How Long Will The Trump Family Be Able To Maintain Their Lifestyle By Grifting?

Like most DWT readers, I would like to see Trump rotting in prison for the rest of his miserable life. Alas, that's probably as likely as me waking up tomorrow with a pet unicorn in my backyard. But this morning Wall Street Journal reporters Brian Spegele and Caitlin Ostroff painted a different kind of hell that awaits a post-Oval Office Trump, one that may be a more realistic expectation-- a reckoning for his business sparked by "some of the deepest financial and legal challenges in his family business empire in decades. No matter what he focuses on after the presidency, the businesses will require his attention. Two New York investigations will continue after he leaves office and the Trump Organization will need to avert a potential cash crunch caused by looming debt maturities at the firm’s real estate holdings. Personal guarantees Mr. Trump made on some of the organization’s debt add urgency to shoring up its financial position."

Expanding his business interests into China may not be as easy as it once looked, since he is now loathed and distrusted there. And his brand is not just crap in Europe, some of his trademarks have been eliminated by legal challenges.

Spegele and Ostroff asserted that "the Trump Organization might soon slim down. Several properties are for sale, including its Washington hotel and two skyscrapers in New York and San Francisco that are part-owned by the Trump Organization. The organization also has been considering selling its Seven Springs estate outside of New York" to help avert a lending crunch of more than $400 million of debt due in the next few years. They wrote that "many lenders have indicated they are wary of doing business" with Trump, who has been exposed worldwide as an amoral, ethics-free crook and sociopath.

It is unknown whether Mr. Trump will want to resume an active management role. When elected, he turned over management of the business to his sons Eric and Donald Jr. while keeping ownership. Some Trump associates predict the president will return to his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower in New York. “He won’t be able to help himself,” longtime friend and business partner Phil Ruffin previously told The Journal.

Others, including former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney expect he could run for president again. Mr. Mulvaney said in recent days he “would absolutely put him on the shortlist of people likely to run in 2024.”

Since Mr. Trump launched his run for the presidency in 2015, his businesses have become closely linked with the GOP.

Republican spending at Trump properties has topped $23 million since 2015 compared with less than $200,000 in the five years prior, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Those revenues will likely decline, including $37,000 of monthly rent payments the Trump campaign has made to Trump Tower in New York. The office tower, where the Trump Organization is based, has suffered from falling occupancy rates since Mr. Trump took office...

Financial challenges facing the Trump Organization are compounded by long-running legal issues, with New York probes of Mr. Trump’s businesses set to continue after he leaves office. Mr. Trump has also been contending with an Internal Revenue Service audit of his finances.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., a Democrat, has been pursuing years of Mr. Trump’s financial records, and says criminal tax fraud and falsification of business records are among the laws investigators believe may have been broken. Mr. Trump’s lawyers have sought to block a subpoena for the records, arguing the request was overbroad and issued in bad faith.

Another investigation, by New York state’s Attorney General Letitia James, also a Democrat, is examining whether Mr. Trump inflated asset values to obtain loans and get other economic and tax benefits. The Trump Organization has called the investigations politically motivated and denied wrongdoing.

Mr. Trump is unusual among U.S. presidents because much of the legal scrutiny he faces today stems from actions before he became president, said Jeffrey Engel, a presidential historian at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

“The fact that Trump thought he could run for president and be president with potential clear irregularities in his financial background and not be discovered, that’s the most surprising part to me,” he said. “It reinforces that he did not fully appreciate what it meant to be president.”

With Mr. Trump in the White House, the Trump Organization said it has put foreign deal-making on hold. But Eric Trump said in an interview this summer that growing internationally would be a key focus when his father left office.

Polls suggest that Mr. Trump’s strident nationalism and trade protectionism made him unpopular in many countries, including China, where he previously sought to benefit from the country’s growth.

