Category: Corruption

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Corruption Donald Trump Ivanka Trump The Trump Adminstration

Report Exposes The Extent Of Ivanka’s Corruption While Her Father Was POTUS

Even though she had absolutely zero experience when it came to government service, for four years Ivanka Trump was given unlimited access to the Oval Office and was reportedly one of her father’s most trusted advisers, which could help explain why Donald Trump was such a massive failure as president.

According to the New York Times, Ivanka was charged with overhauling programs that assisted small businesses run by women around the world, but the program “was so haphazardly managed by a federal agency that an independent watchdog was unable to determine whether it actually worked.

“In a report released on Thursday, the Government Accountability Office found that programs funded through the Women’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act, which Ms. Trump, the eldest daughter of former President Donald J. Trump, helped usher through Congress in late 2018, were deeply flawed and hampered by poor oversight.

“Officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which oversaw $265 million per year in spending on the initiative and an associated antipoverty program, never worked out “an explicit definition” of who was eligible to receive millions in aid, the report found.”

And yet, Republicans like to say that Ivanka was doing great things for women. Clearly, she wasn’t. Instead, she was using taxpayer money to fund a program that we cannot even measure the success or failure of. That’s the very definition of corruption.

The G.A.O. report also found that while Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel hailed Ivanka by claiming her efforts would “empower women all over the world,” the reality was far from what had been promised:

“Investigators, who interviewed agency workers in Africa, Asia, South America and Europe, reported that those workers ‘did not receive any guidance’ from top officials on how to define ‘the very poor,’ hampering efforts to deliver aid.”

Just like her father, Ivanka Trump isn’t good at anything other than lying and cheating. She’s a grifter and she wasted taxpayer money so she could pretend to be “governmenting.”

 

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Corruption Crime Donald Trump Social Media

New Legal Problems For Trump – Gets Busted Shaking Down His Social Media Business Partner

Already facing massive legal problems for his role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, failed former president Donald Trump is now accused of shaking down a partner in his failing social media venture, Truth Social.

The Washington Post took a deep dive into why Truth Social is sinking into financial morass and discovered that the ex-president wanted a top executive at the site to hand over some of his shares to former first lady Melania Trump.

Will Wilkerson, then an executive at former president Donald Trump’s start-up Trump Media & Technology Group, was at a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.,coffee shop with company co-founder Andy Litinsky last October when Trump called Litinsky with a question: Would he give up some of his shares to Trump’s wife, Melania?

Trump Media, the owner of the fledgling social network Truth Social, had just been boosted by a huge merger agreement and a flood of investment that had made the stake worth millions of dollars. Trump had already been given 90 percent of the company’s shares in exchange for the use of his name and some minor involvement, leaving everyone else to split the rest.

Litinsky tried to brush it off, telling Trump “the gift would have meant a huge tax bill he couldn’t pay,” Wilkerson said in an interview. “Trump didn’t care. He said, ‘Do whatever you need to do.’ ”

A few months after Litinsky refused to do as Trump had suggested, he was unceremoniously removed from the company’s board of directors, which certainly sounds like retaliation for not doing what the Donald wanted.

Though Litinsky has not spoken publicly about the incident, Wilkerson has and is now cooperating with prosecutors who are taking a close look at Truth Social, according to The Post.

Wilkerson is cooperating with investigations into Trump Media by the SEC and federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, said his attorneys, Phil Brewster, Patrick Mincey and Stephen Bell. Among the materials he filed with the SEC’s whistleblower office is a detailed, day-to-day computer log compiled by company co-founder Wes Moss, Litinsky and Wilkerson about their daily company-related activities.

Those investigations could serve as the end of Truth Social, which is already on the verge of financial collapse, as Trump and his partners cannot access more operating capital as long as federal regulators suspect illegal behavior by top excutives.

