Dispatches

US MILITARY FLIGHT STOPOVERS IN SCOTLAND HELP STRUGGLING TRUMP RESORT

The Department of Defense quietly made a commercial airport in Scotland a regular stop for cargo flights en route to the Middle East and back, providing a boost for the struggling Prestwick Airport near Glasgow with the transport planes that refueled there while military flight crews were lodged at President Trump’s luxury Turnberry resort, 23 miles away.

The lodging — and millions of dollars in refueling stops at Glasgow Prestwick Airport 23 miles from the Trump resort — triggered an investigation by the House Oversight Committee earlier this year to determine if taxpayer funds were being used to aid both the airport and Trump’s resort.

Crew members stayed at Turnberry during at least two refueling trips between the US and the Mideast, Politico reported. A representative of the Trump Organization told the New York Times that military personnel stayed “a few times.” A crew member reportedly complained that the crew’s per diem didn’t cover the pricey food and drinks at the resort.

The US military is currently Prestwick’s biggest customer. The New York Times reported that the first payments under this contract started in early October 2017 and that a total of 917 payments for “liquid petroleum” have since been made at a total cost of $17.2 million. It is unclear how many stopovers this represents, as multiple payments were often made on the same day.

Total payments for refueling by the Department of Defense to the commercial airport owned by the Scottish government could total as much $21 million by the time the contract ends, The Scotsman reported. The Pentagon provides Prestwick’s biggest revenue stream, though the fuel could have been obtained at an American — or allied — military base at a lower cost. Both Prestwick and Trump’s Turnberry have struggled financially.

The Air Force has access to US air bases at Ramstein, Germany, or Naval Station Rota in Spain to refuel, as well as US military sites in the Azores and in Sigonella, Italy. in the UK, Lakenheath Air Base is situated nearby in England. Those stops might have been cheaper, too: the military gets billed at a higher rate for fuel at commercial airports.

The Department of Defense has so far ignored requests by the House committee for documents concerning the stays — and the Prestwick contract, according to Politico.

“The airport closest to the Trump Turnberry golf course ... has been viewed as integral to the golf course’s financial success, yet it too has lost millions of dollars every year since its purchase by the Scottish government in 2013,” committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said in a letter in June to acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan. “Given the president’s continued financial stake in his Scotland golf courses, these reports raise questions.”

Trump’s Turnberry resort lost $4.5 million in 2017, but revenue increased $3 million in 2018, Politico reported.

The Scotsman newspaper has reported that the US Defense Logistics Agency has already negotiated a four-year contract beginning in October with Prestwick extending to 2024 for 12.4 million gallons of fuel, 3 million more than the current contract, which is about to expire.

The House oversight committee also now plans to investigate Vice President Mike Pence’s stay at Trump’s golf resort in Doonbeg, Ireland, during an official visit to Ireland last week, even though the resort was 180 miles away — on the other side of the island nation — from planned meetings in Dublin.

The House Judiciary Committee has also said it will look into the president’s suggestion that next year’s G-7 summit be held at his Miami golf resort.

TRUMP TOOK A BIG LOAN FROM TRUMP AND NEVER PAID IT BACK, IN JUST ONE MORE APPARENT SCAM. A loan listed on Donald Trump’s personal financial disclosure forms appears to be hiding a scheme in which he got tens of millions from Deutsche Bank and never reported the income to the IRS. It all adds up to a huge violation of federal tax law that Trump is hiding behind one of the many LLCs that make up the Trump Organization, Russ Choma reported in Mother Jones (9/5).

Trump has debts. How many debts, and who is collecting on those debts, is not very clear. It’s especially not clear because Trump is fighting tooth and nail to prevent the release of his tax returns and to prevent banks from providing Congress with any information. But among Trump’s loans there is one that may be more mysterious than all the rest, and that’s the “over $50 million” that Trump owes to … Donald Trump.

