Drain the swamp!

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This week alone, the New York Times reported that Kushner’s family business got big loans from two US financial institutions shortly after he met with their executives in the White House, and the Washington Post reportedthat foreign officials have discussed using his business entanglements to manipulate him, and NBC News reported Mueller is asking whether the Kushner business influenced Trump’s foreign policy. Meanwhile, and separately from Mueller’s probe, federal prosecutors and state regulatorshave both recently sought documents on Kushner Companies’ finances.

Looming over so much of this is the fact that the Kushner company owes $600 million on a money-losing Manhattan tower that’s fully due in just one year. The Kushners have spent much of the past few years trying to get wealthy foreigners to finance an expensive redevelopment plan for the property — but so far, all those efforts have failed.

Jared Kushner’s scandals: Trump-Russia, clearance, and more, explained - Vox

It's a wide ranging article about the Kuchner's dealings and possible conflict of interest. And his father is, well, quite a piece of work..

But a family feud erupted over business and money, splitting Charles Kushner from his brother Murray and his sister Esther. Around the same time, a Kushner Companies bookkeeper filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging illegal political contributions by Charles and other improper financial practices from the company. As a result, the ambitious new US attorney for New Jersey, Chris Christie, started investigating the Kushners.

Believing his relatives were behind all this, Charles did a truly remarkable thing in response: He arranged to pay a prostitute to seduce his sister Esther’s husband, had the ensuing sexual encounter taped and photographed, and sent the tape and photos to Esther. (He arranged for a second prostitute to try to seduce the whistleblowing bookkeeper too, but the guy turned her down.)

It all blew up in Charles’s face — the feds learned of everything, Charles was arrested, and after pleading guilty to tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, and witness tampering (for the tape), he was sent to jail in 2005. What did Jared think about all this? Well, in a 2009 interview with Gabe Sherman of New York magazine, Jared stood squarely behind his father — defending Charles’s vicious actions in a revealing comment that prized family loyalty and business success above such petty matters as ethics and following the law.

Jared Kushner’s scandals: Trump-Russia, clearance, and more, explained - Vox

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Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke wants the world to know when he’s in the building. And so now, at Zinke’s behest, the department’s Washington headquarters flies a secretarial flag when Zinke arrives for the day and lowers it when he leaves. Flag raising, a Navy tradition, isn’t something that’s done for other Cabinet officials, and it isn’t Zinke’s only flamboyance. The former Navy SEAL minted his own challenge coin, rode a horse to his first day of work, and displayed his knife collection in his office before security asked him to remove it.

But these stunts are mere distractions from Zinke’s real influence as interior secretary. Since he was sworn in on March 1, 2017, to lead the $12 billion agency in charge of federal lands and natural resources, he’s made unprecedented changes that could leave a lasting mark on America’s wilderness and its environment. From his recent proposal to open almost all of America’s coast to offshore drilling to rolling back federal protections on national monuments, Zinke has taken extraordinary steps to put public lands in private hands in service of fossil fuel companies and other industries. 

“When Zinke was nominated, he told the American people that he was a conservationist in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt, and he was committed to stewarding our public lands, and he was concerned about issues like global warming,” says Jay Turner, an environmental historian at Wellesley College. “In practice, Zinke has aggressively worked to open up our public lands and natural resources to development by private interests and aggressively rolled back regulations meant to protect those resources and address issues like climate change.”

Ryan Zinke spent his first year in office selling off our public lands - Vox

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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s pride might be hurt by his forced ouster on Tuesday, but his pocketbook won’t be. The former ExxonMobil CEO will still get to enjoy the millions of dollars in tax deferrals he got when he joined the Trump administration in the first place, even though he spent just a little over a year on the job.

Tillerson and Exxon reached an agreement when then President-elect Donald Trump tapped Tillerson to head the State Department. The deal outlined steps for Tillerson to sever all ties with the company to comply with conflict-of-interest requirements while at the same time defining what he was to do with his multi-million-dollar retirement package and hundreds of thousands of Exxon shares. As a result, Tillerson got a major tax break — and is one of several Trump Cabinet appointees with immense personal wealth who did so. He’ll continue to benefit from that arrangement even after he leaves the public sector.

Rex Tillerson gets to keep the big tax break he got as Secretary of State - Vox

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Basically, their biotech startup was founded on the promise of faster, cheaper, painless blood tests. But their technology was fake. Mattis not only served on Theranos’s board during some of the years it was perpetrating the fraud after he retired from US military service, but he earlier served as a key advocate of putting the company’s technology (technology that was, to be clear, fake) to use inside the military while he was still serving as a general.

Holmes is settling the case, paying a $500,000 fee and accepting various other penalties, while Balwani is fighting it out in court. Nobody on the board is being directly charged with doing anything. But accepting six-figure checks to serve as a frontman for a con operation is the kind of thing that would normally count as a liability in American politics. But nobody wants to talk about it. Not just Trump and his co-partisans in Congress; the Democratic Party opposition is also inclined to give Mattis a pass. Everyone in Washington is more or less convinced that his presence in the Pentagon is the only thing standing between us and possible nuclear Armageddon. It’s an absurd, intolerable situation, but that’s life in America in 2018 — and a perfect illustration of how Trump’s unfitness for office exerts a corrosive influence throughout American life.

James Mattis is linked to Theranos’s massive corporate fraud and nobody wants to talk about it - Vox

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A leading U.S. House of Representatives member has privately urged banks to push Senate Democrats to agree to further easing of financial rules in a bid to end a stalemate over the first rewrite of regulations since the 2007-2009 financial crisis, sources said on Tuesday. Representative Jeb Hensarling, who is leading House discussions on the first rewrite of the 2010 Dodd-Frank reform law, made his case to industry lobbyists at a private meeting on Monday, three people with direct knowledge of the meeting told Reuters.

