Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

… among the most cringeworthy communications in the history of the alphabet!

Not all heroes wear capes.

Let’s finish the job.

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

T R E 4 5 O N

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

He really is that stupid.

Cole is on a roll !

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Repub Corruption Open Thread: All in the (Crime) Family

Repub Corruption Open Thread: All in the (Crime) Family

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… Mr. Trump’s name is plastered on signs at the entrance of the project and in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel in Muscat, the nearby capital of Oman, where a team of sales agents is invoking Mr. Trump’s name to help sell luxury villas at prices of up to $13 million, mostly targeting superrich buyers from around the world, including from Russia, Iran and India.

Mr. Trump has been selling his name to global real estate developers for more than a decade. But the Oman deal has taken his financial stake in one of the world’s most strategically important and volatile regions to a new level, underscoring how his business and his politics intersect as he runs for president again amid intensifying legal and ethical troubles.

Interviews and an examination by The New York Times of hundreds of pages of financial documents associated with the Oman project show that this partnership is unlike any other international deal Mr. Trump and his family have signed.

– The venture puts Mr. Trump in business with the government of Oman, an ally of the United States with which Mr. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, cultivated ties while in office and which plays a vital diplomatic role in a volatile region. The Omani government is providing the land for the development, is investing heavily in the infrastructure to support it and will get a cut of the profits in the long run.

– Mr. Trump was brought into the deal by a Saudi real estate firm, Dar Al Arkan, which is closely intertwined with the Saudi government. While in office, Mr. Trump developed a tight relationship with Saudi leaders. Since leaving office, he has worked with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund to host the LIV golf tour and Mr. Kushner received a $2 billion infusion from the Saudi fund for his investment venture.

– Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, has already brought in at least $5 million from the Oman deal. Under its terms, Trump Organization will not put up any money for the development, but will help design a Trump-branded hotel, golf course and golf club and will be paid to manage them for up to 30 years, among other revenue.

– The project could also draw scrutiny in the West for its treatment of its migrant workers, who during the first phase of construction are living in compounds of cramped trailers in a desertlike setting and are being paid as little as $340 a month, according to one of the engineers supervising the work…

Mr. Trump’s business ties in the Middle East have already been under intense scrutiny. Federal prosecutors who brought criminal charges against him in the case stemming from his mishandling of classified documents issued subpoenas for information about his foreign deals and the agreements with the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour.

During his presidency, Mr. Trump’s family business profited directly from money spent at his Washington hotel by foreign governments including Saudi Arabia, just one example of what ethics experts cited as real or perceived conflicts of interest during his administration. His stake in the project in Oman as he runs for president again only focuses more attention on whether and how his own financial interests could influence foreign policy were he to return to the White House…

Oman, in fact, is nothing like the Hamptons. It is a Muslim nation and absolute monarchy, ruled by a sultan, who plays a sensitive role in the Middle East: Oman maintains close ties with Saudi Arabia and its allies, but also with Iran, with which it has considerable trade.

As a result, Oman has often served as an interlocutor for the West with Iran, including in the lead-up to the 2015 agreement the Obama administration and other Western governments negotiated with Iran to slow its move to build nuclear weapons, a deal Mr. Trump later abandoned. In recent months, Oman has hosted indirect talks to try to ease tensions between Iran and the United States…

DarGlobal is teaming up with luxury brands like Missoni, Versace and Lamborghini — as well as the Trump family — on projects outside Saudi Arabia targeting international buyers. DarGlobal is targeting buyers who will pay as much as a 30 percent premium for a “branded” townhouse and can often buy their units with cash, according to a confidential company document obtained by The Times.

“There is a big wealth concentration in the world, which means that those people will more and more demand more exclusive products and more exclusive projects,” Ziad El Chaar, DarGlobal’s chief executive, told real estate developers in France this year…

And when it comes to a famous name evoking a lust for money and an unpicky attitude towards the means of its acquistion, you can’t find one more apropos than TRUMP!

Nosy news articles like this help explain why Jarvanka, now that J-Kush has achieved his own respectably opaque two-billion-dollar Saudi slush fund, have chosen to (publicly) step back from Daddy’s messy political operations…

(As a sad-trombone coda, there’s also been a trickle of articles claiming that Tiffany Trump — having finally drawn her bio-dad’s attention by marrying her very own Middle-Eastern billionaire nepo-baby — will be the next-gen stand-in of an imagined Presidential reinstatement.)

