cabinet trump
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yikes 1219 disambig theocracy
neglected, see zinke, pruitt, VPence ...
do we need sep node for the prayer mtgs? drollinger?
1/20 new tag PPP pence, pompeo perry, ie high ranking trump dominionist/ paleo-catholic
droll is proxy for scary xian trump cabinet pompeo, pence, perry ...
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2ND TERM
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On Thursday, Daily Beast columnist David Rothkopf laid out the true breadth of President Donald Trump's "epidemic" of lies, and detailed the "grim" consequences if they go unchecked. According to Rothkopf, under Trump's leadership, the government has gone "braindead," and if he and his allies have their way, the American people will be next.
"This administration has waged war on the First Amendment and is the least transparent in history, while it is erratic and chaotic and the goat rodeo to end all clusterf–ks, there is one thing about which we can be absolutely certain," writes Rothkopf. "It lies. The president lies. His soon-to-depart press secretary lies… and so will her replacement, no matter who that is. His director of communications lies. His Cabinet secretaries lie."
The harms caused by these lies, asserts Rothkopf, have touched nearly every aspect of American life. As he explains, "When economic data is released, it is no longer reliable. When casualty counts for military actions are announced, they are wrong. When new policy initiatives are announced, what we’re sure of is that the ones that might help us will never happen and the ones that appear crazy or ill-conceived will surely turn out worse than we can imagine. When big deals are announced, we know that there are side deals we will never hear of."
Rothkopf argues that we can't believe any benefit or information the administration claims to offer, writing, "Did DOGE save us money or enhance government efficiency? No. Will the Make America Healthy Movement make us healthier? The opposite. When the insanity of RFK Jr. and his quack clack leads to disease outbreaks, contaminated food and viral misinformation, the only thing we know for sure is that these unqualified nutcases are lacing their announcements with science they read off a tile over a urinal at an 1-95 rest stop.
Wherever possible, mendacious goons kill or pervert or attempt to coopt reliable sources of government data, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to the National Weather Bureau. Look out your window; do you see a baked landscape? Shriveling crops? Europe in flames from wildfires? Well, try to find information about climate change on a government website — it’s not there. There is no climate change, folks."
Trump's allies, says Rothkopf, feed into the lies. For example, while hard data shows that the Republicans are poised to take major losses in the upcoming midterms, "what kind of predictions do you hear from the White House, the Keebler Elf serving as Speaker of the House, or the confederacy of dunces in the GOP caucuses? That it’s all gonna be great!
Prosperity is around the corner. (It must be. Scott Bessent said it would be.) Peace is around the corner. (It must be. Marco Rubio said it would be.) Big victories are coming. (They must be. Because Dear Leader says so and he is never wrong.)"
What's more, writes Rothkopf, the American people not only know they're being lied to, but "we also know that behind their lies are malevolent intentions, incompetence, pathological personalities, ignorance and corruption. They are not just unleashing a never-ending torrent of falsehoods, but they are doing it to hide a destructive agenda in which the people of the United States are very often the intended victims." And other nations know Trump is lying to them too.
Rothkopf says the situation arose "because we stopped giving proper value to the character of our leaders, and like a virulent epidemic, the flaws of those we elevated then spread so rapidly that they now threaten the very life of our republic. That’s no exaggeration." He argues, "The only path out is that each of us, individually, makes seeking the truth our top priority, and skepticism our constant ally. We must seek out reliable sources of information and reject those who deliver anything less. For voters, it is also essential we become intolerant of liars in government, media, the corporate world, academia — anywhere...Demand proof. Demand evidence. Make people work for your trust."
He concludes on a dire note, warning, "In the best case, if we reject lies and demand truth again — starting with November’s elections — it will still take many years to restore trust in the U.S. government at home and abroad. But if we fail to, if we allow the lies to triumph yet again, we may well live the rest of our lives in this new grim, unnecessarily, tragically dark age, and with the fear that must carry with it."
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AN 1 26
One of President Donald Trump's Cabinet officials is now in hot water over an investigation into alleged alcohol abuse on the job and relations with a subordinate. And on Monday, some of her staffers were put on leave.
That's according to an article in Bloomberg, which reported that two senior staffers in the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) have been suspended in the wake of a DOL inspector general investigation into Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-Deremer. One of Bloomberg's sources anonymously confided to the outlet that Chavez-Deremer's chief of staff Jihun Han and deputy chief of staff Rebecca Wright have been officially put on leave.
The New York Post recently reported that DOL staffers were allegedly fabricating work trips on behalf of Chavez-Deremer so she could visit family and friends. The labor secretary reportedly had more than 50 official trips in 2025, visiting 37 states. Chavez-Deremer is also accused of drinking alcohol in her office, and for having an inappropriate relationship with an unnamed male subordinate.
According to the Post, Chavez-Deremer — who is married — has hosted the staffer at her Washington D.C. apartment on multiple occasions, and also invited them to her hotel room during work trips. The Post's sources also referred to the labor secretary as the "boss from hell," accusing her of ordering employees to run personal errands for Chavez-Deremer and perform other mundane tasks unrelated to their jobs.
Chavez-Deremer's alleged inappropriate relationship reportedly involved one episode in which she invited the subordinate to her Las Vegas hotel room, where she was staying to celebrate her niece's 40th birthday in October, when the federal government was shut down. The labor secretary reportedly dismissed her security detail before inviting the man over.
The Post also alleged that when Han asked Chavez-Deremer about a stash of alcohol she kept near her office desk, the labor secretary reportedly told her chief of staff to "leave it alone." The stash reportedly includes champagne, bourbon and Kahlua.
Trump administration spokespeople denied the report. White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers called the accusations "baseless," and insisted that Chavez-Deremer "is an incredible asset to President Trump’s team and she will continue advancing the President’s America First agenda."
"These unsubstantiated allegations are categorically false,” DOL spokesperson Courtney Parella told the Post. “Secretary Chavez-DeRemer has complied with all ethics rules and Department policies and remains fully engaged in carrying out the Department’s work on behalf of this historic Administration. The Secretary is considering all possible avenues, including legal action, to fight these baseless accusations from anonymous sources.”
Click here to read Bloomberg's article in its entirety, and click here to read the New York Post's report.
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an 10 25
ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl discussed the push and tug between affluent Donald Trump supporters in the aftermath of Trump’s November election win, with certain personalities grinding against others at the very onset.
Vanity Fair published an excerpt of Karl’s new book “Retribution,” which lays out early opposition to certain appointments by billionaire World Wrestling Entertainment co-founder Linda McMahon and America First Policy Institute CEO Brooke Rollins — who Vanity Fair writer Bess Levin described as a member of Trump’s “brick-s—— scary new cabinet.”
Karl said McMahon and Rollins quickly despised Trump’s pick of former campaign worker Susie Wiles for White House Chief of Staff and “rushed over to Mar‑a‑Lago in a last‑ditch effort to derail the pick.”
“Various Trump aides, most of whom had worked for Wiles during the campaign, managed to impede the two women on their way to see Trump. They even orchestrated a phone call with Vice President–elect JD Vance to delay the two aspiring chiefs of staff on their way to Trump’s office. By the time McMahon and Rollins got in to see Trump, it was too late. He had already asked Wiles to be chief of staff,” Karl wrote. “They would have to settle instead for secretary of education and secretary of agriculture, respectively.”
Trump’s billionaire friend Howard Lutnick, meanwhile, campaigned early to topple the appointment of former Republican lawmaker and MTV reality star Sean Duffy for the role of transportation secretary. Claiming “the man has no relevant experience” doesn’t get far with Trump, according to Karl, so Lutnick “tried to appeal to the president‑elect’s ego instead, tasking his team with searching through Duffy’s hundreds of television appearances to find any criticism of Trump.”
Duffy, according to Karl, was a consistent supporter. Lutnick had to scroll all the way back to the early days of the 2016 Republican presidential primary “to find anything Duffy had said that was remotely negative about Donald Trump.”
Lutnick eventually found a September 2015 interview in which the then‑congressman had said he didn’t believe Trump was a real conservative and didn’t think he would win the party’s nomination. Of course, even then, Duffy had praised Trump for “boldly speaking and saying things that the conservative wing wished that their leaders would say.”
“As weak as Lutnick’s effort to dig up dirt turned out to be, that one stray comment from almost ten years earlier nearly cost Duffy the job,” Karl wrote. “Trump, reconsidering the pick, called Duffy and his wife, Rachel, and they were able to convince the president‑elect that Sean had long since changed his views on Trump’s conservative bona fides.
Trump’s advisor Steve Bannon launched his own attack against the appointment of Kristi Noem as secretary of the sprawling Department of Homeland Security.
“‘We still got the global war on terror,’ an exasperated Steve Bannon told me two days after Trump made the announcement. ‘She runs the whole thing? She runs the f—— Secret Service? It’s all of it. It’s the global war on terror. It’s all that’” Karl reports. “‘What are you talking about? She’s never been in law enforcement!’”
But Bannon didn’t put the blame on Trump for making what he considered a terrible choice. He blamed Corey Lewandowski for convincing the president‑elect to do it.
“’This motherf—— asked for somebody who’s obviously unqualified — and it’s dangerous,’” Karl reports Bannon telling him. “‘This is dangerous. What are you doing?’”
Read the full Vanity Fair excerpt at this link.
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msnbc legal guy? says nothing she does resembles lawyering; signed off on Q jet?
an 5 25
President Donald Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff for policy Stephen Miller is reportedly unofficially running the Department of Justice (DoJ), despite having no law degree.
The New York Times reported Monday that Attorney General Pam Bondi "is still finding her footing, as evidenced by her setback with the Epstein files."
According to the report, Bondi sees her role as that of a surrogate. She considers herself "a faithful executor and high-volume messenger, compelled to cede ground to empowered players in the West Wing, and in her own building, who exercise significant authority that rivals her own."
READ MORE:Trump's new greed deal the ultimate act of destruction the prophets have predicted
Bondi reportedly advocated for a limit to clemency for Jan. 6 rioters to those not accused of acting violently. Ignoring her suggestion, Trump extended pardons to even violent offenders.
According to the current and former Trump aides the Times interviewed, it was clear from the start that Miller would exercise control inside the department. The report cited 20 current and former officials, who were not named.
Elizabeth Oyer, the DoJ's former top pardon lawyer who was fired for her refusal to give gun ownership rights to the actor Mel Gibson, told the Times: “The decisions are being made at the White House, and then they’re being pushed down to the Department of Justice, which is very, very atypical."
“It feels like she is just performing a part,” Oyer added. She is like an actor, in a way.”
READ MORE: 'Embarrassment:' Trump admin asks judge to hide it's tactics for mass layoffs
"If there is a script, it has come in the form of prescriptive executive orders and memos from the White House. The agenda has largely been set by Mr. Trump, his adviser Stephen Miller and other officials — hashing out details with two former criminal defense lawyers for Mr. Trump who run day-to-day operations in the department, along with the attorney general," the Times report said.
It further noted that Bondi has "flattered Trump lavishly, if not always factually." [vid]
When Trump a day after he crossed the 100-day mark of his time in office last month, members of the cabinet took turns to praise the president.
Although everyone offered glowing reviews, Bondi stood out by telling Trump that he was genuinely the best president of all time.
"President, your first 100 days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in this country. Ever. Ever. Never seen anything like it. Thank you," she said during the Cabinet meeting.
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AN 525 VID]
When President Donald Trump a day after he crossed the 100-day mark of his time in office last month, members of the cabinet took turns to praise the president.
Although everyone offered glowing reviews, Attorney General Pam Bondi stood out by telling Trump that he was genuinely the best president of all time.
"President, your first 100 days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in this country. Ever. Ever. Never seen anything like it. Thank you," she said during the Cabinet meeting.
READ MORE: 'Embarrassment:' Trump admin asks judge to hide it's tactics for mass layoffs
In a podcast for The New Republic discussing Trump's need for constant approval, journalists Greg Sargent and Amanda Marcotte described the "over-the-top" praise he receives from his aides as feeding into his "narcissism.""Every emotion is exaggerated to the maximum. They pretend to be angry at the loudest volume. They pretend to be sad with the biggest droopy faces and wailing tears. Everything’s loud and garish and schmaltzy," Marcotte said.
"Most of us would be embarrassed to have somebody praise us like that because we know it’s not true... But he just needs it to just be constantly coming into his ears. And it’s getting worse as he ages, for various reasons. Any psychologist will also tell you that when narcissists are feeling insulted or they’re feeling their insecurity rise up, often because their approval ratings are coming down or they’re otherwise failing, their need to be told they’re the greatest just continues to go up."
Sargent and Marcotte also analyzed White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt's description of the president, calling it "cultlike."
"She routinely fluffs Trump with astonishingly cultlike descriptions of him to reporters—ones that portray him as powerful, calm, and completely in command of events. But then, left to his own devices on Truth Social, Trump presents the opposite picture, erupting regularly in wild meltdowns and uncontrollable hissy fits over the tiniest of slights," Sargent said.
READ MORE:Trump's new greed deal the ultimate act of destruction the prophets have predicted
According to Marcotte,"the over-the-top nature of it does affect certain people by convincing them—I don’t think Trump’s voters, even his biggest fans, think he’s the greatest president ever; the person with the most integrity via all time; no person has ever been anything more thing than Donald Trump ever has."
She added that repeated claims such as, "He’s the greatest businessman of all time," unintentionally reinforce the notion that he was at least a successful businessman, which is actually false. "He was a failure. He bankrupted his company over and over and over again," Marcotte said during the podcast.
The speakers also discussed "AI-generated and real photographic imagery of over-the-top abuse" of migrants detained by the administration "and functionally kidnapped and renditioned to a foreign prison."
"And they shaved their heads. They made sure to like make their tattoos as garish as possible. They had videos of them bent over in these torture positions. And you see the effect that it has on the audiences at Trump’s 100-day rally. The crowd went absolutely nuts," she said.
READ MORE:An 'Angry Black Woman' explains how it's up to white Americans to defeat Trumpism
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BASICALLY GO AROUND TABLE BROWN NOSING; BONDI WENT FROM 20M KIA TO 258! actually 70k last year
AN 525
NO LNX
Trump’s clown car cabinet is driving off a cliff
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reacts as she walks towards the White House, in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 10, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Sabrina Haake, Raw Story May 03, 2025
UPS, the United Parcel Service, just announced that it is laying off 20,000 employees and closing 73 of its buildings by the end of June. It attributes the downturn to reduced shipping volume from its largest customer, Amazon, due to Trump’s tariffs.
When a division of Amazon considered telling consumers the truth, by posting the costs tariffs added to the price of each imported product, the mere possibility set the White House on attack mode. Trump immediately called Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, who reassured him Amazon would never do such a thing, while Karoline Leavitt accused Bezos of a “political and hostile” act just for thinking about it.
When a presidential team of incompetent egoists calls truth-telling a “hostile act,” we’re in trouble.
Ruinous economic indicators prompt ruinous deflection
Trump’s first quarter report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis reflects a sharp contraction in the economy, showing an annual decrease in the GDP of 0.3 percent. Compared to Biden’s last quarter, when “real GDP increased 2.4 percent,” the data suggest that perhaps Trump isn’t the economic genius he claims to be.
These are not partisan data; that the Bureau falls under the US Department of Commerce suggests Trump may soon hobble its reporting capacity. For now, the data show economic contraction, reflecting a colossal reversal from Biden’s expansion. Wall Street sums up Trump’s first 100 days in office as the “worst for the stock market in half a century.”
On brand, when faced with these data, Trump lied, deflected, and blamed his predecessor, posting,“This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s. I didn’t take over until January 20th. This… has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that (Biden) left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!”
Trump continues to manufacture Biden’s “bad numbers”
Trump can’t stop parroting his own campaign lies about Biden’s economy. During the 2024 presidential campaign, when he wasn’t manufacturing a border invasion to enrage people, Trump repeatedly attacked Biden’s economy. It worked. While remaining mum on how his own COVID-19 mismanagement worsened the economy, he convinced 49% of voters that they were impoverished, despite economic indicators to the contrary.
After commerce reports came out this week, Trump doubled down. During an embarrassing televised cabinet meeting orchestrated to praise himself, Trump confirmed that he sought to undo everything Biden did to improve the economy, stating, “We came in and I was very against everything that Biden was doing in terms of the economy. … We took over his mess in so many different ways.”
Trump and his cabinet may drink their own economic Kool-Aid, but Wall Street is abstaining. Multiple indicators confirmed that Biden delivered the strongest post-COVID economic recovery in the world, including: growth and job creation that exceeded G7 and other advanced economies' growth in 2024; inflation control despite global inflationary pressures; avoidance of the post-COVID recession predicted by many; wage gains; strong market performance with record S&P 500 highs; and stellarinfrastructure investment that Trump, in a toddler-esque pique of jealousy, is scrambling to unravel.
During Biden’s term, the U.S. added 16 million jobs, low earners were experiencing wage growth, inflation levels approached the Federal Reserve’s target, and unemployment hit a 54-year low. By these metrics, Biden performed economic jujitsu, delivering an economy that The Economist called “the envy of the world.”
Teaching Trump media how to lie better
After Trump officially blamed Biden this week for economic contractions caused by his own ill-conceived tariffs, he went further, instructing right-wing media how to spin bad economic news of the future. During his televised “Praise Dear Leader” cabinet meeting, Trump told his preferred outlets (Fox, Newsmax, OAN) that they should also blame any economic downturns in the second quarter on Biden.
Trump showed similar intransigence during an interview with Terry Moran of ABC News about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man Trump is keeping in an El Salvador prison despite a Supreme Court order to facilitate his return. Trump insisted during the interview that an obviously photoshopped picture showed Garcia with “MS13” tattooed on his knuckles. When Moran told Trump that the image was clearly photoshopped, Trump acted like a tyrant. He first suggested Moran owed him something – it was thanks to Trump that Moran got the interview at all. Frustrated by Moran’s continuing refusal to lie, Trump told him, “you’re not being very nice,” before pivoting to attacking media as a whole, saying this “is why people no longer believe the news … It’s such a disservice…”
Discussing the Supreme Court order to facilitate Garcia’s return, Moran stated the obvious — that Trump could simply pick up the phone, call El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, and get him back. Trump confirmed that he is, indeed, flouting the Supreme Court’s authority, stating, “I could…. And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that.”
In one interview, Trump vacillated between being the all powerful Oz, and the cheap salesman behind the curtain. When Moran reminded him that the high court ordered him to return Garcia, Trump deflected, incredibly: “I'm not the one making this decision. We have lawyers who don't want to do this.”
Trump’s clown car cabinet is driving off a cliff
After the Supreme Court slapped the administration and ordered Garcia’s return with a 9-0 decision, White House adviser Stephen Miller simply lied about it. Miller claimed on Fox News that the administration had “won” the case, “clearly,” prompting a conservative columnist to retort, “Nope, you lost. Unanimously.” Fox viewers, of course, won’t hear that rejoinder as Fox anchors continue to throw falsehoods at the wall to see what sticks.
As Team Trump continues governing the country like a made-for-Fox-TV reality show, real-life consequences are piling up. China just canceled orders for American pork, soybeans, and lumber, putting US farmers in “full-blown crisis” mode.
Maybe, like dolls for Christmas, farmers can make do with selling one or two hogs instead of 30. As Trump put it during a town hall Wednesday night, he plans to defeat public skepticism over his tariffs through deception. “I just think that I’ll be able to convince people how good this is.”
NOW READ: Trump's rampage is out of control — but there's one way to stop it
Sabrina Haake is a 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her columns are or have been published in Alternet, Chicago Tribune, MSN, Out South Florida, Raw Story, Salon, Smart News, State Affairs, and Windy City Times. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: Bondi launches dubious ‘Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias’ in U.S. government
Trump administration officials could be focused on “anti-religion bias” within the government, but they’re instead focused only on “anti-Christian bias.”
ref
no lnx
Bondi launches dubious ‘Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias’ in U.S. government
Trump administration officials could be focused on “anti-religion bias” within the government, but they’re instead focused only on “anti-Christian bias.”
:{:{April 23, 2025,}:
By Steve Benen
The first hint of things to come came two weeks ago, when State Department encouraged employees to report — even anonymously — allegations of anti-Christian bias within the agency. The Department of Veterans Affairs took a nearly identical step soon after.
Evidently, these weren’t just random memos. The Washington Post reported:
Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday convened the first meeting of a task force President Donald Trump has charged with searching for and eradicating what he’s described as “anti-Christian bias” within federal agencies and regulatory practices. Joined by other Cabinet officials, Bondi kicked off the session by attacking the administration of former president Joe Biden, who she said had “abused and targeted Christians.”
So, a few things.
First, the idea that Biden — a devout and lifelong church-going Roman Catholic — “abused and targeted Christians” is absurd and beneath the office of the attorney general. Indeed, congressional Republicans spent much of the former president’s term raising similar allegations, but an inspector general’s report found no evidence to support the claims.
If Bondi has new evidence to support her partisan attacks, she’s kept it to herself.
Second, it’s hard not to notice the faith-specific drive of this new administrative task force. The attorney general and her colleagues aren’t focused on “anti-religion bias” within the government; they’re focused only on “anti-Christian bias” within the government.
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The Post’s report noted, “[E]ven before the group’s inaugural meeting, critics have assailed its mission as a bald attempt by government to elevate one faith over others and to rewrite recent history under the guise of protecting religious freedoms.” Given the circumstances, it’s not hard to conclude that these critics have a point.
But I was also struck by just how many Cabinet secretaries and prominent federal officials have joined this endeavor. While the increasingly hyper-partisan attorney general is serving as the task force’s chair, she’s serving alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez DeRemer, and FBI Director Kash Patel.
Also on hand for the inaugural meeting of this group was Small Business Administration chief Kelly Loeffler, Deputy Treasury Secretary Michael Faulkende, White House Domestic Policy Council Vince Haley, and a variety of leading officials from the Justice Department, FEMA, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and Office of Management and Budget.
Given the inconvenient fact that the task force is focused on a problem that doesn’t appear to exist, that was quite a turnout.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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2 25
When only a small group of people with extraordinary wealth have power over the government, our system is not responsive to the will of the people, but rather to the will of a handful of wealthy donors whose biggest concerns are lining their own pockets.
Yet, President Trump is rewarding his biggest donors with political favors and countless opportunities to enrich themselves at the expense of the American people.
