intelligence services. When The American Conservative requested documents related to the coup under the Freedom of Information Act, the CIA and State Department failed to make anything available.

On Friday, The American Conservativefiled a lawsuit against the State Department in the U.S. District Court of Columbia.

The Trump administration has denied any involvement with coup leader Jordan Goudreau and his private security firm Silvercorp. According to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “there was no U.S. government direct involvement.”

Yet, according to reports, President Trump’s bodyguard Keith Schiller knew of the plans before the coup was attempted. The coup plotters say they were met at the Trump Doral by two members of the Trump administration who expressed support for the plot. And mere days before the launch of Operation Gideon, and on the first anniversary of a separate failed coup attempt in Venezuela, former National Security Advisor John Bolton cryptically tweeted, “Morning is coming to Venezuela – again.”

In the months leading up to Operation Gideon, the Trump administration placed a bounty on the heads of President Nicolas Maduro and a dozen current and former Venezuelan officials. They also upped sanctions on the socialist country and sent the largest fleet ever to the Southern hemisphere, reportedly to interdict drug trafficking from Venezuela.

These steps, which appeared to be placing the U.S. on an inexorable path towards regime change, were approved by Elliot Abrams, special envoy on Venezuela at the State Department at the time. Abrams has a long history of supporting disastrous foreign policy schemes. He was involved in the Iran Contra scandal and pled guilty to lying to Congress about America’s role in foreign policy failures—twice.

In August, a Venezuelan court sentenced Airan Berry and Luke Denman, two former US special-forces soldiers captured during the failed attempt to overthrow the Maduro government, to 20 years in prison. 

To what extent was the U.S. government involved in Operation Gideon? Were U.S. taxpayers funds used in the plot? Why was nothing done to stop this before it embarrassed the U.S. government and its supporters in Venezuela? There are dozens of still unanswered questions in this story. With this lawsuit, The American Conservative hopes to be able to provide Americans some answers.

American Conservative files suit by Barbara Boland on Scribd

According to a readout of a call between President-elect Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Suga, Biden recommitted the U.S. to defending the Senkaku Islands as part of the mutual defense treaty between the U.S. and Japan:

Biden confirmed that Article 5 of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty will be applied to the defense of Okinawa Prefecture and the Senkaku Islands. Article 5 stipulates that the U.S. is obliged to defend Japan should its territories come under attack. Former President Barack Obama was the first U.S. leader to declare that the pact applies to the Senkakus.

Biden is reaffirming the position that the Obama administration took in 2014, but that doesn’t make this commitment any wiser or better than it was when it was first made. As a general rule, the U.S. shouldn’t extend its defense commitments to include disputed territories. In this particular case, committing to defend the Senkakus makes even less sense because these are just uninhabited rocks in the ocean. It strains credulity that the U.S. would actually go to war with China for the sake of these rocks, and that makes it more likely that China will test that commitment. The U.S. risks undermining its commitments to treaty allies when it recklessly expands them to include territory that we aren’t going to defend when push comes to shove. Instead of deterring China and protecting a treaty ally, this commitment seems more likely to create an unnecessary flashpoint that could lead to further escalation. Our colleagues at Defense Priorities made the same points earlier today:

Even if you think the U.S. military should defend Japan, it makes no sense to extend that commitment to uninhabited rocks under disputed ownership.

Pledging American lives to the defense of the Senkakus is all risk, no gain. https://t.co/myY8nmgYQ0

— Defense Priorities (@defpriorities) November 12, 2020

It is important to note that this does not represent a change from Trump administration policy. Obama was the first to make the commitment explicit, but it has been echoed by his successor. The Trump administration stated its commitment to defend the Senkakus as well, and it actually went farther than the previous administration by leaving open the possibility of recognizing Japanese sovereignty over the islands. Like many foreign policy issues on which there is bipartisan consensus, this position has received remarkably little scrutiny and it has encountered virtually no opposition. The U.S. shouldn’t involve itself in bilateral territorial disputes between other nations, our government shouldn’t make security guarantees that it isn’t going to honor, and it is hard to believe that any administration would follow through on a commitment to defend these rocks. It is an unnecessary and untenable commitment, and the U.S. would be wise to renounce it.

Ron Klain was named chief of staff in a future White House under Joe Biden on Wednesday.  

