Letter to Judge Sullivan indicating that additional notes were added to ex-FBI Strzok’s chronology for Michael Flynn. Why? Just a way to move Flynn out of jail from DOJ.
Can we put this in Questionable Behavior please? @anon95374541 @MissJava Thanks!
All roads on this investigation story lead back to the Daily Mail so far, so I am watching to see if this proves true and more comes out.
Per the request of Judge Reggie Walton, the redacted portions of the Mueller report DO need to be unredacted. He read through the report and it needs to come out. A FOIA request also had some additional pressure about this too! They will be out before Nov 2nd…
A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the Department of Justice (DOJ) to publish information redacted from the Mueller report that had been designated as privileged.
District Judge Reggie Walton said the Trump administration had failed to justify certain redactions from the report on the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The specific redactions he took issue with cover the decisionmaking process within former special counsel Robert Mueller’s team over whether to charge certain people with crimes during the probe.
“Based on the Court’s review of the unredacted version of the Mueller Report, the Court concludes that the Department has failed to satisfy its burden to demonstrate that the withheld material is protected by the deliberative process privilege,” Walton, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush, wrote in his 40-page opinion.
The decision comes as a result of a pair of lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) brought by a journalist with BuzzFeed News and the Electronic Privacy Information Center that sought to have the full, unredacted report released to the public.
Walton on Wednesday ruled that the DOJ could continue to withhold material it had redacted under FOIA exemptions allowing agencies to conceal information that would compromise law enforcement investigations or compromise the privacy of witnesses.
Matt Topic, who was lead attorney for plaintiffs, told The Hill: "After a very thorough review, the Court found that the Justice Department violated federal law with regard to a number of the redactions to the Mueller Report. We look forward to the release of this additional information by November 2."
A spokeswoman for the DOJ did not immediately respond when asked for comment.
In March, Walton ordered the DOJ to give him access to an unredacted copy of the report so that he could review their withholdings. He excoriated the department and Attorney General William Barr at the time for misrepresenting the report’s conclusions before it was actually released.
A bit more…yes, the family should be worried if Brad Pascale talks. And sourced from the DailyMail article…but additional input from Campaign staff.
As the Times story lit up cable news and Twitter, news broke that Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale had been taken into custody outside his Ft. Lauderdale home and hospitalized after threatening to commit suicide and allegedly beating his wife days prior. Police body camera footage showing an officer brutally tackling a shirtless, 6’8” Parscale to the pavement instantly became a visual metaphor for the chaos engulfing the Trump campaign. One campaign adviser I spoke with was shocked by the amount of force the police used to subdue and cuff Parscale. “If Brad had been Black, there would be riots all over the country,” the source said. (In fact, police have killed unarmed Black men in far less hostile situations.)
Parscale’s public meltdown happened while he is reportedly under investigation for stealing from the Trump campaign and the RNC. According to the source close to the campaign, the Trump family is worried that Parscale could turn on them and cooperate with law enforcement about possible campaign finance violations. “The family is worried Brad will start talking,” the source said.
In response the Trump campaign’s communications director, Tim Murtaugh , said: “It’s utterly false. There is no investigation, no audit, and there never was.”
Great - check on a secretive ‘law commission’ halted by DC Judge.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A federal judge on Thursday halted the work of a policing panel created by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration that aimed to deliver a slate of “law and order” reform proposals before the Nov. 3 election, saying it violated federal open meeting laws.
The Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice was part of a Justice Department effort to deliver on a promise by Trump last year to a meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
The commission’s membership - made up entirely of federal, state and local law enforcement, with no civil rights advocates - and secretive proceedings led the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund to sue to stop its work.
U.S. District Judge John Bates in Washington on Thursday ruled in the group’s favor.
A national commission on law enforcement launched earlier this year by President Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr has violated federal law by failing to have a diverse membership and failing to provide public access to its meetings, a federal judge ruled Thursday. The judge ordered the commission to stop work, though it has already sent its draft report and recommendations on improving American policing to Barr for release next month, and prohibited Barr from releasing a final report.
The ruling by Senior U.S. District Judge John D. Bates in Washington came in response to a lawsuit from the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, which sought an injunction against the Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice for violating laws on how federal advisory committees must work. Bates did not issue an injunction, but ordered the commission to change its membership and comply with other aspects of the law.
