David Corn's Blog, page 3

Trump Can’t Escape the Original Sin of His Presidency: His Bond with Putin

Donald Trump set off another social media eruption on Tuesday when he posted on his money-losing Truth Social site, “What Valdimir Putin doesn’t realize is that if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. He’s playing with fire!” Here apparently was evidence from the horse’s mouth that Trump has long been playing nice with and protecting the tyrannical Russian leader and war criminal. There were, of course, no details.

Trump was reacting to Russia’s recent escalation of deadly drone and missile attacks on Ukraine—the largest bombardment of the war targeting Ukrainian cities. These assaults marked the first time since Putin invaded Ukraine over three years ago that Moscow has drawn opprobrium from Trump. Two days earlier, he had expressed a similar sentiment, stating, “I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia.” But in this post he groused that Putin “has gone absolutely CRAZY!” and was “needlessly killing a lot of people…for no reason whatsoever.” He declared that if Putin wants “ALL of Ukraine” that “will lead to the downfall of Russia!”

Did these messages signal some sort of pivot for Trump? Who knows with him? Trump could just as easily in the middle of the night zap out a post inviting Putin to his big, beautiful upcoming military parade in Washington, DC. But these posts have returned to the spotlight the curious relationship between Trump and Putin, and any such assessment has to include a fundamental fact that has been memory-holed and generally absent from the national political conversation: Trump initially won the presidency partly because Putin covertly attacked the 2016 election.

Since he returned to the Oval Office, Trump has generally acted in sync with his longstanding affinity for Putin. He badgered and threatened Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, blaming him for the Russia-Ukraine war that was launched by Putin, and repeatedly expressed sympathy and support for Putin, even as Russian forces bombed civilian targets and continued kidnapping thousands of Ukrainian children. It seemed rather obvious that Trump wanted the war to end not because he was outraged by Putin’s vicious and vile assault on democracy and decency but so he would be free to work with the Russian autocrat for whom he has expressed admiration for over a decade.

In 2013, when Trump announced he would be staging his Miss Universe contest in Moscow—a venture that would earn him several million dollars thanks to the event being underwritten by a Putin-friendly oligarch—he asked, via a tweet, if Putin, who at that point was ratcheting up his repressive ways, would “become my new best friend?” When he was in Moscow for the pageant, Trump, who had long chased deals in Russia (and who had attracted Russian money for his various business projects), was obsessed with meeting with Putin. No tete-a-tete transpired. In subsequent years, he often hailed the Russian (“strong,” “smart”), and he periodically sought to develop a Trump tower in Moscow—a project he secretly pursued while running for president in 2016. (His personal attorney, Michael Cohen, even sought assistance from Putin’s office for the deal, which eventually fizzled.)

Trump has for years been yearning for an out-in-the-open bromance with Putin—perhaps like the profitable relationships he has forged with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other nations. But this desire has been impeded by the Ukraine war and also complicated by an inconvenient fact: Trump would not likely have reached the White House without Putin’s assistance.

For nine years, Trump has done a masterful job of suppressing what was perhaps the most important story of the 2016 race: Moscow attacked the US election to assist Trump, and Trump and his crew aided and abetted that assault by denying it was happening. With his relentless ranting about “Russia, Russia, Russia,” the “Russia hoax,” and the “witch hunt”—propaganda enthusiastically embraced and loudly amplified by right-wing media and GOP leaders—Trump has essentially erased from public discourse Putin’s successful subversion of an US election and Trump’s own traitorous complicity.

There have been multiple official reports and much media reporting on this matter. But one only need turn to a bipartisan 966-page report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020, when it was chaired by none other than Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), now Trump’s secretary of state and national security adviser, to get a clear picture of what had happened four years earlier:

The Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.

There is nothing ambiguous there. Nor was there any uncertainty in the report that Trump and his campaign took advantage of Putin’s clandestine operation and, worse, helped it by claiming it didn’t exist—that is, echoing Putin’s denials and abetting Moscow’s coverup:

While [Russian intelligence] and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort. 

Whether there was any collusion—and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report did reveal that Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chair, secretly met during the race with a Russian intelligence officer who might have been involved in the operation targeting the US election—Trump, at the least, was assisting a foreign adversary as it schemed to sabotage a US election.

The Russian assault in 2016 included several components, including flooding social media with messages meant to exacerbate political discord and boost Trump. What likely had the most impact on the race was the hack-and-release operation, in which Russian cyber-warriors pilfered politically sensitive and occasionally embarrassing emails and documents from John Podesta, chair of the Hillary Clinton campaign, and slipped them to WikiLeaks, which then released them during the final weeks of the campaign—creating a steady stream of bad press that weighed down the Clinton effort in the home stretch.

Given how close the vote was in 2016, a number of events could be considered decisive—such as then-FBI Director Jim Comey’s last-minute revival of the investigation of Clinton’s handling of official email when she was secretary of state. But that list includes the Russian attack. Without it, Trump might not have narrowly won. The country will never know for sure, but Putin got what he wanted: Trump in power

Ever since, Trump has loudly and repeatedly bleated there was no Russian operation that helped grease his way into the White House—and he has avoided accountability for his own act of betrayal. He has gone so far as to say he believes Putin’s phony claims of innocence and to reject the findings of the US intelligence community, which concluded Moscow mounted this assault on American democracy to improve Trump’s chances.

Moreover, Trump has whined that both he and Putin have been victimized by the assorted Trump-Russia investigations. During his infamous meeting in the Oval Office with Zelenskyy on February 28, Trump evinced sympathy for Putin, suggesting the Russian leader had been unfairly tainted by these probes: “Let me tell you: Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and ‘Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia.’ You ever hear of that deal?”

Trump was revealing to the public that he felt a powerful bond with Putin, insisting both he and the Russian dictator had been falsely maligned. It was an absurd moment. The facts have long been established: Putin subverted a US election and assisted Trump, and Trump endorsed and advanced Putin’s fake denials. Was Trump now saying this—expressing fellowship with this despotic warmonger—out of a sense of loyalty to him or gratitude? Does Putin have any leverage over him? Or has he deluded himself into believing that Putin did not intervene in the election so he can regard his victory as unstained? Or was he just playing the part of a useful idiot? Whatever the case might be, Trump was voicing heartfelt solidarity with an authoritarian who has committed war crimes. No surprise, he was showing us that what most mattered to him about Putin was not his ruthless war in Ukraine or his totalitarian governance of Russia but their shared plight due to “Russia, Russia, Russia.”

This statement indicated something uniquely bizarre about Trump’s relationship with Putin remains. There’s no telling how that will influence how Trump handles the latest developments in Ukraine and how he responds to Putin’s intransigence and horrific violence. As of this writing, Trump has griped about Putin’s recent bombing. But he has yet taken no steps to further punish Russia. On Wednesday, he downplayed the possibility of slapping Moscow with no sanctions, saying. “If I think I’m close to getting a deal, I don’t want to screw it up by doing that.”

As Trump seeks to implement autocratic and corrupt rule in the United States, his dealings with Putin are likely to be complex and, perhaps, erratic. He hates Zelenskyy. He admires Putin. He wants the war to go away. He foolishly promised he could make that happen in 24 hours. He doesn’t know what to do, and Putin, still aiming to crush a democratic Ukraine, is not helping. The known history between the two—and there could be important aspects that are unknown—is complicated and still puzzling. But as pundits, politicians, and voters assess how Trump is faring with all this, they ought to keep foremost in mind that he’s sitting in the White House partly because of Putin’s skullduggery. That’s the original sin of the Trump presidencies, and many in Ukraine and America are bearing its consequences.

Trump’s Big Fail: Making America the 1980s Again

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Gargantuan tax cuts for the well-heeled, draconian cuts in programs for low-income Americans, boondoggle spending for iffy missile defense, and siding with the whites of South Africa: Donald Trump is making America the 1980s again. Last week, he shoved the nation into a time machine and transported it to the Age of Reagan, embracing the worst excesses of the era. In several instances, he has surpassed the outrages and extreme measures of our first made-on-TV president. Trump is putting the failed policies of the past on steroids in his relentless crusade to derail and damage the nation.

On Thursday, House Republicans passed a megabill covering taxes, government spending, and much else that Trump has called for. The tax cuts are obscene—the typical Republican fare, throwing piles of money at the upper crust and crumbs (at best) to the rest. According to the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model, the top one-tenth of a percent—people with incomes greater than $4.3 million—will receive on average a $389,000 annual boost from the tax provisions, if the GOP-controlled Senate accepts this plan. Many Americans who make less than $51,000 could lose about $700 a year in after-tax income. It’s truly a rob-the-poor-to-pay-the-rich scheme.

The true beneficiaries of the Trump-GOP measure ain’t a secret. Look at this chart from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy:

One quarter of the entire tax cut ends up in the pockets of the 1 percent. It’s a good time to be an oligarch. The bill proves that the purported populism of Trump and MAGA is a big con.

