Although this conflict of interest has been documented before, and it was already known that the Secret Service paid a bill of 1.4 million dollars to the former president’s hotels from 2017 to 2021, Congress has seen accounting reports that generate more outrage.

On Monday, the House Oversight Committee reported that the fees charged to the Secret Service to stay at Trump hotels, and thus provide a security scheme for the president and his family when they participated in events, was totally “ excessive”. According to bills seen by the Committee, federal employees paid up to five times the budgeted rate for one night’s stay.

“The exorbitant fees being charged to the Secret Service and the agents’ frequent stays at Trump properties raise significant concerns about the personal treatment of the former president and may have resulted in a taxpayer-funded windfall for the former president’s ailing businesses. Trump,” said Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat from New York.

In one of the ledgers seen by the Oversight Committee it is found that the Secret Service was charged $1,160 for a room at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., a rate that was five times higher than the 2012 budget. dollars per room for that season. This is money paid by taxpayers. Hotels offer a special government rate for federal officials, at a good discount, but this does not seem to be the case with the Trump Organization.

These records contradict information from the Trump Organization and relatives of the former president, who claimed that Trump hotels gave agents rooms at normal cost, at deep discounts or even for free.

“Any services provided to the United States Secret Service or other government agencies at Trump-owned properties were at their request and provided at cost, heavily discounted or free of charge,” the Trump Organization said in a statement. .

Eric Trump, son of the former Republican president, had stated on his own that “if my father travels, (the agents) stay at our properties for free… if they went to a hotel across the street, they would be charged $500 for night, while you know we charge them, like 50 (in ours)”.

Trump visited his estate 547 times, including 145 visits to his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida and also his ongoing visits to the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, according to an investigation by the US-based Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility. Washington. Secret Service agents were to stay with him. If the budget for a room was much less than spent, how did the Secret Service pay the bills?

“The Secret Service has been authorized additional flexibility for spending during protection missions, including per diem spending above the government rate,” Maloney said in a letter sent to the Secret Service asking for more complete information about expenses, since the panel he presides considers that the expenses could be higher than the 1.4 million that are known.

“Given longstanding concerns about the former president’s conflicts of interest and efforts to cash in on the presidency, the committee has a strong interest in obtaining a full accounting of federal government spending on Trump properties,” he wrote. Maloney.

Neither the Trump Organization nor the Secret Service have commented on this scandal.

(Taken from The Spectator)

As detailed by the attorney general of New York, Letitia James, the authorities want the accused to not be able to acquire commercial real estate in the state for five years, and prevent them from receiving loans from any financial institution registered in the entity during the same period.

The 214-page lawsuit is the culmination of a three-year investigation showing that Donald Trump and his children Ivanka, Eric and Donald Trump Jr., as well as Trump Organization executives Allen Weisselberg and Jeffrey McConney, allegedly used the image of wealth and opulence of the former president to make him look like a great businessman who earned millions of dollars when he was a television presenter, as well as during his presidency.

James announced the details of the lawsuit at a news conference, where she said the case was civil, not criminal, and that her office rejected settlement offers made by Trump’s attorneys.

The prosecutor stated that the “investigation revealed that Donald Trump engaged in years of illegal conduct to inflate his net worth, to deceive the banks and the people of the great state of New York.”

“Stating that you have money that you don’t have is not the art of the deal. It is the art of theft,” she maintained.

The prosecutor seeks compensation of 250 million dollars, since, according to her, this would be the approximate value of the benefits that the defendants would have obtained after using these fraudulent practices.

The objective of the alleged scheme would be to boost Trump’s image as a billionaire and the value of his properties, since by doing so he obtained several advantages: he could access favorable loan conditions with cheaper interest, pressure insurers to provide him with more comprehensive coverage at lower premiums while strengthening his image as a business strongman.

Meanwhile, the investigation also indicated that the former president and his company devalued assets on other occasions to obtain tax benefits.

The prosecuting body claims to have found evidence of falsifying business records, issuing false financial statements, insurance fraud, conspiracy acts and bank fraud. James’ office said the findings will be forwarded to federal prosecutors and the Internal Revenue Service.

The former president would have lied when he said that his apartment in Trump Tower had 2,787 square meters and not the real 1,096. Meanwhile, his valuation of Mar-a-Lago in Florida was $739 million and not the roughly $75 million he actually costs.

What is the prosecution looking for?
Letitia James, through her office, is seeking the appointment of an independent auditor for at least five years to oversee the Trump Organization’s compliance with financial reporting, appraisals, and disclosures to lenders, insurers, and tax authorities. .

