President Trump called for the arrest of California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday after the state’s attorney general sued Trump’s decision to federalize National Guard troops for at least 60 days without a request from Newsom in response to protests against federal immigration raids in Los Angeles.
Latest: An estimated 4,000 Guard troops have now been federalized and put on active duty—doubling the total from Monday—in support of Trump’s raids, which have been conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE agents. The newest announcement of 2,000 more Guard troops was delivered via social media not by Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth or Trump, but by Hegseth’s assistant public affairs official Sean Parnell.
Why seek to arrest Newsom, according to Trump? “His primary crime is running for governor, because he’s done such a bad job,” Trump told reporters Monday. “What he’s done to that state is like what Biden did to this country,” Trump alleged.
California reax: “We don’t take lightly to the president abusing his authority and unlawfully mobilizing California National Guard troops,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said Monday. He’s seeking a court order to declare the Guard authorization unlawful “and asking for a restraining order to halt the deployment,” according to the Associated Press. You can find Bonta’s 22-page suit (PDF) here.
Rhetoric watch: Trump claimed the protesters are “insurrectionists” in remarks to reporters Monday. Other White House officials have echoed their boss “in what may become a rationale for him to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act,” David Sanger of the New York Times reported Monday.
- Notable: Trump supporters attempted an actual insurrection on January 6, 2021, in an effort to stop the certification of President Biden’s electoral victory. Many carried Trump flags; at least one carried the Confederate flag; dozens attacked police. Trump pardoned more than 1,000 of them after taking office five months ago.
Hours later, Trump backpedaled his LA “insurrection” claim, telling reporters, “I wouldn’t call it quite an insurrection, but it could have led to an insurrection.” CNN has more on Trump’s inconsistent handle on the i-word, noting “an insurrection isn’t about the level of violence; it’s about the target and purpose of it,” here.
Coverage continues after the jump…
Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1964, the Senate broke a 75-day filibuster against the Civil Rights Act, leading to the bill’s passage.
New: Trump ordered 700 active duty Marines to Los Angeles ostensibly to protect federal law enforcement officers and property on Monday, defense officials at U.S. Northern Command announced in a statement. They’ll be joining “approximately 2,100 National Guard soldiers” whom NORTHCOM says “have been trained in de-escalation, crowd control, and standing rules for the use of force.”
The Marines are from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division. The Guard troops include “approximately 1700 soldiers from the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, a California National Guard unit in a Title 10 status,” NORTHCOM says.
Reaction: Newsom said Monday the state of California will sue in response to Trump’s deployment of Marines, too.
Status report: “So far, the troops appear to have largely stayed out of confrontations between protesters and local police, who broke up protests downtown late Monday night,” the New York Times reported Tuesday morning, and noted, “There generally seemed to be fewer clashes between protesters and police officers than on Sunday, when demonstrators briefly shut down the 101 freeway.” Police have arrested 150 people in Los Angeles since Friday.
Newsom to Trump: “You sent your troops here without fuel, food, water or a place to sleep. Here they are—being forced to sleep on the floor, piled on top of one another. If anyone is treating our troops disrespectfully, it is you, [Trump],” the governor wrote on social media Monday afternoon.
“This isn’t about public safety. It’s about stroking a dangerous President’s ego,” Newsom said in a separate post. “This is Reckless. Pointless. And Disrespectful to our troops,” he added.
Developing: The Pentagon is “scrambling” to draw up rules of engagement for the 700 Marines sent to LA, AP reported Monday evening. “For example, warning shots would be prohibited, according to use-of-force draft documents viewed by The Associated Press. Marines are directed to deescalate a situation whenever possible but also are authorized to act in self-defense, the documents say.”
Worth noting: The Pentagon’s draft memo includes “measures [that] could involve detaining civilians until they can be turned over to law enforcement,” AP writes, describing what would be a highly unusual escalation in the use of the military inside the United States.
Trump’s Homeland Security Department wants those troops to be able to arrest “lawbreakers” in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday after obtaining a copy of a letter sent Sunday from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to the Pentagon’s Pete Hegseth.
Why it matters: “The military is generally barred under federal laws from taking part in domestic law enforcement. Noem’s request may be a step toward the administration sidestepping those laws by invoking the Insurrection Act,” the Chronicle reports.
Local reax: “This isn’t what happens in a democracy, this is what happens in a dictatorship,” State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said. “We have a time-honored tradition in the United States that the military does not enforce civilian law.”
ACLU reax: “From the get-go, the Trump administration’s deployment of troops into the streets of California, over the governor’s objection, has raised serious constitutional concerns,” Hina Shamsi, director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement Monday.
“Every move President Trump has made since Saturday night has been escalatory and inflammatory. The idea that these Marines have anywhere near the kind of training required to police protests while respecting people’s constitutional rights would be laughable if the situation weren’t so alarming,” Shamsi added.
What does history tell us about responding to protests with active duty troops? “The most recent modern invocation of the Insurrection Act took place in 1992, when President George H.W. Bush used it in an attempt to quell the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles,” the Center for American Progress wrote in a report published in February.