“Ron Klain’s deep, varied experience and capacity to work with people all across the political spectrum is precisely what I need in a White House chief of staff as we confront this moment of crisis and bring our country together again,” Biden, the president-elect, said on Twitter.

“Ron has been invaluable to me over the many years that we have worked together, including as we rescued the American economy from one of the worst downturns in our history in 2009 and later overcame a daunting public health emergency in 2014,” Biden said in a separate statement.

Klain’s status as a longtime Biden devotee — he first worked for Biden when he was a U.S. senator from Delaware in 1989 — combined with serving as President Barack Obama’s Ebola czar clearly bolstered his case for the top job in the future White House’s political staff, amid a pandemic. Biden unveiled the choice first, following recent precedent from Donald Trump, who swiftly named Reince Priebus chief of staff and Steve Bannon chief strategist in 2016, and Obama, who swiftly named Rahm Emanuel chief of staff in 2008. 

But Klain’s arc was circuitous: his political stock crashed with Biden just a few years ago when Wikileaks revealed a smug Klain gloating about his defection to the camp of Hillary Clinton in 2015. “It’s been a little hard for me to play such a role in the Biden demise,” Klain wrote top Clinton lieutenant John Podesta. “I am definitely dead to them—but I’m glad to be on Team HRC.” 

Biden eventually passed on a 2016 presidential run, with Democratic insiders sometimes portraying Klain’s defection as a final nail in the coffin. The turnabout is a reminder of how much has changed in five years, even as an old hand of Washington is set to take the keys to White House. 

“I’m honored by the President-elect’s confidence and will give my all to lead a talented and diverse team in a Biden-Harris WH,” Klain wrote Wednesday night on Twitter.

Douglas Macgregor, President Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to Germany, was installed at the Pentagon as senior advisor on Wednesday, as part of a broader post-election shakeup. 

His retention by President Trump was first reported by Axios, and confirmed to me by Macgregor on Wednesday. It is a show of force from an embattled White House. In recent days, Trump has “terminated” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, Mark Tomb and other figures. There is considerable speculation that Trump will fire CIA director Gina Haspel next. Haspel met with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday night, in a summit with an undisclosed agenda. 

Trump’s shakeup is the latest in an administration defined by them. He tore through his political staff in 2017— dispensing with Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, Sean Spicer and Anthony Scaramucci. He convulsed his national security and legal apparatuses in 2018 and 2019— installing Mike Pompeo and John Bolton over Rex Tillerson and H.R. McMaster, and firing the generally-revered James Mattis, while replacing longtime loyalist Jeff Sessions with Matthew Whitaker, and later, William Barr. 

Trump had a notorious flameout with Bolton, and in recent weeks, has complained Barr has been recalcitrant in going after the administration’s political enemies. Scaramucci and Bolton said, in no uncertain terms, that Trump should not be re-elected. Mattis and former chief of staff John Kelly rebuked the president during the general election; Mattis said Trump had made a “mockery of the Constitution”; Kelly proclaimed that Trump was “the most flawed person” he had ever met. Only Scaramucci — with his administration tenure, by far, the most short-lived — formally backed Biden, however.  

Notably, the upheaval in Trump’s ranks has seldom indicated a policy trajectory, rather interpersonal rancor. The president has a demonstrated preference for personal rapport over policy alignment— and lengthy discussion of the nitty-gritty. Sessions is considered the godfather of “Trumpism,” but he was the subject of a campaign of personal destruction on the part of the president to the bitter end. Trump replaced Bolton with “Bolton lite” Robert C. O’Brien. Trump ignominiously got rid of Rex Tillerson, though Tillerson’s foreign policy realism is probably closer to Trump’s stated preferences than the Pompeo doctrine.

None of it mattered. 

Still, there are some slivers of evidence this shuffle could be significant, especially with the specter of President-elect Biden haunting the administration. Macgregor is on the record as favoring full withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trump’s previously-announced choice to be envoy to Kabul also has publicly favored withdrawal. “The president is taking back control of DOD. It’s a rebirth of foreign policy. This is Trump foreign policy,” a U.S. official claimed to The Intercept’s Lee Fang. Between the lines, it would be part and parcel with a strategy to hamstring the almost-certain, incoming Democratic administration. Trump could be going full realist on Afghanistan, while at the same time delivering the coup de grace — an assault of further sanctions — in four years of undeterred belligerence toward the Iranian regime.

