When it comes to the Trump administration, the corruption really is ubiquitous. By no means will this be a comprehensive accounting of it, or anything close to one. What I've tried to do is pull together, in one place, a lot of the existing, typically very scattered reporting on the subject to try to give some sense of the scale and scope of it--something I haven't seen anyone else do. For those who don't rather rigorously follow public affairs, a lot of this information will no doubt be new. Because of its origins, it may seem a bit ragged, subject to occasional asides and not as focused or well-structured as a proper article should be. I've tried to organize it into three general sections but there's plenty of overlap. I've tried to minimize repetition. It's bound to be a long article, which usually means fewer people read it. I present it for the record, because no one else has.
During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump adopted the pose of a populist reformer, the nemesis of "Crooked Hillary" Clinton who was going to the corrupt capitol to, in his much-repeated phrase, "drain the swamp." Once elected though, Trump proceeded to build a deeper, smellier, murkier swamp in D.C. than has existed in the lifetime of anyone reading these words today...
SIFTING SWAMP GRIFTING
There were, during the 2016 cycle, indications of what was to come. It was little-noted by the press at the time but Trump's campaign appeared to be essentially a money-making scheme. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow--back before she got lost in Russia conspiracism and became a complete joke--put together a good segment in which she dissected the Trump campaign's June 2016 filing with the Federal Election Commission; Trump had been spending millions of dollars in campaign funds on his own properties, charging himself rent, fees, buying merchandise from himself--converting donor money into personal profit for Trump and his family.
Such practices are of questionable legality. As the U.S. House Ethics Committee website explains, the Federal Election Campaign Act "provides that a contribution or donation accepted by a candidate or the holder of a federal office may not be 'converted by any person to any personal use.'" Still, this grift has continued. Upon his election, Trump refused to divest himself of the Trump Organization, his massive business empire,[1] and has treated his presidency as a for-profit venture for himself, his family and his cronies. From Wired, 20 July, 2017:
"Back in 2000, when Donald Trump was considering a presidential run on the Reform Party ticket, he told Fortune, 'It's very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.' And though it's hard to say whether Trump has actually managed to turn a profit (at least not without getting a look at his tax returns), according to his re-election campaign's FEC filings, Donald Trump is sure as hell trying his best.By Dec. 2018, Forbes reported "the richest president in American history has turned $1.1 million from donors across the country into revenue for himself." Forbes began regularly tracking this phenomenon. By March 2019, it was $1.3 million; Dec. 2019, $1.7 million; Feb. 2020, $1.9 million. And, of course, there's more; Trump has used his position as de facto chief Republican to cash in on his own party. By July 2020, "$2.2 million of contributions from other people has turned into $2.2 million of revenue for Trump," and Forbes broadened the scope of its examination:
"Even though Trump is, in fact, the current president, he only stopped running for a brief few hours on Inauguration Day. As soon as Trump filed for re-election, at 5:11 pm on January 20, his campaign officially sprang back into action. That means Trump can legally continue to funnel funds from donors back into his own businesses. According to the Trump campaign's self-reported FEC filings, this has amounted to about $600,000 spent at Trump-owned properties in just the first six months of his presidency."
"[T]hat's just counting the money flowing directly through the president's campaign. His reelection apparatus also includes two joint fundraising committees, which work with the Republican Party to raise money for Trump. Since he took office, those entities--named Trump Victory and the Trump Make America Great Again Committee--have funneled another $2.3 million into the president's private business, according to a review of Federal Election Commission records. Then there's the Republican National Committee, which has spent an additional $2.4 million at Trump properties. Add it all up, and the president, working in concert with the party he leads, has helped push $6.9 million into his businesses since taking office."In November, 2019, Public Citizen cast a wider net and found...
"GOP-affiliated political groups and candidates have spent more than $8 million at the president's various resorts and properties since President Trump was elected in 2016, according to a new analysis.Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington (CREW) has often been an excellent watchdog over these sorts of activities. In October 2019, CREW covered how this game works:
"Politico on Monday reported that analysis from the left-leaning consumer rights group Public Citizen shows that the Trump Organization has become a haven for Republican groups hosting political events and fundraisers, an informal arrangement that directly financially benefits the president.
"The amount reported by Politico represented a sharp increase in revenue from political sources for the Trump Organization, which received just under $70,000 in total from such groups in the two years leading up to his campaign announcement.
"Since that announcement in June of 2015, the amount has ballooned to $15 million, with $8 million having been spent at Trump resorts and properties since Trump won the 2016 election. The highest level was in 2016, when nearly $12 million in total political spending occurred at Trump businesses that year."
"The cost of a basic room at Trump's DC Hotel is nearly three times its average rate on November 7th. Conspicuously, that's the night between Senate Republicans' two day retreat at Trump's Hotel. Filling the hotel with a who's who of Republican power players serves as an invitation for anyone looking to influence the government, and the hotel's role as a hot spot for influence peddling has helped to make it one of the few bright spots in Trump’s financial portfolio. Since Trump never divested from his businesses when he became president, he stands to profit from the decision to host the Republican retreat at his hotel, and even more massively because of the spike in rates that evening... This is not the first time that Trump Hotel rates have spiked around a Trump-centered event in the area. CREW reported that during the Fourth of July rally that Trump planned on the National Mall, the hotel was unavailable to reserve unless you were willing to book several nights at a time, and the surrounding days saw a huge spike in room costs.And from December 2019:
"This is also not even close to the first time that members of Congress have helped pad Trump's bottom line by patronizing his properties. In fact, CREW has tracked 98 members of Congress who have visited a Trump business. Some have been frequent visitors, like Senator Lindsey Graham who has paid 17 visits, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy with 11, and Senator Rand Paul with 11."
"In November, we noticed a mysterious spike in the price of available rooms at Trump's DC hotel for a Saturday night in December. The minimum cost was 13 times the average, but we couldn't identify a reason for the spike, until photos surfaced of the Trump Victory Committee's winter retreat at Trump's Hotel on that exact night, which appears to have sold out much of the venue. While the least expensive room for a one-night stay at the hotel was around $500 on surrounding days, the cheapest room on December 14 was a whopping $6,719. With access to Trump, Pence, and other top officials, and a bonus invitation to the White House holiday party for donors, we no longer have to wonder why... The exorbitant cost is even more evidence that hosting fundraisers at the Trump International Hotel is one of the best ways to sell out the notoriously empty venue, sending donor money right into Trump’s pocket.These kinds of cash-ins take on a much more sinister complexion when the big spenders are entrenched interests looking to buy influence with the administration. Trump's retention of the Trump Organization has created a daily ethical morass, the depths of which are difficult to plumb; it simply has no precedent. It creates endless conflicts of interest. CREW began tracking them and had, by October 2019, documented over 3,000 of them. Among other things, lobbyists, political groups, representatives of foreign governments and foreign-government-linked orgs have, during Trump's presidency, suddenly come to see the merits of spending a great deal of money at Trump properties. This kind of patronage is completely unethical, of extremely dubious legality and when carried out by foreign governments and their associated entities and representatives, a direct violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution (whose framers didn't think it was right for American presidents to be in the pay of foreign powers).
"Lucky donors who managed to snag a room were also invited to the White House's holiday open house, meaning that the cost of a room at Trump's DC Hotel and donations towards his reelection included exclusive political access for the buyer... Rate spikes like this have happened before at Trump's DC hotel, on the Fourth of July and during a Senate Republican retreat in November; but at thirteen times the average rate, The Trump Victory retreat drove an unprecedented jump."
In November, 2019, CREW looked at how well-heeled interests were holding events at Trump properties:
"Private prisons, payday lenders, fossil fuel companies, and dozens of other special interests have learned one important truth about influence in the age of Trump: If you want to gain favor with the president and his administration, it doesn't hurt to hold lavish events at the properties he still owns and profits from. In the past, special interests have tried to ingratiate themselves with administrations by making large political donations, but in the Trump era, they can do so by personally enriching the president.Trump seems to appreciates this patronage; he certainly makes it pay:
"The evidence is overwhelming. According to CREW's tracking of Trump's conflicts of interest, special-interest groups--many of which are trying to secure favorable policy decisions from various agencies in the Trump administration--have hosted or sponsored at least 100 events at Trump properties. That amounts to roughly one special-interest event at a Trump property every 10 days he has been in office... Hosting an event at a Trump property frequently affords special interest groups access to high-level government officials. Trump himself has attended two of them... Meanwhile, CREW has tracked 60 other instances where Trump administration officials and 26 occasions where members of Congress have attended an event at a Trump property hosted by groups representing big businesses, banks, energy and an array of other special interests."
"The Trump administration has been kind to many of the industries that have gathered at a Trump hotel or resort. It has dealt or supported favorable policies to private prisons, payday lenders, and the fossil-fuel industry, each of which has hosted large gatherings at a Trump property.From CREW's accounting of Trump conflicts:
"Private prison contractor GEO Group, for example, hosted an annual conference at Trump National Doral near Miami in 2017 and sponsored another group's event there last month. Community Financial Services Association of America, a trade group representing payday lenders, has held events at the same Trump resort both this year and last, racking up about $1 million in charges. Energy industry groups including the National Mining Association and the Independent Petroleum Association of America have hosted no fewer than seven events at the Trump hotel in Washington.
"These tallies don't even include special-interest spending at Trump properties that wasn't spent on lavish events. For example, T-Mobile has admitted to Congress that spending by its executives at the Trump hotel in Washington increased significantly--to the tune of almost $200,000--while it sought approval from two executive-branch agencies for a merger with Sprint. In the end, they got what they wanted: Trump’s Justice Department signed off on the merger in July, which went on to gain approval from the Federal Communications Commission earlier last month."
"Foreign governments and foreign government-connected entities have learned to curry favor with President Trump and his administration by taking actions that benefit his businesses. Since President Trump took office, 141 foreign officials from 75 foreign governments have visited his properties and 8 governments have held or sponsored 13 events there. Some other countries, like China and Brazil, have granted the Trump Organization valuable trademarks, which in some cases had been languishing for years before President Trump's election, and that's not counting the trademarks that China and Japan have granted to Ivanka Trump.On 5 Dec., 2018, the Washington Post reported that
"Other conflicts--such as a foreign government developing infrastructure that helps a Trump-branded business overseas or foreign officials gaining private access to the president's son during a launch event for a foreign Trump-branded business--are more difficult to categorize, but they show how Trump's businesses at home and abroad could impact United States foreign policy."
"Lobbyists representing the Saudi [Arabian] government reserved blocks of rooms at President Trump's Washington, D.C., hotel within a month of Trump's election in 2016--paying for an estimated 500 nights at the luxury hotel in just three months, according to organizers of the trips and documents obtained by The Washington Post."Representatives from at least 32 foreign governments have visited the Trump Hotel D.C. since Donald Trump was elected president," reported 1100 Pennsylvania in September 2019. "At the Trump Hotel D.C., lobbyists advocating on behalf of foreign interests have pitched their causes--in person--to President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo"--1100 Pennsylvania that same month.
"At the time, these lobbyists were reserving large numbers of D.C.-area hotel rooms as part of an unorthodox campaign that offered U.S. military veterans a free trip to Washington--then sent them to Capitol Hill to lobby against a law the Saudis opposed, according to veterans and organizers.
"At first, lobbyists for the Saudis put the veterans up in Northern Virginia. Then, in December 2016, they switched most of their business to the Trump International Hotel in downtown Washington. In all, the lobbyists spent more than $270,000 to house six groups of visiting veterans at the Trump hotel, which Trump still owns."
In Aug. 2019, Trump granted himself a lucrative no-bid contract to host a bevy of world leaders at his own Doral golf resort in Florida for the next G-7 summit. After this uncharacteristically led to a flurry of negative stories--most of Trump's graft is absurdly underreported--even some Republicans began questioning the propriety of such graft. After a few months, Trump backed down and canceled the plan.
In July 2020, news broke that Trump had tried to steer the British Open golf tournament to his Turnberry resort in Scotland.
"The New York Times reported this week that the president urged his ambassador to the U.K. to try to get British officials to steer a lucrative golf tournament to the Trump Turnberry resort in Scotland, one of the president's struggling businesses. The reporting is very easy to believe, not only because of Trump's routine corruption, but also because the ambassador, billionaire donor Woody Johnson, apparently told several colleagues about the president's request, which he acted on.The State Dept. inspector general had investigated the matter in the Fall of 2019.
"In case there were any lingering doubts, career diplomat Lewis Lukens, Johnson's deputy in London, confirmed that he warned the ambassador that pressing British officials to boost Trump's private business would be unethical. (Lukens was later fired.)
"Initially, the White House had literally nothing to say about the controversy, which was notable in its own right, but at yesterday's press briefing, a reporter specifically asked the president whether he asked Johnson to do this. Trump replied:
"'No, I never spoke to Woody Johnson about that, about Turnberry. Turnberry is a highly respected course, as you know, one of the best in the world. And I read a story about it today and I had never, I never spoke to Woody Johnson about doing that. No.'"First, there's ample reason to believe Trump's denial is a lie. After all, there's no reason for Johnson, the president's financial supporter and handpicked ambassador, to make this up.
"Second, even the denial reeks of corruption. In response to a question about misusing his office to help his business, the president used the White House podium to praise and promote his business."
"NBC News added yesterday than an IG report 'was completed and marked classified as of May; an unclassified version has yet to be released.'"Trump subsequently fired the inspector general who carried out this investigation.
A McClatchy story from January 2018 examined some of the ways in which, in the aftermath of Trump's assumption of the presidency, foreign governments were suddenly doing favors for Trump businesses:
"In Indonesia, a local government plans to build a road to shorten the drive between the main airport on the island of Bali and the new high-end Trump resort and golf course.Foreign Policy from June 2017:
"In Panama, the country’s federal government intervened to ensure a sewer system around a 70-story Trump skyscraper shaped like a sail in Panama City would be completed.
"And in other countries, governments have donated public land, approved permits and eased environmental regulations for Trump-branded developments, creating a slew of potential conflicts as foreign leaders make investments that can be seen as gifts or attempts to gain access to the American president through his sprawling business empire."
"According to a report from the Associated Press, the Chinese government has approved nine Trump trademarks it had earlier rejected, in whole or in part... A New York Times review of 10 trademark databases in April showed that Trump’s company, now run by his two adult sons, has 157 trademark applications pending in 36 countries.And on into infinity.
"Beijing has now granted 39 Trump trademarks since the president took office. It has also granted his daughter, Ivanka, at least seven new trademarks since she joined her father's White House. There has also been scrutiny into her Chinese factories, after labor-rights activists were detained while inspecting one of the plants where Ivanka-branded shoes are made."
In an extraordinary article from 2018, Forbes looked at the corrupt morass created by Trump's commercial tenants:
"The largest American office of China's largest bank sits on the 20th floor of Trump Tower, six levels below the desk where Donald Trump built an empire and wrested a presidency. It's hard to get a glimpse inside. There do not appear to be any public photos of the office, the bank doesn't welcome visitors, and a man guards the elevators downstairs--one of the perks of forking over an estimated $2 million a year for the space.Trump conceals his rent roll, so Forbes tried to assemble one, by
"Trump Tower officially lists the tenant as the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, but make no mistake who's paying the rent: the Chinese government, which owns a majority of the company. And while the landlord is technically the Trump Organization, make no mistake who's cashing those millions: the president of the United States, who has placed day-to-day management with his sons but retains 100% ownership. This lease expires in October 2019, according to a debt prospectus obtained by Forbes. So if you assume that the Trumps want to keep this lucrative tenant, then Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. could well be negotiating right now over how many millions the Chinese government will pay the sitting president. Unless he has already taken care of it: In September 2015 then-candidate Trump boasted to Forbes that he had 'just renewed' the lease, around the time he was gearing up his campaign.
"It's a conflict of interest unprecedented in American history. But hardly unanticipated. The Founding Fathers specifically built this contingency into the Constitution through the Emoluments Clause, which prohibits U.S. officials from accepting gifts, titles or 'emoluments' from foreign governments... [N]early 200 congressional Democrats sued the president over possible violations in June. Much of the yammering in this area surrounds Trump's hotels, especially the one in Washington, D.C., which has billed $268,000 in hotel rooms and catering to the Saudi government, and his international licensing deals, which allow foreign tycoons and hucksters, many with connections to their local governments, to pay the Trump Organization more than $5 million a year in order to profit from the president's name in far-flung locales.
"But that's all small potatoes. The real money in the Trump empire comes from commercial tenants like the Chinese bank. Forbes estimates these tenants pay a collective $175 million a year or so to the president. And they do so anonymously."
"identifying 164 tenants, in virtually every industry, from all around the world, and then estimated payments, wherever possible, based on property records, debt prospectuses and conversations with real estate experts. When tenants refused to say how much space they rented, we made in-person visits and took rough measurements... When we could not get more detailed information, we assumed tenants paid rates comparable to those for similar properties in their respective markets. We believe we've tracked the sources for 75% of the rent flowing into the president's coffers.Keep those renters happy:
"The numbers are significant: $21 million here, $12 million there. The names even more so: At least 36 of Trump's tenants have meaningful relationships with the federal government, from contractors to lobbying firms to regulatory targets.
"How tangled is it all? Forbes discovered one deal, previously unreported, in which Trump partially serves as his own landlord: The U.S. government is paying some rent to the person who runs it."
"How, then, to consider the backroom discussions between federal officials and Walgreens Boots Alliance, one of the largest pharmacies in the world? Through its brand Duane Reade, it is the highest-paying tenant in Trump's skyscraper at 40 Wall Street in New York, with $3.2 million in annual rent, according to a 2015 prospectus. In October 2015, Walgreens Boots Alliance announced a $9.4 billion merger with rival Rite Aid, requiring a sign-off from antimonopoly regulators. After the deal failed to secure approval under President Obama, it then fell to the Trump administration, which arrived in Washington during the first quarter of 2017. According to federal disclosures, that was the same quarter Walgreens Boots Alliance began directly lobbying the White House on 'competition policy issues.' In September, despite objections by one of the two commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission, Trump's tenant got the green light for a slimmed-down, $4.4 billion version of the deal. In January, Trump announced he would nominate the commissioner who supported the deal, Maureen Ohlhausen, to be a federal judge."Then, there are the banks:
"Capital One rents space for an estimated $1 million at the bottom of Trump's Park Avenue condo building--while the Justice and Treasury departments investigate the bank's anti-money-laundering program. Four years ago, the Department of Justice reached a nearly $17 billion settlement--the largest ever of its kind--with Bank of America, the biggest tenant (an estimated $18 million a year) at the 555 California Street complex in San Francisco, where Trump owns a 30% stake. Like all big banks, BofA remains under scrutiny by federal officials. In December, Trump tenants UBS, Barclays and JPMorgan, plus Trump lender Deutsche Bank, got waiver extensions from the Department of Labor that allow them to avoid part of their punishment for illegally manipulating interest rates and foreign exchange rates."Before the Covid-19 outbreak ended Trump's constant campaign rallies, a regular feature of his stump speech was accusing Joe Biden's son Hunter of cashing in on Joe's previous office and insisting that if his children had done any such thing, he'd be held to a different standard. A representative sample from a Trump rally in October 2019:
"Can you imagine if Don Jr. or if Eric Trump or if our beautiful Ivanka--she works so hard... Can you imagine if they walked out with $1 1/2 billion?"The hapless Hunter Biden never walked out of anything with any "1 1/2 billion" and while most of Trump's specific claims regarding Hunter Biden were either false or distorted beyond recognition--and were widely and correctly dismissed as nonsense--it's a fact that Joe Biden's family has always cashed in on Joe Biden's offices. But, of course, it's also a fact that Trump's family has cashed in on his presidency since it began. GQ, in October 2019, covered some examples:
"Since [Trump's inauguration], Forbes says, [Donald Trump Jr. and Brother Eric] have sold off more than $100 million worth of Trump Organization real estate. That figure includes a $33 million sale of the company’s stake in a federally subsidized housing complex--a transaction Secretary of House & Urban Development Ben Carson had to approve--and a $3.2 million sale of land in the Dominican Republic last year, which Forbes called 'the clearest violation of their father's pledge to do no new foreign deals while in office.' Taxpayers cover the security costs of each business trip the pair makes--in the first two months of 2017 alone that included $97,830 for a trip to Uruguay, $53,155.25 for a trip to Vancouver, and $16,738.36 for a trip to Dubai, according to NBC News.Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner both hold senior jobs in Trump's White House, despite having no experience to qualify for them. When they were appointed, intelligence officials held up their security clearances; Trump simply overruled the officials. The GQ article covers how she got the first of those shady Chinese trademarks on the same day she and Kushner attended a White House state dinner with Chinese president Xi Jinping, how she and other White House employees used her used the spotlight provided by their work to promote Ivanka-branded apparel and accessories, how Jared appears to have used his office to pressure the Qatari government--ultimately successfully--into bailing him out of some trouble with a debt-ridden bit of Manhattan real-estate. There's this:
"In February 2017, the Trump Organization unloaded a $15.8 million Trump Park Avenue penthouse--a home formerly occupied by Jared and Ivanka--to Angela Chen, who runs a consulting firm with ties to Chinese government officials and (allegedly) Chinese military intelligence, says Mother Jones. A Forbes analysis found that this price was 13 percent more than that paid for a comparable unit a year earlier, and that it sold at a time when the building’s other units, on average, were selling for 25 percent less."[2]
"Cadre, a real estate investment company owned in part by Kushner, has taken in some $90 million in offshore funding via an ominously-described 'opaque offshore vehicle' in the Cayman Islands since he joined the White House. Some of the money, the Guardian says, came from other tax shelters; some of it came from unidentified sources in... Saudi Arabia,"Also the story of how Ivanka successfully pushed for the "Opportunity Zones" project, offering lavish tax-breaks to rich people who invest in areas designated as less developed, and is investing in those zones.
"Can you imagine" indeed.
That last item points to another bog 'burb in the Trump swamp.
Trump has frequently bragged that he donates his $400,000 presidential salary back to the government, taking only $1 a year to meet the constitutional obligation that he receive a paycheck. The Domestic Emoluments Clause of the Constitution limits the president's compensation to his congressionally-authorized salary and specifically forbids his taking any further fee, profit or stipend from either the U.S. government or the government of any state. Trump has walked all over this throughout the whole of his administration, fleecing the government for a fortune.
If a president wants to fleece the government, he has a lot of government employees at his command, and Trump has members of his own administration make extensive use of his properties. On 1 July, 2020, 1100 Pennsylvania reported that "27 of the 35 different officials who have served in President Trump's cabinet have visited the Trump Hotel D.C." Some have even lived there. 1100 Pennsylvania, 27 Sept. 2019:
"Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, then-Small Business Administrator Linda McMahon, then-advisor Gary Cohen, and then-communications director Anthony Scaramucci have lived (separately) at the Trump Hotel D.C."CREW catalogued 318 executive-branch officials who had gone to Trump properties during his administration.
In November 2019, the Huffington Post reported:
"With his Thanksgiving vacation, President Donald Trump's golf hobby has now cost Americans an estimated $115 million in travel and security expenses--the equivalent of 287 years of the presidential salary he frequently boasts about not taking.
"Of that amount, many hundreds of thousands--perhaps millions--of dollars have gone into his own cash registers, as Secret Service agents, White House staff and other administration officials stay and eat at his hotels and golf courses.
