Posts Tagged ‘ President Corrupt ’

The ambassador’s residence was being painted

Sep 3rd, 2019 4:32 pm | By

Corrupt at every opportunity, that’s Trump’s motto. He’s so corrupt he has Mike Pence staying at his Irish golf hotel on the far side of Ireland from where Pence needs to be to do the job he’s supposed to be doing. All to put more $$$$$ in Donnie Two-Scoops’s pocket.

Pence spent both Monday and Tuesday nights at Trump International Golf Links & Hotel in Doonbeg, in a small town on Ireland’s southwest coast, returning to the village after meetings with Ireland’s top elected officials.

Southwest coast. Dublin is on the east coast. Yes Ireland is a small country but it’s not so small that that’s a sensible way to do things.

Pence defended that decision — which required him

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Immortal words

Aug 27th, 2019 10:27 am | By

Trump says his glorious Doral golf dump HAS NO BEDBUGS. Well all right then.

The president would like to make one thing clear: The Trump National hotel in Doral, Fla. — which he’s pushing as the site for next year’s G-7 meeting — does not have bed bugs.

“No bedbugs at Doral,” Trump tweeted Tuesday morning. “The Radical Left Democrats, upon hearing that the perfectly located (for the next G-7) Doral National MIAMI was under consideration for the next G-7, spread that false and nasty rumor.”

Not a rumor so much as a widely-reported news item.

The “nasty rumor” to which he refers stems from a 2016 lawsuit brought by Eric Linder, a New Jersey man who claimed his

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“Why should I lose lots of opportunities?”

Dec 4th, 2018 10:00 am | By

The emoluments case is going ahead.

A U.S. district court judge has now ruled that discovery can proceed in a lawsuit that the attorneys general of Maryland and the District have filed against Trump. The president had tried to stall the lawsuit, but failed.

This discovery process will now entail an effort to peer into the finances of the Trump International Hotel in D.C., which has become a magnet for spending by foreign governments and dignitaries. The lawsuit alleges that by profiting in this way, Trump — who declined to divest himself of his business holdings as president — is violating the emoluments clause, which bars federal officials from taking such benefits from foreign (or state) governments unless Congress

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Entanglements

Jun 12th, 2017 12:17 pm | By

Then there’s that lawsuit filed today by the AGs of Maryland and DC:

The attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia have announced they’ve filed suit against President Donald Trump, alleging he violated the Constitution by retaining ties to a sprawling global business empire.

District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine and Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh made the announcement at a jointly held news conference in Washington, confirming the suit has been filed in federal court in Maryland. Frosh and Racine cited Trump’s leases, properties and other business “entanglements” around the world as the reason for the suit, saying those posed a conflict of interest under a clause of the Constitution.

“The president’s conflicts of interest

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Corruption is corruption

Jan 23rd, 2017 12:28 pm | By

NPR reports on that lawsuit.

A team of ethics experts and legal scholars filed a lawsuit in federal court this morning that says President Donald Trump’s overseas businesses violate the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which bars presidents from taking money from foreign governments.

The group says it is asking the court “to stop Trump from violating the Constitution by illegally receiving payments from foreign governments” with ties to Trump interests. The lawsuit states that:

“These violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause pose a grave threat to the United States and its citizens. As the Framers were aware, private financial interests can subtly sway even the most virtuous leaders, and entanglements between American officials and foreign powers could pose a creeping,

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Hail to the sleaze

Jan 19th, 2017 5:09 pm | By

Trump is partying up his inauguration…and he’s doing it at his hotel. That means he’s profiting while he parties, which is sleazy as fuck. Tomorrow at 12:01 Eastern it will become more than sleazy.

With sirens blaring, a fleet of limousines and security personnel raced down Pennsylvania Avenue twice in less than the last 24 hours to deliver Donald J. Trump to inauguration events.

But he was not heading to the White House. He was going to Trump International Hotel.

The hotel he leases from the federal government, and runs as a profit-making venture.

Conflicts that for months have been theoretical are now about to become real — most immediately a possible challenge by the federal government. It owns

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Puffing the name

Nov 30th, 2016 10:53 am | By

Damn, I missed one. Too busy documenting his tweets, no doubt. Ten days ago he met with three business partners from India, who tweeted a photo of the four of them thumbs-upping.