“Especially in 2020,” Bates wrote, “when racial justice and civil rights issues involving law enforcement have erupted across the nation, one may legitimately question whether it is sound policy to have a group with little diversity of experience examine, behind closed doors, the sensitive issues facing law enforcement and the criminal justice system in America today.”
On the Judge Amy Cony Barett front, she is selectively disclosing what she tells the judicial committee, leaving out Roe v. Wade ad to remove it, with her endorsement on it.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, failed to disclose her participation in a 2006 newspaper ad calling for Roe v. Wade to be overturned and ending its “barbaric legacy” when she submitted paperwork to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Two Democratic committee aides confirmed to NBC News that the two-page ad published in the South Bend Tribune of Indiana, which included her name in a long list of those in support, was not disclosed in the Senate forms required of judicial nominees and maintained that it should have been. They said it should have been included in the response to a question in the forms asking for citations of “books, articles, reports, letters to the editor, editorial pieces or other published material you have written or edited.”
“The ad should have been included in Judge Barrett’s Senate Judiciary Questionnaire and was not,” one of the two aides said, asking not to be named in order to speak freely about the questionnaire. The aide also said that Barrett did not include her participation in the ad in her Senate disclosure forms for her 2017 appeals court appointment.
This two-page ad from 2006 signed by Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett was not included in her Senate disclosure forms.South Bend Tribune / via Newspapers.com
Barrett’s support for the ad, and her failure to report it, was first reported in The Guardian.
A White House spokesman said that because Barrett did not write or edit the advertisement, it does not fall within the scope of the questionnaire.
Victoria Nourse, a professor at Georgetown Law, was special counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee and went through the same disclosure process when President Barack Obama nominated her to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Her nomination was part of a slate of Obama judicial nominees blocked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
“She should have disclosed it,” Nourse said. “In my experience, I would have had to do it,” especially when it pertains to a contentious issue likely to come before the court. Nourse said the paperwork requirements for judicial nominees are very specific and strict and it took her months to fill them out. “You’re supposed to give anything you have on the internet and all of your endorsements."
Lots of agreement on Barr’s lack of respect for the rules…and his complicit actions to endorse the conpiratorial meanderings of the President.
DOJ Alumni Open Letter on Protecting Free and Fair Elections | by DOJ Alumni | Oct, 2020 | Medium
We, the undersigned, are alumni of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) who have collectively served both Republican and Democratic administrations. Each of us took an oath to defend the Constitution and pursue the evenhanded administration of justice free from partisan consideration.
Many of us have spoken out in previous statements, motivated by an ongoing concern that President Trump and Attorney General Barr are weaponizing the DOJ in the service of Trump’s personal interests, thereby doing grave damage to the rule of law, to the foundational principle that the law should be applied equally to all Americans, and to the DOJ’s institutional credibility as an independent law enforcement agency.
We speak out again now because we fear that Attorney General Barr intends to use the DOJ’s vast law enforcement powers to undermine our most fundamental democratic value: free and fair elections. He has signalled this intention in myriad ways, from making false statements about the security of mail-in voting from foreign hackers to falsely suggesting that mail-in ballots are subject to widespread fraud and coercion. Most recently, the Department made a premature and improper announcement of a mail-in ballot tampering investigation that the White House immediately used as a talking point in its campaign to discredit mail-in voting and to further the claim it will be rigged against President Trump.
And based on Attorney General Barr’s public statements and other evidence, it appears that he will use the ongoing inquiry into the origins of the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election — known as the “Durham investigation” after John Durham, the U.S. Attorney in Connecticut tapped by Barr to lead it — to help President Trump’s reelection chances. There are serious questions about whether there is a legitimate basis for the Durham investigation. It has been repeatedly politicized and tainted by President Trump, and both the DOJ’s Inspector General and the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have concluded that the Russian interference investigation was wholly appropriate and methodologically sound. But even if there is a legitimate predicate for the Durham investigation, there is clearly no justification for taking public action on it in such close proximity to the November election. Such a blatant politicization and abuse of federal law enforcement power risks immense and lasting harm to our democracy and to the integrity and reputation of the DOJ.
