More noses in troughs and this white collar crime and these allegations have resulted in charges.

Not in the supercops remit at all!



Thinskin

 

Melania Trump cost taxpayers at least $64,000 for a spa weekend as whole Trump family racked up $600 million in security

Sarah K. Burris
May 20, 2021



Melania Trump and her husband Donald Trump/Screenshot


Former first lady Melania Trump refused to go to public events with her husband as news became public that he had an affair with Stormy Daniels in the weeks that followed her giving birth to his son. Mrs. Trump sought to go to Mar-a-Lago for a spa weekend instead of being with her husband on international visits.

The facts are part of Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig's new book on the lack of funding to sustain the Secret Service.

"Melania Trump reportedly was 'blindsided' and 'furious' by reports about Trump's alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, so she took an impromptu, two-day trip to Mar-a-Lago," The Mercury News reported. "That quick trip possibly cost American taxpayers at least $64,000 in costs, from traveling on a military C-32A plane, the New York Times reported at the time."

Now that Leonnig is looking back at the costs, the dollars are stacking up. She estimates at least $600 million in Secret Service fees over the four years that Trump and 13 of his family members were protected. Before leaving office, Trump extended that protection for an additional 6 months.

"By law, Donald and Melania Trump are automatically entitled to Secret Service protection for the rest of their lives, while 15-year-old Barron is entitled to protection until his 16th birthday," the report noted. It isn't unusual for presidents to extend the protection of their children, but typically when the children become adults, like Don. Jr. and his siblings, protection isn't seen as a concern.

Those extensions have cost American taxpayers big time as the family took lavish vacations and sought international business opportunities after leaving office. Jared Kushner's May trip to Abu Dhabi cost Secret Service at least $12,950 just for the hotel rooms at the Ritz-Carlton.

Jared and Ivanka's 10-day ski trip to Salt Lake City, immediately after the end of Trump's presidency, cost a total of $62,599.39 just in hotel rooms for Secret Service agents, found the Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

The first several months that Melania Trump refused to move into the White House cost the Secret Service a pretty penny too. The USSS asked for an emergency infusion of $28.3 million to secure Trump Tower in New York. Once the move to the White House was complete, the couple rarely stayed in the penthouse, opting instead to stay at Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster. The price tag for Trump Tower is more than any other president in history.

According to "The Art of Her Deal," a 2020 biography on Melania Trump, the new first lady used the delay in moving to the White House to leverage it for her own financial gain, renegotiating her prenuptial agreement with the president to ensure she'd get a better settlement and future role for her son when the couple divorces.

Read the full report at The Mercury News.

https://www.rawstory.com/melania-trump-secret-service-weekend/

 

Shooter came across this post he made back in December, 2018.
He had no idea just how prophetic he would be.

 

Well looking supercop's old posts should be fun!

Thinskin

 

Trump Hit Secret Service With $40,000 Mar-a-Lago Bill After Leaving Office, Says Report
THE GRIFT GOES ON

Jamie Ross
News Correspondent

Published May. 21, 2021 6:55AM ET

Reuters/Marco Bello

It’s a long list, but President Donald Trump’s little ruse of staying at his own hotels and clubs and then forcing the Secret Service to spend millions to rent out his rooms was one of his most blatantly unethical practices in office. According to The Washington Post, that grift is still going on. Secret Service documents reportedly show that Mar-a-Lago has billed the agency $396.15 every single day from when he left office up to the most recent filings at the end of April. Overall, that means the Secret Service has paid a total of at least $40,011.15 to Trump’s club since he left office. The Post reports that the payments were incurred for use of a single room at Mar-a-Lago that has been turned into a workspace for agents. The money adds to the $2.5 million that Trump’s properties charged the federal government during the four years of his presidency. The Trump Organization, Trump’s post-presidential office, and the Secret Service all refused to comment on the filings before they were published by the newspaper.

