Republicanism is inherently crooked. All of American politics is inherently crooked, mind you, but the Trump administration was an unabashed celebration of crookedness in all its forms, to the point where we'll probably never learn all the crooked things that took place inside crooked White House halls filled with crooks and spokescrooks for the crooks and senior crook advisers who pretended not to see the crooks between meetings with the crooks that would pay them crooked amounts of money to pad their crooked lifestyles after they had their fill of doing crooked things at the rest of us.
With that said, here's a new story about Donald Trump "senior adviser" Kellyanne Conway! Had you guessing there for a minute, didn't I? When you hear "member of Trump administration did a crooked thing" there's absolutely no way to narrow that down past 100 or so most-likely suspects. It's the world's worst version of Guess Who.
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Politico is now reporting on a newly discovered 2017 financial connection between the seemingly all-powerful conservative dark money saboteur of the nation's Supreme Court, Leonard Leo, and the Trump senior adviser pushing hardest for Leo's "handpicked" list of preferred future Supreme Court appointees.
The summary version is this: When Conway took on the Trump administration duty of "senior adviser," the title broadly given to those inside the White House who were proven to be even passingly effective at reining Donald Trump in during one of his private fits, her ownership of a small private polling company called "The Polling Company" created an immediate governmental conflict of interest. Ethics rules required her to separate herself from the firm, i.e., sell it, but the company was so small that she herself was its only substantive asset. That's not really a "sellable" company; a better approach would likely be to just shut the thing down.
Or, if you are in American politics and in a position where other people in American politics might find it useful to do you a little cash favor in exchange for your continued abstract or not-abstract support, you might just happen to find that a person who's been counting on you to push their own personal agenda can "facilitate" a sale that wouldn't otherwise happen. That appears to be the arrangement Conway found with Leo: Politico reports that Leo, "via one of his dark money groups, helped finance" the sale of Conway's company to another in a deal worth somewhere between $1 million and $5 million. The sale was to a company allied with Leo's interests; Politico notes a regulatory paper trail that suggests one of Leo's own dark money groups helps finance the sale.
So Conway gets a seven-figure payout for selling a company she was not ethically allowed to head when in government service, and Leo coincidentally helps out a Trump adviser who would be among the most aggressive in promoting Leo's foul-the-Supreme-Court agenda. Wow, what a coincidence. That's only the 51st most coincidental coincidence of 2017. In the White House. In that wing. On that day.
You're going to ask now how illegal it might be, this whole arrangement of paying actual cash money to ease the life of a White House presidential adviser who can help make or break your own ideological life's work, and the answer is Hell If Anybody Knows at this point. It's illegal enough that both Leo and Conway refused to speak with Politico about it, and not-illegal by virtue of the sheer rampant volume of such exchanges inside the Trump administration, inside Congress, and in the government-to-media-to-goverment pipeline.
What, are we supposed to be ranking these things? How does this compare to Scott Pruitt's many scandals, or to any number of House members who trot into executive positions at companies they did favors for during their tenures? It's probably not as bad as fomenting a violent insurrection, if we're keeping track, and probably more explicitly illegal than charging Secret Service agents inflated prices to "protect" you at your own for-profit clubs.
Still, though, to hear that Kellyanne Conway was one of the people on the not-proverbial take—how shocking. How surprising. You think you know a person, eh?
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