Beyond the legal and ethical red flags
Trump tried to get the fat cat he made ambassador to the UK to muscle the UK government to muscle the British Open to spend its money at Trump’s golf resort. That’s a lot of levels of trying to muscle people to send money his way for a vulgarian from Queens.
The American ambassador to Britain, Robert Wood Johnson IV, told multiple colleagues in February 2018 that President Trump had asked him to see if the British government could help steer the world-famous and lucrative British Open golf tournament to the Trump Turnberry resort in Scotland, according to three people with knowledge of the episode.
Why would the British government want to do anything so corrupt and sleazy and trashy? They’re not the boss of the British Open, and Turnberry is a Trump racket, so…why would they consider that for a second? It’s ludicrous. And if they did, of course, the British Open would tell them to get stuffed. And they know it would. The whole thing is moronic as well as filthy…but the filth is very filthy.
The ambassador’s deputy, Lewis A. Lukens, advised him not to do it, warning that it would be an unethical use of the presidency for private gain, these people said. But Mr. Johnson apparently felt pressured to try.
Filth. Trump is filth.
Lukens was not happy about the filth.
Mr. Lukens, who served as the acting ambassador before Mr. Johnson arrived in November 2017, emailed officials at the State Department to tell them what had happened, colleagues said. A few months later, Mr. Johnson forced out Mr. Lukens, a career diplomat who had earlier served as ambassador to Senegal, shortly before his term was to end.
That’ll teach him! We can’t have honest people in Trump’s administration; it would be unseemly.
Beyond the legal and ethical red flags, asking for such a favor from his host country would put Mr. Johnson in an untenable position as the emissary of the United States.
“It is diplomatic malpractice because once you do that, you put yourself in a compromised position,” said Norman L. Eisen, who served as President Barack Obama’s special counsel for ethics and later as his ambassador to the Czech Republic. “They can always say, ‘Remember that time when you made that suggestion.’ No experienced diplomat would do that.”
I would hope even an inexperienced one would see how gruesomely wrong it would be. Ambassadors aren’t there to funnel money to crooked presidents; that’s not what ambassadoring is for.
True enough. But then again, times change; particularly in America as it spirals down the black hole of Trumpism.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/jul/21/colbert-late-night-trump-fox-news-portland
Asking for a friend – doesn’t the US have laws and checks and balances designed to stop Presidents from using the power and might of the US Federal Government to enrich themselves and their families?
We have some but there are also exceptions for presidents. But anyway the ones that do apply are just being ignored. CREW files suits, but nothing happens. It’s all just insane.
In a way I see a silver lining with Covid-19.
I mean the fact of the matter is – if it wasn’t for the virus, this wouldn’t cost Trump anything.
The overarching thing I’ve seen following American politics is in times of relative calm, it is hard to not see both parties are as bad as each other. In real terms, that is a justified belief – for example I struggle to see how Trump trying to push the Ukraine into prosecuting Hunter Biden isn’t the same thing as Joe Biden pushing the Ukraine to do the reverse.
In fact I actually see Trump as the lesser of two evils in that case because his actions effectively undermined any future president or vice president trying to influence foreign prosecutions offices, as it is now clear that such decisions could just end up being reversed come the next US president.
It is in times of crisis that the difference is most clear. The worst president before Trump was GW Bush, a man who lied America into a war, undermined human rights on a global scale, and crashed the world economy. It was only when the bill for all of GW’s incompetence came due that America turned to the Democratic Party, the housing market had to crash to eject the presidential bloke-you-could-have-a-beer-with.
Covid-19 has illustrated that there is indeed a difference between the parties. If not entirely in ideology or honesty, at least in basic competence.
Figures like Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson have, for all their blokesy authoritarian bullshit, demonstrated that blokesy authoritarian bullshitting doesn’t exactly work for dealing with real problems. You can talk about “owning the libs” all you like, but the lib response to the high number of Covid-19 deaths wouldn’t have been to complain about how much testing is going on.
Nor would the libs have diverted medical supplies from the areas that needed them for the sake of favouring their political allies. Nor would the libs have tried to monopolise potential treatments or any potential vaccines.
The libs wouldn’t say to inject bleach.
And it isn’t a bunch of libs going out whining about how they don’t like wearing masks, or outright stating that they aren’t interested in protecting others from the disease.
Sure, the Democrats probably wouldn’t have done well in this crisis. Having the cost of healthcare placed on the employer means that in what is a healthcare crisis, you get a huge surge in people without insurance, but they at least would have been clearer on what the crisis was, and not promoted treatments before those treatments could undergo testing.
Trump demonstrated throughout this whole thing the true nature of Trump, not as a tough boss that gets things done, but as a man who panics, as a man who cannot act rationally in the face of an actual problem.
And that weakness undermines everything. His response to the Black Lives Matter protests is an attempt to look strong, but mostly he looks like a terrified weasel who happens to have control of an army.
It even translates to cases of corruption like this. A while back Jim Sterling covered the many evils of Bobby Kotick, one of the cases Sterling raised was that when Kotick went bankrupt at a point, he managed to con the local sheriff into taking a much less valuable computer than the one that was supposed to be repossessed.