The core principle of federal law enforcement — familiar to all DOJ lawyers — is that the law should be applied equally and impartially, free from partisan considerations. It is embodied in the Constitution and countless laws and rules governing the conduct of federal prosecutors, including DOJ policies — both written and unwritten — designed to avoid interference with an election. One such unwritten policy — sometimes called the “60-Day Rule” — creates a presumption that DOJ personnel should not take public steps or make public statements about a criminal investigation in the period immediately before an election if doing so could influence the vote.
Attorney General Barr is well aware of the 60-Day Rule and the longstanding policies and traditions it serves. Indeed, he endorsed it during his own Senate confirmation hearing, explaining that it exists because “the incumbent party has their hands on … the levers of the law enforcement apparatus of the country, and you do not want it used against the opposing political party.” Earlier this year, Attorney General Barr issued a memorandum to DOJ personnel in which he reiterated that “the Department has long recognized that it must exercise particular care regarding sensitive investigations and prosecutions that relate to political candidates, campaigns, and other politically sensitive individuals and organizations — especially in an election year.” In doing so, he acknowledged the importance of “ensur[ing] that the Department’s actions do not unnecessarily advantage or disadvantage any candidate or political party.” During his first tour as Attorney General, Barr criticized just such an action, when Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh indicted former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger days before the 1992 election, thereby damaging President George H.W. Bush’s re-election campaign.
But now, Attorney General Barr seems to be ignoring the principle altogether in his handling of the Durham investigation, which he has continued in spite of President Trump’s repeated efforts to use it as a political weapon. President Trump has publicly insisted on prosecutions of numerous persons associated with what he calls the “Russia Witch Hunt,” including former President Obama and former Vice President Biden, and has bluntly stated that Attorney General Barr’s ability to be considered “the greatest attorney general in our history,” versus just “an average guy,” hinges on whether he prosecutes them. President Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows suggested that he has reviewed documents related to the investigation that demonstrate that “it’s time for people to go to jail.” Far from distancing himself from these abuses of power, Attorney General Barr has repeatedly violated DOJ policy by commenting on the investigation, to include opining that its subjects committed crimes constituting “one of the greatest travesties in American history” and “sabotage” of President Trump’s 2016 campaign. Such improper political influence from the White House and guilt-presuming comments not only violate DOJ policy, they undermine fundamental fairness and due process.
While the 60-Day Rule’s presumption against pre-election action can sometimes be overcome for legitimate law enforcement purposes — such as the need to enforce a subpoena when a prosecutor fears evidence will be destroyed or the need to make an arrest when a suspect may flee — we are aware of no such exigencies here. The recent resignation of Nora Dannehy, one of prosecutors on the Durham investigation — in apparent protest of pressure to produce unprecedented pre-indictment findings before the election — further suggests that the Durham investigation is being used as a means of partisan interference in the election on President Trump’s behalf.
In recent remarks, Attorney General Barr criticized DOJ career prosecutors for being insufficiently deferential to the Trump administration and the political leadership at DOJ. Attorney General Barr’s comments display a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of career prosecutors and why many of them have openly resisted his interventions on President Trump’s behalf. While it is of course true that the DOJ is managed by its political leaders, when those leaders violate their oath to faithfully execute the law, the career staff is obligated by their own oaths of office to uphold the principle of equal justice under law. All DOJ officials, including Mr. Durham himself, should respond to any improper efforts to influence the election by: reporting misconduct; refusing to carry out improper directives; and following the lead of Ms. Dannehy and others and resigning rather than violate their oaths of office. The Inspector General should protect the DOJ’s integrity by answering the call of the House of Representatives to open his own investigation into election interference. And given Attorney General Barr’s demonstrated willingness to use the Department to help President Trump politically, the media and the public should view any election-related activity by the DOJ — including any announcement or findings related to the Durham investigation — with appropriate skepticism.
CNN reporting
Talking head and former Naval officer Tom Nichols.
