Tag: President Fraud

  • Little more than a checkbook for Donnie Two-scoops

    There’s one.

    https://twitter.com/NewYorkStateAG/status/1075057547072233473

    https://twitter.com/NewYorkStateAG/status/1075058113148002305

  • Take thy reward

    Trump’s choice for very right-wing ambassador to Israel is a lawyer who helped Trump make out like a bandit from his company that went bankrupt. Ben Mathis-Lilley at Slate has the story:

    In 1995, a company called Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts went public on the New York Stock Exchange. Trump was its chairman and, beginning in 2000, its CEO. The company lost money every year of its existence and went bankrupt in 2004. Its total 1995–2004 losses: $647 million. When it went bankrupt, bondholders had to settle for less than what they were owed. Employees lost their jobs and contractors went unpaid. IPO investors who held on until the end ultimately lost 90 cents for every dollar invested.

    Other high-end casino and resort companies did well in the same period. And, bonus, Donald Trump did well from his bankrupt company, even as everyone else took a bath.

    His contract kept him well-compensated personally even as he burdened the company itself with unsustainable debt. Like his presidential campaign, meanwhile, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts spent big sums of (other people’s) money on other Trumpworld properties—at one point estimating in a public filing, for example, that it had paid $470,000 for “Trump Ice”-brand bottled water in one year. Fortune estimates that on the whole, Trump Hotels—and its zombie post-bankruptcy successor, Trump Entertainment Resorts, which itself went bankrupt in 2009—paid Donald Trump a total of $82 million.

    No doubt he’ll do the same for us!

    Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer, throughout all of this, was David Friedman. It was Friedman who filed for the bankruptcies in 2004 and 2009 and negotiated with the creditors to whom Trump Hotels had gotten in too deep. Neither Trump nor Friedman, however, was ever accused of doing anything improper or illegal in relation to Trump Hotels. Running a company into the ground and then getting to keep all of the enormous windfall you reaped while doing so, as we all learned after the 2008 bank crashes, is often just the way things are done.

    And the way rich people get richer, which is the very essence of a flourishing democracy, right?

    In other words, Friedman did a pretty good job on Trump’s behalf. Now, if confirmed, he gets a big reward: Becoming the United States’ ambassador to one of the world’s most explosive geopolitical hot spots despite a total lack of diplomatic experience and a history of making incendiary statements.

    If this were a tv serial, it would be fascinating to watch. As reality, it’s more of a nightmare.

  • To address any issues

    Trump is going to be in violation of his lease with the GSA the minute he becomes president.

    The new Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., is in a historic federal building. A government agency called the General Services Administration, or GSA, negotiated the lease with the Trump Organization. And that lease includes this language: No elected official shall be admitted to any share or part of this lease or to any benefit that may arise there from.

    Steven Schooner is a professor of government procurement law at George Washington University Law School; he read the lease and says it means what the words say.

    I think that the only logical or reasonable reading of that language is that the president of the United States may not be admitted to a share of the lease and may not benefit from it. So come January 20, it seems to me the president-elect is in breach of the contract. And quite simply, I believe the GSA should end the contract. They should simply terminate it.

    But will they? I’m getting the feeling that nobody is going to do anything about Trump’s many violations except whine about them.

    To the extent that he is going to appoint the head of the GSA and the head of the GSA will serve at his pleasure and he’s going to be basically the tenant, there’s no way there can be an arm’s length relationship between the two parties – more importantly, that GSA employees have to demand financial information from the Trump Organization on an annual basis and then renegotiate the pricing.

    There’s no way a GSA civil servant is going to be able to negotiate with the president or the president’s children with the government and the public’s interest at heart.

    But will anybody do anything about it?

     

    SHAPIRO: Trump recently settled a lawsuit over Trump University for $25 million or so, and you argue that under ordinary circumstances, that would be a red flag for GSA and that in fact it might be enough to prevent the office from ever doing business with the Trump Organization again.

    SCHOONER: Absolutely. If you read the New York attorney general’s press release, basically what they said is that among other things, there was fraud. If this was any other contractor, there would be members of Congress screaming at the GSA suspension and debarment official, basically saying, you must ensure to protect the government’s interests that the government never does business with this type of contractor again.

    And Trump of course isn’t this type of contractor but the actual contractor – the fraud himself in person.