Trump’s business is not actually a single business at all, but an interwoven network of over 500 LLCs and holding companies. They may have different names, different assets, and even different addresses, but what almost all these companies have in common is that they are 100% owned by Trump.

With that in mind, Mark Sumner noted at DailyKos (9/6), Mother Jones took a look a Trump’s personal financial disclosure forms and found that he reports owing “over $50 million” to Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC. Trump owns that company 100%. So he owes that debt to himself. Which isn’t necessarily dishonest, but Trump sets the value of Chicago Unit Acquisition at zero. He’s borrowed at least tens of millions, but he doesn’t seem to be making any payments on this “loan” at all. That’s just the start of the weirdness. On the books of the company, the company that Trump owns, the loan to Donald Trump is classified as a high-risk loan. 

That last thing is certainly true. But everything else about this situation stinks to high heaven. As the Mother Jones analysis points out, it not only violates every rule of accounting, but it also looks like massive tax fraud.

Chicago Unit Acquisition seems to be tied to Trump’s real estate in that city, which would make sense, except for the fact that it also doesn’t seem to have any real estate assets. It seems very much as if Trump set up a company, passed money through that company, and reported that money as a loan when it came to his personal finances. Except he owes no interest and is making no payments.

Asked about the company in a New York Times interview, Trump replied, “We don’t assess any value to it because we don’t care. I have the mortgage. That is all there is. Very simple. I am the bank.” Trump’s attorney declared that the company was both “corporate trade secrets” and “nobody’s business.” 

But the secret here looks like fraud, Sumner noted. As the Mother Jones piece explains in detail, Trump borrowed most of the money for his Chicago project from (where else?) Deutsche Bank. But when the project turned out to be a money pit, he turned around and sued Deutsche Bank. Because it was a lot cheaper to sue than it was to pay what he owed. In a settlement that followed, Deutsche Bank may have forgiven Trump part of what he owed.

As far as the IRS is concerned, that difference between what he actually owed and what the bank agreed to take has another name: income. Taxable income. And that seems to be where Chicago Unit Acquisition comes in. The real secret sauce here may be that Trump took the paper income that he gained by wrangling with Deutsche Bank and gave it to his on-paper company. That on-paper company then “loaned” Trump that theoretical money. And just like that, taxable income was replaced by debt.

The scheme is related to one known as “parking debt,” through which borrowers drop a debt into an LLC that exists for no reason other than to absorb the loss and put off reporting the income. It’s a tactic that can range from mildly shady to a serious tax scam. Parking a debt without paying it back—which is exactly what Trump seems to have done—violates federal tax law.

Of course, there are other reasons that Trump might have written this debt up in the way that he did. But then, Sumner noted, they’re also illegal.

TRUMP SECURITY RISK CAUSES CIA TO PULL TOP KREMLIN SPY. The CIA extracted one of its highest-level spies from Russia in the early summer of 2017 due to concerns that Donald Trump would expose the covert source to Russian officials, CNN reported (9/9).

The extraction followed the meeting in May 2017 in the Oval Office in which Trump blurted out highly classified intelligence to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. That intelligence concerned ISIS in Syria and had been provided by Israel. That disclosure, even though it did not involve the source they removed from Russia, freaked intelligence officials out about the risk of the source being outed. Loyal Trumper Mike Pompeo, then-CIA director and now secretary of state, “told other senior Trump administration officials that too much information was coming out regarding the covert source, known as an asset,” according to CNN’s sources.

According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.

The covert source provided information for more than a decade, according to the sources, and an initial effort to extract the spy, after exposure concerns, was rebuffed by the informant.

“They did get the source out of the country before Trump’s July 2017 meeting with Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit—the infamous meeting in which Trump was not staffed. The one where he confiscated the interpreter’s notes,” Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos (9/9). “Afterward,” CNN reports, “intelligence officials again expressed concern that the President may have improperly discussed classified intelligence with Russia, according to an intelligence source with knowledge of the intelligence community’s response to the Trump-Putin meeting.”