President-elect Donald J. Trump met in the last week in his office at Trump Tower with three Indian business partners who are building a Trump-branded luxury apartment complex south of Mumbai, raising new questions about how he will separate his business dealings from the work of the government once he is in the White House.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump described the meeting as a courtesy call by the three Indian real estate executives, who flew from India to congratulate Mr. Trump on his election victory. In

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Turkey and Saudi Arabia

Nov 26th, 2016 10:06 am | By

The one in Turkey. There is a Trump Towers Istanbul.

Donald Trump’s company has been paid up to $10 million by the tower’s developers since 2014 to affix the Trump name atop the luxury complex, whose owner, one of Turkey’s biggest oil and media conglomerates, has become an influential megaphone for the country’s increasingly repressive regime.

That, ethics advisers said, forces the Trump complex into an unprecedented nexus: as both a potential channel for dealmakers seeking to curry favor with the Trump White House and a potential target for attacks or security risks overseas.

The president-elect’s Turkey deal marks a harrowing vulnerability that even Trump has deemed “a little conflict of interest”: a private moneymaker that could open him

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Phone calls

Nov 26th, 2016 9:50 am | By

The Argentina deal.

Three days after the phone call between Trump and Macri on Nov.14, Trump’s associates at Buenos Aires firm YY Development Group announced that the construction project would go ahead, in an interview with La Nación (link in Spanish). The tower’s construction had reportedly been held up for years, for various reasons, with YY Development actively restarting construction permit requests when pro-business Macri took over from statist former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in Jan. 2016.

There’s nothing substantive to confirm that the phone call and construction announcement are linked, but local news media have reported that the call itself was arranged in very unusual fashion. Macri, who is son of one of Latin America’s richest

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Examples

Nov 26th, 2016 9:42 am | By

There’s a petition urging Congressional investigation of Trump’s massive conflicts of interest. It includes a useful list:

Here are the examples of potential corruption that have emerged just since Nov. 8:7,8,9

  • Trump’s children have a role in the presidential transition, despite claims that they will take over the Trump business from their father.
  • Ivanka Trump attended a meeting with the Japanese prime minister and reportedly joined a phone call between her father and the president of Argentina.
  • A long-stalled Trump project in Argentina mysteriously got the green light to move forward days after that phone call.
  • Trump reportedly used his meeting with British politicians to push them to block offshore wind farms that he believes will sully the view
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They decided to cut him some slack

Nov 25th, 2016 5:33 pm | By

John Cassidy at the New Yorker on the elephant in the room: Trump’s conflicts of interest and his cheery refusal to do anything about them.

Last week, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization said the family was “in the process of vetting various structures,” and insisted that whatever arrangement they settled on would “comply with all applicable rules and regulations.” But this was yet another empty statement. For historical reasons, Presidents are exempted from many of the conflict-of-interest laws that apply to other federal officeholders, such as Cabinet members.

This exemption dates back to the earliest days of the Republic, when Presidents tended to be wealthy plantation owners with large holdings of land and slaves. The Founding Fathers were well

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Haggling over the quid pro quo

Nov 23rd, 2016 2:13 pm | By

On NPR, a conversation about the conflict of interest issue. Richard Painter advised Bush Junior and Norman Eisen advised Obama.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

President-elect Donald Trump shifted positions on several issues yesterday. But in a talk with The New York Times, he avoided placing many limits on his opportunity to profit while in office.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

The president-elect, who has worldwide business interests, admits that he, quote, “might have requested a business favor from visiting British politicians.” His staff had previously denied that.

INSKEEP: His staff also denied that Trump sought a business favor when talking with Argentina’s president, but his daughter Ivanka – a vice president of his company – joined that call.

His daughter was on Read the rest



Trump provides free storage

Nov 22nd, 2016 1:11 pm | By

Trump’s other BFF, the Washington Post, reports on an admission by the Trump Foundation.

President-elect Donald Trump’s charitable foundation has admitted to the IRS that it violated a legal prohibition against “self-dealing,” which bars nonprofit leaders from using their charity’s money to help themselves, their businesses or their families.

That admission was contained in the Donald J. Trump Foundation’s IRS tax filings for 2015, which were recently posted online at the nonprofit-tracking site GuideStar. A GuideStar spokesman said the forms were uploaded by the Trump Foundation’s law firm, Morgan, Lewis and Bockius.

The Post doesn’t know if the IRS got the same forms.

