like CN, they'll call themselves "libertarians" but shill for republican politicians. although in the younger age group, libertarians are basically republicans that smoke weedit's amazing how quick people Republicans are to deny that they're Republicans. Republicans and hipsters, kindred spirits in denial of self.
D.C. and Maryland sue President Trump, alleging breach of cons utional oath
Attorneys general for the District of Columbia and the state of Maryland sued President Trump on Monday, alleging that he has violated anti-corruption clauses in the Cons ution by accepting millions in payments and benefits from foreign governments since moving into the White House.
The lawsuit, the first of its kind brought by government en ies, centers on the fact that Trump chose to retain ownership of his company when he became president.
Trump said in January that he was shifting his business assets into a trust managed by his sons to eliminate potential conflicts of interests.
say Trump has broken many promises to keep separate his public duties and private business interests.
For one, his son Eric Trump has said the president would continue to receive regular updates about his company’s financial health.
alleges “unprecedented cons utional violations” by Trump.
The suit says Trump’s continued ownership of a global business empire has rendered the president
“deeply enmeshed with a legion of foreign and domestic government actors” and
has undermined the integrity of the U.S. political system.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local...t-draw7&wpmm=1
Thanks.
No pithy thoughts? Or is corruption ok with you?
Probe of Eric Trump Foundation could potentially get VERY close to White House
In case you missed it, New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman has indicated that he is taking a very long and very hard look at the Eric Trump Foundation’s shady business dealings—including how a $100,000 donation from Donald Trump’s foundation didn’t go to help kids fight cancer, but ultimately wound up in the Trump Organization’s bank account.
What you may not know is that if Schneiderman does move forward with this, any investigation could potentially put the squeeze on one of Trump’s closest White House confidants.
Namely,
Dan Scavino, Trump’s social media chief—the notorious fake news peddler who runs the White House Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram feeds, as well as Trump’s “official” Twitter account.
While delving into Schneiderman’s potential investigation at Liberal America,
I noticed that Scavino had been one of a number of Trump Organization employees to find their way onto the Eric Trump Foundation board from 2011 to 2015—
around the time that the Eric Trump Foundation’s financial practices started getting dodgy.
As Forbes originally noted, by 2015, at least
six Trump Organization employees served on the Eric Trump Foundation board—including Scavino.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/6...tail=emaildkre
Attorneys General of Maryland, D.C. to Sue Trump Over Foreign Payments
Looks like we get to have a full blown cons utional crisis.
http://ktla.com/2017/06/12/maryland-...eign-payments/
Trump insider pursuing bid for FBI building contract, raising questions of conflict of interest
Not even going to bother with links. Google is that way....
Is Trump Inc. the President’s Greatest Vulnerability?
A group of enterprising lawyers thinks it might be, whether all roads lead to Russia or not.
it began to occur to many people that the president’s defiant refusal to separate himself from his tangle of international business interests might represent something more ominous than mere stubbornness,
that his inveterate hucksterism might not be a simple personality quirk or an implausible selling point of his successful campaign, but the fatal weakness of his presidency.
Since the election, Eisen has been saying that Trump’s refusal to fully divorce from his company would provide the president’s opponents with an opening. “We sounded a pretty loud and pretty accurate clarion call,” he told me in February, “that if he didn’t separate, everything he did would be surrounded by a miasma of scandal.”
CREW first sued Trump three days after his inauguration, claiming his overseas business ties violated the Cons ution.
Since then, it has been launching actions against the administration and its allies in Congress at a rate of about one a day, filing lawsuits and public-record inquiries and lodging complaints with authorities like the Office of Government Ethics.
These are not the sort of events that mobilize the TV-network klieg lights, like Comey’s recent Senate testimony, but they play a role that is both probative and performative.
Grand Washington scandals — the kind that bring down presidencies — are incremental affairs, the product of our rusty democratic machinery, and there are always many people at work in the engine room, stoking the boiler with the fuel of information.