Read it at TheWashington Post

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump...ill-after-leaving-office-says-report?ref=home

 

It is simply a cash cow for Trump!

He is also taking the Presidential pension after telling us he does not need the money.

Yeah right!

Thinskin

 

The witch hunt continues.
So, cause its Trump, he shouldn't get the pension every other president gets. And he should give the government free space in his home so, you know, the secret service can do its job.

Biden collects rent from Secret Service - Washington Times

The U.S. Secret Service does more than protect Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — the agency also pays him rent.

Since April, Mr. Biden has collected more than $13,000 from the agency charged with protecting him and his family for use of a rental cottage adjacent to the waterfront home he owns in a Wilmington, Del., suburb.

Mr. Biden, listed not as vice president in federal purchasing documents but as a “vendor,” is eligible for up to $66,000 by the time the government contract expires in the fall of 2013, the records show.​

And in case you want to huff and puff about Presidents "negotiating" the fees, no, there is a formula to determine how much the government pays in rent.

Did the Clintons Charge Rent to the Secret Service? | Snopes.com

Secret Service Payments: It claims that "[t]he Clintons charge the Federal government $10,000 monthly rent" for the quarters used by the Secret Service at the couple’s residence in Chappaqua, N.Y. This is false. The Clintons legally would have been entitled to receive $1,100 per month (not $10,000) but refused the money.​

Shooters work here is done; more propaganda and lies from the unsupporters exposed with but a moment searching google.

 

Has anyone told stumbles and thin skin Donald Trump is not president anymore .

 

What goes around comes around.

Denied: Judge orders Trump cabinet member to testify citing 'extraordinary circumstances'

Jon Skolnik, Salon
May 20, 2021



(AFP / MANDEL NGAN)


A federal judge on Wednesday ruled that former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos will have to testify in a class action lawsuit over her handling of the Education Department's student debt loan forgiveness program.

Judge William Alsup said "exceptional circumstances" warrant issuing DeVos a subpoena, a move that goes against both Devos' and the Biden administration's requests to excuse her from providing testimony.

The lawsuit, which has been brought on behalf of about 160,000 borrowers, alleges that the plaintiffs were defrauded by for-profit colleges and then neglected by the federal government.

The controversy dates back to 2018, when the Department of Education unexpectedly stopped making decisions on "student-loan borrower-defense applications," in which students could petition the department to have their debt federally relieved if they believed their colleges had misled them.

After an 18-month halt on the program, the Trump administration began rejecting a disproportionately high number of applications issuing scant explanations as to why, instead citing that the Department needed to mull over its policy on the issue. At the time, Devos claimed that making decisions on these applications was "time-consuming and complex."

DeVos will be pressed in her hearing on the department's inadequate record-keeping of loan forgiveness claims, as well as whether the Trump administration lied about its rationale for the vast number of rejections it issued.

"If the judicial process runs to presidents, it runs to Cabinet secretaries — especially former ones," Alsup wrote in his decision, adducing the subpoena of former President Richard Nixon over the Watergate tapes following Nixon's departure from office. "Extraordinary circumstances warrant the deposition of Secretary DeVos for three hours, excluding breaks."

Over the past several months, four depositions have been conducted with testimony from numerous Education Department officials, all of which have denied responsibility for the sudden discontinuation of the loan relief program, as well as the unexplained wave of rejections. Many pointed to DeVos as a prime suspect.

"Beyond illuminating her involvement, these material gaps at the highest rungs of the Department's decision-making record reveal the necessity of Secretary DeVos's testimony for an independent reason," Alsup argued. "We lack an official and contemporaneous justification for the eighteen-month delay because this suit concerns agency inaction, and not the usual agency action."

Alsup specifically claimed that DeVos appears to have had a personal hand in the department's decision-making process. Lawyers are expected to ask the former official whether she "directed her subordinates to cease issuing student-loan borrower-defense decisions, or whether she tacitly approved of the halt once manifested."