Another matter that James seeks, which is allowed by federal law, is to ban the former president and the Trump Organization from making commercial real estate acquisitions and obtaining loans from New York banks for five years, as well as permanently bar the Trumps from being officials or directors of any company or similar business entity registered and/or licensed in the State of New York.

Officials of the Trump Organization, if found guilty, would be barred from exercising the financial control function of any New York corporation or similar business entity registered and/or licensed in the State of New York.

In addition, the Organization will go to trial in October for a criminal proceeding. He is accused of giving tax-free perks to top executives, including CFO Weisselberg, who received $1.7 million in bonus payments.

The executive pleaded guilty on August 18 and will have to testify at trial. If the Trump Organization is found guilty, it could pay a penalty of twice the amount of the taxes it has not paid.

As Letitia James files this lawsuit, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is conducting a parallel criminal investigation into the same business practices, saying in a statement that “our criminal investigation regarding former President Donald J. Trump, the The Trump Organization and its leadership is active and ongoing.”

The former president testified in August about this case after strong pressure, although in his statement he accepted the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, which allows the accused to remain silent.

From his social media platform, Truth Social, Donald Trump called the lawsuit “another witch hunt by a racist attorney general,” referring to James, a declared Democrat and African-American.

The former president called James “a fraud who campaigned on a ‘get Trump’ platform, despite the fact that the city is one of the world’s crime and murder disasters under his watch!” .

Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba, also lashed out at the prosecutor, accusing her of abusing her authority “by meddling in transactions in which absolutely no wrongdoing has occurred,” adding that the lawsuit “doesn’t even focus on the facts.” nor in the law, rather, is it focused solely on advancing the attorney general’s political agenda.”

The lawsuit about Trump joins various open legal proceedings against the president, who could aspire to re-election in 2024 and squeezes a pillar of the Republican Party a few weeks before the mid-term elections in November, in which this force is play the domain of Congress.

(With information from France24 and RT in Spanish)

So then the city is not the one you are walking, but instead the replicas and the representations that you carry with you, and what actually matters to you is how to focus the vivid images you no longer see, but which reside within you like the lines of your palm, in which are etched the corners, the window grilles, the large angels carved into the walls, the skyscrapers, the exits to the urban labyrinth that are in the songs of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Patti Smith and the models of identity that the folk song broadcasts from Washington Square Park.

You already know New York. It is described in the first chapter of Moby Dick, in The Great Gatsby and Manhattan Transfer, of course. It’s The Catcher in the Rye, the city as background for the mystery of adolescence; The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, according to Henry Miller, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, from the viewpoint of Tom Wolfe. It’s Truman Capote, Toni Morrison and Richard Price. You know that no one who writes in Spanish has surpassed the New York chronicles penned in our language by José Martí: “Culture is as subtle as air, and like perfume more vaporous than visible. But a sign of culture is a desire for it, and this is New York,” he said in 1884, having been “in the fiery workshops, where the country is forged: with those who wander, with those who fall in love, with those who steal, with those who live in solitude and inhabit it; with those who build.”

You have seen this city in a thousand and one forms in the Woody Allen films that came to the theater in your small town. You heard it in a song, Moon River, when it was the voice of a woman with a guitar and freshly-washed hair at the window in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The Big Apple is also an open-air film set: you shoot aerials, panoramic vistas, kisses on Fifth Avenue, King Kong cradling Ann, Broadway musicals, bank robberies, the neon lights of Times Square…

We all have in our memory an inexhaustible city in this cluster of islands bought from the indigenous people in 1626 by the Dutch and which they called New Amsterdam, but not for long. The English seized it from them in 1664 and gave it its definitive name. And since New York is New York, monumental, classic, modern, avant-garde, lyrical, Hollywood-esque, capitalist, imaginative and rebellious, sketching a route through its streets depends not on what you want, but on time.

That flag as a sign of conquest and that hateful gesture is not New York, they tell you, and now you’re getting on the subway, it’s as if you’ve paid for admission to the great human comedy. It’s not just that you see the face of the world—you’re told that one time a passenger on the train started to yell: “Does anyone here speak English?” and no one turned around. Those tunnels that bore through all of the city’s subsoil, which harbor all of the faces and all of the languages on the planet, is the place where segregation breaks down and where you are certain that there is no apocalypse for you, although you live surrounded by its signs. The faces of the poor, rich, old, adolescent, black, white, those from New Jersey, from the Bronx or from Soho should be visible underground. They can travel, sitting side by side, the Wall Street yuppie who drove the price of an orange through the roof in all the markets of the world, and the man who lost his meager harvest and ended up cleaning the bathrooms of the Stock Exchange.