"The exact amount cannot be determined because the White House refuses to reveal how many Trump aides have been staying at his properties when he visits them and will not turn over receipts for the charges incurred."[3]
The piece covers how Trump used the rate-hike scam to swindle taxpayers:
Working from very incomplete records, the Washington Post tracked down "more than $471,000 in payments from taxpayers to Trump's companies," including some specific payments made by the Secret Service. In 2017 trips to Trump's Mar-a-Lago, Secret Service agents were charged $650 a night, an amount "more than triple the normal limit on federal spending for a
hotel room in that area, which was $182. It was even more than what the
State Department paid for rooms at Mar-a-Lago around the same time, which was $520 to $546." The Secret Service was charged this rate dozens of times in 2017. It was charged $396.15 a night--still more than twice the normal limit--dozens of times in 2018. More:"ProPublica... found that Mar-a-Lago charged taxpayers $546 a night for rooms--three times the per-diem rate and the maximum allowed by federal rules--for 24 Trump administration officials who stayed there during a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2017. Taxpayers also picked up a $1,006.60 bar tab for 54 top shelf drinks ordered by White House staff.In 2019, Eric Trump told Yahoo News:
“If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free. So everywhere that he goes, if he stays at one of his places, the government actually spends, meaning it saves a fortune because if they were to go to a hotel across the street, they'd be charging them $500 a night, whereas, you know we charge them, like $50."But that, of course, isn't how Trump operates. "Other recent presidents have allowed the Secret Service to use their properties," reported the Washington Post in February 2020, citing as examples "George H.W. Bush's compound in Maine, Bill Clinton's home in suburban New York, George W. Bush's ranch in Texas." Trump, on the other hand, charges the Secret Service to stay on his properties when it's protecting him. The Huffington Post:
"The group Property of the People recently revealed payments totaling $254,021 from the Secret Service to various Trump properties in just the first five months of his presidential tenure. Over that period, Trump had golfed 25 times. As of Wednesday, he has spent 223 days at a golf course he owns. If the first five months are an accurate indicator, that means the Secret Service has likely spent nearly $2.3 million in taxpayer money at Trump’s businesses, of which he is the sole owner."
"...[A]t the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, the Secret Service was charged $17,000 a month to use a three-bedroom cottage on the property, an unusually high rent for homes in that area, according to receipts from 2017. Trump's company billed the government even for days when Trump wasn’t there... Since fall 2017, there have been 100 rental listings for homes with three or more bedrooms in Bedminster, according to the website Zillow.com. None were anywhere near Trump's rate; the average rental rate was $3,400, and the highest rent listed on Zillow was $8,500. Trump charged twice that."The Secret Service was charged for that cottage for three months, even though Trump was only in Bedminster about 1/3 of that time.
In the Summer of 2019, Trump was planning to visit England then go to Normandy to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Allied invasion and decided to sandwich in a detour to his golf resort in Doonbeg, Ireland. At the time, Trump said "we're going to be staying at Doonbeg, in Ireland because it's convenient and it's a great place. But it's convenient." In reality, as the Huffington Post reported
"Trump was much closer to Paris and Normandy when he was staying in London for the first two nights of his trip. Staying in Doonbeg Wednesday night required a flight from England about 370 miles west to the Atlantic coast of Ireland. The Normandy visit on Thursday meant retracing most of those miles, flying 440 miles east, and then another 440 miles west to return to Ireland that afternoon."Trump had no official business in Ireland that would justify the excursion, so he added some. Sort of:
"Trump... discussed his resort with Ireland's minister for trade, employment and business upon his arrival at Shannon Airport, where he met Ireland’s prime minister. That 65-minute meeting was conducted at an airport lounge near the food court and the duty-free shopping... It was the entirety of Trump's official business in Ireland."Huffpost noted that this "official business" was scheduled well after Trump had decided to go to Doonbeg but with it, taxpayers picked up the bill. Huffpost reported that "the Ireland excursion cost taxpayers at least $3.6 million more than if Trump had stayed in London on Wednesday night and returned to Washington from France on Thursday, according to a HuffPost analysis." Among the expenses: "$1,023,940 to rent cars and limos; $10,866 to install temporary phone lines and $16,325 to rent golf carts for the Secret Service agents protecting Trump on the golf course."
Three months later, Vice President Mike Pence was on a state visit to Ireland but he didn't stay in Dublin, where worked the Irish leaders he was to meet: Instead, "the vice president stayed 181 miles away by car on the other side of Ireland--at the Trump International Golf Links & Hotel in Doonbeg. The person who suggested he stay there was the hotel's owner himself, President Trump."[4] This cost the usual fortune. Among other things, CREW later discovered that "taxpayers paid President Trump’s Doonbeg resort $15,144.94 for Secret Service lodging during Vice President Mike Pence's September 2019 trip to Ireland, according to records obtained by CREW."
By December 2019, Trump had spent nearly 1/3 of his presidency at his own properties at taxpayer's expense, money straight from the treasury to his own pocket.[5]
Trump looks after his cronies too.
A recent example that played out in public is the matter of Trump's scumbag buddy Roger Stone. In November 2019, Stone was convicted of 7 felonies stemming from his efforts to sabotage a congressional investigation that threatened Trump.
"Mr. Stone, 67, was convicted in federal court of seven felonies for obstructing the congressional inquiry, lying to investigators under oath and trying to block the testimony of a witness whose account would have exposed his lies. Jurors deliberated for a little over seven hours before convicting him on all counts. Together, the charges carry a maximum prison term of 50 years."The U.S. Attorney's office that successfully prosecuted the case recommended a sentence of 7 to 9 years. Trump publicly attacked that decision then intervened with the Justice Department to secure a reduced sentencing recommendation. All four U.S. Attorneys involved in the case resigned from it in protest. Stone received a much lower 40-month sentence then, before he was to report to prison to begin it, Trump commuted even that.
Trump's first National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, lasted only a few weeks on the job before having to resign in scandal. Flynn pled guilty to lying to the FBI about conversations he'd had with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. prior to assuming office. He then lied to others in the administration, including Vice President Mike Pence, who repeated his lies in public, opening up Flynn to the possibility of blackmail by the Russians, who knew the truth. At the time of his plea agreement, Flynn also admitted he'd been an unregistered foreign agent for the Turkish government. He was also reportedly involved in, among other things, a plot to kidnap a Turkish dissident living in the U.S. and return the fellow to Turkey. Flynn twice pled guilty to the lesser charges and was, as a consequence, never prosecuted for the Turkish business (he denied any involvement in the kidnapping plot). But then, after signing a detailed account of his lesser crimes, repeatedly admitting his guilt in court and agreeing to never withdraw his pleas, Flynn tried to back out. Trump--always looking to protect his friends and becoming increasingly obsessed with the Fox News-peddled idea of a "deep space" conspiracy inside the government that is out to get he and his underlings--fixated on the case and soon, the Department of Justice was, as in the Stone case, radically reducing its sentencing recommendation, arguing that probation would be sufficient. Eventually, the DOJ filed a brief requesting that the case against Flynn be dropped entirely. Reflecting the crackpot conspiracism of Fox, the brief was laughably false in every significant respect:
"The Justice Department did not merely contend that Flynn should be allowed to withdraw his plea, as he has been seeking to do. It argued that the entire case should be dismissed with prejudice--meaning that the case should be dismissed in a fashion that would preclude its being refiled... The government's 20-page brief is not an honest document... The brief's account of the history of the Flynn case is not accurate, its account of the government's own conduct equally flawed. And it all leads up to a conclusion so obviously wrong that one does not need to know anything about counterintelligence to see through it: that there is no reasonable basis even to interview a senior government official when that person has engaged over sanctions imposed against a foreign adversary government that interfered in an election--and who subsequently lied to the vice president of the United States about the substance of his conversation with an agent of that government. Based on this position, the Justice Department today took an even greater leap: that it is perfectly legal for the official, if interviewed under these circumstances, to lie through his teeth repeatedly to the FBI agents who show up to interview him.This was the Justice Dept. acting as defense counsel for a confessed felon. The prosecutors who worked on the case unanimously refused to sign the brief; the top prosecutor who had been on the case from the beginning resigned from it just before Justice filed. The presiding judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, is required to sign off on any dismissal and has proven unwilling to immediately do so, leading to further court action in which the Trump Justice Dept. officially joined Flynn's legal team in demanding the case be dropped. This is unlikely to succeed, so Flynn probably has a presidential pardon in his future.
"These are quite literally the positions that the Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr took today in a U.S. federal court."
Investigating Trump cronies can be a risky business. Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the southern district of New York, had successfully pursued an investigation of longtime Trump fixer Mickey Cohen, who pled guilty to financial and campaign finance crimes, implicating Trump in illegal payments made to two women during the 2016 campaign in order to keep them quiet about affairs they'd had with Trump. Berman also successfully indicted Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, associates of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and key players in carrying out Trump's Urkainain schemes. Berman was investigating Giuliani himself. And so on. In June 2020, Attorney General William Barr suddenly announced that Berman would be stepping down from his job. This, it turned out, was news to Berman, with whom this had never even been discussed. Berman learned of it via a press report. He immediately said he wouldn't be stepping down. Of that statement, Barr declared, "unfortunately, with your statement of last night you have chosen public spectacle over public service." Though it had been Barr, not Berman, who had created the public spectacle, Barr dropped the hammer: "Because you have declared that you have no intention of resigning, I have asked the President to remove you as of today, and he has done so."[6]
With socially destructive wealth concentration already at Gilded Age levels prior to the Trump administration, the signature legislative achievement of "populist" Trump is, of course, the massive 2017 tax-cut for the wealthy and for corporate America, paid for by taking on new public debt. Trump's own savings from that cut were likely in the tens-of-millions of dollars--exact figures aren't possible, as Trump conceals his tax returns from the public. Trump's wealthy donors made out like bandits, and they were appreciative--while the bill was under consideration, millionaires and billionaires dramatically ramped up their political giving to Trump and the Republicans (Trump, of course, had his hand out for payoffs right from the jump). After it was signed into law, Trump and his underlings made the package even worse:
"...big companies wanted more--and, not long after the bill became law in December 2017, the Trump administration began transforming the tax package into a greater windfall for the world's largest corporations and their shareholders. The tax bills of many big companies have ended up even smaller than what was anticipated when the president signed the bill... Through a series of obscure regulations, the Treasury carved out exceptions to the law that mean many leading American and foreign companies will owe little or nothing in new taxes on offshore profits, according to a review of the Treasury's rules, government lobbying records, and interviews with federal policymakers and tax experts. Companies were effectively let off the hook for tens if not hundreds of billions of taxes that they would have been required to pay."[7]Part of the tax package was the Opportunity Zone program, by which investors could save a fortune by plowing capital gains they may realize into federally-designated zones, which are supposed to be poor neighborhoods. The profits from those investments are, in turn tax-free. This was sold by Trump and other proponents as a way to spur investment in impoverished communities, and Trump has often bragged them up, including in his pitch ludicrous numbers he pulls out of an orifice about the amount being invested in them. In the Trump administration's handling of the program, it became another giveaway to the wealthy, leading to what the New York Times called "a wave of developments financed by and built for the wealthiest Americans... [E]ven supporters of the initiative agree that the bulk of the opportunity-zone money is going to places that do not need the help, while many poorer communities are so far empty-handed." Trump's cronies--former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, former Trump White House aide Anthony Scaramucci, real-estate magnate Richard LeFrak and the family of Jared Kushner "are looking to profit from what is shaping up to be a once-in-a-generation bonanza for elite investors." The Times offers examples of some of the luxury developments the program is subsidizing.
Mr. Scaramucci's development in New Orleans offers a portrait of how the tax break works. His investment company, SkyBridge Capital, is using the so-called opportunity zone initiative to help build a hotel, outfitted with an opulent restaurant and a rooftop pool, in the city's trendy Warehouse District."The tax benefit also is helping finance the construction of a 46-story, glass-wrapped apartment tower--amenities include a yoga lawn and a pool surrounded by cabanas and daybeds--in a Houston neighborhood already brimming with new projects aimed at the wealthy."And in Miami's hot Design District, where commercial real estate prices have nearly tripled in the last decade, the tax break is set to be used for a ritzy new office tower with a landscaped roof terrace."
That last project is the work of Daniel Lebensohn, who worked for Trump selling luxury condos North of Miami. Also in Miami...
"Mr. LeFrak--who donated nearly $500,000 to Mr. Trump’s campaign and inauguration and is personally close to the president--is working with a Florida partner on a 183-acre project that is set to include 12 residential towers and eight football fields' worth of retail and commercial space."In spring 2018, as they planned the so-called Sole Mia project, Mr. LeFrak's executives encouraged city officials in North Miami to nominate the area around the site as an opportunity zone, according to Larry M. Spring, the city manager. They did so, and the Treasury Department made the designation official."
"Financial institutions," note the Times, "are not even trying to make it look as if their
opportunity-zone investments were intended to benefit needy communities":
"CBRE, one of the country’s largest real estate companies, is seeking opportunity-zone funding for an apartment building in Alexandria, Va., which CBRE is pitching to prospective investors as 'one of the region's most affluent locations.'
"JPMorgan Chase is raising money to build housing targeting students in College Park, Md., near the University of Maryland. (Because many students do not have jobs, census data often wrongly suggests that college towns are poor neighborhoods.)
"In marketing materials, JPMorgan noted that while College Park 'qualifies as low income due to the student population, the area around it is affluent.' The bank added, 'The tax benefits can be remarkable.'
"The Swiss bank UBS is raising funds from its 'ultra high net worth' clients--requiring in some cases that they have at least $50 million in investable assets--for developments in New York and Connecticut. The projects include a 23-story retail and office building in Downtown Brooklyn and an upscale apartment building in New Rochelle, N.Y., with a yoga studio and 24-hour valet parking. There is even a spa--for residents' pets.
"Other companies have set up subscription databases showing which zones have the highest incomes and fastest-growing populations to help investors steer their money to the most lucrative and least risky destinations."
ProPublica notes that "the program currently lacks transparency or a mechanism for determining its effectiveness. Opportunity zone funds self-certify on their private tax forms that they are in compliance with the program. There is no mechanism for informing the public in any detail about who is using the tax break or for what purpose.""[N]umerous reports have highlighted ways in which politically connected individuals have landed opportunity zone designations for areas in which they have a financial stake, sometimes at the expense of poorer areas."ProPublica's reporting uncovered instances in Baltimore and Detroit in which billionaires stand to benefit from the break in areas that shouldn’t have qualified for the program in the first place. The Times reported that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had intervened to get a tract added to the program that included land owned by a billionaire investor... In June, ProPublica and WNYC reported on an opportunity zone in Baltimore largely owned by Under Armour founder Kevin Plank's private development company. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan picked the area for the program after a meeting with Plank's lobbyists, despite a member of his own staff noting that it was too wealthy to qualify for the program. Both Hogan and Plank's team have said the development will benefit a neglected part of the city and help the surrounding communities."Last month, ProPublica published a report showing that Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert stands to benefit from the program in wealthy areas of downtown Detroit, including one area that shouldn’t have qualified for the program. Internal emails showed that Gilbert’s representatives communicated with officials at the local, state and federal levels about the program prior to the areas being designated as opportunity zones. Quicken denies that the company lobbied the Treasury Department to make any particular areas eligible for the program."The New York Times reported last month on how Mnuchin personally intervened in the Treasury’s implementation of the law to include the Nevada tract where billionaire Michael Milken owns land."
After months of this reporting, the Treasury Department's inspector general finally got around to opening an investigation into the opportunity zones program in January.
When it came to the federal efforts to ameliorate the economic harm caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the story was the same. In March 2020, Trump signed into law the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. CARES was supposed to be a relief bill aimed at supporting small businesses through the crisis. The Paycheck Protection Program, created by the Act, was supposed to provide cheap loans to these businesses, which would be converted into grants if the businesses maintained payroll. In the Trump administration's hands, it became yet another giveaway to Trump family-members, cronies and the wealthy. ProPublica, 6 July, 2020:
"Businesses tied to President Donald Trump's family and associates stand to receive as much as $21 million in government loans designed to shore up payroll expenses for companies struggling amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to federal data released Monday... The [Paycheck Protection Program] has been criticized for including some loan recipients, particularly large, publicly traded companies, and for favoring wealthier businesses that had existing relationships with banks. In some cases customers could essentially skip the line... The New York Observer, the news website that [Jared] Kushner ran before entering the White House and is still owned by his brother-in-law's investment firm, was approved for between $350,000 and $1 million, data shows. A company called Princeton Forrestal LLC that is at least 40% owned by Kushner family members, according to a 2018 securities filing, was approved for $1 million to $2 million. Esplanade Livingston LLC, whose address is the same as that of the Kushner Companies real estate development business, was approved for $350,000 to $1 million... The loans to Kushner-related companies were first reported by The Daily Beast."In addition, up to $2 million was approved for the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy, a nonprofit religious school in Livingston, N.J., that’s named for Jared Kushner’s grandfather and supported by the family."In April, a bank approved a loan of between $150,000 and $350,000 for the Pennsylvania dental practice of Albert Hazzouri, who golfs with Trump and frequents Mar-a-Lago, the president's private club in Palm Beach, Florida. In 2017, Hazzouri used his access to the president to pass him a policy proposal on club stationery on behalf of the American Dental Association. He addressed the note to Trump 'Dear King.'"Hazzouri also leaned on his relationship with Trump in an unsuccessful bid to obtain a dentistry license to expand his business in Florida. Hazzouri didn't immediately return calls seeking comment Monday."Firms tied to the president's children also stand to benefit from the program. A small indoor lettuce farming business applied for funds between $150,000 and $350,000, SBA data show. Trump Jr. had invested in Eden Green Technology, a vertical farming company just south of Dallas, whose co-chair, Gentry Beach, was a Trump campaign fundraiser."Trump Jr. purchased his shares as Beach sought Trump administration funding for his other global business interests, ProPublica first reported in December 2018."
And:
It goes on and on:"Monday's list included a Manhattan law firm whose marquee attorney has fiercely defended Trump for almost two decades. Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP--whose managing partner, Marc Kasowitz, was at one point the president's top lawyer in the special counsel's Russia investigation--was set to receive between $5 million and $10 million from Citibank, data show. (The largest loan a company could seek was $10 million.)"Once dubbed the 'Donald Trump of lawyering' by The New York Times, Kasowitz represented Trump in the Trump University fraud lawsuit. and during the 2016 campaign he helped keep Trump's 1990 divorce from being unsealed. ProPublica reported three years ago that Kasowitz bragged to friends that he made between $10 million and $30 million per year."
ProPublica notes that the Trump administration resisted releasing the names of any recipients but finally bowed to pressure and released some but only those who had gotten over $150,000. "A consortium of news organizations, including ProPublica, has sued the administration under the Freedom of Information Act to release the full list of recipients and loan details.""The loans helped a hospital executive tightly linked to another Trump attorney and confidant, Rudy Giuliani. Cottage Hospital, a 25-bed critical access facility in Woodsville, New Hampshire, received between $2 million and $5 million in PPP loans. The hospital's CEO, Maria Ryan, is a longtime close associate of Giuliani's."During the last few years, Ryan has accompanied Giuliani on trips to Jerusalem, where the two visited the Hadassah Medical Organization, and to London, where they attended a two-game series between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. Last September, Giuliani brought Ryan to a state dinner at the White House."Ryan currently co-hosts a talk radio show with Giuliani called 'Uncovering the Truth.' She has referred to Giuliani, Trump's personal lawyer, as her 'business partner.' Cottage Hospital's annual revenues typically exceed $30 million, according to its most recent publicly available federal tax return. Ryan's salary, the last filing shows, is nearly $300,000."
CNBC, 14 May, 2020:
"Clay Lacy Aviation, a private jet charter company based in Van Nuys, California, that serves wealthy executives and celebrities, received the government grant as part of the CARES Act... The company appears to have received the largest grant of any private jet company on the list. The vast majority of the other 96 recipients of government funding or loans on the list are major commercial airlines, regional carriers or support companies... According to election filings, Lacy gave $2,700 to the Trump campaign in 2016--the maximum for an individual to give to the campaign--and he gave $47,000 to the Republican National Committee after Trump became the nominee."ProPublica, 15 May, 2020:
The Intercept, April 2020:"An Omaha, Nebraska-based private jet company whose principal owner donated generously to Donald Trump and Republicans ahead of the 2016 election received $20 million in taxpayer aid from the federal bailout package passed in March."Jet Linx Aviation, which caters to well-to-do CEOs and executives, was the second private plane company founded or owned by Trump donors to receive federal funds designated for the airline industry under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act... Jet Linx Management Company Vice Chairman John Denny Carreker and his wife, Connie, gave $68,100 to Trump’s campaign, the Republican National Committee and the Trump Victory Committee between October 2015 and November 2016, Federal Election Commission filings show. Connie Carreker gave an additional $1,000 to the Trump campaign in November 2018, according to the FEC... The average grant amount for the 70 private jet companies to receive aid was $2.2 million, about a tenth of what Jet Linx and Clay Lacy each received."
"Major donors to President Donald Trump's presidential reelection campaign have won coveted loans from the Paycheck Protection Program... The loans, which are converted to grants if payroll is maintained and other, sometimes unclear, conditions are met, have been out of reach for tens of thousands of small business owners, many of whom have faced delays and denials. But PPP loans have been swiftly approved for a number of corporations whose executives have donated heavily to Trump’s campaign, Securities and Exchange Commission records show.Actual small businesses, meanwhile, had trouble getting anything:
"The largest known recipient of small business rescue money has been a set of luxury hotels run by Archie Bennett and his son Monty Bennett. The pair have obtained over $59 million in PPP funds for Ashford Hospitality Trust and Braemar Hotels & Resorts, holding companies used to own and manage a range of hotels, including the Ritz-Carlton in St. Thomas... The father and son are also megadonors who have given nearly half a million dollars to Trump since 2016 and over $1.3 million to GOP politicians and groups in recent years. The company, disclosures show, also sought professional influence.
"Just days after the passage of the CARES Act, the sweeping bailout law that enabled the PPP program, the Ashford Hospitality Trust signed a lobbying contract with Jeffrey Miller, a lobbyist and fundraiser who has raised $1,494,000 for Trump’s 2020 reelection. Miller went to work attempting to influence the Small Business Administration and Congress on behalf of his client, records show, to obtain a share of the bailout money.
"They weren’t the only ones with a financial inside track to the Trump administration.
"Continental Materials Corp., a construction equipment product company, received $5.4 million in PPP loans. The firm is owned by the family of Ronald Gidwitz, who has donated $50,000 to Trump and over $109,000 to the Republican National Committee in recent years.
"Jarrett Streebin, the founder and CEO of the shipping and tracking start-up EasyPost, gave $105,600 to Trump last year, utilizing a joint fundraising PAC. Streebin's company obtained 'a few million dollars in a PPP loan,' according to an account in the Wall Street Journal.
"Nikola Motor Company, a startup that develops electric trucks, received $4.1 million in PPP loans. The company is run by Trevor Milton, a billionaire Trump donor. The hotel company owned by Gordon Sondland, the hotel magnate who donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, and later received an ambassadorship from the president, received PPP loans.
"Hallador Energy, an Indiana-based coal company, obtained $10 million in PPP funding. The company currently employs Scott Pruitt, Trump's former EPA administrator, as a lobbyist, the Washington Post reported. Phunware, a Texas-based technology firm employed by the Trump campaign to develop applications to track the locations of voters, received $2.8 million in PPP loans."
