This Trump grift has rotted through our government. It must bring a reckoning soon

Source: Raw Story · Bias: Far Left

Summary

On Tuesday night in the State of the Union, we watched the most corrupt president (and presidency) in the history of America lie his way through a fascist-friendly speech. He didn’t mention how rich he’s made himself and his kids off the presidency, as he tried to paint in a good light what is, frankly, the most dishonorable, unprincipled, and criminal regime in the history of the free world.Rumors have been flying for years — ever since Rudy Giuliani apparently confessed during Trump’s first term he and Trump were selling pardons for $2 million each and splitting the money — that Trump is at it again, taking what look like bribes for everything from pardons to business deals to regulatory and tariff relief. And the evidence is piling up in ways that are unmistakable.For example, Judd Legum’s Popular Info news site is reporting that the parent company of crypto.com has made a series of “donations” to Trump’s main SuperPAC, MAGA Inc., amounting to $35 million.That SuperPAC has already paid tens of millions for Trump’s legal fees, apparently including personal defense lawyers and business deal lawyers, and can hang onto that money to support Trump’s lavish lifestyle once he leaves office.Shortly after the last donation, as Legum reports:“25 days later, on February 17, the Trump administration’s Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), intervened on Crypto.com’s behalf in high-stakes lawsuit in federal court.”But that’s just the tip of this particular iceberg. Crypto.com also runs prediction markets, the slick new way to get around laws regulating gambling, and recently cut a deal with Trump’s media company (which owns and runs his Truth Social site that’s so badly Nazi-infested and whose majority stockholder is Trump himself) to offer prediction market products through Truth Social or the company that owns it.Then there’s the report from The New York Times that lays out how the United Arab Emirates (UAE) desperately wanted to buy super-high-tech chips from the US to kick-start their move from being a petrostate into becoming the Silicon Valley of the Middle East. The only problem was that they have a military cooperation agreement with China, and the US was concerned that they’d funnel some of the chips to that country.So, the UAE “invested” $500 million in Trump’s new crypto scheme. As the Times laid out:“An investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates purchased nearly half of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company last year, making the family business partners with the U.A.E. even as President Trump negotiated foreign policy matters with the Middle Eastern nation …“At the same time that the crypto deal came together, the Emirati government secured an agreement with the Trump administration for the export of hundreds of thousands of advanced chips to power A.I. technology.”Similarly, after Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner backed the Saudi‑UAE blockade of Qatar and defended the crown prince after the Khashoggi killing, the Saudi’s gave Kushner $2 billion to fund his investment firm. No droids in that car!Not to mention the millions that the Saudi’s gave Trump’s tacky golf motels to put on their LIV Golf Tournaments. Or the millions he makes by forcing the Secret Service to pay to follow him to his golf courses and Mar-a-Lago, along with a regular army of foreign governments and corporations seeking favors, as CREW just exposed.Or when Ivanka Trump was the “senior White House advisor” as she and her father were managing a trade and tech confrontation with China and that government “gave” her at least 34 Chinese trademarks worth millions.Immediately thereafter, Trump suddenly reversed course to “save” Chinese telecom giant ZTE and later moved to ease pressure on Huawei via temporary licenses, despite U.S. national‑security warnings. She and her husband reportedly made as much as $640 million during their time exploiting the White House in Trump’s first term.Trump’s boys are opening Trump-branded hotel/golf deals all over the world in countries that have had contentious relationships with the United States, mostly because of authoritarianism and corruption, with hundreds of millions to billions of dollars flowing into the Trump family’s money bin.They include: India, Indonesia, Oman, Vietnam, Romania, Bali (Indonesia), Maldives, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Or all other the corrupt “deals” making Trump’s two oldest sons mindbogglingly rich that Liz Dye documents.And, of course, it works both ways. When Pam Bondi was Florida Attorney General, her office opened an investigation on behalf of Floridians who’d been ripped off by Trump’s scam Trump University. Trump had his fake charity — which was later closed down for fraud — write her campaign an illegal $25,000 check and suddenly the investigation vanished.And then there’s Trump’s pardon pipeline.Consider Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of Binance. Zhao pleaded guilty to violating U.S.