“In one notorious incident, the Marines and police were called to respond to a domestic disturbance at a local home. When the officers arrived, the inhabitants fired a shotgun through the front door. A policeman yelled ‘cover me,’ meaning hold your fire but prepare to shoot as necessary. The Marines, however, ‘responded instantly in the way they had been trained, where ‘cover me’ means ‘provide me with cover using firepower.’ The soldiers then opened fire on the residence, shooting more than 200 bullets into the front of the house. Three children were inside the home at the time. No one involved in the incident was killed, but federal troops were pulled out of Los Angeles on May 10, just days after their initial deployment.”
“This incident illustrates the enormous safety risks posed by deploying combat-trained troops to a civilian environment,” the report’s authors warn. Read more, here.
LA-based journalist Jim Newton wrote a concurrent opinion at the height of the George Floyd protests of 2020, for Politico. Writing about the same incident noted above, he recalled that “By the time soldiers and Marines were in position, the violence was already subsiding, so their mission was muddied from the start: Authorized to ‘restore law and order,’ they were not empowered to ‘maintain law and order.’ Some military leaders concluded that their authorization thus was no longer valid. From then on, each request for military backup—including each request for the guard, which by then had been federalized—was evaluated according to whether it was a request to ‘restore’ order or merely to ‘maintain’ it. The process was cumbersome and sometimes slow.”
BLUF for Newton: “The history in Los Angeles suggests that solid coordination between the state and federal governments, along with decisive use of the National Guard, can save lives and protect property.” But it also “argues against employment of active-duty forces, certainly without consultation and consent of the states,” he said back in June 2020. Read the rest, here.
Another pesky matter: Lots of misinformation and misleading photos are being shared on social media, as the BBC and the New York Times are tracking and flagging for readers. “One was a still from ‘Blue Thunder,’ a 1983 action-thriller about a conspiracy to deprive residents of Los Angeles of their civil rights,” the Times reports. Another featured “a fabricated quote, attributed to former President Barack Obama, discussing a secret plot to impose socialism on the country, as well as a video of burning police cars that was from 2020.”
Several others have been recirculated by influential conservatives since the George Floyd protests of 2020. Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz and conspiracist Alex Jones fell for one of those recirculated images this week, as the BBC’s Shayan Sardarizadeh reported. NYT: “The flood of falsehoods online appeared intended to stoke outrage toward immigrants and political leaders, principally Democrats.”
By the way: The bill Trump is trying to push through a GOP-led Congress includes $160 billion for anti-immigration efforts, including $8 billion for ICE personnel, $15 billion for deportations, and $45 billion for more detention facilities. ICE’s current total budget is $8 billion.
“For perspective, we would be spending [almost] 3x as much on immigration jails alone as on NASA,” observed Naval War College Professor David Burbach.
Pentagon chief Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine are on Capitol Hill today testifying before House appropriators on the latest annual budget request. That began at 9:30 a.m. ET. Details and livestream here.
Update: Hegseth appears to be repeating misleading information about immigration to lawmakers, as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick noted on social media Tuesday, with supporting evidence.
Related reading:
White House
After stoking immigration tensions in California, Trump is to fly to the Army’s Fort Bragg, where soldiers are preparing to celebrate the service’s 250th anniversary this weekend, the Pentagon announced in a short statement Monday.
POTUS limits use of cyber rules to punish U.S. hackers, election meddlers. A Friday executive order, the latest of Trump’s second-term cybersecurity mandates, rolls back an Obama-era order that the State and Treasury departments have used to financially punish people who supported attacks that harmed U.S. national security. His EO echoes unproven claims that cyber and surveillance authorities were politicized to target Trump and his allies. Nextgov/FCW’s David DiMolfetta reports, here.
Related: “Trump might be the most accessible president ever — for spies or scammers,” reports Axios, adding that his administration is “uniquely vulnerable to basic scams like spoofed calls and impersonation attempts.”
The State Department is using AI to help pick new hires, Reuters reported Monday, citing an internal message to employees. “The cable said that StateChat, an in-house chatbot which works using technology from Palantir and Microsoft, will be employed to pick foreign service officers for participation on the Foreign Service Selection Boards, the annual evaluation panels which decide whether and how to promote and shuffle around State Department employees.”
China
China sends two aircraft carriers to the Pacific at the same time. In an apparent first, the Liaoning and Shandong were operating on Saturday in separate areas near remote southern islands belonging to Japan, the Japanese defense ministry said. Reuters has a bit more, here.
China’s propaganda surges as the U.S. retreats from the information war. Washington Post: “Two months after the Trump administration all but shut down its foreign news services in Asia, China is gaining significant ground in the information war, building toward a regional propaganda monopoly, including in areas where U.S.-backed outlets once reported on Beijing’s harsh treatment of ethnic minorities.
“Cutbacks at Radio Free Asia and other news outlets funded by the U.S. Agency for Global Media have allowed China to fill a programming void and expand the reach of its talking points, according to an analysis prepared for a USAGM grantee that, though based on publicly available data, was not authorized to be shared publicly.” More, here.
And lastly: Comcast is among the firms likely hit by China’s Salt Typhoon hackers, sources say. Two U.S. security agencies have listed the telecom-and-entertainment conglomerate, along with the data center giant Digital Realty, among companies likely ensnared by a Chinese hacking group that has penetrated U.S. and global telecom operators, DiMolfetta reported for Nextgov.
Read the full article here