“The Accountability Complex has been activated,” Eisen told me,
After Trump picked a Twitter fight with Nordstrom for remaindering his daughter’s clothing line and Kellyanne Conway told Fox viewers to “buy Ivanka’s stuff,” CREW filed a complaint with the Office of Government Ethics.
It filed a similar one regarding Steve Bannon’s continuing relationship with Breitbart, which appears to have caused Trump to issue a retroactive ethics waiver — a fact only revealed after an intense struggle between the OGE’s director, Walter Shaub, and the White House, which wanted to keep such waivers secret.
CREW has sued the Department of Homeland Security to obtain records of Trump’s visits to Mar-a-Lago and other private properties.
It identifies and amplifies a constant barrage of daily outrages:
U.S. Embassy websites promoting Mar-a-Lago;
the $16 million sale of a Trump penthouse condo to a businesswoman with close ties to the Chinese government;
the Kushner family’s cash-for-visas investment pitch,
and on and on.
, CREW works in public, in the courts, the only ins ution to which Trump has so far deferred, albeit resentfully.
“The resistance is not just the people who are marching through the streets,” Eisen said.
“The framers of the Cons ution foresaw this moment, and they built multiple nodes of resistance into the system itself.”
One of them, CREW claims, is written into the Cons ution: a recently rediscovered single sentence in Article I, known as the foreign emoluments clause.
Earlier this year, Eisen and other activist attorneys dusted off this antique weapon to use against Trump, filing a lawsuit in federal court in New York.
They argue it could force a reckoning for the president and his business — and maybe even unlock his most tightly guarded secrets.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/06/donald-trump-emoluments-clause-crew.html?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=s3&utm_campaign =sharebutton-t
White House for Sale: Emoluments, Corruption and Donald Trump
Never in U.S. history has the prospect of a president’s real and potential business dealings created such a marked array of conflicts.
Donald Trump has real estate and other businesses around the globe.
The Atlantic has been compiling a rolling
“crib sheet” of his potential conflicts, listing no less than 44 separate, serious items in which his personal profit could hinge on U.S. government actions or policies over which he presides.
The CREW lawsuit addresses a direct conduit of foreign-government money to the Trump family via the new
Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, just blocks from the White House.
CREW’s complaint alleges that “since the November 8, 2016 election,
foreign diplomats have been flocking to Defendant’s D.C. hotel, eager to curry favor with Defendant and afraid of what Defendant may think or do if they send their business elsewhere in Washington. ...
The hotel also hired a ‘director of diplomatic sales’ to facilitate business with foreign states and their diplomats and agents.” The lawsuit continues,
“One ‘Middle Eastern diplomat’ told The Washington Post about the hotel: ‘Believe me, all the delegations will go there.’”
The D.C./Maryland lawsuit explains:
“Following the defendant’s inauguration, he continues to own and control hundreds of businesses throughout the world, including hotels and other properties.
His business empire comprises a mul ude of different corporations, limited-liability companies, limited partnerships, and other en ies that he owns or controls—in whole or in part—operating in the United States and at least 20 foreign countries.”
They are suing, they write, so that, among other issues, “Americans do not have to guess whether a President who orders their sons and daughters to die in foreign lands acts out of concern for his private business interests.”
The congressional lawsuit,
led by Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Detroit Congressman John Conyers, reiterates many of Trump’s alleged cons utional violations of the emoluments clause, but focuses on a key phrase: “without the Consent of the Congress.”
They want the
courts to force Trump to seek congressional approval before he receives any profits, or “emoluments,” from business dealings with foreign states.
A key condition congressional Democrats would demand: release of Trump’s tax returns.
“We have seen over and over again that this president believes he is above the law in so many ways,”
Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. “
In a democracy, no one is above the law, not the president or anyone else.”