Theresa Sweet, a leading plaintiff in the suit, told Forbes in March: "Nearly 200,000 defrauded students are still waiting for justice, due in no small part to the malicious efforts of Betsy DeVos and the for-profit education lackeys with which she surrounded herself as Secretary of Education. She utterly failed in her duty to protect students from harm and to hold scam schools accountable."

A hearing for the suit had been scheduled for June 3.

https://www.rawstory.com/betsy-devos-2653056959/

 

Paul Manafort's banker set for trial in corrupt scheme to trade mortgage loans for appointment as Trump's treasury secretary

Travis Gettys
May 22, 2021



(mark reinstein / Shutterstock.com)


The banker who pushed through Paul Manafort's sketchy mortgages is set to go on trial next month on corruption and bribery charges related to the 2016 election.

Former president Donald Trump pardoned his disgraced campaign chairman in the final weeks of his only term, but Stephen Calk, former CEO and chairman of the board of the Federal Savings Bank of Chicago, remains in legal jeopardy for his alleged corrupt scheme to extend $16 million in mortgage loans to Manafort -- who allegedly agreed to help his banker get a major appointment, reported The Daily Beast.

"Calk provided the Borrower with a ranked list of the governmental positions he desired, which started with Secretary of the Treasury, and was followed by Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Commerce, and Secretary of Defense, as well as 19 ambassadorships similarly ranked and starting with the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy," the indictment alleges.

The banker "was aware of significant red flags regarding the borrower's ability to repay the loan, such as his history of defaulting on previous loans," prosecutors say, but approved the mortgage loans anyway as he discussed meetings with Trump in hopes of securing an administration appointment.

"He is not doing meetings on the road on these types of matters," Manafort replied. "I will be calling you later today with updates."

Calk was ultimately not hired for any administration job, and the U.S. Marshals Service ultimately seized Manafort's brownstone, which fell into disrepair.

However, the brownstone passed back into Manafort's control after Trump's pardon -- and the Federal National Bank that Calk once ran wants to foreclose on the property and two others he purchased with $16 million in loans.

Calk's trial is scheduled to begin June 22.

https://www.rawstory.com/stephen-calk/


PS This is some funny shit here.

Secret Service Payments: It claims that "[t]he Clintons charge the Federal government $10,000 monthly rent" for the quarters used by the Secret Service at the couple’s residence in Chappaqua, N.Y. This is false. The Clintons legally would have been entitled to receive $1,100 per month (not $10,000) but refused the money.

 

Sometimes missing the point is more fun than admitting you are a liar.
Eh, stumbler?

 

Newly obtained documents show $157,000 in additional payments by the Secret Service to Trump properties
March 5, 2020 at 12:50 pm Updated March 14, 2020 at 10:39 pm



The new documents and the previously reported ones show that President Donald Trump’s company has charged the Secret Service more than $628,000 since he took office in 2017. The... More
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WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s company charged the Secret Service $157,000 more than was previously known – billing taxpayers for rooms at his clubs at rates far higher than his company has claimed, according to a new trove of receipts and billing documents released by the Secret Service.

Many of the new receipts were obtained by the watchdog group Public Citizen, which spent three years battling the Secret Service over a public-records request from January 2017.

When added to dozens of charges already reported by The Washington Post, the new documents show that Trump’s company has charged the Secret Service more than $628,000 since he took office in 2017.

The payments show Trump has an unprecedented – and still partially hidden – business relationship with his own government. The full scope of that relationship is still unknown because the publicly available records are largely from 2017 and 2018, leaving huge gaps in the data.

The new documents include bills from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, showing charges for 177 additional nightly room rentals in 2017, 2018 and 2019. The rate was $396.15 per night per room, the receipts show.

