The New York Times has a detailed new piece describing yet another instance of Team Trump "blurring the lines" between government and their own fat wallets. By "blurring the lines,” we mean that it looks even more likely than we previously knew that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and ex-Trump Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin were spending the last weeks of Trump's presidency laying the groundwork to collect great mountains of private investment money from the Middle Eastern governments they had spent four years brown-nosing on behalf of, ostensibly, the rest of us.
It isn't just the two of them who made that leap. One of Mnuchin's hires for his Liberty Strategic Capital firm appears to have been literally still collecting government paychecks after having been hired on to Mnuchin's firm. "A Secret Service spokesman said that [Michael D'Ambrosio had disclosed his new employment to the agency and spent his last weeks there on paid leave," reports the Times. But Mnuchin and Kushner filled out their new teams (mostly old Wall Street hand Mnuchin, as Kushner's efforts appear more ... improvisational) with plenty of other Trump administration underlings as well.
The issue isn't even that Mnuchin and Kushner went from government positions to exploiting those past government positions for private gain: Everybody does that. Being able to make big piles of cash after your government job is one of the primary reasons appointees even bother to take administration positions; the whole point of taking an insufferably regimented regulations-obsessed public service job that is likely to last three to four years at best is that afterwards, everyone else in those offices and in the foreign offices you've visited knows your face.
No, what's got people riled is that Mnuchin and Kushner appear to both have been preparing their golden parachutes while still in their government jobs, using their government resources. In fact, both Trump allies have premised their new investment funds as direct sequels to the administration-backed Abraham Fund, an investment vehicle that would collect Middle Eastern government funds and use them to boost economic prospects in Palestine and elsewhere. That effort fell flat, but both Mnuchin and Kushner spent a whole lot of time meeting with governments in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and other wealthy nations during their Trump years—and the transition from government-to-government talks to private-fund-to-government talks, again, appears to have been underway while both men were still part of government.
For both Mnuchin and Kushner, it's paid off to an almost absurd extent. Kushner's newly created firm quickly got $2 billion from the Saudi Arabian government, an investment that can be attributed solely to Kushner's access to government, because there's not a single thing in Kushner's career to date that suggests he ought to be trusted with $2 billion. Mnuchin is raking in half-billion dollar investments from numerous Gulf monarchies—the precise ones he spent time courting as treasury secretary making very similar pitches.
The Times has enough detail to conclude that yes, there's really no other way to interpret this other than as another episode of Trump administration grift. Nobody has any plausible argument other than both appointees shifted seamlessly, with no pause whatsoever, from soliciting Gulf leaders on behalf of the United States to soliciting the same leaders with requests that those governments personally pay them nine to 10-figure "investments" based on those relationships.
Are we even allowed to be mad about it, though? Or is this level of grift, which is now absolutely omnipresent in both parties but which Trumpian Republicans have been managing to get actual indictments over, shifting from "probably corrupt" to "business as usual" through simple repetition?
Trump Campaign Chair Paul Manafort made a career for himself backing pro-Russian oligarchs and advising them how to thwart democracy. Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, Tom Barrack, Steve Wynn: You can't throw an orange in a Republican National Committee meeting or Trump Cabinet meetup without hitting someone indicted after using their political connections to advocate favors on behalf of a foreign power. Republican appointees Rick Perry and Scott Pruitt both appear to have used their offices for private gain during their brief tenures; ex-Interior Secretary David Bernhardt is now facing allegations of outright bribery.
There doesn't appear to be a single person in the Trump Republican orbit who did not sign on to their government post specifically to run a scam of some sort.
As with the chain of events that led the supply of domestic infant formula to collapse, the general impression being left here is that we do not necessarily even have a government, per se. We have a collection of countless grifts, and if governing happens it is because several grifts combined together to produce movement instead of canceling each other out. It is absurd beyond reason to believe that putting the entire infant formula market in the hands of so few companies that a single factory closure would produce a crisis was ever considered a good idea at any step of the way, and yet here we are because deregulation and pro-monopoly grifts are many times more profitable than their alternatives. Money comes in, crooked comes out, and at some point Rand Paul sends out a new fundraising letter.
All right, so now we know that two more Trump administration stalwarts are collecting enormous mountains of cash based on their access to our government, and we have quite a bit of reason to believe that both men acted while in that government to pave the way for their own private profits, even if doing so required, say, an indifference towards the murder of journalists that remains pointedly at odds with the interests of the nation they were representing. So can the press enlighten us as to whether we're supposed to be angry about this? How angry? Is this a big deal thing, or the sort of system-gaming that the fabulously wealthy do all the damn time and absolutely do not get indicted over because screw you, that's why?
