U.S. President Donald Trump reacts at the Mar-a-Lago. REUTERS)
President Donald Trump’s corruption — from awarding no bid contracts to cronies to having his sons make tungsten mining deals with Kazakhstan — is so brazen that “he’s making everybody chumps,” according to a panel of experts.
“I think it’s so unprecedented that our laws don't really contemplate a level of corruption at the presidential level like this,” Brendan Ballou, the former Special Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, told MS NOW anchor Nicolle Wallace on Wednesday. “So we really have to develop laws around unjust enrichment, civil RICO, and so forth, in order to be able to attack some of this stuff.”
Ballou added that Trump’s corruption, in addition to occurring in plain sight, has had important consequences in terms of US policy.
“You think about the picture of the new Qatari-gifted jet that he received — it's now Air Force One,” Ballou said. “Well, shortly after he received that gift, he made a unilateral security guarantee to Qatar. So it's entirely possible that American soldiers might fight and die in defense of a country that has gotten an enormous benefit shortly after giving a private jet to the President.”
He added, “Similarly, you know, the UAE — so much of this money coming from crypto, they invested 500 million dollars in Trump's crypto business, a business that, as far as I can tell, provides no value whatsoever. But after investing half a billion dollars, Donald Trump approved the sale of 35,000 extremely rare, extremely expensive AI chips. So if you're wondering why the cost of technology, microchips, and computers in the United States is going up, in part you can potentially thank this investment from the UAE and what the President saw. So it's so unprecedented, to such an extent, that our legal infrastructure didn't even contemplate that this could occur.”
Wallace then discussed a recent Wall Street Journal report that Trump earned $263 million connected to the sale of equity in his cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial. After the deal was signed, the UAE was granted access to tightly guarded American AI chips.
“The challenge you've got here is: Donald Trump is presumably going to pardon himself on his last day in office, and we have a Supreme Court that is extraordinarily solicitous to this President,” Ballou told Wallace. “So we need to be figuring out — okay, how can we get justice, and how can we stop this stuff from happening while he's still in office? What we really need to be thinking about is: who are the people harmed by these extraordinary instances of corruption?”
He continued, “If you are, for instance, an AI researcher who is now paying more for your chips because of the UAE's potential investment in World Liberty Financial, you need to be bringing a lawsuit to try to enjoin this, so that these people are not getting the fruits of their corrupt actions. And if we can stop people from getting the benefits of corruption, they're going to have fewer incentives to be corrupt in the first place — not Donald Trump, but the people trying to influence him.”
Wallace then pointed out that, whereas Trump had scandals during his first term, during his second the scandals are bigger because they inflict economic pain on all Americans, including his own voters. She added that Trump’s indifference is evident by referring to a bipartisan affordable housing bill on Tuesday as a “yawn.”
“The mechanisms of accountability — the Republican Party, the larger media apparatus, in this case Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber — his media apparatus, they're protection rackets,” Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, a nonprofit media watchdog, told Wallace. “They've basically said, ‘We're not going to just turn a blind eye here — we're going to actively make sure you don't face any accountability for this.’ The Republicans who have spent years complaining about Hunter Biden have said nothing. They don't talk about this. We know what it looks like when they're making noise about things that even whiff of corruption when it's in their political interest. But in this case, he is doing something so brazen, so explicit, so transactional, so corrupt that we can't even really paint a picture — we can't even come up with an evocative response to it, because it's on such an industrial scale. It's like thinking about the universe — it's hard to imagine because of how big it is — so we can't even get the right response out of people. And part of the mechanisms of accountability said, ‘You know, we're going to be a protection racket.’”
Carusone added, “He is making everybody chumps. He's not just doing the corruption — he's doing it in such a brazen and explicit way, and he's not even sharing the wealth. A lot of people who do this at least share it with a couple of people close to them — the people participating in it. But he's not sharing it, he's not spreading it around — not even to the people doing the protection rackets.”