title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In July 2020, federal forces were deployed to Portland, Oregon, in response to rioting during protests against police brutality, which had resulted in vandalism to the city's federal courthouse. The Department of Homeland Security cited Trump's June 26 executive order to protect statues and monuments as allowing federal officers to be deployed without the permission of individual states. Federal agents fired pepper spray or tear gas at protesters who got too close to the U.S. courthouse. The heavily armed officers were dressed in military camouflage uniforms (without identification) and used unmarked vans to arrest protestors, some of whom were nowhere near the federal courthouse.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: The presence and tactics of the officers drew widespread condemnation. Oregon officials including the governor, the mayor of Portland, and multiple members of Congress asked the DHS to remove federal agents from the city. The mayor said the officers were causing violence and "we do not need or want their help." Multiple Congressional committees asked for an investigation, saying "Citizens are concerned that the Administration has deployed a secret police force." Lawsuits against the administration were filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Attorney General of Oregon. The inspectors general for the Justice Department and Homeland Security announced investigations into the deployment.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Trump said he was pleased with the way things were going in Portland and said that he might send federal law enforcement to many more cities, including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, and Oakland"all run by liberal Democrats". Albuquerque and Milwaukee were also named as potential targets.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Under a deal worked out between Governor Kate Brown and the Trump administration, federal agents withdrew to standby locations on July 30, while state and local law enforcement forces took over responsibility for protecting the courthouse; they made no arrests and mostly stayed out of sight. Protests that night were peaceful. A DHS spokesperson said federal officers would remain in the area at least until the following Monday.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: The administration marginalized the role of science in policymaking, halted numerous research projects, and saw the departure of scientists who said their work was marginalized or suppressed. In 2018, 19 months after Trump took office, meteorologist Kelvin Droegemeier became the Science Advisor to the President; this was the longest period without a science advisor since the 1976 administration. While preparing for talks with Kim Jong-un, the White House did not do so with the assistance of a White House science adviser or senior counselor trained in nuclear physics. The position of chief scientist in the State Department or the Department of Agriculture was not filled. The administration nominated Sam Clovis to be chief scientist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but he had no scientific background and the White House later withdrew the nomination. The administration successfully nominated Jim Bridenstine, who had no background in science and rejected the scientific consensus on climate change, to lead NASA. The U.S. Department of the Interior, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) disbanded advisory committees, while the Department of Energy prohibited use of the term "climate change". In March 2020, "The New York Times" reported that an official at the Interior Department has repeatedly inserted climate change-denying language into the agency's scientific reports, such as those that affect water and mineral rights.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration replaced career public affairs staff at the Department of Health and Human Services with political appointees, including Michael Caputo, who interfered with weekly Centers for Disease Control scientific reports and attempted to silence the government's most senior infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, "sowing distrust of the FDA at a time when health leaders desperately need people to accept a vaccine in order to create the immunity necessary to defeat the novel coronavirus". One day after Trump noted that he might dismiss an FDA proposal to improve standards for emergency use of a COVID-19 vaccine, the presidents of the National Academies of Sciences and Medicine issued a statement expressing alarm at political interference in science during a pandemic, "particularly the overriding of evidence and advice from public health officials and derision of government scientists".


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: NASA began the Artemis program in December 2017, with its initial focus on returning humans to the Moon for commercial mining and research, aiming to secure the leading position in the emerging commercial space race. Trump also promoted the United States Space Force. On December 20, 2019, the Space Force Act, developed by Democratic Representative Jim Cooper and Republican Representative Mike Rogers, was signed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. The act reorganized the Air Force Space Command into the United States Space Force, and created the first new independent military service since the Army Air Forces were reorganized as the U.S. Air Force in 1947.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In 2019, Trump signed into law a six-year extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, allowing the NSA to conduct searches of foreigners' communications without any warrant. The process incidentally collects information from Americans.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Prior to David Shulkin's firing in April 2018, "The New York Times" described the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) as a "rare spot of calm in the Trump administration". Shulkin built upon changes started under the Obama administration to do a long-term overhaul of the VA system. In May 2018, legislation to increase veterans' access to private care was stalled, as was a VA overhaul which sought to synchronize medical records. In May 2018, there were reports of a large number of resignations of senior staffers and a major re-shuffling.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In August 2018, "ProPublica" reported that three wealthy patrons of Trump's Mar-a-Lago club, formed an "informal council" that strongly influenced VA policy, including reviewing a confidential $10billion contract to modernize the VA's records. The Government Accountability Office announced in November 2018 that it would investigate the matter.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In 2018, Trump signed into law the VA MISSION Act, which expanded eligibility for the Veterans Choice program, allowing veterans greater access to private sector healthcare. Trump falsely asserted more than 150 times that he created the Veterans Choice program, which has in fact existed since being signed into law by president Obama in 2014.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Under the Trump administration, the Justice Department limited enforcement actions to protect voting rights, and in fact often defended restrictions on voting rights imposed by various states that have been challenged as voter suppression. The Justice Department under Trump has filed only a single new case under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Trump's Justice Department opposed minority voters' interests in all of the major voting litigation since 2017 in which the Justice Department Civil Rights Division Voting Section has been involved.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Trump has repeatedly alleged, without evidence, there was widespread voter fraud. The administration created a commission with the stated purpose to review the extent of voter fraud in the wake of Trump's false claim that millions of unauthorized votes cost him the popular vote in the 2016 election. It was chaired by Vice President Pence, while the day-to-day administrator was Kris Kobach, best known for promoting restrictions on access to voting. The commission began its work by requesting each state to turn over detailed information about all registered voters in their database. Most states rejected the request, citing privacy concerns or state laws. Multiple lawsuits were filed against the commission. Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap said Kobach was refusing to share working documents and scheduling information with him and the other Democrats on the commission. A federal judge ordered the commission to hand over the documents. Shortly thereafter, Trump disbanded the commission, and informed Dunlap that it would not obey the court order to provide the documents because the commission no longer existed. Election integrity experts argued that the commission was disbanded because of the lawsuits, which would have led to greater transparency and accountability and thus prevented the Republican members of the commission from producing a sham report to justify restrictions on voting rights. It was later revealed the commission had, in its requests for Texas voter data, specifically asked for data that identifies voters with Hispanic surnames.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: On August 13, 2017, Trump condemned violence "on many sides" after a gathering of hundreds of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, the previous day (August 12) turned deadly. A white supremacist drove a car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one woman and injuring 19 others. According to Sessions, that action met the definition of domestic terrorism. During the rally there had been other violence, as some counter-protesters charged at the white nationalists with swinging clubs and mace, throwing bottles, rocks, and paint. Trump did not expressly mention Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, or the alt-right movement in his remarks on August 13, but the following day condemned "the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups". On August 15, he again blamed "both sides".


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Many Republican and Democratic elected officials condemned the violence and hatred of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and alt-right activists. Trump came under criticism from world leaders and politicians, as well as a variety of religious groups and anti-hate organizations for his remarks, which were seen as muted and equivocal. "The New York Times" reported Trump "was the only national political figure to spread blame for the 'hatred, bigotry and violence' that resulted in the death of one person to 'many sides'", and said Trump had "buoyed the white nationalist movement on Tuesday as no president has done in generations".


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: The foreign policy positions expressed by Trump during his presidential campaign changed frequently, so it was "difficult to glean a political agenda, or even a set of clear, core policy values ahead of his presidency". Under a banner of "America First", the Trump administration distinguished itself from past administrations with frequent open admiration of authoritarian rulers and rhetorical rejections of key human rights norms.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Despite pledges to reduce the number of active duty U.S. military personnel deployed overseas, the number was essentially the same three years into Trump's presidency as they were at the end of Obama's.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: On October 27, 2019, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi killed himself and three children by detonating a suicide vest during the Barisha raid conducted by the U.S. Delta Force in Syria's northwestern Idlib Province.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Trump withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty, a nearly three-decade old agreement promoting transparency of military forces and activities.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: As a candidate and as president, Trump called for a major build-up of American military capabilities. Trump announced in October 2018 that the United States would withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia. The goal was to enable the United States to counter increasing Chinese intermediate nuclear missile capabilities in the Pacific. In December 2018, Trump complained about the amount the United States spends on an "uncontrollable arms race" with Russia and China. Trump said that the $716billion which the United States was spending on the "arms race" was "Crazy!". He had previously praised his own increased defense spending, five months earlier. The total fiscal 2019 defense budget authorization was $716billion, although missile defense and nuclear programs made up about $10billion of the total.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: During 2018, Trump falsely asserted that he had secured the largest defense budget authorization ever, the first military pay raise in ten years, and that military spending was at least 4.0% of GDP, "which got a lot bigger since I became your president".


