Trump’s Reelection Campaign Is Corrupting the Entire
Federal Government
Photo: Shutterstock
Last week, President Trump broke precedent, if not
the law, by staging his convention at the White House. “The fact is, I am
here,” he announced, gesturing at the White House behind him. “What is the name
of that building?”
This moment was not merely pregnant with
symbolism. It was the blueprint for a pillar of Trump’s reelection strategy,
which is to turn the federal government into an apparatus for his reelection
campaign.
There has been a flurry of recent reports on new
and unprecedented government activity. All of these developments follow the
same theme.
Intelligence director limits
election-security briefings.
On Friday, Director of National Intelligence John
Ratcliffe, an administration loyalist who has echoed the president’s
conspiratorial views, announced it would end the traditional briefings to
Congress on election security. Instead, it would give only written briefs,
which prevent Congress from asking questions or pushing back.
The context for this change is important. Russia
is continuing active measures to help support Trump’s reelection. The most
visible of these measures is
that its proxy agents are pumping distorted or one-sided recordings of Joe
Biden to pro-Trump figures, which have been disseminated by both Trump and his
allied media sources, to further a false narrative of corruption. A report by
the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee last year found, even
more alarmingly, that Russian hackers probed online
weaknesses in election infrastructure in all 50 states.
It is far from certain that any such hacking
attempt will actually materialize this year. But what is clear is that Russia
remains the most active foreign election-security threat.
Ratcliffe is instead promoting Trump’s narrative
that China poses the greatest threat. “When we talk about malign foreign
influence, multiple countries are engaged, but none at the level China is,”
Ratcliffe told Fox News on Sunday. He insisted that he was curtailing
intelligence briefings because Democrats had “leaked classified information for
political purposes, to create a narrative that simply isn’t true, that somehow
Russia is a greater national security threat than China.”
Of course, whether China or Russia poses a greater
national security threat is a matter of opinion. It’s certainly plausible to
defend Trump’s position that China is a more important adversary. But Ratcliffe
is using that to obscure the fact that Russia poses a more important
election-security threat, according to both the administration’s own intelligence and
a bipartisan Senate report.
Trump is mailing out Trump bucks before the
election.
Earlier this summer, negotiations over budget
stimulus broke down, mainly due to internal Republican disagreements — some
Republicans want fiscal stimulus, others don’t, and Trump is most keen on a
payroll-tax suspension that has little support in either party. Trump announced
he was breaking off negotiations and unilaterally extending unemployment
benefits and halting collection of the payroll tax.
At first the measure appeared completely moribund.
But the government is working around the limits, at least partially. Forty
states have signed up for a limited extension of unemployment benefits,
which will begin reaching workers early this month, and run through October.
While the economic value of the payments is small, it is optimized to deliver
its biggest punch in the run-up to the election.
Trump’s payroll-tax suspension has fared more
poorly. Businesses have largely held off on participating, due to concerns that
if they withhold collections now, they may be stuck with a huge bill next year.
But Trump has devised a partial workaround to this obstacle, too: The federal
government will suspend payroll
taxes for its employees, the administration announced yesterday.
Federal workers are not happy about this plan,
which will give them a bigger paycheck this fall, only to load up a gigantic
tax burden in January. But for Trump’s purposes, it works very nicely.
Employees will get a big raise in the weeks leading up to the election.
FDA might release a vaccine early.
Trump has been pressuring the Food and Drug
Administration to accelerate therapies and vaccines. The pattern is that he
attacks the agency as a tool of the “deep state,” and pressures its
administrators to submit to his political agenda:
This of course is Trump’s familiar projection at work. He assumes FDA scientists could only be motivated by political considerations, because Trump is only motivated by political considerations.
FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn gives every sign of
submitting to Trump’s pressure. Last week, the agency cooperated with a splashy announcement that
it was authorizing blood plasma treatments, despite insufficient evidence of
their efficacy. Sunday, Hahn told the Financial Times he might approve emergency usage of
the Oxford vaccine before it had completed its phase three trials. This could
open the door to a Trump vaccine announcement in October, allowing him to
benefit from the appearance that the pandemic is about to disappear, even if
reality does not match the promise.
