Tag: Trump administration corruption

Federal judge hires high-powered D.C. attorney to defend his actions in Flynn case

Washington Post logoThe federal judge who refused a Justice Department request to immediately drop the prosecution of former Trump adviser Michael Flynn has hired a high-profile trial lawyer to argue his reasons for investigating whether dismissing the case is legally or ethically appropriate.

In a rare step that adds to this criminal case’s already unusual path, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan has retained Beth Wilkinson to represent him in defending his decision to a federal appeals court in Washington, according to a person familiar with the hire who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. The U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is now examining the judge’s actions and the larger case against Flynn after lawyers for President Trump’s former national security adviser asked the court to force Sullivan to toss Flynn’s guilty plea.

Wilkinson, known for her top-notch legal skills and get-results style, is expected to file a notice with the court in the coming week about representing the judge. She declined to comment when reached Friday evening. Sullivan also declined to comment through his office. Continue reading.

PompeoGate: The First Scandal Of Campaign 2024

Do you remember Mike Pompeo?

Not the Pompeo who now serves as secretary of state, and who liked to boast that he had restored the “swagger” of the diplomatic corps (even as he served up his own Ukraine ambassador to a White House smear campaign). And no, not the sleazy character who induced the firing of the State Department’s inspector general in order to bury an investigation of his own misconduct. This Secretary Pompeo is a flunky of President Donald Trump who lives happily inside the president’s ethical vacuum.

But just a few years ago, there was a representative from Kansas by the same name. He was a West Point graduate who oozed religious righteousness — and a congressional scourge who felt obliged to express his white-hot anger in a separate and furious postscript to the House Select Committee on Benghazi report in 2015. Continue reading.

Trump’s Vaccine Chief Has Vast Ties to Drug Industry, Posing Possible Conflicts

New York Times logoThe chief scientist brought on to lead the Trump administration’s vaccine efforts has spent the last several days trying to disentangle pieces of his stock portfolio and his intricate ties to big pharmaceutical interests, as critics point to the potential for significant conflicts of interest.

The scientist, Moncef Slaoui, is a venture capitalist and a former longtime executive at GlaxoSmithKline. Most recently, he sat on the board of Moderna, a Cambridge, Mass., biotechnology firm with a $30 billion valuation that is pursuing a coronavirus vaccine. He resigned when President Trump named him last Thursday to the new post as chief adviser for Operation Warp Speed, the federal drive for coronavirus vaccines and treatments.

Just days into his job, the extent of Dr. Slaoui’s financial interests in drug companies has begun to emerge: The value of his stock holdings in Moderna jumped nearly $2.4 million, to $12.4 million when the company released preliminary, partial data from an early phase of its candidate vaccine trial that helped send the markets soaring on Monday. Continue reading.

Pence’s ‘special envoy’ in foreign aid office sparked ethics complaint just weeks after he started his job

AlterNet logoIn early 2018, an incoming Trump political appointee and ally of Vice President Mike Pence made an unusual suggestion to a United Nations agency whose funding hinged on support from a skeptical Trump administration: He pitched them to do business with one of his private-sector clients.

“Might merit your team’s consideration,” Max Primorac wrote in January, weeks before he formally started at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he would eventually become an adviser to Pence.

The client pitch by an incoming official sparked a complaint a month later from an anonymous State Department official, according to documents obtained by ProPublica. The U.N. agency, the United Nations Development Program in Iraq, had by then received over $190 million in funding from USAID, the complaint said. Continue reading.

NYC Bar Association issues stunning rebuke of AG Bill Barr — and asks Congress to investigate him for bias

AlterNet logoThe New York City Bar Association has taken the extraordinary step of asking Congress to investigate Attorney General Bill Barr for being too politically biased to faithfully execute his duties as America’s top law enforcement official.

Bloomberg reports that the Bar Association is claiming that Barr’s recent statements and actions indicate that he may be enabling and encouraging “political partisans willing to use the levers of government to empower certain groups over others.”