Ben Rhodes…former NSC under Obama
Just some twisted stuff…
No one can help, no one’s in charge…
The White House rejected on Monday an offer from the nation’s public health experts to lead the effort to track down and notify Americans who were exposed to a growing coronavirus outbreak linked to President Donald Trump and several top aides.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is widely considered the federal government’s authority in contact tracing, the public health best practice of reaching out to people at risk of acquiring an infectious disease and to identify others who were subsequently exposed.
In interviews and internal CDC communications reviewed by USA TODAY, current and former agency officials accused the White House of seeking to avoid learning the scope of the outbreaks. Without an independent investigation, they said, countless others may be exposed and never know it.
“CDC, when left in the hands of its scientists, makes tough decisions and helps implement them and maybe that’s not what the White House wants,” said Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, a former CDC director and 26-year veteran of the agency. “They seem to be marching toward a different goal. It’s a petty one and a partisan one. And all of us pay the price.”
Two political appointees at the federal agency that oversees the Voice of America recently investigated one of its most prominent journalists to make the case he was biased against President Trump.
NPR has learned the appointees compiled an extensive report deemed “confidential” on VOA White House bureau chief Steve Herman, claiming that in his reporting and tweets that Herman had been unfair to Trump and had broken the broadcaster’s standards and social media policies. They repeatedly cited a “conflict of interest,” based on their conclusions from Herman’s social media postings, including his own tweets and his “likes,” according to materials reviewed by NPR. The findings were quietly presented to acting Voice of America Director Elez Biberaj for action two weeks ago.
In so doing, the two men appear to have violated laws and regulations intended to protect the federally funded news outlet from political interference or influence. That has set off alarms within the VOA newsroom, already unnerved by investigations of coverage of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden by VOA’s Urdu language service and the tenor of language used to describe his wife, Jill Biden, to introduce a segment on VOA’s French to Africa language service.
DNI head Ratcliffe selects and releases some classified documents related to the CIA, FBI’s Trump-Russian investigation which coincidentally help Trump make his argument that he was unfairly investigated.
Brennan’s book is out today as well, criticizing the Administration.
Drumroll…it’s dirty tricks time with selective classified notes just prior to election.
Former CIA director John Brennan accuses intel chief of selectively declassifying documents to help Trump - CNNPolitics
On Tuesday, CNN confirmed that Ratcliffe declassified Brennan’s notes and the intelligence memo – a decision that comes one week after he released a letter outlining the claims about Clinton coming from Russian intelligence services.
Brennan’s notes and the CIA memo were handed over to the Senate and House intelligence committees, a democratic congressional source and Ratcliffe’s office confirmed to CNN after it was first reported Tuesday by Fox News.
In a statement to CNN, Ratcliffe said he declassified the documents at “the direction of President Trump.”
Trump on Tuesday evening tweeted about the Russia investigation, vowing to declassify all related materials and documents “pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal.”
That message came during a Twitter spree attacking former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former special counsel Robert Mueller and the FBI, where Trump said he will declassify the documents with “no redactions.” Trump was quote-tweeting Paul Sperry, a conservative journalist and fellow at the Hoover institution, who wrote that if the documents were declassified, it would show that “the FBI and CIA not only knew the Russia ‘collusion’ allegations against Trump were a political dirty trick, but that they were in on the trick.”
Yet in a later tweet, Trump said he already had declassified all the relevant intelligence – but it was unclear what he was referring to beyond the documents released by Ratcliffe in recent days.
But Brennan told CNN Tuesday that the memo declassified by Ratcliffe, which he characterized as a Counterintelligence Operational Lead (CIOL), is just one of several documents that were sent to the FBI related to Russian activity during the 2016 race.
There are a lot of other CIOLs that talk about the contacts that were taking place between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russians. So he might want to think about trying to balance some of these releases by providing information to the American public about what the intelligence community had unearthed during this period of time about Russia’s interactions with those involved in the Trump campaign," he said.
Last week, CNN reported that Ratcliffe declassified unverified Russian intelligence despite concerns being raised by the CIA and National Security Agency, according to people briefed on the matter.
Career officials in the intelligence agencies were concerned about declassifying the information because it was unverified and they believed it could reveal sources and methods. Ratcliffe overrode those concerns and sent the document to Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, the people said.
