UncleBuck
Well-Known Member
will he get fewer votes again?Trump will have many more scores as it is clear he is going to win in a landslide.
will he get fewer votes again?Trump will have many more scores as it is clear he is going to win in a landslide.
Amen to that, Father Jack!If Trump immoliated himself in the Rose Garden, crying that he was was wrong to say that COVID-19 would simply disapear, that would be some semblance of justice.
I still would not forgive him
But, what I want to see is the total aninialation/fucking destruction of the Trump "Empire"
I want to see his entire fucking family destroyed & die destituted for his actions, just like his actions have caused millions of Americans to suffer that fate due his fucking arrogance/stupdity.
I want retribution.
I would guess an odd # in the upper 40’s.i would guess it's an even # less than 18.
smoke report? it must be something good.Trump will have many more scores as it is clear he is going to win in a landslide.
Eric Trump took his Secret Service agents to Trump golf courses in Scotland, as he led transatlantic tours for paying customers. Donald Trump Jr. took his protectors to the Trump hotel in Vancouver, stopping over on hunting trips to Canada.
And Ivanka Trump took her Secret Service detail to the Trump golf club in Bedminster, N.J., again and again — even after she asked other Americans to “please, please” stay home during the coronavirus pandemic.
On trips like these, Secret Service agents were there to protect Trump’s children. But, for the Trump family business, their visits also brought a hidden side benefit.
Money.
That’s because when Trump’s adult children visited Trump properties, Trump’s company charged the Secret Service for agents to come along. The president’s company billed the U.S. government hundreds, or thousands, of dollars for rooms agents used on each trip, as the agency sometimes booked multiple rooms or a multiroom rental cottage on the property
Many of Trump’s marquee properties, such as his Doral resort in Florida and his hotel in Washington, have struggled in recent years, weighed down by Trump’s divisive politics. Last week, the New York Times reported that Trump’s tax returns show that his businesses lost millions of dollars in recent years— even before the pandemic, which slammed the travel business and caused widespread closures and layoffs at Trump properties.
The Secret Service and the White House declined to comment for this article, as did Ivanka Trump — the president’s eldest daughter, who left the Trump Organization to work in government. The president’s other adult children — Eric, Donald Jr. and Tiffany — did not respond to requests for comment.
Eric and Donald Jr. are said to run the Trump Organization day to day, although their father still owns it.
In the past, Eric Trump has defended the company’s decision to charge the Secret Service for rooms at Trump properties, saying the law does not allow them to give rooms free. He has not said what law he is referring to. He has said, however, that the company charges the government very low rates — “We charge them cost, effectively housekeeping cost,” he said in a Fox News podcast earlier this year.
“I joke all the time that I would like nothing more than to never have another person from the government stay at one of our properties because it displaces a true paying guest,” Eric Trump said on the podcast.
Neither the White House nor the Trump Organization will say how much the government has paid to Trump’s business in total since he took office.
Instead, The Post has compiled its own accounting, one receipt at a time, using public-records requests and a lawsuit. After the release of records last month, that total now stands at $1.2 million — most of which is related to Trump’s own travel, which includes more than 270 visits to his properties, according to the Post tally.
Previously, records obtained by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington showed that agents had accompanied members of the Trump family on thousands of trips since the president took office.
But until now, it was not clear how much taxpayer revenue Trump’s children’s travel had brought back to their father’s company this way. The latest batch of Secret Service records obtained by The Post provides a clearer picture, by identifying Trump’s children as the drivers behind dozens of such transactions.
In most cases, the Secret Service redacted the room rates it had been charged by the Trump Organization, making it difficult to check Eric Trump’s assertion that the company charged only enough to recoup housekeeping costs.
Among the bills that did list a room rate, the cheapest rate was $175 per night, for a room at the Trump hotel in Washington. But the rates at times climbed much higher.
These payments stand in contrast to a philosophy that Eric Trump laid out in the early days of his father’s presidency, that the family would not use Trump’s power for financial gain.
“There are lines that we would never cross, and that’s mixing business with anything government,” Eric Trump told The Post in 2017.
Among Trump’s four adult children, the youngest — Tiffany Trump — appears just once in the Secret Service records obtained by The Post. She accompanied her older brothers to the grand opening of the Trump hotel in Vancouver in 2017. Their combined Secret Service details required 56 rooms, and the Trump hotel charged the government $14,900.
The records also show about $29,000 in federal payments to Trump properties that related to travel by Donald Trump Jr. He stayed repeatedly at the Trump hotel in Washington — just blocks from his father’s residence at the White House. His trips included two to testify to Senate committees investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.