"Many large banks reportedly gave preference to wealthy customers. JPMorgan Chase, for instance, awarded nearly every high-income private banking customer a PPP loan who applied, while only 6 percent of the 300,000 retail small business customers who applied were able to receive a loan. Surveys from the National Federation of Independent Business show that only 20 percent of small businesses that applied received a PPP loan."A different angle: The New York Daily News, in conjunction with RevealNews, reported on how Republican red states, which had, at that time, barely been hit by the virus, were soaking up money from the program while Democratic blue states that had been devastated by the virus were being left out:
"An analysis of 1.6 million Paycheck Protection Program loans by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found that 58% of North Dakota’s small businesses got loans through the program. A majority of small businesses in Nebraska and South Dakota, neither of which have shelter-in-place orders, also received help.The Associated Press, 7 July, 2020:
"It was a different story, however, in states with high death tolls and some of the earliest stay-at-home orders prompted by COVID-19. In New York and New Jersey, where more than 350,000 are infected and more than 20,000 have died, just 18% of businesses got help, Reveal’s analysis found. In California, where more than 3 million workers have filed for unemployment after that state became the first to issue a stay-at-home order, that number was 15%."
"Government watchdog groups say they have little faith in the administration conducting oversight of the program," reported the AP, "noting Trump has ousted numerous inspectors general and has broadly resisted efforts to add transparency." Indeed, as recipients of aid were never banned from making political contributions, Trump appears to have been using the program as a fundraising tool, as businesses allegedly so ravaged by the virus that they're receiving aid then had plenty of money to plow back into Trump's campaign. The Huffington Post, 20 July, 2020:"As much as $273 million in federal coronavirus aid was awarded to more than 100 companies that are owned or operated by major donors to President Donald Trump's election efforts, according to an Associated Press analysis of federal data."Many were among the first to be approved for a loan in early April, when the administration was struggling to launch the lending program. And only eight businesses had to wait until early May before securing the aid, according to the AP’s review of data released Monday... Fast-food chains like Muy Brands, oil and gas companies and white-collar firms were all granted a slice of more than $659 billion in low-interest business loans that will be forgiven if the money is used on payroll, rent and similar expenses."All told, the Trump supporters who run these companies have contributed at least $11.1 million since May 2015 to Trump’s campaign committees, the Republican National Committee and America First Action, a super PAC that has been endorsed by Trump, the AP review found. Each donor gave at least $20,000... Among the recipients named Monday was the conservative website NewsMax, which was approved for a loan up to $5 million on April 13, the data shows. NewsMax CEO Christopher Ruddy has donated $525,000 to political committees supporting Trump, records show. He did not respond to a request for comment."Muy Brands, a San Antonio, Texas-based company that operates Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and Wendy’s franchises, was approved for a loan worth between $5 million and $10 million. Its owner, James Bodenstedt, has donated $672,570 to Trump since 2016, records show. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
"Irving, Texas-based M Crowd Restaurant Group, which owns 27 Texas restaurants including the Mi Cocina chain, was approved for between $5 million and $10 million. Ray Washburne, one of the company’s founders, was vice chairman of the Trump Victory Committee in 2016 and donated $100,000 to the PAC last August. The company did not respond to a request for comment."
"As the coronavirus ravaged America this spring, 15 business leaders gave President Donald Trump and the Republican Party $1.4 million in big checks while their businesses collected at least $41 million in federal assistance.A fine scam; in effect, public money that is supposed to go for small businesses being used, instead, to illicitly finance Trump's reelection.
"William Scott, CEO of railroad contractor Trans-Global Solutions, donated $150,000 to the Trump Victory committee in the weeks after his company received as much as $10 million from the Paycheck Protection Program on April 14.
"Alfred Hendrickson, the owner of a South Florida Toyota dealership, donated $41,100 to Trump’s Make America Great Committee on April 27, the same day his dealership received a PPP loan worth as much as $5 million.
"And Dan Eberhart, the head of oilfield services provider Canary LLC, gave $100,000 to Trump Victory on June 10, two months after receiving as much as $8.4 million in PPP loans for Canary and three affiliated companies."
Since the Summer of 2019, Trump and the Republican National Committee have engaged in a remarkable--and remarkably ham-handed--campaign to force GOP candidates and elected officials to use WinRed, a small-donor fundraising platform. For more than a decade, Republicans have conducted such fundraising via another platform, Anedot, and, more recently, its spin-off Give.GOP. Anedot has served over a thousand federal election clients. RealClearPolitics reported that "forty-five out of 50 state [Republican] parties are using it, as are 111 incumbent House campaigns and 22 incumbent Senate campaigns"--just shy of half the Republicans in the U.S. Congress. The platform is a proven success; processing over $300 million for Republicans in the 2018 cycle, and it's significantly cheaper for its clients than WinRed, but Trump and the RNC leadership have tried to hamstring it. The RNC, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Republican Governors Association sent the company cease-and-desist letters demanding it no longer use, among other things, "RNC", "GOP" or the Republican elephant logo."Trump Victory and the Make America Great Committee are both joint fundraising committees that pass along donations to both the Trump reelection campaign, which cannot take more than $5,600 from a single individual for an election cycle, and the Republican National Committee, which can accept as much as $1.4 million per election cycle per person.
"Among the donors to those committees, according to their 2020 second-quarter filings to the Federal Election Commission, were 15 individuals and couples affiliated with two dozen businesses that received PPP money, as reported by the Treasury earlier this month. Those companies together received at least $40.8 million and as much as $87.7 million in payments (based on the ranges of amounts provided by the Treasury)."
"An RNC memo addressed to 'interested state parties' and emailed July 8 started off with a soft sell. Extolling WinRed as being built on a 'proven fundraising technology' after years studying [Democratic fundraising platform] ActBlue, the memo explicitly stated that state GOP committees could continue using their existing processing 'for the time being.'What's really going on here? Some observers have suggested this misbehavior is merely the action of a Republican Establishment desperate to create a comparable alternative to Democratic powerhouse platform ActBlue and incompetently trying to force the issue by any means necessary but in the era of the Trump Swamp, there are always more base agendas in play: WinRed's founder Gerrit Lansing is a Republican insider and Trump crony. Lansing was appointed by Trump to be the swamp's chief digital officer but was forced out after only a few weeks because he was unable to pass the ethics screening. And there's also the fact that 2/3 of the processing fees WinRed charge go toward paying Stripe, a credit processing company of which Joshua Kushner--Jared Kushner's brother--owns a chunk.
"'We will alert you when WinRed begins processing for state accounts,' the memo stated. The email was from Chris Carr, political director for Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee for Trump, the RNC and several state party committees... But only one day later, the soft pitch gave way to threats as the RNC laid down the law, vowing to withhold national party committee investments and data from federal candidates and state parties who don’t sign-up for the WinRed platform."
On 20 June, 2018, MarketWatch ran a good editorial on the vending-machine nature of the Trump regime, written by, surprisingly enough, two authors from the noxious Center for American Progress.
"President Donald Trump recently directed Secretary of Energy Rick Perry to prepare steps to subsidize coal and nuclear power plants, which are struggling to compete against cheaper, cleaner alternatives. This directive would bail out some of his largest donors while increasing energy costs for millions of Americans, showing once again the grift and graft ethos at the center of his economic policy.This is Standard Operating Procedure in this administration.
"Coal barons Bob Murray and Joseph Craft, who have strongly pushed the bailout, have given Trump and Trump-aligned groups millions of dollars. FirstEnergy Solutions, another company that would benefit, paid Perry’s former campaign manager Jeff Miller more than $300,000 to lobby Perry for the bailout. Miller is also a major fundraiser for a Trump Super PAC, which got him access to Trump at an exclusive donor dinner; and the day after the dinner, Trump signaled his support for the coal baron bailout... This is not Murray's first attempt at a bailout. Last year, he asked for one and then gave $1 million to a Trump Super PAC four days later. Trump moved forward with the proposal, which would have increased energy costs for consumers up to $11.8 billion a year.... Craft, meanwhile, not only gave more than $2 million to Trump, but has also been a major backer of Scott Pruitt, who Trump tapped to run the Environmental Protection Agency... In his new position, Pruitt has taken a number of steps to change regulations to benefit coal companies like Craft's."
"Sadly, backroom deals with political donors have become the norm for the Trump administration. Rather than a focus on improving economic growth or creating good-paying jobs, Trump and his allies focus on helping friends, punishing enemies, and leaving everyone else with the bill. Trump's culture of corruption leads to a system that rewards payoffs and cronyism, not innovation and excellence."
UNCOVERING UNGOVERNING SWAMP UNDERLINGS
It's interesting to compare Trump's extraordinarily progressive rhetoric on, broadly, clean government throughout the 2016 campaign with the reality of the administration that emerged. In remarks delivered in Waukesha, Wisconsin (28 Sept., 2016), Trump said:
"Our campaign is about breaking up the special interest monopoly in Washington, D.C. We're trying to disrupt the collusion between the wealthy donors, the large corporations, and the media executives. They're all part of the same rigged political establishment... And they are all in for a big day of reckoning on November 8th."On 17 Oct., 2016, Trump issued a press release outlining a series of reforms he said he would enact:
"First: I am going to reinstitute a 5-year ban on all executive branch officials lobbying the government for 5 years after they leave government service. I am going to ask Congress to pass this ban into law so that it cannot be lifted by executive order.Within a few days of his election--and within a few weeks of that press release--Trump had already hired a slew of lobbyists and top donors for senior roles in his transition team, assigned to staffing departments that oversaw their employers:
"Second: I am going to ask Congress to institute its own 5-year ban on lobbying by former members of Congress and their staffs.
"Third: I am going to expand the definition of lobbyist so we close all the loopholes that former government officials use by labeling themselves consultants and advisors when we all know they are lobbyists.
"Fourth: I am going to issue a lifetime ban against senior executive branch officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government.
"And Fifth: I am going to ask Congress to pass a campaign finance reform that prevents registered foreign lobbyists from raising money in American elections.
"Not only will we end our government corruption, but we will end the economic stagnation... Decades of failure in Washington, and decades of special interest dealing, must come to an end."
"Donald Trump’s transition team appears to have deviated from its own ethics rule barring lobbyists whose work for Trump would overlap with any matters on which they lobbied in the previous year.
"According to a copy of Trump for America Inc.'s Code of Ethical Conduct obtained by POLITICO, a member of the transition team must pledge to 'disqualify myself from involvement in any particular transition matter if I have engaged in regulated lobbying activities with respect to such matter, as defined by the Lobbying Disclosure Act, within the previous 12 months.'
"But at least eight transition team members have done work that appears to flout that internal rule, Senate records show.
"Steve Hart, chairman of Williams & Jensen who was tasked with the handoff of the Labor Department, lobbied on labor issues for Anthem, Brinks and Smithfield Foods as recently as September.
"Michael McKenna, who has been running the Energy Department transition, is a lobbyist at MWR Strategies for French utility Engie (formerly GDF Suez) and power provider Southern Company.
"Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck's David Bernhardt, charged with the Department of Interior, is registered to lobby for Westlands Water District. Bernhardt told POLITICO his colleagues contacted Interior and Justice Department officials, but he has lobbied only Congress for that client.
"Jim Carter, the in-house lobbyist for manufacturing company Emerson, has been in charge of tax reform, even though he lobbied on taxation issues as recently as September.
"Michael Catanzaro, a lobbyist at CGCN for the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, Hess, Encana, Noble Energy and Devon Energy, was made responsible for energy independence. Working with him was Mike Ference, a lobbyist at S-3 Group for Halliburton, Koch Industries and Marathon Oil.
"Martin Whitmer was charged with transportation and infrastructure even though he is a registered lobbyist at Whitmer & Worrall for the American Association of Railroads, the National Asphalt Pavement Association and the Utilities Technology Council."
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| Cartoon by Kevin Siers |
In building his administration, Trump turned to those whose only real qualifications were that they gave money to he and the Republicans. Politico, 27 Dec., 2016:
"More than a third of the almost 200 people who have met with President-elect Donald Trump since his election last month, including those interviewing for administration jobs, gave large amounts of money to support his campaign and other Republicans this election cycle.Trump later made a public show of purging some of the lobbyists he'd initially hired and, in his first days in office in January 2017, announced--and loudly hyped--a new ethics policy. Far from the tough new approach Trump had vowed though, Trump's rules actually loosened the ethics requirements imposed by the prior president:
"Together the 73 donors contributed $1.7 million to Trump and groups supporting him, according to a POLITICO analysis of Federal Election Commission records, and $57.3 million to the rest of the party, averaging more than $800,000 per donor.
"Donors also represent 39 percent of the 119 people Trump reportedly considered for high-level government posts, and 38 percent of those he eventually picked, according to the analysis, which counted candidates named by the transition and in news reports.
"While campaign donors are often tapped to fill comfy diplomatic posts across the globe, the extent to which donors are stocking Trump’s administration is unparalleled in modern presidential history... Trump has stocked his Cabinet with six top donors--far more than any recent White House... The biggest donor who has met with Trump since the election is Todd Ricketts, Trump's pick for deputy secretary of commerce. Ricketts hails from the family that founded TD Ameritrade, owns the Chicago Cubs and is among the Republican Party's top benefactors. They handed Republicans more than $15.7 million for 2016 and more than $26 million in previous cycles. The family also organized a super PAC called Future45 that became the largest unlimited-money group supporting Trump. Todd Ricketts personally donated $63,835 to Republicans.
"Trump's choice to lead the Department of Education, Betsy DeVos, and her family (heirs to auto parts and multi-level marketing fortunes) spent $10.4 million this cycle, including $445,000 to Trump's joint fundraising committee (known as Trump Victory) and one of the super PACs supporting him. She and her husband, Dick, have contributed to the campaigns of 17 senators who will vote on whether to confirm her.
"Linda McMahon, the wrestling magnate whom Trump named to helm the Small Business Administration, gave $6 million to a pro-Trump super PAC. She and her husband, Vince, are also the largest donors to Trump's foundation.
"Labor Secretary-designee Andy Puzder, CEO of the parent company of the Carl's Jr. and Hardee’s fast food chains, and his wife gave $160,000 to Trump Victory and more than $600,000 to other Republicans this cycle.
"Trump's pick for treasury secretary, investor Steven Mnuchin, personally chipped in $425,000, but was arguably responsible for almost everything Trump raised as his campaign’s finance chairman.
"Beyond the donors joining Trump's administration, two of his biggest benefactors perhaps wield more influence over the transition than any individual donors in history.
"Rebekah Mercer--who with her father, the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, spent more than $22 million backing Republicans this past cycle--is closely aligned with chief strategist Steve Bannon and special counselor Kellyanne Conway, and she has taken a crucial role picking Cabinet nominees. Robert Mercer gave $2 million to a pro-Trump super PAC.
"Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist playing an influential role on Trump's transition team, spent almost $3.3 million this cycle, including $250,000 to Trump Victory and $1 million to a super PAC."
"President Donald Trump's much-hyped ban on administration officials becoming lobbyists removed some of President Barack Obama's ethics rules instead of strengthening them.Even after loosening ethics restrictions, Trump refused to enforce his own rules.
"Trump's ethics pledge, issued as an executive order on Saturday, includes a five-year 'lobbying ban' that falls short of its name, preventing officials from lobbying the agency they worked in for five years after they leave, but allowing them to lobby other parts of the government.
"The order also lets lobbyists join the administration as long as they don't work on anything they specifically lobbied on for two years. Obama's order from 2009, which Trump revoked, blocked people who were registered lobbyists in the preceding year from taking administration jobs... Obama's order also restricted all administration officials from contacting their former agencies for two years after they leave. Trump changed it back to one year for some 3,000 people--everyone except cabinet-level appointees... Obama issued ethics waivers for some officials, and Trump's executive order retained that ability but removed the requirement to disclose them. That opens the door to the White House departing from the policy without public scrutiny or political consequences; the White House could claim any apparent violation had been exempted... The transition also backslid on applying similar rules to its officials, who are allowed to resume lobbying after six months. And several campaign aides, including former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, sidestepped the restrictions by going straight to K Street."
Executive nominees that have to be confirmed by the Senate are required to "submit their employment, earnings, investment, and clients to the [Office of Government Ethics]." The purpose of the OGE is "to ensure an ethical transition, enforcing the laws banning financial conflicts of interest for administration officials." But from the beginning of his transition, Trump was ignoring it:
Trump decided to begin appointing people without ethics vetting, a move Shaub called "unprecedented." Also unprecedented was the Trump team's refusal to communicate with OGE.[8] Later that year, when the Government Accountability Office attempted an audit of the transition, Trump's team refused to even be interviewed--ignored GAO. Noting the obvious, GAO found that Trump's team had, in the transition, broken precedent with his predecessors."Trump's team didn't seem to care. Walter Shaub, director of the ethics office, sent multiple emails offering help and guidance in the week after the election. The emails, released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by MSNBC and the James Madison Project, show he grew increasingly concerned as he heard little in response."'We seem to have lost contact with the Trump-Pence transition since the election,' Shaub concluded November 18, in a strongly worded note urging the transition team to get the office to vet its nominees."After Shaub’s note, the process finally got underway. But the Trump transition team continued to lag behind. When the Senate began confirmation hearings on Tuesday, just seven of Trump's 26 confirmable appointees had finalized, publicly available agreements that explain how they'll avoid conflicts of interest, and only half of them had even submitted the necessary paperwork."
This pointed to what was to come: an administration full of grifters, clowns, crooks and conflicts of interest. Trump hires donors, cronies, demented white nationalists, crackpot conspiracists and--perhaps most perniciously--lobbyists and other representatives of regulated industries, who, in their Trump jobs, are charged with regulating the industries for which they've worked.[9] He routinely hires people who have long and loudly disagreed with the basic mission--often the very existence--of a government agency and tasks them with working in or even leading that agency. Because so many of his nominees couldn't survive the heightened scrutiny a Senate confirmation process would bring, he regularly leaves large portions of the government without proper leadership or installs only temporary leaders--in studying the Trump administration, one will hear the word "acting" tacked on to the titles of the heads of agencies. A lot. Less than a year into the administration, the Daily Beast examined Trump's nominations to positions that required Senate approval:
"Nearly a year since he won election, the president has turned federal agencies over to the private industries that they regulate. And he has done so to a degree that ethics groups say they have never witnessed.That Beast article recounts the story of Steven Gardner:
"The Daily Beast examined 341 nominations the president has made to Senate-confirmed administration positions. Of those, more than half (179) have some notable conflict of interest, according to a comprehensive review of public records. One hundred and five nominees worked in the industries that they were being tasked with regulating; 63 lobbied for, were lawyers for, or otherwise represented industry members that they were being tasked with regulating; and 11 received payments or campaign donations from members of the industry that they were being tasked with regulating.
"Of the 162 nominees who didn't have an overt conflict, 19 had either given money to or been a surrogate for Trump's campaign (many of them ending up in ambassadorships), while 24 were career appointments or reappointments."[10]
"In August 2016, energy consultant Steven Gardner gave a presentation to the trade group Professional Engineers in Mining (PDF). In it, he hammered the Department of the Interior's Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement for what he said was a highly flawed regulatory process behind the office's Stream Protection Rule, a regulation designed to prevent water pollution near coal production sites. Gardner's firm, ECSI LLC, had been retained by a coal industry trade group 'to conduct a comprehensive critical review of the proposed rule,' which it opposed.When the Senate declined to confirm Gardner, Trump initially resubmitted the nomination, only withdrawing it later.
"Gardner ended his August 2016 presentation with a slide asking, 'What's next?' that featured a photo of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Contrary to the slide's projection, Donald Trump prevailed and ended up signing legislation rolling back the Stream Protection Rule.
"And last week, things came full circle when the president nominated Gardner to lead the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, the very office he had vehemently criticized on behalf of a client in the coal industry."
To be the nation's top mining regulator, Trump picked David Zatezalo, the head of a mining company. If that wasn't scandalous enough, ProPublica found that:
"The coal mining company run by President Donald Trump's nominee to be the nation's top mining regulator has already come under criticism for weaknesses in its safety record. It turns out the company was also found by the government to have illegally retaliated against a foreman who complained about sexual and ethnic harassment from supervisors, unsafe conditions and drug use at one of its mines."To head the Department of Health and Human Services, Trump chose former Republican congressmen Tom Price, who, immediately prior to his nomination, was sitting in congress engaged in extremely dubious stock transactions regarding healthcare-related companies. He lasted a little over 7 months before he was forced to resign in scandal after it was revealed that he had inappropriately spent over a million taxpayer dollars on fancy private flights.
Administration officials have regularly pulled such stunts. David Shulkin, Trump's Veteran's Affairs Secretary, used an official trip to essentially take his wife on vacation abroad at taxpayer's expense. Trump's Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and her husband "accepted seven free flights on luxury private aircraft from three South Carolina businessmen." CREW filed a complaint with the State Department's Office of Inspector General requesting an investigation; Haley resigned her job within 24 hours. Trump's Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeatedly used official government trips to visit big Republican donors as he mulled jumping into a Senate race and a potential 2024 presidential bid. When the State IG launched a probe into this conduct, Pompeo requested that Trump fire the fellow, which was done. In October 2018, Roll Call reported that the Interior Department's inspector general had concluded that former congressman Ryan Zinke, Trump's Secretary of the Interior, had "violated federal policy" with regard to travel.
"The inspector general's office reached its findings after investigating allegations that Zinke had made numerous trips, including in private and military jets, at taxpayer expense... Zinke also cost taxpayers $25,000 when he took an unarmed security detail with him during a vacation to Turkey and Greece, the IG said in its report."Zinke had looked into hiring his wife as a volunteer at Interior, which would have allowed her to travel with him at public expense all the time but this was never done.
Like most of the rest of Trump's major appointments, Zinke was a constant source of scandal.
"He reinstituted an arcane military ritual in which staffers are required to scurry up to the roof to fly a special secretarial flag whenever he enters the building. He commissioned commemorative coins bearing his name to give out to employees and visitors. His wife, Lolita Zinek, reportedly treats Interior Department staff like her personal party planners and travel agents. And, of course, like any good Trump administration official, there are the private flights on the taxpayers’ dime... In October, Zinke received a rare rebuke from the Interior's Office of the Inspector General, which was trying to figure out if the secretary's use of taxpayer-funded private jets was completely above board. The investigation had been made extremely difficult, if not impossible, according to Deputy Inspector General Mary Kendall, due to 'absent or incomplete documentation' for many of the trips in question. According to Kendall, Interior officials had failed to provide evidence to 'distinguish between personal, political, and official travel' or cost-analysis documentation that could justify Zinke's decision to fly on chartered or military aircraft."By July 2018, Zinke was up to his neck in federal investigations:
"[T]hose that are currently open include investigations into allegations of scrubbing climate change from government reports, a decision to halt studies on the impact of drilling and mining, the improper use of agency vehicles, a Connecticut casino expansion, and two separate violations of the Hatch Act. That law prohibits most executive branch employees from engaging in certain political activities, something Zinke may have done with, among other things, a pair of socks.Investigators in the office of the Interior Department's inspector general came to believe Zinke had lied to them about that casino business, which led to still another investigation. The Interior IG had to drop its examination of those staff reassignments because Zinke, in an apparent effort to foil oversight that recurs throughout the Trump administration, kept only the sketchiest of records. Zinke had carried out a sudden mass transfer of 27 members of the department's Senior Executive Service. The transfers, as noted by the Washington Post, "came without prior notice and forced some senior workers to move across the country."
A third investigation into a possible Hatch Act violation was opened and closed. Other closed investigations into Zinke's actions involve improper use of chartered flights, senior staff reassignments, and alleged threats made to Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski's office over the Affordable Care Act.
