very different timelines when it comes to the appointment of a special counsel when it comes to the handling of classified documents. merrick garland appointed a special counsel to investigate the handling of some classified documents. his appointment follows the development that a second set of classified documents were found, these in a storage space in the garage of president biden s home in wilmington, delaware. the president s lawyer said it was a small number of documents. watch. on january 5th, 2023, mr. laush briefed me on the results of his initial investigation and advised me that further investigation by a special counsel was warranted. based on mr. laush s initial investigation, i concluded that under the special counsel regulations, it was in the public interest to appoint a special counsel. as i have said before, i strongly believe that the normal processes of this department can handle all investigations with integrity, but under the regulations, the extraord
and their relationship really blew up over the security clearance where he would not give them the clearance, and trump had to order him to do that. and the white house had to create through don mcgahn documentation that showed that trump had overridden the recommendations of the intelligence community and of what kelly and mcgahn wanted. and i think he was deeply suspicious of of jared and ivanka. with good reason. they were working day in and day out to sabotage his efforts to bring order to the west wing, right? i mean, it starts it starts with trump telling him, kelly, when he comes in that he wanted kelly to fire them. and kelly s basically telling trump i m not going to get involved in a family issue like this. and kelly wanted jared and ivanka to report to report to him like everyone else in the white house. but they didn t want to do that. they wanted to go around him.
tripped up by jonathan swan s super simple question. of course birtherism is racist. why does a story about john kelly s actual experience in the west wing coming out now isn t entirely clear, but it all comes to jared and ivanka and the dysfunctional dynamic created by trump s unqualified, unvetted and unmanageable kids. there is little left to the imagination in mike schmidt s telling and reporting as kelly s tenure after chief of staff. quote, another major issue was the ongoing competition between ivanka and melania trump. kelly had been told earlier in the presidency that ivanka had wanted to take over the title of first lady and assume many of the ceremonial roles that come with the title, following a similar model to the presidency of the unmarried james buchanan, who in the mid 19th century turned to his niece to fulfill the duties of the first lady. as if that father-daughter relationship were not creepy enough, from the forthcoming paper back of mike schmidt s
your new reporting is this indifference when he s briefing him on the consequences. he is explaining how this escalates. and it s the indifference to death that i ve never seen so starkly. we knew that trump had indifference to suffering in the spiked wall he wanted at the southern border and the nukes he wanted shot into mexico. but the indifference in your telling of kelly s efforts to educate him on the horrors and the heinous nature of war feels like an inflection point for kelly. look, no person understood the horrors of war maybe in the senior ranks of the u.s. merica military officer to lose a child in the post-9/11 wars. and he s trying to explain to trump what this could look like, what a dmz with north and south korea firing on each other could look like, how this could all spin into ways that could lead to missiles flying all over the place.
you probably know this already. i didn t, but i want the read this part of mike s reporting. quote, you were medically disqualified, the doctor told kelly. to kelly this was terrible news. you have to qualify me, kelly said. if your eyesight didn t disqualify you, your bone spurs would, the doctor said. what are bone spurs, kelly asked? kelly could literally feel his heart sink as his life-long dream of being in the marines appeared to be crashing down before him. he protested with the doctor who apparently seeing kelly s interest in knowing that the military needed as many service members as possible for the war in vietnam decided to ignore kelly s health issues. quote, army or marines, the doctor asked? marines, kelly replied. he left for boot camp within a week. kelly s career starts on the exact polar opposite side of the bone spurs question than donald trump s. irony, fate, what do you make of that?