In Bedminster, New Jersey, the new receipts also show that a rental arrangement that began in summer 2017 – where Trump’s club charged the Secret Service $17,000 per month to rent a cottage near the president’s – continued in summer 2018 and for at least part of summer 2019. That rate is unusually high for homes in the area, according to local rental listings.

Trump’s son Eric Trump, who is helping to run the Trump Organization while his father is in the White House, suggested in an interview last year with Yahoo Finance that the company charges a very low rate to federal employees accompanying the president.

“If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free – meaning, like, cost for housekeeping,” said Eric Trump, the company’s executive vice president. Later in the interview, he said, “We charge them, like, 50 bucks.”

In response to questions from The Post about the Secret Service payments, Eric Trump has said the company charges the Secret Service “at cost” but declined to provide more details. The rate charged to the Secret Service at Mar-a-Lago was more than double what the club charged another government customer, a visiting official from the Department of Veterans Affairs, according to VA records.

Asked about the spending, the Secret Service responded with a brief statement. “In the execution of our protective mission, the Secret Service balances operational security with judicious allocation of resources,” a spokeswoman said.

The White House declined to comment. Donald Trump still owns his company but says he has given day-to-day control to his eldest sons.

The Secret Service accompanies the president and his family members wherever they go, and while on protective duty its agents are exempt from federal limits on hotel room spending.

But there appears to be no requirement that presidents must charge the Secret Service. In fact, most recent presidents and vice presidents have allowed the Secret Service to use space on their properties free, according to their spokesmen or presidential library staff.

Before Trump, the one recent exception had been then-Vice President Joe Biden, who charged the Secret Service $2,200 a month to rent a cottage at his home in Delaware. A Biden spokesman said that was a fair market rate. Biden’s payments were formalized in a federal contract and listed in public databases of federal spending.

The Secret Service’s payments to Trump’s companies have been made through federal credit cards, not formal contracts. They are not listed in public databases. The Post and watchdog groups including Public Citizen have assembled some details of the Secret Service’s spending at Trump properties through public-records requests, one receipt at a time.

The documents reviewed by The Post so far have included charges for more than 590 nights in rooms at Trump properties. At Mar-a-Lago, the rate for the Secret Service started at $650 per night, according to people who have seen unredacted versions of the receipts from early 2017 viewed by The Post. The rate then fell to $396.15 per night by fall 2017, other receipts show. At Bedminster, the monthly cottage rent worked out to $566.64 per night.

The Post has not yet found any instance where a Trump property charged the Secret Service $50 per night for a room or any rate under $100 per night.

Public Citizen submitted the public-records request with the Secret Service on Jan. 6, 2017 – before Trump took office. They asked for records related to the cost of Secret Service agents accompanying Trump on trips to his private homes. After three years of legal wrangling, the Secret Service last month sent Public Citizen 60 pounds of documents, the group said.

The Secret Service had produced thousands of pages of receipts, mostly related to Trump’s visits to two properties – Mar-a-Lago and Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster – where he has spent a combined 219 days of his presidency. The receipts were largely from 2017 and 2018.

Trump has spent 355 days – 30 percent of his presidency so far – visiting his own properties, according to a Washington Post tally.

Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, said the group was happy to get the documents – but dismayed that most of them were so old.

“That is not how the process is supposed to work,” Weissman said. “Responding in 2020 with information from 2017 and 2018 is not okay.” The Secret Service said in a statement that it adheres to all rules governing public-records requests.

Some of the documents were for bills from the clubs. Around Christmas 2017, for instance, the Secret Service paid for 57 nights in Mar-a-Lago’s guest rooms, for a total bill of $22,580.

On many bills from Mar-a-Lago, the $396.15 nightly rate for these rooms was listed as “Room Rate at Cost.”

The Trump Organization has not explained how it calculates that cost or why that figure differs so widely from Eric Trump’s public claim that the cost was “like 50 bucks.” Hotel industry experts say that the cost of housekeeping for a luxury hotel room is typically $40 to $50 per night. Could the cost be as high as $396.15 at Mar-a-Lago?

