Guess Who Came to Dinner

From NBC NEWS:

WASHINGTON — As federal workers file out of the State Department at the end of a Washington workday, an elite group is often just arriving in the marbled, flag-lined lobby: Billionaire CEOs, Supreme Court justices, political heavyweights and ambassadors arrive in evening attire as they’re escorted by private elevator to dinner with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Until the coronavirus shut them down in March, the gatherings were known as “Madison Dinners” — elaborate, unpublicized affairs that Pompeo and his wife, Susan Pompeo, began in 2018 and held regularly in the historic Diplomatic Reception Rooms on the government’s dime.

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Steele’s Magnolia

From The Guardian:

The former MI6 officer Christopher Steele had a “personal” relationship with Ivanka Trump and gifted her a “family tartan from Scotland” as a present, the long-awaited report by US Department of Justice inspector general, Michael Horowitz, revealed on Monday.

Horowitz’s review of the FBI’s 2016 investigation into Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign and its links with Russia includes fresh details of Steele’s interactions with the FBI, and startling claims about his relationship with the Trumps dating back to the period before he wrote a controversial dossier on Trump.

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If you shake hands with Wilbur, count your fingers afterwards

From Forbes:

A multimillion-dollar lawsuit has been quietly making its way through the New York State court system over the last three years, pitting a private equity manager named David Storper against his former boss: Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. The pair worked side by side for more than a decade, eventually at the firm, WL Ross & Co.—where, Storper later alleged, Ross stole his interests in a private equity fund, transferred them to himself, then tried to cover it up with bogus paperwork. Two weeks ago, just before the start of a trial with $4 million on the line, Ross and Storper agreed to a confidential settlement, whose existence has never been reported and whose terms remain secret.

It is difficult to imagine the possibility that a man like Ross, who Forbes estimates is worth some $700 million, might steal a few million from one of his business partners. Unless you have heard enough stories about Ross. Two former WL Ross colleagues remember the commerce secretary taking handfuls of Sweet’N Low packets from a nearby restaurant, so he didn’t have to go out and buy some for himself.

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When Pigs Fly

From HIVE at Vanity Fair:

Way back in 2009, when fiscal austerity was still in vogue, Congressman Tom Price was among the most hawkish lawmakers on the issue of government spending. “This is just another example of fiscal irresponsibility run amok,” he cried on CNBC, denouncing the use of private jets by Congress. But at some point, the former orthopedist lost his way. Earlier this year, after he was nominated by Donald Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, reports emerged that Price had “traded more than $300,000 in shares of health-related companies over the past four years while sponsoring and advocating legislation that potentially could affect those companies’ stocks.”

…snip…

Yes, the good life seemed to go to Price’s head, and the gravy train hasn’t stopped since he joined the Trump administration. Earlier this week, we learned that Price had taken a page from Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s playbook and decided to spend thousands of dollars in taxpayer money on private jets when commercial flights (or Amtrak, or a car) would have sufficed.

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Only Label They Need: Gonifs

From Money:

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had requested the use of a government jet for his European honeymoon with his wife Louise Linton earlier this year — a mode of travel that would have incurred $25,000 per hour of flight, according to estimates provided by the U.S. Air Force.

Mnuchin’s request, confirmed by the Treasury Department and first reported by ABC News on Wednesday , was later withdrawn but sparked an inquiry from the Department’s Inspector General.

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Cheney Gang

From MSNBC:

In an interview with MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell, Liz Cheney, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State during the Bush administration, defended her father, saying that the harsh interrogation tactics yielded valuable intelligence and that the tactics didn’t amount to torture.

…snip…

Cheney added that the tactics outlined in the CIA memos are the same techniques are used on Americans for training purposes. “Everything that was done in this program, as has been laid out and described before, are tactics that our own people go through in SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Evasion) training,” she said adding, “We did not torture our own people.”

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(Videos available at link above)

Uncivil Right

From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — A former senior official at the Justice Department routinely hired Republicans, Federalist Society members and “R.T.A.’s” — “Right-Thinking Americans”— for what were supposed to be nonpolitical posts and gave them plum assignments on civil rights cases, an internal department report released Tuesday found.

The former official, Bradley Schlozman, who helped lead the Civil Rights Division for about three years beginning in 2003, also gave false statements to Congress when he denied factoring politics into his hiring decisions, the report from the inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility at the Justice Department found. But last week federal prosecutors declined to bring criminal charges against Mr. Schlozman, who left the department in 2007 amid an uproar over accusations of widespread politicization.

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Look at that putz. You know he got the crap beat out of him in high school. He should have the crap beat out of him now.

When the Inmates Take Over

From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Immigrants seeking asylum in the United States have been disproportionately rejected by judges whom the Bush administration chose using a conservative political litmus test, according to an analysis of Justice Department data.

The analysis suggests that the effects of a patronage-style selection process for immigration judges — used for three years before it was abandoned as illegal — are still being felt by scores of immigrants whose fates are determined by the judges installed in that period.

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