Reader Interactions

81Comments

  1. 1.

    NotMax

    Open thread? FYI.

    For the first time, U.S. regulators on Wednesday approved the sale of chicken made from animal cells, allowing two California companies to offer “lab-grown” meat to the nation’s restaurant tables and eventually, supermarket shelves.

    The Agriculture Department gave the green light to Upside Foods and Good Meat, firms that had been racing to be the first in the U.S. to sell meat that doesn’t come from slaughtered animals — what’s now being referred to as “cell-cultivated” or “cultured” meat as it emerges from the laboratory and arrives on dinner plates. Source

  2. 2.

    Brachiator

    The venture puts Mr. Trump in business with the government of Oman, an ally of the United States with which Mr. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, cultivated ties while in office and which plays a vital diplomatic role in a volatile region. The Omani government is providing the land for the development, is investing heavily in the infrastructure to support it and will get a cut of the profits in the long run.

    This deal puts Hunter Biden’s laptop to shame.

  3. 3.

    bbleh

    I suppose it goes without saying that this makes Trump a TOTAL WINNER, rich and famous and doing MEGA deals all over the WORLD, and if he used his powers as President to give him leverage on this deal, that is totally SMART, just like he says, and Biden is a complete weak loser.  But also Biden is completely corrupt and it’s a totally OUTRAGEOUS double standard to use his powers as President to go after Trump for a few pieces of paper that he was allowed to have anyway.

    I wish I were joking …

  4. 4.

    MattF

    It’ll be interesting if/when the ‘Trump’ brand goes rotten. IMO, it’s already started stinking up the place— and lining up with Prince Bonesaw Of Arabia and Vlad The Destroyer isn’t going to help. But we shall see.

  5. 5.

    Wapiti

    @NotMax: Reminds me of a science fiction story I read as a kid. The protagonist meets up with a worker who is carving slices off of “Chicken Little”, a huge, cancerous, ever-growing chunk of chicken meat. The passage to the resistance cell is under the mass of meat. Maybe Merchants of Venus was the book.

  6. 6.

    geg6

    Jesus.  And these fuckers are screaming about Hunter Biden 24/7?

    And I must say that I’m pissed at Tiffany.  Here I thought she was the only one of this bunch of ghouls with a smidgen of brains and class.  I actually felt some sympathy for her.  Fuck her.  She can go DIAF with the rest of that family from hell.

  8. 8.

    Jeffro

    Profit sharing with a monarch while seeking to run US foreign policy?

    Why not?  No one called him on all the DC hotel grift during his “presidency”, much less all the bribes I’m sure he took to align US policy with Putin, MBS, etc.

  12. 12.

    mrmoshpotato

    Profit sharing with a monarch while seeking to run US foreign policy?

    No puppet corruption.  No puppet corruption.  You’re the puppet corrupt.  You’re the puppet corrupt.

  13. 13.

    Dangerman

    Does he not understand even the appearance of a conflict of interest?

    I’ve yet to see one quality in the man that is even remotely redeeming. Maybe he’s a good Dad (when he’s not lusting for one of his kids). Maybe he’s a good Husband (ok, fucking pron stars probably eliminates that possibility). Maybe he doesn’t cheat at … oh, fuck it, of course he does. A total and complete POS.

    OK, BJ gardeners, I know one of you will know the answer to this one:

    Can you name that tree?

    Not the pines (got those). The other one. City is Highland,  CA, on way to Big Bear (well, base of the route to BB).

  17. 17.

    NotMax

    FYI part 2. Trickle-down popularity.

    The world is watching the search for the OceanGate submarine, lost at sea with five occupants within. The vessel went missing on Sunday morning, roughly an hour and forty-five minutes into its expedition to the Titanic. It’s a terrifying situation to imagine yourself in, and while Canadian, American, and French officials are conducting a massive search operation, the situation looks grim. As people learn more about the Titan submersible and the situation its occupants may be in, their interest is being re-directed to a surprising source — Iron Lung, an indie game about an alien moon and oceans of blood.
    [snip]
    [Creator] Syzmanski shared that;the game was seeing a spike in sales and popularity on his personal Twitter, posting a chart with the caption “This feels so wrong.” The game is also being bombarded with positive reviews, one of which reads: “Retroactively based on a true story.” Source

  19. 19.

