"We will pay the price for decades for an ignorant, mentally unwell U.S. president’s sabotage of America’s distinctive assets, stupidly abetted by cowardly Republicans"

Trump’s exaggerated, confusing, and downright false remarks about a deal with Iran only underscore the perception of the American president as untrustworthy and chaotic, if not insane. A chief beneficiary of his embarrassing performance, coupled with his bullying, disastrous wars, and mindless tariffs, is China. Since Trump does not understand what makes America so powerful, he cannot comprehend that his actions destroy those advantages, thereby boosting China on the world stage.

Nowhere is Trump’s penchant for self-owns more evident than in his determination to blow up alliances. Long ago, Trump alienated progressive leaders in Europe (e.g. Spain, UK, France), and now has become toxic to ones on the far rightwing. Politico reports that far-right French leader Marine Le Pen warned her party “to keep our distance” from Trump. Ouch. Not even the neo-Nazi AfD party in Germany wants to get too close to him, observing that Vice President JD Vance’s visit “hung like millstones around [the former Hungarian leader’s] neck.”

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, once Trump’s biggest supporter in the EU, had enough when Trump attacked Pope Leo. “I find President Trump’s words towards the Holy Father unacceptable,” she said in unusually harsh terms. “The Pope is the head of the Catholic Church, and it is right and normal for him to call for peace and to condemn every form of war.” Given that her voters abhor Trump and he has diminished the value of the U.S. as an ally (by launching tariffs, abandoning Ukraine, and cozying up to Russia), her move after losing a recent referendum makes perfect political sense.

The deterioration in U.S. standing with the public in democratic countries, which in turn affects leaders’ decision-making, is breathtaking. When Politico pollsters asked if China or the U.S. was a more reliable partner, “57 percent of Canadians, 40 percent of Germans, and 42 percent of Britons said China — a sharp decline in America’s perceived trustworthiness,” Robert Kagan wrote recently. “In the past, America’s alliance relationships have survived waves of public disapproval because governments knew that whatever errors the United States made and however unpopular Washington might be, it remained fully committed to defending the order that protected them.” Well, not anymore.

And here is where China makes its move. When Trump snapped back at Meloni, declaring, “She’s the one who’s unacceptable,” China was quick to rush forward. At a meeting in China on economic and trade cooperation, Minister Wang Wentao told Italy’s delegation: “China is willing to work with Italy to further tap into the potential for cooperation.” He added, “Italy is expected to play a constructive role in promoting the healthy and stable development of China-European Union economic and trade relations.”

Time and again, China has shown finesse in capitalizing on Trump’s compulsion to offend and attack allies. Trump’s moves to bludgeon trading partners with tariffs and leave them to bear the brunt of a reckless, counterproductive war with Iran (then threatening NATO when Europeans refused to back him) opened the door for China to present itself as a model of stability in a world of Trumpian chaos.

The Iran war certainly intensified the shift in power and influence away from the U.S. Trump’s decision to move assets to the Middle East furthered China’s strategic objectives, ceding (at least temporarily) the U.S.’s ability to project force and offer protection for its allies. China did not lift a finger to push U.S. forces out of the Indo-Pacific.

As Andrew P. Miller and Michael Clark explained, Trump’s adventurism in Venezuela and Iran have served “to deplete U.S. resources, tank the United States’ reputation, and raise fuel prices,” as well as force the U.S. to reposition personnel and material away from Asia. “With the U.S. military bogged down in the Middle East, China has a freer hand in East Asia,” they wrote. “China can present itself as a responsible peacemaker … [after] the United States has injured its reputation by acting unpredictably, betraying its allies, and starting a war that has done serious damage to the global economy.”

China’s position, if anything, will only improve after (and if) the fighting stops in the Middle East. China no doubt will eagerly offer to participate, if not lead, reconstruction in the region. Trump has given it a golden opportunity to make itself a more attractive partner than the United States, which caused the wreckage. Given resentment toward the U.S. over casualties and physical destruction, its deceptive promises (Regime change! Gulf allies will be fine!), and virulent anti-Muslim language, Middle East leaders may be quite receptive to China’s overtures.

