Drain the swamp!

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A top Trump official at the Interior Department used his government connections to help a relative secure a job at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), according to an internal government watchdog. Interior’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) published a report Friday saying Assistant Interior Secretary Douglas Domenech wrongly used government resources by reaching out to a former high-level EPA employee both in person and by email about a job for his son-in-law. The report said Domenech “took advantage of his position... to gain access to the EPA senior official.”

Trump official violated ethics rules in seeking EPA job for relative, watchdog finds | TheHill

• There are less and less of these watchdogs with teeth..
  

[Admin]

Mom-and-pop shops struggled to obtain PPP money, but Kanye West, Grover Norquist's anti-spending group, and a number of Trump allies didn't seem to have any trouble obtaining taxpayer funds.  Last month, the Trump administration backtracked on its earlier vow to disclose the recipients of taxpayer-funded Paycheck Protection Program loans meant to help small businesses weather the economic fallout from the coronavirus crisis. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin claimed at the time that reporting the names of beneficiaries, and amounts received, would risk revealing “confidential information.” But under pressure from congressional committees, the administration reversed again, releasing its PPP records Monday. It turns out, the White House may have had good reason to want to keep the data under wraps. While much of the nearly $660 billion went to the small businesses it was designed to help prop up, a sizable slice of the pie went to large corporations, organizations with connections to political elites, and—predictably—companies linked to Donald Trump and his associates and allies. 

Democrats had already worried that the potential for abuse was high, but those fears were compounded when Trump abruptly sacked Glenn Fine, the inspector general who had been tasked with overseeing the historic $2 trillion rescue bill, as part of his broader watchdog purge. “I’ll be the oversight,” Trump said in March, insisting that he could provide a check on his own administration’s handling of the funds. But the PPP debacle makes clear that’s not adequate.

Devin Nunes’ Winery, Kushner Family Business Raked In Coronavirus Relief Money | Vanity Fair

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Now, Trump is king of the swamp.
Not long ago, his then-Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, Scott Pruitt, was living in super-cheap housing courtesy of the wife of a man lobbying the EPA and Scott Pruitt.
Trump opened the door for 281 lobbyists to work for his administration in his first three years. Former lobbyists now run four agencies, including the departments of Defense and Energy.
“How sick is Trump’s revolving door?” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted last year after a former coal lobbyist was put in charge of regulating air pollution.
More recently, Trump fired the State Department inspector general at the request of the secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. Why?
Well, the inspector general was looking into how Pompeo used the department staff to run errands, such as picking up takeout food orders and the family dry cleaning.
If you think that was bad, how about this? Pompeo spoke at the convention, live from Jerusalem, while on a taxpayer-funded trip.
Really.
Oh, and the head of the Department of Homeland Security used the White House to stage a naturalization ceremony starring the president. It became a video segment for the GOP convention.
“It’s starting to seem like the Trump administration is going out of its way to find new ways to violate federal law,” said government watchdog group, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The group was referring specifically to the Hatch Act, which prohibits partisan political activities by federal employees.
Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, responded that “nobody outside the Beltway really cares” about the president using government employees for his political campaign.
In any other administration, Trump’s actions would be a four-alarm scandal. Do you remember the outrage when Vice President Al Gore merely made a campaign fundraising call from the White House?
Trump has now turned the tables on the press.
His press office recently announced they have compiled a “very large dossier” on a Washington Post writer, David Fahrenthold, after he reported that “taxpayers have paid Trump’s businesses more than $900,000 since he took office.”
That was followed by an act of screaming hypocrisy when a former Florida attorney general, Pam Bondi ®, tore into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son at the convention for allegedly taking money from foreign governments.
Her charges against the Bidens have long been reviewed and found lacking. But Bondi said: “If they want to make this election between who is saving America and who is swindling America, bring it on.”
Bondi’s hypocrisy encompasses her work as a registered agent for Qatar, a foreign government dealing with charges of corrupt dealings in its bid for the soccer World Cup.
As for the baseless charge that the Biden family took in millions from a foreign government, it is hard to ignore that Trump’s daughter Ivanka was granted valuable trademarks by China, including three approved on the same day she dined with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping.
And more muck emerges from the swamp daily.
Last month, Trump’s 2016 campaign CEO Stephen Bannon was arrested and charged with fraud for a fundraising scam called “We Build the Wall.” Did any of the Trump backers who gave millions to Bannon remember that Trump promised Mexico was going to pay for the border wall? 
Then there is former White House counselor and Trump 2016 campaign manager Kellyanne Conway.
The Office of Special Counsel sent 134 letters warning federal workers for possible illegal actions during the first three years of the Trump administration. Conway was scolded that her “disregard for the restrictions the Hatch Act places on executive branch employees is unacceptable.”
In one case, she promoted Ivanka Trump’s clothing line on television.
Now The New York Times reports the huckster tactics are distorting conservative media.
Reporter Kevin Roose wrote “pro-Trump political influencers” make money by swarming “every major news story, creating a torrent of viral commentary that reliably drowns out both the mainstream media and the liberal opposition.”
The Huffington Post recently reported on the booming market for pro-Trump memes that is enriching conservative teens.
“As Election Day looms, MAGA meme moguls are enjoying explosive surges in traffic …Their thriving cottage industry serves as a free propaganda operation for the president’s campaign” — and brings money to anyone willing to dive into the Trump swamp, wrote Jesselyn Cook.

Eric Hoffer, the philosopher, once wrote, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
I wonder if he liked the fireworks..