    Shapiro (the NPR reporter) asks what would happen if the GSA did terminate.

    SCHOONER: Well, the obvious solution would be a transfer or what in government contracts we call innovation. GSA could go to some other firm and basically say, run the hotel for us. It’s just another lease. So that’s easy enough.

    But let’s also be clear. GSA could simply tomorrow – and I believe they should – terminate the contract because the president-elect has breached a material or a significant or important term in the contract. If they terminate, look; we know the Trump organization is notoriously litigious, so maybe they sue. But in terms of contract interpretation 101, we think the GSA wins that case.

    But even if they lose – and this is so important – it’s only money. The principle here, the idea that federal procurement is supposed to be free from these types of conflicts, is much more important than a little bit of money.

    That’s that line near the end of Fargo – “and all for a little bit of money.”

    The GSA says it’s not going to do anything about it.

    SHAPIRO: We requested an interview with the head of GSA. They declined and sent us a statement that says in part, it is the Office of Government Ethics that provides guidance to the executive branch on questions of ethics and conflicts of interest. GSA plans to coordinate with the president-elect’s team to address any issues that may be related to the Old Post Office building, which is the home of the Trump hotel. What do you make of that statement?

    SCHOONER: Well, the Office of Government Ethics is a policy shop. They specifically make clear that they don’t solve these kinds of problems. They don’t investigate. They don’t prosecute. They make policy.

    It’s GSA’s contract. They had plenty of time to figure out a solution. They can’t foist their problem off on anybody else, and it’s time for them to step up to the plate and do the right thing.

    But they won’t. This is how it’s going to go – everybody will just say that’s someone else’s job, and Mr Corrupt Thieving Fraud will do whatever he wants to.

  • They talked about their first meeting

    Ok the Trump-Macri story may not be true. It’s not completely clear that the reporter wasn’t joking.

    On his popular Sunday night program “Periodismo para Todos” (Journalism for All), the muckraking Argentine reporter Jorge Lanata and his guests delivered an explosive claim: U.S. President-elect Donald Trump asked the country’s president for help getting permits for a stalled Trump tower project in Buenos Aires.

    The story caught fire, but it may be just more fake news.

    Ivan Pavlovsky, a spokesman for Macri who was present in the room during their call, said the claims were false and that “nothing like that ever happened.”

    “They didn’t talk about any investments or any tower,” said Pavlovsky, reached by phone in Buenos Aires. “They talked about good relations between Argentina and the United States and the time they first met each other, more than 20 years ago” in New York City, said Pavlovsky.

    A Trump spokes also denied it but we  know how worthless that is. Sorry, Donnie, but if you lie your lying ass off throughout the campaign, we’re not going to believe you now.

    The allegation that caught fire on social media Monday started the previous evening’s broadcast of “Journalism for All.”

    Lanata, best known in Argentina as a fierce and irreverent critic of former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, said during the show’s opening monologue that he had a story about Trump that was “half joking, half serious.”

    “Macri called him,” Lanata told his audience. “Trump asked him to approve a tower he’s building in Buenos Aires. It wasn’t only a conversation about geopolitics.”

    It wasn’t clear whether Lanata meant the allegations were “half serious” or if the story so defied credulity as to seem like a joke. Nor did he reveal the sources for his claim.

    So, not a very solid story then. Marked “doubtful” for now.

  • Measure the headlines

    A drawback to getting news online is that one doesn’t necessarily see how the news is presented and ordered – what is above the fold in huge headlines and what is below it in ordinary headlines. Jamison Foser has shown me what I’ve been missing.

    Big headlines right at the top of the page, the whole entire above the fold occupied by Clinton email news.

    On the other hand…

    See there? The “email news” was empty bullshit, calculated to damage Clinton and help Trump. The Trump Not-University fraud suit is not empty bullshit – it’s about real fraud, in which Trump – the president-elect – cheated gullible people out of a lot of money. A hugely rich man cheated people with little money (if they had much money they wouldn’t bother with any real-estate “university”) out of a big chunk of money – yet that gets muffled treatment, while Clinton’s mistake with emails gets reported like high treason.

    The email story was before the election and the fraud story was after, but that’s not a sufficient reason for such disproportionate coverage.

