TRUMP CORRUPTION INDEX
This Week in Trumpland Corruption: A Tax Shelter From the Storm
This week saw more drama over John Bolton’s book and a stunning first look at Trump’s tax avoidance schemes
Is there enough graft, double-dealing, and self-interested chicanery in the Trump administration to publish this column every week? Only time — and Trump — will tell. (But we feel pretty confident.) Presenting this week’s installment of the Trump Corruption Index.
Our Tax-Evader-in-Chief
Among the revelations published by New York Times Sunday in its exhaustive investigation into President Trump’s tax returns: In 2016 and 2017 — the year he won the presidency and his first year in the White House — Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes. For comparison, Barack Obama and George W. Bush each regularly paid over $100,000 in annual federal income taxes while they were in office. In addition, Trump has received a windfall since entering office from foreign officials, politicians, and lobbyists who have stayed at his properties or become members of his clubs. Mar-a-Lago, for example, saw its profits rise from $664,000 in 2014 to just shy of $6 million in 2016.
- Corrupt-o-meter (out of a possible five emojis): 💰💰💰💲💲
Berkeley’s Big Bad Wolf
Berkeley Research Group, a consulting firm where Hope Wolf, wife of acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, works as the vice president of professional staff operations, has been awarded more than $6 million in contracts by the Department of Homeland Security since September 2018, according to NBC News. Berkeley Research Group did not contract for DHS until after 2017, when Wolf became chief of staff at Transportation Security Administration, a DHS agency. “After Mr. Wolf joined DHS, it began pumping millions of dollars into his wife’s firm, which also happens to be his largest financial asset,” Kyle Herrig, founder of the watchdog group Accountable.US, told NBC News. “The arrangement is highly problematic and warrants congressional scrutiny.”
- Corrupt-o-meter: 🐺🐺
A Class Act
Top White House officials tried to downplay the risk of sending children back to school, according to documents unearthed by the New York Times on Monday. As part of that effort, White House officials tried to push data suggesting the pandemic posed a relatively minor threat to children, especially as compared to keeping schools closed. An email sent in July by Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, to Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had urged him to use a document produced by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration warning that school closures would affect kids’ mental health..
- Corrupt-o-meter: ✏️✏️😷
A Social Media Vote-Dissuasion Scheme
In 2016, The Trump campaign’s voter database put 3.5 million Black voters in the “deterrence” grouping, meaning it would try to deter them from voting, according to an investigation released last week by Channel Four News, a British TV network. Looking at the Trump campaign’s 2016 voter database of some 200 million records, Channel Four News found that, as a way to organize Facebook ad strategy, voters in battleground states were placed in one of eight “audience” categories; “deterrence” was one such category.
- Corrupt-o-meter: 🖥️🖥️🗳️
Bill Barr is now Trump’s speechwriter
Several times in recent days, the Justice Department has released sensitive material that was, within hours, included in President Trump’s campaign speeches, Politico reported Tuesday. A number of legal experts expressed concern over this trend, which suggests that Attorney General William Barr is trying to help Trump. “These actions are not typical,” William Jeffress, a defense lawyer who represented Richard Nixon after he left the White House, told Politico. “Tradition is that politically sensitive actions by DOJ go dark at least 60 days before an election.”
- Corrupt-o-meter: 💬💬🦜
A political process in the handling of Bolton’s book
Ellen Knight, the former senior official at the National Security Council who was in charge of reviewing John Bolton’s book for sensitive information before publication, said in a letter to Bolton’s lawyers last week that the White House and the Justice Department pressured her to claim it contained classified information. “[A] designedly apolitical process had been commandeered by political appointees for a seemingly political purpose,” Knight said in the letter, adding that the White House counsel tried to coerce her into reneging on clearance to material in the book she’d marked safe for publication. Knight also claims her refusal to cooperate with the White House had career ramifications, as prior plans to bring her on as full-time staff were scrapped by late July.
- Corrupt-o-meter: 📖📖🇺🇸🇺🇸