Consider China’s advantage (facilitated by Trump anti-green energy derangement) in clean energy. Its ability to sell EV’s and solar panels throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Africa is now unmatched. “It’s not hard to imagine policymakers from across the developing world looking at examples like these and concluding that betting on Beijing isn’t actually the riskier option,” Bloomberg reports. Given Trump’s hostility to green energy and his bewildering international conduct, if “the only options are dependence on predictably mercantilist Beijing and on an erratic, self-centered and disruptive U.S., the choice is obvious.”

If there were any doubt as to the fallout from Trump’s war, diplomatic cables show the damage the war has done to U.S. relations with Muslim countries such as Azerbaijan, Bahrain, and Indonesia, Politico reports. “Some of the cables describe anti-U.S. sentiment that is having an immediate impact, while others raise concerns that relationships could be in danger if the war continues much longer.”)

In sum, Trump has never understood that U.S. power and prestige rely on our long-standing alliances, technological prowess, attractiveness as a destination for the best and the brightest, and moral stature. Whether isolating the U.S. from European allies, waging a reckless war, burning through U.S. munitions, ceding China the lead in green energy, undercutting our university scientific research system, chasing away immigrants, or destroying our moral authority (hence, our standing to pressure China on human rights), Trump has unilaterally disarmed the U.S. By jettisoning our inherent strengths, Trump boosts China, which never had those advantages.

When historians look back on this period to understand how the U.S. lost global preeminence to China, the question will not be “Who lost China?” but “Who lost superpower status to China?” We will pay the price for decades for an ignorant, mentally unwell U.S. president’s sabotage of America’s distinctive assets, stupidly abetted by cowardly Republicans.

-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is reader-supported. To enable us to provide independent journalism while holding accountable those who wage senseless wars (at home and abroad), please join our community as a subscriber.

 

Thomas, Reagan, Trump

 

People feel like there’s a darkness that’s spread across America in the 15 months since Trump took office a second time. It’s being noticed all over the world, from the Pope to the leaders of our (formerly) allied nations and is being embraced by dictators like Putin and MBS.

The most corrupt Supreme Court justice in history, Clarence Thomas, who’s taken millions from billionaires and then voted to promote their interests, inadvertently helped us all see clearly the source of this depravity that’s permeated so much of our government at all levels. Last week he gave a speech at the University of Texas, Austin, and blamed the ills of the world (and America) on the rise of “progressivism.”

Thomas blamed progressivism for everything from the rise of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao to racial segregation and the eugenics movement that Hitler borrowed from America and Britain to excuse his Final Solution.

In fact, Thomas is following an old tradition that was explained a century ago when arch-conservative propagandist Joseph Goebbels famously said, “Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty.” It’s the foundation of the modern saying, “Every accusation is a confession.”

My father fancied himself a conservative back when I was a kid during the Eisenhower and Kennedy era, but in his mind that simply meant that one doesn’t radically or rapidly change society without first thinking through the consequences in detail and then, when you do decide to make changes to the rules of society, you move forward in measured increments. Conservatively.

At least that’s how Dad explained it to me, and how both Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his then-VP Richard Nixon explained it in their own ways.

Eisenhower, writing to his brother in 1954, warned that any party that tried to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, or other social programs would “disappear,” noting that only “a tiny splinter group” believed such a rollback was even possible. Nixon, two decades later, was just as blunt about the need for pragmatic, incremental governance, famously observing in a 1971 message to Congress that “we are all Keynesians now.”

In other words, the conservatism of that era wasn’t about blowing up the New Deal with its programs of Social Security, the minimum wage, labor protections, funding scientific research and education, etc.; it was about tending it carefully, changing it cautiously, and conserving what worked.