McCarter noted, “the president of the United States has been deemed a national security risk by his own government.”

NOAA PROBES NOAA’S ‘POLITICAL’ RESPONSE TO TRUMP’S LIES. The acting chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration does not seem happy with the agency’s bootlicking support of Donald Trump’s Alabama hurricane predictions and plans to investigate. After Trump claimed Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama, the National Weather Service in the state issued a correction. Trump’s sustained temper tantrum over being wrong got to the point that NOAA officials put out a statement defending Trump and taking the NWS office to task for denying Trump’s original mistake “in absolute terms.”

“To recap: Trump was wrong. The National Weather Service let Alabamians know they didn’t need to be worried about being hit by a hurricane. Trump got mad. NOAA got Trump’s back and told the NWS not to let people know they didn’t need to panic,” Laura Clawson noted at Daily Kos (9/9).

Acting chief scientist Craig McLean now says he’ll investigate that NOAA response, which he criticized sharply.

”The NWS Forecaster(s) corrected any public misunderstanding in an expert and timely way, as they should,” McLean wrote in an email obtained by the Washington Post. “There followed, last Friday, an unsigned press release from ‘NOAA’ that inappropriately and incorrectly contradicted the NWS forecaster. My understanding is that this intervention to contradict the forecaster was not based on science but on external factors including reputation and appearance, or simply put, political.” This stuff matters, because “the content of this press release is very concerning as it compromises the ability of NOAA to convey life-saving information necessary to avoid substantial and specific danger to public health and safety.”

That being the case, McLean is “pursuing the potential violations of our NOAA Administrative Order on Scientific Integrity.”

So, Clawson wondered, “how quickly do you think the Trump administration will find a way to get rid of this guy?”

TRUMP TAKES MONEY FROM FEMA FOR BORDER SECURITY WITH HURRICANE SEASON RAMPING UP. The Trump administration is moving nearly $300 million from agencies including $155 million from cash-strapped and under-staffed Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), even as a growing tropical storm headed toward Puerto Rico and the southeastern United States.

That money will instead fund border security programs, including immigrant detention overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It comes with hurricane season ramping up, even as Puerto Rico and other parts of the country lag in recovery efforts following devastating storms over the past two years.

Democratic leaders criticized Trump’s prioritization of hardline immigration policies over disaster preparation and relief. But Trump ignored those comments, focusing instead on Puerto Rico, a long-running source of ire for the White House, as Hurricane Dorian appeared headed toward the US territory. The hurricane, which grew to Category 5, instead settled over the Bahamas, doing catastrophic damage before moving north to the Southeastern seaboard.

As part of Homeland Security (DHS), FEMA has endured repeated criticism over the agency’s botched response to Hurricane Maria, with internal findings showing FEMA was deeply understaffed and ill-prepared to deal with a disaster on the scale of the Category 5 hurricane at the time. Since the departure of agency head Brock Long earlier this year, FEMA remains without a permanent administrator.

During a hearing this past June, acting FEMA Administrator Peter Gaynor admitted that the agency was “short a few thousand employees” with Atlantic hurricane season already underway. Long, the agency’s former head, told E&E in a recent interview that the agency “is dying a death by 1,000 cuts” as it struggles to overcome staffing and budget challenges, as well as a lack of direction.

Now, FEMA is set for another blow. Trump administration officials said (8/28) $271 million in funds will be moved from several agencies to support border enforcement. Of that amount, $155 million will come from FEMA, while the rest will come from the US Coast Guard and other sources.

When DHS notified Congress about the transfer in July, officials said that “absent significant new catastrophic events” FEMA’s disaster relief fund is expected to operate smoothly without the additional money—as long as there are no more hurricanes.

TRUMP DIVERTS FUNDS FROM MILITARY SCHOOLS AND DAY CARES TO BUILD BORDER WALL. President Trump, despite his empty claims that he’s the most pro-military president “ever,” is preparing to drain funds from schools and day care centers that serve military families, as well as stalling readiness projects, to pay for his promised border wall, Alan Pyke noted at ThinkProgress (9/5).

