Heitkamp: If House GOP Subpoenas Hunter Biden, Senate Dems Should Go After Jared and Ivanka
Former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that if the House Republicans subpoena President Joe Biden’s son Hunter the Senate Democrats should investigate former President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Discussing Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), Heitkamp said, “I think – Joe’s got to decide whether he’s going to run again, right? So that’s the interesting thing there. He’s not going to become a Republican. He’s going to continue to do what he’s always done, which is speak his mind and, you know, drive deals, like the Inflation Reduction Act, which was really what a lot of Democrats ran on at the end.”
She added, “And so when you look at this, the whole dynamics of the Senate right now, it really — when you say you don’t know want they’re going to do with subpoena power, you heard what Elizabeth Warren is talking about doing, subpoenaing Jared and Ivanka to talk about the $2 billion Saudi thing. And that’s a shot across the bow if you’re going to go after, you know, Joe Biden’s son in the House – maybe we ought to look at the deals that were done by Jared and Ivanka when they were in the White House.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
Key Democrats ask State, Defense for records on Kushner family business
Two Democratic congressional committee chairs have co-authored letters to the State and Defense departments on Tuesday asking for an array of records on Jared Kushner’s family business, raising concerns about his financial interests as he influenced the Trump administration’s foreign policy in the Persian Gulf.
House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (N.Y.) and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (Ore.) in asking for the records cited previously undisclosed emails that largely relate to a 2018 bailout of a Kushner-owned office building. The request comes as part of the committees’ investigation into whether the former White House senior adviser’s financial conflicts of interest improperly influenced U.S. policy.
The letters, which were first reported by The Washington Post, detail how Canadian investment firm Brookfield Asset Management cut a previously known deal to pay a 99-year lease up front on the Kushner family’s 39-story office building in midtown Manhattan, worth about $1.1 billion, helping the Kushners avoid defaulting on impending loan payments.
Maloney and Wyden stressed that the fund that paid for the bailout included the Qatar sovereign wealth fund as its second-largest investor.
“Given the substantial personal financial benefit Brookfield conferred on Mr. Kushner and his family, we are deeply concerned by Mr. Kushner’s personal involvement in a range of policy-making processes in which he appears to have exercised his influence as a senior U.S. government official on matters directly affecting Brookfield and its investors,” Maloney and Wyden wrote.
“We have been fully transparent and responded to all requests,” Brookfield said in a statement. “As we have said all along, the decision to acquire this building was based purely on its own merits—it was an iconic, underperforming building in a prime location in need of significant redevelopment. The building has now been transformed, and we believe it will exceed our expectations in delivering value for our clients.”
The Hill has reached out to Kushner’s company for comment.
Kushner, who is married to former President Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, was heavily involved in the administration’s Middle East policy.
Maloney and Wyden in part raised concerns about Kushner’s reported involvement in the administration’s position on an economic blockade of Qatar imposed by a Saudi-led coalition in 2017, which alleged Qatari support for terrorism and came one month after the former president visited Saudi Arabia.
The two Democrats claimed the blockade may have been used as leverage for the Manhattan building’s bailout, noting that the secretaries of State and Defense at the time did not support the blockade.
Kushner in his memoir claimed he was not to blame for the Saudis’ actions and attempted to lift the blockade, The Washington Post reported.
The letters also take aim at Kushner’s involvement in negotiating the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement given Brookfield’s large asset portfolio in North America as well as the investment firm’s efforts seeking approval to acquire a U.S. nuclear reactor company during the lease negotiations.
Maloney and Wyden also raised concerns about Kushner seeking investment from the United Arab Emirates for his new firm shortly after leaving the White House.
Trump on his last day as president announced he would exempt the country from tariffs on most aluminum imports, although President Biden later reversed the decision.
Trump Organization Convicted of Tax Fraud; Hunter Biden Still Walks Free
The most damning example of “class justice” in America is the fact that Trump remains free 23 months after attempting to overthrow the government.
Manhattan jury finds Trump family companies guilty on all charges
After a six-week trial, a Manhattan jury needed only one day to find two Trump family businesses guilty on all 17 criminal counts leveled against the organizations. Charges against the Trump Organization and the Trump Payroll Corporation included criminal tax fraud, conspiracy and falsifying business records.
To find the organizations guilty, the New York jury had to find that the Trump Organization’s former chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, or his subordinate, senior vice president and controller Jeffrey McConney, as high agents of the company, acted on behalf of the company to their benefit.
Jurors found that the executives at Trump’s companies orchestrated a long-running tax dodge scheme that allowed them access to high-rise apartments, luxury cars and bountiful holiday bonuses, all off the books and tax-free. Weisselberg admitted on the stand and in a previous guilty plea to falsifying business records and keeping a separate set of accounting books in order to hide the expenditures, in the process reducing the tax burden on the companies and on himself.
The well-known practice, which is illegal, lasted for decades within the Trump family businesses and is, in fact, pervasive throughout the corporate-financial elite and the capitalist economy as a whole. Major exposures of the financial secrets of the world’s elite have shown that tax evasion and money laundering among the financial oligarchy are not just routine, but ubiquitous.
