Category Archives: Trump Administration

Anyone Paying Attention to Wilbur Ross, Commerce Sec?

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What is Wilbur Ross worth? The answer is a slippery one when you ask Wilbur to respond. There is a dispute when it comes to his financials in the ranger of a billion or two. Further, where did his wealth come from you ask? Well there were allegedly family trusts, hotels, shipping companies, steel, banking in Cyprus and even those Rothschilds. More here from Forbes.

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Wilbur Ross’ company has been moving LPG for a Russian gas giant.

But now, in what might seem almost an echo of the Red Scare that lasted in America for generations, this business relationship is seen as tainted, an ominous connection to a country that unleashed cyberwar against American democracy and the 2016 election that put Trump in the White House.

Are all connections to Russia now suspect? Or are they sometimes merely an inconvenient consequence of doing business in a country where major corporations often are controlled by the Kremlin?

The latest tie between Russia, Trump and his campaign and administration officials came to light Sunday with news that the U.S. commerce secretary is a part owner of Navigator Holdings, a shipping company that transports LPG produced by Sibur, a big Russian company with ties to the Kremlin.

Some shipping business experts who follow the company are shrugging off the news.

“Russia has a lot of commodities that need to go somewhere else,” said Benjamin J. Nolan, a financial analyst who covers Navigator for Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. He added, “Odds are, they are going to have long term contracts with Western shipping companies.”

The Russian government is a powerful factor in almost every part of the country’s economy. Some of Russia’s biggest banks, such as Sberbank and VTB are state-controlled, with their management answering directly or indirectly to the Kremlin.

Then there is Gazprom, a big gas supplier to Europe, and Rosneft, the oil producer. Both are majority state owned.

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Two people associated with Siber are under U.S. sanctions

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How about Venezuela? Yup…

Despite U.S. sanctions on Venezuela’s bond transactions in international markets and other restrictions against top officials, the Paradise Papers show that Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross has an important stake in multi-million dollar businesses related with state-oil giant Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA).

As reported by Newsweek on Sunday, Ross still retains interest in Navigator Holdings, a shipping company incorporated in the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific that maintains a close relationship with Russia’s energy company SIBUR, which is run by President Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law Kirill Shamalov and other individuals who have been sanctioned by the U.S. Navigator Holdings has received millions of dollars every year in earnings due to coastal shipping services provided to PDVSA.

PDVSA is no small client of Navigator Holdings. The state-oil company contributed to 10.7 percent of Navigator’s earnings during fiscal year 2014 and 11.7 percent in fiscal year 2015, according to Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional. The company’s earnings translate into $33.7 million and $36.7 million for each fiscal year thanks to PDVSA’s use of the Navigator’s 29 tankers to carry liquefied petroleum gas during those years.

As he was awaiting confirmation, Ross failed to disclose any business interests with Putin’s family and his stake in the maritime industry. James Rockas, Ross’s spokesman, told the New York Times that the secretary of commerce “recuses himself from any matters focused on transoceanic shipping vessels, but has been generally supportive of the [Trump] administration’s sanctions of Russian and Venezuelan entities.”

But Ross’s businesses pose a potential conflict of interest, ICIJ reported. Ross has “the power to influence U.S. trade, sanctions and other matters that could affect SIBUR’s owners,” the Paradise Papers report added. More here from Newsweek.

 

Saudi Arabia says Lebanon Declares War

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It is all about Iran….

Arabia reveals list of wanted members of the terrorist militias in the region including

What did President Trump know or what was he told?

Remarks by President Trump and Prime Minister Hariri of Lebanon in Joint Press Conference

Saudi Arabia says Lebanon declares war, deepening crisis

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia accused Lebanon on Monday of declaring war against it because of aggression by the Iran-backed Lebanese Shi‘ite group Hezbollah, a dramatic escalation of a crisis threatening to destabilize the tiny Arab country.

Lebanon has been thrust to the center of regional rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran since the Saudi-allied Lebanese politician Saad al-Hariri quit as prime minister on Saturday, blaming Iran and Hezbollah in his resignation speech.