House lawmaker urges banks to push Senate on further rule-easing: sources

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New York City has launched an investigation into properties owned by Kushner Cos. after a report that the company regularly filed false paperwork with the city, The Associated Press reported Wednesday. The Department of Buildings is investigating more a dozen Kushner Cos. properties after the AP reported that the company had regularly filed false paperwork about rent-regulated tenants in its properties. The company filed documents with the city that stated it didn’t have any rent-regulated tenants in its building, while hundreds of those tenants lived in Kushner Cos. properties across the city.

NY investigating Kushner Cos. properties after report on filing false paperwork | TheHill

Jared Kushner reportedly discussed classified information obtained from the President's Daily Brief with Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, who then bragged that he had Kushner "in his pocket." The top secret information included US intel on Saudi royals who opposed the Crown Prince's rule, reported The Intercept. Shortly after meeting with Kushner, Salman began a large-scale corruption crackdown, which arrested 200 officials. Kushner has built a personal relationship with the crown prince, and is said to be playing an important role in the royal's visit to the US this week.

Saudi Crown Prince reportedly said Jared Kushner is 'in his pocket' - Business Insider

Mind you, Kushner doesn't even have a security clearance..

A Lebanese-American businessman worked for more than a year with an influential Trump fund-raiser to push Emirati and Saudi interests in the White House. The New York Times reported Wednesday that George Nader, a businessman and adviser to the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, sought to cultivate Elliott Broidy, the Republican National Committee's deputy finance chairman, as a tool of influence in President Trump's White House.

Mueller witness and GOP fund-raiser sought to push UAE, Saudi agendas in White House: report | TheHill

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For Elliott Broidy, Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign represented an unparalleled political and business opportunity. An investor and defense contractor, Mr. Broidy became a top fund-raiser for Mr. Trump’s campaign when most elite Republican donors were keeping their distance, and Mr. Trump in turn overlooked the lingering whiff of scandal from Mr. Broidy’s 2009 guilty plea in a pension fund bribery case.

After Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Broidy quickly capitalized, marketing his Trump connections to politicians and governments around the world, including some with unsavory records, according to interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Broidy suggested to clients and prospective customers of his Virginia-based defense contracting company, Circinus, that he could broker meetings with Mr. Trump, his administration and congressional allies.

Mr. Broidy’s ability to leverage his political connections to boost his business illuminates how Mr. Trump’s unorthodox approach to governing has spawned a new breed of access peddling in the swamp he vowed to drain.

Mr. Broidy offered tickets to V.I.P. inauguration events, including a candlelight dinner attended by Mr. Trump, to a Congolese strongman accused of funding a lavish lifestyle with public resources. He helped arrange a meeting with Republican senators and offered a trip to Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private Florida resort, for an Angolan politician. And he arranged an invitation to a party at Mr. Trump’s Washington hotel for a Romanian parliamentarian facing corruption charges, who posted a photograph with the president on Facebook.

This type of access has value on the international stage, where the perception of support from an American president — or even a photo with one — can benefit foreign leaders back home. Mr. Broidy was open about his business interests, but the administration made no effort to curtail his offers of access to clients or prospective clients.

Fund-Raiser Held Out Access to Trump as a Prize for Prospective Clients - The New York Times

The rest of the article is equally depressing, albeit not surprising.

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Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has appointed 15 representatives of the outdoor recreation industry to advise him on how to operate public lands, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post, including three people whom department officials flagged as potentially having a conflict of interest on the matter.

The membership of the “Made in America” Outdoor Recreation Advisory Committee, which Zinke launched in November, marks the third time the secretary has assembled panels dominated by industry players to help chart policies affecting their businesses. Many of the members of the Royalty Policy Committee hail from the oil, gas and mining industries; the new International Wildlife Conservation Council is largely composed of people with ties to trophy hunting.

Zinke creates new outdoor recreation panel made up almost entirely of industry advisers - The Washington Post

And it gets worse, read the article..

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You might have heard of Cambridge Analytica, the company of Trump financiers, hedge fund billionaires the Mercers and his campaign strategist Steve Bannon. Here is wistleblower Chrstopher Wylie, with new revelations.

Christopher Wylie says Cambridge Analytica "don't care whether or not its legal as long as it gets the job done." He paints a picture of a lawless organisation seeking to disrupt elections around the world. He says an offshoot of the company distributed videos of dismembered people in an attempt to intimidate Nigerian voters. He reveals shocking claim that his predecessor was poisoned and that police were bribed not to investigate.

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower reveals shocking claim his predecessor was poisoned and police bribed - Business Insider

It gets worse, read the story..

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No swamp draining here, in fact exactly the opposite is happening..

“Why shouldn’t the president surround himself with successful people?” argued Larry Kudlow, now Trump’s primary economic adviser, in 2016. “Wealthy folks have no need to steal or engage in corruption.” The administration seems to have set out to refute this generous assumption. The sheer breadth of direct self-enrichment Trump has unleashed in office defies the most cynical predictions. It may not be a surprise that he continues to hold on to his business empire and uses his power in office to direct profits its way, from overseas building deals down to printing the presidential seal on golf markers at the course near Mar-a-Lago. It is certainly not a surprise that Trump has refused to disclose his tax returns. What’s truly shocking is how much petty graft has sprung up across his administration. Trump’s Cabinet members and other senior officials have been living in style at taxpayer expense, indulging in lavish travel for personal reasons (including a trip to Fort Knox to witness the solar eclipse) and designing their offices with $31,000 dining sets and $139,000 doors. Not since the Harding administration, and probably the Gilded Age, has the presidency conducted itself in so venal a fashion.

Corruption Is Trump’s Greatest Political Liability