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Tag: richard blumenthal
Senate Commerce Chair Asks FTC To Probe Facebook's Suspected Deceptions

Senate Commerce Chair Asks FTC To Probe Facebook's Suspected Deceptions

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The chair of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday asked a regulator to investigate whether Meta Platforms' Facebook misled its advertising customers and the public about the reach of its advertisements.

In a letter to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan seen by Reuters, Senator Maria Cantwell said "evidence suggests that Facebook may have deceived its advertising customers about its brand safety and advertising metrics" and "may have engaged in deceptive practices."

Meta and the FTC did not immediately comment.

Cantwell added that "public information suggests that Facebook’s potential misrepresentations about brand safety and advertising metrics may be unfair, as well as deceptive."

She said "a thorough investigation by the Commission and other enforcement agencies is paramount, not only because Facebook and its executives may have violated federal law, but because members of the public and businesses are entitled to know the facts regarding Facebook’s conduct."

Cantwell cited a 2020 Senate report that Facebook reportedly controlled approximately 74 percent of the social media market.

In October, Senator Richard Blumenthal said both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the FTC should investigate claims made by a Facebook whistleblower that the company knew its apps were harming the mental health of some young users.

The FTC has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook that urged a court to demand that the company sell two big subsidiaries.

The FTC's case against Facebook represents one of the biggest challenges the government has brought against a tech company in decades, and is being closely watched as Washington aims to tackle Big Tech's extensive market power.

The FTC originally sued Facebook during the Trump administration, and its complaint was rejected by the court. It filed an amended complaint in August that Facebook has asked be tossed out.

(Reporting by David Shepardson and Chris Sanders; editing by Diane Craft and Grant McCool)

Senator: If Trump Jr. Defies Senate Intelligence Subpoena, Arrest Him

Senator: If Trump Jr. Defies Senate Intelligence Subpoena, Arrest Him

Trump has basked in his supporters’ pernicious “lock her up” chants against Hillary Clinton for years.

But now, at least one Democratic Senator is calling for Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., to be locked up — if Trump Jr. ignores a subpoena from the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee.

“The subpoena should be enforced,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said on Thursday, according to the Hill newspaper. “If he refuses to obey it, he should be locked up.”

The GOP-run Senate Intelligence Committee subpoenaed Trump Jr. in order to clear up testimony Trump Jr. previously gave the committee that has since been contradicted by former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, according to Reuters.

The testimony is in regard to Trump Jr.’s involvement in the negotiations for a new Trump Tower in Moscow, which took place as Russia was hacking and meddling in the 2016 election to benefit Trump.

Blumenthal said that Trump cannot exert executive privilege to prevent his son from testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee — a tactic Trump has used to block other subpoenas issued by House Democrats.

“There are no privileges for Donald Trump Jr.,” Blumenthal said. “The son of the president doesn’t have any of those privileges.”

Blumenthal added that there are “a number of responses he gave that are challengeable based on the truth” and that Trump Jr. needs to clear those up.

“I was in the room and my clear impression was that his answers were deliberately misleading and false,” Blumenthal said. “He said he was only peripherally aware of the negotiations in Moscow for Trump Tower there when apparently he was briefed extensively.”

Lying to Congress is a crime — one that helped send Cohen to federal prison for three years.

Trump and other Republicans are furious with Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) for issuing the subpoena to the younger Donald. They’re saying that the president’s son has been “exonerated” by special counsel Robert Mueller’s report and that Congress should move on.

But Mueller’s report never says Trump Jr. was exonerated, and even says there is a “reasonable argument” to conclude that he broke campaign finance laws with the infamous Trump Tower meeting. That doesn’t sound like exoneration in the slightest.

He does have one legal way of getting around the subpoena: invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

And according to Reuters, it appears Trump Jr. may very well invoke that right to avoid answering questions about his possible lies.

Of course, Trump himself has excoriated people who have invoked their Fifth Amendment rights, saying that “innocent” people don’t plead the Fifth.

Trump might change his tune now that his own son is running out of options.
Published with permission of The American Independent.
Founders Foresaw Trump When They Wrote Emoluments Clause

Founders Foresaw Trump When They Wrote Emoluments Clause

Reprinted with permission from DCReport.

That pesky, annoying caboose of legal problems for Donald Trump continues to move through the federal courts, thanks to a decision last week.

While Trump faces attacks on his taxes, his business practices and ethics, and the findings of the Mueller Report, this challenge focuses on the idea that Trump continues to bank profits from his hotel business while serving in the White House — an alleged abridgment of the “emoluments” clause of the Constitution.

In Washington, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan denied a Justice Department request to dismiss the lawsuit, filed in 2017 by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and 200 other members of the House and Senate who claim Trump is violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution by doing business with foreign governments through his hotels.