As the members of Congress filed their lawsuit, The Washington Post broke the news that special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice related to his firing of FBI Director James Comey—all this on Donald Trump’s 71st birthday.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/...trump_20170615
Trash STILL has 35%+ approval
Trump’s Business Ties in Persian Gulf Raise Questions About His Allegiances
LONDON — President Trump has done business with royals from Saudi Arabia for at least 20 years, since he sold the Plaza Hotel to a partnership formed by a Saudi prince.
Mr. Trump has earned millions of dollars from the United Arab Emirates for putting his name on a golf course, with a second soon to open.
He has never entered the booming market in neighboring Qatar, however, despite years of trying.
Now a feud has broken out among these three crucial American allies, and Mr. Trump has thrown his weight firmly behind the two countries where he has business ties, raising new concerns about the appearance of a conflict between his public role and his financial incentives.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/17/w...e=article&_r=0
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Anybody see a pattern yet?
The problem with this is, that the potential scenario where the Russian government has played banker to Trump is far more likely than any pee pee tape.
Which is why you work so hard at ignoring this thread.
It's "potential", Trash's son said Russian money was pouring in years ago, keeping Trash afloat when US banks denied him loans. He had s bags running all over the planet trying to find money, and Pootin came through.
Even if a pee tape is found, the only people who would care would so-called "conscience" voters, evangeliclals, and their complete support of Trash exposes them as total, venal frauds, like libertarians.
It's Pootin's compromising and owning Trash with $Ms that will bring Trash down, with cake icing of Trash + entourage being told about Pootin attacking Hillary, but doing nothing about it, aka "passive collusion".
Trump steals from the poor to give to himself—cuts housing aid for tenants, but not landlords
Donald Trump’s proposed budget aggressively reduces programs designed to help the poor find housing, but leaves intact a program that rewards wealthy landlords—including one very special individual.
One of those landlords is Trump himself, who earns millions of dollars each year as a part-owner of Starrett City, the nation’s largest subsidized housing complex. Trump’s 4 percent stake in the Brooklyn complex earned him at least $5 million between January of last year and April 15, according to his recent financial disclosure.
Trump may like to hang his name on faux luxury goods, but it’s the these apartments for the poor that has been his most dependable source of income.
Trump has already taken home $38 million in government money for Starrett City just since his inauguration.
The property has provided Trump a steady—and massive—income even when his disastrous investments in casinos and gaudy condos has left him filing bankruptcy on company after company. It’s an investment that’s proved to be so good, you can tell that Trump didn’t make it.
Trump once called Starrett City “one of the best investments I ever made,” but it was his father who was an investor in its construction, according to a representative of Starrett City.
“Upon Fred Trump’s death, his four children inherited his interests,” Bob Liff, a spokesman for Starrett City Associates ...
Not only is Donald Trump taking millions from the government, he’s still living on money given to him by his father.
https://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/...tail=emaildkre
Trump seeks sharp cuts to housing aid, except for program that brings him millions
https://www.washingtonpost.com/inves...t-draw7&wpmm=1
#TaxpayersKeepMakingTrashRich
Trump Administration Conflicts Of Interest: How Gary Cohn Could Sell U.S. Infrastructure To Goldman Sachs
President Donald Trump's administration this week touted an infrastructure plan that would sell off public assets to private financial firms. Left unsaid in the White House promotional materials was any mention that the Trump aide who is overseeing the initiative comes from a Wall Street firm that says it is seeking to buy up the very same kind of assets the Trump administration plans to sell off.
Leading the White House privatization initiative is Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs, who received a $285 million dollar payout upon leaving the bank and taking a job as the director of Trump’s National Economic Council.
As Cohn has led the infrastructure privatization initiative from that perch,
Goldman Sachs declared that it continues to look at “new business initiatives” that revolve around taking ownership of public assets, according to Securities and Exchange Commission do ents reviewed by International Business Times.
Cohn is spearheading the administration’s infrastructure policy despite a White House official telling Bloomberg News in February that he “will recuse himself from participating in any matter directly involving his former employer.”
the administration has not released a list of waivers, and has moved to block federal agencies from disclosing such waivers to federal ethics regulators.
there is no way to know if Cohn is wading into ethically murky waters.
