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Francisco 2.0

By Francisco 2.0
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GHOSTUSER
GHOSTUSER

I fucking love this President. My 2 faves during my lifetime are Trump and Nixon. They share a lot of similarities and were besieged by the same groups of assholes. No I’m not trolling. Y’all, the lef

Francisco 2.0
Francisco 2.0
Brisketexan
Brisketexan

This.....is magnificent. The "younger generation" is going to have to work double-time to fund YOUR Social Security, which YOUR generation of elected officials raided the fuck out of.  And which,

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henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29224

Posted
Posted
2 minutes ago, Doc Sam Beckett said:

Is this asshole trying to claim that they aren't separating parents from their children? I can't even follow what this dipshit is trying to say. Any translators? 

anything you approve of = he did it, by himself, and it was his idea

anything you disapprove of = obama's fault, assist from crooked hillary

translation complete. 

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Skyline

Skyline 325

Posted
Posted
2 minutes ago, Doc Sam Beckett said:

Is this asshole trying to claim that they aren't separating parents from their children? I can't even follow what this dipshit is trying to say. Any translators? 

The dumbest part is when he claims to be for DACA/The Dreamers and the interviewer cuts him off to point out that Trump, after all, ended DACA.

So naturally, Trump goes all over the place in response. 

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triplehorn

triplehorn 2664

Posted
Posted

Louisiana ?  woah

Support for Trump Plunges In Louisiana

 

June 21, 2019 at 7:50 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 85 Comments

“A clear majority of Louisiana voters don’t want Donald Trump to win a second term as president, an independent poll shows,” the Baton Rouge Advocate reports.

“The poll shows that those surveyed by a 54-37% margin favor electing someone other than Trump as president… Only 47% of voters polled approved of Trump’s performance while 46% disapproved.”

“Trump’s weaker-than-expected poll results will likely have consequences for this year’s governor’s race because many Republicans have been saying a late-in-the-campaign endorsement from the president could deliver the decisive blow for a conservative Republican to knock off Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat.”

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henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29224

Posted
Posted
23 minutes ago, triplehorn said:

Louisiana ?  woah

Support for Trump Plunges In Louisiana

 

June 21, 2019 at 7:50 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 85 Comments

“A clear majority of Louisiana voters don’t want Donald Trump to win a second term as president, an independent poll shows,” the Baton Rouge Advocate reports.

“The poll shows that those surveyed by a 54-37% margin favor electing someone other than Trump as president… Only 47% of voters polled approved of Trump’s performance while 46% disapproved.”

“Trump’s weaker-than-expected poll results will likely have consequences for this year’s governor’s race because many Republicans have been saying a late-in-the-campaign endorsement from the president could deliver the decisive blow for a conservative Republican to knock off Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat.”

he won louisiana by 20 points in 2016.  and this is not an isolated situation either.

kasich was being interviewed yesterday saying how concerned a lot of republicans are about what's happening (numbers all trending down) and trump's attitude towards it (acting like everything is great when it isn't).  he also said ohio was one of the few swing states trending red.

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Dnaguy

Dnaguy 12585

Posted
Posted
14 hours ago, Aqua Buddha said:

I like how Trump is a supposed germaphobe but he'll raw dog a porn star.

They get tested way more than the average joe / Jill. 

I get where you’re coming from but in this regard his logic is on solid ground.

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SuingToGetAMessageBoard?

SuingToGetAMessageBoard? 3861

Posted
Posted
13 minutes ago, henrygandorf said:

he won louisiana by 20 points in 2016.  and this is not an isolated situation either.

kasich was being interviewed yesterday saying how concerned a lot of republicans are about what's happening (numbers all trending down) and trump's attitude towards it (acting like everything is great when it isn't).  he also said ohio was one of the few swing states trending red.

it would be interesting if everyone focuses on texas as the white whale and then a few others end up flipping as a result of inattentiveness

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Jive Turkey

Jive Turkey 12931

Posted
Posted

Ho hum. Another day, another woman accusing the President of sexual assault.   She’s #16. This allegedly occurred in 1996. 

Quote

The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.

I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.

The whole episode lasts no more than three minutes. I do not believe he ejaculates. I don’t remember if any person or attendant is now in the lingerie department. I don’t remember if I run for the elevator or if I take the slow ride down on the escalator. As soon as I land on the main floor, I run through the store and out the door — I don’t recall which door — and find myself outside on Fifth Avenue.