In addition to funding his 2024 campaign, billionaires — with a combined net worth exceeding $1.2 trillion — also bankrolled President Trump’s inauguration.
But this was only the beginning. Case in point: Despite not being elected by the American people, billionaire Elon Musk's rise to power represents a dangerous new way Trump is manipulating our system so his biggest donors can use the government to line their own pockets.
Our government should not work this way. Presidents creating positions of power for and granting access to wealthy special interests as a thank you for their political donations is corruption and makes the executive branch less responsive to the will of the people.
Campaign Legal Center (CLC) has pushed for stronger campaign finance laws because the American people deserve a government that is transparent and responsive to all Americans, not just a tiny group of billionaires.
We hold all government actors — including Elon Musk — accountable to the laws that make sure public servants serve Americans and not their own business interests.
Elon Musk being gifted a position of power after financially supporting the Trump campaign makes our work fighting corruption more important than ever.
We must ensure that wealthy special interests cannot gain power through illegal coordination schemes, and we must hold all government officials to high ethical standards.
Americans are far too familiar with the ultra-rich using their wealth to access the halls of power. Campaign Legal Center has repeatedly sounded the alarm on the longstanding trend of presidents rewarding their biggest donors with powerful positions such as ambassadorships in their administration.
Now we’re witnessing President Trump reward his wealthy donors not only with ambassadorships, but also with positions in the Cabinet and new roles such as Musk’s unelected position that is influencing government decisions in the shadows.
While the public has little clarity on President Trump’s newly established “U.S. DOGE Service” (CLC has filed public records requests to bring clarity to the matter), Musk has already begun to exert sweeping control over agencies and the sensitive information they hold.
The experts in government agencies, like engineers, economists and scientists, help improve Americans’ daily lives and shouldn't be subject to threats and harassment by an unelected donor.
The Trump administration has already signaled that avoiding conflicts of interest will not be a priority for its political appointees.
The ethics pledge signed between his appointees and the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) has raised eyebrows by allowing several wealthy members of his administration to oversee matters they clearly have a vested interest in.
Perhaps nowhere are the dangers of conflicts of interest more apparent than with Elon Musk clearly standing to gain personal wealth from holding influence over the government’s approach to the federal budget and setting regulations.
He has many business interests intertwined with federal policy — from the hefty government contracts with his SpaceX rockets to the regulation of his electric vehicle company.
Now, in his largely undefined role with DOGE, Musk even has access to information about his company’s competitors.
While Musk only has money to gain, the American people have everything to lose — allowing a private citizen with billions in personal interest to dictate government actions threatens the public service mandate of our agencies.
The Supreme Court’s weakening of our campaign finance laws, the Federal Election Commission’s refusal to hold bad actors accountable and the lack of independent and enforceable ethics enforcement in our government have all played a key role in our country’s allowing only a few wealthy individuals to consolidate power.
However, we have the ability to uphold a government by the people and for the people before it is too late.
CLC will continue to hold the Trump administration accountable by uncovering and exposing corruption and self-dealing. We will also strenuously advocate for strong ethics laws and transparency requirements that ensure our officials remain beholden to the public good, not personal gain.
Now is the time to enforce the guardrails of democracy that will ensure that executive power cannot be auctioned off to the highest bidder by any president to come.
Campaign Legal Center will continue to push for transparent, accountable government at every turn.
Support CLC's work to make sure our government serves the American people, not the business interest of wealthy donors.
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cnn
CNN —
Nearly three dozen of President-elect Donald Trump’s picks to serve in his incoming administration donated to his campaign or to the deep-pocketed outside groups that worked to elect him, a CNN analysis of federal campaign records shows.
They range from tech multibillionaire Elon Musk – who has emerged as the single largest, disclosed political donorof the 2024 presidential election – to others close to Trump tapped for key roles throughout government.
In all, eight of his Cabinet picks – led by Linda McMahon, the billionaire wrestling magnate Trump has selected to oversee the Education Department – and their spouses donated more than $37 million combined from their personal accounts to aid Trump, the review found, underscoring the proliferation of ultra-rich Americans now poised to shape US policy in the incoming second Trump administration.
(Two other Cabinet choices, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik and Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, transferred money from their campaign accounts to the pro-Trump effort.)
Musk has not been selected for a formal Cabinet job but is helping guide a new Department of Government Efficiency initiative and has played a pivotal role in the presidential transition – offering his views on job candidates, talking to world leaders and meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill as he weighs how to downsize the federal government.
In all, the SpaceX and Tesla chief executive donated more than $277 million to federal elections this cycle, the lion’s share of which – more than $262 million – benefited Trump. Most of Musk’s pro-Trump dollars flowed to a super PAC that the world’s richest man created to help turn out voters on the Republican’s behalf in key swing states.
Outside of self-funded presidential candidates, no individual has donated more to shape federal contests in a single election cycle, said Brendan Glavin, research director of OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan organization that analyzes money in politics.
Trump’s donors “are not just getting these sort of plum ambassadorships on the side,” Glavin said. “Major donors are getting positions that affect policy.”
The CNN analysis researched the more than 90 people that Trump had announced for high-level positions in the administration through Tuesday, which marked five weeks since his election victory. More than 30 of them had donated to his campaign or to one of the leading Trump-aligned outside groups, the review of FEC records found.
“Millions of Americans fed up with failure in the White House and federal government joined President Trump in the movement to restore our nation’s greatness. Some who will work with President Trump are among those millions of people who supported the campaign and helped the President win a decisive electoral victory,” Brian Hughes, a Trump transition team spokesman, said in a statement in response to CNN’s inquiry about donors joining the administration.
The total donations from Trump’s current Cabinet picks marks a surge from Trump’s first term. Five members of his original Cabinet had donated nearly $8 million to his committees or to the major outside groups supporting him, a review of campaign reports shows.
Donations from McMahon, who served as Trump’s SBA administrator in his first White House term, accounted for more than 90% of that total in the 2016 election.
The sums spent to aid Trump in 2024 far exceed the donations that President Joe Biden’s Cabinet members contributed to help him win the White House in 2020, FEC records show.
A dozen members of Biden’s Cabinet reported donations to his campaign or major super PACs involved in the 2020 election, giving less than $100,000 in total.
Billionaires in the administration
Musk’s spending dwarfed that of other supporters.
McMahon was the largest donor among Trump’s Cabinet picks and the second most generous contributor, after Musk, among the administration members announced through Tuesday, the review found.
Most of the $21.2 million she donated went to Make American Great Again, Inc., the main Trump-affiliated super PAC that spent heavily on advertising to aid his campaign.
Other seven-figure donors among Trump’s Cabinet picks include Cantor Fitzgerald chief Howard Lutnick, whom Trump has tapped to serve as Commerce secretary; Scott Bessent, the hedge fund executive Trump has selected to oversee the Treasury Department; and former Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler, his choice to head the Small Business Administration.
Loeffler’s husband, Jeff Sprecher, also was a major donor, contributing more than $2 million to the pro-Trump MAGA Inc. super PAC and Trump’s joint fundraising committee.
Sprecher is the CEO of the Intercontinental Exchange, which owns the New York Stock Exchange, and was at Trump’s side when the president-elect rang the opening bell at the exchange Thursday.
In an email, Loeffler’s communication director Caitlin O’Dea said, “Senator Loeffler is proud to be one of President Trump’s strongest supporters for the same reason a historic landslide of Americans voted to put him back in the White House: he will restore American prosperity, security, and opportunity.”
The billionaire embrace marks a turnaround of sorts for Trump, who saw corporate America recoil from him after the violent January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. And he has seen new support from tech leaders who are pushing for fewer regulations from the federal government.
The staggering sums spent by Musk in this year’s election helped Trump close the financial advantage of his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, who swiftly raised $1 billion after becoming her party’s standard-bearer in late July.
Super PACs face no limit on the size of donations they can receive or spend, but technically are not allowed coordinate their advertising decisions with the candidates they support.
However, a ruling this year by the FEC granting campaigns the ability to coordinate with outside political action committees on paid canvassing efforts freed up Musk to guide a ground game for Trump.
“The campaign finance system is a joke,” said Fred Wertheimer, who heads the Democracy 21 watchdog group and is a longtime advocate for limits on money in politics. “Musk is the example now of how campaign finance laws have failed.”
He said he worries about government departments led by billionaires who have no “interest in doing the job that the agency was assigned.”
Musk did not respond to inquiries from CNN.
But Tom Davis, a former congressman from Virginia who chaired the House Republicans’ campaign arm for several years, argues “there is nothing inherently wrong about people who made a lot of money wanting to give back through government.”
“The fact that they have contributed shows a degree of loyalty,” he added.
Friends and family
Presidents often reward donors and allies with plum positions – often dispatching them to glamorous, low-conflict posts in Europe or the Caribbean.
Some of Trump’s early picks for ambassadorships follow that pattern and include billionaires who donated to his reelection effort. Among them: Arkansas investor Warren Stephens, named as the US’ envoy to the UK, and Charles Kushner, Trump’s choice for ambassador to France – one of several extended family members or close friends who has been chosen for diplomatic gigs.
Kushner, who donated $2 million to pro-Trump efforts and received a presidential pardon at the end of Trump’s first term, is the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter, Ivanka. Another donor, Tom Barrack, who oversaw the fundraising for Trump’s first inauguration, is his choice as ambassador to Turkey.
And incoming special envoy to the Middle East, real-estate tycoon Steve Witkoff, is a longtime Trump friend and a partner in the cryptocurrency businesses that Trump launched with his sons earlier this year.
He donated $250,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC.
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White House billionaires have no idea how Americans live (and don’t seem to care)
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no lnx
Trump staffed his Cabinet with wealthy advisers. Some stand to gain even more from recent policy shifts
By Isabelle Chapman, Curt Devine, Majlie de Puy Kamp, Casey Tolan and Kyung Lah, CNN
Thu April 24, 2025}:
CNN
After staffing the wealthiest presidential Cabinet in modern American history with energy and banking titans, President Donald Trump has spent his first three months in office boosting those industries while dismantling long-established guardrails against government corruption.
A CNN review of Trump’s actions as he approaches the 100-day mark of his presidency found that as his administration has slashed the federal workforce and shaken the global economy with tariffs, the president’s team has made changes that could also directly benefit his Cabinet members or their former companies.
At the same time, by gutting traditional oversight bodies and embracing historically lax ethics rules, Trump has enabled conflicts of interest and greased the revolving door between government and the private sector. At least eight nominees for executive branch positions would have been banned or had limited roles under previous administrations – including Trump’s first term – due to their recent work as lobbyists, according to an analysis by the watchdog Campaign Legal Center that was reviewed by CNN.
Some potential conflicts have played out in plain view – like when Trump used the White House lawn last month to produce what seemed like an elaborate ad for key adviser and top donor Elon Musk’s struggling Tesla brand. The Trump administration has also cleared the way for Musk’s Starlink business to win new government contracts.
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk depart after looking at Tesla vehicles on the South Lawn of the White House on March 11, in Washington, DC.:
But other examples of possible conflicts are found deep in Cabinet members’ ethics reports, such as Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s disclosure that he would receive a million-dollar bonus – after his swearing-in – from the fracking company he founded, led and now plays a role in regulating.
Even as they’ve agreed to divest, some Cabinet members have found a loophole: giving control of certain assets to their adult children. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick handed the reins of his financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald to his 27-year-old son, while Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he would give his interest in litigation against a vaccine maker – part of an industry he is now tasked with regulating – to his adult son.
Some of Trump’s policies also could help his own business interests. By establishing a strategic Bitcoin reserve, the president is backstopping the value of the cryptocurrency, enriching existing holders of the asset, some of whom spent millions helping reelect the president. Meanwhile, Trump and his family have moved to expand their own crypto interests. And this week, Trump sent the value of his personal meme coin soaring by promising its top buyers a chance to dine with the president next month.
Many of the Trump administration’s early actions have pushed priorities that Republicans have sought for years, and the White House says its moves to slash regulations are needed to reduce spending and eliminate government inefficiency.
“The people elected me to do the job, and I’m doing it,” Trump said in March. “My administration will reclaim power from this unaccountable bureaucracy.”
But from cryptocurrency and energy policies to efforts as niche as rural internet access, some of the administration’s moves also closely align with the financial interests of his top advisers and the president himself.
“This administration seems entirely indifferent to ethics, and that contrasts certainly with the past several administrations, including Trump one,” said Richard Briffault, a Columbia University law professor who studies government ethics. “The level of complete indifference to it takes us back to before Watergate.”
‘Tearing down’ ethics rules
In the wake of the Watergate scandal, Congress passed sweeping ethics legislation to hold the executive branch more accountable.
Within weeks of beginning his second term, Trump flouted many of those decades-old protections – including by firing more than a dozen inspectors general and dismissing the head of the government’s ethics watchdog. He also signed an order making it easier for lobbyists to join agencies overseeing industries they used to represent.
The United States has spent years building up an “ethics infrastructure,” Briffault said. “In less than 90 days, this administration has been tearing (it) down.”
Trump’s unprecedented moves come as his Cabinet includes some of the richest people to ever hold the reins of power in the federal government. Many came straight from positions of power in key industries.
CNN analyzed dozens of financial disclosures and ethics statements filed by presidential appointees to track the wealth and potential conflicts of interest among Trump’s Cabinet members. The disclosures offer a limited picture of nominees’ finances: Officials are only required to list their assets in broad ranges.
Still, Trump’s leadership team appears to eclipse the wealth of any previous Cabinet going back decades. Of 21 Cabinet members, seven reported holding at least $10 million in assets, and some are even billionaires.
Lutnick – who has been a Wall Street power player since the mid-1990s – has an estimated net worth of $3.1 billion, according to Forbes. That’s roughly 15 times as much as the combined maximum reported net worth of former President Joe Biden’s entire outgoing Cabinet.
Five Trump Cabinet members reported holding individual assets worth more than $50 million, the highest range on disclosure forms. And that doesn’t include Musk, the world’s richest person with a net worth of about $371 billion, who as a special government employee is not required to publicly report anything about his wealth.
While Biden filled his Cabinet mostly with bureaucrats and politicians, Trump’s team also includes former CEOs who ran major energy and financial services companies before joining him in Washington.
“We’re seeing industry officials coming into the executive branch in a way that we’ve never seen in past administrations, including the first Trump administration,” said Danielle Caputo, senior ethics counsel for the Campaign Legal Center.
While supporters of Trump’s efforts say industry expertise helps officials better understand the fields they regulate, ethics watchdogs fear actions undertaken by highly-connected officials could benefit their former companies and colleagues instead of the American public.
Some moves could particularly benefit the super-wealthy. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, for instance, has taken a chainsaw to the Internal Revenue Service, which includes a unit that audits America’s ultrawealthy. Data obtained by CNN and first reported by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists revealed that the Global High Wealth unit was hit by layoffs at a far higher rate through March of this year than the IRS as a whole.
Trump has also rescinded a Biden-era executive order creating ethics requirements for political appointees.
Members of the past three administrations — including those who worked under Trump during his first term — previously had to commit not to accept gifts from lobbyists. They were also banned from working on issues they lobbied on in the two years before their appointment, and after leaving government, couldn’t lobby on behalf of industries they’d recently regulated.
Those rules would have banned or limited the roles of eight Trump nominees, including three officials tapped for Environmental Protection Agency roles who lobbied for fossil fuel groups in recent years, according to an analysis by Campaign Legal Center shared with CNN.
Additionally, CLC found Trump has named at least six political appointees to serve as senior ethics officials, a role normally held by nonpartisan career officials.
Inspectors general across more than a dozen different agencies were fired during Trump’s first week in office. The IGs act as independent watchdogs, and the president is supposed to provide a 30-day notice to Congress before removing them, which Trump failed to do. Trump defended the move by suggesting some IGs had been “unfair” and firing them was “a very standard thing to do.”
The crypto stakes
On the campaign trail, Trump promised to make America the “crypto capital of the planet.” He kicked off his second term with moves to boost the crypto industry such as establishing a national bitcoin reserve, dissolving a Biden-era task force that investigated crypto criminals, installing a Musk ally as “crypto czar” and revoking a banking rule that discouraged financial institutions from owning crypto.
At the same time, Trump and his family have gotten deep into crypto by launching a new firm and the president’s own meme coin, a digital asset that has no underlying value and trades largely on hype. Trump also installed Lutnick, a banker who before his swearing-in was overseeing more than $1.5 billion in crypto-related investments, as his commerce secretary.
Lutnick has long pushed to legitimize bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Last October, while he was still CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, he told a podcast host he had “hundreds and hundreds of millions” of exposure to bitcoin, presumably through crypto assets held by his firm.
Cantor Fitzgerald is now run by his son, which ethicists say leaves Lutnick with an improperly close tie to the firm’s success.
“By turning it over to a family member, you may not benefit directly, but you surely have an interest in the well-being of your child,” said Briffault.
Cantor Fitzgerald didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Howard Lutnick listens as President Donald Trump delivers remarks before Lutnick is sworn in as Commerce Secretary in February.
Meanwhile, Trump’s sons launched a digital currency company, World Liberty Financial, in 2024, and took an ownership stake in a bitcoin mining venture called American Bitcoin last month. Trump’s own media company announced plans earlier this year to potentially buy bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
At least eight top officials in the executive branch disclosed crypto holdings in their financial disclosures, although some agreed to divest the assets. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, HHS Secretary Kennedy and Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz each reported owning more than $500,000 in crypto assets.
An HHS spokesperson told CNN that “Secretary Kennedy continues to adhere to all ethical and legal requirements.”
So far, the Trump administration’s crypto moves haven’t led to a boom in valuations for digital assets. While the price of bitcoin, a bellwether for the $3 trillion crypto market, skyrocketed nearly 50% between Trump’s election victory and inauguration, it has fallen about 9% since then, mirroring broader stock market declines.
Still, Eric Talley, a Columbia University professor who studies corporate law, said he saw the Trump administration’s efforts to promote crypto, and specifically the strategic bitcoin reserve, as “particularly suspicious.”
“The economic stakes — if you were a heavy holder of crypto — would be huge and profoundly positive if you could cause the US government to essentially guarantee a big chunk of the stability of the market of at least some of the crypto issuances,” he said.
‘Energy dominance’
During his time in the private sector, former fracking executive Chris Wright was a zealous and vocal critic of government regulations meant to curb global warming. His company Liberty Energy filed a lawsuit that challenged a federal rule requiring companies to disclose details about greenhouse-gas emissions. In one video he posted on social media, Wright declared, “There is no climate crisis.”
Now, as energy secretary, Wright has authority to reverse some of the policies he railed against as Liberty’s CEO.
Wright has ordered the department to “build energy infrastructure and remove barriers to progress,” among other steps, to achieve US “energy dominance.” Under his leadership, the agency has ceased its pursuit of a net-zero carbon future, cut fossil fuel regulations and accelerated numerous natural gas export projects.
Inside the department, Wright has alarmed some staffers with his embrace of fracking over other energy projects. Four current Department of Energy employees, who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, described a general attitude of hostility toward most renewable energy. One staffer pointed to webpages that once promoted solar energy and have now been taken offline, and other employees described circulating lists of renewable energy programs that could be on the chopping block.
Having a former fracking executive run the energy department is “absolutely a conflict of interest,” one staffer said.
Some of Wright’s former Liberty colleagues have also followed him into the department, including his current scheduling director, one of his advisers and a Liberty board member who has been nominated to serve as an assistant energy secretary.
President Donald Trump holds an executive orders after signing a series of orders on American energy production during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House on April 8 in Washington, DC.
:
In the short term, falling oil prices due to economic turmoil under Trump could hurt fracking companies. But leaders at Wright’s former company have applauded the policy shifts. “We have an administration now that is working hard to remove some of the impediments that have been challenges,” Liberty Energy CEO Ron Gusek said at the New York Stock Exchange in March. “Those things give us a path forward to invest in our business.”
According to his ethics documents, Wright owned about $54 million worth of Liberty stock as of February, though disclosures show he sold off Liberty shares in recent weeks and moved money into general investment funds. He also disclosed that he would receive a roughly $1 million performance bonus for his work last year from the fracking company in March, after his swearing-in. A Liberty filing last month stated he received his bonus.
A Liberty spokesperson said, “To our knowledge, there has been no communication with Secretary Wright or any representative from the Department of Energy regarding Liberty Energy business.”
While the fossil fuel industry cheers Wright’s successes, some communities that expected financial help from the Department of Energy have faced roadblocks. Under a program funded by the bipartisan infrastructure law, for example, the department planned to disperse $500 million in grants to help schools in disadvantaged regions across the US improve their energy efficiency.
But multiple school district administrators told CNN that since Wright took over, the department has largely stopped communicating with them about federal funding from the program. Now, some districts fear they won’t receive all the money they were promised.
Brent Foster, who heads a committee to upgrade infrastructure at Mosier Community School in Oregon, points to the school’s century-old heater.
Mosier Community School, a public charter school in a rural Oregon county that voted for Trump, was awarded a roughly $870,000 grant from the program. That money could help replace the school’s unreliable century-old heater and windows that are currently held closed with tape, said Brent Foster, who leads a committee to upgrade the school’s infrastructure.
This year, the DOE has canceled meetings with the school about the grant and has not been processing requests related to the project, according to Foster, who said he doesn’t know whether the funds will ever come through.
Winning the grant “felt like a miracle,” Foster said. “The idea that the federal government would sign a contract… then pull the rug out from under us, it’s difficult to understand.”
An Energy Department spokesperson said the agency is reviewing all activities to ensure they follow the law and align with the administration’s priorities. “President Trump’s administration is advancing a strategy of energy addition – embracing all forms of energy that are affordable, reliable, and secure,” said the spokesperson, who added that Wright has complied with department ethics requirements.
A change that could help SpaceX
The federal government has earmarked tens of billions of dollars to close the digital divide, connecting millions of rural Americans to fast, reliable internet. And for years, Musk’s SpaceX has tried to become eligible for the funds, at times without success.
In 2022, the Federal Communications Commission rejected a nearly $900 million grant application by Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet system, saying the company failed to show it could deliver on the promised service.
Similarly, the $42 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program was specifically designed to prioritize the gold standard of broadband internet – fiber-optic cables – over other technologies such as satellite service.