And why only screw hard-pressed Americans on taxes, when you can screw them by ripping apart social programs they rely upon?

It also illustrates that Republicans—surprise, surprise—are huge hypocrites when it comes to the deficit. They don’t give a damn about red ink, if the green flows to the wealthy. The conservative Manhattan Institute estimates this tax bill will cost more than Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, the Covid stimulus act, Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill plan, and his Inflation Reduction Act combined, adding $6 trillion to the deficit over 10 years. (One GOP House member claimed it would add $20 trillion!) Still, party on, dude. (Okay, Wayne’s World was a 1990s film.)

And why only screw hard-pressed Americans on taxes, when you can screw them by ripping apart social programs they rely upon? To cover a slice of the costs of this tax-cut orgy for oligarchs, the House Republicans included historic slashes of the safety net. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the measure’s assorted reductions and changes in Medicaid and other programs would decrease federal spending on health care by more than $700 billion and leave 8.6 million Americans uninsured by 2030.

It would also shrink the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—a.k.a. food stamps. Ty Jones Cox, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told CNBC this is the “biggest cut in the program’s history.” It would be the first time since SNAP began that the federal government would not ensure children in every state have access to food benefits. 

This is so Reaganesque. Remember ketchup as a vegetable?

Trump and his minions on Capitol Hill are trying to revive trickle-down Reaganomics, claiming these tax cuts for plutocrats will juice the economy for all. But supply-side economics has long been discredited. Reagan’s embrace of it led to a recession and such large deficits in the early 1980s that even Republicans voted to raise taxes, and President George H.W. Bush, his successor, accepted the reality that taxes had to be hiked up for fiscal sanity, despite his “read my lips” campaign vow not to increase them.

Trump and his minions on Capitol Hill are trying to revive trickle-down Reaganomics, claiming these tax cuts for plutocrats will juice the economy for all.

In addition to bringing back the trickle-down catastrophe, Trump rebooted another old show: Star Wars. Reagan, enamored with the idea of preventing nuclear war, launched the Strategic Defense Initiative that was supposed to deliver a system for shooting down nuclear missiles lobbed at the United States. The military spent up to $100 billion and perhaps as much as $400 billion—no one seems to know for sure how much was wasted—and no such system was ever built. Top scientists at the time said the whole thing was not technically feasible, and many nuclear strategists feared it would destabilize the nuclear balance and incentivize a Russian first strike on the United States. Eventually—after much money went down the drain—SDI withered.

But it’s back. Last week, Trump announced Golden Dome, a supposedly “next generation” missile defense shield that would go beyond the aspirations of SDI and protect the nation from not only ballistic missiles but cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, and drones. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the initial down payment would be $25 billion. Once again, scientific experts are calling this a pipe dream. In March, the American Physical Society released a report that concluded:

Creating a reliable and effective defense against the threat posed by even the small number of relatively unsophisticated nuclear-armed ICBMs…remains a daunting challenge. The difficulties are numerous, ranging from the unresolved countermeasures problem for midcourse-intercept to the severe reach-versus-time challenge of boost-phase intercept. Few of the main challenges have been solved, and many of the hard problems are likely to remain formidable over the 15-year time horizon the study considered.

Sound familiar? The report added, “The costs and benefits of such an effort therefore need to be weighed carefully.” It doesn’t seem like such a weighing is underway.

A Carnegie Endowment paper reached a similar conclusion, noting “the challenge of developing a space-based missile defense shield remains formidable.” It cited a National Research Council study from 2012 that estimated the total cost of a space-based missile defense system could be as much as $831 billion (in 2025 dollars).

Hundreds of billions of dollars, a system that might not work, more weapons, more global instability—what a deal.

It added that this program will likely prompt Russia to build more and better nukes: “Russia will…need to respond. That will entail accelerating existing efforts to modernize each leg of the nuclear triad by replacing Soviet-era delivery systems with newer Russian designs. We can also expect renewed emphasis on exotic weapons that promise to evade all conceivable missile defense systems.” The latter includes the Poseidon, a nuclear-powered torpedo that can hit coastal targets in the United States. Say, New York City. “Golden Dome,” this paper noted, “will therefore press Russia into a new arms race.”

Hundreds of billions of dollars, a system that might not work, more weapons, more global instability—what a deal.

As for South Africa, Trump hosted a visit from that nation’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, on May 21. In front of his guest in the Oval Office, Trump pushed the fraudulent notion that Afrikaner farmers have been the victims of a white genocide. That’s why he said he had to take in 59 of them recently as refugees—because they are victims of persecution. (Trump’s administration is not accepting persecuted refugees from other African nations for some reason.) With all this, Trump was promoting a phony narrative that has also been championed by Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, as well as by white nationalists.

A recent analysis by PolitiFact cast this story of white genocide as rubbish: “White farmers have been murdered in South Africa. But those murders account for less than 1% of more than 27,000 annual murders nationwide. Experts said the deaths do not amount to genocide, and Trump misleads about land confiscation.” It quotes Gareth Newham, who heads a justice and violence prevention program at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, who said, “The idea of a ‘white genocide’ taking place in South Africa is completely false. As an independent institute tracking violence and violent crime in South Africa, if there was any evidence of either a genocide or targeted violence taking place against any group based on their ethnicity this, we would be amongst the first to raise (the) alarm and provide the evidence to the world.”

In the White House, Trump was peddling a racist fairy tale promulgated by bigots—in what was yet another throwback to the decade of Reagan. Throughout his presidency, Reagan and the right fought the anti-apartheid movement, voicing support and sympathy for the racist regime of Pretoria. They opposed calls for divesting from South Africa. They denigrated Nelson Mandela and his freedom movement as commies. Some right-wingers went so far as to buy Krugerrands, gold coins minted in South Africa that were boycotted around the world, to express solidarity with the repressive white ruling class.

Decades later—after the liberation of South Africa—it might be tough for Trump to call for reinstating apartheid. (Make Apartheid Great Again?) But he has found another way to exploit that country for his racism-fueled politics. With this unfounded conspiracy theory, he depicts a Black-ruled nation as a place of savagery. Thus, he signals to white nationalists he’s on their side and characterizes Blacks as a threat to white people.

It’s back to the future. (That movie came out in 1985!) We’ve dumped big hair and tacky leg warmers, but Trump is emulating policy disasters of the past, and he’s poised to do far more damage than Reagan. The nation has not learned from the past. We are reliving it with another show-biz president—as both farce and tragedy.

For Trump, le Grift, C’est Moi

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

The only time I ever worked on a political campaign, decades ago, I did opposition research on a Republican senator from New York named Alfonse D’Amato. He had a scandal-ridden background, most notably due to his proximity to a kickback scheme in Long Island in which public employees were forced to pay 1 percent of their salaries to the local GOP machine. (He denied wrongdoing.) He also was tied to a corruption scandal involving federal contracts doled out by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. (He denied wrongdoing.) He also had been chummy with at least one mob-related crook—and maybe more. (He denied wrongdoing.) Add to all that, a string of other sleazy controversies.

But none of this ever stuck to D’Amato, who cultivated the reputation of a street-savvy, give-you-a-wink rogue. Through his 18 years in the US Senate, he survived various allegations and investigations and was reelected twice. He was pure Teflon. It took me a while to figure out why.

I finally got it and derived the White Tablecloth Theory of Dirty Politics. If you’re out at a nice restaurant, sitting at a table with a white tablecloth, and you spill your red wine, everyone notices. There’s a big ugly stain that’s hard to ignore. But if the tablecloth is already dirty and marred by previous wine spillage and you knock over your glass, well, one more stain doesn’t matter. It blends right in.

Trump has engaged in record-setting levels of corruption, as he mixes his business interests with his day job. It’s as if the presidency is a mere side hustle to his main gig of maximum personal enrichment.

D’Amato had so many stains on his record that by the time I started digging and finding additional ones, it just didn’t matter. The new revelations hardly stood out; they became part of the existing mélange. This dynamic continued throughout his political career. With his image as a guy who played perhaps a bit too loose and too fast, yet another disclosure of improbity didn’t change anything.

He was nothing compared to Donald Trump. But watching the president these past few months, I kept thinking of the Tablecloth Theory. Trump has engaged in record-setting levels of corruption, as he mixes his business interests with his day job. It’s as if the presidency is a mere side hustle to his main gig of maximum personal enrichment. His trip to the Middle East this past week was more a venture of Trump, Inc. than a presidential mission. His Trump Organization is developing projects in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—the three nations on his Mideast tour—while hooking up with firms tied to these Arab governments.

