It's "Five Scandals Friday" Time

A few weeks ago, I wrote about five under-the-radar scandals that were plaguing the Trump administration — including the metastasizing series of scandals around the labor secretary that resulted in her resignation.

One of those scandals got a big update this week: The IRS, which remember reports to the President, and Donald Trump, who remember IS the president, are in talks to settle Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the agency.

The result on the table right now, somehow, seems even more corrupt than I could have originally imagined: Trump is negotiating dropping the lawsuit in exchange for the agency ending its various audits of Trump and his companies, as well as what ABC News says is the “creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News. The commission overseeing the compensation fund would have the total authority to hand out approximately $1.7 billion in taxpayer funds to settle claims brought by anyone who alleges they were harmed by the Biden administration's ‘weaponization; of the legal system, including the nearly 1,600 individuals charged in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol attack as well as potentially entities associated with President Trump himself.”

This is Donald Trump basically getting the federal government to use your tax dollars to pay off the foot soldiers in his army who tried to overthrow the US government and peaceful transition of power on January 6^th , as well as rewrite the history of a whole number of righteous and real prosecutions and investigations of criminals associated with the Trump administration. In addition to being corrupt, it also appears that the proposed settlement is actually illegal.

One of my mantras over the last 16 months has been that Trump manages on a regular basis to have scandals as big and serious as Watergate once was for Nixon that never receive meaningful airtime or attention. This IRS story should be front-page, wall-to-wall news, but it’s not.

And it’s not even this week’s only scandal — here, again, are five entirely new scandals from this past week alone, each arguably bigger than any that affected the Biden administration during his entire four-year presidency:

1) Eric Trump Goes to China.

Among the heavy-hitting corporate leaders who accompanied Donald Trump to China this week was, well, the head of Donald Trump’s own company. Eric Trump was said to be joining the trip in a “personal capacity,” but it’s hard to square the years of performative outrage the Republicans had over the price of Hunter Biden’s paintings when in the Trump era the president’s son is negotiating deals overseas under the color of selling access to the president’s inner circle — deals like the recent announcement of Trump Tower Tiblisi, which has just as many sketchy financial backers as one would expect. Let’s remember last fall, when Indonesia’s president asked Trump on a hot mic: “Can I meet Eric?”

In a very-much-related story, Bloomberg this week has some amazing reporting about how “disappointed” the Middle Eastern royal families and investors are in their bribes investments funneled to Jared Kushner. What makes the story so amusing to read is how the royal families are actually getting good investment returns from their Kushner investments — but they’ve been screwed geopolitically by Trump’s war with Iran. “The investments in Jared’s firm were meant to anchor ties with the Trump family,” one expert told Bloomberg. “The Gulf states likely felt very angered, if not let down, that the US didn’t fully consider their security needs.”

As Bloomberg reports, “The discontent stops short of a full rupture, particularly with the conflict still unresolved. But government officials and wealth fund executives say that the Iran war has exposed the limits of a business partnership that Gulf royals have spent billions to nurture, according to people familiar with the matter.”

The tl;dr: They paid what they thought was protection money to a mafia racket — and turned out to just have bought into a standard investment fund.

Speaking of Trump family grifting:

2) The Grift of the Trump Phone.

There’s also been some amazing reporting in recent days about how the much-touted “Trump Mobile Phone,” announced amid extensive fanfare last year and which supposedly garnered hundreds of thousands of $100 preorders, has turned ever more clearly into pure vaporware. From the start, it seemed clear that the phone would never exist as advertised — a $499 made-in-America mobile device — but in the 11 months since, the promised shipping deadlines have passed one after another, Trump Mobile’s statements have gotten squishier, and there’s still no sign that the phone actually exists at all.

In fact, the eagle eyes at Judd Legum’s Popular Information compiled this week how the Terms of Service for the “Trump phone” were updated last month to make clear that the phone may never exist. The language on the website now reads, “A preorder deposit provides only a conditional opportunity if Trump Mobile later elects, in its sole discretion, to offer the Device for sale. A deposit is not a purchase, does not constitute acceptance of an order, does not create a contract for sale, does not transfer ownership or title interest, does not allocate or reserve specific inventory, and does not guarantee that a Device will be produced or made available for purchase.”

