Drain the swamp!

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David Pecker, owner of the Inquirer and long-time friend of Donald Trump given immunity:

News of the media figure’s help in an investigation that is likely to prove damaging to Trump’s presidency came in the week that also saw Cohen turn on his former boss, as other former acolytes continue to assist the special counsel’s parallel Russia inquiry in Washington, further embattling the White House. The Enquirer, the often lurid tabloid that reportedly played a key role in shielding Trump from negative stories, has become deeply embroiled in the legal storm engulfing the White House. Experts predicted on Thursday that it could have its press protections stripped away. The developments came in the aftermath of Michael Cohen’s guilty plea on Tuesday on two counts relating to federal campaign finance violations. The charges stemmed from hush money payments to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels and ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal, which were steered through the tabloid company, according to court documents emerging from the Cohen plea agreement.

David Pecker: Trump confidant and National Enquirer boss was given immunity in Cohen case | Media | The Guardian

• He will only have been immunity if testifying would have incriminated himself, so there very likely is a crime
  
• There supposedly is a treasure trove of stories about Trump that the Inquirer killed, even the released tape by Cohen with a conversation with Trump about repaying Pecker for silencing a Playboy model mentions this.
  
• They already had enough other stuff on Cohen (tax fraud, for instance), why did they focus on this? Likely because with Pecker, they can corroborate Cohen's story that he was directed by Trump.
  

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The federal government’s top official charged with protecting student loan borrowers announced his resignation on Monday, saying the Trump administration is making it impossible for him and other career staffers to do their job. Seth Frotman, the student loan ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), wrote in a scathing letter on Monday that bureau leadership “has turned its back on young people and their financial futures.” The letter, to acting CFPB Director Mick Mulvaney and other leadership, accuses the agency of siding with business interests over the consumers it is supposed to protect — including suppressing a report on how banks were ripping off students.

CFPB student loan watchdog Seth Frotman quits over Mulvaney frustrations - Vox

More swamp..

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White House officials, including President Trump, met with top officials from the FBI and General Services Administration (GSA) before the GSA's announcement in February that the FBI headquarters would remain in Washington, D.C., according to a new watchdog report. The report by the GSA's inspector general (IG) found that top members of the agency might have misled Congress over the amount of influence the White House yielded over their decision to keep the FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. The report is the latest fuel to ongoing speculation over Trump's reported "obsession" with the location of the FBI headquarters. Several Democratic lawmakers have stated they believe Trump wants to keep the headquarters in its current place because Trump International Hotel is nearby.

Watchdog says administration officials made misleading statements on FBI headquarters | TheHill

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The Kushner family real estate company was fined $210,000 by New York City regulators on Monday following an Associated Press investigation earlier this year that showed it routinely filed false documents with the city claiming it had no rent-regulated tenants in its buildings when, in fact, it had hundreds.

Kushner Cos. fined $210K by New York for false documents

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And there are still people who believe Trump is draining the swamp..

About those steel and aluminium tariffs, companies applying for exemptions stand a much better chance if they trail favor with the administration..

In Warren’s letter to the inspector general, which was shared with Vox, she pointed out one particularly distressing case she came across this summer. In July, the Commerce Department had approved a tariff exemption for the US subsidiary of a sanctioned Russian metals company with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Despite past objections from US steel producers, United Company Rusal was allowed to purchase 6.6 million pounds of imported aluminum, untaxed.

The Commerce Department told the New York Times earlier this month that it approved the waiver because “this product is not available from U.S. manufacturers.” It then reversed course and denied the waiver, due to a “clerical error.”

Warren also cited concerns that Mick Mulvaney, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, was openly lobbying the Commerce Department to grant a break to a South Carolina company whose owner donated to his 2016 congressional campaign. Element Electronics, a television assembly plant, said it would need to shut down if it had to pay the tariffs.

“The Commerce Department process for making decisions that affect thousands of American companies subject to President Trump’s tariffs is failing to protect national security; it is arbitrary and opaque, replete with mistakes, and subject to political favoritism. It is therefore imperative that your office investigate this matter,” Warren wrote in the letter..

Trump steel tariffs: Warren asks for investigation of administration’s exemptions - Vox

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And the reason we haven’t gotten to that point is, sadly, both simple and crude: Pharma has bought itself enough politicians to block policies that might reduce its profits.

I’m not just talking about campaign contributions, either. I’m talking about the personal enrichment of politicians who serve pharma’s agenda.

After all, who put together the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, which put taxpayers on the hook for seniors’ prescription drug costs but specifically prohibited Medicare from negotiating prices? The answer is that it was largely devised by then-Representative Billy Tauzin, Republican of Louisiana — who shortly thereafter left Congress to become the highly paid president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association, the industry’s main lobbying group. If that sounds remarkably raw, that’s because it is.

And Trump, far from draining this swamp, invited it in to the executive branch. Tom Price, his first secretary of health and human services, was forced out because of his lavish travel spending — but his pharma-related conflicts of interest were actually a much bigger deal. And his successor, Alex Azar, is … a former drug company executive whose stated views on drug pricing are completely at odds with everything Trump said in the campaign.