And that was my last hideous man. The Donna Karan coatdress still hangs on the back of my closet door, unworn and unlaundered since that evening. And whether it’s my age, the fact that I haven’t met anyone fascinating enough over the past couple of decades to feel “the sap rising,” as Tom Wolfe put it, or if it’s the blot of the real-estate tycoon, I can’t say. But I have never had sex with anybody ever again.

https://www.thecut.com/2019/06/donald-trump-assault-e-jean-carroll-other-hideous-men.html

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henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29224

Posted
Posted
11 minutes ago, Message Board User said:

 

i saw in an interview not long ago, someone mentioned that trump has this antiquated old school new york mentality - where he sees the nyt, time magazine, and abc news as "legit mainstream outlets" so he will agree to an abc news interview, even when his people advise him against it. (i can't remember the exact list beyond time and abc news, but it was only 3-4 outlets)

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SuingToGetAMessageBoard?

SuingToGetAMessageBoard? 3861

Posted
Posted
11 minutes ago, Jive Turkey said:

Ho hum. Another day, another woman accusing the President of sexual assault.   She’s #16. This allegedly occurred in 1996. 

https://www.thecut.com/2019/06/donald-trump-assault-e-jean-carroll-other-hideous-men.html

1) motion to change sexual assault to rape.  the former implies anything from grabbing a boob in an unwanted way and up.  this is horrific

2) jesus, don't read that article if you want to continue believing life isn't just terrible for a great many people.

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Skyline

Skyline 325

Posted
Posted
7 minutes ago, SuingToGetAMessageBoard? said:

1) motion to change sexual assault to rape.  the former implies anything from grabbing a boob in an unwanted way and up.  this is horrific

2) jesus, don't read that article if you want to continue believing life isn't just terrible for a great many people.

There have been multiple other women who claim similar things against Trump, including a tape of him admitting to this stuff casually. We shouldn't be surprised anymore but here we are. 

Forget the man's politics for one moment, and consider the implications of his behavior towards women. That should be enough to disqualify him from any job in the country. But, here we are. 

I agree with point #1, call it what it is. 

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Nivek

Nivek 17361

Posted
Posted
There have been multiple other women who claim similar things against Trump, including a tape of him admitting to this stuff casually. We shouldn't be surprised anymore but here we are. 
Forget the man's politics for one moment, and consider the implications of his behavior towards women. That should be enough to disqualify him from any job in the country. But, here we are. 
I agree with point #1, call it what it is. 

Sorry he is a man of God and they would never abuse women and children.
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henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29224

Posted
Posted
17 minutes ago, Skyline said:

There have been multiple other women who claim similar things against Trump, including a tape of him admitting to this stuff casually. We shouldn't be surprised anymore but here we are. 

Forget the man's politics for one moment, and consider the implications of his behavior towards women. That should be enough to disqualify him from any job in the country. But, here we are. 

I agree with point #1, call it what it is. 

and there are a lot of suburban housewives who voted for him (or against hillary) 3 years ago.  i think they're regretting that.

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Chad Fuck

Chad Fuck 18104

Posted
Posted
Just now, henrygandorf said:

and there are a lot of suburban housewives who voted for him (or against hillary) 3 years ago.  i think they're regretting that.

Well, I can tell you the rural ones still love him.  It's bat shit crazy, but there it is.

 

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32547

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But Obama had a tan suit.

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-inc-podcast-taxpayers-covered-liquor-bill-for-trump-staffers-and-more-mar-a-lago

 

Quote

In April 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, estate and club, for a two-day summit. While Xi and his delegation stayed at a nearby hotel, Trump and his advisers stayed at the peach-colored, waterfront resort.

That evening, Trump and a dozen of his closest advisers hosted Xi and the Chinese delegation in an ornate dining room where they ate Dover sole and New York strip steak. Those sorts of lavish, formal gatherings are expected for a major bilateral summit

 

Quote

But then there are less formal events. At some point later that evening, a group repaired to Mar-a-Lago’s Library Bar, a wood-paneled study with a portrait of Trump in tennis whites (titled “The Visionary”) hanging nearby. The group asked the bartender to leave the room so it “could speak confidentially,” according to an email written by Mar-a-Lago’s catering director, Brooke Watson.

State-Department-Mar-a-Lago-Spending-Rec

 

Quote

The Secret Service guarded the door, according to the email. The bartender wasn’t allowed to return. And members of the group began pouring themselves drinks. No one paid.

