After Trump met with TV executives and anchors yesterday, a reporter asked Kellyanne Conway if Trump is still conducting business as the president-elect and "is that an appropriate use of his time and are you confident he isn't breaking any laws?"
She replied, "I'm very confident he isn't breaking any laws. He has various lawyers, accountants and advisers telling him what he can and can't do."
Don't you feel better now?
During the entire presidential campaign, C&L and many other progressives demanded the media look much more closely at Trump's tax returns, business ties at home and abroad and as Kurt Eichenwald made quite clear, it's impossible for Donald to separate himself from his businesses and that will impact foreign relations.
Remember how the media and Republicans in Congress obsessed over Bill Clinton's use of the White House Christmas card list?
The Republican Congress heard 140 hours of testimony -- repeat, 140 hours of testimony -- on the burning question of whether the Clintons had misused the White House Christmas card list.
Digby writes about this in length:
That tweet from Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway came in response to questions from the press about all of Trump’s ethical violations since the election. I wrote about a few of themon Monday, but since then it has been reported that Trump had asked about some permitting issues for a Trump project during a call with the president of Argentina (an issue Kurt Eichenwald raised in his investigation of Trump’s conflicts of interest back in September). The Argentine president’s office said the request didn’t happen, but the journalists who reported it are credible and it has since been revealed that Ivanka Trump was on the call, so it was a breach of normal protocol regardless.
Last night the New York Times reported that when Trump met with British politician Nigel Farage he asked for help in opposing wind farms that ruin the view from Trump’s Scottish golf courses. Andy Wigmore, an anti-Brexit media consultant who was present, said they are happy to oblige:
Mr. Wigmore headed communications for Leave.EU, one of the two groups that led the Brexit effort. He said in an email that he and Mr. Banks would be “campaigning against wind farms in England, Scotland and Wales.”
Trump will surely not forget the favor.
These are some of the recent ethical breaches we know about. They are unlikely to be the only ones. The Trump transition has already made it clear that they do not believe the norms that have always applied to previous presidents should apply to him.
The president-elect tweeted this out Monday night:
These issues were obvious during the campaign when Trump refused to release his taxes or otherwise reveal the extent of his holdings. There were dozens of issues — such as his fraudulent charity, the myriad lawsuits, claims of sexual assault, benefits his campaign received from actions against his opponents by hackers and law enforcement — that would almost certainly have destroyed any other candidate.
But the press pretty much ignored this issue throughout the campaign. They are paying attention now, but there is a sense that it’s all just whirling around in the general maelstrom that is the Trump phenomenon...read on.
Read the whole piece because she explains quite clearly how Trump is violating norms and the Constitution, even to the extent that he’s committing impeachable offenses even before he takes office.
But will anybody bother to hold him accountable?
And like clockwork, during Trump's meeting with the NY Times, he said this:
Are you ready for Richard Nixon, Part Deux?