Some of the president’s most virulent critics see a shakeup in the Pentagon as evidence of a last-minute consolidation of power by Trump, as he attempts to dispute the election and avoid ejection from office. “A coup is under way,” Timothy Snyder of Yale said on Wednesday, using language more often found on the right in recent months. “And the number of participants is not shrinking but growing. The coup has to be defeated, and the lie has to be answered.” 

If it came to that — if Trump attempted to use the military in a hold on power — there is every evidence it would be an unwinnable struggle. If polling is to any longer be believed, only three percent of Americans believe the president has been re-elected. Trump would not command the faith of his own party’s brass, with Majority Leader McConnell, set to be Washington’s top Republican, having only committed to perfunctory recounts in disputed states. The Wall Street Journal and Fox News, the most influential center-right organs in the United States, have declared Biden the winner. And the military community is by no means monolithically pro-Trump.  

If history is any guide, Trump’s latest dismissals are based principally in personal clashes, with perhaps a side of policy prerogative.

On this edition of Empire Has No Clothes, Matt, Kelley, and Daniel speak to Jack Hunter, the libertarian writer for the Washington Examiner. He discusses the likely election of Joe Biden and whether the hawks will find a home in his administration. We also talk about Donald Trump’s post-election stand and whether it’s good for America’s relations with the rest of the world.

Listen to the episode in the player below, or click the links beneath it to subscribe using your favorite podcast app. If you like what you hear, please give us a rating or review on iTunes or Stitcher, which will really help us climb the rankings, allowing more people to find the show.

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A top policy official at the U.S. Department of Defense’s top policy official was dismissed on Tuesday, one day after President Donald Trump fired defense secretary Mark Esper via tweet. Sources say the White House now seems focused on going after Mark Esper’s undersecretaries at the Pentagon.

James Anderson, the confirmed deputy undersecretary of defense for policy and a former George W. Bush administration official, has been replaced in the Pentagon’s powerhouse policy shop with former Fox News contributor Anthony Tata. Anonymous officials told media they are afraid Tata will force resignation’s across the department. 

There are a number of high-level firings and resignations occurring throughout the administration. On Monday, the Department of Justice’s top election crimes prosecutor quit to protest Attorney General Bill Barr’s call for U.S. prosecutors to take account of election irregularities before the Electoral College certifies Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election. It is expected that Pentagon intelligence chief Joseph Kernan and Esper’s former chief of staff Jen Stewart will also be removed. 

Much of the media is speculating that the latest Trump firings may be retaliation for person affronts to Trump.

“The rapid-fire personnel changes at the Pentagon are emblematic of overall confusion and unease at the president’s refusal to accept the election results, officials said. Trump insists the election results are not final, alleging baseless claims of voter fraud,” reports Foreign Policy.

“It’s embarrassing for the United States. I was a CIA officer for 26 years,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior officer with the intelligence agency, quoted in Foreign Policy.“These are the [situation reports] that I’d be writing about a dictator who’s mad at his defense minister and has his interior minister fire him. It’s like something out of the Middle East.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper offers a less sinister explanation. 

“Sources say [the firings] may be because Esper and his team were pushing back on what they viewed as a premature withdrawal from Afghanistan before conditions were met, as well as other pending security issues,” Tapper wrote.

If true, this means that these people lost their jobs because they were unwilling to carry out Trump’s foreign policy objectives. In some cases, this unwillingness may have stretched to actual opposition. Trump pledged to remove U.S. troops from Afghanistan by Christmas. As with other troop withdrawal promises, the Pentagon stonewalled.

“Military experts said it would be impossible to withdraw all 5,000 US troops in Afghanistan and dismantle the US military headquarters by the end of the year,” reports the Guardian.

So, are the most recent spate of resignations the result of personal malice on the part of the President towards his underlings? Are they the result of policy differences on withdrawal from Afghanistan? Or, maybe these people think they’re heading into a lame-duck presidency and want to secure high-paying work in the private sector.

Whatever the reason for the recent slate of firings, in the case of Anderson in particular, several current and former officials told Foreign Policy that he was given the option to resign or be fired by Trump’s new acting Pentagon chief Christopher Miller. Anderson had anticipated his firing and moved his belongings out of the Pentagon weeks ago. 

In his resignation letter, Anderson praised the “dedicated team of national security professionals” at the Pentagon and said “[i]t is clear that despite profound national security and defense challenges, America is more secure than it was four years ago.”

