Tag: Trump administration corruption

Jeffrey Epstein taken into custody in New York on new charges related to sex crimes involving minors

NOTE:  Why are we posting this article? The Trump Administration’s Secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta, was the U.S. Attorney who cut the “sweetheart deal” for Mr. Epstein.

Washington Post logoJeffrey Epstein, the well-connected multimillionaire who was sentenced to just more than a year in jail to resolve allegations that he molested dozens of young girls, has been taken into custody in New York on new charges having to do with sex crimes involving minors, a person familiar with the matter said.

The precise nature of the charges — and how they differ from the previous allegations to which Epstein, now 66,pleaded guilty in 2008 — could not immediately be learned. Epstein attorney Martin Weinberg did not respond to a request for comment late Saturday. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, where Epstein is expected to appear in federal court this week, declined to comment.

The latest charges add a significant new wrinkle to the considerable political and legal saga surrounding Epstein. The wealthy financier — who counted among his friends President Trump and former president Bill Clinton — pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges in Florida of soliciting prostitution in a controversial arrangement that allowed him to resolve far more serious federal allegations of molesting young girls.

View the complete July 7 article by Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky on The Washington Post website here.

Former White House counsel: I’m ‘not aware of any situation like’ Transportation Secretary Chao’s conflicts of interest

AlterNet logoIn recent weeks, the term “conflict of interest” has been used a lot in connection with Elaine Chao, secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation under the Trump Administration. Chao is married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and a June 10 report in Politico found that she used her position to help create a pathway for transportation projects in her husband’s state, Kentucky. Discussing Chao’s activities with Yahoo Finance, ethics lawyer Virginia Canter asserted that the conflict of interest is enormous.

Previously, Canter served as a White House associate counsel under two previous presidents: Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Presently, Canter is chief ethics counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington — and she said of Chao, “I am not aware of any situation like this.”

The Wall Street Journal, on May 28, reported that Chao still owns shares in a company that provides construction materials, Vulcan Materials Co., more than a year after promising to give them up. Further, Chao’s family owns an American shipping company with deep business and political ties in China.

View the complete June 25 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao Still Owns Shares She Pledged To Divest

“For the head of the DOT to have a financial interest in an asphalt company, that is not sending a message to employees of DOT that she is making ethics a priority.”

Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao still owns shares in a major construction firm despite pledging to divest them, according to a new report by the Wall Street Journal. Chao had served on the board of the company, Vulcan Materials, for about two years before joining the Trump administration as head of the Transportation Department.

In part of her ethics agreement, Chao said she would end her financial interests in the company by taking “a cash payout for all of my vested deferred stock units” by April 2018. But a financial disclosure report released by the Transportation Secretary’s husband, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), revealed Chao had maintained ownership of somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of Vulcan stock.

The Wall Street Journal estimates Chao has netted more than $40,000 from the stock since April 2018, the date she agreed to cash out on her shares. The Transportation Secretary has been one of the most vocal advocates of President Trump’s plan to invest $1 trillion into U.S. infrastructure, and critics are concerned federal funds would be directly allocated to Vulcan, one of the nation’s largest suppliers of construction materials.

View the complete May 30 article by Peter Castagno on the Citizen Truth website here.

Trump’s EPA is ‘cooking the books’ to justify its attack on clean air rules

Experts call it a “deeply cynical strategy” that puts lives at risk.

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working to distort the way it measures the benefits of some of the agency’s most impactful policies, regulations that safeguard human health by limiting air pollution. The primary beneficiary of such distortion? The coal industry.

When the government evaluates the health and financial benefits of clean air, the calculation typically incorporates the number of lives saved and the scale of reduced health impacts thanks to reducing pollution — also known as “co-benefits.” Incorporating these factors into a cost-benefit analysis forms the very foundation upon which many environmental protections are based.

But now, experts warn the EPA is opening the door to industry challenges to these clean air rules by changing the way it evaluates the long-accepted science on the risk of particulate matter — microscopic particles polluting the air that are linked to increased heart attacks, strokes, and respiratory disease.

View the complete May 23 article by Kyla Mandel on the ThinkProgress website here.

A Would-Be Trump Aide’s Demands: A Jet on Call, a Future Cabinet Post and More

Access to a government jet 24 hours a day. An office in the West Wing, plus guaranteed weekends off for family time. And an assurance of being made secretary of homeland security by November.

Those were among a list of 10 conditions that Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, has given to the White House if he is to become the administration’s “immigration czar,” a job President Trump has been looking to create to coordinate immigration policy across government agencies. The list was described by three people familiar with it.

Mr. Kobach, who once served as an adviser to the hard-line immigration Sheriff Joe Arpaio and helped write an Arizona law requiring local officials to verify the citizenship of anyone they had “reasonable suspicion” to believe was an unauthorized immigrant, said he would need to be the main television spokesman for the Trump administration on immigration policy. And he said he wanted a guarantee that cabinet secretaries whose portfolios relate to immigration would defer to him, with the president mediating disputes if need be.

