Lessons From Two Corruption Stories in North America: Trudeau vs Trump II

Trudeau's woes, as I mentioned them in my previous post, make an interesting backdrop to a real corruption scandal in the US.

Anyone with half a brain and willingness to face reality knows that Trump is a corrupt liar. But his latest is a doozy.

A while ago, the billionaire owner of New England Patriots Robert Kraft was caught in a massage parlor receiving the proverbial "happy ending" or "rub and tug" in current parlance. The spa was part of a chain that was established by Li Yang, a Chinese businesswoman. While she no longer owns that particular establishment, a word I use advisedly, she still has a number of spas and massage parlors in southern Florida.

Currently, Li Yang's (she goes by Cindy) more prominent business is selling access to President Trump to Chinese companies. Yes, you read that correctly. She went from profiting from the debasing work of enslaved and likely trafficked women to funneling money to the Grifter-in-Chief.

Here is how she and her husband Zubin Ging went about it. First, they contributed to Trump Victory, a PAC, over $42,000.

Then Cindy arranged to have her photo taken with the President during a donation dinner at Mar-a-Lago Resort. 

The New York Times now reports that she has raised $ 50,000 in donations so she could take a photo with Trump at an event last March, which the president later even signed with a silver pen. 

This looks like an earmarking scheme.
That's a violation of federal election laws and a crime.

It could be a crime because of the way she raised the requisite $50,000.

Because individual financiers could not contribute more than $ 5,400, but the photo opportunity cost $ 50,000, Yang had at least nine people from their environment to donate money to Trump - each exactly $ 5,400. Among the donors were her husband and her mother, as well as several women who worked in shops of Yang's family.

Li Yang with the Orange Man

Now with visual proof of her proximity to Trump, Cindy and her husband Zubin Gong started a company that promised Chinese businessmen access to the President and prominent cabinet members and other politicians.

The company, called GY US,  "describes itself on its website, which is mostly in Chinese, as an “international business consulting firm that provides public relations services to assist businesses in America to establish and expand their brand image in the modern Chinese marketplace.”

There is more:

On a page displaying a photo of Mar-a-Lago, Yang’s company says its “activities for clients” have included providing them “the opportunity to interact with the president, the [American] Minister of Commerce and other political figures.” The company boasts it has “arranged taking photos with the President” and suggests it can set up a “White House and Capitol Hill Dinner.”

And to prove that they displayed many pictures taken with Trump and his family members.

Her Facebook contains many more pictures taken with (besides Trump and family) "Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Rick Scott, Sarah Palin, the president’s campaign manager and an assortment of other high-level Republican operators."

The company website (which is now down) has a list of upcoming Mar-a-Lago events where guests would have the opportunity to mingle with Trump and his family. One such event was Trump's New Year dinner and GY US brought in a number of Chinese businessmen to interact with Trump, his sons and his sister Elizabeth Trump Grau.

Now, that dinner cost $575 two years ago, $750 last year and $1,000 in 2019. Yahoo Finance reported that one Chinese businessman, Huachu Tang flew 17 hours to make it to the dinner and noted that "Tang has paid even more since he received admission as part of a package offered by a public-relations agency." Which is GY US.

However, Trump couldn't attend due to government shutdown. So, to get his money's worth, Tang did the next best thing and had his picture taken with the rest of the Trump family.

So this is a President who profits from his position by selling tickets to private dinners at his own resort, charges $50,000 a pop to get his picture taken and allows Chinese former brothel owners to sell access to him to Chinese businesses.

Now we know why he spends so much time in the Southern White House.

Imagine the uproar if anybody else did these things. Actually no need to imagine, there is precedent.

There was a time when such plainly corrupt conduct would have raised more than an eyebrow or two. Back in the distant past when Crooked Hillary was first lady, her husband had barely won his re-election when the Republicans became obsessed about the Chinese trying to buy their way to some White House influence.

Remember the conservative outrage?

The Chinese influence story was what lead to Ken Starr and Monica Lewinsky.

That supposed Chinese scandal was of course the context for the fateful decision to hire one Ken Starr to investigate Lewinsky et al, to put an end to a president defiling the temple of justice. 

To that end, one Brett Kavanaugh leaked all the juicy bits of the grand jury deliberations and the Starr investigation to the media, and Lindsey Graham argued in a Senate impeachment trial that the nation should cleanse the office of the presidency by firing the president. Graham now plays golf with Donald Trump and Kavanaugh sits on the highest court in the land. The irony gods escaped to the vomitorium some time ago.

IOKIYAR.

That's why the Trudeau scandal is not really a scandal.