The Trouble With SCOTUS

Right now, no one can make a solid point that the Supreme Court is somehow the very picture of "judicial independence". Not when billionaires can shape the court(s) to their liking, dole out lavish gifts to certain SCOTUS justices - and almost certainly to others in the lower courts - and then argue their interests before the federal courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, expecting everybody to sit around and accept it all as perfectly legit.

Wanna talk about how people with very narrow interests can go Judge Shopping, pick a venue where they know their side will be heard loud and clear, and stand an extraordinarily good chance to get a very favorable decision?

This is nine kinds of fucked up, and Roberts "respectfully declines" to talk about it with the Senate Judiciary Committee - the committee tasked with oversight of the whole fucking Judicial Branch.

Maybe Roberts will suddenly become a more standup guy, and see the error of his ways, but since Mrs Roberts has snagged a shit ton of "commissions" by helping to recruit lawyers for legal firms that litigate before the federal bench - including the top court where her hubby is the top boss - I won't be holding my breath on that one.

The Polite Disdain of John Roberts Finds a Target

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Although the three branches of the American government were designed to be coequal, the structure of the Constitution tells us something about the relative power of each branch, as envisioned by the framers.

Article I establishes the Legislature. Article II establishes the executive branch. And Article III establishes the federal judiciary. It is true that the branches share powers and responsibilities. But it’s also true that the framers trusted Congress — the representative branch — with far more authority than it did the president or the Supreme Court.

Congress makes laws. Congress spends money. Congress approves the president’s cabinet and says whether he can appoint a judge or not. Congress structures the judiciary and Congress sets the size of the Supreme Court and the scope of its business.

The upshot of all of this is that when Congress calls, the other branches are supposed to answer — not as a courtesy, but as an affirmation of the rules of the American constitutional order. The modern Congress might be weak and the presidency might be, against the expectations of the framers, the center of American political life, but it’s still newsworthy when a member of the executive branch says he or she won’t meet with the Legislature.

John Roberts, the chief justice of the United States, is from a different branch of government, the Supreme Court. But he — a constitutional officer confirmed to his seat by the Senate — is still subject to the power of Congress to question and investigate his conduct. When Congress calls, he too should answer.

Last week, Congress called the chief justice. In the wake of revelations concerning the friendship between Justice Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow, a billionaire Republican donor, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, invited Roberts to testify at an upcoming hearing on Supreme Court ethics rules.

“There has been a steady stream of revelations regarding justices falling short of the ethical standards expected of other federal judges and, indeed, of public servants generally,” Durbin wrote in his letter to the chief justice. “These problems were already apparent back in 2011, and the Court’s decade-long failure to address them has contributed to a crisis of public confidence.”

“The time has come for a new public conversation on ways to restore confidence in the Court’s ethical standards,” Durbin went on to say. “I invite you to join it, and I look forward to your response.”

This week Roberts answered. He said, in a word, no.

“I must respectfully decline your invitation,” Roberts wrote. “Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee by the chief justice of the United States is exceedingly rare as one might expect in light of separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence.”

This deceptively polite reply sounds reasonable for as long as you can manage to forget the fact that it is questions about the ethical conduct of the court and its members that have compromised the independence of the court. Was Thomas influenced by the largess of his billionaire benefactor? Was Justice Samuel Alito influenced by an explicit campaign to curry favor with the conservative justices? Was Justice Neil Gorsuch influenced by the lucrative sale of a Colorado property, in the wake of his confirmation, to the head of a powerful law firm with ample business before the court?

It is with real chutzpah, in other words, that Roberts has claimed judicial independence in order to circumvent an investigation into judicial independence.

More striking than this evasion is the manner in which Roberts ended his reply. Faced with serious questions about the integrity of the court, Roberts pointed to a nonbinding ethics document that has done almost nothing to prevent these situations from arising in the first place. “In regard to the Court’s approach to ethics matters,” he wrote, “I attached a Statement of Ethics Principles and Practices to which all of the current members of the Supreme Court subscribe.”

Roberts did not write an aggressive or confrontational letter. And yet, he is quietly making an aggressive and confrontational claim about his own power and authority and that of the court’s. “Separation of powers,” in Roberts’s view, means the court is outside the system of checks and balances that governs the other branches of government. “Judicial independence,” likewise, means neither he nor any other member of the court has any obligation to speak to Congress about their behavior. The court checks, according to Roberts, but cannot be checked.

A number of legal scholars have remarked on the judicial power grab of the last several years, in which courts across the federal judiciary have seized key governing decisions from the legislative and executive branches and disparaged the ability of elected officials to, as Josh Chafetz of Georgetown University Law Center writes, “engage in principled, competent governance.”

As one of the architects of this development in American politics, Roberts is essentially using this letter to make plain to Congress the reality of the situation: I will not speak, and you cannot make me. And he’s right, not because Congress doesn’t have the power, but because it doesn’t have the votes. In the absence of a majority of votes, the Senate Judiciary Committee cannot subpoena a justice. In the absence of 218 votes, the House cannot impeach a justice. And in the absence of 67 votes, the Senate cannot remove a justice.

There are steps Congress could take to discipline the court — shrinking its budget, reducing the scope of its docket, imposing ethics rules itself, even making it “ride circuit” à la the 19th century — but those require a majority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate because of the filibuster, as well as a consensus among lawmakers (and specifically, Democrats) to follow through if they ever have the chance to do so.

It is not especially dramatic, but this exchange with Chief Justice Roberts over the court, its ethics and its responsibility to the public and its representatives has done more than almost anything else in recent memory to illustrate a key reality of American politics in this moment: that our Supreme Court does not exist in the constitutional order as much as it looms over it, a robed tribunal of self-styled philosopher-kings, accountable to no one but themselves.

One thing we have to keep in mind is the probability that the people running the show may have reason to dismiss our suspicions out of hand. The corruption may be part of the long-game intention to dismantle our little experiment in democratic self-government. We have to allow for that probability, no matter how small we may think it is.

"Shit happens" is not something that really applies to major league politics. Yes, coincidence is a thing, but in politics, coincidence is almost always engineered by someone for some specific reason.

This Is The GOP

It's old and crusty, and it's started to sound very stale, but:

ladies and gentlemen, this is the GOP -

the party of law-n-order

Ex-Florida lawmaker behind the 'Don't Say Gay' law pleads guilty to COVID relief fraud

Former Florida lawmaker Joseph Harding has pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges related to COVID-19 relief funds. The 35-year-old is scheduled for sentencing in July.

A former Florida lawmaker who sponsored a bill dubbed the "Don't Say Gay" law by critics has pleaded guilty to fraudulently obtaining COVID-19 relief funds.

Joseph Harding entered a guilty plea on Tuesday in federal court in the Northern District of Florida to one count of wire fraud, one count of money laundering and one count of making false statements, according to court records.

Harding faces up to 35 years in prison, including a maximum of 20 years on the wire fraud charge. A sentencing hearing is scheduled for July 25 at the federal courthouse in Gainesville.

The former Republican lawmaker shot to notoriety last year as one of the sponsors of a controversial Florida law that outlawed the discussion of sexuality and gender in public school classrooms from kindergarten through grade 3.

The legislation became a blueprint for similar laws in more than a dozen other conservative states.

"This bill is about protecting our kids, empowering parents and ensuring they have the information they need to do their God-given job of raising their child," Harding said when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law last March.

