Tag: Trump grift

Trump’s post-presidency will be cluttered with potentially serious legal battles

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NEW YORK — President Trump’s ongoing court battles are unlikely to pose significant legal jeopardy for him before he leaves office, but the swirl of criminal investigations and civil complaints stemming from his business activities and personal conduct could prove potentially more serious once he departs, experts say.

Among Democrats, there is a palpable desire to pursue the harsh accountability for Trump that many say he has avoided by virtue of his office. But his successor, President-elect Joe Biden, reportedly has little appetite for doing so, having signaled to advisers that unleashing the federal government to settle scores would undermine his goal of unifying the country.

A spokesman for Biden’s transition team declined to comment but pointed to statements Biden made previously affirming that he would not interfere with a Justice Department investigation into Trump nor pardon his predecessor. “It is not something the president is entitled to do, to direct a prosecution or decide to drop a case,” Biden told MSNBC in an interview in May. “It’s a dereliction of duty.” Continue reading.

Trump Tax Write-Offs Are Ensnared in 2 New York Fraud Investigations

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Inquiries into the president and his businesses, one criminal and one civil, are now looking at tax deductions taken on consulting fees. Some of the payments appear to have gone to Ivanka Trump.

Two separate New York State fraud investigations into President Trump and his businesses, one criminal and one civil, have expanded to include tax write-offs on millions of dollars in consulting fees, some of which appear to have gone to Ivanka Trump, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The inquiries — a criminal investigation by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., and a civil one by the state attorney general, Letitia James — are being conducted independently. But both offices issued subpoenas to the Trump Organization in recent weeks for records related to the fees, the people said.

The subpoenas were the latest steps in the two investigations of the Trump Organization, and underscore the legal challenges awaiting the president when he leaves office in January. There is no indication that his daughter is a focus of either inquiry, which the Trump Organization has derided as politically motivated. Continue reading.

Trump faces around two dozen legal threats leaving office — and he’s getting desperate

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President Trump has only made one brief public appearance since the election was called for Joe Biden, and his Twitter feed is filled with conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud, which state elections officials have repeatedly rejected. His refusal to concede has complicated President-elect Biden’s transition, and senior Republicans have mostly aligned behind Trump or stayed silent as he continues his desperate legal campaign to overturn the election results in several key states that won Biden the presidency. New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer says Trump has a lot at stake due to the litany of lawsuits and criminal investigations he faces. “He has many reasons to be concerned,” she says. “If he leaves the White House, he’s going to lose the immunity that goes along with being president.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

The number of Americans hospitalized due to COVID-19 has more than a doubled in the past week as infections soar to record numbers across the nation. On Thursday, a staggering 163,000 new cases were reported — a new world-shattering record. The U.S. death toll has topped 242,000. Despite the surge, President Trump is largely ignoring the crisis, letting the virus rip through the country. Continue reading.

Trump is in survival mode — and caught in a pardon dilemma with no good alternatives

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Donald Trump is becoming more fearful and anxious by the day. Above everything else, he desperately wants to save his own skin and avoid spending his remaining days outfitted in an orange prison jumpsuit. This is why, as the legal challenges to his humiliating defeat at the polls fail one by one, he will eventually shed his phony tough-guy facade and seek refuge in a presidential pardon for the myriad of federal felonies he may have committed.

The question is not whether Trump will pursue the pardon remedy, but precisely when and how he will do so. Even though a presidential pardon would apply only to federal offensesand leave him exposed to charges under New York law arising from the ongoing probeconducted by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, he has no other viable choice.

One of the few things Trump understands about the Constitution is the plenary nature of the pardon power granted to presidents. The pardon power is the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. To date, Trump has used his authority to pardon or commute the sentences of 44 individuals convicted of federal crimes. The recipients of his beneficence include such darlings of the unhinged radical right as Joe Arpaio, the notoriously racist former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona; and Dinesh D’Souza, the prominent author, documentary filmmaker and conspiracy theorist. Continue reading.

Trump formed a PAC to fight the ‘stolen’ election. An expert says the president is using it to ‘fleece his supporters’

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President Donald Trump is now raising money to fund his baseless legal battle as he claims the presidential election was “stolen” by Democrats. Up until Tuesday, the Trump campaign claimed all of the funds raised were going to be designated for paying off the campaign’s debts.

Trump supporters received emails aggressively urging them to donate to the president’s legal fund so he has the “resources” needed to fight the election results. “THE DEMOCRATS WANT TO STEAL THIS ELECTION!” the Trump campaign said in its email. “We can’t allow the Left-wing MOB to undermine our election.”

On Tuesday morning, a very small disclaimer has been added to those emails and it raises a lot of questions about how those funds will be used going forward. Continue reading.

