Trump 43: King of Chaos

[GreyhoundFan]

"There’s another whistleblower complaint. It’s about Trump’s tax returns."

Spoiler

Hey, have you heard about this whistleblower complaint?

An unnamed civil servant is alleging serious interference in government business. If the allegations are true, they could be a game-changer. They might set in motion the release of lots of other secret documents showing that President Trump has abused his authority for his personal benefit.

Wait, you thought I meant the whistleblower from the intelligence community?

Nope. I’m talking about a completely different whistleblower, whose claims have gotten significantly less attention but could prove no less consequential. This whistleblower alleges a whole different category of impropriety: that someone has been secretly meddling with the Internal Revenue Service’s audit of the president.

In defiance of a half-century norm, Trump has kept his tax returns secret.

We don’t know exactly what he might be hiding. His bizarre behavior, though, suggests it’s really bad.  

Maybe these documents would reveal something embarrassing but not criminal (e.g., the relatively puny size of his fortune). Maybe they’d reveal that some of his financial dealings are legally dubious or even fraudulent, which would be consistent with past Trump-family tax behavior.

Most significantly, they might reveal that Trump has been profiting off the presidency. Among the relevant conflict-of-interest questions that Trump’s taxes could answer: whom he gets money from, whom he owes money to (and on what terms) or how his 2017 tax overhaul enriched him personally.

Not that you’d know it from the administration’s stonewalling, but Congress actually has unambiguous authority to get Trump’s returns. In fact, it has had the authority to get any federal tax return, no questions asked, for nearly a century. Under a 1924 law, Treasury “shall furnish” any tax document requested by the House Ways and Means or Senate Finance Committee chairs.

That’s exactly what the House Ways and Means chairman, Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), did in the spring. The statute doesn’t require him to state any legislative purpose for his request, but he provided one anyway: He said that committee needed to make sure the IRS, which it oversees, is properly conducting its annual audit of the president and vice president, as the IRS manual has required post-Watergate.

There is historical precedent for worrying about how rigorously the IRS might be auditing its own boss. In the early 1970s, the agency commended then- President Richard M. Nixon on his supposedly pristine tax filings, even though he owed about a half-million dollars in unpaid taxes and interest.

Since then, presidents have voluntarily released their tax returns. So Congress didn’t really need to worry much about whether the IRS was going easy on the president.

“The concern about the IRS’s audit is almost minimal or nonexistent if tax returns are public, because there are effectively a million auditors,” says George K. Yin, University of Virginia School of Law professor emeritus and former chief of staff of Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation. “The public can see if there’s any funny business going on.”

Current circumstances are different, of course.

Still, from an optics standpoint, this IRS-audit-oversight rationale seemed a strange one for Neal to cite. Especially because it was the primary rationale offered, and there was no reason at the time to believe the IRS was actually being bullied. So, for the first time in history, the administration refused a Ways and Means tax request, on the grounds that Neal’s stated legislative purpose was “pretextual.”

But now, in retrospect, Neal’s stated purpose looks either extremely ingenious — or extremely lucky.

That’s because this summer an anonymous whistleblower approached the House committee to say its concerns had been justified. The whistleblower offered credible allegations of “evidence of possible misconduct,” specifically “inappropriate efforts to influence” the audit of the president, according to a letter Neal sent to the treasury secretary.

We don’t know the complaint details, including who allegedly meddled with the audit or how, and whether the IRS complied. The complaint hasn’t been released, and Neal said last week  that he’s still consulting with congressional lawyers about whether to make it public.

But the exact details of the allegations matter less than the fact that they corroborate Democratic lawmakers’ argument that oversight of the IRS’s annual presidential audit is indeed a legitimate reason they — and hopefully, eventually, the public — should see Trump’s taxes. It’s hard to imagine how the federal judge in this case could now rule against the committee.

As is so often true with allegations of Trumpian wrongdoing, we’ve learned once again that there’s a there there — and there, and there, and all sorts of other places you mightn’t have thought to look.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘A presidency of one’: Key federal agencies increasingly compelled to benefit Trump"

Spoiler

As the impeachment drama has unfolded over the past week, a series of disclosures has illuminated President Trump’s command over key federal agencies, revealing how he has compelled them to pursue his personal and political goals, investigate his enemies and lend legitimacy to his theories about the 2016 election.