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Controversy arose in November 2019 after Trump pardoned or promoted three soldiers accused or convicted of war crimes. The most prominent case involved Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL team chief who had been reported to Navy authorities by his own team members for sniping at an unarmed civilian girl and an elderly man. Gallagher faced court martial for the murder of a wounded teenage combatant, among other charges. The medic of his SEAL team was granted immunity to testify against him, but on the witness stand the medic reversed what he had previously told investigators and testified that he himself had murdered the teenage combatant. Gallagher was subsequently acquitted of the murder charge against him, and the Navy demoted him to the lowest possible rank due to his conviction on another charge. The Navy later moved to strip Gallagher of his Trident pin and to eject him from the Navy. Trump intervened to restore Gallagher's rank and pin. Many military officers were enraged by Trump's intervention, as they felt it disrupted principles of military discipline and justice. Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer protested Trump's intervention and was forced to resign; in his resignation letter, he sharply rebuked Trump for his judgment in the matter. Trump told a rally audience days later, "I stuck up for three great warriors against the deep state."


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: The Trump administration sharply increased the frequency of drone strikes compared to the preceding Obama administration, in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, rollbacked transparency in reporting drone strike deaths, and reduced accountability. In March 2019, Trump ended the Obama policy of reporting the number of civilian deaths caused by U.S. drone strikes, claiming that this policy was unnecessary.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: The number of U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan decreased significantly during Trump's presidency. By the end of Trump's term in office troop levels in Afghanistan were at the lowest levels since the early days of the war in 2001. Trump's presidency saw an expansion of drone warfare and a massive increase in civilian casualties from airstrikes in Afghanistan relative to the Obama administration.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In February 2020, the Trump administration signed a deal with the Taliban, which if upheld by the Taliban, would result in the withdrawal of United States troops from Afghanistan by May 2021 (Trump's successor Joe Biden later extended the deadline to September 2021). As part of the deal, the U.S. agreed to the release of 5,000 Taliban members who were imprisoned by the Afghan government; some of these ex-prisoners went on to join the 2021 Taliban offensive that felled the Afghan government.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In 2020, US casualties in Afghanistan reached their lowest level for the entire war. In Iraq, casualties increased, being significantly higher in Trump's term than Obama's second term.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Following the collapse of the Afghan government and the fall of Kabul in August 2021, accusations by Olivia Troye surfaced on Twitter of the Trump Administration deliberately obstructing the visa process for Afghans who had helped U.S. efforts in Afghanistan.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: On January 19, 2021, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the Department of State had determined that "genocide and crimes against humanity" had been perpetrated by China against the Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. The announcement was made on the last day of Trump's presidency. The incoming president, Joe Biden, had already declared during his presidential campaign, that such a determination should be made. On January 20, 2021, Pompeo along with other Trump administration officials were sanctioned by China.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: After initially adopting a verbally hostile posture toward North Korea and its leader, Kim Jong-un, Trump quickly pivoted to embrace the regime, saying he and Kim "fell in love". Trump engaged Kim by meeting him at two summits, in June 2018 and February 2019, an unprecedented move by an American president, as previous policy had been that a president's simply meeting with the North Korean leader would legitimize the regime on the world stage. During the June 2018 summit, the leaders signed a vague agreement to pursue denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, with Trump immediately declaring "There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea." Little progress was made toward that goal during the months before the February 2019 summit, which ended abruptly without an agreement, hours after the White House announced a signing ceremony was imminent. During the months between the summits, a growing body of evidence indicated North Korea was continuing its nuclear fuel, bomb and missile development, including by redeveloping an ICBM site it was previously appearing to dismantleeven while the second summit was underway. In the aftermath of the February 2019 failed summit, the Treasury department imposed additional sanctions on North Korea. The following day, Trump tweeted, "It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea. I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!" On December 31, 2019, the Korean Central News Agency announced that Kim had abandoned his moratoriums on nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests, quoting Kim as saying, "the world will witness a new strategic weapon to be possessed by the DPRK in the near future." Two years after the Singapore summit, the North Korean nuclear arsenal had significantly expanded.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: During a June 2019 visit to South Korea, Trump visited the Korean Demilitarized Zone and invited North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to meet him there, which he did, and Trump became the first sitting president to step inside North Korea.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In October 2019, after Trump spoke to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the White House acknowledged that Turkey would be carrying out a planned military offensive into northern Syria; as such, U.S. troops in northern Syria were withdrawn from the area to avoid interference with that operation. The statement also passed responsibility for the area's captured ISIS fighters to Turkey. Congress members of both parties denounced the move, including Republican allies of Trump like Senator Lindsey Graham. They argued that the move betrayed the American-allied Kurds, and would benefit ISIS, Russia, Iran and Bashar al-Assad's Syrian regime. Trump defended the move, citing the high cost of supporting the Kurds, and the lack of support from the Kurds in past U.S. wars. Within a week of the U.S. pullout, Turkey proceeded to attack Kurdish-controlled areas in northeast Syria. Kurdish forces then announced an alliance with the Syrian government and its Russian allies, in a united effort to repel Turkey.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In 2020, the Trump administration asserted that the U.S. remained a "participant" in the Iran Deal, despite having formally withdrawn in 2018, to persuade the United Nations Security Council to reimpose pre-agreement sanctions on Iran for its breaches of the deal after the U.S. withdrawal. The agreement provided for a resolution process among signatories in the event of a breach, but that process had not yet played out. The Security Council voted on the administration's proposal in August, with only the Dominican Republic joining the U.S. to vote in favor.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Trump actively supported the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen against the Houthis. Trump also praised his relationship with Saudi Arabia's powerful Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. On May 20, 2017, Trump and Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud signed a series of letters of intent for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to purchase arms from the United States totaling $110billion immediately, and $350billion over ten years. The transfer was widely seen as a counterbalance against the influence of Iran in the region and a "significant" and "historic" expansion of United States relations with Saudi Arabia. By July 2019, two of Trump's three vetoes were to overturn bipartisan congressional action related to Saudi Arabia.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In October 2018, amid widespread condemnation of Saudi Arabia for the murder of prominent Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi, the Trump administration pushed back on the condemnation. After the CIA assessed that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman ordered the murder of Khashoggi, Trump rejected the assessment and said the CIA only had "feelings" on the matter.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Since the Six Day War in 1967, the United States had considered Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank to be "illegitimate". This status changed in November 2019 when the Trump administration shifted U.S. policy and declared "the establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not "per se" inconsistent with international law."


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Trump unveiled his own peace plan to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict on January 28, 2020. His first official diplomatic success was realized in August 2020 with the first of the Abraham Accords, when Israel and the United Arab Emirates agreed to begin normalizing relations in an agreement brokered by Jared Kushner. The following month, Israel and Bahrain agreed to normalize diplomatic relations in another deal mediated and brokered by the Trump administration. A month later, Israel and Sudan agreed to normalize relations in a third such agreement in as many months. On December 10, 2020, Trump announced that Israel and Morocco had agreed to establish full diplomatic relations, while also announcing that the United States recognized Morocco's claim over the disputed territory of Western Sahara.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: As Donald Trump lost the election bid against Joe Biden, the U.S. State Department notified Congress about its plans to sell 18 sophisticated armed MQ-9B aerial drones to the United Arab Emirates, under a deal worth $2.9 billion. The drones were expected to be equipped with maritime radar, and the delivery was being estimated by 2024. Besides, another informal notification was sent to the Congress regarding the plans of providing the UAE with $10 billion of defense equipment, including precision-guided munitions, non-precision bombs and missiles.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: American intelligence sources found the Russian government attempted to intervene in the 2016 presidential election to favor the election of Trump, and that members of Trump's campaign were in contact with Russian government officials both before and after the election. In May 2017, the Department of Justice appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate "any links and/or coordination between Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump, and any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation".


