Category: Policies

Trump Shifts Course on Egypt, Praising Its Authoritarian Leader

Ever since he seized power in a military takeover nearly four years ago, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt has been barred from the White House. But President Trump made clear on Monday that the period of ostracism was over as he hosted Mr. Sisi and pledged unstinting support for the autocratic ruler.

“We agree on so many things,” Mr. Trump said as he sat beside Mr. Sisi in the Oval Office. “I just want to let everybody know in case there was any doubt that we are very much behind President el-Sisi. He’s done a fantastic job in a very difficult situation. We are very much behind Egypt and the people of Egypt. The United States has, believe me, backing, and we have strong backing.”

In that one moment, Mr. Trump underscored a fundamental shift in American foreign policy since he took office. While his predecessors considered authoritarians like Mr. Sisi to be distasteful and at times shied away from them, Mr. Trump signaled that he sees international relations through a transactional lens. If Egypt can be a partner in the battle against international terrorism, then in Mr. Trump’s calculation, that is more important to the United States than concerns over its brutal suppression of domestic dissent.

Nothing could have made Mr. Sisi happier. He arrived from Cairo with a list of financial, security and political requests, but effectively he got what he really wanted in the six minutes that news media photographers were permitted in the Oval Office to record the visit that President Barack Obama had denied him. The picture of the general-turned-president in the White House, hosted by an American leader lavishing praise on him, was the seal of approval he had long craved, the validation of a strongman on the world’s most prominent stage.

That big hug was just what Mr. Sisi’s government sought, said Eric Trager, a scholar on Egypt at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “It wants to see the White House legitimate it, and set it on a new course.”

The scene provided a powerful counterpoint to Mr. Sisi’s many critics, in Egypt and abroad, who know him as the leader of the military takeover that removed an elected president, oversaw a vicious security operation in which hundreds of protesters were gunned down in the streets of Cairo and has cemented his authority by filling prisons with his opponents while strangling the free press.

It was the first visit by an Egyptian president to Washington since 2009, when the guest was the autocratic former president Hosni Mubarak, then in the waning years of his rule — an era now viewed by many Egyptians as a time of relative freedom, prosperity and security. Mr. Mubarak was pushed out in 2011 by a wave of street protests and succeeded, in a democratic election, by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi. Taking advantage of popular discontent with Mr. Morsi two years later, the military, led by Mr. Sisi, then a general, took power and Mr. Sisi became president in a pro forma election that awarded him 97 percent of the vote.

Little of that seems to matter to Mr. Trump, though, who has showcased his determination to reshape America’s relationship with a number of Middle Eastern countries, regardless of human rights concerns. In his public remarks on Monday, Mr. Trump made no mention of such issues; aides said he believed discussing them in private might be more effective.

“I just want to say to you, Mr. President, that you have a great friend and ally in the United States and in me,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Sisi.

Mr. Sisi responded in kind, sometimes in language mimicking a Trumpian sales pitch. “You will find Egypt and myself always beside you in bringing about an effective strategy in the counterterrorism effort,” he said. He also vowed to support Mr. Trump’s effort to negotiate peace between Israelis and Palestinians, calling it an effort to “find a solution to the problem of the century in the deal of the century.”

While Egypt has long been a crucial American ally in the Middle East, Mr. Trump’s admiration for Mr. Sisi seems to mirror in some ways his appreciation for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as a fellow tough figure. After their first meeting in September, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly when Mr. Trump was running for president, he hailed Mr. Sisi as “a fantastic guy” and spoke admiringly of his iron-fisted methods. “He took control of Egypt. And he really took control of it,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network.

Mr. Sisi has rejected suggestions that he rules like a dictator. Speaking to The Financial Times in December, he said he was “building love between Egyptians, a wave of respect for the other that will start in Cairo and spread across the region.”

Yet as he was preparing to meet Mr. Trump on Monday, a court in Cairo sentenced 17 people to jail terms of five years each for taking part in street protests in January 2015.

In Rome, the parents of Giulio Regeni, an Italian postgraduate student found dead in Cairo last year, held a news conference to press their longstanding accusations that Egyptian security officials had abducted, tortured and killed their son, probably on suspicion that he was a spy. The family’s lawyer, Alessandra Ballerini, said they had identified two high-ranking Egyptian national security officials said to be implicated in the case, but declined to give further details.

