What's going on with the Executive Departments

[GreyhoundFan]

40 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

He cites "relentless assaults on you and your team" that "seem to be a blood sport."

Yeah, because Der Trumpenfuhrer and his "team" never attack anyone. Oh please.

[AmazonGrace]

The order of stupidity: Bonehead,  moron, effing moron, rickperry. 

Perry links fossil fuel development to preventing sexual assault

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/358386-rick-perry-fossil-fuels-will-help-prevent-sexual-assault

[candygirl200413]

Here's a snippet but I'm super hoping for the best.

Education officials expect ‘ineffective’ Betsy DeVos to step down as her agenda collapses: report

Quote

President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is “one of the most ineffective people ever to hold the job,” say some insiders, and education officials are already starting to plan for a “post-Devos landscape” when she is removed or steps down.

In a comprehensive profile, Politico said billionaire evangelical Christian DeVos has found herself stymied by the bureaucratic restraints on her job, but that bringing about change in Washington requires “time, patience and government savvy — three things she does not have.”

DeVos, said Politico’s Tim Alberta, is on a “religiously infused journey to reimagine the relationship between government, parents, teachers and schools.”

The Secretary wants to allow parents more freedom to withdraw their children from public schools and enroll them in charter schools, religious schools and private schools. What makes DeVos radical is she wants federal tax dollars to follow those children out of the public school system.

One problem with implementing her plan is that public schools receive very little of their funding from the federal government. Another is her overall unpopularity and ineffectiveness.

Her first budget proposal for the department — one which would have slashed funding from multiple school programs and reapportioned that money to DeVos’ pet cause, “school choice” — was rejected by Congress. Now, with her agenda on the rocks and morale at the Education Department cratering, some predict that DeVos may return to the private sector sooner than she’d planned.

“She can talk about bureaucracy and how constraining it is for her, but a Republican-controlled Congress rejected her budget proposals. She can’t fill her senior staff slots. Morale is terrible at the department,” says Thomas Toch of FutureEd — an education think tank affiliated with Georgetown University’s McCord School of Public Policy. “And I’ll tell you, in Washington education circles, the conversation is already about the post-DeVos landscape, because the assumption is she won’t stay long. And for my money, I don’t think it would be a bad thing if she left. I think she’s been probably one of the most ineffective people to ever hold the job.”

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[GreyhoundFan]

@candygirl200413 -- I'd also love to see her go. Politico did a long profile on her for the November/December magazine. It's far too long to paste here, but I'll share a few snippets:

Quote

Sitting in a second-floor classroom, fielding questions from a dozen students, DeVos likely didn’t win over any of her critics. Asked about the fate of a hypothetical underperforming public school, she said, “The school won’t be able to survive. … Just like we see in lots of other parts of our world, if people don’t choose something, it can’t continue to stay in business.” But for those listening closely, some of the secretary’s answers might have provided relief. The most revelatory exchange came when Kory Gallagher, Kansas City Academy’s principal and government teacher, asked DeVos to explain what her job actually entails. “The Department of Education is there to carry out the laws that are passed by Congress,” she said. “And I think, really key, is that we remember what our role is and not confuse it with the role of Congress—which is to make and pass laws.”

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DeVos may have been Trump’s most controversial Cabinet nominee—the first in American history to require a tiebreaking confirmation vote cast by the vice president. Yet she runs the administration’s smallest and arguably least potent federal department; DeVos does not enforce America’s laws like Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or direct its international relations like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. And after nine months in office, it has become apparent to the education secretary that she has limited power to transform the nation’s schools. When it comes to the most contentious debates surrounding America’s K-12 system—vouchers, standards, incentives, tests—DeVos had more tangible influence as a private citizen in Michigan than she does now in Washington.

Public schools receive little of their funding from the feds—roughly 9.1 percent in the 2015-16 school year, according to the National Education Association—giving Washington minimal leverage over states and localities. The 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), seen as a bipartisan rebuke to the perceived overreach of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, further decentralized much of K-12 decision-making to an unprecedented degree. It’s true that the secretary has more autonomy when it comes to higher education: Student loans and regulatory guidance, among other things, are within her purview. But this is not where DeVos has focused her decades of advocacy work—nor was it the focus of the entrenched resistance warning of her plans to decimate the nation’s public schools.

“It’s ironic that she emerged as the Cabinet nominee to draw the strongest and most visceral opposition, given the constraints on the ability of any secretary of education to effect dramatic change in American education,” says Martin West, an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who served as Mitt Romney’s top education adviser in 2012. “Those constraints are greater now than ever given the restrictions on the secretary’s authority that were built into ESSA.”

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But she clearly had more ambitious aims when taking the job—and has grown frustrated at her inability to achieve them. In several interviews this fall with Politico Magazine, DeVos repeatedly returns to the word “bureaucracy”: how it smothers creativity, blocks innovation, slows change to a glacial pace. When I ask what has surprised her most about the job, DeVos does not hesitate. “The bureaucracy is much more formidable and difficult than I had anticipated—and I expected it to be difficult,” she says. “It’s even worse. And you know, in talking to a lot of the great career staff, it’s like everybody nods their heads when you talk about this … yet it seems like everyone is powerless to do anything about it.”

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For now she has taken a narrower tack, rolling back Obama-era regulations governing higher ed and using her megaphone to preach the gospel of free-market education. Accomplishing any version of her life’s mission—disrupting the K-12 system—hinges on whether she can persuade Congress to alter its model for funding education policy nationwide. And in her first try, earlier this year, she failed.

If there’s one thing DeVos has learned so far, it’s that getting your way in Washington requires time, patience and government savvy—three things she does not have. Armed with ideas, and having transitioned from successful outsider to struggling insider—becoming Public Enemy No. 2 in the process—Betsy DeVos is still capable of shaking up American education. But not to the extent she or her enemies once imagined.

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The corner office on the Department of Education’s seventh floor is a sterile, placid space, with charcoal-colored carpet and fluorescent lighting. The towering bookcases lining the rear walls are nearly empty, save for a few scattered trinkets. Facing them from across the room sits DeVos at her espresso-finished desk, her binder and a small stack of documents neatly organized, as she writes thank-you notes to people she met on last week’s tour. She sips from a white carton that reads, “BOXED WATER IS BETTER,” explaining that the packaging is more environmentally friendly than plastic—and, upon further questioning, sheepishly admitting that her family actually owns the company.

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In retrospect, DeVos tells me, she blames the transition team for its handling of her confirmation. “I think I was undercoached,” she says. “The transition group was very circumspect about how much information they gave me about then-current policy and … it was in their view a balance between being prepared for a confirmation hearing and not having well-formed opinions on what should or shouldn’t change, so as not to get caught in a confirmation hearing making commitments that then I wouldn’t want to or be able to keep. And in hindsight, I wish I had a whole lot more information.”

She also flashes irritation recalling how she wasn’t permitted to do any interviews of her own, not even “Good Morning America” or a similarly friendly venue from which to defend herself. “During the confirmation process, I wasn’t able to talk with the media at all. I wasn’t able to express anything from my perspective,” she says. “So it gave weeks and weeks of open shots for my opponents to take.”

Of course, these things were interrelated: DeVos’ manifest lack of knowledge about the department’s portfolio spawned negative news coverage. After two Republican senators defected, it took Pence’s historic vote to confirm her. (She keeps a framed replica of that Senate roll-call record in her office.) The “weeks and weeks of open shots” put DeVos at a deficit entering the Education Department. And despite her best efforts to learn the culture and gain acceptance—she walked every floor of the department’s D.C. buildings her first day and greeted every employee she could find—DeVos today seems to be treading water.

She has yet to fill senior staff positions, and it’s widely known that numerous prominent Republicans having turned down offers. She has struggled to acclimate to the proverbial big ship that turns slowly. Perhaps most significant, she failed to persuade the committees of jurisdiction in Congress to approve her and the department’s budget request, which would have slashed funding to other initiatives in the name of expanding DeVos’ pet cause, school choice. It amounted to an embarrassing repudiation of a president and a secretary in their first year, when there is traditionally the most political capital to spend—especially considering Republicans control both the House and Senate.

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“She can talk about bureaucracy and how constraining it is for her, but a Republican-controlled Congress rejected her budget proposals. She can’t fill her senior staff slots. Morale is terrible at the department,” says Thomas Toch, the director of FutureEd, an independent education think tank at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy. “And I’ll tell you, in Washington education circles, the conversation is already about the post-DeVos landscape, because the assumption is she won’t stay long. And for my money, I don’t think it would be a bad thing if she left. I think she’s been probably one of the most ineffective people to ever hold the job.”

That assessment was somewhat harsher than those I heard from a handful of department employees. They were startled by DeVos’ nomination and remain uninspired by her command of internal processes. Yet the response to most questions about the department’s vitality is a collective shrug—the implication being that DeVos has realized she can only do so much, and has shown neither the appetite nor the ability to do more.

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For all the lack of authority to remake K-12, the education secretary enjoys significant leverage in American higher education. This has resulted in some predictable swings in policy based on the politics of the administration in power, and in DeVos’ case that has meant undoing much of what Obama’s secretaries did.

Already since taking office, DeVos’ department has deregulated the for-profit college industry that was targeted by Obama for its abuses and lack of accountability; revised the rule for defrauded students to gain loan forgiveness; attempted to consolidate all student loans under one servicing company, a plan she later abandoned; and, most notably, rescinded the Obama-era guidance on Title IX as it pertained to sexual assault cases on campus.

To DeVos and her counterparts at other agencies, Obama’s overreach offers easy early victories that align with Trump’s anti-regulatory zeal and a laissez-faire approach to government. To opponents, it speaks to the administration’s lack of constructive goals. “It’s hard watching someone whose only vision is undoing everything we did for eight years,” says Matt Lehrich, an Obama appointee to the department who served under secretaries Arne Duncan and John King.

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This sort of nuance has been swept away by the passion of education debates and, more broadly, the frenzied nature of the Trump news cycle. But if the education of Betsy DeVos has been discovering the relative limits of her authority on the job, the American people, if they study her closely, might find themselves learning a similar lesson.

“There were some students who said, ‘We shouldn’t let her in,’ and there was some education to do on our end,” Gallagher, the Kansas City Academy principal, told me after DeVos’ visit. “It’s like, ‘Guys, the Department of Education on the federal level is not the beast you imagined it to be.’” Gallagher glanced toward his kids and told me of a classroom discussion earlier this year. “Our students were very upset about the transgender bathroom reversal. And I had to have a conversation, ‘Guys, it actually wasn’t the Department of Education. That’s the Department of Justice,’” he said. “‘I understand your anger. I’m with you. But she didn’t do that. So let’s try to be responsible about what we’re attributing to her and what we’re not.’”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump administration releases report finding ‘no convincing alternative explanation’ for climate change"

Spoiler

The Trump administration released a dire scientific report Friday detailing the growing threats of climate change. The report stands in stark contrast to the administration’s efforts to downplay humans’ role in global warming, withdraw from an international climate accord and reverse Obama-era policies aimed at curbing America’s greenhouse-gas output.