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: During his January 2017 confirmation hearings as the attorney general nominee before the Senate, then-Senator Jeff Sessions appeared to deliberately omit two meetings he had in 2016 with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, when asked if he had meetings involving the 2016 election with Russian government officials. Sessions later amended his testimony saying he "never met with any Russian officials to discuss issues of the campaign". Following his amended statement, Sessions recused himself from any investigation regarding connections between Trump and Russia.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In May 2017, Trump discussed highly classified intelligence in an Oval Office meeting with the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and ambassador Sergey Kislyak, providing details that could expose the source of the information and how it was collected. A Middle Eastern ally provided the intelligence which had the highest level of classification and was not intended to be shared widely. "The New York Times" reported, "sharing the information without the express permission of the ally who provided it was a major breach of espionage etiquette, and could jeopardize a crucial intelligence-sharing relationship." The White House, through National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster, issued a limited denial, saying the story "as reported" was incorrect and that no "intelligence sources or methods" were discussed. McMaster did not deny that information had been disclosed. The following day Trump said on Twitter that Russia is an important ally against terrorism and that he had an "absolute right" to share classified information with Russia. Soon after the meeting, American intelligence extracted a high-level covert source from within the Russian government, on concerns the individual could be at risk due, in part, to Trump and his administration repeatedly mishandling classified intelligence.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In October 2017, former Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements to the FBI regarding his contacts with Russian agents. During the campaign he had tried repeatedly but unsuccessfully to set up meetings in Russia between Trump campaign representatives and Russian officials.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Trump went to great lengths to keep details of his private conversations with Russian president Putin secret, including in one case by retaining his interpreter's notes and instructing the linguist to not share the contents of the discussions with anyone in the administration. As a result, there were no detailed records, even in classified files, of Trump's conversations with Putin on five occasions.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Of Trump's campaign advisors and staff, six of them were indicted by the special counsel's office; five of them (Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos) pleaded guilty, while one has pleaded not guilty (Roger Stone). As of December 2020, Stone, Papadopoulos, Manafort, and Flynn have been pardoned by Trump, but not Cohen or Gates.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: On June 12, 2019, Trump asserted he saw nothing wrong in accepting intelligence on his political adversaries from foreign powers, such as Russia, and he could see no reason to contact the FBI about it. Responding to a reporter who told him FBI director Christopher Wray had said such activities should be reported to the FBI, Trump said, "the FBI director is wrong." Trump elaborated, "there's nothing wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country, Norway, 'we have information on your opponent'oh, I think I'd want to hear it." Both Democrats and Republicans repudiated the remarks.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: "The New York Times" reported in June 2021 that in 2017 and 2018 the Justice Department subpoenaed metadata from the iCloud accounts of at least a dozen individuals associated with the House Intelligence Committee, including that of Democrat ranking member Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, and family members, to investigate leaks to the press about contacts between Trump associates and Russia. Records of the inquiry did not implicate anyone associated with the committee, but upon becoming attorney general Bill Barr revived the effort, including by appointing a federal prosecutor and about six others in February 2020. "The Times" reported that, apart from corruption investigations, subpoenaing communications information of members of Congress is nearly unheard-of, and that some in the Justice Department saw Barr's approach as politically motivated. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz announced an inquiry into the matter the day after the "Times" report.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In February 2018, when Mueller indicted more than a dozen Russians and three entities for interference in the 2016 election, Trump asserted the indictment was proof his campaign did not collude with the Russians. "The New York Times" noted Trump "voiced no concern that a foreign power had been trying for nearly four years to upend American democracy, much less resolve to stop it from continuing to do so this year".


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In July 2018, the special counsel indicted twelve Russian intelligence operatives and accused them of conspiring to interfere in the 2016 U.S. elections, by hacking servers and emails of the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign. The indictments were made before Trump's meeting with Putin in Helsinki, in which Trump supported Putin's denial that Russia was involved and criticized American law enforcement and intelligence community (subsequently Trump partially walked back some of his comments). A few days later, it was reported that Trump had actually been briefed on the veracity and extent of Russian cyber-attacks two weeks before his inauguration, back in December 2016, including the fact that these were ordered by Putin himself. The evidence presented to him at the time included text and email conversations between Russian military officers as well as information from a source close to Putin.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: On March 22, 2019, Mueller submitted the final report to Attorney General William Barr. Two days later, Barr sent Congress a four-page letter, describing what he said were the special counsel's principal conclusions in the report. Barr added that, since the special counsel "did not draw a conclusion" on obstruction, this "leaves it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime". Barr continued: "Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel's investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense."


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: On April 18, 2019, a two-volume redacted version of the special counsel's report titled "Report on the Investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential Election" was released to Congress and to the public. About one-eighth of the lines in the public version were redacted.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Volume I discusses about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, concluding that interference occurred "in sweeping and systematic fashion" and "violated U.S. criminal law". The report detailed activities by the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-linked Russian troll farm, to create a "social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton", and to "provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States". The report also described how the Russian intelligence service, the GRU, performed computer hacking and strategic releasing of damaging material from the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations. To establish whether a crime was committed by members of the Trump campaign with regard to Russian interference, investigators used the legal standard for criminal conspiracy rather than the popular concept of "collusion", because a crime of "collusion" is not found in criminal law or the United States Code.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: According to the report, the investigation "identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign", and found that Russia had "perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency" and the 2016 Trump presidential campaign "expected it would benefit electorally" from Russian hacking efforts. Ultimately, "the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." However, investigators had an incomplete picture of what had really occurred during the 2016 campaign, due to some associates of the Trump campaign providing false or incomplete testimony, exercising the privilege against self-incrimination, and having deleted, unsaved, or encrypted communications. As such, the Mueller report "cannot rule out the possibility" that information then unavailable to investigators would have presented different findings.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Volume II covered obstruction of justice. The report described ten episodes where Trump may have obstructed justice as president, plus one instance before he was elected. The report said that in addition to Trump's public attacks on the investigation and its subjects, he had also privately tried to "control the investigation" in multiple ways, but mostly failed to influence it because his subordinates or associates refused to carry out his instructions. For that reason, no charges against the Trump's aides and associates were recommended "beyond those already filed". The special counsel could not charge Trump himself once investigators decided to abide by an Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion that a sitting president cannot stand trial, and they feared charges would affect Trump's governing and possibly preempt his impeachment. In addition, investigators felt it would be unfair to accuse Trump of a crime without charges and without a trial in which he could clear his name, hence investigators "determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the President committed crimes".


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Since the special counsel's office had decided "not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment" on whether to "initiate or decline a prosecution", they "did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President's conduct". The report "does not conclude that the president committed a crime", but specifically did not exonerate Trump on obstruction of justice, because investigators were not confident that Trump was innocent after examining his intent and actions. The report concluded "that Congress has authority to prohibit a President's corrupt use of his authority in order to protect the integrity of the administration of justice" and "that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the president's corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law".