Beyond a shared love for harsh rhetoric warning against the dangers of jihadist Islam, Mr. Trump has striking similarities with Mr. Sisi’s brand of authoritarianism in Egypt, according to Middle East analysts. Both leaders came to power promising splashy projects derided by experts — an expensive extension of the Suez Canal for Mr. Sisi, and a giant wall along the Mexico border for Mr. Trump. In speeches, both leaders have been ridiculed for making exaggerated claims, embracing conspiracy theories and speaking in a limited rhetorical style.

Egyptians also often mock Mr. Sisi for speaking in a rustic form of Arabic that contrasts with the formal version usually favored by national leaders. Mr. Trump has the grammar and vocabulary of a fifth-grade student, one study last year found.

Both leaders are notoriously thin-skinned and project a sense of unfiltered self-regard. In recent months, Mr. Trump branded critics in the “fake news” media as the “enemy of the American people”; last year, in a fit of exasperation, Mr. Sisi told Egyptians, “Please, do not listen to anyone but me!”

Yet in many other ways there are vast differences between their styles. While Mr. Trump wrestles with a hostile media and recalcitrant factions in his Republican party, Mr. Sisi’s government has imprisoned dozens of journalists — fewer only than China and Turkey, according to press freedom groups — while the national Parliament is stuffed with his supporters.

It remains far from clear what the two leaders can offer each other in concrete terms. Mr. Sisi has resisted loud appeals to release Aya Hijazi, an American aid worker imprisoned in Egypt, while Mr. Trump’s White House is considering slashing foreign aid to countries including Egypt’s $1.3 billion in military assistance. The Trump administration also appears to have gone cold on proposals to designate the country’s Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.

While human rights advocates criticized Mr. Trump, a lawyer for Ms. Hijazi said her supporters had been working with his administration to highlight her case and those of others held. “We are confident that the case is being prioritized at the highest levels of the United States government,” said the lawyer, Wade McMullen, managing attorney at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, an advocacy center.

One thing Mr. Sisi desperately wants, according to Western officials in Cairo, is for Mr. Trump to reinstate a military financing deal, suspended under Mr. Obama in 2015, allowing Egypt to effectively buy, on credit, the tanks, warplanes and other large-ticket military items it desires. Such a deal would give Mr. Sisi something to bring home to his backers in the military.

But experts say that while a military finance deal might please American defense contractors, it could frustrate American counterterrorism goals by making Egypt less likely to pour resources into smaller weapons that are better suited to battling Islamic State insurgents in Sinai.

“If Trump is really interested in getting the Egyptians to fight radical Islam, giving them more tanks will not help our goals,” said Amy Hawthorne of the Project on Middle East Democracy, a Washington nonprofit that has been sharply critical of Mr. Sisi.

Some experts worry that Mr. Sisi’s hard-knuckled approach to Islamism — banning all forms of political Islam, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as fighting jihadist violence — could ultimately feed a new wellspring of radicalism that could blow back on the United States.

“The authoritarian bargain the U.S. has struck with Egypt might seem to be the right thing, but it never pays off in the long run,” Ms. Hawthorne said. “It’s not just about being on the wrong side of history, but about over-investing in a regime that is fueling radicalization that will ultimately harm U.S. interests.”

(h/t New York Times)

Reality

This isn’t the first time Donald Trump praised other authoritarian leaders while calling the democratically elected officials in Congress and the White House “weak.”

  • After receiving praise from Vladimir Putin, Trump showed lots of love for the authoritarian Russian President in return saying he’ll get along fine with him.
  • Praised North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un on how well he killed all of his uncles in order to take power.
  • In the midst of a brutal civil war where authoritarian Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, Trump was kind enough to give Bashar a grade of ‘A’ for leadership.
  • During the CNN-Telemundo Republican candidates’ debate in February that while Gaddafi was “really bad,” his tactics were effective and we would be so much better off if Gaddafi were in charge.
  • Trump tweeted a quote from former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. When asked about being associated with a fascist Trump responded what difference does it make if it was Mussolini or somebody else — it’s a very good quote.
  • And Trump has a history of praising Saddam Hussein in interviews and at rallies.

Gadhafi, Hussein, Bashar, Un, and Putin all have committed atrocities against their own people and were among the world’s worst human rights abusers.

President Trump Just Signed Off on Killing Your Internet Privacy Protections

President Trump signed into law a resolution that repealed protections requiring Internet service providers to get your permission before collecting and sharing data. These protections — which had not yet gone into effect — were approved by the Federal Communications Commission in the final days of the Obama administration.

The providers have data on your web browsing history, app usage and geo-location.