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This Trump grift has rotted through our government. It must bring a reckoning soon
Raw Story

This Trump grift has rotted through our government. It must bring a reckoning soon

Far Left

On Tuesday night in the State of the Union, we watched the most corrupt president (and presidency) in the history of America lie his way through a fascist-friendly speech. He didn’t mention how rich he’s made himself and his kids off the presidency, as he tried to paint in a good light what is, frankly, the most dishonorable, unprincipled, and criminal regime in the history of the free world.Rumors have been flying for years — ever since Rudy Giuliani apparently confessed during Trump’s first term he and Trump were selling pardons for $2 million each and splitting the money — that Trump is at it again, taking what look like bribes for everything from pardons to business deals to regulatory and tariff relief. And the evidence is piling up in ways that are unmistakable.For example, Judd Legum’s Popular Info news site is reporting that the parent company of crypto.com has made a series of “donations” to Trump’s main SuperPAC, MAGA Inc., amounting to $35 million.That SuperPAC has already paid tens of millions for Trump’s legal fees, apparently including personal defense lawyers and business deal lawyers, and can hang onto that money to support Trump’s lavish lifestyle once he leaves office.Shortly after the last donation, as Legum reports:“25 days later, on February 17, the Trump administration’s Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), intervened on Crypto.com’s behalf in high-stakes lawsuit in federal court.”But that’s just the tip of this particular iceberg. Crypto.com also runs prediction markets, the slick new way to get around laws regulating gambling, and recently cut a deal with Trump’s media company (which owns and runs his Truth Social site that’s so badly Nazi-infested and whose majority stockholder is Trump himself) to offer prediction market products through Truth Social or the company that owns it.Then there’s the report from The New York Times that lays out how the United Arab Emirates (UAE) desperately wanted to buy super-high-tech chips from the US to kick-start their move from being a petrostate into becoming the Silicon Valley of the Middle East. The only problem was that they have a military cooperation agreement with China, and the US was concerned that they’d funnel some of the chips to that country.So, the UAE “invested” $500 million in Trump’s new crypto scheme. As the Times laid out:“An investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates purchased nearly half of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company last year, making the family business partners with the U.A.E. even as President Trump negotiated foreign policy matters with the Middle Eastern nation …“At the same time that the crypto deal came together, the Emirati government secured an agreement with the Trump administration for the export of hundreds of thousands of advanced chips to power A.I. technology.”Similarly, after Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner backed the Saudi‑UAE blockade of Qatar and defended the crown prince after the Khashoggi killing, the Saudi’s gave Kushner $2 billion to fund his investment firm. No droids in that car!Not to mention the millions that the Saudi’s gave Trump’s tacky golf motels to put on their LIV Golf Tournaments. Or the millions he makes by forcing the Secret Service to pay to follow him to his golf courses and Mar-a-Lago, along with a regular army of foreign governments and corporations seeking favors, as CREW just exposed.Or when Ivanka Trump was the “senior White House advisor” as she and her father were managing a trade and tech confrontation with China and that government “gave” her at least 34 Chinese trademarks worth millions.Immediately thereafter, Trump suddenly reversed course to “save” Chinese telecom giant ZTE and later moved to ease pressure on Huawei via temporary licenses, despite U.S. national‑security warnings. She and her husband reportedly made as much as $640 million during their time exploiting the White House in Trump’s first term.Trump’s boys are opening Trump-branded hotel/golf deals all over the world in countries that have had contentious relationships with the United States, mostly because of authoritarianism and corruption, with hundreds of millions to billions of dollars flowing into the Trump family’s money bin.They include: India, Indonesia, Oman, Vietnam, Romania, Bali (Indonesia), Maldives, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Or all other the corrupt “deals” making Trump’s two oldest sons mindbogglingly rich that Liz Dye documents.And, of course, it works both ways. When Pam Bondi was Florida Attorney General, her office opened an investigation on behalf of Floridians who’d been ripped off by Trump’s scam Trump University. Trump had his fake charity — which was later closed down for fraud — write her campaign an illegal $25,000 check and suddenly the investigation vanished.And then there’s Trump’s pardon pipeline.Consider Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of Binance. Zhao pleaded guilty to violating U.S.