Month: November 2016

Trump hired Tom Delay’s lawyer to give him ethics advice

by digby

I wrote about it for Salon this morning:

The news media finally seems to have caught up to the notion that Donald Trump’s international business dealings might just create a bit of a conflict of interest as president of the United States. The New York Times published an investigation over the Thanksgiving weekend into some of Trump’s business partners around the world and how they see his election as a “yuge” opportunity to make a lot of money by partnering with the president-elect’s “brand” — the profits from which his family will undoubtedly share. At this point, it appears Trump has no intention of doing anything more than superficially distancing himself from the business and pretending that’s a “blind trust.”

In his interview with the Times last week, Trump explained that he had thought he would have to “do something” and had since been told that “the president can’t have a conflict of interest,” immediately evoking memories of Richard Nixon’s famous quote: “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.” It’s a very similar notion. The idea is that the president’s job is so unique that normal rules and laws do not apply. The full quote is even more incoherent:

As far as the, you know, potential conflict of interests, though, I mean I know that from the standpoint, the law is totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest. That’s been reported very widely. Despite that, I don’t want there to be a conflict of interest anyway. And the laws, the president can’t. And I understand why the president can’t have a conflict of interest now because everything a president does in some ways is like a conflict of interest, but I have, I’ve built a very great company and it’s a big company and it’s all over the world . . .

Now, according to the law, see, I figured there’s something where you put something in this massive trust and there’s also — nothing is written. In other words, in theory, I can be president of the United States and run my business 100 percent, sign checks on my business, which I am phasing out of very rapidly, you know, I sign checks, I’m the old-fashioned type . . . But in theory I could run my business perfectly, and then run the country perfectly. And there’s never been a case like this where somebody’s had, like, if you look at other people of wealth, they didn’t have this kind of asset and this kind of wealth, frankly. It’s just a different thing. 

But there is no — I assumed that you’d have to set up some type of trust or whatever and, you know. And I was actually a little bit surprised to see it. So in theory I don’t have to do anything. But I would like to do something. I would like to try and formalize something, because I don’t care about my business.

Trump seems to have been told that the presidency is unique and therefore not subject to conflict-of-interest laws, and also that he is unique because he’s so vastly wealthy he is not subject to conflicts of interest. In any case, it’s worth reading the entire transcript to see just how much over his head he really is.

President Obama tried to warn Trump that he needed to find a White House counsel who would give him strong, unbiased advice and help him navigate these treacherous ethical waters. Trump clearly didn’t listen. In fact he went out of his way to name as his chief counsel one of the most notorious lawyers in Washington, Don McGahn, the man best known as the ethics lawyer to corrupt former House whip Tom “The Hammer” DeLay, a man who pretty much filled the swamp Trump promised to drain. As one of the architects of the “K Street Project,” which strong-armed lobbyists into only hiring Republicans if they wanted to do business with the government, DeLay and McGahn were instrumental in institutionalizing GOP self-dealing and corruption during the Bush years.

DeLay had Texas tear up its 2000 redistricting plan after Republicans won the majority in 2002, and McGahn defended him when DeLay was tried for illegally funneling campaign cash into a PAC to help Republicans win. (He lost the case, but it was reversed on appeal.) Of course, McGahn had also been the lawyer who advised him the scheme was legal in the first place.

McGahn helped DeLay with a Russian pay-to-play scheme and subsequent RICO lawsuit. As the in-house counsel for the National Republican Campaign Committee, McGahn oversaw the raising of more than $625 million between 2000 and 2008 with almost no oversight and no rules. The scheme finally ended when a Republican congressman insisted on an audit and the FBI indicted the treasurer on embezzlement charges.

Naturally, George W. Bush then made McGahn a member of the Federal Election Commission, where he did everything in his power to undermine the campaign finance laws — and succeeded — after which he went to work for the Koch brothers. Of course. In 2016 he joined the Trump campaign, and he will now be White House counsel.