Providers would also have been required to notify customers about the types of information collected and shared.

Trump’s move doesn’t come as a surprise: the White House said last week that repealing the protections will create an “equal playing field” between Internet service providers and tech companies

Opponents of the privacy rules argued they would place an undue burden on broadband providers while leaving large Internet companies like Facebook (FB, Tech30) and Google (GOOG) free to collect user data without asking permission.

“President Trump and Congress have appropriately invalidated one part of the Obama-era plan for regulating the Internet,” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who was appointed by Trump, said in a statement. “Those flawed privacy rules, which never went into effect, were designed to benefit one group of favored companies, not online consumers.”

But rather than apply similar protections to more businesses, the resolution passed by Republican-controlled Congress scraps the rules entirely.

Democrats and privacy advocates have argued this approach effectively hands over the customer’s personal information to the highest bidder.

(h/t CNN)

Trump Sunday Morning Tweet Promises ‘Love and Strength’ of GOP Will Eventually Take Away Obamacare

President Donald Trump was off and running on Twitter Sunday morning, once again attacking the media for saying his plan to repeal and replace Obamacare is “dead.”

Ten days after House Majority leader Paul Ryan (R-WI) pulled his Trumpcare bill in the face of certain defeat and Trump administration officials said the president was moving on to budget and tax matters, Trump declared on Sunday that he still intends to get rid on Obamacare.

The president then asserted the real story the press should be covering is “surveillance and leaking.”

“Anybody (especially Fake News media) who thinks that Repeal & Replace of ObamaCare is dead does not know the love and strength in R Party!” Trump tweeted before adding, “Talks on Repealing and Replacing ObamaCare are, and have been, going on, and will continue until such time as a deal is hopefully struck.”

Trump’s mention of “love and strength in the R party” strikes a conciliatory tone from his recent Twitter attacks on the hard right Republican Freedom Caucus that torpedoed Trumpcare.

On Saturday, Trump’s social media director Dan Scavino called for the defeat of Freedom Caucus Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) to be defeated at the polls.

You can see Trump’s Sunday tweets below:

(h/t Raw Story)

Icahn Raises Ethics Flags With Dual Roles as Investor and Trump Adviser

Since Carl Icahn, the billionaire investor, was named by President Trump as a special adviser on regulatory matters, he has been busy working behind the scenes to try to revamp an obscure Environmental Protection Agency rule that governs the way corn-based ethanol is mixed into gasoline nationwide.

It is a campaign that fits into the charge Mr. Trump gave Mr. Icahn, to help the nation “break free of excessive regulation.” But there is an additional detail that is raising eyebrows in Washington: Mr. Icahn is a majority investor in CVR Energy, an oil refiner based in Sugar Land, Tex., that would have saved $205.9 million last year had the regulatory fix he is pushing been in place.

Mr. Icahn, known internationally for his pugnacious and persistent approach to activist investing, has brought that same technique to his new role. He quizzed Scott Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general, about the ethanol rule when Mr. Icahn helped interview Mr. Pruitt for the E.P.A. job. Mr. Icahn later reached out to Gary D. Cohn, Mr. Trump’s top economic adviser, to raise the issue. Mr. Icahn said he even had a telephone conversation in February with Mr. Trump himself.

The blitz has already generated at least one clear outcome: Since Mr. Trump was elected president with Mr. Icahn’s very vocal support and nearly $200,000 in political contributions to Republican causes — the stock price of CVR Energy has soared. By late December, it had doubled. It is still up 50 percent from the pre-election level, generating a windfall, at least on paper, of $455 million as of Friday.

The merging of private business interest with government affairs — aspects of which have previously been reported by Bloomberg, but which The New York Times has found further evidence of — has generated protests from ethics experts in Washington, as well as certain Senate Democrats. They consider Mr. Icahn’s dual roles perhaps the most troubling conflict of interest to emerge so far in the new administration.

“This is a mile out of bounds by any standard,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, who, along with other Democrats, sent a letter Monday to Mr. Icahn, the Office of Government Ethics and the Department of Justice to object to Mr. Icahn’s dual roles, and to ask new questions. “Were the shoe on the other foot, Republicans would be having fits about any Obama relationship like this.”

Mr. Icahn, 81, in a series of interviews in the last week, was unapologetic. He said he was not subject to conflict of interest rules because he is an informal, unpaid adviser to Mr. Trump, not an official government employee.

“I’m not making any policy,” Mr. Icahn said. “I am only giving my opinion.”