Juan Williams: Swamp creature at the White House | TheHill

• And this from a Fox News contributor..
  

[Admin]

Brushing aside widespread alarm over mail slowdowns, prescription medicine delays, potential election sabotage, and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s reported role in an illegal straw-donor scheme, members of the Republican-dominated U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors on Wednesday said they are “thrilled” by DeJoy’s performance thus far as head of America’s most popular government institution.

After meeting with DeJoy behind closed doors to discuss several ongoing congressional investigations into his actions as USPS chief and previous work as a GOP fundraising powerhouse, two Republican board members gushingly praised the postmaster general and said there are no plans to discipline him over his destructive policy changes or possible criminal actions..

'Dereliction of Duty': Outrage as USPS Board Issues Gushing Praise for DeJoy Amid Mail Slowdowns, Medicine Delays, and Straw-Donor Scandal | naked capitalism

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Thousands of documents detailing $2 trillion (£1.55tn) of potentially corrupt transactions that were washed through the US financial system have been leaked to an international group of investigative journalists. The leak focuses on more than 2,000 suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed with the US government’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Banks and other financial institutions file SARs when they believe a client is using their services for potential criminal activity. However, the filing of an SAR does not require the bank to cease doing business with the client in question.

The documents were provided to BuzzFeed News, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The documents are said to suggest major banks provided financial services to high-risk individuals from around the world, in some cases even after they had been placed under sanctions by the US government. According to the ICIJ the documents relate to more than $2tn of transactions dating from between 1999 and 2017. One of those named in the SARs is Paul Manafort, a political strategist who led Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign for several months..

Leak reveals $2tn of possibly corrupt US financial activity | US news | The Guardian

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A 2001 U.S. Postal Service Inspector General audit found that noncompetitve contracts awarded to New Breed Logistics, run by now-Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, may have cost the USPS at least $53 million more than if the contracts had been competitively awarded, NBC News reports, raising scrutiny that DeJoy may have overbilled the USPS and marking the latest in a string of damaging reports tied to the controversial postmaster general’s work in the private sector.

Louis DeJoy’s Former Company New Breed Logistics May Have Overcharged Postal Service By $53 Million, Audit Found

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The next day, board members — many of them Republican donors — got another taste of government uncertainty from Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council. Hours after he had boasted on CNBC that the virus was contained in the United States and “it’s pretty close to airtight,” Mr. Kudlow delivered a more ambiguous private message. He asserted that the virus was “contained in the U.S., to date, but now we just don’t know,” according to a document describing the sessions obtained by The New York Times.

The document, written by a hedge fund consultant who attended the three-day gathering of Hoover’s board, was stark. “What struck me,” the consultant wrote, was that nearly every official he heard from raised the virus “as a point of concern, totally unprovoked.”

The consultant’s assessment quickly spread through parts of the investment world. U.S. stocks were already spiraling because of a warning from a federal public health official that the virus was likely to spread, but traders spotted the immediate significance: The president’s aides appeared to be giving wealthy party donors an early warning of a potentially impactful contagion at a time when Mr. Trump was publicly insisting that the threat was nonexistent.

As Virus Spread Early On, Reports of Trump Administration Briefings Fueled Sell-Off - The New York Times

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The president’s business has received at least $8.1 million since he took office from hosting meetings and events at his properties, like Mar-a-Lago, which Trump has referred to as “the Southern White House”. The Post says that Trump has made more than 280 visits to his hotels and clubs in his official capacity as president.

Meanwhile, a ProPublica report also published today reveals that the construction of Trump’s border wall has been costly, particularly because the Trump administration has failed to contain costs and encourage competitive pricing in contracts with construction companies.

Trump’s wall has costed about five times more than fencing built by the Bush and Obama administration, even though Trump has touted his skills as a savvy businessman. Additionally, many of the construction firms that have won contracts for the wall have executives who have donated to the campaigns of Trump or other Republicans, ProPublica reports..

Trump lashes out after Obama mocks him for being 'jealous of Covid's media coverage' – live | US news | The Guardian

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My book exposed a grubby secret of American higher education: that the rich buy their under-achieving children’s way into elite universities with massive, tax-deductible donations. It reported that New Jersey real estate developer Charles Kushner had pledged $2.5 million to Harvard University in 1998, not long before his son Jared was admitted to the prestigious Ivy League school. At the time, Harvard accepted about one of every nine applicants. (Nowadays, it only takes one out of twenty.) 

I also quoted administrators at Jared’s high school, who described him as a less than stellar student and expressed dismay at Harvard’s decision. “There was no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard,” a former official at The Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, told me. “His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought for sure, there was no way this was going to happen. Then, lo and behold, Jared was accepted. It was a little bit disappointing because there were at the time other kids we thought should really get in on the merits, and they did not.”

The Story Behind Jared Kushner’s Curious Acceptance Into Harvard — ProPublica

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Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has helped oversee a string of failed court challenges to President Trump’s defeat in the election, asked the president’s campaign to pay him $20,000 a day for his legal work, multiple people briefed on the matter said. The request stirred opposition from some of Mr. Trump’s aides and advisers, who appear to have ruled out paying that much, and it is unclear how much Mr. Giuliani will ultimately be compensated.

Since Mr. Giuliani took over management of the legal effort, Mr. Trump has suffered a series of defeats in court and lawyers handling some of the remaining cases have dropped out. A $20,000-a-day rate would have made Mr. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who has been Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer for several years, among the most highly compensated attorneys anywhere.

Giuliani Is Said to Seek $20,000 a Day Payment for Trump Legal Work - The New York Times