Swamp Watch News

[_Gunnar]

Migrant Children Are Being Given To An Adoption Agency Linked To Betsy DeVos

So the GOP is into child trafficking.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Banghazi! Emails! Deep State!

That's outrageous! This scandal, if true, should be emblazoned in the headlines of every major media outlet that has any sense of honesty and morality, and should result in criminal prosecution and long prison sentences for everyone involved in it--including and (perhaps, especially) Betsy DeVos. Why has no one already been indicted for this?

[_canpakes]

President Fraudster sets the standard ...

In a 2011 document known as a “Statement of Financial Condition,” Trump purported to own 55 home lots ready to sell for at least $3 million apiece at his Southern California golf course. Yet, in reality, he’d only been zoned for 31, thereby overstating his future revenue by a cool $72-odd million. In a document from 2012, he tacked on an extra 800 acres to the size of his roughly 1,200 acre Virginia vineyard. In 2013, in an attempt to bolster his bid for the Buffalo Bills, a two-page “Summary of Net Worth” conveniently omitted his ownership of two hotels, in Chicago and Las Vegas, meaning, per the Post, “that some of Trump’s actual debt load was hidden from anyone reading the statement.” In perhaps the most brazen, Trumpian “exaggeration,” he invented an extra 10 stories at Trump Tower, claiming that the building was 68 stories when, in actuality—you can literally look at the building and count them—there are 58.

In a sign of just how ridiculous these statements were, the accountants who prepared the documents literally put a disclaimer on them, effectively stating that Trump was full of crap:

"When compiling these statements of financial condition, those accountants have said they did not verify or audit the figures in the statements. Instead, when Trump provided them data, they wrote it down without checking to see whether it was accurate . . . The documents begin with two-page disclaimers, warning of various ways in which the statements don’t follow normal accounting rules. The accountants note that Trump is the source of many buildings’ valuations—and that, contrary to normal accounting rules, he had inflated them by counting future income that wasn’t guaranteed.”

"Users of this financial statement should recognize that they might reach different conclusions about the financial condition of Donald J. Trump” if they had more information, the statement concludes.”

[_canpakes]

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) is calling for an inspector general investigation following a report that a top Trump administration health care official has directed taxpayer dollars to GOP communications consultants.

The request from Pallone to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) inspector general comes after Politico reported on Friday that Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Seema Verma pushed to use millions of federal dollars on Republican media consultants to boost news coverage of the agency's work.

Among the duties of those consultants was bolstering Verma’s image, Politico reported.

“These contracts are a highly questionable use of taxpayer dollars,” Pallone said in a statement Friday. “Given that this agency should be spending tax dollars to ensure Americans can access quality health care, it is particularly egregious that it is using millions to ensure its Administrator has access to outside public relations and image building services.”

Pallone’s committee oversees CMS, the agency that is responsible for running Medicare, Medicaid and the ObamaCare marketplaces.

“I intend to ask the HHS OIG to immediately begin an investigation into how these contracts were approved, whether all regulations and ethical guidelines were followed, and why taxpayers are stuck paying for these unnecessary services,” Pallone added, referring to the Office of Inspector General. “This is not the way to drain the swamp.”

CMS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

[_Kevin Graham]

Tricia Newbold, a Trump official, briefed the House oversight committee on “grave” security risks.

A Trump official has come forward with major concerns about security at the White House, according to a House Oversight and Reform Committee report.

Tricia Newbold, the adjudications manager in the Personnel Security Office, came forward with what the committee is calling “grave breaches of national security” at the White House that she has witnessed over the past two years, including 25 individuals who were allowed security clearance despite recommendations that their applications be denied.

“I would not be doing a service to myself, my country, or my children if I sat back knowing that the issues that we have could impact national security,” Newbold told the committee, according to a letter from Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) to the White House counsel to the president.

The whistleblower’s report highlights the Trump White House’s inability to attract top-level talent. Previous administrations, both Republican and Democratic, were seen as prestigious places to work, giving hiring managers large numbers of applicants for every position and letting them screen out candidates with dubious work histories.

But highly qualified Republicans have largely avoided Trump administration jobs for fear that working for Trump would hurt their reputations and careers. Republicans who dislike Trump disparage many of those working at the White House and in top agency jobs as “C and D list” staffers who would never have been able to find work in a normal GOP administration.

A committee memo outlines Newbold’s claims while reiterating that she’s taking a huge personal risk by coming forward. Newbold says that she’s tried to come forward to her superiors about her security concerns — which she documented in a list of individuals whose “drug use and criminal conduct” made them unfit for security clearance — but was ignored or told to change her mind.

In one instance, she says, she drafted a security clearance denial for a “high-profile official” and brought it to White House Director of Personnel Security Carl Kline, who “called me in his office and asked me to change the recommendation. I said I absolutely would not.”

Ned Price, a former CIA analyst who served as spokesman for the National Security Council under former President Barack Obama, said he was not aware of anything similar happening during his time in the White House.