Critics from Democrats to LGBTQ groups took to calling it the "Don't Say Gay" law and condemned Republicans for chilling speech in schools.

In December, a federal grand jury returned an indictment against Harding, 35, who was accused of lying on his applications to the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, which gave out loans to businesses impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. He resigned from Florida's House of Representatives one day later.

Harding fraudulently obtained more than $150,000 from the Small Business Administration, portions of which he transferred to a bank and used to make a credit card payment, prosecutors said.

In his bio on the Florida House Republicans website, Harding is described as a "serial entrepreneur" who started several businesses related to "boarding and training horses, real estate development, home construction, and landscaping."

He was first elected to public office when he won the state House seat in November 2020.

Another Shoe

It's raining shoes. Again. Or Still. Or something.

It's going to take years to sort thru all of the shit that we haven't dealt with over the last several decades. Some of which we've just kinda needed to ignore because it made us feel a little paranoid. Some of which we've been manipulated into feeling weird about. Some of which just seemed too "political thriller" -ish - and dammit, maybe I've been watching too many old movies about intrigue at the palace.

We get lulled into a belief that democracy is something we get to have, instead of something we have to do. And suddenly, our little experiment in self-government is looking pretty shaky.

ie: "Suddenly" over the last 40 years or so

If we learn nothing else, let's hope we're learning how toxic fake news is - how toxic the politics of faking news can be - and which outfits are putting out all that fake news, and which politicians are lying to us about which news is the fake news.

It makes my head hurt, and I've been into the politics thing for a good long time - so I have some sympathy for people who just wanna live their lives without having to worry a whole lot about it. I don't have a lot of patience with them, but I do understand the desire to go about your business and trust that things will work out.

Anyway, the worse it gets on one side, the better it can be on the other - if we can figure out which side it's best to be on.

Fox News producer alleges sexism, coached testimony, in new lawsuit

Abby Grossberg, who alleges discrimination and a hostile workplace, says she was ‘coerced, intimidated, and misinformed’ while preparing for her deposition in the $1.6 billion Dominion defamation case.

On the eve of a key hearing in a defamation lawsuit against Fox News, an employee who was deposed in the case sued the company, alleging that its lawyers coached her to shift blame for decisions to air Trump allies’ false claims of election fraud.

The lawsuit from producer Abby Grossberg came late Monday, hours after Fox sought a restraining order to keep her from disclosing in-house legal discussions.

Grossberg’s suit could create an opening for Dominion Voting Systems — which is also suing Fox, for airing unfounded claims that it rigged the 2020 election — to question the credibility of her testimony and that of other Fox employees deposed in the matter.

In a federal civil suit, filed in the Southern District of New York, Grossberg alleges that she was “isolated, overworked, undervalued, denied opportunities for promotion, and generally treated significantly worse than her male counterparts, even when those men were less qualified than her,” and that she was retaliated against after she complained.

Her suit also details claims that she was subjected to “vile sexist stereotypes.” It describes a male senior producer scolding her for sharing too much information with Maria Bartiromo, the popular opinion host for whom they both worked at the time. The senior producer and another male executive described the host in terms such as “menopausal,” “hysterical” and “a diva,” Grossberg alleged.

A spokesperson for Fox called Grossberg’s suit “baseless,” saying, “We will vigorously defend these claims.”

Grossberg’s account of a sexist environment at Fox News echoes stories shared by several female employees in 2016 and 2017, when powerful network co-founder Roger Ailes and prime-time star Bill O’Reilly were forced out by allegations of sexual harassment.

But it is the producer’s allegations that Fox lawyers “coerced, intimidated, and misinformed” her as they prepped her to testify in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation suit that are poised to further complicate that roiling legal battle.

A little-known staffer at Fox News for the past four years, Grossberg this month emerged as a key behind-the-scenes player at the center of the blockbuster case. Dominion argues Fox knowingly aired spurious claims that it rigged its voting machines in favor of Joe Biden; Fox argues that it was simply reporting on newsworthy claims made by a sitting president.

Both sides are appearing in Delaware Superior Court on Tuesday to argue for the judge to rule in their favor — probably the last major hearing before the case is expected to go to trial next month.

Grossberg was subpoenaed by Dominion last year to discuss her work on televised segments in which Bartiromo and guests discussed far-fetched and unproven claims of election fraud. But in her deposition prep sessions, the producer claims, Fox lawyers “were displeased with her being too candid” and took extra time “to make sure she got her story straight and in line with [Fox’s] position.”

She said she was urged to give generic answers such as “I do not recall” and discouraged from offering explanations of how Bartiromo’s understaffed team was unable to keep up with warnings from Dominion about false statements they had aired.

By giving what she calls “false/misleading and evasive answers” that she said were encouraged by Fox’s legal team, Grossberg says she put herself at risk of committing perjury, while “subtly shifting all responsibility for the alleged defamation against Dominion onto her shoulders, and by implication, those of her trusted female colleague, Ms. Bartiromo, rather than the mostly male higher ups at Fox News.”

Fox lawyers, in their request for a restraining order, said Grossberg’s plan to share details from her conversations with lawyers was “a transparent attempt to gain leverage over Fox News.” They also wrote that Grossberg “proved unable to perform adequately” after a recent promotion and that she had been issued a written warning.

Late Monday, a company spokesperson said that Fox “engaged an independent outside counsel to immediately investigate the concerns raised by Ms. Grossberg, which were made following a critical performance review.”

In an interview with The Washington Post late Monday, Grossberg’s attorney, Parisis G. Filippatos, called Fox’s restraining order an “attempt to chill her,” adding that “her suit will reveal the truth, not the selected version of sanitized events that Fox is famous for.”

Fox placed her on leave Monday from her current job as a booker for Tucker Carlson’s prime-time show, he said.

Grossberg also filed a defamation suit against Fox in Delaware Superior Court that claims the company induced her to make statements in her deposition that made her look “inept” and harmed her reputation.

Details of Grossberg’s suits were first reported late Monday by the New York Times.

In Grossberg’s September deposition, Dominion lawyers asked her about the circumstances surrounding a Nov. 8, 2020, appearance by Trump-affiliated attorney Sidney Powell, who told Bartiromo on air that there had been “computer glitches” during the election and “fraud … where they were flipping votes in the computer system or adding votes that did not exist.”

Grossberg defended the decision to air claims like those that Powell was promoting, according to segments of her deposition made public this month. “We bring on people and they give their opinions,” she said. “Maria asked questions. The guests responded and gave their points of view, and it was up to the audience to decide.”

She told Dominion’s lawyers that the fraud claims were aired because her production team “thought the public deserved to hear what the current administration was saying.”

Grossberg first gained public notice in February, when Dominion filed a widely publicized brief that described one of its lawyers asking Grossberg if it’s important to correct falsehoods uttered on the show — and Grossberg replying, simply, “No.”

This, Dominion argued, was more evidence that Fox staff knew Trump election-fraud claims were false but did not convey that to viewers.

In fact, Grossberg said in her suit, she did not want to give that answer, but “she had been conditioned and felt coerced to give this response that simultaneously painted her in a negative light as a professional.”

After “writers at prominent media outlets called Ms. Grossberg’s ethics as a journalist and her professional judgment into question,” she alleges, she suffered anxiety and stress.

While Grossberg’s testimony and internal emails were cited prominently in briefs that Dominion has filed in its defamation suit, Fox’s lawyers made only a single, fleeting reference to her in their own defense filings, in which they cited an email of Grossberg’s to demonstrate that Bartiromo “reached out to sources and conducted research into the President’s claims.”

