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Showing posts with label crypto currency. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crypto currency. Show all posts
Lindsey Graham's late-stage evolution from Trump foe to Trump sycophant is well known. But David Corn is here to remind us of another important legacy: Graham's acrobatic flip-flop on the Trump-Russia scandal.
From David:
Eventually Graham got on board with Trump’s Russia denialism. He mounted a side investigation that focused not on Putin’s operation but on the FBI’s investigation of the Russian operation and the Steele dossier, the series of memos produced by a former British intelligence official that contained uncorroborated allegations of Trump-Russia collusion. Attacking the FBI probe and the Steele dossier—which was paid for by an opposition research firm retained by a lawyer working for the Clinton campaign—became the Republican’s main tactic to divert attention from Putin’s assault on the 2016 campaign and from Trump’s complicity (that is, his false insistence that there had been no Russian intervention).
This isn't just some minor detail. In fact, it is key to understanding what was most important to Graham: the influence gained by willfully serving a demagogue. It is how a man goes from calling Donald Trump a "race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot" to closely trailing God.
How the man working to make the defense secretary richer helped lay the groundwork for Trump's disastrous attack.
BY DAN FRIEDMAN AND GLEN STELLMACHER
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There’s a new private club in DC for the Trump elite. Top-line memberships cost $500,000. But for five figures, the right folks can still join and mingle and hobnob with members of the Trump family and administration. One of the owners is Donald Trump Jr. And the first member is David Sacks, the tech titan who’s President Trump’s crypto and AI czar. No doubt, lobbyists, donors, and others looking for favorable treatment from Trump will sign up and help line Jr.’s pockets.
Our reporters David Corn and Russ Choma dug into this story and found the fellow who set up the club is a San Francisco real estate developer named Glenn Gilmore. For years, he’s been a business associate of Sacks, who says he has no ownership interest in the club. As David and Russ write:
[T]he arrangement with this new club seems rather comfy: The president’s crypto and AI adviser is promoting a plutocratic club that stands to earn millions of dollars in revenue for its owners (which includes a son of the president)—with some of that money presumably coming from the checkbooks or crypto wallets of lobbyists, donors, and others who might want favorable policies and decisions from the Trump administration. And a business associate of his is a key part of the action and perhaps in a position to benefit financially.
Government ethics experts have raised questions about the club. As the piece puts it, “Trump once proclaimed he would drain the swamp in Washington. Instead, it looks as if his kin and crew are developing it.”
The fellow in charge is a business associate of crypto and AI czar David Sacks—and that raises possible ethics questions.
BY DAVID CORN AND RUSS CHOMA
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A day after videos emergedof ICE agents chasing after farmworkers across California, forcing immigrants to hide in fields, President Donald Trump appeared to say, in a Truth Social post, that he would not fully pursue his core policy proposal of mass deportation. He had sympathy, if not for the workers then for the agricultural industry—his fellow bosses—who needed the hunted men for labor power.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long-time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” he wrote on Truth Social, before issuing a vague declaration, “Changes are coming!” Speaking to reporters later on Thursday, Trump reiterated the sentiment. “Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers…They’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great.”
A quick look at similar remarks should disabuse you of such hope.
But what changes? Had a frazzled “Farmer” person” in the Hotel and Leisure business” gotten through to the president? The Department of Homeland Security did not have clear answers. “We will follow the President’s direction and continue to work to get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America’s streets,” Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokesperson, told Mother Jones.
From one angle, it could seem as though Trump, amid the explosive escalation in his mass deportation agenda that has resulted in more military personnel in the city of Los Angeles than Syria and Iraq combined, sees the terror of his agenda. That a racist plan to deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States is now actively ruining industries, including some of our most critical. (He clearly did not heed my colleague Isabela Dias’ many warnings.) That maybe, Trump has gone too far.
But a quick look at similar remarks should disabuse you of such hope.
In April, Trump proposed something comparable, and equally vague. “So a farmer will come in with a letter concerning certain people, saying they’re great, they’re working hard,” he rambled in a Cabinet meeting. “We’re going to slow it down a little bit for them, and then we’re going to ultimately bring them back. They’ll go out. They’re going to come back as legal workers.”
It wasn’t clear what Trump meant by “slow[ing] it down a little bit” or what visa he was proposing with the prospect of returning as a legal worker. Immigrants across the country have been disappeared and physically terrorized ever since; the country is now seeing the clear hardline approach of Stephen Miller, who has reportedly driven the administration to workplace raids, which set off the protests in LA.
That confusion, both in April and today, is all but certain to be intentional. Because, while Trump’s politics teem with many abhorrent themes, the singular idea that this country has gone to hell because of immigrants, and we must take it back from them, is what animates his entire worldview. Sure, some empathetic, moderating position might emerge on his social media platform. But chaos and confusion are just a piece of this overall plan.