“The process was sacrosanct in the sense that career officials had the final say. There was a recognition that even the appearance of political pressure could raise concerns,” Price said. “But here’s the other difference: senior White House officials in the Obama era tended to be individuals who had served at high levels of career service or who had previously served in senior appointed positions. This administration is rather unique in the number of officials who have never held positions of public trust — or who haven’t done so in many years.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), ranking member of the committee, released a statement calling the investigation a sham.

“Chairman Cummings’ investigation is not about restoring integrity to the security clearance process, it is an excuse to go fishing through the personal files of dedicated public servants,” Jordan said. “The process by which this matter has so far progressed has been anything but fair.”

[_canpakes]

Pettiest, most childest ‘President’ ever, Part 247:

The US State Department planned to honor a prominent Finnish journalist this month — and then rescinded her award, reportedly because of her public criticism of President Donald Trump.

Jessikka Aro, a journalist who helped expose the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll factory that spreads propaganda online, learned in January that the State Department would honor her for her reporting as part of its International Women of Courage awards.

Then, a few weeks later, the State Department abruptly told Aro she wouldn’t be receiving the award after all because of a “regrettable error.” But now, Foreign Policy’s Reid Standish and Robbie Gramer report that the State Department might have reneged on the award because Aro had criticized Trump publicly, including on social media.

According to Foreign Policy:

“It created a shitstorm of getting her unceremoniously kicked off the list,” said one U.S. diplomatic source familiar with the internal deliberations. “I think it was absolutely the wrong decision on so many levels,” the source said. The decision “had nothing to do with her work.”
A State Department spokesperson told Vox in a statement that the award was revoked “due to a lack of coordination in communications with candidates and our embassies, a regrettable error was made and a candidate was incorrectly notified that she had been selected as a finalist.”

“We regret this error,” the spokesperson added. “We admire Ms. Aro’s achievements as a journalist, which were the basis of U.S. Embassy Helsinki’s nomination.”

Sources told Foreign Policy that the decision to uninvite Aro didn’t come from the bigwigs at the State Department, such as Secretary Mike Pompeo, but instead from lower-level staffers “wary of the optics of Pompeo granting an award to an outspoken critic of the Trump administration.”

Aro told Foreign Policy that she was surprised by the about-face of the State Department and that she had canceled speaking engagements and other plans to attend the ceremony in Washington, DC, on March 7. The event went forward as planned, with Pompeo and first lady Melania Trump honoring 10 women — including some activists and at least one reporter.


“The reality in which political decisions or presidential pettiness directs top U.S. diplomats’ choices over whose human rights work is mentioned in the public sphere and whose is not is a really scary reality,” Aro told Foreign Policy about the reversal.

[_canpakes]

President Donald Trump has followed the time-honored tradition of offering plum ambassadorial posts to wealthy donors.

What's different is that the Trump administration has nominated a greater number of political appointees to top-level slots, and is seeing a larger share stall in the Republican-controlled Senate.

An NBC News review found at least 14 nominees were big donors to Trump's presidential inaugural committee, which is now under federal investigation. They donated an average of slightly over $350,000 apiece.

Why the lag in confirmations?

"Trump's picks are less qualified than prior presidents," said a Marquette University law professor who has looked at the qualifications of nearly 2,000 nominees.

[_canpakes]

MAGA, indeed.

In the U.S., dietary policy is a patchwork, mostly concerned with removing potentially harmful ingredients from American diets. On the federal level, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced in 2015 that the food industry had three years to get rid of all partially hydrogenated oils, the main source of trans fat. (Not every company made the deadline.)

On the local level, a handful of cities have started taxing sugar-sweetened beverages, with mixed results. Michelle Obama was successful in changing nutritional requirements for school lunches when her husband, Barack Obama, was president, pushing through policies requiring more fruits, vegetables and whole grains and setting limits on calories, sodium and trans fat.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture under President Donald Trump announced last year that it would roll back many of those standards. 

On Wednesday, the Trump administration was sued in Manhattan federal court by a half-dozen states over its plan to allow more salt and fewer whole grains in school. The suit, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, claims the Agriculture Department implemented a final version of the national guidelines for breakfasts and lunches in schools without giving states a chance to weigh in, as required by Congress

[_EAllusion]

These type of Trump world stories are a dime a dozen:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ ... 3d4a466c62

When President Trump first nominated Barry Myers, then the CEO of AccuWeather and a fierce critic of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, to head the very agency he had spent decades attacking, many who care about government ethics sounded the alarm. The announcement seemed extreme, even by the loose ethical standards of the Trump administration — which is partly why his first nomination stalled in the Senate in 2018. On Wednesday, the Senate GOP leadership plans to ram through Myers’s renomination without a hearing despite his failure to address any of the major ethics issues that were raised the first time he went through this process. If anything, Myers’s financial activity since his first nomination expired only heightens concerns about his ethics.

Myers’s ties to AccuWeather remain deeply concerning. He recounted for the Senate how he and his family built the company from the ground up to become a dominant player in the weather forecasting industry. In addition to Myers serving as its CEO, his wife was its director of executive projects, and his brothers held more than 90 percent of the company’s stock.

