Trump ‘terminates’ his defence secretary
President uses Twitter to sack official as he claims that Biden ‘stole’ election with votes of dead people
DONALD TRUMP fired his defence secretary by tweet last night, indicating he would seek to settle scores with his own officials over the next few months.
The president wrote: “Mark Esper has been terminated. I would like to thank him for his service.”
He announced that Christopher Miller, a former special forces officer who is head of the National Counterterrorism Center, would become acting defence secretary.
Mr Esper was Mr Trump’s fourth
Pentagon chief in four years and was fired after 16 months in the job.
Mr Trump was angered when Mr Esper resisted pressure to deploy troops to quash civil unrest in the wake of the death of George Floyd. He was also annoyed by the slow pace of the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan.
Mr Esper also disagreed with the president’s attitude toward the Nato alliance, and his position on renaming US military bases after Confederate generals.
He had reportedly drafted a resignation letter weeks ago in anticipation of being terminated. Other senior officials potentially in the line of fire include Christopher Wray, the FBI Director, and Gina Haspel, the CIA Director.
Last night, Ben Carson, a member of Mr Trump’s cabinet, and David Bossie, who is heading his post-election legal fight, were diagnosed with coronavirus. Meanwhile, Mr Trump planned to encourage his supporters to hold rallies around the country, and to use obituaries of dead people he claims voted to back up his case that the election was “stolen” by Democrats. The White House backtracked from an apparent initial plan for Mr Trump to hold campaignstyle rallies where he would read out the obituaries. Officials suggested the president would not appear in person but there would be events like the Trump boat parades held during the campaign.
Indications emanating from Mr Trump’s legal team were that the court struggle could last a month as they exhaust all options in several states where the race was close. Dec 8 is the deadline for resolving election disputes at the state level. All recounts and court contests over presidential election results must be completed by that date.
A few senior Republicans, including former president George W Bush and former presidential nominee Mitt Romney, have congratulated Joe Biden, but the vast majority of the more than 50 Republican senators have not.
Those speaking publicly stuck to the position that the legal process should take its course. Mitch Mcconnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, did not acknowledge Mr Biden as presidentelect, and referred to “preliminary election results”. He said: “President Trump is 100 per cent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities.”
A “voter fraud’ hotline set up by Mr Trump’s campaign for people to report incidents was inundated with prank calls mocking the president.
Eric Trump, the president’s son, wrote on Twitter that the Democrat National Committee was “spamming our voter fraud hotline to bog down the thousands of complaints we are receiving! Wonder what they have to hide.”
Mr Trump’s team was redirecting campaign staff to states where they plan to dispute results, including sending nearly 100 people from Florida to Georgia. In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign has alleged that more than 21,000 votes were cast in the name of dead voters. The claim is based on a legal case brought by a conservative group against the Pennsylvania secretary of state, Democrat Kathy Boockvar, accusing her of wrongly including 21,000 dead residents on voter rolls. A spokesman for the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office said: “There is currently no proof provided that any deceased person has voted in the 2020 election.”
Mr Trump’s team was meeting at the White House. Conflicting reports have emerged of an internal split between aides over whether the president should concede. But senior campaign adviser Jason Miller said that was “100 per cent false” and the word “concede” was “not even in our vocabulary”.
Meanwhile, Mr Biden said: “This election is over. I will be a president for everyone.”