The European Public Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the center-right European People’s Party over alleged misuse of funds in its contracts with two Greek consultants, a media consortium reported.
The investigation centers on more than half a million euros awarded to two consultants ahead of the 2024 European election.
The European Parliament, which finances European political parties, refused to reimburse the contracts in full after deeming the costs excessive.
It covered only the initial €110,000 payments, leaving the EPP to pay roughly €350,000 itself, according to Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, Dutch investigative outlet Follow the Money and Greece’s Inside Story.
The consultants were hired to work on the party’s communications ahead of the election campaign. However, former EPP employees told reporters at the outlets that their fees were disproportionate to the work they delivered. The consultants disputed that assessment and said they had subsequently reimbursed part of the money.
The EPPO neither confirmed nor denied the investigation, saying it could not comment in case it jeopardized any ongoing proceedings or their outcome.
A spokesperson for the EPP said: “We have not been formally notified regarding this matter. The EPP fully respects the independence and mandate of the relevant authorities and remains committed to providing them complete transparency and full cooperation, should it be requested.”
In late August, President Donald Trump announced what he called the “biggest oil deal in world history.” Since then, the full text of the accord — which grants the U.S. sweeping access to Venezuela’s oil reserves — has been one of the most sought-after secrets in Washington, D.C.
ProPublica has reviewed a copy of the 18-page strategic partnership agreement signed for the United States by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The document reveals carefully constructed terms that favor U.S. interests at every turn and cements the power of a small group of people handpicked by the Trump administration to govern and profit from the deal. The role of the Venezuelan government and the potential benefits to its people are largely absent from the text.
One of the most criticized aspects of Trump’s announcement has been his choice of a partner: Alejandro Betancourt, a globe-trotting Venezuelan oligarch who has faced money-laundering investigations in three countries.
The Trump administration is taking a 35% stake in Betancourt’s firm, North American Blue Energy Partners, by acquiring shares in a Barbados-registered parent company. The deal document provides little information about the owners and investors behind the parent company, who could receive enormous wealth from the arrangement.
The agreement also safeguards Betancourt’s position as chief executive of NABEP and says the U.S. government will work with the parent company to appoint a powerful seven-member board to govern the venture for an initial 15-year term. Those aspects of the deal, according to people with knowledge of how it came together, were designed to prevent future U.S. and Venezuelan leaders from dismantling the enterprise.
Orlando Alvarado, a name not disclosed by the Trump administration as a party to the accord, signed the agreement on behalf of the parent company, alongside Betancourt, Hegseth and Rubio. Alvarado has held senior roles in multiple Betancourt businesses, including as chief financial officer of an energy firm that became embroiled in scandals a decade ago. According to the Miami Herald, federal prosecutors identified Alvarado as an unindicted co-conspirator in a scheme to embezzle money from Venezuela’s national oil company.
NABEP spokesperson Terry Wade said that “neither Mr. Betancourt nor Mr. Alvarado has ever been charged with any crime in any country, and any claims against them are baseless.”
Key aspects of the plan differ from the Trump administration’s public pronouncements. Trump has said the deal will secure America’s energy dominance for the next century. But the text indicates that U.S. purchasing rights expire in half that time and that the underlying operating rights appear to run afoul of Venezuelan laws limiting oil concessions to 25 years.
The agreement does ensure the United States a deep discount from fair-market value on 20% of NABEP’s oil, as Trump has said. It does not, however, explicitly guarantee that Betancourt’s company is obligated to pay the estimated $200 billion in royalties and tax payments to Venezuela that the White House has said would benefit the country.
There are also significant caveats related to Trump’s central selling point to Americans — that the deal will bring a gusher of low-cost oil imports.
The agreement gives the U.S. the right to purchase 20% of NABEP’s oil at a discounted rate of $30 a barrel, or less than a third of what oil has sold for in recent months, according to one of three supporting documents reviewed by ProPublica.
But this fee does not account for the cost of getting Venezuela’s oil out of the country. Much of Venezuela’s raw crude is so thick that it won’t flow through pipelines unless it is first blended with 20% or more of oil thinner products. Under the deal, the potentially significant cost of importing millions of barrels of those blending materials is not included in the price.
The White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and the energy company NABEP all defended the agreement, saying in statements that their new public-private venture will provide meaningful and lasting economic benefits to both countries that cannot be captured in a legal document.
“This historic deal marks a major step toward stabilizing Venezuela’s economy after years of hyperinflation and almost no new investment, while more than doubling the United States’ oil reserves,” said White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers.
Wade emphasized that NABEP was chosen because of its track record of expanding oil production in Venezuela in recent years and that the agreement was between the company and the U.S. government, not Venezuela.
“Thanks in large part to the agreement,” Wade said, “there is a surge in confidence about the future of Venezuela’s oil industry and, as a direct result, substantial new investments are flowing into the country.”
He added that much of NABEP’s oil comes from fields that require little or no blending materials and that blending costs would not meaningfully impact the price of production. “Our barrel economics are strong.”
The newly revealed details of the agreement are nonetheless likely to raise more questions about whether the unorthodox marriage of the United States and a foreign energy baron can bring lasting benefits to either country — and which private parties might benefit along the way. Trump’s oil deal is likely to face scrutiny in both the United States and Venezuela, especially if Democrats win one or both chambers in the midterm elections, according to former U.S. diplomats and congressional staff.
“Question number one in a new U.S. Congress will be: Why Betancourt?” said former Ambassador James Story, who served as the top U.S. diplomat in Caracas from 2018 to 2023, in an interview. “Why did he get this deal? And was he involved in criminality? It seems reasonable to have a congressional hearing about those questions.”
“Question number one in a new U.S. Congress will be: Why Betancourt?”
James Story, former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela
In public comments, Delcy Rodríguez, who won the backing of the Trump administration to serve as Venezuela’s interim president, praised the accord as “historic.” She has asserted that Venezuela will retain sovereignty over its natural resources and defended the choice of Betancourt.
People with knowledge of the Trump administration’s behind-the-scenes decision-making and negotiations with Betancourt spoke to ProPublica on condition of anonymity because they were either not authorized to do so or were fearful of retribution.
One reason that the precise terms of the deal have remained hidden until now is that the signed agreement is marked as a “sensitive” government document. That classification is commonly used to shield a variety of federal records from public release, including those containing personnel information, details about ongoing law enforcement operations and matters protected by attorney-client privilege. The document also contains a confidentiality clause barring Betancourt’s company from disclosing the “existence and terms” of the U.S. government agreement.
One person familiar with the deliberations said that people close to the Trump administration seemed keen to partner with Betancourt’s company because of the privacy and flexibility it offered. That appeared to give NABEP an advantage over publicly traded oil companies, which would be obligated to shareholder reporting requirements.
“For example,” the person said, “Chevron couldn’t give 35% of their shares to the Pentagon.”
The Deal
The oil deal is sensitive partly because of likely resistance in Venezuela, where critics have already described it as a U.S. takeover of the country’s precious natural resources.
A ProPublica analysis shows that its terms favor American interests at nearly every turn and try to enshrinethe Trump administration’s imprint indefinitely.
The document states that a majority of the seven-member board must be U.S. citizens at all times, and the U.S. government can appoint one “non-voting observer” to join the group. Betancourt, who will serve as the chief executive, is the only board member named by the agreement. The initial board will establish the process for choosing new members.
“Throughout the evolution of the deal, it was clear that the governing structure was intended to ensure maximum control by the people making the deal and to insulate them from future administrations seeking to reverse the agreement or call it into question,” a person familiar with the negotiations said.
There is no requirement for any Venezuelan government participation in the board.
The agreement also offers long-lasting protections for Betancourt and unnamed investors. It requires a supermajority vote of five to oust Betancourt as CEO, change the board composition or execute any transactions with a shareholder that isn’t the U.S. government, an indirect equity holder, director, affiliate or “immediate family members.”
The board will determine compensation for Betancourt in his role as chief executive, the document says. As structured, the deal does not appear to require any public disclosures about pay or distribution of shares to executives.
The agreement does not say which shareholders, affiliates or family members have been approved to transact with Betancourt’s company. Under Barbados corporate law, there is almost nothing that can force those interests to be revealed publicly.
The agreement does, however, require the company to maintain “anti-money laundering controls,” submit to external audits and inspections of its records by the U.S. government, and provide the U.S. government with an annual budget and quarterly unaudited financial statements. It is unclear if these reports will ever be made public.
It could be some time before the company produces enough oil to fulfill a significant share of U.S. demand. Betancourt’s company currently produces about 200,000 barrels per day — or about as much over the course of a year as the United States uses in three days.
NABEP aims to increase its production to 500,000 barrels per day by the end of 2028, according to recent reports.
In addition to securing a discount on 20% of NABEP’s oil, Washington also has “first priority” to purchase all of the company’s remaining oil production for the next 50 years, including an irrevocable right to buy its entire oil supply in the event the U.S. declares a national emergency.
The U.S. also receives a “most favored nation” status that requires Betancourt’s firm to disclose any other business agreements it signs, and, if they are favorable, to grant Washington matching terms.
One person who reviewed parts of the contract was surprised at the tangible benefits for the U.S. compared with the lack of binding commitments to Venezuela: “I gave you 20% of my production at ‘cost plus,’ fine. I gave you all of my production if there’s a national emergency, OK. … So what do I get in exchange?”