I remember watching a reaction video to that, where the guy reacting said that this made him like Kotick more, because it made Kotick sound smart.
Without Covid-19 laying it all bare, Trump using the presidency to enrich himself in this way, to a surprisingly large sector of Americans, would just make him sound smart. Personally I blame Ayn Rand.
But with Covid-19, it is no longer cute. It is going to go down as a footnote for the many, many fuck-ups of Donald Trump, but at least it will not garner the admiration that it once did.
@Rob,
We’ve realized Hamilton’s dream, turning the President into a monarch. And not one of those cuddly constitutional monarchs like they have in Europe, but an honest-to-god 18th Century divine right monarch.
We’re reliving the death of the Roman Republic, as the Senate slowly cedes its power to the strongman. The Dems may slow that process down, but without some serious changes to the Constitution they can’t stop it.
Bruce Gorton @4:
” for example I struggle to see how Trump trying to push the Ukraine into prosecuting Hunter Biden isn’t the same thing as Joe Biden pushing the Ukraine to do the reverse.”
Well, there is the small matter that the latter DID NOT HAPPEN.
To be clear:
The NY Times confirms that (1) an investigation had already been opened into Burisma (though really, its founder) by the time Hunter Biden accepted a seat on its board; (2) that investigation went dormant under a new prosecutor, Shokin; (3) Biden — consistent with the stated policy of the U.S. and its allies — pressured for Shokin to be replaced precisely because he was SOFT on corruption investigations; and (4) the subsequent prosecutor completed the investigation and cleared Burisma and its founder.
In other words, Joe Biden was lobbying for MORE investigation and prosecution, not less. If he was trying to “protect” his son, he could have just shut up and hoped that the do-nothing prosecutor remained in office and continued to do nothing. And there was nothing to protect his son from — Burisma and its founder were cleared, and even the suspected wrongdoings predated Hunter’s tenure on the board.
You can, of course, question whether it’s a good idea for a vice-president’s son to be accepting lucrative board posts, and Ophelia and many of us here have done that. (It’s not entirely clear how you could enforce any rule against it — adult children are adults.)
Here is how Biden described it:
“I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”
Why didn’t Joe recuse himself? He knew his son was on the board of a company that Shokin was tasked with investigating, that’s one hell of a conflict of interest, why didn’t he recuse himself?
Why was Biden the one delivering the threat?
And yeah Burisma was cleared, after a prosecutor was forced to resign in part as a response to the demands of a US vice president whose son was on the board. I am sure that in no way impeded the prosecution.
I still think Biden should have done whatever it took to get Hunter to stay completely away from Burisma. I get that Hunter isn’t 6, but there are things Biden could have done and said that would have done the job if Hunter has any kind of moral sense. Burisma wouldn’t have been offering Hunter the job were it not for Biden so Biden could have pointed out that fact and said “you can’t exploit my position this way.” It’s not the same as “no you can’t go to the movies tonight” but it ought to have moral force. “Hunter what are you thinking, they’re dangling this job because they hope to influence me, what do you think that will look like to the rest of the world, you can’t accept it.”
You’re changing your accusation. You accused Joe Biden of pushing a prosecutor NOT to investigate his son.
The facts — and even the right-wing publications I reviewed don’t dispute this — are that it was the opposite. Shokin was a do-nothing prosecutor who wasn’t pursuing corruption investigations aggressively enough. And that wasn’t just the U.S.’s complaint, it was other countries complaining as well. That was the message Joe Biden delivered.
Yes, ideally Hunter Biden wouldn’t be on that board at all. And Joe Biden probably should have stayed away from the situation entirely. But to the extent Joe’s actions affected Hunter at all, it was ADVERSE to Hunter’s interest.
If you want to retreat to a more general argument, fine. But have the grace to admit that you made an incorrect accusation.
I’m not changing my accusation, I’m saying that by not recusing himself Biden left himself open to my accusation.
And I frankly just don’t believe he didn’t do it.
South Africa’s kind of strategically important. We have a state arms manufacturer in Denel (Which is important if you want to do something about Saudi Arabia in Yemen because we’re selling the Saudi’s weapons too), we’re a semi-important port, we are a major supplier for gold, platinum and we have rare earths – which the Chinese are interested in because of their use in electronics.
Throw in the fact that we’re a nuclear power and the second largest economy in Africa (We were the largest before Zuma) and we have strategic value on the global stage. So what about corruption?
Schabir Shaik was found guilty of having a corrupt relationship with Jacob Zuma in 2005, in 2009 the NPA dropped all corruption charges against Zuma, a decision which was later found to be irrational.
If you’re talking about a weak prosecutions office that’s soft on corruption, that was South Africa throughout Zuma’s tenure as president. And yeah the Russians were making moves on us at the time, they were trying to sell us a nuclear power plant we couldn’t afford, which was kind of the final straw.
But you know what Obama did? Threatened us with trade sanctions if we didn’t take America’s salmonella chicken.
It is just not my experience of American foreign policy that the US is suddenly so interested in making sure other countries, even strategic ones, have strong prosecutions offices. I just don’t buy that the one time I ever hear of the US doing this, it happens to be to a guy tasked with investigating a company where the vice president’s son sits on the board.