Today’s modern conservative movement, though, isn’t conservative at all, and hasn’t been since the Reagan Revolution: it’s reactionary and, through the two Trump presidencies and the Project 2025 embrace of Orbánism and Putinism, has now become fully fascistic.

It all began in a big way when, in 1954, the Supreme Court reversed their 1898 Plessy v Ferguson “separate but equal” decision with Brown v Board of Education, mandating that Black children must participate in racially integrated classrooms.

Petro-billionaire Fred Koch, who’d made his initial fortune in the Soviet Union, was offended and threw major funding into the virulently anticommunist John Birch Society, which was running billboards across America calling for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren over the Brown decision.

While that impeachment never happened, the movement grew (my dad introduced me to the JBS when I was 13, saying, “You should hear what the crazies are saying”) and soon JBS’ morbidly rich funders decided that paying taxes to fund programs that would benefit “poor people” (aka Black people) was also an abomination just as bad as white kids having to sit with Black kids in public school classrooms.

In 1980, Reagan rode that racist message (along with sabotaging Jimmy Carter by cutting a deal with the Ayatollah to hold the American hostages until after the election) to the White House with millions in dark money support from those same petro-billionaires.

Reagan’s first official campaign stop had been to speak at an all-white county fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the brutal murder of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, in 1964. The subject of his speech was “states’ rights,” which everybody knew was code for “let the Southern states continue their segregation programs.”

On the 1980 campaign trail, Reagan told the story of the “strapping young buck” in line at the supermarket upsetting all the hard-working white people when he whipped out his food stamps to pay for his “steak and beer”; it was the male complement to Reagan’s Black “welfare queen” myth. Cut off his food stamps, the logic went, and he’ll be forced to look for gainful employment…even if there were no jobs within miles and white employers wouldn’t then hire Black people.

But Reagan didn’t just talk about stopping affirmative action: he took steps to push America back to the white supremacist 1950s. As The Washington Post noted:

“In the 1980s, the Reagan administration began to roll back civil rights protections and legally designated targets for affirmative action hires, thus bringing the politics of reverse discrimination to the White House. Under the now familiar banner of ‘Let’s Make America Great Again,’ Reagan campaigned vigorously against affirmative action in 1980, promising voters he would overturn policies that mandated, in his view, ‘federal guidelines or quotas which require race, ethnicity, or sex . . . to be the principle factor in hiring or education.’”

Clarence Thomas, of course, worked for Reagan back then, doing everything he could to sabotage affirmative action programs. He began hanging out with billionaires in a classic example of, “I’ve got mine, screw you.”

Once the petro-billionaire’s agenda — gut social programs and regulations that protect working class people and children, all to pay for over $38 trillion in tax cuts for themselves — got rolling, other billionaires from other industries jumped on board, funding think tanks, publications, radio and TV stations and networks, universities, and a massive legal effort to pack the courts with Clarence Thomas-type judges and justices.

Because the New Deal — which they were explicitly trying to repeal, root and branch — was so popular, they had to bullshit the American people with an intensity and ferocity that America hadn’t seen since the “Horse and Sparrow” days of the last Gilded Age:

— Tax cuts for billionaires would “trickle down” to workers.
— Unions hurt and rip off their members.
— Regulations stunt economic growth and thus kill jobs.
— Social Security is going broke.
— “Free Trade” will “lift all boats.”
— For-profit schools and prisons do a better job.
— America can’t afford a national healthcare system.
— Corporations are “persons” and should have rights under the Bill of Rights.
— Giving millions to a politician or president isn’t bribery; it’s “free speech.”
— When young people get free college, they don’t value it.
— More CO2 is good for plants and climate change is a hoax.
— Government isn’t the solution to our problems; it is the problem itself.
— Corporate monopolies “increase efficiency” and are thus a good thing.

Once the system got up and running it began to run on autopilot, fueled into hyperdrive by Clarence Thomas’ deciding vote in Citizens United (at the same time he was taking big bucks from the same billionaires the decision freed to bribe judges and politicians). It was spread across America by Limbaugh and an Australian billionaire who made his initial fortune complaining about Black American GIs “raping” white Australian women when US troops were stationed there during WWII.

