#steve mnuchin
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Don't ban TikTok, do anything else
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Rabbi Sam wants TikTok
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The Trump Organization charged the Secret Service up to $1,185 per night for hotel rooms used by agents protecting former President Donald J. Trump and his family, according to documents released on Monday by the House Oversight Committee, forcing a federal agency to pay well above government rates.
The Committee released Secret Service records showing more than $1.4 million in payments by the Department to Trump properties since Mr. Trump took office in 2017. The Committee said that the accounting was incomplete, however, because it did not include payments to Mr. Trump’s foreign properties — where agents accompanied his family repeatedly — and because the records stopped in September 2021.
The records the panel obtained provided new details about an arrangement in which Mr. Trump and his family effectively turned the Secret Service into a captive customer of their business — by visiting their properties hundreds of times, and then charging the government rates far above its usual spending limits.
The records also make clear that Mr. Trump’s son Eric — who ran the family business while his father was in office — provided a misleading account of what his company was charging.
In 2019, Eric Trump said the Trump Organization charged the government only “like $50” for hotel rooms during presidential visits.
Instead, records obtained by the Committee showed, the Trump International Hotel in Washington repeatedly charged the Secret Service rates more than $600 per night. In one case, the hotel charged the Secret Service $1,160 a night for a room used while protecting Eric Trump in 2017. That was more than four times higher than the government’s usual spending limit for Washington hotels — but Secret Service officials approved the expense, according to the records.
The same year, the documents showed, Mr. Trump’s hotel in Washington charged the service $1,185 for a room used while guarding Donald Trump Jr.
“Per diem rates could not be obtained,” a Secret Service record said, referring to the government’s official maximum rate. By law, the department is allowed to exceed those maximum payments when its protective mission requires the additional cost.
Previously, the highest rate that the Trump Organization was known to have charged the government for a hotel room was $650 per night, for rooms at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla.
“What gets me is, over and over again, how they just lie about this stuff,” said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York and the Chairwoman of the Oversight Committee. “Documents don’t lie.”
On Monday, Eric Trump issued a statement saying that the Trump Organization “would have been substantially better off if hospitality services were sold to full-paying guests.” He did not address the discrepancy between the rates he claimed the company had charged and the rates shown in the record.
In an interview, Ms. Maloney said the documents made clear that Mr. Trump was taking advantage of taxpayers by effectively requiring Secret Service agents to stay at properties he owned, and then billing the government exorbitant charges.
“This raises concerns that the Trump Organization was profiting off the presidency,” Ms. Maloney said. “It’s excessive.”
She said the Committee would continue to investigate how Mr. Trump’s businesses leveraged the presidency to his financial advantage, particularly regarding connections to foreign governments.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Ms. Maloney said.
While Mr. Trump was in office, his hotels were visited repeatedly by people seeking to influence his administration, including foreign leaders, embassies and telecom executives who needed the Justice Department’s approval for a pending merger. Since Mr. Trump still owned his businesses, he could benefit directly from their patronage.
In the past, Trump Organization representatives have said that the company billed the government “at cost” and could have made more money renting rooms to other guests. The company continued to charge the Secret Service since Mr. Trump left office and began living at his properties full-time.
In 2020, The Washington Post reported that the government had spent more than $2.5 million at Trump properties during his presidency. The payments came from multiple agencies and were largely prompted by Mr. Trump’s travel.
The State Department, for instance, paid the Mar-a-Lago club thousands of dollars for expenses related to Mr. Trump’s summits with foreign leaders there — including charges for flowers, food and even glasses of water.
The White House paid Mar-a-Lago more than $1,000 to cover 54 alcoholic drinks consumed by Trump aides in a private bar, as first reported by ProPublica.
And the Secret Service paid Mr. Trump’s company to follow his family to properties around the country and the world. Many of those charges were related to the former president’s visits to Mar-a-Lago and Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J. — where the Secret Service paid the Trump Organization $17,000 per month, an unusually high rent for that area, to use a “cottage” on the grounds of the golf club.