...In Scotland, meanwhile, the Trump Organization spent more than $100 million to buy and renovate the Trump Turnberry golf resort. That property hasn’t turned a profit since Mr. Trump bought it in 2014, records show. This summer, around 70 staffers at Turnberry were cut, say former employees.

The Trump Organization said it has been investing heavily in Turnberry to make it one of the world’s top golf resorts.

Those challenges notwithstanding, the Trump family says it believes the president’s supporters will stick with them. For example, Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., will still be a draw, said member Whitney Schneider. “People will always want to see Mar-a-Lago and they’ll always want to see where the president lives,” she said.

Can a family maintain billionaire status as notorious grifters? I'm sure they plan to try and for at least a few years, they should be very successful at it, given the relationship between Señor T and 72,936,343 American voters (47.3%). And Trump is also popular among large segments of the population in fascist countries like Hungary and Israel. As Ron Reagan, Jr. noted last month, "We've got a bunch of grifters there in the White House."

The Trump Family Are Worse Grifters Than The Biden Family-- So There!

Cornered by Nancy Ohanian

Trump has used the presidency to enhance his own business interests more than he's worked for the interests of the United States or the chumps and easy marks who voted for him in 2016. As Anita Kumar wrote in her Politico essay, How Trump fused his business empire to the presidency yesterday, Señor T "has yet to face accountability for blatant conflicts of interest tied to his private businesses... He has spent one out of every three days as president visiting one of his luxury resorts, hotels or golf courses. He has leveraged his powerful international platform to promote his developments dozens of times. And he has directed millions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers to his businesses around the globe. In three years in the White House, Donald Trump has accomplished something no president before him has done: fusing his private business interests with America’s highest public office."

Presumably Pelosi doesn't want any of that mentioned in the trial. Her handpicked impeachment managers-- or at least Schiff and Nadler (and with her guidance) sent this out to the media yesterday. Excerpt:

Nadler

The American people entrusted President Trump with the extraordinary powers vested in his Office by the Constitution, powers which he swore a sacred Oath to use for the Nation’s benefit.  President Trump broke that promise. He used Presidential powers to pressure a vulnerable foreign  partner to interfere in our elections for his own benefit. In doing so, he jeopardized our national security and our democratic self-governance. He then used his Presidential powers to orchestrate a  cover-up unprecedented in the history of our Republic: a complete and relentless blockade of the  House’s constitutional power to investigate high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

President Trump maintains that the Senate cannot remove him even if the House proves every claim in the Articles of impeachment. That is a chilling assertion. It is also dead wrong. The Framers deliberately drafted a Constitution that allows the Senate to remove Presidents who, like  President Trump, abuse their power to cheat in elections, betray our national security, and ignore checks and balances. That President Trump believes otherwise, and insists he is free to engage in such conduct again, only highlights the continuing threat he poses to the Nation if allowed to remain in office.

Despite President Trump’s stonewalling of the impeachment inquiry, the House amassed overwhelming evidence of his guilt. It did so through fair procedures rooted firmly in the Constitution and precedent. It extended President Trump protections equal to, or greater than, those afforded to Presidents in prior impeachment inquiries. To prevent President Trump’s obstruction from delaying justice until after the very election he seeks to corrupt, the House moved decisively to adopt the two Articles of impeachment. Still, new evidence continues to emerge, all of which confirms these charges.

Now it is the Senate’s duty to conduct a fair trial-- fair for President Trump, and fair for the American people. Only if the Senate sees and hears all relevant evidence-- only if it insists upon the whole truth-- can it render impartial justice. That means the Senate should require the President to turn over the documents he is hiding. It should hear from witnesses, as it has done in every impeachment trial in American history; it especially should hear from witnesses the President blocked from testifying in the House. President Trump cannot have it both ways. His Answer directly disputes key facts. He must either surrender all evidence relevant to the facts he has disputed or concede the facts as charged. Otherwise, this impeachment trial will fall far short of the American system of justice.