In one section of the form, the IRS asked if the Trump Foundation had transferred

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“Since I have you on the line, Mauricio…”

Nov 21st, 2016 12:28 pm | By

TPM tells us:

For a number of years, Trump and his Argentine partners have been trying to build a major office building in Buenos Aires. The project has been held up by a series of complications tied to financing, importation of building materials and various permitting requirements.

According to a report out of Argentina, when Argentine President Mauricio Macri called President-Elect Trump to congratulate him on his election, Trump asked Macri to deal with the permitting issues that are currently holding up the project.

Pause to stare at the screen in frozen horror.

This comes from one of Argentina’s most prominent journalists, Jorge Lanata, in a recent TV appearance. Lanata is quoted here in La Nacion, one

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Step right up, rent a bed in Trump’s new hotel, Ambassador

Nov 19th, 2016 5:21 pm | By

This is completely astounding.

Friday evening, the Washington Post reported that about 100 foreign diplomats gathered at President-elect Donald Trump’s hotel in Washington, DC to “to sip Trump-branded champagne, dine on sliders and hear a sales pitch about the U.S. president-elect’s newest hotel.” The tour included a look at the hotel’s $20,000 a night “town house” suite. The Post also quoted some of the diplomats saying they intended to stay at the hotel in order to ingratiate themselves to the incoming president.

ARE YOU SERIOUS???

He is marketing his new hotel to foreign diplomats?

I’m out of swears, out of facial expressions, out of anything that can express my disgust.

“Why wouldn’t I stay at his hotel blocks

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The kids sat in on the meeting with that guy from Japan

Nov 18th, 2016 4:16 pm | By

Again the mind reels. Ivanka Trump sat in on the meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister yesterday. Fortune says this is tinpot oligarchy behavior.

President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly said that there would be no conflicts of interest during his administration because his vast business empire would be in a “blind trust.” But White House ethics lawyers in both parties have criticized that, noting that having his children run the company means it would be neither blind nor a trust.

The very first meeting that the President-elect held with a world leader, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, is prompting further criticism—even alarm. According to photographs taken at Trump Tower in New York City and published this week, the

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The Borgias hit a bump in the road

Nov 18th, 2016 11:23 am | By

I didn’t know this: there’s an actual law against presidents hiring family members.

Mr. Kushner has consulted with at least one lawyer and believes that by forgoing a salary and putting his investment fund, his real estate holdings and The New York Observer into a blind trust, he would not be bound by federal nepotism rules, according to one of the people briefed.

Ethics lawyers in both parties said that such an arrangement would violate a federal statute designed to prevent family ties from influencing the functioning of the United States government. Under a 1967 law enacted after John F. Kennedy installed his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general, no public official can hire a family member —

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Filthy Trump

Nov 17th, 2016 5:37 pm | By

Have nausea medications handy. Welcome to the Trump kleptocracy.

Anti-nepotism laws prevent Trump from giving his family members jobs in the administration. But don’t think that’s going to stop them from being active participants in U.S. government decision-making, or using the fact that Trump is president to keep money flowing in. In fact, we could see the president enriching himself and his family on a scale that we normally associate with post-Soviet kleptocrats and Third World dictators.

For starters, Ivanka, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. are on the executive committee of Trump’s transition team, helping decide who gets hired for key positions and what the administration’s initial focus will be. We learned that someone on the transition team inquired

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Still going down the list

Nov 17th, 2016 11:28 am | By

Joshua Foust’s list.

Item six is the only one without a link.

  • Putting one’s children into senior positions of a government is the behavior of a banana republic, not a constitutional democracy with strong institutions. This is not normal.

There was Kennedy making his brother Attorney General. There was plenty of controversy about that at the time. Sticking in three children and the spouse of one of them, all at once – when they are all entangled in the president’s many businesses – that’s a whole new level.

Item seven is his refusal to disclose his taxes.

Item eight:

  • Asking if he can decline the President’s salary, so as to avoid paying taxes, is not normal.

The link … Read the rest



More going down the list

Nov 17th, 2016 10:37 am | By

Joshua Foust’s list part 2.

The third item on the list:

  • Blasting journalists with product placements for the labels your child, who is on your transition team, is wearing is not normal.

The link is to a tweet:

Jason Pinter responded a few days ago that she did the same thing after the convention:

“Shop Ivanka’s look from her #RNC speech” – that’s not normal.

I followed the link: it goes … Read the rest