The idea that this man is going to give Trump guidance on how to deal with conflicts of interest in an ethical manner is laughable. His career has been spent counseling his clients on how to do the opposite. Like Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn and Jeff Sessions, it’s yet another example of Trump hiring the worst person in America for the job. It’s almost as if he’s trolling America, just messing with our heads for the fun of it. And like nearly all forms of trolling it’s not funny at all.

Use your leverage? You bet they will
by Tom Sullivan

You wonder why Donald Trump doesn’t simply move on to the next lie. He has a boundless supply. But after being hammered for his tweets about the popular vote totals being compromised by millions of illegal votes, his team seems determined to dig in. Daily Beast reports:

President-elect Donald Trump doubled down on claims of voter fraud on Monday night, lashing out at journalists who dared to ask for some evidence. Addressing several journalists, Trump wrote, “There is NO QUESTION THAT voter fraud did take place, and in favor of Corrupt Hillary!” As for those who expressed doubt about Trump’s assertions, the president-elect told them to put up or shut up: “Pathetic – you have no sufficient evidence that Donald Trump did not suffer from voter fraud, shame! Bad reporter.”

That last one complaining the press has failed to prove a negative was Trump retweeting a 16 year-old from Beverly Hills. Actually, Trump didn’t use the retweet function. He simply copied and pasted the kid’s tweet.

@realDonaldTrump Good evening! Have been looking for examples of voter fraud. Please send our way. Full-time journalist here still working.— Jeff Zeleny (@jeffzeleny) November 29, 2016

The New York Times editorial board figured, like many of us, that should Trump lose on Nov. 8 he would try to delegitimize the election by floating conspiracy theories from “right-wing propaganda sites like InfoWars.” Instead he’s trying to delegitimize his own victory. The Times writes:

In addition to insulting law-abiding voters everywhere, these lies about fraud threaten the foundations of American democracy. They have provided the justification for state voter-suppression laws around the country, and they could give the Trump administration a pretext to roll back voting rights on a national scale.

And why is Mr. Trump so hung up on the popular vote in the first place? After all, he won where it counts — in the Electoral College. And yet, in the three weeks since his victory, Mr. Trump has already admitted at least twice that he would prefer the presidency be determined by the popular vote, and not by 538 electors. It’s clear he feels threatened by Mrs. Clinton’s popular-vote lead — now more than 2.3 million and expected to exceed 2.5 million; as a percentage of the electorate, that is a wider margin than five presidents enjoyed. With support for third-party candidates added in, 54 percent of voters rejected Mr. Trump.

The right has been flogging the tiresome fraud meme for decades, insisting they are deeply concerned with election integrity when evidence exists that’s not their real motivation and evidence for massive fraud is absent.

Can we get back to something that’s a real threat to the country (in addition to Trump’s immaturity)? Say, how his business dealings worldwide leave him compromised as president when dealing with foreign powers? The Atlantic has a handy crib sheet on Trump’s global conflicts of interest:

The unprecedented nature of Trump’s business interests, coupled with the many precedents that Trump broke throughout his campaign—not releasing his tax returns, for example, which severely limits attempts to understand his financial situation—has provoked speculation that his presidency may bring about equally unprecedented opportunities for conflicts of interest. Trump’s response—provided on Twitter—only reinforces concerns that he will make little effort to avoid entangling his business and personal interests, and will instead attack those who point that out.

Prior to the election it was well known that I have interests in properties all over the world.Only the crooked media makes this a big deal!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2016

The short-fingered vulgarian is insecure about the size of his win, the size of his, uh, hands, and the size of his net worth. “Use your leverage,” Trump advises in “The Art of the Deal.” Foreign powers? You bet they will.

Thanks for the tip, Mr. Minority.