But Fox representatives have cited Grossberg’s testimony in communications with journalists to dispute some of Dominion’s legal claims.

Earlier this month, exhibits were unsealed showing that Powell had forwarded Bartiromo an email from a Minnesota artist that spun theories about an elaborate vote-flipping scheme and supposed connections between Dominion and top Democrats, as well as bizarre claims about murder and time-travel. Dominion lawyers have sought to draw a connection between this email — which its own author deemed “wackadoodle” — and the election-fraud claims that Bartiromo and Powell discussed on the air.

Fox spokespeople, though, countered this argument in an email to reporters by pointing to Grossberg’s explanation, drawn from her testimony: “We never used [the email.] So this is just all hypothetical really. … This isn’t something that I would use right now as reportable for air.”

According to Fox’s complaint, first reported by the Daily Beast, the network’s lawyers advised Grossberg in meetings before her deposition that “they represented Fox News and not her in her individual capacity” and that their discussions with her “were subject to the attorney-client privilege” and must be kept confidential.

The complaint stated that Fox first realized Grossberg intended to share details of those conversations when the company received a draft of Grossberg’s potential legal filing against the company last month.

Grossberg, the complaint stated, told the network that she was not subject to the company’s attorney-client privilege.

Because Of Course

How do you launder 12 million dollars?

How do you pay off a crooked politician without making it obvious that you're paying off a crooked politician?

American politics has come to look like an open sewer - at least on the Republican side.

I'm not saying there are no Democrats making bank on selling their influence - Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema being the most noticeable examples - it's just that Republicans are making far less effort to cover their shit.

So now it's up to Kevin McCarthy to figure out how to spank the more obvious offenders like Santos - making it seem as though McCarthy is "taking a firm hand" - without losing the support of the plutocrat assholes who put guys like Santos in office in the first place.

But of course, McCarthy will be weighing his options even then. Does he get more out of it by smacking Santos, or by using the threat of smacking Santos to rein him in, which sets the example of a "strong Speaker" who'll allow the shenanigans as long as he gets his cut?

Sold: Yacht With a Waterfall. Price: $19 Million. Broker: George Santos.

Just before his House election, Mr. Santos helped two of his largest donors reach a private deal on a $19 million boat, mixing his political and personal interests.

Representative George Santos brokered the sale of a yacht that sleeps 12 guests and seven crew, and boasts an infinity pool, a waterfall and an outdoor shower.

A $19 million luxury yacht deal brokered by Representative George Santos between two of his wealthy donors has captured the attention of federal and state authorities investigating the congressman’s campaign finances and personal business dealings.

The sale, which has not been previously reported, is one of about a dozen leads being pursued by the F.B.I., the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn and the Nassau County district attorney’s office, people familiar with the investigation said.

Prosecutors and F.B.I. agents have sought in recent weeks to question the new owner of the 141-foot superyacht — Raymond Tantillo, a Long Island auto dealer — about the boat and his dealings with Mr. Santos, including his campaign fund-raising efforts.

Mr. Tantillo bought the boat from Mayra Ruiz, a Republican donor in Miami. Mr. Santos negotiated the payment — $12.25 million up front, with $6.5 million more in installments — and advised the two on the logistics of turning over the yacht, according to a person familiar with the sale, which took place a few weeks before his election in November.

It is not clear what laws, if any, may have been broken in the transaction. Several election law experts said that if the sale was designed to inject money into Mr. Santos’s campaign, it may be in violation of federal law governing caps on campaign contributions. It could also be illegal if Mr. Santos tied any commission he received on the sale to previous or future donations.

But even if Mr. Santos broke no laws, the deal serves as further evidence of an emerging narrative given by people in his political orbit — that Mr. Santos seemed to use his campaign not only to win elected office but also as a networking exercise to ingratiate himself with rich donors and enrich himself from those contacts.

Mr. Santos has denied wrongdoing. Joe Murray, a lawyer representing Mr. Santos in potential criminal matters, declined to comment, as did spokesmen from the F.BI., the United States attorney’s office in Brooklyn, and the Nassau County district attorney, who is working with federal authorities on the investigation.

More on George Santos

• House Committees: Representative George Santos said that he would temporarily recuse himself from sitting on congressional committees as he faces multiple investigations over his lies.
• Signaling a Re-election Bid: Mr. Santos filed paperwork indicating his intent to seek re-election in 2024. The move does not guarantee that Mr. Santos will run for office, but it allows him to continue fund-raising and spend campaign funds.
• A.T.M. Fraud Scheme: Mr. Santos's former roommate, who pleaded guilty to a federal fraud charge in 2017 and was deported to Brazil, sent an affidavit to federal authorities accusing the representative of running a card-skimming operation.
• His First Bill: Mr. Santos wants to raise the cap on the so-called SALT deduction — a move that would partly undo President Donald J. Trump’s tax plan that limited how much homeowners could deduct in state and local property taxes.
• Mr. Santos’s campaign finances and personal business dealings have been under scrutiny following revelations by The New York Times in December that Mr. Santos had fabricated or embellished most of his résumé. The Times has since reported on curious omissions in his campaign filings, an unregistered fund connected to him, and other irregularities in his finances.

A central mystery is Mr. Santos’s sudden, unexplained jump in income, and where he got the money to loan himself roughly $700,000 over the course of his 2022 campaign.

During his first bid for Congress in 2020, he reported an income of $55,000; two years later, he reported a $750,000 salary and over $1 million in dividends from his company, the Florida-based Devolder Organization, which Mr. Santos described as a “capital introduction” business.

Mr. Santos, a Republican, has said publicly that his company brokered deals between high net-worth clients. In an interview with Semafor in December, he sought to explain his work by saying that if a client wanted to sell a plane or a boat, he would “put that feeler out there” among his contacts, adding that he had landed a couple of million-dollar contracts.

“If you’re looking at a $20 million yacht,” he told Semafor, “my referral fee there can be anywhere between $200,000 and $400,000.”

As it turns out, there was, in fact, a yacht worth nearly $20 million.

In 2019, records show, John H. Ruiz, a Miami lawyer and businessman, bought a superyacht made by the Italian yacht builder Mangusta. The yacht, which was listed at the time for 18 million euros, or $20 million, sleeps 12 guests and seven crew, and featured an infinity pool, a waterfall and an outdoor shower. It was called “Namaste,” a greeting in Hindi.

Mr. Ruiz, a Coral Gables lawyer who specializes in health care and malpractice claims, gained notoriety last year when he took his data analytics company public in a reverse merger with a special purpose acquisition company. The company, MSP Recovery, briefly had a record-setting valuation of nearly $33 billion, making Mr. Ruiz a billionaire many times over.

But the stock promptly plummeted to a dollar a share and, in June 2022, he and the firm’s co-founder lent the company $113 million to plug a cash shortfall.

Mr. Ruiz did not donate to Mr. Santos’s campaign, but his wife, Mayra, was a particularly generous supporter. Campaign finance records show that on March 31, 2022, Mayra Ruiz gave $10,800 to Mr. Santos’s joint fund-raising committee. Later, she was among the first to give Mr. Santos money after he won the election.

Mr. Santos has failed to disclose any of his Devolder clients. But in December, the Tantillo Auto Group — Mr. Tantillo’s network of car dealerships on Long Island — and two organizations tied to Mr. Ruiz’s family were identified by The Daily Beast as Devolder clients. The Daily Beast quoted Mayra Ruiz saying the family had hired Devolder in early 2022, but did not provide more detail.

