Trump Facing More Trouble After Shady Meeting With Oil Executives

Donald Trump may be in trouble for asking oil executives to donate $1 billion to his campaign in April.

Citizen for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit watchdog organization, filed a complaint with the Justice Department alleging criminal bribery regarding Trump’s meeting with industry leaders. The former president and convicted felon told them the $1 billion would be part of a deal in exchange for loosened regulations of the oil industry.

In a statement, CREW’s president Noah Bookbinder said Trump’s actions towards oil executives “follow a pattern.”

“Donald Trump’s actions here follow a pattern of Trump opening himself up to corrupt influence, courting conflicts of interest, and using official positions to enrich himself—and in this case may run afoul of the criminal law,” Bookbinder said. The complaint was sent as a letter to the chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, Corey Amundson, as well as FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Ron Wyden, the respective chairs of the Senate Budget and Finance Committees, are also investigating the meeting, with Whitehouse calling it the “definition of corruption.”

And he has a point. Trump is effectively selling laws to big business, with oil executives already drafting executive orders for him to sign immediately if he gets reelected. Trump reportedly promised these executives that he’d scrap a ban on permits for new liquefied natural gas exports on the first day, overturn new tailpipe emission limits designed to help the transition to electric vehicles, and offer more leases for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

Trump’s first term was full of giveaways to the fossil fuel industry, so why is he asking for cash now? It’s because he’s short on cash, already funneling his donor contributions to the lawyers concerned with his many legal issues. As much as his rise in politics came from attacking the wealthy elite establishment, he’s fully willing to cozy up to billionaires and wealthy business leaders as long as they are willing to pay up.

Last week, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed into law a controversial bill requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms. Shortly before, he told donors at a GOP event in Tennessee, “I’m going home to sign a bill that places the Ten Commandments in public classrooms. And I can’t wait to be sued.” Sure enough, Louisiana parents and a coalition of civil liberties organizations are granting him his wish.

The ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, along with the parents of children enrolled in Louisiana public schools, filed a lawsuit against the state for violating the religious freedom of students on Monday. The move was widely expected, not just by Landry and religious conservative pugilists, but also by a consensus of legal experts, who claim the law is unconstitutional. Supreme Court legal precedent is on their side; two previous attempts to mandate similar displays were struck down.

But Landry’s giddiness for the upcoming legal fight echoes the attitude of the bill’s co-author, Louisiana State Representative Lauren Ventrella, who, in the midst of a flailing attempt to defend the law on national television, revealed the Christian conservative strategy on which she and Landry will rely.

“Now it is a different bench” on the Supreme Court, Ventrella told CNN’s Abby Philip. With a 6–3 conservative majority—including religious fundamentalist Christians Amy Coney Barrett and Samuel Alito, and multiple justices who have shown a willingness to depart from precedent capriciously—advocates of the law are hoping to move the lawsuit through the courts until it finds a friendly reception at the Supreme Court.

In the meantime, though, they’ll continue to run roughshod over the First Amendment.

Judge Aileen Cannon was poised Monday to do Donald Trump yet another massive favor in his classified documents case, aiming to slow down proceedings and muddy the waters by raising concerns about special counsel Jack Smith’s spending.

Attorneys for the former president have continued to push the claim that Smith’s appointment was constitutionally invalid, and in a hearing Monday, they took aim at the budget for Smith’s investigation. Cannon, who has readily slowed Trump’s trial to a complete standstill, was happy to entertain the defense’s grievances.

Fresh off of his loss in Manhattan criminal court, Trump’s lawyer Emil Bove argued that the Department of Justice had violated the U.S. Consitution’s appropriations clause by improperly funding Smith’s office.

Trump’s defense lawyers had argued in a court filing Friday that Smith was not paid through the Justice Department but through an “off the books” fund reserved for “independent counsels,” which lack the necessary oversight. They alleged that Smith has access to a “permanent indefinite appropriation,” which is otherwise not available to a special counsel.

