Tag: Trump corruption

Trump pressed Ukrainian leader to investigate Biden’s son, according to people familiar with the matter

Washington Post logoPresident Trump pressed the leader of Ukraine to investigate the son of former vice president Joe Biden in a call between the two leaders that is at the center of an extraordinary whistleblower complaint, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Trump used the July 25 conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to pressure the recently elected leader to pursue an investigation that Trump thought would deliver potential political dirt on one of his possible challengers in 2020, the people said.

The descriptions of the call provide the clearest indication to date that Trump sought to use the influence of his office to prod the leader of a country seeking American financial and diplomatic support to provide material that could aid the president’s reelection. After spending much of his presidency fending off allegations that he welcomed 2016 campaign help from Russia, Trump now stands accused of soliciting political ammunition from a country next door to Russia.

View the complete September 20 article by Matt Zapotosky, Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashim and Carol D. Leonnig on The Washington Post website here.

How the tyrant in the White House just took our government to a new depth of depravity

AlterNet logoTo me, it feels ice-tinglingly creepy that the U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu in Washington wants to bring criminal charges against former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.

The charge, basically that McCabe lied about a leak to a reporter, seems to come nowhere near close to supporting a criminal charge after 18 months of investigation, an expired grand jury and public humiliation for McCabe in firing him two days short of his professional resignation, killing off his pension. It seems that even a grand jury has decided not to react to the prosecution’s call for indictment.

But that’s not what’s wrong here. It is the White House squeezing the Justice Department to do its political bidding.

View the complete September 20 article by Terry H. Schwadron of Raw Story and DC Report on the AlterNet website here.

Federal agency ordered to investigate Homeland Security nominee

What happens next may rest with McConnell

The Department of Energy has been told to investigate allegations of corruption by William N. Bryan, the White House’s nominee for a senior post at the Department of Homeland Security, CQ Roll Call has learned.

Bryan joins a long line of Trump administration nominees who’ve faced controversy. Just this week, the White House withdrew the nomination of Jeffrey Byard to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel told the Energy Department in a letter last month to investigate a whistleblower’s allegations that Bryan used his former position at DOE to funnel business to a private energy company.

View the complete September 19 article by Joshua Eaton on The Roll Call website here.

Intelligence official directly contradicts Trump administration’s excuses for suppressing whistleblower

AlterNet logoA top official in the intelligence community has disputed the factual basis for the Trump administration’s suppression of a whistleblower complaint believed to regard the potential misconduct of the president himself, a new letter released Thursday revealed.

The letter was made public by House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA). He is locked into a fierce and potentially explosive dispute with an array of forces within the administration to obtain the complaint, which was made through proper channels by an intelligence official last month to the community’s inspector general. Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint was “credible” and “urgent,” and subsequent reporting from the Washington Post found that it concerns a “promise” made by Trump in communication with a foreign leader.

But acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, who is supposed to take such urgent complaints from the IG to Congress, has refused to turn over the documents after consulting with the Justice Department about the matter. DNI General Counsel, in consultation with the DOJ, told Schiff and the committee that the law doesn’t require “disclosure of the complaint to the intelligence committees” because it did not concern “allegations of conduct by a member of the intelligence community or involve intelligence activity under the DNI’s supervision.”

View the complete September 19 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.

Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn exposed in new documentary that contains ominous warning about the president’s downfall

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump has long looked at infamous attorney Roy Cohn as his political mentor, and at one point during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation demanded that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions act more like Cohn in assertively defending him.

A new documentary called “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” exposes the history of Trump’s hero, who first became famous during Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s hearings about purported communist infiltration of the United States government in the 1950s.

Politico senior staff writer Michael Kruse has written up a review of the documentary in which he explains why Trump obviously finds Cohn so appealing: For decades he got away with remorselessly breaking the law.

