Trump & Troops comparison with past presidents.

Russian bounties offered to Taliban-linked militants to kill coalition forces in Afghanistan are believed to have resulted in the deaths of several U.S. service members, according to intelligence gleaned from U.S. military interrogations of captured militants in recent months.

Several people familiar with the matter said it was unclear exactly how many Americans or coalition troops from other countries may have been killed or targeted under the program. U.S. forces in Afghanistan suffered a total of 10 deaths from hostile gunfire or improvised bombs in 2018, and 16 in 2019. Two have been killed this year. In each of those years, several service members were also killed by what are known as “green on blue” hostile incidents by members of Afghan security forces, which are sometimes believed to have been infiltrated by the Taliban.
The intelligence was passed up from the U.S. Special Operations forces based in Afghanistan and led to a restricted high-level White House meeting in late March, the people said.


The meeting led to broader discussions about possible responses to the Russian action, ranging from diplomatic expressions of disapproval and warnings, to sanctions, according to two of the people. These people and others who discussed the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity because of its sensitivity.

The disturbing intelligence — which the CIA was tasked with reviewing, and later confirmed — generated disagreement about the appropriate path forward, a senior U.S. official said. The administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, preferred confronting the Russians directly about the matter, while some National Security Council officials in charge of Russia were more dismissive of taking immediate action, the official said.

It remained unclear where those discussions have led to date. Verifying such intelligence is a process that can take weeks, typically involving the CIA and the National Security Agency, which captures foreign cellphone and radio communications. Final drafting of any policy options in response would be the responsibility of national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien.

The CIA assessment took some time, and coincided with the scaling back and slowing down of a number of government functions as the coronavirus pandemic began to take hold, two people said.

Asked to comment, John Ullyot, an NSC spokesman, said that “the veracity of the underlying allegations continue to be evaluated.” The CIA and the Defense and State departments declined to comment.

Russia and the Taliban have denied the existence of the program.

Among the coalition of NATO forces in Afghanistan, the British were briefed late last week on the intelligence assessment, although other alliance governments were not formally informed. The New York Times first reported the existence of the bounty program on Friday evening.

But as more details have unfolded, the primary controversy in Washington over the weekend revolved around denials by President Trump and his aides that the president was ever briefed on the intelligence.

Trump on Sunday confirmed statements by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and the White House press secretary that he received no briefing on the subject, and he referred in tweets to “so-called reports” by “Fake News.”

“Nobody briefed or told me, [Vice President] Pence or Chief of Staff [Mark Meadows] about the so-called attacks on our troops in Afghanistan by Russians, as reported through an ‘anonymous source’ by the Fake News . . . Everybody is denying it & there have not been many attacks on us,”
Trump said on Twitter, insisting that “nobody’s been tougher on Russia than the Trump administration.”

But his Twitter remarks did little to clarify whether the administration was denying that the assessment existed, or simply denying that Trump knew anything about it. Richard Grenell, who served as acting director of national intelligence until last month, tweeted that “I never heard this. And it’s disgusting how you continue to politicize intelligence.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Sunday joined other lawmakers — including leading Republicans — in expressing concern and calling for the administration to provide Congress with an explanation.

“This is as bad as it gets, and yet the president will not confront the Russians on this score, denies being briefed,” Pelosi said on ABC News’s “This Week.”

“But he wants to ignore,” she said, “he wants to bring them back to the G-8 despite the annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine, despite what they yielded to [Putin] in Syria, despite [Russian President Vladimir Putin’s] intervention into our election, which is well documented by our intelligence community, and despite now possibly this allegation, which we should have been briefed on.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump ally who golfed with the president Sunday, earlier tweeted that “I expect the Trump Administration to take such allegations seriously and inform Congress immediately as to the reliability of these news reports.”

In a second tweet, Graham said it was “Imperative Congress get to the bottom” of the Russian offer “to pay the Taliban to kill American soldiers with the goal of pushing America out of the region.”

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the third-highest-ranking member of the House GOP leadership, also took to Twitter on Sunday to say that if the report of Russian bounties “is true, the White House must explain” why the president wasn’t briefed, who did know and when, and “what has been done in response to protect our forces & hold Putin responsible.”

