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mick mulvaney
Watchdog Memos Show a Trump 'Utterly Indifferent to the Public Interest' in First Term
The group's leader said the media should "cover the Biden vs. Trump election as a comparison between how each president administered the immensely important executive branch."
Jun 24, 2024
The Revolving Door Project on Monday released a set of reports on corruption and mismanagement in executive agencies during the Trump presidency, calling on the media to focus on presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump's poor governing record as he campaigns to retake the Oval Office.
The new reports, called "retrospective memos," show that Trump's executive branch was rife with cronyism and corporate influence from 2017 until 2021. RDP, a watchdog group focused on the executive branch, released the reports as a way to fight "Trumpnesia" and focus the political discussion on the governance records of Trump and President Joe Biden, a Democrat seeking reelection.
"Donald Trump's most important legacy as president wasn't what he said, or even what bills he signed, but how he turned the federal government into a favor machine to benefit his family and cronies," Jeff Hauser, RDP's executive director, said in a statement. "The media should not focus on the aesthetics of this week's presidential debate but rather cover the Biden vs. Trump election as a comparison between how each president administered the immensely important executive branch."
"It's important to revisit how poorly he ran the executive branch his first time round."
RDP issued eight memos, covering disaster management, the environment, financial regulation, housing, immigration, labor, education, and transportation.
Each provides evidence of a Trump administration that was "utterly indifferent to the public interest," as Timi Iwayemi, RDP's research director, said in the statement.
In many cases, Trump appointees were hostile to the original aims of the agencies. they served.
Mick Mulvaney, Trump's choice to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, tried to roll back rules limiting predatory payday lending—a practice that "preys on the working poor," the financial regulation memo says.
Mulvaney—who's now suggesting a "revenge-a-thon" against Trump's foes—also appointed political cronies and failed to undertake the enforcement actions against companies that were the CFPB's raison d'être. A 2019 feature in The New York Times Magazine was titled, "Mick Mulvaney's Master Class in Destroying a Bureaucracy From Within."
Trump's National Labor Relations Board was led by Peter Robb, a management-side lawyer who was the Reagan administration's lead attorney on litigation dealing with the air traffic controllers' strike of 1981, in which the federal government fired about 11,000 workers and banned them from being rehired. Like Trump's Department of Labor, which was ultimately run by the son of former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the NLRB under Robb was pro-management—and reportedly dysfunctional.
Other federal agencies were hardly more committed to serving the public interest in the late 2010s.
"Trump's Interior Department advanced the interests of extractivist industry on public lands while refusing to account for how its actions would worsen climate change," according to RDP's environment memo. "The Trump administration auctioned off over 10 million acres of land and water to oil and gas drilling, including by drastically reducing the size of national monuments like Bears Ears in Utah, a sacred homeland to five tribal nations, in order to open them up to development."
The Department of Housing and Urban Development, run by former presidential candidate Ben Carson, was plagued by "handouts to friends and family," a series of "deadly budget cut proposals," and a "war on fair housing," according to the RDP's housing memo.
Trump's disaster management choices were particularly consequential. The Federal Emergency Management Agency " horrifically" mismanaged the response to two consecutive hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico in 2017, which got minimal—and very delayed—relief compared to Texas communities that were hit by a hurricane during that period.
RDP's catalog of Trump administration failures is designed to clarify the stakes of the 2024 election.
"The series serves as a reminder to the public that the president's primary responsibility is to direct the vast apparatus known as the executive branch of the federal government," RDP said. "Sadly, former president Donald Trump either neglected this responsibility or wielded it in favor of corporations throughout his four years in office."
Iwayemi said "Even as current conversations wisely focus on Project 2025 and Trump's promise to leverage executive power to harm political enemies, it's important to revisit how poorly he ran the executive branch his first time round as a cure to the public's apparent Trumpnesia."
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Top Former Trump Aide Mick Mulvaney Floats 'Revenge-a-Thon' Against Political Foes
The former White House chief of staff suggested that there would be nothing untoward about targeting Democrats should Trump win reelection in November.
Jun 11, 2024
"What's wrong with a little revenge?"
That's what Mick Mulvaney, former President Donald Trump's one-time acting White House chief of staff—who consumer advocate Ralph Nader once described as the twice-impeached Republican's "sadist-in-chief"—asked Tuesday in a Hill opinion column suggesting that there would be nothing unseemly if his ex-boss is reelected and decides to embark on a campaign of retribution targeting Democrats.
"Would any investigation by the next Trump administration, or by an assertive state attorney general, constitute 'revenge'? Or would it simply be applying the exact same standard to Democrats that they have applied to Donald Trump?" he asked.
"Here is my question: What is the difference between 'payback' or 'a revenge-a-thon' and simply applying the same standards to other elected officials that have now been applied to Trump?" Mulvaney wrote.
"Put another way: Now that Democrats in law enforcement have established a new standard for what justifies a criminal indictment of a former elected official or a current candidate for office, what is wrong with having Republican law enforcement apply those exact same standards to Democratic officials and candidates?" he added.