The Secret Service also paid the Trump Organization for rooms it used while protecting top administration officials — including Vice President Mike Pence and Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin — during their stays at Trump properties.
The records obtained by the Oversight Committee show that the Secret Service has made at least 669 payments to Mr. Trump’s company, Ms. Maloney said on Monday in a public letter to Kimberly A. Cheatle, the agency’s director.
The Secret Service issued a written statement saying only that it would respond to the Committee’s requests for more information but did not provide any additional details.
Mr. Trump continued to own his businesses throughout his presidency, though he said he had given day-to-day management to his adult sons. The Trump Organization’s charges did not violate the law, ethics experts said, since presidents are largely exempt from conflict-of-interest laws that apply to other federal officials.
#us politics#news#donald trump#trump administration#trump organization#eric trump#Secret Service#house oversight committee#rep. Carolyn B. Maloney#trump international hotel#The Washington Post#department of state#ProPublica#Trump National Golf Club#mike pence#steve mnuchin#Kimberly A. Cheatle#2022
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the incredibly fucked up thing im about to tell you is steve mnuchin was actually by far the best member of trump's cabinet. i think trump hired him because he looked like an evil monopoly man and his wife looked like a bondage-themed villainess from a Spy Kids movie , but steve. was actually ok. like not great but he was ok. at his job as secretary of the treasury. like he was a piece of garbage but he generally wanted america's economy to work so that he could continue to make money and not scrounge for beans in a nuclear apocalypse. its insane that this was the "good one". look at that guy. also he managed to stay the entire time. genuinely incredible.
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No one loves Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman more than America’s elite. In recent years, we’ve seen leaders, investors, and celebrities hold out a Saudi exception to human rights in the service of a blurry concept of national interests that requires the U.S. to constantly compromise its values in service of an autocrat. And so MBS has been welcomed back into the establishment fold, and he won over Washington. And now he’s taking a victory lap.
When Saudi Arabia convened a 2018 summit in Riyadh, businesspeople shielded their name tags from view, sheepish about seeking MBS’s money just days after journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. But the stigma has apparently worn off, and big names in finance, tech, media, and entertainment showed up at the Miami edition of Davos in the Desert.
The entire conceit of the conference is that Saudi Arabia can be abstracted from MBS, who is hardly ever mentioned yet remains the unspoken force behind the events. The host, the Future Investment Initiative Institute, a mouthful, is essentially the crown prince’s personal think tank. Session after session offered platitudes and ruminations on the least controversial ideas ever—AI is going to change the world! Climate is important! Sports bring people together! The two-day gathering was titled “On the Edge of a New Frontier,” itself a sort of redundant name. (Isn’t a frontier an edge?)
Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of a major sovereign wealth fund that’s currently under Senate investigation, led the proceedings. The Public Investment Fund that Al-Rumayyan runs is the conference’s founding partner and powers its lavish events. That Al-Rumayyan has $70 billion in annual investments to dole out is enough to draw out financial titans, curious entrepreneurs, and former Trump officials.
Jared Kushner, who had grown a beard, was talking about his theory of investing, without noting that MBS’s sovereign wealth funds had reportedly contributed $2 billion to his Affinity Partners. Steve Mnuchin, who similarly snared $1 billion of Saudi funds for his Liberty Strategic Capital, wore a suit and dress sneakers and talked about Israel as a tech hub. Mike Pompeo, in a tie, said that U.S. leadership in the world requires a “stability model” that involves working with “like-minded nations,” though “they’re not all going to be democracies.” Little wonder he rushed U.S. arms to Saudi Arabia as secretary of state as part of an end run around Congress.
Doing business with Saudi Arabia has become so normalized that the CEOs of major corporations and investment firms showed up in droves. There was Accenture’s Julie Sweet, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, and Thiel Capital’s Jack Selby. David Rubenstein—the billionaire who has played host to President Joe Biden at his Nantucket estate—spoke alongside his daughter Gabrielle. (This year, the Biden administration didn’t send an emissary, but the deputy commerce secretary, Donald Graves, attended in 2021.)
