Five Trump Scandals You’ve Probably Missed

Washington can only pay attention to a scandal or two at a time — add in a headline-grabbing crisis, whether it’s ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis, the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, and now two months of war with Iran that have spiraled into the greatest energy disruption in history — and there are all sorts of should-be-big-deal scandals that don’t get the oxygen or sustained media focus that they should.

In fact, one of the stranger aspects of this second Trump administration is how in any given week there are scandals playing out in Cabinet departments, sub-Cabinet posts, and outer-rings-of-Trump influence that never even make the front page — and yet most of them would be bigger than the biggest scandal to hit either the Obama administration or Biden administration and would have likely even led to resignations and firings in the first Trump administration.

And, no, I’m talking about the weird stuff — the latest story about RFK Jr. and dead animals or how he used to snort cocaine off toilet seats, or Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s latest imbroglio over the Epstein Files.

Nor am I talking about the latest Kash Patel allegations (that’s another column entirely, stay tuned!) or Tulsi Gabbard, both of whom have experienced seemingly monthly scandals since they took office.

Nor am I talking about all the corruption underway in the Trump family business — like the fact that Jared Kushner, who holds no public office and whose finances are entirely tied up in the Middle East, is leading the geopolitical negotiations over the war in Iran (here’s this weekend’s latest entry in that field of sickening corruption, if you missed it), or that Eric Trump, who is supposedly leading the totally-arms-length family business, is evidently accompanying his dad on the state visit to China next month. I also don’t mean all the insider trading that’s happening around Donald Trump’s decision-making.

I’m not even talking about all the corrupt and often illegal or even unconstitutional shenanigans that leaders like Office of Management and Budget chief Russ Vought, who gutted USAID and then used its funding to pay for his personal security, or Ric Grenell, who managed to destroy the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in a matter of just months.

I’m talking about basic betrayals of public office, trust, and confidence-in-leadership that are the table stakes of good government.

Today, I wanted to give a quick round-up of five of those currently-unfolding scandals that under any normal interpretation of democracy and American politics would be administration-shaking and yet there’s a good chance you haven’t even heard of at least three of them: 

1) The Labor Secretary and Her Husband :: You may not even know that Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a former House representative from Oregon and one-time mayor of Happy Valley, is even the Secretary of Labor, but across the last three months, she’s become the center of what it probably the strangest “normal” Cabinet scandal of the 21st Century. (Fun Fact: New DHS secretary Markwayne Mullin had such confidence in her integrity that he was actually the senator to “introduce” her at her confirmation hearing last year.)

If one pieces together the months the reporting, it appears that Chavez-DeRemer has been having an inappropriate relationship with a member of her security detail and the department’s Inspector General is investigating whether the relationship also involved “travel fraud” and official events set up merely to mask personal travel — an investigation that began with reports that she was a “boss from hell” and drinking during the workday and that has resulted in several top staff being placed on leave or departing entirely. Meanwhile, her husband has been hit with sexual misconduct charges by Labor Department employees and, evidently, been barred from even entering the building where his wife is the Cabinet secretary. The latest is allegations now that Chavez-DeRemer has been retaliating against the women who filed complaints against her husband.

As MS Now’s Carol Leonnig and Mychael Schnell reported, “At least three people have lodged formal workplace discrimination complaints against Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, alleging she created a toxic workplace and sought to retaliate against women who reported her husband for sexual misconduct in her office, according to two sources familiar with the allegations.”

Now, last week, the New York Times came out with a new round of apparent misconduct, including that the Inspector General has uncovered that “Chavez-DeRemer’s husband exchanged text messages with young female staff members, as did her father. Some of the young women were instructed by Ms. Chavez-DeRemer and the former deputy chief of staff to ‘pay attention’ to the men, according to people familiar with the investigation.” Last April, the Cabinet secretary’s father texted one female staffer, “Hearing u/r in town. Wishing you would let me know. I could have made some excuses to get out and show u around. Please keep this private.” Now Chavez-DeRemer only took office in early March, meaning that her dad was sending texts that inappropriate within weeks of her appointment.

So far Chavez-DeRemer was generally denied wrongdoing and the White House has issued its routine and bombastic statements of support, but the fact that a Cabinet Department is being paralyzed by an increasingly damning and far-reaching ethics investigation like this would have — under any normal media or political environment — led to far deeper coverage and resignations than it has so far. The closest first-term analogue is probably the extravagant use of private jets by HHS Secretary Tom Price, and he resigned quickly under pressure back then.