That investigation was closed due to a lack of cooperation from Interior officials. Thomas Armstrong, general counsel for the Government Accountability Office, wrote senior House Democrats at the time that, 'Interior did not provide us with any information on the substance of the telephone calls. In light of this, we lack the requisite facts on which to base a legal opinion.'
"Requests for investigation over a fourth potential Hatch Act violation, along with investment in a fire arms company and a U.S. Geological Survey science data ethical breach, are still pending."
"In the new report, Deputy Inspector General Mary Kendall of Interior found that the members of a board set up to make the transfer decisions in May did not follow the correct protocol for record-keeping. The Executive Resources Board, Kendall's report found, 'did not document its plan or the reasons it used when selecting senior executives for reassignment, nor did it gather the information needed to make informed decisions about the reassignments.'Then, there was this:
"Without documentation including 'meeting minutes, notes, voting or decision records,' investigators were not able to determine whether the board's decisions complied with federal law to protect employees from sudden transfers. Interviews with those making personnel decisions did not yield an explanation. 'When we asked the ERB members who in the Department leadership ordered the reassignment of senior executives, no one could provide an answer,' the report read... In total, 12 reassigned Interior employees interviewed by the inspector general’s office... said they believed they were transferred because of prior work on climate, conservation, energy and other issues."
"A foundation established by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and headed by his wife is playing a key role in a real-estate deal backed by the chairman of Halliburton, the oil-services giant that stands to benefit from any of the Interior Department’s decisions to open public lands for oil exploration or change standards for drilling.Zinke tried to distance himself from this story, initially saying he'd "resigned as president and board member" of the foundation when he became Interior Secretary. Two days later, it emerged that Zinke had, in fact, met--at the Interior Department--with Lesar and the other developers involved in the project. Zinke's official calendar for that day didn't disclose who he met.
"A group funded by David Lesar, the Halliburton chairman, is planning a large commercial development on a former industrial site near the center of the Zinkes' hometown of Whitefish, a resort area that has grown increasingly popular with wealthy tourists. The development would include a hotel and retail shops. There also would be a microbrewery--a business first proposed in 2012 by Ryan Zinke and for which he lobbied town officials for half a decade.
"The Whitefish city planner, David Taylor, said in an interview that the project's developer suggested to him that the microbrewery would be set aside for Ryan and Lola Zinke to own and operate, though the developer told POLITICO that no final decisions have been made.
"Meanwhile, a foundation created by Ryan Zinke is providing crucial assistance. Lola Zinke pledged in writing to allow the Lesar-backed developer to build a parking lot for the project on land that was donated to the foundation to create a Veterans Peace Park for citizens of Whitefish. The 14-acre plot, which has not been significantly developed as a park, is still owned by the foundation. Lola Zinke is its president, a role her husband gave up when he became interior secretary.
"The Zinkes stand to benefit from the project in another way: They own land on the other side of the development, and have long sparred with neighbors about their various plans for it. If the new hotel, retail stores and microbrewery go through, real estate agents say, the Zinke-owned land next door would stand to increase substantially in value."
Lesar... is providing money to back the hotel and retail development, according to business records and officials at Whitefish city government and Halliburton. He also has a longstanding relationship with the Zinkes. In 2014, he and his wife, Sheryl, gave $10,400, the maximum allowed by law, to Zinke’s first House campaign. His only other federal contributions that year were to Halliburton's PAC and the campaign of Rep. Liz Cheney, whose father, Dick, ran the company before becoming George W. Bush's vice president."
Zinke had vowed to "create a conservation stewardship legacy, second only to Teddy Roosevelt." Instead, he just acted as a shill for the rapacious and environmentally-destructive energy interests that fund Republican campaigns:
"The lengths to which Zinke went to ensure a better future for coal, oil, gas, and mining interests are impressive. He overturned an Obama-era moratorium on new coal leases on federal land and scrapped a hydraulic fracturing rule meant to protect public health. He rolled back an Obama-era rule limiting the amount of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, that can be released from oil and gas operations on federal and tribal lands. He proposed opening nearly all US waters to offshore drilling, and moved to weaken key offshore safety regulations adopted in the aftermath of the devastating Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In fiscal 2018, Interior offered more than 12.8 million federal acres for oil and gas leasing, 'triple the average offered during President Barack Obama’s second term,' the New York Times reported. That’s an area more than twice the size of Maryland. Some of those leases sold for as little as $1.50 per acre, according to a Times investigation.Zinke managed to hold his job for nearly 2 years--with more corruption investigations opening along the way--before he was finally forced to resign in January 2019.[11]
"The oil and gas industry, a top donor to Zinke’s congressional campaigns, applauded the secretary at nearly every turn... Perhaps just as controversial as Zinke's fossil fuel push were his actions targeting already protected lands. Whereas Roosevelt protected more than 230 million acres of federal land by establishing five national parks, 18 national monuments, and dozens of national forests, wildlife refuges, and bird reserves, Zinke led the largest reduction of national monuments in American history. Last December, on Zinke’s recommendation, Trump cut a collective 2 million acres from a pair of Utah national monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. The move opened the door for oil, mining, and other development... And despite Zinke’s repeated assurances that the administration would not sell or transfer federal lands, the Bureau of Land Management proposed pawning off more than 1,600 acres of former Grand Staircase-Escalante land, as HuffPost first reported... Along the way, Zinke peddled industry talking points, misinformation, and climate change denial. In a May 2017 op-ed, he argued that natural areas can benefit from resource extraction. He claimed California’s catastrophic wildfires have 'nothing to do with climate change'--then later said 'of course' it was a factor, without acknowledging the role humans play. And he repeatedly cast doubt on the latest federal climate assessment, which found that greenhouse gas emissions have put the planet on a trajectory toward catastrophic climate change... His final acts as secretary included pushing the administration one step closer to opening Alaska's fragile Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling, which he said 'stands out among the most impactful' Interior accomplishments in terms of 'bolstering America’s economic strength and security.' (That claim about the economy is highly debatable.) He unveiled a plan to dismantle Obama-era protections for the greater sage grouse, a move that would open up millions of acres of the declining game bird's habitat to energy and mineral development. When a US Geological Survey assessment identified an ocean of previously undiscovered oil and gas reserves in the Permian Basin under Texas and New Mexico, Zinke rejoiced. 'Christmas came a few weeks early,' he said."
As Zinke's replacement, Trump chose David Bernhardt, a lobbyist for the oil and gas and agriculture industries who had served as a Deputy Secretary under Zinke. He too is just one long scandal. Within 4 days of his confirmation, the department's inspector general had opened an investigation, looking into 7 complaints alleging conflicts of interest by the new Interior Secretary.
Bernhardt testified to congress--under oath--that all of his lobbying work ended in November 2016, and, in fact, he ended his registration as a lobbyist at that time but the New York Times later discovered he'd continued lobbying for one of his clients, California's Westlands Water District, right up until at least March 2017--only a few weeks before being chosen as Deputy Sec. of Interior. He'd been working for years for Westlands, lobbying the government to sufficiently weaken environmental protections as to allow the environmentally destructive re-routing of river-water for irrigation for commercial agriculture."As a top official since 2017 at the Interior Department," the New York Times reported, "Mr. Bernhardt has been finishing the job: He is working to strip away the rules [Westlands] had hired him to oppose."
Another of Bernhardt's clients, the Independent Petroleum Producers Association, sought, in 2017, to gut a century-old law that punished oil and gas companies for killing certain migratory birds; the Interior Department issued a legal opinion in support of this change then moved ahead with it.
At the end of 2018, Trump and the Republicans shut down the federal government in an effort to, among other things, blackmail congress into funding his wall on the Southern border--the one for which Trump, during the 2016 campaign, told the public Mexico would be paying. During the shutdown, 2,300 members of the Bureau of Land Management were deemed essential enough to remain on duty but Bernhardt assigned 800 of them--over 1/3--to processing new oil-drilling applications. And--big surprise...
"A new analysis by the Center for Western Priorities finds that dozens of drilling permits approved during the shutdown were for companies that serve on the boards of major trade associations that were recent clients of David Bernhardt.At the same time, Bernhardt undertook efforts to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil-drilling, moving forward with the required public comment period on the horrific proposal at a time when Bureau of Land Management officials had largely been sacked and were unavailable to answer questions.
"According to data from the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, 71 offshore drilling permits were approved during the shutdown. Of those, 53 permits were for companies that sit on the board of directors for the National Ocean Industries Association (NOIA), a major offshore drilling trade association and former Bernhardt client... Similarly, of the 38 onshore drilling permits approved by the Bureau of Land Management during the shutdown, 20 were for companies that sit on the board of directors of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) or affiliates of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association (USOGA), both former Bernhardt clients. When seeking office at the Interior Department, Bernhardt listed both trade associations on his ethics recusal and noted IPAA was a source of personal income on his financial disclosure."
Entrenched interests love having their people on the inside. In January 2020, Public Citizen issued an analysis that found that
"17 former lobbying and legal clients who were on Bernhardt's recusal list have lobbied the federal government since the start of the Trump administration. The analysis also found $29.9 million in lobbying spending by former Bernhardt clients over the past three years. Of the 17 former clients, 14 have lobbied the Interior Department since the start of the Trump administration. The eight largest, each of which have spent more than $1 million on lobbying since the Trump administration began, were: Sempra Energy, Noble Energy, Equinor, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, Cadiz Inc., NRG Energy, Wetlands Water District and the Forest County Potawatomi Community."With Bernhardt's in place at Interior, his former lobbying firm suddenly started doing gangbusters business with clients looking to lobby the department:
Like his predecessor Zinke, Bernhardt keeps intentionally vague records. In February 2019, CNN reported that"Over the past three years, according to federal records, acting interior secretary David Bernhardt's former firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck has quadrupled its business related to Interior."In 2018, two dozen clients paid BHFS a total of $4.8 million to lobby Interior, according to data compiled from a lobbying database maintained by the Senate. During the previous year, when Bernhardt left the firm to join the Trump administration as deputy secretary, it collected a total of $3.5 million in Interior-related revenue."By comparison, the firm's total income to lobby Interior in 2016 was $1.2 million. During all but one year going back to 2009, BHFS‘s Interior-related revenue never broke seven figures."
"More than 150 entries [in Bernhardt's official calendar] from August 2017 through September 2018 'failed to include either a description of the meeting topic or the non-DOI attendees,' the letter says, including 98 entries described as 'External Meeting.'"A month later, the Washington Post reported on how Bernhardt's calendar is prepared. Interior prepares a card each day using a Google document and featuring Bernhardt's detailed schedule but withholds the information from the public then overwrites it the next day, keeping no copy. To recover this, Interior staffers had to go back and look at version histories of the document. When congress inquired about Bernhardt's calendar, Bernhardt fired off a snotty letter asserting, "I have not personally maintained a calendar for years, and I have no intention of suddenly doing so now."
A March 2019 report from Documented points to one of the likely reasons for this:
"A new analysis from Documented has found that from 2/15/17 to 10/1/18, there were at least 70 meetings between top DOI political appointees and entities listed on Acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt's ethics recusal letter. The analysis demonstrates that despite legally binding ethics pledges, Bernhardt's one time lobbying clients have few fetters on their access to top Interior policymakers."Scott Pruitt was a climate change denialist who had been one of a group of Republican attorneys general who had secretly teamed up with polluting industries to fight Obama-era environmental regulations. With such a pedigree, Trump chose him to head the Environmental Protection Agency.
Among other things, Pruitt removed from the EPA's advisory boards multiple scientists who had gotten EPA grants. This was rather cynically presented as a measure to combat conflicts of interest. "Those advisory committees have given us the bedrock of science to ensure that we’re making informed decisions," Pruitt said at an EPA event in October 2017. "And when we have members of those committees that have received tens of millions of dollars in grants at the same time that they're advising this agency on rulemaking, that is not good and that's not right." Pruitt's commitment to opposing conflicts of interest--and his real motive for adopting this policy--was immediately demonstrated by his replacing the dismissed scientists with employees of the polluting energy companies EPA is charged with regulating.
As icing on the cake, it later emerged that Pruitt made these new appointments "at the suggestion of campaign contributors and oil and coal industry officials."
"The American Petroleum Institute... put forward six of its own recommendations for various science boards, and two of those ultimately landed positions advising EPA: Merl Lindstrom, the vice president of technology for Phillips 66, and Robert Merritt, a retired geoscience manager from oil giant Total SA. API Director of Federal Relations Hilary Moffett in August sent the list of candidates to Jackson and Deputy Assistant Administrator for Research and Development Richard Yamada."Texas businessman Doug Deason submitted a list of candidates for the Science Advisory Board. His only qualification for making such recommendations was that he's a Trump mega-donor; he and his family had given nearly $1 million to Trump and the Republicans in 2016:
"Pruitt has regularly sought to build connections with top GOP donors, including some whose businesses are heavily regulated by EPA. He has huddled with Steve Chancellor, a coal executive who raised over $1 million for Trump, POLITICO reported. And he sat in coveted courtside seats at a University of Kentucky basketball game with tickets from billionaire coal magnate and Republican funder Joe Craft, whose wife is Trump's ambassador to Canada, The New York Times has reported.Deason's list was compiled by Kathleen Hartnett White, another climate-change denialist who had written a book defending polluting fossil fuel companies from criticism by environmentalists.
"Deason's top recommendation to Pruitt was Michael Honeycutt, a toxicologist at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, who was subsequently appointed to lead the Science Advisory Board, which counsels the agency on how it uses science to write regulations and is currently reviewing sweeping rule changes Pruitt is implementing. Honeycutt has been a critic of EPA's regulations, and cast doubt on its assessments of the dangers of mercury, arsenic and ozone pollution.
"According to internal emails, Deason told Pruitt's then-scheduler Sydney Hupp in May 2017 that Pruitt 'asked that I help them add a few experts on a new proposed Science Advisory Board.' EPA didn't publicly request candidates until June."
"During her time on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, [Hartnett White] argued that renewables are 'a false hope' and that coal helped abolish slavery. Among her many demonstrably false proclamations, White called climate change the 'dogmatic claim of ideologues and clerics' and said that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant."And:
"Hartnett White, a senior fellow at the Austin-based conservative think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation, has said that she would like to help cut many of these regulations and refers to them as 'red tape.' She is in favor of revising the National Environmental Policy Act, signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1970, which compels federal agencies to analyze how proposals may affect the environment before they are approved. At the Texas Public Policy Foundation, she helps run the group's Fueling Freedom Project, a campaign to deregulate the energy sector."Such views led Trump to appoint Hartnett White to lead the Council on Environmental Quality! But at her confirmation hearing, she was unable to answer even the most basic questions regarding the environmental science that would have been her milieu had she been confirmed. Republicans nevertheless voted to send her nomination to the full Senate.
"Then, White committed a cardinal mistake. In response to a series of questions from the Senate Democrats, White seemed to have plagiarized answers from EPA administrator Scott Pruitt and EPA assistant administrator Bill Wehrum in at least 18 instances. Senator Tom Carper, minority leader on the environment committee, and other Democrats wrote that they were 'troubled' White appeared to 'have cut and pasted from the written answers of other nominees.'Hartnett White's nomination was withdrawn in February 2018. Perhaps she found some consolation in the fact that her awful recommendations for those advisory boards, delivered by Deason to Pruitt, were hired.[12]
"But by the end of December 2017, the Senate had failed to bring up her nomination after 77 days. The Senate decided at the close of session to send the nomination back to the White House, instead of tabling it for the next year, forcing the White House to decide whether to renominate her. In January, the White House resubmitted her name for consideration along with several others. Carper responded that White's 'disdain for science and basic facts is clear' and that the Trump administration 'should expect a fight.'
"Now, the Trump administration has apparently decided White is not worth the fight."
Pruitt, meanwhile, seemed to be competing with Ryan Zinke for who could wrack up the most corruption investigations into his activities. From May 2018:
"There are currently 15 federal investigations reviewing his conduct in office, including one where the Government Accountability Office decisively concluded that his actions violated two U.S. laws."Under investigation were Pruitt's "stays in pricey hotels, his first-class airfares and his trips on military aircraft and charter flights," his diversion of EPA resources to enlarge his security detail, expand its duties to around-the-clock and to take it with him everywhere, even on family outings to Disneyland and the Rose Bowl, and his leasing, for only $50 a night, of a fancy D.C. condo from the wife of the head of Williams & Jensen, a lobbying firm. That last one sound bad enough? It never is:
"While he was renting the condo, the EPA issued a letter explaining that it had no serious environmental objections to an oil pipeline expansion for Enbridge, Inc., a client of Williams & Jensen. Enbridge was previously required to pay the second-largest fine in the history of the Clean Water Act for a spill that sent hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil into Michigan waterways."In April 2018, Vox reported that "the mounting appearance of misconduct and corruption at the EPA has started to attract not just the attention of Democrats--170 of whom have called for Pruitt’s resignation--but Republicans, too."
By July, 2018, CNN reported:
"EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and his aides have kept 'secret' calendars and schedules to overtly hide controversial meetings or calls with industry representatives and others, according to a former EPA official who is expected to soon testify before Congress. A review of EPA documents by CNN found discrepancies between Pruitt's official calendar and other records.Two days later, Pruitt resigned.
EPA staffers met routinely in Pruitt's office to 'scrub,' alter or remove from Pruitt's official calendar numerous records because they might 'look bad,' according to Kevin Chmielewski, Pruitt's former deputy chief of staff for operations, who attended the meetings.
"A CNN review which compared Pruitt's public calendar with internal EPA schedules and emails shows more than two dozen meetings, events or calls were omitted from his public calendar.... Chmielewski says he was forced to leave the EPA in February after raising questions about Pruitt's spending and management."
Toward the end of Pruitt's tenure, there was this:
Dow is, of course, a top producer of toxic waste and has, for many years, been the subject of repeated successful legal actions against its polluting activities. Only a few months before Trump appointed Wright, the company had been forced to cough up an estimated $77 million in compensation for decades of pollution by its plant in Midland, Michigan."President Donald Trump on Friday tapped a chemical industry insider to run the Environmental Protection Agency office that oversees emergency response to hazardous spills and cleanups of the nation's most toxic sites."The White House announced that Trump has nominated Peter C. Wright to serve as EPA's assistant administrator for Land and Emergency Management. Wright has worked as a corporate lawyer at Dow Chemical Co. since 1999."Despite Trump’s campaign pledges to 'drain the swamp' in Washington, Wright's nomination is the latest example of the president appointing corporate lawyers or lobbyists to supervise federal offices that directly regulate their former employers."
To replace Pruitt as EPA chief, Trump chose Andrew Wheeler, a lobbyist for the coal industry:
"[Wheeler] has said he is 'not at all ashamed' of his lobbying for Murray Energy Corp, the nation's leading underground coal mining company, the focus of criticism by environmentalists.To lead the EPA's clean air office, Trump chose William Wehrum:
"Wheeler had also lobbied for utility Xcel Energy Inc (XEL.O) and consulted for biofuels industry group Growth Energy, agricultural merchant and biofuels producer Archer Daniels Midland Co (ADM.N) and International Paper Co (IP.N)."
As a South Carolina congressman, Mick Mulvaney was all despicable reactionary demagoguery and pay-to-play politics with a shady past. 8 Feb., 2019:"As a corporate lawyer, William L. Wehrum worked for the better part of a decade to weaken air pollution rules by fighting the Environmental Protection Agency in court on behalf of chemical manufacturers, refineries, oil drillers and coal-burning power plants."Now, Mr. Wehrum is about to deliver one of the biggest victories yet for his industry clients--this time from inside the Trump administration as the government's top air pollution official."On Tuesday, President Trump is expected to propose a vast rollback of regulations on emissions from coal plants, including many owned by members of a coal-burning trade association that had retained Mr. Wehrum and his firm as recently as last year to push for the changes."
"Eleven years ago, former acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney was the co-owner of a company that wanted to build a strip mall in an upscale Charlotte community, according to the Washington Post.The New York Times, 16 July, 2012:
"To finance the project, they borrowed $1.4 million from a family firm owned by Charles Fonville Sr.
"The project fell apart, the mall was never built, and Mulvaney adopted a political career, which eventually led to the White House.
"And Fonville never got his money back.
"A sum that has now reached $2.5 million with interest was brushed off by Mulvaney as a bad real estate deal. He has said that the sum 'will go unpaid.'...Fonville has accused Mulvaney's two companies of 'intent to deceive,' 'fraudulent acts,' and 'breach of contract' to avoid payment of the loan."
This shady org was run by lobbyist Scott Reed. One of the politicians it helped elect to congress: Mick Mulvaney. When Trump was elected, he nominated Mulvaney to run the Office of Management and Budget. He'd go on to choose Mulvaney for a rotating series of high-level administration appointments, continuing right on to the present. Politico, Fall 2017:"In early 2010, a new organization called the Commission on Hope, Growth and Opportunity filed for nonprofit, tax-exempt status, telling the Internal Revenue Service it was not going to spend any money on campaigns."Weeks later, tax-exempt status in hand as well as a single $4 million donation from an anonymous benefactor, the group kicked off a multimillion-dollar campaign against 11 Democratic candidates, declining to report any of its political spending to the Federal Election Commission, maintaining to the I.R.S. that it did not do any political spending at all, and failing to register as a political committee required to disclose the names of its donors. Then, faced with multiple election commission and I.R.S. complaints, the group went out of business."
"In the past, he has questioned whether government should fund medical research or student loans, called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, proposed abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency and pushed repeatedly for government shutdowns. In his new gig, he has questioned whether government should fund Meals on Wheels or diabetes treatment for patients who 'eat poorly,' called climate action 'a waste of your money,' hinted that the Energy and Education departments might be unconstitutional, and suggested he would welcome another shutdown."At OMB, Mulvaney focused on trying to convince Trump to gut Social Security and Medicare.[13] He'd adopted the pose of a "deficit hawk" while in congress, bedeviling anything the Obama administration wanted to do, but as OMB director, these principles instantly disappeared and he oversaw a massive explosion in government red ink.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency created during the Obama administration and charged with looking out for consumers instead of merely big donors, has long drawn opposition from the right. While in congress, Mulvaney had said of it:
"It's a wonderful example of how a bureaucracy will function if it has no accountability to anybody. It turns up being a joke, and that's what the CFPB really has been, in a sick, sad kind of way."He went on to call it "extraordinarily frightening" and, in fact, co-sponsored legislation that would have eliminated it entirely. Vox notes that under it's first director, "the bureau has, by its own tally, handled more than 1.2 million consumer complaints and brought about nearly $12 billion in relief for harmed consumers." In Nov. 2017, Trump--in violation of the law--appointed Mulvaney to be the new director of CFPB.
Mulvaney immediately set about trying to destroy it. The New York Times has done a lot of excellent reporting on this particular matter. In a lengthy article on 16 April, 2019, the New York Times magazine reported at great length on how Mulvaney began piling on the bureaucracy at CFPB, trying to monkeywrench its operations while insulating himself from scrutiny. The New York Times, 5 Dec., 2017:
The New York Times, 18 Jan., 2018:"The defanging of a federal consumer watchdog agency began last week in a federal courthouse in San Francisco."After a nearly three-year legal skirmish, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau appeared to have been victorious. A judge agreed in September with the bureau that a financial company had misled more than 100,000 mortgage customers. As punishment, the judge ordered the Ohio company, Nationwide Biweekly Administration, to pay nearly $8 million in penalties."All that was left was to collect the cash. Last week, lawyers from the consumer bureau filed an 11-page brief asking the judge to force Nationwide to post an $8 million bond while the proceedings wrapped up.Then Mick Mulvaney was named the consumer bureau’s acting director."Barely 48 hours later, the same lawyers filed a new two-sentence brief. Their request: to withdraw their earlier submission and no longer take a position on whether Nationwide should put up the cash.... Inside the agency, change has been swift. Mr. Mulvaney briefly stopped approval of payments to some victims of financial crime, halted hiring, froze all new rule-making and ordered a review of active investigations and lawsuits. Some, he has indicated, will be abandoned."