His family business is also cutting lucrative crypto deals with Arab partners. As my colleague Russ Choma recently reported, Eric Trump, who runs the Trump Organization now, was recently in Dubai and announced that

MGX, a UAE-based investment fund, would invest $2 billion in crypto exchange Binance using a “stablecoin” created by the Trumps’ crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. The deal could net the Trump family hundreds of millions, as the transaction lends enormous credibility and liquidity to their crypto business. MGX isn’t just any UAE-based investment fund. It’s chaired by Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser and brother of the Emirates’ ruler, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Let’s not forget the Saudi investment fund that kicked in $2 billion when Jared Kushner started his private equity firm, Affinity Partners, which subsequently attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in backing also from Qatar and the UAE.

Never has a president been so financially intertwined with foreign governments. No wonder he praised Mohammed bin Salman, the murderous ruler of Saudi Arabia, as a “gentleman.” After all, he’s helping Trump and his family make millions. And, as we all know, Trump agreed last week to accept a $400 million gift airplane from Qatar. Any slice of this would have been unthinkable for an American president in the past. But not with Trump. The latest grift is just another drop on an already huge pile of grift.

Remember how the media and the right went nuts when President Bill Clinton hosted coffees at the White House for Democratic donors? Now Trump is using access to the White House as a way to line his own pockets.

Which includes the new crypto ventures he recently started, and there’s not just one. He and his family own a 60 percent stake in World Liberty Financial (WLF), which was launched in September. It manages two digital currencies: $WLF1, which is known as a “governance” token, and $USD1, a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. Whenever either coin is purchased, used, or transferred, WLF gets a fee. So, anyone—a foreign official, an oligarch, a crook, an overseas or domestic corporation seeking preferential treatment, an office seeker, a pardon seeker, a Trump buddy—can put moolah right into Trump’s grubby hands and curry favor with him by purchasing or using either of these coins. Best of all, these transactions can be anonymous. Ca-ching! There’s never been an easier way to bribe a president—or for a president to collect bribes.

Then there are the meme coins that both Trump and his wife, Melania, set up around the time of his inauguration: $TRUMP and $MELANIA. They, too, generate income from transaction fees. The early action on these coins brought in at least $350 million for Trump and $64 million for Melania. More recently, Trump established a contest with the prize of a White House visit for whoever buys the most amount of his pump-and-dump meme coin. Remember how the media and the right went nuts when President Bill Clinton hosted coffees at the White House for Democratic donors? Now Trump is using access to the White House as a way to line his own pockets. And his social media company is looking to go public. Even though it loses a ton of money, Trump stands to gain $3 billion from that deal.

Don’t forget that as president, Trump is in charge of regulating—or not regulating—the crypto industry, and the decisions his administration makes on this front could lead to greater riches for him and his clan.

What we’re seeing is not a conflict of interest, but a congruence of interests. Trump has merged the US government with his business. It’s a cavalcade of corruption. It’s out in the open. It’s brazen and blatant. It’s orders of magnitude shadier than the false allegations (backed by Russian disinformation) that Republicans and right-wing media and operatives have hurled at Hunter and Joe Biden.

If Al Capone were alive today, he would look at all this, smile, and say, “I’m going into politics.”

Unfortunately, no conflict-of-interest rules apply to the president. (They cover other government officials.) But would such rules slow down Trump’s unprecedent money-grab? He’s waving the blood-red tablecloth and shouting, “What are you going to do about it?” The founders’ remedy for a run-amok president was impeachment. They didn’t count on a political party becoming a personality cult committed to defending an autocrat-wannabe.

There’s simply too much sleaze for reporters to keep up with. I’ve only skimmed the surface here. And the White House wants to make it harder to cover Trump’s transgressions. When Business Insider recently ran an article headlined “Don Jr. is the new Hunter Biden,” which examined Junior’s venture capital fund and the conflicts it presents, the White House threatened to go after the publication’s owner, Axel Springer, the German media conglomerate, which also owns Politico.

If Al Capone were alive today, he would look at all this, smile, and say, “I’m going into politics.”

For more than 100 days, Trump has been assaulting American democracy, trampling the rule of law, and running a corrupt autocratic regime. A few Democrats are trying to call attention to his greed spree—which ought to be a bigger focus of their opposition. Sens. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Rep. Sam Liccardo of California have introduced legislation to prevent federal officials—including a president—from using their position to profit off cryptocurrency. Murphy said:

The Trump meme coin is the single most corrupt act ever committed by a president. Donald Trump is essentially posting his Venmo for any billionaire CEO or foreign oligarch to cash in some favors by secretly sending him millions of dollars. It’s almost unbelievable until you remember this president will do whatever it takes—even selling access to the White House—to make himself richer. This is not normal, and we won’t let him get away with it.

Trump has already gotten away with too much. It seems the most important lesson he learned from his first term was not to leave any money on the table. And now he doesn’t give a damn how dirty the tablecloth gets.

We Still Don’t Know What Kash Patel Did as a Consultant for Qatar

In a curious twist during his confirmation process, Kash Patel failed to disclose significant personal financial information until after the Senate hearing in January on his nomination to become FBI director. Consequently, one peculiar item listed on his financial disclosure form received no attention during that hearing: Patel’s work as a consultant for the embassy of Qatar. On this document, Patel did not specify what he did for Qatar or how much he was paid.

Even now—nearly three months after he took the helm of the nation’s top law enforcement agency—the details of Patel’s Qatari connection remain a mystery.

This week Mother Jones contacted the FBI and texted Patel, asking if they would reveal what services he provided to Qatar and what payments he received. Neither responded.

Patel is just one of several top Trump administration aides who have had financial ties to this Arab monarchy. Susan Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, worked for a lobbying firm that represented Qatar. Attorney General Pam Bondi lobbied for the Qataris. Mike Huckabee, now US Ambassador to Israel, was paid $50,000 to visit Qatar in 2018. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, also has pocketed money from Qatar. In 2023, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund bought the Park Lane Hotel from Witkoff’s company in a $623 million deal. The Trump Organization itself recently struck a deal to develop a luxury golf resort in Qatar. And now Qatar is considering handing as a gift to Trump a jumbo airliner worth about $400 million for Trump to use as Air Force One. The plan reportedly is for the 747 to be transferred to Trump’s presidential library foundation after he leaves office, where it could come under his personal control.

There have been few public clues regarding the nature of Patel’s tie to Qatar. His financial disclosure form only says that he made more than $5,000 from this work. It notes that he was paid through a company he owned called Trishul, which engaged in “national security, defense, and intelligence” consulting. According to the form, he earned more than $2.1 million in 2024 through Trishul, which had a number of clients. Those clients included the Trump Media & Technology Group, which operates the Truth Social, Trump’s money-losing social media platform. But the form does not break down how much of Patel’s Trishul income came from each client.

In an ethics agreement Patel filed with the Justice Department, he noted that under federal law he would not be permitted to engage in matters related to Qatar without receiving written authorization permitting him to do so. The agreement stated that he expected such authorization to be granted.

Last year, the Atlantic reported that Patel had claimed that he worked as a security consultant for Qatar during the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Doha. And in February—as ethics experts were questioning whether Patel’s consulting for Qatar would have required him to register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent (which he did not)—the right-wing Federalist reported, “A source close to Patel’s confirmation told The Federalist his work for Qatar was limited to securing the 2022 FIFA World Cup and other security measures, not the kind of representation that would require FARA registration.”

Patel has not offered this World Cup explanation himself. He has said nothing that has been publicly reported about his business association with Qatar. And when Mother Jones asked the Qatari Supreme Committee on Delivery and Legacy, which ran the 2022 World Cup, if Patel did work related to the event, it replied that it had “nothing to comment on this.”

Moreover, Patel’s paperwork states that he was working for Qatar until November 2024. That’s two years past the World Cup. Was he still providing security services at that point for an event that had long since concluded? Also, his financial disclosure form indicates he was paid by the Qatari embassy in the US, not the Qatari sports committee.

The whole point of financial disclosure for top-ranking US officials is for the public to be able to see the size and scope of any conflicts of interests. Yet this episode shows that the current requirements are inadequate. Patel is now heading the FBI, yet questions remain about his finances—including a $25,000 payment he received from a Russian-American-Ukrainian filmmaker who was connected to a Russian propaganda project financed by Vladimir Putin’s office.

Americans have the right know whether an FBI director is clean as a whistle and free of ties that could unduly affect or compromise his actions. Yet Patel has not provided the public a full view of his finances. And even though he is now securely in the position, he won’t explain his relationship to a foreign government with a checkered human rights record and that has has tried to influence US policy and policymakers. The Case of the FBI Chief’s Mysterious Tie to Qatar remains open.