View the complete September 19 article by Brad Reed from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress, former officials say

Washington Post logoThe whistleblower complaint that has triggered a tense showdown between the U.S. intelligence community and Congress involves President Trump’s communications with a foreign leader, according to two former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

Trump’s interaction with the foreign leader included a “promise” that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official in the U.S. intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community, said the former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

It was not immediately clear which foreign leader Trump was speaking with or what he pledged to deliver, but his direct involvement in the matter has not been previously disclosed. It raises new questions about the president’s handling of sensitive information and may further strain his relationship with U.S. spy agencies. One former official said the communication was a phone call.

View the complete September 18 article by Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima and Shane Harris on The Washington Post website here.

McCabe’s legal team says Trump’s attacks have made fair prosecution an ‘impossibility’

Washington Post logoFormer acting FBI director Andrew McCabe and his legal team have waged a vigorous public campaign to dispute allegations that he lied to investigators about a media leak.

Behind the scenes, they have been just as aggressive.

In recent months, McCabe’s attorneys shared with federal prosecutors and top Justice Department officials a point-by-point rebuttal of what they view as flaws in a possible criminal case against McCabe.

View the complete September 16 article by Matt Zapotosky on The Washington Post website here.

Vice President Pence to headline anti-gay Christian conservative group’s anniversary gala at Trump’s DC hotel

AlterNet logoVice President Mike Pence is the headline act for Concerned Women for America‘s 40th anniversary celebration – and fundraising – dinner Thursday night, at the Trump International Hotel at the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C. Pence will deliver his remarks around 7 PM at the Christian conservative anti-gay group’s “Ruby Red and Black Tie Gala” at the Trump International’s Ballroom.

“The planned speeches suggest that President Trump and his Cabinet are not shying away from events that drive revenue to Trump’s company, even after multiple stories have brought new scrutiny to the blurring of lines between Trump’s business and presidency,” The Washington Post reports.

It’s a stunning cirle of money and influence the President has created.

View the complete September 12 article by David Badash from the New Civil Rights Movement on the AlterNet website here.

Air Force crews have lodged at Trump’s Scottish resort at least 4 times

The trips date back to at least September 2018 and continued through at least this past June.

Air Force crews have stayed overnight at President Donald Trump’s Turnberry resort in Scotland on at least four occasions, two more than previously reported.

The four trips — uncovered through interviews with people present, records of expenditures and social media postings — date back to at least September 2018 and continued through at least this past June. They include at least one instance in which a crew member said a nearby airport arranged for rides and lunches to and from the luxury waterside retreat. All the flights were shuttling crews between the United States and the Middle East, and at least three of them of them were divisions of the Air National Guard. In total, over 60 service members stayed at the posh property on these stopovers.

Now, with Congress returning from an extended August break, Democrats want to make sure these Air Force crews never again stay at Trump Turnberry. On Monday, lawmakers began stumping for the Senate to adopt an amendment that would bar the Pentagon from spending money at nearly five dozen Trump properties worldwide. The House passed the clause in July as part of the broader annual defense policy bill, but it has not yet been adopted into law.

View the complete September 9 article by Natasha Bertrand and Connor O’Brien on the Politico website here.

Trump has been keeping close tabs on the Mar-a-Lago books during his presidency

AlterNet logoDonald Trump has not given up control of his for-profit businesses as he pretends at the task of playing president. Members of Trump’s transition team or, more likely, government ethics officials were at least able enough to convey how grotesquely improper that was, to the point where Trump was obliged to pantomime handing those companies’ management over to his adult children, but he did not financially divest from those companies, as literally every other modern president was expected to do as a matter of basic norms.

The whole thing has been a charade. A fraud. And as we hear, every month, of new instances in which government agencies, the military, the Secret Service, or the thoroughly toadying vice president have been forced to put government money into Trump’s businesses and therefore his own pockets, the pretense that Trump is somehow uninvolved with this grift of his own making is at this point barely pretensed-at.

The New York Times cites current and former White House officials to report that Trump “spends more time talking about his properties in private than he does in public, and even as president, remains intimately involved with club minutiae, like knowing all the names on his Mar-a-Lago membership roll.” To spell that out: Trump’s private business invites well-heeled supplicants to pay cash to Donald’s for-profit club. Trump is intimately involved with learning all the names that have given him those cash infusions.

View the complete September 10 post from the Daily Kos not he AlterNet website here.