The Justice Department is widely reported to have offered criminal immunity to Bryan Pagliano, the techie who set up Hillary Clinton’s private email operation. Now that he has that get-out-of-jeopardy-free card, Mr. Pagliano also ought to be able to tell Congress and the public what he knows.
Last year Mr. Pagliano exercised his Fifth Amendment right not to testify about his role in maintaining a private email system for Mrs. Clinton when she was Secretary of State. But as GOP Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley wrote in a letter to him last week, “there is no longer reasonable cause for you to believe that discussing these matters with the relevant oversight committees could result in your prosecution.” They want Mr. Pagliano to appear before the Homeland Security and Judiciary committees. (Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Wednesday refused to say if Justice had offered Mr. Pagliano immunity, but that’s her standard operating procedure.) CONTINUE AT SITE
Major nations were brought to their knees when their economies unraveled. More than any constitutional crises, war, plague or immigrants at the borders, when massive debt is the central pillar of a nation’s economy its very survival is in jeopardy.
When nations engage in the political quick fix of borrowing to cover their budget deficits (defined as monetizing the debt), the results have been catastrophic.
Without the leadership and determination to grow our economy, enforce balanced budgets, an end the shortsighted policy of bonding out our budget deficits, the enormous national debt will only keep increasing. Government tax revenues will be offset by ballooning debt service payments that divert money away from education, Medicaid, and national defense. A desperate government will then look to run their printing presses at the Mint 24/7 to cover the shortages and hyperinflation will begin to devour our life savings. It is a threat as serious as the Great Depression.
Against the backdrop of venomous presidential primary races and fierce partisan warfare over the next Supreme Court nominee it is time for a remedial history lesson for America’s White House hopefuls.
The past repeatedly reminds us that major nations were brought to their knees when their economies unraveled. More than any constitutional crises, war, plague or immigrants at the borders, when massive debt is the central pillar of a nation’s economy its very survival is in jeopardy. Yet over the past decade here in America our political leaders have failed to grow our economy, borrowed to support wasteful programs, and thrown dollars at problems rather than make the difficult policy decisions required. As a result, our national debt has grown from $8.5 trillion in fiscal year 2006 to over $19 trillion today, an unsustainable debt that places our nation at risk to an historic financial meltdown.
Marty Rosenberg has sat across the negotiating table from Donald Trump, and he says it cost his business nearly a half-million dollars when the man who currently reigns as the Republican presidential front-runner didn’t live up to his end of the deal.
The year was 1990, and Mr. Trump’s newly constructed Taj Mahal hotel and casino was hurtling toward bankruptcy, while Mr. Rosenberg’s Atlantic Plate Glass (APG) and scores of other contractors who built the lavish megacasino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, waited for more than $60 million in overdue payments.
“We got to the end of the job, and I think he owed APG about $1.5 million,” Mr. Rosenberg recalled in a recent interview. “I was waiting for my check, and it didn’t come.”
Mr. Rosenberg, who was vice president of Atlantic Plate Glass at the time, helped form a committee of construction firms and suppliers stiffed by Mr. Trump. He then served as a member of the so-called Group of Seven leading the committee’s negotiations that resulted in the contractors getting partial payments.
Atlantic Plate Glass lost about $450,000 in the settlement, said Mr. Rosenberg, adding that his personal finances took a hit because of his minority stockholder stake in the firm, and that the company struggled but overcame the loss.
Others fared worse, he said, including smaller businesses that didn’t survive.
“From my experience, he is definitely ego-driven, disingenuous and will say whatever he has to say at the time,” Mr. Rosenberg, 73, said of the billionaire businessman. “Trump says whatever is on his mind at the time that will get him off the hook.”
Mr. Trump questioned Mr. Rosenberg’s motives for telling his story now. He said he didn’t remember Mr. Rosenberg, but he remembered the glass job at the Taj Mahal cost a total of about $10 million.
“To the best of my knowledge, I never even met him. Just another publicity-seeker,” Mr. Trump said in an email to The Washington Times.
In 2009, lots of people were feeling vulnerable. The housing bubble had burst, taking with it millions of jobs. Pensions had vanished. Stocks were slumping. For a shrewd businessman, it was the perfect time for a get-rich-quick scheme.
Enter Donald Trump.
In November 2009, Trump, boasting a Midas-gold tie, took the stage in front of several thousand fans at Miami’s Hyatt Regency to debut his latest venture: The Trump Network™, a multi-level marketing operation focused on nutritional supplements. Trump was, as ever, ebullient: “When I did The Apprentice, it was a long shot. This is not a long shot. . . . We are going to be the biggest in the industry.” The Trump Network’s motto was ubiquitous at the event: Discover the Difference between Opportunity and Success.
In reality, people were about to discover the fine line between a multi-level marketing strategy and a pyramid scheme.
In early 2009, Trump purchased Ideal Health, Inc., founded in 1997 outside Boston by Lou DeCaprio and brothers Todd and Scott Stanwood, who became Trump Network executives. They got to work selling two products: Donald Trump and nutritional supplements. “If you know anything about network marketing — and anything about the power of the Trump brand — you’ll know this is an extraordinary opportunity,” Scott Stanwood wrote on his LinkedIn page. Meanwhile, in a promotional video for the Trump Network, DeCaprio touted the “best nutritional formula in the world.”
