The Official 2nd Term Trump corruption thread

Trump's tax cuts fueled massive economic growth that Biden's economy benefitted from -- this works both ways. Surely you understand this. Although I'd point out that you think tax cuts (which speak to revenue/receipts) somehow boosted Biden's spending. That's just illogical.

I brought facts and comprehensive data, you brought incomplete, isolated examples that were logically inconsistent. I brought actual numbers, you brought insults. You lose. You have been bested in debate.

GOOD DAY

 

Trump is so transparent in everything he and Musk are doing. It's all about them, not us. They aren't even trying to hide all their conflicts of interest right now. I don't think his so called immunity covers illegal acts, conflicts of interest, and doing foreign and domestic deals, and taking bribes to put more money into their pockets.

As they fire whoever they want, give access to everyone's financial records, business contracts, and private personal information such as social security numbers to whoever they want, they are breaking laws.

Is he making your life better by saying he's going to buy the Gaza strip, do some ethnic cleansing, and move those Palestinians somewhere else? Is that bringing down the cost of your groceries, addressing affordable healthcare, or anything else more important in our own country? Nope. Jared and Trump have their eyes set on luxury resorts on the Gaza strip, and want to use our government dollars to clean up the rubble, remove any ordinance, and get it all nice and clean "without those Palestinians" so they can build their own luxury hotels to wine and dine foreign leaders at government expense while reaping in the profits.

It's the same with the Kushner Trump hotel ventures in Saudia Arabia, Serbia, Albania, and everywhere else abroad, it's deals and policies for dollars. Don't even get me started on what I think Musk has his eyes set on ensuring his companies get contracts here and abroad, and the minerals he needs, which Donald will help him get. Nah, no conflicts of interest there. They stroke each other's personal needs, all in the cover name of government efficiency. SMH. It's unlike anything we've ever seen before. It's corruption of the highest degree. I don't see how he can go a year without being impeached.

 

Elizabeth Warren jumps on board the Trump 2.0 corruption train

link will work for everyone

Elizabeth Warren Agrees With Trump: Big Banks Discriminate
The progressive senator from Massachusetts says banks have been shutting down too many accounts without explanation

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy...c?st=s6W2C5&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

 

Drain the swamp...

Pete Hegseth’s Venmo: Defense Contractors, UnitedHealth Execs, Fox, and Friends
The VA may be the next government agency to go dark, if Pete Hegseth’s digital Rolodex is anything to go by.

Prospect.org
by Daniel Boguslaw, Luke Goldstein
February 5, 2025


Ahead of his confirmation hearing earlier this month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s very public biography was the leading topic of discussion. Major media outlets and Democratic senators seized on a police report detailing a violent allegation of sexual assault, a $50,000 settlement, allegations of public intoxication, Christian crusader tattoos, and the now-secretary’s long-standing support of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL accused of committing a war crime.

But left mostly unexamined in the deluge of details about his sordid background was any scrutiny of the potential conflicts of interest hiding in plain sight, which offer insight into how he might approach key policy issues before the Pentagon.

Hegseth’s Venmo profile, left on public, reveals a digital Rolodex stocked with C-suite executives who have serious financial stakes in befriending the top dog at DOD. Despite the depiction of Hegseth by both Trump acolytes and Democrats alike as an anti-establishment crusader, his contacts are stocked with consummate Washington insiders from the political, media, and donor class.

The individual transactions on Hegseth’s Venmo account are private, but what remains public is his list of friends; at most, that can indicate accounts he’s repeatedly transacted with. At the very least, this list represents phone contacts that were transported into his account as Venmo friends. As Joe Biden found out the hard way, a publicly available network of associates of the head of the Pentagon could be a national-security risk.

The Defense Department did not return a request for comment.

Heavily featured in the list are a new generation of tech-centric defense contractors hailing from Silicon Valley, a break with the old-guard citadel in Northern Virginia. These include officials with GOP mega-donor Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril. While this cohort already receives billions of dollars’ worth of defense technology–related contracts, they’re hungry for more. They recently announced their intent to form a joint cartel to compete against legacy contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon for a wide array of government procurement and services.