The Justice Department has prioritized a probe that the president hopes will discredit a finding by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help him win. As part of that effort, Attorney General William P. Barr has met overseas with foreign intelligence officials to enlist their aid in “investigating the investigators,” as the right’s rallying cry goes, and dig into the president’s suspicions.

The State Department, meanwhile, has been investigating the email records of as many as 130 current and former department officials who sent messages to the private email account of Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and Trump’s 2016 opponent. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defied Congress on Tuesday by attempting to block the depositions of five department employees called to testify in the impeachment inquiry.

The inquiry itself was sparked by a July 25 phone call in which Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate unsubstantiated corruption allegations against former vice president Joe Biden, a leading 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, and his son.

In each of these instances, the president or administration officials have strongly defended their conduct as proper and above board.

But taken together, they illustrate the sweeping reach of Trump’s power and the culture he has spawned inside the government. The president’s personal concerns have become priorities of departments that traditionally have operated with some degree of political independence from the White House — and their leaders are engaging their boss’s obsessions.

“Barr and Pompeo are stuck in the fog machine. They seem captives of the president’s perverse worldview,” said Timothy Naftali, a historian and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. “Authoritarian regimes have this problem all the time . . . when all government activity is the product of the id of the leader. But in a republic, that’s unusual.”

Most Republicans have stood by Trump. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), echoing many of them, told reporters it would be “insane” to impeach Trump and said the exchange with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was appropriate.

Trump’s moves underscore his transformation as president. He arrived in Washington a neophyte uncertain about how to operate the machinery of government. But now, in his third year in office, Trump has grown confident about exercising power, disposing of aides who acted as guardrails and elevating those who prove their loyalty by following his orders.

As the president said last month after John Bolton’s abrupt exit as national security adviser, “It’s very easy actually to work with me. You know why it’s easy? Because I make all the decisions.”

Trump was sworn in as the 45th president with less governmental experience than any of his predecessors. His advisers tried to tutor him about the three branches of government and the constitutional balance of powers. The general ethos among Trump’s top aides then was to protect institutions and moderate some of the president’s swings — to resist rather than follow his impulses, as described by one former senior White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share a candid assessment.

Since then, Trump has become more emboldened to make decisions and has systematically dispensed with much of his early team, including former defense secretary Jim Mattis, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, former White House chiefs of staff Reince Priebus and John F. Kelly, former White House counsel Donald McGahn, former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, former economic adviser Gary Cohn and others.

“I’m not sure there are many, if any, left who view as their responsibility trying to help educate, moderate, enlighten and persuade — or even advise in many cases,” the former senior official said. “There’s a new ethos: This is a presidency of one.”

“It’s Trump unleashed, unchained, unhinged,” this official added. “He continues to go further and further and further, and now I don’t think there’s anybody telling him, ‘No.’ ”

Some of Trump’s closest aides and friends strongly contest the suggestion that he is unbridled and pursuing his personal interests at the expense of the nation. Instead, they cast him as a politician who is curious, at times to a fault, about the investigations into his 2016 campaign and determined to reveal more about those efforts. They shrug off his moves as “Trump being Trump” and part of the president’s showmanship in driving the national political debate as opposed to a possible constitutional reckoning.

“He’s actually very calm,” said one White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly. “He’s not raging. He’s not fuming. He can’t stand what some people write or say on television, sure, but his presidency isn’t consumed by that.”

Sam Nunberg, a former Trump campaign adviser, said the president has long wanted to be the sole driver of his message, with everyone else playing supporting roles — which is how he ran his business and 2016 campaign from his corner office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower in New York.

“He wants to be the one adjusting and taking the lead on where it goes, not adjusting to others,” Nunberg said. “It goes back to how he navigated network TV, the tabloids and business publicity. That’s his playbook.”

