Richard Grenell: Weigh-in offer for Governor of California, former acting director of national intelligence, to meet Trump on Saturday

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The topic will certainly come up again when the former acting director of national intelligence and Trump ally meets with the former president at Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago, but the two are expected to discuss a range of topics, said the source to CNN on Saturday.

CNN previously reported that Newsom’s opponents, angry at the Democratic governor’s restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic, have gathered over a million of the nearly 1.5 million signatures they need before March 17 to get a reminder of the ballot. The source, however, warned that it is not clear at this point whether the promoters of the recall would be able to collect enough signatures by the March deadline.
Politico was the first to report on Grenell’s meeting with Trump.

Grenell raised the possibility of a race during his remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla. On Saturday morning.

“In my three decades in US politics, I have never seen a better case of recall, than there is currently in California,” he said. “And of course, if an official still doesn’t keep their promises, and you can’t limit their tenure or call them back in time, there’s always another option: you can run against them yourself.”

Under the California Constitution, recall leaders must produce 1,495,709 valid signatures by March 17, which equates to 12% of the votes cast in the last gubernatorial election.

If they meet that threshold, it’s unclear what month a recall election would appear on the California ballot given the state’s complex, multi-step process to formally hold the election.

The state’s Democratic Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis told CNN’s Kate Bolduan on Thursday that the recall effort against Newsom was likely to proceed.

Newsom has been praised for its decision to lock down California at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, a move that has slowed the spread of the virus there for some time. But the governor faced widespread outrage for breaking his own Covid-19 rules and attending a birthday party with a dozen other guests at an elite Napa County restaurant in early November.

As the fallout from this event persisted, coronavirus cases in California increased, ultimately propelling the west coast state to the nation’s top spot for the most Covid-19 cases and the most deaths.

During Trump’s presidency, Grenell served as U.S. Ambassador to Germany for more than two years during which he also served as Acting Director of Intelligence for three brief months in 2020. He stepped down from both roles in the spring of 2020 but remained an ally of the Republican president.

Critics had viewed Grenell as the least experienced and most overtly political official to serve as the DNI. His brief stint as head of intelligence was controversial for his oversight of two senior career layoffs, a restructuring of several parts of the office, and the declassification of Obama administration documents that fueled the “Obamagate conspiracy theory” “amplified by Trump and his allies.

CNN’s Maeve Reston, Cheri Mossburg, Alex Marquardt, Zachary Cohen and Jeremy Herb contributed to this report.

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