He also made several return trips to the Trump hotel in Vancouver. A former manager at that hotel said Trump Jr. sometimes visited on his way to or from fishing or hunting trips in Canada.
“We would at least seal off 15 rooms” for Trump and his Secret Service agents, the former manager said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships in the hotel business.
Trump does not own the Vancouver hotel, but his company is paid to manage the property and license Trump’s name. The Vancouver Trump hotel is now shuttered: The owner of its building declared bankruptcy in August, blaming a drop in business caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
In the records obtained by The Post, travel by Ivanka Trump and her family accounted for more than $42,000 in federal payments to Trump properties.
Much of that total came this spring, after Ivanka Trump had urged other Americans not to travel.
“For those lucky enough to be in a position to stay at home, please, please, do so,” she said in a video posted to Instagram on March 29. “Each and every one of us plays a role in slowing the spread.”
Between mid-March and mid-June, the Secret Service records show 13 trips to Bedminster by Ivanka Trump or her husband, Jared Kushner, plus three others by Trump family members whose names were redacted. For most of that time, D.C. and New Jersey were asking residents to stay home if possible to avoid spreading the novel coronavirus. A spokesman for Kushner did not respond to a request for comment.
During this period, the Trump golf club charged the Secret Service even more than usual for rooms at Bedminster. The typical rate, during past visits by Trump family members, was $567 per night for agents to stay at a four-room cottage at the club.
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at least it's not cowboy catheter.
That worked.If *you* know something about these taxpayer-funded payments to @realdonaldtrump's businesses -- which Trump's government is trying to keep hidden -- I'd love to know more!
Find me at [email protected]. https://t.co/huQbFkaJ63
— David Fahrenthold (@Fahrenthold) October 19, 2020
In the final days of the 2020 election season, President Trump has featured his White House press secretary as a star at his campaign rallies, where she has triumphantly joined him onstage.
Trump’s daughter Ivanka, a senior White House adviser, has stumped for him and on Saturday posted a stylized photo with uniformed law enforcement officers in Wisconsin, a key battleground.
His top aides, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser Robert O’Brien, have found pressing official business in a number of swing states, traveling there on taxpayer money.
And Trump is considering shifting his election night viewing party from the Trump International Hotel to the White House — a move that could help him skirt the local D.C. government’s coronavirus restrictions while also overriding long-standing norms from both political parties to refrain from overt campaigning at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
For months, Trump has obliterated the lines between campaigning and governing, and he and his aides have accelerated their drive to leverage the power of the presidency to shore up his election chances with days left before Tuesday’s vote. Trailing in the polls to Democratic nominee Joe Biden, Trump has employed an all-hands-on-deck approach to maintaining the office, dispatching aides to act as surrogates and using the government’s machinery to bolster his campaign.
The activities have drawn rebukes from government ethics watchdogs and Democrats who have charged that Trump’s team is trampling over the Hatch Act, which prohibits most senior officials, outside of the president and vice president, from engaging in electioneering activities while on the job.
A report released Thursday by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination, said that 14 Trump administration officials had been found to have violated the law a total of 54 times. At least an additional 22 officials are under investigation for nearly 100 more violations, the report said.
All presidents running for reelection have been bolstered by the trappings of office — traveling with a large media contingent, a government plane and a megaphone amplified by the ability to turn White House events into de facto campaign advertisements.
Like Trump, Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush used Air Force One as a dramatic background at campaign rallies held on airport tarmacs. But as he has barnstormed through swing states during the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has upped the ante — staging the vast majority of his rallies at airports with the majestic presidential jet as a set piece. He also has used Marine One to make theatrical low flyovers at some rallies, thrilling supporters.
Past White Houses have carefully sought to wall off their West Wing staff from the campaigns. But on Thursday, Trump called McEnany onstage at a rally in Tampa, then played a video clip of her acting as a campaign surrogate in a television interview earlier in the day.
In the clip, she attacks Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey over the social media company’s decision to limit the spread of unverified information circulated by Trump allies in an effort to tar Biden. She also defends Trump’s management of the pandemic, which has killed more than 229,000 Americans, with infection rates spiking again through the country.
“Who’s going to say it better than Kayleigh?” Trump said, as the crowd cheered. Her husband, Tampa Bay Rays pitcher Sean Gilmartin, had joined them, holding their infant daughter.
Meredith McGehee, executive director of Issue One, a nonprofit group that advocates for political reform, said that laws such as the Hatch Act are intended to preserve a functioning democracy.
“The norms are what differentiate a functional democratic republic from all the other banana republics around the world,” McGehee said. “The danger of throwing out the norms is that the machinery of government begins to seize up and the American people don’t have faith” in the system.