A U.S. official said Rodriguez had granted NABEP 100-year oil concessions to operate there, although this figure is not referenced in the accord and appears to contradict Venezuelan law.
In the event of a dispute, Venezuela can’t challenge the deal in its own courts. The agreement dictates that any conflict between the company and the United States must be settled under U.S. law, not Venezuela’s. The two sides even spelled out that any civil case or arbitration must be argued before the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, where Trump’s Justice Department has turned, time and again, for favorable rulings.
Where U.S. law does not apply, Texas state law governs, the agreement states.
A Pentagon office has been tasked with someday executing the financial transaction to capitalize on the U.S. government’s 35% share in the venture. The document shows that the U.S. will pay nothing upfront but plans to acquire its stake in Betancourt’s company by paying $0.01 per warrant share. Those terms are set to expire on the 75th anniversary of the closing date.
In a White House statement last month, Trump touted those shares as potentially worth “hundreds of billions,” plus dividends. But Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee said they believe the Pentagon office does not have the legal authority to execute an agreement with a foreign entity operating in a country under U.S. sanctions.
Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said that the Defense Department conducts “extensive due diligence” before extending capital assistance. Wilson declined to comment on any of the legal considerations or further technical aspects of the deal “to protect the integrity of the process.”
Several other detailed aspects of how the company will operate are currently under negotiation among the Trump administration, Betancourt and the parent company, the partnership documents show. The agreement repeatedly cites a set of “Implementation Documents” that will finalize the U.S. ownership stake and the rights of unnamed investors.
The full force of the deal will not take effect until both parties have complied with its closing conditions, which the agreement indicates could happen within months.
Last month, Senate Democrats blasted what was known of the oil accord and demanded details in a letter to Rubio, Hegseth and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright.
“It is unclear why the American public should support this attempt to entangle the United States with a relatively unknown foreign oil company that lacks the capacity or credibility to develop oil fields of the magnitude described and whose leadership has faced international criminal investigations,” four ranking senators said in the letter.
They asserted that most of the “oil fields are nowhere near ready for production” and that it could “take up to a decade before global oil markets are meaningfully impacted and the American people see any tangible benefit.”
A Willing Partner
Almost immediately after U.S. special operations forces seized President Nicolás Maduro in January and airlifted him out of Venezuela, Trump left little doubt that his larger goal was to restore American access to Venezuela’s oil reserves two decades after most U.S. firms had been ejected from the country.
By early spring, an obscure cast of energy officials, lawyers and lobbyists had started to craft plans to deliver on Trump’s America First energy agenda. One person familiar with the deliberations said that U.S. officials had considered backing an idea for publicly held American oil companies like Chevron, Exxon and Conoco to carve up and rehabilitate Venezuela’s aging oil sector. Another potential route went through Betancourt’s company, which is the second largest private oil firm operating in Venezuela. Working with the Venezuelan state company, Petróleos de Venezuela, SA, was never really an option due to its underlying debt and history of corruption, the person said.
The option of turning to large multinational oil companies quickly stalled. In some cases, oil executives balked at jumping back into the complexity of the Venezuelan market; in others, firms struggled to get more than “lip service” meetings in Washington and Caracas, according to media reports and people familiar with the deal.
“NABEP was given priority,” one person said. “Exxon, Conoco and the others were treated as second class.”
Betancourt’s star was rising in the Trump administration. He had served as an interlocutor for Washington with the Maduro government and had ties to some leaders of the Venezuelan opposition, according to current and former U.S. officials. He had also provided information that helped the U.S. forces seize Venezuelan oil tankers and that aided strategy and planning before the capture of Maduro, Reuters reported.
In addition, Betancourt had developed a good relationship with Rodríguez, whom Trump had backed as the country’s interim president. And Betancourt had done so despite the fact that her influential brother, National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez, had accused him of corruption in a televised speech in 2020, according to former U.S. officials and press reports.
U.S. officials also saw practical reasons to partner with Betancourt, several people said. He and his then-business partner in the U.S., Harry Sargeant, a Trump supporter, appeared to be a rare success story in a battered industry, operating some of the only active oil fields in the country.
“The main thing I found promising is that the fields are producing in Venezuela,” said a former State Department official who analyzed the company’s activities. “I think it’s particularly important that you buy into fields that are producing. … If your policy goal is to raise production quickly, this makes sense.”
But partnering with Betancourt posed major challenges.
For starters, the 46-year-old billionaire was confined to house arrest on his 300-acre Oxfordshire estate in England, fighting off a Swiss extradition request tied to an international money-laundering probe. Betancourt could fly to his $46 million London residence by private helicopter — but his Venezuelan and Italian passports were locked down, and British authorities had barred him from driving on public roads, according to media reports about the special bail arrangement.
Betancourt’s legal problems stemmed from his role in troubled Venezuelan energy projects during the corrupt rule of former President Hugo Chávez. Several of Betancourt’s known or alleged associates were charged or convicted in a major U.S. money-laundering investigation known as Operation Money Flight. Betancourt surfaced as a suspect in the U.S. case and is still under investigation for suspected money laundering by authorities in Spain, according to former U.S. and European officials and press reports.
The most popular leader of the Venezuelan opposition in exile, María Corina Machado, recently described Betancourt as having been involved in “obscene corruption” that caused great suffering for the Venezuelan people, according to a recent New York Times interview.
Betancourt has not been charged in any country. His lawyer has maintained his client’s innocence, saying Betancourt has been unfairly maligned because people associate him with a group of wealthy young Venezuelans, some of whom have been accused of wrongdoing, according to press reports.
Many Venezuelans see Betancourt as a “totemic, emblematic, corrupt figure,” said Brian Naranjo, a former senior U.S. diplomat in Venezuela, in an interview.
“He is not really an oil man,” Naranjo said. “The talent he brings is that he’s a new person in a long line of Venezuelan businesspeople who deal in influence. Their big lever is connections and influence. It is know-who, not know-how.”
In a recent interview with Spanish language media, Rubio defended Betancourt, praising his oil company’s work in Venezuela and his support for factions of the Venezuelan opposition in exile.
Rubio downplayed the legal scrutiny Betancourt has faced, saying a review conducted with U.S. law enforcement agencies indicated “there were no investigations of him in our system.”
“The talent he brings is that he’s a new person in a long line of Venezuelan businesspeople who deal in influence. … It is know-who, not know-how.”
Brian Naranjo, former U.S. diplomat
It remains unclear exactly how Betancourt shed the travel restrictions imposed by European authorities. But The Washington Post reported that senior Trump administration officials, including Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, former Attorney General Pam Bondi and then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, petitioned their foreign counterparts to allow Betancourt to travel freely and to close their investigations into him and his business ventures.
The Trump administration’s next hurdle to working with Betancourt was figuring out how to legally invest. The government’s $200 billion investment agency, the International Development Finance Corporation, was created to do just that but is currently barred by U.S. law from operating in Venezuela.
At different points through the summer, aides to Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought stepped in, pressing Defense and State department officials to consider alternate financing paths, according to one person familiar with the deal’s progression.
By July, the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, headed by David Lorch, emerged as a potential solution.
Lorch, who had moved to the Pentagon from Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg’s private equity firm, Cerberus Capital, quickly embraced the idea, according to people familiar with the deal. Lorch and other Pentagon and State Department officials flew to Caracas in the final days of that month and agreed in principle to a deal. The details would be hammered out back in Washington, the people said.
A Pentagon spokesperson said Lorch declined to comment.
On Aug. 5, Betancourt strode into a conference room behind the art deco facade of the old Greyhound Bus Terminal in downtown Washington that houses an auxiliary Pentagon office. The assembled Defense Department officials gave the Venezuelan billionaire the red carpet treatment, lining up to shake his hand, according to people familiar with the meeting. But some in the room were stunned to discover that the U.S. government was preparing to do business with Betancourt, the people familiar with the meeting said.
Betancourt was accompanied by Jacob Hirshman, the chief executive and co-founder of Erebor Bank, the first new bank chartered after Trump returned to office, according to people familiar with the meeting. The bank, backed by Trump supporters and investors Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey, has vowed to reconnect Venezuela to the world economy.
Hirshman did not respond to a request for comment.
Lorch told the group, which included dozens of former Wall Street associates he’d hired into the office, that the alliance with Betancourt was a major “opportunity” to fulfill one of the Trump administration’s top goals, securing benefits to the United States and Venezuela for decades to come.
The meeting touched off a month of around-the-clock calls and video conferences.
People familiar with the deal’s progression said Lorch soon became involved in structuring key aspects of the deal beyond its financing, including how the board would sit for 15 years and choose its successors. One said he put an explicit premium on setting up the venture in a way that it could not be undone by Trump’s successor.
The months of work on the deal burst into public view on Aug. 28 with a Trump announcement on Truth Social.
“The United States of America has just entered into an Agreement with the Country of Venezuela on, THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!” Trump posted on a Friday night.
Two days later, Hegseth, Rubio, Betancourt and Alvarado signed the deal.
In March, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was fired after it was revealed she and her assistant, Corey Lewandowski, had been funneling multi-million dollar contracts to a political ally for self-serving TV advertisements. On Oct. 13, U.S. ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle resigned under pressure from the administration when it was reported she had shaken down a donor for $100,000 to pay her American Express bill. This week, Alina Habba, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and the former acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey, said, “Hold my beer, ladies,” when The New York Times reported she had been given a $50 million personal contract in exchange for securing a presidential pardon.
