THREAD: Wilbur Ross is in the news, so here's your regular reminder that he's lowkey one of the most problematic and potentially criminally corrupt officials in Trump's cabinet.
For one, Ross possibly engaged in criminal ethics violations because in 2018, when he found out that NYT was writing a story about his dealings with a firm that has ties to Putin, he shorted the stock, then sold assets he should have already divested citizensforethics.org/press-release/…
And that's not all. Ross also apparently participated in a series of meetings with major companies that he and his wife held significant financial interests in, despite (again) having promised to divest the holdings citizensforethics.org/press-release/…
Last year, we learned that the Office of Government Ethics declined to certify his financial disclosure after concluding that Ross wasn't "in compliance with applicable laws and regulations"
Also last year, a federal judge ruled that Ross broke several laws and violated the constitutional underpinning of representative democracy in pushing to add questions aimed at undercounting certain minority groups in the census.
There's also the fact that Wilbur Ross might have stolen $120 million from people he worked with, which really says something about the kind of people Trump hires forbes.com/sites/danalexa…
And we just got his most recent financial disclosure
In any other administration, Ross's continued employment would be a national scandal, but in the Trump era, he's one of the longest-serving cabinet secretaries in the administration.
Drain the Swamp? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Trump’s Truth Social got an $8 million cash injection that it never disclosed from an unknown source tied to a shady, porn-friendly bank in the Caribbean run by a Russian entrepreneur who has recently started buying up multimillion dollar houses in Miami washingtonpost.com/technology/202…
For those playing along at home, the front runner to be the Party of Family Values’ nominee for president not only had an affair with a porn star while his third wife nursed his fifth child, but his company is also propped up by money tied a bank that facilitates porn payments
Try to imagine the orgasmic frenzy that would erupt on the right of Joe Biden had a failing company kept alive by an anonymous $8 million investment tied to a shady bank run by Russians that helps process payments for the porn industry
My first question is WHICH TX school shooting is he talking about? Uvalde? Santa Fe? Or did he mean to say Tennessee? Which is what the tweet that I presume he was referring to was about?
If you didn’t see the outpouring of protest and rage after all of these shootings, especially Tennessee, then I would strongly encouraging you to reevaluate your news diet.
The George Santos indictment appears to raise one of the threads of the early Santos saga that I hadn't thought about in a while: Redstone Strategies, the company that Santos appears to have variously described as an LLC, a super PAC, and a dark money group to different donors
On the left is NYT description where Santos describes Redstone as a super PAC ("independent expenditure only cmte"), and the right is the indictment showing that the money went to a "company #1" (i.e. not a super PAC).
Even if it was a super PAC, it would have been illegal for Santos to ask for that much money from a donor on behalf of the super PAC.
Crow calls the ProPublica report a "political hit job" by a group that's "funded by leftists." But ProPublica—which was founded by a former WSJ publisher and managing editor—provided Crow a detailed list of questions and printed his responses in full dallasnews.com/news/2023/04/1…
“It’s worth noting that he and Justice Thomas were given detailed, written questions in advance of our stories. Thomas declined to respond. Crow’s answers were included in full. He questioned none of the facts we reported.” - Stephen Engelberg, editor in chief of ProPublica
Reporter: Would Crow be friends with Thomas if he weren’t a Supreme Court justice?
Crow: “It’s an interesting, good question. I don’t know how to answer that. Maybe not. Maybe yes. I don’t know.”
As Republicans in Congress dig into the minutia of Hunter Biden's business deals in China, they remain completely unperturbed by the millions in income from China that Trump kept hidden during his presidency, even lying about when he closed his Chinese bank account
"And: House Oversight was handed documents showing how foreign actors spent money with the Trump Organization as they sought to influence Trump’s administration, while he was in office. But under Comer’s leadership, that document production ended." washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/…
1/ One of several notable details from Trump's financial disclosure obtained by @CREWcrew today was this valuation of Seven Springs. It potentially VASTLY overstates the actual value of the property, which is important because the NY AG is currently suing him for potential fraud
2/ Notice that the reported valuation of the property is "Over $50 million." It caught my eye because the Seven Springs property is the subject of a lawsuit filed last September by @NewYorkStateAG alleging potential financial fraud by Trump's businesses ag.ny.gov/press-release/…
3/ The NY AG lawsuit referenced the Trump Organization's valuations of the property, stating that "All of these values were a fiction, totally unsupported by the development history of the property and contradicted by every professional valuation of the property."