America, Say Goodbye to a Generation of Scientists, Researchers, and Policy Experts

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

The other day I ran into an acquaintance who runs a government program that provides a valuable service and that Donald Trump and Elon Musk have tried to eliminate entirely. Through legal action and other means, this organization has fought back and so far staved off execution, even as much of its activity has been halted. The goal, I was told, is to preserve this program even as a shell that does a fraction of what it once did. That way, if the Trump crusade is eventually beaten back and Democrats regain power, it can be returned to its previous size and scope. “If it is destroyed,” this person said, “it will be nearly impossible to rebuild from scratch. We have to preserve it in some form, even if greatly diminished.”

I was heartened to see a public servant engaging in strategic resistance from the inside. Holding on for dear life for four years will be tough and not fun. Those people engaged in this insider opposition deserve our respect and appreciation.

But this encounter led me to an obvious realization. This hanging-on strategy cannot work across the board. Some government agencies that performed crucial work are being eradicated or broken beyond repair. Moreover, this obscene demolition derby is causing what will be a generational loss of brainpower and talent for the United States that will likely not be remedied.

Many of these people—midcareer or young scientists—will leave the field or look elsewhere. For some, the latter will mean seeking jobs in other countries. No doubt, many won’t return to the United States.

It’s easiest to spot this in scientific research. With the extensive cutbacks at the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies that support research, jobs are being lost throughout the scientific community. And Trump’s extortion-like withholding of federal funding from universities that draw his ire also threatens the research cosmos.

Research programs and centers at universities and institutions across the country have had to cut positions and rescind employment offers to newly graduated PhDs. They have had to turn away graduate students due to slashes in funding. Many of these people—midcareer or young scientists—will leave the field or look elsewhere. For some, the latter will mean seeking jobs in other countries. No doubt, many won’t return to the United States. They will establish themselves, fall in love, start families in other lands. All these brilliant minds, educated and trained here, will cook up ideas—advances that help cure diseases, create new energy systems, yield not-yet-imaginable technological breakthroughs—that benefit their adopted lands.

We are throwing away one of the great drivers of American society and the US economy. Two months ago, Lisa Jarvis, a columnist at Bloomberg Opinion who covers biotech, put it plainly:

The Trump administration’s attacks on science and funding at the National Institutes of Health will set research and training for future scientists back a generation.

This might sound melodramatic to anyone not intimately familiar with the world of academic training and research. But in just two months the administration has cut off opportunities at every phase in a scientist’s career. Unless funding and the freedom to pursue science without political bias are restored, biomedical research in the US will become less ambitious, less competitive and result in fewer breakthroughs.

After the Trump White House recently released its slash-and-burn budget blueprint that included huge cuts for the NIH, the National Science Foundation, and other government agencies that fund scientific research, Michael Lubell, a physicist who tracks science policy at the City University of New York, told Nature, “The message that this sends to young scientists is that this country is not a place for you.  If I were starting my career, I would be out of here in a heartbeat.”

The man who irrationally obsesses about a trade deficit doesn’t care about creating a massive knowledge deficit. Who will benefit from this?

This is a serious self-inflicted wound. The man who irrationally obsesses about a trade deficit doesn’t care about creating a massive knowledge deficit. Who will benefit from this? European nations that are already luring away our scientists and China, as it surpasses the US in R&D investment. Meanwhile, Trump’s assault on elite universities could lead to a decline in the enrollment here of foreign students and a loss of talent from overseas. Trump is engineering a brain drain that won’t be easy to reverse.

And it’s not just within science. The administration decimated USAID, the agency that distributes foreign aid. Thousands of employees and contractors were pink-slipped, and humanitarian agencies funded by USAID had to lay off workers. A whole cadre of people who had developed expertise in delivering aid and overseeing humanitarian programs overseas—not an easy task—will now disappear. That human capital will dissipate, rendering it harder to revive these programs in the future. Job cuts at the State Department and the CIA will shrink the population of foreign policy experts knowledgeable about assorted parts of the globe.

Demoralized federal agencies will attract less fresh blood and become less attractive to the best and the brightest. Do we really want fewer young scientists, researchers, and policy experts looking for ways to prevent the next pandemic? Or searching for a cure for Alzheimer’s? Or preparing the government for the next international crisis?

I’m surprised there has not been more political outrage expressed over Trump’s maniacal effort to kill a generation of people with the expertise needed for a secure, prosperous, healthy, and competitive America. In his 1956 poem “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg wrote, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” All these years later, we are not destroying our best minds. We’re just telling them to get lost. Many will find other homes. And we, not they, will suffer.

A Holocaust Tale for Today

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Imagine a situation in which the threat of fascism is so pressing that you consider sending your children to another country. That’s what happened decades ago for the family of Julian Borger, the world affairs editor of the Guardian. Borger has long been a keen observer of wars, global crises, and international relations. His work is an essential read for anyone looking to make sense of our mad world. But with a new book, Borger has cast his gaze back to the 1930s and a piece of family history he stumbled across only recently.

After Hitler annexed Austria in the Anschluss of March 1938, Borger’s grandparents and his father, Robert, then 11 years old, as well as all the families of the Jewish community of Vienna, became targets of the vicious antisemitic campaign waged by the Nazis and their Austrian allies. Soon after the Germans’ arrival, as the Borgers were being forced to give up their radio shop and subjected to hate, humiliation, and violence, they managed to find a way to send their only son to the United Kingdom. And, as Jews were being sent to labor camps, they, too, escaped Vienna.

This is quite the moment to be writing about Nazi authoritarianism and the Holocaust.

That’s as much of the story as Julian knew. No details. His father never talked about what happened. But not long ago, through an odd coincidence, Julian discovered that his grandparents had taken out a three-line ad in the Manchester Guardian—the previous name of the newspaper where he works—looking for a Brit who would take in his son. He started poking about and discovered that other Viennese Jewish families had done the same and that scores of Viennese children had found refuge from the Nazis because British citizens responded to these pleas. The result of his subsequent investigation is a wonderful book that is both a personal memoir of hidden history and a gripping account of the fates of these Jewish children, including his dad: I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children, and the Adverts That Helped Them Escape the Holocaust. This is quite the moment to be writing about Nazi authoritarianism and the Holocaust. Julian was kind enough to talk with me about the book and what insights about today he’s gained from digging into the past.

How did you first uncover this unknown past about your father?

It was the archivist at the Guardian who found it. In late 2020, at the end of the first Trump term, I was talking to an American immigration lawyer. She was trying to stop the deportation of West Africans, in particular Cameroonians, to their home country, where, in the midst of civil war, they were likely to be killed or tortured. She made a remark about how we keep reliving the same traumas, generation on generation. And she mentioned how her dad had escaped from Vienna in the late 1930s, and she said it had something to do with the Manchester Guardian, the original name of the newspaper. It reminded me that in our family lore the Manchester Guardian had something to do with my dad coming out of Vienna.

This gave me the idea of asking our archivist. Because the Guardian was coming up to its 200th anniversary, I thought it might make for an interesting story. I mentioned to him there was something about my father. The next day, he wrote back and said, “Is this it?” Attached to the email was an advert I’d never seen before. I had thought that maybe there had been an article in the paper about Brits taking in Viennese children. I had no idea there had been an ad with such a personal plea.

Courtesy Julian Borger and the Guardian archives

The wording of it was straightforward but emotional: “I Seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent Boy, aged 11. Viennese of good family.”

When did it appear?

On August 3, 1938. This was five months after the Anschluss, and the lives of Jews in Vienna were becoming more precarious with every passing day. They had lost their jobs, their livelihoods. My father, like other Vienna Jews, was removed from his school and put into a separate Jewish school. I only learned much later some of the things that happened to my family in those months, because this was something we never talked about. This advert opened the door to the buried history of my family.

“Children could leave without having to pay the various exit taxes the Nazis demanded. Parents had to decide to send their children away, not knowing if they’d be able to join them.”

What happened with the advertisement your grandfather placed? Were there many responses?

My father was lucky that my grandfather did this early. These adverts began to appear late July 1938. A couple of Welsh school teachers in Caernarfon, Wales, who were looking for ways to help saw it. They could see what was happening in Central Europe. They wanted to make a difference and help in any way they could. They started corresponding with my grandparents. They even traveled down to the Home Office in London to make sure the paperwork was speeded up. At the time, you could get a child out of Austria if or she had a sponsor in a destination country willing to look after them and pay for their education. It was much harder for adults. So Jewish parents in Vienna had to make this decision. Do we all stay together, or do we at least try to save our children?

How long did the process take?

The advert was published in August, and in October, he was traveling to the UK. At this point, the Nazis were focused on getting Jews out. This was before the final solution. Children could leave without having to pay the various exit taxes the Nazis demanded. Parents had to decide to send their children away, not knowing if they’d be able to join them.

After you saw the ad, you realized there was an untold story here not just about your family. What did you do next?

After first experiencing the surprise of seeing my grandparents pleading for the life of my father, I realized he was not alone. In that block of adverts, there are five other kids. So I searched the archives and found 80 children advertised this way in the Manchester Guardian. It seemed obvious to me, as a journalist, that I had to find out what happened to all of them. That is the starting point of the book.