Six days later, on April 13, Mar-a-Lago created a bill for those drinks, tallying $838 worth of alcohol plus a 20% service charge. It covered 54 drinks (making for an average price of $18.62 each) of premium liquor: Chopin vodka, Patron and Don Julio Blanco tequilas and Woodford Reserve bourbon. Watson’s email did not specify how many people consumed the alcohol or who the participants were. (It stated that she was told the participants included then-strategist Steve Bannon and then-deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin. Bannon, who has said he stopped drinking years ago, said he didn’t drink at Mar-a-Lago and didn’t recall the episode. Hagin did not respond to requests for comment.)

State-Department-Mar-a-Lago-Spending-Rec

 

Quote

The bill was sent to the State Department, which objected to covering it. It was then forwarded to the White House, which paid the tab.

The unusual cocktail hour underscores a unique push and pull in the current administration: Donald Trump’s White House pays a bill and Donald Trump’s club reaps the revenue. (It’s unclear if the White House asked any of those drinking to reimburse the government; the White House declined to comment.)

 

Spoiler

The premium liquor costs are only the beginning of government spending at Mar-a-Lago that emerges in hundreds of pages of receipts and email correspondence between Trump Organization employees and staffers for the State Department, which oversees presidential diplomatic travel and works with the Secret Service and White House. The emails show that the president’s company refused to agree to what was essentially a bulk-purchase agreement with the federal government, and that it charged the maximum allowable federal rate for hotel rooms. The Trump Organization could be obstinate when it came to rates for, say, function rooms at Mar-a-Lago, a problem that was eased when the president signed a law lifting the maximum “micro-purchase” the government can make.

The emails have been released as part of an ongoing lawsuit between the nonprofit Property of the People, a Washington-based transparency group, and the federal government. Property of the People provided the emails and receipts to ProPublica and we, in turn, have added them to our tracker of government spending at Trump-owned properties for our interactive graphic Paying the President. (The State Department is expected to release an additional 1,800 pages of records as part of the lawsuit, which was filed under the Freedom of Information Act.)

In response to questions from ProPublica, the State Department asked for and received the documents described in this article. State Department officials promised a detailed response, but then declined comment.

The documents reveal the intersection between Trump’s conflicting interests. The emails show that “Mar-a-Lago wanted to have the government money without the government rules,” said Charles Tiefer, a law professor at the University of Baltimore who served on the congressionally chartered Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Listen to the Episode

A few months after Trump’s inauguration, the State Department proposed a contract that would pay $200,000 for all room costs for federal employees who stay at Mar-a-Lago over the first term of his presidency. But Mar-a-Lago rejected the government’s proposal. Instead, Trump’s resort bills the government the maximum permitted by federal rules: 300% of the government’s per diem rate, which works out to $546 per night.

Mar-a-Lago rejected the proposed flat-fee arrangement, according to the emails, because of concerns the club’s lawyers had about the Federal Acquisition Regulation, or FAR, which governs federal purchases and is overseen by contracting officers. FAR seeks to promote competition and maintain “the public’s trust.”

The emails suggest the Trump Organization was worried that the lack of competitive bidding could run afoul of federal rules, among other concerns. A State Department staffer wrote in May 2017 that Mar-a-Lago’s attorneys brought up federal “small business set-aside” requirements, which set strict rules for sole-source government bids for small businesses. The State Department staffer wrote that Mar-a-Lago’s “concerns are based on their general lack of knowledge on the applicability of the FAR regulations.”

State-Department-Mar-a-Lago-Spending-Rec

Mar-a-Lago and the Trump Organization did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

Since Mar-a-Lago wouldn’t agree to a bulk contract, the State Department had to go to Plan B. When it came to the meeting with China’s president, for example, the agency had to go into some contortions to make Mar-a-Lago’s $546 nightly room rate square with its rules on competitive bidding, given that there are other less expensive hotels nearby. At least 16 staffers stayed at the Hampton Inn in West Palm Beach; at least eight stayed at the nearby Hilton Garden Inn; and four others stayed at the Tideline Ocean Resort & Spa, where the press pool also stayed, according to a hotel manifest obtained through the FOIA lawsuit. The government-negotiated rates at those establishments ranged from $195 to $305 per night.

State-Department-Mar-a-Lago-Spending-Rec

(At least 24 White House and federal staffers stayed at Mar-a-Lago during the Xi visit. They included then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson; then-chief of staff Reince Priebus; then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis; Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin; then-National Economic Council adviser Gary Cohn; and other advisers, past and present, such as Bannon, Hope Hicks, Stephen Miller and Sean Spicer.)