FAA Restricts Drones Flying Over Pipeline Protests

By Spocko

From the Drone Law Journal November 27, 2016

The FAA has imposed a 4-nautical mile Temporary Flight Restriction, (“TFR”), in airspace up to 3500 feet above sea level, over the Standing Rock Protest in North Dakota. The land in that area sits approximately 1600 feet above sea level, meaning about 1900 feet of the sky above the protest is off limits to any aircraft other than those permitted to fly — namely, aircraft in support of the law enforcement activities.

Neither the mainstream media, nor citizen journalists, nor activist hobbyists may fly in that area to document what law enforcement is doing.

Why is there a TFR over Standing Rock? — Peter Sachs, Esq.

This action will prevent the media or activists from showing shocking footage of water cannons used to spray protesters.

Forbes contributor John Goglia has pointed out that “keeping the media from documenting law enforcement actions is not part of the FAA’s mission. Nor is it a legal basis for issuing flight restrictions.” Yet that is exactly what they did in Ferguson and it appears they are doing the same here.

I reached out to the FAA for more specific information on why the TFR was issued, including whether it was issued because of the reports of drones being shot down. I also requested information on whether drone journalists could get permission to fly through the TFR and, if so, how. Lastly, I asked what the FAA was doing to investigate and prosecute the 8 or more instances of drones being shot down as the agency confirmed to me several months ago that shooting down drones was a felony.

– Flight Restrictions Over Standing Rock: Is The FAA Effectively Taking Sides In Pipeline Dispute? Forbes, John Goglia

Here was their response to the first two questions:

The Federal Aviation Administration carefully considers requests from law enforcement and other entities before establishing Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFR) in U.S. airspace. The TFR currently over the pipeline protest was approved to ensure the safety of aircraft in support of law enforcement and the safety of people on the ground.

The TFR includes provisions for media to operate aircraft – both traditional and unmanned – inside the TFR, provided that operators comply with the language of the Notice to Airmen. In the case of unmanned aircraft, operators must also comply with the requirements of Part 107 and coordinate beforehand with the FAA. We’ve had no requests from media who meet those requirements.

The first answer doesn’t really address the question. The FAA is saying “We were told it was unsafe by law enforcement and other entities, we believed them.”

Law enforcement has learned from the Ferguson flight restrictions to not say their intentions out loud. Now when they want to block the media drones they say it’s about safety, not limiting access, “We are worried all those drones will fall out of the sky and hurt the people on the ground. Drones might fly up and hit the law enforcement aircraft that are in the restricted zone.”

The second answer is very important. It’s saying the media CAN operate in the restricted flight zone, but they have to show they have certified training (Part 107) and they have to coordinate with the FAA.

What is Part 107? It’s a long list of requirements a remote operator must have. It’s fairly new (August 29, 2016) and it was put into place partly because of jackholes who were flying their drones around during emergencies getting in the way of fire fighters.

I don’t know how hard it is to get this certificate or if any of the media in place have them. But because the FAA says that no one has asked yet, that means ALL DRONES flying during the TFR are flying illegally.

If someone is not certified, but they operate anyway, they would be subject to “all applicable federal criminal and civil penalties.” BTW, it’s $1,100 for each incident.

Here’s the deal, law enforcement can’t arrest people for taking a photo, but they can arrest them for taking the photo from a drone in the TFR.

Law enforcement now has a new federal law to use to arrest people who break it.

Here is the FAA’s answer to drones being shot down:

Although the FAA is aware of anecdotal reports of drones being shot down, the agency has received only one official report. On Oct. 23, a drone was shot down with bean bags after allegedly being flown in a threatening manner near a law enforcement helicopter. That incident is still under investigation.

The agency also is investigating several incidents in which protestors have allegedly flown their drones in violation of the provisions of the TFR.

This is the ol’ “It was coming right at me!” trick used to justify shootings. Now, because there are no certified remote media drone operators, all drones seen are violating the FAA flight restrictions. This language will also be used to justify police shooting down drones.
http://www.spockosbrain.com/wp-content/uploads/14843645_1315084278504480_1203959275295080448_n.mp4

I’ve included a video above of one of the drones being shot at. This happened in October, before the TFR, but after the August 2016 rules were passed. I don’t know the background of the operator they might have a certificate. In which case they should file a complaint with the FAA about the police shooting at the drone.