President Trump asserts that his impeachment is a partisan “hoax.” He is wrong. The House duly approved Articles of impeachment because its Members swore Oaths to support and defend the Constitution against all threats, foreign and domestic. The House has fulfilled its constitutional duty. Now, Senators must honor their own Oaths by holding a fair trial with all relevant evidence. The Senate should place truth above faction. And it should convict the President on both Articles. 

Adam Schiff by Nancy Ohanian

Neither article mentions that he and his family are world-class grifters and that grifting is the goal of his time in the White House. As Kumar wrote, "Trump’s early decision to maintain his grip on his sprawling real estate empire-- despite his pledge to put his business aside while in the White House-- has created a vast web of potential conflicts of interest, accusations about his policies being driven by his business interests and even possible violations of the law, according to documents and interviews."

The intersections between Trump Inc. and President Trump are everywhere: A Chinese state-owned company was awarded a multimillion contract to help develop a Trump golf course in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, amid a U.S.-China trade war. T-Mobile executives stayed at Trump's Washington hotel while seeking a green light from the federal government for a merger. The IRS commissioner, who refused to release Trump’s tax returns to Congress, collects rent from a pair of Trump condos in Hawaii.

...“The level of this is shocking and deeply disturbing,” Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.), a member of House leadership who serves on the Judiciary Committee. “This president has a habit of doing things out in the open, which are completely improper or even illegal and somehow ... the average person thinks, ‘Well, if he’s doing it out in the open it must be OK; I must not completely understand the rules.’ But it’s not.”

...“President Trump is openly enriching himself by encouraging government entities to spend money at his businesses, and foreign entities appear to frequent his business to curry favor with this administration,” said House Oversight and Reform Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY). “President Trump must be held accountable for his blatant disregard for the Constitution.”

Many that's part of the reason no one but third rate hacks and far right ideologues are agreeing the work for the regime. Nancy Cook looked into the tough time Trump is having filling positions-- more so than any other president in modern history. Qualified people don't want his overwhelming stench of corruption rubbing off on them. Even with a Senate entirely in his pocket, it takes much longer to confirm his unqualified nominees than it has for normal presidents. There are still 170 unfilled positions. Graham Kates reporting for CBS News had a good example: the Secretary of the Navy, a job for which Trump has nominated a string of failed imbeciles. His latest is Kenneth Braithwaite, who tried hiding his relationship to Cambridge Analytica-- which helped Trump steal the 2016 election. Braithwaite was caught. "A willful failure to include a job or consulting position on the Office of Government Ethics Form 278e can be a violation of federal law," wrote Kates. "Braithwaite denies any relationship with Cambridge Analytica that would require this disclosure. Two of the records reviewed by CBS News indicate Braithwaite agreed to a one-year contract with the company beginning on November 1, 2016, one week before Donald Trump was elected president. His apparent role, referred to as both 'associate officer' and 'referral partner' in the records, has not previously been reported.

Trump announced in a tweet on November 24 that he had picked Braithwaite to lead the Navy. He would replace Richard Spencer, who was fired that same day for his handling of an internal review of a Navy SEAL who had been accused of war crimes.

Braithwaite's nomination for Secretary of the Navy has not yet been formally sent to the Senate, but at least one senator is already planning to revisit his 2017 confirmation for ambassador.

A spokesperson for Senator Bob Menendez, the ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement to CBS News that the New Jersey Democrat "will be reviewing this matter closely and seeking additional information," referring to the potential contract with Cambridge Analytica.

"We take the vetting of all nominees very seriously. If true, these reports raise serious questions about how forthcoming Ambassador Braithwaite was during his confirmation process. Failing to disclose a contract with Cambridge Analytica would be totally unacceptable and align Mr. Braithwaite with a growing number of Trump administration officials who have been either flagrantly negligent or intentionally dishonest in their dealings with the U.S. Senate," said Juan Pachon, the senator's spokesperson.

