Good Riddance, Boris Johnson

Former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced Friday that he was resigning as a British lawmaker, after learning he would be sanctioned for misleading Parliament.

Johnson stepped down as prime minister in July, following the bombshell revelations that he and members of his Cabinet had violated U.K. Covid-19 protocols multiple times with wild parties at his office at 10 Downing Street. Johnson admitted in March that he misled Parliament about the so-called “Partygate,” but he denied doing so intentionally. Now he is resigning from his role as Conservative member of Parliament, effective immediately.

Here’s a look back at some of the worst things Johnson has said and done as a public servant.

1. No plan for Brexit

Johnson was one of the key campaigners for Brexit, which he ultimately oversaw during his premiership. But he never expected it to actually happen, according to a biography of him published in May.

“What the hell is happening?” Johnson kept saying after the vote results came in. “Oh shit, we’ve got no plan. We haven’t thought about it.”

The U.K. did finally leave the European Union under Johnson’s leadership. But Brexit, and the deal Johnson negotiated, were a total flop, sticking the U.K. with the lowest economic growth rate of all G7 nations. The International Monetary Fund expects it to be the only leading global economy to shrink this year.

2. Burqas look like “letter boxes”

Johnson compared women wearing burqas to “letter boxes” in a 2018 column for The Telegraph. In his opinion, it was “absolutely ridiculous” that people “choose to go around looking like letter boxes.”

He felt that people should be “fully entitled” to ask a woman to remove her burqa so that they can “talk to her properly.”

3. Bashar Al Assad should “keep going”

In a 2016 column for The Telegraph, Johnson said that Syrian President Bashar Al Assad should be allowed to keep doing his thing because he saved Palmyra from ISIS.

“Hooray, I say. Bravo—and keep going,” Johnson wrote. “Yes, I know. Assad is a monster, a dictator. He barrel-bombs his own people. His jails are full of tortured opponents. He and his father ruled for generations by the application of terror and violence—and yet there are at least two reasons why any sane person should feel a sense of satisfaction at what Assad’s troops have accomplished.” (The two reasons were ISIS and archaeology.)

4. The Holocaust was an attempt to recreate the “golden age” of Europe

Also in 2016, Johnson said the Roman Empire had been a “golden age” that saw Europe unified under a single government. The continent’s past 2,000 years were filled with attempts to recreate that political system.

“Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically,” Johnson told The Telegraph. “The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods.”

5. Black people have “watermelon smiles”

In 2002, Johnson wrote in The Telegraph about a visit then–Prime Minister Tony Blair made to Africa. “What a relief it must be for Blair to get out of England,” Johnson said.

“It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies,” he wrote. He also described African people as having “watermelon smiles.”

6. Colonialism in Africa should never have ended

Johnson was editor of the conservative magazine The Spectator from 1999 to 2005. In 2002, he wrote an article arguing that Africa would be in better shape if British colonialism had never ended.

“The continent may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience,” he wrote in the piece. “The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.”

In the same article, Johnson downplayed Britain’s role in the slave trade and suggested that Ugandans would never have been able to grow a variety of crops. He also managed to blame Vietnam for low coffee prices.

Idaho and Mississippi have zero openly LGBTQ elected officials, despite major advances in queer representation in U.S. politics, a new report found.

The LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, an organization that works to get LGBTQ people into public office, found that the number of openly queer elected officials increased by 13.6 percent from June 2022 to May 2023.

In its annual Out for America report, the group also found that the number of queer people of color elected jumped by 23.2 percent in the past year. But while this progress is heartening, LGBTQ elected officials still only make up less than a quarter of a percent of all U.S. officials.

That discrepancy is particularly noticeable in Idaho and Mississippi, which have no LGBTQ elected officials. Those two states, along with Louisiana and West Virginia, also have zero LGBTQ state legislators.

The situation in Idaho and Mississippi should come as no surprise, though. Both states have been aggressive in pushing legislation to curb LGBTQ rights since the start of the year. Mississippi lawmakers introduced at least 31 anti-LGBTQ bills at the start of the session alone.

Both states have banned gender-affirming care for transgender minors, with Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves signing the measure in February and Idaho Governor Brad Little following suit in April.

The Idaho House also passed two bills in February targeting drag performances. One bill banned drag in public, and the other prohibited state agencies from sponsoring nongovernmental organizations and events such as Pride celebrations. Both those measures stalled in the state Senate.

