Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche sent a letter Thursday to International Criminal Court President Tomoko Akane declaring that the United States “unequivocally rejects” any attempt by the court to assert jurisdiction over U.S. citizens and vowed the Justice Department would not cooperate with ICC investigations involving Americans. “The United States Department of Justice unequivocally rejects […]
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board published a Wednesday op-ed slamming President Trump and his family for “cashing in on the presidency” after his financial disclosures showed the president brought in $2 billion last year alone. Trump’s crypto venture, effectively managed by the Trump Organization, reaped in more than $526.8 million in proceeds from tokens…
President Donald Trump’s corruption — from awarding no bid contracts to cronies to having his sons make tungsten mining deals with Kazakhstan — is so brazen that “he’s making everybody chumps,” according to a panel of experts.“I think it’s so unprecedented that our laws don't really contemplate a level of corruption at the presidential level like this,” Brendan Ballou, the former Special Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, told MS NOW anchor Nicolle Wallace on Wednesday. “So we really have to develop laws around unjust enrichment, civil RICO, and so forth, in order to be able to attack some of this stuff.”Ballou added that Trump’s corruption, in addition to occurring in plain sight, has had important consequences in terms of US policy.“You think about the picture of the new Qatari-gifted jet that he received — it's now Air Force One,” Ballou said. “Well, shortly after he received that gift, he made a unilateral security guarantee to Qatar. So it's entirely possible that American soldiers might fight and die in defense of a country that has gotten an enormous benefit shortly after giving a private jet to the President.”He added, “Similarly, you know, the UAE — so much of this money coming from crypto, they invested 500 million dollars in Trump's crypto business, a business that, as far as I can tell, provides no value whatsoever. But after investing half a billion dollars, Donald Trump approved the sale of 35,000 extremely rare, extremely expensive AI chips. So if you're wondering why the cost of technology, microchips, and computers in the United States is going up, in part you can potentially thank this investment from the UAE and what the President saw. So it's so unprecedented, to such an extent, that our legal infrastructure didn't even contemplate that this could occur.”Wallace then discussed a recent Wall Street Journal report that Trump earned $263 million connected to the sale of equity in his cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial. After the deal was signed, the UAE was granted access to tightly guarded American AI chips.“The challenge you've got here is: Donald Trump is presumably going to pardon himself on his last day in office, and we have a Supreme Court that is extraordinarily solicitous to this President,” Ballou told Wallace. “So we need to be figuring out — okay, how can we get justice, and how can we stop this stuff from happening while he's still in office? What we really need to be thinking about is: who are the people harmed by these extraordinary instances of corruption?”He continued, “If you are, for instance, an AI researcher who is now paying more for your chips because of the UAE's potential investment in World Liberty Financial, you need to be bringing a lawsuit to try to enjoin this, so that these people are not getting the fruits of their corrupt actions. And if we can stop people from getting the benefits of corruption, they're going to have fewer incentives to be corrupt in the first place — not Donald Trump, but the people trying to influence him.”Wallace then pointed out that, whereas Trump had scandals during his first term, during his second the scandals are bigger because they inflict economic pain on all Americans, including his own voters. She added that Trump’s indifference is evident by referring to a bipartisan affordable housing bill on Tuesday as a “yawn.”“The mechanisms of accountability — the Republican Party, the larger media apparatus, in this case Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber — his media apparatus, they're protection rackets,” Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, a nonprofit media watchdog, told Wallace. “They've basically said, ‘We're not going to just turn a blind eye here — we're going to actively make sure you don't face any accountability for this.’ The Republicans who have spent years complaining about Hunter Biden have said nothing. They don't talk about this. We know what it looks like when they're making noise about things that even whiff of corruption when it's in their political interest. But in this case, he is doing something so brazen, so explicit, so transactional, so corrupt that we can't even really paint a picture — we can't even come up with an evocative response to it, because it's on such an industrial scale. It's like thinking about the universe — it's hard to imagine because of how big it is — so we can't even get the right response out of people. And part of the mechanisms of accountability said, ‘You know, we're going to be a protection racket.’”Carusone added, “He is making everybody chumps. He's not just doing the corruption — he's doing it in such a brazen and explicit way, and he's not even sharing the wealth. A lot of people who do this at least share it with a couple of people close to them — the people participating in it.
President Donald Trump has been gradually losing support among all but his most staunch supporters as the economy worsens and he is seen personally profiting from his office. Now one three-time Trump voter admitted to MS NOW that this is “not what I voted for.”“Are people starting to look at Donald Trump and say to themselves, ‘He's not worried about me, he's not concerned about me. He's just concerned about himself. All he does is talk about himself, talk about how great he is. He's putting his name on things, his picture on everything’?” MS NOW anchor Katy Tur said on Thursday. “But also, he's getting super rich while he's in the White House — I mean, really, really rich. That financial disclosure that came out a couple days ago: more than two billion dollars richer than he was last year after taking the White House.”After noting that Trump has particularly profited from cryptocurrency, Tur referred to footage of a three-time Trump voter in Florida who recently spoke with MS NOW correspondent Alex Talbot.“It's frustrating that you see your president getting richer and richer, and the middle class getting poorer,” the voter told Talbot. When asked if he had to pick one word to describe how he feels about Trump enriching himself while ignoring ordinary voters’ economic concerns, the voter replied that he is “confused, and a little disappointed. Not what I had hoped things would be when I voted for him.” He added, when asked if he feels richer or poorer since Trump took office, that he feels “poorer.”“Governor, what do you think about that?” Tur asked former Gov. Pat McCrory (R-NC).“The disappointing thing is not him getting rich,” McCrory told Tur. “The disappointing thing is he got rich on the backs of people who are getting ripped off on high commissions, because that's how they're making most of their money — on the trading of Bitcoin. And that's where the money is made, regardless of what happens to the price. And sadly, the price has gone down dramatically in the past year.”He continued, “So the people who have maybe allegiance to Donald Trump, and maybe thought it was a patriotic thing to do, have lost their shirts — probably 70 percent of the money that they put into it. And yet, the people who took the commissions have become very wealthy on this. Again, I'm not a big fan of crypto, and I'm not a big fan of the crypto industry having so much influence on the Banking Committee, the AG Committee, the Commerce Committee, and other people who have to make rules and regulations on crypto — both Democrat and Republican — and we've got to call it out.” - YouTube youtu.be
A deranged Air Force Major was arrested at the Capitol on Wednesday after he protested against President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance in an area […]
