President Donald Trump and his family have managed to make $2 billion since he returned to office, primarily through the power he has wielded while in office. The government is steering lucrative contracts to companies his kids have invested in and Trump’s employees appear to be shaking down donors to pay off their debts in direct exchange for accessibility to the White House.
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But prosecuting the most corrupt president and administration is difficult when a politically-aligned Supreme Court has deemed the president immune to prosecution.
This makes the White House and U.S. taxpayers look like a $5.6 trillion ATM for certain ethically-challenged MAGA presidents. So how do you do damage control? The answer, according to former FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, is to hit the bad guys in their wallets — and hit them hard.
Speaking with The New Yorker’s “Washington Roundtable” with hosts Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos, Slaughter says it’s not so hard to squeeze crooks for the money they’ve nabbed through dirty deeds, payouts and shadowy behavior.
Mayer said there “is no comparison and no precedent in American history” for the dirt trailing out of the Trump White House.
“There’s so many zeroes your eyes glaze over,” she said, citing Trump signing legislation to facilitate a crypto industry which then enriched him and continues to enrich him. If you pick up the rock you will see the money trail that, to an astounding extent, ends up in his bank account. He’s enriched himself by $2 billion. … Don Jr.’s own investment company has returns of 200 percent, … but the power of the US government is what’s making these people so rich.”
Glasser agreed that Trump was empowered by “the US Supreme Court telling him that he has criminal immunity,” as well as by the fact that he’s survived not one but two impeachments and came back to the presidency, and he’s the first convicted felon serving in the White House and it didn’t hinder him returning t office.
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Osnos added that the president’s get-out-of-jail free pardoning power also gives the president and his associates the opportunity to consider new “reasonable” risks in favor of criminality. Criminals, including the president, are free to walk with the stroke of a Republican pen.
But Slaughter says that immunity does not extend to criminals’ bank accounts.
“In contract law there is a theory called ‘efficient breach’ where it’s maybe more profitable to violate your contract than it is to follow it,” said Slaughter. “We have efficient law violation and efficient corruption, so what we have to do is change the calculus and make it economically inefficient to engage corruption. And that means not only sanctions but civil recovery. I mean non-criminal legal tools that will help us get the money back so that the market gets the message that donating millions of dollars to a ballroom in exchange for some favorable regulatory treatment will not actually profit you in the long run because it’s going to be more costly to do that than short term profitable.”
Need more examples? Slaughter has plenty.
“Let’s say you’ve got a merger that gets approved not because it is legally valid but because the merging companies have paid off close advisors of the president and secured the political favor of merger approval. The law allows you, right now, to go back and unwind mergers that have cleared already, and if we can … establish that it was cleared not because it was legally valid but because it was bought … in a political sense. Then the companies cannot continue to profit from this monopoly power that they have accrued illegally,” said Slaughter.
Similarly, “If you have a no-bid contract that put taxpayer dollars into the pocket of somebody who was supposed to spend two weeks fixing a Reflecting Pool … you can do contract recission, and disgorge those profits and bring them back to the taxpayer,” she said.
And even though American voters are becoming desensitized to corruption due to the sheer amount of it pouring from the White House, Slaughter said they are good and ready to see ill-gotten money returned to them.
“The American people understand right now that corruption is expensive. They understand that they are paying $5-plus dollars a gallon for gas and have trouble affording their groceries,” Slaughter said. “People are struggling to get mortgages because the rates are too high and they’re watching already rich and powerful people get more rich and more powerful through corruption.”
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