The FAA mentions they have only seen one official report. Who filed it?

When the FAA says, “official reports” that usually means from law enforcement, and we know who usually wins in these cases. The good news is that at least in the case of the drone video, there is proof of the incident.

Passing laws that limit the media or just a media tool?

If we step back from this FAA announcement, I can see ways around it using a different tool, “Want a shot from a height? Put a GoPro on a helium balloon. It’s not an aircraft. Don’t have any helium? Attach a camera to a kite. No wind? Get a really long selfie stick.” But that’s my inner MacGyver talking

This is an important issue because of its use of the government, the FAA, to restrict the media’s use of a new tool. They are doing it using an accepted method to make it stick–safety.

When officials lie about what is “safe” when using drones in order to restrict the media, they need to be called on it. We know from the Ferguson transcript officials asked for the TFR just to block the media, they didn’t care about safety.

The other issue to bring up is the use of a certification and permission. One of the ways that the media is contained by government is the issue of credentials, or “press passes.” Making sure the media has drone certification allows the government to keep an eye on them. It’s not embedding, but it does allows the government some control over those given special access.

With all this talk about drones and regulations I don’t want to miss the point of WHY it is so important for people to see what is happening. If the media can’t do it, then we need to. The idea is that when people see what is happening they will be outraged and demand it stop.

While reading about the Birmingham campaign I was curious about who issued the orders to turn the hoses on children and bystanders. I was also wondered who had the authority to tell them to stop.

Obama is still the President. He has the video of what is happening. He has the authority to tell the locals to stop turning high-pressure water hoses on people. Why hasn’t he?

by digby

12-21-15 Grand Rapids, Michigan

No, No think of it, you know, it’s Russia after all. Somebody said “are you at all offended that he said nice thins about you?” I said, “No, No.” And they said “Oh Trump should have been much nastier. That’s terrible.” And then they said, “You know he’s killed reporters,” and I don’t like that. I’m totally against that.  

By the way I hate some of these people, but I would never kill them. I hate them. No I think these people, honestly. I’ll be honest. I would never kill them. I would never do that. 

Ah let’s see… 

Nah. I would never kill them. But I do hate them. Some of them are such lying, disgusting people. It’s true, it’s true. 

[CHEERS] 

I would never kill then and anybody that does I think would be despicable. But you know nobody nobody said, they say he killed reporters. I said, “really?” He says he didn’t. Other people say he didn’t. Who did he kill. Well, we don’t know but we hear that. I said, “Tell me, who did he kill?”

The Washington Post says Trump’s right on this so it’s all good. Never mind. He’s not going to kill journalists. I sure hope nobody who follows him and thinks the press is disgusting, despicable subhumans as he does decides to do something though. Fingers crossed.

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Moral Choices 

by tristero

Once again, Masha Gessen understands:

Following Trump’s first on-the-record meeting with journalists after the election, The New York Times editorial board was most struck by “how thinly thought through many of the president-elect’s stances actually are.” Times columnist Thomas Friedman suggested that this lack of expertise creates an opportunity for good people with knowledge to influence Trump: “They need to dive in now and try to pull him toward the center.” Fellow columnist Frank Bruni went so far as to suggest a radical sort of cooperation based on Trump’s apparently bottomless need for adoration: “Is our best hope for the best Trump to be so fantastically adulatory when he’s reasonable that he’s motivated to stay on that course, lest the adulation wane?”

Friedman I wrote off years ago but I honestly cannot believe that anyone could write what Frank Bruni did. He is actually suggesting that maybe if we just constantly debase ourselves, that if we praise Donald Trump effusively and continuously, then we just might have a chance. Call it the Fellatio Principle of strategic influence.

