This is the most overt corruption to date

Walter Shaub is livid about the Doral crime. He’s also informative – he says the Doral thing is a whole new level. I thought that in terms of the extreme blatancy and defiance of boundaries, but he says more than that. I’ll just go way back early yesterday and quote the hell out of him.

Agents of chaos want you to be cynical about democracy and believe public servants are, were and always will be corrupt. If that’s true, nothing matters. The life of Elijah Cummings and last night’s #Sammies2019 tell a different story. Democracy requires belief in what can be.

David Farenthold said:

The summit will be held in June, when Miami is hot and Doral is usually empty. In 2017, only 38% of Doral’s rooms were occupied in June. Only August (31%) was slower. Now — b/c @realdonaldtrump has awarded the summit to himself — it will be full. 

The “Miami is hot” bit matters – people don’t want to go to Florida in summer. Trump is forcing heads of state and everyone who accompanies them to go to a bad nasty place to make money for himself.

Shaub comments:

This is the most overt corruption to date. How any Senator could fail to object to this is beyond me. There’s no universe in which anyone could believe that, in a country as big as ours, the selection of Trump’s resort was anything but a product of the worst kind of corruption.

Somebody please ask the White House what agency ran this procurement. The White House does not have a procurement team that could run this, and it definitely does not have an appropriation to use for the event.

This is so overtly corrupt that it can’t be viewed as anything but a loyalty test for Senators. If they are corrupt enough to look the other way, Trump will know he can do anything. In that case, he will do everything.

Shaub says CREW filed an investigation request with the State Department on the Doral issue a month ago and haven’t heard anything. That’s not a good sign.

In case it’s not clear from my freaking out, this G-7 thing is an escalation. It may look from the outside like it’s been corruption all along—because it has been—but participating in a contract award to yourself is different by orders of magnitude. This is a red line crossed.

Good to know. Bad to know, but good to know.

I’d like you to imagine a conflict of interest prosecution in which a defense attorney’s closing argument is based on the things Mick Mulvaney said in defense of awarding the G7 contract to Doral. That attorney would be disbarred. The arguments are ridiculous.

The President of the United States participated in the award of a contract to himself. Are there Senators who find that acceptable? Are you prepared to say all future Presidents can award themselves contracts? Why do we even have an @OfficeGovEthics if the Senate will allow this?

We now live in a country where government employees like Mick Mulvaney can violate the ethical principle prohibiting misuse of position for private gain without official rebuke. The ethics program died yesterday.

So…there it is. If they let him get away with this everything will get even worse.

 

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