Journalists have kept a distance from Saudi Arabia after the dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Khashoggi, but in Miami the moderators included CNN’s Bianna Golodryga, Fox’s Maria Bartiromo, Bloomberg’s Manus Cranny, and The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker.
MBS has especially used boldfaced names to rehabilitate his standing post-Khashoggi, his crackdown on women activists, and the destructive Yemen war. In Miami, there was a fireside chat with failed Senate candidate Dr. Oz. “Saudi Arabia is, I think, doing some wise investing and shifting mindsets by trying to leapfrog, in some cases, where the West is,” Oz said.
For Gwyneth Paltrow, it was just another fun public event. She spoke about how Goop had “built meaning” for its fans, in conversation with entrepreneur Moj Mahdara, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton. It was particularly incongruous when Paltrow discussed bringing more women to the cap table to fight the patriarchy.
Rob Lowe had some advice for Riyadh’s efforts to break into Hollywood and create its own film industry. “My view is there’s no reason that Saudi shouldn’t be the leader in IP in the same way they’re attempting to be the leader in sports and everything else,” Lowe said. “You need to have someone who can communicate: Why Saudi, why now.”
For all of the glitzy stage management and slick social media branding, at many moments there were fewer than 50 people watching the livestream on YouTube. But what mattered more were the opinion leaders, financiers, and tycoons in the room.
Big Tech was there, too, with Google’s Caroline Yap and Dell’s Michael Dell. Nothing was quite as obsequious as last year’s gathering in Miami when Adam Neumann, Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz—all beneficiaries of Saudi Arabia’s financial largesse—gushed about how MBS is like a “founder,” except “you call him, ‘His Royal Highness.’”
(continue reading)
#politics#saudi arabia#jared kushner#mohammed bin salman#jamal khashoggi#davos#uae#corporate greed#mbs
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You wanna know what really fucking bugs me? The only Secretary of the Treasury whose name I know is Steve Mnuchin, Donald Trump's corrupt little toady. I know this because every single dollar bill has the signature of the Secretary of the Treasury on it, and while most signatures are illegible caligraphic scrawls, Steve printed his name in block letters like a child. Nine out of ten bills I get as change have his name on them, clear as day, so I am consistently reminded of the nazi regime that destroyed us. I don't know George W. Bush's Secretary of the Treasury, I don't know Barrack Obama's, I don't know Joe Biden's, but I know trump's, and I can't even ignore it when I see it.
These bills will circulate for decades. People are going to collect them in the future. Someone is going to frame one and hang it on their wall as the first dollar they ever earned. It makes me so irrationally angry I could spit.
STeVen T: MNUChin with random capitalization as if he had to sound it out one letter at a time, fuckin ay...
#us dollar#treasury#secretary of the treasury#i'm sure I'm the only person who notices and cares#it will never go away#trump and his ilk are stains upon the tapestry of our nation#if i noticed it then so do you
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Ohhhhhhhhhhh i get it now
We're not trying to BAN Tiktok
We're trying to BUY Tiktok
Fxck these guys
#steven mnuchin#steve mnuchin#tiktok ban#lat#la times#3 14 2024#everythangs corrupt#ban tiktok#republicans
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The quest for Donald Trump’s taxes is finally over and whatever secrets Trump fought for years to conceal will soon be revealed for all to see. But one fact is already clear: The IRS botched its job.
The IRS is required to conduct audits of the President and Vice President while they are in office. This requirement arose in 1997, likely in response to concerns over President Nixon’s tax troubles. But the policy–enshrined in the IRS manual, Section 4.8.4.2.4–was not followed during Trump’s term in office. During his four-year term, the agency opened only one audit–of this 2016 return–which only commenced in 2019 after Chairman Richard Neal of the House Ways and Means Committee sent a letter to the IRS seeking Trump’s returns and tax information. That audit is still not finished.
As the Committee characterized it, the IRS presidential audit program was “dormant” during Trump’s term.
Perhaps this should not have been surprising given that Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was the first Treasury Secretary to refuse to turn over tax information in response to a congressional request and when Congress sued to obtain compliance a Trump-appointed Judge–Trevor McFadden–delayed ruling on the case until after Trump had left office.