And now we have a low-IQ nepo-baby psychopath sitting in the White House because he promised a roomful of petro-billionaires and Elon Musk that he’d cut their taxes, kill off green programs, and let Musk dismantle any agency that was investigating him or his businesses. Trump’s so certain of his royal prerogatives that yesterday he posted on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site a clip of Frank Sinatra singing My Way.

Like other conservative/fascist movements across history, from Mussolini to Stalin to Hitler to Putin to Orbán — all grounded in first defining an “other” who must be feared and stopped — today’s GOP has morphed into something that Eisenhower and even Nixon wouldn’t recognize.

And now he’s threatening to start World War III, all because neither he nor his nepo-baby son-in-law nor any of the 13 billionaires in his cabinet know the first thing about how to actually negotiate on the world stage.

Although Pope Leo XIV says his remarks weren’t specifically directed at Trump, his claim that the world is “being ravaged by a handful of tyrants” certainly hits the mark. This is not conservativism, this new “one man above all” ideology that drives today’s GOP. It’s raw, naked evil. And it’s about damn time that Democrats and Americans of good will begin to call it out for what it is.

-Thom Hartmann

Justice According to Trump

The Justice Department has moved to drop the last remaining January 6 insurrection criminal matters: the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys seditious conspiracy cases. It’s a gratuitous move. On the first day of his second term, Trump issued full pardons to more than 1500 people who overran the Capitol on January 6. Then he commuted the sentences of 14 of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers defendants, the people convicted of the most serious January 6-related offense, seditious conspiracy. Getting clemency got them out of prison, but it didn’t erase their convictions.

So earlier this week, Trump’s U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, moved to vacate the convictions of prominent insurrectionists including Stewart Rhodes and Ethan Nordean. She wrote that doing so was “in the interests of justice.”

 

Here’s what that means: The government wants to pretend the indictments didn’t occur and juries never convicted these defendants on some of the most serious charges that can be leveled against people in a democracy. Vacating a conviction means it never happened.

Prosecutors need a judge’s permission to dismiss a case after it has been indicted. These cases are on appeal, and the government filed its request to vacate before the defendant/appellants’ first briefs are due. Pirro explained “The government respectfully requests that, before the defendants are required to file their opening brief, the Court vacate their convictions under 28 U.S.C. § 2106 and remand so that the government may move to dismiss the indictment with prejudice.” A defendant’s conviction isn’t final until it has been affirmed on appeal, and these convictions haven’t been, so it’s still possible to do away with them. The government argues that judges “routinely” grant these types of motions.

One might hope that the judges here will inquire further into precisely how fulfilling the government’s requests serves “the interests of justice.” But rejecting them could easily result in mandamus orders from a higher court requiring the judges to do so. It’s likely Trump will get his way.

This is what Donald Trump does for his friends—the people willing to plot a violent insurrection in hopes he could hold onto power after losing the 2020 election. He treats the people he thinks of as enemies very differently, but the stench of corruption is the same.

The current example is former CIA Director John Brennan—one of the ultimate catches on Trump’s revenge prosecution list. Trump became convinced during his first term in office that Brennan had been involved in some shadowy plot against him, and although nothing in the extensive “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation carried out by then AG Bill Barr and Special Counsel John Durham bore that out, Trump apparently still holds a grudge. Trump has always been sensitive to the 2017 intelligence assessment that found ​Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election in order to help him, and since Brennan was at the CIA when that happened, Trump seems to hold him responsible. The intelligence assessment appears to have been accurate; both the FBI and a bipartisan Senate Committee agreed.

Brennan is now the target of an investigation in the Southern District of Florida, which appears to be amping up, despite the fact that the career prosecutor who has been running that investigation had been resisting “pressure to quickly bring charges against the former CIA director and prominent critic of President Donald Trump,” according to CNN. She reportedly questioned the strength of the evidence and was subsequently removed from the case. She will be replaced by Joseph diGenova, a former U.S. Attorney during the Reagan administration. diGenova is one of the lawyers who helped with Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.