Gessen knows better:

We cannot know what political strategy, if any, can be effective in containing, rather than abetting, the threat that a Trump administration now poses to some of our most fundamental democratic principles. But we can know what is right [emphasis added]. What separates Americans in 2016 from Europeans in the 1940s and 1950s is a little bit of historical time but a whole lot of historical knowledge. We know what my great-grandfather did not know: that the people who wanted to keep the people fed ended up compiling lists of their neighbors to be killed. That they had a rationale for doing so. And also, that one of the greatest thinkers of their age judged their actions as harshly as they could be judged. 

Armed with that knowledge, or burdened with that legacy, we have a slight chance of making better choices. As Trump torpedoes into the presidency, we need to shift from realist to moral reasoning. That would mean, at minimum, thinking about the right thing to do, now and in the imaginable future. It is also a good idea to have a trusted friend capable of reminding you when you are about to lose your sense of right and wrong.

In short, you can try to appease an authoritarian, and it might work (but it might not). Or you can act morally, and that might not work (but it might). Gessen is saying that there is no way of knowing what will be more effective, but that it is quite clear which is the more moral choice. Go with that.

Read the whole thing. And then read Gessen’s earlier essay on how to survive an autocracy.

The son Trump never had

by digby

No, not Ivanka. And yes, Trump does have three sons of his own. But it’s his son-in-law who’s the fair-haired boy:

Before Kushner joined Trump’s family, he learned the role of loyalty from his own. 

Kushner’s father, Charles, is the son of Holocaust survivors and the architect of a real estate empire in New Jersey. He donated generously to schools, charities and Democratic politicians, but his finances caught the attention of federal authorities, led by the then-U.S. Atty. Chris Christie, who investigated him for tax evasion and improper campaign contributions.

The investigation took an ugly turn as the elder Kushner’s brother and sister cooperated with authorities, and he sought revenge in a sordid sting operation. He hired a prostitute to seduce his sister’s husband, videotaped the sexual encounter in a motel room, and mailed the recording to his sister. 

The scheme backfired, becoming one more piece of the federal case against him. He eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years in prison. 

The case tore apart the family but did not shake Jared Kushner’s devotion to his father. 

“I felt what happened was obviously unjust in terms of the way [prosecutors] pursued him,” he told the Real Deal, a real estate website, in 2014.

You’ll notice that Chris Christie is no longer part of the transition and nobody’s mentioned him for anything recently. It seems Kushner shares his father in law’s thirst for revenge. (This profile in Esquire shows just how “populist” Trump and his entourage really are… Let’s just say that Kushner’s circle is a who’s who of plutocrats.)

In any case, my point in bringing him up is to say that it’s not going to be enough for Trump to pretend to “divest” or put his family’s holdings in a phony blind trust. Kushner’s conflicts are almost as disqualifying. And he’s married to Ivanka, Trump’s choice to run his own company.

This mess is just so complex. There is no fixing it. It was something the Republicans should have brought up way back in the beginning and pushed to keep him from running unless he liquidated. (The Democrats couldn’t do it because it would have been “partisan” he said/ she said.) And the press should have pushed harder on this than the alleged Clinton conflicts which were completely transparent and open for audit.  But they didn’t.

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I wrote about ratfucking for Salon this morning:

On Sunday afternoon Donald Trump tweeted that he had actually won the popular vote, when the current total shows a lead of 2.2 million votes and counting for Hillary Clinton:

Needless to say this is a lie and the fact that a president-elect would say such a thing is shocking. Setting aside the bizarre nature of his assertion and the fact that his spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway issued a thinly veiled threat on CNN that Clinton had better be careful about contesting the vote if she wants to avoid prosecution, it’s important to note that Trump’s erroneous “information” has been percolating in right-wing circles ever since the election.