But that changed rapidly after Trump took office. Lutnick announced last month that the Commerce Department would end “woke mandates” and “favoritism towards certain technologies.” In practice, that means potentially opening up billions in funding for satellite internet companies.
Lutnick’s directive could enable Musk’s company to earn up to $20 billion from the amended BEAD program, according the Wall Street Journal. Today, Starlink is uniquely positioned to provide commercial satellite-based internet. However, other companies, including Amazon, may compete for BEAD grants in the future.
Musk has long criticized the federal government’s rural internet efforts, claiming that had the FCC not rejected Starlink’s grant application in 2022, “it would probably have saved lives in North Carolina” after Hurricane Helene decimated the area. The BEAD program, Musk said, is an “an outrageous waste of taxpayer money” that is “utterly failing to serve people in need.”
SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
Experts say satellite-based internet service could play a useful role in connecting low-density remote areas. But many argue a fiber-optic connection is more reliable and weather resistant than what satellite service can offer today.
“Fiber can handle an almost unlimited amount of bandwidth. Fiber is scalable in terms of speed. Fiber is what we call ‘future proof,’” said Christopher Ali, a professor of telecommunications at Penn State University.
Lutnick’s move to change the program is now prolonging delays in getting shovels in the ground, even as the GOP has blasted the Biden administration over its failure to spend the money more quickly. Senate Majority Leader Sen. John Thune and 12 additional Republican senators, for example, have said the program has “onerous regulations” and moves slowly due to “unnecessary government interference.”
The Commerce Department didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Some states with approved BEAD proposals are waiting for the green light from the federal government before starting work while others are amending their proposals.
A final draft proposal dated March 2025 from West Virginia obtained by CNN details a plan to bring a fiber-optic internet connection to every resident in the state. But after Gov. Patrick Morrisey met with Lutnick later that month, he announced West Virginia would revise the proposal to “evaluate a broader range of technology options, including satellite.”
“The West Virginia Broadband Enhancement Council has always supported fiber deployment and continues to do so,” said Bill Bissett, who heads up the council.
“Every day we delay is another day that West Virginians who are underserved or unserved will not have access to this critical resource,” he added.
Because of Lutnick’s change, government officials will “re-run a process they’ve already completed solely to put satellite service in places that were going to get fiber,” said Evan Feinman, who until recently oversaw the rollout of the BEAD program. “That service will be dramatically slower, less reliable in bad weather … and will cost at least $800 more per year (per household) than the fiber connections would have been.”
The change in direction of the BEAD program is the “poster child for why people should be concerned about conflicts of interest” in this administration, said Briffault, the Columbia law professor, who spoke about how members of Trump’s inner circle could be putting a thumb on the scale.
“You cannot be confident that the decision is being made on the policy merits, as opposed to the influence of a self-interested individual who stands to make a ton of money on it,” he said.
CNN’s Yahya Abou-Ghazala and Anna-Maja Rappard contributed to this report.
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1st term
https://prospect.org/mapping-corruption-interactive
READ THE ARTICLE: https://prospect.org/power/mapping-corruption-donald-trump-executive-branch/
Mapping Corruption: Donald Trump’s Executive Branch
by Jim Lardner
Mapping Corruption:
The Interactive Exhibit
The Trump administration has brought its brand of corruption and self-dealing to every agency in the federal government, and it’s hard for anyone to keep on top of it all. We’ve mapped it out for you. Click on any agency building below, and unlock an extensive dossier of the activities happening inside.
Agriculture Department
Agriculture Department
QUICK AND DIRTY
Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue was the subject of multiple ethics complaints and investigations during two terms as governor of Georgia. In one headline-making case, he approved a tax bill with a little-noticed provision that retroactively saved him $100,000 on a land sale.
Perdue has filled the department’s top ranks with former agribusiness executives and lobbyists, along with an unusual number of Trump campaign workers without other obvious qualifications.
The Agriculture Department has OK’d sharply higher line speeds for hog and poultry slaughterhouses and cut back on USDA meat-safety inspections, letting some big employers hand that responsibility off to low-wage workers.
While in Wisconsin for a conference of dairy farmers at a time of widespread distress and a surge in farmer suicides, Perdue implied that they should just get used to it, telling reporters, “In America, the big get bigger and the small go out.”
The department has proposed taking three million people off food stamps.
The department has loosened many environmental and health and safety regulations and dismissed concerns over climate change.
WHAT AM I DOING HERE?
As governor of Georgia, after issuing an order prohibiting gifts worth more than $25 to state employees, Perdue accepted sports tickets, airplane flights, and other gratuities valued at over $25,000.
He signed a tax bill with a last-minute tweak that saved him $100,000 on an already-completed land sale. One of the legislators backing that bill had worked part time for Perdue on his personal legal business.
As a founder or part-owner of more than a dozen agribusiness companies, Perdue collected $278,000 in federal farm subsidies between 1996 and 2004.
In his campaigns for political office, Perdue received large contributions from the likes of Monsanto and Coca-Cola.
In a 2014 article, Perdue dismissed efforts by “some on the left or in the mainstream media” to connect extreme weather events to climate change. “Liberals,” he wrote, “have lost all credibility when it comes to climate science because their arguments have become so ridiculous and so obviously disconnected from reality.”
HANDOUTS TO THE UNDESERVING
The department has authorized much higher line speeds for giant poultry and hog slaughtering companies, and in some cases let them turn the job of safety inspection over to low-paid slaughterhouse workers, typically earning a couple of dollars over minimum wage.
In his confirmation hearings, Sonny Perdue emphasized his commitment to “customer service.” The customers who have received the best service from his department are giant multinational food and pesticide companies. “They have his ear, he’s hired their lobbyists as top staffers, and pretty much down the line he’s been fulfilling their requests,” says Ben Lilliston of the Minnesota-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
With relatively little public notice, oversight, or hard data, Perdue’s department has distributed more than $28 billion in emergency relief to farmers injured by the administration’s trade war with China. This program has been massively tilted toward multinational agribusiness companies. More than $62 million, for example, has gone to the world’s largest meat processor, JBS, owned by a pair of billionaire brothers who have served prison time for bribing hundreds of government officials in their native country of Brazil.
Midwestern dairy and corn farmers and Maine blueberry growers, among others, have complained bitterly about the way the subsidies have been distributed. Perdue has belittled their protests. “In America, the big get bigger and the small go out,” he said in a speech delivered at the World Dairy Expo in Wisconsin.
Perdue undid a set of newly adopted rules meant to keep agribusiness giants from engaging in price-fixing and other forms of collusion at the expense of farmers or consumers. He effectively eliminated the unit (known as GIPSA) responsible for enforcing the anti-fraud regulations that remained, making it part of an office dedicated to marketing and public relations.
Working with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Perdue’s department pressured Mexico to weaken new nutrition disclosure rules for processed food, intended to combat obesity.
The Agriculture Department went to bat for Dow Chemical in pressing China to accept its genetically modified, herbicide-resistant corn seeds. With that victory secured, Dow spun off its agriculture business into a new subsidiary, Corteva, which is now the top corn seed producer in the Asia-Pacific region.
The department reinterpreted the Clean Water Act to let farmers use previously forbidden chemical pesticides and fertilizers at the risk of contaminating local waterways.
UNDUE INFLUENCE
The number of former industry lobbyists and executives tapped for key jobs at the Department of Agriculture has been extraordinary, even by Trump administration standards, and ethical concerns do not seem to worry very many of them.
A former pesticide industry executive, Rebeckah Adcock, was put in charge of a deregulation team and took part in the effort to get China to accept Dow’s genetically modified corn seeds. Before one high-level meeting on the issue, Dow lobbyist Hunt Shipman emailed Adcock: “Do you know who will staff the secretary?” Adcock treated the question as a joke: “Yes and u do too.” “Roger,” Shipman replied. Then, alluding to the potential conflict of a public servant helping former colleagues, he added: “Maybe you can have a chair on both sides of the table … Maybe you can staff them both?”
Throughout Perdue’s tenure, chemical companies have enjoyed unprecedented physical and email access to top department officials. “A Wide-Open Door for Pesticide Lobbyists at the Agriculture Department,” is how ProPublica summed it up.
Deputy Secretary Steve Censky came to the department after 21 years as CEO of the American Soybean Association, which has lobbied against disclosure rules for products containing genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Censky had helped win passage of a 2016 law that repealed GMO labeling requirements.
Brooke Appleton, Censky’s chief of staff, had been a lobbyist for the National Corn Growers Association and National Association of Wheat Growers. In February 2019, after two years at USDA, Appleton left to become vice president of public policy for the corn growers’ group.
Kailee Tkacz, tapped to serve on a nutritional policy advisory panel, had been a lobbyist for the Corn Refiners Association, the National Grocers Association, and the Snack Food Association, battling against federal efforts to discourage excessive sugar and salt consumption.
Maggie Lyons, chief of staff to the acting deputy undersecretary of Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services, was a former lobbyist for the National Grocers Association.
Kristi Boswell, hired to advise Secretary Perdue on policies related to visas for seasonal farmworkers, had spent five years as a lobbyist for the American Farm Bureau Federation.
The department has a trade policy advisory panel loaded with representatives of such agribusiness groups as the Livestock Export Association of the USA, the International Dairy Foods Association, the U.S. Meat Export Federation, Archer Daniels Midland, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, Cargill, the National Pork Producers Council, Sunkist Growers, and Corteva Agriscience.
APPARATCHIKS
Politico reviewed 42 resumes of the department’s political appointees. Twenty-two had worked on the Trump presidential campaign.
The list of appointees included a long-haul truck driver, a clerk at AT&T, a meter reader for a gas company, a country club cabana attendant, the owner of a scented-candle company, a Republican National Committee intern, and a former Washington state senator who mentioned on his résumé that he was the first elected official in his state to back Trump’s candidacy.
The truck driver, Nick Brusky, received a GS-12 job, paying nearly $80,000 a year, at the department’s Foreign Agricultural Service. Although he had never been involved in developing international markets for farm products, Brusky pointed out that he had experience “hauling and shipping agricultural commodities.”
WE DON’T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT IT
The department’s economic research office concluded that the 2017 Republican tax cuts had given “the biggest benefits to the wealthiest farmers.” After that finding, Perdue decided to move the research office from Washington to Kansas City, even though some staff members had been working and living in Washington for years. Given 33 days to say yes or no to relocating, most of the affected employees decided they couldn’t move and lost their jobs.
Perdue has done the same with the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which supports research at land grant colleges across the country. Here, too, a majority of the employees left rather than make the move. Addressing a Republican Party gala in South Carolina, OMB Director Mick Mulvaney described relocation as a “wonderful way” to shrink the size of government, bemoaning that it’s usually difficult to fire federal workers.
Perdue’s disdain for broadly accepted climate science has helped spur an exodus of USDA professionals. “You get the sense that … this is not a place for you to be exploring things that don’t agree with someone’s political views,” says Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist who worked at USDA for more than two decades. “That’s so sad. I can’t even begin to tell you how sad that is.” Ziska was appalled by the department’s lack of interest in a study of the future of rice-growing and the 600 million people who depend on it. “It feels like something out of a bad sci-fi movie,” he says.
FURTHER REFERENCE
A Wide-Open Door for Pesticide Lobbyists at the Agriculture Department (ProPublica)
The state of the USDA: A quiet dismantling (Ben Lilliston, IATP)
‘They literally take food off their table’: Trump’s Department of Agriculture seeks to cut programs without knowing how many people will be hurt (Politico)
Trump hires campaign workers instead of farm experts at USDA (Politico)
Leveraging the revolving door: lobbying forms show how agriculture group targets officials with industry ties for advocacy (CREW)
The Snack Food and Corn Syrup Lobbyist Shaping Trump’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans (POGO)
A Lesson From the USDA: Want to Make Workers Unhappy? Move Their Office to Another State (Politico)
USDA relocation has delayed key studies and millions in funding, employees say (Washington Post)
Official says USDA departures ‘wonderful’ way to drain the swamp (Federal Times)
House Democrats Are Failing to Protect Farmers from Trump (Washington Monthly)
What’s Up With Trump Bailout Money And JBS? (Drovers)
JBS: The Brazilian butchers who took over the world (Bureau of Investigative Journalism)
Trump farm secretary: No guarantee small farms will survive (Associated Press)
Soybean CEO named No. 2 at USDA (Successful Farming)
We Found a “Staggering” 281 Lobbyists Who’ve Worked in the Trump Administration (ProPublica)
Kailee Tkacz profile (ProPublica)
Revolving Door: Lobbyists-Turned-USDA-Officials Work With Junk Food Industry to Keep Soda, Candy in SNAP Program (Sludge)
‘It feels like something out of a bad sci-fi movie’ (Politico)
Agriculture Department buries studies showing dangers of climate change (Politico)
Sonny Perdue’s School Lunch Bait-and-Switch (Union of Concerned Scientists)
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Commerce Department
Commerce Department
QUICK AND DIRTY
Forbes magazine described Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross as “one of the biggest grifters in American history,” finding a career total of more than $120 million siphoned from business associates.
The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Ross with pocketing $10.4 million that rightly belonged to investment partners.
Ross held official meetings with the CEOs of Chevron and Boeing while his wife owned shares in those companies valued at $400,000 and $2 million.
He failed to divest holdings in the world’s third-largest auto parts maker until October 2017, after official dealings with top people at BMW, Toyota, GM, and Ford, among other major customers of the parts company.
For nearly a year after his confirmation, Ross held onto his stake in Navigator Holdings, a natural-gas shipping company tied to Russian oligarchs and members of Vladimir Putin’s family. Before divesting, Ross personally negotiated a deal to facilitate the export of American-produced liquefied natural gas to China. The ethics officer who OK’d Ross’s actions got a promotion.
Ross came up with a phony legal pretext for the White House’s plan to discourage Latino voting by putting a citizenship question into the 2020 census. Citizenship information would be critical to enforcing the Voting Rights Act’s protections against racial discrimination, the Commerce Department claimed. The Supreme Court found Ross’s justification beyond belief. The decision had actually been made at the behest of a Republican strategist after analyzing its likely impact on racial voting patterns; the anti-immigration zealot and onetime Trump strategist Steve Bannon was one of the people using backdoor connections to get Ross to act.
WHAT AM I DOING HERE?
Secretary Wilbur Ross is a banker and investor known as the “King of Bankruptcy” for his history of gaining control of financially shaky companies, clearing their debts for pennies on the dollar, and squeezing the remaining assets for a quick profit, sometimes after walking away from worker health and pension obligations.
In addition to the many episodes that caused Forbes to call him a grifter on an epic scale, Ross is the former part-owner and vice chairman of a Cyprus bank known as a top money laundry for Russian oligarchs.
SELF-AND-CRONY-ENRICHMENT
Ross played a leading role in U.S.-China trade matters despite his joint investment in a shipping company with a Chinese state fund.
Ross conferred with leaders of state-controlled funds in Qatar, Japan, and Singapore which had previously placed money with his private equity firm.
He sold his interest in a railcar company after lunch with the CEO, who told Ross that Trump tariffs would hurt the business.
Ross made short sales of Navigator stock a few days after learning that the company would be the subject of a damaging story in The New York Times. The share price promptly fell 3.9 percent.
WE DON’T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT IT
The Commerce Department eliminated a committee of 15 scientists helping local officials understand the implications of climate change.
It shut down the chief economist’s office, which had done studies of natural disasters and their economic consequences.
FURTHER REFERENCE
New Details About Wilbur Ross’ Business Point To Pattern Of Grifting (Forbes)
SEC fines Wilbur Ross’ firm $2.3 million over fees (CNBC)
Wilbur Ross (Revolving Door Project Swamp Tour)
The Wilbur Ross Scandal Isn’t About Russia, It’s About Corruption (Intercept)
The Case Of Wilbur Ross’ Phantom $2 Billion (Forbes)
Wilbur Ross Scheduled Meetings With Chevron, Boeing Despite Conflicts Of Interest (Forbes)
Ross shorted Russian-linked shipping company ahead of Paradise Papers (ICIJ)
Commerce Secretary’s Offshore Ties to Putin ‘Cronies’ (New York Times)
How Wilbur Ross made money from a story exposing his business ties to the Kremlin (Quartz)
New Memo Reveals the Census Question Was Added to Boost White Voting Power (Slate)
The company linking Wilbur Ross to Putin cronies has a key role in Trump’s energy plan (Quartz)
Trump just gave China a ‘sledgehammer’ to smash the LNG monopoly (CNBC)
The Trump Administration’s Census Cover Up (ACLU)
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Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
QUICK AND DIRTY
Former Acting Director Mick Mulvaney opposed the agency’s creation and called it “a sick, sad joke.”
The payday lending industry’s main lobbying arm, the Community Financial Services Association of America, spent roughly $1 million holding its 2018 and 2019 annual conferences at the Trump-owned Doral golf resort. Collectively, payday groups and companies gave $2.2 million to the Trump campaign and inaugural committees during the 2016 election cycle.
In May 2018, Mulvaney’s agency took the remarkable step of siding with the payday industry in its legal efforts to delay implementation of a CFPB rule intended to block lenders from manipulating customers into unmanageable long-term debt.
Three weeks later, payday moguls Mike and Tina Hodges contributed $250,000 to the main super PAC working for Trump’s re-election. The Washington Post caught Mike Hodges, CEO of the mega-chain lender Advance Financial, telling his peers that money invested in the Trump cause would mean access to top administration officials. “I’ve gone to [Republican National Committee Chair] Ronna McDaniel and said, ‘Ronna, I need help on something,’” Hodges explained during an industry webinar. “She’s been able to call over to the White House and say, ‘Hey, we have one of our large givers. They need an audience … They need to be heard and you need to listen to them.’”
After lenders poured money into the Trump campaign and inauguration, Mulvaney terminated multiple investigations of payday companies over “rent-a-tribe” arrangements and other circumventions of law.
The bureau has cut back sharply on enforcement and financial relief for defrauded consumers.
The bureau wants to make it easier for debt collectors to barrage people with text and email messages.
WHAT AM I DOING HERE?
Mick Mulvaney, the CFPB’s acting director from late 2017 until late 2019, had been a congressman representing the city of Spartanburg, South Carolina, where the nation’s biggest payday lending company, Advance America, is based. Al Simpson, now a top lobbyist for Advance Financial, was Mulvaney’s chief of staff during his time in Congress.
Mulvaney is a longtime defender of the payday industry and an ideological opponent of efforts to regulate financial companies and their products.
Mulvaney’s appointment appeared to violate the succession provisions of the legislation creating the bureau. The White House took care of that problem by having its Office of Legal Counsel provide a supportive memo. The memo’s author, Steven Engel, had been the lead attorney for a payday lender in a dispute over charges that the CFPB would eventually drop—after Mulvaney took charge.
Current director Kathy Kraninger was an aide to Mulvaney at OMB with no consumer-protection experience.
HANDOUTS TO THE UNDESERVING
Upon assuming the director’s job in November 2017, Mulvaney suspended hiring, rule-making, and fine collection.
In January 2018, Mulvaney canceled an investigation of a South Carolina payday lender that had donated $4,500 to his congressional campaigns. Those contributions were irrelevant, he said, “because I am not in elected office anymore.”
He dropped a CFPB lawsuit against an online lender that had charged up to 950 percent interest while falsely claiming to be run by a Native American tribe in order to dodge state usury laws.
Mulvaney called off efforts to regulate auto lenders accused of cheating vulnerable consumers.
In May 2019, the bureau proposed a rule that would let debt collectors barrage consumers with phone calls, text messages, and voice mails, immunizing them against liability for causing someone’s confidential financial information to be disclosed to a third party.
FURTHER REFERENCE
Mick Mulvaney’s Master Class in Destroying a Bureaucracy From Within (New York Times)
Mick Mulvaney just said the swampiest thing ever (The Point)
Top Questions CFPB Director Kathy Kraninger Must Answer (AFR)
This Is What Trump Quietly Screwing the Poor Looks Like (Vice)
Trump appointee, whose past blogs on race sparked backlash, resigns (Washington Post)
Waters, CFPB chief clash over fair lending enforcement in first showdown (Politico)
Profile of Tom Pahl (Allied Progress)
How Payday Lenders Spent $1 Million at a Trump Resort—and Cashed In (ProPublica)
Payday Rules Relax on Trump’s Watch After Lobbying by Lenders (New York Times)
A payday lender is accused of stealing millions from customers. Trump’s CFPB is now letting them off the hook. (Vox)
Payday lenders discussed raising money for Trump’s campaign to fend off regulation, audio reveals (Washington Post)
Mick Mulvaney: Payday lending campaign contributions pose no conflicts of interest (USA Today)
Read this blistering takedown of a rule that would let debt collectors blast you with text messages (Fast Company)
White House Memo Justifying CFPB Takeover Was Written By Payday Lender Attorney (Intercept)
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Education Department
Education Department
QUICK AND DIRTY
Secretary Betsy DeVos is a multimillionaire and top Republican Party fundraiser who has poured money into private Christian schools and campaigns for “school choice” while referring to public education as “a monopoly” and “a dead end.”
Under her leadership, the Department of Education has continued to collect loan payments from former students of Corinthian, ITT, and other fraud-ridden for-profit college chains.
She has filled key jobs with ex-lobbyists and execs of for-profit colleges.
Her department has failed to deliver financial relief to tens of thousands of teachers, nurses, and police officers, etc., who qualified for public-service loan forgiveness.
The department has rolled back an Obama administration plan to withhold federal funds from for-profit schools whose students consistently fail to gain valuable skills or land decent jobs, leaving them unable to repay their debts.
At the time of her confirmation, DeVos held stakes in a debt collection company and the country’s biggest chain of for-profit charter schools. After she announced the sale of her interest in the debt collection company, it received a Department of Education contract potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
DeVos has all but ignored a presidential directive calling for measures to ease the impact of $1.5 trillion in ballooning student debt on millions of recent college attendees and the state of the economy. Trump, whose re-election could hang on DeVos’s financial support and Michigan campaign ties, has failed to force the issue.
WHAT AM I DOING HERE?
Secretary Betsy DeVos inherited money and married money. She has had almost no personal experience with the public schools.
Her brother, Erik Prince, founded the private military company originally known as Blackwater but renamed Xe Services after its involvement in a notorious 2007 mass killing of Iraqi civilians in Baghdad.