I can just imagine a Trump v Biden campaign, each claiming that the other is more corrupt and that the other's family is more corrupt. America deserves better... right? We still do, don't we? I have a much better idea for a Democratic nominee, one who will kick Trump's ass from Maine to Hawaii and beat him across the Midwest where Hillary failed so badly. Who? Tap the thermometer above. Oh-- and there will be no appointments like Braithwaite... or Bannon or Stephen Miller or William Barr. Of that you can be absolutely certain.

A Family Of Grifters-- The Immediate Family And The Extended Family... All Revolving Around Señor Trumpanzee

Yesterday Forbes.com had the most traffic it's ever had. The site crashed on and off all day after they published this amazing story about how Trump personally ordered Eric, one of his elephant-killing sons, to transfer money contributed for charities assisting children with cancer. $100,000 meant for St. Jude's Research Hospital, for example, wound up in Señor's Trumpanzee's serape. Eric Trumpanzee funneled cash from the charity into the Trump Organization for a decade. Much of the money-- over $800,000-- was laundered through Trump-owned golf courses and other shady Trump-owned businesses. All this crap is illegal and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is investigating the Trump Foundation. In his NY Times OpEd yesterday, The Lawless Presidency, David Leonhardt noted that "Democracy isn’t possible without the rule of law-- the idea that consistent principles, rather than a ruler’s whims, govern society," citing Aristotle, Montesquieu, John Locke and the Declaration of Independence as backup. "You can," he wrote, "also look at decades of American history. Even amid bitter fights over what the law should say, both Democrats and Republicans have generally accepted the rule of law. President Trump does not. His rejection of it distinguishes him from any other modern American leader. He has instead flirted with Louis XIV’s notion of 'L’état, c’est moi': The state is me-- and I’ll decide which laws to follow.

Legitimate traffic this time, not Putin's Macedonian hackers

The hideous menagerie of grifters-- collectively, "the First Family"-- is beyond anything any American alive today has ever experienced in a White House. Reporting this week from Jesse Drucker and Charles Bagli, again, in The Times, confirm what many of us who saw the news about the Kushners trading on the Trumpanzee name it sell visas in China suspected all along.

Kushner-in-law's company, they reported, is looking for a quarter billion dollars "to pay off partners and lenders in a Jersey City apartment tower [conveniently named Trump Bay Street] financed by Chinese investors through a program criticized as offering United States visas for sale."

The project was financed with about $190 million in loans, including $50 million through the EB-5 visa program. That program gives foreign investors preferential treatment in obtaining permanent residency, in exchange for investments of at least $500,000 in American development projects.

Kushner Companies must repay a $140 million construction loan from CIT Group, which is due in September. It also wants to pay off its EB-5 loans, which are all from Chinese investors, although the loans are not due for several years.

Everyone's complicit

Presumably this is related to Kushner-in-law secretly meeting with top Russian spy (fake bankster) Sergey Gorkov and then hiding the meeting from American security agencies-- a serious felony-- and with Kushner-in-law attempting to establish a means of hiding direct communications with Putin from the NSA and CIA. It is interesting to note that when Kushner-in-law made his phony divestments from the family firm, he held onto his stake in the Trump Bay Street property.

In addition to CIT and the EB-5 lenders, the Kushners’ partners in the building include Gaia, an Israeli company linked to the wealthy Steinmetz family, whose best-known member, Beny Steinmetz, is the subject of a Justice Department bribery investigation.

Mr. Kushner did divest his stake in Kushner Companies’ troubled headquarters building at 666 Fifth Avenue, which carries $1.4 billion in debt, according to financial data published by Vornado Realty Trust, a partner in the deal.

Talks over a possible $4 billion investment in that property with Anbang Insurance Group-- a Chinese conglomerate with political connections to Beijing-- ended in March after Democratic lawmakers wrote to the White House Counsel’s Office and the Treasury secretary, expressing concern that such a deal could breach federal ethics rules. Mr. Kushner’s broad White House portfolio has included relations with China.