Saudi Gulf affairs minister Thamer al-Sabhan said the Lebanese government would “be dealt with as a government declaring war on Saudi Arabia” because of what he described as aggression by Hezbollah.

Faulting the Hariri-led administration for failing to take action against Hezbollah during a year in office, Sabhan said “there are those who will stop (Hezbollah) and make it return to the caves of South Lebanon”, the heartland of the Shi‘ite community.

In an interview with Al-Arabiya TV, he added: “Lebanese must all know these risks and work to fix matters before they reach the point of no return.”

He did not spell out what action Saudi Arabia might take against Lebanon, a country with a weak and heavily indebted state that is still rebuilding from its 1975-90 civil war and where one-in-four people is a Syrian refugee.

There was no immediate comment from the Lebanese government.

Hezbollah is both a military and a political organization that is represented in the Lebanese parliament and in the Hariri-led coalition government formed last year.

Its powerful guerrilla army is widely seen as stronger than the Lebanese army, and has played a major role in the war in neighboring Syria, another theater of Saudi-Iranian rivalry where Hezbollah has fought in support of the government.

Lebanese authorities said on Monday the country’s financial institutions could cope with Hariri’s resignation and the stability of the Lebanese pound was not at risk.

But the cash price of Lebanon’s U.S. dollar-denominated bonds fell, with longer-dated maturities suffering hefty losses as investors took a dim view of the medium- to longer-term outlook for Lebanon.

HARIRI FREE TO TRAVEL, SAUDI FM SAYS

Hariri cited a plot to assassinate him during his unexpected resignation speech broadcast from Saudi Arabia which caught even his aides off guard. He also slammed Hezbollah and Iran, accusing them of sowing strife in the Arab world.

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has said he will not comment on Hariri’s speech, calling it a “Saudi statement” and saying Riyadh had forced Hariri to resign.

The sudden nature of Hariri’s resignation generated speculation in Lebanon that his family’s Saudi construction business had been caught up in an anti-corruption purge and he had been coerced into resigning. More here.

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Western intelligence services warned Lebanon’s former Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri of an assassination plot against him, thus prompting him to resign on Sunday, according to Saudi news media. Hariri is a Saudi-born Lebanese politician, reputed to be one of the world’s wealthiest people. He is the second son of the late Rafiq Hariri, who ruled Lebanon for much of the 1990s but was assassinated in 2005. Saad al-Hariri spent most of his life in Saudi Arabia, the United States and France, but returned to Lebanon in 2014 to lead the Future Movement, a center-right political party supported by Sunni Muslims and some Christians. He became prime minister in 2016.

On Friday, Hariri flew from Beirut to Riyadh for a scheduled high-level visit. But on Sunday he shocked the Arab world by announcing his resignation from the post of prime minister. He did so in a surprise television address from the Saudi capital, which was broadcast live in Lebanon. Hariri told stunned Lebanese audiences that he was resigning in order to protect himself from a plot that was underway to assassinate him. He added that the political climate in Lebanon was intolerably tense and reminded him of the conditions that led to the assassination of his father 12 years ago. He also accused Iran and Hezbollah of acting as the primary destabilizing factors in Lebanon and much of the Middle East. Hariri and his supporters believe that Hezbollah was behind his father’s assassination in 2005. There was intense speculation in Lebanon on Monday that Hariri would remain in Saudi Arabia for the foreseeable future, fearing for his life if he returned to Lebanon.

On Sunday, the Saudi-based newspaper Asharq al-Awsatclaimed that Hariri decided to resign after he “received warnings from Western governments” that there would be an assassination plot against him. The newspaper did not name the Western governments, nor did it identify those who are allegedly trying to kill Hariri. Later on Sunday, Saudi television station al-Arabiya al-Hadath alleged that an assassination attempt against Hariri had been stopped at the last minute in the Lebanese capital Beirut earlier in the week. Both news media cited “sources close” to the Lebanese leader, but did not provide specific information, nor did they give details of the alleged plot or plots. It is worth noting, however, that Lebanese security officials denied these reports from Riyadh. Lebanese media quoted senior security official Major General Abbas Ibrahim as saying that no information about assassination plots had been uncovered. Major Ibrahim, who heads Lebanon’s General Directorate of General Security, said that his agency had no information about attempts to kill Hariri or other Lebanese political figures.

