cometcomma
Banned
Scandals with tasty meat on the bone.
Democrats just spent an entire election cycle worrying that a lingering scandal could at any moment do significant, crippling damage to their presidential candidate. And in the end, we were right to be worried.
As someone who just went through this on the Democratic side, I have a message for my buoyant Republicans friends: You have far more to be worried about with President-elect Donald Trump than we ever did with Hillary Clinton. Consider that in just the few weeks since the election, Trump payed $25 million in a legal settlement to thousands of Americans whom he scammed and ripped off; he admitted to illegally using his foundation, which is subsidized by American taxpayers, for personal gain; he appeared to use discussions with foreign leaders to advance his business interests (here and here); and his newly-opened luxury hotel in Washington has rapidly become a potent symbol of the unprecedented legal and ethical challenges the president-elect's global business interests will present.
I'm pretty sure we've ever seen anything like this in modern American history.
But this is just the beginning, and there is certainly more to come. It is my take that there are at least four potential game-changing set of scandals that could alter the course of the Trump Presidency:
Public corruption. The simple truth is that the only way Trump can totally insulate his presidency from potential scandals related to his business is by his family selling off all of their assets. The various half measures being discussed by Trumpworld won't be enough, as a Thursday Washington Post article strongly suggests. Even if he transfers all of his assets to his children, state-sponsored deals from all over the world will tumble their way, raising questions of both law and the optics which Trump himself referred to in his Wednesday tweetstorm on the matter. I actually feel for Trump and his family a bit on this one – there isn't any easy way to do this short of selling everything, something we know isn't going to happen.
And the specter of public corruption won't only relate to the Trump family and its blurring of the lines between government and business. By loading up his administration with billionaires with extensive global and domestic financial interests and little experience in the rough and tumble world of politics, it is likely that members of his team will trip over legal and ethical lines more than is typical.
Russia. There is a chance that the ongoing FBI investigation into former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort or the broader look by the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community into the very one-sided Russian intervention into the election could produce direct evidence of cooperation between a hostile foreign power and members of Trump's team. Given that Trump himself publicly invited the Russian government to help expose Clinton's alleged wrongdoing, and never once condemned the Russian intervention during the entire election, this scenario is not farfetched. Concerns about Trumpworld's relationship to Russian leaders have taken on a new urgency with a series of new reports that Manafort is back in Trump's orbit, playing a big role in the presidential transition.
The other aspect of this story that should worry Republicans is that the more we come to know about the extent of the Russian operation in the U.S., the harder it is to deny that this effort was not significant enough to have affected the outcome of a very close race. Just Wednesday, seven senators urged the Obama administration to immediately declassify and release "additional information related to the Russian Government and the U.S. election." As I wrote earlier this week, it is essential for the American people to be given a more complete understanding of what role Russia played in our election and for steps to be taken to ensure it never happens again.
The FBI's intervention. It is well understood that FBI Director James Comey's resurrection of the Clinton email issue in the closing days of the race was without precedent and highly damaging to her campaign. But this is not all that poured out of the FBI in the final weeks. For days Fox News quoted unnamed FBI sources who claimed an indictment of Clinton was imminent, a story that was eventually retracted. Unnamed FBI sources also claimed that the bureau's investigation into the Trumpworld-Russia connection had turned up nothing; and, implausibly, that the Russian intervention was not designed to benefit one candidate over the other. If it becomes clear that – as has been reported – a group of FBI agents in the New York City office close to Giuliani helped push all of this stuff out in the final days for Trump's benefit this would be a doozy of a scandal. At the very least FBI Director Comey should publicly account for the ******* of leaks in the final weeks.
Melania. Months after news reports questioned the veracity of Melania Trump's immigration story, we still have neither exculpatory documents nor the promised Trump press conference addressing the matter. In the final days of the election the AP dropped a bombshell, finding documents that proved the story she had been telling – even the one put out by a Trump attorney – was false and wrong. As I have detailed elsewhere, the issues raised here are serious. It is almost certain now that Melania did not follow the law, and depending on the circumstances, may have committed crimes as serious as felonies; and there is a great likelihood that her citizenship itself is ill-gotten and theoretically could be revoked. Any aggressive move on immigration early next year by the Trump administration will certainly bring this scandal back to the front pages, and Trumpworld's refusal to release her immigration file or relevant parts of it – easy, simple steps – suggests there are reasons for worry.
While Trump's outsider status has an obvious upside, it also comes with a pretty significant downside. The law and conventions of public life are different for those in private life, making public service far more difficult for families like the Trumps and others he has chosen to serve with him. As a veteran of the Clinton years, I know a few things about scandals. And it is clear to me that that the potential scandals looming over the incoming administration could be far worse than anything we've seen in the last generation of American politics. Republicans have every right to be worried.
