Tag: Trump White House

Mulvaney on cusp of permanent status upgrade

‘He has stayed out of a lot of people’s way,’ said one senior administration official. ‘No one is saying he is killing it but staying out of people’s way has helped.’

The White House plans to drop the word “acting” from Mick Mulvaney’s title, officially making him President Donald Trump’s third chief of staff, according to four current and former senior administration officials.

It’s a recognition that Mulvaney has successfully navigated a tumultuous West Wing. The former South Carolina congressman and White House budget chief talks to the president multiple times a day and maintains good relations with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner — Trump family members who also happen to be the White House’s two most powerful staffers — while giving them and other top staffers more leeway to operate than his predecessor, John Kelly. Mulvaney has also quietly installed roughly eight loyal aides within the West Wing.

“He has stayed out of a lot of people’s way,” said one senior administration official. “No one is saying he is killing it but staying out of people’s way has helped.”

View the complete March 19 article by Nancy Cook on the Politico website here.

Furious GOP Senator retaliating against Trump White House for refusal to turn over ’embarrassing’ Russia documents: report

According to a report at Politico, Sen, Chuck Grassley (R-IUA) is conducting a war with President Donald Trump’s White House over their refusal to turn over information related to Russia.

The report states that Grassley “is accusing the Trump administration of stonewalling him over a request for documents related to the Russia investigation,” so he is holding up the nomination of a key Trump appointee.

According to Politico, “The Iowa Republican’s demand for Justice Department documents on its probe of possible links between the Trump campaign and Moscow has left William Evanina’s nomination to head the National Counterintelligence and Security Center in limbo for the past year, frustrating the nation’s top intelligence leaders and even some fellow Senate Republicans.”According to Politico, “The Iowa Republican’s demand for Justice Department documents on its probe of possible links between the Trump campaign and Moscow has left William Evanina’s nomination to head the National Counterintelligence and Security Center in limbo for the past year, frustrating the nation’s top intelligence leaders and even some fellow Senate Republicans.”

View the complete March 17 article by Tom Boggioni of Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Mnuchin’s Hollywood Ties Raise Ethical Questions in China Talks

WASHINGTON — “Wonder Woman,” the 2017 film that Steven Mnuchin helped produce before becoming Treasury secretary, hauled in about $90 million at the box office in China. It was the film’s most successful international market and a roaring success for an American superhero export. But because of China’s strict laws for foreign films, the studio behind the movie, Warner Bros., received just a small fraction of those revenues.

Now, as Treasury secretary and one of the lead negotiators in trade talks with China, Mr. Mnuchin has been personally pushing Beijing to give the American film industry greater access to its markets — a change that could be highly lucrative to his former industry. While Mr. Mnuchin divested from his Hollywood film production company after joining the Trump administration, he maintains ties to the industry through his wife, the actress and filmmaker Louise Linton.

In 2017, Mr. Mnuchin sold his interest in the company, StormChaser Partners, to Ms. Linton, who at the time was his fiancée. In his 2018 disclosure, which was obtained from the Treasury Department through a records request by The New York Times, StormChaser is listed as one of Ms. Linton’s assets.

View the complete March 14 article by Alan Rappeport and Ana Swanson on The New York Times website here.

Revealed: Salaries for Fox News contributors-turned-Trump administration officials

Service in the Trump administration peeled off the cover from salaries paid to eight former Fox News contributors who went on to government jobs.

Cable news salaries are highly secretive, but Fox News contributors who left to serve in President Donald Trump’s administration were required to file financial disclosure forms that offer a peek into the network’s payroll, reported The Hollywood Reporter.

At least 10 former Fox News contributors have worked in the Trump administration, and the magazine obtained financial disclosure forms for eight of those current or former officials — who were paid an average of $141,000 by the conservative network.

View the complete March 14 article by Travis Gettys of Ray Story on the AlterNet website here.

Trump’s Effort to Cut SNAP by Fiat Would Kill 178,000 Jobs Over the Next Decade

President Donald Trump’s latest budget blueprint is out, and it again calls for eviscerating nearly every program that helps families afford the basics, including cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—the United States’ largest food assistance program, which helps nearly 39 million people get enough to eat—by a staggering $220 billion, literally shrinking the program by one-third. While presidential budgets are often considered dead on arrival, since they do not themselves become law, one particular proposed cut to SNAP poses an immediate and dangerous threat, given that Trump is trying to sidestep Congress to enact it by fiat.

