Forbes magazine described Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross as “one of the biggest grifters in American history,” finding a career total of more than $120 million siphoned from business associates.
The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Ross with pocketing $10.4 million that rightly belonged to investment partners.
Ross held official meetings with the CEOs of Chevron and Boeing while his wife owned shares in those companies valued at $400,000 and $2 million.
He failed to divest holdings in the world’s third-largest auto parts maker until October 2017, after official dealings with top people at BMW, Toyota, GM, and Ford, among other major customers of the parts company.
For nearly a year after his confirmation, Ross held onto his stake in Navigator Holdings, a natural-gas shipping company tied to Russian oligarchs and members of Vladimir Putin’s family. Before divesting, Ross personally negotiated a deal to facilitate the export of American-produced liquefied natural gas to China. The ethics officer who OK’d Ross’s actions got a promotion.
Ross came up with a phony legal pretext for the White House’s plan to discourage Latino voting by putting a citizenship question into the 2020 census. Citizenship information would be critical to enforcing the Voting Rights Act’s protections against racial discrimination, the Commerce Department claimed. The Supreme Court found Ross’s justification beyond belief.
The decision had actually been made at the behest of a Republican strategist after analyzing its likely impact on racial voting patterns; the anti-immigration zealot and onetime Trump strategist Steve Bannon was one of the people using backdoor connections to get Ross to act.