Congress designed the CFPB in such a way as to insulate it from politicization; Mulvaney set out to undermine this independence. The New York Times, 2 April, 2018:"The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s acting director, Mick Mulvaney, intensified his efforts this week to curb an agency he has denounced as a regulator run amok. His latest tactic: starve it of cash."The consumer bureau is funded directly by the Federal Reserve and sends the central bank a request each quarter for money for its operations. On Wednesday, Mr. Mulvaney sent a letter requesting $0 for the current quarter, which runs through March."The bureau has been sitting on a $177.1 million reserve fund, Mr. Mulvaney said in his letter. He plans to use that to cover the bureau’s projected quarterly expenses of $145 million."'I see no practical reason for such a large reserve,' Mr. Mulvaney wrote. '“It is my intent to spend down the reserve until it is of a much smaller size.'"
"In his first report to Congress as the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mick Mulvaney called on lawmakers on Monday to cripple the agency that he has been temporarily tasked with overseeing... Mr. Mulvaney made a series of recommendations to lawmakers that would curb the bureau's power and independence. He called for it to be funded through congressional appropriations, rather than through the Federal Reserve, which has insulated it from political jockeying. He also recommended that bureau rules be subject to legislative approval and advised that the president should have direct oversight and authority over the bureau's director. Right now, the director can be removed by the president only for specific and justifiable cause, rather than for political or other reasons."In a Times story that appeared that same month--"Mulvaney, Watchdog Bureau's Leader, Advises Bankers on Ways to Curtail Agency"--Mulvaney urged the bankers from whose abuses CFPB was supposed to protect the public to use their clout to lean on legislators to support his proposed undermining of the bureau:
"Mick Mulvaney, the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told banking industry executives on Tuesday that they should press lawmakers hard to pursue their agenda... On Tuesday, he implored the financial services industry to help support the legislative changes he has requested."Mulvaney, the article reports, "has frozen all new investigations and slowed down existing inquiries by requiring employees to produce detailed justifications. He also sharply restricted the bureau's access to bank data, arguing that its investigations created online security risks. And he has scaled back efforts to go after payday lenders, auto lenders and other financial services companies accused of preying on the vulnerable."
Mulvaney described for the assembled financial titans how he did things in congress:
"'We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,' Mr. Mulvaney, a former Republican lawmaker from South Carolina, told 1,300 bankers and lending industry officials at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington. 'If you're a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn't talk to you. If you're a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.'"...which is a perfect description of how Mulvaney ran the CFPB. To wit:
A major impetus behind Elizabeth Warren's proposal to create the CFPB was the blight of predatory payday lenders. That New York Times Magazine article went into this in some detail:
"Warren and other consumer advocates argued that payday lenders built their industry on a... sleight of hand. They marketed themselves as lenders of last resort, offering emergency loans for a broken-down car or an unexpected medical bill. But according to Nick Bourke, a former financial-services consultant who now directs consumer-finance research at the Pew Charitable Trusts, what fed the industry's growth were not emergency expenses but the increasingly unstable incomes of the working poor. As their hourly wages fluctuated at the whims of workplace-optimization software, payday-loan customers--typically white women earning around $30,000, according to Pew’s research--borrowed to pay their rent or electric bills. The average customer paid $55 in fees to borrow $375, due on their next payday. But most found that they couldn't afford to repay the loan after two weeks. They took out another loan to cover the first, and usually another.Richard Cordray, the CFPB's first director, battled payday lenders. Before he resigned his post, he began the process of formulating a rule:
"Consumer advocates called this cycle a 'debt trap' and argued that payday lenders, much like credit-card companies, disguised the true costs of their products. Store clerks emphasized the small-seeming fees and pushed customers to roll their old loans into new ones, so that the fees snowballed, eventually exceeding the cost of the original loan. While most banks made money by finding customers who could repay their debts on time, payday lenders made money by finding customers who couldn't. 'If borrowers repaid loans in just two weeks and walked away as advertised, lenders would go out of business,' Bourke says."Improbably, the payday-loan industry earned a fortune from the working poor. The short loan terms and frequent rollovers pumped out profits faster than conventional lending, requiring less capital and yielding bigger profits... A bureau study of 15 million loans found that customers who kept rolling their loans over--taking out 10 or more a year--were the cream of the payday-loan industry, generating three-quarters of all loan fees."
"In 2015, the agency outlined its core proposal, one that would eliminate debt traps: an ability-to-repay rule. Under such a rule, payday lenders would have to check whether borrowers could afford to pay back a loan before making it in the first place--a short-term loan would have to actually be short-term, not just bait for a debt trap. The rule would have real teeth: If companies lent money to people who couldn't afford to pay it back, they could face prosecution and sizable fines."Utterly reasonable but Mulvaney put a stop to it. He also "dropped a lawsuit against an alleged online loan shark called Golden Valley Lending. The suit says the lender illegally charges people up to 950 percent interest rates. It took CFPB staffers years to build the case." 2 Feb., 2018:
"Last week, Mr. Mulvaney scrapped an investigation into the marketing and lending practices of World Acceptance Corporation, a lender based in South Carolina that donated $4,500 to Mr. Mulvaney’s previous congressional campaigns through its political action committee."It was 10 months into Mulvaney's tenure before the bureau took a single company to court. Mulvaney, you see, "received nearly $63,000 for his campaigns from payday lending groups." Payday lenders were delighted by his "leadership" of the CFPB and knew just how to keep themselves in the good graces of the administration:
"In mid-April, hundreds of members of the payday lending industry will head to Florida for their annual retreat featuring golf and networking at a plush resort just outside Miami. The resort just happens to be the Trump National Doral Golf Club."Mulvaney went after the CFPB's complaint database. He couldn't get rid of it--it had been established by law--so he cut off public access to it.
"'I don't see anything in here that I have to run a Yelp for financial services sponsored by the federal government,' Mulvaney said during his address to the American Bankers Association meeting. 'I don’t see anything in here that says that I have to make all of those public.'"
And, of course...
While Mulvaney killed the rule that would have required payday lenders to ascertain if their clients had the ability to pay back loans before issuing them, the Intercept reported, on 27 July, 2018, that Mulvaney's CFPB was sharply reducing fines for corporate criminals when said criminals pled poverty, leaving their victims with nothing at all."Eight of the 10 companies subject to the most consumer complaints about their banking practices contributed to Mulvaney's political campaigns, according to a report by Public Citizen, an liberal consumer rights group, scheduled to be released Tuesday. Nineteen of the top 30 contributed $140,500 to Mulvaney."Equifax, which is under investigation by the CFPB after a massive data breach last year that exposed sensitive data of millions of people, has received the most complaints — 83,252, according to Public Citizen's analysis. Equifax's political action committee contributed $5,000 to Mulvaney's campaigns. An Equifax competitor, Experian, has been the subject of more than 72,000 complaints and contributed $6,000 to Mulvaney's campaigns, according to the report."JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, the biggest banks in the country, have received more than 50,000 complaints each and contributed thousands of dollars to Mulvaney's campaigns."
"The friendly accommodation of corporate criminals reflects a pervasive tendency across the Trump administration. At 12 different federal agencies, enforcement actions and fines fell sharply in 2017 relative to the final year of the Obama administration, according to a Public Citizen report released last week.The Intercept notes that
"'Public Citizen's new report marshals prodigious evidence demonstrating that Trump's enforcers accord corporations impunity for misconduct,' said Bartlett Naylor, financial policy advocate at Public Citizen. 'At the CFPB, if Mulvaney can’t conjure an excuse for reducing penalties, he reduces them anyway.'"
"Kathy Kraninger, a midlevel official at the Office of Management and Budget with no background in consumer protection or financial regulation, has been nominated to replace Mulvaney at the CFPB, and she could get a vote in the Senate Banking Committee as early as next week."Kraninger became the next head of the CFPB, while Mulvaney was tapped to become Trump's chief of staff, then a special envoy to Northern Ireland. As chief of staff, Mulvaney was centrally involved in Trump's criminal scheme to withhold military aid to the Ukraine as a means of extorting the new government into launching fake "investigations" of Trump 2020 rival Joe Biden. In one particularly surreal moment, Mulvaney appeared at a press conference and openly admitted the administration was engaged in a quid pro quo with the aid--something the administration had denied for weeks. He added, "we do that all the time with foreign policy... And I have news for everybody. Get over it. There is going to be political influence in foreign policy." Within a few hours, Mulvaney had reversed himself, arguing that his remarks had been misconstrued to "advance a biased and political witch hunt" and that those who'd clearly heard him earlier shouldn't believe their own ears. "Let me be clear, there was absolutely no quid pro quo between Ukrainian military aid and any investigation into the 2016 election."
In Feb. 2020, Mulvaney said of press coverage of COVID-19,
"The reason you're seeing so much attention to it today is that they think this is going to be the thing that brings down the president. That's what this is all about."...which seems like a good note on which to come back around to the Department of Health & Human Services. Once Tom Tom Price's scandals knocked him out of his job as Secretary of HHS, Trump nominated, as his replacement, Alex Azar, a board member of "the primary lobbying group for the biotech industry," and, more to the point, a former president of a price-gouging pharmaceutical giant:
"When Pres. Donald Trump announced he was nominating Alex Michael Azar II to be the next secretary of health and human services, Trump called him a 'star for better healthcare and lower drug prices.' The catch is that Azar, who served as president of pharmaceutical giant Lilly USA until January, has been widely criticized for raising medication costs. During his decade at Lilly, the company tripled the price of its insulin and was fined for colluding to keep its prices high in Mexico."Azar continued his predecessor's efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act and set about trying to destroy Medicaid for poor people. In the aftermath of the Ebola epidemic in 2014, the Obama White House had established a directorate "to do everything possible within the vast powers and resources of the U.S. government to prepare for the next disease outbreak and prevent it from becoming an epidemic or pandemic," but in 2018, Trump disbanded it, and a year later, when COVID-19 appeared, the administration was almost entirely unprepared. Like Trump, Azar, in the earliest stages of the outbreak, opted to portray it as no big deal. He appointed Brian Harrison, an aide whose major healthcare experience was years spent as a dog-breeder, to coordinate HHS's response to the virus. Trump, of course, used the coronavirus relief approved by congress as another giveaway to his wealthy donors and to the wealthy in general. While the virus raged in March, Trump demanded from state governors praise of his scandalously bad handling of the virus. "All I want them to do, very simple, I want them to be appreciative," Trump said "We've done a great job." When he received this praise, he turned it into political ads. When governors didn't go along with this narcissistic exercise, he attacked them and told Mike Pence, the head of his coronavirus task-force, not to even speak to them. In April, Trump assembled an "Opening Our Country" council "to advise him on how to reopen the country's economy in the wake of the pandemic"; it was made up almost entirely of corporate executives "to the general exclusion of union leaders, public health professionals and consumer advocates," and, as Public Citizen reported at the time, over 1/3 of them--36%--"have made contributions to either Trump's campaign committee, political committees supporting him or his inaugural committee. Combined, they have given $103 million." Trump has lied about the virus from the beginning, downplaying its seriousness, suggesting it was under control, that it would simply go away, that 99% of COVID-19 infections were "totally harmless," and on and on and on--lies that directly endanger the public health. The administration's efforts to force schools to re-open for the 2020/2021 season--efforts driven by nothing more than Trump's terror that he can't win reelection without a return to something like normalcy--can fairly be judged as attempted mass-murder, and to cover for it, Trump, in August, insisted children "are almost immune from this disease" (children have no immunity whatsoever and spread it to those around them). Thanks, in part, to the Trump administration's utterly incompetent response, the virus has, as of this writing, destroyed at least 184,000 Americans and counting.
Some have argued that Wilbur Ross Jr., Trump's Commerce Secretary (and a big Republican donor), is Trump's most corrupt cabinet official. This author doesn't see much point in trying to create a ratings scale for such things, particularly when it comes to the Trump swamp, where corruption is so omnipresent one risks seriously underplaying it by focusing on some theoretical Muckiest Mud Dweller. Still, one could make a strong case for the conclusion. Ross is undeniably an egomanical, grifting self-dealer. Consider this: Ross spent over a decade lying to Forbes about his wealth in order to hold a place on the Forbes 400 countdown of wealthiest Americans. Forbes, 12 Dec., 2017:
"Fresh off a tour through Thailand, Laos and China, United States Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross Jr. picked up the phone on a Sunday afternoon in October to discuss something deeply personal: how much money he has. A year earlier, Forbes had listed his net worth at $2.9 billion on The Forbes 400, a number Ross claimed was far too low: He maintained he was closer to $3.7 billion. Now, after examining the financial-disclosure forms he filed after his nomination to President Donald Trump's Cabinet, which showed less than $700 million in assets, Forbes was intent on removing him entirely.As corruption goes, repeatedly lying to Forbes to get on the Forbes 400 is mild stuff indeed, but, as Forbes found, it was an example of a much larger and more significant issue:
"Ross protested, citing trusts for his family that he said he did not have to disclose in federal filings. 'You're apparently not counting those, which are more than $2 billion,' he said. When asked for documentation, the 79-year-old demurred, citing 'privacy issues.' Told that Forbes nonetheless planned to remove him from the list for the first time in 13 years, he responded: 'As long as you explain that the reason is that assets were put into trust, I'm fine with that.' And when did he make the transfer that allowed him to not disclose over $2 billion? 'Between the election and the nomination.'
"So began the mystery of Wilbur Ross' missing $2 billion. And after one month of digging, Forbes is confident it has found the answer: That money never existed. It seems clear that Ross lied to us, the latest in an apparent sequence of fibs, exaggerations, omissions, fabrications and whoppers that have been going on with Forbes since 2004. In addition to just padding his ego, Ross' machinations helped bolster his standing in a way that translated into business opportunities.
"And based on our interviews with ten former employees at Ross' private equity firm, WL Ross & Co., who all confirmed parts of the same story line, his penchant for misleading extended to colleagues and investors, resulting in millions of dollars in fines, tens of millions refunded to backers and numerous lawsuits. Additionally, according to six U.S. senators, Ross failed to initially mention 19 suits in response to a questionnaire during his confirmation process."On 7 Aug., 2018, Forbes reported on the assessment of Ross offered by those who know and have worked with him:
"A multimillion-dollar lawsuit has been quietly making its way through the New York State court system over the last three years, pitting a private equity manager named David Storper against his former boss: Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. The pair worked side by side for more than a decade, eventually at the firm, WL Ross & Co.--where, Storper later alleged, Ross stole his interests in a private equity fund, transferred them to himself, then tried to cover it up with bogus paperwork. Two weeks ago, just before the start of a trial with $4 million on the line, Ross and Storper agreed to a confidential settlement, whose existence has never been reported and whose terms remain secret.Ross was a multi-hundred-millionaire, instead of a multi-billionaire but his holdings would present an endless array of conflicts with the job of Commerce Secretary, where Ross would be charged with implementing policy that could bolster his own bottom line, so upon entering government, Ross had pledged to divest himself of them. "In November 2017," reported Forbes (18 July, 2018), "Ross confirmed in writing to the federal Office of Government Ethics that he had divested everything he promised. But that was not true." Among other things, Forbes discovered that:
"It is difficult to imagine the possibility that a man like Ross, who Forbes estimates is worth some $700 million, might steal a few million from one of his business partners. Unless you have heard enough stories about Ross... Over several months, in speaking with 21 people who know Ross, Forbes uncovered a pattern: Many of those who worked directly with him claim that Ross wrongly siphoned or outright stole a few million here and a few million there, huge amounts for most but not necessarily for the commerce secretary. At least if you consider them individually. But all told, these allegations--which sparked lawsuits, reimbursements and an SEC fine--come to more than $120 million. If even half of the accusations are legitimate, the current United States secretary of commerce could rank among the biggest grifters in American history... Those who've done business with Ross generally tell a consistent story, of a man obsessed with money and untethered to facts. 'He'll push the edge of truthfulness and use whatever power he has to grab assets,' says New York financier Asher Edelman. One of Ross’ former colleagues is more direct: 'He’s a pathological liar.'"
"For most of last year, Ross served as secretary of commerce while maintaining stakes in companies co-owned by the Chinese government, a shipping firm tied to Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, a Cypriot bank reportedly caught up in the Robert Mueller investigation and a huge player in an industry Ross is now investigating. It’s hard to imagine a more radioactive portfolio for a cabinet member.A month later,, the New York Times expanded on: the story about Ross's insider trading:
"To this day, Ross' family apparently continues to have an interest in these toxic holdings. Rather than dump them all, the commerce secretary sold some of his interests to Goldman Sachs--and, according to Ross himself, put others in a trust for his family members. He continued to deal with China, Russia and others while evidently knowing that his family’s interests were tied to those countries.
"In addition, five days before reports surfaced last fall that Ross was connected to cronies of Vladimir Putin through a shipping firm called Navigator Holdings, the secretary of commerce, who likely knew about the reporting, shorted stock in the Kremlin-linked company, positioning himself to make money on the investment when share prices dropped.
"Absurdly, maintaining all those conflicts of interest appears to be entirely legal--a reflection of ethics laws woefully unprepared for governing tycoons like Donald Trump and Wilbur Ross.
"Ross appears to have broken one law, however: submitting a sworn statement to federal officials in November saying he divested of everything he had promised he would--even though he still held more than $10 million worth of stock in financial firm Invesco, his former employer. He also continued to hold a short position in a bank called Sun Bancorp, a company he had promised to divest. The next month, Ross got rid of interests in both."
Such stories regarding Ross are endless. The Center for Public Integrity on Ross's Invesco holdings:"Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross Jr. shorted stock in a shipping firm--an investment tactic for profiting if share prices fall--days after learning that reporters were preparing a potentially negative story about his dealings with the Kremlin-linked company."The transaction, valued between $100,000 and $250,000, took place last fall after Mr. Ross became aware that journalists investigating offshore finances were looking at his investments in the shipper Navigator Holdings, whose major clients included a Russian energy company. The New York Times emailed a list of questions about Navigator to Mr. Ross on Oct. 26."Three business days later, Mr. Ross, a wealthy investor, opened a short position in Navigator, according to filings released on Monday by the Office of Government Ethics. The company's stock price slid about 4 percent before Mr. Ross closed his position on Nov. 16, eleven days after the articles were published by The Times and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists as part of the 'Paradise Papers' project."The transaction was first reported on Monday by Forbes. In interviews, ethics watchdogs raised alarms, saying the short sale created the appearance that Mr. Ross was acting on nonpublic information to potentially profit, which federal officer-holders are prohibited from doing."
"Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross appears to have earned seven figures from his failure to divest stock holdings until months after he was required to do so, a Center for Public Integrity analysis found.The Daily Beast, 20 Feb., 2019:
"Ross was supposed to sell his Invesco Ltd. stock, valued at between $10 million and $50 million, within 90 days of his Senate confirmation, according to his ethics agreement. He was confirmed on Feb. 27, 2017, which meant he was required to divest before the end of May 2017.
"But in filings publicly released last month, Ross acknowledged he failed to sell his stock in Invesco until December 2017. By that time, his stock’s value had increased by between approximately $1.2 million to $6 million over its value at the end of May, depending on Ross’ actual number of shares, a figure that hasn’t previously been reported... Ross 'mistakenly believed that all of my previously held Invesco stock was sold' before he assumed the commerce secretary position, according to a note in the transaction report he filed with federal ethics officials. 'In December 2017, I discovered that the previously held stock had not been sold. I then promptly sold these shares,' he wrote... This latest filing contradicts an earlier one that included a sworn statement saying Ross had divested everything he had promised to divest--including the Invesco stock.
"The date of the sale means Ross held the stock for essentially all of 2017, while performing his duties as commerce secretary. His ethics agreement called for him to recuse from any matter that 'to my knowledge has a direct and predictable effect on the financial interests of the entity or its holdings until I have divested it.'
"If Ross did recuse from a government matter that could affect Invesco or anything else, the Commerce Department appears to have no record of it, according to the department’s response last week to Freedom of Information Act requests from the Center for Public Integrity."
"The Office of Government Ethics has reportedly declined to certify Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross' financial disclosure over information that was described by the watchdog as 'not accurate.' The agency said the form was rejected after Ross again claimed to have sold his BankUnited stock despite not actually doing so. When Ross joined the Trump administration in 2017, he signed an ethics agreement that required him to divest in BankUnited, Inc., and other companies, by May 2017. According to Talking Points Memo, the agency warned Ross in July 2018, after he first claimed to sell the stock, that 'the errors on his financial-disclosure forms and his failure to comply with his ethics compliance agreement' could lead to 'a serious criminal violation.' But he reportedly filed a new 'transaction report' in October 2018 that showed he hadn't actually sold his BankUnited stock--even though he said he did on his disclosure. 'Therefore, OGE is declining to certify Secretary Ross' 2018 financial-disclosure report because that report was not accurate and he was not in compliance with his ethics agreement at the time of the report,' the OGE’s letter to Ross reportedly read."Forbes, 25 Oct., 2018:
"New evidence suggests that Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross put himself at risk of violating a criminal conflict-of-interest law by discussing business matters with Chevron executives--while his wife apparently owned a stake in the company worth more than $250,000.And so on.
"On March 22, 2017, Ross hosted Chevron's then-CEO John Watson, along with two other executives, in his conference room, according to the commerce secretary's calendar. Forbes first reported the existence of the meeting in July, but both the Department of Commerce and Chevron refused to say what was discussed during the sit-down. After a legal battle that lasted more than six months, however, the government watchdog group American Oversight released a detailed version of Ross' calendar last week, which shows that the agenda centered on oil and gas developments, tax reform and trade issues... Federal law prohibits officials from taking certain actions that affect financial interests held by them or their spouses. Conflicted officials can weigh in on broad issues that impact the whole economy, but not more specific matters that will directly, and predictably, impact companies in which they are investors.
"In some cases, officials can also get waivers that allow them to get around the rules. Commerce Department staffers did not answer questions about whether Ross secured such a waiver before the Chevron meeting."
As Commerce Secretary, Ross oversees the decennial U.S. census and within days of assuming that post, he decided, over the objection of the Census Bureau itself, to try to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census in a bid to suppress immigrant participation. In March 2018, Ross appeared before the House Subcommittee on Appropriations, Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies and repeatedly perjured himself. Asked if he'd discussed the matter with Trump or anyone else at the White House, Ross replied, "I am not aware of any such." Of the origin of the citizenship question, Ross asserted "we are responding solely to the Department of Justice's request." The Justice Department had, in fact, requested in December 2017 that a citizenship question be added to the census under the pretense that it was needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965--a need that hadn't existed in the first 52 years of the act--but it subsequently emerged that Ross himself had worked behind the scenes for months to engineer that Justice "request," simply looking to create some CYA rationale for it, and that, contrary to his assertion, Ross had been discussing the matter with Steve Bannon, then Trump's Chief Strategist (and an immigrant-hating white nationalist).