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: On May 1, 2019, following publication of the special counsel's report, Barr testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, during which Barr said he "didn't exonerate" Trump on obstruction as that was not the role of the Justice Department. He declined to testify before the House Judiciary Committee the following day because he objected to the committee's plan to use staff lawyers during questioning. Barr also repeatedly failed to give the unredacted special counsel's report to the Judiciary Committee by its deadline of May 6, 2019. On May 8, 2019, the committee voted to hold Barr in contempt of Congress, which refers the matter to entire House for resolution. Concurrently, Trump asserted executive privilege via the Department of Justice in an effort to prevent the redacted portions of the special counsel's report and the underlying evidence from being disclosed. Committee chairman Jerry Nadler said the U.S. is in a constitutional crisis, "because the President is disobeying the law, is refusing all information to Congress". Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Trump was "self-impeaching" by stonewalling Congress.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Following release of the Mueller report, Trump and his allies turned their attention toward "investigating the investigators". On May 23, 2019, Trump ordered the intelligence community to cooperate with Barr's investigation of the origins of the investigation, granting Barr full authority to declassify any intelligence information related to the matter. Some analysts expressed concerns that the order could create a conflict between the Justice Department and the intelligence community over closely guarded intelligence sources and methods, as well as open the possibility Barr could cherrypick intelligence for public release to help Trump.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Upon announcing the formal closure of the investigation and his resignation from the Justice Department on May 29, Mueller said, "If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, decide as to whether the president did commit a crime." During his testimony to Congress on July 24, 2019, Mueller said that a president could be charged with obstruction of justice (or other crimes) after the president left office.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Amid accusations by Trump and his supporters that he had been subjected to an illegitimate investigation, in May 2019, Barr appointed federal prosecutor John Durham to review the origins of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. By September 2020, Durham's inquiry had expanded to include the FBI's investigation of the Clinton Foundation during the 2016 campaign.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In November 2017, Sessions appointed U.S. Attorney John Huber to investigate the FBI's surveillance of Carter Page and connections between the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One, starting in November 2017. The investigation ended in January 2020 after no evidence was found to warrant the opening of a criminal investigation. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's April 2019 report documented that Trump pressured Sessions and the Department of Justice to re-open the investigation into Clinton's emails.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: The Trump administration has been characterized by a departure from ethical norms. Unlike previous administrations of both parties, the Trump White House has not observed a strict boundary between official government activities and personal, political, or campaign activities.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: During the 2016 campaign, Trump promised to "drain the swamp"a phrase that usually refers to entrenched corruption and lobbying in Washington, D.C.and he proposed a series of ethics reforms. However, according to federal records and interviews, there has been a dramatic increase in lobbying by corporations and hired interests during Trump's tenure, particularly through Pence's office. About twice as many lobbying firms contacted Pence, compared to previous presidencies, among them representatives of major energy firms and drug companies. In many cases, the lobbyists have charged their clients millions of dollars for access to the vice president, and then have turned around and donated the money to Pence's political causes.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Among the administration's first policies was a five-year ban on serving as a lobbyist after working in the executive branch. However, as one of his final acts of office, Trump rolled back that policy, thus allowing administration staff to work as lobbyists.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: A number of former Trump associates, fundraisers and aides had faced criminal charges. In July 2021, one of his high-profile associates and a close friend, Thomas J. Barrack Jr. was arrested on federal charges for acting as an unregistered foreign lobbyist, obstructing justice and giving false statements to the FBI. The 74-year-old private equity investor was accused in a nine-count indictment of illegally lobbying and exerting influence over Trump on behalf of the United Arab Emirates. Federal prosecutors said Barrack had to complete the "wish list" given by the Emirati officials, stating what foreign policy changes they expected from the US. A former top executive at Barrack's firm, Matthew Grimes, and an Emirati businessman, Rashid al-Malik, also faced federal charges of acting as Emirati agents without registering with the Justice Department. Barrack pleaded not guilty and was released from custody after posting $250 million bail with a cash security of $5 million. Barrack and Grimes were found not guilty on all charges in November 2022.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Trump's presidency has been marked by significant public concern about conflict of interest stemming from his diverse business ventures. In the lead up to his inauguration, Trump promised to remove himself from the day-to-day operations of his businesses. Trump placed his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. at the head of his businesses claiming they would not communicate with him regarding his interests. However, critics noted that this would not prevent him from having input into his businesses and knowing how to benefit himself, and Trump continued to receive quarterly updates on his businesses. As his presidency progressed, he failed to take steps or show interest in further distancing himself from his business interests resulting in numerous potential conflicts. Ethics experts found Trump's plan to address conflicts of interest between his position as president and his private business interests to be entirely inadequate. Unlike every other president in the last 40 years, Trump did not put his business interests in a blind trust or equivalent arrangement "to cleanly sever himself from his business interests". In January 2018, a year into his presidency, Trump owned stakes in hundreds of businesses.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: After Trump took office, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, represented by a number of constitutional scholars, sued him for violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause (a constitutional provision that bars the president or any other federal official from taking gifts or payments from foreign governments), because his hotels and other businesses accept payment from foreign governments. CREW separately filed a complaint with the General Services Administration (GSA) over Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C.; the 2013 lease that Trump and the GSA signed "explicitly forbids any elected government official from holding the lease or benefiting from it". The GSA said it was "reviewing the situation". By May 2017, the "CREW v. Trump" lawsuit had grown with additional plaintiffs and alleged violations of the Domestic Emoluments Clause. In June 2017, attorneys from the Department of Justice filed a motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that the plaintiffs had no right to sue and that the described conduct was not illegal. Also in June 2017, two more lawsuits were filed based on the Foreign Emoluments Clause: "D.C. and Maryland v. Trump", and "Blumenthal v. Trump", which was signed by more than one-third of the voting members of Congress. United States District Judge George B. Daniels dismissed the CREW case on December 21, 2017, holding that plaintiffs lacked standing. "D.C. and Maryland v. Trump" cleared three judicial hurdles to proceed to the discovery phase during 2018, with prosecutors issuing 38 subpoenas to Trump's businesses and cabinet departments in December before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay days later at the behest of the Justice Department, pending hearings in March 2019. NBC News reported that by June 2019 representatives of 22 governments had spent money at Trump properties. In January 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuits as Trump was no longer president.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In March 2018, "The New York Times" reported that George Nader had turned Trump's major fundraiser Elliott Broidy "into an instrument of influence at the White House for the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates... High on the agenda of the two men... was pushing the White House to remove Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson," a top defender of the Iran nuclear deal in Donald Trump's administration, and "backing confrontational approaches to Iran and Qatar".


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: "The Washington Post" reported in May 2017, "a wide variety of information that until recently was provided to the public, limiting access, for instance, to disclosures about workplace violations, energy efficiency, and animal welfare abuses" had been removed or tucked away. The Obama administration had used the publication of enforcement actions taken by federal agencies against companies as a way to name and shame companies that engaged in unethical and illegal behaviors.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: The Trump administration stopped the longstanding practice of logging visitors to the White House, making it difficult to tell who has visited the White House. In July 2018, CNN reported that the White House had suspended the practice of publishing public summaries of Trump's phone calls with world leaders, bringing an end to a common exercise from previous administrations.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Trump refused to follow the rules of the Presidential Records Act, which requires presidents and their administrations to preserve all official documents and turn them over to the National Archives. Trump habitually tore up papers after reading them, and White House staffers were assigned to collect the scraps and tape them back together for the archives. He also took boxes of documents and other items with him when he left the White House; the National Archives later retrieved them. Some of the documents he took with him were discovered to be classified, including some at the "top secret" level. Trump sometimes used his personal cellphone to converse with world leaders so that there would be no record of the conversation. By May 2022, federal prosecutors had empaneled a grand jury to investigate possible mishandling of documents by Trump and other officials in his White House.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In the first three and a half years of Trump's term, the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal government ethics agency, found 13 senior Trump administration officials in violation of the Hatch Act of 1939, which restricts the government employees' involvement in politics; 11 of the complaints were filed by the activist group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). By comparison, CREW stated that it was aware of only two findings of Hatch Act violations during the eight years of the Obama administration.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Henry Kerner, head of the Office of Special Counsel, found in a report released in November 2021 that at least thirteen administration officials demonstrated "willful disregard" for the Hatch Act, including "especially pernicious" behavior in the days before the 2020 election.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In March 2019, Tricia Newbold, a White House employee working on security clearances, privately told the House Oversight Committee that at least 25 Trump administration officials had been granted security clearances over the objections of career staffers. Newbold also asserted that some of these officials had previously had their applications rejected for "disqualifying issues", only for those rejections to be overturned with inadequate explanation.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: After the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed former head of White House security clearances Carl Kline to give testimony, the administration instructed Kline not to comply with the subpoena, asserting that the subpoena "unconstitutionally encroaches on fundamental executive branch interests". Kline eventually gave closed-door testimony before the committee in May 2019, but House Democrats said he did not "provide specific details to their questions".


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: On August 12, 2019, an unnamed intelligence official privately filed a whistleblower complaint with Michael Atkinson, the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community (ICIG), under the provisions of the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA). The whistleblower alleged that Trump had abused his office in soliciting foreign interference to improve his own electoral chances in 2020. The complaint reports that in a July 2019 call, Trump had asked Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate potential 2020 rival presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, as well as matters pertaining to whether Russian interference occurred in the 2016 U.S. election with regard to Democratic National Committee servers and the company Crowdstrike. Trump allegedly nominated his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr to work with Ukraine on these matters. Additionally, the whistleblower alleged that the White House attempted to "lock down" the call records in a cover-up, and that the call was part of a wider pressure campaign by Giuliani and the Trump administration to urge Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. The whistleblower posits that the pressure campaign may have included Trump cancelling Vice President Mike Pence's May 2019 Ukraine trip, and Trump withholding financial aid from Ukraine in July 2019.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Inspector General Atkinson found the whistleblower's complaint both urgent and credible, so he transmitted the complaint on August 26 to Joseph Maguire, the acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Under the law, Maguire was supposed to forward the complaint to the Senate and House Intelligence Committees within a week. Maguire refused, so Atkinson informed the congressional committees of the existence of the complaint, but not its content. The general counsel for Maguire's office said that since the complaint was not about someone in the intelligence community, it was not an "urgent concern" and thus there was no need to pass it to Congress. Later testifying before the House Intelligence Committee on September 26, Maguire said he had consulted with the White House Counsel and the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, of which the latter office gave him the rationale to withhold the complaint. Maguire also testified: "I think the whistleblower did the right thing. I think he followed the law every step of the way."