Habba is the perfect example of the Trump insider. A graduate of Widener University Commonwealth Law School, she practiced law at her first husband’s firm and served as general counsel for a parking garage company owned by her second husband. A New Jersey local, she apparently caught the president’s eye after she joined his golf club in Bedminster, which was near her small private law firm. She began appearing on Fox News as a Trump defender, and in September 2021, Trump hired her for his legal team. One of her first actions was to file a $100 million lawsuit against The New York Times and Mary Trump, the president’s niece, and take over defending Trump in a defamation case brought by a former contestant on “The Apprentice” after several veteran lawyers withdrew. The Times case was dismissed for “fail[ing] as a matter of constitutional law.” The former “Apprentice” contestant dropped her case after Habba countersued her for trying to “stifle Donald Trump’s free speech.”
Habba was part of the team that represented Trump in the fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, where Habba’s main contribution appeared to be mimicking Trump’s patented mugshot glower before the cameras. She served as lead attorney in E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit against Trump, during which the judge admonished her repeatedly for her poor legal skills. The case ended up with a jury awarding Carroll $83.3 million in damages.
But Habba’s most infamous case as the president’s personal lawyer was one brought in the Southern District of Florida in May 2022. Trump sued the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Jake Sullivan, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and others for allegedly perpetrating “a calculated scheme to defraud the news media, law enforcement, and counterintelligence officials for the purpose of proliferating a false narrative of collusion between Trump and Russia.”
U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks was not amused. Four months later, he dismissed the case, saying it was inadequate in all respects. In January 2023 he sanctioned Trump and Habba to the tune of nearly $1 million, writing, “Here, we are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose.”
Naturally, Trump appealed, but the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling. Earlier this month, the sorest loser appealed the case to the Supreme Court.
Habba’s record as the president’s personal attorney speaks for itself. She didn’t fail upward quite as spectacularly as U.S. Circuit Judge Emil Bove and Attorney General Todd Blanche, but Trump did bring her into the White House as counselor to the president and later nominated her to be U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey.
As interim U.S. attorney, Habba immediately began to cause chaos. Like Noem, she cosplayed as a U.S. marshal and announced she would pursue political prosecutions of prominent New Jersey Democrats, including the governor. A panel of judges, following the law, refused to allow Habba to serve in an interim capacity, forcing Trump to withdraw her name from consideration for the job, designating her acting U.S. attorney instead. Eventually, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found that Habba was not lawfully appointed to that post as well, disqualifying her from the position.
She was then hired to a Justice Department post clearly made up on the fly, pending a reversal of the opinion, in which case she would be reappointed as U.S. attorney. That never came about, and according to what we learned from the explosive New York Times report, Habba had other plans anyway.
As it happens, right around that time a Venezuelan billionaire banker named Julio Herrera Velutini wanted a pardon. He had already been given a very generous deal by Trump’s Justice Department, which had reduced felony bribery charges to a misdemeanor, but he wanted his record cleared completely. He hired Christopher Kice, another of Trump’s former personal lawyers, to help him grease the skids. To sweeten the pot, Herrera’s daughter, who holds U.S. citizenship, had contributed $3.5 million to Trump’s super PAC. But by fall 2025, nothing had happened, so the Herrera family decided to hire someone with a little more juice. They tapped Habba, who was still working at the Justice Department, and allegedly offered her $10 million a year for four years and at least $10 million in bonuses.
They created a company, Concord Partners, which has no known business dealings, and in January 2026 Habba signed on as its general counsel. Days after she took the position, Trump granted Herrera the pardon.
This is the most egregious case involving the sale of pardons under Trump that we’ve heard about . . . The grift has become so blatant that the public has finally started to notice — and they don’t like what they see.
This is the most egregious case involving the sale of pardons under Trump that we’ve heard about. According to various reports, procuring presidential pardons has apparently become a cottage industry among many MAGA insiders, who are becoming wealthy trading on their access to Trump. For his part, the president appears to be handing them out to Republicans like Hershey bars on Halloween. The grift has become so blatant that the public has finally started to notice — and they don’t like what they see.
Habba apparently hasn’t yet collected her fee, and this revelation may just end up depriving her of most of it. But she needn’t worry. She just married a much younger Turkish billionaire named Turhan Mildon in a reported $10 million wedding attended by fellow Trump officials including Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel and civil rights division head Harmeet Dhillon. Habba has no financial worries, and there will almost certainly be no legal ramifications for this flagrant conflict of interest and pay-to-play scheme.
But she is embroiled in yet another convoluted scandal involving her new husband, in which he supposedly sent $17 million to Richard Grenell, Trump’s former envoy to Venezuela, who at the time was director of the embattled John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. This donation, later determined to have actually been sent from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Mildon has many business dealings, went to a Texas defense contractor. Habba is alleging that the portion meant for the Kennedy Center — an obvious sop to Trump after he took it over — never made it there.
The full contours of this dispute are not yet clear, and Grenell has denied any knowledge of the matter. But never fear: The White House is on it. Trump assigned Will Scharf, the White House counsel, to look into the matter, and no doubt Habba was pleased. After all, Scharf was one of the honored guests at her wedding. It’s nice to keep it all in the family.
CORRECTION: This column has been updated to clarify Richard Grenell’s tenure at the Kennedy Center, which ended in March 2026.
A Serbian prosecutor investigating alleged corruption surrounding a Trump real estate project in Belgrade was targeted with Israeli-made Pegasus spyware after speaking out about political interference and abuses of power, according to research made public Monday.
Rade Bajić, a member of Serbia’s Public Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime, is reported to be the latest target identified in a growing spyware scandal that has engulfed the country’s political opposition, civil society and institutions.
The research is the latest by Toronto University’s Citizen Lab in collaboration with Serbian digital rights organization, SHARE Foundation, including the discovery that Bajić received an Apple Threat Notification iMessage on Aug. 13.
The spyware revelation comes amid mounting controversy over plans to redevelop the former Yugoslav military headquarters in Belgrade into a luxury Trump Tower skyscraper. The project, associated with Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, has faced allegations of political interference and irregularities surrounding the removal of the site’s protected heritage status.
Bajić’s targeting follows revelations in September that at least 14 people in Serbia, including student activists and opposition figures, had received warnings indicating they may have been targeted with sophisticated spyware. Researchers at Toronto University’s Citizen Lab confirmed a Pegasus infection in at least one case.
“In Serbia, spyware surveillance has steadily expanded from civil society and journalists to student activists, politicians and now university and judicial representatives,” said Andrijana Ristić, a policy advisor at SHARE Foundation. “This escalation is fueled by perceived impunity and state inaction, even in cases where criminal complaints have been filed.”
Another prominent figure caught up in the surveillance scandal is Vladan Đokić, rector of the University of Belgrade, whose phone was infected with Pegasus, according to the same report.
Đokić has emerged as a prominent figure in Serbia’s protest movement after refusing to facilitate a government crackdown on student demonstrators. He has faced sustained pressure from authorities, including a police raid on his university offices on March 31, during which computers and servers were reportedly seized.
Until September, Đokić was also frequently mentioned as a potential leader of the student-backed electoral list ahead of Serbia’s planned Oct. 25 parliamentary snap elections.
The identity of those responsible for deploying Pegasus against Bajić and Đokić has not been established.
“NSO has spent a decade claiming to turn over a new leaf each time an abuse surfaces. But there is no hiding the truth: Pegasus is a technology for repression,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab. “It’s no accident that people standing up for freedom in the face of corruption keep getting hacked with NSO’s products.”
The EU’s antifraud watchdog said it has passed on to prosecutors allegations of potential corruption at the European Economic and Social Committee, a Brussels-based body that advises the EU on proposed legislation and policy.
OLAF, the antifraud office, received a report from whistleblowers earlier this year saying there was a conflict of interest in the management of funds at the EESC, which is financed by the EU. It has now passed the case to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office.
OLAF’s press office told POLITICO it had sent the case to EPPO but added that it could not comment further.
The EPPO did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“The EESC was informed by OLAF yesterday that this case has been transmitted to the EPPO,” an EESC spokesperson told POLITICO.
“Under these circumstances, the EESC cannot comment further except to re-confirm that when these matters first arose, the EESC president immediately and proactively referred the allegations to OLAF. The EESC will continue to respect fully the independence of this process.” Séamus Boland of Ireland was elected president in October 2025.
“The EESC and its senior leadership take this matter very seriously and remain fully committed to integrity, transparency and accountability,” the spokesperson added.
The EPPO has significantly stronger enforcement powers than OLAF. Whereas OLAF conducts administrative investigations, the EPPO investigates crimes against the financial interests of the EU, and can search private homes or seize evidence.
OLAF has also been investigating a report that EESC executives tried to smoke out a staff whistleblower who raised the alarm about the funding concerns, the EU Ombudsman told POLITICO.
Anonymous letters, seen by POLITICO, say that IT workers at the EESC were asked by senior managers to identify which staffers had connected to the OLAF website in previous weeks.
The EESC said those anonymous letters contained “serious personal threats” and added that they were not made through the EESC’s “robust formal whistleblower process.”
La volonté de la Commission européenne de rendre les milliards de l’UE plus réactifs aux crises à venir pourrait aussi les rendre plus exposés aux risques d’abus, avertit la Cour des comptes européenne.
Son président Tony Murphy alerte que les principaux piliers de la réforme du budget à long terme de l’UE, élaborée par la Commission, risquent de brouiller la vision des agents chargés de veiller à ce que les fonds publics soient dépensés comme prévu.