Her father-in-law, Richard M. DeVos, founded the multilevel marketing giant Amway and used Republican Party connections to throttle a federal investigation depicting his company as a pyramid scheme.
DeVos has been a leading bundler of campaign money for Republican candidates in her native Michigan and across the country.
Her family has poured millions of dollars into private Christian schools and campaigns for “school choice.” The goal of her educational activism, she has said, is to “advance God’s kingdom.”
She refers to education as an “industry” and has called public education “a closed market,” “a monopoly,” and “a dead end.”
UNDUE INFLUENCE
Diane Auer Jones, principal deputy under secretary, is one many former lobbyists or execs of for-profit college companies tapped for positions of authority by DeVos. Jones was an executive at Career Education Company, one of the country’s biggest for-profit college chains and the target of multiple lawsuits and investigations, including a case brought by New York state in which the company paid $10 million over inflated job placement statistics. (In her new job, Auer Jones has been tasked with developing a less confrontational approach to such offenses.)
Robert Eitel, deputy general counsel, was the chief compliance officer at Bridgepoint, which got into legal trouble for deceiving students about loan costs and using taxpayer dollars to shower money on its executives and shareholders while most students wound up as dropouts. At the Education Department, Eitel has played a part in efforts to block a rule that would help defrauded borrowers gain relief.
Chief Enforcement Officer Julian Schmoke is a former dean at DeVry (aka Adtalem Global Education), which paid $100 million to settle charges of deceptive marketing. In his current role, Schmoke has helped shrink the special Department of Ed team that investigates such abuses, while canceling investigations of Bridgepoint and CEC.
James Manning, former acting under secretary, was a longtime consultant to loan servicers (such as Performant) accused of overcharging borrowers and using bullying collection tactics. At the Education Department, Manning ran the office of federal student aid and oversaw compliance issues involving taxpayer-funded grants and loans. He left in June 2019 to resume his lobbying career.
FURTHER REFERENCE
Corruption Needs To Be A Kitchen Table Issue In 2020. Start With Betsy DeVos. (CEPR)
Trump administration let nearly $11 million in student aid go to unaccredited for-profit colleges (Washington Post)
Education Department explains why only 1% of people who applied for public-loan forgiveness were accepted (MarketWatch)
Education Department awards debt collection contract to company once tied to DeVos (Chicago Tribune)
DeVos Sued Amid New Evidence About Whether Her Agency Aided For-Profit Operator (U.S. News)
Education for Sale? (The Nation)
For-Profit Colleges Gain Beachhead in Trump Administration (ProPublica)
Federal judge holds DeVos in contempt in loan case, slaps Education Department with $100,000 fine (Washington Post)
Betsy DeVos Lost More on Theranos than the Average American Will Make in 100 Lifetimes (Vanity Fair)
Betsy DeVos Throws Favors to For-Profit Schools (NEPC)
Trump administration let nearly $11 million in student aid go to unaccredited for-profit colleges (Washington Post)
Eyeing populist challenge from the left, Trump seeks plan to tackle student debt (Washington Post)
Education Dept. awards debt-collection contract to company with ties to DeVos (Washington Post)
She Left the Education Dept. for Groups It Curbed. Now She’s Back, With Plans. (New York Times)
DeVos Department Stacks Negotiations Deck With For-Profit College Lawyers (Republic Report)
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Energy Department
Energy Department
QUICK AND DIRTY
Former Secretary Rick Perry received $14 million in oil and gas industry campaign contributions over the years.
He filled the top ranks of the department with former fossil fuel industry lobbyists and executives, and fought to keep dirty coal plants in business.
Perry was one of the “Three Amigos” assigned by the White House to work with Rudy Giuliani on the task of pressuring the Ukraine government to help whip up a scandal involving former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
While in Ukraine for the inauguration of President Volodymyr Zelensky, Perry recommended several Americans as energy advisers to the new government. One of them was a Texas backer of Perry’s political career; he and another Texan later struck a 50-year oil and gas exploration deal with Ukraine’s government, winning out over a competing company that offered millions of dollars more.
WHAT AM I DOING HERE?
Campaigning for president in 2011, Perry promised to eliminate three cabinet departments. During a debate, he was unable to remember one of them—the Energy Department. That “oops” moment helped sink his candidacy.
Before becoming energy secretary, Perry served on the board of a company, Energy Transfer Partners, whose major client was the Dakota Access Pipeline. He was also on the board of a Sunoco oil subsidiary.
Perry’s successor, Dan Brouillette, had held an assistant secretary position at the Department of Energy under President George W. Bush, and went on to become an auto industry lobbyist before being tapped to join the Trump administration.
SELF-AND-CRONY-ENRICHMENT
In April 2017, Perry arranged an invitation for his wife, Anita, to a reception and a “cultural program” for G7 ministers in Rome, with her travel expenses to be paid for by the Department of Energy, according to a spokesperson.
In September 2019, Perry announced the creation of a new Office for Artificial Intelligence and Technology. His wife Anita held stock in three potentially affected companies—Verizon, AT&T, and Splunk. Under Perry’s leadership, the Energy Department’s overall budget shrank, with especially sharp declines in spending on renewable energy, to the dismay of some in Congress. Meanwhile, Perry called for $119 million to be spent on the AI initiative in 2020.
UNDUE INFLUENCE
Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary Angelos Kokkinos previously served as a top executive at Babcock Power, a supplier of steam generation and environmental-control equipment.
Chief of Staff Brian McCormack lobbied against rooftop solar power on behalf of the Edison Electric Institute.
Under Secretary Mark Menezes was a lobbyist for electrical utility companies and trade groups, including American Electric Power, Duke Energy, Edison Electric Institute, Southern Company, and Koch Mineral Services.
Deputy Assistant Secretary Mark Maddox had been at the Energy Department during the George W. Bush administration; more recently, he was a lobbyist for petroleum, coal, and utility companies.
Under Secretary for Science Paul Dabbar came to his job after overseeing mergers and acquisitions for J.P. Morgan & Co. He had also worked as an adviser to TransCanada, Allete, AES, and Dynegy, among other fossil fuel companies and utilities.
Sean Cunningham, head of the Office of Energy Policy and Systems Analysis, previously worked for the corporate law firms of Balch & Bingham and Hunton & Williams, representing energy and mineral interests.
Cathy Tripodi, director of the Laboratory Operations Board, came to the department from a job with the consulting firm of Faegre Baker Daniels, where she represented energy clients.
Senior adviser Theodore Garrish previously worked for the Nuclear Energy Institute and Bechtel.
FURTHER REFERENCE
Rick Perry created AI office within Energy Dept. despite wife’s investments (CREW)
How a Coal Baron’s Wish List Became President Trump’s To-Do List (New York Times)
Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming From Inside the White House (Vanity Fair)
Energy Dept. Nominee Rick Perry: Fossil Fuel’s $14 Million Man (Food & Water Watch)
After push from Rick Perry, his backers got huge gas deal in Ukraine (NBC)
Rick Perry says he’s not giving up on struggling coal plants (Axios)
Oil and Gas Ties Run Deep in Trump Administration (Pacific Standard)
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Environmental Protection Agency
Environmental Protection Agency
QUICK AND DIRTY
Secretary Andrew Wheeler is a former coal lobbyist whose top client was Murray Energy. That company’s CEO, Robert Murray, is a climate change denier and a major backer of Donald Trump.
While under consideration for his current post, Wheeler hosted campaign fundraising events for Senators John Barrasso (R-WY) and Jim Inhofe (R-OK), two members of the committee that would do the first review of his fitness. Both senators received campaign donations from a PAC associated with Wheeler’s law firm.
Murray prepared a policy wish list and hand-delivered it to Energy Secretary Rick Perry. The EPA has so far acted on at least several of Murray’s recommendations. They include abandoning an Obama administration rule barring coal companies from dumping waste into streams and waterways; making it easier to open new coal plants; and allowing higher levels of mercury pollution.
Nancy Beck, named deputy assistant administrator for Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (and recently nominated to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission), is a former industry lobbyist who, before coming to the EPA, battled against an agency proposal to halt the sale of three chemicals linked to birth defects, nerve damage, and deaths. Within weeks of her arrival, Beck was leading the charge against that proposal, using the same arguments she had developed as a lobbyist, to the dismay of agency professionals who had long been working on the issue. Seeking to dispel any ethical concerns, the EPA had its legal counsel compose a pair of “impartiality determination” memos citing Beck’s “unique expertise, knowledge and past experience” and the need to consider “all perspectives.”
Wheeler has absolved his agency of any duty to address global warming, the biggest and clearest environmental threat facing our country and the world.
UNDUE INFLUENCE
David Dunlap, deputy assistant administrator for research and development, is a former policy director for Koch Industries. At EPA, Dunlap has had a role in regulating formaldehyde despite the fact that one of the country’s largest producers of formaldehyde, Georgia-Pacific Chemicals, is a Koch subsidiary.
David Fischer, deputy assistant administrator for chemical safety and pollution prevention, is a former industry lawyer and senior director of the American Chemistry Council, which represents chemical companies.
Alexandra Dunn, assistant administrator for chemical safety and pollution prevention, was also employed by the American Chemistry Council.
As an industry lawyer, Susan Bodine, now assistant administrator for enforcement and compliance assurance, had defended polluting companies against Superfund cleanup responsibilities.
Peter Wright, assistant administrator for land and emergency management, oversees toxic waste site cleanup. He used to work for DowDuPont, which has been implicated in problems affecting roughly one-seventh of all toxic waste cleanup sites.
Senior Deputy Counsel Erik Baptist, the EPA’s top lawyer for chemical safety, came from the American Petroleum Institute.
Steven Cook, chair of the Superfund toxic cleanup task force, spent more than two decades as a lawyer for LyondellBasell Industries, self-described as “one of the largest plastics, chemicals and refining companies in the world.”
David Ross, assistant administrator for water, is a former lobbyist with Crowell and Moring, representing Peabody Energy, among other clients.
Dennis Forsgren, deputy assistant administrator for water, was a lobbyist for GE and Exxon, among others.
Troy Lyons, associate administrator for congressional and intergovernmental relations, previously worked for Hess and British Petroleum.
Senior Adviser George Sugiyama came over from the lobbying firm of Troutman Sanders, with the National Mining Association as one of his clients.
IGNOMINIOUS DEPARTURES
Scott Pruitt, Wheeler’s predecessor. In addition to spending more than $124,000 on unjustified first-class air travel and $43,000 on a soundproof phone booth, Pruitt used EPA staff to help land a job for his wife, rented a condominium apartment on Capitol Hill at a bargain rate from a lobbyist’s wife, asked aides to purchase an old mattress from the Trump Hotel, and had his security detail drive him around on drugstore errands.
Bill Wehrum, former assistant administrator for air and radiation, had been a lawyer/lobbyist representing clients in more than 30 pollution-related lawsuits against the EPA. He resigned in June 2019, while under investigation by a House committee for conflicts of interest, after the announcement of a weak EPA replacement rule for the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan.
WE DON’T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT IT
The agency has moved to limit the use of scientific research to cases in which all raw data is publicly accessible. This would exclude numerous studies that rely on confidential personal-health data.
EPA has left many vacancies unfilled in the office responsible for air pollution and toxics research. Remaining staff feel pressured to keep quiet on sensitive topics like climate change, according to one veteran of the unit who left in 2017.
After a scientific advisory board questioned the basis for a proposed rewrite of Obama administration rules on waterways and vehicle tailpipe emissions, more than a quarter of the panel members were dismissed or resigned, many of them to be replaced by scientists with industry ties.
In 2019, the EPA terminated its funding of 13 health centers around the country that studied the effects of pollution on the growth and development of children, among other things.
In 2017, aides to Administrator Scott Pruitt told EPA economists to re-evaluate the effects of the Obama administration’s clean-water rule. Their initial study had found more than half a billion dollars in economic benefits; now they were ordered to say the benefits could not be quantified, according to a 30-year veteran of the agency who left around this time—part of an exodus of professional staff.
FURTHER REFERENCE
Andrew Wheeler (Revolving Door Project Swamp Tour)
Coal Lobbyist Hosted Fundraisers for Senators Evaluating His Nomination for Top EPA Post (Intercept)
EPA’s Pruitt Racked Up $3.1 Million Bill for Security in First Year (Bloomberg)
Carl Icahn’s Failed Raid on Washington (New Yorker)
US EPA grants biofuels waiver to billionaire Carl Icahn’s oil refinery (Reuters)
Trump’s Chemical Romance (Public Citizen)
Senate confirms a former coal lobbyist as Scott Pruitt’s second-in-command at EPA (Washington Post)
Trump may appoint former chemical industry executive to lead Consumer Product Safety Commission (Washington Post)
Why Has the E.P.A. Shifted on Toxic Chemicals? An Industry Insider Helps Call the Shots. (New York Times)
How the Trump Administration Pulled Back on Regulating Toxic Chemicals (Yale Environment)
Trump’s Move Against Landmark Environmental Law Caps a Relentless Agenda (New York Times)
Leveraging the revolving door: lobbying forms show how agriculture group targets officials with industry ties for advocacy (CREW)
EPA Rejects Ban On Common Pesticide Linked to Brain Damage in Children (Forbes)
Directory of Lobbyists in Trump Administration (ProPublica)
Chemical Industry Executive Nominated to Lead Consumer Watchdog Agency (New York Times)
Former chemical industry attorney takes over EPA’s Superfund task force (ThinkProgress)
EPA plan to end funding for children’s health research leaves scientists scrambling (Science)
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Health and Human Services Department
Health and Human Services Department
QUICK AND DIRTY
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar was a pharma lobbyist and later a top executive and president of the multinational drug company Eli Lilly.
Prices for the company’s drugs shot up during Azar’s tenure at Lilly; the cost of insulin tripled.
HHS has so far failed to follow through on Trump promises to reduce drug prices.
As alarm over the COVID-19 virus spread, Azar refused to promise that a vaccine would be broadly affordable.
His department has systematically worked to undermine the Affordable Care Act, sometimes diverting funds designated for promoting that law into the campaign against it.
HHS policies have helped push millions of low-income families off Medicaid.
Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, spent over $2 million on a personal public-relations campaign while boasting of her efforts to “end waste, fraud and abuse” in the Medicaid program. The goals of her PR campaign including getting Verma listed as one of the country’s top “Power Women,” gaining coverage in places like Glamour magazine, and securing invitations to high-profile events such as the Kennedy Center Honors. Some of the consultants on the receiving end of these payments had worked on the Trump presidential campaign.
IGNOMINIOUS DEPARTURES
Former Secretary Tom Price had to resign after spending close to a million dollars on chartered jets and government aircraft rather than using commercial flights.
As a Georgia congressman, Price bought and sold hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of shares in health care companies while sitting on the House Ways and Means Committee and working on legislation and regulations affecting that industry.
During an official trip to Australia, Price pressured officials to let drug companies keep clinical-trial data confidential for 12 years instead of five years. Price held shares in an Australian pharmaceutical firm; afterward, he bought an additional $84,000 stake in the company, which gave him a discount price.
DERELICTION OF DUTY
Under Price and Azar, the department has systematically discouraged Affordable Care Act sign-ups by deleting enrollment links and references to the law from government web pages; ordering a nearly 90 percent cut in spending on ACA promotion; slashing grants to nongovernment groups helping people enroll; canceling billions in payments meant to reduce deductibles and co-pays; and encouraging insurance companies to market junk health plans as an ACA alternative.
HHS has failed to follow through on Donald Trump’s promises to reduce drug prices by, for example, using Medicare’s clout to negotiate discounts with pharmaceutical companies.
Through spending cuts and the approval of state-level work requirements, HHS has helped push millions of low-income families off Medicaid.
From the time Donald Trump became president until March 2020, nearly three million Americans have been added to the ranks of the uninsured.
UNDUE INFLUENCE
In March 2019, Laura Kemper left a senior position at HHS to become vice president for government affairs at Fresenius, a giant lobbying firm with multiple health care clients. Since that time, she has held meetings with congressional, White House, and HHS staff over reimbursement practices for dialysis services, among other issues. Fresenius reported more than $2.2 million in lobbying expenditures during the first half of 2019.
In January 2019, Colin Roskey became HHS’s deputy secretary for legislation for mandatory health, after a 20-year lobbying career in which he represented private companies on many of the issues he would oversee for the government.
Erin Estey Hertzog, an attorney at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was previously a top lobbyist for the Biotechnology Industry Organization.
Chief of Staff Lance Leggitt was a lobbyist for Baker Donelson Bearman Caldwell & Berkowitz, working for health care clients.
Timothy Clark, former senior Adviser to the secretary was president and founder of Clark Strategy Group, which represented pharmaceutical companies. Clark resigned in July 2018 after he was revealed to have sent out pro-Trump tweets under a hashtag linked to the theory that Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta was involved in satanic practices.
FURTHER REFERENCE
Erasing the Affordable Care Act (Sunlight Foundation)
Trump Takes His Sabotage of Obamacare to a New Level (New York)
The Same Agency That Runs Obamacare Is Using Taxpayer Money to Undermine It (New York Times)
The Trump Administration Cracked Down on Medicaid. Kids Lost Insurance. (ProPublica)
Three million more people are uninsured. Thanks, President Trump. (Washington Post)
HHS Chief Of Staff Last Year Lobbied Very Agency He Now Helps Run, Ethics Waivers Reveal. (Kaiser Health News)
A Staggering Number of Lobbyists Have Worked in the Trump Administration. (Truthdig)
For Big Pharma, the revolving door keeps spinning (The Hill)
Eli Lilly tripled the price of insulin under Trump’s pick for HHS and Democrats are pouncing on that (Business Insider)
The Trump administration reportedly paid a PR firm more than $2 million to get a top healthcare official on ‘Power Women’ lists and magazine covers (Business Insider)
Key Trump health official spends millions on GOP-connected consultants (Politico)
Trump’s HHS Pick Alex Azar Is the Worst Pharma Bro of All (OurFuture)
He Raised Drug Prices at Eli Lilly. Can He Lower Them for the U.S.? (New York Times)
Trump Admin’s Pharma Connections (Public Citizen)
Tom Price Bought Drug Stocks. Then He Pushed Pharma’s Agenda in Australia. (ProPublica)
Health secretary Alex Azar won’t promise that a coronavirus vaccine would be affordable (The Verge)
Comedian triggered rain of profane texts on senior official (Energy Wire)
HHS staffers depart after controversial social media posts (The Hill)
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Homeland Security Department
Homeland Security Department
QUICK AND DIRTY
With the shift from fighting terrorists to fighting immigrants, the Department of Homeland Security has become a major funder of the private prison industry, which has reciprocated by sending a torrent of money to the Trump re-election effort and the Republican Party.
The two giants in the field, GEO Group and CoreCivic, run a combined 41 facilities housing more than half of the detainees held in custody by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit, known as ICE. As of mid-2019, the two companies had received an estimated $2.9 billion in federal contract revenues, $1.7 billion for GEO and $1.2 billion for CoreCivic. Executives and PACs associated with those companies have so far made roughly $1 million in reported contributions to the Trump 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
GEO Group has found other ways to send money to the president and his family. In 2017, the company moved the site of its annual conference to the Trump National Doral Miami golf resort. GEO Group Vice President Dave Venturella has been a regular guest at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, staying there at least ten times by his count.
During the 2016 election cycle, the industry as a whole made an unprecedented $1.7 million in contributions to federal candidates, mostly Republicans. It set another record with $1.9 million in reported contributions during the 2018 cycle. In all, Donald Trump has received nearly $1 million in private-prison money—more than 25 times the contributions the industry made to President Barack Obama over two terms in office.
The latest secretary of homeland security, Chad Wolf, was a lobbyist working for Indian and U.S. companies that found jobs for H-1B foreign workers, often displacing American workers in the process.
GOVERNMENT FOR SALE
State and local corrections departments, which make up much of the private-prison industry’s client base, generally pay between $35 and $65 a day per inmate. By contrast, ICE reimbursement rates run as high as $300 a day. “These people are profitable,” says Alex Friedmann of the nonprofit Human Rights Defense Center.
But that profit stream was at risk before Donald Trump’s election. In August 2016, after a series of investigations and scandals involving substandard medical care, deaths, suicides, sexual abuse, and exploitative labor practices, the Obama administration announced plans to phase out the use of private companies in immigrant detention.
One day after that announcement, a GEO subsidiary gave $100,000 to Rebuilding America Now, a pro-Trump Super PAC led by a pair of former Trump staffers. About a month later, GEO boosted its contribution to $225,000. GEO Group’s PAC and its CEO gave the same amount to another committee, Trump Victory, for distribution to the Trump campaign and other Republican efforts.
GEO and CoreCivic (formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America) each went on to donate $250,000 to the Trump inaugural committee.
When Jeff Sessions got tapped for attorney general, GEO Group hired two former Sessions Senate aides, David Stewart and Ryan Robichaux, to lobby on its behalf. A month after Inauguration Day, Sessions revoked the Obama-era guidance.
By that time, GEO’s stock market value had doubled, while CoreCivic’s was up 140 percent. “Thanks to President Donald Trump,” CNN observed, “America’s private prisons appear to be entering a golden age.”
And thank President Trump they did, in the form of roughly $1 million in contributions to his election and re-election campaigns at last count.
The war on immigration has produced windfall profits for companies hired to handle a set of ancillary tasks. Major awardees include Comprehensive Health Services, which collected more than $400 million for work performed between January 2018 and June 2019. Large sums also flowed to tech companies like Unisys ($619,409,627 for the same period) and consulting firms like Deloitte ($400,500,000). McKinsey & Co., as part of an overall ICE contract from which it received $20 million, gave advice on how to fund the hiring of 10,000 new immigration officers; among other proposed means, McKinsey proposed cutting DHS expenditures on food and medical care for detainees.
The construction of President Trump’s border wall has been a corporate windfall in its own right. The overall price tag has passed the $11 billion mark, close to the cost of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
One of the companies in line to profit is Fisher Sand & Gravel. Its CEO, Tommy Fisher, has been a major financial backer of North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer, who has taken up the company’s cause. President Trump also became a fan after Fisher went on Fox News to claim he could do a faster and cheaper job. Fisher Sand & Gravel subsequently won a $400 million wall contract through the Army Corps of Engineers.
