December, 12 2019, 11:00pm EDT
Stand Up America Implores Lawmakers to Impeach Donald Trump
Following a vote in the House Judiciary Committee to move articles of impeachment against Donald Trump forward, Stand Up America Founder and President Sean Eldridge released the following statement:
"On this historic day, the House Judiciary Committee did its duty by voting to uphold the Constitution and by approving articles of impeachment against a lawless president.
WASHINGTON
Following a vote in the House Judiciary Committee to move articles of impeachment against Donald Trump forward, Stand Up America Founder and President Sean Eldridge released the following statement:
"On this historic day, the House Judiciary Committee did its duty by voting to uphold the Constitution and by approving articles of impeachment against a lawless president.
" Donald Trump has shown time and again that he is willing to abuse the power of his office and conceal the evidence of his high crimes for his own gain--and unless he is removed from office, Trump's corruption will only become more brazen.
"Republicans in Congress have no substantive defense of Trump's actions, just a blind loyalty to their party and an allegiance to a corrupt president. If GOP lawmakers fail to put their country first by refusing to hold Trump accountable, they will be accomplices to the subversion of our democracy.
"We call on every lawmaker--Democrats and Republicans--to show their loyalty to our country and our Constitution by voting to impeach Donald Trump."
Stand Up America is a progressive advocacy organization with over two million community members across the country. Focused on grassroots advocacy to strengthen our democracy and oppose Trump's corrupt agenda, Stand Up America has driven over 600,000 phone calls to Congress and mobilized tens of thousands of protestors across the country.
LATEST NEWS
Putting 'Americans at Risk,' 1-in-4 Trump Commerce Department Officials Have Glaring Conflicts of Interest: Analysis
"These seeming conflicts raise serious questions about whether these federal employees are beholden to the American people or to the interests of private for-profit corporations," said one of the authors.
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More than 1-in-4 senior appointees in President Donald Trump’s Department of Commerce have significant “conflicts of interest,” according to a report published on Wednesday, pointing to the same sort of corporate capture that is rampant across the administration.
The watchdog group Public Citizen reviewed financial disclosure forms for 112 senior officials in the department, which is dedicated to overseeing industry and economic growth. It found that at least 30 of them have substantial ties to the very industries that the department is tasked with regulating.
It’s a pattern seen across the Trump administration, where fossil fuel lobbyists and insiders dominate the Energy and Interior departments, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency.
But as the new report, written by journalist Zach Everson and researcher Douglas S. Pasternak, explains, the Commerce Department is “unique in its active engagement in the economy to benefit particular companies, including those for whom its current officials once worked.”
“The conflicts of interest identified in this report put Americans at risk,” said Pasternak, the research director for Public Citizen’s Trump Accountability Project.
The entanglements start at the top, with the billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has ties to more than 800 different businesses from his decades as the CEO of the Wall Street financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, with interests spanning finance, real estate, crypto, AI, tech, satellites, energy, and gaming—many of which could be affected by Commerce policy.
While Lutnick promised to sell his business interests within 90 days of being confirmed at the department, he missed that deadline by more than four months. And instead of putting his financial stake into a blind trust, he sold his interest in the fund to trusts benefiting his four children.
As Commerce Secretary, Lutnick has engaged in actions that the report says "have a clear conflict with his family’s financial interests and appear to violate ethical norms for government employees."
In particular, it highlights his role in pushing for the dramatic expansion of artificial intelligence data centers across the US, and pressured other governments, including that of the United Arab Emirates, to invest in them.
At the same time, his former company, Newmark, where his son now sits on the board of directors, has facilitated more than $25 billion in AI-data center deals.
Similarly, Commerce invested over $1.6 billion in the mineral company USA Rare Earth Inc. while Cantor was leading the company's private fundraising.
Lutnick has also been at the center of the Trump administration's efforts to promote cryptocurrency and develop regulatory policy around it. This could impact the blockchain platform Tether, which hosts the world's largest stablecoin, for which Cantor acts as the primary custodian for more than $180 billion worth of reserves.
Beyond Lutnick, the department is crawling with ex-industry employees, lobbyists, and corporate lawyers now embedded in the regulation of their former clients.
Joyce Meyer, formerly a top lobbyist for the life insurance industry, now serves as undersecretary for economic affairs, where she oversees the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the US Census Bureau, which produce economic reports that shape federal tax, interest, and spending policy.
The current undersecretary for industry and security, Jeffrey Kessler—who oversees export controls on technology, software, commodities, and other equipment—previously worked as an attorney for the law firm WilmerHale, where he represented dozens of clients across industries he now regulates, including Boeing, Meta, and Eli Lilly.
One of the people in charge of regulating the sale of defense technology abroad, Joe Bartlett, who serves as deputy undersecretary at the Bureau of Industry and Security, came from one of the US military’s biggest drone makers, Skydio, which is subject to BIS export controls.