The White House did not seek to prevent the release of the government’s National Climate Assessment, which is mandated by law, despite the fact that its findings sharply contradict the administration’s policies. The report affirms that climate change is driven almost entirely by human action, warns of potential sea level rise as high as 8 feet by the year 2100, and enumerates myriad climate-related damages across the United States that are already occurring due to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming since 1900.

“It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” the document reports. “For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.”

The report’s release underscores the extent to which the machinery of the federal scientific establishment, operating in multiple agencies across the government, continues to grind on even as top administration officials have minimized or disparaged its findings. Federal scientists have continued to author papers and issue reports on climate change, for example, even as political appointees have altered the wording of news releases or blocked civil servants from speaking about their conclusions in public forums. The climate assessment process is dictated by a 1990 law that Democratic and Republican administrations have followed.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and President Trump have all questioned the extent of humans’ contribution to climate change. One of EPA’s Web pages posted scientific conclusions similar to those in the new report until earlier this year, when Pruitt’s deputies ordered it removed.

The report comes as President Trump and members of his Cabinet are working to promote U.S. fossil fuel production and repeal several federal rules aimed at curbing the nation’s carbon output, including ones limiting greenhouse-gas emissions from existing power plants, oil and gas operations on federal land and carbon emissions from cars and trucks. Trump has also announced he will exit the Paris climate agreement, under which the U.S. has pledged to cut its overall greenhouse-gas emissions between 26 percent and 28 percent compared to 2005 levels by 2025.

The report could have considerable legal and policy significance, as the scientific matter provides new and stronger support for EPA’s greenhouse gas “endangerment finding” under the Clean Air Act, which lays the foundation for regulations on emissions.

“This is a federal government report whose contents completely undercut their policies, completely undercut the statements made by senior members of the administration,” said Phil Duffy, the director of the Woods Hole Research Center.

The government is required to produce the National Assessment every four years. This time, the report is split into two documents, one that lays out the fundamental science of climate change and the other that shows how the United States is being impacted on a regional basis. Combined, the two documents total over 2,000 pages.

The first document, called the Climate Science Special Report, is now a finalized report, having been peer reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences and vetted by experts across government agencies. It was formally unveiled Friday.

“I think this report is basically the most comprehensive climate science report in the world right now,” said Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers who is an expert on sea-level rise and served as one of the report’s lead authors.

It affirms that the U.S. is already experiencing more extreme heat and rainfall events and more large wildfires in the West, that more than 25 U.S. coastal cities are already experiencing more flooding, and that seas could rise by between 1 and 4 feet by the year 2100, and perhaps even more than that if Antarctica proves to be unstable, as is currently feared. The report says that a rise of over 8 feet is “physically possible” with high levels of greenhouse-gas emissions, but there’s no way right now to predict how likely it is to happen.

When it comes to rapidly escalating levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the report states, “there is no climate analog for this century at any time in at least  the last 50 million years.”

Most striking, perhaps, the report warns of the unpredictable — changes that scientists cannot foresee that could involve tipping points or fast changes in the climate system. These could switch the climate into “new states that are very different from those experienced in the recent past.”

Given these strong statements — and how they contradict Trump administration statements and policies — some members of the scientific community had speculated that the administration might refuse to publish the report or alter its conclusions. During the last Republican presidential administration, that of George W. Bush, the national assessment process was highly controversial, and a senior official at the White House Council on Environmental Quality edited aspects of some government science reports.

Yet multiple experts, as well as some administration officials and federal scientists, said that Trump political appointees did not change the special report’s scientific conclusions. While some edits have been made to its final version — for instance, omitting or softening some references to the Paris climate agreement — those are focused on policy.

A senior administration official, who asked for anonymity because the process is still underway, said in an interview that top Trump officials decided to put out the assessment without changing the findings of its contributors even if some appointees may have different views.

A federal scientist involved in writing the report, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the press, said that political appointees made no effort to change the scientific findings after being briefed on them.

Glynis Lough, who is deputy director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists and had served as chief of staff for the National Climate Assessment at the U.S. Global Change Research Program until mid-2016, said in an interview that the changes made by government officials to the latest report “are consistent with the types of changes that were made in the previous administration for the 2014 National Climate Assessment, to avoid policy prescriptiveness.”

Perhaps no agency under Trump has tried to downplay and undermine climate science more than the EPA. Most recently, political appointees at the EPA instructed two agency scientists and one contractor not to speak as planned at a scientific conference in Rhode Island. The conference marked the culmination of a three-year report on the status of Narragansett Bay, New England’s largest estuary, in which climate change featured prominently.

The EPA also has altered parts of its website containing detailed climate data and scientific information. As part of that overhaul, in April the agency took down pages that had existed for years and contained a wealth of information on the scientific causes of global warming, its consequences and ways for communities to mitigate or adapt. The agency said it was simply making changes to better reflect the new administration’s priorities, and that any pages taken down would be archived.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has repeatedly advocated for the creation of a governmentwide “red team/blue team” exercise, in which a group of outside critics would challenge the validity of mainstream scientific conclusions around climate change.

Other departments have also removed climate change documents online: Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, for example, no longer provides access to documents assessing the danger that future warming poses to deserts in the Southwest.

And when U.S. Geological Survey scientists working with international researchers published an article in the journal Nature evaluating how climate change and human population growth would affect where rain-fed agriculture could thrive, USGS published a news release that omitted the words “climate change” altogether.

The Agriculture Department’s climate hubs, however, remain freely available online. And researchers at the U.S. Forest Service have continued to publish papers this year on how climate change is affecting wildfires, wetlands and aquatic habitat across the country.

While the Trump administration has not altered the new climate science report substantially, it is already coming under fire from some of the administration’s allies.

The day before it was published, Steven Koonin, a New York University physicist who has met with EPA administrator Scott Pruitt and advocated for the “red team/blue team” exercise, pre-emptively criticized the document in the Wall Street Journal, calling it “deceptive.”

Koonin argued that the report “ominously notes that while global sea level rose an average 0.05 inch a year during most of the 20th century, it has risen at about twice that rate since 1993. But it fails to mention that the rate fluctuated by comparable amounts several times during the 20th century.”

But one of the report’s authors suggested Koonin is creating a straw man. “The report does not state that the rate since 1993 is the fastest than during any comparable period since 1900 (though in my informal assessment it likely is), which is the non-statement Steve seems to be objecting to,” Kopp countered by email.

Still, the line of criticism could be amplified by conservatives in the coming days.

Meanwhile, the administration also released, in draft form, the longer volume 2 of the National Climate Assessment, which looks at regional impacts across the United States. This document is not final, but is now available for public comment and will itself now begin a peer review process, with final publication expected in late 2018.

Already, however, it is possible to discern some of what it will conclude. For instance, a peer reviewed Environmental Protection Agency technical document released to inform the assessment finds that the monetary costs of climate change in the U.S. could be dramatic.

That document, dubbed the Climate Change Impacts and Risk Analysis, finds that in a high end warming scenario, high temperatures could lead to the loss per year of “almost 1.9 billion labor hours across the national workforce” by 2090. That would mean $ 160 billion annually in lost income to workers.

With high levels of warming, coastal property damages in 2090 could total another $ 120 billion annually, and deaths from temperature extremes could reach 9,300 per year, or in monetized terms, $ 140 billion annually in damages. Additional tens of billions annually could occur in the form of damages to roads, rail lines, and electrical infrastructure, the report finds.

This could all be lessened considerably, the report notes, if warming is held to lower levels.

I wonder how and why Pruitt didn't squash this report.

[WiseGirl]

16 hours ago, candygirl200413 said:

Here's a snippet but I'm super hoping for the best.

Education officials expect ‘ineffective’ Betsy DeVos to step down as her agenda collapses: report

 

 

As a teacher make my dreams come to fruition and let this be true!

[GreyhoundFan]

"Protected status no longer justified for Central Americans and Haitians in U.S., State Dept. says"

Spoiler

More than 300,000 Central Americans and Haitians living in the United States under a form of temporary permission no longer need to be shielded from deportation, the State Department told Homeland Security officials this week, a few days ahead of a highly anticipated DHS announcement about whether to renew that protection.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sent a letter to acting DHS secretary Elaine Duke to inform her that conditions in Central America and Haiti that had been used to justify the protection no longer necessitate a reprieve for the migrants, some of whom have been allowed to live and work in the United States for 20 years under a program known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

Tillerson’s assessment, required by law, has not been made public, but its recommendations were confirmed by several administration officials familiar with its contents. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

DHS has until Monday to announce its plans for roughly 57,000 Hondurans and 2,500 Nicaraguans whose TPS protections will expire in early January. Although most arrived here illegally, they were exempted from deportation after Hurricane Mitch devastated Central America in 1998. Their TPS protections have been renewed routinely since then, in some cases following additional natural disasters and resulting insecurity.

Congress established TPS in 1990 to protect foreign nationals from being returned to their countries amid instability and precarious conditions caused by natural disasters or armed conflict.

Trump administration officials have repeatedly noted that the program was meant to be temporary — not a way for people to become long-term residents of the United States. Officials said that long-ago disasters should not be used to extend provisional immigration status when the initial justification for it no longer exists.

Tillerson’s assessment is consistent with broader administration efforts to reduce immigration to the United States and comply with legal restrictions that it maintains have been loosely enforced in the past.

“It is fair to say that this administration is interpreting the law, exactly as it is, which the previous one did not,” an administration official said.

The official acknowledged that the countries in question continue to suffer from problems of poverty, corruption and violence that, in many cases, have spurred illegal migration. But, the official said, those conditions should be addressed in other ways.

“The solution is going to require working with Congress and these countries,” the official said. “We are equally committed to finding that. There is no lack of empathy here.”

But “with this particular law,” the official said, “it is very clear to this administration what needs to be done.”

Administration officials have also said that the return of tens of thousands of migrants could benefit the Central American nations and Haiti, because their citizens will return with job skills, democratic values and personal savings acquired from living long term in the United States.

Many of the immigrants have homes, businesses and U.S.-born children, but if the protections expire, they could be subject to arrest and deportation. “We understand this is a very difficult decision,” the administration official said.

DHS officials declined to say Friday what the agency planned to do, or when an announcement would be made.

“The acting secretary has made no decision on TPS,” said Tyler Houlton, a spokesman for the agency.

Tillerson’s letter does not amount to a recommendation. But DHS is required to seek the agency’s input, and officials said the State Department’s position carries significant weight.

The largest group of TPS recipients — about 200,000 — are from El Salvador, and DHS has until early January to announce its plans for them. At least 30,000 of them live in the Washington area, according to immigrant advocacy groups.

When the Obama administration last extended TPS for the Salvadorans, in July 2016, it said that they were eligible because conditions justifying it continued to be met.

“There continues to be a substantial, but temporary, disruption of living conditions in El Salvador resulting from a series of earthquakes in 2001,” Homeland Security officials said at the time, “and El Salvador remains unable, temporarily, to handle adequately the return of its nationals.”