“Il nous est plus difficile de suivre l’argent”, a-t-il souligné. “On dit à l’Etat membre : ‘Voici une somme considérable, et vous faites en sorte que tout est en ordre.’ C’est en quelque sorte d’autocontrôle.”
Cet avertissement intervient alors que l’épineux débat du montant du budget 2028-2034 de l’UE est au menu du sommet des dirigeants européens à Bruxelles cette semaine, et que la Cour a constaté une augmentation des irrégularités dans l’utilisation des fonds publics.
Outre le montant total des moyens, se pose la question de leur répartition. Après un cycle budgétaire marqué par la pandémie, les guerres et les conséquences du changement climatique, la Commission souhaite rendre le prochain budget plus agile. Pour ce faire, elle prévoit d’en affecter environ la moitié — soit près de 1 000 milliards d’euros sur sept ans — à une enveloppe unique dans laquelle les pays pourront puiser pour remplir leurs objectifs dans des domaines comme l’immigration, l’agriculture ou le développement régional.
Ces fonds destinés à l’agriculture et au développement régional — souvent octroyés sous forme de subventions aux exploitations agricoles et aux projets locaux — sont depuis longtemps exposés à la fraude et aux détournements.
Selon Tony Murphy, accorder aux gouvernements nationaux une plus grande marge de manœuvre pour réorienter leurs dépenses rendrait le suivi de ces dernières encore plus difficile.
“Il y aura une certaine flexibilité, mais à quel prix ?”, a-t-il soulevé lors d’une interview. Une grande partie du contrôle dépendra des mesures de surveillance que chaque pays a déjà mises en place.
D’autant que les irrégularités dans l’utilisation des fonds du budget de l’UE sont en hausse. Les erreurs de versement se sont élevées à 5 milliards d’euros l’année dernière, selon le dernier rapport de la Cour des comptes européenne.
Dans le prochain budget de l’UE, il pourrait même s’avérer impossible d’estimer ce chiffre, a prévenu Tony Murphy, car les auditeurs de chaque pays ont des rôles et des méthodes de travail différents. “Année après année, nous avons constaté que le travail de ces autorités d’audit n’est pas entièrement fiable”, a renchéri son chef de cabinet, Wolfgang Stolz, lors de l’entretien.
Dans un communiqué, la Commission a défendu sa proposition, soulignant que les “principes fondamentaux” du système de contrôle actuel resteraient en vigueur. Les autorités nationales “fonctionnent bien”, a-t-elle affirmé, tout en précisant qu’elle se réservait le droit de demander aux Etats membres de “modifier le plan ou de mettre en place des mécanismes de correction si nécessaire”.
Des fonds mélangés aux budgets nationaux
L’une des innovations proposées par la Commission consiste à intégrer la politique agricole commune (PAC) — qui constituait jusqu’à présent une ligne budgétaire à part entière — dans un fonds gigantesque appelé plan de partenariat national et régional.
Tony Murphy a souligné qu’il ne prônait pas un modèle plutôt qu’un autre. Mais à mesure que les fonds européens s’intègrent de plus en plus aux budgets nationaux, il sera plus difficile pour Bruxelles de contrôler où va réellement son argent. La PAC est plus facile à contrôler lorsqu’“elle n’est pas mélangée à ce méli-mélo”, a estimé le président de la Cour des comptes européenne.
Les articles de presse sur des subventions agricoles versées pour de faux pâturages en Grèce ou sur des fonds destinés à soutenir le tourisme rural en Slovaquie qui financent de luxueuses villas pour les riches illustrent de manière frappante la difficulté de contrôler ces versements dans le cadre du système actuel.
Et le modèle sur lequel repose le nouveau système de dépenses — le fonds de relance post-Covid de l’UE — n’est pas de bon augure, a pointé Tony Murphy. Si les pays ont désormais plus de facilité à affecter les fonds là où ils sont nécessaires, les dépenses sont également devenues plus opaques. Les nouveaux plans nationaux ont été élaborés selon le même modèle.
Dans le cadre du système budgétaire actuel, la Cour des comptes européenne peut se rendre physiquement sur place dans une exploitation agricole bénéficiant de fonds européens. En revanche, dans le cadre du fonds de relance post-Covid, l’UE ne publie chaque année que la liste des 100 principaux bénéficiaires.
“Ce n’est pas très transparent. Je veux dire, où va réellement l’argent de l’UE ? C’est ça qui compte”, a insisté Tony Murphy. “On a un fonds qui regroupe différentes politiques publiques, avec des objectifs et des échéances complètement différents, des mécanismes de mise en œuvre différents et moins de prévisibilité.”
Cet article a d’abord été publié par POLITICO en anglais, puis a été édité en français par Jean-Christophe Catalon.
TIRANA — The College of Europe’s Tirana office was among the latest casualties of escalating student protests gripping the Albanian capital.
The office for the school, which serves as a training ground for future EU civil servants, was broken into, looted and set on fire on Wednesday evening.
“Until yesterday, this was the office of the College of Europe,” Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama said in an Instagram video delivered from the burned-out shell of the office. Rama’s own workplace is a stone’s throw from the Pyramid complex housing the College of Europe.
Rama said he did not believe the damage was down to the students. “Students are the future, they are the ones who look ahead, who want to go further and faster,” he said.
Instead, he accused his political opponents of being behind the destruction, claiming that they were attempting to undermine Albania’s progress. The opposition parties deny any wrongdoing.
The College of Europe in Tirana refused to comment.
Protests in Albania have been ongoing since late May against the proposed development of a luxury resort linked to U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and alleged government corruption. But the situation escalated on Tuesday and Wednesday as students from around the country clashed with police, set fire to government buildings and businesses linked to powerful businessmen, and damaged traffic lights, bus stops, and the city’s roads.
Alice Taylor/POLITICO
The Delegation of the European Union to Albania released a statement Thursday morning, condemning the destruction of private and public property and asking protesters to exercise restraint. “Violence has no place in democracies,” they wrote.`
Large swathes of the city were damaged during over 14 hours of protests Wednesday. The Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Education and Ministry of Finance, as well as a number of government institutions, banks, and private businesses, were broken into and set on fire. In centrally located Skanderbeg Square, protesters torched a large under-construction tower block, with flames reaching several floors.
With the destruction came many reports of police brutality, including against regular citizens and journalists. Several media workers were prevented from filming or had their equipment confiscated. On Tuesday, a young man required emergency surgery for a severely broken leg following an altercation with police.
At least 89 people required hospital treatment, including about 51 police officers, while many more protesters have reported minor injuries.
On Thursday, protests began again at 8 a.m., as students across Tirana boycotted lessons and marched toward the Ministry of Education. Police immediately dispersed demonstrators with tear gas and water cannons, while the unrest continued to spread to other parts of the capital, particularly near government institutions and the headquarters of Rama’s Socialist Party.
A parliamentary session for Thursday was canceled after students said they would not allow any deputies to access the assembly.
Protests also spread to other parts of Albania. Masked protesters clashed with police in multiple cities, with damage, fires, and violence reported across the country.
Many businesses throughout the capital were shuttered for the day, with owners putting up signs saying “we are with you, please don’t burn our businesses.”
The students and the so-called “Flamingo Revolution” protestors are demanding the resignation of Rama and the entire government, and a new start for Albania — including economic, educational, government, electoral and legal reform.
Rama told Reuters on Thursday that he has no intention of resigning.
Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi always said that the only way for Democrats to win elections was to focus on the proverbial “kitchen table issues.” As the leader of the caucus for 20 years, she had quite a track record, presiding over quite a few big wins and many small ones, so she knew what she was talking about. According to her way of thinking, people are motivated to vote over concerns about their own material well-being, and in recent years, this has meant healthcare, job security and the cost of living — the basics.
Republicans, by contrast, tend to rely on a broader appeal to security in general. “Law and order” has been their bumper sticker, covering a wide range of free-floating anxieties in American society having to do with cultural changes, race and the loss of status of straight white males. Their answer to economic stress comes down to blaming the bogeyman of the day, whether it’s immigrants or the deficit, and the answer is always tax cuts and more tax cuts.
Democrats have usually been trusted more on the kitchen-table issues, depending on whether they happen to be in office when some kind of economic crisis hits. Jimmy Carter paid a high price, losing his 1980 re-election bid after having inherited crippling stagflation from his GOP predecessors, and was hit with a big recession as a result of the Federal Reserve policies — which he supported — to break it. His successor, Ronald Reagan, reaped the benefit, a common consequence of painful Democratic policies necessarily deployed to clean up a Republican administration’s economic mess.
The GOP enjoyed 12 years in the White House after Carter’s loss, including a big boom which inevitably turned into a recession and helped ensure Bill Clinton’s victory over George H.W. Bush in the 1992 election. Clinton presided over an economic boom that saved his presidency, which was otherwise dogged by scandals largely perpetrated by the GOP’s final evolution from the party of mainline Protestants and main street business owners to one of ruthless street-fighters.
Economics, of course, aren’t the only issue that motivates voters. While more abstract notions of foreign policy and national security are rarely at the top of the agenda, war certainly can be. George W. Bush learned this in 2006, when the American people finally realized the Iraq war was a disaster. But something else was looming on the horizon. Bush had also made the fatal mistake of trying to privatize Social Security, breaking whatever trust people had in Republicans to safeguard their hard-won benefits. The Democrats won the midterm election in a rout.