A third person familiar with the issue said that “I don’t think that anybody withheld anything and screwed up by not getting to the president on time.” Until “you were absolutely sure of the intelligence and the NSC had drawn up policy options, you weren’t going to walk into the Oval Office,” the person said.

So the issue is not when the president was briefed, the person said, but rather, “now that you are aware of it, what are you going to do about it? That’s where the focus should be.”

In years past, there were persistent reports that Russia was supplying small arms to the Taliban. Carter Malkasian, who served as a senior adviser to the previous chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., said Russia had cultivated a relationship with certain Taliban elements, largely in northern Afghanistan, beginning around 2015. The outreach was partly as a response to Moscow’s concerns about the threat posed by Islamic State militants in the region, and also out of a desire to see U.S. troops leave the region.

But more recently, U.S. officials said that Russia — which tried and failed to start its own Afghan peace process — has been cooperative and helpful since the Taliban signed a peace deal, including a plan for U.S. withdrawal, with the administration early this year.

Malkasian, now a scholar at CNA, said the bounty operation, if true, could be a “random” initiative, rather than one that reflected a well-coordinated program ordered by the highest levels of the government.

He said that a primary Russian goal in Afghanistan continues to be the exit of American forces, but not at any cost.
“They may want us out, and they may be happy to see a few Americans die,” he said, “but I don’t think they want to see the Taliban take over.”

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DIY-HP-LED said:

Looks like Donald had a hand picked crowd and everybody was shook down for grenades so fatboy wouldn't get fragged. The troops coulda hit the ground safely behind the concrete barriers, "Fire in the asshole", as the grenade lands by his feet! Donnie forgot to have a grenade sump built into the stage. I wonder if a secret service agent would fall on it for him, or let the dear leader take the frags...

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The Army is investigating how a pair of soldiers ended up in a Democratic convention delegate video, the service said.
In the announcement for American Samoa on Tuesday, two delegates from the U.S. territory declared their vote for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. They were flanked by two soldiers in camouflage wearing black masks. This may have run afoul of Pentagon guidelines that regulate political activity, drawing a line between the military and appearances of political influence.

The soldiers, assigned to the Army Reserve’s 9th Mission Support Command, are under investigation, an Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Emanuel Ortiz, said Wednesday.

“Wearing a uniform to a partisan political event like this is prohibited,” Ortiz said in a statement. “The Army follows the Department of Defense’s long-standing and well-defined policy regarding political campaigns and elections to avoid the perception of DoD sponsorship, approval or endorsement of any political candidate, campaign or cause.”

The composition of the segment was an “oversight,” Democratic National Committee spokesperson Xochitl Hinojosa said.

“Each state was asked to highlight issues and values that matter most and the American Samoa delegation wanted to highlight their commitment to military service when they filmed their segment,” Hinojosa said.

The Pacific Island territory has for years contributed more U.S. soldiers per capita than any state, according to Army data provided to The Washington Post in January.

Pentagon policies outline how service members can and cannot participate in political events. Typically, the uniform itself is the deciding factor.
“Examples of prohibited political activities include campaigning for a candidate, soliciting contributions, marching in a partisan parade and wearing the uniform to a partisan event,” Ortiz said.

It is unclear whether the soldiers involved understood the ramification of appearing in the video. Both soldiers are specialists, a lower enlisted rank that does not often flirt with the political world, which is dotted with retired senior officers.

The military under the Trump administration has sometimes struggled with navigating political fault lines.

Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was roundly criticized in June for appearing in uniform with President Trump as officials walked to a church near the White House after protesters, demonstrating in reaction to the killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans, were forcibly removed for Trump to have a photo taken there.

Milley later apologized: “I should not have been there. My presence in that moment, and in that environment, created the perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”

The White House last year asked the Navy to minimize the visibility of the USS John S. McCain during Trump’s visit to Japan. The Navy did not meet the request for the ship, named after the father and grandfather of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a political foe of the president who died in 2018.

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A group of lawyers is offering advice to military and National Guard members who worry they may be given unlawful orders if deployed during protests or disputes over next month’s elections.

The Orders Project was formed in response to the use of force against protesters this summer in Lafayette Square, two of the founders said in an interview Friday.