Last December, Congress rejected President Trump’s attempts to use the 2018 Farm Bill to make deep cuts to SNAP. Immediately after this rejection, President Trump announcedthat he would cut SNAP unilaterally through administrative action. Following through on that announcement, the Trump administration last month released a proposed rule that would dramatically scale back eligibility for SNAP by curtailing states’ flexibility to help jobless or underemployed workers in hard-hit regions. By the administration’s own estimate, the rule would take food assistance away from some 755,000 Americans.

As new analysis from the Center for American Progress shows, if enacted, Trump’s proposed rule wouldn’t just hurt workers struggling to afford enough to eat—it would also hurt the American economy as a whole.

View the complete March 14 article by Rachel West and Rebecca Vallas on the Center for American Progress website here.

Gary Cohn says Trump is ‘desperate’ for trade deal with China

Gary Cohn, President Trump’s former top economic adviser, says the president is “desperate” to reach a trade deal with China and is being ill-served by protectionist advisers who have left the White House “living in chaos” on major decisions.

“The president needs a win,” Cohn said in an interview with Freakonomics, a public radio show and podcast.

Trump expects a China deal to boost the stock market, which has treaded water for the past year, the former aide said. Cohn cast doubt on the president’s ability to obtain fundamental changes in China’s state-led economic system, one of his core negotiating objectives.

View the complete March 13 article by David J. Lynch on The Washington Post website here.

Jared Kushner ordered smear campaign against army vet who refused to serve in Trump White House: book

Mark Corallo, an Army veteran who once served as a spokesman for President Donald Trump’s legal team, says that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner waged a smear campaign against him after he refused a job at the Trump White House.

According to an excerpt of a book called “Kushner, Inc.” published by ABC News, the campaign against Corallo began after he rejected Kushner’s pleas to work as the White House Communications Director.

“Don’t you want to serve your country?” Kushner asked him at the time.

View the complete March 13 article by Brad Reed of Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Trump’s FY 2020 Budget Exposes His False Promises and Misplaced Priorities

If there is truth in the old adage that “budgets are moral documents,” then President Donald Trump’s fiscal year 2020 budget, its first part released today, is morally bankrupt. It aims debilitating cuts at programs on which American families rely in order to pay for tax cuts, strips regulators’ ability to stop corporate wrongdoers and polluters, and launches yet another brutal attack on Americans’ health care. Every year, pundits declare the president’s budget “dead on arrival,” but Americans should make no mistake: Trump’s FY 2020 budget is a clear statement of his priorities, and its policies are those the president would enact if given the opportunity. And Trump’s priorities and policies reveal his sheer contempt for the “forgotten men and women” for whom he pledged to fight.

In fact, this year, Trump’s first ruse—even before his accounting gimmicks begin—is the budget rollout itself. The budget is already more than a month late thanks to Trump’s 35-day government shutdown, but it is being released in two parts: Today, Trump revealed a message-heavy budget overview. But Americans will have to wait another week before learning many of the specifics of his deep cuts; the complete budget is slated for March 18. While this ruse may obfuscate details of Trump’s devastating policies, it does not change the reality that the administration will be seeking drastic cuts to key priorities that the American people strongly support.

View the complete Seth Hanlon, Lily Roberts and Rachel West on the Center for American Progress website here.

Massage Parlor Entrepreneur Was Selling Access To Trump

It was awkward enough when pictures surfaced showing that Trump spent Super Bowl Sunday partying with a woman, Li “Cindy” Yang, who is implicated in a prostitution and human trafficking scandal. Now, it looks like Yang was also selling access to Trump and his inner circle.

Li Yang used to own the “spa” where New England Patriots owner (and Trump pal) Robert Kraft was arrested for solicitation. That spa has been linked to a human trafficking pipeline from China to Florida. Yang sold the spa a few years ago, but there’s evidence she knew sexual services were offered there when she owned the spa.

And Yang isn’t just linked to Trump. She’s partied with both of Trump’s sons and high-level Florida Republicans, like Sen. Rick Scott and Gov. Ron DeSantis.

View the complete March 11 article by Lisa Needham on the National Memo website here.

Without immigrants, Trump’s jobs numbers would be much, much worse

During the second daily news briefing of 2019 on Monday, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, was asked how the administration rationalized adding trillions of dollars to the national debt despite President Trump’s repeated campaign-trail insistence that the debt would drop.

“He also came into office and had an economic recovery that was needed to put people back to work, get the economy going and to rebuild the military, and had historic levels of military at $700 billion and $716 billion in — in national defense dollars,” Vought said. He didn’t mention that the debt has also been driven higher by a decline in corporate tax revenue after the 2017 Republican tax bill or that Trump had repeatedly railed against the debt added under former president Barack Obama when Obama also aimed to get Americans back to work. Continue reading “Without immigrants, Trump’s jobs numbers would be much, much worse”