But it surely must be stunning to most Americans that among the reasons cited by IRS officials for their failure to follow policy was that they were apparently intimidated by the complexities of Trump’s taxes. In an internal memo, the agency seemed to whine about the return having “about 400 flow-through returns… and since some of these are tiered… a total of 500 flow-through returns”—which meant that to “do a thorough review of these returns we would need a team much larger than the current team.”
A “flow-through” entity is one in which the income that comes into the business passes onto the owner and is commonly used to reduce taxation.
In sum, the IRS rewarded Trump’s complex business structures by throwing their hands up at the prospect of having to dig into all those hundreds of records. Excuse me, but I thought that was what IRS agents liked to do?
Note that the agency had no concerns about following its policies when it came to auditing for President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden.
The recent disclosure that, during the Trump administration, the President regularly asked for audits of those he considered his political enemies—and invasive audits of former FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe did occur—should raise deep concerns and trigger increased scrutiny. Such scrutiny could be undertaken by the agency’s Office of Inspector General or the the Justice Department’s Tax Division—not to mention Congress—although further work by the House of Representatives on the issue is highly unlikely given that the Republicans are about to take control of the House.
Chairman Neal and the present Ways and Means Committee have fought the good fight and put a lie to repeated claims that their investigation lacked legitimate purpose. All along, Neal stated that their purpose was to perform oversight on the effectiveness of the presidential audit program and “on behalf of the American people… determine if that policy is being followed.”
We the people have our answer now, and it isn’t pretty.
#us politics#news#donald trump#trump administration#2022#republicans#conservatives#gop#trump tax returns#trump taxes#internal revenue service#irs#audits#presidential audit program#Section 4.8.4.2.4#president richard nixon#Rep. Richard Neal#house ways and means committee#steve mnuchin#Judge Trevor McFadden#flow-through entities#president barack obama#president joe biden#James Comey#Andrew McCabe#Office of Inspector General#department of justice#us house of representatives
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For my birthday, my parents got me a piece of paper with the signature of one of the Executive Producers a few movies I love: The Lego Movie, Edge of Tomorrow, The Man From UNCLE, Mad Max Fury Road.
Unfortunately, that Executive Producer is Steve Mnuchin.
It's a $50 bill.
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This day in history
Next Tuesday (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.
#20yrsago Wired runs a balanced Broadcast Flag story — last week to fight the proposal https://www.wired.com/2003/11/fcc-moves-to-stifle-tv-piracy/
#20yrsago 20,000 libertarians to move to New Hampshire https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/27/us/libertarians-pursue-new-political-goal-state-of-their-own.html
#10yrsago HOWTO protect yourself from Internet surveillance, EFF edition https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/ten-steps-against-surveillance
#10yrsago D&D with toddlers https://web.archive.org/web/20131107181349/http://gygaxmagazine.com/selected-content/dming-for-your-toddler/
#5yrsago Steve Mnuchin stole Cesar Sayoc’s house https://theintercept.com/2018/10/26/cesar-sayoc-foreclosure-steven-mnuchin/
#5yrsago The Copyright Office’s DMCA-defanging is nice, but man, there are: So. Many. Hoops to jump through https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-wins-dmca-exemption-petitions-tinkering-echos-and-repairing-appliances-new
#5yrsago Chicagoans can actually play “Machine Learning President,” the election RPG https://www.polygon.com/2018/10/25/18010142/machine-learning-president-2020-election-larp
#5yrsago China Telecom has been using poisoned internet routes to suck up massive amounts of US and Canadian internet traffic https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1050&context=mca
#5yrsago Using science to fine-tune your fake blood recipe https://www.wired.com/story/water-flour-syrup-dye-mastering-the-elements-of-fake-blood/
#1yrago Uline's billions fund voter suppression https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/26/boxed-in/#bircher-jr
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always a shock to the system at the end of edge of tomorrow (great movie) when you see that it was produced by steve mnuchin
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