DHS must also decide what to do with about 50,000 Haitian TPS recipients by Thanksgiving Day. The Haitians, who are concentrated in South Florida, received TPS after a 2010 earthquake that killed 200,000.

Advocates say removing TPS would be a cruel blow to long-standing, law-abiding immigrants, forcing them to decide between remaining in the country illegally or leaving their homes and families. According to a recent study by the left-leaning Center for American Progress, TPS recipients have nearly 275,000 U.S.-born children.

If recipients lose their protections but defy orders to leave, it would not be difficult for immigration enforcement agents to find them. The provisional nature of their status requires them to maintain current records with DHS; the agency has their addresses, phone numbers and other personal information.

“Terminating TPS at this time would be inhumane and untenable,” a group of Catholic charity leaders wrote to Duke in a recent letter, arguing that it would “needlessly add large numbers of Hondurans and Salvadorans to the undocumented population in the U.S., lead to family separation, and unnecessarily cause the Department of Homeland Security to expend resources on individuals who are already registered with our government and whose safe return is forestalled by dire humanitarian circumstances.”

If DHS ends the TPS protections, it is expected to grant recipients a grace period of at least six months or more to give them time to prepare for departure.

In May, then-DHS Secretary John F. Kelly extended TPS for Haitians for six months, far less than the 18-month waivers granted by the Obama administration.

Kelly, in a statement at the time, called the six-month window a “limited” extension whose purpose was to “allow Haitian TPS recipients living in the United States time to attain travel documents and make other necessary arrangements for their ultimate departure from the United States.”

Haiti is the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country and remains in the grips of a cholera epidemic triggered by U.N. troops who were sent after the earthquake.

Advocates of reduced immigration say the Haiti decision will be a key test of the administration’s willingness to follow through on its by-the-books rhetoric.

Immigration experts believe many of the Haitians could attempt to seek refuge in Canada, particularly French-speaking Quebec, to avoid arrest and deportation.

Shaking my head. The administration saying that the return of the migrants would benefit their home countries is unbelievable.

[WiseGirl]

Did I miss this in another thread? Someone else with Russian ties? Imagine that?

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/05/trump-commerce-secretary-wilbur-ross-business-links-putin-family-paradise-papers

 

[Zola]

I keep thinking about this quote from Patti Davis, which is almost uncomfortably apt:

"I would just like to point out that I have never seen a group of people acquainted with so many Russians. I’ve met two Russian people in my entire life, and one of them was a refrigerator repair man. The fact that every other person the Trumps know is Russian should have tipped us off a year ago that something was amiss."

[Howl]

17 hours ago, WiseGirl said:

Did I miss this in another thread? Someone else with Russian ties? Imagine that?

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/05/trump-commerce-secretary-wilbur-ross-business-links-putin-family-paradise-papers

Holy crapola!  And Ross' spokesperson spokesliar was fibbing all over the place. There's a link in this article to another Guardian article about the wealthy and powerful children and grandchildren of Russian elites connected to Putin: Russia's new princelings

[GreyhoundFan]

Sigh: "Diplomats fear Tillerson transparency push is linked to Clinton emails"

Spoiler

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s assignment of as many as several hundred State Department officials to quickly clear a huge backlog of public records requests is being met with deep skepticism by rank-and-file employees.

Tillerson says his goal is transparency. But many State workers fear the real reason is political: expediting the public release of thousands of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s official emails.

The staffers also suspect the move — which will reassign many of them from far more substantive duties and has already sparked a union complaint — is meant to force many of them to resign out of frustration with what are essentially clerical positions.

The issue spotlights the deepening distrust toward Tillerson at Foggy Bottom, where his attempts to restructure the department, cut its budget and centralize policymaking have already hurt morale. But it is drawing applause from conservative groups, which have been pressuring Tillerson to act on a backlog of 13,000 Freedom of Information Act requests — many of them relating to emails and other records from Clinton’s tenure.

“We haven't understood why there's been a slow-walking of releasing records, and we've been quite public in counseling the administration to take an approach of extreme transparency,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative activist group that has sued the Trump administration for more Clinton documents.

“It looks like someone's listening,” Fitton added.

Current and former career diplomats scoff at such talk. They say the real story is Tillerson’s contempt for a State Department workforce he sees as bloated, and one that President Donald Trump views as a Democratic stronghold loyal to Clinton, who served as secretary of state from 2009-13.

While many of the people assigned to open-records duty are lower-level staffers and interns, some have previously held prestigious posts, helping shape U.S. foreign policy and engaging in high-level diplomacy.

"Nothing better illustrates the view of the Trump administration that U.S. diplomats are nothing more than overpaid clerks," said Thomas Countryman, a retired career foreign service officer who served as assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration.

Tillerson announced his decision to ramp up FOIA processing in an Oct. 17 email to State employees. Tillerson has set an ambitious — some say implausible — goal of clearing the backlog by the end of this year.

Suspicions around his motivation are being fueled in part by an Oct. 27 CNN report that, citing unnamed sources, said Trump is pushing the State Department to release any remaining Clinton emails it may still have and that the president had asked Tillerson to clear the department's backlog of unfulfilled records requests.

According to Judicial Watch, the State Department has yet to process about 40,000 pages of at least 72,000 records that contain Clinton emails. However, State Department officials have indicated they believe that many of those still-unreleased documents are duplicates of information already shared with the public. Recent waves of releases of Clinton-related records have yielded little fresh material.

Tillerson's email made no mention of Clinton, Trump's Democratic rival in the 2016 presidential election. But many of the outstanding open-records requests are related to her tenure as secretary of state and have become a subject of intense interest among conservative activists who say the Trump administration hasn’t done enough to act on them.

“There has been no substantial change whatsoever in the Rex Tillerson State Department or the Jeff Sessions Justice Department about Mrs. Clinton’s emails,” legal analyst Andrew Napolitano told Fox Business Network in August.

Tillerson’s email said the department’s FOIA backlog stretches back roughly a decade and would take at least two years to clear without more resources. To cut that time, the department will commit more people to open-records duty and streamline the process so as to move toward a "goal of a more responsive, more accountable, and more transparent State Department," Tillerson wrote.

Tillerson did not say how many State officials would be reassigned, but sources familiar with the situation say hundreds of State staffers will be affected, either part-time or full-time, because every bureau has been told to commit people to review and release records. The sources also said Tillerson is calling for the backlog to be cleared by the end of the year, a goal that may prove impossible.

"It's a remarkable misuse of resources to advance what is at its core a partisan political aim," one affected State employee said. "We all know what's going on. And, of course, we're all unhappy that we're being made a part of it."

The State Department's press section did not respond to questions from POLITICO about whether Tillerson is motivated by a desire to release the Clinton emails, instead issuing a statement largely echoing Tillerson's Oct. 17 memo. But White House spokesman Raj Shah cast Tillerson's open records drive as part of Trump's overall goal to see all government agencies be more transparent.

“The State Department has already begun work to reduce one of the worst backlogs in the federal government and the administration has issued guidance instructing all agencies to increase efficiency and reduce FOIA backlogs," Shah wrote in an email. “This is the people’s government, and decades of waiting for records the government is obligated to produce is no longer acceptable.”

Government watchdogs, however, say they’ve seen no signs of similar initiatives at other departments and agencies.

“In particular, there has been no comparable involvement by an agency head like Secretary Tillerson in the FOIA process lately,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy. “But the backlog at State is particularly large, driven in part by a focus on former-Secretary Clinton and her tenure in the department.”

The State Department is a favorite target of open records requests from journalists as well as activist organizations, and past secretaries of state have struggled to contain the mushrooming requests. The demand for Clinton's emails, sparked by revelations in 2015 that she had used a private server while secretary of state, shed an especially harsh light on State's sluggish record-release process.

John Kerry, Tillerson's predecessor as secretary of state, named a transparency coordinator to try to speed things up. Kerry’s FOIA surge called for the addition of 50 reviewers and administrative staff; many of the reviewers were retired foreign service officers brought back on board to help out.

Moira Whelan, who served as a deputy assistant secretary under Kerry, downplayed diplomats' concerns that Tillerson's FOIA push is an anti-Clinton drive.

“If more right-wing groups are FOIA-ing than left-wing groups, that is what it is — it’s FOIA, it’s a system for everyone," she said. "It doesn’t matter what the motivation is. Any secretary should try to make it a priority."

Still, a State Department official familiar with the situation told POLITICO that the initiative is "causing panic in some managers as well as foreign service officers because Human Resources needs to pull bodies to the FOIA office." Competition for other assignments also has intensified as people try to avoid being "FOIA'd."

Tillerson’s FOIA push also is leading many employees, who hail from both the civil service and the foreign service, to consider quitting the State Department altogether.

That may help Tillerson fulfill another goal: trimming State's head count. The secretary has said he wants to cut at least 2,300 positions through a combination of buyouts and attrition. The department's press office did not respond to a request for information about how close Tillerson is to achieving that goal. The State Department has 75,000 employees across the world.

Tillerson also has moved to shut down more than 30 special envoy offices — including that of the transparency coordinator — and staffers from some of those offices may be shifted over to FOIA duty.

In the wake of Tillerson's email, representatives with the American Federation of Government Employees have filed a complaint on behalf of civil servants being given open-records duties at State. A union official said the complaint, lodged with the Federal Labor Relations Authority, requests an investigation into whether the department is violating labor laws by changing people’s working conditions without negotiating with the union.

Tillerson's push to clear the FOIA backlog is in some ways fitting with his professional background.

As a former CEO of ExxonMobil, Tillerson has long been interested in organizational challenges. And, even as the U.S. faces major diplomatic tests, such as how to deal with North Korea's nuclear program and counter Iran's moves in the Middle East, Tillerson has said the "most important" thing he can do is reshape the State Department to be more effective and efficient.

On the other hand, Tillerson's critics note, ExxonMobil was not known for being transparent under Tillerson. And since taking over as secretary in February, Tillerson has largely avoided the spotlight. He also has centralized decision-making to himself and a handful of aides to such a degree that much of the department's rank and file feels sidelined.

...but her emails... Sigh.

[AmazonGrace]

 

I know we are all shocked to hear but Wilbur Ross is a liar. 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2017/11/07/the-case-of-wilbur-ross-phantom-2-billion/#4514fe237515

The Case Of Wilbur Ross' Phantom $2 Billion

Fresh off a tour through Thailand, Laos and China, United States Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross Jr. picked up the phone on a Sunday afternoon in October to discuss something deeply personal: how much money he has. A year earlier, Forbes had listed his net worth at $2.9 billion on The Forbes 400, a number Ross claimed was far too low: He maintained he was closer to $3.7 billion. Now, after examining the financial-disclosure forms he filed after his nomination to President Donald Trump's Cabinet, which showed less than $700 million in assets, Forbes was intent on removing him entirely.

Ross protested, citing trusts for his family that he said he did not have to disclose in federal filings. "You're apparently not counting those, which are more than $2 billion," he said. When asked for documentation, the 79-year-old demurred, citing "privacy issues." Told that Forbes nonetheless planned to remove him from the list for the first time in 13 years, he responded: "As long as you explain that the reason is that assets were put into trust, I'm fine with that." And when did he make the transfer that allowed him to not disclose over $2 billion? "Between the election and the nomination."