Ms. Ruiz did not respond to requests for comment. Christine Lugo, a lawyer for Mr. Ruiz, said her client was “not interested in making any statement other than the fact that he has already publicly disclosed that he does not know who George Santos is and has never contributed to his campaigns and has never done any business with him.”

Mr. Santos, by many accounts, mingled campaign fund-raising with personal business opportunities. Several donors have described encounters with Mr. Santos at fund-raisers in which he would describe deals he could broker with other donors in industries including insurance and pharmaceuticals, or he would tell them about donors who were seeking to sell businesses or luxury items.

Mr. Santos would offer to bring people together, with the implicit understanding that he would take a cut, they said. The pitches were often paired with requests for donations. None of the other potential arrangements described to The Times appear to have resulted in deals.

Among the donors he courted, Mr. Santos seems to have grown close to Mr. Tantillo, according to people familiar with their relationship.

Mr. Tantillo gave more than $17,000 to Mr. Santos’s campaign and affiliated committees; his estranged wife is recorded as giving at least $5,000 more, as is another ex-wife. (Contribution limits in New York congressional races in 2022 were slightly altered after a state court ruling scuttled an electoral map and forced an August primary; the Federal Election Commission held that candidates could raise additional funds.)

In August, Mr. Santos approached Mr. Tantillo with an offer to sell him the yacht. The agreement was hammered out in late September in Coral Gables, and Mr. Santos suggested moving the boat into a free-trade zone at the port, the person said.

It is common for boat sales to take place in a free-trade zone before going overseas — often, the Bahamas — and returning with a new owner, according to another person familiar with the sale and with the Miami port system.

As negotiations progressed, Mr. Santos pressed Mr. Tantillo for additional donations and financial help for his campaign and for other Republicans as Election Day drew near, the person said. Mr. Tantillo did not provide additional funds.

“I have every reason to believe that Mr. Tantillo will not be charged for anything, including the purchase of a boat or campaign contributions,” said Robert Curtis Gottlieb, a lawyer for Mr. Tantillo.

At least one other large donor was asked for a major contribution weeks before the election, The Times has reported.

After weeks of negotiations, Mr. Tantillo agreed in September 2022 to buy the yacht, according to a person familiar with the sale. The deal was brokered by Mr. Santos with Ms. Ruiz, according to emails described to The Times.

On Nov. 3, 2022, “Namaste” left for the Bahamas from its berth in West Palm Beach, Fla. Fifteen days later, port records show, the boat returned to Florida under a new flag — the Cayman Islands — a different name and a new owner.

Mr. Tantillo rechristened the boat “Neverland.”

Today's Non-Accountable Accountability

House Republicans Quietly Halt Inquiry Into Trump’s Finances

G.O.P. leaders are declining to enforce a court-supervised settlement for Mazars, Donald J. Trump’s former accounting firm, to turn over records in an investigation into whether he profited from the presidency.

WASHINGTON — House Republicans have quietly halted a congressional investigation into whether Donald J. Trump profited improperly from the presidency, declining to enforce a court-supervised settlement agreement that demanded that Mazars USA, his former accounting firm, produce his financial records to Congress.

Representative James R. Comer, Republican of Kentucky and the chairman of the Oversight and Accountability Committee, made clear he had abandoned any investigation into the former president’s financial dealings — professing ignorance about the inquiry Democrats opened when they controlled the House — and was instead focusing on whether President Biden and members of his family were involved in an influence-peddling scheme.

“I honestly didn’t even know who or what Mazars was,” said Mr. Comer, who was the senior Republican on the oversight panel during the last Congress, while Democrats waged a lengthy legal fight over obtaining documents from the firm.

“What exactly are they looking for?” Mr. Comer added in a brief statement to The New York Times on Monday. “They’ve been ‘investigating’ Trump for six years. I know exactly what I’m investigating: money the Bidens received from China.”

He confirmed the end to the inquiry into Mr. Trump after Democrats wrote to Mr. Comer raising concerns about the fact that Mazars, the former president’s longtime accounting firm that cut ties with him last year, had stopped turning over documents related to his financial dealings. The top Democrat on the panel suggested that Mr. Comer had worked with Mr. Trump’s lawyers to effectively kill the investigation, an accusation the chairman denied.

“It has come to my attention that you may have acted in league with attorneys for former President Donald Trump to block the committee from receiving documents subpoenaed in its investigation of unauthorized, unreported and unlawful payments by foreign governments and others to then-President Trump,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the panel, wrote on Sunday evening to Mr. Comer.

Mr. Comer on Monday denied knowledge of any attempt to coordinate with Mr. Trump’s lawyers to block the investigation, but he made it clear he did not plan to keep it going. His committee has issued no subpoenas concerning Mr. Trump’s finances.

Democrats fought in court for years to get financial documents from Mr. Trump’s former accounting firm, and only last year — after entering into a court-ordered settlement — began receiving the documents and gaining new insights into how foreign governments sought influence using the Trump International Hotel. The company has been delivering the documents to the committee in batches.

A Divided Congress

• The 118th Congress is underway, with Republicans controlling the House and Democrats holding the Senate.
• I.R.S. Commissioner: The Senate voted to confirm Daniel Werfel to be the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, filling a critical position at the agency as it starts an $80 billion overhaul.
• F.B.I. Surveillance: The revelation by Representative Darin LaHood, Republican of Illinois, that he was the target of surveillance material searches conducted by the F.B.I. put a twist on a murky incident that has loomed over a debate on reauthorizing an expiring surveillance law.
• D.C. Crime Law: The Senate voted overwhelmingly to block a new criminal code for the District of Columbia, with Democrats bowing to Republican pressure to take a hard line on crime.
• A Freshman Republican on the Road: As Representative Josh Brecheen travels his district in eastern Oklahoma, his pitch to constituents reflects how the party has intertwined its spending fight with cultural battles.
• In the letter, Mr. Raskin wrote that he had reviewed communications between Patrick Strawbridge, Mr. Trump’s counsel, and a lawyer for Mazars in which the Trump lawyer indicated he had been told that House Republicans would no longer insist on additional document production. On Jan. 19, Mr. Strawbridge wrote, “I do not know the status of Mazars production, but my understanding is that the committee has no interest in forcing Mazars to complete it and is willing to release it from further obligations under the settlement agreement.”

Mr. Raskin wrote that Mr. Strawbridge had confirmed that assertion had been made to him twice by the acting general counsel of the House of Representatives, who at the time was Todd Tatelman.

Mr. Tatelman did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Mr. Strawbridge or lawyers for Mazars.

Democratic staff aides on the committee said they had repeatedly sought written confirmation from Mazars that House Republicans had agreed to release the firm from its obligations under the subpoena and court-supervised settlement agreement. But Mazars said it had not received such a release nor was any filed with the court, which has retained jurisdiction over the matter.

Even so, Mazars informed Democratic staff members that, as a result of Mr. Strawbridge’s assertions, it would cease production after the delivery of a small tranche of documents that it had already identified as responsive to the subpoena, the letter states.

Enforcement of a court-supervised settlement agreement made with one Congress during a subsequent Congress under new leadership remains a legally murky gray area. Subpoenas in cases involving the House expire at the end of each Congress, but Mazars had continued to produce documents even after the House changed hands into Republican control. Still, a judge would be unlikely to enforce the settlement if the parties involved were no longer interested in enforcement, according to lawyers in both parties.