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: On September 22, Trump confirmed that he had discussed with Zelensky how "we don't want our people like Vice President Biden and his son creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine." Trump also confirmed that he had indeed temporarily withheld military aid from Ukraine, offering contradicting reasons for his decision on September 23 and 24.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: On September 24, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the start of a formal impeachment inquiry. On September 25, the White House released a non-verbatim transcript of the call between Trump and Zelensky; while the members and staff of congressional intelligence committees were allowed to read whistleblower complaint. On September 26, the White House declassified the whistleblower's complaint, so Schiff released the complaint to the public. The non-verbatim transcript corroborated the main allegations of the whistleblower's report about the Trump–Zelensky call. The non-verbatim transcript stated that after Zelensky discussed the possibility of buying American anti-tank missiles to defend Ukraine, Trump instead asked for a favor, suggesting an investigation of the company Crowdstrike, while later in the call he also called for an investigation of the Bidens, and cooperation with Giuliani and Barr. On September 27, the White House confirmed the whistleblower's allegation that the Trump administration had stored the Trump–Zelensky transcript in a highly classified system.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Following these revelations, members of congress largely divided along party lines, with Democrats generally in favor of impeachment proceedings and Republicans defending the president. Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker resigned and three House committees issued a subpoena to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to schedule depositions for Volker and four other State Department employees, and to compel the release of documents. Attention to the issue also led to further revelations by anonymous sources. These included the misuse of classification systems to hide records of conversations with Ukrainian, Russian and Saudi Arabian leaders, and statements made to Sergei Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak in May 2017 expressing disconcern about Russian interference in U.S. elections.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Trump often sought to use the office of the presidency for his own interest. Under his leadership, the Justice Department, which is traditionally independent from the President, became highly partisan and acted in Trump's interest.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: "Bloomberg News" reported in October 2019 that during a 2017 Oval Office meeting, Trump had asked Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to pressure the Justice Department to drop a criminal investigation of Reza Zarrab, an Iranian-Turkish gold trader who was a client of Trump associate Rudy Giuliani. Tillerson reportedly refused.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Trump attempted to host the 2020 G7 Summit at his Doral Golf Resort, from which he could have made significant profits. Trump visited his properties 274 times during his presidency. Government officials were charged as much as $650 per night to stay at Trump's properties.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In the lead up to the 2020 election, Trump and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a close ally of Trump, sought to hamper the US postal service by cutting funding and services, a move which would prevent postal votes from being counted during the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Trump has fired, demoted or withdrawn numerous government officials in retaliation for actions that projected negatively on his public image, or harmed his personal or political interests, including Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In December 2020, shortly before Christmas and in his last month in office, Trump granted 26 people full pardons and commuted the sentences of three others convicted of federal crimes. Those who benefitted included his former campaign advisor Paul Manafort, advisor and personal friend Roger Stone and Charles Kushner, father of Trump's son-in-law and confidant Jared Kushner. In the final hours of his presidency, Donald Trump pardoned nearly 74 people, including rappers, financiers, and former members of congress. Those pardoned include his former senior adviser Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner's friend charged with cyberstalking, Ken Kurson; a real estate lawyer, Albert Pirro; and rappers prosecuted on federal weapons offenses, Lil Wayne and Kodak Black. Trump also pardoned his former fundraiser Elliott Broidy, who worked for China, the UAE, and Russia at the White House. Broidy also lobbied the US government to end the investigations in the 1MDB scandal.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: According to several reports, Trump's and his family's trips in the first month of his presidency cost U.S. taxpayers nearly as much as former president Obama's travel expenses for an entire year. When Obama was president, Trump frequently criticized him for taking vacations which were paid for with public funds. "The Washington Post" reported that Trump's atypically lavish lifestyle is far more expensive to the taxpayers than what was typical of former presidents and could end up in the hundreds of millions of dollars over the whole of Trump's term.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: A June 2019 analysis by the "Washington Post" found that federal officials and GOP campaigns had spent at least $1.6million at businesses owned by Trump during his presidency. This was an undercount, as most of the data on spending by government officials covered only the first few months of Trump's presidency.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In the 2018 mid-term elections, Democrats had a blue wave, winning control of the House of Representatives, while Republicans expanded their majority in the Senate.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: On June 18, 2019, Trump announced that he would seek re-election in the 2020 presidential election. Trump did not face any significant rivals for the 2020 Republican nomination, with some state Republican parties cancelling the presidential primaries in the states. Trump's Democratic opponent in the general election was former Vice President Joe Biden of Delaware. The election on November 3 was not called for either candidate for several days. On November 7, the Associated Press along with mainstream media called the race for Joe Biden.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: It was the first presidency since that of Herbert Hoover in 1932 in which a sitting president was defeated and his party lost its majorities in both chambers of Congress.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Trump refused to concede, and the administration did not begin cooperating with president-elect Biden's transition team until November 23. In late December 2020, Biden and his transition team criticized Trump administration political appointees for hampering the transition and failing to cooperate with the Biden transition team on national security areas, such as the Defense and State departments, as well as on the economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, saying that many of the agencies that are critical to their security have incurred enormous damage and have been hollowed outin personnel, capacity and in morale. Throughout December and January, Trump continued to insist that he had won the election. He filed numerous lawsuits alleging election fraud, tried to persuade state and federal officials to overturn the results, and urged his supporters to rally on his behalf. At the urging and direction of Trump campaign attorneys and other Trump associates, including Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon, Republican activists in seven states filed and submitted false documents claiming to be the official presidential electors. The “alternate slates” were intended to serve as a reason for Congress or the Vice President to reject the results from the seven states.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: On January 6, 2021, rioters supporting Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to thwart a joint session of Congress during which the Electoral College vote was to be certified, affirming the election of former vice president Joe Biden as president.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: During an initial rally earlier that morning, Trump encouraged his supporters to march to the U.S. Capitol. Subsequently, pro-Trump attendees marched to the Capitol building, joined other protesters, and stormed the building. Congress was in session at the time, conducting the Electoral College vote count and debating the results of the vote. As the protesters arrived, Capitol security evacuated the Senate and House of Representatives chambers and locked down several other buildings on the Capitol campus. Later that evening, after the Capitol was secured, Congress went back into session to discuss the Electoral College vote, finally affirming at 3:41a.m. that Biden had won the election.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Five casualties occurred during the event: one Capitol Police officer, and four stormers or protesters at the Capitol, including one rioter shot by police inside the building. At least 138 police officers (73 Capitol Police officers, 65 Metropolitan Police Department officers) were injured, including at least 15 who were hospitalized, some with severe injuries. Three improvised explosive devices were reported to have been found: one each on Capitol grounds, at the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee offices.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Following the Capitol attack, several cabinet-level officials and White House staff resigned, citing the incident and Trump's behavior. On January 6, the night of the storming, a number of White House officials submitted their resignations, including Stephanie Grisham (chief of staff to the first lady), Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger, White House Social Secretary Anna Cristina Niceta Lloyd, and Deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Matthews. More officials continued to resign, including Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers Tyler Goodspeed, and former White House chief of staff and special envoy to Northern Ireland Mick Mulvaney.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: On January 7, the day after the Electoral College results were certified by Congress, Trump tweeted a video in which he stated, "A new administration will be inaugurated on January 20th. My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power." The State Department subsequently told diplomats to affirm Biden's victory.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: On January 12, the House voted in favor of requesting that the vice president remove Trump from office per the Twenty-fifth Amendment; hours earlier, Pence had indicated that he opposed such a measure. The next day, the House voted 232–197 to impeach Trump on a charge of "incitement of insurrection". Ten Republican representatives joined all Democratic representatives in voting to impeach Trump. Trump is the first and only president to be impeached twice. On February 13, the Senate voted 57–43 to convict Trump on a charge of inciting insurrection, ten votes short of the required two-thirds majority, and he was acquitted. Seven Republican senators joined all Democratic and independent senators in voting to convict Trump.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Trump gave a farewell address the day prior to the inauguration of Joe Biden. In it he stressed his economic and foreign policy record, and said the country can never tolerate "political violence". Breaking from tradition, Trump did not attend Biden's inauguration, becoming the first departing president in 152 years to refuse to attend his elected successor's inauguration, but he did honor another tradition by leaving Biden a letter on the "Resolute" desk in the White House.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: In the sixth Siena College Research Institute's presidential rankings, conducted after Trump had been in office for one year, Trump was ranked as the third-worst president. C-SPAN's 2021 President Historians Survey ranked Trump as the fourth-worst president overall and the worst in the leadership characteristics of Moral Authority and Administrative Skills. Trump's best rated leadership characteristic was Public Persuasion, where he ranked 32nd out of the 44 individuals who were previously president.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: At the time of the 2016 election, polls by Gallup found Trump had a favorable rating around 35% and an unfavorable rating around 60%, while Clinton held a favorable rating of 40% and an unfavorable rating of 57%. 2016 was the first election cycle in modern presidential polling in which both major-party candidates were viewed so unfavorably. By January 20, 2017, Inauguration Day, Trump's approval rating average was 42%, the lowest rating average for an incoming president in the history of modern polling; during his term it was an "incredibly stable (and also historically low)" 36% to 40%. Trump was the only president to never reach a 50% approval rating in the Gallup poll dating to 1938.