As summarized by Fortune Magazine, the judge’s ruling would allow the Democrats to start seeking financial records from the Trump Organization in a pre-trial exchange of information. The Justice Department can try to block that by appealing the ruling. Trump is already fighting congressional subpoenas for his tax information in court and has vowed to fight “all subpoenas.”

Sullivan in September ruled the Democrats have legal standing to pursue their claim, and held off deciding on the merits. Last Tuesday’s 48-page decision gives a detailed explanation for siding with the Democrats in a fight they say is crucial for battling corruption by the Trump White House.

As part of the clash, Democrats are using a broad definition of emoluments to cover profits from Trump’s businesses and Trump is seeking a narrow meaning. Sullivan said the Democrats had the more convincing argument.

Trump’s definition “disregards the ordinary meaning of the term as set forth in the vast majority of Founding-era dictionaries,” Sullivan said in his ruling. The judge also said Trump’s definition “is inconsistent with the text, structure, historical interpretation, adoption, and purpose of the clause; and is contrary to executive branch practice over the course of many years.”

Democrats argued the word is broadly defined “as any profit, gain or advantage.” The president countered that an emolument would be, for example, a payment from a foreign government for an official action or a salary from a foreign power.

The emoluments clause says that certain federal officials, including the president, can’t accept an emolument from “any King, Prince, or foreign State” without “the Consent of the Congress.” The congressional Democrats are seeking an order compelling Trump to notify Congress when he’s offered an emolument, giving them the option to vote on whether he can accept it. Blumenthal has called the emoluments clauses the Constitution’s “premier anti-corruption provision.”

Trump said he stepped down from running his $3 billion empire but retained his ownership interests, a decision the Democrats say violates the emoluments clause because he’s getting payments from foreign governments without congressional approval.

While the Democrats claimed they’re being denied the right to vote on the benefits, attorneys for the president say the matter should be resolved in Congress, not in court.

Meanwhile, Reuters has an interesting report about what appears to be another emoluments clause controversy. This one aims at how Trump has allowed at least seven foreign governments to rent luxury condominiums in New York’s Trump World Tower in 2017 without approval from Congress, according to documents and people familiar with the leases, a potential violation of the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause.

The emoluments clause controversies started out as debates among legal scholars regarding provisions of the Constitution that had not been interpreted by any court of record in the United States since the adoption of the Constitution itself. Over the past two years, though, the issues raised have given rise to litigation across the nation and allegations of self-dealing and what some might call influence peddling through Trump’s businesses, in a form that has never been seen with any previous president.

IMAGE: Flags fly above the entrance to the new Trump International Hotel on its opening day in Washington, DC, September 12, 2016. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo

Trump Campaign Urges TV Producers To Silence His Critics

Trump Campaign Urges TV Producers To Silence His Critics

Talk about bad faith.

On Monday, the Trump campaign sent a memo to TV producers arguing that prominent Trump critics — including four Democratic members of Congress, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, and former CIA Director John Brennan — should be banned from appearing on news segments.

The reason? All six people have made comments about Trump and Russia that the Trump team disagrees with.

Tim Murtaugh, communications director for the Trump campaign, claims in the memo that Brennan, DNC Chair Tom Perez, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Eric Swalwell (D-CA), have all made “outlandish, false claims” about the likelihood that Trump or members of his campaign colluded with Russia on its election-meddling.

Murtaugh then begs producers to “employ basic journalistic standards” when considering whether these members of Trump’s enemies list “warrant further appearances” — or, in other words, to never book them again. If producers do decide to book them, Murtaugh begs that anchors at least “challenge them to provide the evidence which prompted them to make the wild claims in the first place.”

There’s a lot to unpack here.

First of all, Trump is routinely represented on TV by serial liars like Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Rudy Giuliani. Even if the claims about Trump critics lying were true, it would take a lot of chutzpah for the Trump campaign to try to take the high road on facts and truth.

But more to the point, the claims about lying aren’t true.

The Trump campaign, like the Trump White House, is promoting the bogus idea that the Mueller report has completely exonerated Trump — even though almost no one, including the White House, has gotten the chance to read that report in full.

The only thing made public so far is a four-page summary of Mueller’s report that is written by a biased source: William Barr, Trump’s hand-picked attorney general.

And even that likely skewed summary included a quote from the Mueller report making clear that the report “does not exonerate” Trump on the question of obstruction of justice.

It’s true that Barr’s report also says the Mueller report “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

But we don’t know what else the Mueller report said about the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia. And being unable to “establish” collusion beyond a reasonable doubt is not the same thing as saying there was no evidence for it.

That’s what the six critics on the Trump campaign’s list were talking about: evidence of collusion. And there’s plenty of that — both in public reports, and potentially as part of investigations still being conducted by Congress.

It’s hard to say whether the Trump campaign’s stunt is more pathetic, or more scary. It’s a chilling attempt to stifle freedom of the press, but it’s also a flatly absurd gambit from a group of serial liars.

In other words, it’s typical Trump behavior.

Published with permission of The American Independent.