State-Department-Mar-a-Lago-Spending-Rec

The State Department also broke with protocol regarding taxpayer-funded travel and applied for a Citibank travel card just for Mar-a-Lago visits.

Meanwhile, other problems emerged:

Mar-a-Lago can’t process charges over $10,000, which led to problems when the club split bills and charged the government card for multiple transactions, emails show.

State-Department-Mar-a-Lago-Spending-Rec

Mar-a-Lago refused government requests to waive the costs of its “function room” for press and other official meetings in April 2017, leading to a near-violation of a $3,500 government spending cap. Last year, Trump signed a law that lifted that cap, known as the “micro-purchase threshold,” from $3,500 to $10,000. The law does not appear to have been aimed at facilitating spending at Mar-a-Lago, but it allows the club to avoid additional government contracting rules when charging sums below $10,000.

In one instance, after the government was charged more than $3,500 for conference space at Mar-a-Lago, it asked the Trump Organization for a 10% discount so that it wouldn’t violate the micro-purchase threshold. Mar-a-Lago relented, but only after months of haggling.

State-Department-Mar-a-Lago-Spending-Rec

In the emails, the director of presidential travel support, Michael Dobbs, frequently described the creation of a charge card unique to Mar-a-Lago as a “headache.”

State-Department-Mar-a-Lago-Spending-Rec

As Steve Schooner, a professor of government contracting law at George Washington University, put it, “The fact that we have a State Department contracting officer saying this is a headache is a reminder that, but for the relationship with President Trump, this would not be a contract the government would be having. That’s a problem.”

Many of the expenses incurred by White House staff are arranged and paid for by the White House’s Office of Administration. These expenses are not required to be made public. The same goes for Secret Service spending to protect the president on such visits. (The Government Accountability Office released a report last month evaluating spending at Mar-a-Lago in February and March 2017 and found that a total of $60,000 was spent at the hotel during four trips; the figure ran to $13.6 million when costs for plane travel, secret service, security and other logistics were included.)

The State Department payments, and its work on behalf of the White House and other traveling staff, are considered public records.

Between 2015 and June of 2018, at least $16.1 million has poured into Trump Organization-managed and branded hotels, golf courses and restaurants from his campaign, Republican organizations and government agencies. Because Trump’s business empire is overseen by a trust of which he is the sole beneficiary, he profits from these hotel stays, banquet hall rentals and meals.

Federal spending rules don’t specifically address agency-level spending on alcohol that is directly invoiced to the government, as occurred with the $1,000 bar tab at Mar-a-Lago. The State Department and the White House have had exemptions included in their appropriations legislation to allow for alcohol purchases.

Individual government employees are not permitted to use charge cards for “improper” purposes, such as alcohol, and federal per diem rules allow for charges for breakfast, lunch, dinner and related tips and taxes but specifically exclude alcoholic drinks.

Six government contracting experts said Mar-a-Lago may be violating rules requiring competitive bids. They argue that Mar-a-Lago’s practice of invoicing meeting spaces, hotel stays and meals separately is a way to get around federal spending rules.

“Mar-a-Lago didn’t want to compete, they wanted to sneak around the requirements, and charge much higher prices than the competition,” said Tiefer, who served as deputy general counsel with the House of Representatives for 11 years. “It’s not the first time in history that vendors have tried to get around the rules by charging individual components. This is familiar to every contracting officer. And it’s wrong. It’s not just a technicality. It’s not a game. The only safeguard the public has against the Trumps swallowing up all the government business is at least minimal competition.”

Several experts contend the State Department is exploiting loopholes in government spending rules to facilitate official gatherings at Mar-a-Lago. “It’s one of the biggest fears coming true, that they are bending over backwards to help the Trump Organization,” said Scott Amey, general counsel of the Project On Government Oversight. “I’m frustrated the State Department would exploit the system to bill Uncle Sam and the taxpayers. To have the government bicker to get a 10% discount shows the Trump Organization isn’t putting the American public first. It’s a worst-case scenario when it comes to conflicts of interest, with the president and his children putting themselves and profits ahead of the public.”

 

 

 

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jimmyjazz

jimmyjazz 46996

Posted
Posted
14 minutes ago, Chad Fuck said:

Well, I can tell you the rural ones still love him.  It's bat shit crazy, but there it is.

A good portion of rural women are conservative Christians who believe they occupy a subservient role to men.  

