Tag: Trump administration corruption

Top Interior official who pushed to expand drilling in Alaska to join oil company there

Washington Post logoJoe Balash, a Trump appointee, had served as assistant secretary for land and minerals management until Aug. 30.

Last summer, Scott Pruitt left his job heading the Environmental Protection Agency and within a few months had started consulting for coal magnate Joseph W. Craft III. Three weeks after leaving the Interior Department, energy counselor Vincent DeVito joined Cox Oil Offshore, which operates in the Gulf of Mexico, as its executive vice president and general counsel. Now, Joe Balash — who oversaw oil and gas drilling on federal lands before resigning from Interior on Friday — is joining a foreign oil company that is expanding operations on Alaska’s North Slope.

Balash, who served as the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for land and minerals management for nearly two years, confirmed in a phone interview Tuesday night that he will begin working for the Papua New Guinea-based Oil Search, which is developing one of Alaska’s largest oil prospects in years. On Wednesday, Oil Search officials said he would become senior vice president for external affairs in the company’s Alaska operations. Continue reading “Top Interior official who pushed to expand drilling in Alaska to join oil company there”

Pompeo’s business deals with foreign-government companies

Washington Post logo“I ran a small business that made machine parts for the aerospace industry. And I spent a fair amount of time in Bangalore and in Chennai working with HAL — with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited — to sell products we — a small joint venture.”

— Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, remarks at the India Ideas Summit, June 12, 2019

“Question: Do you stand by the statement you made in your SSCI questionnaire that for the previous ten years you had not been involved in any financial or business transactions with any entity controlled by a foreign government? Answer: Yes.”

— Question for the Record (QFR), Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the nomination of Pompeo to be secretary of state, April 12, 2018

A line in a recent lengthy profile of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in the New Yorker caught our attention: “[David] Murfin named Pompeo president of Sentry International, an oil-services firm that manufactured parts in China and elsewhere and sold them in the U.S. One Sentry joint venture was with a subsidiary of the Chinese national oil firm Sinopec, although Pompeo later told the Senate that he had no business ties to foreign government-owned entities.”

View the complete August 29 article by Glenn Kessler on The Washington Post website here.

GOP members confirm Bernhardt met with group tied to ex-client

Democrats might be focusing on meetings and calls kept off Interior secretary’s official calendar

Republicans on two House committees probing Interior Secretary David Bernhardt acknowledged in a report Thursday that the attorney and former energy lobbyist appeared to have met with the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, a trade group affiliated with a former Bernhardt client.

The joint report from Republican staff on the House Oversight and Reform, and Natural Resources committees also said ethics officials at the Interior Department approved the meeting with the trade group. The report, by acknowledging the meeting, may also indicate where the majority Democrats are focusing their examination into whether Bernhardt kept phone calls and meetings with industry representatives and groups off his public calendar.

Bernhardt, who became secretary in December 2018 after serving as deputy secretary, signed an ethics pledge when he joined the department to recuse himself from meetings with former clients. He listed the U.S. Oil and Gas Association as a client. The group’s website lists the Louisiana association as one of its four divisions.

View the complete August 23 article by Jacob Holzman on The Roll Call website here.

How the student loan industry lobbied DeVos to fight state regulations

The Trump administration’s attempts to shield some student loan companies from new state regulations began after the industry waged a furious lobbying campaign, which included the head of student loan giant Navient, emails obtained by POLITICO show.

Jack Remondi, chief executive officer of Navient, personally emailed a top aide to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, urging the administration to “quickly” declare that states lacked the authority to police the companies that, like his, collect federal student loans.

Remondi and other industry heavyweights were trying to enlist the Education Department’s help to fend off the growing trend of states considering or passing laws to crack down on student loan servicing companies. The states were responding to allegations of misrepresentations and other abuses in the industry, which manages the student loan payments of the nation’s more than 45 million student loan debtors.

View the complete August 15 article by Michael Stratford on the Politico website here.

Interior secretary will be allowed to meet with former fossil fuel clients starting this weekend

Secretary David Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist, previously recused himself from all decisions involving his former firm’s clients.

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt’s ethics recusal will expire on Saturday. The ethics pledge banned Bernhardt from decisions involving his former firm’s clients for two years.

Bernhardt was also not able to meet with these companies, unless five or more other stakeholders were present and nothing relating specifically to the companies was discussed.

But all of this is set to change on August 3.

View the complete August 2 article by Kyla Mandel on the ThinkProgress website here.

Trump friend with business ties to Middle East pushed to shape U.S. policy in the region, House Democratic report says

Washington Post logoThomas J. Barrack Jr., a Los Angeles-based investor and informal adviser to President Trump, sought powerful positions in the Trump administration in 2017 while pushing a U.S. nuclear energy policy in the Middle East that could benefit his company, according to a new report by congressional Democrats.