title: Presidency of Donald Trump

text: Since the beginning of the presidency of Donald Trump, ratings of how well U.S. democracy is functioning sharply plunged. According to the 2018 Varieties of Democracy Annual Democracy Report, there has been "a significant democratic backsliding in the United States [since the Inauguration of Donald Trump]... attributable to weakening constraints on the executive." Independent assessments by Freedom House and Bright Line Watch found a similar significant decline in overall democratic functioning.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: Enes Kanter Freedom (; born Enes Kanter; May 20, 1992) is a professional basketball player who is currently a free agent. Born in Switzerland to Turkish parents, he was raised in Turkey and moved to the United States as a teenager. Freedom was selected as the third overall pick of the 2011 NBA draft by the Utah Jazz. A center, Freedom has played for five NBA teams since entering the league in 2011. Between 2008 and 2015, he represented the Turkish national team in international play.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: Enes Kanter Freedom was born on May 20, 1992 in Zürich, Switzerland as Enes Kanter. Kanter's parents are Turkish. His father, Mehmet Kanter, received his M.D. from the University of Zurich. The family then returned to Turkey, where Kanter grew up. Mehmet Kanter became a professor of histology and genetics at Trakya University. Kanter's mother, Gülsüm Kanter, is a nurse. Kanter has three younger siblings: two brothers (including basketball player Kerem Kanter) and one sister.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: Starting in second grade, Kanter attended Hizmet-affiliated schools, part of the Gülen movement in Turkey. He lived in Ankara and then moved to Istanbul to play professional basketball as a teen.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: At the age of 17, Kanter moved to the United States to play basketball. He attended Findlay Prep in Henderson, Nevada, and then Mountain State Academy in Beckley, West Virginia; neither school allowed him to play high school basketball because of his contract with Nike while he played basketball professionally. Kanter then attended Stoneridge Preparatory School in Simi Valley, California, where he was able to play basketball for a season.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: Before moving to the United States, Kanter played under Serdar Apaydın's management for the Fenerbahçe youth squad between 2006 and 2008 and then, during the 2008–09 season, Kanter was a seldom-used reserve for the Fenerbahçe senior team. He played in at least nine games with the team: four in the EuroLeague and five in the Turkish Super League. Fenerbahçe and the Greek League basketball team Olympiacos both offered Kanter professional contracts, but he declined because he wanted to play high school and college basketball in the United States.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: In 2009, Kanter moved to the United States, where he enrolled at Stoneridge Preparatory School in Simi Valley, California, and played for the basketball team in 2009–10. At the 2010 Nike Hoop Summit, Kanter played for the international team, recording 34 points and 13 rebounds. His point total was a record for the event, breaking Dirk Nowitzki's record set in the 1998 game. Both Rivals.com and Scout.com (now known as 247Sports.com) rated Kanter as a five-star prospect, the highest possible rating.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: On November 23, 2009, Kanter verbally committed to play for the Washington Huskies. Kanter chose Washington over UCLA, USC, Indiana and UNLV. However, he re-opened his recruitment in February 2010, and on April 14, Kanter signed a National Letter of Intent to play college basketball for Kentucky.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: However, despite signing with the Kentucky Wildcats, the NCAA declared him permanently ineligible as a collegiate athlete because he received approximately $33,000 from Fenerbahçe in excess benefits. The NCAA ruled that this amount was above and beyond what was considered acceptable. On January 7, 2011, the NCAA rejected Kentucky's appeal, upholding that Kanter was permanently ineligible.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: Kanter, a center, was drafted third overall by the Utah Jazz in the 2011 NBA draft. Upon being drafted, he said "I'm so happy, I'm so excited. I know the Utah Jazz fans are crazy and I love them. I will bring the team toughness and post moves, rebounding, everything. I will try to do everything to make the playoffs." On December 9, 2011, he signed his rookie scale contract with the Jazz following the conclusion of the NBA lockout. In 2011–12, he became the 10th Jazz rookie in franchise history to appear in every regular-season game. He also recorded the most rebounds for a Jazz rookie in debut with 11 against the Los Angeles Lakers on December 27. In the season, he averaged 4.6 points and 4.2 rebounds in 66 games.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: In 2012–13, Kanter improved his averages in every major statistical category, led the team in scoring three times and rebounding four times, and scored in double-figures 22 times. In 70 games (two starts), he averaged 7.2 points and 4.3 rebounds per game. On March 1, 2013, Kanter had the first 20-20 game of his career with career-highs of 23 points and 22 rebounds to lead the Jazz to a 98–68 victory over the Charlotte Bobcats. He later missed the final 10 games of the season due to a dislocated left shoulder.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: In 2013–14, Kanter appeared in 80 games (37 starts), averaging 12.3 points and 7.5 rebounds per game. On March 3, 2014, he scored a then career-high 27 points in a 114–88 loss to the Milwaukee Bucks.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: On December 16, 2014, Kanter scored a then career-high 29 points in a 119–111 loss to the New Orleans Pelicans.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: On February 19, 2015, Kanter was traded to the Oklahoma City Thunder in a three-team deal that also involved the Detroit Pistons. Two days later, he made his debut for the Thunder, recording a double-double with 10 points and 13 rebounds in a 110–103 win over the Charlotte Hornets. On April 1, 2015, he scored a then career-high 30 points in a 135–131 loss to the Dallas Mavericks.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: After the 2014–15 season, Kanter became a restricted free agent. On July 9, 2015, he received a four-year, $70 million offer sheet from the Portland Trail Blazers. However, three days later, the Thunder exercised their right of first refusal and matched the offer sheet extended to Kanter by the Trail Blazers. On March 14, 2016, he scored a then season-high 26 points in a 128–94 win over the Portland Trail Blazers. On April 6, he recorded a career-high 33 points and 20 rebounds in a 120–115 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers, becoming the first player in Thunder history to score at least 30 points and grab 20 rebounds in a game. In Game 3 of the Thunder's first-round playoff series against the Dallas Mavericks, Kanter recorded a playoff career-high 21 points and a game-high eight rebounds in a 131–102 win, claiming a 2–1 series lead. In Game 4 of the series, Kanter helped the Thunder go up 3–1 with 28 points on 12-of-13 shooting, setting a playoff career high for the second straight game.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: On November 28, 2016, Kanter recorded a season-high 27 points and 10 rebounds in a 112–103 win over the New York Knicks. On January 26, 2017, he sustained a fractured forearm after punching a chair on the Thunder's bench during their game against the Dallas Mavericks. He was subsequently ruled out for six to eight weeks. He returned to action on February 24, 2017 against the Los Angeles Lakers after missing nine games. He finished with four points on 2-for-12 shooting.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: When Kanter lost his passport and faced being trapped abroad his teammates, Russell Westbrook and Steven Adams, reached out to him to make sure he was okay.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: On September 25, 2017, Kanter was traded, along with Doug McDermott and a 2018 second-round pick, to the New York Knicks in exchange for Carmelo Anthony. In his debut for the Knicks in their season opener on October 19, 2017, Kanter had 10 points and seven rebounds in a 105–84 loss to his former team, the Oklahoma City Thunder. Five days later, he recorded 16 points and 19 rebounds in a 110–89 loss to the Boston Celtics. On November 29, 2017, after missing three games with back spasms, Kanter had 22 points and 14 rebounds in a 115–86 win over the Miami Heat. On December 25, 2017, he had a season-high 31 points and tied a career best with 22 rebounds in a 105–98 loss to the Philadelphia 76ers. He joined Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell and Bob Lanier as the only players with a 30-20 game on Christmas. On January 30, 2018, he recorded 20 points, 20 rebounds and five assists in a 111–95 win over the Brooklyn Nets. On February 6, 2018, in a 103–89 loss to the Milwaukee Bucks, Kanter recorded 19 points and 16 rebounds for his sixth consecutive double-double, marking the longest streak by any Knick since David Lee had seven straight from February 9–26, 2010. On March 6, 2018, he had 18 points and 11 rebounds in a 111–87 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers. It was Kanter’s 32nd double-double of the season, a career high.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: On October 19, 2018, Kanter scored 29 points in a 107–105 loss to the Nets. A day later, he recorded 17 points and 15 rebounds in a 103–101 loss to the Celtics, becoming the first Knick since Zach Randolph (2007–08) to start the season with three straight double-doubles. On November 5 he recorded 23 points and 24 rebounds in a 116–115 double-overtime loss to the Chicago Bulls. On November 11, he notched his fifth straight double-double with 16 points and 15 rebounds in a 115–89 loss to the Orlando Magic. On November 25, recorded 21 points and a career-high 26 rebounds in a 103–98 win over the Memphis Grizzlies. In late December, Kanter was demoted to a reduced role off the bench. Kanter was waived by the Knicks on February 7, 2019. During his last game at Madison Square Garden, Kanter ran out and kissed the court goodbye.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: On February 13, 2019, Kanter signed with the Portland Trail Blazers. He made his debut for the Trail Blazers on February 21, recording 18 points and nine rebounds off the bench in a 113–99 win over the Brooklyn Nets. In game one of the Trail Blazers' first-round playoff series against the Oklahoma City Thunder, Kanter had 20 points and a career playoff-high 18 rebounds in a 104–99 win, becoming just the third player in team history with at least 20 points and 18 rebounds in playoff game: Bill Walton did it three times and LaMarcus Aldridge once.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: When free agency opened on July 1, 2019, Kanter and the Boston Celtics agreed to a two-year, $10 million contract. He was officially signed on July 17. With the Celtics, Kanter averaged 8.1 points, 7.4 rebounds, and 1 assist. His season highs were 22 points, 6 blocks, and 19 rebounds. In the playoffs, he scored a total of 50 points in 11 games, averaging 4.5 points per game.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: On November 20, 2020, Kanter was traded back to the Portland Trail Blazers in a three-team trade that also included the Memphis Grizzlies. On April 10, 2021, in a 118–103 win over the Detroit Pistons, Kanter set a career high and franchise record 30 rebounds, breaking Sidney Wicks record of 27 which he set in 1975. He also scored 24 points in the game, in which he became just the third player in the past 20 years to deliver a 20-point, 30-rebound performance.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: On August 13, 2021, Freedom signed a one-year, worth $2.7 million veteran's minimum contract with the Boston Celtics.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: On February 10, 2022, Freedom was traded, along with Dennis Schröder and Bruno Fernando, to the Houston Rockets in exchange for Daniel Theis. On February 14, the Rockets waived Freedom. Freedom alleges he was waived because of his views about the Chinese government. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver denied this claim saying “I made it absolutely clear to [Kanter] that it was completely within his right to speak out on issues that he was passionate about.”