Just saying yes to drug companies - NYT

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By refusing to divest, Trump raised an unprecedented question: How would the most divisive presidency in modern American history affect a company built on the president’s persona? Forbes has been working to answer that question since the moment Trump got elected, interviewing nearly 200 colleagues, partners and industry observers. While the experiment continues to unfold, in real time, the early results are in. Much as he’s trying—and he’s definitely trying—Donald Trump is not getting richer off the presidency. Just the opposite. His net worth, by our calculation, has dropped from $4.5 billion in 2015 to $3.1 billion the last two years, knocking the president 138 spots lower on the latest The Forbes 400 (which will be published in full tomorrow).

Three factors are at play. Much of that decline is due to deeper reporting, which revealed, for example, that the president had been lying about the size of his penthouse. Some of it is due to larger market forces. Trump owns commercial space at a time when e-commerce is decimating brick-and-mortar retail, shaving more than $100 million off his fortune—and no amount of bully-pulpit Amazon-bashing will change that.  Trump Tower, NYC: The number in the pie chart is the percentage of the building's square footage owned by Trump, including office and retail space and his personal penthouse. For Trump Tower and the Trump hotels in Chicago and Las Vegas, the numbers But the third factor comes from how Trump the president affects Trump the brand.

How Trump Is Trying—And Failing—To Get Rich Off His Presidency

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Exxon knew it had to write down 20% of their oil and gas reserves, but not before issuing billions of bonds. The subsequent share price clash led to pension fund losses, and one of these sued Exxon, which is a prime avenue to keep company honest.

Not for much longer, if Trump has his ways..

Such suits have long been used by pension funds and other investors to help keep companies, like Exxon, honest. And for decades, the Securities and Exchange Commission has prohibited companies from using tricks — such as forced arbitration clauses — to avoid accountability in the courts. That policy has been critical in ensuring the integrity of stocks and, when companies cheated, in recovering billions for investors who were defrauded.

But Trump’s SEC is, according to press reports, “laying the groundwork” to reverse those longstanding policies and allow corporations to sneak forced arbitration clauses into their initial public offerings or charters. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce — a Trump appointee — has even publicly endorsed allowing companies to slip these clauses into their charters, which could let companies block investors from court without even seeking approval from the Commission first.

These moves are so brazen, and so rife with danger for retirees and other investors, that Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) called them “a stealth attempt by the Commission to circumvent . . . the fundamental rights of shareholders.” The Carpenters Fund’s case against Exxon and Tillerson shows why. In August, the Commission dropped its investigation into Exxon Mobil and declined to pursue any action against the company, despite extensive evidence that the company lied to artificially inflate the value of its reserves.

Trump administration rigging the game, and your retirement fund could be the loser | TheHill

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Lengthy and disturbing report:

The Trump administration has helped advance some of mega-donor Sheldon Adelson’s financial interests. During Japanese PM Shinzo Abe’s visit to Mar-a-Lago, Trump raised Adelson’s bid to build a casino in Japan, according to two sources. The GOP’s tax law includes previously undetailed benefits to companies like Adelson’s. Adelson helped an Israeli friend’s company secure an EPA research deal. Internal objections were overruled.

Trump’s Patron-in-Chief: Casino Magnate Sheldon Adelson

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Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law, paid little to no federal income taxes from 2009 to 2016, according to a report from The New York Times. Filings by the Kushner Companies reviewed by The Times show massive losses listed as depreciation, a real estate tax law allowance that allows for a deduction to reduce taxes. The report comes just over a week after another extensive Times investigation that found the president employed "dubious tax schemes" in the 1990s to bolster his gains from the family inheritance.

Jared Kushner reportedly dodged income taxes for years - Business Insider

The financial documents the Times reviewed offer a detailed look at how real estate developers like Kushner and Trump manipulate the law to essentially steal millions of dollars — legally — from the American people. And the Republican tax cuts last year made it even easier to do. The way the tax loophole works is that the law assumes that buildings lose value every year. But as The Times explains, that’s not really true; in fact, they often gain value. But even if they’re gaining value, developers like Kushner can legally claim that the law’s assumptions about depreciation are true, inflating the loss of value so they can report a loss of income. The company’s assets are then integrated into the owner’s personal taxes, meaning Kushner could report that, although he personally made a ton of money, he “lost” more because of what Kushner Companies purportedly lost in the value of its buildings. He can then deduct that loss from his taxes for that year and in the years to come, leaving him with no taxes to pay — even though he’s actually raking in a fortune in profits. The scheme is even more insidious than that, though, because Kushner Companies isn’t really putting up the money to buy buildings in the first place. Most of the capital comes in the form of mortgages and personal loans from banks. So the company is essentially writing off lost money that it never spent in the first place. Then, when it sells the building, it can use the proceeds to finance a new purchase, allowing it to defer ever paying the capital gains taxes it would owe.

Jared Kushner’s legal tax evasion shows how wealthy real estate investors steal from taxpayers – ThinkProgress