The allegations detailed in a report released Monday by the House Oversight and Reform Committee come weeks after Barrack was interviewed by federal prosecutors about his work for foreign clients.

Together, the inquiries intensify the spotlight on the longtime Trump friend, who played a central role in raising big-dollar contributions for the president’s campaign and inaugural committee. Multiple federal probes have been examining possible foreign influence on Trump’s campaign including through donors to his inaugural committee, which raised a record $107 million.

View the complete July 29 article by Tom Hamburger and Josh Dawsey on The Washington Post website here.

‘I Have a Moral Responsibility to Come Forward’: Colonel Accuses Top Military Nominee of Assault

New York Times logoWASHINGTON — Col. Kathryn A. Spletstoser of the Army says she had returned to her hotel room and was putting on face cream on the night of Dec. 2, 2017, after a full day at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum in California, when her boss, Air Force Gen. John E. Hyten, the commander of United States Strategic Command, knocked on her door and said he wanted to talk to her.

The military’s itinerary of General Hyten’s movements that day in Simi Valley, which was viewed by The New York Times, said he was having “executive time.” Colonel Spletstoser said in an interview this week that her boss “sat on the bed in front of the TV and asked me to sit down next to him.”

According to her account, General Hyten reached for her hand. She became alarmed, and stood back up. He stood up too, she said, and pulled her to him and kissed her on the lips while pressing himself against her, then ejaculated, getting semen on his sweatpants and on her yoga pants.

View the complete July 26 article by Helene Cooper on The New York Times website here.

Trump transition adviser convicted on foreign-agent charges

A federal jury on Tuesday convicted Bijan Rafiekian, a former business partner of Michael Flynn, on a pair of foreign-agent felony charges stemming from work the two men did for Turkish interests during the final months of the Trump presidential campaign in 2016.

The verdicts, returned by jurors in Alexandria, Va., after a weeklong trial and only about four hours of deliberation, amount to a belated courtroom victory for special counsel Robert Mueller, who investigated the $600,000 lobbying and public relations contract at the heart of the case and then handed the matter off to other federal prosecutors after Flynn’s guilty plea to a false-statement charge in 2017.

Rafiekian, 67, faces up to 15 years in prison on the two felony counts against him: acting as an unregistered foreign agent in the U.S., and conspiracy to violate that law as well as to submit false statements to the Justice Department in a foreign-agent filing. Defendants are typically sentenced in accord with federal sentencing guidelines that result in far less than the maximum.

View the complete July 23 article by Josh Gerstein on the Politico website here.

Lifelong Republican and former judge leaves GOP with scathing goodbye statement

AlterNet logoThree guesses why she’s leaving …

The deep corruption of Spiro Agnew? No. Trey Gowdy’s fey Christmas elf hair? Nuh-uh. Oh, I know. Trump! That racist sh**heel hardly any Republicans dare gainsay.

Elsa Alcala isn’t a prominent national figure, but she was a Texas judge, and her Dear Jackasses letter is a gem. Apparently, Trump’s latest racist pus-draining was a bit too much for her to stomach.

Enjoy: https://twitter.com/keribla/status/1150914870814093315

 

View the complete July 17 article by Aldus J. Pennyfarthing from Daily Kos on the AlterNet website here.

Republicans shriek about ‘the criminalization of politics’ as Trump advisors brazenly break this 1929 law

AlterNet logoWriters, bloggers, commenters, and pundits nearly exhausted the dictionary in the runup to the president’s July 4th Trumpapalooza™. With his tanks, parades, flyovers, and personal address, Donald Trump’s appropriation of America’s Independence Day rightly earned descriptions ranging from inappropriate, disgusting, and self-serving to grotesque, Orwellian, and masturbatory. But word that the Republican National Committee was distributing special reserved-seat tickets to GOP megadonors and VIPs to a taxpayer-funded event produced a qualitatively different reaction. As conservative columnist and Never-Trumper Jennifer Rubin put it, “This is the mother of all Hatch Act violations.”

Writing in Slate, legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick offered a primer on what types of July Fourth hijinks could indeed constitute violations of the Hatch Act, the 1939 law “that bars virtually all federal employees from engaging in partisan political activities.” But whatever Hatch Act transgressions may have emerged from Donald Trump’s autodeification in D.C. last Thursday, one thing is certain: Trump’s right-wing media enablers and Republican allies on Capitol Hill will defiantly brush them under the rug. As the record-setting Hatch Act lawlessness of Trump counselor Kellyanne Conwayshows, today’s Republicans have no problem with politicizing the operations of the federal government and politicizing crime itself. Continue reading “Republicans shriek about ‘the criminalization of politics’ as Trump advisors brazenly break this 1929 law”