Some outside scholars have a different interpretation. Trump’s moves represent a fundamental reorientation of American democracy, said Timothy Snyder, a Yale history professor and author of “On Tyranny,” a resistance guide to what he describes as America’s turn toward authoritarianism.

“Rather than having the boring system we take for granted, where you have laws based on facts, instead you have a personality who makes up his own reality,” Snyder said. “At first, that reality is just confusing and seems to gum up the works, but after a while, the leader starts to draw people into that reality by making them defend it or making them prove it. This is what’s happening here.”

In Trump’s Washington, many administration officials have calculated that if they do not enthusiastically wade into Trump’s riptide of grievances and personal pursuits, they risk being ridiculed or sidelined by the president, as was the case with Bolton, a hawk whom Trump has mocked since his departure as “Mr. Tough Guy.”

The implicit day-to-day charge for many Trump advisers is simple, according to aides and other officials familiar with the president’s Cabinet and West Wing staff: Figure out how to handle or even polish Trump’s whims and statements, but do not have any illusion that you can temper his relentless personality, heavy consumption of cable news or thirst for political combat.

Acquiescence is central to survival. Trump has bonded with aides who take his running complaints about the “deep state” and “fake news” seriously, along with his embrace of people and positions outside of the mainstream. The leading members of Trump’s inner circle dutifully work to address his concerns, sometimes by directing federal resources.

Officials including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, for example, have worked to block Democratic lawmakers and others from obtaining access to Trump’s tax returns, which he has refused to disclose publicly.

The list of Trump loyalists pulled into his maneuvers begins at the top. Vice President Pence traveled to Europe in early September and met with Zelensky and urged him to address “corruption,” seeming to reiterate the message Trump communicated to Zelensky in July about investigating the Bidens. This was before promised U.S. military aid to Ukraine was released.

Barr’s role in the investigation into the Russia probe’s origins, which is being conducted by U.S. Attorney John Durham in Connecticut, is extraordinary in part because the probe seeks evidence of misconduct within his own Justice Department to support the conspiracy theory — embraced by Trump and advanced on Fox News — that the Russia inquiry was corrupt and predicated on undermining Trump.

Snyder said the investigation Trump sought and Barr is pursuing fits a pattern of behavior in which leaders try to disprove or undermine facts — in this case, the conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win — with other investigations.

“The idea of investigating the investigation is that you cast doubt on the boring factual stuff,” he said. “Even if you don’t win with your adventurous fiction, you also win if your adventurous fiction casts doubt on the boring facts.”

The White House and Justice Department have defended this review of the investigation into possible connections between Russia and members of the Trump campaign as appropriate; Barr told Congress in April that he believed “spying did occur.”

Barr’s interest in the probe is unsurprising to several of his associates, who said this week he is a headstrong and deeply conservative man who at this point in his career has grown disdainful of the Democratic Party, the federal government and the news media, criticizing them in private as biased and skewed against the president.

Trump’s advisers say he respects Barr’s approach and considers him “tough,” especially compared to former attorney general Jeff Sessions, who in 2017 recused himself from the Russia investigation.

“We have a great attorney general now,” Trump said of Barr in July. “He’s strong, and he’s smart.”

it's disgusting how quickly the mango menace has turned the U.S. into a banana republic.

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘It’s a dumb thing to say’: Critics blast Trump for calling his impeachment inquiry a ‘COUP’"

Spoiler

President Trump claimed he was a victim of a coup d’etat on Tuesday night, continuing his dramatic rhetoric that has drawn fierce pushback from legal scholars and Democrats since the House impeachment inquiry began last week.

“As I learn more and more each day,” he wrote on Twitter, “I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of the United States of America!”

Critics disputed the president’s tweet by pointing to basic definitions of a coup d’etat, a violent illegal overthrow of the government by an opposing group, and impeachment, a legal process laid out in the Constitution. Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), a presidential hopeful, even suggested Trump should not be allowed to make such a remark on Twitter, sharing his “COUP” tweet with CEO Jack Dorsey.

“Time to do something about this,” she tweeted to Dorsey.