Kelly Love, a White House spokeswoman, also dismissed the criticism. She pointed to the December news release when Mr. Trump first named Mr. Icahn “special adviser to the president” on regulatory matters. “He is simply a private citizen whose opinion the president respects and whom the president speaks with from time to time,” Ms. Love said in a written statement. “Mr. Icahn does not have a position with the administration nor a policy-making role.”

Both compared Mr. Icahn’s role to corporate executives serving on federal advisory commissions, who are expected to argue for changes in federal policies while remaining corporate officers. But CVR Energy, of which Mr. Icahn owns 82 percent, is just one entry on a growing list of potential conflicts that have surfaced since his December appointment.

Mr. Icahn has provided input to the White House on the selection of the new head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He is a major investor in companies that have recently been targeted for enforcement action or investigation by the S.E.C., including CVR Energy and Herbalife, the nutritional beverage company, of which he owned about 24 percent at the end of last year.

Mr. Icahn has also pressed Freeport-McMoRan, the global mining company he helps run as a result of his large investment, to more aggressively fight back against the government of Indonesia, the company’s chief executive, Richard Adkerson, said in an interview Friday. Indonesia is challenging Freeport’s contract to extract gold and copper from one of the world’s largest mines.

The company, as that pressure from Mr. Icahn and other investors has intensified, has been asking for help from the State Department, Commerce Department and White House, Mr. Adkerson said.

Mr. Icahn is “very concerned about what is happening in Indonesia,” Mr. Adkerson told reporters in Indonesia last month, adding that he was “confident the U.S. government will want to see Freeport treated fairly.” (Both Mr. Adkerson and Mr. Icahn said that Mr. Icahn, who controls two of eight seats on the company’s board, had not directly intervened with the Trump administration on this matter.)

And while the Trump administration imposed a broad freeze on the adoption of new regulations — holding up dozens of new rules affecting everything from hybrid cars to furniture manufacturing — it surprised industry officials by allowing one Internal Revenue Service rule to go into effect in late January. The rule expands a special kind of oil and gas business organization with tax advantages, known as a master limited partnership, that Mr. Icahn cited as a primary reason he first made his big investment in CVR Energy back in 2012.

What is clear is that Mr. Icahn has an unusual position in the Trump administration. During his campaign, Mr. Trump repeatedly boasted of his ties to Mr. Icahn — calling him “my very dear friend” and citing Mr. Icahn’s support as a sign that “many of the great businesspeople are endorsing me.”

His fortune, $16.6 billion, according to a Forbes estimate, is greater than those of all the other members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet combined, with investments in companies as diverse as Hertz, Xerox and PayPal, as well as A.I.G., the multinational insurance company, and most recently Bristol-Myers Squibb, the global biopharmaceutical company.

Mr. Trump’s cabinet appointees, many of whom are very rich, had to undergo stringent reviews by the Office of Government Ethics that negotiated personalized asset sales agreements for each of them to help them avoid conflicts of interest. But Mr. Icahn is not required to take any such steps, given that he is an unpaid adviser rather than a formal government employee.

Mr. Icahn has long fought against the ethanol rule, known more formally as the Renewable Fuel Standard. In August he wrote an unusually personal 11-page letter to Gina McCarthy, who served as President Barack Obama’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and one of Ms. McCarthy’s top deputies, with an all-capital-letter headline: “PROGRAM IS BROKEN AND NEEDS TO BE FIXED IMMEDIATELY.”

He pushed the federal government, in this letter and other appeals, to eliminate the requirement that refiners be held responsible for ensuring that ethanol is blended into gasoline, given that the actual blending is often done by gas station owners, closer to the point of sale. Other merchant refiners like the San Antonio-based Valero Energy joined Mr. Icahn in pressing the E.P.A.

“This is a terrible, flawed rule,” said LeAnn Johnson Koch, a lawyer representing a group of smaller refiners, who joined the effort.

Major oil companies, like Exxon Mobil, own both the refineries and service stations, so they can handle this requirement. But CVR Energy and other so-called merchant refiners no longer handle the gasoline once it leaves their refineries. So they must buy renewable fuel credits — nicknamed RINs — to prove to the E.P.A. that they have complied with the blending of the ethanol and gasoline, a requirement that cost CVR $637.5 million over the last four years.

“You are robbing refineries so that gas station owners and other players can make windfall profits,” Mr. Icahn said in an interview Friday, barely able to contain his anger at the arrangement.