The Pentagon is diverting billions of dollars from already funded projects at military bases around the world in order to rush fence construction along the US-Mexico border, Defense Department (DOD) officials announced (9/4).

The department indicated the shunting of money away from military child care offerings was not DOD’s idea. “A Pentagon official said in a briefing that the department was given a ‘lawful order’ by Trump to divert the funds,” Reuters reported.

The delayed projects related to quality-of-life for families on bases include a new elementary school tied to a US military facility in Germany, a day care center at the Maryland base where the primary crews responsible for servicing and operating Air Force One are stationed, and a new fire station at a Marine Corps facility in South Carolina. Housing construction for troops and families on bases is being held harmless in the fund diversion, the Pentagon said.

The department has also deferred various projects tied to training and readiness for troops themselves, according to the New York Times. A pistol range in Oklahoma, a cyber-defense facility in Virginia, various unspecified flight simulators, scheduled repairs at ports, and firing range facilities will all be mothballed to build the fencing, according to the Times.

A total of $3.6 billion in already-appropriated DOD funds is being shifted to Trump’s fencing projects, according to a department letter reported Tuesday by The Daily Beast. The word “wall” appears zero times in the letter, the site noted, but it lists locations and structural details for 140 total miles of new fence. Much of that length will replace or augment existing structures.

More than a third of the total cost and mileage goes to the 52 miles of Rio Grande riverfront stretching north from Laredo, Texas. The bulk of the other projects, however, either replace existing pedestrian and vehicle barriers with newer versions, or add additional layers to existing fence lines.

Much of the US-Mexico border is already fenced from previous administrations’ own lower-profile efforts at enhancing security. Those projects have left scars in border communities, where property owners subjected to eminent domain frequently received low-ball compensation offers and misleading pitches about how the new barriers would affect their ability to utilize the land they still own after the feds are done building.

Lawsuits and massive settlements followed those prior waves of construction, adding to the up-front cost of the projects. The big takeaway from government reviews of what had gone wrong was that rushing into these sorts of projects creates preventable waste and generates violations of landowners’ rights.

When the people done wrong by hurried government appraisers and lawyers are rich, they can afford to sue and hold out for something approximating just compensation. It’s the little guys — families living on modest tracts, and medium-large ranching and agricultural operations that look rich on paper but actually trade in razor-fine profit margins — who end up screwed for good.

Editor’s Note: This was among the last dispatches from ThinkProgress, which ceased operations on Sept. 6. It will be missed.

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION PLANS TO GUT FOOD STAMPS, HITTING RED STATES HARDEST. President Trump’s latest attack on working families will hit especially hard in states that voted for him: More than half of the people who are set to lose access to food stamps under regulations proposed this summer live in states that went for Trump in 2016, Alan Pyke noted at ThinkProgress (9/5).

One in every 12 people who receives food stamps nationwide will lose them under the policy — some 3.6 million people, according to new analysis by Mathematica, the private policy analysis firm the Department of Agriculture (USDA) has relied upon for the past 40 years.

“I was surprised by the extent of the impact in some of the southern states, such as Texas,” Mathematica senior research programmer Sarah Lauffer said. The impact was always going to be severe in states that apply the current rules in the most generous fashion, but southern states have generally not extended their eligibility lines quite as far. Despite that, Lauffer said, her team found “34% of elderly Texans receiving benefits will lose them through this rule.”

Almost 400,000 people in Texas currently receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits would lose them. Another 328,000 in Florida, 200,000 in New York, 97,000 in Georgia, and 176,000 in Washington state face cuts, to name just a few standouts.

The administration plans to slash benefits by ending a popular, bipartisan policy known as broad-based categorical eligibility (BBCE). That policy protects low-wage workers from a quirk of poverty-assistance law known as the “benefits cliff,” whereby earning or saving slightly too much money can trigger a low-income family’s eviction from public assistance programs.