This could mean that the information about a possible assassination plot against Hariri was given directly to him by Western intelligence agencies, probably because the latter fear that Lebanese security agencies are infiltrated by Hezbollah sympathizers. Or it could mean that the Saudi media reports are inaccurate. Lebanon is now awaiting further details by Hariri regarding the alleged assassination plot against him. In the meantime, the already fragile political life of Lebanon appears to be entering a period of prolonged uncertainty.

Here Comes Eric Holder, Again Marc Elias Right Behind Him

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Holder’s a Democrat, but it wasn’t Northam’s tax plans or social views or life story that brought him there. It was the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), the Obama-backed group he chairs, which decided months ago that the most important way this year to shape the future of gerrymandering was ensuring a Democrat is in the Virginia governor’s mansion when the next set of House and state legislative maps get drawn after the 2020 Census.

The $1.2 million that the NDRC has put behind Northam, some direct to his campaign and some through its own digital ad program, is nothing compared to the group’s plan for 2018: a goal of raising over $30 million, to be deployed largely into governors’ races—with a focus on large states where substantially shifting the legislature is out of reach, like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Where recapturing the statehouse is within reach, or where there’s a chance to bust up a GOP supermajority—as in Colorado, Minnesota, Nevada and North Carolina—they will back and help direct Democrats’ efforts.

So far, a majority of NDRC money and attention is going to legal challenges, and though the group is currently hiring a litigation director, most of the work is being handled by well-known Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias. Already this year, they’ve been pursuing cases in Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia, and expect that this will be an even bigger part of their role in off years ahead, and in challenging maps drawn in states where they don’t do well in elections. The whole summary is here.

Now on to that cat, Marc Elias…Holder, Hillary and Barack’s friend.

Big questions are being asked on The Hill about how journalists were paid to spread the news about the slimy dossier.

Rep. Devin Nunes, California Republican and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, signed a subpoena to force a bank to turn over Fusion’s financial records. He wants to know who paid for the dossier, which was written in a series of 18 memos by former British spy Christopher Steele. He relied almost exclusively on unidentified Kremlin sources.

Fusion went to federal court to block the move, but the law firm Perkins Coie LLP, whose partner Marc E. Elias is the Clinton’s campaign’s general counsel, intervened. It filed a letter acknowledging it had paid Fusion for the dossier on behalf of Democrats. Fusion and Mr. Nunes then worked out an agreement on access to some of the firm’s financial records. The rest of the story here.

*** Marc Elias is the ‘go-to’ legal fixer guy for almost every Democrat in DC… 1-800 Call Marc

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Remember Obama’s White House lawyer, Bob Bauer? He is the founder of the law firm Perkins Coie.

The firm was founded by attorney Bob Bauer, who has been a close legal adviser to President Barack Obama ever since he decided to run for Senate in 2005. Bauer was the chief counsel for the Obama White House from Jan. 2010 to Jun. 2011.

Elias was called on for Claire McCaskill and Mary Landrieu….Harry Reid and even John Kerry dialed him up over the whole ‘Swift Boat’ thing. More here.

Roll Call profiles Marc Elias, a partner at Perkins Cole and the go-to election lawyer for Democrats. “Over the past decade, since Kerry hired him as his campaign counsel, Elias has risen to become an indispensable figure in the party. He has a second office in the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee headquarters, where he’ll spend most of Election Day “pacing around” Executive Director Guy Cecil’s office “and driving him nuts for most of the day.”.. As chairman of the political law practice at Perkins Coie, Elias oversees 18 attorneys and represents nearly every Democratic senator. The firm’s client list also includes the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Governors Association.