THE BOSS’S BIDDING
Secretary Wolf has been a cheerleader for the border wall project, participating in promotional events that effectively double as commercials for Donald Trump’s re-election.
The Trump family has realized huge financial benefits from the operations of the Secret Service, a unit of DHS. Candidate Trump promised to “rarely leave the White House because there’s so much work to be done,” making his administration a bargain for the taxpayers. President Trump has spent nearly a third of his days at one of his resort properties, causing the Secret Service to spend vast, unprecedented sums providing security at those sites, with much of the money winding up in Trump pockets. Since 2017, golf cart rentals (through third-party vendors, not the Trump organization) have cost the government at least $588,000, according to federal spending data posted online.
In a one-month period in early 2017, U.S. taxpayers spent roughly $13.6 million on just four Trump trips to his Mar-a-Lago property in South Florida, according to the Government Accountability Office. That works out to an average of $3.4 million per trip, $1.3 million of that amount attributable to the Secret Service.
Trump has made 22 more trips to Mar-a-Lago since then, according to a Washington Post If the Secret Service’s costs remained constant, that would mean more than $28 million in further spending by that agency alone, and $75 million by the government as a whole—on a small fraction of Trump’s total travel. Recent data is unavailable, however: The White House has refused multiple requests, and the Secret Service has fallen far behind in its reporting.
Another snapshot came in March 2017. With the Secret Service still adjusting to Trump’s large family and frequent golfing trips, the agency asked Congress to add $60 million to its budget just to handle Trump’s travel, according to internal agency documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
President Trump has visited family-owned properties outside the Washington area more than 50 times, by the Post’s count. His sons Eric and Donald Jr. have traveled to Dubai, Ireland, and India. A single visit in 2017 by Eric Trump to a Trump property under construction in Uruguay cost taxpayers nearly $100,000 just in hotel bills for Secret Service agents and embassy staff members.
It took President Barack Obama two terms to run up a total travel bill of $97 million. Based on the Government Accountability Office’s estimates, Trump spending exceeded that amount long ago.
UNDUE INFLUENCE
Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf came to the job after 12 years as a lobbyist for the firm of Wexler & Walker Public Policy Associates, working for Indian and U.S. companies that placed H-1B foreign workers, often displacing American workers.
David Stewart, a former aide to Senator Jeff Sessions, left in October 2016 to become a lobbyist for GEO Group, the private-prison giant.
Ryan Robichaux, another member of Jeff Sessions’s Senate staff, went on to the lobbying firm of Bradley Arant Boult Cummings, working on federal government contracts. Sessions, as was widely anticipated, was then tapped for a top administration job (attorney general); since that time, Robichaux’s firm has been paid upwards of $390,000 by GEO Group.
Scott Sutterfield, now an executive at LaSalle Corrections, previously ran ICE’s field office in New Orleans, focused on overseeing the immigration deportation process and detention facilities across the South. During his time in the job, ICE began using eight new for-profit detention centers in Louisiana and Mississippi. Sutterfield then went to work for LaSalle, the company operating six of the new jails. While he claimed to have recused himself from the contracting process, LaSalle’s Director of Operations, Kevin Sumrall, didn’t seem so sure. “Not extremely a lot,” he said when asked if Sutterfield had been involved in decisions affecting LaSalle.
Mary Loiselle, now a GEO Group executive, is another former ICE official.
Daniel Ragsdale, another GEO Group executive, had been ICE’s second-in-command and briefly its acting director.
Dave Venturella. GEO’s senior vice president of business development, previously ran the ICE unit responsible for arresting and detaining undocumented immigrants.
John Kelly, former secretary of homeland security and White House chief of staff, currently serves on the board of Caliburn International, whose subsidiary Comprehensive Health Services operates four shelters for unaccompanied migrant children.
FURTHER REFERENCE
‘These people are profitable’: Under Trump, private prisons are cashing in on ICE detainees (USA Today)
How Private Prisons Are Profiting Under the Trump Administration (Center for American Progress)
Private prisons back Trump and could see big payoffs with new policies (USA Today)
Follow the Money: Former Sessions Aides are Lobbyists for Private Prisons Group (Nonprofit Quarterly)
ICE Contracts Are Booming. See Which Vendors Are in Your State. (American Prospect)
Private Contractors Made Billions From Immigration and Corrections Contracts Under Trump, Obama (Public Citizen)
The Secret Service has spent almost $590,000 on golf carts to protect Donald Trump (GolfNewsNet)
Below the Surface of ICE: The Corporations Profiting From Immigrant Detention (In These Times)
How McKinsey Helped the Trump Administration Detain and Deport Immigrants (ProPublica)
Memo Restoring Use of Private Prisons Is Good News for One Company (The Nation)
Secret Service has paid rates as high as $650 a night for rooms at Trump’s properties (Washington Post)
Nearly a third of the days he’s been president, Trump has visited a Trump-branded property (Washington Post)
Trump spent 1 of every 5 days in 2019 at a golf club (CNN)
S. to Phase Out Use of Private Prisons for Federal Inmates (New York Times)
Lawsuit: Trump Super PAC Took Illegal Donation From Private Prison Company (International Business Times)
Trump administration installs plaque marking finish of 100 miles of border wall (The Hill)
ICE’s second-in-command reportedly hired by private prison group facing lawsuit over forced labor (Daily Kos)
Back to Map
Housing and Urban Development Department
Housing and Urban Development Department
QUICK AND DIRTY
HUD Secretary Ben Carson had no experience in government and questioned his own fitness for a Cabinet appointment.
After his confirmation, he gave top jobs and rapid pay raises to a roster of friends and associates.
Ignoring a $5,000 limit on office expenditures, Carson ordered a $31,000 dining set. When word got out, he canceled the order and seemed to blame his wife for the idea. In a whistleblower complaint, a career HUD official, Helen Foster, said she was told to “find money” for the purchase and then demoted for raising objections.
Carson has called for drastic cuts to his own department, outside of the decorating budget. An anti-government ideologue, he says he puts his faith in private-sector remedies such as the administration’s Opportunity Zone program, which relies on tax incentives to spur development in low-income communities.
Under Carson’s oversight, that program has been tweaked again and again to produce greater benefits for billionaires and Trump friends and supporters.
Carson’s son and daughter-in-law have HUD-related business activities. Carson has created opportunities for them to participate in official events and use their family ties to try to make deals for themselves.
Ben Carson Jr. runs a Maryland-based construction firm and a private equity fund. His wife Merlynn is a management consultant. In 2017, Carson Jr. organized a “listening tour” in Baltimore for his father. One of the people invited to participate was Seema Verma, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Although she did not attend, Merlynn Carson subsequently obtained a half-million-dollar consulting contract from Verma’s agency.
SELF-AND-CRONY-ENRICHMENT
Deputy Chief of Staff Alfonso Costa Jr. is the son of a man described by the secretary as “my very best friend.” Carson and Al Costa Sr., a dentist turned commercial real-estate investor, were partners in a lucrative deal involving an office building in Pittsburgh—a property that has netted Carson as much as $2 million a year. Carson has been a frequent guest at Costa’s villa in Tuscany, which rents for upwards of $20,000 a month. In 2017, Costa Sr. was convicted of health care fraud after billing insurance companies for $44,000 in fictitious dental work. He escaped a prison sentence thanks partly to a supportive letter from Carson.
The Opportunity Zone program, entrusted to Carson’s leadership, has become a boondoggle for billionaires and Trump associates. In Baltimore, Under Armour founder Kevin Plank (another recipient of an invitation to the secretary’s listening tour) won an Opportunity Zone designation for a project located in an area initially rejected as too wealthy. In Florida, the beneficiaries include a Republican donor developing a luxury housing project and superyacht marina near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. In Detroit, Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert has several Opportunity Zone projects in the works after extensive lobbying.
DUTIES BETRAYED
At the behest of the White House and anti-immigration zealot Stephen Miller, Carson has pushed ahead with plans to oust “mixed-status” immigrant families from public-housing projects. Children and U.S. citizens could be evicted if HUD and the administration get their way.
Carson has been a mouthpiece for the White House’s repeated threats to withhold funds as a way of punishing cities, such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, Texas, that resist the administration’s immigration policies.
With public-housing projects across the country in acute disrepair, Carson’s department has proposed a series of budgets that would slash spending on maintenance. He has urged local housing agencies to find private sources of funding, or, failing that, to sell or demolish properties and leave tenants to fend for themselves.
Echoing the rhetoric of Wall Streeters and right-wing ideologues, Carson likes to blame the problems of the housing market on excessive regulation, and especially on fair-lending policies. On that theory, HUD has abandoned its Obama-era policy of prodding local jurisdictions to address long-standing patterns of racial discrimination in housing.
FURTHER REFERENCE
What you should know about Ben Carson (Revolving Door Project)
Ben Carson’s Family Involvement at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (American Oversight)
Emails show Carson family fingerprints at HUD despite warnings (CNN)
Billionaires Keep Benefiting From a Tax Break to Help the Poor. Now, Congress Wants to Investigate. (ProPublica)
A Trump Tax Break To Help The Poor Went To a Rich GOP Donor’s Superyacht Marina (ProPublica)
Ben Carson Wants To Put Thousands Of Children On The Streets (DCReport)
HUD Secretary Ben Carson to be sued for suspending Obama-era fair-housing rule (Washington Post)
‘Using his position for private gain’: Ben Carson was warned he might run afoul of ethics rules by enlisting his son. (Washington Post)
Ben Carson’s family ethics drama, explained (Vox)
Did HUD really need to spend $31,000 of taxpayer money on that dining furniture for Ben Carson? (USA Today)
Ben Carson stands by ‘best friend’ who pleaded guilty to healthcare fraud (Guardian)
Back to Map
Interior Department
Interior Department
QUICK AND DIRTY
Secretary David Bernhardt spent years representing mining and oil and gas interests, including Rosemont Copper, the National Mining Association, Cadiz, Inc. (a water project developer), Cobalt International Energy, Halliburton Energy, the Independent Petroleum Association, and the U.S. Oil and Gas Association.
As a lobbyist, Bernhardt earned $1.2 million from mining clients, $2.1 million from oil and gas clients, and $1.5 million from other energy companies, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. He entered office with more declared conflicts of interest than any other Trump Cabinet member.
His former firm, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, has quadrupled its revenues since Bernhardt came to Interior, while past Bernhardt clients have won a series of moneymaking policy breaks.
Bernhardt has filled the top ranks of his department with former extractive-industry employees and lobbyists—some 60 in all.
Permits for drilling on public land and under the seas have been approved at a record rate. In March 2020, as the COVID-19 epidemic spread, Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management sold more than 14,000 oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico over the little-heard objections of environmental groups.
Interior has moved to grant a long-term water supply contract to the Fresno-based Westlands Water District, one of Bernhardt’s former clients, which attends to the water needs of large almond growers and other agribusiness companies in Northern California, potentially at the expense of Bay Area residents who depend on the same source of supply. Bernhardt has acknowledged that, as deputy secretary in 2017, he pushed to weaken protections for fish in order to justify giving more water to Westlands—an issue on which he had previously lobbied.
Documents released by Friends of the Earth show Bernhardt taking part in numerous meetings on the issue, even when ethics rules barred his involvement. “Everything I do, I go to our ethics officers first,” he told The New York Times.
SELF-AND-CRONY-ENRICHMENT
During the Trump presidency, Interior Department officials have held more than 250 meeting with oil, gas, electricity, coal, and mining executives—12 times the number of meetings with conservation or renewal-energy advocates.
This total includes at least ten conversations with offshore drilling interests; nine with oil industry groups; six with executives of Shell, BP, ExxonMobil or ConocoPhillips; and five with the National Mining Association.
The list of meetings also includes at least 70 with former Bernhardt clients or employers, including the Independent Petroleum Association of America, the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, the National Ocean Industries Association, and Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.
In all, the Interior Department has taken favorable action on 25 measures sought or supported by at least 16 of Bernhardt’s former clients, according to the Center for Western Priorities.
UNDUE INFLUENCE
Under Bernhardt’s leadership, Interior has hired at least 25 former industry lobbyists and 35 former employees of mining and fossil fuel companies. Eleven officials of the Trump Interior Department have already gone out the revolving door to jobs with industry groups or lobbying firms, including BP and the American Petroleum Institute.
William Perry Pendley, deputy director in charge of the Bureau of Land Management, headed the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which sued federal agencies over conservation policies and rejected the whole idea of federally owned land. Pendley’s group took up the cause of anti-government ranchers such as Cliven Bundy, whose son led a group of armed militants in seizing control of a national wildlife refuge facility in Oregon in early 2016.
Scott Angelle, tapped to oversee safety and environmental enforcement, earned roughly $1.5 million serving on the board of an oil and gas pipeline company. Previously, as Louisiana’s secretary of natural resources, he fought to end the moratorium on Gulf Coast drilling established in the wake of the BP spill. He resigned his state job in 2012, after a brine company he was in charge of regulating created a giant sinkhole. Addressing an oil-industry audience in 2017, Angelle gave out his cellphone number and advised listeners to communicate with him by phone, avoiding the creation of a paper trail.
Assistant Secretary Doug Domenech is a former oil and gas lobbyist who ran an industry-financed foundation dedicated to making the “forgotten moral case for fossil fuels.” At Interior, Domenech met with officials of his former foundation in violation of conflict-of-interest rules, according to the department’s inspector general.
Deputy Secretary Katharine MacGregor, Bernhardt’s second-in-command, is a former lobbyist who, in a previous role at Interior, held multiple meetings with industry players while leading the charge to terminate a study of the health effects of mountaintop removal coal mining. As a Republican staffer on the House Natural Resources Committee, MacGregor was seen as an important ally by the Independent Petroleum Institute. After she joined the Interior Department, one top official of that group joked that “We’ll call Kate” would become its standard response to unwanted regulation.
James Cason, associate deputy secretary, is a former oil and gas lobbyist who held a high-ranking Interior Department post in the Reagan administration. In 1989, Cason had to withdraw from consideration for a top Agriculture Department job over charges that he had broken rules and suppressed research data in order to permit oil shale land to be sold for $2.50 an acre.
Solicitor Daniel Jorjani started out as an energy industry lawyer before serving in the George W. Bush administration. He went on to work for a series of Koch family–funded advocacy groups, becoming one of the highest-paid employees in the Koch network.
Scott Cameron, deputy assistant secretary, was a lobbyist for the firm of Dawson and Associates, representing a list of clients that included Marcellus Shale Coalition and Shell Oil. He also worked for a government contractor, the Tuknik Corporation, which has received at least $3.7 million in Interior Department business during Cameron’s time in office. There is no record of Tuknik winning any such contracts before then.
Susan Combs, assistant secretary, was a figure in Texas politics and a member of Governor Rick Perry’s administration, regularly siding with oil and gas interests against enforcement of the Endangered Species Act. Combs, now overseeing an agency-wide reorganization plan, has been the beneficiary of an estimated $2.1 million in campaign contributions from oil companies that support that plan.
Karen Budd-Falen, deputy solicitor for parks and wildlife, previously worked with William Perry Pendley at the Mountain States League Foundation, where she supported the Bundy family and other anti-government ranchers.
Kathleen Benedetto, special assistant, spent two decades working for mining companies, helping build a coalition that aimed to “completely throw out” the Endangered Species Act. After 13 years in a staff job at the House Natural Resources Committee, Benedetto returned to lobbying, this time for Bioxy Research, which provides “services for the oil and gas, refining and chemicals, mining, agriculture and construction industries.”
HANDOUTS TO THE UNDESERVING
The department has relaxed offshore-drilling safety rules imposed after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Interior has moved to allow oil drilling in the formerly off-limits Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, after Congress authorized that action in the 2017 tax bill.
The department has weakened the Endangered Species Act by making it harder to consider the impact of climate change and giving new weight to the law’s effects on corporate interests.
A rule intended to increase fracking safety and transparency has been rescinded.
Interior has overturned a ban on African trophy imports.
The department has relaxed oil and gas industry safeguards meant to reduce leaks of methane, a devastating greenhouse gas.
WE DON’T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT IT
The Interior Department sidelined its own legal and environmental analyses in order to advance a proposal to raise the height of the Shasta Dam in California.
It shut down its Invasive Species Advisory Committee.
The department has withdrawn funding for a network of regional research centers that studied habitat loss and wildfire management, among other problems.
In 2019, the National Park Service’s top climate change scientist, Patrick Gonzalez, received a “cease and desist” letter from supervisors after testifying before Congress (in his separate capacity as a University of California faculty member) about the risks of global warming.
IGNOMINIOUS DEPARTURES
Ryan Zinke, the first Trump-named interior secretary, was the target of at least eight inspector-general inquiries before his dismissal. He spent large sums of money on charter flights (one of them to deliver a speech to a hockey team owned by a former campaign contributor), censored a National Park Service report on climate change, blocked a casino project after visits from a potential competitor’s lobbyists, and awarded a Puerto Rico electricity restoration contract to a tiny, family-connected firm in his Montana hometown that turned out to lack basic staff, equipment, and experience for such a job. Zinke finally became too much of an embarrassment by trying to spend $139,000 on six new office doors.
FURTHER REFERENCE
Bernhardt Buddies: Conflicts of Interest Abound at Trump’s Interior Department (Public Citizen)
Zinke’s #2 has so many potential conflicts of interest he has to carry a list of them all (Washington Post)
Oil and mining lobbyist David Bernhardt nominated to be Secretary of Interior (OpenSecrets)
Interior’s Bernhardt worked closely on matters he promised to avoid (Politico)
Interior Secretary Bernhardt’s previous job raises questions about a deal for his ex-client (L.A. Times)
Interior Chief’s Lobbying Past Has Challenged the Agency’s Ethics Referees (New York Times)
Department of Influence (Western Values Project)
Sinkhole spurs evacuations, lawsuits and an official resignation (Louisiana Weekly)
Last Week Tonight Called Trump’s Head of Oil Rig Safety, Who Gives His Cellphone Number to Industry Executives (Slate)
The Interior Secretary Wants to Enlarge a Dam. An Old Lobbying Client Would Benefit. (New York Times)
David Bernhardt’s Ex-Lobbying Clients Met 70 Times with Interior Department Appointees (Documented)
How The Interior Department Got Swamped (HuffPost)
The firm that once employed Trump’s pick to run Interior is making millions lobbying it (Washington Post)
Interior’s watchdog opens investigations into Bernhardt (Politico)
Cason withdraws name from nomination (UPI)
Ryan Zinke is the new Scott Pruitt (Washington Post)
Domenech broke ethics rules, government watchdog concludes (Idaho Statesman)
Doors to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s office are getting a nearly $139,000 upgrade (USA Today)
Scott Angelle profile (Department of Influence)
Daniel Jorjani profile (Department of Influence)
Corporate Calendars: Dirty Energy Dominates Bernhardt, MacGregor Meetings at Interior Dept. (Public Citizen)
Trump Interior nominee fast-tracked a ‘deficient’ drilling permit (Reveal)
With The Public Distracted, Interior Department Moves Full Speed Ahead On Oil & Gas Leases (CleanTechnica)
Science Under Attack: How Trump is Sidelining Researchers and Their Work (New York Times)
Watchdog Releases Documents Relevant to Ethics Investigation into Interior Secretary Bernhardt (Daily Kos)
Interior’s Rollback Includes Surprise Gift to Oil Industry (POGO)
Back to Map
Justice Department
Justice Department
QUICK AND DIRTY
In a job traditionally defined as “the nation’s chief law enforcement officer,” William Barr has often seemed to act as the president’s defense lawyer and legal errand-runner. He has shown his loyalty to the chief executive by, among other things, writing and releasing a deceptive “summary” of the Mueller report before the actual contents were made public.
Barr also bypassed Senate confirmation to install acting U.S. attorneys in New York and New Jersey—offices crucial to the fate of corruption charges against the Trump administration or family.
He has repeatedly kept evidence of Trump misdeeds from reaching agencies or officials who might pursue them.
Barr has advanced a series of extreme legal arguments for noncooperation with congressional requests and inquiries.
He has gone out of his way to denigrate the president’s critics and lend credibility to his conspiracy theories.
After Trump complained about the DOJ’s sentencing recommendations for Roger Stone (convicted of lying to Congress and obstructing justice), Barr overruled prosecutors and softened their recommendation. Trump tweeted his “congratulations to Attorney General Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought.”
Barr was also a key figure in granting additional pardons to white-collar criminals with influence at the White House or in the inner circles of the Republican Party.
Although best known for his fervent defense of President Trump, Barr has a history of lucrative legal work for telecoms and other giant companies, along with a recent record of action and inaction that has given corporate America cause to be extremely grateful for his service at the Justice Department.
Since Trump became president, the number of federal prosecutions of white-collar criminals (over price-fixing, tax fraud, and environmental offenses, for example) has fallen to its lowest level in decades. When it comes to the resolution of such cases, Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski (see below) has told prosecutors to weigh the “financial burden” of ordering a company to be supervised by an independent monitor. Benczkowski’s directive appears to be intended to help corporate criminals avoid even that comparatively modest sanction.
WHAT AM I DOING HERE?
In July 2018, Barr composed an unsolicited memo to the Department of Justice and President Trump’s defense team. His memo condemned the Mueller investigation as a legal travesty and effectively asserted the president’s right to terminate any inquiry into his activities or fire any executive-branch official who displeased him. Although Barr said the memo was not intended as a job application, it served that purpose nicely. “Mueller’s core premise—that the President acts ‘corruptly’ if he attempts to influence a proceeding in which his own conduct is being scrutinized—is untenable,” Barr wrote. Five months later, he was tapped to succeed Jeff Sessions as attorney general.
Barr’s views on presidential power appear to shift with the political winds. When Bill Clinton asserted lawyer-client privilege to avoid turning documents over to the Senate committee investigating Whitewater, Barr dismissed that claim as “preposterous.” When George W. Bush declared “war on terrorism” and ordered the invasion of Iraq, Barr once again became a champion of the president’s “maximum power.”
From 1994 to 2008, Barr served as general counsel first to GTE and later to Verizon, the product of its merger with Bell Atlantic. That merger wound up making Barr a millionaire many times over; after taking early retirement from Verizon in 2008, he received a $28 million payout—cited as an example of overcompensation and sloppy corporate governance in a watchdog group’s complaint.