So began the mystery of Wilbur Ross' missing $2 billion. And after one month of digging, Forbes is confident it has found the answer: That money never existed. It seems clear that Ross lied to us, the latest in an apparent sequence of fibs, exaggerations, omissions, fabrications and whoppers that have been going on with Forbes since 2004.

Spoiler

 

In addition to just padding his ego, Ross' machinations helped bolster his standing in a way that translated into business opportunities. And based on our interviews with ten former employees at Ross' private equity firm, WL Ross & Co., who all confirmed parts of the same story line, his penchant for misleading extended to colleagues and investors, resulting in millions of dollars in fines, tens of millions refunded to backers and numerous lawsuits. Additionally, according to six U.S. senators, Ross failed to initially mention 19 suits in response to a questionnaire during his confirmation process.

Nearly a week before this article went to press, both Ross and his team at the Commerce Department were sent a detailed list of questions. "Secretary Ross has filed all required disclosures in accordance with the law and in consultation with both legal counsel and ethics officials at the Department of Commerce and Office of Government Ethics. As we have said before, any misunderstanding from your previous conversation with Secretary Ross is unfortunate." They declined to provide further answers on the record.

But Ross' questionable assertions to Forbes, combined with a recent controversy about a multimillion-dollar stake in a shipping company that does big business with close associates of Vladimir Putin, paint a clearer picture of the commerce secretary's tactics. His slippery statements during his confirmation hearings--"I intend to be quite scrupulous about recusal and any topic where there is the slightest scintilla of doubt"--came as no surprise to those who have known Ross for decades.

Recommended by Forbes

"Wilbur doesn't have an issue with bending the truth," says David Wax, who worked alongside Ross for 25 years and served as the No. 3 person in his firm. Another former colleague, who requested anonymity, was less circumspect: "He's lied to a lot of people."

Twenty-six years before Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, Wilbur Ross disappeared. It was 1990, corporate America was sick on junk bonds, and Ross was a top bankruptcy negotiator. But one November day, he failed to show up at an important meeting to brief bondholders in a furniture company's bankruptcy. They didn't know where he had gone.

Until they went home and turned on the television. There was Ross, with Donald Trump, announcing a deal to recapitalize Trump's Taj Mahal casino, which was then careening toward bankruptcy. They were technically adversaries, with Ross representing one group of bondholders--at one point Trump asked them to fire Ross after he dismissed a Trump proposal to keep 100% of his equity, saying, "It's too early for Christmas." But Ross eventually brokered a deal among Trump, debt holder Carl Icahn and Ross' own clients that allowed Trump to keep a 50% stake. "I think [Ross] is very talented, a fantastic negotiator," Trump said at the time.

The son of a judge, he always has been. He grew up in New Jersey, attended Yale and then Harvard Business School and eventually wound up as the bankruptcy work-out specialist at the investment bank Rothschild, where he was known for his ability to quickly distill complex situations. "He was very, very sharp," says someone who worked with him back then. "Very tough." By the early 1990s, his unit was bringing in around $18 million a year, with Ross personally pocketing more than a third of that.

Ross was an extremely well-paid professional, but he yearned for the big money and big spotlight that come with having your own shop. "People knew of him," says another former colleague, "but not on his own." At first, he worked within Rothschild, raising $200 million for an internal private equity fund that would leverage his bankruptcy expertise to pick up companies on the cheap. Three years later, in 2000, he bought out the fund and slapped his name on the door. At 62, when most investment bankers start dabbling in golf and vineyards, Ross was poised to claim some glory for himself. Says Wax: "He viewed it as an opportunity to have a pulpit, to name something after himself and to potentially make a lot of money."

Ross quickly accomplished all three of those things. In 2002, his firm invested in the bankrupt steelmaker LTV. According to a Harvard Business School case study, LTV had put $1.2 billion into new plants and equipment but laid off 7,500 union employees and faced a $3.4 billion pension burden. As a master of work-outs, Ross knew he could get the federal government to take over the pensions. According to people who worked at the firm then, Ross told the unions he'd buy the business if they let him hire back just 3,500 workers. Figuring 3,500 jobs were better than none, the union agreed, and WL Ross picked up most of LTV's assets, without the pension headaches, for $135 million and about $165 million in annual environmental liabilities.

Ross' timing was impeccable. One week later, President George W. Bush issued a stiff tariff on steel imports, sending U.S. prices soaring and making Ross look like a genius. He rolled up several more steel companies, including Bethlehem Steel, into International Steel Group, which filed for an IPO in 2003.

Ross was technically the beneficial owner of nearly $1 billion worth of the stock. But most of that belonged to his investors, not Ross personally. In 2005, Indian billionaire Lakshmi Mittal bought the business for around $4.5 billion in cash and stock.

Ross personally invested only about $3 million in his firm's first two funds, according to former employees. Buoyed by International Steel Group, he roughly tripled that money, but the bigger payout came from carried interest--the manager's cut of overall profits, typically 20%. In all, Ross made an estimated $260 million.

A huge score, yes, though not nearly enough to be one of the 400 richest people in America. But when a Forbes reporter reached out to Ross, apparently crediting him with his investors' money, the future commerce secretary did nothing to clarify the situation, according to notes at the time.

"I just spoke to Ross," the reporter wrote. "He's one of the easiest new guys I've put on [The Forbes 400] in a while. Very low-key, said he didn't really want to be on, but at the same time wasn't going to fight success. He says he doesn't want to juice up his numbers at all."

"I told him we're going to start him at $1 billion," added the reporter, who no longer works at Forbes . "And he said 'Yep, fine, thank you.' "

Ross appeared on The Forbes 400 for the first time in 2004, with a net worth listed at $1 billion. It was nearly four times as much as he was likely worth. "Everyone that I knew that worked with Wilbur knew it wasn't true," says a former colleague of Ross. A legend was born, and like most legends, this one had its roots in a myth.

Within days of that fateful issue of Forbes, Ross married for the third time at a beachside church in Southampton,

New York. His bride, Hilary, 12 years younger, had spent much of her life in the Hamptons and Palm Beach, two of the East Coast's most famous billionaire playgrounds. "She brought him a certain kind of prominence, socially," says David Patrick Columbia, who publishes Hilary's musings on his website, New York Social Diary. "It was a perfect merger." Adds another contemporary: "She wants her husband to be on The Forbes 400."

Life began to change for Ross. Once known for quirky suspenders, he now wore impeccable suits. A workaholic for most of his career, he began spending much of the year outside of New York. He started flying private, built up a collection of paintings by the Belgian artist René Magritte and bought a Palm Beach estate for $13 million.

His fundraising kept pace with his spending. In 2005, he raised a $1.1 billion flagship fund, his largest yet. The next year, he sold WL Ross & Co. to the publicly traded investment-management company Invesco for $100 million up front and the ability to earn an additional $275 million, depending on how much money he was able to raise in later funds.

With Invesco and a big incentive behind him, Ross raised a massive $4.1 billion fund in 2007, putting roughly $70 million of his own money into that one and the 2005 predecessor, according to three former employees. His net worth at this time was likely around $400 million, thanks to the sale of WL Ross & Co. But when contacted by Forbes that year, he gave valuations for his firm's investments as if the money belonged to him. The myth, with Forbes compounding it based on our original mistake and Ross' exhortations, got bigger. Now Forbes listed Ross with a net worth of $1.7 billion.

That wasn't enough. "I would say the total now is a bit more than $2 billion," Ross wrote in a 2011 email, according to notes taken at the time. In 2013, a different Forbes reporter realized that prior estimates seemed to include not just Ross' money but that of the investors in his funds. Ross strung us along, leading us to believe he would provide evidence of his assets, but never did. Just months later, he was insisting that he was even richer, and Forbes continued to largely fall for it. "2.75 [billion] is a bit low but probably close enough," he wrote in an email around the start of 2014. In September, he was arguing for a valuation of $3.45 billion but begrudgingly accepted a smaller figure: "3.1 [billion] is low, but I understand why you wish to be conservative."

Why wouldn't Ross be satisfied with $400 million? "You're talking about someone as egotistical as they come," Wax says. Five other former employees add a more tangible reason: The more money Ross appeared to be worth, the more money investors seemed willing to give him. "Really, for us, it was a bet on him, " says Sam Green, who helped put $300 million into Ross' funds on behalf of the Oregon Public Employees Retirement Fund, citing his personal wealth as one factor. "I don't know of any better indicator of future success than having been successful in the past." Ross had seemed to figure out how to make fake numbers generate real assets.

In 2010, Ross set out to raise a new private equity fund, hoping to come up with another $4 billion. It was an audacious goal in the wake of the financial crisis, far more than many of his partners thought would be possible. After two years of fundraising, Ross closed it with just $640 million of investments. Still, he told the media he had raised $2.2 billion. Technically true but also misleading. Most of the other $1.6 billion or so came from other funds or accounts that paid little or no fee to Invesco. Given that shareholders might assume that the firm had an extra $2.2 billion of assets generating fees for its private equity arm, which was not true, Invesco later clarified the matter on an earnings call.

There were also charges related to transparency inside the funds. In August 2016, the SEC announced a settlement with Invesco-owned WL Ross after investigating whether the firm had charged its investors improper fees from 2001 to 2011. WL Ross agreed to pay a $2.3 million fine, without admitting or denying the findings of the investigation. It also agreed to refund $11.8 million to investors. And that was small potatoes: Buried in its 2015 annual report, Invesco disclosed that it had paid an additional $43 million in reimbursements and regulatory expenses associated with its private equity business in the previous two years. The filings don't explicitly connect that money to WL Ross--and these payments have never before been reported--but four former employees said they were all tied to Wilbur Ross' firm. Invesco declined to comment for this story.

In 2012, Ross' longtime No. 2, David Storper, left the firm but said he retained interests in many of the funds. Three years later, Storper alleged in a lawsuit that the firm sent him inaccurate financial information after his departure and that Wilbur Ross stole his interests outright. Ross denied the allegations, and the lawsuit remains ongoing. A few years earlier, a vice chairman of WL Ross sued Wilbur Ross for more than $20 million, alleging that Ross tried to cut him out of interest and fees he had been promised. The parties had reached a settlement by 2007, which former employees say cost about $10 million.

The Storper case has other ex-employees looking back to be sure they were sent proper information. Joseph Mullin, a former member of WL Ross' 15-person investment team, filed his own suit against WL Ross & Co., also alleging that Ross took his interests after he left. The firm filed a motion to dismiss in February, but the case remains active. A third ex-colleague, who is not in litigation, argues that Ross' tactics went beyond hard-nosed negotiating: "Everybody does some cheating, everybody does some lying. Not everybody steals from their employees."