There’s some evidence that Trump might be considering replacing her, which would be consistent with his second-term trend of solely ousting his female Cabinet secretaries while allowing all his male appointees to run amok. Speaking of which:

2) Pete Hegseth’s War Profiteering? :: The Financial Times had a bombshell report earlier this month that a broker for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tried to buy defense funds ahead of the war in Iran. According to the FT’s reporting, Hegseth’s Morgan Stanley broker contacted the investment firm BlackRock in February and wanted to make a multimillion-dollar investment in a fund that included major defense contractors — the deal evidently didn’t happen, in part because the fund wasn’t yet open to Morgan Stanley clients. It’s unclear, though, whether the broker pursued another avenue.

“If this report is accurate, it would appear to represent an appalling effort to profit off of your knowledge of the President’s plans for war,” a group of Democratic senators wrote in a letter to Hegseth. “This would be a profound conflict of interest and a potential violation of your federal ethics agreement—and betrayal of the nation paying the price for this war and the troops you are sending into harm’s way.”

Hegseth’s spokesperson has denied the reports, but there’s been precious little follow-up since to know whether this story and scandal is (a) wrong in some fundamental way; (b) a strange one-off; or (c) the tip of the iceberg.

(The irony is that, so far it wouldn’t have been a very good investment — the fund, iShares Defense Industrials Active, is basically flat over the last three months, although I wrote last week about how there’s likely to be a lot more money flowing into defense contractors in the months and years ahead, so perhaps it’s too early to judge?)

3) The Border Patrol Chief’s Prostitution Scandal ::  The Washington Examiner reported earlier this month that Michael Banks, the chief of the Border Patrol, “was known among colleagues for taking regular trips abroad to engage in sex with prostitutes, according to six current and former Border Patrol employees…. Banks ‘bragged’ to colleagues while in his previous management role at Border Patrol about paying for sex with prostitutes while traveling in Colombia and Thailand over the course of a decade. Banks’ behavior was said to have been investigated by Customs and Border Protection officials twice, including last year, but the investigation ended abruptly while Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was in office, leading to more questions.”

Anyone who has read any of my reporting about the cultural rot inside Customs and Border Protection will find this an altogether unsurprising story at one level. Similarly, it doesn’t take much to understand why the leader of one of the largest and most sensitive federal law enforcement agencies engaged in activity that could be blackmail material is a bad idea.

To me what is most interesting about it, in fact, is who wrote and where: The reporter, Anna Giaritelli, has covered border issues for more than a decade and is one of the best-sourced on the beat — but her publication, the Examiner, normally approach coverage from a far-right-wing and sympathetic-to-the-border-patrol perspective. Giaritelli often scoops what one might call “friendly exclusives,” like the latest heinous crime committed by an “illegal alien,” and so sources coming forward to her with an explosive story like this says something interesting about the knives being out for Banks inside CBP.

And yet there’s been all but crickets since — the LA Times and Daily Beast both wrote up the Examiner’s scoop, but as far as I can tell, there’s been zero public congressional outrage or follow-up reporting.

4) Trump and the IRS: In a similar shocking-but-not-altogether-surprising vein, news came Friday that the IRS is in negotiations with Trump to settle his absurd $10 billion lawsuit against the agency. As you may recall, Trump had filed what was from the start an obvious shakedown suit against the agency for failing to protect his tax returns, which were taken by a government contractor and leaked to the New York Times. That reporting showed the various ways that Trump had manipulated income and tax returns in order that to claim that in the year he entered the White House he owed just $750 in taxes — and that in other years, he’d paid nothing at all.

The levels of impropriety here deeper than the layers of an onion. Trump has survived politically in office by awarding himself the double-standard that he can sue anyone he wants, but that no one can sue him or bring charges against him while he’s president. Here, though, he’s taken it one step further and is suing an agency that he controls. He is both the plaintiff and the defendant here — and it’s people he’s appointed to their jobs who are now negotiating against him for a settlement.

This couldn’t be a simpler scandal to sum up for the American people, if anyone cared to do so: This is Donald Trump ordering the looting of the public treasury for his own benefit.

5) Corey Lewandowski and Kristi Noem :: It sure feels like we’re only in the earliest stages of finding out how corrupt, chaotic, and just-plain-weird it was inside DHS during Kristi Noem’s tenure. Right now, a spotlight is finally beginning to shine on the inappropriate role Lewandowski appeared to play as the gatekeeper for large federal contracts inside DHS; rumors have circulated in D.C. for months that something was dirty amid how Trump’s longtime insider was parceling out hefty contracts.