The protests, which followed the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis, prompted confusion among law enforcement and National Guard leaders. Some officials said they had no warning that the U.S. Park Police, which commanded the operation, planned to move against protesters and that the crowd could have been moved out of the area without the use of force.

The legal group anticipates that military personnel might find themselves in the same position this fall, and they may question whether orders they receive are legal.

Some of the scenarios the lawyers have imagined are rooted in recent history with this year’s protests.
But President Trump has also raised the prospect of unprecedented legal challenges. For instance, the lawyers say he could federalize the National Guard and order members to seize disputed ballots. Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that mail-in ballots, expected to be cast in historic numbers, are rife with fraud and could imperil his reelection chances.

“Military personnel don’t have to follow an unlawful order, but they take a risk when deciding not to,” said Eugene R. Fidell, one of the country’s leading experts on military law and an Orders Project co-founder.

Fidell advised concerned personnel to consult first with lawyers in their chain of command and to seek out the group as a kind of backup, if they want another opinion. The volunteer attorneys are all experts on the Uniform Code of Military Justice and will consult with service members on a case-by-case basis.

The group hopes to provide “a guide for the perplexed,” Fidell said, and has compiled a legal sourcebook for military personnel as well as lawyers.

Not only are service members not required to follow illegal orders, they are required not to obey “flagrantly unlawful” ones, said Michel Paradis, a professor of military law at Columbia Law School, who is not involved in the Orders Project.

But in reality, those who refuse take enormous risks.

Military law “makes disobedience to an order itself a criminal offense,” Paradis said. He explained that disputes are typically settled informally within the chain of command. Military lawyers can also help resolve disagreements. In more extreme cases, a service member who believes an order is unlawful can report the matter to an inspector general.

But those who choose to go outside those traditional processes will find little guidance.

“The lack of clarity should be emphasized here — we didn’t find any military case law where the issue of obedience to orders was litigated in a context where personnel were deployed domestically,” said Brenner Fissell, an associate professor of law at Hofstra University and an Orders Group co-founder.

Fidell said this summer’s protests, as well as the president’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose, have convinced the group that military personnel could use extra counsel.

Soldiers might be given orders to open fire at protesters, Fidell said, recalling the killing of four unarmed
Kent State University students by Ohio National Guard members during a Vietnam War protest in 1970. And unprecedented legal questions could arise if the election is still in dispute come Inauguration Day but Trump continues to give orders to the military.

“We hope they’ll never happen,” Fidell said of such nightmare scenarios. “But it’s unrealistic to think these are out of the question.”

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The first time President Trump claimed false credit for the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act — which President Barack Obama signed into law in 2014 — was on June 6, 2018. That day, as Trump signed the Mission Act, a modest update to the bipartisan VA Choice legislation, he seemed to conflate the two.

“So it’s now my great honor to sign the VA Mission Act, or as we all know it, the Choice Act, and to make Veterans Choice the permanent law of our great country,” the president said, standing in the Rose Garden. “And nobody deserves it more than our veterans.”

In the coming weeks, Trump began systematically erasing from the legislation’s history not just Obama but also the late senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), who not only co-sponsored the VA Choice Act but also was so instrumental in passing the Mission Act that he is one of three senators for whom the act is officially named.

That didn’t stop Trump from falsely claiming — as he did at a tank factory in Lima, Ohio, in March 2019 — that McCain, his frequent political rival, failed to make any progress on the VA Choice Act.

“McCain didn’t get the job done for our great vets and the VA, and they knew it,” Trump said.

The president’s handling of the VA Choice legislation offers a crystalline window into the anatomy of a Trump lie: the initial false claim, the subsequent embellishment and gilding, the incessant repetition and the clear evidence that he knows the truth but chooses to keep telling the falsehood — all enabled by aides either unwilling or unable to rein him in.

“A lot of the problem with the president is he’s just using the wrong words,” said Jeremy Butler, the CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a nonpartisan veterans advocacy and support group. “He’s calling it ‘Choice,’ when he means the Mission Act, but to the average listener, the Mission Act doesn’t mean anything, but ‘Choice’ does.”

Butler said Trump’s inaccurate language also undermines his efforts on improving veteran care: “The real question is: Is this legislation working? Is it doing what it needs to be doing? But it’s hard not to get sucked into misstatements and mistruths and half-truths, whether it’s intentional or not.”