Anthony
Fauci quickly warned that a premature vaccine release could
prove counterproductive. But for Trump’s purposes, the perception of solving
the crisis before the election, followed by a cold splash of reality after,
would suit him perfectly.
HHS unveils an election slush fund.
Politico has obtained a Health and Human Services
contract for $250 million to communications firms to promote the Trump
administration’s message on the coronavirus. Spending money to promote
public-health information is a completely legitimate use of taxpayer dollars.
But spending money to make people feel good about the government is not.
In the context of a presidential campaign, $250
million is a lot of money.
And the administration’s plan seems almost indistinguishable from a generalized
campaign message. “By harnessing the power of traditional, digital and social
media, the sports and entertainment industries, public health associations, and
other creative partners to deliver important public health and economic
information the administration can defeat despair, inspire hope and achieve
national recovery,” the document instructs.
This is not spending to promote
sound public-health behavior. (Trump himself has undermined this guidance since
the beginning of the pandemic.) It is spending to make people feel good about
the status quo and make them believe that a national recovery is underway.
A federal task force is combating “left-wing
terrorism.”
At his press conference yesterday, Trump announced a
joint Justice Department–Homeland Security task force to “investigate violent
left-wing civil unrest.”
Of course there is some civil unrest. But its
scale, confined to small sections of a couple cities, has been massively
exaggerated by Trump and his media allies. Much more troubling is the fact
that, while violence has been stoked by extremists at both ends of the
political spectrum, Trump is identifying the perpetrators entirely with the
left. In his press conference yesterday, he defended an armed gunman who is
being charged with murder in Kenosha, and insisted that Trump fans who drove
through Portland firing paintballs at demonstrators were merely defending
themselves.
Trump’s unhinged rhetoric would just be a Trump
problem, were it not for the fact that the government appears to be following
his lead. Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf told Tucker
Carlson last night he is “working” on a plan to arrest leaders
of Black Lives Matter, who he claims are instigating a violent plot. Trump’s
Homeland Security officials have already ignored or
downplayed threats involving right-wing terrorism, which has resulted in a
number of deadly shootings.
It’s common for Trump to announce a measure that
sounds terrifyingly authoritarian, only for the scheme to bog down in the
bureaucracy and amount to little. Wolf and Barr may or may not have a workable
scheme to crack down on Black Lives Matter while leaving armed right-wing goons
unmolested. At minimum, they are using federal law enforcement as a platform to
disseminate Trump’s propaganda message that violent threats are coming
exclusively from the left.
***
Events are moving quickly, and we do not have
perfect information about what all this means. It may add up to less than what
it appears at the moment. Many times before, career officials or even political
appointees have reeled back Trump’s most corrupt or dangerous orders.
But there is a pattern in all these events: They
describe recent actions by the federal government; they all serve the purpose of
enabling Trump’s election; and they all conscript the power of the federal
government in novel ways.
It has the appearance of coordinated action — as
if Trump has ordered every arm of the government to generate whatever tools can
be placed at the disposal of his reelection.
What Are the Chances Trump Could Actually Go to Jail?
New York state legal experts—and one of the president’s
biographers—weigh in.
by James Bruno
August 11, 2020
Will America soon have its first Shawshank President? Will
Donald Trump find himself fending off riots in the Attica mess hall? Tweetless
and at the mercy of 2,000 “angry Democrat” inmates?
A number of
recent developments show that one cannot rule it out. Things took a decidedly serious turn
last week when New York prosecutors told a federal judge that there were
“public reports of possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the
Trump Organization.” They
added that they that they may also be investigating possible crimes involving
bank and insurance fraud, according to the New York Times,
which also reported that Deutsche Bank has been complying with a Manhattan
District Attorney’s Office subpoena for months, turning over detailed financial
records in connection with some $2 billion the bank has lent Trump.
The news comes
on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling last month that declared the president
was not immune from state criminal investigations, therefore clearing the way
for a New York grand jury to subpoena Trump’s financial records, an effort
spearheaded by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr.