Donald Trump, whose trademark 2016 motif was demanding Hillary Clinton be locked up for deleting emails, apparently admires that the emails were deleted, and wishes his legal team was up to snuff to do that kind of thing.

The former president has been impeached twice, criminally indicted, and found liable for sexual abuse and defamation. And now, as he faces 37 criminal counts for mishandling classified government documents, absurd details of his behavior reveal both how tough a case this will be for him to crack and how almost too hypocritical he is.

“He said, he said that it—that it was him. That he was the one who deleted all of her emails, the 30,000 emails, because they basically dealt with her scheduling and her going to the gym and her having beauty appointments,” Trump said to his lawyers, an unnamed lawyer (widely assumed to be Evan Corcoran) told the special counsel. “And he was great. And he, so she didn’t get in any trouble because he said that he was the one who deleted them.”

Trump shared the story on May 23, in the immediate aftermath of being issued a subpoena for the trove of classified documents he had taken from the White House. He apparently reiterated the story more than once, perhaps insinuating to the lawyers that they ought to be prepared to participate in some covering up themselves.

The difference between what Trump says in public versus what he says in private echoes the broader contradiction of him, for years, repeatedly calling for the lengthy imprisonment of those who mishandle classified information. Meanwhile, he had conceded he could not declassify things after leaving office (while sharing classified documents with people without security clearances).

The absurdity is embodied just as well by him sharing the classified documents with someone from his super PAC and hiding the documents in his shower, a Mar-a-Lago ballroom, and a bathroom with a signature Trump-style chandelier.

Donald Trump allegedly kept hundreds of classified documents, including on how best to attack the United States, from seven different government agencies, the indictment against him reveals.

Trump is now the first former president ever to be federally charged. Of the 37 total charges against him, which were unsealed Friday, 31 are for willful retention of national defense information. He is accused of keeping an array of classified national security material after leaving the White House, despite being unauthorized to do so.

The documents had come from the CIA, the Defense Department, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Department of Energy, and the State Department and its Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

And a look at what was in the classified documents is quite damning.

The materials Trump kept included information on “potential vulnerabilities” to military attack for the United States and its allies, as well as details on the U.S. nuclear program. “The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods,” the indictment said.

The documents also contained plans for possible retaliatory attacks on foreign nations. One such document detailed a plan to attack Iran. Prosecutors obtained recordings of Trump admitting he had the document and that he knew he couldn’t declassify it because he was no longer president. That document has not yet been recovered.

Donald Trump was so loose with secret government documents, he was showing them to someone from his super PAC and hiding them in his shower.

After being impeached twice, criminally indicted, and found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, the former president has now received 37 criminal counts for mishandling classified government documents.

The indictment, released Friday, lays out wild details about how Trump handled the documents, even being “personally involved” in packing up the boxes full of the classified information as he left the White House.

After transporting the classified documents to Mar-a-Lago, Trump apparently hid the boxes in a Mar-a-Lago ballroom, bathroom and shower, an office, his bedroom, and a storage room.

At the Bedminster Club in New Jersey, in August or September 2021, Trump allegedly showed a representative of his PAC—who did not have security clearance—“a classified map related to a military operation and told the representative that he should not be showing it to the representative and that the representative should not get too close.”

All told, Trump allegedly retained classified documents from seven agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense, National Security Agency, and State Department.

Also at the Bedminster club, Trump showed a writer, a publisher, and two members of his staff—none with security clearance—a “plan of attack” that was apparently prepared for him by the DOD and a senior military official. He called it “highly confidential” and “secret,” adding, “As president I could have declassified it,” and, “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.” Previous reporting indicates this may have been a Pentagon document on a plan to attack Iran.

In the August Mar-a-Lago FBI search alone, out of the 102 documents recovered, 17 were classified as “Top Secret,” 54 were “Secret,” and 31 were “Confidential.”

Before said raid, and after Trump was issued a subpoena in May, one of Trump’s attorneys had recounted that Trump apparently said, “I don’t want anybody looking, I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t,” and “Well what if we, what happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them?” and even “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?”

Note, again, while others, including Joe Biden and Mike Pence, have been found to have possessed classified documents from previous administrations, each have complied with inquiries and in returning documents expeditiously, something Trump demonstrably did not do and has actively obstructed.