(Dobbs) We Never Expect Thieves To Obey the Law, Do We?

If you find yourself anywhere near the White House, put your wallet in the front pocket of your pants and if you’re carrying it in a purse, zip it up.

Oct 4

If he could, I think Donald Trump would steal money from the Little Sisters of the Poor.

As it is, according to what major news outlets have learned from federal government spending reports and leaks from his administration, he is stealing money from congressionally appropriated funds for border protection, for military housing, for National Science Foundation research, for assistance to European and Middle Eastern countries that depend on the United States to help protect them, even funds for “Line-of-Duty death memorials,” which honor officers killed in the line-of-duty.

How is he spending it? At least in part, to fund his faux public service announcements, whose only obvious purpose is to glorify Donald Trump.

You know, the ones that have aired in the past week on Fox broadcasts of college and professional football games, on CBS Mornings and Good Morning America, even— oddly, given the president’s maliciousness toward it— on CNN. The ones in which he walks menacingly toward a camera and we hear him delivering unifying lines like, “We will demolish the deep state, we will expel the war-mongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists.”

The ones Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, came up with a name for: “Mr. Trump’s narcissistic ego trips.”

It’s what I wrote about last Tuesday. The ads that end with lettering at the bottom of the screen: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”

They sure are.

Of course they’re not supposed to be. The Hatch Act prohibits the use of federal offices or federal time to make political statements. Federal appropriations laws prohibit government agencies from using taxpayer money for unauthorized “publicity or propaganda purposes.” The Government Accountability Office prohibits federal money from being used for communications that are “purely partisan” and “designed to aid a political party or candidates.” Ranking Judiciary Democrat Raskin soon might be Judiciary chairman Raskin, and his opinion is, these ads “may be felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes.”

And the main thing is, the Constitution prohibits a president from redirecting money appropriated by Congress without the approval of Congress.

But we never expect thieves to obey the law, do we?

Trump stole money from a line item in the Defense Department budget called “Armed forces quality of life: Fund improvements to housing, health care, education and child care,” to pay everyone in uniform his “warrior dividend” in the symbolic amount of $1,776, which came to more than $2.5 billion.

By withholding $1.4 billion that Congress designated for other kinds of research, he also stole from the National Science Foundation to fund research into artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

And in the latest act of theft, he stole tens of millions of dollars Congress wanted to provide to allies in Europe and the Middle East, and redirected it to right-wing governments in Latin America. The State Department said, “Reprogramming money away from Middle East and Europe to the Western Hemisphere is consistent with the National Security Strategy.”

That might be, but it’s not consistent with the will of Congress. Which means it’s not consistent with the Constitution.

Heaven only knows what he’ll steal from to keep his bribe-like pledge to pay $5,000 to every American adult if Republicans win the midterms. If we’re lucky, we won’t have to find out.

As for the ads, if the leaks are accurate, Trump and his band of thieves told the director of the Office of Management and Budget on September 19th to come up with $20 million from the taxpayers’ coffers to produce and air the ads. The director chose to pull the money from the Department of Homeland Security. On September 20th, a public relations firm got the contract and we were off to the races. The paper trail supports this story.

It raises a question I haven’t heard anyone ask yet: doesn’t the president have a slush fund, a few slush funds for this sort of thing? Like his super PAC “MAGA, Inc.?” According to The Washington Post, at the beginning of September it had more than $415 million in its bank account.

And there are others with hundreds of millions more.

But Trump makes the excuse that those funds are for political campaigns and his so-called PSAs aren’t. “These are ads for the country,” he told reporters last Wednesday. “You have to understand, I’m not promoting a candidate. I’m not promoting myself because I’m not running for office. I’m promoting the country.” A White House statement elaborated: “These public service announcements are about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders and abroad.”

Somehow, when I hear the president saying, “We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all,” he’s not making me feel the love.

[Salon] We Never Expect Thieves To Obey the Law, Do We?

(Dobbs) We Never Expect Thieves To Obey the Law, Do We?

If you find yourself anywhere near the White House, put your wallet in the front pocket of your pants and if you’re carrying it in a purse, zip it up.