“Donald Trump is running a presidential campaign built on culture instead of ideology and issues. It is a culture furious with President Obama’s lawlessness and the failure of congressional Republicans to stop him. Unfortunately, the real culture of Donald Trump is a culture of bombast, bluster, and serial business failure. Perhaps this is the sort of person Americans want in the White House. Or perhaps they don’t know the sort of person Trump is.”
Trump earns support from Americans who think he has a Midas touch and will use his business skills to fix the mess President Obama has created. But a closer look at Trump’s record reveals his success story is just that — a story. How many of his supporters know about Trump University? Trump Air? Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump ties, or the United States Football League?
Trump’s business history reveals someone skilled at making money at the expense of other Americans while his businesses fail, and a man who will say almost anything about these failures. And his legacy of business failures goes beyond the four bankruptcies of his Atlantic City casinos. It includes outsourcing jobs to China, ripping off students seeking an education, and leaving a path of devastated Americans in his wake.
Just ask Louis Piatt. He put his faith in Donald Trump before he concluded Trump University was a worthless scam. Trump University was an unaccredited program that was supposed to teach ordinary Americans how to hit the big time in real estate.
Professor Donald supposedly would offer personal lessons on how to make money. In a perverse way, Trump did. Trump University made money by fleecing regular Americans who saved and paid tens of thousands of dollars in tuition before it vanished. Trump University taught a harsh lesson in grifting.
What of Trump’s skill at “getting things done”? When it came to Trump University, it was mostly bluster. Trump used his personal brand to separate middle class Americans from their money. One pitch about the faculty from Dean Donald went like this:
And honestly, if you don’t learn from them, if you don’t learn from me, if you don’t learn from the people that we’re going to be putting forward, and these are all people handpicked by me, then you’re just not going to make it in terms of world-class success.
Trump University collapsed in a blizzard of lawsuits in 2010, and in 2013 the New York attorney general sued Trump University for $40 million for allegedly defrauding students.
“Mr. Trump is a business nationalist without a core philosophy of government, so his policy arc is going to be an adventure. But some of his voters might be surprised to learn that he wants to flood the U.S. with cheap Mexican goods and other dangerous foreign imports.”
Donald Trump is going to build a wall, and it’s going to be a beautiful wall, and everyone will love it—but it’s also going to have one notable side entrance. To wit, the GOP frontrunner won’t let Mexicans into America but he’ll make an exception for Mexican drugs.
Mr. Trump released a 10-paragraph health plan last week, perhaps in response to the criticism that he has no policy details. We’ll discuss the complete outline at a later date, but one detail that leapt out for comment is his endorsement of foreign pharmaceutical importation—an idea even liberals left for dead a decade ago. His campaign promises to “remove barriers to entry into free markets,” because “allowing consumers access to imported, safe and dependable drugs from overseas will bring more options to consumers.”
Sorry, it won’t. The U.S. maintains a “closed” drug distribution network of manufacturers, suppliers and pharmacies—precisely because overseas drugs often aren’t safe and dependable. Recent years have seen a proliferation of pill mills and forgery rings that slip counterfeit or adulterated products into global supply chains. The World Health Organization estimates 10% of drugs world-wide are bogus.
In the case of Mexico, the U.S. State Department warns travellers that as many as 25% of the medications available south of the border are fake. The Los Zetas, Sinaloa and Juárez cartels have diversified their portfolios into deceptive pharmaceuticals. The modern “closed” U.S. system was created in 1999 because Southern California was awash with fraudulent black-market compounds smuggled from Mexico. CONTINUE AT SITE
As our friend Guy Benson tallies things up in the Clinton email scandal, there were not only a whopping 2,079 emails containing classified information that were stored and transmitted on Hillary Clinton’s non-secure private server system. It turns out that she personally wrote 104 such emails – which, the Washington Post gingerly observes, “could complicate her efforts to argue that she never put government secrets at risk.” I’ll say. In fact, I have said: see my February 6 column describing the damage the former secretary of state has done to national security by exposing intelligence secrets, collection methods, and sources of information to hostile foreign intelligence services.
Let’s also keep in mind a fact that’s easy to forget since what’s before our eyes is so outrageous: For now, we are only talking about the Clinton emails that she deigned to turn over to the government. As Guy reminds us, there are another 32,000 emails that she attempted to delete. There have been reports indicating that the FBI has been able to recover at least some of these from the server. It is a shoe that has yet to drop.
Recall the state of play: Mrs. Clinton originally insisted no classified information was ever transmitted on her servers. When this became untenable, she changed her story to claim that she never personally sent or received classified emails – a claim that, even if true, would be of little legal relevance since she caused the creation of the private server system via which, because of the way she ran her office, the transmission of classified emails by her underlings was inevitable. But of course, we now know for sure that the claim is not true: Wholly apart from what she may have received, Clinton personally wrote and sent those aforementioned 104 emails containing classified information.