The documents from Mazars have thus far provided new evidence about how foreign governments sought to influence the Trump administration. In November, for instance, documents the committee received from Mazars detailed how officials from six nations spent more than $750,000 at Mr. Trump’s hotel in Washington when they were seeking to influence his administration, renting rooms for more than $10,000 per night.

“In the face of mounting evidence that foreign governments sought to influence the Trump administration by playing to President Trump’s financial interests, you and President Trump’s representatives appear to have acted in coordination to bury evidence of such misconduct,” Mr. Raskin wrote to Mr. Comer.

At the same time that Mazars has stopped producing documents about Mr. Trump’s finances, Mr. Comer has ramped up his investigation into Mr. Biden and his relatives.

Mr. Comer has issued a broad subpoena to obtain bank records of associates of the Biden family, requiring Bank of America to produce “all financial records” for three private individuals from Jan. 20, 2009, to the present — a 14-year period, Mr. Raskin wrote.

He has focused in particular on John R. Walker, an associate of Hunter Biden, the president’s son, whose business dealings are under investigation by the Justice Department. Mr. Walker was involved in a joint venture with CEFC China executives, a now-bankrupt Chinese energy conglomerate.

Mr. Raskin accused Mr. Comer of using a “wildly overbroad subpoena” to conduct “a dragnet of political opposition research on behalf of former President Trump.”

Mr. Comer responded that Mr. Raskin was trying to distract “from the real issue here, and that is the Biden family money trail from China.”

“I now possess documents to prove it; Raskin knows it, and Raskin has had a meltdown,” Mr. Comer added.

When Congress was in Democratic hands, the House Oversight Committee waged a yearslong battle to obtain Mr. Trump’s financial records from Mazars in one of the major legal sagas of the Trump presidency.

Mazars cut ties with the Trump Organization in 2022, saying it could no longer stand by a decade of financial statements it had prepared.

Today's Crooked Politician

It's not always a Republican, because it can't always be a Republican.

But it seems like it's always a Republican, because something like 95% of the time, it's a Republican.

So yeah - for all practical purposes, it's always a fucking Republican.

Former Ohio House speaker convicted in $60 million bribery scheme

Former state House Speaker Larry Householder and former Ohio Republican Party Chair Matt Borges were convicted Thursday in a $60 million bribery scheme that federal prosecutors have called the largest corruption case in state history.

A jury in Cincinnati found the two guilty of conspiracy to participate in a racketeering enterprise involving bribery and money laundering, after about 9.5 half hours of deliberations over two days.

U.S. Attorney Kenneth Parker said the government's prosecution team showed that "Householder sold the Statehouse, and thus he ultimately betrayed the people of the great state of Ohio he was elected to serve." He called Borges "a willing co-conspirator."

"Through its verdict today, the jury reaffirmed that the illegal acts committed by both men will not be tolerated and that they should be held accountable," Parker said.

Attorneys for Householder and Borges did not immediately respond to messages left by The Associated Press on Thursday.

Prosecutors alleged that Householder orchestrated a scheme secretly funded by Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. to secure his power in the Legislature, elect his allies — and then to pass and defend a $1 billion nuclear power plant bailout benefiting the electric utility. They alleged that Borges, then a lobbyist, sought to bribe an operative for inside information on the referendum to overturn the bailout.

Householder, 63, had been one of Ohio's most powerful politicians — and twice elected speaker — until the Republican-controlled House ousted him after his indictment from his leadership post, and then in a bipartisan vote, and with Householder vigorously objecting, from the chamber. It was the first such expulsion in 150 years.

He took the stand in his own defense, contradicting FBI testimony and denying that he attended swanky Washington dinners where prosecutors allege he and executives of FirstEnergy hatched the elaborate scheme in 2017.

Borges, 50, did not testify at trial but has insisted that he's innocent. Both men face up to 20 years in prison.

The verdict comes two-and-a-half years after Householder, Borges and three others were arrested. Over the past seven weeks, jurors at the trial were presented with firsthand accounts of the alleged scheme, as well as reams of financial documents, emails, texts and wiretap audio.

"... alleged ..." ? - it was proven beyond a reasonable doubt, to the satisfaction of 12 regular everyday people who returned a unanimous verdict. It's not fucking "alleged" anymore.

The prosecution called two of the people arrested — Juan Cespedes and Jeff Longstreth, who pleaded guilty — to testify about political contributions that they said are not ordinary, but bribes intended to secure passage of the bailout bill, known as House Bill 6.

Householder's attorneys described his activities as nothing more than hardball politics.

Jurors also heard taped phone calls in which Householder and another co-defendant, the late Statehouse superlobbyist Neil Clark, plotted a nasty attack ad — and, in expletive-laced fashion, contemplated revenge against lawmakers who had crossed Householder.

Householder testified that he never retaliated against those who voted counter to his wishes or who donated to his rivals.

Under a deal to avoid prosecution, FirstEnergy admitted using a network of dark money groups to fund the scheme and even bribing the state's top utility regulator, Sam Randazzo.

Randazzo resigned as chair of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio after an FBI search of his home, but he has not been charged and denies wrongdoing.

When Tyrants Embrace

Settle in - it's a long one.

After helping prince’s rise, Trump and Kushner benefit from Saudi funds

An investment fund overseen by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is backing ventures that profit the former president and his senior adviser, raising questions of conflict

In early 2021, as Donald Trump exited the White House, he and his son-in-law Jared Kushner faced unprecedented business challenges. Revenue at Trump’s properties had plummeted during his presidency, and the attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters made his brand even more polarizing. Kushner, whose last major business foray had left his family firm needing a $1.2 billion bailout, faced his own political fallout as a senior Trump aide.

But one ally moved quickly to the rescue.

The day after leaving the White House, Kushner created a company that he transformed months later into a private equity firm with $2 billion from a sovereign wealth fund chaired by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Kushner’s firm structured those funds in such a way that it did not have to disclose the source, according to previously unreported details of Securities and Exchange Commission forms reviewed by The Washington Post. His business used a commonly employed strategy that allows many equity firms to avoid transparency about funding sources, experts said.

A year after his presidency, Trump’s golf courses began hosting tournaments for the Saudi fund-backed LIV Golf. Separately, the former president’s family company, the Trump Organization, secured an agreement with a Saudi real estate company that plans to build a Trump hotel as part of a $4 billion golf resort in Oman.

The substantial investments by the Saudis in enterprises that benefited both men came after they cultivated close ties with Mohammed while Trump was in office — helping the crown prince’s standing by scheduling Trump’s first presidential trip to Saudi Arabia, backing him amid numerous international crises and meeting with him repeatedly in D.C. and the kingdom, including on a final trip Kushner took to Saudi Arabia on the eve of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.

New details about their relationship have emerged in recently published memoirs, as well as accounts in congressional testimony and interviews by The Post with former senior White House officials. Those revelations include Kushner’s written account of persuading Trump to prioritize Saudi Arabia over the objections of top advisers and a former secretary of state’s assertion in a book that Trump believed the prince “owed” him.

They also underscore the crucial nature of Trump’s admission that he “saved” Mohammed in the wake of the CIA’s finding that the crown prince ordered the killing or capture of Post contributing opinion columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Now, with Trump running for president again, some national security experts and two former White House officials say they have concerns that Trump and Kushner used their offices to set themselves up to profit from their relationship with the Saudis after the administration ended.