When his nomination was first announced, we were concerned about whether Myers could be relied on to oversee an agency that can directly affect his family’s business. AccuWeather uses NOAA’s free weather data to make its own predictions, which it then sells to the public. AccuWeather has also argued that NOAA should reduce the amount of weather information it releases directly to the public — that is, much of the data generated by NOAA with our tax dollars would be available exclusively to private companies like AccuWeather that could then sell us forecasts based on that data. Myers himself has advocated that NOAA do less for America so AccuWeather can increase its profits.

This history raised serious questions about Myers’s ability to act impartially, which fueled a public outcry that stalled his first nomination. The clock ran out for Myers in January when the new Congress took office.

Now Myers is back with a new nomination and a mysterious financial arrangement. A year ago, one of us, writing for the Campaign Legal Center at the time, warned the Senate that “nothing in his ethics agreement would prevent him from selling his shares of AccuWeather to his family and, upon leaving the government, offering to repurchase those interests for the same price — possibly even at a negligible price or, at least, without incurring any capital gains.” And indeed, a few months ago, Myers sold his stock under a redemption agreement, which is a contract that lets a closely held company or its shareholders buy back an investor’s stock. Financial disclosure forms show that Myers sold for a fraction of what he previously claimed it was worth.


In the disclosure report Myers filed with his first nomination, he valued that stock as worth between $25 million and $50 million. Bloomberg Businessweek reports that it has obtained another document in which Myers placed the value higher, at $57 million. But Myers’s latest financial disclosure report reveals that when he was renominated in January, he sold the stock, apparently to his family or their company, for just $15.9 million. That figure seems especially low given that Myers earned almost $1.4 million in passive investment income as a stockholder in 2018 alone.

So, how has Myers explained this great disparity? Myers does not appear to have offered any public explanation. And the Senate appears ready to confirm him without demanding one. AccuWeather said in a public statement in January that Myers had divested his holdings in the company to fulfill an ethics pledge he made, but selling stock before confirmation is unusual. (A lawyer for Myers wrote to members of the Senate committee that oversees NOAA last year that Myers is “making a total, clean break with AccuWeather interests and he has no arrangements or agreements whatsoever to return to AccuWeather.”)

But, in fact, these circumstances raise the possibility of a sham transaction. It’s not clear what could have motivated the drastic discount. There may well be a legitimate explanation: Maybe it’s remotely possible the company lost more than half its value in the past year, maybe he was wrong about its value in the first place, or maybe negotiations for the sale just went badly for him.


Whatever the reason, though, the Senate has a constitutional duty to obtain an explanation before confirming Myers. That means obtaining a copy of the redemption agreement and any independent valuation used to determine the sale price. It also means getting Myers to explain the transaction and affirm that neither he nor his wife will ever repurchase shares of AccuWeather. Otherwise, anything NOAA does to benefit AccuWeather under Myers’s leadership could ultimately benefit Myers himself.


The past two years have taught us a number of lessons about the infirmities of our government ethics program, and we are about to learn another one. In a letter to the Commerce Department’s lead ethics official, Myers makes clear that, if the Senate confirms him as head of NOAA, he will not recuse himself from all “particular matters” benefiting AccuWeather. He promises only to implement a narrow recusal from matters in which AccuWeather is an identified party, such as a litigation, contract or grant. He leaves open the option to participate in decisions affecting AccuWeather as leading competitor in the weather forecasting industry — for instance, a decision to accede to the company’s demand that NOAA reduce the amount of weather information it releases directly to the public.

Myers’s attorney told the Senate that it was unfair to expect Myers to “operate under tighter constraints than those imposed by the most impartial arbiter available under the law.” But this argument ignores limitations the existing legal framework for ethics imposes on the Office of Government Ethics, which lacks any mechanism to compel Myers to do more to resolve his conflict of interest. In this context, we should be worried about his refusal to adopt a broader recusal.

The Senate’s advise-and-consent role in the nomination process is a constitutional safeguard that should be used to plug gaps in conflict-of-interest laws. For example, the Senate Armed Services Committee routinely insists, as a condition of confirmation, that all nominees within its purview divest any defense contractor’s stock, whether or not that stock would pose a conflict of interest. This practice is a wise prophylactic measure, but it is one the law most certainly does not require. The Senate Commerce Committee should follow suit and demand, as a condition of confirmation, that Myers recuse himself from any particular matter benefiting AccuWeather.

We need to be able to count on the Senate to act as a constitutional guardian of government integrity. If not, we may as well stop asking what NOAA can do for us and start asking what NOAA can do for the Myers family

If there was an federal agency to combat flesh eating vampires that live in people's basements, Trump would appoint as its head a flesh eating vampire who has long advocated that Americans be required to spend 4 hours in their basement each day.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Herman. damned. Cain.

smh

- Doc

[_Morley]

If there was an federal agency to combat flesh eating vampires that live in people's basements, Trump would appoint as its head a flesh eating vampire who has long advocated that Americans be required to spend 4 hours in their basement each day.