CNN went on to report that the Justice Department said in a statement that it is a routine practice to move attorneys around on cases “so offices can most effectively allocate resources.” The statement continued, “It is completely healthy and normal to change members of legal teams.” That’s unlikely to fool anyone. It’s counterproductive and wasteful of time and deep knowledge about the evidence in a case to make a move like this, and it doesn’t happen in the absence of solid reason. Here, it appears to be happening, as we saw in the Eric Adam’s case in New York, and the cases involving Jim Comey and Letitia James in the Eastern District of Virginia, to remove an unwilling prosecutor and replace her with a more compliant one. We don’t yet know what the potential charges might look like here, and the government seems confident, with the matter proceeding in Judge Aileen Cannon’s district. But it’s hard to imagine there’s anything of substance here.

The polar opposite treatment of these two cases clarifies just how defunct the Justice Department is. During Trump’s first term in office and his bid for reelection, I repeatedly spoke of the danger he posed to our criminal justice system and hence to our democracy, the risk he would turn us into a banana republic where an authoritarian leader uses the criminal justice system to reward his friends and punish his enemies. And here we are. This is what the stakes are in the midterm elections. Because a president who is willing to do all of this—and has a party behind him that is willing to be complicit—will try to do whatever it takes to hold onto power. It’s a moment where no one can afford to stay on the sidelines.

This isn’t about one case or a handful of defendants. It’s about whether the rule of law still has meaning, whether Trump will succeed in eroding it into yet another political tool; applying it differently to people depending on who they are—and whose side they’re on. When a president can make convictions disappear for his allies while leaning on prosecutors to go after his critics, the damage isn’t just theoretical, it’s already happening in front of our eyes. And once that line is crossed, it doesn’t easily uncross itself. It’s on all of us to see it clearly and refuse to look away.

Thanks for being here with me at Civil Discourse and making it possible, through you subscriptions, for me to write the newsletter.

We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance

 