In so many ways, Trump Mobile is indicative of the low-level grifting and corruption that pervades every corner of the Trump organization, both the company and the administration. This has been the Trump business model for a generation — one that sees ordinary Americans as easy marks.

3) Katie Miller Goes To Paramount?

Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen, runs what is regarded as one of the worst podcasts on the far-right — despite getting high-level guests, it has atrociously small viewership, like 3,700-viewers-of-its-most-recent-episode low. Axios, which has become something of the house organ for MAGA, broke the news that she is now being considered for a distribution deal with Paramount — which, of course, in a fact completely unmentioned in the Axios story, just happens to need presidential approval for its $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers Discovery. We have gotten so accustomed in such short order to the idea of companies funneling to Trump officials what are clear to any objective observer as nothing more than bribes — “buying” the lackluster podcast of the wife of Trump’s top advisors, after all, feels like penny ante stuff after Amazon directly paying the First Lady for a documentary about her life.

4) Kash Patel Goes Snorkeling.

One thing you have to say about Kash Patel is that he’s somehow able to find creatively new and astonishingly dumb ways to embarrass himself — each story somehow more cringeworthy than the last, from needing a woman’s jacket to wear at the Charlie Kirk shooting, to partying at the Olympics, to wearing mortifying custom sneakers to handing out his custom bottles of bourbon. Now, in one of the weirdest Kash Patel scandals to arrive yet, the Associated Press reported Thursday evening that the FBI director went on a “VIP Snorkel” at the USS Arizona gravesite in Pearl Harbor during a stopover in Hawaii. As Stacey Young of Justice Connection told the AP, “It fits a pattern of Director Patel getting tangled up in unseemly distractions — this time at a site commemorating the second deadliest attack in U.S. history — instead of staying laser-focused on keeping Americans safe.”

Which, speaking of strange and inappropriate on-the-government-clock vacation activities: 

5) Sean Duffy’s Great American Road Trip.

I’m old enough to remember when Fox News spent weeks decrying the audacity of Pete Buttigieg taking any time off for paternity leave when he and his husband Chasten adopted their newborns. Now, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, a former Fox News star married to a current Fox News star, has announced that he and his family secretly taped a multi-part “reality show” called the Great American Road Trip to celebrate and promote the nation’s 250^th birthday this summer. That’s weird, sure, but here’s the scandal part: Guess who paid for the production costs?! Oh, just the industry he regulates!

Filming for the road trip was worked around Duffy’s official travel, and evidently done by the same production company that he once worked with on Road Rules, the reality show that launched his career and where he met his wife on a subsequent series, Road Rules: All-Stars. The costs for the glorified Duffy family vacation were paid for by a totally independent nonprofit that just so happened to draw on giant six-figure sponsorships from companies like Toyota, Boeing, and Royal Caribbean that are regulated by the Transportation Department and which have also seen recent investigations by the department.

I know the can-you-imagine comparisons are exhausting, but I can imagine all too clearly how Fox News would have covered the idea of Pete and Chasten Buttigieg having a family road trip being paid for by Boeing, Toyota, and Royal Caribbean.

* * *

One other update to the last “five scandals” piece: The chief of the Border Patrol, who you may remember was having some problems due to overseas prostitutes, suddenly announced his retirement yesterday. There’s some evidence that Banks’ retirement after 16 months atop the Border Patrol is a sign that Markwayne Mullin is “cleaning house,” as the Washington Examiner puts it: “One senior administration official told the Washington Examiner that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin met privately with National Border Patrol Council President Paul Perez on Wednesday to discuss Banks, in light of a second news story officials anticipated would come out on Thursday and paint Banks in a negative light. Perez and the union were heavily involved in selecting Banks to lead Border Patrol when Trump took office.”

If so, that would be a good sign, but a new letter and investigation by the Southern Border Communities Coalition shows that the rampant corruption and misconduct at the Border Patrol goes deep — sexual misconduct charges also recently plagued the second-highest and third-highest ranking officials at the Border Patrol.

If — and this is a very big if — Markwayne Mullin is serious about ethical reform and combatting misconduct at the Border Patrol it would be an unabashedly and unreservedly welcome development.

For now, though, there’s still far too much scandal across too much of this administration — a lot of it the type that will make it very hard to put Humpty Dumpty back together again later.

GMG