Comments by "Voix de la raison" (@voixdelaraison593) on "CBS Mornings"
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Treasonous Trump and his toddy Barr’s Banana Republic
In 1988 to 1992, Argentina, Brazil and Peru were struggling to reestablish democratic norms after the long, dark night of military dictatorship. One of the biggest challenges was restoring public confidence that justice is blind and engages in an honest search for truth.
But thanks to President Trump and the inexcusable damage he is doing to our justice system, South America’s past has become America’s present.
There has been considerable evidence that Trump is causing irreparable harm to the Public’s faith in justice. Once squandered, it is incredibly hard to regain.
That’s the kind of damage Trump is threatening with his outrageous and un-American attacks on the Justice Department and the federal judiciary for finding his cronies — including longtime political adviser Roger Stone, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort — guilty of crimes and deserving of punishment. We have seen this type of behavior before in the South American Countries of Venezuela, Argentina, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and many others.
In Argentina, Carlos Menem, was a populist norm-breaker who nepotistically involved his family in running the government and was widely viewed as corrupt. In 1991, Menem’s sister-in-law and appointments secretary, Amira Yoma, was indicted on money-laundering charges that involved suitcases full of cash allegedly being smuggled in and out of the country. Yoma’s ex-husband was head of the customs service at Ezeiza International Airport outside Buenos Aires, where he allegedly facilitated the cash-smuggling.
Menem was accused of secretly meeting with the prosecuting judge in charge of the Yoma case. The president initially denied having had such a meeting but ultimately admitted it, claiming it was about some unrelated matter. The judge’s secretary alleged that the judge had gone to the presidential residence, where she showed Menem secret prosecution documents about the Yoma case.
That judge was suddenly taken off the case, which was assigned to a different judge, and Yoma was eventually cleared of all charges. It is safe to say that few Argentines were surprised.
There simply was very little confidence in the ability of the justice system to discern truth from falsehood or to punish the powerful and well-connected. There was an understanding, moreover, that prosecutors and the court system could and sometimes would be used as political tools.
Years after leaving office, Menem was convicted on unrelated charges involving weapons smuggling and embezzlement. He maintained his innocence, claiming he was being persecuted by his political enemies.
In these fragile democracies justice was being warped by politics and it had a corrosive effect on the larger society. A lack of confidence that court proceedings could — or even were intended to — arrive at truth encouraged the propagation and spread of conspiracy theories. Argentina still struggles to escape the widespread belief that unseen forces control events from deep in the shadows.
This is not the sort of path I ever thought the United States could take. But it has not been naive, to believe that federal prosecutors and judges tried their very best not to let politics influence their decisions — and that they generally succeeded because they took their responsibilities seriously.
When four assistant U.S. attorneys asked to be taken off the Stone case, they were sounding an alarm. We must all pay attention.
Their recommendation that Stone serve seven to nine years in prison for his crimes was tough, but federal prosecutors tend to be tough. Stone was duly convicted in a court of law, and U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson will decide his punishment. But when higher-ups in Attorney General William P. Barr’s Justice Department overrule the prosecutors who handled the case on Stone’s recommended sentence; when Trump tries to delegitimize those prosecutors as “Angry Democrats” because they worked for former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III; and when Trump goes so far as to try to intimidate Jackson, a highly respected veteran federal judge — when such things happen, you have to wonder whether Trump is leading us down that Banana Republic path.
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Chris Reed
JARED KUSHNER HAS CREATED A SHELL COMPANY TO FUNNEL CAMPAIGN CASH TO FAMILY MEMBERS.
Donald Trump and his family have spent the last four years making the airtight case that they view the presidency as simply a means to enrich themselves and their associates. They probably don’t particularly like that reputation and, yet, it hasn’t stopped them from funneling taxpayer money to their private business, gouging the Secret Service, and raising legal defense funds that the fine print says could go directly to their pockets. Oh, and, according to a new report, setting up a shell company that spent hundreds of millions of campaign dollars to pay Trump family members along with other expenditures it seemingly wanted to keep under wraps.
According to Business Insider, first son-in-law Jared Kushner personally approved the creation of the company, incorporated as American Made Media Consultants Corp. and American Made Media Consultants LLC, in April 2018. From there, Eric Trump’s wife, Lara Trump, was named president, with Mike Pence’s nephew John Pence serving as vice president. If you’re wondering why the shell company, described as Business Insider as acting “almost like a campaign within a campaign” was necessary, well, it’s not entirely clear, but it sure sounds like the express purpose was the ability to shield “financial and operational details from public scrutiny,” as it allowed the campaign to avoid federally mandated disclosures concerning what it was spending considerable amounts of money on. And by considerable we mean nearly half of the $1.26 billion raised for Trump’s reelection.
Campaign-finance records showed Trump's reelection effort and its affiliated committee with the RNC spent more than $600 million through American Made Consultants since its formation. For months, some of Trump’s top advisers and campaign staff told Insider they had no idea how the shell company functioned, which cast an air of mystery around the operation…. Some of those same advisers said they didn’t learn about John Pence’s and Lara Trump’s involvement until Insider contacted them for this story.
Campaign-law experts have long accused the Trump team of using a corporate pass-through to hide payments. The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, led by former Republican Federal Election Commission Chairman Trevor Potter, filed a civil complaint with the FEC in July accusing the Trump campaign of “disguising” about $170 million worth of campaign spending in large part “by laundering the funds” through AMMC. Brendan Fischer, the Campaign Legal Center’s director of federal reform, said the payments to AMMC were a “scheme to evade telling voters even the basics on where its money is really going” and a “shield to disguise the ultimate recipients of its spending.”
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