But the Obama administration, in November, moved to reject the request to revamp the system.

“We were not persuaded that the program would be appreciably better at accomplishing its goals, with the approach that he was advocating,” said Janet McCabe, the E.P.A. administrator who oversaw the program.

So after Mr. Trump won, Mr. Icahn took up the campaign again, this time gaining much higher access. First, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Icahn to help him screen candidates for the E.P.A. job, so when Mr. Icahn interviewed Mr. Pruitt, he asked him specifically about his position on the ethanol rule.

“The E.P.A., in my opinion, has gone way too far, has sort of run amok with these crazy regulations,” Mr. Icahn said in an interview with Bloomberg television in early December, explaining why he supported Mr. Pruitt for the job. Mr. Icahn then added that Mr. Pruitt had made clear to him that “he feels pretty strongly about the absurdity of these obligations, and I feel that this should be done immediately,” referring to the ethanol rule.

In February, Mr. Icahn set up a telephone call with Mr. Trump. The conversation, which took place in the lobby of Mr. Icahn’s New York apartment building as he was returning from walking his dog, involved a plan he had hatched to force the E.P.A. to revamp the rule, details of which were confirmed by Mr. Icahn, after being first reported by Bloomberg.

Mr. Icahn confirmed in an interview Friday that he had follow-up conversations with Mr. Cohn, Mr. Trump’s top economic adviser, and Mike Catanzaro, a top Trump White House aide on energy policy (and a former oil industry lobbyist).

But Mr. Icahn’s plan has run into intense opposition from other industry players, including the powerful American Petroleum Institute, and a trade association that represents major ethanol producers like Iowa-based Poet. In an interview last week, Poet’s chief executive, Jeff Broin, called the plan a “back-room” deal. “It seems like self-dealing to me and a clear conflict of interest,” he said.

The White House, in a statement, said no policy change was imminent.

But Mr. Icahn’s actions have already generated calls for investigations, including a complaint filed this month with congressional officials by Public Citizen, a liberal nonprofit group.

Not uncharacteristically for Mr. Icahn, he shows no sign that he intends to back down in his push for the policy change.

“All my life I have fought the establishment — from U.S. Steel, to eBay, to Apple,” he said last week, listing some of his famous battles to force management changes at companies in which he has invested. “I have never shied away from it. I am not going to now.”

(h/t New York Times)

Eric Trump Says He Will Keep Father Updated on Business Despite ‘Pact’

Eric Trump has said he will give his father “quarterly” updates on the family’s businesses – which the president has refused to divest from – in spite of the sons’ promises to separate the private companies from their father’s public office.

In an interview with Forbes magazine, Donald Trump’s middle son at first said the family honored “kind of a steadfast pact we made” not to mix business interests with public ones.

“There is kind of a clear separation of church and state that we maintain, and I am deadly serious about that exercise,” he said. “I do not talk about the government with him, and he does not talk about the business with us.”

But he went on to say that he would keep the president abreast of “the bottom line, profitability reports and stuff like that, but you know, that’s about it”.

He said those reports would be “probably quarterly”.

“My father and I are very close,” he added. “I talk to him a lot. We’re pretty inseparable.”

Since their father handed day-to-day management of the Trump Organization to his adult sons, Eric and Donald Jr, the family has insisted they do not discuss the business with president. Ethics attorneys of both parties and the nonpartisan Office of Government Ethics have called the arrangement a failure to prevent potential conflicts of interest – for instance, Trump hotels selling rooms to foreign diplomats.

Eric Trump’s statement alarmed ethics experts, including Lisa Gilbert, a director at the not-for-profit watchdog Public Citizen. “It confirms our worst assumptions about the lack of separation between his business and current office,” she said. “There’s no way to reconcile quarterly updates from your son.”

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Gilbert said there were signs that the Trump family was already profiting from the presidency, including increased business at his golf clubs. His south Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, doubled its entrance fee to $200,000 in January, and in February the first lady, Melania Trump, filed court documents arguing that the White House was an opportunity to develop “multimillion-dollar business relationships”.

“It’s not a single thing,” Gilbert said. “Their businesses are doing better because there is more cachet around them.”

The watchdog released a report this week analyzing the first two months of the Trump presidency. It concluded that Trump had broken several promises to “isolate” himself from the business, that his White House was “clouded by corruption and conflicts”, and that he had surrounded himself “with the same major donors and Wall Street executives he claimed he would fight if elected”.