Of those 80, how many did you track down?

Mostly all of them. I was able to find out what happened to them. But when it came to locating those for whom there was someone who could talk about them, that was a smaller number. Within that group, there were seven who left very full accounts of what had happened to them, mostly in memoirs written for their families. There was one survivor of the children from these adverts still alive, in her 90s, and living in Connecticut. I came across her late in the project, after I had despaired of finding anyone still alive. I mainly talked to the children of these people. In each case, I would send them the advert. And in all but one case, they’d never seen or heard of the advertisement.

What happened to your father’s parents?

They both survived. His mother got out of Vienna with a visa for domestic work. There was a shortage of maids at that time in Britain. She was able to travel out of Vienna with my father. But her visa did not allow her to have a child with her in Britain. So she could not look after him or stay with him. Then, with the help of his foster parents, they were able at the last moment in 1939 to obtain a visa as an agricultural laborer for my grandfather. That part of the family all survived. Others did not.

But did they all unite at some point?

They never lived together again as a family. My father stayed with his foster parents in Wales until he went to university.

The book starts with a dark day in 1983 when you’re in your 20s, come home, and learn your father, a lecturer in psychology at Brunel University, has just committed suicide. Is there a connection between that and the story you’re telling in this book?

His foster mother definitely thought so. When my father took his life, it was my job to ring round people, and the person I left until last was his foster mother. Her immediate reaction was to say he was Hitler’s last victim: “They got to him in the end.” This came as a complete shock to me. It was something we just didn’t talk about. We didn’t talk about the past. In the note he left, he didn’t mention any of this. But she was quite adamant about it.

Much later, when I was researching this book, I realized why she seemed so certain. That’s because she was the last person he went to see before taking his own life. Tragically, she was away that weekend. He hung around the house for a little bit and then disappeared. When I called her, she knew that he’d come looking for her and that she’d been away. She felt he was trying to revisit that part of him, the boy who turned up as an 11-year-old refugee on her doorstep, and wanted to reconnect with that part of his life. At the time that didn’t mean much to me or our family because it was a piece of his life we didn’t talk about. It took on greater significance nearly 40 years later when I found the advert and began investigating my father’s early years.

“We could now remember people who had died under the Nazis who had been completely blotted out of our family history. We grew up thinking that as a family we survived scot-free. But it turned out there had been people who had perished in our family.”

The British are famous for being reserved when it comes to their emotional lives. Did you ever have any inkling of how your father’s experiences as a young boy—living in Nazified Austria and escaping—affected him?

There’s the British stiff upper lip. He definitely wanted to see himself as British. But I also found this attitude was widespread among these refugees. At least half of them did not mention the past and the adverts to their families until quite late in life, when they came under heavy pressure to talk about it. I also found this among the survivors from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The vast majority did not want to burden the next generation. It was a conscious decision: The trauma stops with me, and the next generation shouldn’t know. I believe that was his approach, and that was why he rebuffed any attempt to talk about his past. I once tried to do a school project on the Anschluss, thinking he’d help me. But he was very standoffish and did not want to get involved.

You’re best known as a foreign correspondent for the Guardian covering crises and foreign affairs around the globe. What was it like to write a memoir?

It goes against the grain in news-oriented journalism to write in the first-person singular. It was counterintuitive for me and felt self-indulgent. But the driving force behind writing the book was chronicling the extraordinary stories of these seven survivors. And the price for doing that was to tell this very painful story of our family that we had tried to block out. That ended up a blessing, because I found out a lot that had been hidden from our family that we could be proud of. We could now remember people who had died under the Nazis who had been completely blotted out of our family history. We grew up thinking that as a family we survived scot-free. But it turned out there had been people who had perished in our family. They just were not mentioned; their pictures were not on our walls. I’m grateful the book pushed me in a direction so that they now will be remembered. I went to visit their graves in Vienna—for those who had graves. On each it says, “unvergessen.” Unforgotten. That was a promise not kept. This book was a way of redeeming that promise.

You say some of these stories of these children are remarkable. Give me one.

Can I give you three? One is a guy called George Mandler, who lived very close to my dad in Vienna and was just a bit older. He came to Britain. But many Jewish refugees there in 1940 thought Britain was going to fall. Most of the kids in this book ended up getting on boats and going to the US. He did that and later signed up with the US Army and became one of the Ritchie Boys, an organization of refugees—many Jewish from Central Europe—who were trained to be intelligence officers and sent back to the front lines to interrogate German prisoners and conduct counterintelligence operations. (They were trained at Camp Ritchie in Maryland.) Mandler helped to chase the remnants of the SS through the forest of post-war Germany. He and two other Ritchie Boys came across an SS hideout in the middle of the woods in Germany and discovered a trove of Nazi cash. They decided to divide the loot among themselves as a kind of restitution and never told anyone else—until he wrote about it in a memoir for his family.

There was one girl who ended up in the Shanghai ghetto, a forgotten episode of the Holocaust. After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese took control of the international settlement in Shanghai and didn’t know what to do with the Jews. After Japan and Germany became allies, the SS showed up and advised the Japanese to put all the Jews on an ocean liner and torpedo it. That was too much for the Japanese, and, as kind of a compromise, they rounded up the Jews, placed them in a ghetto, and significantly worsened conditions. But the majority of these Jews survived. This woman, Gertrude Langer, in a long interview about Shanghai, gave a fantastic description of what that was like and also described pre-war Shanghai, a town essentially run by two Iraqi Jewish families and like a little Vienna. This was a whole episode of Jewish history I knew little about.

The third one is a boy named Fred Schwarz, who didn’t get as far as Britain. He got stuck in Netherlands, in a Nazi transit camp called Westerbork, and then was transferred to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. He and his brother survived all of it, and he described their harrowing experiences in intimate details in a book he published in Dutch called Trains on a Dead Track. It’s one of the most extraordinary accounts of survival I’ve ever read. It’s so intimately and precisely remembered, and he recounts these extraordinary scenes at the end of the war, when the camp inmates and their SS guards were both desperately trying to flee the Red Army and reach the American forces.

Working on this book, no doubt, caused you to think more about the Holocaust than we are generally accustomed to doing. But as a journalist, you’ve covered many horrors and genocidal actions. Did working on this book change how you see the Holocaust?

No matter how black or dark an idea we have of the Holocaust, it’s still impossibly tainted, because all our accounts of the Holocaust are from people who survived it. This book contains the tales of survivors, but I’m very aware these are the stories of a small minority who got away. The great unknown is all the stories of the people who did not survive. Maybe that is so overwhelming and too difficult for us to absorb. We learn our history of the Holocaust out of the mouths of people who survived.

The dead don’t speak.

Yes, the dead don’t speak.

There’s a tendency to make comparisons between what is happening now in the United States and what occurred in Germany and Austria in the 1930s. I believe we should learn from history but also be cautious in drawing parallels. After spending so much time researching what happened in Vienna, which was a liberal and cosmopolitan city where Jews had become well established in the highest reaches of society, do you see anything from that period relevant for Americans today?

Several things. One is that among these well-established Jewish families was a conviction that it couldn’t possibly happen here. The Nazis could come in, but it couldn’t last too long, because we are too civilized, and Vienna is too civilized. In that situation, it was the pessimists who survived and the optimists who were killed. Similarly, it was the wealthy Jews who were killed. They had more to lose by leaving, so they stayed.

“This is a reminder of how fragile are the things that we take for granted in terms of civilization and how quickly it can change—and how there are, without doubt, among us people who would enthusiastically take part in atrocities against their neighbors.”

The second thing I found notable was the overnight transformation of the Viennese people. The people who my family, my father, my grandparents saw as schoolmates, neighbors, and friends turned on them overnight when the Nazis arrived. When my grandfather was on his hands and knees with the other Jews being forced to clean the sidewalks, he was spat on and jeered by the people in his district. Many of them he knew. This is a reminder of how fragile are the things that we take for granted in terms of civilization and how quickly it can change—and how there are, without doubt, among us people who would enthusiastically take part in atrocities against their neighbors. There are potential psychopaths among us. What matters is how permissive the environment is. That’s a lesson we learned in Vienna, but also in Yugoslavia and in Rwanda—how fragile is this idea of civilized society.

One of the biggest surprises of the book for me was learning that my great aunt, who was a very diminutive and rather eccentric woman who dressed like it was still the 1930s and who was a terrible hypochondriac and neurotic—a figure of some derision within our family—was a hero of the French Resistance. She was a communist who went to Paris and then to the south of France and became part of a German-speaking network within the resistance that was used to infiltrate German camps, bases, and office. Her son, who was like a brother to my father, was sent to Austria to report on factories and if necessary, sabotage or foment unrest. But the Gestapo learned the identities of the members of his network and came for him. He ended up being taken back to Vienna and tortured to death by the Gestapo.

