No surprise here

Since Miller is the author of the worst deportation/immigration ideas.

[Palantir's] tools have enabled ICE agents to identify, detain and deport people, including through recent enhancements that give officers near-real-time data on self-deportations. Meanwhile, Palantir stock has surged more than 80% this year, making it one of the top performers on the S&P 500.

[...]

POGO previously documented that at least 10 other current or former White House and Department of Homeland Security staffers also owned stock in the company. Four Trump appointees at DHS have reported owning Palantir shares, including Paul Ingrassia, White House liaison to DHS, who was recently nominated to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.

  Migrant Insider

Who else hasn't reported?

Self-interest

 

Is this now the new norm?

I don't expect a Biden administration to be solid enough to investigate and prosecute.

Source and expanded info.

Abuse of power/Conflicts of interest/Emoluments violations

CREW has a live tracker.




This will be in the right sidebar for your future use.

A little conflict

Was that the deal?  Erdoğan wouldn't shut down Trump Towers if Trump got out of his way in Syria?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE: I'm reading that he only rents his name (like most Trump buildings).  So all Erdoğan needed to deal was a threat to remove his name.

How many of your vacations would this pay for?

Deutsche Bank raid follow up

The investigation is the latest in a string of scandals and financial setbacks for the bank, which holds the mortgages on several of Trump’s most prized properties, including his Doral golf resort and his Washington, DC, luxury hotel. Speculation for months has swirled around the possibility that another company could take over the ailing bank—including rumors that the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, a Chinese state-owned bank, might be interested. This is significant because any entity that controls a large chunk of Trump’s debt holds a certain amount of leverage over him—an unprecedented situation in the history of the US presidency.

Trump has a long relationship with Deutsche Bank dating back to the early 2000s. At the time, most US banks refused to loan money to Trump following his string of bankruptcies and Atlantic City failures. But Deutsche Bank continued to let him borrow hundreds of millions of dollars—as of his inauguration, Trump owed the German bank as much as $364 million. Once a powerful player in international banking, Deutsche Bank has paid out billions in settlements to both US and European regulators for its role in the 2008 financial crisis and other scandals. When Trump took office, he refused to divest from his company, meaning he continues to owe the bank money—several of the loans are personally guaranteed by the president—even as the Department of Justice has opened new investigations into the bank’s activities.

In 2017, the bank paid regulators $670 million in fines for its involvement with “mirror trades” in Russia—a complicated scheme to allegedly help wealthy sanctioned Russians move currency out of the country. Deutsche Bank is also embroiled in a scandal involving Danske Bank, a Danish company, which allegedly was involved in laundering billions of dollars from Russia.

[...]

Thursday’s raid is not related to either of those scandals. In a statement, the bank confirmed it had been raided in connection with offshore transactions revealed in the Panama Papers, and said it is cooperating with the investigation.

  Mother Jones

I don't know what the rules are for finding evidence of another crime while searching documents you got under a specific warrant, but I don't think this means Trump is completely in the clear.

Even as it stands, Deutsche Bank’s ownership is rife with conflict of interest landmines for the president. Currently, Chinese financial giant HNA Group, which has sparred with American regulators, owns 8 percent of the German bank—though it is under pressure to sell that piece. American hedge fund Cerberus Capital—co-founded by Stephen Feinberg, a major Trump donor whom the president appointed to head his intelligence advisory board— owns another 3 percent.

I think we've just simply abandoned the issue of conflict of interest as it might apply to the Trump cabal.

Won't it be interesting if the Chinese government, with whom Trump is trying to win a trade war, would buy Deutsche and inherit Trump's personal debt?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Preparing to obstruct

Like this?

November 2, 2018 CREW has uncovered a previously undisclosed ethics waiver that may represent an effort to clear one of the obstacles to Solicitor General Noel Francisco replacing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as the official overseeing the Russia investigation.

If Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein either resigns or is fired, someone else will have to oversee the Special Counsel investigation. Next in line appears to be Solicitor General Noel Francisco. The problem is that Mr. Francisco has ties to the pending investigation that should preclude his participation.

For one thing, his former law firm, Jones Day, represents the Trump Presidential Campaign in the Special Counsel investigation. Also, Mr. Francisco has a continuing financial relationship with Jones Day, which owes him more than half a million dollars. In addition, he previously appeared before the Justice Department as a member of a “Landing Team” on behalf of the Presidential Transition Team.