Trump Lies

— Trump Moves Toward $20 Billion Iran Deal After Blasting Obama for Far Less. Remember when President Obama signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in 2015 (which ended their uranium enrichment and led to the release of 4 US hostages they held) and part of the deal was to return $400 million of their own money to them that we’d held frozen for years? Trump went nuts, calling a press conference and saying, “Iran was in big trouble, they had sanctions, they were dying, we took off the sanctions and made this horrible deal and now they’re a power. We paid $400 million for the hostages. Such a bad precedent was set by Obama. … What we’re doing is insane.” Well, it appears that insanity is contagious: multiple sources are reporting that the Trump regime is considering giving the Iranian government as much as $20 billion for the uranium they have. After the deal was reported, Trump claimed it was never serious; did he just get caught? Will it go forward anyway? It’s really impossible to know when Mango Mussolini is so desperate for a way out of his insane, illegal war, so seriously mentally ill, and so deeply unstable… — Is Cuba next? Trump has already commenced violent hostilities and war-making — without congressional authority and without provocation — against Iran, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nigeria and Somalia and now it appears that Cuba will be next. The guy revels in blood, be it watching gladiators bloody each other in UFC fights, watching the daily “blow them up” reels the Pentagon gives him of people he’s killing in small boats in the Caribbean and in Iran, or cheering on Netanyahu’s slaughters in Gaza and now Lebanon. He apparently gets joy from pain and death, like every other psychopathic leader in history. Now we learn that the Pentagon is laying the groundwork for an invasion of Cuba. Because, of course, why not? If nothing else, ‘Lil Marco thinks it’ll help his ‘28 presidential chances, and every Republican in the House and Senate except a small handful have given him complete authority to ignore the Constitution and Congress. He said on Monday, “We may stop by Cuba after we’re finished with this,” and last month said he hopes to have “the honor of taking Cuba,” adding that he “can do anything I want with it.” This is Caligula-level hubris. Congress must act to reign this in, and then follow it up by impeaching him. — Trump Eyes Billions From IRS in Stunning Cash Grab. Looks like billions of your and my tax dollars are going straight into Trump’s money bin. An IRS official leaked some of Trump’s tax information to the press years ago, so now he’s suing the IRS for $10 billion for his pain and suffering. Instead of fighting the lawsuit, the agency — which falls under the Executive Branch and is headed up by Trump’s billionaire New York real estate buddy Scott Bessent, who works for Trump — is now “negotiating” with Trump to decide how many millions or billions they’ll give him to make the lawsuit go away. As he said in a moment of cynical candor: “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself. We could make it a substantial amount, nobody would care, because it’s gonna go to numerous, very good charities.” Right. Like the children’s cancer charity he and Eric stole from? Or the phony Trump Foundation that gave a big bribe to Pam Bondi when she began to investigate his phony university back when she was Florida AG, and then was shut down with a court order that all 3 of his children take classes in how to not scam people with nonprofits? Can you imagine the media meltdown if a Democrat had done something like this? They swooned for a week when Obama wore a tan suit… — Is the Grocery Aisle the New Front Line of Economic Crisis? The recession is real: people are using credit to buy groceries. About a third of Buy Now Pay Later users (29 percent) are using these high-interest short-term credit programs to buy groceries, a big spike up from 14 percent two years ago, with 38 percent of Gen Z’ers saying they’ve done the same. Forty-seven percent of them also report they’ve been late making BNPL payments in the past year since Trump began his “Liberation Day” tariffs and took an axe to our economy. Ten of the last eleven recessions happened during Republican presidencies, almost always following massive tax breaks for billionaires and cuts to benefits for poor and middle-class people. GOP policies are designed to impoverish most Americans while creating an elite upper class; they’re just a reboot of a system that Adam Smith characterized in the 1700s in his book A Theory of Moral Sentiments and have been pushed by billionaires or their equivalent in every generation since. Warren Buffett famously said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” He was right. — Did a Trump Megadonor Just Prove ‘America First’ Was Always Optional? One of Trump’s biggest donors — over $50 million — is moving a small musical instrument factory to China, killing 150 jobs in Eastlake, Ohio. This is, of course, what billionaires do; squeeze every imaginable penny out of everything they touch. Billionaire John Paulson could have just continued to operate the factory he bought — which has supplied brass instruments to high school marching bands for generations — but, hey, he could make a few extra bucks by using cheap Chinese labor instead. His MAGA workers are feeling betrayed with one telling a reporter, “I’m starting to regret my vote for Trump.” Nonetheless, the cult runs deep; five of six MAGA workers who’ll now be unemployed tell reporters they’ll continue to vote for Republicans. After all, they all hate the same (Black, Hispanic, Queer) people, right? And that’s what counts the most… — When an 85-Year-Old Gets Detained, What Does It Say About ICE? France is outraged at ICE brutality against an 85-year-old French woman who’d come to America to marry her wartime sweetheart. Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé came here on a tourist visa and forgot to renew it; ICE busted her and threw her into a hellhole concentration camp for weeks. She was released this week after intervention by the French government, which is furious. Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said she was subject to “acts of violence” and the story is all over the French newspapers. She’d married former American GI Bill Ross, who she’d met in the 1950s at a NATO base in France, and the couple reconnected decades later after both were widowed. She’d started the formal immigration process to get a green card, which may be what flagged ICE that she was in the system (some reports suggest her husband’s son, a former cop, turned her in to get more of his dad’s estate). We’re holding at least 70,000 people, including thousands of children, in these brutal camps with no due process. Meanwhile, ICE is hiring people who’ve been fired by police departments and flunked out of police academies in their effort to get as many masked, armed thugs onto the streets as they can before the election this fall. Fourteen months into his chancellorship, Hitler only had 40,000 people in his detention camps; history tells us where this all goes and it ain’t pretty… The Hartmann Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

"Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, has amassed approximately $6.16 billion in assets under management—including $1.2 billion in the past year alone"

 

The ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee on Friday morning announced a “sweeping” probe into alleged self-enrichment by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of US President Donald Trump who has served as a high-profile White House envoy in the Middle East while also, according to Congressman Jamie Raskin, “soliciting billions of dollars from Gulf monarchies for [his] private business ventures.”