Our family didn’t know any of this history. My great aunt knew but she didn’t tell anyone. After the war, she went back to Vienna. Her husband and her son were dead, and she lived out the rest of her days a sad figure, existing rather than living. As incurious children, we would visit her and have no idea of her history and what she had been through. That’s a powerful lesson. You just don’t know about people.

Trump’s Mob-like Shakedown: A Scandal Starring “60 Minutes,” Paramount, and the FCC

Once upon a time, but not so long ago, if an American president was involved with a company that had vital business before a federal agency, it would be expected that the chief executive would steer clear of all government deliberations about that firm and that his political appointees at this department would hand over the matter to career officials. But no more.

In yet one more chapter of the never-ending tale of brazen Trump corruption, the Federal Communications Commission chairman whom Trump installed, Brendan Carr, is overseeing both an investigation of CBS News and the ongoing $8 billion sale of the network’s parent corporation, Paramount, to Skydance Media—while simultaneously Trump is suing CBS News for $20 billion, alleging 60 Minutes deceptively edited an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris during last year’s presidential campaign.

Ponder this convoluted circumstance for a moment.

This is an Olympic conflict of interest. Trump, via Carr, can squeeze Paramount and Redstone and force a settlement of his lawsuit, which could result in Paramount paying millions to him.

Carr, a MAGA ideologue who wears a gold lapel pin in the shape of Trump’s profile, has to okay the Paramount-Skydance deal for it to be consummated because it involves the transfer of CBS broadcast licenses. And at the same time, Trump is negotiating a settlement with Paramount over his absolutely frivolous lawsuit against CBS News. If there’s no firewall between Trump and the FCC—and there isn’t, with Carr at its helm—Paramount has a powerful incentive to reach an agreement with Trump in order to gain approval from Carr for this mega-sale that would net mogul Shari Redstone’s family holding company, which controls Paramount, $2.4 billion.

Redstone herself will reportedly pocket over $500 million if the deal is okayed by the Trump administration. She recently recused herself from deliberations regarding the Trump-CBS News lawsuit, but she has certainly signaled her wish for the company to reach a settlement with Trump, which would probably entail some concessions from Paramount, including perhaps a payment to Trump and possibly an admission of wrongdoing. Many legal experts have declared that Trump’s lawsuit is without merit and that CBS News can easily win in court. Still, Paramount, by engaging in negotiations with Trump, has showed it would rather bend than battle while approval for the sale is pending.

This is an Olympic conflict of interest. Trump, via Carr, can squeeze Paramount and Redstone and force a settlement of his lawsuit, which could result in Paramount paying millions to him. It’s a mob-like shakedown: Hey Paramount, you want your billions? Reach a deal with Trump. And Carr is his Luca Brasi—the enforcer who applies the pressure to serve the criminal kingpin.

Carr, whose FCC is also investigating a third-party complaint about the 60 Minutes interview with Harris, has said this inquiry could also be part of his agency’s review of the Paramount transaction. That complaint was filed by the Center for American Rights, a right-wing outfit run by a former aide to onetime GOP Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Carr’s statement certainly sent a clear message: Unless Paramount addresses Trump’s ludicrous allegation that 60 Minutes committed “election interference” by editing the Harris interview, the FCC will nix the Paramount-Skydance deal.

Carr also has suggested that he could kill the Paramount sale unless the company eradicates its DEI efforts. He told Bloomberg in March, “Any businesses that are looking for FCC approval, I would encourage them to get busy ending any sort of their invidious forms of DEI discrimination.” In February, Paramount’s co-CEOs—George Cheeks, Chris McCarthy, and Brian Robbins—sent out a memo to staff noting the company would move to trash its DEI goals. In his interview with Bloomberg, Carr said the FCC’s review of deals would make sure a company has indeed deep-sixed its DEI programs.

This Trump-Carr-Paramount threesome is rotten, and it comes amid an orgy of Trump administration corruption.

During his second stint in the White House, Trump is raking in big bucks with a crypto firm he and his adult sons recently formed, even as he is now in charge of regulating—or not regulating—the high-flying cryptocurrency industry. As the New York Times recently reported, “Trump has leveraged his presidential powers in ways that have benefited the industry—and in some cases his own company—even though he had spent years deriding crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers.” His crypto venture allows favor-seekers, foreigners, influence-peddlers, corporations, connivers, and crooks to anonymously pour money directly into Trump’s pockets. This week, Trump’s cryptocurrency business announced that a fund backed by Abu Dhabi would be signing a $2 billion deal using Trump’s crypto. That could generate hundreds of millions of dollars for Trump and his kin. And Trump is offering White House visits to people who buy his digital coin.

Trump’s family business is engaged in multiple overseas business deals with firms tied to governments he regularly deals with as president. Days ago, the Trump Organization announced a venture with a Qatari government-owned company to develop a golf course and luxury home project there—two weeks before Trump is scheduled to travel to Qatar. His aides have pushed to bring the British Open golf tournament to a Trump resort in Scotland. Trump uses his office to promote his money-losing social media company, which last year paid Donald Trump Jr. $813,000 (or almost a quarter of its revenue) for showing up at board meetings and is currently starting to develop financial products to peddle. Trump has handed out pardons to campaign donors. He used the White House to sell cars for Elon Musk’s Tesla.

There’s plenty more. The bottom line is Trump is treating the White House as an extension of his business empire. Any hint of such self-dealing or shady business shenanigans by a president or vice president used to draw widespread cries of outrage. Before becoming president, Jimmy Carter put his peanut farm under control of a blind trust. Bill Clinton’s presidency was hit by a storm of scandal because of a modest investment in an Arkansas land deal. When Dick Cheney was George W. Bush’s vice president, his ties to Halliburton, a gargantuan military contractor, sparked controversy, with critics wondering whether the Bush-Cheney administration afforded the company, where Cheney had served as CEO, preferential treatment.

These episodes pale in comparison to what Trump is pulling off. The Paramount scheme ought to be a full-fledged scandal of its own. As is true for all the other acts of corruption Trump has been committing non-stop. But each one distracts from the other, and Trump’s flagrant breaches of ethics and his sleazy deals have become the new normal. They are dutifully reported by the media, but they have not yet become BFDs with political consequences for Trump and his Republican comrades.

Last month, Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes who had worked at the show for 26 years, resigned to protest Paramount’s increasing supervision of the program’s content—a move from the company that was presumably driven by its desire to appease Trump and Carr. And on the show itself, correspondent Scott Pelley delivered a commentary in support of Owens, noting that Paramount was threatening “the independence that honest journalism requires.” This was a public embarrassment for Paramount, but it didn’t seem to change its effort to reach a deal with Trump so its owners can bank billions.

All of this stinks. Yet there seem to be no roadblocks to the Trump-Carr caper. And with all the chaos and crisis being caused by Trump, Musk, and their minions, this racket barely stands out. Trump’s mobification of the US government is in plain sight—and with no end in sight.

How the Establishment Is Helping Trump’s Revenge-a-thon

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Let’s go back to June 2, 2024. That morning, Fox & Friends Weekend aired an interview with Donald Trump conducted by the show’s hosts—Pete Hegseth, Rachel Campos-Duffy, and Will Cain. Three days earlier, Trump was found guilty in his porn-star/hush-money case. (Remember, he’s a convicted felon!) And Campos-Duffy brought up a subject that’s long been of great interest to Trump: revenge. As I’ve written many times, Trump’s three most powerful psychological motivations are revenge, revenge, and revenge. (Last month in this newsletter, I traced some of his history as a “revenge junkie.”) In the aftermath of the verdict that found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide his $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels, Campos-Duffy gently prodded him: “You [previously] said, ‘My revenge will be success for America.’ You just had this verdict. Do you still feel the same?”

“I say it, and it sounds beautiful: ‘My revenge will be success,'” Trump said on a Fox News appearance in June 2024. “I mean that.”

“It’s a really tough question in one way because these are bad people,” Trump replied, referring to his critics and those who had brought criminal cases against him. “These people are sick.” He rambled about how tough he was and bragged about how during his first term he had fired FBI Director Jim Comey. He then returned to the issue of retribution: “Look it’s a very interesting question. I say it, and it sounds beautiful: ‘My revenge will be success.’ I mean that. But it’s awfully hard when you see what they’ve done. These people are so evil.”

A far-too-sympathetic Cain tried to push Trump toward a clearer answer. “I hear you struggling with it. I hear you say it’s a tough question—a bit unsure. You famously said, regarding Hillary Clinton, ‘Lock her up.’ You declined to do that as president.”

Trump responded: “I beat her. It’s easier when you win. They all said lock her up and I could’ve done it. But I thought that would have been a terrible thing. And then this [verdict] happened to me. So, I may feel differently about it. I can’t tell you. I’m not sure I can answer the question.”

