Yet another high-level Trump official charged with secretly acting as a foreign lobbyist: justice.gov/opa/pr/former-…
Said it before, but absolutely amazing how the Trump campaign(s) breathed new life into FARA.
Legislation effectively dormant for 75 years—and then Trump came into the picture, and all of his sycophants couldn’t stop themselves whenever a foreign government came knocking.
And these aren’t even all the Trump officials who should be charged with FARA violations yet.
Rudy Giuliani, Richard Grenell, and plenty more can’t feel great about more FARA-related charges coming.
Barrack’s secret work on behalf of the UAE included:
—Changing Trump’s speeches to praise the UAE
—Writing pro-UAE op-eds
—Pushing pro-UAE diplomatic staffing decisions
—Pushing pro-UAE policy
One thing that's clear from this Tom Barrack arrest: What he did on behalf of (and with the help of) the UAE dictatorship was far, far more egregious than anything Maria Butina, who received the same charge, ever did.
Liaising directly with the UAE's dictatorial leadership, working directly with Trump, helping craft White House policy directly. Effectively spying directly on the highest rungs of the U.S.
+1 This was a foreign dictatorship secretly co-opting one of the U.S. president's advisers and close friends, secretly tilting American policy to its own ends, and secretly accessing—secretly spying on—the White House.
It's not just price (and passport) that makes the U.S. "golden visa" program so appealing for kleptocrats.
Kleptocrats can provide whatever information they want about the source of their money, knowing they'll rarely, if ever, be turned down by American authorities.
Real estate and lawyers play an outsized role—a familiar playbook.
The Canadian government's claims that Canada has a "robust and comprehensive anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing regime" are "simply not credible."
In Canada, "relatively simple strategies like [using lawyers and real estate] probably work as well today as they did 20 years ago... From a launderer's point of view, why try harder when old strategies still work perfectly well?"
One of the (many) things we discuss on the klepto reputation-laundering front in this week's episode: universities.
Specifically, how kleptos have turned to Western universities to whitewash their reputation, impact future scholars, and gain access to Western policy-makers.
On the topic of oligarchs, kleptocrats, and the like using American and British universities to launder their reputations, can't recommend enough this paper:
The Lincoln administration implemented a policy of “pure Jacksonian removal” of the Dakota from Minnesota, “a dispossession that went far beyond a ‘relocation’”:
Thomas Jefferson proposed an ‘“Indian Amendment’ by way of an idea he called ‘removal,’ the wholesale transfer of tribes from their eastern lands to the West”