“No. That’s not possible,” Diego Bufquin, a professor at the University of Central Florida’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management told The Post this month.

“Let’s say that you use the best shampoos, the best soaps, the best conditioners, the best coffee,” Bufquin said. “At the end of the day you may have something approaching $100, if you have the top products in the world in your guest room. . . . I’ve never seen variable costs per room sold at $400.”

Experts said that cleaning a room typically takes a housekeeper a half-hour and noted that – according to documents filed with the Labor Department – the starting salary for housekeepers at Mar-a-Lago is $11.17 per hour.

In a recent interview with a Fox News podcast, Eric Trump called a prior Post story on Secret Service payments to the Trump Organization “disgusting” and said that the company does not make a profit on these payments.

“I joke all the time that I would like nothing more than to never have another person from the government stay at one of our properties because it displaces a true paying guest,” he said.

Eric Trump did not respond to questions from The Post asking him to elaborate on his remarks in the interview.

It is difficult to estimate what Mar-a-Lago charges its nongovernment customers, as the club does not publish its room rates. As a private club, the rooms are open only to guests of members, and even members are told to call and ask for price quotes.

But another receipt makes clear that $396.15 is not the lowest the club’s rates can go.

In April 2018, the chief of staff at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Peter O’Rourke, stayed overnight at Mar-a-Lago, according to a hotel bill obtained by ProPublica. At the time, ProPublica reported, O’Rourke was visiting the club to meet with a Mar-a-Lago member and two associates who were unofficially advising the department.

O’Rourke was charged only $195. That is the maximum rate a non-Secret Service government employee was permitted to spend on a hotel in the Palm Beach area under federal rules. O’Rourke has since left VA and did not respond to requests for comment.

The Secret Service happened to be renting four rooms on the same night, other receipts show. Mar-a-Lago charged them $396.15 each – more than double O’Rourke’s rate.

In Bedminster, the receipts show that – as in 2017 – the club charged $17,000 a month for the “Sarazen Cottage.” The monthly arrangement meant the Trump Organization company got paid by taxpayers, even when Donald Trump wasn’t at the club – or even in the country. On June 12, 2018, for instance, Trump was in Singapore for a summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Even with the president was 9,500 miles away, the Secret Service still paid rent on the cottage in New Jersey. A former government official with direct knowledge of Secret Service operations told The Post that because equipment was stored in the cottage, it could not be rented to other guests. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships in the administration.

The Post has now filed more than 60 public-records request of its own, seeking details about payments by the Secret Service, State Department, Defense Department and other agencies. The House Oversight and Reform Committee has also asked the Secret Service for an accounting of its spending at Trump properties, but the service has not yet provided it.

“The Secret Service has a statutory duty to report its expenditures at Trump properties,” committee chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said. “And the incomplete record further underscores the need for transparency.

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation...ts-by-the-secret-service-to-trump-properties/

 

So apparently, because its Trump, the expectation is that he should give the Secret Service free rooms and food and shit.
No other president has ever been expected to do this, just Trump, apparently.

And another thought; Trump Jr. said the organization charges the secret service, in many cases, only something like $50 for a room. But now the claim is there are receipts for something like $400 for a room.

So, either Trump Jr. was lying or mistaken or just plain full of shit, or the secret service is padding the bills by a factor of 8. Or maybe the media got it wrong, or the GOA or something. An interesting question, yes?

And yeah, unsupporters will immediately claim Trump Jr. was lying, without any basis other than Trump lies, but that's Ok. Enjoy yourselves.