Here was a more interesting and revealing exchange than most of Trump’s softball sessions with Fox sycophants. He was still tethered to his lifelong obsession with revenge—if they screw you, screw ’em back 10 times worse, he often said when asked to describe his key to business success—but he knew it was unwise to vow vengeance during his comeback campaign. Yet he could not promise to abandon revenge altogether, as if he realized it was impossible for him to pass up an opportunity for retribution. In a rare (for him) moment, he said he could not provide a firm answer. He seemed to be saying, It would be great to promise I won’t be fixated on vengeance if I’m elected president, but I know me—and that ain’t me.

Trump has abused the power of the presidency to go after his enemies in ways Richard Nixon could never have imagined.

It sure isn’t. Trump cannot escape his compulsions, and perhaps his most powerful one is to get even. It was always obvious that score-settling would be job No. 1, should he return to the White House. An insecure man who’s always had a chip on his shoulder the size of a mountain, he’s defined his life by his relentless accounting and pursuit of grudges. The only surprise has been that his revenge-a-thon has been so extensive, so vicious, and that it has been so successful and generated such little pushback.

Trump has abused the power of the presidency to go after his enemies in ways Richard Nixon could never have imagined. He has pulled security details and/or security clearances from his political opponents and critics, such as John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and others. He has extorted law firms that employed lawyers who previously challenged him politically or legally, and in mob-boss fashion he has forced them to pledge hundreds of millions of dollars in free legal services to his favorite causes (other than himself).

This past week, Trump signed executive orders targeting two officials who served in his first administration: Chris Krebs, who was then the nation’s cybersecurity chief, and Miles Taylor, a Department of Homeland Security official who anonymously wrote an op-ed and then a book criticizing Trump. The president called Taylor a traitor and instructed the Justice Department to investigate him. Krebs’ sin was having declared the 2020 election, which Trump lost, free of fraud. Trump went so far as to revoke security clearances for employees of SentinelOne, a cybersecurity firm where Krebs now works. Trump has also trained his ire on universities (including Columbia University, Brown University, Harvard University, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania, his alma mater), cultural institutions (the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian Institution), and assorted news organizations.

In any previous era, this orgy of vengeance would be the top political story. Yet with the flood of Trump-spurred outrages underway since January 20, it does not dominate the headlines. Moreover, the surrender of many of his targets undermines criticism of Trump’s revenge frenzy. Trump has used the capitulation of these law firms as proof that he is right to assail them as hotbeds of evil scheming that threatens the nation. On Wednesday, he claimed that the settlements signed by these firms—some previously associated with Democratic causes—was proof the 2020 election was stolen from him: “The election was rigged. It’s been proven…When you look at all these lawyers and law firms that are signing, giving us hundreds of millions of dollars. It was proven by so many different ways…It was a very corrupt election.”

Trump claims it’s proven that the 2020 election was rigged, citing the fact that law firms are giving him money

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-04-09T20:21:39.294Z

ABC News settled with Trump ($15 million); Meta settled with Trump ($25 million). CBS has been considering settling a case that Trump filed against its news division. It’s all encouragement for worse and more dangerous conduct.

Of course, Trump was lying about that. But embedded in that lie was an important point. By yielding and offering Trump hundreds of millions of dollars in pro bono work, these firms were indeed bolstering the notion they had done something wrong—whatever that may have been—when they had not. Each white flag waved in the face of a Trump attack strengthens him and his authoritarian bullying.

When Trump first targeted Paul, Weiss, that law firm explored joining with other firms to mount a united front against Trump’s assault. But it quickly folded, and that effort evaporated. Reuters reported on Thursday that the cybersecurity industry was declining to rally behind SentinelOne and Krebs. Columbia University complied with Trump strong-arming last month by agreeing to a list of onerous demands from Trump to regain the $400 million in federal funding he suspended. Was that sufficient? Absolutely not. In response, the Trump White House did not resume the funding and raised the prospect of slapping a consent decree on Columbia that would place the school even more so under the thumb of the administration. Feed the leopard, and the leopard wants more. (Brown, Princeton, and Harvard have told Trump to get lost.)

ABC News settled with Trump ($15 million); Meta settled with Trump ($25 million). CBS has been considering settling a case that Trump filed against its news division. It’s all encouragement for worse and more dangerous conduct. On Sunday night, after 60 Minutes aired two stories about Trump, he called on Brendan Carr, his loyalist running the Federal Communications Commission, to revoke CBS’ broadcast license. (In his first days as FCC chief, Carr ordered investigations of NPR and PBS.)

I don’t expect these careerist MAGA cultists to make a peep. But I confess I am disappointed in the Establishment.

What the last few weeks have taught Trump is not only that revenge is sweet; it’s also so easy! Why cease? Many of his foes fold, and there’s been no political cost for his perversions of power. Republicans and conservatives once were eager to decry excessive presidential flexing. They screamed about Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden issuing too many executive orders and governing through these directives. Remember the outrage when Biden tried to wipe out some student debt through an executive order? Now these fretters about presidential abuses are silent. As are those Republicans and right-wingers who in the past railed about the so-called “weaponization” of government, such as, notably, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). Trump is literally exploiting his position to demean and destroy his detractors and his perceived enemies, even ordering the Justice Department to investigate a critic. Yet…crickets.

I know: You are stunned by the hypocrisy.

I don’t expect these careerist MAGA cultists to make a peep. But I confess I am disappointed in the Establishment: those law firms, universities, media organizations, and corporate leaders who are either bending the knee or not protesting Trump’s arguably illegal blackmail operation. With their silence, they are all complicit in Trump’s war on America and enabling his march toward autocracy. “This is the Vichy moment. It’s a classic collaborationist dilemma,” says Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, which has not yet been assaulted by Trump. “You can have preserved your school, but you live in a sea of authoritarianism.”

Trump’s latest attack on a law firm (as of this writing) demonstrated how absurd and dangerous is the mad king. His target was Susman Godfrey, and the executive order he signed denounced the firm for alleged efforts to “weaponize the American legal system and degrade the quality of American elections.” Like similar directives, it did not specify the firm’s supposed misdeeds. But we know why Trump is after it. Susman Godfrey successfully represented Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News in the defamation case that accused the right-wing network of knowingly spreading Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and won the company a $787 million settlement from Fox. It also has represented Dominion in lawsuits against Rudy Giuliani, former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, and others who peddled pro-Trump conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. And it has handled Dominion’s similar lawsuit against Newsmax.

Here’s another way for Trump to keep fighting for his Big Lie—and to punish those who have helped expose it as utter bullcrap. (The executive order also excoriates Susman Godfrey for offering financial awards and employment opportunities to “students of color.”) As with the other firms on his hit list, Trump ordered the suspension of security clearances held by its attorneys, limited government interactions with the firm, and barred its lawyers’ access to federal buildings.

Susman, to its credit, is fighting back, as are Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, and Jenner & Block. These other law firms, each a target of a similar executive order, have sued Trump and won preliminary rulings that found Trumps’ directives violated the Constitution. In the lawsuit Susman filed against the Trump administration on Friday, it summarized the emergency at hand:

It ought to be a point of widespread consensus: A president should not use the authority of the federal government to pursue his personal vendettas.

In America we have, in the words of John Adams, a government of laws and not men. President Trump’s campaign of Executive Orders against law firms and others, including the Executive Order he signed on April 9, 2025 against Susman Godfrey, is a grave threat to this foundational premise of our Republic. The President is abusing the powers of his office to wield the might of the Executive Branch in retaliation against organizations and people that he dislikes. Nothing in our Constitution or laws grants a President such power; to the contrary, the specific provisions and overall design of our Constitution were adopted in large measure to ensure that presidents cannot exercise arbitrary, absolute power in the way that the President seeks to do in these Executive Orders.”

President Donald Trump holds a signed executive order in the White House on April 8.Evan Vucci/AP

The firm added: “If President Trump’s Executive Orders are allowed to stand, future presidents will face no constraint when they seek to retaliate against a different set of perceived foes. What for two centuries has been beyond the pale will become the new normal. Put simply, this could be any of us.”

More than 500 law firms and hundreds of law professors and former judges have filed amicus briefs to support the law firms Trump has attacked. Still, many leaders in the legal world and elsewhere have stayed mum, cowed by Trump. It ought to be a point of widespread consensus: A president should not use the authority of the federal government to pursue his personal vendettas. In fact, Trump’s flagrant abuse of power might constitute an impeachable offense.

So far, Trump has (mostly) gotten away with it. Even if he loses in court, he has blackballed law firms, and potential clients with interests before the federal government have been sent a signal: Don’t hire these guys. The acquiescence and silence, no doubt, emboldens Trump. Who know who he’ll come after next? Corporations, nonprofits, Hollywood studios, think tanks? With many in the powers-that-be class yielding to Trump’s revenge-palooza or declining to protest it, there’s likely no end in sight. After all, a junkie is always looking for the next fix.