Trump has used the pandemic as cover to make decisions that, in the past, would be unthinkable for a sitting president. For instance, after the Republican National Convention was canceled in Charlotte in August, Trump delivered his renomination acceptance speech before 1,500 guests on the South Lawn of the White House.
Earlier this year, the Treasury Department ordered that Trump’s name be signed on federal stimulus checks sent in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The Agriculture Department included letters signed by Trump in the emergency food boxes it sent to food banks across the nation.
Meanwhile, Cabinet members have stumped for Trump while appearing in their official capacity. In October, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue was cited by the Office of Special Counsel, a federal watchdog agency, for violating the Hatch Act by advocating for the president during an official trip to North Carolina. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is being investigated by the same office for taking aim at Biden during a Fox News interview.
O’Brien recently traveled to battleground areas of Minnesota and Wisconsin to talk up the Trump administration’s support for local mining and defense contractors. Pompeo spoke to a Texas megachurch, addressed the Wisconsin legislature and made virtual remarks to a Florida conservative antiabortion group.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler spent 40 days this year on trips to swing states on government business, compared with just 10 days visiting non-swing states, according to a report from E & E News.
Acting Homeland Security secretary Chad Wolf and acting deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli have traveled to swing states on official visits to reinforce Trump’s immigration policies. The watchdog group American Oversight filed a complaint with the Office of Special Counsel requesting an investigation into whether their events were aimed at affecting the outcome of the election.
Wolf had already received a warning for taking part in a naturalization ceremony at the White House in August that was televised during the GOP convention.
“What we’re seeing now would have been inconceivable to the previous administration,” said a former Obama White House aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person’s new job did not authorize on-the-record comments. “It’s not simply the Hatch Act violations. Those are the symptoms. The broader disease at play here is the intermingling of political interests and the national interest.”
Federal agencies have also been producing content using taxpayer money that borders on campaign materials. This past week, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt released a campaign-style video on the Interior Department’s official Twitter account in which Trump praised his work preserving “the awesome majesty of God’s creations.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement also launched a billboard campaign last month in Pennsylvania featuring “criminal aliens” wanted for federal crimes. The signs dovetailed with Trump’s campaign message, saying, “Sanctuary Policies are a REAL DANGER.”
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WASHINGTON (AP) — When the Trump administration gave a well-connected Republican donor seed money to test a possible COVID-19-fighting blood plasma technology, it noted the company’s “manufacturing facilities” in Charleston, South Carolina.
Plasma Technologies LLC is indeed based in the stately waterfront city. But there are no manufacturing facilities. Instead, the company exists within the luxury condo of its majority owner, Eugene Zurlo.
Zurlo’s company may be in line for as much as $65 million in taxpayer dollars; enough to start building an actual production plant, according to internal government records and other documents obtained by The Associated Press.
The story of how a tiny business that exists only on paper has managed to snare attention from the highest reaches of the U.S. military and government is emblematic of the Trump administration’s frenetic response to the coronavirus pandemic.
It’s also another in a series of contracts awarded to people with close political ties to key officials despite concerns voiced by government scientists. Among the others: an ill-conceived $21 million study of Pepcid as a COVID therapy and more than a half billion dollars to ApiJect Systems America, a startup with an unapproved medicine injection technology and no factory to manufacture the devices.
In addition, a government whistleblower claimed that a $1.6 billion vaccine contract to Novavax Inc. was made over objections of scientific staff.
At the center of these deals is Dr. Robert Kadlec, a senior Trump appointee at the Department of the Health and Human Services who backed the Pepcid, Novavax and ApiJect projects. Records obtained by the AP also describe Kadlec as a key supporter of Zurlo’s company.
In one government email obtained by the AP, an official said Kadlec, whose job as assistant secretary for preparedness and response is to help guide the nation through public health emergencies, was “all in” on Plasma Technologies.
This was the case despite misgivings from the scientists he oversees. One of them said the company would be just another “mouth to feed” that would distract from other important work on the pandemic. An HHS spokesperson said Kadlec “does not have a role in technical review of proposals nor in negotiating contracts.”
Kadlec has come under pressure from the White House to act with more urgency and not be bound by lower-level officials whom Trump has castigated as the “deep state” and accused of politically motivated delays in fielding COVID-19 vaccines and remedies. This pressure has led to investments in numerous untested companies.
The AP reached out to more than a dozen blood plasma industry leaders and medical experts. Few had heard of Zurlo’s company or its technology, and would not comment.
Zurlo, the company’s founder and a former pharmaceutical industry executive, told the AP in an email that the renewed interest in his company is being driven by COVID and other diseases.