Among other things, the proposed citizenship question triggered a flurry of lawsuits. The courts took a dim view of the antics of Ross and his aides. The New York Times, 15 Jan., 2019:
The question eventually went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The ACLU, which brought the suit in question:"A federal judge blocked the Commerce Department from adding a question on American citizenship to the 2020 census, handing a legal victory on Tuesday to critics who accused the Trump administration of trying to turn the census into a tool to advance Republican political fortunes... In a lengthy and stinging opinion, Judge Jesse M. Furman of the United States District Court in Manhattan said that Wilbur L. Ross Jr., the commerce secretary, broke 'a veritable smorgasbord' of federal rules when he ordered the citizenship question added to the census nearly a year ago. Judge Furman said Mr. Ross cherry-picked facts to support his views, ignored or twisted contrary evidence and hid deliberations from Census Bureau experts."Judge Furman also criticized Mr. Ross and his aides for giving false or misleading statements under oath as they struggled to explain their rationale for adding the question."
"This morning, the Supreme Court told the country what we and our clients have long known: that Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross provided a false reason for his decision to add a citizenship question to the Decennial Census. The court explained that the Trump administration's stated reason for adding a citizenship question--enforcement of the Voting Rights Act--was 'contrived.' The justices could not 'ignore the disconnect between the decision made and the explanation given.' Bottom-line, this decision prevents addition of the citizenship question to the 2020 Census based on the administration’s lies.In Sept. 2019, Ross became embroiled in an absurd comedy. Donald Trump had tweeted that Alabama would be hit "harder than anticipated" by Hurricane Dorian. No portion of Alabama was in the path of Dorian and a few minutes later--probably recognizing a situation that endangered public safety--the National Weather Service in Birmingham tweeted that Dorian wouldn't hit Alabama. A few days later, Trump doubled down. Insisting that Alabama had been a state potentially at risk from Dorian, Trump displayed a map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that, as the New York Times put it, "appeared to have been altered with a black Sharpie to include Alabama in the area potentially affected by Dorian." Dorian didn't hit Alabama.
"As we explained in our complaint and as the district court's decision found, Secretary Ross 'was determined to reinstate a citizenship question from the time he entered office.' He adopted the Voting Rights Act as the reason 'late in the process' after already having 'made up his mind' to add a citizenship question for other, unstated reasons. Ultimately, 'the evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation the Secretary gave for his decision.' In other words, the Secretary's decision was a solution in search of a problem."[14]
Ross denied making any threats but refused to clarify his involvement in the matter."[Ross] threatened to fire top employees at the federal scientific agency responsible for weather forecasts last Friday after the agency's Birmingham office contradicted President Trump's claim that Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama, according to three people familiar with the discussion."That threat led to an unusual, unsigned statement later that Friday by the agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, disavowing the National Weather Service's position that Alabama was not at risk. The reversal caused widespread anger within the agency and drew accusations from the scientific community that the National Weather Service, which is part of NOAA, had been bent to political purposes... NOAA ultimately issued an unsigned statement last Friday calling the Birmingham office's statement 'inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time.'"
Betsy Devos had absolutely no experience with public schools in any capacity but she was an opponent of public education who had spent years promoting various voucher schemes aimed at stripping public money from public schools and funneling it into for-profit private and religious ones. Trump tapped her to become his Secretary of Education.
At her confirmation hearing, Devos was unable to answer basic questions regarding education policy. The things she did say "suggested she knows little about what the department she hopes to lead actually does."
In questioning about whether guns should be allowed in schools, Devos suggested schools need them to defend against potential attacks by grizzly bears. And she wasn't kidding."The Education Department hands out billions of dollars of grants and loans to college students. It gives grants to help educate students with disabilities and poor students. It investigates complaints that schools violated students' civil rights, which under President Obama has included aggressive investigation of colleges accused of mishandling sexual assault."And when DeVos was asked about those issues, she often floundered. She didn’t seem to understand how the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, the bedrock federal law guaranteeing an education to students with disabilities, works--and later she admitted to Sen. Maggie Hassan that she might have been confused. She was way off on a figure about how much student debt has grown. She gave a non-answer to Sen. Bob Casey's question about the Education Department's instructions to colleges on handling sexual assault, suggesting she knew the guidance was controversial but didn’t understand what it was... It was softball questions she should have been able to answer, not harsh attacks, that tripped her up every time."
It would probably be overly cynical to suggest Trump's choice of Devos was at all influenced by the fact that she and her family have given over $20 million to Republicans over the previous 27 years--half of that in the 2016 cycle alone--or that, after she bombed so miserably in her confirmation hearings, the $800,000+ she gave to 20 current Republican senators in any way greased the skids for her confirmation (with all of those 20 voting for her instead of recusing themselves). The Senate deadlocked 50-50 on approving her and for the first time in history, the Vice President, as President of the Senate, had to cast a tie-breaking vote for a cabinet appointee.
After a few weeks on the job, Devos backed Trump's proposal to cut funding the Education Department's budget by 13%, rolling back funding to pre-2002 levels despite the number of students serviced by public schools having significant grown, but still finding $1.5 billion to encourage privatization schemes aimed at funneling money from schools in poorer districts into already-affluent ones. Devos has continued along this line, trying to defund the Education Dept. while pushing for privatization, throughout her reign.
Devos staffed the department with lobbyists and other representatives of private, for-profit schools that had gotten into hot water for fraudulent practices. She attempted to monkeywrench a pair of rules designed, in the wake of the failure of two giant for-profit college chains, to protect students from fraud by for-profit colleges, institutions that, though only accounting for 10% of national enrollment, are responsible for over 98% of fraud complaints. For-profit schools had sought to beat back these rules for years and were willing to pay:
"Campaign contributions from the for-profit education industry now heavily favor Republicans, a change from earlier in the decade. In 2010, 63 percent of donations went to Democrats. However, in each successive cycle since, Republicans have gotten at least two-thirds of the donations from the industry each cycle, with the most coming in 2018, a whopping 83 percent."That last figure happened after Devos halted the rules in question. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia sued. In June 2018, Devos proposed a substitute rule that "would make it harder for students who were victims of predatory lending practices at for-profit colleges to get their loans forgiven," relief Devos's fluffy aristocrat's brain wants to treat like welfare[15] but to which those students are legally entitled.
"The proposal would also make it harder for students at colleges that have suddenly closed to obtain a loan discharge--a move that would reduce debt relief by about $2.2 billion over 10 years, at the expense of vulnerable students."In Sept. 2018, a federal court ruled that Devos's actions in delaying the rules were illegal. "[I]n a sweeping 57-page decision, [U.S. District Court Judge Randolph Moss] ruled that DeVos' actions were 'unlawful', 'procedurally invalid' and 'arbitrary and capricious.'"
Meanwhile, Devos, in effect, dismantled the Education Department's special team devoted to investigating abuses by for-profit colleges. Its members have seen their investigations suspended and they've been "marginalized, reassigned or instructed to focus on other matters, according to current and former employees." Devos enacted a policy of trying to sabotage law enforcement agencies from looking into student loan servicers.
Upon becoming Secretary, Devos had slammed the breaks on processing fraud claims by students seeking to have their debts discharged, letting the victims of fraud, saddled with useless credits or degrees, to languish in crippling debt, their credit destroyed--victimizing them twice. Worse, Devos sadistically insisted on continuing to try to collect on that debt, doling out a third round of abuse. A huge backlog of claims piled up."The Education Department is intervening on behalf of student loan servicers, some accused of illegally exploiting borrowers, by declining to turn over information to law enforcement agencies in multiple states investigating the businesses, some consumer advocates say."The department's reluctance to share data from or about student loan servicers was revealed in documents and correspondence to the Senate education subcommittee recently obtained by NBC News... The Education Department posted an announcement in March 2018 in the Federal Register arguing that its oversight pre-empts state regulations when it comes to policing the student loan industry, and its responsibility to oversee the nine servicers currently contracted to handle federal student loans is being undermined by state enforcement... Those borrowers have paid out billions of dollars in additional interest charges to student loan servicers, some of whom continue to reap big earnings, lawmakers and advocates say."
All of this led to further lawsuits but no matter how many times she lost, Devos continued to try to re-screw the victims on behalf of the fraudsters. She introduced a formula that would provide only partial relief to victims, based on what she assessed as the economic harm they'd suffered. Many, whom the department agreed had been defrauded, got nothing at all. To obtain the data used to assess that economic harm, Devos was violating the Privacy Act. Further legal action put a stop to that but Devos defiantly insisted she would continue trying to do those economic harm assessments. Nearly a year later, Devos sent to congress Diane Auer Jones--a longtime lobbyist and executive for a for-profit college and Devos's principal deputy undersecretary--to say the department didn't even have a timetable for addressing the then-accumulated 158,000 fraud claims and to blame the court ruling--the one that stopped the department's violations of the law--for the delay.
"In effect, Trump's Education Department tried to shortchange swindled students and now they're blaming the court for not letting them do so."A few weeks later, Education Dept. spokesman Liz issued a statement repeating this line. "The only thing stopping the Department from finalizing thousands of these claims is the constant stream of litigation brought by ideological, so-called student advocate special interests." A large number of recent student fraud complaints are related to Corinthian Colleges, a chain of for-profit schools that collapsed in 2015 in the face of extensive investigations by state and federal agencies. Even after Devos was ordered by a federal court to stop collecting the student debt of the Corinthian students who had filed complaints, she continued to do so with thousands of them. The court wasn't amused. October 2019:
Between June 2018 and June 2019, the Education Dept. didn't approve a single new fraud claim. By then, the backlog of unprecessed claims had risen to 210,000. Devos enacted the new rules she'd proposed a year earlier:"A federal judge on Thursday held Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in contempt of court and imposed a $100,000 fine for violating an order to stop collecting on the student loans owed by students of a defunct for-profit college."The exceedingly rare judicial rebuke of a Cabinet secretary came after the Trump administration was forced to admit to the court earlier this year that it erroneously collected on the loans of some 16,000 borrowers who attended Corinthian Colleges despite being ordered to stop doing so.
"U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim wrote that 'the evidence shows only minimal efforts to comply with the preliminary injunction' she issued in May 2018 ordering the Education Department to halt its collection of the loans."
"In August, the DOE made it harder than ever for defrauded students to obtain relief. Under the new rules, they must demonstrate financial harm (by showing that they searched unsuccessfully for employment in their field). More importantly, they must prove that they reasonably relied on misrepresentations in deciding to obtain their loans, and that the specified misrepresentation 'was made with knowledge of its false, misleading, or deceptive nature or with a reckless disregard for the truth.' With little access to attorneys or discovery, the rules, as one observer has noted, require students 'to submit evidence [they] do not have and cannot get.'The House of Representatives passed a resolution in January 2020 condemning these changes. The Senate followed suit in March but Trump vetoed the bill. In July, 22 states and the District of Columbia filed suit against the new rule.
"And that’s not all.
"The DOE now requires students to apply individually for relief and permits institutions to use pre-dispute arbitration agreements and class action waivers as a condition of enrollment, provided the schools make 'plain language-disclosures' about these processes. Such agreements, of course, keep claims out of the courts, where other students and the public at large might learn about them. Class action waivers prevent students, many of whom lack the resources to pursue legal remedies on their own, from sharing the costs and burdens of litigation."
In July, 2018, Devos rolled back regulations protecting online students.
"The regulations, which DeVos has delayed until July 2020, would require online or distance programs to disclose to prospective and enrolled students whether their programs meet licensing requirements in their states, and whether the school is under investigation by a state or accrediting agency.Several teachers organizations sued. In May 2019, they won.
"'Without them, students... could end up saddled with debt and stuck with a worthless degree they can't use,' said [California Teachers Association] President Eric Heins."
In March 2019, another federal court ruled that Devos had again acted illegally in delaying another rule "required states to address racial disparities in special education programs." And (May, 2020):
"DeVos first published her proposed rewrite of the federal rules enforcing Title IX, the landmark law that prohibits sex discrimination in public education, in 2018... Last week, on May 6, the final regulations were published. Now school districts, colleges and universities must comply by August 14... One major objection has to do with DeVos' redefinition of sexual harassment as 'severe and pervasive.' Pervasive means victims must suffer repeated incidents of harassment before they have a Title IX complaint. It's a stricter definition of harassment than the one used by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to protect adult workplaces.Devos has exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to pursue her efforts to divert public money away from public schools and into private ones.
"As a result, 'a 6-year-old now must endure more extreme levels of harassment before she has a visible complaint under Title IX than a grown woman would have to tolerate to have a similar claim for workplace harassment,' [NEA President Lily] Eskelsen GarcÃa pointed out.
"Another issue--with obvious, alarming consequences--is that the DeVos rules allow accused rapists to cross-examination victims and witnesses in live, trial-like hearings... Forcing victims of sexual violence to be interrogated by their attackers will worsen their trauma, advocates fear.
"The likely outcome is that many survivors will simply choose not to report their assaults."
Trump has a fascist's enthusiasm for war-crimes and war-criminals. John Bolton, Trump's third National Security Advisor, was the latter, one of the driving forces behind Bush's murderous invasion of Iraq. Elliot Abrams became notorious in the '80s for his role in covering up atrocities by Reagan-backed forces in El Salvador in order to keep U.S. aid flowing to the terrorist government there. Facing serious charges during the Iran-contra scandal, Abrams was allow to plead guilty to the lesser offense of lying to congress. That should have been the end of him but George Bush Jr. reimported him into government, where he was reportedly complicit in the 2002 effort to overthrow democracy in Venezuela. Perhaps in recognition of that last, Trump, in 2019, appointed Abrams his Special Representative for Venezuela--later, Trump's Special Representative for Iran. A good 2019 article in the Atlantic noted Trump's enthusiasm for war-crimes:
"As a candidate, the president regaled his audiences with vivid tales of brutality, some apocryphal, and vowed to imitate them.Trump has intervened to protect those who committed truly horrific crimes--butchering helpless detainees, shooting unarmed civilians, etc. Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher shot civilians, gruesomely murdered a teenager who was in his custody then threatened to kill his colleagues if the reported him. Then he posed for pictures with the corpose of the boy he'd carved up. Via a scheme with one of his buddies, he managed to escape justice on the most serious offenses but was convicted of bringing discredit to the armed forces. The Navy demoted him; Trump reversed this. The Navy sought to remove his Trident pin, indicating his membershuip in the SEALS; Trump prevented this. When Richard Spencer, the Secretary of the Navy, objected, Trump fired him. Trump called the pardoned war-criminals "warriors." When the International Criminal Court launched an investigation of crimes against humanity in Afghanistan, Trump's reaction was to impose economic sanctions and travel restrictions on its investigators.
"On the campaign trail, Trump frequently invoked a false story about General John Pershing crushing a Muslim insurgency in the Philippines with bullets dipped in pig's blood, declaring, 'There was no more radical Islamic terror for 35 years!' He vowed to impose torture techniques 'a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.' Trump declared that he would 'take out the families' of terrorist suspects, assuring skeptics that the military would not refuse his commands, even though service members have a duty to refuse orders that are manifestly illegal. 'If I say do it, they’re going to do it'... [T]he president's ardor for violations of the laws of war has manifested itself in his decisions to intervene in war-crimes cases on behalf of the defendants. In four separate cases since the beginning of his presidency, and for the first time in the history of modern warfare, an American president has aided service members accused or convicted of war crimes, against the advice of his own military leadership... [Trump] argues that the crimes of which the men are accused are not truly crimes at all. As the president put it on Twitter, 'We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!' This is a philosophy that makes no moral distinction between killing combatants and killing the innocent... The crimes of which these service members are accused were committed against people the president does not consider fully human. It would not do to punish Americans for killing people whose lives, in the eyes of the president and many of his supporters, do not matter.
"As with so many of Trump's outrages, this one extends a preexisting logic to more obviously monstrous ends. When the Bush administration and its apologists justified torturing Muslims, and when the Obama administration prevented any civil or criminal accountability for those who created the torture regime or even those who exceeded its guidelines, they were sending a similar message. With Trump, the distinction is that he sees such crimes not as a necessary evil, but as a positive good.
"Trump is already reportedly planning to have one or more of these service members appear at his campaign rallies."
For many years, the American rightist elite, Trump among them, has polluted the public discourse with malignant fairy-tales of widespread voter fraud in American elections, imaginary tales that are, in turn, used by legislators to attempt very real voter suppression. Trump rode this saw throughout 2016, ripping at the fabric of the entire premise of liberal democracy. Trump "won" the presidency despite drawing nearly 3 million votes less than his nearest rival, Hillary Clinton. Within a few days of his "victory," he claimed:
"In addition to winning the electoral college in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally."
The claim traced back to a right-wing blogger, Gregg Phillips, whose claim was that 3 million votes were cast in 2016 by illegal aliens. His source for this was his own ass; as the Washington Post noted, Phillips "started making claims even before data on voter history was actually available in most jurisdictions." Trump later repeated his own claim shortly after being sworn in as president to a group of congressional leaders, asserting more specifically that he would have won except for the 3-5 million illegal aliens who cast votes. The Washington Post curtly noted that "the claim is not supported by any verifiable facts, and analyses of the election found virtually no confirmed cases of voter fraud, let alone millions." Discussing these imaginary illegal votes in a January 2017 interview by ABC News, Trump claimed:
"Of those votes cast, none of 'em come to me. None of 'em come to me. They would all be for the other side. None of 'em come to me. Those were Hillary votes. And if you look at it they all voted for Hillary. They all voted for Hillary. They didn't vote for me. I don't believe I got one. Okay, these are people that voted for Hillary Clinton."
Predictably, the commission immediately became a farce. It attempted to bigfoot privacy laws, requesting from the states vast amounts of voters' personal information. The request for this data had been sent in violation of the law; the data itself was supposed to be transmitted via an entirely unsecured email server and, of course, many states had laws against releasing it. Among them was Kansas, where Kobach was Secretary of State but where state law forbade compliance (the editors of the Washington Post were feeling cheeky when reporting that one, sending it out under the leadline, "Kris Kobach Says He Can't Comply With Kris Kobach's Voter Data Request"). In the request that went to Texas, Kobach was perhaps a little too on-the-nose, specifically asking for records identifying voters with Hispanic surnames. The rejection of these requests was as strong as it was bipartisan. "Forty-four states and the District of Columbia have refused to provide certain types of voter information to the Trump administration's election integrity commission," reported CNN in July 2017. Trump, showing his usual regard for privacy, impotently fumed on Twitter. "What are they trying to hide?" Addressing the commission's first official meeting, he said of the states refusing, "One has to wonder what they're worried about. There's something. There always is."
The effort by the commission to collect personal data, along with its usual Trumpian lack of transparenty, led to 7 lawsuits against it. In November 2017, another was added to the pile: Matthew Dunlap, Maine's Secretary of State and a member of the commission itself, sued the commission because he and the other Democratic commissioners were, in violation of the law, being kept in the dark about its activities.[16] At the end of December 2017, Dunlap prevailed in the case but rather than providing the information, Trump announced he was disbanding the commission, then said he wouldn't be complying with the court order for the info because the commission no longer exists. Dunlap continued to press his case in court and eventually got his hands on the commission's documents. Reading through them, Dunlap told the Washington Post,
"I see that [the commission] wasn't just a matter of investigating President Trump's claims that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally, but the goal of the commission seems to have been to validate those claims."Dunlap called the commission "the most bizarre thing I’ve ever been a part of." The documents showed the commission found no evidence whatsoever of widespread voter fraud.
Kobach emerges from the blackest, most putrified waters of the Trump swamp. In 2016, Trump went from low-sigle-digit joke to Republican frontrunner by characterizing Mexican immigrants as rapists, criminals, drug-dealers. His use of such protofascist language and themes, both during the campaign and throughout his presidency, has drawn a large and enthusiastic following of overt racists, fascists, white nationalists but it's also the case that right-wing media had been offering the same language and themes for years--Trump is a product of this phenomenon--and the emergence of the Trump movement threw a steady stream of jet fuel on that fire. In media, Republican "conservatism" in the many forms in which we've traditionally known it has virtually ceased to exist, consumed by this blaze and replaced by ugly gradients of protofascism.
For at least a decade-and-a-half, Kris Kobach worked for the Tanton network, a series of front-groups founded, beginning in the '70s, by white nationalist John Tanton with the goal of mainstreaming racist anti-immigrant sentiment by providing it a public sheen of scholarly respectability. Tanton groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) produce a steady stream of psuedo-scholarly articles, ads and "studies" on the baleful effects of immigration, portraying immigrants as vicious criminals, parasitic welfare drains, interlopers who take the jobs of native-born Americans, blaming them "for everything from terrorism to global warming." Directly echoing the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Third Reich itself, thes portrayals fall apart under any real scrutiny but for many years--and despite the public record with regard to the racist nature of the orgs producing them--they were often treated by mainstream press outlets as serious analyses.
Overt white nationalists perpetually fulminate against what they dub "white genocide" or "the Great Replacement." This is the idea that non-white immigrant "invaders" are being used to replace white, native-born peoples and "Western civilization" (almost invariably just treated as a euphemism for the former), and often takes the form of conspiracy theories wherein liberals, Jews, liberal Jews or fill-in-the-far-right-boogeyman is intentionally facilitating this "invasion." For decades, this has been the central preoccupation of overt white nationalists. In recent years, as conservatism has increasingly yielded to protofascism, it has also been become a regular feature of formerly conservative media. Popular Fox News figures like Tucker Clarson and Laura Ingraham, for example, regularly promote Great Replacement narratives. It's the beast the Tanton network feeds. Tanton published an English translation of "The Camp of the Saints," an unspeakably racist dystopian French novel depicting a more dynamic version of this idea: a fleet of non-white Third World refugees, portrayed as filthy, animal-like rapists and murderers, being allowed to overrun France and white civilization itself. The novel has achieved legendary status in white nationalist and neo-Nazi circles, treated, alongside "The Turner Diaries," as a sort of bible. John Tanton, who is offered ebullient praise for the book, attributed to it his fixation on immigration. It's also a much-referenced favorite of Steve Bannon, the man who took Trump's 2016 campaign to victory and was, for the first 7 months of Trump's presidency, Trump's "Chief Strategist," a position invented specifically for him.
Tanton published "The Camp of the Saints" through his own publishing house, the Social Contract Press, which, until Tanton's 2019 death, also published a journal of the same name. Social Contract publishes a medley of virulent white nationalists alongside less toxic conservative figures who apparently don't mind lending racist ideologues whatever prestige they may milk from the association. Kris Kobach drew some heat a few years ago when he appeared as a presenter at a Social Contract event and was totally unrepentant, calling the criticism "outrageous."
"According to the [Southern Poverty Law Center], if you’re against illegal immigration, you're a racist."...which is a common dodge used by racists trying to maintain some public respectability--throw that "illegal" in there and pretend as if you're just standing up for the law. But these attacks on immigrants are just as harshly directed at legal immigrants as well. Tanton, in fact, founded FAIR to try to reverse a revision of immigration law in the '60s that ended racial quotas that favored white Europeans. It also implies that the ugly racism so ubiquitously on display is acceptable if it's directed at illegal immigrants, which is self-evidently absurd.
Before joining the Trump campaign and administration, Breitbart's then-editor Steve Bannon aligned the publication with the racist "alt-right." Kobach worked as a columnist at Breitbart, where he did things like claim immigrants commit a disproportionate share of crime in the U.S. This is entirely false, of course--years of reputatble studies on the subject have shown that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans--but Kobach didn't need reputable studies. He had as his source Peter Gemma, a racist who is up to his ass in the Holocaust denial movement and worked for the Council of Conservative Citizens--a retitling of the old White Citizens Council and an org that, among other things, has characterized black people as a retrograde species of humanity. After their respective stints in the Trump administration, Kobach and Bannon reunited to work on We Build the Wall, an effort by Trump cronies and supporters to crowdfund Trump's long-promised wall on the Southern U.S. border. Kobach called his participation in this project "one of the most rewarding things I have done in my career." Bannon and the others behind WBTW--but not yet Kobach--were just indicted on fraud charges. While cheaply building a relative handful of scattered sections of wall, they conspired to secretly pocket the money.
