There are plenty of reasons to ding The New York Times for its coverage of Donald Trump, but credit where credit is due: When it comes to reporting on the president’s bribe plane, they are not taking their foot off the gas.
Despite the Trump administration’s copious efforts to stop the paper from covering the ongoing debacle, the Times dropped genuinely jaw-dropping new reporting about the misbegotten misadventures of your taxpayer dollars at work sprucing up Trump’s new ride. And they rolled it out in a one-two punch right after the administration was forced to drop the subpoenas it had issued that were transparently designed to make the paper think twice about continuing to report on the bribe plane’s foibles.
President Donald Trump speaks with reporters in flight on Air Force One after landing at U.S. Air Force Base at RAF Mildenhall, in Suffolk, Eastern England, on July 8.AP
You’ll recall that Trump could not have been more excited, or demanded more attention, for the inaugural flights on Bribe Force One, the plane gifted to him by Qatar that taxpayers paid to fix up so that Trump can take it with him when he leaves. But Trump only got one week with his bribe plane before it was grounded, so while he got to take his cool new ride to Turkey, he didn’t get to fly it home.
The initial report from the Times didn’t specify what, exactly, led to the decision to swap the plane, but their updated reporting found that U.S. officials received a credible threat that Iranian proxy forces were targeting Trump and the new Air Force One. However, it doesn’t appear that the threat was about the bribe plane specifically, but rather whatever plane Trump was traveling in.
The fact that the administration solved this simply by swapping back to the old plane kind of highlights that the bribe plane was not ready for prime time. That’s a somewhat curious state of affairs given that we’d just been divested of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to upgrade the plane—dollars which presumably should have given it the same features as the existing Air Force One.
The Times helped solve a little bit more of that mystery on Saturday, and the administration is no doubt howling over it. It turns out that Trump was so eager to get the bribe plane off the ground and have it looking snazzy that he just skipped over installing major security features on the refurbished jet. The New York Times found that the new ride doesn’t seem to have a lower-level exit, where the president can be more easily moved in and out of the plane in a high-risk situation; lacks the same backup power capacity as the existing Air Force Ones; and whoopsie, skipped out on the advanced antimissile system.
Hmm. Those seem like kind of big things to miss?
We also learned that because this was a different type of plane than the one that Air Force One pilots normally fly, we paid hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to buy new equipment for the pilots to train on. Oh, and also that an actual retrofitting of the new plane would have taken years, not months.
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The administration was unhappy enough with The New York Times’s earlier reporting on the Ballad of the Bribe Plane Swap that it subpoenaed all the reporters, sought phone records from third-party carriers, and in a genuinely unhinged move, demanded phone records from two of the reporters’ spouses and even the mother of one. The subpoenas were obvious fishing expeditions, made clear by the fact that they wanted records back to Jan. 1, a full six months before the bribe plane took flight.
That move did not turn out super great for the Department of Justice, whose lawyers spent a very humiliating Thursday afternoon in front of a federal judge explaining that yes, they just completely ignored the binding law that requires the government to exhaust other means before subpoenaing journalists but that it was totes fine because they were going to take some additional investigative steps in the future, so no harm no foul.
Oh, and yes, they also neglected to inform the judge who issued the subpoenas that they were for members of the press, also a no-no! But that was also fine because “later we did legal research.”
Pedro Molina/Tribune Content Agency
On Thursday, the judge gave the DOJ two choices: withdraw the subpoenas or the judge would quash them instead. So, the administration withdrew the subpoenas, but then had a DOJ spokesperson run to the press to whine about how mean the judge was.
“This judge’s conduct overrides clear longstanding principles and common sense — blocking the grand jury from receiving core evidence in a national security investigation,” a DOJ spokesperson said. “Make no mistake, this investigation remains ongoing, and we will pursue justice against those threatening national security by leaking classified information, a serious federal crime.”
Tough talk from a team that literally just admitted to a federal court they did not actually obtain all that cool incredible national security evidence before getting the subpoenas, but were maybe going to later. We also learned that the administration had also subpoenaed Google along with a nondisclosure order preventing Google from revealing it for a year.
Because the DOJ is such a dumpster fire, they withdrew the subpoenas but neglected to withdraw the NDO, so Google had to go to court to deal with that.
Meanwhile, we’re PLANEMAXXING, with the administration trying to spin this expensive cock-up into some cool thing where we should all be extremely hyped to spend more money on Trump’s plane. But also the plane is perfectly safe and great and perfect, even though not safe and great and perfect enough to fly.
And no, you still can’t know which upgrades weren’t made, which upgrades are going to be made, or how much it will cost. Well, not until the next New York Times story drops, that is.