In a letter addressed to Kushner, the Maryland Democrat charges that by pushing for investments in his international investment firm, A Fin Management LLC (Affinity), while also serving as “Special Envoy for Peace” for the Trump administration, he has created “a glaring and incurable conflict of interest” in the eyes of the American people.

While Raskin points out that Kushner repeatedly vowed to stay out of government during Trump’s second term and, going further, said he would not raise funds for Affinity during that time, both promises were “quickly” broken.

In April of 2022, the New York Times reported how Kushner had secured a $2 billion investment from a sovereign wealth fund directed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MbS. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, investigations were demanded over accusations that previous financial ties meant that MbS had Kushner “in his pocket.”

According to Raskin’s letter on Friday:

"Mr. Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, has amassed approximately $6.16 billion in assets under management—including $1.2 billion in the past year alone—with an extraordinary 99 percent of its funding derived from foreign nationals. These include sovereign wealth funds operated by the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. At the same time, Mr. Kushner has assumed a central role in sensitive geopolitical negotiations across the Middle East and beyond.

"Despite explicit public assurances that he would avoid both government service and fundraising during President Trump’s second term, Mr. Kushner has done precisely the opposite. He has inserted himself into the world’s most volatile global conflicts as one of the United States’ chief negotiators all while deepening his financial reliance on, and entanglement with, foreign governments."

Citing the horrific US complicity in Israel’s ongoing attacks on Gaza as well as Trump’s illegal war of choice against Iran, Raskin’s letter to Kushner charges that “your decision to play completely irreconcilable and unethical dual roles has been haunting American foreign policy since President Trump returned to Washington in 2025.”

Noting that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia remains “your largest investor through Affinity and thus possesses significant financial leverage over” Kushner, Raskin explains to the president’s son-in-law in his letter that “you cannot both be a diplomat and a financial pawn of the Saudi monarchy at the same time; you cannot faithfully represent the United States with billions of dollars in Saudi and Emirati cash burning a hole in every pocket of every suit you own.”

Due to these concerns, explained Raskin, the House Committee on the Judiciary investigation will probe “your conduct and that of your firm with the goal of learning information critical to reforming our bribery laws, conflict of interest provisions, other statutes and rules governing the conduct of government and special government employees, and FARA.”

Offering a list of requests, the letter demands that Kushner provide a detailed account of his communications with various investment partners and entities related to his business dealings and that of his work as special envoy to the president, with a deadline of April 30 to comply.

“This investigation will be a priority for our committee in the coming period,” Raskin’s letter states. “We expect your full cooperation and that you will provide us with all relevant documents that touch upon how your business interests, family wealth, and governmental duties and missions have merged and converged.”

-Jon Queally, Common Dreams

Thanks to Trump’s Iran War, Big Oil Raking in $30 Million Per Hour in Windfall Profits

 

US President Donald Trump’s unprovoked war of choice in Iran has been a goldmine for the fossil fuels industry, which is earning massive windfall profits thanks to the rise in the price of petroleum.

An analysis published by The Guardian on Wednesday estimated that the 100 biggest oil and gas companies have collectively raked in an extra $30 million per hour since Trump launched his war with Iran without any congressional authorization in late February.

In just the first month of the conflict, The Guardian reported, Big Oil made $23 billion in windfall profits, and the industry is projected to haul in an additional $234 billion in windfall profits by the end of the year if the price of oil stays in the $100 range.