    The fraud suit is a very important story. The guy who will be president in under 9 weeks settled a lawsuit over his cheating a bunch of people out of thousands of dollars each. Our next president is a rich guy who preys on poor people and steals what little money they have. That is a major story.

    I guess we should look on the bright side? He doesn’t roast and eat babies, that we know of?

     

  • Other issues

    The Times suggests Trump’s imbecilic tweeting may be an intentional diversionary tactic.

    But even as Mr. Trump’s transition team appeared eager to embrace a more disciplined approach to the process of building out his administration, the president-elect’s Twitter complaints about “Hamilton” and “Saturday Night Live” provided a distraction.

    That may have been the intention. Mr. Trump’s Twitter posts diverted attention from other issues, including a $25 million settlement in a lawsuit against Trump University, concerns about conflicts of interest involving the president-elect’s business dealings, and questions about the propriety of potentially appointing his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to a White House post.

    Not around here they didn’t. I posted about both.

    That’s the thing about Trump, as I keep saying – he’s so horrible on so many fronts, it’s very difficult to keep track of them all. But it’s not impossible. His childish tweets aren’t going to prevent me from pointing out his fraud and corruption and nepotism, along with his racism and misogyny and fascism.

    He may succeed in trashing everything, but we will keep the records.

  • Trump agrees he cheated those students

    In more bad news, Trump has settled the lawsuits against Trump “University.”

    Donald J. Trump has reversed course and agreed to pay $25 million to settle a series of lawsuits stemming from his defunct for-profit education venture, Trump University, finally putting to rest fraud allegations by former students, which have dogged him for years and hampered his presidential campaign.

    The settlement was announced by the New York attorney general on Friday, just 10 days before one of the cases, a federal class-action lawsuit in San Diego, was set to be heard by a jury. The deal, if approved, averts a potentially embarrassing and highly unusual predicament: a president-elect on trial, and possibly even taking the stand in his own defense, while scrambling to build his incoming administration.

    It was a remarkable concession from a real estate mogul who derides legal settlements and has mocked fellow businessmen who agree to them.

    But the allegations in the case were highly unpleasant for Mr. Trump: Students paid up to $35,000 in tuition for programs that, according to the testimony of former Trump University employees, used high-pressure sales tactics and employed unqualified instructors.

    Also, teaching some tricks of the real estate trade does not constitute a university. A trade school, maybe; a university, no.

    the position of Mr. Trump and his legal team appeared to soften soon after his election on Nov. 8. At a hearing last week, Daniel Petrocelli, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, expressed interest in moving toward a settlement. Mr. Trump’s lawyers were seeking to delay the trial in one of the California cases until after his inauguration on Jan. 20, while also requesting that he be allowed to testify on video.

    “The time and attention to prepare and testify will take him away from imperative transition work at a critical time,” Mr. Petrocelli wrote in the request to the judge, Gonzalo Curiel, last week, noting the “thousands” of appointments that President-elect Trump needed to make in the weeks ahead.

    Judge Curiel, of Federal District Court, who is hearing the two California cases, was thrust into the limelight of the campaign in May when Mr. Trump spent several minutes at a rally denouncing the judge’s decisions in the case, calling him a “hater” and questioning his impartiality because of his Mexican heritage.

    That’s our shiny new president – a guy who cheats people out of as much as 35 thousand dollars for teaching them some marketing tricks they could learn from a pamphlet, and who incites xenophobia against a judge hearing the case against him. Don’t we feel proud!!

    Trump University, which operated from 2004 to 2010, included free introductory seminars across the country, focusing largely on real estate investing and on learning Mr. Trump’s secrets. Students could then purchase more expensive packages costing up to $35,000.

    Documents made public through the litigation revealed that some former Trump University managers had given testimony about its unscrupulous and exploitative business practices. One sales executive testified that the operation was “a facade, a total lie.” Another manager called it a “fraudulent scheme.”

    Other records showed how Mr. Trump had overstated the depth of his involvement in the programs. Despite claims that Mr. Trump had handpicked instructors, he acknowledged in testimony that he had not.

    That’s our shiny new president – a cheat and fraud who could take his place alongside the Duke and the Dauphin. If only he could share their fate.

    Anyway. The settlement is bad news, because the trial would have made him look even worse.

    So our shiny new president has admitted to cheating a lot of people out of a lot of money. Good start.