“I do think it is appropriate to view with extreme skepticism decision making that Mr. Cohn does that may benefit Goldman Sachs.”
The six-page initiative rolled out by the Trump administration earlier this week detailed plans to spend $200 billion to “incentivize additional non-Federal funding” and reward private investors for buying and maintaining government-owned infrastructure properties, like bridges, airports and toll highways.
Those initiatives echo plans laid out by Goldman Sachs in its SEC filings dating back to at least 2008.
In a section of its most recent annual SEC filings about the company’s “recent and planned business initiatives,” the bank details its ongoing public infrastructure investments.
http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/trump-administration-conflicts-interest-how-gary-cohn-could-sell-us-infrastructure
http://www.dailywire.com/news/17880/...paign=dwbrand#
OOPS: Clinton Foundation Admits It Took $1 Million From Qatar And Forgot To Tell The Government
Among the thousands of emails hacked from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman John Podesta and published by Wikileaks, one stated that officials from the government of Qatar gave the Clinton Foundation $1 million to celebrate Bill Clinton’s 65th birthday, funds which the foundation did not report to the State Department.
That would seemingly violate an ethics agreement Hillary Clinton signed when she became Secretary of State in 2009, in which she promised the foundation would notify the State Department's ethics official if a new foreign government wanted to donate or "increase materially" its contributions.
Qatari officials pledged the money in 2011; in April 2012 Amitabh Desai, the Clinton Foundation's foreign policy director, sent an email acknowledging the Qataris wanted to meet Bill Clinton “for five minutes” in New York City.
Clinton Foundation spokesman Brian Cookstra told Reuters that the $1 million gift was not a "material increase" in Qatar’s contributions. But Qatar had given between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation in total, meaning the $1 million gift represented between a 20% to 100% increase.
The State Department told Reuters it had no record of the Qatar donation.
In 2016, the Foundation admitted that the Clinton Health Access Initiative had not published a list of its donors since 2010, although Hillary Clinton had promised she would offer an annual list.
As Reuters noted, Clinton Foundation officials acknowledged they sometimes evaded the agreement with the Obama administration, but blamed oversights. At least eight other countries in addition to Qatar gave new or increased funding to the foundation, most often for the Clinton Health Access Initiative.
Betsy DeVos Just Announced The New Head Of Federal Student Aid And Left Out One Key Detail
Johnson is the CEO of for-profit lender, Reunion Student Loan Services, BuzzFeed’s Molly Hensley-Clancy revealed soon after the press release announced the pick.
Hensley-Clancy confirmed Johnson’s current status with the company after noticing his position on the company website and his personal CV.
The Department of Education has yet to comment on the glaring omission.
One can certainly understand DeVos’ impulse to hide the shameful fact that
she chose a man who profits off of student debt to run America’s $1.3 billion debt program, which 13 million Americans depend on each year.
That she and her press team were aware of the obvious conflict — so cognizant in fact that they chose to hide it
http://washingtonjournal.com/2017/06...ne-key-detail/
Guess Where Trump Is Throwing His First 2020 Fundraiser
http://washingtonjournal.com/2017/06...20-fundraiser/
How much corruption are you going to put up with from Trump?
Is there anything he could do that might concern you?
Trump president. Not Clinton.
Ethics Watchdog Group Seeks Probe Into Pruitt’s Travel At Taxpayer Expense
An ethics watchdog group has filed a complaint asking for an investigation into Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s frequent flights to his home state of Oklahoma at taxpayer expense.
The group American Oversight sent a letter Thursday to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel asking for an investigation into whether Pruitt violated federal rules by using government resources to travel to Oklahoma for “personal or political reasons.”
Records released by the EPA in response to an open-records request show
Pruitt traveled to Oklahoma at least 10 times during his first three months as EPA chief at a cost of more than $15,000.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/wa...+%28TPMNews%29
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