The 45-year-old was born in New York City, grew up on Long Island and attended high school in Suffern, a small town in suburban Rockland County. He’s one of two sons to a stay-at-home-mom and a father who worked on Wall Street before becoming a small-business owner. They were “New Deal Democrats, Jews from New York,” Elias said, laughing. He graduated from Hamilton College in 1990 with a degree in government before going to Duke, where he earned both a law degree and a master’s in political science in 1993. He joined Perkins Coie and quickly moved into the political law practice under Bob Bauer, who would go on to become campaign and White House counsel to Barack Obama, and Judy Corley, who became in-house counsel to Richard Gephardt after Republicans won the House majority in 1994.” [RollCall]

California: 200,000 Acres and Epic Homelessness

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Just how more twisted can it all get in California? Anyone heard from Ryan Zinke, Secretary of the Interior lately?

AP: Homelessness is not a new issue to America’s West Coast. But it’s getting worse – much worse.

On any given night, more than 105,000 people are sleeping unsheltered in some of the country’s biggest and trendiest metropolises, driven there by soaring housing costs, rental vacancy rates that rival those in Manhattan and a booming tech economy that’s leaving thousands behind. Another 63,000 are sleeping in shelters or transitional housing with no safety net.

The rising numbers have pushed abject poverty into the open like never before.

San Diego now scrubs its sidewalks with bleach to counter a deadly hepatitis A outbreak that has spread to other cities and forced California to declare a state of emergency. In Anaheim, home to Disneyland, 400 people sleep along a bike path in the shadow of Angel Stadium. Organizers in Portland, Oregon, lit incense at a recent outdoor food festival to mask the stench of urine in a parking lot where vendors set up shop.

All along the coast, elected officials are scrambling for solutions .

“It’s a sea of humanity crashing against services, and services at this point are overwhelmed, literally overwhelmed,” said Jeremy Lemoine, who works for a Seattle nonprofit that provides various forms of assistance to the homeless. “It’s catastrophic.” The photo gallery is here.

SEATTLE (AP) — Housing prices are soaring here thanks to the tech industry, but the boom comes with a consequence: A surge in homelessness marked by 400 unauthorized tent camps in parks, under bridges, on freeway medians and along busy sidewalks. The liberal city is trying to figure out what to do.

Public health is at risk, several cities have declared states of emergency, and cities and counties are spending millions — in some cases billions — in a search for solutions. Organizers in Portland lit incense at an outdoor food festival to cover up the stench of urine in a parking lot where vendors set up shop.

They have no running water and no propane for the cook stove. They go to the bathroom in a bucket and dump it behind a nearby business.

After four months, the stench of human waste inside the RV is overwhelming. They are exhausted, scared and defeated, with no solution in sight.

“Between the two of us a month, we get $1,440 in disability,” he said. “We can’t find a place for that.”

Voters have approved more than $8 billion in spending since 2015 on affordable housing and other anti-homelessness programs, mostly as tax increases. Los Angeles voters, for example, approved $1.2 billion to build 10,000 units of affordable housing to address a homeless population that’s reached 34,000 people within city limits.

Jeremy Lemoine, an outreach case manager with REACH in Seattle, called it the situation a refugee crisis.

*** So, what role does the Department of Fish and Wildlife along with the Department of Interior play in this homelessness at least in California?

Seeking to free up about 200,000 acres from Ventura County to San Diego for housing, a group representing property owners, homebuilders and others has filed a lawsuit seeking to loosen the endangered species status for the coastal California gnatcatcher.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday, Nov. 2, by the Pacific Legal Foundation, asks the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to conduct a fair review of scientific evidence that has emerged casting doubt on the rarity of the bird. More here.

*** So we have this bird, a gnatcatcher that is getting in the way of housing and property rights at least in parts of California. Yup, you read that right. There is a lawsuit underway and honestly, it has been a legal issues for decades….yes….decades.

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Remember that Delta Smelt, that little fish that was destroying farming in California? (A case that is in fact still an issue in 2017) Now we have a bird, that is not an endangered species that is hurting property owners and the entire construction and housing industry in California.