Former Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher, who recently cashed in on his political connections as the new head of defense for Palantir, is on the list, as is Christian Brose, the chief strategy officer for Anduril. Brose was a former congressional staffer on the Armed Services Committee for Sen. John McCain.

Former Massachusetts Republican Sen. Scott Brown (who is musing about running again for a New Hampshire seat in the U.S. Senate in 2026) also appears to be friends with Hegseth. He now chairs a lobbying front group for the tech industry called the Competitiveness Coalition. In 2022, the coalition helped to kill an antitrust bill in Congress that would have more aggressively regulated the e-commerce business of Amazon, another major budding defense contractor. Amazon currently holds a multibillion-dollar contract with DOD for cloud services through its AWS operation.

Then there’s Richard Salgado, who served as Google’s director of law enforcement and information security until 2022 and now runs a private consultancy. Evan Bahr, a former adviser to Peter Thiel’s hedge fund who now works in venture capital, is also on the contact list.

Defense is not the only industry group well represented in Hegseth’s Rolodex with business decisions sitting before the Pentagon. Spread out across Hegseth’s Venmo are senior members of UnitedHealth Group, which is based in Minnesota, where Hegseth unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate in 2012. A UHG vice president, product director, and a public affairs consultant who has represented the health giant all show up as well.

The secretary of defense has been a long-standing proponent of privatizing the Department of Veterans Affairs, even advising the Trump White House during its first term to take steps to outsource more VA health operations, because government health care, in his words, “doesn’t work.” UnitedHealth is already the largest private administrator of Medicare Advantage, the private Medicare option, and would be uniquely well positioned to move into the veterans market should the opportunity present itself. In fact, it already has.

Optum, a subsidiary owned by UnitedHealth, currently serves as a third-party administrator for managing the VA’s Veterans Community Care Program (VCCP). The costs of this privatized expansion of VA care rose from $14.8 billion in 2018 to $28.5 billion in 2023. Year-over-year referrals to providers outside of the VA are expanding by double digits, including privately provided emergency care services for veterans, which make up more than a third of VCCP spending.

As Wendell Potter, the health executive turned industry whistleblower, put it succinctly, “For veterans enrolled in private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans run by UnitedHealth, Optum effectively double dips—collecting full payments from Medicare for the expected medical costs of that enrollee for the entire year while simultaneously charging the VA for coordinating private care for the same patient. According to a recent study from Harvard, as much as $1.3 billion in excess funding went to Medicare Advantage plans for veterans who, by and large, relied on VA care instead.”

Because the private sector is incentivized to wring as many reimbursements out of the federal government as possible, reporting shows that veterans are getting ill-advised prostate surgeries, marked-up chemo drugs, and unnecessary joint replacements, all on the taxpayer dime.

Meanwhile, Hegseth is on the record urging further privatization of the VA. Veterans groups “encourage veterans to apply for every government benefit they can ever get after they leave the service,” he told Fox News in 2019. “To me, the ethos of service is, I served my country because I love my country and I’m gonna come home and start the next chapter of my life. If I’ve got a chronic condition—mental, physical, otherwise—the government better be there for me, but otherwise I don’t want to be dependent on that.”

Continued...

 

Go pound some more sand and then howl at the moon woke clowns.

 

Even their flags are polite.

 

Marc Andressen and crypto bros want to axe her baby, the CFPB.

Her mention of it in the article is likely signaling for a deal.

 

2 weeks down. 206 more to go!

 

Populism => letting Russian gangsters launder their money here.

 

the funnny thing here is that - if Trump/Bondi were actually smarter - they *could* use the Anti-Klepto program to seize or threaten people who don't cooperate with other Trump-related corruption schemes.

 

Will the Biden family escape justice? A reckoning is coming to Washington

https://unherd.com/2025/02/will-the-biden-family-escape-justice/