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henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29224

Posted
Posted
8 minutes ago, Lurch said:

Donald was credibly accused of his 16th sexual assault today, and it won’t change a thing.

we don't need anything to change.  that's kinda the bigger point here.

if he murdered the pope, he'd be at 41.  if he solved middle east peace, cured cancer, and won the home run derby, he'd be at 41.

his base isn't going anywhere, but it's not getting bigger either.

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 90569

Posted
Posted
38 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

A good portion of rural women are conservative Christians who believe they occupy a subservient role to men.  

And quite a few of them grow weary of falling down the stairs and running into a doorknob, so they’ll do what they are told.  

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Grade of D as in David

Grade of D as in David 13255

Posted
Posted
51 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

But Obama had a tan suit.

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-inc-podcast-taxpayers-covered-liquor-bill-for-trump-staffers-and-more-mar-a-lago

 

 

 

 

 

  Hide contents

The premium liquor costs are only the beginning of government spending at Mar-a-Lago that emerges in hundreds of pages of receipts and email correspondence between Trump Organization employees and staffers for the State Department, which oversees presidential diplomatic travel and works with the Secret Service and White House. The emails show that the president’s company refused to agree to what was essentially a bulk-purchase agreement with the federal government, and that it charged the maximum allowable federal rate for hotel rooms. The Trump Organization could be obstinate when it came to rates for, say, function rooms at Mar-a-Lago, a problem that was eased when the president signed a law lifting the maximum “micro-purchase” the government can make.

The emails have been released as part of an ongoing lawsuit between the nonprofit Property of the People, a Washington-based transparency group, and the federal government. Property of the People provided the emails and receipts to ProPublica and we, in turn, have added them to our tracker of government spending at Trump-owned properties for our interactive graphic Paying the President. (The State Department is expected to release an additional 1,800 pages of records as part of the lawsuit, which was filed under the Freedom of Information Act.)

In response to questions from ProPublica, the State Department asked for and received the documents described in this article. State Department officials promised a detailed response, but then declined comment.

The documents reveal the intersection between Trump’s conflicting interests. The emails show that “Mar-a-Lago wanted to have the government money without the government rules,” said Charles Tiefer, a law professor at the University of Baltimore who served on the congressionally chartered Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Listen to the Episode

A few months after Trump’s inauguration, the State Department proposed a contract that would pay $200,000 for all room costs for federal employees who stay at Mar-a-Lago over the first term of his presidency. But Mar-a-Lago rejected the government’s proposal. Instead, Trump’s resort bills the government the maximum permitted by federal rules: 300% of the government’s per diem rate, which works out to $546 per night.

Mar-a-Lago rejected the proposed flat-fee arrangement, according to the emails, because of concerns the club’s lawyers had about the Federal Acquisition Regulation, or FAR, which governs federal purchases and is overseen by contracting officers. FAR seeks to promote competition and maintain “the public’s trust.”

The emails suggest the Trump Organization was worried that the lack of competitive bidding could run afoul of federal rules, among other concerns. A State Department staffer wrote in May 2017 that Mar-a-Lago’s attorneys brought up federal “small business set-aside” requirements, which set strict rules for sole-source government bids for small businesses. The State Department staffer wrote that Mar-a-Lago’s “concerns are based on their general lack of knowledge on the applicability of the FAR regulations.”

State-Department-Mar-a-Lago-Spending-Rec

Mar-a-Lago and the Trump Organization did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

Since Mar-a-Lago wouldn’t agree to a bulk contract, the State Department had to go to Plan B. When it came to the meeting with China’s president, for example, the agency had to go into some contortions to make Mar-a-Lago’s $546 nightly room rate square with its rules on competitive bidding, given that there are other less expensive hotels nearby. At least 16 staffers stayed at the Hampton Inn in West Palm Beach; at least eight stayed at the nearby Hilton Garden Inn; and four others stayed at the Tideline Ocean Resort & Spa, where the press pool also stayed, according to a hotel manifest obtained through the FOIA lawsuit. The government-negotiated rates at those establishments ranged from $195 to $305 per night.

State-Department-Mar-a-Lago-Spending-Rec

(At least 24 White House and federal staffers stayed at Mar-a-Lago during the Xi visit. They included then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson; then-chief of staff Reince Priebus; then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis; Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin; then-National Economic Council adviser Gary Cohn; and other advisers, past and present, such as Bannon, Hope Hicks, Stephen Miller and Sean Spicer.)

State-Department-Mar-a-Lago-Spending-Rec

The State Department also broke with protocol regarding taxpayer-funded travel and applied for a Citibank travel card just for Mar-a-Lago visits.