“I think it was an obvious opportunity for them to build their Rolodexes,” John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser, said in an interview. “And I think they were probably hard at work at it, particularly Jared.”

“Why should Jared be worried about the Middle East?” Bolton said. “It’s a perfectly logical inference was that had something to do with business.”

Kushner declined to comment.

In his memoir, Kushner did not mention his new equity firm or the Saudi investment, and he has not publicly addressed whether he talked to Mohammed during the administration about doing business with him afterward. It is not known whether Kushner discussed business deals with Mohammed while in office.

A former administration official allied with Kushner, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the matter publicly, said there are numerous examples of top former government employees doing business with people they once dealt with while in public service. Kushner had such a broad agenda that it would be unfair to block business relationships with those he knew from his White House days, the former official said.

Trump declined to comment. His spokesman, Steven Cheung, said in response: “President Trump is the most pro-America president in history and used his superior negotiating skills to ensure this country is never beholden to anyone.” Eric Trump, Trump’s son who is also the executive vice president of the Trump Organization, said in a statement that “LIV is doing incredible things for the game of golf and it should be no surprise that we were asked to host these amazing events.” Trump has also previously said he did tens of millions of dollars of business with Saudis before becoming president.

The Saudi Embassy in Washington and a spokesman for the Saudi Public Investment Fund did not respond to requests for comment.

Democrats who have launched congressional investigations into Trump’s and Kushner’s ties to Saudi Arabia said there is no precedent for how the two have relied so significantly on Saudi investments in their businesses after directly helping Mohammed while in office. The lawmakers expressed concern that such business ties could leave them beholden to the crown prince if they return to the White House.

“The financial links between the Saudi royal family and the Trump family raise very serious issues,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who chairs the Senate Finance Committee and for several years has been investigating various ties between the Saudis, Trump and Kushner, “and when you factor in Jared Kushner’s financial interests, you are looking right at the cat’s cradle of financial entanglements.”

Those concerns come at a high-stakes moment in the fraught U.S.-Saudi relationship. The investments by the Saudis came as the U.S. State Department said in a 2021 report that there continued to be “significant human rights issues” in Saudi Arabia, citing “credible reports” of torture and executions for nonviolent offenses. President Biden, who has backed away from a campaign pledge to hold the kingdom to account for human rights abuses, clashed openly with Riyadh in the fall over cuts in oil production. Trump, if he is reelected, may be less likely to confront the Saudi regime in future crises due to his financial entanglements, experts say.

Retired military personnel are required under ethics rules to obtain approval to work for foreign governments like Saudi Arabia. But there’s no requirement for Trump, a former commander in chief, nor for former senior White House officials such as Kushner, to disclose if they have financial ties to foreign governments, according to Don Fox, former acting director of the Office of Government Ethics. He said their work has exposed a glaring shortfall in ethics laws that needs to be fixed by Congress.

“I think the Congress had a certain vision in mind for what the post-presidency looks like, such as creating a library and museum and some speaking and writing a memoir,” Fox said. “I don’t think it ever occurred to the drafters of these ethics laws that a former president would actually try to cash in on his years of office this way.”

A beneficial relationship

Shortly after Trump’s election in 2016, Kushner connected with Mohammed for the first time.

Both were ascendant young scions of powerful families. Kushner, a 35-year-old with no foreign policy experience, was tapped by Trump to work toward Middle East peace; Mohammed, a 31-year-old deputy crown prince, was eyeing a path to the throne that seemed blocked by the reigning crown prince.

Over the next four years, that relationship would prove extraordinarily beneficial to both men.

Mohammed would reap arms sales, a presumed green light to blockade his neighboring nation of Qatar — despite a major U.S. military base there — and a hands-off policy when he imprisoned an array of leading Saudi citizens for months in a high-end hotel, reportedly demanding billions in funds from some in exchange for their release.

Trump and Kushner would get Mohammed’s support for an anti-terrorism center, arms purchases, and a deal normalizing relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and other nations.

Kushner was the key, making regular trips to Saudi Arabia and staying in close contact with Mohammed — to the concern of some White House colleagues. Two former senior administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, said they often felt they were in the dark on sensitive diplomatic issues on which Kushner took the lead.

“I didn’t really know what Jared was doing with the Saudis,” one former administration official said. “That was part of the problem. We didn’t know what Jared was doing generally. And, you know, other governments had decided that you want to get close to Trump, the way to do it is through Jared.”

At the outset, the Saudis had decided the incoming Trump administration could offer a reset to U.S. relations with the kingdom, despite Trump’s campaigning by saying that “Islam hates us” and calling for a “Muslim ban” of immigrants, Kushner wrote in his memoir.

Kushner “was learning diplomacy on the fly,” he wrote in his memoir. Mohammed’s associates sensed Kushner’s inexperience during a post-election meeting. In a summary of the 2016 talk by Saudi officials reported by the Lebanese publication Al Akhbar, Mohammed’s advisers wrote: “Kushner made clear his lack of familiarity with the history of Saudi-American relations.”

It soon became clear that Kushner effectively was running foreign policy on Saudi Arabia.

In March 2017, Mohammed arrived in Washington and had lunch with Kushner and Trump at the White House. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson didn’t attend, and the meeting went against advice from Trump’s National Security Council. Tillerson could not be reached for comment.

That same month, Kushner asked Trump to make Saudi Arabia the site of his first foreign trip. Kushner said it could jump-start the administration’s Middle East policy by cultivating Mohammed to help forge a diplomatic breakthrough with Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Tillerson opposed rewarding the Saudis with the first trip, and Trump told Kushner that he planned to follow the secretary of state’s advice. As Kushner continued to push, he wrote, Trump told him, “Jared, read my lips: we’re not going to Saudi Arabia. Take no for an answer!”

It didn’t matter. As Kushner told it, he had seen Trump change his mind on other matters, so “I didn’t interpret his words as a hard no.”

Kushner wrote that he called Mohammed and told the prince, “Everyone here is telling me that I’m a fool for trusting you,” but after receiving assurances from the prince, he outlined a proposal to Trump: The Saudis would denounce terrorism in the region, sign deals that were supposed to create American jobs and purchase U.S. arms. Trump changed his no to a yes. The trip was on.

It was the first of Kushner’s many boons to Mohammed, who used Trump’s visit to aid his sudden rise over a rival to become crown prince later that year. At a dinner, Mohammed told Kushner about a Saudi plan to blockade Qatar, which has a large U.S. military base. Tillerson later told Congress that the conversation made him “angry” because he didn’t have a say, but Trump essentially endorsed the move on Twitter.

One of the starkest tests of the Trump administration’s relationship with Mohammed came as a result of the prince’s ire with Khashoggi, a prominent journalist with ties to the royal family who had called for changes in the kingdom. Shortly after Trump’s election, Mohammed’s aides had ordered him to stop writing critically about the U.S.-Saudi relationship, but he refused and later relocated to the Washington area and became a columnist for The Post.

In October 2018, an assassination team that had flown from Riyadh to Istanbul aboard two planes owned by the Public Investment Fund killed Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate there. After Turkey said Saudi Arabia was responsible, Kushner talked with Mohammed about how to respond.

The next month, the CIA concluded that Mohammed had “approved an operation” to kill or capture Khashoggi, which the prince denied. Mohammed’s years-long effort to rise to power was in grave danger.