On November 8, 2016, the night that upended American politics, Wilbur Ross was with Donald Trump, his family and top backers in New York City. The relationships inside this inner sanctum ran deep. Billionaire Phillip Ruffin, the president's Las Vegas partner who had Trump serve as best man at his wedding, was there. So was Icahn and apparently Richard LeFrak, the real estate tycoon who was part of the Palm Beach circle that included Trump and Ross.

But Ross was the only one who left his day job to join Trump in government. "I'd rather hang myself," Ruffin told Forbes earlier this year. "I don't know why Wilbur took it."

But viewed in the context of Ross' career arc, it makes perfect sense. The steel deal made him rich, but his returns have been mediocre since, so much so that WL Ross filed documents to raise a sixth flagship fund last year, but nothing seemed to come of it. Trump, the guy he kept afloat 26 years before, offered his fellow attention-seeking dealmaker a lifeline to relevance.

Ross' appointment as secretary of commerce came with one catch: He had to disclose his assets, providing evidence that he was not as rich as he had long claimed. In 2015, he sent Forbes a detailed breakdown of his supposed holdings, listing $1.25 billion in partnership interests, $1.1 billion in municipal bonds, $500 million in equities, $200 million in art, $110 million in real estate and $200 million in cash, for a fanciful total of $3.4 billion, according to notes taken at the time. We eventually listed him at $2.9 billion. Last year, Ross' assistant claimed $3.7 billion; we stuck with $2.9 billion.

His former colleagues saw the moment of reckoning coming as soon as he accepted a Cabinet role. "It was surprising because he would have to reveal to the world that he wasn't a billionaire," one ex-employee said. "I was surprised that he would take that risk."

But Ross was ready to double down, even while he was a Cabinet member, telling Forbes about the putative $2 billion asset transfer to his family members after the election. That opened up a storm of questions from ethics and tax experts. If Ross had owned $2 billion of additional assets before the election, wouldn't they have produced income that he was required to disclose, even if he no longer owned the assets? And why would someone apparently transfer $2 billion to his family, thereby triggering more than $800 million in gift taxes, especially with a president in the White House who was prepared to eliminate the estate tax and therefore much of the cost of transferring fortunes to later generations?

"I am aware of the ethics and tax rules and have complied with all of them," Ross wrote in an October email to Forbes . "Aren't you going a bit overboard on this? I have explained my situation to you and am surprised and disappointed by the seemingly accusatory tone of your email. For more than 50 years I have had a good relationship with your publication and with the Forbes family. And never have had a bad experience with either. In fact I was just the featured speaker at your magazine's hundredth anniversary CEO conference in Hong Kong."

After Forbes published an online story on October 16 laying out those questions, six Senate Democrats wrote a letter to the top ethics official in the federal government, asking him to figure out what was going on with Ross' finances. "It is imperative that Congress and the Office of Government Ethics know the full extent of Mr. Ross's holdings to ensure he is not putting personal gain ahead of the interests of the American people."

The Department of Commerce issued a statement saying the $2 billion gift never happened. "Contrary to the report in Forbes, there was no major asset transfer to a trust in the period between the election and Secretary Ross's confirmation."

The only problem with that statement: The person who told Forbes that the transfer had taken place, that it had happened after the election and that it had meant more than $2 billion of family assets weren't on the disclosure was none other than the sitting secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross.

 

 

[candygirl200413]

So I have a peer that works for the NIH and she was showing in her snapchat story the amount of information they can't share because of this administration. The amount of lines I saw in her report was just disgusting and horrible.

[fraurosena]

Wut???

Firm founded by KGB spy to guard US Moscow embassy

Quote

The US State Department has employed a private firm set up by a veteran Soviet-era spy to provide security for its Moscow embassy and diplomatic missions in Russia. The move comes after Moscow ordered the US to more than halve its staff in Russia earlier this year.

The US has now signed a contract with Elite Security Holdings, founded by the ex-KGB General Viktor Budanov. General Budanov was a close friend of British spy and defector Kim Philby. A notice on the US State Department website shows the contract with Elite Security Holdings is worth more than $2.8m (£2.1m).

A document posted online outlining "justification and approval" for the contract says guards at the Moscow embassy and other US missions were among the staff included in the expulsion order, adding: "The only option available, to ensure security services continue, is via a commercial contract." It said the US government had contacted more than three US private security firms but had not found one "with the requisite licensing or desire to operate in-country".

"Due to the urgency of this requirement, the Department of State sought a firm with the requisite licensing and capacity to quickly stand up guard operations at all four US Mission Russia posts," it says.

"The number of firms that met this requirement limited the number of sources considered to one - Elite Security Services Holding Co."

The Russian daily Kommersant says Elite Security Holdings, founded in 1997, is now run by Gen Budanov's son, Dmitry Budanov. On its website, the security company says it operates across Russia, Europe and countries formerly in the Soviet Union.

In July, Russian President Vladimir Putin said staff numbers at US diplomatic missions in Russia would have to be slashed by 755, in retaliation for new US sanctions against Moscow. The sanctions were intended as punishment for the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and alleged Russian interference in the US election.

Last December, then President Barack Obama ordered the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats, along with the closure of two compounds, in response to allegations of election meddling.

President Donald Trump has since been dogged by claims that Russia tried to sway the election in his favour, allegations that both he and the Kremlin strongly deny.

Several investigations are under way to determine whether anyone from the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow.

General Budanov became one of the KGB's most illustrious agents. He befriended Kim Philby after the British double-agent's defection to the Soviet Union in 1963. In a 2007 interview, Gen Budanov said that in the late 1980s he had served in the KGB mission in East Germany and worked alongside Mr Putin.

Well, I guess we now know why all those embassy staff were expelled by Putin. It was (at least in part) so that this multi-million contract could be given to Putin's good mate, General Viktor Budanov.

[GrumpyGran]

10 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Wut???

Firm founded by KGB spy to guard US Moscow embassy

Well, I guess we now know why all those embassy staff were expelled by Putin. It was (at least in part) so that this multi-million contract could be given to Putin's good mate, General Viktor Budanov.

Wut, indeed! Now my tax dollars are going to a KGB agent? What happened to  our military, Marines, guarding our embassies? So Tillerson is going to go down now too? So be it, lie down with dogs, what will you get? His bites are going to hurt bad.

[AmazonGrace]

This story is  hilarious (well perhaps not if it's your tax dollars that pay her salary) 

https://www.thedailybeast.com/no-one-knows-what-omarosa-is-doing-in-the-white-houseeven-omarosa

No One Knows What Omarosa Is Doing in the White House—Even Omarosa

The ‘Apprentice’ star has a top salary and a high-ranking job. But when we spent time with her, it was her wedding she was planning.

Spoiler

 

It’s nearly 9 a.m. in the West Wing lobby. The room is quiet save for two staff assistants whispering about weekend plans, and me, waiting on an over-firm red sofa to meet with Omarosa Manigault.

When she glides in she is statuesque, wearing a sleeveless sheath, her legs long and bare. It’s St. Patrick’s Day and it’s 28 degrees outside. “You must be freezing,” I say. She lets out a sing-song laugh that cracks the silence.

“No,” she says. “I’m hot-blooded.”

We had arranged an hour-long interview. So it’s a surprise when Omarosa leads me into the Roosevelt Room, scans the space, points to a couch, and, with the reverence one might grant two open barstools at Starbucks, says, “Let’s just sit here.” Two maids dusting the large wooden table trade confused glances. A woman leans in the doorway. “Just so you know,” she says, “Bannon”—as in Steve, the then chief strategist—“could walk in at any minute with the Egyptians.” It’s no bother, Omarosa responds. “We’ll just be a few minutes.”

She turns back to me. “So,” she says. “What do you want to talk about?”

There’s been some confusion about Omarosa’s precise role in this White House. She is formally the communications director for the Office of Public Liaison, the same position once held by Kal Penn of Harold & Kumar fame. But I wanted Omarosa to help me understand what keeps her busy during the workday and how one of the biggest reality stars of the early aughts—apart from her own boss—was reshaping the administration.

Before Ivanka, before Jared, before even Melania, Omarosa was the most prolific one-named celebrity in Donald Trump’s orbit. Her role as a surrogate on his campaign was the reward for 13 years of unshakable devotion, beginning as America’s favorite villain on The Apprentice, where she curried favor with Trump for her bombast. She returned later as a contestant on the spin-off Celebrity Apprentice, where she dumped wine on Piers Morgan’s head.

Now a senior White House staffer banking the highest recorded salary allowable ($179,700 per year), Omarosa remains a mystery to many members of Washington’s political class and even her White House colleagues.

 

But on this particular Friday morning, Omarosa simply does not have the time to explain what, exactly, it is that she does. She can give me 15 minutes at most, she says, despite the hour-long appointment. It’s a very, very busy day, she tells me, and asks if I’d rather shadow her for the morning. “You can see me in action,” she says.

She tells me to hurriedly stuff my bag under her desk—a plain, shared space near the Oval Office that she uses apart from her office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. We’ve got to get a move-on, she says. There are menus to finalize and place settings to set. There’s a white floral number to change into, and three different shades of MAC foundation to blend.

Today isn’t just any ordinary day, it turns out. Yes, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is visiting, and the president has last-minute health care negotiations with Republican leadership. But much more crucially, it’s bridal luncheon day at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., and Omarosa is getting married.

 

This is not Omarosa’s first tour of the White House. At age 23, before she became a reality TV star, the Howard University grad worked under Vice President Al Gore with the title of “special assistant of logistics.” Then she bounced around a bit, working for President Bill Clinton in the personnel office, and finally at the Commerce Department. Writing in her 2008 book, The Bitch Switch—her “step-by-step guide for locating your inner BITCH, personalizing your switch, and knowing when to turn it on and when to turn it off”—she called her unnamed boss in personnel “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” someone who “constantly sabotaged her efforts.” There was no love lost. By the time she landed at Commerce, Cheryl Shavers, Clinton’s undersecretary for technology, told People magazine that Omarosa “was asked to leave as quickly as possible… One woman wanted to slug her.”

This go-around seems different, at least so far. Perhaps the venomous exchanges are a relic of her boardroom days. “She’s a lot softer now,” says Katrina Campins, Omarosa’s Apprenticeroommate and bridesmaid. Indeed, if there’s any animosity between Omarosa and current White House staffers, it doesn’t show. She greets women with a “Hey, girl!” departs with a “later, gator.” She mingles with communications staff in the Navy mess hall, trading compliments on their dresses. “Mine’s not even fancy!” she says. “It’s Tahari!” She orders grits and sausage from the mess, which, for reasons that remain unclear, we do not pick up, but instead sashay along to the next task. Omarosa is in a smashing mood.

And why shouldn’t she be? In just a few hours, she’s hosting her eight bridesmaids, plus her mother, Theresa Manigault—AKA Momarosa—and fiancé, Rev. John Allen Newman, in the White House for a St. Patrick’s Day-themed bridal luncheon. There, waiters will serve appetizers, entrees, and desserts. Presaged by a shamrock-bordered invitation, the luncheon is the kickoff event of Omarosa’s bridal shower.

“It was a good way to spend time with her before the wedding got underway,” bridesmaid and former fellow Clinton staffer Aisha McClendon would tell me of the White House gathering.

