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Tag: presidential cabinet

  • Tom Homan and the Case of the Missing Fifty Thousand

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    The Vice-President, it must be noted, graduated from Yale Law School, where presumably he learned something about what it takes to “violate a crime”—and how behavior that does not rise to the level of criminality can nonetheless be suspicious and blameworthy. The incoming Trump Administration was reportedly alerted to the investigation. It must have realized that a story this odiferous had a high likelihood of being leaked, yet it gave Homan a prominent role. It is hard to imagine another Administration in the post-Watergate era making that judgment—even if officials didn’t find Homan’s actions morally repugnant, they would avoid him out of self-preservation. But for the Trump team, with its high tolerance for embarrassment and supreme confidence in its impunity, there isn’t much that is off the table. So the Administration can brazen its way through self-serving deals that would have made its predecessors blanch: the gift of a luxury jet from Qatar; the various ventures into cryptocurrency, including a gala dinner for the biggest investors in the $TRUMP meme coin. A bag of cash pales by comparison.

    The Stephanopoulos-Vance encounter was not the Administration’s first effort to shut down the Homan story. Shortly after MSNBC broke the news of the cash transfer, in late September, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told a reporter, “Well, Mr. Homan never took the fifty thousand dollars that you’re referring to, so you should get your facts straight.” The investigation, Leavitt asserted, had represented “another example of the weaponization of the Biden Department of Justice against one of President Trump’s strongest and most vocal supporters in the midst of a Presidential campaign. You had F.B.I. agents going undercover to try and entrap one of the President’s top allies and supporters, someone who they knew very well would be taking a government position months later.” Homan, she said, “did absolutely nothing wrong.”

    On October 7th, at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s oversight hearing for Attorney General Pam Bondi, four Democratic senators—Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island; Mazie Hirono, of Hawaii; Alex Padilla, of California; and Peter Welch, of Vermont—also raised the matter of the missing fifty thousand. Bondi’s response was characteristically bristling and evasive; Whitehouse asked about the money seven times, to no avail. “You’re very concerned about money and people taking money and you rail against dark money yet you work with dark-money groups all the time,” Bondi told him. When Whitehouse asked Bondi if investigators had examined whether Homan reported the fifty thousand as taxable income, Bondi retorted, “Senator, I would be more concerned, if I were you when you talk about corruption and money, that . . . you pushed for legislation that would subsidize your wife’s company.” (Sandra Whitehouse, a marine biologist, has worked for an ocean-conservation group that receives federal funds for which her husband voted. The Senate Ethics Committee has dismissed two complaints on this subject.) The investigation into Homan “was resolved prior to my confirmation as Attorney General,” Bondi told Welch. “It’s not resolved. There’s fifty thousand dollars,” Welch responded. “Homan has it, or somebody has it. Do you have no interest in knowing where it is?” Bondi replied, “You’re not going to sit here and slander Tom Homan.”

    Homan, for his part, has tried a couple of different defenses. “Look, I did nothing criminal. I did nothing illegal,” he told Laura Ingraham, of Fox News, in September. Ingraham didn’t press Homan about whether he’d taken the money, and he didn’t deny it. Appearing Wednesday evening on NewsNation, Homan was more definitive. “I didn’t take fifty thousand dollars from anybody,” he declared, and added a helping of self-pity. “There’s been hit pieces on me since I came back to this Administration,” he said. “What people don’t talk about is I took a significant, huge pay cut to come back and serve my nation, and I’m not enriching myself doing this job.”

    The beauty of the Homan story is that its elements are so easily grasped: the undercover agents, the alleged dangling of contracts, the Cava bag, the missing cash. You don’t have to plow through the intricacies of international law or the economics of meme coins to understand that there is every indication that something very wrong happened, whether or not it amounted to a crime. To ask about this, again and again, is not slander, it is an obligation—of reporters, lawmakers, and the public. Because to let this episode slide—to allow it to be overtaken by the next outrage and the one to follow—would be to accept that no accountability is ever imposed on anyone in Trump’s orbit. Where’s the fifty thousand? ♦

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    Ruth Marcus

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  • The Sycophancy Must Be Televised

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    When Donald Trump began to speak on Tuesday, during what would become the longest televised Cabinet meeting ever, he did not exactly advertise his plans to make history. There was a lot of the usual Trump palaver about how windmills are “ruining our country” and about the transformative power of his tariffs, which, he insisted, will completely revitalize the American economy. “It’s going to happen like magic,” he vowed. “It’s going to happen without question.” Standard stuff, at least for Trump 2.0, with the President’s top advisers gazing adoringly as Trump vamps for the cameras.