Wonder if those homeless know about that gnatcatcher…

Import a Terrorist, Apply to the Diversity Visa Lottery Program

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Even the LATimes calls for the program to be ended. In part: Sayfullo Saipov, who allegedly killed eight and wounded 11 in a truck attack on Tuesday, entered the country from Uzbekistan through the diversity visa lottery. He is not the first presumed terrorist to enter using the program. Lottery terrorists include Hesham Mohamed Ali Hedayet, who shot up an El-Al ticket counter in 2002, killing two, and Imran Mandhai, who planned to bomb power stations in Florida the same year.

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The chilling details on Imran Mandhai are located here.

Imran Mandhai.

National security problems with the lottery have long been known. At a 2003 congressional hearing, the inspector general of the State Department, which oversees the lottery, testified that the program “contains significant risks to national security from hostile intelligence officers, criminals and terrorists attempting to use the program for entry into the United States as permanent residents.”

The concerns identified at that hearing 14 years ago remain. In 2016, Immigration and Customs Enforcement created a list of countries that “promote, produce, or protect terrorist organizations or their members.” Of the top 10 source countries for lottery winners in 2016, four were on ICE’s list: Egypt (No. 2), Iran (No. 3), Uzbekistan (No. 5) and Sudan (No. 7). Many other countries on the ICE list also send significant numbers of lottery winners.

In 2015, 14.4 million individuals plus family members successfully registered for the annual drawing. The State Department has to weed out those who do not qualify. After a computer randomly selects 100,000 names. State Department employees interview and vet the finalists, whittling down the list to the 50,000 cap. This is no simple task, since most applicants come from countries where recordkeeping is spotty and documents are hard to verify. Screening for visa lottery fraud takes up valuable State Department resources that could be allocated elsewhere if the program did not exist.

*** Suddenly, Chucky Schumer is suddenly quiet or forgets some facts.

The program was created by the late-Senator Ted Kennedy in the early 1990s, with help from then-Rep. Chuck Schumer, now the Senate Minority Leader, as a way to open the door to more Irish immigrants who could not qualify for immigration opportunities because of our equally nonsensical family chain migration policy. Of course, Schumer (and Kennedy until his death), continues to this day to defend family chain migration, and is fighting efforts to adopt a merit-based immigration policy that would obviate the need for the annual Wheel of Fortune exercise. More here. 

Included in the lottery are all four countries the U.S considers state sponsors of terror — Iran, Sudan, Cuba, and Syria — and 13 of the 14 nations that are coming under special monitoring from the Transportation Security Administration as founts of terrorism. Pakistan is excluded because, like China, it sends over tens of thousands of immigrants each year and doesn’t need to be in the lottery.

Among the winners for 2010 are:

Nigeria: 6,006
Iran: 2,773
Algeria: 1,957
Sudan: 1,084
Afghanistan: 345
Cuba: 298
Somalia: 229
Lebanon: 181
Libya: 152
Iraq: 142
Saudi Arabia: 104
Syria: 98
Yemen: 72

The State Department’s Office of the Inspector General recommended in a 2003 report that terror-sponsoring nations be removed from the diversity visa program.

“OIG believes that this program contains significant vulnerabilities to national security as hostile intelligence officers, criminals and terrorists attempt to use it to enter the United States as permanent residents,” the office’s deputy inspector testified to Congress in 2004.

A separate report filed by the Government Accountability Office also faulted the program for being susceptible to widespread fraud. A cottage industry has emerged abroad to cater to the lottery, and it regularly bilks people out of massive amounts of money and even coerces some into marriage to keep their diversity visas. More here.

Meanwhile:

The resettlement of refugees in the U.S. has been fairly consistent across the country since 2002, with no state resettling a majority of them. In fiscal year 2017, no state resettled more than 10% of the 53,716 refugees the nation admitted that year. California, Texas, New York, Washington, Michigan and Ohio each accounted for at least 5% of refugees resettled, while all other states had a lower share. In fiscal 2002, the earliest year state-level data are publicly available, California resettled 16% of the nation’s 27,110 refugees, the only state to account for more than 15% of the nation’s total that year – or in any following year, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. State Department data.

Most refugees today come from the Middle East and Africa, but this has not always been the case. Check more details here.