Despite being found guilty on all counts, the Trump Organization was fined only $1.62 million, a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars the business reports in yearly revenues and a rounding error compared to Trump’s estimated $3.2 billion net worth as of September 2022, according to Forbes.
The verdict is politically significant as it implicates the former president. The Trump Organization was founded by Trump’s fascist father, Fred Trump, and is now, along with the Trump Payroll Corporation, legally a felonious enterprise.
The convictions could also be used as evidence in a future criminal trial against Trump. They further jeopardize Trump’s third run for president, which he announced three weeks ago.
While Trump himself was not on trial, he was named several times during the proceedings by prosecutors. Following the guilty verdict, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said the criminal investigation into Trump, which appeared to be winding down earlier this year, remains “active and ongoing.”
The verdict is the culmination of a long-running investigation that began with a criminal inquiry by then-Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. into the Trump Organization in 2018. Vance’s handpicked successor, Bragg, took up the investigation after he was elected in 2021.
Within a month of being sworn in, Bragg informed the two leading prosecutors in the investigation that he did not feel they had enough evidence to bring charges against Trump himself, as they had yet to turn Weisselberg against his lifelong employer. The two prosecutors promptly resigned and a previously impaneled grand jury was allowed to expire.
While he refused to turn against his boss, Weisselberg still served as the prosecution’s chief witness in the trial against the Trump family businesses. As part of a plea deal agreed to earlier this year, Weisselberg admitted that he and McConney engaged in a conspiracy to “defraud federal, New York state, and New York City tax authorities.”
In order to secure a 100-day sentence, despite being found guilty of 15 felonies, Weisselberg had to testify against the companies he oversaw for decades as Trump’s so-called “money man.”
On the stand during the trial, Weisselberg, who is still an employee of the Trump Organization, accepted all of the blame for the criminal practices in which the company engaged, supposedly free from any influence or direction from Trump or his family members. Defense lawyers for the Trump companies likewise argued that Weisselberg went “rogue” when he decided to manipulate the company books for his and his family’s personal benefit.
In rendering the guilty verdicts, the jury indicated that it found the defense arguments unpersuasive.
On the morning prior to the guilty verdict, Trump re-posted an earlier statement on his personal media platform, Truth Social, accusing the District Attorney’s Office of engaging in a “political Witch Hunt” over “Fringe Benefits, something that in the history of our Country, has never been so tried in Court before.”
In a statement to the New York Times following the verdict, Trump said he was “disappointed with the verdict” and planned to appeal. Alan Futerfas, a defense lawyer for the Trump Organization, confirmed that the company would appeal.
Trump, seeking to distance himself from the verdict, said the case was about Weisselberg “committing tax fraud on his personal tax returns.” The Trump Organization similarly released a statement after the verdict stating that the “notion that a company could be held responsible for an employee’s actions, to benefit themselves, on their own personal tax returns is simply preposterous.”
Weisselberg’s lawyer, Nicholas Gravante Jr., issued a statement after the verdict was reached asserting that his client fulfilled his “only obligation relating to the trial... [to] testify truthfully, and clearly he did.”
DA Bragg said following the verdict, “The former president’s companies now stand convicted of crimes. That is consequential. It underscores that in Manhattan we have one standard of justice for all.”
Bragg’s comments are betrayed by reality. Aside from the token fine levied against the companies, which will in no way prevent them from continuing their criminal operations, the fact that Trump himself has yet to charged with a crime related to the numerous illegal activities in which his businesses were engaged underscores the two-tier class justice system that exists in America.
The most damning example of “class justice” in America is the fact that Trump remains free 23 months after attempting to overthrow the government.
Trump calls for “termination” of US Constitution to restore him to power
Donald Trump called for the “termination” of the US Constitution in order to return him to power and throw out the results of the 2020 election, in an outburst on his social media platform Truth Social.
Trump was responding to a report by new Twitter owner Elon Musk that the social media site had blocked distribution in October 2020 of a New York Post report on Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden. Trump claimed the actions by Twitter had decided the outcome of the presidential election.
“Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” he wrote, adding, “Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
Both the Post article and the decision of Twitter to block its distribution for several days are well known and were widely reported in the days leading up to the November 2020 election. Trump’s claim that this constituted some sort of decisive media and FBI intervention to affect the outcome of the vote is not only fraudulent, it is absurd.
It comes after two years in which Trump has claimed that the vote-counting itself was rigged, either by ballot-stuffing by Democratic Party operatives or through the use of software that switched Trump votes to Biden. The Hunter Biden “suppression” claim has not been part of the “stolen election” narrative, so Trump’s sudden elevation of the issue has a certain bizarre and desperate quality.
Far more important than the particular trigger is the content of Trump’s declaration that the Constitution should be set aside to restore him to power, and the response to it in official Washington, both from Republicans and Democrats and in the corporate-controlled media.
In one sense, Trump’s reference to the Constitution amounts to an admission that his demand in January 2021 that Vice President Pence set aside the electoral votes for Biden in six “battleground states” that Biden narrowly won was unconstitutional. Pence refused to either award the six states’ electoral votes to Trump or set them aside entirely, claiming, correctly even though at the last minute, that he had no authority under the Constitution to do so.