Two years later, Barack Obama was hit with a double whammy. The war in Iraq was still the top issue, but at the height of his campaign against Arizona Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee, the bottom fell out of the housing market and the world suffered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the same time, the healthcare crisis had reached a crescendo, with millions of people going bankrupt, and many suffering and dying due to the high price of insurance. After his win, those kitchen-table issues were front and center in shaping Obama’s presidency. In fact, two years into his first term, as the Great Recession continued to drag on, the American people let out the equivalent of a political primal scream and gave Democrats what Obama famously admitted was a “shellacking” in the 2010 midterms. Perversely, this was largely caused by the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the party’s healthcare plan, underscoring that no good deed goes unpunished.
Then came Donald Trump. When he announced his candidacy for president in 2015, the economy was on the upswing, and just enough people were gulled by his phony reputation as a great businessman and promises to make everyone rich that he eked out an Electoral College win. Once in office, Trump basically just rode the recovery that was already underway and took credit for it. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit and his incompetence fully manifested itself, voters turned against him. If there was ever a kitchen-table issue, the pandemic was it: We were all stuck sitting around the table for months, wondering if the world was ever going to be the same. Trump failed to rise to the occasion.
But he was elected again after Joe Biden presided over the pandemic’s economic recovery, which was painful, ushering in inflation for the first time in decades to a chunk of a population that had never experienced it. The issue did him — and his vice president, Kamala Harris, who replaced him on the ticket — in, returning Trump to the White House on the promise that he would restore the economy to the alleged golden age of his first term. Unfortunately for America and the world, enough people bought into Trump’s chicanery once again, and here we are today in a crisis of chaos, mistrust, incompetence and despair over the radical policies wrought by a second Trump administration.
Kitchen-table issues are still at the top of most voters’ lists. The cost of living remains high and keeps climbing. Housing is out of control, and gas prices are through the roof due to Trump’s war of choice with Iran. His much-ballyhooed tariffs have helped keep inflation high, and there is now little doubt what is driving the polls showing that Republicans are about to take a drubbing in the November midterms.
But the concept of kitchen-table issues has its limits. Not everything in life is actually about money, and people’s perceptions of the economy are often colored by other issues that don’t appear at first glance to be directly related.
But the concept of kitchen-table issues has its limits. Not everything in life is actually about money, and people’s perceptions of the economy are often colored by other issues that don’t appear at first glance to be directly related. Bush’s losses in 2006, for instance, were affected by his mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War, both of which contributed to a sense that the administration suffered from hubris and incompetence. There is little doubt that the backlash against Obama during his first term was also driven by the recoil on the right to his identity as the first Black president. Trump likewise benefited from the fact that misogyny and racism were in play in his victories over the first two women to win the nominations of a major party.
The problem is that Democrats have too often relied solely on the kitchen-table issue agenda and failed to address underlying anxieties that contribute to their distress. And with Donald Trump, they are legion.
The unrelenting pandemonium of his presidency, from his brutal immigration crackdown to the flagrant corruption and degeneration of the president himself, as manifested in his obsession with gold and the building of personal monuments in a time of economic stress, is making the public depressed and angry. The fact that Trump broke one of his fundamental promises to not get the country into a war, as he whines constantly about being denied the Nobel Peace Prize, is maddening. His ongoing disregard of the rule of law and the assault on the democratic process are obvious. The disconnect between what average Americans are feeling and the way their leaders are behaving is a mile wide.
People have been yearning for a holistic explanation for this chaos and confusion — and Democrats have finally found a way to express it. As POLITICO recently noted, Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, along with Senate candidates Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and James Talarico of Texas, as different as they are individually, are “leaning hard into anti-corruption messaging in the final weeks of the campaign as new research suggests that linking corruption to Americans’ economic struggles can boost Democrats into the home stretch.”
The corruption argument is compelling. Beyond the hated war in Iran (and its resulting gas prices), Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and old friend Steve Witkoff’s deals in the Middle East have come under scrutiny and outrage, as have the government contracts being handed out to companies in which Trump’s sons are invested. Pardons are being sold to anyone with enough cash, some of them to people convicted of healthcare fraud, even as the Republicans are cutting Medicaid and healthcare subsidies. Contrary to his blarney, Trump’s Louis XIV-style monuments to himself are being largely paid for by the taxpayers. On top of all that, there are the reports that Trump has made $2 billion since returning to the White House, a figure that is excessive, even for him.
The shameless grifting is too obvious for voters to overlook, and the Democrats have finally realized that the critique of Trump and MAGA Republicans must go beyond the kitchen table because it is all connected. The chaos, incompetence, deceit and self-dealing are at the heart of America’s distress, and it’s benefiting Trump and his cronies at the expense of average taxpayers.
Distilling all this into a media-ready indictment, a soundbite, is difficult, but “Washington is rigged to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyday Americans” is about as good as it gets. Let’s hope Democrats can carry this message of reform past Election Day and actually do something about it.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) has a book to promote. In it, he revealed this week, he delves into his greatest regret: voting to confirm Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
“The president referred to Pete Hegseth as right out of Central Casting — and I agree with that: He’s an actor. He’s not a manager,” Tillis told MS NOW’s Morning Joe.
This confession comes with a hint of déjà vu. An outgoing senator with a brand as a moderate — at least within the spectrum of today’s Republican Party — regrets a pivotal confirmation vote. Perhaps it brings to mind Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the doctor-turned-legislator who, despite his reservations, confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead Health and Human Services. Kennedy then immediately broke promises Cassidy said he had made to him, and began acting on his life’s work to undercut the vaccine regimen in America. Who could have seen it coming?
Emine Yücel has a piece out at TPM this morning about another potential member of the “Oops” Caucus in the making: Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) who, now that she is locked in a tight reelection fight, is outspokenly critical of White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought. Vought’s manifold creative ways to impound congressionally appropriated funds — seen by many experts as indicative of a veritable constitutional crisis — is, of course, a slap in the face of the Senate Appropriations Committee Chair, Collins.
But Collins voted to confirm Vought. Vought was confirmed by all 53 Republican senators. All Democrats voted against him.
As Emine details, Vought’s views, at the time of that vote, were clear. During Trump’s 2024 campaign, Vought, now famously, was caught on tape saying of government agencies, “we want their funding to be shut down.” “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said.
He did not hide these views during his confirmation hearing, during which he said he believed the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, passed to rein in the Nixon administration’s refusal to spend congressionally appropriated funds, was unconstitutional. Collins voted for him after all this was public. Collins’ office did not answer Emine when asked whether the senator regrets her vote.
These “Oops” Caucus stories share a few factors: a senator viewed by much of the media as more reasonable or centrist than their colleagues, and a Trump administration figure taking actions that are exactly in line with who they were publicly known to be. Is it believable that Kennedy, America’s leading vaccine skeptic, would choose not to act on those beliefs once in government? Is it believable that Vought, who declared his intent to starve the government of funds, would then not do so once confirmed? Is it reasonable to believe that a weekend Fox News host, known for his extreme Christian views and lack of personal control, would undergo a total transformation once given authority over the most powerful military in the world?
Tillis’ support for Hegseth was particularly egregious given that he initially urged key witnesses to come forward against the nominee, suggesting that, if they did, the nomination would fail. As the Wall Street Journal reported in January 2025:
Tillis personally assured Danielle Hegseth in a call on Jan. 19, witnessed by two other people, that if she signed the statement testifying that she believed her former brother-in-law Pete Hegseth has an alcohol-abuse problem and was abusive to his second wife, it would carry weight, and potentially move three votes—his own, along with the votes of Sens. Susan Collins (R., Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska), those people said.
Danielle Hegseth did as Tillis asked. Tillis nonetheless cast the deciding vote to confirm Hegseth.
It takes 51 votes to confirm a member of the administration in the Senate, and in many cases, a two-thirds majority — 67 votes — to remove one. Once these people are in, they are in. The time to examine their records closely is before they are confirmed, not after. The “Oops” Caucus is made up of veterans of the Senate who know how this works. Keep that in mind when assessing their second thoughts.
To his (limited) credit, Tillis goes some way toward capturing the situation in his book, confessing that his and similar senators’ failure to do the job they were elected to do came from the fear of losing it.
“I know for a fact that there are others like me,” he writes, “Republicans who agreed to go along with the early demands of the Trump team no matter how ridiculous they were, believing that failing to do so would mean the end of their political career, and who now see that things have gone way too far.”
Trump Says He’ll Pay for Those ‘Government-Funded’ Campaign Ads After All
A rare climb-down from the commander in chief.
The news came in a Truth Social post: “The Radical Left is upset with the fact that I am taking Ads, which I consider to be a positive promotion for our Great U.S.A., and paying for them with U.S.A. money.” He claimed (falsely) that this is “a rather standard thing to do” but said he would now “pay for them myself, and with money I raised for MAGA, Inc.,” a Super PAC.
The U.S. government has spent more than $10 million on these ads, the New York Times reports. The money came from funding appropriated for the Department of Homeland Security.
The ads appear to violate a provision of the 2026 appropriations law saying money can’t be used for “propaganda.” The new arrangement likely violates the law as well: The Campaign Legal Center, a good government group, has filed a complaint with the FEC over Trump’s claims to control MAGA Inc.’s money — Super PACs are supposed to be independent of the politicians they support. But the FEC is nonfunctional, with four of six commissioner seats vacant, and nothing is likely to happen.