The report also identifies multiple other employees who have worked for weather data companies that have pushed to privatize forecasts now provided for free by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
"It is unclear if these officials are serving the American public as their positions require or attempting to enrich their former employers or potential future employers, and ultimately themselves," Pasternak said. "These seeming conflicts raise serious questions about whether these federal employees are beholden to the American people or to the interests of private for-profit corporations.”
Everson added that the department "is meant to work in the interest of the people, not in the interest of a few select billionaires.”
He said, "Political appointees within the Trump administration need to be subject to standards of ethical and financial conduct which prevent them from using their positions of power to skim off the top.”
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'Another Trump-Authorized Murder': 1 Dead, 2 Survivors Reported After Latest US Boat Bombing
More than 200 people have been killed in US strikes targeting boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean that the Trump administration claimed—without providing evidence—were smuggling drugs.
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The US military said Tuesday that one person was killed and two others survived the latest attack on a boat that the Trump administration claimed—again without providing concrete evidence—was involved in smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
"On June 16, at the direction of the commander of US Southern Command Gen. Francis L. Donovan, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations," SOUTHCOM said in a statement.
"Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations," the statement continued. "One male narco-terrorist was killed during this action, and there were two male survivors."
SOUTHCOM added that it "immediately notified [the] US Coast Guard to activate the Search and Rescue system for the survivors."
It is not known whether the survivors were saved.
The attack—in which no US forces were harmed—was one of more than 60 that have occurred in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean since US President Donald Trump launched the campaign early last September. More than 200 people have been killed.
Relatives of people killed in some of the boat strikes, as well as officials in Venezuela and Colombia, say that at least some of the victims were fishers who were not part of the illicit drug trade.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro has accused the US of “murder." Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was abducted during a US invasion in January and imprisoned in the United States on dubious narco-terrorism charges.
In January, relatives of two Trinidadian fishers killed in the strikes filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit in Massachusetts.
Experts argue that the strikes are illegal. Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America previously said that even in cases of vessels that were involved in drug trafficking, the bombings were illegal and “the equivalent of straight-up massacring 16-year-old drug dealers on US street corners.”
Just Security editor-in-chief and New York University School of Law professor Ryan Goodman said last month that the “overwhelming consensus of experts, myself included, assess these to be murder because no armed conflict” is occurring, adding that they would be a “war crime if it were armed conflict"—and possibly even a "crime against humanity."
Responding to Tuesday's strike, former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth lamented what he called "another Trump-authorized murder" and act of "blatant criminality."
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Trump's Iran Disaster an Even Bigger US Strategic Defeat Than Vietnam: Expert
"The United States is inarguably in a weaker position than when it began this war of choice, with core US strategic objectives harmed."
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President Donald Trump's illegal war of choice with Iran has dealt the United States an even bigger strategic defeat than the one it suffered in the Vietnam War, according to one expert.
In an essay published on Tuesday by Foreign Policy, Paul Musgrave, associate professor of government at Georgetown University in Qatar, made the case that the damage done to the United States' reputation and credibility in the wake of the Iran war are significantly more severe than anything the country suffered in the wake of Vietnam.
Even though the Vietnam War went on for far longer and resulted in far more deaths than Trump's Iran war, Musgrave argued, the US nonetheless exited it with little long-term damage to its global power.
"Compare that situation with the aftermath of Trump’s war," Musgrave continued. "The United States is inarguably in a weaker position than when it began this war of choice, with core US strategic objectives harmed."
Musgrave noted that while the US and Israel had initial success in decapitating Iran's leadership at the beginning of the conflict, this only left the hardliners in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to run the country.
By failing to achieve the stated aim of regime change and by empowering even more radical elements within Iran, Musgrave added, Trump has severely damaged other nations' willingness to trust the US for national security protection.
"Regional allies, many of whom reportedly argued against the venture, bore the brunt of the costs of the fighting," the scholar wrote. "Most tellingly, Iran learned that its capacity to throttle the Strait of Hormuz could deliver economic leverage on a worldwide scale."
Writing in The New York Times on Wednesday, national security journalist WJ Hennigan argued that the United States' strategic defeat has laid bare the limits of US military power to bend weaker nations to its will.
In particular, he pointed out that the US, which spent $1 trillion on its military last year, could not take out even a majority of Iran's missile stockpiles.
"Yes, the wonder weapons that American industry cranks out, like cruise missiles and air-defense interceptors, have proven impressive on the battlefield," Hennigan wrote. "But the war has exposed the underlying weaknesses of depending on weaponry that’s extremely expensive and time-consuming to deliver. During an April 30 congressional hearing, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth estimated it could take 'months and years' to replenish the stocks that had been used in the war."
Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, similarly said that Trump's Iran war had resulted in a strategic defeat for the US. However, he also expressed hope that this defeat could mark a turning point in US foreign policy circles regarding the applications of American power throughout the world.
"There’s a longstanding US bipartisan consensus around wildly inflating the Iranian threat," Duss wrote in a social media post. "Trump’s war, a strategic defeat, was an expression of that consensus. If... ending the war puts the US and Iran on path to a more normal relationship, that will be a positive thing."
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