ADM valued a grain plant at 4 million dollars in 2016. But shortly after Sonny Perdue was selected to be the Secretary of Agriculture, it agreed to sell it to him for 1/16 that price.
Perdue then had his company, AGrowStar held in trust as an ethics measure. The company was sold for 12 million dollars, which included a now significantly more valuable grain plant.
Perdue did not disclose the sale because it was held in trust.
The trustee then chose not to keep any of the money from the sale of the company, instead, simply giving it to Perdue. Perdue also did not disclose that.
This article does not suggest these transactions to be illegal.
But I do think the public should have a right to know when public officials are offered sweetheart deals by the companies they will regulate.
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Quite literally promised him immunity so he couldn't plead the 5th in a civil case, then tried to innocent kid whistle their way out of the agreement as soon as it became politically inconvenient.
It honestly reminds me of Heath v. Alabama, where Georgia offered a man life in prison if he'd plead guilty to a crime, and then conspired to use the plea to have him executed in Alabama because he crossed state lines to commit the crime.
In a lawsuit that claims a teacher was so offended by a student's failure to recite the pledge, or write down its words as part of an assignment that he began to mistreat the student, it's a bit rich for a judge to write that "folks are just so easily offended these days"
The teacher gave a long, weird speech about communism and sharia law and sex offenders.
Then, the student says he was just sort of consistently a jerk to her, and when she complained, he played a bunch of weird Christian music in class and stared at her.
And he kept doing this stuff even though the administrators were asking him not to.
One of those contradictions you come across in history a fair bit is that there are a lot of people who are terrible in public life, but wonderful at home. And the opposite.
But whatever arguments we had in 1865 about putting up a bust of Taney--and at the time they were largely about our national tradition of always making a bust of the Chief Justice, he is remembered most for one of the worst judicial opinions in American history.
People who talk a lot about the presumption of innocence are often unaware of how little it does even in the exact right spot: the criminal justice system.
We routinely hold presumptively innocent people in jail for years awaiting trial. And juries are not bound to respect it.
Like, if all 12 jurors came forward after you were convicted of a crime and said "we felt he did not prove his innocence" not only will that not result in a new trial that testimony is literally inadmissible.
So when you tell me that in a wholly different context, involving whether I believe bad things someone told me about you, I have to presume you're innocent, I really, truly don't. I can use the available facts and make up my own mind at whatever burden of proof I feel like.