Meanwhile, other problems emerged:

Mar-a-Lago can’t process charges over $10,000, which led to problems when the club split bills and charged the government card for multiple transactions, emails show.

State-Department-Mar-a-Lago-Spending-Rec

Mar-a-Lago refused government requests to waive the costs of its “function room” for press and other official meetings in April 2017, leading to a near-violation of a $3,500 government spending cap. Last year, Trump signed a law that lifted that cap, known as the “micro-purchase threshold,” from $3,500 to $10,000. The law does not appear to have been aimed at facilitating spending at Mar-a-Lago, but it allows the club to avoid additional government contracting rules when charging sums below $10,000.

In one instance, after the government was charged more than $3,500 for conference space at Mar-a-Lago, it asked the Trump Organization for a 10% discount so that it wouldn’t violate the micro-purchase threshold. Mar-a-Lago relented, but only after months of haggling.

State-Department-Mar-a-Lago-Spending-Rec

In the emails, the director of presidential travel support, Michael Dobbs, frequently described the creation of a charge card unique to Mar-a-Lago as a “headache.”

State-Department-Mar-a-Lago-Spending-Rec

As Steve Schooner, a professor of government contracting law at George Washington University, put it, “The fact that we have a State Department contracting officer saying this is a headache is a reminder that, but for the relationship with President Trump, this would not be a contract the government would be having. That’s a problem.”

Many of the expenses incurred by White House staff are arranged and paid for by the White House’s Office of Administration. These expenses are not required to be made public. The same goes for Secret Service spending to protect the president on such visits. (The Government Accountability Office released a report last month evaluating spending at Mar-a-Lago in February and March 2017 and found that a total of $60,000 was spent at the hotel during four trips; the figure ran to $13.6 million when costs for plane travel, secret service, security and other logistics were included.)

The State Department payments, and its work on behalf of the White House and other traveling staff, are considered public records.

Between 2015 and June of 2018, at least $16.1 million has poured into Trump Organization-managed and branded hotels, golf courses and restaurants from his campaign, Republican organizations and government agencies. Because Trump’s business empire is overseen by a trust of which he is the sole beneficiary, he profits from these hotel stays, banquet hall rentals and meals.

Federal spending rules don’t specifically address agency-level spending on alcohol that is directly invoiced to the government, as occurred with the $1,000 bar tab at Mar-a-Lago. The State Department and the White House have had exemptions included in their appropriations legislation to allow for alcohol purchases.

Individual government employees are not permitted to use charge cards for “improper” purposes, such as alcohol, and federal per diem rules allow for charges for breakfast, lunch, dinner and related tips and taxes but specifically exclude alcoholic drinks.

Six government contracting experts said Mar-a-Lago may be violating rules requiring competitive bids. They argue that Mar-a-Lago’s practice of invoicing meeting spaces, hotel stays and meals separately is a way to get around federal spending rules.

“Mar-a-Lago didn’t want to compete, they wanted to sneak around the requirements, and charge much higher prices than the competition,” said Tiefer, who served as deputy general counsel with the House of Representatives for 11 years. “It’s not the first time in history that vendors have tried to get around the rules by charging individual components. This is familiar to every contracting officer. And it’s wrong. It’s not just a technicality. It’s not a game. The only safeguard the public has against the Trumps swallowing up all the government business is at least minimal competition.”

Several experts contend the State Department is exploiting loopholes in government spending rules to facilitate official gatherings at Mar-a-Lago. “It’s one of the biggest fears coming true, that they are bending over backwards to help the Trump Organization,” said Scott Amey, general counsel of the Project On Government Oversight. “I’m frustrated the State Department would exploit the system to bill Uncle Sam and the taxpayers. To have the government bicker to get a 10% discount shows the Trump Organization isn’t putting the American public first. It’s a worst-case scenario when it comes to conflicts of interest, with the president and his children putting themselves and profits ahead of the public.”

 

 

 

MAL can't process transactions over 10k on a credit card and they won't take a PO? Is this some attempt to fly under the radar of suspicious transactions that would trip AML inquiries?

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jimmyjazz

jimmyjazz 46996

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I find it impossible to believe that Mar a Lago doesn't regularly process $10K and up bills.  There's no way they'd be so bush league as to not allow credit card transactions above that amount.  (Well, I'd believe they're bush league, but a week with room service, spa and golf could easily hit that number, and demanding that guests split bills?  Oy.)

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