Wilkerson now says he believes Truth Social will fail, like so many of Trump’s business ventures have:

“We weren’t trying to be Trump Org 2.0. We always saw Trump as the rocket fuel to send this thing to space. I wanted this to succeed more than anything. … But these are glaring issues, and they’re threatening me now for calling them out. I couldn’t stay quiet anymore.”

Categories
Congress Corruption Elections

Madison Cawthorn Is Flat Broke, Hundreds Of Thousands Of Dollars In Debt And Facing Criminal Charges: Report

North Carolina GOP Congressman Madison Cawthorn’s life is in complete shambles, and it’s hard to feel sorry for him considering the bad shit he’s done over the past couple of years.

First and foremost, Cawthorn is broke and cannot pay his campaign debts, which, it just so happened, he incurred for illegal purposes, meaning that in addition to soon being unemployed, he’s also facing indictment and time in prison if found guilty.

Roger Sollenberger of The Daily Beast reports that everything that can go wrong for Cawthorn is doing exactly that

With two weeks to go until a primary election he was fated to lose, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) was already underwater. His campaign held more than twice as much debt as it had cash on hand, the donor well was dry, and he and his staff were months into a madcap spending streak that one campaign source called “baffling.”

And now, after indeed losing that primary, there’s no money to pay the piper.

Specifically, there’s no money to repay the supporters who donated hundreds of thousands of dollars in advance to Cawthorn’s election efforts beyond the primary—to the general election he now won’t be competing in.

That shuffling of money is illegal, and that complicates matters considerably for the soon-to-be ex-congressman, who is going to be hard-pressed to find an attorney who will represent him without a retainer:

The breach of fiduciary obligations follows a string of personal and professional embarrassments that hounded the one-term congressman across the weeks and months leading up to his primary defeat—accusations of insider trading, multiple alleged ethics violations, unforced public gaffes, and photo and video leaks designed to humiliate him.

But the campaign’s financial washout is more than another embarrassment; it’s against the law.

To borrow a phrase from Homer Simpson, D’oh!

But perhaps most confounding and embarrassing for Cawthorn is the spending reports which show how he managed to burn through so much cash so quickly. The details in federal reports sound like something a college frat boy would have done:

This person pointed to a spree of frivolous charges over the last year that all accelerated into 2022, such as $1,500 in “egregiously” frequent trips to Chick-Fil-A, almost $3,000 at a place called Papa’s Beer, three separate charges at a high-end cigar shop, $21,000 for lodging in Florida and—the biggest drain—hundreds of thousands of dollars in sky-high consulting and fundraising fees, including for Cawthorn’s friend and campaign manager, Blake Harp, who was drawing a salary beyond federal limits.

Jordan Libowitz, communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, says Cawthorn is screwed:

“There are few more ironclad rules in campaign finance than you can’t spend general election funds in a primary. There are strict limits on how much may be given and spent in each. If Cawthorn spent funds raised for the general during the primary and made no attempt to refund the general donations, he’ll likely be in a lot of trouble with the FEC.”

Beginning in January of next year, Cawthorn will no longer have his congressional salary, so he’s quite literally going to be jobless, penniless, and facing the prospect of legal action against him.

Sometimes karma is a very beautiful thing.

Categories
Corruption GOP U.S. Senate

Ted Cruz Caught Using Taxpayer Money To Employ Family Members

Proving that he’s just as corrupt as almost every member of the GOP, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz has been caught employing members of his family with taxpayer money in direct violation of federal law.

According to Business Insider:

“Cruz employed the daughter of his first cousin in his Senate office as a paid press assistant and gave his cousin’s son a coveted Senate internship. Cruz put his cousin on the payroll for his 2016 presidential campaign and later for his Senate campaign, records show.”