    Scout211

    I read this story yesterday and was about to post it in the comments but then decided not to because it just seemed like another day in Trump’s corruption and money laundering making schemes.

    The NYT’s headline now says “underscores ethical concerns,” but the original headline online was something like how with Trump, “ethics and politics intersect”. All the other news services headlines included, “ethical red flag,” “blatant as it comes,” “ethics experts sound alarm,” “deal poses threat.”

    Let’s not sound an alarm NYT.  Someone might get mad.  At you.

    Cowards.

     

    ETA: edited for typos and clarity.

  21. 21.

    Jerzy Russian

    @Dangerman:   The tree with the purple leaves?  That is a jacaranda tree.  They are common here in San Diego, they bloom late May or early June.  Really nice trees.

  25. 25.

    dmsilev

    @Dangerman: As others have said, that’s a jacaranda. They’re in bloom right now around here, and we have a lot of them, so the whole city is bright purple for a few weeks. Very pretty. And then the dead blossoms fall off and it’s a heck of a mess.

  26. 26.

    Danielx

    @Dangerman:

    Dude – he doesn’t recognize the concept of conflict of interest. There’s no conflict, ever. There is that which benefits DJT, and there’s everything else, period dot.

  27. 27.

    Dangerman

    @CarolPW: Interesting. My Folks had a bougainvillea; lovely thing, sharp f’ing thorns as I recall and, also recalling, massive draw for bees. Trimming it sucked.

    Curiously, my Father’s name was Jack and my Mother’s favorite color was Purple. This property isn’t too far from their old place (and my Childhood home). I’m helping a Friend look and there aren’t too many places in the Inland Empire that are all that nice (excluding Mountain communities; I love Oak Glen, for example). Highland is …. OK. Not too far from not OK but it is what it is. I don’t go down there very much any more because too many drivers off their nut. I see some crazy shit when I visit.

    ETA: Or when visited here (i.e., 4th of July, Pismo, which is just fucking nuts).

  28. 28.

    RaflW

    @Jeffro: Oh, some institutions and even a few people in leadership roles called these abuses out. But our cynical beltway press decided that this sort of out in the open corruption was boring.

  30. 30.

    mrmoshpotato

    As a sad-trombone coda, there’s also been a trickle of articles claiming that Tiffany Trump — having finally drawn her bio-dad’s attention by marrying her very own Middle-Eastern billionaire nepo-baby — will be the next-gen stand-in of an imagined Presidential reinstatement.

    Oh goody!  So the entire family can go fuck themselves into the Sun – Barron too!

  35. 35.

    Jackie

    @Brachiator: I read somewhere that Ivanka thinks TIFG’s name is tarnished and she’s swapping for the tarnished name of Kushner. She should just take Ivanna’s maiden name IMH.

  36. 36.

    Geminid

    Oman does play an important diplomatic role in the region. They brokered the recent detente between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and Omani diplomats accompanied Saudis to San’aa, capital of Yemen, where they signed a ceasefire with the Houthi government that is still holding.

    As noted in the post, Oman recently hosted “indirect” talks between US and Iranian officials regarding Iran’s nuclear program. Both countries are being very cagey about these talks and deny that they have continued in New York. But the process has evidently progressed enough for Congressional Republicans and the Israeli Prime Minister to warn against a possible agreement.

    Oman can do this because they are a stable country that has steered clear of the various conflicts that have wracked the region over the last few decades. They are trusted where trust is a scarce commodity.

  37. 37.

    MattF

    @Anotherlurker: Don’t put much faith in those headlines about search and rescue homing in on areas where they heard ‘noises’. The ocean depths are big, dark, and noisy. There could be a miracle, but it’s not likely.

  39. 39.

    Steve in the ATL

    @MattF: how is the brand not rotten already?  I get that poorly educated working class racists love him, but what men of wealth and power are still impressed with him?  What does he bring to the table for Middle East oligarchs?  I don’t get it.