Ending the expanded eligibility system for SNAP will also boot roughly half a million kids out of free school meal programs nationwide. The administration has insisted those kids could all hop right back in by filling out application forms currently mooted by the BBCE system, but experts have warned it doesn’t necessarily work that way.

The administration forecasts a $10 billion total draw-down in SNAP spending over the next five years once the policy is enacted. It didn’t estimate the long-term costs of making families hungrier and more desperate.

“Allowing families whose gross income is a little over the poverty level to receive food assistance helps make sure that both the kids and adults in the family are able to eat,” said Lisa Davis, Senior Vice President at the poverty policy center No Kid Hungry. “Children that don’t get the nutrition that they need end up with worse health-care outcomes, worse physical and cognitive development, they have poorer outcomes in school, they find it harder to concentrate, they don’t do as well on tests, there are more behavioral issues.”

N.C. SUPREMES DROP HAMMER ON PARTISAN GERRYMANDERING. In July 2016, a federal appeals court struck down a map of legislative districts drawn by the Republican majority in the North Carolina state legislature, Charles P. Pierce noted at Esquire (9/4). In doing so, the court said that the profoundly gerrymandered map had targeted African American citizens “with almost surgical precision,” which, in the usually polite parlance of judicial opinions, is the equivalent of hitting the losing party in the lawsuit over the head with a hockey stick.

The North Carolina state supreme court made that previous opinion look like a swat with a feather duster. In a whopping 357-page opinion (9/4), the court dropped the big one. From the New York Times:

In outlawing the partisan maps, the judges relied heavily on a broad reading of Section 10 of the State Constitution, which states in its entirety that “All elections shall be free.” While higher state courts have said little about the clause, they wrote, other rulings have made it clear that citizens express their will at the ballot box and that the state has a compelling interest in keeping the vote fair. “The free elections clause of the North Carolina constitution guarantees that all elections must be conducted freely and honestly to ascertain, fairly and truthfully, the will of the people,” the judges wrote. But “it is not the free will of the people that is fairly ascertained through extreme partisan gerrymandering. Rather, it is the carefully crafted will of the map drawer that predominates.”

Clearly, the court was influenced by a number of recent developments. First, the Supreme Court of the United States took a walk on the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering, but said quite clearly that state courts could rule on the question based on the individual state constitutions. North Carolina now joins Pennsylvania as states in which this strategy has been successful.

JOBS REPORT FOR AUGUST FALLS 30,000 SHORT OF PREDICTION AS RETAIL JOBS DECLINE FOR 7TH MONTH. The Bureau of Labor Statistics report for August has been released showing 130,000 new jobs. That number falls well short of the 160,000 predicated for the month. In addition, the BLS again revised previous months downward, shaving another 20,000 jobs from June and July numbers, Mark Sumner noted at DailyKos <>(9/6).

The day before, Donald Trump tweeted about “really good jobs numbers!” leading many to believe that the August numbers would over-perform expectations and driving a temporary spike in stock prices. That turns out to not be the case. Nonfarm payrolls added 130,000 jobs vs. 160,000 expected. The unemployment rate remained at 3.7%. Average hourly earnings were up slightly with a 0.4% increase.

One section that is under particular scrutiny: retail jobs dropped by another 11,000 in August. That’s the seventh straight month of losses in that area and signal a weakness in retail sales.

The 130,000 jobs in August followed a report of 164,000 seasonally adjusted new jobs in July. At that time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics also revised June and May down by 41,000.

TRUMP TO UKRAINE: NO AID UNLESS YOU SMEAR JOE BIDEN. Donald Trump has suspended the delivery of $250 million in US military aid to a country still fighting Russian aggression in its eastern provinces, and the Washington Post editorial board suspects Trump politicizing foreign policy.