Barr is also a former director of the Och-Ziff Capital Management Group, a hedge fund involved in the purchase of 14 ski resort properties across the country. Not long after he resigned from that board in 2018, the company paid a $412 million fine to settle charges of offering bribes in several African nations; some of the bribe money reportedly went to the son of former Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi.
HANDOUTS TO THE UNDESERVING
During Barr’s time as attorney general, DOJ has given the green light to mergers, such as the one between T-Mobile and Sprint, that promised to be politically helpful to Donald Trump and the Republican Party. The attorneys general of 13 states and the District of Columbia sued to block that deal, warning that it would lead to less competition and higher prices. In most such cases, the states and the federal government craft a united response; this time the Justice Department took the extraordinary step of filing a legal brief in favor of the merger (and against the position of the states), while the head of its antitrust division became actively involved in negotiations to bring the deal to fruition.
While the government was considering the deal, T-Mobile and Sprint executives spent approximately $195,000 staying at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. That hotel has become a favorite roosting place for many other corporate leaders as well as foreign government officials seeking policy concessions from the Trump administration. Barr could have asked his department to investigate this practice as a potential violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause. Instead, he has not only failed to launch such an inquiry; he has personally adopted the practice of holding an annual holiday party at the Trump Hotel, paying $30,000 for the privilege.
Antitrust, like presidential power, is an area of policy where Barr’s views have tended to follow his partisan and financial interests. Recently, his department has been criticized for selective enforcement as a result of its much-publicized announcement of plans to launch an antitrust investigation of Google, a company whose power is seen as a threat to the telecoms and traditional media interests.
UNDUE INFLUENCE
Brian Benczkowski, assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division, previously represented a series of large and morally tainted corporations including BP, HSBC, Valeant Pharmaceuticals, and Volkswagen.
Before becoming assistant attorney general for antitrust, Makan Delrahim helped Google win FTC and DOJ approval for its 2007 acquisition of the online advertising giant DoubleClick.
Solicitor General Noel Francisco, now charged with representing the executive branch in cases before the Supreme Court, spent ten years working for the corporate law firm of Jones Day. Handling the appeal of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s corruption conviction, Francisco persuaded the court to narrow the scope of a federal bribery law in a way that, according to Bloomberg News, could mean the reversal of many “high-profile public corruption cases.”
Rachel Brand, who preceded Francisco as solicitor general, was a lawyer or lobbyist for Google, T-Mobile, and the United States Chamber of Commerce, among other corporate clients. During her time in private practice, she filed a friend-of-the-court brief that helped Citigroup dodge an admission of wrongdoing for its role in the sale and promotion of mortgage bonds of the kind that had driven the U.S. financial system to the edge of collapse. In February 2018, Brand left government to become a top executive at Walmart.
FURTHER REFERENCE
William Barr’s $30k Trump hotel party illustrates how corruption is becoming more brazen and blatant (Vox)
Trump’s Government Lawyers Don’t Know Who Their Real Client Is (Atlantic)
Trump’s Ukraine Scandal Is Also Attorney General Bill Barr’s Scandal (Vice)
Google’s onetime hired gun could now be its antitrust nightmare (Politico)
Barr’s Past Disqualifies Him From Serving As Attorney General (Restore Public Trust)
Barr Confirms DOJ has ‘Established an Intake Process’ to Review Giuliani’s Biden-Ukraine Info (National Review)
William Barr, Trump’s Sword And Shield (New Yorker)
Trump’s Justice Department Has an Antitrust Problem Too (Bloomberg)
Preventing the Politicization of Antitrust Enforcement (New America)
With a Regulator Like This, Who Needs an Investment Banker? (Bloomberg)
Corporate Impunity: “Tough on Crime” Trump Is Weak on Corporate Crime and Wrongdoing (Public Citizen)
Justice Department’s Google inquiry loses top antitrust official (The Verge)
S. Scrutiny of Banks Could Fall to Business Lobby Lawyer (Bloomberg)
Attorney General Barr to Testify In House Amid Criticism Over Roger Stone Case (NPR)
William Barr and the Corruption of the Justice Department (American Prospect)
How Bill Barr Turned the Justice Department Into a Cover-up Operation for Trump (GQ.com)
Back to Map
Labor Department
Labor Department
QUICK AND DIRTY
Under Trump, the Labor Department killed the so-called “fiduciary” rule requiring retirement investment advisers to put clients’ financial interests ahead of their own interests. Thanks to that reversal, brokers and insurance company salespeople remain free to recommend needlessly expensive financial products, chiseling workers and retirees out of as much as $17 billion a year in excessive fees.
Bowing to pressure from big restaurant chains like Olive Garden, IHOP, Applebee’s, and Denny’s—and parroting their talking points—the Labor Department decided that they don’t always have to let workers keep the tips customers leave for them.
In a move sought by restaurant and hotel franchisers, the Trump Labor Department issued a regulation to make it easier for such companies to avoid paying for certain kinds of overtime.
Under Alexander Acosta and Eugene Scalia, there has been a sharp decline in OSHA enforcement actions, and half of the agency’s top jobs have been left vacant.
WHAT AM I DOING HERE?
Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia built a reputation as a “go-to” lawyer for big corporations challenging worker rights and safety rules. Clients included Boeing, Chevron, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, United States Chamber of Commerce, American Petroleum Institute, United Parcel Service, Anheuser-Busch, and Facebook.
Scalia helped Walmart do away with a Maryland law requiring large employers to either contribute to worker health plans or help the state cover Medicaid costs.
He represented UPS and Anheuser-Busch in opposing a requirement that employers track repetitive-stress injuries and musculoskeletal disorders and look for ways to prevent them.
He unsuccessfully sought to have SeaWorld declared exempt from the Occupational Safety and Health Act because that legislation had failed to specifically mention the marine-animal entertainment business.
Scalia argued that a law requiring employers to “provide” items of safety equipment such as gloves and mesh aprons in a meat-packing plant did not prevent companies from making workers pay for such gear.
He was a lynchpin of Wall Street’s campaign to undo post-crisis financial regulations, filing six major lawsuits on behalf of banks.
IGNOMINIOUS DEPARTURES
Scalia’s predecessor, Alexander Acosta, was forced to resign over his role in the sweetheart plea agreement with serial sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
FURTHER REFERENCE
Eugene Scalia, Trump’s Labor nominee, earned millions while working for big business, disclosure shows (CNBC)
5 things to know about Eugene Scalia, Trump’s new labor secretary with a famous dad (Vox)
New York, 16 Other States Sue Over DOL Joint-Employer Rule (Bloomberg)
The DOL’s New Fiduciary Rule: What Are Some Likely Outcomes? (Lexology)
The new US labor secretary has a history of opposing workers’ rights (Quartz)
Acosta to Resign as Labor Secretary Over Jeffrey Epstein Plea Deal (New York Times)
Back to Map
State Department
State Department
QUICK AND DIRTY
The U.S. has a long tradition of bestowing ambassadorships on wealthy friends of the president and his party. Donald Trump has taken it to new extremes, making more crony appointments than any past president and giving them to people with weaker qualifications in return for bigger sums of money.
His picks have included, as ambassador to Iceland, a dermatologist who had never even visited the country; as ambassador to the Bahamas, a real-estate developer who in his Senate confirmation testimony incorrectly described his assignment as a former U.S. rather than British protectorate; and as ambassador to Slovenia, the founder of an evangelical charity known for sharing bizarre right-wing social media posts such as “The Clinton ‘Body Count’ EXPANDS—5 Mysterious DEATHS in the last 6 weeks.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was actively involved in the Trump-directed campaign to discredit former Vice President Biden. In addition, Pompeo refused to defend the career ambassador to the Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, against baseless accusations promoted by Rudy Giuliani in order to facilitate deals for himself and his cronies and carry out the plan to have Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky announce an investigation into the business activities of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son.
Yovanovitch is just one of many high-ranking State Department professionals who have been unfairly demoted, reassigned, or disparaged by the White House and pro-Trump forces. Pompeo is not known to have stood up for any of them.
After participating in a key phone call between President Trump and Zelensky, Pompeo failed to acknowledge being on the line until evidence of his involvement surfaced.
During the House impeachment hearings, Pompeo tried to keep State Department officials from testifying and refused to supply investigators with requested documents.
One former White House official has described Pompeo as “among the most sycophantic and obsequious people around Trump.” An ex-ambassador has likened him to “a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.”
WHAT AM I DOING HERE?
Pompeo was a Kansas congressman known for his strong relationship with the Koch brothers. Koch Industries and Koch employees donated more than $200,000 to Pompeo’s first two election campaigns.
He gained national attention as one of the Republican firebrands driving the Benghazi investigation—an obsessively partisan effort to blame Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the death of a U.S. ambassador.
Questions have been raised about the tasks assigned to Pompeo’s security detail, which, according to a whistleblower’s complaint, have included picking up Chinese food and bringing the family dog back from a grooming appointment. One agent is said to have described the job as “Uber Eats with guns.”
Pompeo’s wife Susan has sat in on planning meetings, accompanied the secretary on trips, and is said to regard herself as a de facto State Department employee. Susan Pompeo has her own security detail, reportedly ordered for her without any threat assessment and for reasons not apparent to some of the officials who normally decide such things.
Pompeo’s predecessor, Rex Tillerson, had been the CEO and a longtime executive at Exxon, raising huge conflict-of-interest questions involving America’s energy policies and relations with oil-and-gas-buying or -selling countries around the world.
GOVERNMENT FOR SALE
The long list of big-money ambassadors includes:
Name Assignment Backstory
Gordon Sondland European Union Hotel magnate and one of the Trump campaign’s biggest donors, giving more than $1 million
Donald Tapia Jamaica Major GOP donor who got rich running a construction supply company
David Fischer Morocco Owner of multiple Michigan car dealerships and contributor of $250,000 to the Trump inauguration committee
Jeffrey Ross Gunter Iceland Dermatologist and longtime GOP donor
John Rakolta Jr. United Arab Emirates Construction company heir and major Republican donor
Lynda Blanchard Slovenia Founder of evangelical charity and wife of Alabama real-estate magnate
Lana Marks South Africa Fashion designer and member of the Mar-a-Lago Club
Joe Cella Fiji Founder of National Catholic Prayer Breakfast
David B. Cornstein Hungary Jewelry magnate, Republican donor, and longtime member of Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club
Kelly Craft United Nations Republican donor, wife of billionaire coal executive, and frequent guest at Trump properties
David Friedman Israel Bankruptcy lawyer, longtime Trump associate, and key 2016 fundraiser
Ronald Gidwitz Belgium Private equity manager and cosmetics executive
Robert “Woody” Johnson United Kingdom Johnson & Johnson heir and New York Jets owner
Trevor Traina Austria Dow Chemical heir and tech entrepreneur
Adrian Zuckerman Romania Real-estate lawyer and member of Bedminster golf club
Carla Sands Denmark Former chiropractor turned The Bold and the Beautiful actress
Jamie McCourt France Former Los Angeles Dodgers owner
William Kohorst Croatia Real-estate developer
FURTHER REFERENCE
Donors to the Trump inaugural committee got ambassador nominations. But are they qualified? (NBC)
The Ukraine scandal exposes the Trump crony Pompeo really is (Vox)
Echoes of Benghazi Criticism and Anger Confront Pompeo in Ukraine Inquiry (New York Times)
Mike Pompeo, The Secretary of Trump (New Yorker)
Democrats investigating whistleblower claims Pompeo’s security picked up Chinese food and his dog (CNN)
At Embassies Abroad, Trump Envoys Are Quietly Pushing Out Career Diplomats (Foreign Policy)
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Transportation Department
Transportation Department
QUICK AND DIRTY
When Elaine Chao was nominated for secretary of transportation, ethics watchdogs pointed to two big corruption risks. In office, Chao has borne out both fears—through actions likely to serve the financial interests of her family’s international shipping business, or the political interests of her husband, Kentucky Senator (and Senate Majority Leader) Mitch McConnell.
As transportation secretary, Chao heads the department that regulates international shipping, while her father, James Chao, runs a giant company that builds ships in Chinese government–run facilities and has received hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from a bank tied to China’s authoritarian regime. The financial fortunes of Chao and McConnell are linked to that business: In 2008, they received a gift from James Chao valued at between $5 million and $25 million, according to federal disclosures.
In 2019, a New York Times investigation identified numerous actions taken by Chao or her department that could be advantageous to the family business. These actions have included public appearances with her father and a planned joint trip to China to meet with government officials. Under her leadership, the department has also moved to cut subsidies for cargo shippers that compete with the family business.
With McConnell running for re-election in 2020, Chao has created what amounts to a special pipeline for transportation projects in his home state, making a joke of her efforts to be helpful. “I try not to come empty-handed,” she quipped at a Lexington, Kentucky, event where she announced a $2.3 million grant to the local transit authority.
WHAT AM I DOING HERE?
As a well-compensated director of Wells Fargo from 2011 to 2017, Chao sat by, lucratively, while the bank engaged in massive fraud, illegally repossessing military service members’ cars, creating millions of unauthorized accounts (disproportionately targeting non-English-speakers, elderly people, and other unusually vulnerable segments of the customer base), and ignoring the complaints of employee whistleblowers over sales goals that encouraged fraud.
Chao has already made more than $2 million from her Wells Fargo board service, and stands to gain a further payout of $1 million to $5 million by 2021. Meanwhile, many of the bank’s defrauded customers are still struggling to recover from the damage.
SELF-AND-CRONY-ENRICHMENT
Chao failed until 2018 to sell her holdings in Vulcan, a manufacturer of road-construction materials—a line of business profoundly affected by Department of Transportation policies. She took action to divest only after The Wall Street Journal revealed her continued stake.
Chao has instructed a top deputy, Todd Inman—a former McConnell aide—to oversee DOT spending in Kentucky, greasing the wheels for grants so far totaling at least $78 million in the run-up to her husband’s re-election 2020 campaign. One highway-improvement project went to a McConnell political stronghold, Paducah, that had been twice rejected for previous grant applications.
FURTHER REFERENCE
Elaine Chao Investigated by House Panel for Possible Conflicts (New York Times)
Chao created special path for McConnell’s favored projects (Politico)
McConnell’s Wife Gave Him A Special Reelection Present: $78 Million In Federal Funding (Vanity Fair)
Kentucky On Her Mind (Restore Public Trust)
Transportation Secretary Still Owns Stock She Pledged to Divest (Wall Street Journal)
Elaine Chao Sells Vulcan Stock Holdings (Wall Street Journal)
As Ethics Probes Build, Will Elaine Chao Answer for Wells Fargo Fraud Scandal? (Morning Consult)
McConnell 2008 Financial Disclosure Report (U.S. Senate)
USDOT grants $2.3 million for LexTran electric buses (WKYT)
Back to Map
Treasury Department
Treasury Department
QUICK AND DIRTY
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin got personally rich during his 17 years at Goldman Sachs, specializing in the kind of private-label mortgage securities that would end up nearly wrecking the global economy in 2008.
He got richer by capitalizing on the carnage to buy a failing, scandal-stained bank on the cheap and carry out 36,000 foreclosures (many involving high-risk reverse mortgages marketed to elderly homeowners) while collecting federal subsidies intended to help keep people in their homes.
In 2015 and 2016, Mnuchin led the fundraising effort for candidate Donald Trump, raising $169 million.
A day after being nominated for the job, Mnuchin declared the watering-down of Dodd-Frank bank rules his “top priority.”
As head of the Financial Stability Oversight Council and leader of the agency overseeing the IRS, Mnuchin has been the administration’s point man in efforts to weaken bank regulations, obscure scrutiny of financial activities, and provide favorable tax rulings for wealthy individuals and businesses—an expanse of territory filled with opportunities for him to bestow favors on industry cronies.
In 2017, Mnuchin’s office released recommendations for tax regulations that were almost entirely lifted from a memo put out by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Mnuchin overruled IRS lawyers to block disclosure of Trump tax returns.
After attending a conference hosted by convicted securities crook Michael Milken, Mnuchin intervened in rule-writing deliberations, making it easier for Milken to qualify for the “Opportunity Zone” tax break. Milken later secured a presidential pardon with Mnuchin’s further assistance.
In other decisions involving Opportunity Zones, Mnuchin’s team failed to insist on eligibility guidelines ensuring that low-income areas and residents benefit, as the law stipulates. “At every step, the Treasury Department has made it easier for wealthy investors to reap a taxpayer windfall” from Opportunity Zones, says Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has introduced legislation that would force investors to disclose more information about their spending and its effects.
Others in a position to benefit from Treasury’s Opportunity Zone decisions include the family of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; former Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey; Richard LeFrak, a New York real-estate magnate and longtime Trump associate; and former White House aide Anthony Scaramucci.
WHAT AM I DOING HERE?
Mnuchin is a former hedge fund manager and bank CEO—the fifth of the last eight Treasury secretaries with a Wall Street background, and the third with Goldman Sachs on his résumé.
His bank, OneWest, evicted a 103-year-old woman for missing a single payment on her homeowner’s insurance; foreclosed on a 92-year-old over a mortgage check written for 27 cents less than the correct amount; and changed the locks on a Minnesota family in the middle of a blizzard.
OneWest was implicated in the use of cooked or robo-signed backup documents, among other practices that a New York judge characterized as “harsh, repugnant, shocking and repulsive.”
SELF-AND-CRONY-ENRICHMENT
After committing himself to the divestment of his share in a movie company, Mnuchin “sold” it to his fiancée (now wife) Louise Linton.
In his first six months as Treasury Secretary, Mnuchin spent $1 million flying on government jets. He would have used one for his honeymoon if department lawyers hadn’t warned against it.
Incorporated and unincorporated businesses and America’s richest families received huge benefits from the 2017 tax cut bill. To make those benefits seem more reasonable and affordable, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans claimed to be closing loopholes at the same time. Since the law’s enactment, the Treasury Department has taken steps to significantly reopen two key loopholes.
That rule-writing process was overseen by a top Mnuchin deputy, Chip Harter, who spent years at the accounting and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and the law firm Baker McKenzie helping companies take advantage of such tax-avoidance techniques.
With the assistance of lobbyists from Harter’s former firms, a group of foreign-owned multinational corporations—including the Swiss food giant Nestlé and the Dutch chemical manufacturer LyondellBasell—won a concession that will re-legitimize a complex currency-accounting ploy as a way to reduce their U.S. taxes.
In similar fashion, a group of foreign-owned banks—including Credit Suisse and Barclays—succeeded in exempting a large class of bank transactions from the supposed crackdown. Many tax experts, including some at Treasury itself, insisted that the law did not give the department the authority to grant such an exemption. Harter dismissed their arguments. Erika Nijenhuis of the law firm Cleary Gottlieb was one of the lobbyists who made the banks’ case in private meetings with top Treasury officials; in September 2019, Nijenhuis joined the department’s Office of Tax Policy, which continues to work on these rules. As a result of Treasury’s decisions, the foreign banks stand to gain as much as $50 billion, and the loophole-closing measure is likely to collect only a small fraction of the $150 billion in new revenues originally projected by Congress.
Altogether, federal tax collection efforts are running tens of billions of dollars behind Congress’s original projections, significantly inflating the cost of the 2017 tax bill. In 2018, the United States had the sharpest decline in tax revenues of any of the 36 OECD nations.
THE BOSS’S BIDDING
Mnuchin was instrumental in overruling career IRS lawyers to block disclosure of Trump tax returns.
IRS Chief Counsel Michael Desmond, also involved in that decision, previously worked for the Trump organization and continues to receive rent from Trump-branded condos.
Desmond got his position after the president leaned on the Senate to expedite his confirmation.
In negotiations over a proposal to move the Secret Service from the Homeland Security Department back to the Treasury Department, Mnuchin has been trying to block disclosure of Trump-related travel and security expenses until after the 2020 election.
FURTHER REFERENCE
This Is Still Happening: Steven Mnuchin (Slate)
Mnuchin: Dodd-Frank Reform “Number One Priority” (Americans for Tax Reform)
Trump administration calls for rolling back Obama-era financial regulations (Washington Post)
The Travels Of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin (CREW)
Treasury Completes Rules for Opportunity Zone Tax Breaks (New York Times)
Trump Asked That Confirmation of I.R.S. Counsel Be a Priority (New York Times)
R.S. Memo Undercuts Mnuchin on Withholding Trump’s Tax Returns (New York Times)
Trump’s handpicked IRS chief and IRS legal counsel both have ties to Trump businesses (The Week)
IRS whistleblower said to report Treasury political appointee might have tried to interfere in audit of Trump or Pence (Washington Post)
Mnuchin seeks delay of proposed disclosure of Secret Service spending on presidential travel until after election (Washington Post)
Steven Mnuchin ran a “Foreclosure Machine” and other fun facts about Trump’s shortlist for Treasury (Vanity Fair)
Trump Treasury ripped its tax cut recommendations straight from the Chamber Of Commerce (Intercept)
Symbol of ’80s Greed Stands to Profit From Trump Tax Break for Poor Areas (New York Times)
Trump Tax Break That Benefited the Rich Is Being Investigated (New York Times)
Milken Had Key Allies in Pardon Bid: Trump’s Inner Circle (New York Times)
Broken Promises: More Special Interest Breaks and Loopholes Under the New Tax Law (Center for American Progress)
How Big Companies Won New Tax Breaks From the Trump Administration (New York Times)
Steve Mnuchin’s reign of destruction: From Wall Street to Trump’s Treasury (Salon)
Back to Map
CREDITS
Dossiers by Jim Lardner. Map art by Peter and Maria Hoey. Coding by Donny Truong.
READ THE ARTICLE: https://prospect.org/power/mapping-corruption-donald-trump-executive-branch/
Mapping Corruption: Donald Trump’s Executive Branch
by Jim Lardner
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1.20
https://features.propublica.org/cabinet-cards/trump-cabinet-advisers-turnover-two-years
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posner on reed F&F:
Unprecedented Power
Whether Trump’s evangelical boosters actually believe he is anointed by God or that the evidence really does exonerate him, they have one powerful motive for their unflagging support: Trump has given evangelicals unprecedented power. With him in the White House, Christian right ideologues have virtual carte blanche to run his administration, as he has handed them control over personnel and policy at a level they could have only dreamed of, even under admired presidents like George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. Trump has handed them conservative judicial nominees, from the Supreme Court down to federal trial courts, and also has installed longtime evangelical allies at key Cabinet posts, including Mike Pompeo at the State Department, Bill Barr at the Department of Justice, Ben Carson at Housing and Urban Development, and Betsy DeVos at Education. Ralph Reed has told his followers, “There are more Christians serving” in the Trump administration “than all previous presidents combined.”