“It is increasingly clear that the collection of adequate supplies of plasma is not possible; the answer being the adoption of new process technology that fully utilizes the scarce plasma currently available,” he said.
But whether Zurlo’s technology, which claims to increase the amount of disease-fighting plasma harvested from human blood, will be an improvement over other methods is still anyone’s guess.
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A FORMER SENATOR ON BOARD
Top government officials began to take notice of Plasma Technologies after Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator from Pennsylvania and two-time presidential candidate, became part-owner, according to the records and AP interviews.
After Congress supplied hundreds of billions of dollars to combat the pandemic, Santorum stepped up his sales pitch for the company’s method of turning human plasma into a therapeutic product — a process the company has described as a game changer. In mid-August, the federal government awarded Plasma Technologies a $750,000 grant to demonstrate that it could deliver on its promises.
Santorum, who’s held no elective office since 2007, remains influential among social conservatives, a key part of President Donald Trump’s political base. Santorum has extolled the president’s handling of the pandemic on national television in his job as a CNN commentator, arguing that the nation’s response would have been worse under a Democratic administration.
Trump “didn’t botch it,” Santorum said recently in response to charges that the president had done a poor job leading the country through COVID-19. “I mean you guys keep blaming Trump. This is a local decision.”
HHS would not comment when asked whether Santorum’s public backing of the president led to a company he has a financial stake in getting a government contract.
Zurlo has deep ties to the Republican Party. He has contributed thousands of dollars to Santorum’s campaigns and to other GOP campaigns and political action committees. He entertained Santorum and his family at the mansion Zurlo used to own on Kiawah Island, an exclusive golf resort in South Carolina. They would play golf during the day and enjoy evenings overlooking the Atlantic, according to Michel “Mitch” LaPlante, a former business associate of Zurlo’s who attended several dinners with Santorum and Zurlo.
The business relationship between Zurlo and LaPlante turned ugly after those days of hobnobbing on Kiawah. A real estate deal they had invested in together fell into foreclosure, leading to a suit seeking more than $700 million by their mortgage lender. Each man sued the other for fraud and severed their business ties acrimoniously.
Zurlo founded Plasma Technologies in 2003, according to articles of organization and other records filed with South Carolina’s secretary of state. The company’s most recently listed address is Zurlo’s condominium in Charleston’s French Quarter.
The company has no other presence in South Carolina — or any other state — even though a U.S. government spokeswoman told the AP that Plasma Technologies has “manufacturing facilities” in Charleston.
“Fairy tale,” LaPlante said when asked if Plasma Technologies operates any commercial space in South Carolina’s most populous city.
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OUTSIDE, LOOKING IN
A spokesman for Abeona Therapeutics declined to comment on the licensing agreement with Plasma Technologies.
Santorum blamed the deal’s demise on onerous regulatory hurdles imposed by the Food and Drug Administration to ensure patient safety.
“They basically killed the product,” he said.
Santorum rejected any suggestion that Zurlo’s innovation is unproven, even though his company has never made an FDA-approved product. Plasma Technologies, he declared, is on the verge of transforming the industry, and for a fraction of the cost to develop a coronavirus vaccine.
“I’m just telling you, it’s gonna happen,” Santorum said.
___
“The connection is not viable from a contractual standpoint,” the officer wrote in a July 16 email.
Still, a week later, Plasma Technologies had a champion at the Pentagon.
Santorum said he was contacted by Steven Morani, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for materiel readiness. Defense Department officials were drawn to the idea of a U.S.-owned and operated fractionation facility, according to Santorum.
It’s not clear what changed, but messages from late July show Morani and other defense officials had conferred and would support the Plasma Technologies project. An initial $750,000 in emergency coronavirus spending would be used to prove the concept, a move backed by HHS, with as much as $65 million in government money to come later to build a commercial facility and to purchase plasma and other materials, according to the emails. That’s more even than Plasma Technologies requested.
The messages don’t say where that money would come from or why the additional $13.4 million is required.
Morani referred AP’s emailed questions about the company and the contract to a Defense Department spokeswoman, Jessica Maxwell, who declined to discuss future funding for Plasma Technologies.
“The $750,000 is currently the total amount of government funding planned for the effort,” Maxwell said.
Santorum, who criticized a reporter for writing what he termed a “political hit piece,” said Zurlo intends to donate any profits Plasma Technologies generates to charities that support the mission of the Catholic Church.
But Santorum had different plans for any returns on his investment.
“I have made no such claims as a father of seven who has three weddings this year,” he said. “If any money were to come, I would welcome that money to help pay my bills.”
Trump *IS* a landlord!why? he could've done it before 7/31, to not interrupt our landlords cash flow- don't they have to pay mortages too?
Donald Trump hates landlords!