A Washington DC wine bar sued Trump and his new hotel this month, alleging that his ownership provides an illegal competitive advantage. The president still holds direct ties to his businesses, DC liquor board documents show, as the sole beneficiary of a revocable trust.

The White House and Department of Homeland Security have declined to answer questions about whether taxpayer dollars have profited the Trump family, for instance through Secret Service rental payments to Trump properties.

“Eric Trump and his father the president are doing what we thought they would do all along,” said Richard Painter, who served as chief ethics attorney for George W Bush. “This of course makes no difference for conflict of interest purposes because it is his ownership of the businesses that creates conflicts of interest, regardless of who manages them.”

Painter added that Trump’s remarks show that “the businesses is an important concern for the president”.

Gilbert compared the arrangement to other possible conflicts in the White House. Trump has appointed his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a senior adviser, despite anti-nepotism laws, and the president’s daughter, Ivanka, has acquired a security clearance and an office in the White House, although she has no official role. In November, Trump denied that he had sought security clearances for his children.

“We don’t really have a mechanism to enforce the ethics rules,” Gilbert said. “It’s left us without a lot of ground to stand on.”

Like the president, Kushner and his wife have said they will separate themselves from their family businesses, but have only done so partially, if at all. Kushner retains parts of his billionaire family’s real estate empire, White House documents show, and Ivanka Trump has so far failed to resign, as promised, from the family business, according to documents acquired by ProPublica.

Possible conflicts have already arisen for both of the president’s family confidantes: Kushner’s family is negotiating a $400m deal with a Chinese firm connected to Beijing’s leadership, and one of Ivanka Trump’s brands was promoted, in violation of ethics rules, on national television by another of the president’s advisers.

In Dallas this month, Donald Jr told Republican fundraisers that he had “basically zero contact” with his father. His brother, similarly, told Forbes that he tries to “minimize fluff calls that you might otherwise have because I understand that time is a resource”.

But he also echoed an earlier boast about the family brand being “the hottest it has ever been”.

“We’re doing great in all of our assets,” he said, before arguing that being the family in the White House also entailed “great sacrifices” for the business, especially “when you limit an international business to only domestic properties, when you put hundreds of millions of dollars of cash into a campaign, when you run with very, very tight and strict rules and the things that we do every single day in terms of compliance.

“I don’t know,” he concluded. “You could look at it either way.”

(h/t The Guardian)

Former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort ‘Offered to Help Putin’

Paul Manafort is said to have proposed a strategy to nullify anti-Russian opposition across former Soviet republics a decade ago.

AP says documents and interviews support its claims about Mr Manafort.

Mr Manafort has insisted that he never worked for Russian interests.

He worked as Mr Trump’s unpaid campaign chairman from March until August last year, including the period during which the flamboyant New York billionaire clinched the Republican nomination.

He resigned after AP revealed that he had co-ordinated a secret Washington lobbying operation on behalf of Ukraine’s ruling pro-Russian political party until 2014.

Newly obtained business records link Mr Manafort more directly to Mr Putin’s interests in the region, AP says.

It comes as Trump campaign advisers are the subject of an FBI investigation and two congressional inquiries.

Investigators are reviewing whether the Trump campaign and its associates co-ordinated with Moscow to interfere in the 2016 presidential election campaign to damage Mr Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, a stern critic of Mr Putin.

Mr Manafort is said to have pitched the plans to aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska, a close ally of President Putin.

In a confidential strategy plan in 2005, AP reports, Mr Manafort proposed to influence politics, business dealings and news coverage in the US, Europe and the ex-Soviet republics to advance the interests of the Putin government.

At this time, US-Russia relations were deteriorating.

“We are now of the belief that this model can greatly benefit the Putin government if employed at the correct levels with the appropriate commitment to success,” Mr Manafort is said to have written, adding that it would be offering “a great service that can refocus, both internally and externally, the policies of the Putin government”.

Mr Manafort signed a $10m-a-year contract beginning in 2006, AP reports. How much work he did under this contract was unclear.

Mr Manafort and Mr Deripaska reportedly maintained a business relationship until at least 2009.

When Donald Trump picked Paul Manafort to be his campaign chair last March, the political operative was a relatively minor player in Washington, consigned to working for deep-pocketed foreign benefactors. That those benefactors have turned out to include Russian oligarchs and Ukrainian politicians with ties to Vladimir Putin is sure to cause growing concern in the Trump White House.

Now it appears increasingly likely that Mr Manafort is one of the “individuals associated with the Trump campaign”, in Director James Comey’s words, at the heart of an ongoing FBI investigation.