“Some suspect Mr. Trump is once again catering to Mr. Putin, who is dedicated to undermining Ukrainian democracy and independence. But we’re reliably told that the president has a second and more venal agenda: He is attempting to force Mr. Zelensky to intervene in the 2020 U.S. presidential election by launching an investigation of the leading Democratic candidate, Joe Biden. Mr. Trump is not just soliciting Ukraine’s help with his presidential campaign; he is using U.S. military aid the country desperately needs in an attempt to extort it.”

The strong-arming of Zelensky was reported to the New York Times (8/21) by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who said he had met in Madrid with a close associate of the Ukrainian leader and urged that the new government restart an investigation of Biden and his son. Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, while Joe Biden, as vice president, urged the dismissal of Ukraine’s top prosecutor, who investigated the firm.

Giuliani also wants a probe of claims that revelations of payments by a Ukrainian political party to Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, were part of a plot to wreck Trump’s candidacy. In other words, Trump associates want the Ukrainian government to prove that Ukraine improperly acted against Trump in the 2016 election; but they also want it to meddle in his favor for 2020.

“Mr. Zelensky is incapable of delivering on either demand.”

Kevin Drum noted at MotherJones (9/7), “This week’s obsession with Sharpiegate was all good fun, but today we learned that Trump, as usual, is taking it very, very seriously indeed: he strong-armed NOAA into issuing a late-Friday press release saying, wrongly, that Alabama had been in danger from Hurricane Dorian all along. In the great scheme of things, this doesn’t matter much except as yet another example of how Trump works. On a much bigger, more corrupt scale it’s the same thing that’s happening with Ukraine.”

DHS SPENT $120M ON OFFICE FURNITURE AS MIGRANT KIDS GO WITHOUT SOAP. As Donald Trump’s administration has swindled millions of dollars from critical projects and agencies such as FEMA to aid his mass deportation agenda, an investigation by the Daily Beast finds that since the start of his presidency, Homeland Security has spent nearly $120 million of its funding on office furniture and supplies. Not blankets or soap or even a toothbrush for jailed migrant kids, but instead luxury recliners for officials’ rears, Gabe Ortiz noted at DailyKos (9/6).

“The office furniture expenditures, sorted by code in the Federal Procurement Data System Product and Service Codes Manual, include filing cabinets, dry-erase boards, desks, and many, many chairs—and does not include cots, bed frames, or mattresses destined for use by undocumented immigrants in detention centers,” the Daily Beast reports. “Much of the new furniture is earmarked for the department’s new Washington, D.C. headquarters, dubbed ‘the most ambitious federal building project since the Pentagon.’”

At least $1,500,000 of that was spent on Herman Miller goods—“the luxury furniture maker whose Aeron chair is featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection”—for just two US Citizenship and Immigration Services offices. Keep in mind that USCIS, which processes applications for permanent residence and other documents, has a backlog at “crisis levels,” the American Immigration Council said, and agency leaders had the gall to ask staff to volunteer extra time to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement with paperwork.

But $803,095.54 in Herman Miller furniture for one office in Jackson, Miss. Meanwhile, this past June, New Yorker magazine reported that Customs and Border Protection officials treated a lice outbreak among kids jailed at a Clint, Texas, facility by giving them two combs to share. When the children lost one of the combs, agents “got so mad that they took away the children’s blankets and mats. They weren’t allowed to sleep on the beds, and they had to sleep on the floor on Wednesday night as punishment for losing the comb.”

The administration’s swindling is also affecting US-born kids. “Congress appropriated money for a new middle school at Kentucky’s Fort Campbell,” Daily Kos’ Laura Clawson wrote earlier Friday. “Then, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s help, Donald Trump took that money to build his border wall, leaving kids in McConnell’s home state behind.” The New York Times reports that “teachers at Mahaffey will continue to use mobile carts to store their books, lesson plans and homework assignments because there is not enough classroom space.” MAGA.

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2019

Populist.com