That declassified document, which includes a Russian intelligence assessment from 2016 that Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to “stir up a scandal” against then-candidate Trump by tying him to Russia and the hack of the Democratic National Committee, has sparked charges from Democrats and former intelligence officials that Ratcliffe was politicizing intelligence and sharing Russian disinformation.
It was the latest in a string of declassified documents Ratcliffe and Attorney General William Barr have provided to Senate Republicans and others targeting the FBI’s Russia investigation ahead of the November election.
Ratcliffe noted in the summary he provided to Graham that the intelligence community "does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication."
Ratcliffe later issued a clarifying statement that the information “is not Russian disinformation.” But multiple intelligence and law enforcement officials say the possibility that it is disinformation hasn’t been ruled out by the intelligence agencies.
Some crazy stories rolling out now… the sources I’d be careful of for some of these, clearly.
What T’s authoritarian motivated position really wants - wants to go after rivals - Hillary, release selective documents which skew the ‘russian’ argument towards T being unfairly pursued, take conversations away from Covid and destabilize the elections. Unpresendented.
President Trump’s order to his secretary of state to declassify thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails, along with his insistence that his attorney general issue indictments against Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., takes his presidency into new territory — until now, occupied by leaders with names like Putin, Xi and Erdogan.
Mr. Trump has long demanded — quite publicly, often on Twitter — that his most senior cabinet members use the power of their office to pursue political enemies. But his appeals this week, as he trailed badly in the polls and was desperate to turn the national conversation away from the coronavirus, were so blatant that one had to look to authoritarian nations to make comparisons.
He took a step even Richard M. Nixon avoided in his most desperate days: openly ordering direct, immediate government action against specific opponents, timed to serve his re-election campaign.
“There is essentially no precedent,” said Jack Goldsmith, who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush and has written extensively on presidential powers. “We have a norm that developed after Watergate that presidents don’t talk about ongoing investigations, much less interfere with them.”
“It is crazy and it is unprecedented,” said Mr. Goldsmith, now a professor at Harvard Law School, “but it’s no different from what he has been saying since the beginning of his presidency. The only thing new is that he has moved from talking about it to seeming to order it.”
Mr. Trump’s vision of the presidency has always leaned to exercising the absolute powers of the chief executive, a writ-large version of the family business he presided over. “I have an Article II,” he told young adults last year at a Turning Point USA summit, referring to the section of the Constitution that deals with the president’s powers, “where I have the right to do whatever I want as president, but I don’t even talk about that.”
Now he is talking about it, almost daily. He is making it clear that prosecutions, like vaccines for the coronavirus, are useless to him if they come after Nov. 3. He has declared, without evidence, that there is already plenty of proof that Mr. Obama, Mr. Biden and Mrs. Clinton, among others, were fueling the charges that his campaign had links to Russia — what he calls “the Russia hoax.” And he has pressured his secretary of state to agree to release more of Mrs. Clinton’s emails before the election, reprising a yearslong fixation despite having defeated her four years ago.
Presidential historians say there is no case in modern times where the president has so plainly used his powers to take political opponents off the field — or has been so eager to replicate the behavior of strongmen. “In America, our presidents have generally avoided strongman balcony scenes — that’s for other countries with authoritarian systems,” Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, wrote on Twitter after Mr. Trump returned from the hospital where he received Covid-19 treatment and removed his mask, while still considered contagious, as he saluted from the White House balcony.
Long ago, White House officials learned how to avoid questions about whether the president views his powers as fundamentally more constrained than those of the authoritarians he so often casts in admiring terms, including Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. They have something in common: Mr. Trump’s State Department has criticized all three for corrupting the justice systems in their countries to pursue political enemies.
(Russia, the State Department complained in its 2019 Human Rights report, engaged in a “crackdown on political opposition and other critics before and after presidential elections that Vladimir Putin won.” Turkey, it said the same year, has conducted the “arbitrary arrest and detention of tens of thousands of persons, including former opposition members of parliament.” In recent weeks. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been particularly outspoken about the state’s use of a new national security law to arrest activists and political opponents of the Chinese Communist Party.)
Mr. Pompeo has always bristled when reporters have asked him to explain what the world should believe when it reads Mr. Trump’s most authoritarian-sounding tweets. He answers that what distinguishes the United States is that it is a “rule of law” nation, and then often turns the tables on his questioners, charging that even raising the issue reveals that the reporters are partisans, not journalists, intent on embarrassing Mr. Trump and the United States.
