It was bad when the Bidens did it, and it’s just as bad when the Trumps do it.
Insider deals, finders’ fees and backdoor introductions to family members are business-as-usual in Third World banana republics, but these slimy practices have now been normalized in the White House, to the shame of the nation.
The New York Times reports that Eric and Donald Trump Jr., sons of President Donald Trump, and Kyle and Brandon Lutnick, sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, are tied to a billion-dollar tungsten-mining deal that the US government is financing in Kazakhstan.
The prez himself actually called into a meeting between Howard Lutnick and Kazakhstan’s president as the deal was being finalized.
Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment-banking company founded by Lutnick and now run by his sons, has long been a prominent underwriter of global-mining projects.
Lutnick himself has stepped away from the company. But Cantor Fitzgerald’s interests have certainly not been harmed by having its founder in Trump’s Cabinet: Cantor is an adviser or underwriter for at least 13 mining companies that have or are in the process of getting major financing or contracts from the federal government.
The Trump sons, meanwhile, are part-owners or investors in companies neck-deep in a key defense contract to mine tungsten reserves in Central Asia.
It stinks to high heaven.
If a president’s family making bank from obscure resource companies in the former Soviet Union sounds familiar, maybe that’s because Hunter Biden’s lucrative connection to Burisma — a Ukrainian gas company — was a major scandal in the 2020 election and beyond.
Republicans, including Donald Trump, were justifiably outraged at the obvious influence-peddling.
Hunter Biden’s role as Biden family bagman — the one who collected money on behalf of the “Big Guy” — became the emblem of a rotten, damaged Oval Office.
True, no one thought of Trump & Co. as unblemished saints, but who would’ve thunk he, his kin and associates were going to use the Biden family template — virtually backing up the truck and stealing the carpets and silver — as a model of ethical behavior?
The Lutnick and Trump boys have been sloshing around in the muck since their dads came to power 18 months ago.
They’ve profited handsomely from cryptocurrency deals while the government their fathers control were setting crypto policy.
Democrats in Congress are pressing for an investigation into Trump sweetheart deals.
If they take the House in the midterms, these hearings are surely coming.
It would behoove the Trump administration, and the nation as a whole, if the president gets ahead of the growing scandal, acts transparently and cleans up the whole mess before it swamps his final two years in office — and defines his legacy.