During Monday’s hearing, assistant special counsel James Pearce responded to the defense’s claims, arguing that the Justice Department could just as easily pay Smith’s bills out of their own pot.

But Cannon didn’t seem convinced. The Trump-appointed judge said that the seemingly “limitless” funding suggested a separation of powers issue, per Bove’s claim.

Cannon called the cost of Smith’s appointment a “significant” amount of money, according to The Washington Post, although it is likely only a small fraction of the Department of Justice’s whopping $40 billion annual budget.

Resolving whether Smith’s appointment is constitutional will only drag out Trump’s classified documents case, making it less likely with every passing day that he will face trial before the November election.

Cannon held a second hearing Monday afternoon over prosecutors’ request that a gag order be placed on the former president, preventing him from making unfounded claims against the FBI. Trump has insisted that federal agents intended to maim or even assassinate him while searching Mar-a-Lago, while in reality, they purposefully timed their search to occur when he was absent.

An RNC staffer is behind the viral doctored videos of Joe Biden appearing senile, a new report from The Daily Beast shows.

According to the Beast’s Jake Lahut, 31-year-old Jake Schneider, a former Trump campaign employee and former intern for Tea Party Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann, runs the popular RNC Research Twitter account, which has posted several videos of Biden appearing confused or freezing up. RNC Research has also promoted an edited video that suggests that the president pooped himself (it has since been debunked).

Sources close to the Trump campaign called Schneider “the tip of the spear” of the Republican effort to make Biden’s age a central issue of the election. And they’re not wrong. Schneider and RNC Research enjoy high levels of coordination with powerful right-wing media organizations smuggling the interests of the ruling class through seemingly neutral platforms: Sinclair Broadcast Group, the media company buying up local news affiliates and turning them into pro-Trump organs, has been blasting out syndicated news features on Biden’s age using RNC Research videos (including, in at least three articles, the claim that he pooped himself) to nearly 100 local news websites in the past month.

RNC Research’s skullduggery comes in the wake of the total remaking of the RNC in Trump’s image: Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump and election-denier Michael Whatley were picked to helm the organization in March.

George Conway has issued a harsh wake-up call for MAGA supporters around the country: No one else in the entire world likes your candidate.

“Basically, the entire world makes fun of this man,” Conway said on the most recent episode of his podcast George Conway Explains It All.

“In MAGA Land, they don’t appreciate what a global, planetary joke he is to the world,” Conway continued in the Thursday episode, later posting the same quote on his social media. “They think of Donald Trump as this tough guy who scares everybody. He scares everybody the same way that a 5-year-old walking around on a roof holding a bomb might scare. But he’s, you know, he’s weak and pathetic and stupid.”

In another portion of the podcast, Conway claimed that Trump should make for an easy debate opponent for President Joe Biden to prepare for, claiming that Trump’s repetitive attacks are “not very good” and “usually in the same order.”

Political advisers and news outlets have scrambled to pinpoint Trump’s battle tactics for presidential debates since he first appeared as a legitimate candidate in 2016. The Atlantic argued that Trump relies heavily on a rhetorical approach called the Gish gallop, which they describe as a “torrent of incorrect, irrelevant, or idiotic arguments” in which one can bury their opponent. One political insider told Politico Magazine that Trump has “no strategy, just kill and eat.” And Vox created a seven-part taxonomy of Trump’s approach, observing that he “turns tough policy questions into simple stories,” filibusters until the clock runs out to avoid giving details, and leans on his poll numbers and meaningless, three-word slogans.

Conway is the ex-husband of former top Trump White House aide Kellyanne Conway, who reportedly still has the close ear and attention of the presumptive GOP presidential nominee—so much so that she’s been doing the legwork of weighing candidates for Trump’s vice president pick. The Conways split up in 2023 after spending the better part of the Trump administration sniping at each others’ political opinions in the public sphere.