This is just the latest story over the past couple of weeks involving the issue of “fake news” and its effect on this last election. It has been revealed that Facebook, one of the most important news purveyors in the world with 44 percent of Americans saying they get news from the site, was responsible for a vast number of false stories being pumped out to millions of people, most of them helpful to Trump.

Earlier this year Facebook had been hit with accusations of suppressing conservative stories, so the company eliminated human news curators and replaced them with a new algorithm that, well, ended up providing more conservative stories. Most of them were fake, many of them focused on lurid pseudo-scandals about Hillary Clinton.

On Reddit, a Clinton fake scandal called #Pizzagatecontinues to rage. It is entirely false, yet the site’s Trump-supporting users are up in arms over Reddit’s decision to ban the board that had fueled the conspiracy theory, involving accusations that Clinton had been running a pedophile ring out of the back of a pizza parlor. Reddit would not have banned it if its users hadn’t been publishing the private information of innocent people and accusing them of pedophilia.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, The Washington Post unveiled a big story about Russian involvement in disseminating fake news. Other news outlets have tracked down fake news purveyors as well, including individual entrepreneurial types as close as California and as far flung as Macedonia and the nation of Georgia, where the perpetrators coincidentally found that fake news benefiting Donald Trump could be very lucrative on the internet. The Post article has been challenged for its reliance on a questionable group that claims to be tracking fake news sites that aren’t actually fake news sites. (And there’s good reason to suspect that much of the spike in fake news traffic came from good old Matt Drudge, a phenomenon that I wrote about months ago.)

The Intercept published a fascinating account of fake news being created by Floyd Brown (a famous associate of Trump intimates Kellyanne Conway and David Bossie and the founder of the right-wing “oppo” group Citizens United, which drove Whitewater coverage in the 1990s). It’s not surprising that the man who created the Willie Horton ad would be involved in an enterprise like this. The article also tracks fake news stories circulated by the site Lifezette of possible Trump administration hire Laura Ingraham and far right institutions like World Net Daily.

The upshot of all this is that regardless how this fake news is circulated, the right wing has a much greater appetite for it than the left. Donald Trump was the perfect candidate for a moment when lies are given huge circulation among people eager to hear them. He is an accomplished con artist, who knows how to tell people what they want to hear.

But let’s not pretend that this particular approach to politics was invented by Trump and some internet entrepreneurs in Macedonia. The Republican Party has been doing this on a smaller scale for nearly 50 years. In fact, it was perfected by minions of Donald Trump’s political inspiration, Richard Nixon, the originator of the phrase “silent majority” and “law-and-order president.” It started at the University of California during the late 1960s and it has a very evocative name: “ratfucking.” That phrase was coined by a man named Donald Segretti, who was hired to run an oppo operation for the Nixon campaign in 1972. (There’s a famous scene in “All the President’s Men” where Segretti’s character confesses what it was all about.)

Ratfucking is usually defined broadly as “dirty tricks” and it certainly is one. But it means something more specific. As Rick Perlstein wrote in Esquire last month, it’s a game in which false information is generated and circulated to the media and blamed on someone else. Perhaps the most famous example was the “Canuck letter,” whereby Segretti & Co. forged a letter to the editor of the Manchester Union Leader in New Hampshire, claiming that former senator Edmund Muskie, then the leading Democratic candidate for president, was bigoted against Americans of French-Canadian descent. Muskie was compelled to give a speech in the snow refuting the charge. Media outlets claimed the snow on his cheeks were tears and it effectively ended his campaign.

As it happens, a man who proudly wears a tattoo of Nixon on his back and who was among Nixon’s band of ratfuckers, was also involved in Trump’s campaign. That would be former campaign operative and full-time agitator Roger Stone. His involvement in the WikiLeaks hacks has been the subject of much speculation, and Stone has hinted broadly that he had a hand in that operation. It would be a break with the ratfucking tradition for him to admit it outright.