Gene Healy, a vice president at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, called Trump’s comparison “dumb and galling.” He pointed out how Vice President Pence, a close ideological ally, would take office if the president were to be impeached, unlike in the illegal overthrow Trump’s tweet evokes.

“What kind of coup would replace Donald Trump with his handpicked, duly elected, loyal-to-a-fault running mate? That’s not a coup,” Healy, also the author of “Indispensable Remedy: The Broad Scope of the Constitution’s Impeachment Power,” told The Washington Post. “So it’s a dumb thing to say, but it’s something that is par for the course in terms of moronic political rhetoric.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The “COUP” tweet follows explosive, and at times threatening, comments Trump has made in attempt to discredit the impeachment inquiry. He has questioned whether House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) should be arrested for treason, an offense that can be punishable by death. He has ominously alluded to the same punishment while attacking the anonymous whistleblower, whom Trump called “almost a spy.” And he has suggested on Twitter that his impeachment could lead to civil war while quoting Southern Baptist megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress — who had just made a similar argument on “Fox & Friends Weekend.”

Likewise, Trump’s “COUP” tweet came hours after his allies made the same case on Fox News.

“This is not an impeachment. This is a coup d’etat,” Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who led impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton in 1998, said Tuesday on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom.”

Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser, later told Fox Business Network: “This is nothing less than an attempted coup d’etat and end run around the ballot box."

But Healy said the “coup” argument is old news, a recycled political talking point spewed by both President Richard M. Nixon’s surrogates in the aftermath of Watergate and by Democrats defending Clinton in the ’90s.

“Let’s not pretend Trump is the first to use this stupid comparison,” he said.

During Clinton’s impeachment, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), now chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which is tasked with investigating Trump, called it a “partisan coup d’etat.” It was a “Republican coup d’etat,” said former congressman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), and it was “raw, unmasked, unbridled hatred and meanness that drives this impeachment coup d’etat, this unapologetic disregard for the voice of the people,” said Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) at the time.

Hillary Clinton, in fact, also said her husband experienced an “attempted Congressional coup d’etat” in her 2003 memoir, “Living History.”

It was already stale by then. For decades after Nixon’s resignation, his closest allies continued to spin the same “coup d’etat” alternative history.

“Having been beaten at the polls in the crushing defeat of the McGovern-Shriver ticket, the left-wingers determined to reverse the election results by forcing Nixon out of the presidency by a process which amounted to a coup d’etat,” Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s vice president who resigned in 1973, wrote in 1980.

Some of Nixon’s most ardent supporters, notably his speechwriter Patrick J. Buchanan, are still making that case today. In June, Buchanan said that if impeachment ever happens to Trump, that would also be an “attempted coup to overthrow a president by the losers of 2016.”

“This COUP business from Trump is the same nonsense that the revisionist Nixon gang pushed for years,” Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said on Twitter, “that Nixon wasn’t really guilty of anything, he was removed from office via a ‘silent coup’ of plotters determined to destroy Nixon’s legacy and policies.”

Healy said Trump notably diverges from past presidents threatened with impeachment by making the “COUP” claim himself rather than leaving it to his surrogates. “He crossed a new rhetorical Rubicon,” Healy said, while noting he finds the president’s “civil war” and “treason” rhetoric considerably more troubling.

It’s also not the first time Trump has claimed to be the victim of a coup. During then-special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump frequently retweeted or quoted Fox News pundits and Tom Fitton of the conservative legal watchdog group Judicial Watch, who said that the president was targeted in a “Deep State coup effort.”

There has been only one successful coup d’etat in U.S. history, when white neo-Confederates overthrew the multiracial local government in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898, killing at least dozens of black residents and politicians in the process.

Making light of a coup for political purposes, critics charged, failed to appreciate the gravity of actual coups such as this one or others around the world.

“A Coup is what took the lives of my two brothers during the first Liberian civil war,” Wilmot Collins, mayor of Helena, Mont., who is a Liberian refugee and Democratic candidate for Senate, wrote on Twitter. “What the President is facing is not even close to a Coup. It’s called accountability. And it’s long overdue.”