I suppose a Richard Nixon revival was inevitable. After all, the 37th president was the modern model of the corrupt, abusive presidency that is currently being perfected by Donald Trump and his corrupt administration. In fact, much of the legal theory of the unitary executive under which the current administration operates sprang from the bowels of right-wing think tanks smarting from Nixon’s fall from grace.
Many of the norms, rules and laws that governed the executive branch until Trump and his loyalists systematically threw them in the White House dumpster originated in the aftermath of Watergate, so reimagining Nixon as the first victim of the so-called deep state serves as a perfect rationale for what is happening today. For conservatives, the long-awaited historical payback has finally come.
In July, the Wall Street Journal reported that Nixon is suddenly all the rage among young conservatives who are “Nixonmaxxing” all over social media and sporting merch with sayings like “Nixon now, more than ever” and “Pretty girls for Nixon.” One young fan mused, “Is Nixon pulling off the greatest posthumous political comeback in history?”
Maybe so. This new interest among the Gen Z crowd is actually a well-designed public relations campaign by The Nixon Foundation, which used social media in 2018 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his presidency. Short-form videos featuring Nixon saying “I am not a crook” over gangster rap, along with clips from “Mad Men” showing Jon Hamm-as-Don Draper saying, “Kennedy, I see a silver spoon, Nixon, I see myself,” went viral.
But the fandom is more than just vibes. Podcasters like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson have both recently called Watergate a setup, never mind the evidence or admissions by Nixon’s accomplices like H.R. Haldeman in his diary. Even Vice President JD Vance is in on the act, comparing himself to Nixon in June during an event to promote his memoir at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum: “Young senator, vice president, writes some bestselling books, is hated by the media.” (He’s not wrong.)
“I’ve always liked Richard Nixon,” Vance said, calling him a political genius. The vice president praised Nixon’s foreign policy acumen, giving him props for the opening of China and the Vietnam peace process, while conveniently leaving out the part about bombing Cambodia. Vance also denigrated the Watergate hearings and investigations that eventually brought Nixon down, saying, “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
Nixon didn’t have the right-wing media machinery that now excuses Trump’s criminality and spreads conspiracy theories — like the trope that the “deep state” is out to get the president. That alone has managed to keep the MAGA base and Republican officials on board with Trump.
Sadly, he’s probably right. Nixon didn’t have the right-wing media machinery that now excuses Trump’s criminality and spreads conspiracy theories — like the trope that the “deep state” is out to get the president. That alone has managed to keep the MAGA base and Republican officials on board with Trump, which is why he was acquitted in two impeachment trials during his first term. After all, Nixon didn’t resign until he was told that he had lost his base in the Senate and faced certain conviction and removal from office. That wasn’t the case in February 2021, of course, when the Senate refused to convict Trump for “Incitement of Insurrection.”
But there is also evidence that even Nixon had his limits. Yes, he grossly abused the office of the presidency, treating the executive branch like his private fiefdom. He ordered the FBI and the CIA to commit crimes. He bribed, blackmailed and paid off potential witnesses against him. But he didn’t burn the tapes, and he dutifully turned them over when the Supreme Court ordered him to do so. And although there was that infamous “19-minute gap” on one of the tapes that would have sealed his fate, many of the conversations revealed a profane, corrupt president.
But even as Nixon’s overall approval rating sank to 24% during the week before his resignation on Aug. 9, 1974, Republicans — 62% of them — still supported him. These were undoubtedly some of the die-hards who eventually began pushing to roll back the reforms that were enacted in Nixon’s wake.
During a post-presidency with British television presenter David Frost, Nixon famously said, “When the president does it, it’s not illegal.” Those words sounded then — and sound now — like an authoritarian gaffe. But in reality, the idea was based on a very real concept popular among right-wing Republicans, who believed that the president should have unfettered power to enact policies to “protect” the nation.
After that interview, Nixon penned a 2,500-word essay explaining he didn’t believe the president is above the law, but that the nation’s executive must be granted “some faith in his judgment” and given “room for maneuver.”
“His powers are not unlimited,” Nixon wrote. “But neither can be existing law — in a limited way, and at times of special need — and still meet these larger responsibilities.” Apparently, “special need” could be defined as whatever the president says it is, and therein lies the unlimited power.
This notion forms much of the logic of the unitary executive theory that has been growing among thinkers on the right for decades, and with court cases beginning in the early 1980s, the presidency has been granted more and more such power. This, of course, culminated in Trump v. United States, the 2024 Supreme Court ruling that gave the president near total immunity from prosecution for anything done in office. (The president had already been granted immunity from civil liability by the Court in Nixon v. Fitzgerald in 1982.) Now, the idea that presidents are above the law is gaining steam with yet another “investigation of the investigation,” this time into the special prosecutors who scrutinized Nixon back in 1974.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump Justice Department is now officially looking into that case based upon the conspiracy theories promulgated by Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon aide turned historical revisionist and conspiracy theorist who presented “a two-hour presentation at Justice Department headquarters called ‘Watergate As Lawfare,’” making the argument that, you guessed it, the deep state took down Richard Nixon.
There’s a method to all this madness, and it’s best illustrated by the fact that Vance is the one leading the charge. Any ambitious Republican official thinking about the future has to find some way to excuse their complicity in Trump’s corrupt — and likely illegal — behavior. If they have any hope of being elected to national office, their only choice is to try to maintain these MAGA fictions and arcane conspiracy theories after Trump is gone by continuing to deny the reality of what he’s done. One way to do that is to convince people that it was never just about Trump; the deep state has been out to get Republicans ever since Nixon.
If they can’t convince people that their complicity was actually righteous resistance to a secret cabal of bureaucrats and dirty cops fighting to keep Republicans from enacting their righteous agenda, then potential GOP presidential candidates like Vance are likely going to have a hard time overcoming what is likely to be a massive revolt against Trumpism once he is out of office.
We’re seeing the edge of it now — and it’s not just about the price of gas. The air is finally going out of MAGA, and every single Republican politician who took advantage of it will be held accountable by the voters for what they have done. The GOP’s only hope is to find a Republican somewhere who hasn’t been touched by Trump and MAGA.
The biggest scandal in the modern history of professional sports broke wide open across the Atlantic this past week. How much that reflects larger social, cultural and economic pathologies and whether it affects regular people’s lives in any meaningful way is a complicated question. At the very least, I would suggest that the Manchester City scandal, which has driven the already-overheated British media to new heights of hysteria, isn’t really about soccer or sports.
Man City (often simply called “City”) is by far the most successful team in the English Premier League over the last 15 years and one of the four or five biggest soccer franchises in the world. Last week an independent legal panel delivered a long-anticipated verdict, finding the club guilty on 114 counts of systematic financial fraud, amounting to more than a billion dollars in fake revenues and sham commercial sponsorships. This scathing judgment only covers the years from 2009 to 2018, but no one thinks the actual or alleged fraud suddenly stopped after that.
Effectively, the verdict amounts to a finding that City cheated their way to the top of world football through a dizzying but blatant series of scams and shell games, allowing the team’s petro-state owners to illegally outspend competitors and pump hundreds of millions into inflated salaries for star players like Norwegian thirst-trap Erling Haaland (he of the formerly golden locks), Kevin De Bruyne and Sergio Agüero, and illustrious coaches, first and foremost among them the Catalan genius Pep Guardiola.
(Visionhaus/Getty Images) British newspaper headlines after Manchester City found guilty of breaches of Premier League financial rules, Sept. 26, 2026.
Along with winning numerous championships and tournaments, Man City changed the nature of the world’s favorite sport and transformed the EPL from a medium-size U.K.-based enterprise plagued by hooliganism, erratic attendance and crumbling stadiums into a global merchandising and marketing empire whose broadcasts, “kits” and online fan clubs extend from Indonesia to Arkansas.
If you belong to the large proportion of humanity inclined to a shrug-emoji reaction — billionaire oligarchs, overpaid athletes, incalculable sums of dirty money; who cares? — the first thing to say is that you’re absolutely right and that’s the only healthy response. But the salient fact that pushes the Man City narrative beyond a sports-business scandal and toward more cultural, political and even philosophical terrain is that virtually everyone who followed soccer and the EPL understood what was happening all along. That sort of willful blindness or collective cynicism is by no means limited to sports or celebrity culture — and it has become a widespread corrosive force in our society.
At any rate, everyone who was paying attention rapidly perceived the pattern after 2008, when Manchester City — a historically mediocre team with a modest fan base, sad-sack local rivals to Manchester United, who dominated the sport in the 1990s — was acquired by the Abu Dhabi United Group, a private equity firm closely aligned, shall we say, with the royal family of a Persian Gulf autocratic state. (Exactly how closely, and whether ADUG can be considered a separate entity from the Abu Dhabi government, is one of the issues at stake in the byzantine Man City case, now heading into an appeal process that could take years.)
It’s worth noting here that City Football Group, the ADUG subsidiary that has poured all that money into Man City, also owns or operates football/soccer clubs and related real estate projects around the world, including New York City FC in Major League Soccer, which at this moment is constructing an expensive new stadium in Queens, to be named — like everything else in the CFG universe — for Etihad Airways, Abu Dhabi’s state-owned carrier.
Here we find the central conundrum of the Man City scandal: Abu Dhabi’s petrodollars are deeply embedded in the economies of many Western nations, and any effort to punish or exile the emirate’s big sporting property could have far-reaching ripple effects.