But it’s not yet lunchtime, so morning duties still loom. Outside the mess hall, we stop at the lectern of a security guard—A.J.—who indulges a giddy Omarosa by showing her a photo of the themed invitation on his computer. Her iPhone starts ringing—her fiance’s name, followed by a unicorn emoji, flashes across the screen. “Hey, baby,” she says. “Can I call you on my secure line?”

It’s tough to sneak in a question to Omarosa—about her job, her life, her goals, about where exactly we are heading at this precise moment—because we are always walking, quickly and seemingly aimlessly across the West Wing, and in and out of rooms at the EEOB. At some point we are looking for a certain Josh, though we don’t ever locate him, and I never find out why he’s needed. As we knock on the door to one office, she finally muffles an answer as to what we’re doing: “… the faith communities, does anyone need to be blessed…”

Many of her answers go this way, with sentences accomplishing the syntactical feat of never seeming to begin or end. Or they begin and end at the same time: “Everything,” she says when I ask about the contents of her job portfolio right now.

But never mind that, because Omarosa has a luncheon to host. She even brought a new dress for today’s event. She shows it to me as we stop next in her EEOB office, a light-drenched space a little larger than the average American living room. Adorning the walls and tables are three long gowns, clusters of makeup, an array of hair tools, and a few pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage. Today’s outfit—a white shift dress printed with red and pink and purple flowers—is draped across a chair.

Omarosa’s White House life is a constant blend of the weighty business of the U.S. government and the never-ending personal demands of that very moment. We bump into National Trade Council chairman Peter Navarro, who is dressed in workout attire and carrying in one hand a copy of his own book, Death By China, and in the other a box of Mesa Sunrise cereal. “O-ma-ro-sa!” Navarro says, drawing out each syllable of her name. He asks if she’s planning to go on Dancing With the Stars. No, she tells him. Unfortunately her foot is still healing, the result of a fall while jumping into the motorcade in January. Navarro gives her tips on how to exercise it. But before he finishes we have to get going. Later, gator.

We walk to a door close to the White House side of EEOB. Suddenly, Omarosa turns to me.

“Well, I’ve enjoyed this first part,” she says. “When do you want to do the second part?”

***

Alas, that second interview would never happen. In a trend familiar to lovelorn folks nationwide, Omarosa ghosted me. Dozens of calls, emails, and texts over the course several months have gone unreturned.

After the abrupt end to our day in March, I called a Republican source in constant contact with the White House and asked what they thought Omarosa’s job entailed. “No clue,” the source said. I told the source about our whirlwind of a morning.

“Wait, Hope [Hicks] let you follow [Omarosa] around?” the source asked. No, I hadn’t spoken with Hope, who now serves formally as the White House communications director. “So Sean [Spicer] let you?” Ditto. “Christ,” the source said. “No one in the comms department knew a random reporter was walking around the West Wing. This is why people think we’re a shit show.”

Ultimately, in my quest to better understand what, exactly, Omarosa does each day, I learned little more than the fact that she was getting married. I reached out to then deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders to find out more about the bridal luncheon—whether it was normal, in the middle of a workday, for a staffer to use the White House for a personal event? Did taxpayers, or Omarosa herself foot the bill?

“I have no idea… I will try to track her down,” Sanders responded. On Friday, a senior White House official emailed: “She did not have a bridal lunch but did invite her bridesmaids to have lunch with her in the navy mess which all commissioned officers are allowed to do.”

Since then, Omarosa got married. It was April 8, with a cherry-blossom-themed ceremony in none other than the Trump Hotel in D.C. (Her gown, a $6,500 YKA Makino piece, was part of her compensation for appearing on TLC’s Say Yes to the Dress.) Then there was her letter to the Congressional Black Caucus in June, in which she invited members to a meeting with President Trump, signing it, “The Honorable Omarosa Manigault.” As Politico reported, “Multiple CBC members said they were put off… saying she hasn’t earned that title nor has she helped raise the profile of CBC issues within the White House as promised.”

And while she does pop up in White House press briefings from time to time, there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to which ones. During our morning together, for example, she toyed with whether or not to attend that day’s session. “I may go, I may not,” she said.

If Omarosa’s White House sounds less like a storied institution than a personal playground, well, that’s precisely because she intends it to be. As she writes in The Bitch Switch, a woman in control—of her life, of her relationships, of her career—“determines her own rules of engagement for every situation.”

She may be perfect for this administration after all.

***

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Oh, for pity sake: "Sessions considering second special counsel to investigate Republican concerns, letter shows"

Spoiler

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is entertaining the idea of appointing a second special counsel to investigate a host of Republican concerns — including alleged wrongdoing by the Clinton Foundation and the controversial sale of a uranium company to Russia — and has directed senior federal prosecutors to explore at least some of the matters and report back to him and his top deputy, according to a letter obtained by The Washington Post.

The revelation came in a response from the Justice Department to an inquiry from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Robert W. Goodlatte (R-Va.), who in July and again in September called for Sessions to appoint a second special counsel to investigate concerns he had related to the 2016 election and its aftermath.

The list of matters he wanted probed was wide ranging, but included the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, various dealings of the Clinton Foundation and several matters connected to the purchase of the Canadian mining company Uranium One by Russia’s nuclear energy agency. Goodlatte took particular aim at former FBI director James B. Comey, asking for a second special counsel to evaluate the leaks he directed about his conversations with President Trump, among other things.

In response, Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd wrote that Sessions had “directed senior federal prosecutors to evaluate certain issues raised in your letters,” and those prosecutors would “report directly to the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, as appropriate, and will make recommendations as to whether any matters not currently under investigation should be opened, whether any matters currently under investigation require further resources, or whether any matters merit the appointment of a Special Counsel.”

President Trump has repeatedly criticized his Justice Department for not aggressively probing a variety of conservative concerns, saying recently that officials there “should be looking at the Democrats.” Sessions’s letter is likely to be seen by some, especially on the left, as an inappropriate bending to political pressure.

Freaking Goodlatte, he's not running for re-election next year, but he just has to go out with a bang. And Possum Sessions is just too happy to oblige.

[onekidanddone]

13 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Freaking Goodlatte, he's not running for re-election next year, but he just has to go out with a bang. And Possum Sessions is just too happy to oblige.

Probably looking for a spot next to Trump's golden oval orifice err office

[GrumpyGran]

12 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Oh, for pity sake: "Sessions considering second special counsel to investigate Republican concerns, letter shows"

  Reveal hidden contents

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is entertaining the idea of appointing a second special counsel to investigate a host of Republican concerns — including alleged wrongdoing by the Clinton Foundation and the controversial sale of a uranium company to Russia — and has directed senior federal prosecutors to explore at least some of the matters and report back to him and his top deputy, according to a letter obtained by The Washington Post.

The revelation came in a response from the Justice Department to an inquiry from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Robert W. Goodlatte (R-Va.), who in July and again in September called for Sessions to appoint a second special counsel to investigate concerns he had related to the 2016 election and its aftermath.

The list of matters he wanted probed was wide ranging, but included the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, various dealings of the Clinton Foundation and several matters connected to the purchase of the Canadian mining company Uranium One by Russia’s nuclear energy agency. Goodlatte took particular aim at former FBI director James B. Comey, asking for a second special counsel to evaluate the leaks he directed about his conversations with President Trump, among other things.

In response, Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd wrote that Sessions had “directed senior federal prosecutors to evaluate certain issues raised in your letters,” and those prosecutors would “report directly to the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, as appropriate, and will make recommendations as to whether any matters not currently under investigation should be opened, whether any matters currently under investigation require further resources, or whether any matters merit the appointment of a Special Counsel.”

President Trump has repeatedly criticized his Justice Department for not aggressively probing a variety of conservative concerns, saying recently that officials there “should be looking at the Democrats.” Sessions’s letter is likely to be seen by some, especially on the left, as an inappropriate bending to political pressure.

Freaking Goodlatte, he's not running for re-election next year, but he just has to go out with a bang. And Possum Sessions is just too happy to oblige.

So, essentially we are going to appoint a special counsel, at the tax payers' expense, to try to dig up dirt on the Democratic party, with special focus on Hillary Clinton. Because she is working in a government job, taking the tax payers' money...oh, wait, she's not!

They know that the legitimacy of the election is more in doubt every day and they're trying to criminalize her in advance.

Will there ever be a day when the corrupt right won't try to investigate the left as a diversion? And letting Sessions investigate anybody is a joke. He is being investigated!

[GreyhoundFan]

13 minutes ago, GrumpyGran said:

Will there ever be a day when the corrupt right won't try to investigate the left as a diversion?

In a word: NOPE. It's insane, isn't it?

[GreyhoundFan]

Another great one from Alexandra Petri: "Eternal sunshine of the spotless Sessions"

Spoiler

On the whole, Jeff Sessions has been much happier since the procedure.

It is only when he is called periodically before Congress and questioned about anything he has done at any time that it becomes inconvenient.

A memory is an unpleasant thing to have. A private record of every humiliation that taunts you as you go about your business from day to day is always a hard sell. In the Trump administration, it is a positive hazard. Any memory of history would remind you of similarities to Creepy Despots and Generally Bad Eras In Human History and suggest that These Tax Policies Were Tried Before With Marginally Better Accounting And Even Then They Didn’t Work. Any memory of your own past would be full of inexplicable Russian contacts and people like George Papadopoulos. At a certain point, you just want the noise to stop and to clear any images of Sergey Kislyak from your central cache.

Carter Page? Sam Clovis? Who are these people? They possess all the charm and awareness of someone who calls in to the radio show to explain what is Really Going On With UFOs, and to have to remember that they were in any way related to the campaign is too depressing. Better to remove it all. Better to have the procedure.

So Jeff Sessions does not recall. And this is not uncommon in the Trump administration. Why would you want to remember that someone had put Rick Perry in charge of the department that contained all our nuclear weapons, and, more alarming still, that you were Rick Perry, if you did not have to?

Vice President Pence has the procedure daily, because he doesn’t recall that it happened and he still feels that he remembers too much. His mind is a field full of colts frolicking. Colts — no, there is a twinge there. Something happened with the Colts. He must forget again. He would have no idea how often the erasure happened if it were not for the punch card entitling him to a free one after his ninth.

The whispers go that Donald Trump had the procedure before even getting into politics and that it is the secret to his constant surprise and delight at relatively basic functions of governing.

The procedure, of course, has its side effects. After your memory is removed, you cease to be clear on what year it is. For Sessions’s Justice Department, this has so far meant merrily going around to remove anything that would have seemed out of place before the civil rights movement. His aides try to smooth things for him, making certain there are no African American senior staff members in his agency in order to avoid cognitive dissonance. Was the department moving backward, asked Cedric Richmond at Tuesday’s hearing. Backward? Sessions could not imagine anywhere else to go.

The procedure, on the whole, has been a good thing — except on those rare days when Sessions is called into Congress to testify. Then everything starts to feel wrong. He knows this place. He may not remember it, but he knows it. It feels right that he should sit here. These are his distinguished colleagues, are they not?