But, as Trump later put it in a recorded interview, “I saved his ass,” according to “The Trump Tapes” by Post associate editor Bob Woodward. Trump refused to endorse the CIA’s conclusion, equivocated about Mohammed’s involvement, opposed releasing of the report and vetoed a congressional bill to block arms sales to the kingdom. The president sent Mike Pompeo, who had replaced Tillerson as secretary of state, to meet with the prince and remind him of his debt.

“My Mike, go and have a good time. Tell him he owes us,” Pompeo recalled in his 2023 memoir, “Never Give An Inch.” Pompeo did not respond to a request for comment.

It was a pivotal moment that halted efforts to isolate Mohammed, who is known as MBS, in Congress and around the world. “Without the absolute protection of Trump and Kushner, MBS would definitely have fallen,” said Abdullah Alaoudh, the director for the Gulf at Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), a group founded by Khashoggi. Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi’s fiancee, said in a statement to The Post that Trump and Kushner “covered for the Crown Prince.”

Before Trump left office, Kushner flew to Saudi Arabia in early January 2021 for his final official meeting with Mohammed. On the public agenda was finalizing an agreement to end Riyadh’s blockade against Qatar.

Kushner flew home on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, and rushed to the White House.

Troubled businesses

As his administration ended, Trump’s brand was troubled. His family’s hotels, resorts and other properties had lost $120 million in revenue in 2020 thanks to the pandemic and his polarizing presidency. He faced multiple investigations into his business practices and actions seeking to overturn his 2020 defeat; then in December 2022, the Trump Organization was convicted of tax fraud.

Kushner, meanwhile, faced potential difficulties because of both his association with Trump and his own failings. Kushner’s family company had already required a bailout in 2018 from a Canadian firm because of his decision to buy a $1.8 billion office building in New York. An ongoing congressional investigation is looking into whether the bailout was partially financed by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. Now, despite having no experience running a private equity fund, Kushner was in search of billions of dollars for his new venture.

Saudi Arabia, however, soon invested in both men.

The day after the Trump administration ended, Kushner created a company called A Fin Management and used that as a springboard to create a private equity fund later that year called Affinity Partners. Such funds typically use investor money to buy into emerging companies.

Kushner has not said when he first sought $2 billion from the Saudi’s Public Investment Fund. The four members of a five-person panel of the fund’s advisers who attended a meeting about the matter were “not in favor” of the investment, citing Kushner’s inexperience in private equity and the fact that the Saudis would bear most of the risk, the New York Times reported, citing confidential minutes of the panel’s meeting in June 2021 that have not been made public.

Shortly after that meeting, however, Mohammed led the full board in approving the investment, according to the Times report.

In March 2022, the Kushner-run company filed an investment adviser registration document called Form ADV with the SEC that requires only a vague report on where its money came from. Kushner’s company declared that $2.51 billion out of its total $2.54 billion in assets under management came from “non-United States persons.”

The form also asks whether the “type of client” is “sovereign wealth funds and foreign official institutions.” Kushner’s firm left that box blank, instead describing its client as pooled funds operated by his company, which subsequently confirmed the Times report that $2 billion had come from the Saudis.

Chad Mizelle, an adviser to Kushner’s company, said in a statement to The Post that “Affinity Partners’ Form ADV, like numerous other private equity firms, correctly states that it has pooled investment vehicles as clients.” An SEC spokesman declined to comment.

Kushner’s company stands to receive a $25 million management fee annually from the Saudi investment plus a share of the profits.

Kushner has made his work with Mohammed while in the White House a selling point for his business. In a presentation to investors, first reported by the Intercept, Kushner notes his work “managing Middle East peace efforts” and specifically cites the result of his Jan. 5, 2021, meeting with Mohammed, saying they had discussed lifting the Qatar blockade.

There’s little transparency in private equity firms like Kushner’s. Such funds are allowed to keep secret the names of their investors, which has led Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, to push for legislation requiring more disclosure of foreign investments. The FBI said in 2020 that “threat actors likely use private placement of funds, including investments offered by hedge funds and private equity firms, to launder money.”

Kushner’s company, which is staffed by a number of former top administration officials, has so far allocated only about 15 percent of its available cash — a strategic move as it waits for the economy to improve, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal business decisions.

Information about Trump’s possible Saudi payments is even more opaque. Before his political career, Trump had long claimed a profitable history of dealmaking with the Saudis.

On the day he launched his campaign at Trump Tower in 2015, he said, “I love the Saudis. Many are in this building.” Later that year, he said at a campaign rally that “they spend $40 million, $50 million” buying his apartments. In August 2015, The Post reported, he established eight shell companies that included the name “Jeddah,” apparently referring to Saudi Arabia’s second-largest city, and four mentioned a hotel — but there’s no record that anything resulted, The Post reported.

Starting last year, LIV Golf hosted two tournaments at Trump properties, with recent court proceedings revealing that the Public Investment Fund covers 100 percent of tournament costs, according to coverage of the case.

A LIV Golf spokesman declined to comment, and a Public Investment Fund spokesman did not respond to requests to comment.

LIV Golf, which was set up as a competitor to the PGA Tournament, has struggled to attract top golfers. After the PGA pulled a tournament from a Trump course following the Jan. 6 insurrection, Trump boosted the LIV tour, calling it a public relations coup worth billions of dollars for Saudi Arabia and urging golfers to “take the money” and join LIV. He has not said how much he earned from the arrangement.

Ted Bishop, a former PGA president, said in an interview that a major tournament typically pays $2 million to $3 million to play on a course, not counting other revenue such as sponsorships, merchandise, and food and beverage.

Critics of LIV Golf have called the Saudi funding an effort at “sportswashing,” meant to divert attention from the killing of Khashoggi and its record on human rights. “I think the vast majority of golf fans oppose LIV Golf because it is a moral question,” Bishop said.

The Trump Organization in November signed a deal with a Saudi Arabian firm, Dar Al Arkan, to develop Trump-branded villas, a hotel and a golf course in Oman with the support of that country’s government. Such branding was once the mainstay of Trump’s international business, but the Oman agreement was the first such international deal publicly announced after he left office.

Eric Trump said in a statement that “Trump Oman is an exceptional project, in an exceptional location and we are excited to enter that rapidly growing market with an incredible hotel, world class golf course and much much more.”

Democrats have continued to push for more details about Donald Trump’s and Kushner’s deals.

The House Oversight Committee said in a June 2 letter to Kushner that it wanted to know if he had “improperly traded” on his government position to get the investment and whether he influenced U.S. policy to do so.

The committee’s investigation has stalled as a result of the Republican takeover of the House, but Wyden’s Senate Finance Committee may request the same documents as part of a broader inquiry in whether there is a connection between what Trump and Kushner did during the administration and the subsequent Saudi deals.

“Following the money is the premier issue,” Wyden said. “That’s how you understand potential conflicts of interest.”

Mohammed, meanwhile, has continued his rise to power and is expected to become king when the current monarch dies or steps down.

Biden, who vowed during his 2020 campaign to make Saudi Arabia “the pariah that they are” over Khashoggi’s murder, traveled to Saudi Arabia in July and fist-bumped Mohammed. Then his administration said that under international law, Mohammed was immune from a lawsuit in the Khashoggi killing because he had been named the sitting head of his government.

Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of the Khashoggi-founded group DAWN, has called on Congress to pass legislation to prohibit all former senior U.S. officials from working for, or financially benefiting from, a foreign government. Without such a law, she said in a statement, former U.S. officials can “monetize their work for our government into lucrative contracts with foreign governments.”