So it’s now my great honor to sign the VA Mission Act, or as we all know it, the Choice Act, and to make Veterans Choice the permanent law of our great country.
President Trump in June 2018

Trump has used the VA Choice assertion in part to create a false sense of accomplishment and to elevate himself while diminishing McCain and Obama.

As Trump repeated the mistruth, he grew bolder, claiming falsely that the legislation had, as he said at one 2018 event, “eluded us for 40 years? 50 years?” He also downplayed McCain’s role, using the legislation as a cudgel to attack the former Vietnam prisoner of war and diminish his contributions.


The newer legislation makes it easier for veterans to seek private care and offers improvements such as allowing veterans to see non-VA doctors for primary care if their drive to a VA facility is more than 30 minutes, rather than 40 miles, or if their wait for an appointment is more than 20 days, rather than 30. According to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, an additional 640,000 veterans each year will seek care outside the VA system, and the legislation requires VA to negotiate a contract for veterans to seek care at private walk-in clinics.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a statement that Trump’s improvements to the VA system go well beyond what Obama accomplished during his two terms.


“Delivering for veterans requires constant attention from the White House on both the legislative front and how the department operates, and if the president can’t even remember the name of the largest VA legislation to pass in the last decade, how can he possibly be a competent administrator of the VA?” Goodwin said. “That’s kind of the crux of the problem with this.”

Dan Pfeiffer, who served as a senior adviser to Obama when the VA Choice law was passed, said the sheer pointlessness of the false claim makes it all the more galling. “He could just as easily say, ‘I passed the Mission Act,’ and that would be just as politically beneficial,” he said. “Either he likes lying too much to stop lying, or his staff is too afraid to tell him he’s wrong so he keeps on perpetuating this falsehood.”

Dan Caldwell, a senior adviser for Concerned Veterans for America — a veterans advocacy group that is part of the conservative Koch political network — offered a different perspective, saying that one of Trump’s key 2016 campaign promises was giving veterans more choice, which Trump ultimately delivered.

“As implemented, the Obama administration law didn’t give veterans true choice,” Caldwell said. “The president deserves a lot of credit for making progress on this issue.”

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Voting by U.S. troops has been thrust into the spotlight as a bitter election campaign comes to a close, with opponents of President Trump alleging that his efforts to limit mail-in voting could disenfranchise military families.
Follow the latest on Election 2020

Democrats have raised the issue repeatedly after the president said last week that it would be “very proper and very nice” if a winner was declared on Election Day. Trump added that it was “totally inappropriate” for ballots that arrive later to be included, even though the votes of hundreds of thousands of service members that are sent by mail have been counted afterward for years.

Trump’s opponents have pounced on the comments, suggesting that they show the president is willing to win at all costs, even if doing so hurts military families.

“I don’t know what Donald Trump has against military members and their families, but right now his allies are doing everything they can to make it harder for those serving overseas to have their votes counted,” former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg, a supporter of Joe Biden who served in the Navy in Afghanistan, tweeted Sunday night.

The Lincoln Project, a political activist group formed by Republican operatives who oppose the president, released an online ad Monday narrated by actor Mark Hamill saying Trump has called for the election to be decided based only on ballots that arrive by Nov. 3.


“If he gets his way, many who cast absentee ballots will not have their vote counted,” Hamill said in the ad. “This will deny thousands of troops serving overseas of their most sacred right. Stripping the men and women in our military of the very freedoms they served and sacrificed to defend — it cannot be allowed to happen.”

A Trump campaign spokeswoman, Thea McDonald, sought to clarify the president’s comments on Monday, drawing a distinction between military ballots and others.

“President Trump believes that military ballots should be accepted according to the law, as always, and that the law should be applied as written to everyone else,” McDonald said. “There are and should be exceptions for our military members serving our country overseas. There should not be exceptions for the Democrats in Philadelphia who attempt to vote after Election Day.”

But questions remain about how many votes cast by service members and their families will be counted, amid a slowing of the mail caused in part by the coronavirus pandemic and in part by changes made by the Trump administration to the U.S. Postal Service.