View the complete May 20 article by Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni on The New York Times website here.

EPA watchdog suggests agency recover $124,000 in Pruitt’s ‘excessive’ travel expenses

Agency rejects the idea, calling ‘cost recovery inappropriate’ because officials had approved Pruitt’s trips at the time

The Environmental Protection Agency should consider recovering nearly $124,000 in improper travel expenses by former EPA chief Scott Pruitt, the agency’s inspector general recommended Thursday.

The findings, issued nearly a year after Pruitt resigned amid controversy over his spending, travel and ties to lobbyists and outside groups, highlight the fiscal impact of his penchant for high-end travel and accommodations. Investigators concluded that 40 trips Pruitt either took or scheduled during a 10-month period, between March 1 and Dec. 31, 2017, cost taxpayers $985,037.

The bulk of those expenses were for Pruitt’s round-the-clock security detail, which billed $428,896 in travel costs. The agency spent an additional $339,894 on staffers traveling with the former administrator. The “questioned amount” the inspector general’s office identifies for possible recovery is the $123,941 that taxpayers spent on flying both Pruitt and a security agent in first- or business class, instead of coach.

View the complete May 16 article by Juliet EIlperin and Brady Dennis on The Washington Post website here.

Six Trump Interior appointees are being investigated for possible ethical misconduct

The Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General has opened an investigation into whether six of President Trump’s appointees have violated federal ethics rules by engaging with their former employers or clients on department-related business.

The new inquiry, which the office confirmed in an April 18 letter to the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, is looking into senior Interior officials, including Assistant Secretary for Insular and International Affairs Doug Domenech, White House liaison Lori Mashburn, three top staffers at the Office of Intergovernmental and External Affairs, and the department’s former energy policy adviser. The Campaign Legal Center detailed the officials’ actions in a Feb. 20 letter to the inspector general’s office, suggesting a probe is warranted.

To avoid conflicts of interest, Trump signed an executive order days after taking office that requires appointees to recuse themselves from specific matters involving their former employers and clients for two years. The complaint, which cites reports in HuffPost and the Guardian as well as extensive public records, outlines how a half-dozen political appointees at Interior continued to discuss policy matters with organizations that had employed them in the past.

View the complete April 23 article by Juliet Eilperin and Dino Grandoni on The Washington Post website here.

Bernhardt’s office acknowledges meetings left off schedule

The Interior Department has acknowledged that Secretary David Bernhardt’s staff intentionally left controversial meetings with representatives of fossil fuel, timber and water interests off his public calendar, citing “internal protocol” governing his schedules.

The department also confirmed that Bernhardt used a personal itinerary kept on a single Google document that was regularly overwritten by his scheduling staff and said he is still doing so as House Democrats probe whether the practice adheres to federal records laws.

Until now, the department had denied that any schedules were being overwritten. Bernhardt told lawmakers earlier this year the only calendar he used was on a document posted to the department’s website. He said he had “not personally maintained a calendar for years” and had “no intention of suddenly doing so now.”

View the complete April 16 article by Jacob Holzman on The Roll Call website here.

W. Samuel Patten sentenced to probation after steering Ukrainian money to Trump inaugural

An American political consultant whose guilty plea marked the first confirmation that illegal foreign money was used to help fund Donald Trump’s inaugural committee was sentenced to probation Friday by a federal judge who cited his cooperation with U.S. prosecutors.

W. Samuel Patten, 47, in August admitted steering $50,000 from a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician to Trump’s committee in an investigation spun off from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Patten acknowledged he was helped by a Russian national who is a longtime associate of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and the case was referred to prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington and the Justice Department’s national security division.

Before he was sentenced, Patten, accompanied in court by his wife, sister and friends and neighbors, thanked the judge for her handling of his case and asked for a sentence that would permit him to “continue in whatever way I can to serve my country.”

View the complete April 12 article by Spencer S. Hsu on The Washington Post website here.

Trump’s Pick for Interior Dept. Continued Lobbying After Officially Vowing to Stop, New Files Show

WASHINGTON — A previously undisclosed invoice indicates that David Bernhardt, President Trump’s choice to lead the Interior Department, continued to lobby for a major client several months after he filed official papers saying that he had ended his lobbying activities.

The bill for Mr. Bernhardt’s services, dated March 2017 and labeled “Federal Lobbying,” shows, along with other newly disclosed documents, Mr. Bernhardt working closely with the Westlands Water District as late as April 2017, the month Mr. Trump nominated him to his current job, deputy interior secretary. In November 2016, Mr. Bernhardt had filed legal notice with the federal government formally ending his status as a lobbyist.

Westlands, a powerful California agribusiness group, was one of Mr. Bernhardt’s main lobbying and legal clients between 2011 and 2016. During that time, Westlands paid Mr. Bernhardt’s firm $1.3 million for lobbying services.

View the complete April 4 article by Coral Davenport on The New York Times website here.