Federal law could not be more clear. U.S Code § 3110 states:

“A public official may not appoint, employ,
promote, advance, or advocate for appointment,
employment, promotion, or advancement, in or
to a civilian position in the agency in which he
is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction
or control any individual who is a relative of the
public official. An individual may not be appointed, employed, promoted, or advanced in or
to a civilian position in an agency if such appointment, employment, promotion, or advancement has been advocated by a public official,
serving in or exercising jurisdiction or control
over the agency, who is a relative of the individual.
(c) An individual appointed, employed, promoted, or advanced in violation of this section
is not entitled to pay, and money may not be
paid from the Treasury as pay to an individual
so appointed, employed, promoted, or advanced.”

When confronted with the information about his employment of relatives with taxpayer funds, members of his staff resorted to the ad hominem attack line used so often by failed, one-term former President Donald Trump, calling the article “fake news” and refusing further comment.

How do you suppose Cruz and his fellow Republicans in the Senate would act if say the son or daughter of President Joe Biden’s first cousin was suddenly given a plum job in the White House and drew a salary paid for with tax dollars? There’d likely be a hue and cry not heard since the days of the bogus Benghazi hearings, and it’s even safe to suggest that some extremists in the GOP (like Sen. Cruz) would recommend impeachment.

Ted Cruz is a liar, a fraud, and a man who gave aid and comfort to insurrectionists by refusing to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election even though he had no proof of any irregularities in the balloting.

 

Categories
Corruption Crime Donald Trump Russia The Trump Adminstration

Court Filings Suggest Giuliani And His ‘Associates’ Are In Bed With The Russian Mafia

When his attorney made a court filing ago to convince a judge that Rudy Giuliani’s electronic devices contain confidential information such as discussions with clients, the documents that wound up in the public record shed new light on the full scale of unsavory characters Rudy has been rubbing elbows with and also point to a larger conspiracy which involves the Russian mafia.

Giuliani’s attorney, Robert J. Costello, notes that the former New York City mayor should never have been raided by the FBI late last month, the New York Times reports:

“In a 17-page letter to the judge who authorized the searches, Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers argued that it would have been more appropriate — and less invasive — for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan to seek information through a subpoena, which, unlike a warrant, would have given him an opportunity to review the documents and respond.

“The defense lawyers wrote that prosecutors ‘simply chose to treat a distinguished lawyer as if he was the head of a drug cartel or a terrorist, in order to create maximum prejudicial coverage of both Giuliani and his most well-known client — the former president of the United States.'”

Though Rudy may not be the head of a drug cartel, it seems he travels in the same circles and does business with members of organized criminal organizations that do indeed traffic in narcotics, engage in sexual trafficking of young girls, and have people killed for daring to report on their illegal activities.

At one point in the court documents that became public, there’s a tantalizing tidbit that refers to Dmitro Firtash, a Ukrainian businessman with extensive ties to Russian organized crime, legal analyst Marcy Wheeler pointed out on Twitter. It also mentions possible associates of Giuliani who worked in the United States as unregistered foreign agents of Firtash:

Firtash, it should be added, gave a $1 million loan to Lev Parnas, who was working for Giuliani at the time in an attempt to dig up dirt on the Biden family:

“A billionaire with alleged ties to the Russian mob, Firtash is facing bribery-related charges in the U.S. and fighting extradition from Vienna. He once attempted to buy and redevelop the famous Drake Hotel in New York with the now-incarcerated Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman. And he’s seen by Ukrainian anti-corruption activists and Western governments as a corrupt instrument of Russia.”

 

So former President Donald Trump’s personal attorney — the man who was actively working to sabotage Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign — was also doing business with a man who has deep ties to the Kremlin and the Russian mob.

The mention of Firtash in the court filings is also yet another connection that Trump has to Russia, despite his protestations that he has never done business with Russian entities or sought assistance from the Russian government.

If nothing else, the ongoing legal case against Giuliani could give us greater insight into just how deeply Donald Trump is tied to Russia, the Kremlin, and Russian organized crime. It may also wind up leading to criminal charges against the former president, his children, and members of the Trump Organization.