 

Trump Flack Jason Miller Ordered To Pay $42,000 in Legal Fees For Failed Suit
BITTER PILL

Roger Sollenberger
Political Reporter

Updated May. 22, 2021 6:44PM ET / Published May. 22, 2021 6:42PM ET

Drew Angerer/Getty


A U.S. District Court judge in Florida has ordered Jason Miller, a spokesperson for former President Trump, to pay G/O Media 42,000 in legal expenses. This comes after a federal appeals court rejected his second $100 million defamation suit against G/O, the parent company of Gizmodo, Jezebel, and other websites. A federal judge tossed Miller’s original lawsuit in 2019, finding that the now-defunct website Splinter had accurately reported a 2018 viral story titled, “Court Docs Allege Ex-Trump Staffer Drugged Woman He Got Pregnant With ‘Abortion Pill,’” which the Trump spokesperson claimed had cost him his contract as a paid political commenter for CNN. Miller had argued in his second attempt that those court documents were out of bounds, but last month a panel of judges on the 11th Circuit ruled that they were protected under New York fair reporting privilege and upheld the 2019 decision.

Roger Sollenberger found true love, suckers
@SollenbergerRC
A US District Judge has ordered Trump flack Jason Miller to pay Gizmodo nearly $42,000 to cover legal expenses from his failed $100 million defamation suit. The judge found Gizmodo accurately reported a court filing alleging Miller slipped an abortion pill into a woman’s smoothie

3:35 PM · May 22, 2021

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump...lar42k-in-legal-fees-for-failed-suit?ref=home

 

Exactly how many President's owned the hotels that the Secret Service had to stay in again?

Go on tell us dotard!

Thinskin

 

Dotards do not explain anything to flaming arrogant assholes.
Dismissed.

 

Trump aide concealed work for PR firm and misled court to dodge child support
This article is more than 1 month old
Jason Miller signed secret deal to stay with DC-based Teneo after ‘resigning’ and then appeared to misrepresent employment status


Jason Miller, middle, at Trump’s second impeachment trial in February. Photograph: Erin Scott/Reuters

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/25/jason-miller-trump-aide-teneo-secret-deal-pr-firm

 

Secret Service agents could be called to testify against Donald Trump: report

Sarah K. Burris
May 24, 2021



Presidential Secret Service agent beside motorcade (Photo: Shutterstock)


With the shifting of investigations on former President Donald Trump, there's a possibility that Secret Service agents might be asked to testify.

Senior Washington correspondent for BusinessInsider, Dave Levinthal, explained to SiriusXM host Julie Mason Monday morning that it harkens back to the days of former President Bill Clinton and the Ken Starr investigation. In that case, Levinthal explained that agents were subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury.

Given Secret Service agents followed Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and Eric Trump it could make for a lot of agents who witnessed many things. There is no law on the books that prevents agents from testifying.

Levinthal went on to explain that most of the legal challenges that Trump faces are related to his businesses, but as president, he was accused of using the office for his own financial benefit. So, agents could be called to testify about that.

There's also the matter of what Trump did to intervene in the Georgia election that could have fallen under election fraud.

The agency has opposed subpoenaing their agents, noting that it puts them in an awkward position where the protectee must trust them.

Listen to the clip below:


Dave Levinthal
@davelevinthal
Answering the Qs you didn't know you had: Could @SecretService agents testify against Trump? And would they follow Trump to prison if he ever went? @juliemason and I reveal all on @SXMPOTUS' @MasonMornings.

Dave Levinthal on Trump's Secret Service Possibly Testifying Against...
Dave Levinthal, Senior Washington Correspondent for Insider, joins Julie Mason to discuss the latest updates on Trump's legal woes.
siriusxm.com
7:49 AM · May 24, 2021

https://www.rawstory.com/seret-service-testify-donald-trump/

 

Another value treasonous conservative/Republicans claimed to have is not allowing the government to spy on Americans. But when Trump came along that was proven just another lie.