When the We Build the Wall indictments came down, Trump--as usual, whenever trouble looms--tried to distance himself from the project, saying it was "only done to make me look bad." But last year, Kobach claimed Trump was very enthusuastic about We Build the Wall:
"Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state and ally of President Trump, said in a 2019 interview that he’d spoken with Trump three times about the private border wall construction effort that is now at the heart of a federal fraud investigation.Kobach has a long history of lying and perhaps he was about this as well but it's a little tougher for Trump to distance himself from the scandal, which involves Trump supporters and former Trump officials trying to bring about one of Trump's signature political promises. The conspirators used Trump's Mar-A-Lago club to put Trump's imprematur on their scheme,[17] and Trump's family was involved in the project. The Kansas City Star (20 Aug., 2020):
"Kobach said on an episode of the 'We Build The Wall' show in May 2019 that Trump was 'enthusiastic' about the project and gave it his blessing.
"'I've spoken to the President about this project on three occasions now,' Kobach, the general counsel and a board member for the project, said at the time. 'And he said--the first time I told him about it--he said, "Well, you tell the guys at We Build The Wall, that they have my blessing." And he used those exact words.'
"'And he's continually, I've met with... or talk[ed] with him on the phone periodically, and I just spoke with him about it,' he continued. 'I want to say about a week and a half ago, keeping him up to speed on our progress as well. So he's enthusiastic.'
"Kobach, who also later served on Trump's voter fraud commission in 2017 and ran for governor of Kansas in 2018, made several other comments about Trump's approval of the project, saying in another video from the group that the president 'expressed a clear enthusiasm for it.'"
"...the president's oldest son, Donald Trump, Jr., participated in a fundraiser for the group with Bannon and Kobach last year. Trump, Jr., was instrumental in introducing Kobach to his father in 2016 and joined Kobach for fundraisers during his 2018 campaign."At present, there's no reason to belive Trump himself was party to any of the fraud allegedly committed by We Build the Wall but the affair--like much of the rest of his administration--does speak to the character of those with whom he surrounds himself. Alongside all of the other corruption, Trump has filled his administration, particularly those parts of it dealing with immigration policy, with white nationalists or people who are enmeshed in white nationalist politics, drawing very heavily from the Tanton network. Last year, America's Voice assemblied a depressingly long list of some of them. The Center for American Progress (yeah, yeah) offered a more detailed look at a relative handful of the "anti-immigrant extremists" in the Trump administration.
A 2019 USA Today investigation revealed how Trump was able to turn his own virulently anti-immigrant policies into yet another revenue stream for himself. During the Obama administration, the government was in the process of phasing out its association with shady private prison companies. During the 2016 campaign and after, those companies began doling out a fortune in political donations, mostly to Trump and Republicans, and Trump reversed this, spending his administration handing out lucrative contracts to these companies, particularly expanding contracts to house immigrants. Under Trump, "ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] pays a higher premium per detainee than state and local prisons do. Jails typically pay private prison companies $35 to $40 per day per inmate, while state prisons pay $55 to $65 per day… ICE can pay up to $300 per detainee. Children and families are worth the most per head."
"The use of private prisons to detain immigrants is not new, but the business has exploded under Trump. At least 24 immigration detention centers and more than 17,000 beds were added in the past three years to the sprawling detention system run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)."
Prior to Trump, many of these companies were struggling. Under Trump, they’ve generated "record-setting revenue" and have plowed a portion of that right back into Trump and the Republicans via "record-setting political donations":
"The private prison industry set highs for federal campaign contributions in the 2016 presidential election cycle, spending more than $1.7 million, then again in 2018 by spending more than $1.9 million… Since the 1990 election, for-profit prisons, their political action committees and employees have given $9.5 million to candidates and the groups that support them, according to a USA TODAY Network analysis of data from the Federal Election Commission and the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics in Washington. Over that time, 78% of those funds backed Republican candidates or causes… Trump has received more than 25 times the amount of contributions that President Barack Obama received over his entire eight years in office--$969,000 to Trump and $38,000 to Obama. The industry donated to people inside Trump's inner circle, including Vice President Mike Pence, former Energy Secretary Rick Perry and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley while each served as governor of their home states.
GEO Group and CoreCivic, "the giants in the field" now operate "41 facilities that hold more than half of all detainees in ICE custody." And...
"GEO Group and CoreCivic each donated $250,000 to Trump's inaugural committee that helped fund the festivities as he was sworn into office. Hininger of CoreCivic said the company supported inaugurations of Presidents George W. Bush and Obama but did not provide specifics on how much they donated to those committees.
"GEO Group gave $225,000 to a super PAC that supported Trump. GEO Group's PAC and its CEO gave a combined $225,000 to Trump Victory, a committee that collects money and distributes it among the Trump campaign and other Republican efforts."
And, of course, "the GEO Group has taken the controversial step of frequently using Trump properties for business events and trips." When Trump convened an August 2018 meeting to discuss prison-related issues--at his own Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, of course--"guests included five governors and two state attorneys general--all but one of whom had received donations from the private prison industry in their state elections, according to data compiled by the nonpartisan National Institute on Money in Politics":
"They included former Republican Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky ($2,000), Republican Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi ($6,000), former Republican Gov. Nathan Deal of Georgia ($78,000), Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana ($13,500), former Republican Florida Attorney General Bondi ($2,000) and Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ($15,000), according to data compiled by the National Institute on Money in Politics.”
Hey, want a job in the Trump administration? Drop a bundle at Trump properties.
"Trump has nominated or considered four paying members of his Mar-a-Lago resort for ambassadorships, as well as a handful of members from other clubs as well. In November, Trump nominated Lana Marks, a Mar-a-Lago member, to be Ambassador to South Africa, though her experience as a handbag designer does not make her an obvious choice. Trump announced his plans to nominate Robin Bernstein, a founding member of Mar-a-Lago, to serve as Ambassador to the Dominican Republic in October 2017… [A] set of frequent Mar-a-Lago guests has become the so-called 'Shadow Rulers' of the Department of Veterans Affairs, allegedly calling important shots at the agency despite not being government officials."
Like every administration, Trump doles out ambassadorships to big donors but he has taken this practice to new lows:
"When President Donald Trump's pick for ambassador to the Bahamas testified before Congress to make the case for his nomination, he incorrectly stated that the island nation was part of the U.S. It is an independent country.
"For ambassador to the United Arab Emirates--a job so sensitive in the tense Middle East that every previous president gave it to a career diplomat-- Trump picked a wealthy real estate developer with no diplomatic experience.
"The ambassador to Morocco? A well-heeled car dealer. The nominee for Iceland? While well-traveled, he had never been to that Nordic country. For Melania Trump's native country of Slovenia? The founder of an evangelical charity who frequently reposted false far-right social media posts on her Facebook page.
"None have diplomatic experience, but they share one trait: All were big donors to Trump's presidential inaugural committee, which is now under federal investigation.
"An NBC News review of those who donated to the Trump inauguration found at least 14 major contributors to its inaugural fund who were later nominees to become ambassadors, donating an average of slightly over $350,000 apiece… Since the 1950s, roughly two-thirds of confirmed ambassadors have been career foreign service officials and one-third have been political appointees. Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush kept within that range, according to the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), which is comprised of current and former diplomats.
"The Trump administration is different. Of its confirmed appointees, around 50 percent are career foreign service diplomats, and 50 percent are political appointees, according to AFSA."
When Trump staffed the Agriculture Department, he was--as is so often the case--hiring people whose only qualification is that they were Trump supporters:
"President Donald Trump's appointees to jobs at Agriculture Department headquarters include a long-haul truck driver, a country club cabana attendant and the owner of a scented-candle company.
"A POLITICO review of dozens of résumés from political appointees to USDA shows the agency has been stocked with Trump campaign staff and volunteers who in many cases demonstrated little to no experience with federal policy, let alone deep roots in agriculture. But of the 42 résumés POLITICO reviewed, 22 cited Trump campaign experience. And based on their résumés, some of those appointees appear to lack credentials, such as a college degree, required to qualify for higher government salaries."
Only the best.
For all of Trump's tough talk in 2016 about getting lobbyists out of government and ending the revolving door between lobbying and government, the Associated Press reported last year that after only 2 1/2 years in office, Trump had already "named more former lobbyists to Cabinet-level posts than his most recent predecessors did in eight, putting a substantial amount of oversight in the hands of people with ties to the industries they're regulating":ProPublica (15 Oct., 2019) reported:"Former lobbyists run the Defense and Interior departments, Environmental Protection Agency and office of the U.S. Trade Representative. The acting Labor secretary, Pat Pizzella, is a former lobbyist and Trump's pick to run the department, Eugene Scalia, also is an ex-lobbyist. Scalia's confirmation hearing before a GOP-controlled Senate committee is scheduled for Thursday and Democrats are expected to grill him on his long record of opposing federal regulations ."A seventh ex-lobbyist, Dan Coats, resigned as Trump’s intelligence chief in August."President Barack Obama had five former lobbyists in his Cabinet during two terms in office and President George W. Bush had three, also during eight years in the White House, according to lobbying and foreign agent disclosure records."
ProPulbica cites the example of Colin Roskey, who went straight from 20 years as a lobbyist for the healthcare industry to the Trump Department of Health and Human Services, where, "as deputy secretary for legislation for mandatory health, he headed the portfolio that he tried to influence for most of his career." Roskey spent 9 months in that job then "went straight back to work for his old lobbying firm, Lincoln Policy Group, which specializes in health care policy.""At the halfway mark of President Donald Trump's first term, his administration has hired a lobbyist for every 14 political appointments made, welcoming a total of 281 lobbyists on board, a ProPublica and Columbia Journalism Investigations analysis shows... The number of lobbyists who have served in government jobs is four times more than the Obama administration had six years into office. And former lobbyists serving Trump are often involved in regulating the industries they worked for.
"Even government watchdogs who've long monitored the revolving door say that its current scale is a major shift from previous administrations. It's a 'staggering figure,' according to Virginia Canter, ethics chief counsel for the D.C.-based legal nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. 'It suggests that lobbyists see themselves as more effective in furthering their clients’ special interests from inside the government rather than from outside.'"
This is a common track for Trump officials. Politico (8 July, 2020):
And there's this:"On a February morning in 2018, representatives of several California water agencies arrived at a meeting at the Interior Department's austere Washington headquarters to discuss a long-sought goal: weakening the Endangered Species Act so more water could be diverted for farming."Less than three months later, one of the Interior officials at the meeting, Jason Larrabee, stepped down from his government post. Word reached one of the water agencies he'd met with that he was 'considering various offers from lobbying shops in D.C.,' as one lawyer put it.
"At the moment, he's not working for any water district or irrigation district in California, so a great opportunity exists to hire him prior to others seeking his services,' the lawyer told the water agency at the time."The water agency quickly hired Larrabee. And he has spent the past two years lobbying officials who once worked down the hall from him to side with farmers over environmentalists in California's water wars."Larrabee is one of at least 82 former Trump administration officials who have registered as lobbyists, according to an analysis of lobbying disclosure filings. Many more former administration officials have gone to work at lobbying firms or in government affairs roles in corporate America but have not registered as lobbyists... As Trump prepared to sign his administration's ethics pledge in 2017, he joked that 'most of the people standing behind me will not be able to go to work' on K Street. Yet one of the people standing behind him--then-White House chief of staff Reince Priebus--is now the chairman of a lobbying firm that's hired several other former White House aides, two of whom have registered as lobbyists."
"An APM Reports review of news coverage, ethics agreements and government financial disclosure forms has found that more than half of Trump's 20-person Cabinet has engaged in questionable or unethical conduct."There's no accountability for any of this; Trump doesn't enforce even the watered-down ethics pledge he makes those in his administration sign.
UNACCOUNTABLE SWAMP BETWEEN UNCOUNTABLE RAINDROPS
To construct and maintain such a scummy swamp, it's necessary to short-circuit all of the checks worked into government to ameliorate corruption, and Trump has made war against any institutional efforts to conduct oversight of his administration or hold he or his underlings accountable for their disreputable activities.
Inspectors general are the internal watchdogs of government agencies, assigned to looking out for unethical conduct, waste, fraud and abuse. Trump has allowed large numbers of IG offices to sit vacant for long stretches of his presidency or to appoint only acting IGs, leaving the offices without a permanent leader.
"What's more distressing, is the President seems to be particularly slow to fill IG positions at agencies critical to his policy agenda and where questionable ethical activity has already occurred."When IGs try to hold he and his people responsible, Trump drops the axe. Steven Linick, then-State Dept. IG was conducing multiple investigations of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, looking into Pompeo's improper use of official flights to visit Republican donors, his unlawful declaration of an "emergency" when there was no emergency in order to allow for the resumption of weapons sales for Saudi Arabia to aid the Saudi genocide in Yemen and Pompeo's practice of holding lavish "Madison Dinners" at the State Dept. in which he assembled corporate, political and media elite to build a support-base for his own political future. Trump fired Linick at Pompeo's request. When Christi Grimm, the acting IG of Health & Human Services, released a report covering shotages of testing supplies and protective gear at hospitals during the coronavirus pandemic, Trump ranted and raved against the report, falsely insisting there were no such shortages and calling the report "another fake dossier." And then he replaced Grimm. Mitch Behm, the acting IG of the Transportation Dept., opened an inquiry into whether Trump Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao was giving preferential treatment in a discretionary grant program to organizations and projects in Kentucky while her husband, Senate Majority Leader and Trump ally Mitch McConnell, was running for reelection there.[18] He too was replaced.[19]
At the same time, Trump has often given IG posts, which are supposed to be independent, to political appointees working in other areas of his administration. In at least one instance, Trump appointed one of his donors to be the acting IG of the Interior Dept. Before joining the Trump administration, Gail Ennis "was a partner at WilmerHale, which lobbies on behalf of organizations with business before Interior."
"Ennis is a problematic choice for many reasons, including her political donations to Trump's election and re-election efforts. Beginning the day after Donald Trump became the Republican nominee for president, Ennis donated thousands of dollars to the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, the Republican National Committee and Donald Trump’s campaign... While IGs are allowed to make political donations, they are appointed to act as independent and nonpartisan watchdogs. Ennis' substantial donations before and after Trump's election raise questions about her impartiality in a role where it is paramount."CREW notes that Trump tried to slip this past everyone. "Her appointment was never formally announced by the White House, and went unnoticed for weeks."
During the Robert Mueller probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Establishment Democrats and elements of the corporate press, each pursuing their own agendas, spent two years lost in Fox News-like conspiracy mongering, building the Russia story into a massive scandal that would soon see Trump's administration dramatically end, probably with Trump unmasked as an agent of Vladimir Putin. This hype, nonsense and gross journalistic malpractice raised public expectations to such an impossible level that when the conclusion of the investigation utterly failed to meet them, public interest fizzled like those sensationalistic charges and Trump's team was able, through some often dishonest scheming, to completely outmaneuver his critics. Trump's take was that he had been exonerated of all wrongdoing.
Almost entirely lost in all of this were the actual findings of the Mueller report, which were a very damning indictment of Trump and his swamp. The final report offered a portrait of a "president" behaving like a gangster--constantly trying to obstruct the investigation, destroying evidence, witness tampering, creating (and attempting to create) false records to mislead investigators. What should have been a huge scandal--and would have swiftly led to the impeachment of any prior president--landed with a thud because of all the Russia conspiracy hype.
A very old joke asks "how can you tell when a politician is lying?" The answer: "When his lips are moving." It's an overstated assessment of a particularly damnable trait of public officials, the disgust it engenders worked into the exaggeration. Trump is perhaps the first politicians about whom it can be said that joke isn't really an exaggeration. Trump's dishonesty is compulsive. It seems to be stamped on his DNA. It has no apparent limits. Nothing is spared it. Trump lies as he breathes. If something is coming out of his mouth, it's more likely than not a lie. He lies even when the truth would serve him better. The Washington Post has made a project of cataloging this impulse. By July 2020, it had documented more than 20,000 false or misleading claims by Trump.
In the course of the Mueller probe, the special counsel wanted Trump to testify. Trump's lawyers, realizing this would end their congenital liar of a client, were having none of that. Mueller didn't have the power to compel Trump to testify and eventually just dropped the matter, settling for allowing Trump to submit written answers to some questions. Having gotten away with this, Trump apparently decided he could just extend this practice--minus even the written answers--to congress, which does have the power to compel testimony from administration figures. Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in 2018 and opened some investigations into the Trump administration. Trump announced a policy of total resistance to congressional oversight.
As part of an investigation of possible emoluments clause violations by Trump, the House Oversight and Reform committee subpoenaed Trump's accounting firm to turn over Trump's financial records. Trump's lawyers threatened the firm with legal action if it complied. Trump then sued the committee's chairman in an effort to block the subpoena. Trump's lawsuit was quickly laughed out of court; Judge Amit Mehta was so unimpressed with Trump's case that she not only upheld the subpoena but took the extra step of denying Trump's team a stay of the decision pending appeal. Trump appealed the ruling and lost again. The case ultimately went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which punted the issue, curiously deciding the lower court had failed to thoroughly enough examine the separation of powers issues raised by the case, suggesting a formula whereby it could do so and sending the case back down the chain for reconsideration.[20]"Every administration has fought with Congress, but seldom like this. Lawmakers are seeking information that would shed light on Trump's personal affairs, and the White House has responded with personal attacks... The White House has signaled it will fight them on every front."'We're fighting all the subpoenas. These aren't like impartial people. The Democrats are trying to win 2020,' Trump said Wednesday."
Both the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees subpoenaed from the Justice Department the unredacted Mueller report and its underlying grand jury evidence. Trump's Attorney General William Barr refused to comply. When the Judiciary committee voted to hold Barr in contempt, the White House swooped in claiming the report was covered under executive privilege. Every administration makes executive privilege claims, often frivolous, often to conceal damaging details about executive-branch operations, then feuds with congress over them. The Trump swamp has made these claims--more sweeping that past administrations--as part of a much larger and completely unprecedented effort to blockade congressional oversight--a context that shouldn't be overlooked--and in a way that is often impossible to defend, even by the thin arguments that usually underpin such assertions.
In March 2018, for example, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross testified to a House subcommittee about his efforts to add a citizenship question to the U.S. census. He'd denied ever discussing the matter with White House officials and had insisted he'd tried to add the question only at the request of the Justice Department. It later emerged that, on both of these matters, Ross had perjured himself. He'd been in contact with the White House all along and that Justice Dept. request was, in reality, something Ross had spent months behind the scenes trying to manufacture. Congress wanted answers. In April 2019, the House Oversight and Reform committee subpoenaed documents from Ross and Attorney General William Barr on this matter. Both defied the subpoenas and the White House made an executive privilege claim over the material in question. Ross's earlier testimony, in which he'd offered an exculpatory but false narrative before a Republican-controlled subcommittee, was just fine; it was only when his deceit had been revealed that the administration decided this material had to be withheld. The committee voted to hold both in contempt. Trump's Justice Department--run by Barr--promptly announced it wouldn't be pursuing any charges against Barr or Ross.
During the Mueller probe, Trump had told then-White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller. Recognizing the very questionable legality of such a move, McGahn had refused. Later, Trump instructed McGahn to lie to investigators, denying this and constructing a false record that would show Trump never made any such request. McGahn again refused. The House Judiciary committee subpoenaed McGahn to testify about this. Trump moved to block any such appearance, asserting that senior advisors to the president are immune from such subpoenas from congress and that this immunity continues even after the advisors leave office (McGahn had left the Trump administration months earlier).
Such radical immunity claims have been made by numerous recent presidents. George Bush Jr. tried it, producing the only case in which the courts directly ruled on the question:
"[A] claim of absolute immunity from compulsory process cannot be erected by the Executive as a surrogate for the claim of absolute executive privilege already firmly rejected by the courts. Presidential autonomy, such as it is, cannot mean that the Executive's actions are totally insulated from scrutiny by Congress. That would eviscerate Congress's historical oversight function... [T]here is no judicial support whatsoever for the Executive's claim of absolute immunity..."Not a decision that stutters. In addition, in the case of McGahn, the immunity claim was being made as a cover for illegal activities that the Mueller team had already documented in a publicly-released report. In August 2019, House Democrats sued to compel McGahn's testimony, then, in November 2019, a federal court ruled that McGahn must testify:
"It is clear to this Court for the reasons explained above that, with respect to senior-level presidential aides, absolute immunity from compelled congressional process simply does not exist... Presidents are not kings."The lawyers for His Highness's swamp of course disagreed and the case has only continued.[21] In years of litigation on this and other cases, Trump hasn't managed to win a single ruling supporting his magestirial but legally baseless "absolute immunity" claim. That didn't kept his underlings from continuing to cite it as they refused to provide requested--even subpoenaed--documents and testimony to congress.
White House counsel Kellyanne Conway, for example. In June 2019, the Office of Special Counsel encountered something so egregious that it did something it had never done in any administration; it recommended that Conway be fired for extensive violations of the Hatch Act, which bars federal employees from using their office to engage in political activities. Instead of firing Conway, the White House counsel--no kidding--"immediately issued a letter calling for the agency to withdraw its recommendation that Conway be removed"! The Office declined. Conway had, by then, violated the Act dozens of times--more than anyone in decades. CREW documented more than 50 violations of he Act by Conway on Twitter alone. Looking into Conway's crimes, the House Oversight committee subpoenaed her. She refused to appear, citing the "absolutely immune" nonsense.
By the way, with Trump making it clear his underlings will face no penalty for violating the law, those Hatch Act violations have proliferated. By July 2020, "the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), which enforces the Hatch Act, has found that more than a dozen senior Trump administration officials have broken this law." The comparable number for the 8 years of the Obama administration? Two. As of this writing, the Trump swamp just carried out its most blatant violations of the Hatch Act yet, staging parts of the Republican National Convention, broadcast on nationwide television, from the White House and other sites controlled by the federal government. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo just made a remote convention speech from Jerusalem (Senate-confirmed presidential appointees at State are barred from even appearing at a political party convention or related event). "Some of Mr. Trump’s aides privately scoff at the Hatch Act," reports the New York Times, "and say they take pride in violating its regulations."
That kind of shamelessness is everywhere in the Trump administration. In 2016, Trump relentlessly roasted Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server during her time as Secretary of State--a scheme by Clinton to skirt public records laws. But once in power, the Trump swamp has made extensive use of private email for their work-related communications.
"In November 2019, the Daily Beast reported on emails obtained by American Oversight that show former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley had sent multiple emails containing classified information over an unclassified system because she had lost her password for such protected communications."No, really--that really did happen.
"Those emails, sent shortly after a July 2017 North Korean missile test, contained a number of redactions indicating that the content of fell under the Freedom of Information Act's 'classified national defense' exemption."Clinton faced harsh criticism for having transmitted classified information on her private server. This author isn't among those who immediately pearl-clutch at the very thought of classified info being insecurely passed around, for the simple reason that the U.S. government obsessively overclassifies everything. If revelation of the information being transmitted would actually cause harm, it's a lot bigger scandal. Public records laws are, themselves, very important though. Trump rode into office on scathing criticism of Clinton's scheme to dodge such laws then established a swamp that regularly does the same thing.