  41. 41.

    Jeffro

    @Dangerman: I recently got the ‘Seek’ app by iNaturalist and it’s able (about 98% of the time) to tell me whatever plant/shrub/flower/tree I’m looking at.

    You just take a pic and POOF, there you go!  It’s kind of awesome.  =)

    There are plenty of similar ones, I’m sure.

    I also love ‘Skyview Lite’ for telling me what I’m seeing up in (yup, you guessed it) the night sky.

  42. 42.

    James E Powell

    @Anotherlurker:

    The contrast could not be more stark, but I think it’s not billionaires, it’s Titanic. It still gets attention.

    I can’t prove it, but my sense is that if the five people in the submersible were scientists studying global warming or pollution, the story would not be getting anything like this amount of attention.

    NB – Unless one of the scientists was a young, attractive blonde American woman.

  43. 43.

    Dangerman

    @MattF: I suspect, and I’ll confess to not really following this all that closely, they didn’t suffer. It was likely very fast. What I’ve read about the pressure vessel issues makes me wonder why someone didn’t say “now wait just a damn second” …

  46. 46.

    Anotherlurker

    @MattF: Very true. As a SCUBA diver, I remember being fascinated every time I heard whales singing in the distance.  Haunting and powerful.

    It just gets me that the deaths of 500 people seeking new lives is not worth a mention in the US press.

  47. 47.

    Old School

    CNN — 
    The US House of Representatives on Wednesday voted to censure Rep. Adam Schiff, a key lawmaker in Democrats’ congressional investigations into former President Donald Trump during his presidency.

    The resolution accuses Schiff of misleading the American people while pursuing the congressional investigation into Russia and the Trump campaign as the then-chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and for actions Schiff took leading up to the former president’s first impeachment. Schiff has dismissed the allegations as “false and defamatory.”

    The vote was 213-209 along party lines.
    Six Republicans voted present.

  48. 48.

    Kirk

    @MattF: I’m not putting much faith in the banging. I keep recalling various tales of causes of such in wrecks – eddy currents, happenstance of debris where local animal life is active, a motor doggedly turning at slow speed, etc.

  50. 50.

    geg6

    @MattF:

    I agree.  I know nothing about subs but I am a certified diver and know at least a little about the dangers of depth in the ocean.  From what I’ve been reading from numerous media sources about the poor construction, materials and design of that thing, I have no doubt these guys were toast a long time ago.  I’d feel real bad about it, but I just don’t give a shit about stupid billionaires choosing to kill themselves and paying a fortune to do it.  I wish more of them would do stupid and expensive stunts and kill themselves.

  51. 51.

    Bill Arnold

    @Kayla Rudbek:

    Lois McMaster Bujold’s vat protein

    Arthur C Clarke wrote a short story about cultured/synthetic human flesh.
    Ethical Cannibalism!

  52. 52.

    Redshift

    @Bill Arnold: There was a story I’ve forgotten the title of set in a future with all sorts of synthetic foods. The protagonist is a food biologist who created a very popular one called the bananameat tree. The secret ingredient was a certain amount of human DNA.

  54. 54.

    stinger

    @Wapiti: I believe it’s The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth. 1952. Has a lot in common with Dorothy Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise!

  55. 55.

    NotMax

    @Kirk

    Calls to mind a scene from On the Beach:

    The glimmer of hope is dashed when a crewman is sent ashore in San Diego, protected by a radiation-resistant suit, only to find the source of the mysterious Morse code signal is an empty coke bottle attached to a window blind jostling in the breeze which is randomly tapping the telegraph key.

  56. 56.

    Redshift

    Under its terms, Trump Organization will not put up any money for the development…

    Translation from NYT-speak: it’s a bribe.

  57. 57.

    Bill Arnold

    @Jeffro:

    I recently got the ‘Seek’ app by iNaturalist and it’s able

    The iNaturalist image datasets (for contests) are notoriously among the most difficult for AI image classification methods. A large number of species, with well-labeled images, with a limited number of images per species (15+ IIRC for the contest datasets). Sounds like iNaturalist has picked one of the leading classifiers.