As for the fake news, we may never know if the popularity of fake news from overseas and nonpartisan actors was driven by a desire to see Trump elected president or by the simple fact that Trump’s supporters will believe anything. But an article by The Washington Post’s Philip Bump tracks Trump’s “millions of illegal votes” lie to its homegrown origins in the right-wing fever swamps, where it’s been circulated everywhere by way of Matt Drudge as well as Alex Jones, Roger Stone’s good friend and ally. And the president-elect is now directly helping circulate it via his Twitter feed to millions. Even Nixon didn’t get his hands dirty with tricks like these.

Another lovely Real American

by digby

This is what Trump has unleashed. These people feel they have been freed:

“I voted for Trump — so there,” the woman shouted. “You want to kick me out for that? And look who won.”

She calls the African America store employee an animal.

Why are they so angry?

Because they know they are being assholes and they can’t stand it that the rest of us aren’t joining their tantrum.

Update: The white nationalist Trump fans want this to become the norm:

“There hasn’t been a government on our side for 150 years,” Sam Dickson, an attorney who has represented the Ku Klux Klan, said in a 2011 speech to Spencer’s NPI. “The US government — the system in America — is the greatest enemy our race has for its survival.”

Undoing this means going further than shifting immigration policy, even dramatically. It means shifting the lens through which Americans see politics — ushering in a new, racially polarized discourse in which openly racist arguments once again become acceptable to make.

Trump, with his incendiary rhetoric about virtually every minority group — like calling Mexicans “rapists” and describing black communities as dystopian hellscapes — has helped push discourse in what alt-rightists see as the right direction. Because Trump has gotten away with saying offensive stuff, and seized the highest office in the land while doing it, they think they’ve made progress.

“What are we fighting for is a ‘new normal,’ a moral consensus we insist upon,” Spencer said in his recent NPI address (the “Hail Trump!” one). “Donald Trump is a step towards this new normal.”

It seems to be working.

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Safe spaces for angry people

by digby

This, via Daily Kos:

High school civics: emoluments
by Tom Sullivan

The emoluments clause. Remember it? The Chief Ethics Counsels for the last two presidents do:

Richard Painter, Chief Ethics Counsel for George W. Bush, and Norman Eisen, Chief Ethics Counsel for Barack Obama, believe that if Trump continues to retain ownership over his sprawling business interests by the time the electors meet on December 19, they should reject Trump.

In an email to ThinkProgress, Eisen explained that “the founders did not want any foreign payments to the president. Period.” This principle is enshrined in Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution, which bars office holders from accepting “any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.”

But don’t you know who he is? He’s Trump, dammit.

Violation of the emoluments clause was considered grounds for impeachment by founders debating the proposed constitution. Eisen continues:

Eisen said that Trump’s businesses, foreign and domestic, “are receiving a stream of such payments.” A prime example is Trump’s new hotel in Washington DC which, according to Eisen, is “actively seeking emoluments to Trump: payments from foreign governments for use of the hotel.”

“The notion that his (through his agents) solicitation of those payments, and the foreign governments making of those payments, is unrelated to his office is laughable,” Eisen added.

Not even inaugurated yet and Trump’s already on the cusp of a constitutional crisis. Not that he’d know one if it bit him in the assets. Which is right where it should, actually.

He could, of course, sell off his companies to avoid violating the Constitution and/or impeachment. Or else get “Republicans in Congress [to] admit that they endorse Trump’s exploitation of public office for private gain and authorize his emoluments as the Constitution allows.” The ThinkProgress report considers the latter “unlikely.” Why, I can’t imagine.

Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe believes Trump would be in violation upon uttering the oath of office. But the Electoral College could justifiably deny him that chance:

“[T]o vote for Trump in the absence of such complete divestment… would represent an abdication of the solemn duties of the 538 Electors,” Tribe said.

Don’t hold your breath. People of integrity stopping Trump in the Electoral College? That’s just as unlikely.

What does kleptocrat look like translated into Russian and written in Cyrillic script? Anyone know?