In late 2019, the news broke that Trump had been trying to use U.S. aid to blackmail the government in the Ukraine into manufacturing "investigations" into Joe Biden, one of Trump's prominent 2020 rivals. This led to a flurry of coverage but as with "Russia, Russia, Russia," the press missed the real story, narrowly focusing on the court intrigue aspect of Trump trying to screw Biden while ignoring the larger context revealed by a string of little-noticed stories that appeared throughout that scandal; that Trump had been using criminals, con-men and corrupt officials to establish what was essentially a racketeering operation aimed at undermining reform efforts in Ukraine and corrupting the new reformist government there for their own benefit, an effort of which the extortion attempt was but one part. The failure to adequately provide that context allowed Trump and his Republican enablers to muddy the waters and spin the extortion effort as some sort of legitimate initiative. Nancy Pelosi, the alleged "Democratic" Speaker of the House, aided in this effort. In between time spent helping pass Trump's major agenda items and beating back progressives, Pelosi was a rock of opposition to impeachment throughout 2019. Even after she finally acquiesced to an impeachment inquiry, she continued to protect Trump, insisting it have an excruciatingly narrow focus.
Trump's response to the launch of the inquiry was delivered by Trump's dimwitted White House Counsel:
"White House Counsel Pat Cipollone's letter to the House leadership, declaring that the president will not cooperate in any impeachment inquiry, is an extraordinary document in more than one respect. As Keith Whittington and Frank Bowman have shown, the letter's constitutional and 'legal' arguments are baseless. It misrepresents the constitutional law and precedent that it is pleading on the president's behalf. On the merits, it is an exceptionally weak performance. Add to this another deficiency: its glaring failure to effectively represent the institutional interests of the presidency."Cipillone's letter was little more than a litany of insults and political posturing. It asserted that until the House took a formal vote on establishing an impeachment inquiry, no such inquiry exists--a claim with no constitutional or legal basis. Rather than making any case for affording Trump the sweeping procedural safeguards it outlines, it merely assumes Trump is somehow entitled to them as "rights," though they exist nowhere in the relevant U.S. law, and dismisses the inquiry as illegitimate based on that assumption. It asserts that there is no basis for any inquiry and makes its case for this by distorting the public record beyond recognition.
"When all is said and done, Cipollone has informed the House that, on the basis of a unilateral and unsupportable judgment about its merits, the president is washing his hands of the impeachment inquiry."Trump issued a blanket order that no one in the administration was to cooperate in any way with the inquiry.
In response to a lawsuit aimed at prying from the swamp the unredacted Mueller report, Trump sent administration lawyers into court to argue his case that no impeachment inquiry exists until a formal vote was taken. The swamp could cite no legal or constitutional basis for this assertion, so, well...
Within days, the House adopted a resolution formalizing the inquiry and establishing rules for it. After insisting such a resolution was necessary, Trump simply continued his across-the-board blockade of information while continuing to rant and rave against the proceedings. The administration witnesses who, under House subpoena, testified at the inquiry did so in contravention of Trump's orders. In December, after a narrowly focused inquiry, the House impeached Trump."A federal judge handed a victory to House Democrats on Friday when she ruled that they were legally engaged in an impeachment inquiry, a decision that undercut President Trump’s arguments that the investigation is a sham."The declaration came in a 75-page opinion by Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell of the Federal District Court in Washington. She ruled that the House Judiciary Committee was entitled to view secret grand jury evidence gathered by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III."Typically, Congress has no right to view such evidence. But in 1974, the courts permitted lawmakers to see such materials as they weighed whether to impeach President Richard M. Nixon. The House is now immersed in the same process focused on Mr. Trump, Judge Howell ruled, and that easily outweighs any need to keep the information secret from lawmakers."And in a rebuke to the Trump administration, she wrote that the White House strategy to stonewall the House had actually strengthened lawmakers' case. She cited Mr. Trump's vow to fight 'all' congressional subpoenas and an extraordinary directive by his White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, that executive branch officials should not provide testimony or documents to impeachment investigators."'The White House’s stated policy of noncooperation with the impeachment inquiry weighs heavily in favor of disclosure,' Judge Howell wrote. 'Congress's need to access grand jury material relevant to potential impeachable conduct by a president is heightened when the executive branch willfully obstructs channels for accessing other relevant evidence."
The matter then moved to the Senate for trial, where the Senators would be Trump's jurors and decide his fate. During the 2016 campaign, Trump had observed, "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters," and the conventional wisdom was that no matter what happened in the House impeachment, the Senate, controlled by Republicans, would refuse to remove Trump. Trump wasn't taking any chances. He began openly using his fundraising network to raise money for Republican senators who were facing tough re-elections fights in the 2020 cycle and for whom voting for Trump's acquittal could be a problem back home, if they sign a resolution condeming the impeachment inquiry as "unprecedented and undemocratic."
"On Wednesday, the Trump reelection campaign sent a fundraising appeal to its massive email list urging donors to provide a contribution that would be divided between the president and Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, and North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis. Each of the senators are supporting the anti-impeachment resolution despite being endangered in 2020.Maine Sen. Susan Collins, on the other hand, was facing a tough reelection battle but had refused to sign the pledge; when Trump started doling out the largesse, she was passed over. Jury tampering is a somewhat imprecise metaphor here but these actions by Trump were certainly in the spirit of it.
"'If we don’t post strong fundraising numbers,' the message warned, 'we won't be able to defend the President from this baseless Impeachment WITCH HUNT.'
"Next week, Trump will lend a hand to Georgia Sen. David Perdue, a staunch ally who has also spoken out against impeachment. On Nov. 8, the president will host an Atlanta fundraising lunch that will jointly benefit his campaign, the Republican National Committee, and Perdue’s reelection effort. Attendees are being asked to give up to $100,000, according to an invitation obtained by POLITICO.
"Trump is also set to appear next week at a reception for Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC closely aligned with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and party leadership."
As expected, the Senate voted to acquit Trump; within 48 hours, Trump began firing those who had had recognized the legality of congressional supboenas and had testified in the inquiry.
"Emboldened by his victory and determined to strike back, Mr. Trump ordered Gordon D. Sondland, the founder of a hotel chain who donated $1 million to the president's inaugural committee, recalled from his post as the ambassador to the European Union on the same day that Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, a decorated Iraq war veteran on the National Security Council staff, was marched out of the White House by security guards."Just for good measure, Trump also fired Vindman's brother Yevgeny. Later, Trump fired Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general who had investigated the initial whistleblower complaint that led to the impeachment then had alerted congress of its existence in compliance with statute, at a time when the White House was ignoring the law and trying to sweep it under the rug. "That man is a disgrace to IGs," Trump declared. "He's a total disgrace."
SOME PARTING THOUGHTS
Yes, dear reader, it's almost over!
It feels important to reiterate a point made in the introduction; though this is an article of some length, it isn't a comprehensive treatment of the subject of Trump's corruption. The number of corruption stories not covered here probably significantly outnumber those addressed, and the details of those addressed are far more voluminous than the accounts of them here. With the Trump administration, corruption is everywhere. Everything. It's also the case that I may have unduly leaned on a "just the facts, ma'am" model to the detriment of more thoroughly examining the soul of the Trump swamp, as it feels as if something of the flavor of that swamp is missing.. Trump's chronic dishonestly, his endless hypocrisies, his personal viciousness--none feel, at first blush, as if they're as much of a presence as they probably should be. Trump is, as of this writing, running an administration that more closely resembles a criminal conspiracy alongside a self-righteous "law n' order" campaign ludicrously libeling his 2020 Democratic challenger Joe Biden as someone who will allow criminals to run wild. If, from this article, the Trump swamp sounds bad, it is, in reality, much worse.
Because political partisans will inevitably try to have it otherwise, it's perhaps even more important to note that Trump's swamp is really the American swamp.The swamp he's built isn't a new one; it's just a vast expansion of the one that already existed. When it comes to this kind of inveterate corruption, Trump's major innovation is simply that he is far more prolific. He is, in this respect, an aberration from the American presidential norm only in scale. He isn't a germ that invaded and contaminated some previously functional organism. He has simply taken the corrupt bribery-and-donor-service system that dominates our politics much closer to its logical end. What's most shocking about all of this corruption isn't what of it is criminal. It's how much of what he has done is perfectly legal (or arguably legal). The institutions of government that are supposed to protect against this sort of malfeasance have shown themselves to be entirely incapable of doing so--they're products of the same system. Even as people take to the streets desperately crying out for reform that addresses the ills that plague them, systemic corruption presents them with a government entirely unresponsive to their needs, one that only just rips them off to enrich a relative handful of elite, a political process that offers them no positive choice and little real input. Even with Trump trying his best to lose the upcoming presidential election, the prospects of any real systemic course-correction, with yet another corrupt swamp-creature waiting in the wings as Trump's major challenger, are slim indeed.
This is an unsustainable course that could ultimately be the end of the already-dying American experiment in liberal democracy. Those of us with more radical leanings wouldn't necessarily see that as a bad thing, but one doesn't want to replace it with something worse.
--j.
---
[1] After he was elected, Trump made a big show of resigning from his many positions within the Trump Organization. But if Trump isn't running his businesses, from which he still reaps the benefit, who is? Trump announced he was turning over control to his adult sons but in 2019, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington did some digging and found that--surprise, surprise--no one has filled Trump's positions.
[2] Since Trump's election, the Trump Organization's real-estate transactions have been shady as hell. In June 2017, USA Today reported:
[6] In an amusing footnote to that story, Trump--recognizing the whole affair looked like exactly what it was--then denied he'd had anything to do with firing Berman. "I'm not involved," he told reporters. "That's [Barr's] department, not my department." But Barr didn't have the authority to fire Berman.
[7] A 2019 op-ed in the New York Times examined the wealth concentration the Trump tax-cuts had exacerbated:
[9] Six months into the administration, ProPublica reported:
All of these staffers were hired on a temporary basis but many were expected to transition into permanent jobs in the government, which, in fact, happened. By August, these staffers had multiplied to more than 1,000 and ProPublica was on the case again, revealing that the latest hires included various crackpots, people tied to regulated industries, at least 61 more registered lobbyists, and that hundreds of these theoretically temporary employees were being hired into the government.
[11] Within only a few weeks of that resignation, Zinke began to cash in, joining lobbying firm Turnberry Solutions.
[12] That entire sorry advisory board episode was only one chapter in a larger drama. The Washington Post reported in January that "hundreds of scientists across the federal government... have been forced out, sidelined or muted since President Trump took office":
[14] When Republican operative and gerrymanering expert Thomas Hofeller died, his daughter came into possession of multiple harddrives and thumbdrives regarding her father's work and, among other things, it provided a much darker explanation for the origin of the citizenship question: a scheme to advantage Republicans by suppressing the Hispanic vote. Hofeller had urged Trump's transition team to include the citizenship question and later authored "the key portion of a draft Justice Department letter claiming the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act," the phony rationale for the change on which the Trump administration eventually settled.
[15] Whenever she signed off on claims that had already been approved by the Obama administration, she added the words "with extreme displeasure" beneath her signature.
[16] Traditionally, such commissions have been bipartisan, evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, but Trump's commission was lopsidedly stacked with not just Republicans but right-wing crackpots. Back when it was being assembled, Hans von Spakovsky, wrote the Trump administration and urged that no Democrats, mainstream Republicans or academics be included. Von Spakovsky, whom the Union of Concerned Scientists has described as being part of "a small but virulent group of pseudoscientific charlatans, intent on restricting participation in elections," has a long history of promoting false tales of voter fraud. Trump appointed him to the commission.
[17] The Miami Herald (22 Aug., 2020) reported that "Bannon was arrested Thursday on an ultra-luxury yacht belonging to the Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, a high-profile Communist Party dissident who is a Mar-a-Lago member... Guo, the Chinese billionaire, joined Mar-a-Lago in early 2015. The Wall Street Journal later reported that Trump dismissed a request from China' government to extradite Guo--who is wanted there on charges of bribery and sexual assault, among others--after learning he was a member of Mar-a-Lago."
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[1] After he was elected, Trump made a big show of resigning from his many positions within the Trump Organization. But if Trump isn't running his businesses, from which he still reaps the benefit, who is? Trump announced he was turning over control to his adult sons but in 2019, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington did some digging and found that--surprise, surprise--no one has filled Trump's positions.
[2] Since Trump's election, the Trump Organization's real-estate transactions have been shady as hell. In June 2017, USA Today reported:
"Since President Trump won the Republican nomination, the majority of his companies' real estate sales are to secretive shell companies that obscure the buyers' identities, a USA TODAY investigation has found.[3] NBC News (Dec. 2017) reported "the precise number of times Trump has actually played golf is difficult to track. His administration has tried to hide Trump's activity, keeping his traveling press pool away and often refusing to confirm whether he has played golf." During the 2016 campaign, Trump mocked President Obama for an allegedly excessive amount of time spent on the golf course. "I love golf," he said while in New Hampshire, "but if I were in the White House? I don't think I'd ever see Turnberry again, I don't think I'd ever see Doral again. I'd just want to stay in the White House and work my ass off and make great deals." In Virginia, he said, "Because I'm going to be working for you, I'm not going to have time to play golf. Believe me." Then, of course, his administration has been one long golfing trip. That Huffpost article reports that
"Over the last 12 months, about 70% of buyers of Trump properties were limited liability companies--corporate entities that allow people to purchase property without revealing all of the owners' names. That compares with about 4% of buyers in the two years before."
"Trump is on schedule to spend far more time on the golf course than Obama did. At this point in Obama’s first term, he had spent 88 days on a golf course. But Trump's visit to his course in West Palm Beach on Wednesday was his 223rd day at one of his own courses--two and a half times as many golfing days as Obama.
"Further, Obama played the majority of his rounds at courses on military bases within a short drive of the White House, while Trump has insisted on taking numerous trips to visit his courses in New Jersey and Florida, both of which require seven-figure travel and security costs."
[4] The New York Times further reported that
[5] Further running afoul of the Domestic Emoluments Clause, Trump has raked in plenty of scratch from state governments as well. At least 10 governors, for example, dropped over $400,000 at Trump National Doral--Trump's Miami golf course--in the first half of 2017. Another example: Kentucky taxpayers picked up the bill when then-Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin stayed at Trump's D.C. hotel in 2019. Still another: then-Maine Gov. Paul LaPage "spent more than $22,000 from the state budget at Trump properties in his final two years in office. All told, LePage and his administration booked 40 rooms at the Trump International Hotel in Washington--paying between $362 and $1,100 per room, according to some remarkable reporting in the Portland Press Herald.""[F]or Mr. Pence, the visit to Doonbeg was only the most recent instance in which he or his relatives have patronized Mr. Trump’s businesses."His Great America Committee has spent more than $225,000 at Trump International Hotel in Washington since 2017, one of the largest vendor expenditures for the political committee. Great America Committee has also recently spent money at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia, Federal Election Commission records show."Greg Pence, the vice president’s brother and an Indiana congressman, is another big spender at Trump International, paying more than $45,000 worth of bills at the hotel since 2017."
[6] In an amusing footnote to that story, Trump--recognizing the whole affair looked like exactly what it was--then denied he'd had anything to do with firing Berman. "I'm not involved," he told reporters. "That's [Barr's] department, not my department." But Barr didn't have the authority to fire Berman.
[7] A 2019 op-ed in the New York Times examined the wealth concentration the Trump tax-cuts had exacerbated:
"For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans last year paid a lower total tax rate--spanning federal, state and local taxes--than any other income group, according to newly released data."[8] The Trump White House issued ethics waivers for many early appointees, excepting them from ethics rules, but failed to disclose them. In April 2017, Shaub started demanding that the administration publicly release them. As NPR reported, such waivers "are considered public documents, but the Trump White House had been holding them back, saying OGE lacked the legal authority to require disclosure." Trump eventually caved but in July, 2017, Shaub, an 11-year veteran of the Office of Government Ethics, resigned in disgust.
[9] Six months into the administration, ProPublica reported:
[10] Two months into the administration (8 March, 2017), ProPublica reported that while Trump was dragging his feet about appointing nominees to posts requiring Senate approval--meaning scrutiny--he was installing hundreds of staffers throughout the government whose duties and even their identities were being kept secret by the White House. ProPublica identified more than 400 of them, including"President Trump entered office pledging to cut red tape, and within weeks, he ordered his administration to assemble teams to aggressively scale back government regulations."But the effort... is being conducted in large part out of public view and often by political appointees with deep industry ties and potential conflicts."Most government agencies have declined to disclose information about their deregulation teams. But ProPublica and The New York Times identified 71 appointees, including 28 with potential conflicts, through interviews, public records and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act."Some appointees are reviewing rules their previous employers sought to weaken or kill, and at least two may be positioned to profit if certain regulations are undone."The appointees include lawyers who have represented businesses in cases against government regulators, staff members of political dark money groups, employees of industry-funded organizations opposed to environmental rules and at least three people who were registered to lobby the agencies they now work for."
"A Trump campaign aide who argues that Democrats committed 'ethnic cleansing' in a plot to 'liquidate' the white working class. A former reality show contestant whose study of societal collapse inspired him to invent a bow-and-arrow-cum-survivalist multi-tool. A pair of healthcare industry lobbyists. A lobbyist for defense contractors. An 'evangelist' and lobbyist for Palantir, the Silicon Valley company with close ties to intelligence agencies. And a New Hampshire Trump supporter who has only recently graduated from high school... The list we obtained includes obscure campaign staffers, contributors to Breitbart and others who have embraced conspiracy theories, as well as dozens of Washington insiders who could be reasonably characterized as part of the 'swamp' Trump pledged to drain.That number, ProPublica notes, is an undercount and doesn't include lobbyists who don't formally register or who work at the state level.
"The list is striking for how many former lobbyists it contains: We found at least 36, spanning industries from health insurance and pharmaceuticals to construction, energy and finance. Many of them lobbied in the same areas that are regulated by the agencies they have now joined."
All of these staffers were hired on a temporary basis but many were expected to transition into permanent jobs in the government, which, in fact, happened. By August, these staffers had multiplied to more than 1,000 and ProPublica was on the case again, revealing that the latest hires included various crackpots, people tied to regulated industries, at least 61 more registered lobbyists, and that hundreds of these theoretically temporary employees were being hired into the government.
[11] Within only a few weeks of that resignation, Zinke began to cash in, joining lobbying firm Turnberry Solutions.
"'I am excited to join Turnberry Solutions and I look forward to helping companies navigate the Washington, D.C., bureaucracy,' Zinke said..."The fossil fuel industry was pleased with Zinke's opening of public lands for oil and gas drilling; within a few months, Zinke was touting his new career as an "advisor and business strategist" for the very oil, gas and mining companies he'd previously been charged with regulating.
"Among them: Texas pipeline supplier Cressman Tubular Products Corp. and Oasis Petroleum Inc., a Houston-based oil and gas explorer that donated tens of thousands of dollars to Zinke when he was seeking re-election to the House. In April, Zinke joined the board of U.S. Gold Corp., and is set to receive $90,000 in consulting fees from the Nevada-based mining company, according to filings.And so on.
"He is also a managing director and consultant for North Carolina-based private investment company Artillery One, and is promoting U.S. liquefied natural gas to foreign markets. He is serving as an adviser to Turnberry Solutions, the Washington lobbying firm stacked with former Trump administration advisers and campaign aides."
[12] That entire sorry advisory board episode was only one chapter in a larger drama. The Washington Post reported in January that "hundreds of scientists across the federal government... have been forced out, sidelined or muted since President Trump took office":
"In the first two years of the Trump administration, more than 1,600 federal scientists left government, according to Office of Personnel Management employment data analyzed by The Washington Post. That represents a 1.5 percent drop, compared with the 8 percent increase during the same period in the Obama administration.
[13] And, in fact, Trump, who vowed during the 2016 campaign not to cut Social Security, has included massive SS cuts in all four of his annual budget submissions during his administration."One-fifth of the high-level appointee positions in science are vacant--normally filled by experts who shape policy and ensure research integrity."Of those who departed, the numbers were greatest among social scientists, soil conservationists, hydrologists and experts in the physical sciences--chemistry, geology, astronomy and physics."At the Environmental Protection Agency, nearly 700 scientists have left in the past three years, according to The Post analysis."
[14] When Republican operative and gerrymanering expert Thomas Hofeller died, his daughter came into possession of multiple harddrives and thumbdrives regarding her father's work and, among other things, it provided a much darker explanation for the origin of the citizenship question: a scheme to advantage Republicans by suppressing the Hispanic vote. Hofeller had urged Trump's transition team to include the citizenship question and later authored "the key portion of a draft Justice Department letter claiming the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act," the phony rationale for the change on which the Trump administration eventually settled.
[15] Whenever she signed off on claims that had already been approved by the Obama administration, she added the words "with extreme displeasure" beneath her signature.
[16] Traditionally, such commissions have been bipartisan, evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, but Trump's commission was lopsidedly stacked with not just Republicans but right-wing crackpots. Back when it was being assembled, Hans von Spakovsky, wrote the Trump administration and urged that no Democrats, mainstream Republicans or academics be included. Von Spakovsky, whom the Union of Concerned Scientists has described as being part of "a small but virulent group of pseudoscientific charlatans, intent on restricting participation in elections," has a long history of promoting false tales of voter fraud. Trump appointed him to the commission.
[17] The Miami Herald (22 Aug., 2020) reported that "Bannon was arrested Thursday on an ultra-luxury yacht belonging to the Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, a high-profile Communist Party dissident who is a Mar-a-Lago member... Guo, the Chinese billionaire, joined Mar-a-Lago in early 2015. The Wall Street Journal later reported that Trump dismissed a request from China' government to extradite Guo--who is wanted there on charges of bribery and sexual assault, among others--after learning he was a member of Mar-a-Lago."
[18] Chao's run as Transportation Secretary is one long scandal too. From American Oversight:
“At the same time Chao's Kentucky favoritism was coming to light, questions were also arising about her role in her family’s prominent shipping company, Foremost Group. In June 2019, the New York Times reported on how Chao's position in the Trump administration had 'boosted the profile' of Foremost. In one instance from 2017, an official at the American embassy in Beijing sent an email to the Department of State seeking ethics advice about questionable arrangements for a Transportation Department trip to China. Among the official's concerns were requests from Chao's office for accommodations for Chao family members associated with Foremost Group. Chao subsequently canceled the trip.
“Following the Times report, American Oversight obtained and published official calendars revealing that her actions on behalf of her family's company included a private photo session with her father, James Chao, and Foremost Group employees at the Department of Transportation as well as a past speaking engagement. That same summer, following a Wall Street Journal report, Chao sold her shares of construction company Vulcan Materials, more than a year past the deadline she had initially pledged for divestment. In September, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform announced an investigation into Chao's business ties, citing her Vulcan Materials investments, the canceled China trip, and her public appearances alongside her father.
“Since then, additional reporting from Politico, citing documents uncovered by American Oversight, found that 25 percent of Chao's meetings with local officials in her first 14 months as secretary were with officials from Kentucky, many of those meetings having been arranged through McConnell’s office, which notified Chao's staffers which of the officials were 'loyal supporters.'"
[19] Hilariously, the Trump administration then claimed that Behm was never acting IG.
“But several documents, including Behm’s own bio on the DOT website and a recent press release naming him to a pandemic oversight task force, refer to him as the acting IG for the agency.”
[20] Simultaneous with this case, New York prosecutors were also seeking these same financial records as part of a grand jury investigation. Trump has fought these efforts as well, less successfully.
[21] In August 2020, an appeals court ruled that congress does have the right to sue to compel McGahn's testimony, rejecting Trump’s immunity claims but allowing the administration to continue to stonewall congress by letting the case continue on other grounds.
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