It moves you to sit beside a young woman who will cross all of Manhattan after cleaning a boxing gym. She tells you that she’s from Puebla, that they caught her when the tried to enter the United States at the border and later they released her, that she has two undocumented daughters who won’t be able to go to college and that her husband works in construction. While she converses she distractedly jiggles a book that she obviously was reading before starting this dialogue. Surely no one will believe you when you tell them: the title she has in her hands is The Power of Dreams.

You end up where you started, asking yourself the same questions from the morning. But night in this city can’t go out if it’s not in a big way. Between the Hudson and the East River, at the crossroads of the paths that José Martí must have roamed during the 15 most prodigal years of his life, you can hear a Bruce Springsteen concert dedicated to the work of Pete Seeger and recorded in Dublin. A powerful band full of banjos, trumpets, violins and accordions furiously intones the hymn of the civil rights movement, “Eyes on the Prize”: “The one thing we did was right/ Was the day we started to fight.” And this, which you hear with your aching feet, tells you that there’s something beyond the movies, literature, newspapers and even the history books. There is a New York that is only your New York.
(By Rosa Miriam Elizalde)

Little before his departure this afternoon, Cuomo said he will do everything within his reach to achieve lifting the economic, commercial and financial blockade that the U.S. keeps on the island for more than half a century.

He thanked all the attention he received during his stay on the part of officials and the people of the island and highlighted the importance of the meeting he held with First Cuban Vicepresident Miguel Díaz-Canel, with whom he talked about the perspectives of developing Cuban-United States links.

I feel proud of the role played by President Barack Obama in the process of approaching Cuba, in particular his most recent decision to exclude Cuba from the list of nations that according to the U.S. State Department sponsor terrorism.

Cuomo visited Tuesday the Special Development Zone of Mariel and on Monday he held a meeting with Cuban Minister of Foreign Trade and Investment, Rodrigo Malmierca, in which both talked about business opportunities offered by the Caribbean nation.

The New York Governor arrived here yesterday accompanied by representatives of leading U.S. companies like the financial services company Mastercard, airline JetBlue, pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Regeneron, agribusiness enterprises, among others.

These businesspeople sustained work meetings with their Cuban counterparts in order to pave the way to a later-on cooperation, when the policy of unilateral sanctions imposed by Washington against the greater of the Antilles is dismantled.

Cuomo is the first U.S. governor to visit Cuba after thne decision announced on December 17, 2014 by presidents Raul Castro and Barack Obama of laying the foundation for the reestablishment of diplomatic relations and advance to normalization of bilateral links.

(Prensa Latina)

During the meeting, Diaz-Canel and Cuomo talked about the process to update the Cuban economic system, the relations between Cuba and the United States and the prospects to develop relations between the state of New York and Cuba, said a press release circulated here.

Director of the General Office for the United States of the Cuban Foreign Ministry, Josefina Vidal and other ministerial officials participated in the meeting, said the communique.

The governor of New York arrived yesterday in Cuba, heading a group of 20 businesspeople from his state, interested in knowing the business opportunities with the Caribbean island.

Opening the New York-Cuba Business Forum at the hotel Parque Central in this capital, Cuomo asserted that full relations between Cuba and the United States were the path to discuss not only those issues on which we agree, but also our differences.

The New York governor also expects that the blockade (imposed by the United States on the island more than 50 years ago) is lifted to be able to finally make progress in the normalization of relations.

(Prensa Latina)

The National Ballet of Cuba (BNC) is scheduled to perform Wednesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it will give four shows after a brief, warmly-received stay in Washington.

The Cubans will kick off their Brooklyn performances with “La magia de la danza” (the magic of dance), a show that is like an anthology of relevant moments of 19th century dance, including versions of classics like Giselle, The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Don Quixote, Sleeping Beauty and the Gottschalk Symphony.

The BNC came to New York after earning a burst of positive reviews, such as the one by Maritza Gueler, who wrote in Danza Hoy, “The Ballet Nacional de Cuba dances with passion, the passion of its own Cuban essence. And it dances with the pride of being one of the most famous companies in the world, whose main characteristic is the technique of the Cuban school of ballet.”

Meanwhile Sara Kaufman of the Washington Post wrote, “There are so many stellar qualities in this company, all of them underscoring a wide-open embrace of physical potential.”

Under the general direction of Alicia Alonso, the company has returned to New York as part of a U.S. tour after an eight-year absence.

The next cities on the tour agenda are the Costa Mesa and Los Angeles in California, where the tour will end on June 28.

(Prensa Latina)