'An environment of paranoia and retaliation': Report reveals Trump-era Commerce Department's 'obscure security unit'

Alex Henderson, AlterNet
May 24, 2021



Wilbur Ross REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

During Donald Trump's four years as president, his administration was a revolving door. But one person who was part of the Trump Administration throughout most of his presidency was former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who started in February 2017 and stayed until February 2021. The U.S. Department of Commerce, journalist Shawn Boburg reports in an article published by the Washington Post on May 24, has had an "obscure security unit" that was "tasked with protecting" its "officials and facilities" — and during its Trump/Ross era, according to Boburg, it "evolved into something more akin to a counterintelligence operation that collected information on hundreds of people inside and outside the Department."

According to Boburg, "The Investigations and Threat Management Service (ITMS) covertly searched employees' offices at night, ran broad keyword searches of their e-mails trying to surface signs of foreign influence and scoured Americans' social media for critical comments about the (2020 U.S.) Census, according to documents and interviews with five former investigators. In one instance, the unit opened a case on a 68-year-old retiree in Florida who tweeted that the Census, which is run by the Commerce Department, would be manipulated 'to benefit the Trump Party,' records show."

Boburg adds, "In another example, the unit searched Commerce servers for particular Chinese words, documents show. The search resulted in the monitoring of many Asian-American employees over benign correspondence, according to two former investigators."

John Costello, who formerly served as deputy assistant secretary of intelligence and security for the Commerce Dept. under the Trump Administration, is highly critical of ITMS — telling the Post that ITMS "has been allowed to operate far outside the bounds of federal law enforcement norms and has created an environment of paranoia and retaliation at the Department."

Bruce Ridlen, a former supervisor, told the Post that the ITMS' tactics make it look as though "someone watched too many 'Mission Impossible' movies."

Ridlen, who left ITMS in October 2020, told the Post, "I chose to resign from my position with ITMS after it became clear there was no authority to perform law enforcement functions. There were no policies in place to outline standards of conduct or to establish parameters for investigative activities, which led to investigative inquiries of U.S. persons over protected free speech found on several social media platforms."

Former Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo was sworn in as commerce secretary under President Joe Biden in early March.

Boburg explains, "(ITMS) has managed to keep a low public profile until now, while pursuing investigations into 'counterintelligence, transnational crime and counterterrorism,' as it described its activities in a 2018 budget document submitted to Congress. Incoming Commerce leaders from the Biden Administration ordered ITMS to pause all criminal investigations on March 10, and on May 13, ordered the suspension of all activities after preliminary results of an ongoing review, according to a statement issued by Department spokeswoman Brittany Caplin. The suspension came two days after the Post presented its findings about the unit to the department and sought interviews."

The statement read, "The current Commerce Department leadership team takes this issue seriously. The Department expects that at the end of the review, it can and will implement a comprehensive solution to the issues raised."

https://www.rawstory.com/an-environ...a-commerce-departments-obscure-security-unit/

 

DOJ Demands Steve Wynn Register as Foreign Agent or Face Court Battle
WYNN-WIN SITUATION?

Blake Montgomery
Reporter/Editor

Published May. 26, 2021 4:21PM ET

Mike Blake/Reuters

The Justice Department has notified Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn that he must register as a foreign agent acting on behalf of China or face a court battle, The Wall Street Journal reports. In 2017, Wynn spoke with a Chinese government official about a Chinese billionaire, Guo Wengui, and later lobbied Donald Trump’s administration to deport the businessman from the U.S. back to China, where he’s a wanted fugitive. Guo is charged with sexual assault, bribery, and other crimes; he has denied accusations of wrongdoing and called them political persecution. He has also been linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. The DOJ has told Wynn—who once had business ties to gambling hotspot Macau—that he must register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act or face litigation forcing him to comply. Wynn’s attorney told the Journal, “Steve Wynn never served as an agent or lobbyist for China or anyone else.” Guo welcomed the news in a statement, calling Wynn “a greedy spy of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Read it at The Wall Street Journal


https://www.thedailybeast.com/justi...ister-as-foreign-agent-or-face-court?ref=home