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Ross Raked In Over $53 Million As Trump's Commerce Secretary

Ross Raked In Over $53 Million As Trump's Commerce Secretary

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

The Commerce Secretary appointed by former President Donald Trump is said to have earned at least $53 million while collecting a taxpayer salary for a position that required him to work in the best interest of the public instead of focusing on his own profits.

According to HuffPost, Wilbur Ross' earnings were a focal point of a recent complaint filed by the watchdog organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). During his four years working under the Trump administration as the head of the U.S. Commerce Department, Ross reported making "somewhere between $53 million and $127 million."

CREW reports that the figures are based on three different yearly financial disclosures along with Ross' final termination report which the watchdog organization obtained from the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.

Ross' financial disclosure filings have triggered complaints about the conflict of interests between his position and profitable affiliations. The watchdog organization sounded off about Ross' entanglements with a number of private companies while holding public office. Since the federal government only requires outside income to be reported in "broad range," CREW also believes there is a high likelihood that Ross' profits were "significantly more" than reported.

"Wilbur Ross reported making a minimum of $53 to $127 million in outside income during his four years as secretary of commerce for Donald Trump," CREW said in its statement. "It is possible that he earned significantly more as he was not required to specify certain income totals over $1 million. Even in an administration characterized by corruption, Ross became notorious for mixing personal business with his government role."

The statement added, "It is impossible to know Ross's exact income because it was reported in broad ranges, but it is clear that while running the agency in charge of promoting economic growth and regulating global trade for the United States, he made tens of millions of dollars."

The latest complaint against Ross comes just months after the release of a report by the Commerce Department's Inspector General's Office. While Ross was cleared on speculation of insider trading, the report did indicate that he had "violated the federal standard of failing to avoid the appearance of ethical and legal breaches."

Former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross

Trump's Commerce Chief Oversaw Security Unit That Spied On Census Critics

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

During Donald Trump's four years as president, his administration was a revolving door. But one person who was part of the Trump Administration throughout most of his presidency was former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who started in February 2017 and stayed until February 2021. The Department of Commerce, as journalist Shawn Boburg reports in an article published by the Washington Post on May 24, has had an "obscure security unit" that was "tasked with protecting" its "officials and facilities" — and during its Trump/Ross era, according to Boburg, it "evolved into something more akin to a counterintelligence operation that collected information on hundreds of people inside and outside the Department."

According to Boburg, "The Investigations and Threat Management Service (ITMS) covertly searched employees' offices at night, ran broad keyword searches of their e-mails trying to surface signs of foreign influence and scoured Americans' social media for critical comments about the (2020 U.S.) Census, according to documents and interviews with five former investigators. In one instance, the unit opened a case on a 68-year-old retiree in Florida who tweeted that the Census, which is run by the Commerce Department, would be manipulated 'to benefit the Trump Party,' records show."

Boburg adds, "In another example, the unit searched Commerce servers for particular Chinese words, documents show. The search resulted in the monitoring of many Asian-American employees over benign correspondence, according to two former investigators."

John Costello, who formerly served as deputy assistant secretary of intelligence and security for the Commerce Department under the Trump Administration, is highly critical of ITMS — telling the Post that ITMS "has been allowed to operate far outside the bounds of federal law enforcement norms and has created an environment of paranoia and retaliation at the Department."

Bruce Ridlen, a former supervisor, told the Post that the ITMS' tactics make it look as though "someone watched too many 'Mission Impossible' movies."

Ridlen, who left ITMS in October 2020, told the Post, "I chose to resign from my position with ITMS after it became clear there was no authority to perform law enforcement functions. There were no policies in place to outline standards of conduct or to establish parameters for investigative activities, which led to investigative inquiries of U.S. persons over protected free speech found on several social media platforms."

Former Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo was sworn in as commerce secretary under President Joe Biden in early March.

Boburg explains, "(ITMS) has managed to keep a low public profile until now, while pursuing investigations into 'counterintelligence, transnational crime and counterterrorism,' as it described its activities in a 2018 budget document submitted to Congress. Incoming Commerce leaders from the Biden Administration ordered ITMS to pause all criminal investigations on March 10, and on May 13, ordered the suspension of all activities after preliminary results of an ongoing review, according to a statement issued by Department spokeswoman Brittany Caplin. The suspension came two days after the Post presented its findings about the unit to the department and sought interviews."

The statement read, "The current Commerce Department leadership team takes this issue seriously. The Department expects that at the end of the review, it can and will implement a comprehensive solution to the issues raised."

Blame Wilbur Ross For Clumsy Lies That Made A Mess Of Census

Blame Wilbur Ross For Clumsy Lies That Made A Mess Of Census

If you want to understand why the Trump administration is scrambling at the last minute to include a citizenship question in the 2020 census, you have to look beyond the lawsuits filed by Democrats anxious about the question’s political impact. The only reason that litigation produced a June 27 Supreme Court decision blocking the question was the blatant, bumbling mendacity of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose rationale for the change Chief Justice John Roberts and four of his colleagues deemed “contrived” and “pretextual.”

Whether that conclusion should make a legal difference is a matter of dispute; four justices thought it shouldn’t. But if Ross, whose department includes the Census Bureau, had told the truth — or even if he had been better at lying — census forms with the citizenship question would already be rolling off the presses.

The evidence that Ross’ official explanation — that the Justice Department needed better data to enforce the Voting Rights Act — was not the real reason for his decision persuaded three federal judges as well as a majority of the Supreme Court. It is not hard to see why.