For Trump, the
stakes couldn’t be higher once he leaves office: He could go from the White
House to the Big House.
So, I asked
some experts the likelihood that the president could really wind up in a New
York prison. “Absolutely yes, if we are a nation of equal justice and Trump is
convicted of serious felonies,” Trump biographer David Cay Johnston told me.
But he quickly added, “Whether it happens is entirely unpredictable.”
Still, New
York has a real chance at putting Trump behind bars. The state has jurisdiction
over most of his properties and operations relating to his 2016 presidential
campaign. Crucially, states also are not subject the U.S. Department of
Justice’s rule that a sitting president may not be prosecuted for federal
crimes. Trump,
therefore, is stripped of his four-year kryptonite shield if he is re-elected.
A state indictment of a sitting president, though historically unprecedented,
is entirely possible. His DOJ-Roy Cohn, Bill Barr, is constitutionally
powerless to intervene.
That should
make Trump uneasy, especially as New York Attorney General Letitia James ramps
up her own investigations. “We will use every area of the law to investigate
President Trump and his business transactions and that of his family,”
she declared after taking office two years ago.
At the same
time, Vance’s subpoena appears to go beyond obtaining financial records
relating to alleged pre-election hush money payments to silence two women,
Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. Both of the women claim to have had affairs
with Trump. Information
gleaned from the DA’s inquiry could expose tax cheating and money laundering as
well as bank and insurance fraud, which are felonies.
Johnston told
me he’s confident that Vance already has Trump’s New York tax filings. Even
though the IRS and state tax authorities share tax information on citizens and
business entities, it’s unclear whether he also has the president’s federal
returns. The DA is seeking Trump’s financial records from his accounting firm
Mazars USA in addition to Deutsche Bank—to compare that data with what he
already possesses, looking for corroborating information, according to
Johnston.
“Trump
has a well-documented history as a tax
cheat
and for hiding business records,” Johnston
said.
“This is garden variety tax fraud, a straight-up
tax
scam that could easily be a felony.”
That doesn’t
necessarily mean he will go to jail. More often than not, tax cheats get away
with heavy fines in lieu of prison sentences, Johnston said. Moreover, Trump,
like many very wealthy people, will continue to throw monkey wrenches into the
judicial system with appeal after appeal and other rope-a-dope tactics until
revenue agencies finally become open to a low-punitive settlement.
This is echoed
by Duncan Levin, formerly a senior staff member under District Attorney Vance
and an ex-assistant U.S. attorney. Whether the president would actually be
sentenced to prison is a political call, Levin said. “Can you imagine an
ex-U.S. president actually being sent to prison?” he told me. “It’s
inconceivable that Trump didn’t know about the hush money payments. But it’s
highly unlikely that he’d be arrested on misdemeanor charges. They would have
to be very serious felonies.” False statements to financial institutions would
count.
More likely,
he added, the DA may be zeroing in at this point on Trump’s inner circle.
“Michael Cohen didn’t act alone. He collaborated with people within the Trump
organization to cover up the hush payments just before the election,” Levin
said. Look, at least initially, for indictments of Trump underlings.
The good news,
though, is that Vance will not put off his investigation and possible
indictments until after the November election. DA’s proceed on cases
irrespective of extraneous events, including a general election, Levin said.
But the hope
of many that Trump could finally be held accountable for his crimes may be
remote. At most, one can imagine him behind bars at a white-collar
correctional facility like that of his former lawyer Michael Cohen, as opposed
to hard time at a penitentiary like Attica. For now, though, time will
tell. The Americans who want to see justice carried out are more likely to watch
this shamed crook-in-chief spending his remaining years out of office consumed
in exhausting and financially draining legal battles, fully exposed for the
criminal he’s always been.
James Bruno
James
Bruno is a Washington Monthly contributing writer and former U.S.
diplomat. Read his blog, DIPLO DENIZEN, and follow him on
Twitter @JamesLBruno. The opinions and characterizations in this article
are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of
the U.S. government
.
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