But his anger is often wielded as a shield, one that keeps him from publicly grappling with the underlying question: How can Washington take on other authoritarians around the world — especially China, Mr. Pompeo’s nemesis — for abusing state power when the president of the United States calls for political prosecutions and politically motivated declassifications?
“We’ve never seen anything like this in an American election campaign,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a former under secretary of state who is now an informal adviser to Mr. Biden. “It reduces our credibility — we look like the countries we condemn for nondemocratic practices before an election.”
“I have worked for nine secretaries of state,” Mr. Burns said. “I cannot imagine any of them intervening in an election as blatantly as what we are seeing now. Our tradition is that secretaries of state stay out of elections. If they wanted to release Hillary Clinton’s emails, they could have done it in 2017, 2018 or 2019. It is an abuse of power by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo.”
Another career diplomat who served as both ambassador to Russia and deputy secretary of state, William J. Burns, said that what Mr. Trump had ordered is “exactly the kind of behavior I saw so often in authoritarian regimes in many years as an American diplomat.”
“In dealing with Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey, we would have protested and condemned such actions,” he said. “Now it’s our own government that’s engaging in them.”
And the accomplices who will allow T’s arguments to fly…Fox, Barr etc.
While most of the nation was largely fixated over the past week on President Donald Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis, the President and his allies in right-wing media have been engrossed with something else entirely.
Trump, with the help of outlets like Fox News, has been pushing a dishonest narrative in touting intelligence documents that his administration declassified last month on the eve of the first presidential debate. They claimed the information was a supposed smoking gun proving that Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration sought to frame Trump with a Russian collusion scandal.
But when examined closely the documents indicate no such thing. In fact, by the Trump administration’s own admission, they are based on unverified Russian intelligence that could be totally bogus. Which is to say that the President and Fox News personalities such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson are hyping and disseminating information that originates from a foreign adversary to bludgeon top Democratic officials.
Trump and his allies have even gone so far as to demand or suggest that President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden should be charged with actual crimes -- again, resting much of their case on unverified Russian chatter and other cherry-picked material that the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency warned against releasing, as CNN previously reported.
It’s the latest episode in a long-running attempt by Trump and right-wing media to portray the Obama administration as nefarious actors who sought to launch a coup of an incoming Republican administration. This “deep state” conspiracy has been thoroughly discredited.
What makes this situation more alarming is that John Ratcliffe, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence who declassified the documents, appears to be selectively doing so to help Trump accuse his 2020 opponent of committing a crime – all with the help of a major US media organization.
It has some current and former intelligence officials aghast.
"We are acting like a banana republic, with various cabinet officials so beholden to a dictator, they violate all norms and rules simply to curry favor," said Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer who oversaw operations in Europe and Russia before retiring last summer.
Campaigning four years ago as a Washington outsider, Donald J. Trump electrified rallies with his vows to “drain the swamp.” But once he was in the White House, President Trump didn’t merely fail to end Washington’s insider culture of lobbying and favor-seeking. He reinvented it, turning his own hotels and resorts into the Beltway’s new back rooms, where public and private business mix and special interests reign.
Federal tax-return data for Mr. Trump and his business empire obtained by The New York Times shows that even as he leveraged his image as a successful businessman to win the presidency, large swaths of his real estate holdings were under financial stress, having racked up losses over the preceding decades.
After the election, his family business discovered a lucrative new revenue stream: people who wanted something from the president.
An investigation by The Times has found over 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments that patronized Mr. Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from him and his administration. Nearly a quarter of those patrons have not been previously reported.
Here are some key findings from the investigation.
The president’s family business earned millions from customers with interests before his administration
Just 60 customers with interests at stake before the administration brought the Trump Organization nearly $12 million during the first two years of Mr. Trump’s presidency, The Times found. Almost all saw their interests advanced, in some fashion, by the president or his government.
Interviews with nearly 250 business executives, club members, lobbyists, Trump property employees and current or former administration officials provided a comprehensive account of how well customers fared with the administration — and how the president profited.