As a brazen liar caught in the act of lying, Trump now says: Yes, what I wanted violated the Constitution. So what? This demonstrates that in the final days of his presidency, Trump was deliberately conspiring against the democratic rights of the American people and seeking to extend his presidency by becoming a president-dictator who would inevitably seek to suppress all opposition to his rule by force and violence.
Trump’s open declaration of his intention to “terminate” the US Constitution is of historic importance. It goes without saying that no American president has ever used such language. All 45 US presidents, including Trump, began their terms in office by taking an oath to uphold and defend the US Constitution, the basic document on which all American political institutions are founded.
The United States is a political entity that was not formed on the basis of ethnicity or common language, or a slow and gradual historical evolution. It was established through the American Revolution, which inaugurated a new era in global, not just American, development and became the first country to be founded on the basis of a written constitution, adopted in 1789.
To have a former president, who himself swore to uphold it, now declaring that it must be “terminated” in order to restore himself to power, indicates that capitalist democracy in America is now in a state of terminal crisis. Either the fascist forces for which Trump speaks, and which increasingly dominate the Republican Party, will establish a capitalist dictatorship of the most monstrous character, or the working class will take power as part of the world socialist revolution. There is no middle ground.
Equally significant is the response of the Republican and Democratic politicians in Washington. Several Republicans congressmen appeared on Sunday morning television interview programs. All sought to evade any direct response to media questioning about Trump’s statement about the Constitution.
David Joyce and Mike Turner, both “moderates” from Ohio, and Mike Lawler, a newly elected “moderate” from New York, all disassociated themselves from Trump’s statement and even criticized it, but they all refused to draw any political conclusions from it. Joyce declared explicitly that he would vote for Trump if he was the Republican presidential nominee in 2024.
Pressed on how he could vote for a candidate who had called for terminating the US Constitution, Joyce replied blandly that Trump said many things that he disagreed with.
No conservative or Freedom Caucus Republicans appeared on the interview programs. But Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy, the likely future Speaker of the House, did appear on Maria Bartiromo’s program on Fox News. In the course of eight minutes, he denounced what Bartiromo called “collusion between the media, the FBI, all these forces working against us,” apparently a reference to the Hunter Biden issue.
Bartiromo did not ask and McCarthy did not volunteer an opinion on Trump’s response to the same issue: that the US Constitution should be overturned to restore him to power. Instead, McCarthy revealed that he will call for the establishment of a House Select Committee on China, with Republican and Democratic members, to investigate the claims of systematic penetration by agents of the Chinese Communist Party into US business and government circles.
The Democratic Party’s response to Trump’s declaration was passive and perfunctory. The White House issued a brief statement by a junior press spokesman, which concluded, “You cannot only love America when you win.”
At a campaign appearance Saturday night in Boston, before a group of Democratic Party financial contributors, Biden stuck to the script and made no mention of Trump’s comments.
Democrats who appeared on Sunday television interview programs, including the new trio of top leaders in the House of Representatives, criticized Trump’s remarks but reiterated their desire to work with the new Republican majority in the House, including prospective Speaker McCarthy.
In other words, the Democrats criticize the fascist party leader, Trump, but want to cozy up to the congressional leadership of that same party, including McCarthy, Mitch McConnell and Elise Stefanik.
In the meantime, Biden and the congressional Democrats demonstrated their real priorities, pushing through legislation to outlaw a railroad strike and impose the companies’ terms on 115,000 railroaders. Next up for the Democratic-controlled lame duck session of Congress is the National Defense Authorization Act, which will propose more than $900 billion for the Pentagon, including billions more for the US-supported NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.
Trump Organization Convicted of Tax Fraud; Hunter Biden Still Walks Free
Former President Donald Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, was convicted of tax fraud and other financial crimes on Tuesday in the case brought by the Manhattan District Attorney.
Meanwhile, Hunter Biden continues to walk free, despite admitting in December 2020 — after the presidential election — that he was under federal investigation for possible tax violations linked to his foreign business activities.
Trump’s real estate organization was a convicted on all 17 counts on the second day of deliberation following the trial, where the Trump Organization was accused of being complicit in a scheme by top executives to avoid paying personal income taxes on job perks “such as rent-free apartments and luxury cars,” the Associated Press reported.
The organization could face up to a maximum of $1.62 million, which is a comparably small amount for the company’s size, but the AP noted that “the conviction might make some of its future deals more complicated.” Overall, the conviction comes after New York prosecutors have spent the last three years investigating the former president and his businesses.
Trump himself was not a target of the investigation or prosecution.
The case against the company was based on the testimony from the Trump Organization’s former finance chief, Allen Weisselberg. Weisselberg testified in exchange for only having a five-month jail sentence after previously pleading guilty to charges that he manipulated the Trump Organization’s books as well as his own compensation package to reduce his taxes.
Weisselberg refused pressure to testify against Trump as part of the plea deal.
Jacob Bliss is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jbliss@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter @JacobMBliss.
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