TRUMP CORRUPTION INDEX
The Barr Gets Even Lower: This Week in Trumpland Corruption
This week takes us from the attorney general’s pressure campaign against a Fox News personality to more weirdness with Trump’s wall
Is there enough graft, double-dealing, and self-interested chicanery in the Trump administration to publish this column every week? Only time — and Trump — will tell. (But we feel pretty confident.) Presenting this week’s installment of the Trump Corruption Index.
The muzzler-in-chief
CNN correspondent Brian Stelter reports in his new book, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, that Attorney General William Barr met last year with Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch to ask that he “muzzle” Andrew Napolitano, the network’s senior judicial analyst and one of its most vocal critics of the Trump administration. Stelter cites an anonymous source in saying that Trump “was so incensed by the judge’s TV broadcasts that he had implored Barr to send Rupert a message in person.” Sure enough, Napolitano soon after saw his daytime slot disappear and was notably absent from any impeachment coverage.
- Corrupt-o-meter (out of a possible five emojis): 📺📺📺🦊🦊
A developing picture
Sen. Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee last week asking that they investigate the Trump administration’s decision to offer and then rescind a $765 million loan to Kodak to produce ingredients for generic drugs, including the president’s beloved hydroxychloroquine. Warren was baffled as to why the U.S. International Development Finance Corp. (DFC), Trump’s new foreign aid agency, would tap Kodak, a struggling digital camera manufacturer, to manufacture pharmaceuticals. Warren also pointed to Kodak’s lobbying efforts ahead of the loan, and noted with suspicion that Kodak saw its stock price rise in the days leading up to the loan’s announcement. “DFC provided this taxpayer-funded loan to produce an unproven drug to Kodak, a company that had no pharmaceutical manufacturing experience, through an opaque process and after an extensive and unprecedented lobbying effort by the company,” Warren wrote.
- Corrupt-o-meter: 📷📷💊
Pardon me, but that smells like corruption
Miles Taylor, a former employee in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump, said Tuesday that the president tried to convince immigration officials to break the law and close the U.S.-Mexico border by offering to pardon anyone who did so. “It was April of 2019. We were down at the border, and the president said to the senior leadership of the Homeland Security Department behind the scenes, we should not let anyone else into the United States,” Taylor said in an advertisement released by Republican Voters Against Trump. “And even though he had been told on repeated occasions that the way he wanted to do it was illegal, his response was to say, ‘Do it. If you get in trouble, I’ll pardon you.’” A similar allegation appeared in April 2019, in a New York Times story reporting Trump told the then-commissioner of Customs and Border Protection that he would receive a presidential pardon if he blocked off the southern border to migrants.
- Corrupt-o-meter: ⚖️⚖️⚖️🇲🇽🇲🇽
Another brick in the wall
The White House is issuing contracts to construction companies to build a border wall without owning rights to the land on which the wall is supposed to be built, The Intercept reported on Sunday — part of a last-ditch effort ahead of the November election to ramp up its construction timeline and make good on Trump’s promise to voters to “build a wall.” (For all his talk of a wall in 2016, Trump’s only actually built five miles of new construction; otherwise he’s either replaced or reinforced existing fencing.) The Intercept reports that Trump is also ignoring the Real ID waiver process, which provides notification to landowners that a government-backed border wall is heading for their backyard, for expediency’s sake.
- Corrupt-o-meter: 🧱🧱🚧
Pompeo needs to read the employee handbook
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech at the RNC on Tuesday night appears to be in violation of a State Department policy which Pompeo himself approved. “Senate-confirmed Presidential appointees may not even attend a political party convention or convention-related event,” according to a State Department memo sent out in February and obtained by Politico.
- Corrupt-o-meter: 📕📕
More charity for a billionaire
A report out Monday from the Project on Government Oversight, an independent watchdog, found that four coal mining companies owned by Ukrainian oligarch and billionaire Rinat Akhmetov received a total of $21 million in Paycheck Protection Program loans. Akhmetov featured briefly in the Mueller report on Russia’s election interference: Akhmetov had hired lobbyist Paul Manafort — who would later work as campaign chairman for Trump’s 2016 campaign — to consult for one of Ukraine’s political parties, the Party of Regions, and its leader (and the country’s eventual president), Viktor Yanukovych. Akhmetov is also one of two Ukrainian billionaires who appeared in last week’s Senate report on election interference for giving Manafort the funds that would eventually lead to his arrest.
- Corrupt-o-meter: ⚒️⚒️🇺🇦
Buddying up to Broidy
Court documents filed last week allege that the Chinese government tapped Elliott Broidy, the top fundraising official at the Republican National Committee, in 2017 to quietly lobby the White House to deport Guo Wengui, a U.S.-based Chinese businessman who left China in 2014 amid charges of bribery (he denies any wrongdoing). According to the filings, Sun Lijun, China’s then-vice minister of public security, met with Brody in May 2017 in a hotel in Shenzhen; the meeting was allegedly orchestrated by Jho Low, a Malaysian businessman who is said to be behind a multi-billion-dollar fraud at a Malaysian development fund called 1Malaysia Development Bhd, and who just weeks before the meeting had paid Brody $4 million for helping in a separate Justice Department investigation.
- Corrupt-o-meter: 🇨🇳🇨🇳🇨🇳💰💰