States begin readying National Guard for potential election unrest

Trump and his allies have continued to signal that they could challenge any mail-in or absentee ballots received after Election Day. During a rally on Sunday, Trump warned that as soon as the polls close, “we’re going in with our lawyers.”

The courts have issued mixed rulings on the matter. The Supreme Court rejected Wisconsin’s request to extend the deadline for counting mail-in ballots but permitted extended periods for receiving mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

In Minnesota, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit ruled late last week that a Republican lawmaker and a GOP activist could challenge the state’s plans to continue counting votes received within seven days of the election.

The appeals court ordered Minnesota to set aside any ballots received after 8 p.m. on Nov. 3, meaning those votes could be discarded depending on future court rulings. The ruling came after election authorities in the state had already informed voters in the mail-in instructions that their ballots would be counted so long as they were postmarked by Election Day and arrived within a week after the vote.


Maj. Scott Hawks, a spokesman for the Minnesota National Guard, said the state has more than 900 soldiers and airmen deployed worldwide.
Others on the rolls as Minnesota residents and deployed with active-duty units also could be affected.

The effort to count votes from the military has long been flawed and varied state to state.

More than 252,000 uniformed service members stationed away from home and their families voted in the 2016 general election, according to Count Every Hero, an initiative established by RepresentUs, a nonpartisan anti-corruption group, that promotes the right of service members to vote.

Twenty-eight states and D.C. accept and count ballots from overseas service members that arrive after Election Day, according to a recent report by Count Every Hero. More than 70 percent of the available votes in the electoral college will come from states that count overseas military votes after Election Day, the report said.


The deadlines vary: South Carolina, for example, will count mailed absentee ballots from service members abroad if they are sent before the close of the polls and received within two days of the election, while Washington state will count ballots that arrive by Nov. 23, according to the report.

Steve Abbot, a retired Navy admiral who is now a co-chair of Count Every Hero, called Trump’s comments about not counting ballots after Election Day a “torpedo in the water.”

“Elections don’t end on the specified day of the election because the results can’t possibly all be tallied on time,” said Abbot, who served in the administration of President George W. Bush after retiring from the military. “We would counsel patience by every single citizen, including the president, to wait for a proper tally on all of the votes.”

Several active-duty service members, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said they watched closely this year after casting ballots from overseas and were concerned.

A Marine Corps gunnery sergeant in Japan said that he has voted by absentee ballot before but did not trust the mail to send it back to his home state of Florida in time this year. Instead, he said, his wife filled out the ballot in the United States for him during a video call.

“Last election, my absentee ballot didn’t arrive until Election Day,” he said. “So that wasn’t ideal.”

An Army officer in Europe said he voted in North Carolina by sending a ballot online — an option that does not exist in every state. His biggest concern, he said, was signing his name with a computer mouse the same way that he does with a pen.

The challenges apply to service members and their families in the United States, too.

Margaret Smith said she and her husband, a member of the Air Force, live on Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. She said she mailed a form requesting a ballot to her jurisdiction of Bell County, Tex., on Oct. 14 and called repeatedly afterward knowing that her request for a ballot was due Oct. 23, according to state law. She never got the help she needed, she said.

“It’s not going to count because we didn’t get to vote,” she said Monday. “We can’t just get up and go to Texas tomorrow.”
Matthew O. Dutton, the Bell County interim elections administrator, said in an email that his office never received her request.

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House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) formally announced Tuesday evening that he was for the annual Pentagon policy bill, before he will turn against the measure that provides pay raises for troops and a list of critical new provisions with overwhelming bipartisan support.

As he entered the House floor for that vote, McCarthy told reporters that he would absolutely vote for the National Defense Authorization Act, a yearly exercise deemed so key to basic functions of the military that it has passed for 59 straight years.

However, the GOP leader said, he absolutely would not vote to override President Trump’s threatened veto out of his anger toward social media laws that have no place in a debate about the military.

Furthermore, McCarthy said his official position is to always support Trump’s veto.

“My point has always been, when I became a leader, I would not vote against the president’s veto. I will hold up the president’s veto,” McCarthy told reporters, adding: “We’ve always worked together to make bills better.”

So one final norm could come crashing into the new political world order of Trump mandates, halting a regular bipartisan accomplishment in its tracks so that the outgoing president can chase one other grievance that has little to do with the underlying policy imperative.

