It's Gangland

And sometimes it gets to be too much

So nothing is illegal any more.

Bezos following on Zuckerberg, who chose the same nice round number for his inauguration donation, but it doesn't occur to Washington Post to call that one a bribe either:

The donation, which was confirmed by Meta spokesman Andy Stone, is the latest effort by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to mend fences with the political right, which has persistently criticized him following the company’s 2021 decision to ban Trump from Meta’s social platforms. The donation arrives nearly two weeks after Zuckerberg dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November.

And today it's reported that Sam Altman of Open AI has also joined the million-dollar inauguration club, is that cool or what? And Apple's Tim Cook, Tim Apple as Trump has called him, has a dinner date coming up with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, so I suppose he'll be ponying up his million soon.

Hardly anyone is using the word "bribe", despite the fact that we basically know Trump pocketed donations from his first inauguration, in 2017, another million dollars, as it happens, in the form of grossly inflated charges paid by the Inauguration Committee to the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania for the inauguration events held there; I'd forgotten, but DC Attorney General Karl Racine brought a lawsuit against the committee and the Trump Organization over it and won a $750,000 settlement out of them. Or course there's also a fig leaf of denial: the defendants say they are settling only to avoid the cost and trouble of litigating, and do not admit any "wrongdoing, unlawful conduct, or liability".

I don't know how it's going to work this time. Trump no longer owns a DC hotel into which he can launder the contributions (though it's reported today that the organization is considering buying the Pennsylvania Avenue place back), and the foundation he used to use to receive payments disguised as "charitable" donations so he could avoid paying taxes on them, most famously $5 million in 2007 for TV appearances from professional wrestling CEO Linda McMahon, later appointed head of the Small Business Administration, now slated to return in the new Trump administration as secretary of education, the Trump Foundation, was shut down by New York State in 2018. Jonathan Last at The Bulwark suggests that this time he won't need to bother laundering it:

The inaugural fund is required to disclose who gives money to it, but is not required to disclose what the money is spent on. And in cases where there is a surplus—where it raises more money than it spends on the inauguration festivities—it is not required to refund or dispose of the money in any particular way. In other words: It’s pure tribute. The inauguration fund is a way for rich people to funnel money to the incoming president that he can then use however he sees fit, completely unfettered and under cover of darkness.

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Speaking of charitable foundations, it was reported this week that Trump's designated replacement for FBI director Christopher Wray (who has disappointed Trump by his willingness to allow Trump to be criminally charged in the attempt to prevent President Biden from assuming power in January 2021 and his theft of thousands of government documents, some of them highly classfied, as if he was a common criminal like Hunter Biden or Senator Robert Menendez), Kashyap P.V. Patel, has a kind of downmarket charitable foundation of his own, the Kash Foundation, with a website linking to merch such as his children's books on "King Donald" and clothing from his Based Apparel company.

Its IRS filings say that the $213,000 in grants included “$70,000 in academic scholarships to young men and women, thousands of dollars of grants for financial and legal assistance for whistleblowers, needy families and education”, but neither the foundation and the foundation’s website nor public statements by the organization’s representatives offer any information about 2023’s grant winners....

What the foundation’s filings do show is that in 2023, its charitable giving was far outstripped by promotional spending, and a large proportion of that has gone to a company controlled by [Patel's business partner, direct marketing entrepreneur Andrew] Ollis.

The foundation’s most recent 990 tax form shows that in 2023, its payouts to its two biggest contractors – more than $425,000 – were twice what it gave out for charitable purposes, and more than 57% of all its spending.

The charity’s biggest contractor –[Ollis's] One and Oh LLC – alone received more than scholarship recipients, having been paid over $275,000 for “advertising merchandise”, according to the filing, which alone represents more than 37% of all of the non-profit’s spending that year.

Does that look suspicious at all to you?

Russiagate fans will remember Patel as the chief disinformation cook on the staff of the House Intelligence Committee when Devin Nunes (now CEO of Trump's failing "Truth Social" platform) was its chairman, working right from the beginning, in April 2017, on discrediting the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation, later the Mueller investigation, into Russian interference with the 2016 election and Trump's relationship to it; he was the principal author of the "Nunes memo" alleging (falsely, of course) that the whole investigation was predicated on the discredited Steele Dossier (in fact it was predicated on the famous London wine bar conversation in which George Papadopoulos told the Australian High Commissioner the crazy story about the Russian hacking of the Hillary Clinton campaign after the crazy story turned out to be true), and led to the discovery of pretty much the only crime the hapless special counsel John Durham was ever able to bring to justice, the fudging of the third renewal application for Carter Page's surveillance order.

After the Democrats took back the House in the 2018 elections, Patel left the Intelligence Committee to work directly for the White House, along with another old Nunes staffer, Michael Ellis, and the Mike Flynn protégé Ezra Cohen-Watnick, and was posted to the National Security Council, where he was suspected of serving as a spy for Trump on the making of Ukraine policy, around the time when Trump (with the assistance of his Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney and Mulvaney's deputy, Russell Vought, who is expected to go back to running OMB in the new administration) was committing the crimes that led to his first impeachment.

Subsequently he went to the Directory of National Intelligence under Richard Grenell, and then, after Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper (apparently over the latter's refusal to send troops to shoot at Black Lives Matter protesters), became chief of staff at the Pentagon under acting secretary Chris Miller, engaged with Cohen-Watnick in activities unknown, and David Ignatius at Washington Post began to wonder:

As with so many other still-mysterious aspects of the Trump presidency, there’s a riddle at the center of Patel’s many activities. Beyond the basic goal of advancing Trump’s personal agenda, was there a larger mission? Was there a systematic plan, for example, to gain control of the nation’s intelligence and military command centers as part of Trump’s effort to retain the presidency, despite his loss in the November 2020 election? Or was this a more capricious campaign driven by Trump’s personal pique and score-settling without a clear strategy?

When he eventually surfaced in Emperor Trump's exile court at Mar-a-Lago as Trump's "representative", with fake journalist and Giuliani associate John Solomon, in regard to the stolen documents case, I thought that was a clue to the mystery, and the mystery of the documents as well, but I'm afraid we'll never know now that the case itself has been rendered untriable. Except that Patel's new job as director of the FBI, if Trump really manages to get him in, will certainly be to punish the bureau for its past lèse-majesté, or turn it into Trump's personal secret police force, or both. They're all such criminals

Monmouth University asking voters whether it would bother them if Trump suspends some laws or constitutional provisions, as he's threatened, to "go after" his enemies:

Republicans in a large majority don't take him seriously, they say, but at the same time if he is serious and does it they won't be especially upset, if at all. That's a telling result.