“Now, as ever, our long-term success depends on adhering to the U.S. Constitution all public servants swear to defend,” Anderson wrote. 

Anderson had previously opposed the appointment of other Trump favorites to slots at the Pentagon, according Tata, Rich Higgins, a former National Security Council staffer, and Frank Wuco, a former State Department official and radio shock jock known for posing as a jihadi. He also opposed the removal of the Pentagon’s top Europe and NATO official Michael Ryan. Anderson’s predecessor, John Rood, was also removed earlier this year.

“They are filling all of the positions with political types not policy people,” a former senior administration official said anonymously. “So they are the crew they sent over from the [White House].”

There are not many qualified policy people who would take a job that they will likely only have for 73 days until January, 2021 — and it is extremely common for old hands to leave as the presidency enters either a second term or its lame-duck period. Media fears about the rapid exit of officials are likely overblown. 

Did you miss The American Conservative’s Foreign Policy conference last week? No problem! The video for TAC’s 7th Annual Foreign Policy Conference: Beyond 2020: The Future of Realism and Restraint in a Chaotic World is now available.

As we move forward from a presidential election which may ultimately be settled in the court system, where does all this leave restrainers and realists? Is there hope for a noninterventionist foreign policy in the near future?

Check out TAC’s dynamic line up of speakers who discuss these important questions and much more.

Welcome, Emile Doak, The American Conservative

Opening Remarks by Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio)

Election 2020 Results: What Does This Mean for Foreign Policy? 

• Matt Purple, senior editor, The American Conservative

• Dan Caldwell, senior advisor, Concerned Veterans for America

• John Glaser, director of foreign policy studies, Cato Institute

• Moderator: Rachel Bovard, senior director of policy, Conservative Partnership Institute

The China Problem: Realism or Restraint? 

• Doug Bandow, senior fellow, Cato Institute

• Harry Kazianis, senior director of Korean studies, Center for the National Interest

• Gordon Chang, author, The Coming Collapse of China

• Moderator: Curt Mills, senior reporter, The American Conservative

National Conservatism: An Easy Fit for Restrained Foreign Policy?

• Robert W. Merry, writer-at-large, The American Conservative

• John Fonte, director, Center for American Common Culture at the Hudson Institute

• Amber Athey, Washington editor, Spectator USA

• Moderator: William S. Smith, managing director, Center for the Study of Statesmanship at Catholic University

The Foreign Policy Future of the Right

•  Michael Anton, research fellow at Hillsdale College

•  Chris Buskirk, editor & publisher,  American Greatness

•  Moderator: Arthur Bloom, web editor, The American   Conservative

Great Power Politics in the ’20s and Beyond

• John Mearsheimer, professor of political science, Harvard University’s Kennedy School

• Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs, University of Chicago

• Moderator: Curt Mills, senior reporter, The American Conservative

Grading the Trump First Term: Did He Drain the Swamp?

• Gil Barndollar, senior research fellow, Center for the Study of Statesmanship at Catholic University

• Kelley Vlahos, senior advisor, Quincy Institute

• Daniel McCarthy, editor, Modern Age

• Moderator: Barbara Boland, foreign policy & national security reporter, The American Conservative

Concluding Remarks, Emile Doak, The American Conservative

We appreciate your continued readership and support as we reshape the Right!

President Donald Trump announced Monday afternoon that he had fired Secretary of Defense Mark Esper.

“Mark Esper has been terminated,” Trump tweeted. “I would like to thank him for his service.”

“I am pleased to announce that Christopher C. Miller, the highly respected Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (unanimously confirmed by the Senate), will be Acting Secretary of Defense, effective immediately,” Trump wrote.

The Pentagon has not commented as of this writing.

After reports Friday suggested that Esper, along with FBI Director Chris Wray and CIA Director Gina Haspel, were on Trump’s chopping block, the Department of Defense categorically denied the rumors, saying that, “Esper has no plans to resign, nor has he been asked to submit a letter of resignation.”

That statement is at odds with three unnamed defense officials who say Esper had submitted an undated resignation to the administration, as is common practice.

Two decisions seem to have put Esper at odds with the administration: in June, Esper said he did not support the invoking the Insurrection Act and deploying active-duty U.S. troops to cities in a response to civil unrest.

“I say this not only as secretary of Defense, but also as a former soldier and a former member of the National Guard, the option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire situations. We are not in one of those situations now,” Esper said.