 

[Curious]

On 9/29/2019 at 5:23 AM, Ozlsn said:

I laughed out loud at this. Oh Rudy, poor baby. A hero in his own lunchbox.

I'm not a huge fan of Rudy, but to see how far he has dropped and what he has done to his legacy makes me kind of sad.  It's obvious he's declining.  He contradicts himself from sentence to sentence now.  Half the stuff he says makes no sense. He's dropped so far from being America's Mayor.

[fraurosena]

Trump is actually losing his shit because of the impeachment. He sounds desperate and afraid. And nonsensical.

[thread with high-- or rather, lowlights of his onscreen rant today]

Rest of the thread under the spoiler:

Spoiler

 

Just look at the expression on his face as he rants. That is the look of a troubled and very frightened man.

[nvmbr02]

Now it is the second rant of the day...another presser with the President of Finland.

 

He is back on the stable genius garbage. 

[fraurosena]

Wut?!

 

Did you notice the Finnish president swat Trump's knee-grabby hand away? 

Honestly, I don't know why foreign leaders still want to meet with him.

[formergothardite]

9 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Honestly, I don't know why foreign leaders still want to meet with him.

I don't either because they all look remarkable uncomfortable when they are stuck next to him. 

I guess they do it so he won't get mad and attempt to attack their country. 

[fraurosena]

Not only is Trump an asshat, he's a rude asshat at that.

 

[Curious]

5 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Trump is actually losing his shit because of the impeachment. He sounds desperate and afraid. And nonsensical.

[thread with high-- or rather, lowlights of his onscreen rant today]

Rest of the thread under the spoiler:

  Hide contents

 

Just look at the expression on his face as he rants. That is the look of a troubled and very frightened man.

I was watching this and ended up having to mute it because I was making myself hoarse from screaming at the tv.  He was unhinged.  At what point are the republicans going to put us all out of our misery.

[GreyhoundFan]

From the wonderfully sarcastic Alexandra Petri: "For the last time, Trump’s every move is brilliant and calculated"

Spoiler

“There are different ways to bake the cake, depending on what sort of cake you want. Different flavoring, different temperatures, different ingredients yield different types of cake, and the president as the master baker is testing recipes and deciding what type of cake he wants.”

— a senior official, explaining President Trump’s approach to impeachment to The Post on Monday.

For the last time, this is all part of the plan. Getting himself impeached is actually a strategic triumph for President Trump, and anyone who thinks otherwise is just not playing chess in enough dimensions. Consider what is the greater mark of strategic genius: to mire yourself and your administration in an endless series of idiotic and pointless controversies, often rife with misspellings, damaging your standing at home and abroad, or to NOT do that? If you say the second, you are a fool. This is all part of the plan. Actually, this is good. Actually, this is great.

I repeat, every move that Trump makes, has made or is making, currently, with the president of Finland sitting helplessly by his side, wearing an expression of alarm, is planned. It is a genius plan. It might look like the random, haphazard flailing of a cat that has gotten its head stuck in a bucket. But actually he is in total control.

He is like a master baker, preparing everything just exactly the way he would like it. You can’t make a cake without breaking eggs! That is why he has broken all the eggs and will not stop breaking eggs until there are no eggs anymore. He is baking the chess pieces into a cake, and it is brilliant, and that is why no one has thought to do it before. If it looks messy, if it looks like he is covered in batter and surrounded by trolls and incompetents and family members (but I repeat myself) — well, that is not correct. I’m embarrassed that you would think that maybe he did not know what he was doing, just because he looked and sounded and acted like he did not know what he was doing. Really, the fool here is you.

Ah, the genius of this man! Moriarty wept, and also the Borgias, and also Jesus, although that may have been for unrelated reasons. His is the shrewdness of Alexander the Great, cutting through the Gordian knot. He has the vision to cut through things, even if the things he is cutting through say “THIS IS LOAD-BEARING, DON’T CUT." He dares to push the buttons labeled “DO NOT PUSH: WON’T DO ANYTHING GOOD, AND WILL RELEASE OPOSSUM." There is no puzzle, norm or rule of whatever degree of complexity he cannot immediately dismantle with a single movement.