And it’s another destruction of what it means to be a conservative in the Trump era, as support for a strong national security has been a bedrock of party orthodoxy for decades and decades. Republicans have long considered this bill to be a religious act, protesting any time Democrats try to use this must-pass bill to include extraneous policy measures.

Now, in his last days in office, a Republican president has threatened passage of the legislation because he wants to change the laws regarding social media companies like Twitter.

In his final days in office, Sen. Lamar Alexander waxes nostalgic

Veteran Republicans are just baffled by how this has all transpired.

“It’s the most important bill of the year. We’re talking about the equipment we’re gonna have, we’re talking about the number of F-35s, we’re talking about, anyway, it’s all the things that our kids could get,” Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters before Tuesday’s House vote.

Inhofe, 86, won his first Senate race in 1994, after eight years in the House, coming of political age in the Reagan-Bush years. He rattled off a list of other things in the legislation, including hazard pay for troops on the battlefield, before repeating himself one last time.

“It’s the most important bill of the year,” he said.

Last year’s final Pentagon bill passed the Senate 86-8, with a similar sweeping vote, 377-48, in the House.

Inhofe has spent many hours on the phone with Trump trying to explain to him that the telecommunication laws he is concerned about, Section 230 of the relevant 1996 law, has no place in a Pentagon policy bill.

“He is wrapped up in the — on the 230 language, which is not anything that — it’s very simple that there’s no way we could have a defense authorization bill with that language in it,” Inhofe said.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), fully aware of how Trump feels that he was treated poorly by social media companies, simply ducked the issue at his weekly news conference, stating that the Pentagon bill would come to a vote later this week.

“It’s my intention to vote for it,” McConnell told reporters, making no mention of whether he would round up support to override the president’s veto.

But the House is now the biggest obstacle, because McCarthy is promising to throw his full support behind Trump.
To be sure, McCarthy joined 139 other House Republicans in voting for the Pentagon bill Tuesday, with just 40 of their GOP colleagues in opposition, providing a final tally of support — 335 — that is well above the two-thirds majority threshold required to override Trump’s veto.

And McCarthy is confident that he has plenty of Republicans who, just like he is doing, will be for the legislation until they are against it, unwilling to cross Trump on a veto override vote.

“I think they would stand with the president,” McCarthy told reporters Tuesday outside the House chamber.

This legislation is so bipartisan that House Democrats agreed to name this year’s bill after retiring Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), a close McCarthy friend who served as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee before Democrats won back the majority two years ago.

The measure’s importance has only grown as the rest of Congress turned into a legislative graveyard, meaning it was one of the few bills that other, smaller bills can hitch a ride on as a way to get signed into law.

“We have to move forward,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who won reelection last month largely on Trump’s coattails.
“A part of it is the vehicles are left in this Congress. In my opinion, it’s a must-pass bill.”

Indeed, Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, desperately wanted to pass a similar policy bill for the State Department, something that has not been approved in more than 15 years. Engel, who lost his primary last summer and is retiring, voted present Tuesday as a protest because he thought he had a deal to include the State Department’s authorization bill as a rider to the NDAA.

Before Tuesday’s vote, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) held out hope that Republicans would convince Trump to sign the bill, citing Inhofe’s public statements of how critical the legislation is.

“You don’t want to put the defense bill at risk. And I think, hopefully, that view will prevail in the Republican Party,” Hoyer said.

Awaiting Georgia runoffs, U.S. Senate and its committees have been plunged into uncertainty

Opposition to the bill traditionally comes from the far left flank of Democrats who oppose too much military spending and several dozen libertarian-leaning Republicans.

Now, Trump’s hostage-holding move will expand the number of Republicans opposing the $741 billion bill, possibly providing enough leverage to block it from overcoming his expected veto.

His social media fight has nothing to do with the military’s annual funding, troop pay or weapons procurement, but Trump knows that lawmakers really like to pass the NDAA — so he will just hold it hostage as leverage for action on Section 230 changes.

And as part of Trump’s gambit, McCarthy is happy to help block legislation that he otherwise supports.

“I’m hopeful that people will come to a wiser position, solve the problems that the president has and be able to have this bill signed,” he said Tuesday.

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