Many said in interviews that any favorable outcome was incidental to their patronage. But whether these customers won or lost, Mr. Trump benefited. They paid his family business for golf outings and steak dinners, for huge corporate retreats and black-tie galas.
During Mr. Trump’s campaign and the months leading up to his inauguration, the in-house magazine at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida announced nearly 100 new members, a number of whom had significant business interests in Washington. The tax records show that in 2016 alone, the club’s initiation fees delivered close to $6 million in revenue.
The president kept an eye on the Trump Organization from Washington
As president-elect, Mr. Trump had pledged to step back from the Trump Organization and recuse himself from his private company’s operation. As president, he kept watch on properties run by the company, which is now led by his sons Eric and Donald Jr.
When Mr. Trump stopped by the Trump International Hotel in Washington, he sometimes let managers know he was being briefed on their performance. At Mar-a-Lago, he told longtime members that he ought to raise prices on the new crowd angling to join. Then he did, at least twice.
Eric Trump sometimes told his father about specific groups that had booked events at Mar-a-Lago, a former administration official said. And as Mr. Trump surveyed his business empire from the White House, he occasionally familiarized himself with details from club membership lists, according to two people with knowledge of the activity.
Getting access to Mr. Trump was easy: He has spent time at his hotels and resorts on roughly one day out of every four of his presidency
When the president walked into his Washington hotel for dinner, word seemed to spread almost instantaneously. People might camp out at the hotel bar for hours, hoping for even a brief audience. At Mar-a-Lago, members paid Mr. Trump to spend time at what was, ultimately, his home. During meals, people would line up at his table. Guests, even paying members, had a habit of thanking Mr. Trump for having them over.
“People know and expect him to be at Mar-a-Lago, so they’ll bring a guest or come with a specific idea,” said Fernando Cutz, a former national security aide who often visited the club with Mr. Trump. “With that access, you could pitch your ideas. With this president, he’d actually listen and direct his staff to follow up.”
And chances were good he’d be around. Mr. Trump has visited the Trump family’s hotels and resorts on nearly 400 days of his presidency.
Victories were as weighty as a presidential directive and as ephemeral as a presidential tweet
Patrons at the properties ranged widely: foreign politicians and Florida sugar barons, a Chinese billionaire and a Serbian prince, clean-energy enthusiasts and their adversaries in the petroleum industry, avowed small-government activists and contractors seeking billions from ever-fattening federal budgets.
Mr. Trump’s administration delivered them funding and laws and land. He handed them ambassadorships, appointments, presidential directives and tweets.
More than 70 advocacy groups, businesses and foreign governments threw events at the properties that had previously been held elsewhere, or created new events that drove dollars into the Mr. Trump’s business.
Donors also paid for the privilege of giving money to his campaign and super PAC. Mr. Trump attended 34 fund-raisers held at his hotels and resorts, events that brought them another $3 million in revenue. Sometimes, he lined up his donors to ask what they needed from the government.
Some customers framed their patronage in religious terms
Almost from the outset of the Trump presidency, his Washington hotel was a hub of religious gatherings, fund-raisers and tours — events that converted Mr. Trump’s most loyal voters into some of his most reliable customers.
Prominent evangelical ministers were given V.I.P. status at the hotel, according to former employees, with their names and pictures distributed to the staff alongside those of senior Republican lawmakers and Fox television luminaries. And they spent big.
Unlike businesses and trade groups, many religious conservatives explicitly linked their support of Mr. Trump’s business to his administration’s socially conservative agenda. Some explained in interviews how Mr. Trump had delivered so much for evangelicals — on abortion, judges, Israel and more — that they wanted to show their gratitude.
“If we can support this president by having dinner or staying at the hotel, then we want to do that,” said Sharon Bolan, an evangelist from Dallas who belongs to Mr. Trump’s national faith leaders group.
Even politicians from small countries rubbed shoulders with the leader of the free world
The Times identified more than 20 foreign officials, politicians and businesses or groups closely affiliated with governments abroad that held events at Mr. Trump’s properties or paid for rooms there.
For foreign politicians on the lower rungs of Washington’s diplomatic ladder, even a chance meeting with the American president can be a significant propaganda victory. At a gala held by local Republicans last spring at Mar-a-Lago, the head of Romania’s sixth-largest political party shook hands with Mr. Trump. And some embassies moved their annual galas or independence commemorations to the Washington hotel.