    But, in hindsight, the warning signs were there. For starters, it was more than seventeen minutes before anyone else said a word at the meeting, and, even then, the speaker—Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—only managed a “Yes, sir” before Trump resumed speaking. No one else said anything of substance after that for another fifteen minutes, at which point the President called not on a member of the Cabinet but on Iris Tao, a reporter for the Epoch Times, a far-right news organization linked to an exiled Chinese opposition movement. “I heard you were very savagely mugged in the city,” he said, inviting her to recount the episode. She did so, recalling a terrifying incident of a man in a ski mask striking her in the face with the butt of a gun, and concluded with profuse thanks to the President for his decision to send in federal troops to fight crime in Washington. “Thank you for now making D.C. safer,” Tao said. “For us, for our families, for my parents, on behalf of my parents, and now my baby on the way. Thank you so much.” This is what passes for journalism these days at the White House, now that Trump’s staff has taken control of the formerly independent press rotation and started deciding on its own which news organizations get access to the President. The Kremlin press pool could not have played the moment any better.

    As for Trump, his performance, too, seemed right out of the Kremlin playbook. As the meeting dragged on, I remembered Vladimir Putin’s tradition of a marathon annual press conference, in which he holds forth on matters as varied as street cleaning and the perfidy of the West. Putin’s all-time record for one of these appearances, set in 2008, was four hours and forty minutes, so I guess there is still something for Trump to aspire to. In the end, Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting clocked in at three hours and seventeen minutes, which, if it did not beat Putin, was still significantly longer than “The Godfather,” as was quickly noted. (Can you imagine the Rotten Tomatoes score if audiences were actually forced to watch Tuesday’s meeting in full?) The first Cabinet member to be called on, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., did not get to speak until more than forty-eight minutes had elapsed. The first questions to the press did not come until nearly two and a half hours in.

    There is a strong argument to be made for not wasting time with what followed. We already know that this live-streaming President is addicted to his own show; of course, he’ll let it run as long as possible. As for the rest, it’s hardly a revelation that Trump’s fellow cast members are so desperate for a bit of his airtime—and approbation—that they’ll say anything to get it. Besides, it’s been a week with so many other truly extraordinary developments emanating from the Trump Administration, “a Watergate every day,” as the author Garrett Graff put it. Does another Trump talkfest actually rate?

    An incomplete catalogue of events since my last Letter from Trump’s Washington would include the White House’s attempt to fire Lisa Cook, a governor of the independent Federal Reserve; the attempted ouster of Trump’s new head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and subsequent resignations of several senior officials in protest of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine policies; the President’s threat to expand his militarization of domestic policing from Washington to other Democratic-run cities such as Baltimore and Chicago; a federal takeover of Union Station; a new executive order purporting to ban flag-burning in defiance of Supreme Court decisions ruling that it is constitutionally protected free speech; Friday-evening purges of senior officials in the intelligence community who contradicted the Administration’s propaganda; and the President personally demanding the prosecution of his former friend Chris Christie after Christie said something he did not like on television. And that’s the partial list.

    With so many truly existential threats to the democracy unfolding during what is supposed to be the final vacation week before the post-Labor Day rush, it seems almost wrong to get worked up watching a hundred and ninety-seven minutes of Trump and his team of “butt-snorkelers,” as the retired Army General Ben Hodges memorably called them.

    Nonetheless, dear reader, I watched. And, I would argue, it was worth every excruciating minute.

    Trump, like any narcissist who is handed a microphone before an adoring audience, can’t help but reveal. One thing this Cabinet meeting and other recent appearances have shown is a President who is openly riffing as never before about his unchecked reign. “Not that I don’t have the right to do anything I want to do,” he explained at one point, while elaborating on his plans to expand troop deployments. “I’m the President of the United States. If I think our country is in danger, and it is in danger in these cities, I can do it.” He also commented, as he had a day earlier, on critics who say he’s acting like a dictator with his police power grab. “Most people say, ‘If you call him a dictator then . . . if he stops crime, he can be whatever he wants,’ ” Trump said, before adding, “I’m not a dictator, by the way.”

    Aside from his almost palpable delight that so many people have finally figured out he’s a world-class strongman, Trump could not restrain himself from admitting what lies behind the performative anti-crime spree he’s launched in Washington—the prospect of a winning issue in next year’s midterm elections. “I think crime is going to be a big thing,” he said, two hours and thirty-six minutes into the meeting. “And we are the party, the Republicans are the party that wants to stop crime. . . . It’s going to be a big, big subject for the midterms. And I think the Republicans are going to do really well.”

    As is often the case, though, Trump’s biggest reveal is what he shows about those around him; he is a mirror, and not a flattering one, for other people’s souls. In that category, few on Tuesday could top the Secretary of Labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who invited Trump to come see his own “big, beautiful face” mounted on a huge, Putin-style banner flying on the outside of her department’s headquarters. “You are really the transformational President of the American worker,” she told him. Brooke Rollins, the Secretary of Agriculture, offered some stiff competition, though, as she waxed poetic about Trump’s contribution to the history of the Republic. “I do believe we’re in a revolution,” she said. “1776 was the first one, 1863 or so with Abraham Lincoln was the second. This is the third, with Donald Trump leading the way. And we are saving America.”

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    Susan B. Glasser

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