Trump to the USA: There Is No Rule of Law

In the future, April 14, 2025, may well be recognized as a monumental day in US history. That is, of course, if there is honest history in the future. Because this is the day that President Donald Trump sent a clear message to the nation: There is no rule of law in the United States.

It happened in the Oval Office. Trump was hosting El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele—who has referred to himself as a “dictator”—and an obvious issue hovered over the session: the Trump administration’s wrongful deportation of Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, where he has been locked up in the country’s notorious CECOT megaprison for the last three weeks.

The US government has conceded that Abrego Garcia was rounded up and shipped off with other immigrants to El Salvador by mistake. Yet at this tete-a-tete, both leaders made clear they intended to do nothing to redress this act of profound injustice. Asked by a reporter if he would return Abrego Garcia to the United States, a grinning Bukele, sitting next to Trump, replied, “How can I return him to the United States? Am I going to smuggle him? Of course, I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?”

There is no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist or any sort of criminal.

At the meeting, Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to address the matter. She said Abrego Garcia’s return is “not up to us. If [El Salvador] wanted to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio piped up to dismiss the Supreme Court ruling that declared the Trump administration must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States—a ruling that backed much of US District Judge Paula Xinis’ order that required his “return” to the country. “No court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States,” Rubio huffed.

Never has such a toxic brew of cruelty, absurdity, and danger been on display in the White House. Trump and his crew were saying that the US government could mistakenly apprehend a resident, ship him to El Salvador to be imprisoned possibly for life in brutal conditions, and not have to take any steps to undo this violation of due process and decency—even after courts instructed it to do so.

Their message: The law doesn’t matter, we can do what we want. This is authoritarianism.

And their refusal was presented like a mordant joke. A Kafkaesque charade. An evil Catch-22. The Salvadoran autocrat said he couldn’t do anything; the Trump posse said, it’s not on us. So nothing can be done to prevent an innocent man from rotting in a hellhole. Of course, this is untrue. They don’t want to fix the horrific situation they created.

There are obvious reasons why. Were Abrego Garcia to be returned to the United States, he would become a symbol of the outrageous excesses of Trump’s deportation crusade. The Trump administration initially contended Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13, a violent transnational street gang. But in her ruling, Xinis pointed out that “the ‘evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie, and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York—a place he has never lived.”

If he were brought back to the United States, he would receive much attention in the media and serve as a constant reminder of Trump’s extremism and the perils of this campaign. His presence in the debate would keep raising questions about the program and future deportations. To prevent this bad PR, the White House wants him disappeared. And it appears that Bukele gets that and is eager to be an accomplice.

So the Trumpers are waging a war here to protect their deportation effort, and they don’t mind sacrificing Abrego Garcia. Hours before the White House meeting, senior Trump aide Stephen Miller, during an interview with Fox News, exclaimed that Abrego Garcia “was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador…This was the right person sent to the right place.” Yet Trump’s solicitor general, John Sauer, an ICE field office director, and a Justice Department lawyer each conceded during court proceedings that Abrego Garcia was erroneously removed to El Salvador. (Bondi’s Justice Department suspended the lawyer who made that admission.) Miller’s rant was in keeping with a top rule of the Trump gang: Never admit fault; never apologize.

The Supreme Court, in a 9-0 decision, ruled that Xinis’ “order properly requires the government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” The only way to ensure that—to abide by the court’s decision—would be for the Trump administration to bring him back, which, no doubt, it could do with a simple request to Bukele.

Yet, as of now, Trump, has not acted to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision. This is the moment that has long been anticipated: the authoritarian-minded Trump defying a court order and essentially claiming that he is above the law and that the rules do not apply to him. He is signaling that he can use government force in the most egregious manner and no one—no court—can stop him. What might he try next? Illegal arrests or deportations of American citizens? In this case, one man has been unjustly condemned to a nightmarish imprisonment. But now all of us are threatened.

Gabbard’s Pick to Run Counterterrorism Center Aided Start of a Right-Wing Paramilitary Group

When Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, went looking for someone to head the National Counterterrorism Center, she landed on Joe Kent, a former Green Beret, past CIA officer, and twice-failed MAGA congressional candidate in Washington state, who, as the Associated Press reported, “stands out for the breadth of his ties to a deep-seated extremist fringe.” During his first campaign in 2022, Kent consulted with white nationalist Nick Fuentes on social-media strategy. He also had a member of the Proud Boys on his campaign staff, and he embraced as a supporter and ally Joey Gibson, the leader of Patriot Prayer, a Christian nationalist group.

But his associations with far-right extremists began prior to his attempt to win a congressional seat. In 2020, Kent helped boost the organizing message of a new right-wing paramilitary outfit that called itself the 1st Amendment Praetorian.

On September 20, 2020, Robert Patrick Lewis, a former Green Beret and QAnon supporter, posted a long thread on Twitter (now X) that announced the formation of the group. Lewis declared that a band of “military, law enforcement & intel community veterans” had come together to protect the First Amendment rights of conservatives. He presented a harsh, conspiratorial, and paranoid view, claiming, “There are Marxist & leftist politicians aiming to lock down total control over our populace.” He asserted, “Their tyrannical, Marxist subversive groups such as ANTIFA & BLM demand total subservience to and adulation of their specific view of the world.” And he maintained the “corrupted Main Stream Media does their best to tarnish the reputation and destroy the lives of any public or private citizen who dares step up to them or fight back against their narrative.”

Lewis called on “military, law enforcement or intelligence community” veterans to join 1AP and fight back. In an apparent sign of support, Kent reposted this thread.

Lewis noted that 1AP would be providing security services for right-wing rallies and marches, including those “with a large number of high-profile, conservative VIPs speaking & attending.” For one event, he said he needed veterans to provide “physical security, intelligence/surveillance and to serve as team leaders for small security & intelligence and intelligence cells.” He promised, “we will keep your names confidential and our personnel records & communications will be encrypted.” He added, “This group was formed to protect attendees at President Trump’s campaign rallies.”

Soon after forming 1Ap, Lewis presented it not only as a security service for the right but as an intelligence operation. He told Fox News, “Our intelligence shows that no matter who wins the election, they [Antifa] are planning a massive ‘Antifa Tet Offensive,’ bent on destroying the global order they are not beholden to any one party. Their sole purpose is to create havoc, fear, and intimidation.” (No such uprising occurred.) After the election, 1AP claimed it was collecting evidence of fraud. On January 6, as the riot began at the Capitol, Lewis tweeted, “Today is the day the true battles begin.” (He later said he was at the Willard Hotel, not Capitol Hill, that day.)

Lewis’ 1AP did provide security at various events featuring far-right extremists. According to the final report of the House January 6 committee, during a December 12, 2020, rally of pro-Trump election deniers in Washington, DC, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, a right-wing, anti-government militia, “coordinated” with 1AP “to guard VIPs, including retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne.” (Both Flynn and Byrne were prominent promoters of the crackpot conspiracy theory holding that the 2020 election was stolen form Trump.) Months later, Lewis and 1AP provided security at a QAnon conference in Dallas, where Flynn essentially called for a military coup in the United States.

On social media, Kent has often boosted posts from Lewis. At one point each complimented the other for a podcast appearance. When Kent ran for Congress, Lewis expressed his support for him on social media. In a 2022 Telegram post, Lewis said that he knew Kent “personally” and “wish I could personally vote for him.” In January, 1AP posted on Telegram that there were “mumblings” that Kent could be appointed to lead the National Counterterrorism Center and that this “would be a very good thing. I could not support this more strongly.”

Mother Jones sent Kent, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Counterterrorism Center a list of questions about Kent’s support for 1AP and his relationship with Lewis. Neither Kent nor the agencies responded.

Kent has an established record as an extremist and promoter of conspiracy theories. During his 2022 run, he called for charging Dr. Anthony Fauci with murder to hold him “accountable” for the “scam that is Covid.” He promoted Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was rigged against him. He backed the idea the January 6 riot was orchestrated by the Deep State to discredit Trump and his supporters. He referred to the J6 rioters as “political prisoners.” He pushed the notion that billionaire Bill Gates was seeking to “control the food supply” and “control housing” to force people to “live in the pod eat the bugs.”

Like Gabbard, Kent has no experience in leading a large intelligence organization. (After serving in the Army, he was a field operative for the CIA for a short time.) Both Kent and Gabbard were on the infamous Signalgate chat. As head of the NCTC, Kent will have the responsibility for monitoring and preventing both foreign and domestic terrorism. But his past as a conspiracy theorist and his association with far-right extremists raise questions about his analytical abilities and his capacity to assess threats of domestic terrorism that arise from the right. His association with 1AP and Lewis is just one more reason to wonder about his judgment.