Meanwhile, the financial benefits of the Saudi relationship with Trump and Kushner continue.

Trump is slated to hold three more LIV tournaments on his properties this year.

And Kushner reportedly has raised at least another $500 million for his company from international investors since he filed the SEC form last year, bringing the total to around $3 billion.

He has not identified the source of that additional money.

Bill Barr: A Dickhead's Dickhead

Bill Barr’s Image Rehab Is Kaput

Former Attorney General William Barr has spent the last year in a desperate salvage operation for what’s left of his legal and ethical reputation. During his 22 months in office, he allowed his Justice Department to become a personal protection racket for his boss, Donald Trump, and left prosecutors, the F.B.I. and other law enforcement officials subject to the worst impulses of the president. But then, in his 2022 memoir, Mr. Barr did an about-face, bashing Mr. Trump for lacking a presidential temperament and singling out his “self-indulgence and lack of self-control.”

In the book, he urged Republicans not to renominate Mr. Trump in 2024, accusing the former president of going “off the rails” with his stolen-election claims by preferring the counsel of “sycophants” and “whack jobs” to that of his real advisers. Clearly concerned that history was paying attention, he was even stronger in his videotaped testimony to the Jan. 6 committee, loosing a variety of barnyard epithets and bitter insults to describe Mr. Trump’s legal strategy. He said the president had become “detached from reality” and was doing a disservice to the nation.

The hollow and self-serving nature of this turnabout was always apparent. Mr. Barr never made these concerns public at a time when his dissent would have made a difference. Instead, he left office in 2020 showering compliments on his boss, praising Mr. Trump’s “unprecedented achievements” and promising that Justice would continue to pursue claims of voter fraud that he must have known were baseless.

But if Mr. Barr harbored any fantasy that he might yet be credited with a wisp of personal integrity for standing up for democracy, that hope was thoroughly demolished on Thursday when The Times published the details of what really happened when Mr. Barr launched a counter-investigation into the origins of Robert Mueller’s report on the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. The reporting demonstrated a staggering abuse of the special counsel system and the attorney general’s office, all in a failed attempt by Mr. Barr to rewrite the sour truths of Mr. Trump’s history.

It was bad enough when, in March 2019, Mr. Barr tried to mislead the public into thinking the forthcoming Mueller report exonerated Mr. Trump, when in fact the report later showed just how strong the links were between the campaign and the Russian government, which worked to help defeat Hillary Clinton. A few months later Mr. Barr assigned John Durham, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut, as a special counsel to investigate Mr. Mueller’s investigation, hoping to prove Mr. Trump’s wild public allegations that the federal intelligence officials had helped instigate the claims of Russian interference to damage him.

Attorneys general are not supposed to interfere in a special counsel’s investigation. The whole point of the system is to isolate the prosecution of sensitive cases from the appearance of political meddling. But the new Times reporting shows that Mr. Barr did the opposite, regularly meeting with Mr. Durham to discuss his progress and advocating on his behalf with intelligence officials when they were unable to come up with the nonexistent proof Mr. Barr wanted to see. (Aides told Times reporters that Mr. Barr was certain from the beginning that U.S. spy agencies were behind the allegations of collusion.)

When the Justice Department’s own inspector general prepared to issue a report saying that, while the F.B.I. made some ethical mistakes, the investigation was legitimate and not politically motivated, Mr. Durham lobbied him to drop the finding. When that effort was unsuccessful, Mr. Barr reverted to his usual pattern of trying to spin the report before it was issued, disagreeing with its finding before it was even out. Mr. Durham then followed up with a similar statement, shattering the clear department principle of staying silent about a current investigation.

The two men even traveled to Britain and Italy together, pressuring government agencies there to disclose what they told U.S. spy agencies about the Trump-Russia connections. That infuriated officials of those governments, who said they had done nothing of the kind, and no evidence was ever found that they had. But on one of those trips, The Times reported, Italian officials gave the men a tip which, people familiar with the matter said, linked Mr. Trump to possible serious financial crimes. (It is not clear what those crimes were, and more reporting will be necessary to reveal the details.) Did Mr. Barr follow protocol and turn the tip over to regular prosecutors in his department for investigation? No. Instead, he gave it to his traveling companion, Mr. Durham, who opened a criminal investigation but never made it public and never filed charges, and when word began to trickle out that a suspected crime had been discovered, he falsely let the world think it had something to do with his original goal.

The Durham investigation, of course, has never presented any evidence that the F.B.I. or intelligence agencies committed any misconduct in the course of the Russia investigation, bitterly disappointing Mr. Barr and especially his patron, Mr. Trump, who had assured his supporters for months that it would produce something big. Desperate for some kind of success, Mr. Durham indicted Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who had worked for Democrats in their dealings with the F.B.I., over the objections of two prosecutors on the special counsel team who said the case was far too thin and who later left the staff.

Mr. Sussmann was acquitted last May of lying to the bureau, and the jury forewoman told reporters that bringing the case had been unwise. Mr. Barr later tried to justify the trial by saying it served another purpose in exposing the Clinton campaign’s starting the Russia narrative as a “dirty trick.” The trial did nothing of the kind, but it did expose Mr. Barr’s willingness to abuse the gratuitous prosecution of an individual to score political points against one of Mr. Trump’s most prominent enemies.

One of the other casualties of this deceitful crusade was the deliberate damage it did to the reputations of the F.B.I., the intelligence agencies and officials in Mr. Barr’s own department. All of these agencies have had many problematic episodes in their pasts, but there is no evidence in this case that they willfully tried to smear Mr. Trump and his campaign with false allegations of collusion. They were trying to do their jobs, on which the nation’s security depends, but because they got in Mr. Trump’s way, Mr. Barr aided in degrading their image through a deep-state conspiracy theory before an entire generation of Trump supporters. Republicans in the House are launching a new snipe hunt for proof that these same government offices were “weaponized” against conservatives, an expedition that is likely to be no more effective than Mr. Durham’s and Mr. Barr’s.

But weakening the country’s institutions and safeguards for political benefit is how Mr. Barr did business in the nearly two years he served as the nation’s top law enforcement official under Mr. Trump. He has a long history of making the Justice Department an instrument of his ideology and politics; when he was attorney general in 1992 during the Bush administration, the Times columnist William Safire accused him of leading a “Criminal Cover-up Division” in refusing to appoint an independent counsel to investigate whether the Bush administration had knowingly provided aid to Saddam Hussein that was used to finance the military before Iraq invaded Kuwait. Under Mr. Trump, Mr. Barr did the opposite, demanding that an unnecessary special counsel do the bidding of the White House and trying to steer the investigation to Mr. Trump’s advantage. His efforts came to naught, and so will his campaign to be remembered as a defender of the Constitution.

The Fuckery Within

Next time you hear someone bitch about how slowly the DOJ is moving, or what a no good rotten wimpy little milquetoast Merrick Garland has to be when it's been years and what the fuck is he doing and blah blah blah - when you hear that, remember, Garland has to deal with an obvious infestation of rats on the inside of every part of government.

Knowing these rats fucked with investigations and indictments all through Trump's term, and that way too many of them are still there, fucking with things - if for no other reason that to hide out waiting for their next opportunity to fuck things up. Knowing all that, there's no reason to wonder about what a fucking nightmare Garland's job has to be right now.

All that said - what the fuck, Mr Attorney General?

Rachel Maddow 01-30-2023