[...]

As required by that Executive Order, Mr. Francisco signed an ethics pledge in which he promised that, for two years after joining the government, he would not participate in any investigation in which Jones Day represents a client. That promise means he must stay out of the Special Counsel investigation until at least late January 2019.

However, CREW has discovered that the Trump administration issued Mr. Francisco an ethics waiver on April 24, 2018. The waiver relieves him from any obligation to honor his ethics pledge to recuse from investigations involving Jones Day. The waiver states only that he is relieved of this obligation and offers no justification whatsoever. It simply waives the obligation, thereby eliminating one of the three obstacles to his overseeing the Special Counsel investigation.

The waiver is troubling for a couple of other reasons, as well. First, the Office of Government Ethics maintains an online list of all ethics pledge waivers issued by the Trump administration to political appointees serving outside the White House.

[...]

Second, the signature on Mr. Francisco’s waiver appears to match the signature of former Counsel to the President, Donald McGahn II, that appears on other waivers. Mr. McGahn’s involvement is troubling because he, too, comes from Jones Day and pledged not to participate in any investigation in which Jones Day is representing a party. By authorizing Mr. Francisco to participate in the investigation, Mr. McGahn himself participated in the investigation. Mr. McGahn himself received a limited ethics waiver as to Jones Day, but that waiver only authorizes him to participate in meetings and communications with Jones Day and does not authorize him to take other substantive legal actions like issuing a waiver to Mr. Francisco.

[...]

Notwithstanding these waivers, of course, Mr. Francisco should still recuse from the Special Counsel investigation if Mr. Rosenstein resigns or is fired. There is still the matter of the half a million dollars Jones Day owes him, and there’s his own involvement in the Trump campaign’s landing team to consider.

  CREW

"Should" means nothing to this administration.  Ethics is for losers. If there's not a law preventing it, consider it done.  And, if there is a law preventing it, consider it circumvented in some way.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Build that wall, President Trump

LIMA, Peru — Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela says Trump Organization lawyers made a mistake by sending a letter to his office in which they appealed for the leader’s help in a fight over the control of a luxury hotel.

[...]

Without specifically mentioning Trump, he said it is important for leaders to build a wall between their own private interests and those of the public.

The letter provided hard proof of the sort of conflict experts feared when Trump refused to divest from his sprawling empire of hotels and other interests in more than 20 countries.

  WaPo

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

What law?

The Trump administration recognizes no laws, except for ones that might get Hillary Clinton locked up.



Insane.  That's a good descriptor of our current state of affairs.

The aide's name is John Konkus, in case you come across that in the future. You may have heard it in the past.

Pruitt named Konkus, a Republican political consultant, to serve as the EPA’s deputy associate administrator for public affairs. His duties have included signing off on hundreds of millions in federal grants.

[...]

Prior to joining the Trump administration, Konkus worked as an executive vice president for Jamestown Associates, a political consulting firm. According to the firm’s website last year, Konkus “worked on the ground tirelessly to help President Trump win Florida.”

Konkus also served two years as chief of staff to former Florida Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll. A Republican, Carroll was forced to resign in 2013 over consulting work she had previously done for a scam veteran’s charity that state and federal prosecutors said laundered more than $300 million in proceeds from illegal gambling parlors.

[...]

Along with the information about Konkus’ side jobs, the House Democrats also got a copy of letter approving similar outside employment for Patrick Davis, another Trump political appointee working as a senior adviser for public engagement in the EPA’s regional office in Denver.

Like Konkus, Davis is a Republican political consultant who led Trump’s presidential campaign in Colorado. According to a 2015 report by ProPublica, Davis was accused two years earlier of defrauding a conservative super PAC called Vote2ReduceDebt, which was funded by an elderly oil tycoon. The group collapsed after Davis allegedly paid nearly $3 million of the PAC’s funds to organizations run by him or his close associates, according to the news report.

[...]

An EPA ethics lawyer in February 2017 approved of Davis receiving outside compensation for work as sales director for a company called Telephone Town Hall Meeting, which provides services such as robocalls to political campaigns and advocacy groups.

  AP

The Trump administration: keepin' it classy.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.