Everywhere we looks, we sees nothing but crooks.
A 2017 invoice indicates that David Bernhardt, President Trump’s choice to lead the Interior Department, continued to lobby for a major client several months after he filed official papers saying that he had ended his lobbying activities.
Now, let's break this down just to make very, very certain we're all absorbing it. There is an invoice. For lobbying services by David Bernhardt. It is marked "Federal Lobbying." It shows "Federal Lobbying" time Bernhardt billed in March 2017 for his longtime client, the "main" group he did lobbying for while lobbying as a lobbyist. Which is, datewise, considerably more recent than the legal documents Bernhardt filed the November before that declaring that he was no longer lobbying.
Not to worry, a Bernhardt spokesperson told the New York Times: The lobbying for the lobbyist's former lobbying client was not lobbying. It was a typo. It was meant to say "things that are not lobbying."
A spokeswoman for Mr. Bernhardt, Faith Vander Voort, said in an email that the invoice had been labeled incorrectly and that the documents did not describe lobbying activity.
Now let's all have a nice tall glass of None of The Other Parties Mentioned Are Commenting. The invoice, which describes a $25,000 charge for "professional services" during a Bernhardt trip to Denver, Sacramento, and Chicago, is fuzzy on details, but other documents the Times reviewed show that Bernhardt continued to meet with the former(?) client as recently as three days before being nominated to be deputy interior secretary.
Was it a botched invoice? Sure, whatever, y'all knock yourselves out. In the end it only matters in the tedious "federal crimes" sense; in reality, Bernhardt launched into an effort to shape specific federal policies to benefit that very same lobbying client almost immediately after being placed in his Interior Department post, a move that even the Team Trump version of ethics specifically, supposedly, barred.
Is it crooked? Of course it's crooked; there's barely any pretense that it wouldn't be crooked. Upon being elevated to a federal post, David Bernhardt took immediate action to expedite a specific federal decision that his primary client had been requesting for years, and in the face of ethics rules that required him to recuse himself from such decisions.
And it's only barely more crooked than any of the other bizarre things Trump's supposed "best people" have been getting themselves into as they careen through the halls of power.