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: Kanter made his debut for the Turkish national basketball team at the 2008 FIBA Europe Under-16 Championship in Italy. He dominated throughout the tournament, averaging 22.9 points, 16.5 rebounds and 1.5 blocks in 34.6 minutes per game. However, Jonas Valančiūnas was chosen as the MVP after he averaged 14.3 points, 11.1 rebounds and 2.3 blocks in 23.5 minutes. Kanter went on to earn MVP honors at the 2009 FIBA Europe Under-18 Championship after averaging 18.6 points and 16.4 rebounds while leading Turkey's junior national team to the bronze medal. He declined to play for the senior national team at the 2010 FIBA World Championship which was being held in Turkey as the team went on to win the silver medal. His father claimed he did this in order not to miss the first month of classes at Kentucky.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: Kanter played with the Turkish senior team for the first time at the 2011 EuroBasket where he was the youngest player to make the team. He appeared in eight games and averaged 9.6 points and 3.9 rebounds per game. Kanter was left off the team's roster for EuroBasket 2015. Kanter alleged that the omission was due to his relationship with Fethullah Gülen and his support of the Gülen movement while coach Ergin Ataman said that Kanter was excluded because "he did not apologize to teammates for past incidents." Kanter also believes that if he were to go to Turkey to play he would end up in jail, killed by the national government, and a fake poisoning incident would be created.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: Kanter is a professional wrestling fan and has previously expressed interest in pursuing a professional wrestling career. Kanter has had online feuds with professional wrestlers including All Elite Wrestling's MJF.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: On September 9, 2019, Kanter made a special appearance at a WWE "Monday Night Raw" event at Madison Square Garden, where prior to "Raw" going on the air he defeated WWE 24/7 Champion R-Truth to win the title, though he would lose it back to R-Truth moments later (all of which was shown later during the "Raw" broadcast). Kanter established himself as a heel during the segment, when he revealed his Celtics jersey to the New York City crowd.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: Kanter received primary and secondary education at Hizmet schools in Turkey and reconnected with the movement's volunteers when Kanter arrived in the United States, even forming a personal relationship with the movement's founder, Fethullah Gülen. With regard to Gülen, Kanter has said, "His views on my religion, as well as ways to solve today's problems, were attractive to me. Gülen is promoting an Islam that highlights justice, respect and love for those who aren't like us. He believes that being a Muslim comes with some kind of duty, and that is to help others. These are principles that I feel strongly about."


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: Kanter said he became publicly critical of president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2013 due to the corruption scandal in Turkey. After the failed 2016 "coup d'état" attempt, Kanter criticised Turkish president Erdoğan on Twitter, calling him the "Hitler of our century". Soon after the coup attempt in July, his father and his family publicly disowned him due to his political views and his support for Gülen, imploring him to change his surname, on August 8. Kanter stated that he loves Gülen "more than his family", informally changing his name to Enes Gülen. His father was dismissed from his university position a few weeks later, via government decree numbered 272 on September 1, as part of the 2016–17 Turkish purges. Also, Kanter has received backlash from former NBA player Hedo Türkoğlu. Turkoglu has called Kanter's comments "irrational".


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: In Turkey, Kanter's father was charged as a member of a terrorist group in 2018. He was arrested, then was released after being detained for five days. Kanter believes his father has been targeted by the Turkish government and could face many years in prison. Kanter is unable to contact his friends and family back in Turkey because he fears the conversations will be taped and they will be harmed. Six days after the cancellation of his passport, the Turkish government issued an arrest warrant for Kanter due to his membership in Hizmet, an Islamist fraternal movement. Turkey said that charged citizens who fail to come to Turkey during September 2017 face revocation of citizenship; in September 2017, Kanter described himself as stateless. According to "Sports Illustrated", "Although Kanter might dismiss the Turkish arrest warrant as toothless, he faces the more impactful problem of being a man without a country." In December 2017, the Associated Press reported that Turkish prosecutors were seeking more than four years in prison for Kanter, who would be tried in absentia.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: Also in January 2019, Turkey put an extradition request on Kanter and requested that Interpol put a red notice for his arrest. However, according to Interpol's website, no red notice had been issued. U.S. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon took up Kanter's cause, stating "The United States must not stay silent in the face of such a blatant attack on free thought and expression." Kanter later credited the bond he and Wyden had forged as part of the reason he sacrificed salary to facilitate a trade back to Portland in 2020.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: In May 2017, while on a tour hosting basketball camps in Hong Kong and Japan and other parts of Asia, Kanter was in Jakarta, Indonesia. At 2:30 AM, Kanter's manager knocked on his door with alarming information. He was told that two men identifying themselves as Indonesian government officials had visited the camp and wanted to speak to find out if Kanter was sleeping at the camp, which he often did. Kanter, staying at a hotel with his manager, instead immediately left Indonesia, going to Singapore, then Bucharest, Romania via Frankfurt, Germany. On May 20, 2017, when trying to fly into Romaniawhere another camp was planned to be heldKanter was not allowed into the country and was told by officials there that his passport had been cancelled by the Turkish embassy. Kanter was temporarily stranded in Romania, but eventually flew to London and then back to the United States. While stuck in Romania, Kanter took to Twitter to explain his situation and the hashtag #FreeEnes went viral. Upon landing in the US, Kanter said the first thing he did was pray.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: In January 2019, he decided against travelling to London with the Knicks, fearing that his life could be in danger if he traveled to Europe. Kanter did not travel to Toronto with the Portland Trail Blazers in March 2019 for the same reason. According to a 2019 ESPN story, FBI agents have issued him a communications device that allows him to contact the organization at a moment's notice due to credible threats against his life.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: In 2019, Kanter was the subject of an "" ESPN documentary called "Enemy of the State". In October 2021, he condemned Xi Jinping, the Chinese paramount leader, as a "brutal dictator" and expressed his support for the Free Tibet movement on Twitter. In retaliation, the Chinese government stopped streaming all Boston Celtics games. Also in October, he led a rally in Washington D.C., urging the U.S. Congress to pass the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a law that would limit imports from areas where China has oppressed Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz minorities.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: In November 2021, Kanter appeared in interviews on Fox News and CNN advocating the boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games to be held in China. On December 6, 2021, the United States announced a diplomatic boycott of the games, meaning that athletes may still participate but no "diplomatic or official representation" will be sent from the United States government.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: After Kanter was waived out of his most recent contract he claimed he was pushed out of the NBA to appease the Chinese state. Adam Silver and the NBA have denied that Kanter's activism have led to him being blackballed.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: In June 2022, Kanter took part in a press conference with Canadian Senator, Leo Housakos, and Canadian MP, Garnett Genuis. In this press conference, Kanter spoke about how his interest into the situation regarding the Uighurs in China began. The Canadian Government was called upon to halt the importation of goods that were made with forced labor from the province of Xinjiang.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: Kanter is a practicing Muslim. In 2019, he wrote in "The Washington Post" about the challenge of observing Ramadan during the NBA playoffs, which includes daytime fasting while still playing NBA basketball games.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: He has said that he learned English during college by watching "SpongeBob SquarePants" and "Jersey Shore".