“In the Secretary’s telling,” the court said, “Commerce was simply acting on a routine data request from another agency. Yet the materials before us indicate that Commerce went to great lengths to elicit the request from DOJ (or any other willing agency).”

That record shows Ross “began taking steps to reinstate a citizenship question about a week into his tenure, but it contains no hint that he was considering VRA enforcement in connection with that project.” After making the decision for reasons he has yet to reveal, Ross spent months trying to gin up a respectable excuse.

Under Ross’ instructions, his policy director “initially attempted to elicit requests for citizenship data from the Department of Homeland Security and DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, neither of which is responsible for enforcing the VRA,” the court said. “After those attempts failed, he asked Commerce staff to look into whether the Secretary could reinstate the question without receiving a request from another agency.”

The VRA rationale originated not with the Justice Department, as Ross repeatedly claimed, but with Commerce Department staffers trying to satisfy their boss’s demands. The DOJ was unwilling to write this cover story until Ross persuaded the attorney general to intervene, and even then, “the record suggests that DOJ’s interest was directed more to helping the Commerce Department than to securing the data.”

The DOJ letter requesting a citizenship question was not written until nine months after Ross had made his decision, and it “drew heavily on contributions from Commerce staff and advisors.” Furthermore, “After sending the letter, DOJ declined the Census Bureau’s offer to discuss alternative ways to meet DOJ’s stated need for improved citizenship data,” reinforcing the impression that the VRA justification was phony.

Why does it matter? “In order to permit meaningful judicial review, an agency must ‘disclose the basis’ of its action,” the court said. “The reasoned explanation requirement of administrative law … is meant to ensure that agencies offer genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public.”

The court left open the possibility that the Commerce Department could try again, this time without lying. It noted that the commerce secretary has wide discretion to determine the contents of the census and that review of such decisions is “deferential.”

The Trump administration now faces two problems. First, while there are plenty of plausible nonpartisan reasons for asking about the legal status of U.S. residents in the census, coming up with one at this late date will smack of desperation.

Second, the administration has insisted all along that it needed to start printing forms by last week to keep the census on schedule, which is why its appeal in this case went straight to the Supreme Court. The administration has weaved a tangled web for itself that will be hard to escape.

IMAGE: Wilbur Ross testifies before a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee confirmation hearing on his nomination to be commerce secretary at Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., January 18, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine. Follow him on Twitter: @JacobSullum. To find out more about Jacob Sullum and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

In Census Case, Judge Questions Trump’s ‘New’ Reasons For Citizenship Query

In Census Case, Judge Questions Trump’s ‘New’ Reasons For Citizenship Query

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

In a new filing before the U.S. District Court in Maryland, the Trump administration said on Friday that it is still pursuing potential avenues to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census, despite the Supreme Court’s recent ruling blocking such a move.

Chief Justice John Roberts argued in a majority ruling that because Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had provided a “contrived” justification for including the question, falsely citing concern for the Voting Rights Act as his even in light of contradictory evidence, the department would be blocked from moving forward.

Now the Justice Department and the Commerce Department have said that they are examining other potential reasons for including the question in a filing before Judge George Hazel in Maryland. If the administration comes up with a new reason for including the question, the lawyers argued, it will constitute a new decision, and thus wouldn’t be blocked by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling.

“Any new decision by the Department of Commerce on remand providing a new rationale for reinstating a citizenship question on the census will constitute a new final agency action,” they wrote in the filing.

But in his response, Judge Hazel subtly mocked this notion, putting scare quotes around the word “new.” This suggested the obvious fact that there’s nothing new about the administration’s attempt to conjure up a rationale. The administration’s actions clearly show it has already decided that it wants to include the citizenship question — quite obviously because it hopes to discourage certain populations from answering the survey and thus biasing electoral maps against Democrats — and it’s just trying to cook up an excuse that the judiciary can accept.

Judge Hazel used quotes around the word “new” twice, emphasizing how transparent the administration’s attempts to dupe the courts are:

The Court has received and appreciates the discovery plans submitted by both sides. It appears that while the parties agree to the parameters of the proposed schedule, Defendants take the view that discovery on the remaining equal protection and Section 1985 claims should be put on hold pending a “new” decision being reached by the Commerce Secretary. While there is some degree of logic to Defendants’ position, the Court disagrees based on the unique circumstances of this case.

Plaintiffs’ remaining claims are based on the premise that the genesis of the citizenship question was steeped in discriminatory motive. The discovery contemplated by the Court related to the recently discovered evidence in this casc goes directly to that issue. Regardless of the justification Defendants may now find for a “new” decision, discovery related to the origins of the question will remain relevant. Given that time is of the essence, therefore, the prudent course is to proceed with discovery. As both sides acknowledge, the schedule may be adjusted as circumstances warrant.

Hazel also suggested that he sees through the Trump administration’s ploy by referring to the “unique circumstances of this case.” By that he meant, it seems, the circumstance in which the government has been outright lying.

As to the substance of the judge’s order, he concluded that the plaintiffs who are suing the administration, claiming that the question was included with discriminatory intent (as recently revealed emails strongly indicate), can proceed to the discovery phase of their case over the departments’ objections. That means the plaintiffs should be able to receive new evidence about how the citizenship question decision came about, potentially shedding more light on the administration’s corrupt intentions.

IMAGE: US District Judge George Hazel of Maryland.