This would explain why White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer recently downplayed Mr Manafort’s connections to the Trump team, saying he “played a very limited role” in the campaign for “a very limited amount of time”.

Mr Manafort could face legal consequences if the FBI concludes that he did not properly disclose his work for foreign leaders. That would at the very least prove embarrassing for Mr Trump, given the power he delegated to Mr Manafort last summer.

If it turns out that Mr Manafort’s contacts with foreign interests continued during his time at the top of the Trump campaign, the situation for the White House could go from embarrassing to full-blown scandal.

In a statement to AP, Mr Manafort confirmed that he had worked for Mr Deripaska in several countries but insisted the work was being unfairly cast as “inappropriate or nefarious” as part of a “smear campaign”.

“I worked with Oleg Deripaska almost a decade ago representing him on business and personal matters in countries where he had investments,” Mr Manafort said in the statement.

“My work for Mr Deripaska did not involve representing Russian political interests.”

A spokesman for Mr Deripaska in Moscow declined to answer questions from AP.

Further allegations have been made in Ukraine about secret funds said to have been paid to Mr Manafort.

Lawmaker Serhiy Leshchenko said he had evidence that Mr Manafort had tried to hide a payment of $750,000 (£600,800) by a pro-Russian party in 2009.

Mr Manafort’s spokesman said the claim was “baseless”.

Mr Manafort was an adviser to Ukraine’s ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, but denies receiving any cash payments.

(h/t BBC)

Trump Has Political Aides Monitoring the Loyalty of Cabinet Secretaries

As President Trump recently reminded us, when someone has been disloyal to him, he never forgets it. But now that he’s president, it’s become more difficult to keep track of those who have defied him — or who may potentially defy him. That’s why, according to the Washington Post, Trump has embedded political appointees in every cabinet agency and tasked them with keeping tabs on the secretaries’ fealty to the president. Unsurprisingly, this is not going over well with some cabinet members.

The Post is not the first to note the existence of these monitors. Last month, Politico reported that the Trump administration had created the new position of “senior White House adviser” within each agency, placing many former campaign aides in those jobs. Records obtained by ProPublica show that there are at least 16 of these advisers, with Trump loyalists stationed in all the major departments, as well as in some smaller agencies, such as NASA.

There’s some disagreement over who the advisers answer to. The Post says they report to the Office of Cabinet Affairs, which is overseen by White House deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn. An anonymous White House official said the advisers technically report to the head of each agency, but the White House would not discuss the matter on the record.

The advisers’ ostensible mission is to act as a go-between on policy issues for the White House and the agencies, but eight officials tell the Post their primary task is to make sure agency staffers are carrying out the president’s agenda. Concerns about the president’s authority over the executive branch are not unusual, but no recent president has had such an arrangement.

As New York’s Ed Kilgore noted last month, “People like that can be described as political commissars, to use the term made famous in the Soviet Union for the agents sent to impose ideological discipline, particularly in military units.” Sure enough, the former Marine and fighter pilot assigned to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is privately referred to as “the commissar” within the Pentagon.

But the attitude toward the senior White House advisers varies by agency. Aides at the Departments of Transportation and the Interior described the advisers as part of their teams, and some advisers are picking up the slack in understaffed departments. However, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt has reportedly banned former Washington state senator Don Benton, who ran Trump’s Washington state campaign, from meetings. Per the Post:

These officials said Benton piped up so frequently during policy discussions that he had been disinvited from many of them. One of the officials described the situation as akin to an episode of the HBO comedy series Veep.

Behaving like a member of Selina Meyer’s team doesn’t sound so bad when the alternative is an episode out of Soviet history.

Trump Winery Seeks Even More Foreign Workers This Season

A Virginia winery owned by President Donald Trump’s son has applied to hire foreign workers to pick grapes after the company was unable to find U.S. citizens who want the job.

Trump Vineyard Estates, better known as Trump Winery, has asked to bring in 29 workers this season through the federal H-2A visa program, The Daily Progress reported.

The Charlottesville-area winery is owned by Eric Trump, whose father has called on businesses to hire Americans.

The H-2A program enables agricultural employers who anticipate a shortage of domestic workers to bring foreign workers to the U.S. to perform agricultural labor or other temporary or seasonal services. To apply, employers say they’ve been unable to find American citizens to fill the jobs. At least three other local vineyards also applied to hire foreign workers.