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: From 2018 to 2019, Kanter dated professional wrestler Dana Brooke. He began dating fashion designer and equestrian Ariana Rockefeller in 2020.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: Kanter became an American citizen on November 29, 2021, and also legally changed his name to Enes Kanter Freedom at the same time to mark the occasion.


title: Enes Kanter Freedom

text: During the summer of 2018, Kanter held 16 free basketball camps in the United States. Also in the same year, Kanter started a fundraiser for wildfire victims in Greece. In the summer of 2019, 40 free basketball camps were initially scheduled, but he ultimately hosted 50. Another 50 free camps were planned for the summer of 2020.


title: Book of Kells

text: The Book of Kells (; ; Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS A. I. [58], sometimes known as the Book of Columba) is an illuminated manuscript Gospel book in Latin, containing the four Gospels of the New Testament together with various prefatory texts and tables. It was created in a Columban monastery in either Ireland, Scotland or England, and may have had contributions from various Columban institutions from each of these areas. It is believed to have been created  800 AD. The text of the Gospels is largely drawn from the Vulgate, although it also includes several passages drawn from the earlier versions of the Bible known as the Vetus Latina. It is regarded as a masterwork of Western calligraphy and the pinnacle of Insular illumination. The manuscript takes its name from the Abbey of Kells, County Meath, which was its home for centuries.


title: Book of Kells

text: The illustrations and ornamentation of the Book of Kells surpass those of other Insular Gospel books in extravagance and complexity. The decoration combines traditional Christian iconography with the ornate swirling motifs typical of Insular art. Figures of humans, animals and mythical beasts, together with Celtic knots and interlacing patterns in vibrant colours, enliven the manuscript's pages. Many of these minor decorative elements are imbued with Christian symbolism and so further emphasise the themes of the major illustrations.


title: Book of Kells

text: The manuscript today comprises 340 leaves or folios; the recto and verso of each leaf total 680 pages. Since 1953, it has been bound in four volumes, 330 mm by 250 mm (13 inches by 9.8 inches). The leaves are high-quality calf vellum; the unprecedentedly elaborate ornamentation that covers them includes ten full-page illustrations and text pages that are vibrant with decorated initials and interlinear miniatures, marking the furthest extension of the anti-classical and energetic qualities of Insular art. The Insular majuscule script of the text appears to be the work of at least three different scribes. The lettering is in iron gall ink, and the colours used were derived from a wide range of substances, some of which were imported from distant lands.


title: Book of Kells

text: The manuscript is in Trinity College Library, Dublin which usually has on display at any given time two of the four volumes it is now divided into, open to show a major illustration from one and a typical text page from the other, rotated frequently. A digitised version of the entire manuscript may also be seen online.


title: Book of Kells

text: The Book of Kells is one of the finest and most famous, and also one of the latest, of a group of manuscripts in what is known as the Insular style, produced from the late 6th through the early 9th centuries in monasteries in Ireland, Scotland and England and in continental monasteries with Hiberno-Scottish or Anglo-Saxon foundations. These manuscripts include the Cathach of St. Columba, the Ambrosiana Orosius, fragmentary Gospel in the Durham Dean and Chapter Library (all from the early 7th century), and the Book of Durrow (from the second half of the 7th century). From the early 8th century come the Durham Gospels, the Echternach Gospels, the Lindisfarne Gospels (see illustration at right), and the Lichfield Gospels. Among others, the St. Gall Gospel Book belongs to the late 8th century and the Book of Armagh (dated to 807–809) to the early 9th century.


title: Book of Kells

text: Scholars place these manuscripts together based on similarities in artistic style, script, and textual traditions. The fully developed style of the ornamentation of the Book of Kells places it late in this series, either from the late 8th or early 9th century. The Book of Kells follows many of the iconographic and stylistic traditions found in these earlier manuscripts. For example, the form of the decorated letters found in the incipit pages for the Gospels is surprisingly consistent in Insular Gospels. Compare, for example, the incipit pages of the Gospel of Matthew and , both of which feature intricate decorative knotwork patterns inside the outlines formed by the enlarged initial letters of the text. (For a more complete list of related manuscripts, see: List of Hiberno-Saxon illustrated manuscripts).


title: Book of Kells

text: The Abbey of Kells in Kells, County Meath had been founded, or refounded, from Iona Abbey, construction taking from 807 until the consecration of the church in 814. The manuscript's date and place of production have been subjects of considerable debate. Traditionally, the book was thought to have been created in the time of Columba, possibly even as the work of his own hands. This tradition has long been discredited on paleographic and stylistic grounds: most evidence points to a composition date  800, long after St. Columba's death in 597. The proposed dating in the 9th century coincides with Viking raids on Lindisfarne and Iona, which began c. 793-794 and eventually dispersed the monks and their holy relics into Ireland and Scotland. There is another tradition, with some traction among Irish scholars, that suggests the manuscript was created for the 200th anniversary of the saint's death. Alternatively, as is thought possible for the Northumbrian Lindisfarne Gospels and also the St Cuthbert Gospel, both with Saint Cuthbert, it may have been produced to mark the "translation" or moving of Columba's remains into a shrine reliquary, which probably had taken place by the 750s.


title: Book of Kells

text: There are at least four competing theories about the manuscript's place of origin and time of completion. First, the book, or perhaps just the text, may have been created at Iona and then completed in Kells. Second, the book may have been produced entirely at Iona. Third, the manuscript may have been produced entirely in the scriptorium at Kells. Finally, it may have been the product of Dunkeld or another monastery in Pictish Scotland, though there is no actual evidence for this theory, especially considering the absence of any surviving manuscript from Pictland. Although the question of the exact location of the book's production will probably never be answered conclusively, the first theory, that it was begun at Iona and continued at Kells, is widely accepted. Regardless of which theory is true, it is certain that the Book of Kells was produced by Columban monks closely associated with the community at Iona.


title: Book of Kells

text: The historical circumstances which informed the Book of Kells' production were the preservation of the Latin language after the fall of the Roman Empire and the establishment of monastic life which entailed the production of texts. Cassiodorus in particular advocated both practices, having founded the monastery Vivarium in the sixth century and having written "Institutiones", a work which describes and recommends several texts—both religious and secular—for study by monks. Vivarium included a scriptorium for the reproduction of books in both genres. Later, the Carolingian period introduced the innovation of copying texts onto vellum, a material much more durable than the papyrus to which many ancient writings had been committed. Gradually, these traditions spread throughout the European continent and finally to the British Isles.


title: Book of Kells

text: Kells Abbey was pillaged by Vikings many times at the beginning of the 9th century, and how the book survived is not known. The earliest historical reference to the book, and indeed to the book's presence at Kells, can be found in a 1007 entry in the "Annals of Ulster". This entry records that "the great Gospel of Columkille, (Columba) the chief relic of the Western World, was wickedly stolen during the night from the western sacristy of the great stone church at Cenannas on account of its wrought shrine". The manuscript was recovered a few months later—minus its golden and bejewelled cover—"under a sod". It is generally assumed that the "great Gospel of Columkille" is the Book of Kells. If this is correct, then the book was in Kells by 1007 and had been there long enough for thieves to learn of its presence. The force of ripping the manuscript free from its cover may account for the folios missing from the beginning and end of the Book of Kells. The description in the Annals of the book as "of Columkille"—that is, having belonged to, and perhaps being made by Columba—suggests that the book was believed at that time to have been made on Iona.


title: Book of Kells

text: Regardless, the book was certainly at Kells in the 12th century, when land charters pertaining to the Abbey of Kells were copied onto some of its blank pages. The practice of copying charters into important books was widespread in the medieval period, and such inscriptions in the Book of Kells provide concrete evidence about its location at the time.


title: Book of Kells

text: The Abbey of Kells was dissolved because of the ecclesiastical reforms of the 12th century. The abbey church was converted to a parish church in which the Book of Kells remained.


title: Book of Kells

text: The 12th-century writer Gerald of Wales, in his "Topographia Hibernica", described seeing a great Gospel Book in Kildare which many have since assumed was the Book of Kells. The description certainly matches Kells:


title: Book of Kells

text: Since Gerald claims to have seen this book in Kildare, he may have seen another, now lost, book equal in quality to the Book of Kells, or he may have misstated his location.


title: Book of Kells

text: The Book of Kells remained in Kells until 1654. In that year, Cromwell's cavalry was quartered in the church at Kells, and the governor of the town sent the book to Dublin for safekeeping. Henry Jones, who later became bishop of Meath after the Restoration, presented the manuscript to Trinity College in Dublin in 1661, and it has remained there ever since, except for brief loans to other libraries and museums. It has been on display to the public in the Old Library at Trinity since the 19th century.


title: Book of Kells

text: The manuscript's rise to worldwide fame began in the 19th century. The association with St. Columba, who died the same year Augustine brought Christianity and literacy to Canterbury from Rome, was used to demonstrate Ireland's cultural primacy, seemingly providing "irrefutable precedence in the debate on the relative authority of the Irish and Roman churches". Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were invited to sign the book in 1849. The book's artistry was influential on the Celtic Revival; several Victorian picture books of medieval illuminations featured designs from the book which were in turn extensively copied and adapted, patterns appearing in metalwork, embroidery, furniture and pottery among other crafts.


title: Book of Kells

text: Over the centuries, the book has been rebound several times. During a 19th-century rebinding, the pages were badly cropped, with small parts of some illustrations being lost. The book was also rebound in 1895, but that rebinding broke down quickly. By the late 1920s, several folios had detached completely and were kept separate from the main volume. In 1953, bookbinder Roger Powell rebound the manuscript in four volumes and stretched several pages that had developed bulges. Two volumes can normally be seen displayed at Trinity, one opened at a major decorated page, and one opened to show two text pages with smaller decorations.