Mulvaney continued:
Don't get me wrong. I abhor the fact that the standard for pursuing government leaders has been lowered so dramatically. I cringe at what precedents Trump Derangement Syndrome is bringing to our politics and civic institutions. I am extraordinarily worried over the Machiavellian trails the left is blazing in order to 'get Trump.'
But they have set the standard now. They lowered the bar. It is now not only acceptable but praiseworthy to charge a former president of the United States with 34 felonies for a bookkeeping discrepancy of which he may not even have been fully aware.
It's not just the 34 felonies in connection with hush money payments to cover up alleged extramarital affairs for which Trump was found guilty last month by a New York jury his legal team helped select. The presumptive 2024 GOP nominee also faces 54 additional federal and state criminal charges over his alleged mishandling of classified documents—including at least one file related to a foreign nation's nuclear capabilities—and his role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election and fomenting the January 6 Capitol insurrection.
Trump argues that he should be shielded by presidential immunity from charges in the election cases. A ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court—to which he appointed three of the six right-wing justices—is forthcoming.
Last week, a Georgia appeals court
paused proceedings in the election interference case against Trump and other defendants until an appellate panel determines whether the prosecuting district attorney should be disqualified for an alleged conflict of interest.
Trump has attempted to brush off last month's conviction by disparaging the prosecution and jury and declaring that the "real verdict is going to be November 5 by the people," a reference to Election Day.
The former president also raised eyebrows last week by threatening to imprison political opponents including the president, First Lady Jill Biden, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Last November, Trump was accused of using Nazi rhetoric when he vowed to "root out" those he described as "radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country" if he's elected this year.
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'Shameless Corporate Shill' Mick Mulvaney Tells SCOTUS to Destroy Agency Trump Let Him Lead
"It's time to stop pretending this case is anything but a brazen power grab by corporate criminals and their loyal bagmen," one researcher said of a payday lender trade association's attack on the CFPB's funding structure.
Jul 11, 2023
Critics of Mick Mulvaney are calling out the former Republican congressman and Trump administration official this week for submitting an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court urging the justices to gut a federal agency he once directed.
The case Mulvaney weighed in on Monday, Community Financial Services Association of America (CFSA) v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), involves the payday lender trade association challenging the agency's funding structure.
After then-President Donald Trump appointed him as acting director of the CFPB in November 2017, Mulvaney spent the next year trying to sabotage it. He was fiercely criticized, with U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who played a key role in establishing the bureau, saying in 2018 that "this is what happens when you put someone in charge of an agency they think shouldn't exist."
Revolving Door Project senior researcher Vishal Shankar said in a statement Tuesday that "by authoring an amicus brief supporting his former campaign donor, Mick Mulvaney has again proven himself to be a shameless corporate shill."
"As a congressman and CFPB director, Mulvaney repeatedly tried to kill the CFPB after raking in whopping sums from big banks and predatory lenders who wanted the bureau dead," Shankar noted. "Now, with the help of his disgraced former lieutenant, Mulvaney wants SCOTUS to finish the job. It's time to stop pretending this case is anything but a brazen power grab by corporate criminals and their loyal bagmen."
"As a congressman and CFPB director, Mulvaney repeatedly tried to kill the CFPB after raking in whopping sums from big banks and predatory lenders who wanted the bureau dead."
Mulvaney's brief—which names Eric Blankenstein, a Trump appointee who resigned from the CFPB in 2019 over racist blog posts, as one of his two attorneys—claims that "how the CFPB is funded is contrary to the separation of powers that undergirds our entire system of constitutional government."
"It gives a single director control over hundreds of federal workers and hundreds of millions of dollars," the document states. "It deprives Congress of any meaningful oversight of one of the most impactful federal financial services regulators. By extension, it denies the American citizenry the opportunity to effect change, even if a majority of them want to do so."
Accountable.US spokesperson Jeremy Funk warned in response to the filing on Monday that "if the Supreme Court gives those with an ax to grind against the CFPB what they want, it will likely lead to the worst rollback of consumer protections in U.S. history."
"Financial industry stooge Mick Mulvaney and hate crime denier Eric Blankenstein may be the least credible former Trump officials to weigh in on whether the CFPB should keep protecting consumers from industry abuse and discrimination," Funk declared.
"If the idea is to make predatory lenders who filed this baseless lawsuit look good in comparison, these would be the right-wing trolls to do it," he continued. "It says it all about the merits of this case that it's being pushed by a coalition of predatory lenders, industry money chasers, an author of racist internet ravings, and a seminal architect of the insurrection."
Among the other backers of the CFSA's argument is former Trump attorney John Eastman, infamous for his contributions to the former president's "Big Lie" about the 2020 election, which led to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Along with also taking aim at Mulvaney—who was hired as a CBS contributor last year—experts at the Revolving Door Project have blasted Eastman's brief.
"If the CFPB weren't so popular, corrupt bankers and their proxy members of Congress would have succeeded in killing it legislatively," Jeff Hauser, the project's executive director, said Tuesday. "Since the CFPB is too popular to take on legislatively, sellout has-beens like Mulvaney and Blankenstein are shifting to Plan B, seeking action by a judiciary which is as corrupted by big money as it is blinded by right-wing zealotry."
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