Here lies the central conundrum of the Man City scandal, which is, like so much else about this story, a dirty secret that is no secret at all. Abu Dhabi’s petrodollars are deeply embedded in the economies of many Western nations, and any serious effort to punish or exile ADUG’s prize sporting property could have far-reaching ripple effects. That goes a long way toward explaining why U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who has struck such a forceful posture toward Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, has issued only vague blandishments about this explosive case on his own home turf, and clearly hopes the whole thing will simply go away.
In his excellent summary of the City scandal, Alex Shephard of the New Republic observes that the “massive accounting sham” behind the team’s spectacular rise under the Abu Dhabi ownership was concealed only in threadbare fashion, and was widely tolerated for a range of interlocking reasons:
Manchester City committed fraud on a massive scale primarily as a soft power project for an authoritarian nation because it was allowed to do so. The Premier League chose to look away. The team was good and the money was flowing. Questions about its finances — let alone about its ownership — were swept under the rug. As Manchester City became the best team in the Premier League, the Premier League became the most powerful league in Europe and, by extension, the world.
It isn’t easy to translate this tangled affair into American terms, and in any case I’m here to argue that the real significance of the Man City story is not about big-money skulduggery in professional sports. But let’s imagine that the Los Angeles Dodgers or the New York Knicks were found to have broken the rules of their respective leagues to such an extraordinary degree that observers seriously suggested that their recent championships should be stricken from the record books and that the teams themselves should be banished from Major League Baseball and the NBA for years to come, if not forever. (Such outcomes are on the table in the City case; so is a slap on the wrist and a large payoff, or a negotiated compromise somewhere in between.)
Let’s further imagine that we had collectively decided that the Dodgers or Knicks were so entertaining to watch that we’d pretend not to notice that they were owned by Kim Jong-un’s first cousin or Vladimir Putin’s niece. (Which if anything is understating the case: ADUG’s proprietor, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, is the brother of Abu Dhabi’s absolute ruler and his regime’s vice president.) Then we’d pretend we were surprised to learn that their entire operation was shamelessly corrupt, when the only genuinely surprising part was that the leagues involved had decided to risk their own survival by exposing the financial misdeeds after all those years of looking the other way.
My point here is that while I’m surprised to find myself writing yetanotherarticle in 2026 about soccer — if you presume that betrays some personal interest, you would be correct — this one isn’t really about soccer at all. Whatever ultimate judgment befalls Manchester City after years of legal wrangling is beside the point, although there’s some grim amusement to be found in comments sections on The Athletic, as fans try to “well, actually” or DYOR a verdict that will certainly tarnish the team’s reputation in perpetuity.
This is partly a story, as Shephard says, about sportswashing and the immense soft-power reach of authoritarian regimes like the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, all of which are heavily invested in professional soccer and other global sporting ventures. (Paris Saint-Germain, the biggest team in France and current European champions, was once owned by its fans but is now a property of the Qatari state.) Beyond that, it’s a story about questions almost too large to describe clearly.
It’s a story about a world that pretends to value democracy but is increasingly defined by massive inequality, oligarchy and, for that matter, monarchy. It’s about a world where the billionaire ex-president of the United States had to run for re-election in order to stay out of prison — and it worked. A world where the two most respected organizations in American broadcast journalism, CNN and CBS News, could come under the control of one man, who transparently aims to turn them into propaganda outlets supporting one faction of one political party.
This is partly a story about sportswashing and the immense soft-power reach of authoritarian regimes like the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. And also a story about a world that pretends to value democracy but is increasingly defined by massive inequality, oligarchy and, for that matter, monarchy.
It’s a story, in other words, about how much we will put up with. Or rather about how much we have convinced ourselves we must accept, given the unimaginable imbalance between the tech billionaires and fossil-fuel despots on one side and the other 99.9% of us on the other, whose only feasible role is to be their servants, their worker drones or their captive audience, or else to be deemed expendable.
It would be ridiculous to cast the English Premier League as a hero in that larger narrative, as if its current stance had anything to do with standing up against autocratic sportswashing or defending democracy and the rule of law. Man City may even have a point, on the level of libertarian economic theory, that the EPL’s financial rules were unfairly structured to prevent upstart teams from competing with long-established franchises like Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United, and that owners should be allowed to spend as much as they want to put a competitive team on the field. (That is, in fact, exactly how Major League Baseball operates, although its moment of reckoning is right around the corner.)
But there may also be a crude lesson under this dunderheaded clash of the titans that pertains to democracy, and can be seen reflected in the verdict on the Trump regime that we all see coming in this year’s American midterm elections, or in the surge of popular opposition to data centers and to the unrestricted development of AI. To paraphrase the maxim falsely attributed to Lincoln, you can fool a whole bunch of the people for a hell of a long time, but you can’t fool all of them forever.
Ultimately, the Premier League must have concluded that the reputational and economic damage of prosecuting its most successful team for obvious financial crimes — which is likely to be considerable — was preferable to the damage of not doing so. EPL leadership stuck a finger in the wind of public opinion, so to speak, and decided their best chance of not killing the golden goose lay in manning up for the principles they had visibly abandoned, or at least pretending to.
You definitely shouldn’t care what becomes of the EPL or Manchester City; I’d be better off if I didn’t either. Erling Haaland and his teammates will be fine, as will the Abu Dhabi royals, although whatever remains of the club’s pre-2008 Mancunian fanbase is likely to suffer bitterly. But you might care about finding the outer limits of the corrosive social and cultural corruption and cynicism to which we have all been subjected — and in which we have all been complicit — and then finding the courage and resolution to resist.
Will I watch Manchester City’s first post-verdict match on Oct. 11, against their archrivals Liverpool? Um, yeah. It’s a news event! I’m doing my job, or that’s what I’ll tell myself. But I won’t pretend my hands are clean.
‘Nearly Every Claim Uttered in These Ads Is False’
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, has joined other Democrats this week in demanding answers about President Trump’s midterms campaign ads — which promote nothing but himself — and the apparent use of taxpayer dollars to finance them.
I wrote earlier this week about the top Democratic appropriators in Congress calling for investigations into the ads and confirming reports that the White House moved some $20 million in taxpayer funds out of the Department of Homeland Security to bankroll the vanity project. Raskin and Rep. George Whitesides (D-CA) sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) on Tuesday to look into the reported shuffling of funds.
“Accordingly, we are writing to formally request that the GAO investigate the source, accounts, and total amount of taxpayer funds used by the Executive Office of the President to produce and distribute this advertisement across major television markets and official White House social media channels,” Raskin and Whitesides wrote in the letter to acting Comptroller General Orice Brown and special counsel Charles Baldis.
The two are asking for a formal investigation into how much the advertisements cost, how they have been paid for and whether any federal laws were broken in either the creation of the ads or the use of tax dollars to fund them. Raskin and Whitesides asked both agencies to look into whether the ads are a violation of the Hatch Act, the Anti-Deficiency Act, the Consolidated Appropriations Act or other federal criminal statutes.
“The Trump Administration knows what they are doing is unlawful, as evidenced by their halfhearted attempts to defend their actions. An anonymous White House spokesperson called the ads ‘educational,’ and suggested that they are ‘clearly not political’ because the ‘president is not on the ballot,’” the lawmakers wrote. “Yet just a few short weeks ago, at his poorly-rated Republican National Convention, President Trump pleaded for his rapidly dwindling ranks of supporters to vote, begging them to ‘pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.’ The White House can’t have it both ways.”
The lawmakers also, amusingly, fact check many of the claims Trump makes in the ads to argue that they could not possibly serve as “public service announcements” — like those made during the COVID-19 pandemic — as the White House has claimed.
Screenshot: Raskin and Whitesides letter to GAO, OSC Sept. 30, 2026.
“President Trump is obviously desperate for the American people to ‘love’ him, a problem that goes beyond your jurisdiction,” they wrote. “But stealing taxpayer dollars to pay for Mr. Trump’s narcissistic ego trips is plainly illegal. Your agencies have an important responsibility to hold accountable members of his Administration who violate the laws and policies under your purview.”
Raskin and Whitesides join their colleagues Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Henry Cuellar (D-TX) as well as Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) in asking questions about what exactly is going on with the egregious shuffling of funds for the ad campaign, seemingly designed to help Republicans win races next month (even though many vulnerable Republicans are trying to put a 10 foot pole between themselves and Trump’s political toxicity at the moment). The top Democratic appropriators are concerned about this because it appears as though the money was moved and used for something outside of its congressionally appropriated purpose — taxpayer dollars that were allocated for Customs and Border Protection in Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill” last year.
The ads have run on major airwaves in recent weeks including Fox, Newsmax, MS NOW, and CBS, and also during NFL games over the weekend.
Obviously, Democrats are concerned about the corruption and violation of federal law. But this trend of Trump inserting himself into the midterms because he’s worried Republicans are going to lose a chamber of Congress simply because he is not on the ballot — and Republican stumbling as they alternately embrace the administration’s failing policies and distance themselves dramatically from the unpopular president — has been a rare moment of levity in our current hellscape.
Donald Trump has never been one for subtlety, so it follows that his taxpayer-funded “public service announcement” instructing Americans to love him would literally feature a gospel choir singing the words “Love Me.” Along with many of his closest allies, the president is a fan of pseudo-science, so perhaps he believes the repetition will have a hypnotic effect on viewers, reversing through pop psychology trickery the free-fall that has beset his approval ratings.
