Aug.23

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

Corruption, Thy Name Is Trump

There were three pretty big news stories yesterday, all of them involving abuses (or potential abuses) of power by the Trump administration. We're going to run them down here, briefly, and then we might revisit one or more of them during the week, particularly if additional information comes out:

1. Interview with the Vampire: Yesterday, the Department of Justice released a transcript of the two interviews that Deputy AG Todd Blanche conducted with Ghislaine Maxwell.
   
   We did not bother to read a single word of the transcripts. We didn't even bother to read the "Here's what's in the transcripts" stories produced by outlets like CNN, The New York Times and The Guardian. The headlines were more than enough to confirm what we already knew: There is nothing in the transcripts that incriminates Donald Trump.
   
   Maybe we have mentioned this before, but (Z) has an exercise he does with his U.S. history survey course, in which he describes various sources for a particular event, and asks students to assign a score of 0 to 10 to each source, with "0" meaning "useless" and 10 meaning "absolutely perfect." After establishing that there is not, and cannot be, such a thing as a 10, the students usually do a pretty good job of recognizing that some sources are at the 7-8-9 end of the scale, and others are closer to the 0-1-2 end.
   
   This Maxwell transcript is, at best, a 1. Maybe ½. There were two people in that room, Blanche and Maxwell, and they both had extremely strong motivation to avoid incriminating Trump. And even if Maxwell had said anything that reflected unfavorably on the President, do you really think this Department of Justice, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Trump Organization, would have released it?
   
   It is certainly possible that Maxwell spoke honestly and frankly, and that the DoJ maintained the integrity of the recordings/transcription. But "this could possibly be valid" is not a basis for deeming a source to be reliable, particularly when the parties involved in producing the source have so much reason to misrepresent things. Oh, and if you want additional reasons to be suspicious, here are a couple of useful questions to ponder: (1) Why did it take nearly a month to release the transcript? What was being done with the recordings in that time?; and (2) Why was Maxwell moved from a pretty bad prison in Florida to a Club Fed in Texas, especially since her crimes should have made her ineligible for the less onerous facility? The Occam's Razor explanation, at least from where we sit, is: "Trump can't pardon Maxwell now, so she demanded to be moved to a much nicer prison while she waits, in exchange for her cooperation."
   
   
2. Banana Republic: The Trump administration is eager to go after any and all enemies of the state, as it sees them. Most of the time, that means Democrats, immigrants and/or Muslims, but not always. Yesterday, the FBI, which has rapidly been transformed into the President's personal police force, went after a very conservative Republican, namely John Bolton. This is part of a renewed investigation into the possibility that Bolton shared classified information when he published his Trump-critical book in 2020.
   
   A few things worth noting: (1) The book was vetted by various parts of the U.S. intelligence establishment before it was published; (2) the book was published on June 23, 2020, which should mean that the 5-year statute of limitations has run, and the administration is about 2 months too late; (3) this administration seems to have no problem with certain other people keeping/misusing/leaking classified materials.
   
   
3. The Business of America Is Business: This kind of public-private partnership is not entirely unprecedented in U.S. history, but yesterday it was announced that the U.S. government has acquired a 10% stake in chipmaker Intel.
   
   The most obvious example of this kind of arrangement is probably Amtrak, which is a private corporation where all the preferred stock is owned by the U.S. government. It works because there are very clearly defined rules about what the government can, and cannot, do when it comes to running the railroad. It also works because Amtrak has something of a monopoly (so there's no issue of the corporation receiving favorable treatment over one of its competitors), but one that needs to be propped up by federal funding (which makes it only fair that the government should have a say in its operations).
   
   If the Intel situation is managed along the same lines, then the whole thing could be OK. But Donald Trump has a long history of blurring the lines between public and private concerns, and also of making choices that benefit him personally, ethics and the public good be damned. And there are all kinds of ways that the Intel partnership could be abused. For example, while the White House says the U.S. will not claim seats on the Board of Directors, the administration could say they would really like to see Intel move its operations to a non-woke state, and that there will be much "disappointment" if that does not happen. Or, the administration could decide that the IRS will not pursue collection actions against any company that is at least 10% owned by the government, and then could ask Apple "Gee, wouldn't you like to sell us 10% of your shares for pennies on the dollar?" Oh, and while Amtrak does not trade on the U.S. stock exchanges, Intel does. There are all kinds of ways THAT could be abused.

All in all, not a great day for democracy. And it's not a coincidence, we think, that all these stories just so happened to break a few hours before the commencement of the weekend. (Z)