Don’t embarrass yourself by saying, “This is embarrassing!" or "That is not how you spell ‘little’ ” or “That isn’t a hyphen” or "A *MOAT* with ALLIGATORS? Oh, for blank’s sake.” Don’t you see? You are playing into his hands. He wants you to get caught up in this! Only to someone with a small, sad brain like yours would these seem like the movements of a lost, perplexed, damaged person who did not understand what a hyphen was and was too embarrassed to ask, who thought “jock strap” was a dirty word, who genuinely has a temper tantrum when told a moat full of alligators around the country would neither be good nor feasible. This man is astronomical units beyond our frail capacity to understand. The kind of chess he is playing has not even been invented yet. If he appears to be chewing on the pieces and crying, that is its strategy.

It has to be! It cannot be that he is exactly as he appears, that I am doing all this on my own, that I have poured all my intellect into a bottomless void around which time itself seems to warp. It cannot be that he is exactly as he appears. Or why else would he be defeating me?

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"A Trump hotel mystery: Giant reservations followed by empty rooms"

Spoiler

House investigators are looking into an allegation that groups — including at least one foreign government — tried to ingratiate themselves to President Donald Trump by booking rooms at his hotels but never staying in them.

It’s a previously unreported part of a broad examination by the House Oversight Committee, included in Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, into whether Trump broke the law by accepting money from U.S. or foreign governments at his properties.

“Now we’re looking at near raw bribery,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a House Oversight Committee member who chairs the subcommittee with jurisdiction over Trump’s hotel in Washington. “That was the risk from Day One: foreign governments and others trying to seek favor because we know Trump pays attention to this. ... It’s an obvious attempt to curry favor with him.”

The investigation began after the committee received information that two entities — a trade association and a foreign government — booked a large quantity of rooms but used only a fraction of them, according to a person familiar with the allegation who isn't authorized to speak for the committee.

The emoluments clause of the Constitution forbids a president from profiting from foreign governments or receiving any money from the U.S. government except his or her annual salary.

Rep. Ro Khanna, (D-Calif.), a member of the House Oversight Committee, said if Trump or his staff solicited the hotel reservations, they could have broken the law. But even if they didn’t, it’s still a problem.

“If true, at minimum, this suggests there is a culture of corruption that the administration has created,” Khanna said. “There’s a sense that to curry favor you have to engage in pay to play. That’s exactly what the American people hate about Washington.”

Connolly confirmed that committee staff is investigating but said he didn’t have the details of the allegations. The committee, the White House and the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump has repeatedly denied that he is using the presidency to promote his resorts. “I have a lot of hotels all over the place, and people, they use them because they’re the best,” he told reporters last month.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi directed six committees, including Oversight, to continue their investigations as part of the impeachment inquiry and then send relevant cases to the Judiciary Committee.

Pelosi is considering narrowing the House inquiry to Trump's call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, but one lawmaker told POLITICO that even if that happens, she might allow a couple other issues to be included. Those could include accusations of both Trump illegally making money off his presidency and obstructing justice during former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into whether Trump associates colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

Trump has admitted he asked Zelensky to look into whether former Vice President Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian officials to fire a prosecutor to quash a probe of a company on whose board Biden's son served, but he insisted there was nothing wrong with what he did.

“The unifying theme of congressional investigations is examining the president’s abuse of his office and his power to advance his personal political agenda and his goal of financial self-enrichment,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the House Oversight Committee.

Trump has faced criticism for not fully separating himself from his eponymous company after he was sworn into office. The president still owns his business but has placed his holdings in a trust designed to hold assets for his benefit. He can receive money from the trust at any time without the public’s knowledge.

Last month, the Oversight and Judiciary committees released letters they sent to the administration and Trump’s company demanding details about both the president’s call to host a G-7 summit at one of his Florida resorts and Vice President Mike Pence’s recent stay at a Trump resort in Ireland.

But, according to people familiar with the congressional investigation, Oversight’s inquiry goes beyond those two recent instances and into a broader look at other spending at Trump properties that could lead to conflicts of interest, a waste of U.S. taxpayer money and violations of the Constitution.

