Donald Trump staffed his campaign with "unsavory" individuals and attempted to advance them into high positions in government. He succeeded in engaging his daughter and son-in-law in White House duties which is an act of nepotism at a minimum.
Unsavory: distasteful and unacceptable as having broken the law.
Here are the supporting points.
1. Indicted by the Special Prosecutor
"The full list of known indictments and plea deals in Mueller’s probe
1) George Papadopoulos, former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, pleaded guilty in October to making false statements to the FBI.
2) Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, pleaded guilty in December to making false statements to the FBI.
3) Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chair, was indicted in October in Washington, DC on charges of conspiracy, money laundering, false statements, and failure to disclose foreign assets — all related to his work for Ukrainian politicians before he joined the Trump campaign. He’s pleaded not guilty on all counts. Then, this Thursday, Mueller filed a new case against him in Virginia, with tax, financial, and bank fraud charges.
4) Rick Gates, a former Trump campaign aide, and Manafort’s longtime junior business partner was similarly indicted on conspiracy, money laundering, and false statements charges in Washington and a plethora of new tax and financial charges this Thursday in Virginia. But he has now agreed to a plea deal with Mueller’s team, pleading guilty to just one false statement charge and one conspiracy charge.
5-20) 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies were indicted on conspiracy charges, with some also being accused of identity theft. The charges related to a Russian propaganda effort designed to interfere with the 2016 campaign. The companies involved are the Internet Research Agency, often described as a “Russian troll farm,” and two other companies that helped finance it. The Russian nationals indicted include 12 of the agency’s employees and its alleged financier, Yevgeny Prigozhin.
21) Richard Pinedo: This California man pleaded guilty to an identity theft charge in connection with the Russian indictments, and has agreed to cooperate with Mueller.
22) Alex van der Zwaan: This London lawyer pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI about his contacts with Rick Gates and another unnamed person based in Ukraine."
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/20/17031772/mueller-indictments-grand-jury
2. The probe into Manafort and Gates’s Ukrainian work has ensnared one other person so far: Alex van der Zwaan.
"Van der Zwaan was a lawyer for the London office of the New York law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. The son-in-law of a Russian oligarch, he worked with Manafort and Gates on behalf of Ukraine’s government in 2012, to write a report defending the government’s prosecution of a former prime minister."
Vox.com
3. "President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign, according to three advisers to the White House briefing on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.
The meeting was also attended by the president’s campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, as well as by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner recently disclosed the meeting, though not its content, in confidential government documents described in The New York Times."
4. Kershner is working in The White House without a proper security clearance. Trump defends him, though Kershner has yet to pass security muster.
5. Trump's positive behavior toward Russia is inexplicable except when considering that he may be compromised by the Russians.
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Add to this story that the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, is up to his eyeballs in conflict in administering justice.
ReplyDeleteThe Washington Post reports:
ReplyDelete"Top Justice Dept. official alerted White House two weeks ago to ongoing issues in Kushner’s security clearance
A top Justice Department official alerted the White House two weeks ago that significant information requiring additional investigation would further delay the security clearance process of senior adviser Jared Kushner, according to three people familiar with the discussion.
The Feb. 9 phone call from Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to White House Counsel Donald McGahn came amid growing public scrutiny of a number of administration officials without final security clearances. Most prominent among them is Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, who has had access to some of the nation’s most sensitive material for the last year while waiting for his background investigation to be completed.
A week after the call from Rosenstein, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly announced that staffers whose clearances have not been finalized will no longer be able to view top-secret information — meaning that Kushner could stand to lose his status as early as today."
The larger issue is that the Republican Party failed to properly vet their candidate and ultimately that undermined the integrity of Congress and the Executive Branch.
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