Thread by @jaketapper

The president proposed banning Muslims from entering the country and then his administration worked to make a legal version of such an order. That’s not a commitment to protecting #religiousfreedom.

https://twitter.com/SecPompeo/status/1211652264596783105

2/ Some folks need to reacquaint themselves w facts:

As a candidate Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on."

c-span.org/video/?c473746…

3/ A ban was issued in Jan 2017. Giuliani explained: “when (Trump) first announced it, he said, 'Muslim ban.' He called me up. He said, 'Put a commission together. Show me the right way to do it legally.' "

4/ Giuliani put together a “whole group of other very expert lawyers on this... And what we did was, we focused on, instead of religion, danger — the areas of the world that create danger for us. Which is a factual basis, not a religious basis. Perfectly legal...”

5/ So, per Giuliani, by focusing the ban on (initially) seven majority-Muslim countries, and not on ALL Muslims as originally proposed, the Trump WH *thought* it had found a legal way to implement the ban Trump had promised.

The courts didn’t see it that way.

6/ Judge Ann Donnelly held that petitioners against the ban had a "strong likelihood of success" in establishing that its enforcement "violates their rights to Due Process and Equal Protection guaranteed by the United States Constitution."

cnn.com/2017/01/28/pol…

7/ Other judges followed suit. In February 2017, a 3-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled against the travel ban.

google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.…

8/ POTUS said he would try again: “The new order is going to be very much tailored to what I consider to be a very bad decision.”

That came in March and met a similar fate.

9/ US District Court Judge Derrick Watson found the core provisions of the second executive order “likely violated the Constitution because its primary purpose was to disfavor Muslims, but on slightly different grounds.”

google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.…

10/ (This is obviously a very truncated version of a long legal battle.)

In September 2017, Trump offered a third version of the ban. This one added Venezuela and North Korea to the list of (now 6) majority-Muslim countries.

11/ In Maryland, District Judge Theodore Chuang ruled that despite revisions it still constituted a “Muslim ban” and thus violated the Constitution’s protections against religious discrimination.

usatoday.com/story/news/wor…

12/ HOWEVER, this 3rd version of the ban ended up in front of the Supreme Court which ruled 5-4 in favor of the Trump administration.

This third version was found to be legal.

cnn.com/2018/06/26/pol…

13/ As our SCOTUS analyst noted at the time, the Trump administration had made significant changes in response to lower-court rulings invalidating the first two iterations.

cnn.com/2018/06/26/pol…

14/ It still has critics including the libertarian CATO Institute which says “Trump’s ‘Travel Ban’ Is Still a ‘Muslim Ban’ No Matter What the Supreme Court Ruled”...

cato.org/publications/c…

15/ Either way, as originally stated, Trump called for a ban on Muslims; his team has said they worked to craft such a ban but one that would pass legal muster; they succeeded on the third try.