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https://t.co/AY3GSC3gkHTrevor Noah takes a closer look at the beach brawl between India and China’s armies
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https://t.co/AY3GSC3gkHTrevor Noah takes a closer look at the beach brawl between India and China’s armies
I actually don't think Trump will pardon the sheriff. Even he can't be that stupid.
Alveda King, the niece of Martin Luther King Jr., led everyone in singing a few lines of “How Great Thou Art.”
The president then tried to connect this lengthy self-examination to his supporters. Meanwhile, a growing number of them were calling it a night and heading to the exits.
arguing that Mercer's company (which helped fund trump's campaign) is likely laundering money for Putin.
hard to prove but it's probably true.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/carl-icahns-failed-raid-on-washington
the full article.
it's long.
In May, after the revelations about the rin trading by CVR, the senators wrote to the heads of the S.E.C., the E.P.A., and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, calling on them to investigate. But it could not have escaped the senators’ attention that two recipients of their letter—Jay Clayton and Scott Pruitt—had met with Icahn in the context of securing their jobs. The Senate Democrats cannot issue subpoenas to agencies unless they get the Republican majority to sign on—an unlikely outcome.
The White House official who would, in theory, police Icahn’s status is Stefan Passantino, the deputy counsel to the President for compliance and ethics. Passantino was responsible for “counselling” Kellyanne Conway, the Presidential adviser, after she sparked an outcry by promoting Ivanka Trump’s apparel line during a Fox News interview. In the view of Trump Administration officials, Passantino laid to rest the Icahn controversy with his February declaration that Icahn was “simply a private citizen.” Kelly Love, the White House spokeswoman, said, “Mr. Icahn does not have a position with the Administration, nor a policymaking role.”
It is ironic for Passantino to rule on the controversy surrounding Icahn’s conflicts of interest—because Passantino has a conflict of his own. On June 28th, Walter Shaub, the head of the Office of Government Ethics, wrote a letter pointing out that Passantino, in his mandatory disclosures as a full-time White House employee, noted that before joining the Administration he had been a corporate lawyer. He listed the clients for whom he had done work in the two years prior to joining the government. One of them was Icahn. At the time that Passantino was initially queried about the propriety of Icahn’s position, he made no mention of this relationship.
Two weeks after Shaub sent his letter, he resigned, saying that he could no longer meaningfully perform the function for which the Office of Government Ethics was designed. Shaub warned that the United States was facing a “historic ethics crisis.” The White House released a statement lashing out at Shaub, dismissing his concerns as “grandstanding.”
For all of President Trump’s fulminations about the danger of leaks, his White House has a bizarre habit of authorizing spokespeople to talk with the press on the condition that their names not be mentioned. When I asked the White House for an interview with Passantino, to discuss how he had vetted Icahn’s position, a spokeswoman replied that Passantino had been “recused on any matters related to Carl Icahn,” because Icahn was a former client. This was the first I had heard of any recusal, and I asked when it had happened. On the first day of the Administration, the spokeswoman replied.
If the White House spokeswoman was correct, then at the time that Passantino issued the Administration’s judgment that Icahn’s role posed no ethical conflicts he was already recused from offering legal advice on precisely that question. “That’s not how recusal works,” Shaub told me. “Recusing yourself means not delivering the White House’s legal theories about whether Icahn is an employee.” The spokeswoman maintained that, when Passantino made his declaration, he wasn’t making a legal judgment, but “merely reiterating a fact.” Richard Painter, who used to hold Passantino’s job, told me that the White House’s repeated assertion that Icahn is simply a private citizen is “bogus,” adding, “The ethics shop in this White House is not very good.”
Jeff Hauser, who runs the Revolving Door Project, a nonprofit focussed on government corruption, told me that Icahn’s relationship with Trump is a particularly bald example of a kind of clientalist politics that has been more typical, historically, of banana republics, but which is on the rise in the United States. “Once there is an acquiescence that this sort of corruption is acceptable, then you just see the demise of representative government,” Hauser said. “We will essentially become a feudal state, with people creating their own fiefdoms and extracting rents from the public.”
On August 14th, I asked the White House to confirm that Icahn was still a special adviser to the President. The spokeswoman e-mailed me back: “Icahn is NOT ‘a special adviser to the president for regulatory reform.’ ” This was certainly news. In my conversations with Icahn and his lawyer, I had not developed any impression that his status had changed. Was the Administration cutting him loose?
I wrote back to the spokeswoman, asking when Icahn had been let go. She replied, “There was no ‘effective’ end date, because there was never a formal appointment or title after January 20.” This was transparently false; Icahn had been named a special adviser to “the President,” not to “the President-elect.” On March 1st, Icahn’s company told the S.E.C. that he was “currently” a Trump adviser. And why had the White House lawyer, Stefan Passantino, recused himself on January 20th from “any matters related to Carl Icahn” if, as of that very day, Icahn had no role in the Administration?
just checked dudes twitter and found this diamond..
Just subscribed to Washington Post to support journalism.
Might subscribe to LA times also.
Yeah WaPo's paywall is easily avoidable. Unlike Nytimes' paywall, whenever you've reached your monthly article limit on WaPo you can still browse the site and read articles and prevent the paywall from stopping you. When you open an article, the article loads first instead of the paywall straight away. There's a small bit of a delay there. You can therefore time clicking the stop loading page button on your browser so the article is loaded but the paywall is prevented from loading. That's how you can read as much as you want on WaPo without a subscription.I've been subscribed to nytimes
Would subscribe to WaPo too but apparently you don't need to in order to read the articles. You would need to subscribe in order to participate in the comments section though
I actually don't think Trump will pardon the sheriff. Even he can't be that stupid.