The association also accuses Barr of disregarding “fundamental obligations in several public statements during the past few months,” including his duty to “act impartially, to avoid even the appearance of partiality and impropriety, and to avoid manifesting bias, prejudice or partisanship in the exercise of official responsibilities.” Continue reading.

Secretary Chao Under Scrutiny For Grants To Husband McConnell’s Home State

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) examination has raised serious concerns about the process by which Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao determined project grant recipients, finding that it did not treat all applicants with “the assurance of fairness.”

One of the beneficiaries of that process was Boone County, Kentucky — a jurisdiction represented by Chao’s husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Politico reported on Tuesday that a $67.4 million grant application for Boone was “initially flagged by professional staff as incomplete.” After the Department of Transportation gave Boone and a minority of the other incomplete applicants a second chance to fix their submission, Chao selected it as among the 26 grant winners from an initial pool of 258 applicants. Continue reading

Judge rejects claims by Trump ex-adviser of FBI misconduct

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Monday flatly rejected a last-ditch bid by President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn to get the criminal charges to which he already pleaded guilty dropped, brushing aside his claims of misconduct by prosecutors and the FBI.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered Flynn to appear for sentencing on Jan. 28, concluding that the retired Army lieutenant general had failed to prove a “single” violation by the prosecution or FBI officials of withholding evidence that could exonerate him.

Sullivan’s 92-page ruling represented a major blow to Flynn, who has tried to backpedal since he pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about his conversations with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Flynn’s sworn statements in his plea agreement “belie his new claims of innocence,” Sullivan wrote.

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Attorney general reschedules Trump hotel holiday party. DOJ won’t disclose the date.

Washington Post logoWilliam Barr is sticking with the Trump hotel as a venue after a party planned for Sunday night was canceled.

Attorney General William P. Barr had planned to hold a 200-person holiday party at the Trump hotel in Washington Sunday night, but the event was rescheduled, according to a Justice Department spokeswoman.

The spokeswoman declined to say when the event would take place but said it would still be at the Trump International Hotel, a choice that prompted critics to question Barr’s independence from Trump, who still profits from his business while in office.

Barr has been a key defender of President Trump, including Monday when he criticized an inspector general’s report examining the FBI’s investigation into possible coordination between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. Twice this week, Justice Department attorneys are defending Trump in court against suits claiming the president illegally benefits from his business while in office.

Medicare Chief Under Fire For Asking Taxpayers To Cover Stolen Jewelry

Seema Verma filed a claim for jewelry worth $43,000 that was apparently stolen from her rented SUV during a work trip to San Francisco.

A top Department of Health and Human Services official is facing backlash after she asked taxpayers to reimburse her for jewelry and other items stolen with her luggage during a work trip last year.

Seema Verma, who heads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, filed a request to HHS for $47,000 to cover her lost property in August 2018, according to documents obtained by Politico.

The items, which included a $5,900 Ivanka Trump-brand pendant and a $325 moisturizer, were allegedly stolen a month earlier from inside an SUV that Verma had rented while visiting San Francisco for work.

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‘Flat-out corruption’: DeVos accused of scheming to stop next president from canceling student loan debt

AlterNet logoBillionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos this week proposed handing over the federal government’s $1.5 trillion student loan portfolio to a “stand-alone government corporation,” a move observers condemned as a corrupt ploy to strip the next president of the ability to cancel student loan debt.

“This very much appears to be a Betsy DeVos scheme to block the next president from unilaterally forgiving federal student debt, which she is well aware a president could do without Congress,” The Intercept‘s Ryan Grim wrote in a series of tweets late Wednesday. “The DeVos family is heavily invested in the student loan industry and this is just flat-out corruption.”

DeVos’ plan, first introduced on Tuesday, would spin off the Education Department’s Federal Student Aid office into a new and supposedly independent federal agency.

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