Democrats just spent an entire election cycle worrying that a lingering scandal could at any moment do significant, crippling damage to their presidential candidate. And in the end, we were right to be worried.
As someone who just went through this on the Democratic side, I have a message for my buoyant Republicans friends: You have far more to be worried about with President-elect Donald Trump than we ever did with Hillary Clinton. Consider that in just the few weeks since the election, Trump payed $25 million in a legal settlement to thousands of Americans whom he scammed and ripped off; he admitted to illegally using his foundation, which is subsidized by American taxpayers, for personal gain; he appeared to use discussions with foreign leaders to advance his business interests (here and here); and his newly-opened luxury hotel in Washington has rapidly become a potent symbol of the unprecedented legal and ethical challenges the president-elect's global business interests will present.
I'm pretty sure we've ever seen anything like this in modern American history.
But this is just the beginning, and there is certainly more to come. It is my take that there are at least four potential game-changing set of scandals that could alter the course of the Trump Presidency:
Public corruption. The simple truth is that the only way Trump can totally insulate his presidency from potential scandals related to his business is by his family selling off all of their assets. The various half measures being discussed by Trumpworld won't be enough, as a Thursday Washington Post article strongly suggests. Even if he transfers all of his assets to his children, state-sponsored deals from all over the world will tumble their way, raising questions of both law and the optics which Trump himself referred to in his Wednesday tweetstorm on the matter. I actually feel for Trump and his family a bit on this one – there isn't any easy way to do this short of selling everything, something we know isn't going to happen.
And the specter of public corruption won't only relate to the Trump family and its blurring of the lines between government and business. By loading up his administration with billionaires with extensive global and domestic financial interests and little experience in the rough and tumble world of politics, it is likely that members of his team will trip over legal and ethical lines more than is typical.
Russia. There is a chance that the ongoing FBI investigation into former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort or the broader look by the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community into the very one-sided Russian intervention into the election could produce direct evidence of cooperation between a hostile foreign power and members of Trump's team. Given that Trump himself publicly invited the Russian government to help expose Clinton's alleged wrongdoing, and never once condemned the Russian intervention during the entire election, this scenario is not farfetched. Concerns about Trumpworld's relationship to Russian leaders have taken on a new urgency with a series of new reports that Manafort is back in Trump's orbit, playing a big role in the presidential transition.
The other aspect of this story that should worry Republicans is that the more we come to know about the extent of the Russian operation in the U.S., the harder it is to deny that this effort was not significant enough to have affected the outcome of a very close race. Just Wednesday, seven senators urged the Obama administration to immediately declassify and release "additional information related to the Russian Government and the U.S. election." As I wrote earlier this week, it is essential for the American people to be given a more complete understanding of what role Russia played in our election and for steps to be taken to ensure it never happens again.
The FBI's intervention. It is well understood that FBI Director James Comey's resurrection of the Clinton email issue in the closing days of the race was without precedent and highly damaging to her campaign. But this is not all that poured out of the FBI in the final weeks. For days Fox News quoted unnamed FBI sources who claimed an indictment of Clinton was imminent, a story that was eventually retracted. Unnamed FBI sources also claimed that the bureau's investigation into the Trumpworld-Russia connection had turned up nothing; and, implausibly, that the Russian intervention was not designed to benefit one candidate over the other. If it becomes clear that – as has been reported – a group of FBI agents in the New York City office close to Giuliani helped push all of this stuff out in the final days for Trump's benefit this would be a doozy of a scandal. At the very least FBI Director Comey should publicly account for the ******* of leaks in the final weeks.
Melania. Months after news reports questioned the veracity of Melania Trump's immigration story, we still have neither exculpatory documents nor the promised Trump press conference addressing the matter. In the final days of the election the AP dropped a bombshell, finding documents that proved the story she had been telling – even the one put out by a Trump attorney – was false and wrong. As I have detailed elsewhere, the issues raised here are serious. It is almost certain now that Melania did not follow the law, and depending on the circumstances, may have committed crimes as serious as felonies; and there is a great likelihood that her citizenship itself is ill-gotten and theoretically could be revoked. Any aggressive move on immigration early next year by the Trump administration will certainly bring this scandal back to the front pages, and Trumpworld's refusal to release her immigration file or relevant parts of it – easy, simple steps – suggests there are reasons for worry.
While Trump's outsider status has an obvious upside, it also comes with a pretty significant downside. The law and conventions of public life are different for those in private life, making public service far more difficult for families like the Trumps and others he has chosen to serve with him. As a veteran of the Clinton years, I know a few things about scandals. And it is clear to me that that the potential scandals looming over the incoming administration could be far worse than anything we've seen in the last generation of American politics. Republicans have every right to be worried.