“It’s difficult to find people,” said Libby Whitley, an attorney who has worked with employers, including Trump Winery.

Trump Vineyard Estates had initially applied for six foreign workers in December. Two months later, the company applied for 23 more. Both job orders for Trump Vineyard Estates say the primary tasks include planting and cultivating vines, adding grow tubes and pruning grape vines.

H-2A workers and U.S. workers in corresponding employment must be paid a certain rate — $10.72 an hour for vineyard farm workers in Virginia this year.

Whitely said she assumed her company would be flooded with people applying for the jobs because of all the media coverage Trump Winery has received for using the H-2A program.

“Guess how many applicants we had? … 13,” she said. “And they were all from places like the Philippines, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria. We did not have one American worker apply on (the first job order).”

Several people have sent emails to show they are outraged that Trump winery is hiring foreigners, Whitley said.

“I qualify every one of those responses and I say, ‘Are you interested in the job? If you are, please get in touch with us immediately,’” Whitley said.

Trump Winery didn’t respond to a request for comment.

(h/t Denver Post)

Trump Tweets Suggest President (Still) Doesn’t Understand How NATO Works

Less than 24 hours after a very awkward and frosty meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to blast Germany for failing to pay enough to NATO and the United States for security. First though, the president began with a conciliatory message, writing that the meeting with Merkel went great. “Despite what you have heard from the FAKE NEWS, I had a GREAT meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel,” he wrote Saturday morning. But then the president added: “Nevertheless, Germany owes vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!”

That statement echoed what Trump said during his joint news conference with Merkel on Friday, when he called on NATO members to contribute their “fair share,” saying that “many nations owe vast sums of money from past years and it is very unfair to the United States.” Although that could be open to interpretation, the commander in chief’s tweets on Saturday, though, seem to suggest Trump doesn’t really understand how NATO is funded. The New York Times explains:

The message was misleading because no nation actually “owes” money to NATO; its direct funding is calculated through a formula and paid by each of the 28 nations that are members.

Mr. Trump may have been referring to the fact that Germany, like most NATO countries, falls short of the alliance’s guideline that each member should allocate 2 percent of its gross domestic product to military spending, but that money is not intended to be paid to NATO or to the United States.

Ivo Daalder, the former U.S. permanent representative on NATO, called out Trump’s seeming mistake in a series of tweets that begin, “Sorry Mr President, that’s not how NATO works.”

“The US decides for itself how much it contributes to defending Nato. This is not a financial transaction, where Nato countries pay the US to defend them,” Daalder wrote. Although it’s true that only five of 28 NATO countries spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense, many are now increasing their defense budgets. “That’s a good thing,” he added. But even when they do increase their defense budgets, “no funds will be paid to the US … Europe must spend more on defense, but not as favor (or payment) to the US. But because their security requires it.”

These mistakes on Trump’s end are hardly new. During the presidential campaign, Trump frequently talked about NATO in a confusing way that left his statements open to interpretation.

(h/t Slate)

 

 

Trump to Spend 7th Consecutive Weekend at Trump-Branded Property, at Enormous Cost to Taxpayers

President Trump doesn’t want to spend federal dollars on after-school programs, meals for poor people, or heating assistance that helps keep folks alive.

But he has no problem wasting more than $3 million a pop to spend weekends at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. Trump has already made four trips there since becoming president on January 20, and on Friday he confirmed he’s headed there this weekend for the fifth time.

Despite vowing during his campaign that he “would rarely leave the White House because there’s so much work to be done” and “would not be a president who took vacations” because “you don’t have time to take time off,” Trump has visited Trump-branded properties each of the past six weekends. That streak will hit seven when Trump lands at Mar-a-Lago later Friday.

In fact, Trump has spent time at Trump-branded property every weekend of his presidency other than the very first, when he created chaos throughout the country by signing a Muslim ban executive order that was later stayed by a federal court.

As Quartz reported on Friday, after this weekend, Trump will have already spent about $16.5 million on trips to Mar-a-Lago. For that amount, Meals on Wheels could feed 5,967 seniors for a year and after school programs could feed 114,583 children for a year.

On Thursday, Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney defended the draconian cuts included in the Trump administration’s proposed budget by arguing that the federal government can’t ask “a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay for” programs like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But one wonders whether those struggling Americans would rather have public radio or dole out their share of the $3.3 million a self-proclaimed billionaire is spending each weekend to mingle with his ludicrously wealthy club members down in Florida.

(h/t ThinkProgress)

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