Did he talk to Papadopoulos? Well, he must have, mustn’t he, if the paper says it, but all he can picture is a vast whiteness.

“Aren’t I the senator from Alabama?” he asks, meekly, during the recess. They soothe him before bringing him back into the hearing by letting him reactivate the war on drugs, and even then he is not entirely placated.

Karen Bass asks about racial identity movements. Something stirs in his brain. There was a whole report, wasn’t there? But she is asking about white racial identity movements. Now there is only the comforting blank. She looks at him as though he ought to remember something. But he doesn’t remember. The lights are very bright.

They say he gave testimony before. Can this be true? This place feels almost familiar, but he doesn’t remember. There is newspaper being shoved in his face. He must have been there. They have his picture. He doesn’t remember anything. Panic rises in him. He is a young man in Alabama. He is a member of the Senate. Coretta Scott King is testifying against him. No. This isn’t right. None of this is right.

What is the law? What is his job? He wants to go home to a good place in the past that no longer exists, where no one would dare ask him questions like this. Someone promised that the whole country would go there, didn’t he?

Forgetting a thing is almost as good as fixing it. Some would say better.

 

[GrumpyGran]

16 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Another great one from Alexandra Petri: "Eternal sunshine of the spotless Sessions"

  Reveal hidden contents

On the whole, Jeff Sessions has been much happier since the procedure.

It is only when he is called periodically before Congress and questioned about anything he has done at any time that it becomes inconvenient.

A memory is an unpleasant thing to have. A private record of every humiliation that taunts you as you go about your business from day to day is always a hard sell. In the Trump administration, it is a positive hazard. Any memory of history would remind you of similarities to Creepy Despots and Generally Bad Eras In Human History and suggest that These Tax Policies Were Tried Before With Marginally Better Accounting And Even Then They Didn’t Work. Any memory of your own past would be full of inexplicable Russian contacts and people like George Papadopoulos. At a certain point, you just want the noise to stop and to clear any images of Sergey Kislyak from your central cache.

Carter Page? Sam Clovis? Who are these people? They possess all the charm and awareness of someone who calls in to the radio show to explain what is Really Going On With UFOs, and to have to remember that they were in any way related to the campaign is too depressing. Better to remove it all. Better to have the procedure.

So Jeff Sessions does not recall. And this is not uncommon in the Trump administration. Why would you want to remember that someone had put Rick Perry in charge of the department that contained all our nuclear weapons, and, more alarming still, that you were Rick Perry, if you did not have to?

Vice President Pence has the procedure daily, because he doesn’t recall that it happened and he still feels that he remembers too much. His mind is a field full of colts frolicking. Colts — no, there is a twinge there. Something happened with the Colts. He must forget again. He would have no idea how often the erasure happened if it were not for the punch card entitling him to a free one after his ninth.

The whispers go that Donald Trump had the procedure before even getting into politics and that it is the secret to his constant surprise and delight at relatively basic functions of governing.

The procedure, of course, has its side effects. After your memory is removed, you cease to be clear on what year it is. For Sessions’s Justice Department, this has so far meant merrily going around to remove anything that would have seemed out of place before the civil rights movement. His aides try to smooth things for him, making certain there are no African American senior staff members in his agency in order to avoid cognitive dissonance. Was the department moving backward, asked Cedric Richmond at Tuesday’s hearing. Backward? Sessions could not imagine anywhere else to go.

The procedure, on the whole, has been a good thing — except on those rare days when Sessions is called into Congress to testify. Then everything starts to feel wrong. He knows this place. He may not remember it, but he knows it. It feels right that he should sit here. These are his distinguished colleagues, are they not?

Did he talk to Papadopoulos? Well, he must have, mustn’t he, if the paper says it, but all he can picture is a vast whiteness.

“Aren’t I the senator from Alabama?” he asks, meekly, during the recess. They soothe him before bringing him back into the hearing by letting him reactivate the war on drugs, and even then he is not entirely placated.

Karen Bass asks about racial identity movements. Something stirs in his brain. There was a whole report, wasn’t there? But she is asking about white racial identity movements. Now there is only the comforting blank. She looks at him as though he ought to remember something. But he doesn’t remember. The lights are very bright.

They say he gave testimony before. Can this be true? This place feels almost familiar, but he doesn’t remember. There is newspaper being shoved in his face. He must have been there. They have his picture. He doesn’t remember anything. Panic rises in him. He is a young man in Alabama. He is a member of the Senate. Coretta Scott King is testifying against him. No. This isn’t right. None of this is right.

What is the law? What is his job? He wants to go home to a good place in the past that no longer exists, where no one would dare ask him questions like this. Someone promised that the whole country would go there, didn’t he?

Forgetting a thing is almost as good as fixing it. Some would say better.

 

Isn't it unbelievable that we have a endless myriad of things to shake our heads at? Everywhere you turn with this administration there is a WTF.

How is this man allowed to get away with this? He is the Attorney General of this country. If he can't remember things he needs to resign. He's charged with enforcing the laws of this country. He is supposedly a lawyer. And he can't remember anything? And the member of Congress in his party don't think this is dangerous?

WTF!

[GreyhoundFan]

The latest about Thurston Howell III and Lovey: "‘Like Bond villains’: What happened when Steven Mnuchin and his wife posed with a sheet of money"

Spoiler

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin did what just about anyone would do when presented with a newly minted sheet of American currency bearing their name and signature on Wednesday: He posed for a photo.

Coming in the midst of tax-overhaul plans by President Trump and congressional Republicans that nonpartisan analysts say would disproportionately benefit corporations and wealthy individuals, among others, the photo of Mnuchin and wife Louise Linton holding up the sheet of new $1 bills became an instant meme and drew wide mockery around the Internet.

The photo was snapped Wednesday by Jacquelyn Martin, a photographer for the Associated Press, as Mnuchin and Linton, along with U.S. Treasurer Jovita Carranza, toured the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington. The new $1 bills, with Mnuchin and Carranza's signatures, are expected to go into circulation in December. The signatures of Treasury secretaries have appeared on U.S. currency for more than a century, and Mnuchin’s signature is more legible than that of his predecessor Jack Lew, the AP noted.

For many, there was something comical about the picture of the couple, no strangers to accusations of flaunting their wealth and privilege. Mnuchin holds the sheet on both sides, a smile on his face. His wife stands behind him, her hand on the sheet’s corner.

... < good tweet >

“Only way this could be worse would be if Linton and Mnuchin were lighting cigars with flaming dollar bills,” wrote the writer James Surowiecki.

“Just a friendly reminder that the GOP wants to raise taxes on the middle class & take health insurance away from millions of Americans so people like Louise Linton and Steven Mnuchin can get a tax cut,” wrote another. 

Many said the optics of the photograph lent the two the aura of a pair of Hollywood villains. Perhaps it was Linton’s sharp stare and long black gloves. Clad in all black, Linton clasped the sheet of money the way a royal might hold her hand to be kissed.

“Why do Treasury Sec Mnuchin and his wife insist on posing for photos that make them look like Bond villains?” wrote CNBC reporter Christina Wilkie.

... < another good tweet >

The Fox News website described the images as a “big money photo op.”

It is not the first photo of Mnuchin, a former banker and Hollywood producer, and Linton, an actress, to raise eyebrows. A post Linton made on Instagram over the summer, in which she tagged many of the luxury fashion brands she wore on the trip alongside a photo of her and Mnuchin descending the steps of a government plane, drew harsh criticism. Linton then criticized a commenter who questioned why she had promoted the brands, by boasting about her wealth.

“Have you given more to the economy than me and my husband?” she wrote on a now-deleted Instagram post.

A memoir that Linton self-published about a six-month stint in living in Zambia in 1999 was widely denounced for being littered with inaccuracies, and being “falsified,” according to the Zambian High Commission in London.

Mnuchin has also drawn scrutiny for his use of government aircraft to travel.

A few more good tweets are under the spoiler:

Spoiler

 

[GrumpyGran]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

The latest about Thurston Howell III and Lovey: "‘Like Bond villains’: What happened when Steven Mnuchin and his wife posed with a sheet of money"

  Reveal hidden contents

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin did what just about anyone would do when presented with a newly minted sheet of American currency bearing their name and signature on Wednesday: He posed for a photo.

Coming in the midst of tax-overhaul plans by President Trump and congressional Republicans that nonpartisan analysts say would disproportionately benefit corporations and wealthy individuals, among others, the photo of Mnuchin and wife Louise Linton holding up the sheet of new $1 bills became an instant meme and drew wide mockery around the Internet.

The photo was snapped Wednesday by Jacquelyn Martin, a photographer for the Associated Press, as Mnuchin and Linton, along with U.S. Treasurer Jovita Carranza, toured the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington. The new $1 bills, with Mnuchin and Carranza's signatures, are expected to go into circulation in December. The signatures of Treasury secretaries have appeared on U.S. currency for more than a century, and Mnuchin’s signature is more legible than that of his predecessor Jack Lew, the AP noted.

For many, there was something comical about the picture of the couple, no strangers to accusations of flaunting their wealth and privilege. Mnuchin holds the sheet on both sides, a smile on his face. His wife stands behind him, her hand on the sheet’s corner.

... < good tweet >

“Only way this could be worse would be if Linton and Mnuchin were lighting cigars with flaming dollar bills,” wrote the writer James Surowiecki.

“Just a friendly reminder that the GOP wants to raise taxes on the middle class & take health insurance away from millions of Americans so people like Louise Linton and Steven Mnuchin can get a tax cut,” wrote another. 

Many said the optics of the photograph lent the two the aura of a pair of Hollywood villains. Perhaps it was Linton’s sharp stare and long black gloves. Clad in all black, Linton clasped the sheet of money the way a royal might hold her hand to be kissed.

“Why do Treasury Sec Mnuchin and his wife insist on posing for photos that make them look like Bond villains?” wrote CNBC reporter Christina Wilkie.

... < another good tweet >

The Fox News website described the images as a “big money photo op.”

It is not the first photo of Mnuchin, a former banker and Hollywood producer, and Linton, an actress, to raise eyebrows. A post Linton made on Instagram over the summer, in which she tagged many of the luxury fashion brands she wore on the trip alongside a photo of her and Mnuchin descending the steps of a government plane, drew harsh criticism. Linton then criticized a commenter who questioned why she had promoted the brands, by boasting about her wealth.

“Have you given more to the economy than me and my husband?” she wrote on a now-deleted Instagram post.

A memoir that Linton self-published about a six-month stint in living in Zambia in 1999 was widely denounced for being littered with inaccuracies, and being “falsified,” according to the Zambian High Commission in London.

Mnuchin has also drawn scrutiny for his use of government aircraft to travel.

A few more good tweets are under the spoiler:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

She is the definition of a shameless gold digger. If she could wear actual gold she would. I'm guessing their house puts the Trump penthouse to shame. I'd rip my own skin off before I'd work for her. Whore.