This is just one of three separate ads, totaling $1.5 million so far, that feel less like a sincere effort to persuade voters and more like an expensive effort by the White House to soothe the temperamental 80-year-old. Either way, what’s indisputable is that Trump is becoming increasingly frustrated that the chicanery he has used throughout his life no longer seems to be working.
The president has perhaps the most staggering track record of defrauding Americans of any hustler in the country’s 250-year history. His glib assertions of being the greatest genius who knows more than any other person about any subject under the sun have served him well for decades, and his 34 felony fraud convictions and civil fraud cases paint a picture of a man who always seems to find marks who will believe his transparent, self-aggrandizing lies.
Before he won the White House in 2016, “The Apprentice” managed to convince millions of viewers that a man who managed to lose nearly a billion dollars was some great businessman. Even when Trump argued that he, unlike medical experts, understood the salutary effects of household cleaners to treat Covid-19 patients, his followers stayed by his side, some of them putting their trust in MAGA quackery over science-based healthcare like vaccines. The cult of personality built around his persona of presidential greatness remains a puzzling swindle.
But on Monday in the Oval Office, Trump did what he usually does these days when presented with a microphone: He whined at length at how he isn’t getting the love he believes he deserves.
“Nobody talks about all the incredible things,” the president complained, saying America has “the best economy we’ve ever had.” He added, laughably, that people are “twice as wealthy” as they were as two years ago under the Biden administration. Then he repeated his false promise that, if Republicans win the November midterms, the government would issue a “dividend” check of $5,000 to every adult American.
Polls, however, suggest that Americans are finally waking up. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found his approval rating at a dismal 32% — hitting, in other words, the very bedrock of his MAGA base.
It may be easy to laugh at this stuff, but it’s worth taking a moment to remember that Trump has always been this way. Polls, however, suggest that Americans are finally waking up. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found his approval rating at a dismal 32% — hitting, in other words, the very bedrock of his MAGA base. Worse for him, only 13% of Americans, according to an analysis by G. Elliott Morris, are willing to tell a pollster they buy the president’s $5,000 check lie, showing that even people who claim to approve of him can’t be bothered to trust him any longer.
People could be learning from experience. As Catherine Rampell of the Bulwark detailed, the $5,000 check promise is only the latest in a long list of false second-term promises that Americans would be receiving fat checks from the government. Her “partial list” includes these examples:
$5,000 stimulus checks via a “DOGE dividend” (February 2025)
$2,000 stimulus checks via a “rebate” or tariff “dividend” (July 2025, August 2025, November 2025, December 2025, February 2026)
Checks of indeterminate value that would redirect money that would have been spent on Affordable Care Act subsidies (November 2025)
$500 Obamacare “rebate” checks (September 2026)
$5,000 “dividend” if Republicans win the midterms (yesterday)
Thankfully, there now appears to be a limit to the number of times a fraudster can promise the check is in mail before even some MAGA voters start to wonder if they’re being had. Most clung to two big reasons to justify their vote in 2024: the president’s promises to lower prices and end foreign wars. Trump broke both in a dramatic fashion, starting a war with Iran and a trade war with, well, much of the world, both of which have escalated inflation, particularly of fuel prices. Even his most ardent followers are reminded of his lies every time they buy groceries or gas. Running ads that repeat his failed promises only serve to remind people of the broken trust.
Beyond bigger propaganda, Trump has no other ideas for how to change the situation. On top of the ads, last week the White House launched “Trump TV,” which was billed as an alternative to cable news but mostly runs pro-Trump content so poorly produced that it makes AI slop seem compelling. As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye chronicled, the viewership started at a paltry 8,000 people and, by the next day, had faded to fewer than 1,000. It would have likely been even lower if it weren’t for journalists watching it to report on the emptiness of the enterprise.
Perhaps the surest sign that these efforts are more about placating Trump than persuading voters is the his travel schedule. The president is avoiding visiting states with close congressional races, where he risks being shunned by Republican candidates trying to distance themselves from his unpopularity. Instead, he is mostly sticking to deep red states like Alabama and Oklahoma, where they can still scare up enough MAGA diehards to fill stadiums and, crucially, give Trump hours of reassurance that he’s still got fans. On Tuesday, he spoke at an event heralding our era as a “golden age” due to AI. As a political maneuver, his words were baffling, as most Americans deplore the economy and loathe AI. But being surrounded by billionaires while applauding himself with gold-related talk is Trump’s happy zone, and keeping the president there appears to be all that matters to his West Wing staff.
For the worrywarts of the left, there remains plenty to be concerned about. Ahead of the midterms, Democrats are facing intense gerrymandering and voter suppression, which could blunt the wins currently projected by the polls. Even if the party were to take both the Senate and the House, Trump will still occupy the Oval Office for two more years. Armed with the criminal immunity granted him by the Supreme Court, he has no reason to stop blatantly flouting the law in a myriad of ways, ranging from his attacks on the Kennedy Center and prosecuting the Iran war without congressional approval to his own mysterious swelling wealth.
Still, even though it’s almost certainly illegal, there is an upside to Trump using taxpayer money for ego-gratifying TV ads and propaganda. The more time he spends on his futile efforts to restore the glory days when only half of Americans opposed him, the less energy he has for the work of actually governing. Everything he’s done in that arena has been an unmitigated disaster. Keeping Trump distracted from making serious decisions is a good thing for us all.
A Republican member of the Senate broke party ranks on Monday in a letter to the chair and ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asking that the panel subpoena Donald Trump Jr. and gather more facts about his “active promotion of family-backed cryptocurrency ventures, his continued pursuit of international real estate deals involving direct meetings with foreign heads of state, and his reported investments in defense contracting.”
In his letter, Sen. John Curtis (R-UT) argued that his colleagues were being hypocritical in their singular focus on President Biden’s son Hunter Biden throughout the former president’s entire term while turning a blind eye to Don Jr. and the “questions” that have “arisen about the relationships of President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., with foreign business figures and the acceptance of significant gifts. These include a lavish wedding afterparty, on a private island, provided by Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev, who reportedly traveled to China as part of a delegation accompanying Vladimir Putin shortly before giving the gift.”
“A toaster is a wedding gift. A private-island party paid for by a Putin-connected oligarch is something else,” Curtis continued. “Republicans nearly wore out the subpoena machine investigating Hunter Biden’s foreign relationships. We should not unplug it now.”
In his letter to Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Dick Durbin (R-IL), the chair and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, respectively, Curtis also argued that Hunter Biden should be dragged back before the panel as well, and urged the committee to “launch an investigation into the use of presidential family relationships for private financial benefit, preferential treatment, or access by domestic and foreign interests.”
“The country should not have to accept one standard for the family of a Republican president and another for the family of a Democratic president. Nor should congressional oversight begin and end when control of the White House changes hands,” Curtis wrote.
Curtis is not up for reelection until 2030, so he does not fit neatly within the (minor) trend of Republicans gently bucking the president ahead of what polls say could be a dismal midterm election for the GOP. A handful of Republican members of Congress up for reelection have called out Trump on his immigration policies or the war in Iran or on data centers — an issue that is becoming a major flashpoint for Republicans this cycle, even in red states, as Trump refuses to allow for any nuanced position on the matter (due to his whole being in bed with Big Tech thing).
Curtis had previously described reports of Don Jr.’s lavish wedding gift from a Russian oligarch as “corruption.” ProPublica uncovered the cartoonishly venal episode, which involved Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev funding the post-wedding festivities for Don Jr. and his new wife on exclusive islands in the Bahamas. Kremlev has close ties to President Vladimir Putin. President Trump has claimed that his son paid Kremlev back for the extravagant vacation. Don Jr.’s wife is, apparently, still confused about what the issue is.
Grassley has not yet responded to the letter from Curtis, but Durbin posted a statement on Tuesday. He mildly countered Curtis’ claims about Hunter Biden, arguing the former president’s son has “already given Congress a sworn deposition on this issue” but said he supports Curtis’ request for transparency.
“Corruption must never be tolerated. @SenJohnCurtis has made a good faith request that the Senate Judiciary Committee investigate the lavish gift of a Russian oligarch to President Trump’s son as well as any wrongdoing by the son of former President Biden,” Durbin wrote in a post on X. “In fairness, Hunter Biden has already given Congress a sworn deposition on this issue. Donald Trump Jr. has not. To ignore this is to run the risk of being complicit. I will join in supporting Senator Curtis’ request of the Judiciary Committee.”
Corruption must never be tolerated. @SenJohnCurtis has made a good faith request that the Senate Judiciary Committee investigate the lavish gift of a Russian oligarch to President Trump’s son as well as any wrongdoing by the son of former President Biden.
This story was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive their biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
In the final weeks of 2019, a top fundraiser for Sen. Susan Collins walked into a perilous meeting at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C.
For the first time in her two-decade Senate career, the Republican lawmaker from Maine was in danger of losing her seat. President Donald Trump’s dismal approval ratings were dragging her down in the polls, and she was falling behind her likely 2020 Democratic challenger in fundraising.
Scott Reed, head of the Collins super PAC, was on a mission to close that gap. Reed was meeting that day with three executives from a Hawaiian defense contractor, Navatek. A year earlier, Collins had helped their company land a multimillion-dollar Navy research contract in Maine. Now, seated at a coffee shop not far from the U.S. Capitol, Reed asked them for a $500,000 donation.
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