As New York Magazine wrote last month, “Lewandowski’s alleged involvement with DHS contracts has been the second-most controversial aspect of his work as the department’s de facto chief of staff (the first is his widely rumored extramarital affair with Noem). Few people bought Homeland Security’s claims that Lewandowski was doing pro bono government work simply because he’s a selfless patriot.”

Now some reports are surfacing: Last month, NBC reported that Lewandowski told one of DHS’s largest contractors, GEO Group, which runs many of the detention facilities for ICE, among other roles, “that he wanted to be paid in exchange for protecting and growing GEO Group’s DHS contracts, according to a senior DHS official and three people familiar with their discussion.” The story alleged that in a different contract “hiring a Lewandowski-linked consultant was a condition of winning the contract.” Lewandowski has denied wrongdoing, but it’s clear that if Democrats take control of either the House or the Senate this fall, this will be one of the major areas of investigation.

Taken together, these five scandals — again, none of which are really getting any sustained media attention, and some of which you probably never even heard of — show how corrosive this second Trump administration has been to the most basic fundamentals of good governance, and how hard — but necessary — it will be to restore principles of impartiality, ethics, and personal conduct going forward. Rooting out “Trumpism” in the functioning of the US government is going to be a process that extends far long than Trump’s own term in office.

Going forward, I hope Democrats — and members of any party that care about the future of the United States — understand the lesson from Hungary’s elections last week: Fighting corruption needs to be a major plank of any future platform. The US has done tremendous damage to its “clean-hands” reputation over the last year and there must be a giant, sustained, organized effort to restore integrity and rebuild trust across government and the business community. Everyone who participated in corruption and graft should quake in their boots, and we must prosecute and imprison a vast cast of characters who profited from undermining trust and confidence in the US government.

I’ve argued for a decade that the Trump era is what happens when you systemically under-prosecute white collar crime. There is no Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Steve Bannon, or Trump Organization in an era where white collar crime is prosecuted with anything close to the vigor of the lowest-level drug cases in a major US city. It’s no surprise that everyone above — and a whole lot more people in the Trump administration and across corporate America — feels that they can get away with bad behavior; we are living through a catastrophic collapse in already-low-and-declining white collar criminal enforcement by the Trump Justice Department. This is not just, though, a story of Trump; every administration of this century bears meaningful responsibility for the abdication of serious white collar criminal enforcement.

We must, going forward, make white collar crime enforcement great again.

* * *

Okay, I said I was going to list just five scandals, but I can’t help also point to another half-scandal, half-just-plain-weird below-the-radar story that came out in recent weeks: How the US Marshals Service bent rules to allow Elon Musk’s personal security carry weapons in Washington, D.C., and government buildings last year during Musk’s time as the head of DOGE.

We’d known since last year that at least some members of Musk’s personal security had been deputized as US marshals, but NBC’s David Ingram and Ryan J. Reilly reported this month on newly released emails that showed the Marshals Service had initially objected because “Musk’s security detail did not meet what the Marshals Service considered to be the basic requirements to be deputized as federal law enforcement… because they had not successfully completed a ‘basic law enforcement training program’ or did not possess at least one year of law enforcement experience with an agency that had general arrest authority.”

Leadership at the Marshal Service eventually overrode the staff objections and proceeded with granting Musk’s team with law enforcement powers, powers they may or may not still have. The story is not altogether surprising when you’re talking about someone who for several months appeared to be operating as the unelected and unaccountable head of the US government, but it’s still wildly inappropriate to have private mercenaries given government authority.

To me, beyond that, the story is noteworthy for another reason: It provides an interesting window into “who” Musk must be relying upon for what the New York Times called his “mushrooming security apparatus.” While the NYT in that article said he was protected by a security team that “operates like a mini-Secret Service,” the Marshals’ documents indicate they’re not retired law enforcement or ex-Secret Service, as many high-net-worth-individual bodyguards usually are.

Instead, the marshals’ documents appear to confirm what the New York Times indicated in 2024: Musk, who funnels his security through a company called Foundation Security run by a former army “special forces weapons sergeant,” must be relying heavily or exclusively on ex-military — likely former special forces like Navy SEALs, Delta Force, or perhaps even international elite forces.

More soon!

GMG