TRUMP CORRUPTION INDEX

This Week in Trumpland Corruption: The Lies Have It

This week we saw Trump continue to cast doubts over the election results, plus an effort by the CDC to quietly correct a guidance on sending kids to school

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.

Trump is putting himself over national security

The Trump administration has continued to stonewall the incoming Biden administration — and even Republicans are concerned. As Politico reported this week, President Trump has yet to call President-elect Biden, the White House has yet to brief the Biden transition team on Covid-19 or troop withdrawals, and there have so far been no security clearances issued to prospective Biden staff members. “The bottom line is our adversaries look at a transition period as a moment of potential weakness which they will exploit if possible,” said Michael Chertoff, former secretary of homeland security under Bush. Chertoff knows this better than anyone: The 9/11 Commission attributed the ineffective transition to the Bush White House as one of the reasons terrorists were able to pull off their 2001 terror attacks.

• Corrupt-o-meter (out of a possible five emojis): 🤡🎖️🎖️🦠🦠

Self-owned in the Keystone State

Even Trump’s own new lawyer in Pennsylvania, Marc Scaringi, believes the president’s lawsuits are all for naught. In an audio clip unearthed this week by the Washington Post, the Harrisburg-based attorney speculated on his own radio show on November 7 that Trump’s legal actions “will not reverse this election.” In addition, an unauthored blog post on his law firm’s website — which seems to have since been deleted — said that Biden “successfully claimed the role of the 46th president of the United States.” And yet, just a week later, Scaringi has joined Trump’s lawsuit in Pennsylvania, which claims it was wrong that voters in Democratic-leaning…