The top beneficiaries of the Iran conflict are Saudi Aramco, which is projected to earn $25.5 billion in windfall profits by the end of the year; Kuwait Petroleum Corp., which is projected to earn $12.1 billion; and ExxonMobil, which is projected to earn $11 billion.

“The excess profits come from the pockets of ordinary people as they pay high prices to fill up their vehicles and power their homes, as well as from businesses incurring higher energy bills,” The Guardian noted. “Dozens of countries have cut fuel taxes to help struggling consumers, meaning those nations, including Australia, South Africa, Italy, Brazil and Zambia, are raising less money for public services.”

The Guardian’s analysis was conducted by climate watchdog Global Witness, using data from intelligence provider Rystad Energy.

Patrick Galey, head of news investigations at Global Witness, told The Guardian that Big Oil’s windfall profits should be a wakeup call to the world about the dangers of relying on fossil fuels.

“Moments of global crisis continue to translate into bumper profits for oil majors while ordinary people pay the price,” Galey said. “Until governments kick their fossil fuel addiction, all of our spending power will be held hostage to the whims of strongmen.”

Climate advocates have for months been calling for a windfall profits tax on Big Oil during the Iran War as a way to retrieve some of the money consumers have lost during the conflict.

Earlier this month, the climate advocacy organization 350.org renewed its previous call to slap fossil fuel companies with a windfall profits tax, and then invest the revenue into renewable energy sources to provide real long-term relief to global consumers.

Beth Walker, an energy policy expert at climate change think tank E3G, also recommended a windfall profits tax with the aim of ending reliance on dirty energy sources.

“Governments should use taxes on windfall profits to accelerate the transition to green energy,” said Walker, “rather than deepen dependence on fossil fuels.”

 -Brad Reed, Common Dreams

 

"“This is an authoritarian government operating as if the president is king"

 

…As Jacob Rosen and Olivia Gazis of CBS News noted, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is supporting Trump’s attacks on those he perceives to be his enemies by sending to the Department of Justice two criminal referrals yesterday. One is for the former government official who was the whistleblower over the July 2019 phone call in which Trump told Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky he would release money the U.S. Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s 2014 incursion…but only after Zelensky did him the “favor” of smearing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

The whistleblower told the intelligence community inspector general: “I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.”

Gabbard’s second referral is for the inspector general, Michael Atkinson, who found the complaint “credible” and “urgent” and set in motion the process of sharing it with the congressional intelligence committees, which led to Trump’s first impeachment.

As Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, noted, the effort to criminalize whistleblowing from 2019 for what was Trump’s well-established behavior is most likely an attempt to chill future whistleblower complaints.

There certainly appears to be concern on the part of MAGA loyalists that they are in danger of losing power, and that might mean legal repercussions. Testifying before the Senate Budget Committee, Director of Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought denied that he had held back funds Congress had appropriated. Doing so is called “impoundment,” and it is illegal, but the administration has been engaged in it since it took office in January 2025.

Vought is a Christian nationalist and a key author of Project 2025, which sets out to dismantle the federal government. Today Vought said his job was to make sure money was spent “consistent with our agenda.” Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) told Emine Yücel of Talking Points Memo: “They absolutely impounded. He just lied to America.” “He has no respect for the American Constitution and the separation of powers,” Merkley said. “This is an authoritarian government operating as if the president is king. And if we want to save our democracy, we have to save ourselves from the strategy that Mr. Vought implemented.” Republican senator Chuck Grassley (IA) also reminded Vought: “Congress has appropriated money, and you don’t have the authority to impound it.”

[Yesterday] Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) posted on social media that an opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which reviews and approves surveillance warrants against foreign actors and agents in the U.S., “raises serious concerns about FBI implementation of FISA 702,” the law that allows warrantless surveillance. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) reposted Massie’s comment and added that he, Wyden, has sent “a classified letter to House and Senate colleagues about a secret interpretation of surveillance law that every American should be concerned about.”

This exchange seems to suggest that FBI director Kash Patel has authorized FBI agents to use surveillance on Americans without a warrant, illegally…

-Heather Cox Richardson