The Swamp

Johnnie wrote: ↑Sun Nov 22, 2020 10:55 pm I heard Rahm Emanuel for Transportation Secretary.

He's not as much of a piece of shit as McConnell's wife, but the fact he's even in the mouths of anyone is just fucking pathetic.

govmentchedda wrote: ↑Sun Nov 22, 2020 11:11 pm

Johnnie wrote: ↑Sun Nov 22, 2020 10:55 pm I heard Rahm Emanuel for Transportation Secretary.

He's not as much of a piece of shit as McConnell's wife, but the fact he's even in the mouths of anyone is just fucking pathetic.

Fuck.that.shit.

Johnnie wrote: ↑Sun Nov 22, 2020 11:15 pmI'm sure he'll get overwhelming bipartisan support and then I'll be told to calm my attitude down or some shit.

psunate77 wrote: ↑Mon Nov 23, 2020 10:27 am I wish she would STFU.

Remember when she booed Hillary?

tennbengal wrote: ↑Mon Nov 23, 2020 12:59 pm It should be abundantly clear he showed back up to concern-troll and then was planning on dunking on everyone when Trump won. Only Trump didn't win.

Ignore is your friend...

Concerned that President Trump’s refusal to accept the election results is hurting the country, more than 160 top American executives asked the administration on Monday to immediately acknowledge Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the president-elect and begin the transition to a new administration.

As a way of gaining leverage over the G.O.P., some of the corporate executives who signed on to the joint letter Monday have also discussed withholding campaign donations from the two Republican Senate candidates in Georgia unless party leaders agree to push for a presidential transition, according to four people who participated in a conference call Friday in which the notion was discussed.

tennbengal wrote: ↑Mon Nov 23, 2020 10:10 pm

Rex wrote: ↑Mon Nov 23, 2020 7:31 pm This certification/legal/recount saga is the real life version of the Jack Marston epilogue in Red Dead Redemption: totally unnecessary, introduces new characters that nobody likes, memorable only for how annoying it was, and sure to be revisited in the sequel four years from now.

Steve of phpBB wrote: ↑Mon Nov 23, 2020 8:21 pm

Yeah, ok, I guess y'all were right. Biden getting elected is almost exactly the same as having a Republican.

At the time the Office of Inspector General launched the probe, Mayorkas was head of a program known as EB-5, which offered a path to Green Cards to foreign investors willing to put $500,000 into a job-creating U.S. business – a program whose popularity exploded under his stewardship.

Similar issues within the immigration program were the focus of an ABC News investigation that aired last month, which found that officials in the Department of Homeland Security had ignored pointed warnings from federal agents and approved visas for immigrants suspected of having committed fraud, money laundering, and even one applicant with alleged ties to a child porn website. Several of those cases involved investment projects whose executives had sought and received help from powerful political figures to lobby Mayorkas for support.

Concerns about the agency and Mayorkas’s stewardship have simmered for years. When he was promoted to Deputy Secretary, Republican senators took the unusual step of boycotting his confirmation hearing, complaining that he should not be approved until the ongoing investigation into his conduct by the Inspector General was completed. The hearings went forward without the Republican committee members, and he was ultimately confirmed.

DSafetyGuy wrote: ↑Tue Nov 24, 2020 10:42 am

Steve of phpBB wrote: ↑Mon Nov 23, 2020 8:21 pm

Yeah, ok, I guess y'all were right. Biden getting elected is almost exactly the same as having a Republican.

From 2015:

At the time the Office of Inspector General launched the probe, Mayorkas was head of a program known as EB-5, which offered a path to Green Cards to foreign investors willing to put $500,000 into a job-creating U.S. business – a program whose popularity exploded under his stewardship.

Similar issues within the immigration program were the focus of an ABC News investigation that aired last month, which found that officials in the Department of Homeland Security had ignored pointed warnings from federal agents and approved visas for immigrants suspected of having committed fraud, money laundering, and even one applicant with alleged ties to a child porn website. Several of those cases involved investment projects whose executives had sought and received help from powerful political figures to lobby Mayorkas for support.

But, Republicans are definitely the only party to find ways to get their controversial selections approved.

Concerns about the agency and Mayorkas’s stewardship have simmered for years. When he was promoted to Deputy Secretary, Republican senators took the unusual step of boycotting his confirmation hearing, complaining that he should not be approved until the ongoing investigation into his conduct by the Inspector General was completed. The hearings went forward without the Republican committee members, and he was ultimately confirmed.

One is under indictment, the other could be in a Biden administration

By David North on July 2, 2020

Immigration news does not consist solely of polices and numbers. Sometimes it involves interesting individuals, such as the feud seven years ago between two Obama-era appointees, both at the Department of Homeland Security. Jousting were Alejandro Mayorkas, then head of USCIS, and Charles K. Edwards, then the Acting Inspector General.

Edwards alleged that Mayorkas had bowed to political interests to advance some EB-5 (immigrant investor) applications, which the latter denied. Meanwhile there were a variety of reports about Edwards' misuse of his Acting IG's position, such as this one from TV reporter Jake Tapper.

The intervening years have been kinder to Mayorkas than to Edwards. The controversy about the EB-5 applications went away, Mayorkas was promoted to Deputy Secretary of DHS, and was confirmed by the Senate (four words we rarely see these days), and left the Obama administration before it ended to become a partner at a major D.C. law firm.

Edwards never lost the "Acting" title, and moved to another, less prominent position with the department; then he left it. Earlier this year, he was indicted in federal court for theft of government property and scheming to defraud the government.

During the Obama administration he had been accused of nepotism – he hired his wife and arranged for her to continue to work for the IG's Office while on family business in India –and there were charges that he used his IG staff to help him write his dissertation at a time when he was seeking a Ph.D. from Nova Southeastern University in Florida, which US News and World Report gave a (very low) rating of 246 among American universities.

Edwards' indictment in March, in federal court in the District of Columbia, rested on a different set of charges. He and his indicted colleagues were said to have illicitly taken proprietary software from the DHS IG's Office in an effort to sell an updated version of it to the IG for the Department of Agriculture. Other charges were of wire fraud and aggravated identify theft.

Although little public speculation has been printed about staffing the future Biden administration, were that to happen, Mayorkas' resume would suggest he might be considered for a significant job in either the executive or judicial branches; he once was the youngest U.S. attorney in the country, in California. I have not spoken to either man in years.

Steve of phpBB wrote: ↑Tue Nov 24, 2020 2:18 pm See also ...