“Potential violations of the Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution are of grave concern to the Committee as it considers whether to recommend articles of impeachment,” wrote Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.).

Trump frequently visits his properties — primarily in Florida, New Jersey and Virginia — and has traveled to them more than 300 times since he was sworn into office, according to a compilation of information released by the White House. In 2017, he and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a top presidential adviser, even made a brief unannounced stop at the Trump International Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii, to thank employees for their work.

Trump's trips — and the regular visits by Pence and Trump’s adult children — have led the Secret Service and other federal agencies to spend money at his properties.

The Air Force acknowledged in September it has housed crews at Trump Turnberry in Scotland up to 40 times since 2015, and it's undertaking a broader review after POLITICO first reported the stays.

No entity tracks how much the administration is spending at Trump properties, but it’s likely well into the millions of dollars. Some federal agencies, including the Secret Service and the Air Force, have disclosed some documents in response to public records requests.

Public Citizen, a watchdog group, compiled a list of federal agencies, including the National Security Council and the General Services Administration, that spent money at Trump properties in 2018. By that time, the Secret Service had already spent $64,090 at Trump businesses since 2015.

Trump already faces lawsuits alleging he violated the Constitution by accepting payments from foreign officials at his resorts and hotels. His company donated nearly $200,000 to the U.S. Treasury in February that it said came from profits from foreign governments, but watchdog groups say the amount should higher.

Revenue increased at many of the resorts Trump visited in 2018, including the Trump International Hotel in Washington, which has become a top destination for Republicans, according to Trump’s most recent personal financial disclosure forms. That comes even as Trump’s overall income dipped slightly from $450 million in 2017 to $434 million in 2018.

Several House committees have pushed Trump to release his tax returns to learn more about his businesses, but he has refused to do so. The Trump Organization, which comprises more than 500 businesses, is not required to publicly release financial information.

 

[Ozlsn]

5 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Honestly, I don't know why foreign leaders still want to meet with him.

The USA is still very powerful, has influence through both diplomatic and trade channels  (yeah same diff), has an enormous military and nukes. Also the entire post-WW2 period has involved building a lot of ties between nations, both diplomatic and through trade - no one's going to trash them just because the current leader is Trump. They may start strengthening other, non-US ties but they'll work as hard as possible to limit the damage and hope like hell that 2020 or 2024 sees someone more reasonable/intelligent/honest/intelligible/less kleptocratic is installed in his place.

[thoughtful]

59 minutes ago, Ozlsn said:

someone more reasonable/intelligent/honest/intelligible/less kleptocratic is installed in his place.

While doing laundry today, I think I found a candidate who rises above Trump in all of those areas:

Spoiler

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

More under spoiler:

Spoiler

 

 

[FluffySnowball]

I enjoy watching The Young Turks from time to time (watched them more frequently in the past) and this video is just on point. Trump’s recent behavior is even more cringe worthy than before, and that says a lot. The way he acts alone makes me think an impeachment is quite possible and likely:

 

[smittykins]

I have to admit that when Trump yelled “Ask the President of Finland a question!” I half-expected someone to ask him about raking the floors of the forest.

[Audrey2]

To our friends in Finland and others around the globe, I am so, so sorry that our batty Uncle Don is out and about. It's too bad we don't have the attics anymore to lock our batty Uncle Don's into the Attic instead of exposing them to society. 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

 

[Dandruff]

I wonder how thoroughly the President of Finland had his pants washed after that touch.

Edited October 3, 2019 by Dandruff
spelling, again

[fraurosena]

Trump has no idea how to defend himself or his actions. The only thing he knows is when he's afraid he has to go on the attack. So he is persisting in his attacks on Biden, on Schiff, on Pelosi, on Democrats, the whistleblower, and anyone else he perceives to be his enemy, and those attacks will only get worse, and angrier, and more demented as impeachment -- and consequently his removal-- looms ever closer.

 

[thoughtful]

He may be taken down, in part, because he's too stupid to know what to cover up.

[Dandruff]

Maybe he thinks the additional tangles he's creating will delay an impeachment?