At the Faith & Freedom conference in June, Mercedes Schlapp, who at the time served in the White House but later moved over to the Trump reelection campaign, described her office as “the West Wing Chapel.” Derek Kan, a political appointee at the Office of Management and Budget, recounted how the books of Leviticus, Joshua and Genesis shape his views on regulation and taxes.
Health and Human Services has been ground zero for Trump administration efforts to scale back reproductive and LGBTQ rights, and eroding church-state separation and framing it as “religious freedom” for Christians. HHS Secretary Alex Azar then delivered a speech enumerating “many of the ways that under President Trump HHS has protected life, conscience and faith.” The department, he said, has “never fought more fiercely to protect life at all stages, from conception until natural death. That is thanks above all to the work, the leadership and the courage of President Trump, the most pro-life president in American history.” At the Values Voter Summit, two officials from HHS — Shannon Royce, the head of the department’s Office of Faith and Opportunity Initiatives, and Roger Severino, the head of the Office of Civil Rights, which in 2018 launched a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division — were given front-row seats and a shoutout from Tony Perkins.
In turn, evangelical organizations provide top Trump deputies a platform to tout their Christian credentials to the base ? and shield them from the glare of mounting scandals. The same day that Yovanovitch testified in her closed-door deposition, Pompeo delivered a speech, “Being a Christian Leader,” to the American Association of Christian Counselors, which is led by Tim Clinton, another top evangelical ally to Trump. (Clinton did not respond to a request for comment.) A week and a half later, Pompeo touted religious freedom initiatives carried out by the State Department to a Heritage Foundation President’s Club Meeting in Washington, D.C., joking that the gathering had provided him “shelter from the storm.”
Reelecting A ‘Christian’ President
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jefress and paula white get closer to trump?!
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/trumps-base-is-a-cult-rick-perry-slammed-after-saying-donald-trump-is-the-chosen-one-during-fox-news-interview/
no lnx twt
‘Trump’s base is a cult’: Rick Perry slammed after saying Donald Trump is ‘the Chosen One’ during Fox News interview
Written by Roxanne Cooper / Raw Story November 25, 2019
Rick Perry shocked some Fox News viewers when he announced during the weekend that Donald Trump was ‘sent by God’ to lead the country. The outgoing US Energy Secretary also told Fox & Friends’ hosts that President Trump was ‘the Chosen One.’
“God’s used imperfect people all through history,” Perry said, naming several Biblical figures. “King David wasn’t perfect, Saul wasn’t perfect, Solomon wasn’t perfect.”
The interview, which can be seen below, was met with scorn and derision. Here’s a sample:
“A man too arrogant, too self-absorbed, to seek God’s forgiveness is precisely the type of leader John Adams prayed would never occupy the White House” – Rick Perry https://t.co/ecNUH44VFX
— Tim Miller (@Timodc) November 25, 2019
Wow. #RickPerry said trump is “the chosen one” & was sent from god. A few years ago that very same man called trump a “cancer” and a “false prophet.” Corruption sure changes things for ppl. The only god @SecretaryPerry worships is money. #FakeChristian https://t.co/SbHmJzj6HT
— Fulcrum (@Joe_Dameron8) November 25, 2019
I still can’t get over the idea that Rick Perry thinks Trump was Gods pick.
— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) November 25, 2019
Here we go.
A fake Christian invokes the Lord’s name to support a fake president.
Again.
Fox News teases interview with Rick Perry saying Trump was God’s “chosen one’ to be president https://t.co/RgUkOpZgSt
— Richard W. Painter (@RWPUSA) November 25, 2019
If former reality TV host/casino owner Donald Trump is heaven sent, as Rick Perry claims, than it’s true God has a weird sense of humor.
— Jim Heath (@JimHeathTV) November 25, 2019
Rick Perry is the latest to say Trump is “the chosen one”.
It looks like a cult. It walks like a cult. It quacks like a cult.
Yes, people. Trump’s base is a cult.
pic.twitter.com/eLBgFFIyU5
— Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (@ananavarro) November 25, 2019
Trump IS the Chosen One.
Putin chose him. https://t.co/hXEctX8nHr
— Greg Olear (@gregolear) November 25, 2019
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/the-unbearable-wrongness-of-william-barr-professor-of-secular-studies-explains-why-secularism-doesnt-destroy-moral-order/
no lnx
The unbearable wrongness of William Barr: Professor of secular studies explains why secularism doesn’t destroy moral order
William Barr image by U.S. Department of Justice
Written by Phil Zuckerman / Salon November 10, 2019
Last month, in what Jeffrey Toobin called “the worst speech given by an Attorney General of the United States in modern history,” Attorney General William Barr offered a lecture at Notre Dame Law School in which he denounced secularism as a “social pathology” that destroys the “moral order.”After blaming secularists for a host of contemporary problems — including depression, drug overdosing, and violence — Barr explained that without belief in a “transcendent Supreme Being” and adherence to “God’s eternal law,” the “possibility of any healthy community life crumbles.” Unless we follow “God’s instruction manual,” he sermonized, there will be “real-world consequences for man and society” — consequences that are not pretty, but quite grim. For without religion, there can be no “moral culture” and society will inevitably fall prey to humanity’s “capacity for great evil.”
Such hackneyed assertions are not new. Pious people of power have been scapegoating the non-religious for centuries, characterizing non-believers as threats to the nation, and declaring that without religion, there can be no moral social order. And like those before him who have made such claims — from Newt Gingrich to the prophet Muhammed — William Barr is wrong.
When lots of people in a given society stop being religious of their own accord, such organic secularization does not result in the evaporation of morality in society, nor national decay. For instance, the most secular countries in the world today fare much better on nearly every measure of peace, prosperity, and societal well-being — including infant mortality, life expectancy, educational attainment, economic prosperity, freedom, levels of corruption, and so forth — than the most religious countries. In fact, those countries with the highest murder rates — such as Jamaica, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, and Brazil — are extremely religious, while those countries with the lowest murder rates — such as Iceland, Canada, Slovenia, Norway, and the Netherlands — are among the most secular nations in the world. Heck, Singapore and the Czech Republic are among the least religious nations on earth, while Brazil and the Philippines are among the most God-worshipping, yet the latter’s murder rates are over ten times higher than the former’s, and the crime rate of never-been-Christian, strongly secular Japan is 80 times lower than El Salvador’s, a Catholic nation neck-deep in worship of Barr’s “Supreme Transcendent Being.”
Similar correlations hold within our own country: on almost every measure of societal well-being — from poverty rates to STD rates to DUIs — the most secular states tend to fare the best, while the most religious tend to fare the worst. For example, among the states with the highest gun violence and murder rates, many are among the most religious — e.g., Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Arkansas — while among those with the lowest gun violence and murder rates, many are among the least religious states, such as New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, New York, Washington, Massachusetts, and Minnesota.
Of course, such correlations don’t prove that secularism causes these more positive outcomes experienced by less religious societies. But they do knock the knees out of Barr’s thesis that secularism is a destructive force. For if secularism resulted in moral deterioration, then highly secular societies would be decaying bastions of crime and misery, while the strongly religious would be shining beacons of liberty and harmony. But we find just the opposite reality: the nations with the best overall quality of life are among the most secular countries in the world. And while numerous factors account for the differing degrees of societal well-being — factors that have nothing to do with religion or secularism — that’s exactly the point. Societies thrive or fail because of their social policies, laws, economic opportunities, civil institutions, and government regulations — not because of their faith in God, or lack thereof.
Historical analysis is also relevant. The so-called “rise of the nones” has occurred over the last five decades, with both God-belief declining and the percentage Americans claiming no religious affiliation skyrocketing, from less than 5% up to 26% today. And yet, over the course of those same decades, America’s poverty rate has precipitously declined, and the national violent crime rate has gone down by 51%! Clearly, secularism isn’t the hindrance to moral social progress Barr would have us believe.
At the individual level, while religiously-active people do volunteer and donate more money to charity than their secular peers — at least in the US, if not elsewhere — secular people are notably moral in other ways; they are, on average, less racist, less ethnocentric, less homophobic, less militaristic, less authoritarian, and less likely to hit their children than their religious peers; they are also more likely to support women’s equality, reproductive rights, sane gun control, death with dignity, animal welfare and efforts to fight climate change. Finally, atheists are significantly under-represented in prison.
But how can secular people be moral if they don’t believe in God? Easy. Contrary to Barr’s perspective, morality did not start with the Bible. Human communities began constructing ethical codes of conduct long before the world’s major religions arrived on the scene. And that’s because morality first developed during our long evolutionary past, when cooperation, honesty, and altruism increased group survival. Concomitantly, our brains long ago developed neurological pathways and peptides that enhanced our ability to be empathetic and compassionate — the two fundamental cornerstones of a moral orientation. We’ve also learned how to treat others through socialization and enculturation. And our innate ability to think, reflect, and reason has consistently led most of us to the basic, universal ethical principle that we ought to treat people the way we ourselves would like to be treated.
Although religion preaches many moral precepts, it by no means holds a monopoly on them. Ethical life abounds well beyond the confines of church, Bible, and belief in gods. Those who actively scapegoat the secular as pathologically immoral are purposefully spreading fear, and division — and in so doing, violate the very moral orientation they claim to champion.
==
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omg
https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/mike-pompeos-state-department-homepage-advocates-being-a-christian-leader/
no lnx
Mike Pompeo’s State Department homepage advocates ‘being a Christian leader’
Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement October 14, 2019
The website of the U.S, Department of State currently features a photograph of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the words, “Being a Christian Leader.”
The link on the State Dept. homepage goes to a video and the text of Pompeo’s speech to the American Association of Christian Counselors in Nashville, Tennessee on October 11.
Is separation of church and state dead?
The website of the U.S, Department of State currently features a photograph of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the words, “Being a Christian Leader.”
The link on the State Dept. homepage goes to a video and the text of Pompeo’s speech to the American Association of Christian Counselors in Nashville, Tennessee on October 11.
Secretary Pompeo’s speech focuses on how he leads the Dept. of State as a devout Christian. He says he keeps a Bible open on his desk and refers to it during the day.
That in its self would not be exceptionally disturbing except that Pompeo, an evangelical Christian, has said the Bible “informs everything I do.”
He has said it’s “possible,” when asked if God made Trump president “to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace.”
And he has said the wars in the Middle East are a “never-ending struggle” until “the rapture.”
Here’s how The New York Times explained Pompeo’s biblical views just this past March:
Studies show that white evangelicals are much more likely than other Americans to believe that Israel fulfills a biblical prophecy. Known as Christian Zionists, they believe God promised the land to the Jews, and that the gathering of Jews in Israel is foretold in the prophecy of the rapture — the ascent of Christians into the kingdom of God.
Mr. Pompeo talks about the rapture. “We will continue to fight these battles,” he said at a “God and Country Rally” in 2015, because there is a “never-ending struggle” until “the rapture.”
An L.A. Times opinion piece, referring to those remarks, said Pompeo “has his eye on an End Times cleansing.”
The State Dept. advertised Pompeo’s speech and even broadcast it live on the State Dept.’s website:
On October 11, @SecPompeo addresses the 2019 American Association of Christian Counselors World Conference in Nashville. Watch live on https://t.co/58Uc9lIgDz or https://t.co/O2lYyHUIHa at 12:00 PM EDT/ 11:00 AM CDT. pic.twitter.com/Ns5e0TyBXa
— Department of State (@StateDept) October 11, 2019
A few responses via Twitter:
Why are Republicans such as William Barr “willing to destroy the norms of both justice &… democracy…? To this observer, it seems it is the overwhelming desire to impose…a theocratic cultural agenda coupled w/ a..brand of capitalism rapidly devolving into a new feudalism.” https://t.co/NwJQu8g92R
— Jennifer Cohn (@jennycohn1) October 14, 2019
Holy Hell. This is the home page of https://t.co/sfyrXv8tpo. pic.twitter.com/FsE3IJBPlf
— Derek DelGaudio (@derek_del) October 14, 2019
Once again, anybody want to dispute my suggestion of an “evangelical caliphate?”https://t.co/hcdYOIZoHq
— I.M Hydrogen (@ChuckGore2) October 14, 2019
separation of church and state uh what https://t.co/uJL0tHlEx5 pic.twitter.com/UIRjsGZzco
— James K. Yu (@jyu_pdx) October 14, 2019
The home page of the State Department right now. If you believe in the separation of church and state, make sure you leave them a comment. https://t.co/bgEKT4oI0a pic.twitter.com/jOCet0avnh
— Juliana Aldous (@jaldous) October 14, 2019
What fresh hell is this?? I do not want religion in my government and I do not want the government in my religion. Separation of church and state protects both. https://t.co/FQdXxdfURW
— Carly B (@carly__bird) October 14, 2019
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despite promise/chant drain the swamp and some fig-leaf refrom on how long wait revolve door?
https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-bc-us--trump-former-lobbyists-20190917-story.html
In less than three years, President Donald Trump has named more former lobbyists to Cabinet-level posts than his most recent predecessors did in eight, putting a substantial amount of oversight in the hands of people with ties to the industries they're regulating.
The Cabinet choices are another sign that Trump's populist pledge to "drain the swamp" is a catchy campaign slogan but not a serious attempt to change the way Washington works. Instead of staring down "the unholy alliance of lobbyists and donors and special interests" as Trump recently declared, the influence industry has flourished during his administration.
The amount spent in 2019 on lobbying the U.S. government is on pace to match or exceed last year's total of $3.4 billion, the most since 2010, according to the political money website Open Secrets. Trump also has pulled in hefty contributions from industries with business before his administration, and his hotel near the White House has been a magnet for lobbyists and foreign interests since he was elected.
"An administration staffed by former industry lobbyists will almost certainly favor industry over the general public, because that's the outlook they're bringing to the job," said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political reform program at the think tank New America and author of the book "The Business of America is Lobbying."
:{:{}:
Former lobbyists run the Defense and Interior departments, Environmental Protection Agency and office of the U.S. Trade Representative. The acting Labor secretary, Pat Pizzella, is a former lobbyist and Trump's pick to run the department,Eugene Scalia , also is an ex-lobbyist. Scalia's confirmation hearing before a GOP -controlled Senate committee is scheduled for Thursday and Democrats are expected to grill him on his long record of opposing federal regulations .}:
A seventh ex-lobbyist, Dan Coats , resigned as Trump's intelligence chief in August.
President Barack Obama had five former lobbyists in his Cabinet during two terms in office and President George W. Bush had three,also during eight years in the White House, according to lobbying and foreign agent disclosure records. The review was limited to the Trump, Obama and Bush administrations because prior to 1995 there was no central database of federal lobbying registrations and the law was hazy about who was supposed to register.
Shortly after taking office, Trump signed an executive order that revoked an Obama directive prohibiting lobbyists from being appointed to a post at a federal agency they'd lobbied within the last two years. While this "cooling off" period was cast aside, Trump's order continued to bar for two years lobbyists-turned-government-employees from participating in particular matters that they'd lobbied on during the two preceding years.
"Without the cooling off period, these Cabinet heads appear to be serving their former employers' and clients' special interests," said Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump's Cabinet includes the heads of the 15 executive departments and seven other senior-level posts, such as EPA administrator and director of national intelligence. Obama's Cabinet had the same number of members and Bush's Cabinet had two fewer.
Scalia, the Labor Department nominee, has spent much of his career as a partner in the Washington office of the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher firm, where he ran up a string of victories in court cases on behalf of business interests challenging labor and financial regulations. Scalia, the son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, served for a year as the Labor Department's top lawyer during the George W. Bush administration.
His financial disclosure report lists 49 clients who paid him $5,000 or more for legal services, including e-cigarette giant Juul Labs, Facebook, Walmart and Bank of America. Disclosure records show Scalia was registered in 2010 and 2011 to lobby for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Pizzellahas been the acting secretary since Alexander Acosta resigned the post in July amid renewed criticism of how, as a federal prosecutor, he handled a 2008 secret plea deal with wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Pizzella lobbied for clients that ranged from Microsoft Corp. to the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. He also worked on several accounts with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff , although Pizzella was never accused of any misconduct or wrongdoing.
Obama chose Pizzella for a GOP seaton the Federal Labor Relations Authority and he was an assistant Labor secretary during the George W. Bush administration.
Two Trump Cabinet officials, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler, have been accused by congressional Democrats and public interest groups of failing to honor their ethics pledges.
Both Bernhardt and Wheeler, backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have played leading roles in the administration's rollback of environmental regulations. They also both worked at the agency they now lead during prior administrations.
Interior's inspector general launched an investigation of Bernhardt earlier this year after receiving seven separate ethics allegations against him. A complaint filed by the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center alleged that shortly after joining the department in August 2017 Bernhardt became involved in matters that were the focus of his lobbying for California's Westlands Water District that lasted until mid-November 2016.
Westlands has federal contracts to provide irrigation water to 700 family-owned farms in the fertile San Joaquin Valley. The complaint said Bernhardt had "lobbied on discrete provisions of a law directing Interior to maximize water supplies to his clients, and to minimize Endangered Species Act protections in that region."
Then, after joining Interior, Bernhardt breached his ethics pledge by directing government officials under him "to advance the particular matters he had previously lobbied on," according to the complaint.
"It is very hard to tell where Bernhardt's lobbying career ended and where his public service begins," said Brendan Fischer, director of the Campaign Legal Center's federal reform program.
An Interior spokesman said in a statement, "Secretary Bernhardt is and always has been committed to upholding his ethical responsibilities, and he has fully complied with those obligations."
Thomas Birmingham, Westlands' general manager, said the agency is actually disadvantaged with Bernhardt as secretary because he's not been able to engage with him as he did past Interior secretaries, like Ken Salazar and Sally Jewell .
"I don't know what Mr. Bernhardt has done or has not done at Interior," Birmingham said.
Wheeler worked as a lobbyist for eight years and his more than 20 different clients included coal magnate Bob Murray, who pushed hard on the Trump administration to grant a series of breaks for the sagging domestic coal industry.
"I think he's doing a great job," Betsy Monseu, CEO of the American Coal Council, said of Wheeler. "We're pleased to see the regulatory reform agenda moving forward."
But Canter's organization, known as CREW, urged the EPA inspector general earlier this year to investigate whether Wheeler broke his ethics pledge. Among the allegations, CREW said Wheeler had participated in the easing of standards for storing coal ash in 2018 even though he had lobbied on those regulations the year before for Murray Energy.
The inspector general's office declined to say if it had open an investigation, directing a reporter to file a Freedom of Information Act request.
An EPA statement called CREW's complaint "baseless and just flat out false." It said Wheeler works closely with career EPA ethics officials and abides by all ethics requirements.
The Pentagon's top official, Mark Esper , spent seven years lobbying for defense industry juggernaut Raytheon, a company that stands to gain handsomely from Trump's push to boost military spending by billions of dollars. The company closed out 2018 by hitting a record $27.1 billion in net sales, up nearly seven percent from the $25.3 billion the year before.
Esper, who was secretary of the Army when Trump chose him to be defense secretary, faced opposition from only a handful of Democrats and he was confirmed in July by a 90-8 margin.
As Army secretary, Esper hasn't participated in Raytheon-related matters under the terms of an ethics agreement that runs through this November. After that, Esper told Pentagon ethics officials that he will continue to avoid Raytheon issues unless his participation as defense secretary is determined to be essential.
Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. Trade Representative, lobbied primarily for steel companies between 1999 and 2003. Beginning in 2004, he represented just one company, U.S. Steel, which paid his firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, $3.2 million over a seven-year period.
Associated Press researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.
Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
- Environmental Science
- Donald Trump
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
- Antonin Scalia
- George W. Bush
- Barack Obama
- Mark Esper
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/trump-cabinet-bible-study-leader-sets-up-ministry-for-nicaraguan-strongman-sanctioned-by-u-s
Ralph Drollinger, whose ministry runs Bible studies for members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet and the U.S. Congress that are meant to “disciple” public officials to his particular “very conservative” interpretation of Christianity, traveled to Nicaragua this month at the invitation of President Daniel Ortega to discuss setting up similar Bible studies for Nicaraguan officials.
Drollinger spoke at a massive public gathering celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution. Drollinger’s visit, and his
for Ortega and his wife and Vice President Rosario Murillo, are striking in light of the intense criticism of the Ortega-Murillo regime by the U.S. government, which as recently as April expanded sanctions against individuals and institutions associated with the government–not to mention the disconnect between Ortega and Drollinger’s political backgrounds.
In an announcement of the most recent sanctions–against a bank and the son of the president and vice president—the U.S. undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence said, “President Ortega, Vice President Murillo, and members of their inner circle continue to engage in blatant corruption, violence, and violations of basic human rights.” The government has also been criticized by international human rights advocates.
The latest U.S. sanctions came about one year after Nicaraguan officials and their allies killed hundreds of people and jailed or drove into exile thousands more in a violent crackdown on political protesters. Ortega, who has faced “persistent accusations” of election fraud, has consolidated his power, changed the constitution to eliminate term limits, and blocked opposition candidates from running for office. In August 2018, the Washington Post reported that “police and masked gunmen working with them have hunted down opposition leaders and protesters by the hundreds” and that many “have been killed, arrested, or disappeared.” In September, the BBC reported that the government had ordered the U.N. Commission on Human Rights to leave the country after it criticized the government’s use of excessive force against protesters and torture of detainees.
This April, the newspaper El País reported that repression under Ortega “has worsened during this year.” It cited a move by police to prevent regime opponents “from mobilizing in the streets of Managua.”
:{But there was no mention of any of that unpleasantness in Drollinger’s }
:{ at the July 19 celebration. He began his remarks by bringing greetings from the U.S. }::{House of Representatives Bible study, the Senate Bible study, and “the U.S. White House cabinet member Bible study.”}:
Drollinger pronounced himself “blessed” and “honored” by the invitation to come to Nicaragua for the celebration and to talk about creating Bible studies for government officials. “In the United States of America, we have found amongst our political leaders, that it is essential they have a Bible teacher in their midst,” Drollinger said. He reiterated that point, saying “we have found in our nation, that it’s an important aspect of our government to have a Bible teacher in the midst of our political leaders.”