  62. 62.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @PaulWartenberg:

    What happened to the Emoluments Clause is that it was taken to court for the first time, and the judge pointed out that there is no punishment listed in the law books for violating it so there was nothing the judge could actually do.

    ETA – The Supreme Court is riding high on this, too.  Sure, they’ve violated disclosure laws, but they only violated the disclosure laws that have no punishments attached.

  64. 64.

    kalakal

    I don’t get how the Trump ‘brand’ could be a draw to ultra wealthy people. He’s tacky as all hell. If you’re wanting to appear ‘classy’ and using your possessions to bolster you’re image it’s a game of one of these is not like the other

    Patek Phillipe, Balenciaga, Rolls Royce, Trump

  65. 65.

    NotMax

    @Steve in the ATL

    Just yesterday saw some movie footage (shot by Eva Braun, IIRC) of Hitler meeting with a Saudi delegation. This follow-up is from 2013:

    Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah keeps, “treasures” and sometimes shows off a dagger given by Adolf Hitler himself to a visiting Saudi delegation in 1939.
    [snip]
    According to minutes of the meeting kept by the German Foreign Ministry, Hitler had assured al-Hud that the Reich and the Arabs had common interests because “we are both fighting the Jews.” Source

  67. 67.

    Steve in the ATL

    @kalakal:
     

    Patek Phillipe, Balenciaga, Rolls Royce

    Substitute “Aston Martin” for “Rolls Royce” and I’d swear you were stalking Omnes on Insta!

  70. 70.

    BellyCat

    @trnc: Crossing “the streams”  could result in unexpected deleterious consequences (and lawsuits among nearly top ten thousand blogs). //

  72. 72.

    Geminid

    Oman may be using this project as a hedge against a second Trump presidency. From the Second World War up until 2017, Gulf Arab countries could count on the US to guarantee their security. When Trump came to power this relationship became transactional, and the Omanis can’t count on him not winning another term. If Trump does win, this project will give him a stake in the Sultanate’s security. If Trump doesn’t win, this project might never be built.

  76. 76.

    Marc

    @Bill Arnold:  The iNaturalist image datasets (for contests) are notoriously among the most difficult for AI image classification methods.

    On a related topic, I recently installed the Merlin app from Cornell Lab of Ornithology on my Android phone.  It also uses image classification techniques, for both bird photos (which I haven’t tried) and songs (by converting recorded sounds to spectrograms for matching).  On a typical noisy morning in my Oakland front yard this week, it correctly identified hooded orioles, oak titmouses, black phoebes, house finches, and lesser goldfinches.  All in real time, with a thumbnail picture and label for each that highlights as they sing. A great tool for the lazy birdwatcher, like me.

  77. 77.

    Ruckus

    @geg6:

    You know, Hunter could have done some grandiose damage with that laptop that has never been shown to have anything more ominous than a grocery list on it.

    But being best buds with a sultan and a foreign leader who is trying to destroy the country that he attacked because he seems to have gotten just a bit out over his skis is maybe just a tad off putting.

  78. 78.

    Ruckus

    @Dangerman:

    Does he not understand even the appearance of a conflict of interest?

    The list of things, ideas, ideals, laws, humanity that he doesn’t understand would rival a hardbound copy of Webster’s Unabridged.

    For a start….

  79. 79.

    Ruckus

    @MattF:

    If they are at full depth how do they attach a line to pull them up, even if they find them? Because it looked like it’s lifted with slings normally but if it’s on the bottom……

  80. 80.

    Ruckus

    @Steve in the ATL:

    The brand has always been rotten. The people that would use him may be smarter and likely far wealthier but he has a couple of things going for him. He’s willing to sell out for really not much in their worlds. He’s been president and everything in the world help us hopefully won’t ever set a shitty foot in the WH ever again. Those 2 things are why they are willing to deal with him. He’s more like them than anyone else that can get elected here. And he’s for sale cheap.

  81. 81.

    bjacques

    @geg6: well, Musk and Zuck are gonna have a cage fight, I hear.

     

    If the US Coast Guard aren’t confirming or even discussing whether those noises are periodic, on the hour or half hour, then they’re just racing against the clock, which is about to expire, and three billionaires and a pilot and expert who should have known better will join those 500 refugees.

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