President Donald Trump is once again raising eyebrows with his claim on Friday that he didn’t sign a proclamation invoking the arcane wartime law, which his administration leaned on to carry out last weekend’s deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members, CNN reported.
The stunning denial came as Trump took questions from reporters before boarding Marine One, including one surrounding the fury U.S. District Judge James Boasberg unleashed on DOJ attorneys at a hearing Friday as he pressed them on why the proclamtion invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was "signed in the dark.”
“And I don’t know when it was signed because I didn’t sign it,” Trump told reporter. “Other people handled it. But Marco Rubio’s done a great job, and he wanted them out. And we go along with that. We want to get criminals out of our country.”
The new development in the deportation battle – which continues to play out in real time in court – was subjected to a brutal fact-check by CNN’s Jeff Zeleny, who said flatly: “It is his signature.”
“The White House tonight is not explaining the discrepancy here with the president saying he did not sign it, but they are standing behind the meaning of it,” Zeleny said Friday. “And the president has been consistent in the sense he thinks that these people are ‘bad guys’ – in his words, he says it again and again, and due process clearly is not a concern of this administration or the president.”
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Zeleny said he was on the White House’s South Lawn as Trump delivered the new denials Friday and found it “very interesting” that the MAGA leader invoked Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s name.
“He wasn't asked about the secretary of State, he brought him up on his own,” the CNN correspondent said. “I thought that was absolutely fascinating, the president we've seen a few times trying to pass the buck a little bit. So, yes, he stands behind the idea of it, but does not want to get sort of caught up in the legality of it.”
Zeleny concluded that “the bottom line is, is this a time of war? The judge is saying the government hasn't proved that yet.”
Former federal Judge John E. Jones III said in a CNN interview that the legal drama unfolding “has the allure of a slow motion car crash as you look at, but I think there's a further showdown coming.”
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