“Mrs. Vice President has said you are a Christian nation,” he told the crowd. “In America, we view ourselves as a Christian nation. But what is a Christian nation? A Christian nation is a Christian nation to the degree that the people in the nation reflect the attributes of God.”
Drollinger went on to say that it falls to the institution of the church to reflect the mercy, grace, love, patience and kindness of God, adding that other attributes include justice and righteousness, which God has “asked the state to manifest.”
We are personally to manifest the attributes of God’s justice and righteousness in our personal and our national life. And so to the degree that we reflect the love of Christ, to the degree that we reflect the mercy of Christ, to the degree that we reflect the grace of Christ, to the degree that we reflect the patience of Christ, to the degree that we reflect the justice of Christ, to the degree that our nation and our personal lives reflect the righteousness of Christ, is the degree to which we are or are not a Christian nation.
Let’s pause for a moment to remind ourselves what Drollinger and his Capitol Ministries teach about what God wants from public officials. Drollinger believes he has been called by God with a very specific purpose—to convert and “disciple” public officials at every level of government to his biblical worldview. Drollinger teaches public officials that the Bible endorses or mandates right-wing policy positions on economics, immigration, environmental regulation, abortion, LGBTQ equality, and the death penalty. Drollinger teaches that the government’s job is to “quell evil” and that governments and public officials “must send a constant message that sin will be punished.” He also teaches that the Bible promotes distinct gender roles, and he will not allow women to be Bible study leaders.
Drollinger’s teachings are reflected in his handbook for Christian public officials: Oaks in Office: Biblical Essays for Political Leaders. Capitol Ministries says that the Spanish-language edition is soon to be released and “will be used in the discipleship of the nation’s leaders.” Another Drollinger book, “Rebuilding America: The Biblical Blueprint,” has also been translated into Spanish and Portuguese with a new title, “Rebuilding a Nation.”
What might motivate Ortega and Murillo to invite Drollinger to Nicaragua and give him a speaking platform at a major national celebration? It’s a way to publicly wrap themselves in the mantle of Christianity, and perhaps poke a finger in the eye of the U.S. Treasury and State Departments by going over officials’ heads, so to speak, to an American who brags of his access at the highest levels of the U.S. government, including the White House.
This wouldn’t be the first time that Ortega and his wife have used religion for political purposes. A 2018 Washington Post article entitled “From Rebel to Strongman,” noted that when Ortega returned to office in 2006 a decade and a half after he was ousted by voters, he had “amped up his talk of peace and Christian values.” The BBC quoted Ortega saying in 2006, “Jesus Christ is my hero now.” According to Capitol Ministries, Ortega’s invitation said, “We know if the people that God has trusted with the destiny of a nation are born again, our legislators will legislate according to the Bible.”
By one estimate, Nicaragua is about one-half Catholic and one-third evangelical. While Ortega’s opposition to abortion has undoubtedly pleased church leaders from both groups, the government became increasingly hostile to the Catholic Church during the past year over some church leaders’ criticism of his abuses of power.
Foreign Policy reported last August, “In recent weeks, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and forces loyal to him have targeted clergy, profaning and destroying Catholic churches, even killing those who seek refuge within them.” Foreign Policy noted that Vice President Mike Pence had slammed the Nicaraguan government for “virtually waging war on the Catholic Church and those calling for democracy and national dialogue.”
It’s worth noting that Drollinger has seemingly little tolerance for those whose take on Christianity or biblical interpretation differs from his own. He has called the Catholic Church “the world’s largest false religion.”
Given the hostility between the Nicaraguan government and the Catholic Church, the public embrace of Drollinger could be seen as a way for Ortega and Murillo to portray their government as publicly aligned with Christianity in spite of their feud with Catholic leaders.
Indeed, in April, shortly after presidential son Laureano Ortega Murillo was hit with sanctions by the U.S. government, he took part in an evangelical gathering where Managua Mayor Reyna Rueda was given the microphone to thank God for “the peace that reigns in our country.”
The appearance generated some side-eye reporting on the leaders’ newfound enthusiasms. “Until recently, it was normal to see the Ortega Murillo family attending mass,” noted La Presna. “But since the dictatorship declared the Catholic Church as an enemy, they have moved closer to certain evangelical leaders, whose position during the crisis that Nicaragua is going through has been silence.”
La Prensa quoted Eliseo Nunez, a former deputy and member of the Broad Front for Democracy (FAD) portraying the ruling family as unprincipled and willing to do anything to maintain their hold on power. He accused Ortega of “taking advantage of the opportunism of a few pastors” in order to falsely portray all evangelicals as his supporters. There were also some Catholic leaders present at the July 19 celebration, La Presna reported, including a priest who asked Drollinger to intercede with the U.S. government to lift its sanctions.
Capitol Ministries’ own reporting about Drollinger’s public appearance in Nicaragua, which includes a link to the video of his “sermon,” states, “Drollinger explained that in the Bible, God doesn’t talk about ‘Christian nations,’ that only individuals can become Christians by being forgiven for sin through the atoning work of Jesus Christ.” But that’s not accurate, according to the video of Drollinger’s remarks at the political rally. At no point does he “explain” that “God doesn’t talk about ‘Christian nations’”—nor does he talk on that video about “individuals becoming forgiven for sin through the atoning work of Jesus Christ.” [See update below for Capitol Ministries’ explanation.]
“A ‘Christian nation’ per se, doesn’t exist,” continues the Capitol Ministries blog post, “Nations can only be so-called ‘Christian’ to the extent that their laws and people are guided by Christian principles, two of which are righteousness and justice, Drollinger said.
Drollinger did not tell the crowd in Managua that a “Christian nation” doesn’t exist. As noted above, he did say that what makes a nation a Christian nation is that its people and leaders reflect what he calls the attributes of God. He prayed that the people, government officials and country of Nicaragua would reflect the attributes of God, and added, “May God cement these ideas as to what is a Christian nation.”
This apparent misrepresentation* of his public remarks, at least those captured on the video shared by Capitol Ministries itself, may reflect the group’s sensitivity to how researchers and reporters have characterized Drollinger’s positions on church-state separation—he says he supports institutional separation, but not influential separation—and on Christian nationalism, which he has denounced.
Drollinger’s public remarks were translated into Spanish by Oscar Zamora, Capitol Ministries’ Peru-based director for Latin America. Zamora reported that he recently met with Nicaraguan congressional leaders and with General Inspector Jaime Vanegas “who asked me to give a word to almost 200 police officers who were waiting for me at an auditorium next door.” He also said he had met with Managua Mayor Rueda.
After the trip, Capitol Ministries announced that Bible studies for Nicaragua’s cabinet and National Assembly deputies will be led by Arsenio Herrera, who reportedly pastors the largest evangelical church in Managua. Herrera, described as the “spiritual son” of the late American missionary David Spencer, has his own ambitious plans to have a church in every city in the country to go along with his TV ministries. “We are a national church,” he said in 2015. A few years ago he told the Daystar network that he is “believing for the transformation of the nation.” Daystar described him as “working to establish the Kingdom of God in Nicaragua.”
Capitol Ministries says it “has planted ministries in 24 foreign federal capitals and has an objective of establishing 200 ministries in 200 foreign nations in the years to come.” It says that since Zamora’s appointment as Latin America director, “ministries have been birthed in Honduras, Uruguay, Ecuador, Mexico, and Costa Rica.” And it has asked its supporters to pray “for upcoming launches in the federal capitals of Brasilia, Brazil on August 29, and Panama City, Panama on October 22.”
*Update: After this blog post was published, Capitol Ministries contacted Right Wing Watch to let us know that its story about Drollinger’s Nicaragua trip has been edited to clarify that the comments attributed to him that do not appear in the video were meant to be described as things he said later to “explain” the “intent” of his talk in Nicaragua. With this clarification, the CM post no longer appears to report inaccurately what he told the crowd; readers can judge for themselves how closely his actual remarks, which described what makes a nation a Christian nation, matched what Capitol Ministries says was his intent.
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omfg
EPA’s Pruitt Hears From Bible Study Leader That ‘Radical Environmentalism’ Is A ‘False Religion’
MARCH 21, 2018 5:32 PM
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/epas-pruitt-hears-from-bible-study-leader-that-radical-environmentalism-is-a-false-religion/
Drollinger, the man who leads weekly Bible study meetings for members of Congress and Trump’s Cabinet—including embattled Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt—distributed on Monday a Bible study warning that America is in the process of shifting from Christianity to the “false religion of Radical Environmentalism.” Pruitt told CBN last year that it was “wonderful” to participate in the Cabinet Bible studies.
Drollinger’s weekly written Bible studies (also available online in print and audio versions) are distributed to public officials by Capitol Ministries, which is expanding in the U.S. and globally. Drollinger, who sometimes describes them as a kind of a homework supplement to the in-person Bible study meetings, told a reporter last year that Trump reads the studies and sends him positive hand-written notes about them.
The study posted on Monday, “Coming to Grips with the Religion of Environmentalism,” appears to be an updated version of a previous written study with the same title. It draws heavily on a passage in the biblical book of Genesis in which God grants mankind dominion over the Earth and all its creatures and instructs man to rule and subdue creation.
Drollinger argues that it is unbiblical to believe that mankind’s actions could destroy the Earth:
To think that man can alter the Earth’s ecosystem—when God remains omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent in the current affairs of mankind—is to more than subtly espouse an ultra-hubristic, secular worldview relative to the supremacy and importance of man.
Here’s another bit of policy-related teaching that Drollinger has shared with Pruitt and his colleagues in the Cabinet:
To allow fish to govern the construction of dams, endangered species to govern power plants, flies to govern hospitals, or kangaroo rats, homes, is to miss the clear proclamation of God in Genesis.
Because of biblical promises that God would not again destroy the Earth in a great flood, and would continue to send rain, says Drollinger, “we can all rest assured and wholly rely on God’s aforementioned promises pertaining to His ability and willingness to sustain our world’s ecosystem.”
Drollinger, who is from California and recently held a fundraiser with Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue during the World Ag Expo in the heart of California’s agriculture industry, decries efforts in California to limit household water usage, saying there is “more than enough to go around” and that environmentalists’ efforts to restrict water usage reflects asecular worldview that says the environment is more important than people.
“The biblically informed public servant,” says Drollinger, must “order his thinking in light of God’s revealed hierarchy in creation.”
Drollinger says it’s good politics to side against “Radical Environmentalists,” in part because they have fewer children than those who believe “in the biblical truth of multiplying and filling the earth.” His Bible study says thatBible-believers have “outperformed” environmentalist parents “by six million children since the advent of Radical Environmentalism in America,” adding:
Those six million children are just now reaching voting status. Said another way, young Americans raised with a Christian worldview will soon outnumber the children of Radical Environmentalists by at least six million voters in the coming elections. Indeed the scriptural truth that your sins will find you outwill soon be realized across the country. Hopefully the religion of Radical Environmentalism will soon be relegated to fringe minority status in American society. Amen.
Drollinger may have unique access to Cabinet members like Pruitt, and members of the House and Senate, but his anti-environmentalist theology is not unique. For years, Religious Right leaders have attacked the environmental movement—which some have called the Green Dragon. Right-wing “historian” David Barton is among those who signed the 2009 Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming, which denounced efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and said that God had made the Earth and its ecosystems “robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory.”
E&E News examined the impact of Pruitt’s faith on his approach to policy-making in a July 2017 profile, noting that Pruitt served on the board of trustees of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. It also pointed to a 2016 interview, when Pruitt was Oklahoma’s attorney general battling a state Supreme Court ruling about the Ten Commandments, where he said, “A Christian worldview means that God has answers to our problems.” He added, “And part of our responsibility is to convey to those in society that the answers that he has, as represented in Scripture, are important and should be followed, because they lead to freedom and liberty.” Pruitt accused the “political left, the liberals, and those that are anti-faith” of misinterpreting the First Amendment as “a mandate for the government to eradicate all vestiges of religion in the public square.”
Tags: Ralph DrollingerScott PruittChurch-StateEnvironmentTrump AdministrationCapitol Ministries
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RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM By DAVID BADASHAPRIL 18, 201811:03 AM
‘God Is a Capitalist’: Preacher Holding Trump Cabinet Weekly Bible Studies Promotes Christian Extremism
"THE GOVERNMENT’S JOB IS TO 'QUELL EVIL'." "ENTITLEMENT PROGRAMS HAVE NO 'BIBLICAL AUTHORITY'."
Ralph Drollinger's own ministry declared him "not biblically qualified for spiritual leadership." And yet, he leads the Trump Cabinet's weekly Bible study group,organized by Vice President Pence and faithfully attended by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, among others.
Right Wing Watch's Peter Montgomery on Thursday reports "Drollinger’s Capitol Ministries is dedicated to teaching public officials a very conservative take on the Bible. Drollinger teaches that 'the absolutely critical preeminent duty of the Church in an institutionally separated society' is 'to convert the soul and disciple—Christianize—the leaders of the State and its citizenry.'"
Montgomery reveals some of the positions Drollinger is teaching his disciples in the Trump White House. Direct from Right Wing Watch:
the government’s job is to “quell evil”
governments and leaders “must send a constant message that sin will be punished”
entitlement programs have no “biblical authority”
liberal Christians aren’t really Christians, they’re “simpletons”
Catholicism is “one of the primary false religions in the world”
“Radical environmentalism” is a “false religion”
“God only hears the prayers of leaders and citizens who are upright, who live righteously through faith in Jesus Christ”
“God is a capitalist” and because of excessive environmental regulations in the U.S. “the economic benefits God intends from private property ownership have been greatly diminished”
“righteous” people with government positions should not “compromise Biblical absolutes” and should hire only other “righteous” people
Secretary Rick Perry earlier this year explained the weekly meetings: [video] "brilliant"
also senate and congressional bible study
https://www.facebook.com/CapitolMinistries/videos/1743050242422194/
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no lnx
Trump Cabinet Secretaries Attend Bible Study Led by Extremist Pastor ‘Not Biblically Qualified for Spiritual Leadership’
'IT IS THE ESTIMATION OF THESE MEN THAT RALPH DROLLINGER IS NOT BIBLICALLY QUALIFIED FOR SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP' HIS OWN BOARD MEMBERS CHARGED
A large number of President Donald Trump's Cabinet Secretaries attend a weekly bible study group led by a right wing extremist pastor whose own ministry declared him "not biblically qualified for spiritual leadership." The group is sponsored by Vice President Mike Pence.
"Health Secretary Tom Price, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Agriculture SecretarySunny Perdue, and CIA Director Mike Pompeo are just a few of the regulars," Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) reports Monday. "America's top cop, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, also attends the study."
"Nearly all Cabinet officials attend Bible lessons with [a] right-wing pastor who compares Trump to biblical heroes," Sarah K. Burris at Raw Story adds.
The pastor, apparently sourced by Vice President Pence, is Ralph Drollinger of Capitol Ministries.
In 2009 California's Capitol Weekly reported "five board members resigned from Capitol Ministries," of which Drollinger is president.
"This group included John Anderson, a Grace Church member who is now on the Board of Directors of Capitol Commission. In communication with current or former Capitol Ministries board members and others, Grace officials noted on Sept. 24 'It is the estimation of these men that Ralph Drollinger is not biblically qualified for spiritual leadership.'"
If Drollinger's own board members deemed him "not biblically qualified for spiritual leadership," why is he in the White House leading some of the most powerful people in America in Bible study?
On May 21, 2004, the L.A. Times reported Drollinger "wrote in a Bible lesson that women lawmakers with young children at home are sinners."
Three days later Church Central reported Drollinger "claimed that the Bible says God has given men and women different roles. 'Man's is, primarily, to be a breadwinner, and women's is to be at home nurturing their children,' he said." It also reported that when Drollinger called Catholicism a false religion, then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is Catholic, kicked Drolliniger out of the governor's offices.
Theologian Diana Butler Bass calls Drollinger "anti-women, anti-Catholic, anti-LGBTQ, anti-Jewish."
Diana Butler Bass
?
@dianabutlerbass
- Jul 31, 2017
Replying to @dianabutlerbass
Throughout Drollinger has shown himself to be anti-women, anti-Catholic, anti-LGBTQ, anti-Jewish ....
Diana Butler Bass
?
@dianabutlerbass
and teaches God demands borders to keep nations separate w/distinct categories: "citizens, immigrants, foreigners." https://capmin.org/bible-says-illegal-immigration-problem-2/ …
5:45 PM - Jul 31, 2017
What the Bible Says About Our Illegal Immigration Problem
Ralph Drollinger | I am reissuing the study, What the Bible Says About Our Illegal Immigration Problem, this week in order to provide you with a better understanding and a sound systematic theology...
capmin.org
64
44 people are talking about this
Twitter Ads info and privacy
And adds:
Diana Butler Bass
?
@dianabutlerbass
- Jul 31, 2017
Replying to @dianabutlerbass
For Drollinger, the Bible is "restrictionist not racist."
Diana Butler Bass
?
@dianabutlerbass
These are the things that, according to CBN, amount to "spiritual awakening"?? #notinmybible
5:50 PM - Jul 31, 2017
Insisting the "Trump Cabinet Bible study is making history," CBN claims a "spiritual awakening is underway at the White House."
Journalist Amy Sullivan (who tweeted about the above stories) offers this interesting push back:
Amy Sullivan
?
@sullivanamy
Hey, you know who was in a weekly Bible study for nearly all eight years in the White House and nobody cared?
Hillary Clinton
Niraj Warikoo
?
@nwarikoo
Report is by a Christian media outlet. It says AG Sessions, Sec. Betsy DeVos, CIA head Pompeo among members of weekly Bible study: https://twitter.com/nwarikoo/status/892130157464494080 …
2:36 PM - Jul 31, 2017
CBN, which is Fox News for far right wing Christian evangelicals, also claims Trump's cabinet has "been called the most evangelical Cabinet in history." CBN does not cite any source for that ludicrous claim.
But CBN does cite Drollinger himself, speaking about the cabinet members who attend his bible study.
"These are godly individuals that God has risen to a position of prominence in our culture," the pastor who has been called "not biblically qualified for spiritual leadership" tells CBN.
Drollinger says Attorney General Sessions will "go out the same day I teach him something and I'll see him do it on cameraand I just think, 'Wow, these guys are faithful, available and teachable and they're at Bible study every week they're in town.'"
Diana Butler Bass
?
@dianabutlerbass
- Jul 31, 2017
Replying to @dianabutlerbass
Where the controversial Capitol Ministries is sponsored by (among many others) Mike Pence of Indiana: https://capmin.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/How-We-Got-The-Bible-Part3.pdf …
Diana Butler Bass
?
@dianabutlerbass
This is one of Drollinger's Member Bible studies -- on same-sex marriage. Note Pence is a sponsor: http://godsmarriagebow.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/the-bible-supreme-court-and-same-sex-marriage.pdf …
5:00 PM - Jul 31, 2017
CBN also reports Drollinger "teaches weekly studies in theU.S. House and Senate and now leads about a dozen members of President Trump's Cabinet in weekly studies of the scriptures."
At Raw Story, Burris notes "Drollinger sees Pence as a character like biblical stars Joseph, Mordecai and Daniel, all of whom rose to stand beside heads of government in history. Though Joseph is known for always doing the moral thing. Mordecai almost pushed his cousin into slavery. And Daniel committed crimes to avoid committing biblical sins."
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ref
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/07/nearly-all-cabinet-officials-attend-bible-lessons-with-right-wing-pastor-who-compares-trump-to-biblical-heroes/
Nearly all Cabinet officials attend Bible lessons with right-wing pastor who compares Trump to biblical heroes
Sarah K. Burris SARAH K. BURRIS
31 JUL 2017 AT 13:02 ET
Christian Broadcast News has suggested President Donald Trump’s cabinet is the most evangelical cabinet in history even more than born again Christian George W. Bush.
“These are godly individuals that God has risen to a position of prominence in our culture,” said Capitol Ministries president and founder Ralph Drollinger. According to CBN, the majority of the cabinet officials attend a frequent Bible study class, that is the first of its kind in at least 100 years.
He has long maintained that changing the hearts of lawmakers to see a Christian worldview could guide them to making good policies. While he doesn’t lobby on behalf of peace or advocate policies that would fit a Jesus-like agenda, he has started a Bible study group in 40 state capitols as well as foreign capitols. He teaches weekly Bible study classes for the U.S. House and Senate and now leads a group of nearly all of Trump’s cabinet officials.
Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Education Secretary Betsy Devos, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and CIA Director Mike Pompeo are all regular attendees.
The most notable, however, is Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
“He’ll go out the same day I teach him something and I’ll see him do it on camera and I just think, ‘Wow, these guys are faithful, available and teachable and they’re at Bible study every week they’re in town,'” Drollinger said of his influence.
He said that the group is the “best” he’s “ever taught” because the officials “are so teachable; they’re so noble; they’re so learned.”
Trump, however, is in an entirely different category. While the president is always invited to the groups, Drollinger doesn’t disclose that he’s attended, only that he’s been invited. He also sends a copy of the teaching each week to the president.
“I don’t think Donald Trump has figured out that he chained himself to the Apostle Paul,” Drollinger said, though it isn’t clear who the “Paul” is in this analogy. It’s doubtful Trump would get the reference either given his confusion about popular Biblical texts.
Vice President Mike Pence does plan on attending in the future as his schedule permits and he serves as the sponsor of the group.
Drollinger sees Pence as a character like biblical stars Joseph, Mordecai and Daniel, all of whom rose to stand beside heads of government in history. Though Joseph is known for always doing the moral thing. Mordecai almost pushed his cousin into slavery. And Daniel committed crimes to avoid committing biblical sins.
“Mike Pence has respect for the office. He dresses right – like it says Joseph cleaned himself up before he went to stand before the Pharaoh,” Drollinger explained to CBN. “Mike Pence has uncompromising biblical tenacity and he has a loving tone about him that’s not just a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And then fourthly, he brings real value to the head of the nation.”
Drollinger sees Trump as the biblical character Samson, who is known for the source of his strength coming from his hair. Jn Judges, Samson is an immoral person who does little more than slaughter and betray people.
“I just praise God for them,” Drollinger continued. “And I praise God for Mike Pence, who I think with Donald Trump chose great people to lead our nation.”
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