Trump’s Latest Grift Is His ‘Official Election Defense Fund’

Early Friday evening, professor of law and political science at UC Irvine Rick Hasen tweeted out that “If you give money to Trump’s recount/postelection litigation efforts, half of that money will go towards retiring his campaign debt instead, per the fine print.” The tweet was accompanied by a screenshotof the purported fine print on one of the Trump campaign’s fundraising emails, that said “50 percent of each contribution, up to a maximum of $2,800 ($5,000), to be designated toward DJTFP’s 2020 general election debt retirement until such debt is retired.” The emails have been sweatily sent out from the sinking garbage can fire called his campaign since Election Day.

The Wall Street Journal reports that this is indeed true. In fact, the con man-to-the-end and soon-to-be former disgraced and impeached president of the United States’ “official election defense fund” might actually be more about retiring his money-laundering campaign’s debt than anything else.

According to the Journal, while some of the “protect the election” fundraising emails direct marks to pages with fine print like the one Hasen pointed out above, others send MAGA supporters to pages with different fine print: “The fine print on those solicitations says 60 percent of a contribution helps the campaign retire debt and 40 percent goes to the Republican National Committee.” Continue reading.

Trump knows he can’t win — so why is he refusing to concede while fundraising to ‘defend the election’?

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President Donald Trump cannot win re-election. He’s not really even trying. His “legal team” are D-list Fox News TV hosts and far right wing extremists. And in a class of his own, Rudy Giuliani, who reportedly was under DOJ investigation and has been palling around with an actual Russian agent.

Experts say the Trump legal team’s court filings aren’t designed to help him win re-election or keep him in office, and even if they were successful – which the vast majority have not been – would not change the fact that Joe Biden will be declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election.

So what is he doing? Continue reading.

Trump and his allies boost bogus conspiracy theories in a bid to undermine vote count

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The campaign also sent an estimated 9 million text messages between midnight and midday Wednesday, according to an anti-robocall firm, with some messages seeking money to launch voting challenges.

President Trump, his son and top members of his campaign on Wednesday advanced a set of unfounded conspiracy theories about the vote-tallying process to claim that Democrats were rigging the final count.

Eric Trump tweeted a video, first pushed out by an account associated with the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, that purported to show someone burning ballots cast for his father. The materials turned out to be sample ballots, and Twitter quickly suspended the original account that circulated the misleading clip.

Trump’s son and others, including White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, claimed falsely in tweets later hidden by warning labels that the president had won Pennsylvania — even though no such determination had been made. And the campaign’s spokesman, Tim Murtaugh, claimed without evidence that crowd control at a processing center in Detroit was an effort to thwart Trump’s chances of reelection. Continue reading.

Trump Camp Uses Online Gimmick to Fuel Donations Into December

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The Trump campaign is now automatically checking a box to create recurring weekly donations from supporters until mid-December.

President Trump’s campaign is raising money for a prolonged political and legal fight long after Nov. 3 and recently began automatically checking a box to withdraw additional weekly contributions from online donors through mid-December — nearly six weeks after Election Day.

Predicting “FRAUD like you’ve never seen,” the language on Mr. Trump’s website opts contributors into making the weekly post-election donations “to ensure we have the resources to protect the results and keep fighting even after Election Day.” Users must proactively click to avoid making multiple contributions.

The unusual post-election revenue stream would help Mr. Trump pay off any bills that his campaign accumulates before Tuesday — a campaign spokesman said no such debts had been incurred — and could help fund a lengthy legal fight if the results are contested. Continue reading.

How Donald Trump’s insatiable hunger for more bilked the US government for $2.5 billion

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Remember this number: $3. 

That’s how much Trump charged the federal government for a glass of water in April of 2018 when he and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. According to the Washington Post, Trump’s company also charged the government “$13,700 for guest rooms, $16,500 for food and wine and $6,000 for the roses and other floral arrangements,” over the two days he held meetings with Abe at the resort. But one day, Trump was scheduled to meet with Abe without aides and advisers, with no meal service or cocktails or any other celebratory nonsense. Just the two leaders, alone in a room, talking. According to the Post, the bill for that day contained a line item reading, “Bilateral meeting. Water. $3.00 each.”

Donald Trump has been paid “at least $2.5 million by the U.S. government,” since taking office, according to official documents obtained by the Post. Trump has made more than 280 visits to his own hotels and golf clubs over the last four years, and the payments covered costs for “hotel rooms, ballrooms, cottages, rental houses, golf carts, votive candles, floating candles, candelabras, furniture moving, resort fees, decorative palm trees, strip steak, chocolate cake, breakfast buffets, $88 bottles of wine and $1,000 worth of liquor for White House aides.” according to the Post. Continue reading.