More recently, Esper has been working with members of Congress to draft legislation that removes the names of Confederate leaders from military bases. Trump does not support changing the names.

Esper did not have a lot of foreign policy experience. Before leading the Pentagon, he worked as an executive at Raytheon. He left the in 2017 to  serve as the 23rd secretary of the U.S. Army.

A defense department source confirmed that Esper had tendered his resignation and wanted to leave the Pentagon because “he cares about his legacy and prefers to be remembered as someone who was fired because he stood up to the president, rather than being remembered as ‘Yesper.'”

WASHINGTON– Joe Biden, the former vice president, was elected president of the United States on Saturday, the Associated Press, the New York Times and critically, conservative organs the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and National Review report. 

“America, I’m honored that you have chosen me to lead our great country,” Biden wrote on Twitter. “The work ahead of us will be hard, but I promise you this: I will be a President for all Americans — whether you voted for me or not. I will keep the faith that you have placed in me.” Biden’s statement comes hours after a Friday night presser where he stopped just shy of proclaiming total victory. 

President Donald Trump has not conceded. And key figures throughout the Republican apparatus have been vowing to fight any such call for days, contending but not proving there was widespread voter fraud based in large Democrat-run cities, including Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and crucially, Philadelphia. It is unclear if Trump will ever concede, but key fixtures of the state within his own party, including Attorney General Bill Barr, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, have declined to back him in extremity. 

Trump was broadly rebuked by leading alumni of the U.S. military establishment over the summer, including his own former chief of staff, John Kelly, and defense secretary, James Mattis. Trump has proved as president that the military leadership is hardly his friend, and accordingly, looks clear to be forced from office, if it comes to that. My sources around the president indicate that it will not come to that, with in some cases, certain of his acolytes more zealous to continue this fight than he is. 

Regardless, it is poised to be the most fractious transfer of power in U.S. history since before the Civil War, when the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 spurred a secession crisis. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader and now the most powerful Republican in Washington, signaled this week that the states will lead their own votes, and the federal government shall not intervene. Combined with Barr’s inaction, the avenues for Trump to intervene further appear to be all but closed. Litigation initiated in the courts could well be tossed as frivolous before ever reaching the Supreme Court, as had been previously forecasted (and feared) leading up to election day.

Biden is to be sworn in on January 20. He leads a Democratic Party that came to him late, with former President Barack Obama cool on his ascent for much of the primary campaign, and with the party flirting with flashier progressives such Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. A daredevil, quickly doomed run by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg briefly threatened to crowd him in the establishment lane. 

Biden’s centrist triumph in the primaries was followed up by a move left during the COVID-19 pandemic and the summer of Black Lives Matter, ignited by the police killing of George Floyd and lockdown unrest. Biden has denounced the violence seen in major American cities, but the precedent of disorder in the street having helped compel an incumbent U.S. president from office will be disquieting to many for years to come. The dealmaker, consensus-oriented Biden will have his work cut out for him in governing facets of the American right, which see him as illegitimate — just as many on the left treated Trump. But the calls by the Journal and Fox News on Saturday demonstrate that Trump has lost his mandate within the conservative establishment and from the media organs he himself pays closest attention to. 

Yet, the election results were hardly the intense repudiation of Trump that was widely forecasted. Republicans are likely to hold the Senate (that’s now up to run-off elections in Georgia) and actually gained in the House of Representatives. Biden will, however, be a clear popular vote winner, with perhaps the biggest margin, over five percent, since he and Barack Obama were elected in 2008.

The fact that the votes were so close in critical swing states, namely Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania, shows that Biden’s command of the U.S. political system is only partial. His failure to win a broader mandate was disturbing for some on the left. McConnell’s  team, behind closed doors, indicated they would powerfully shape and moderate the composition of Biden’s cabinet, thrilling the markets. The majority leader said in public he was pleased his party had quite possibly held the upper chamber, and said he was relieved his party had stopped the bleeding on embarrassing demographic losses: namely, with women, college graduates and crucially, minorities.

A presidency overwhelmed with charges of racism will end with Trump and his party performing strongest with minorities of any Republican presidential ticket since the enactment of Civil Rights. Leading Republicans called for the continuation of a possible political realignment. 

“We are a working class party now. That’s the future,” Sen. Josh Hawley said this week.