[GreyhoundFan]

"The Daily 202: How EPA chief Scott Pruitt wants to redefine ‘environmentalism’"

Spoiler

THE BIG IDEA: Love him or hate him for it, Scott Pruitt has done as much as anyone else in the executive branch to advance President Trump’s goal of what Steve Bannon called “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency has worked overtime to roll back many of Barack Obama’s proudest achievements. Even with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, the former president couldn’t pass cap-and-trade legislation. Because Republicans controlled the House for six of his eight years, Obama leaned heavily on executive action to push his environmental agenda. That made his victories much more vulnerable to evisceration than, say, the Affordable Care Act or Dodd-Frank.

Pruitt has moved swiftly to unwind Obama-era regulations big and small, from the Clean Power Plan to tighter emissions standards for trucks and a ban on the pesticide chlorpyrifos.

Trump signed an order in February to set in motion the repeal of the 2015 Waters of the United States rule, which expanded the definition of bodies of water that are protected by the EPA. “Within eight minutes of him signing that order, I had paperwork in place to advance it,” Pruitt said proudly.

During a half-hour interview Wednesday afternoon, Pruitt extinguished buzz that he might run for governor of Oklahoma in 2018. The 49-year-old said the work he’s doing right now “is some of the most consequential things domestically that can occur.” His goal is not just to fundamentally transform the EPA but to redefine what it means to be an environmentalist.

“What is true environmentalism? I think it's environmental stewardship — not prohibition,” he said. “The last administration talked about putting up fences. [They said,] ‘Let's not develop, we're not going to use the natural resources to feed the world and power the world.’ I think that's wrong. I think our focus should be on using our natural resources — with environmental stewardship in mind. … We can be about jobs and growth and be good stewards of our environment. The last several years we've been told we can't do both.”

Sipping black coffee in his cavernous office on the third floor of EPA’s headquarters, directly across the street from Trump’s D.C. hotel, Pruitt offered a full-throated defense of his close ties to some of the industries that he regulates — which he contends will ultimately make the air cleaner and the water safer to drink.

The EPA administrator, who was formerly Oklahoma’s attorney general, is adamant that his closeness with these groups is a strength, not a conflict. “I don't hang with polluters; I prosecute them,” he said. “I think it's important in this agency to deal with the bad actors. The difference … is that the agency historically has viewed all industry and all stakeholders as adversaries, as opposed to partners and allies in improving the environment. … When you have that kind of … blanket approach, you don't achieve good things for the environment.”

Pruitt has extensively traveled the country to meet with industry trade group officials and top executives from chemical, agricultural and fossil fuel companies. Last week he flew to South Carolina’s Kiawah Island for the American Chemistry Council’s board meeting. He recently went to a National Mining Association meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in Naples, Fla., and to a golf resort in Arizona to speak at a board meeting for the National Association of Manufacturers.

Since being confirmed in February, Pruitt has visited 30 states. “The best interaction we have is spending time with individuals and companies that live under the regulations that we adopt because they are out there carrying those regulations out each day,” he said. “They breathe the air. They drink the water in these areas. They want, in my view, largely a commitment to better environmental outcomes. And so why not work with them to achieve that?

“We don't have enough resources … to hire enough personnel in this agency to stand on every corner in this country and say, ‘Thou shall,’ and make sure that people do this or that,” he added. “We need commitment from the private sector.”

Pruitt has faced criticism for listening more to these companies than career staff. “On pesticides, chemical solvents and air pollutants, Pruitt and his deputies are using industry figures to challenge past findings and recommendations of the agency’s own scientists,” Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis reported last week. “Pruitt has questioned the legitimacy of the agency’s work on climate science, and continued pressing for the White House to create a ‘red team-blue team’ effort to debate the expert consensus on climate change. … Last month, Pruitt moved to change the makeup of EPA advisory boards — including panels that help prioritize the agency’s research and provide recommendations on federal air-pollution and chemical exposure limits — reflecting his broader effort to shift the way the agency evaluates science. He cut any researchers currently receiving EPA grants from the committees, on the grounds that this funding poses a conflict of interest, while bringing in advisers whose work is funded by industry.”

In our interview, Pruitt maintained that the decline in carbon dioxide emissions — which are now at pre-1994 levels — is due far more to the emergence of hydraulic fracking and the conversion of natural gas to electricity than any government mandate. He cites this as a justification for allowing companies to innovate without interference. “Our focus should be on exporting that technology and innovation to China and India,” he said. “We have nothing to be apologetic about in this area.”

He noted that the EPA no longer promotes renewable energies over fossil fuels because that represents the federal government improperly picking “winners and losers” in the private sector. “That's not within the authority of this agency,” he said. “It's not the goal of this agency to say, ‘Your generation of electricity is good. This is not.’ That's what happened with the Clean Power Plan.”

Pruitt praised Trump for showing “great courage” in his willingness to make politically unpopular decisions vis-à-vis the environment, specifically citing his withdrawal from the Paris climate accord.

Pruitt played a key role in persuading Trump to pull out. “People forget the criticism that was levied against Paris. Some of the most strident criticism was from whom? The environmental left,” he said. “If you go back and look … it was, ‘Why didn't they hold China accountable? Why didn't they hold India accountable? Why is Russia engaged with a baseline of 1994?’ The reason the rest of the world applauded America's participation … in Paris . . . (and) put so much pressure on this country to stay in is because it put us at a disadvantage economically, and it also didn't hold them accountable. It was a bad business deal.”

The administrator has developed a good personal rapport with the president, who he said has been way more hands-on than outsiders understand. “I love spending time around these issues with him because he's got tremendous ideas,” Pruitt said of Trump. “He’s actually presented some things to me on the Superfund sites on how to improve our approach there. It was very instructive.”

Just like his boss, Pruitt is a counterpuncher. When he’s asked about allegations that he’s letting polluters off the hook, he insists that he’s actually being more aggressive than the Obama administration. He noted that the water crisis in Flint, Mich., and the Gold King Mine waste water spill in Colorado happened during the previous administration. He also accused the Obama EPA of cutting the number of personnel in the criminal enforcement office by almost 25 percent.

“As a former attorney general … I know what it means to prosecute people, and I can tell you that it’s a point of emphasis,” he said. “In fact, I'm the first administrator in probably more than a decade — I've been told by staff — that has actually spoken to the criminal enforcement division here to say, ‘Here are the priorities we're going to set.’”

Veterans of the Obama EPA say it would be irregular for the administrator to tell career staff which prosecutions to pursue. There are 2,800 employees in the enforcement division, with 10 regional offices and more than 30 field offices nationwide. Historically there has been a bottom-up approach, designed to prevent political appointees from exerting undue influence.

“All hat and no cattle is I think what they say in Oklahoma,” emailed Cynthia Giles, who directed the EPA’s enforcement office during all eight years of the Obama presidency. “The record does not support Administrator Pruitt’s ludicrous claim to be a tough enforcer.”

I asked Pruitt why the environmental and scientific communities are so strongly critical of him if he’s being as hard on the bad actors as he says. “Because it serves political ends,” Pruitt replied. “You know, I think certain groups want to raise money … and that's unfortunate.”

By one estimate, less than 1 percent of Pruitt’s meetings have been with environmental groups. But the administrator said that does not mean activists have been frozen out. “They’re welcome to come,” he said. “In fact, if they listen to this message, please call. This isn't a matter of not wanting to hear from stakeholders. It is a matter of: Let's have a thoughtful dialogue. … One of the greatest challenges we have the environmental space right now, in my view, is that we want to put on jerseys. People want to say, ‘You’re pro-environment and anti-jobs.’ Or, ‘You're pro-jobs … and you're anti-environment.’ It doesn't have to be that way. That's a false choice. It's a false narrative.”

In that vein, Pruitt said he’s planning to launch two initiatives that environmentalists might want to partner with him on: cleaning up abandoned mines and declaring a war on lead. “It's one of our greatest challenges in this country: lead in our drinking water … that threatens the mental acuity of children,” he said. “I'm likely going to go to Congress next year and will ask them to do some big things. … We can do those things together. Why do we have to continue this divisive type of approach to these very, very important issues to the country?”

He added that enforcement is not mutually exclusive with his parallel effort to accelerate the process for approving new projects. He pledged that, by the end of 2018, anyone who applies for a permit from the EPA will get a decision within six months.

As far as the left is concerned, Pruitt is probably the most divisive EPA administrator since Anne Gorsuch Burford — the mother of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch — during Ronald Reagan’s first term. “Her short, tumultuous tenure was marked by sharp budget cuts, rifts with career EPA employees, a steep decline in cases filed against polluters and a scandal over the mismanagement of the Superfund cleanup program that ultimately led to her resignation in 1983,” Brady Dennis and Chris Mooney wrote in February.

Pruitt, too, has already generated his share of controversies. The EPA, for example, signed a nearly $25,000 contract this summer to construct a secure, soundproof communications booth in Pruitt’s office. Many mocked this as wasteful.

“Well, it's no more than a secure phone line,” Pruitt said when I asked about it. “I didn't have a secure phone in this office to have the conversations that sometimes need to be secure. And it's kind of hard to tell someone that's reaching out that, to have a confidential secure conversation, I've got to go down two floors, and over two levels, and I'll call you back. That's just not … how things should work. … And sometimes legend leads to misinformation in the marketplace. Not everything you read, by the way, is fully reflective of what the truth is.”

Gorsuch Burford’s portrait hangs in the corridor leading to Pruitt’s office. The office itself is full of cool baseball memorabilia. From 2003 until he got elected A.G. in 2010, he was the co-owner and managing partner of a minor league team in Oklahoma called the RedHawks. Pruitt has a bucket of autographed balls, several signed by hall of famers, in front of one of his two fireplaces. He’s got two jerseys framed on the wall. And he has a signed Yogi Berra baseball card on his coffee table.

Justice Gorsuch spoke at the Federalist Society’s annual gala last night. Pruitt will address the group of conservative lawyers later today. The men, born a year apart, are both rock stars on the right. Each interprets the Constitution in a way that would dramatically defang the regulatory state if it became the law of the land.

One of the reasons legal experts expect Gorsuch to be an even more conservative justice than Antonin Scalia, his predecessor, is his rejection of what’s known as Chevron deference. The Supreme Court created the standard in 1984, which requires judges to defer to administrative agencies’ interpretations of federal law in most cases where the law may be “ambiguous” and the agency’s position seems “reasonable.” As a circuit court judge, Gorsuch denounced Chevron deference as “a judge-made doctrine for the abdication of the judicial duty.”

For his part, as the attorney general of Oklahoma, Pruitt sued the EPA 14 times during the Obama administration. He challenged the legal authority of the agency he now runs to regulate everything from toxic mercury pollution and smog to carbon emissions and wetlands. He made clear during our interview that his views haven’t changed.

“Agencies and the executive branch need to enforce the law,” Pruitt said. “They don't need to fill in the spaces if Congress doesn't act. It’s a very important question because a lot of times the tools aren't in the toolbox.”

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I didn't realize Gorsuch's mother had been EPA administrator. Sounds like a lovely woman (note sarcasm font). Pruitt needs to go. NOW.