When the prime minister of the Serbian enclave in Bosnia, Zeljka Cvijanovic, stopped at the hotel and met Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, she issued a news release almost suggestive of a state function. “On the first day of her visit to Washington, Prime Minister Cvijanovic met with the closest associates of the US President,” it proclaimed.
Selfies and social media posts chronicled the favor-seeking
Many of those seeking help from his administration were not shy about advertising their access to the president’s realm. The Times’s investigation includes a review of hundreds of social media posts, many by patrons enthusiastically documenting their visits to Mr. Trump’s properties, as well as an array of published news articles where some patrons spoke candidly about their access.
“Once he became president, everyone wanted to be around him,” said Jeff Greene, a Florida real estate developer and Mar-a-Lago member. It wasn’t influence-peddling, Mr. Greene said. “People like to be where presidents are.”
The Trump Organization did not respond to repeated requests for comment over the past week, nor did it respond to a detailed description of facts included in the article.
A White House spokesman, Judd Deere, issued a brief statement saying that Mr. Trump had “turned over the day-to-day responsibilities of the very successful business he built” to his two adult sons. “The president has kept his promise every day to the American people to fight for them, drain the swamp and always put America first,” he added.
I do like seeing this STAND UP behavior by those who left the WH because of all the double speak coming from the WH. Thank you Olivia for making this clear.
Emphasis: False narratives
This is disturbing…and officiated - church and state, in a secret society or pact. Barr’s got membership to it, and their guy, Leonard Leo is head of the Federalist Society who pick out the judges for the courts.
WOW.
The Opus Dei Catholic Information Center’s “members and leaders continue to have an outsize impact on policy and politics. It is the conservative spiritual and intellectual center … and its influence is felt in all of Washington’s corridors of power,” stated the Washington Post.
QUOTE
In the past two decades, the center’s “K Street NW location, just two blocks from the White House, became a bustling gathering place for conservative academics, politicians, journalists, young professionals.” “The noon Mass became known as a ‘Who’s Who’ scene in conservative circles” including “Judge Robert H. Bork, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), economist Larry Kudlow and former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.).”
Opus Dei’s influence is enormous in the U.S. judiciary.
“The center’s board includes Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society, which helped shepherd the Supreme Court nominations of Brett M. Kavanaugh and Neil M. Gorsuch. White House counsel Pat Cipollone is a former board member, as is William P. Barr, who served as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush and is now President Trump’s nominee for the same position.” Barr, a “committed Catholic,” was highly recommended by Leonard Leo.
The U.S. judiciary has been shaped not only through Leo’s control over Trump’s judicial appointments but also by the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN) directed by Leo and run by Carrie Severino, a former law clerk for supreme court justice Clarence Thomas.
The JCN is a 501©(4) organization, meaning its donors are secret. “It has spent millions across the country to influence the elections of judges and attorneys general as well as judicial appointment and confirmation processes.”
Rings hollow Ivanka…yes, revisionist history.
video of Ivanka
Axios created a measured ‘loyalty’ profile on all the Republicans and their support level for Trump…It measures all the votes with him, as well as anytime they dissented or criticized Trump. The allegiances that T commands how been a powerful incentive for these Republicans because up to probably now, R’s would do anything to avoid criticism from T would could be ruinous to their upcoming elections.
The five who are most loyal, who have stood with hm through thick and thin (in the mid 90% - high 80%'s) Include Rep Grothman 93% (R-WI), Sen Perdue 91% (R-GA), Rep Gaetz 90% (R-Fl), Sen Cramer 89% (R-ND), Rep Gohmert 88% (TX-I)
And the lowest who are in the mid 80 5’s include Sen Romney, and Sen Collins. (R-ME) who is in a super tight election this year, where she will not say she is NOT supporting T, but says she does not approve of what he does.
The index measures both voting loyalty, according to FiveThirtyEight’s Trump Score, and how members reacted to seven of President Trump’s most controversial moments.
Click on the square to read the full reaction. If the square is not clickable, no reaction was found. Scroll to the bottom to see the scores for members who took office after 2017.