So the final evolution in this bogus defense is that there were “no classified markings” on emails stored or sent via the private server. Obviously, this is offered to intimate that she had no way of knowing she and her subordinates were handling classified information with criminal recklessness.
It isn’t just the ties.
Donald Trump has taken some grief for the fact that his signature neckties are made in China. But the scope of Trump-branded products made outside America is larger than has previously been reported — especially when that includes the clothing line named after Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, which is listed on the Trump Organization website as part of the Trump empire.
Thousands of items with the Trump name on them — furniture, shirts, shoes, salad bowls, even “Trump body soap,” and much of Ivanka’s growing jewelry and clothing line — have been made by companies, often paying Trump simply for the use of his name on their goods, that employ foreign workers.
Clothing and home goods are a small part of Trump’s fortune. His total income from licensed home goods was between $2.5 million and $13.1 million, according to his personal financial disclosure.
These Trump company business decisions are directly at odds with the central message of his presidential campaign: a promise to bring back jobs that have been sent abroad.
“I am going to bring jobs back to the United States like nobody else can,” Trump said in his closing statement at last week’s debate in Detroit, ahead of the Republican primary in Michigan on Tuesday.
“I’m going to bring jobs back from China. I’m going to bring jobs back from Mexico and from Japan,” Trump said during the Feb. 13 GOP debate in South Carolina.
In Detroit, Trump admitted he had his clothing line manufactured in China and Mexico. But he claimed that it is “impossible for clothing makers in this country to do clothing in this country.” Trump blamed the Chinese government’s devaluation of the yuan, which helps to make Chinese-made goods cheaper for American consumers than those made in the U.S.
Well before Donald Trump entered the race, there were lots of warning signs that the Republican party was on the road to perdition.
After the marathon 20 debates of 2012, with the ten or so strange candidates who brawled and embarrassed themselves, there had to be some formula to avoid repeating that mob-like mess. Instead, in 2016 there were 17 candidates and 13 debates along with seven forums. There were supposed to be tweaks and repairs that were designed to avoid the clown-like cavalcade of four years ago, but they apparently only ensured a repetition.
Three of the most experienced candidates, at least in the art of executive governance — Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, and Scott Walker — were among the first to get out. The most experienced government CEOs somehow (or logically?) performed poorly in the raucous debates and lacked the charisma or the money or at least the zealous followers of Cruz, Rubio, and Trump.
Or they had too much pride (or sense) — unlike Carson, Christie, Kasich, and Paul — to insist that they were viable candidates when fairly early on, by most measurements, they were not. How strange that those who would have been more credible candidates saw the writing on the wall and left the field — to those marginalized candidates who had no such qualms and ended up wasting months of their time and ours in splintering the vote, engaging in endless bickering on crowded stages, and ensuring that there were few occasions for any of them to distinguish himself. At some point, someone should confess that Democratic debates further Democratic causes far more than Republican debates help Republican causes.
The other veteran governor in the race, Jeb Bush, may have felt, at 63 years old and eight years after the end of his brother’s administration, that his presidential ambitions — born in the pre-Trump-announcement days — were now or never.
Former secretaries of state and defense need to derail ‘classic demagogue’ and calm U.S. allies.
America faces grave threats from abroad. But with Donald Trump close to becoming the Republican nominee and possibly our next president, the most pressing danger to our national security comes from within. More than 100 Republican foreign-policy experts (including both of us) have already weighed in with an open letter, about the perils a Trump presidency would bring. Missing from the names on the letter, and distressingly silent in the debate, however, have been almost all of America’s senior statesmen — especially those who previously served in Republican administrations.
To be sure, a few top leaders have begun to speak out. Without wading into the political debate, retired four-star general Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and CIA, has pointed out that the United States military would be obligated to disobey unlawful orders to torture and kill of the sort that Trump has said he would issue as president. Former secretary of Defense William Cohen has warned that military officers would face Nuremberg-style tribunals if they carried out Trump’s promised plans.
But illegal military orders are, sadly, only part of a much larger menace. Trump is a classic demagogue: He stokes fears and kindles prejudice. His divisive, sometimes violent rhetoric and appeals to racism and xenophobia would destroy the domestic tranquility on which our democracy depends. Beyond the damage it would do at home, a Trump presidency would unravel the American-led international order that has kept us secure since the end of World War II, an order built on alliances, freedom of the seas, respect for international law, defense of human rights, opposition to aggression, free trade, and support for democracy and the rule of law. Trump either does not understand the importance of these principles, is unaware of them or he simply does not care.
Trump has expressed contempt for America’s closest allies, whom he dismisses as parasitic freeloaders, and admiration for the authoritarian regimes that are now hard at work trying to undercut American foreign policy in regions across the globe. He is on record praising Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and offered him a backhanded defense from allegations that he ordered the murder of journalists, explaining, “I think that our country does plenty of killing, too.” As for the Chinese Communist regime’s murderous 1989 crackdown on student protesters, “that shows you the power of strength,” Trump mused.