The Kushner family’s use of the EB-5 visa program created an uproar last month when Jared Kushner’s sister, Nicole Meyer, spoke about him during a marketing trip in Beijing as part of an effort to raise another $150 million in visa funding for a separate Jersey City project. Kushner Companies said later that Kushner family members would no longer participate in such roadshows in China.

The above-mentioned Israeli criminal Kushner is in business with, billionaire Beny Steinmetz, is a notorious blood diamond character who has made his immense fortune by stealing from poor countries with corrupt governments. Perfect for the Trump family!

Trump Family Grifters-- No Apples Fall Far From The Orange

Back in 2014, Peter Elkins and Marty Jones, presaged many a scandal with a piece in Fortune, The dark, disturbing world of the visa-for-sale program. Scamming money out of this one was once the domain of two bit GOP governors; now it's front and center in the White House. Welcome to Trumpland-- Home of The Grifters. The EB-5 visa program is described as "one of the least explored of the many dark corners in America’s deeply troubled immigration process. Scientists and engineers highly coveted by technology companies may be getting thrown out of the country but rich businessmen-- overwhelmingly criminal businessmen-- who understand how to spread around the bribes... welcome, स्वागत हे, welcome, 歡迎, welcome, أهلا بك, welcome, добро пожаловать, welcome...

Increasingly, the skilled and the poor are out of luck. But the rich are another matter. The program (EB-5 is short-hand for the government’s fifth employment-based visa “preference”) allows well-heeled foreigners to leap to the front of the line by simply plunking down $500,000.

From the law’s inception in 1990, selling potential citizenship to the rich struck many as a corruption of American ideals. “Have we no self-respect as a nation?” asked Texas congressman John Bryant on the House floor that year. “Are we so broke we have to sell our birthright?”

But that powerful objection was overcome with an even more potent counterforce: The program would generate jobs where they’re needed most. Immigrants seeking EB-5 visas must invest their half-a-million dollars in a new business that creates 10 full-time U.S. jobs in a high-unemployment or rural district. (Technically, one can obtain an EB-5 visa for $1 million with no requirement that the jobs benefit a struggling area; in reality, few apply under that provision.)

...[B]ecause the EB-5 industry is virtually unregulated, it has become a magnet for amateurs, pipe-dreamers, and charlatans, who see it as an easy way to score funding for ventures that banks would never touch. They’ve been encouraged and enabled by an array of dodgy middlemen, eager to cash in on the gold rush. Meanwhile, perhaps because wealthy foreigners are the main potential victims, U.S. authorities have seemed inattentive to abuses.

And that brings us to the First Family of Grifters-- Trumpanzee's machatunim: Kushner-in-law and all his vile, insect-like, familial New Jersey garbage. These week they were hawking visas in Beijing.

Slide shown during Kushner event in Beijing identifying the father-in-law as the "key decision maker" on EB-5 investor visa program

The Kushner family came to the United States as refugees, worked hard and made it big-- and if you invest in Kushner properties, so can you.

That was the message delivered Saturday by White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s sister to a ballroom full of wealthy Chinese investors, renewing questions about the Kushner family’s business ties to China.

Over several hours of slide shows and presentations, representatives from the Kushner family business urged Chinese citizens gathered at the Ritz-Carlton hotel to consider investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a New Jersey real estate project to secure what’s known as an investor visa.

The EB-5 immigrant investor visa program, which allows foreign investors to invest in U.S. projects that create jobs and then apply to immigrate, has been used by both the Trump and Kushner family businesses.

But President Trump’s vow to crack down on immigration, as well as criticism from members of Congress, has led to questions about the future of a program known here as the “ golden visa.”

The EB-5 has been extremely popular among rich Chinese who are eager to get their families-- and their wealth-- out of the country, though the fact that some move their money out illegally has made the program unpopular with the Chinese government, too.

In the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton on Saturday, Chinese investors were advised to invest sooner rather than later in case the rules change. “Invest early and you will invest under the old rules,” one speaker said.

The woman identified as “Jared’s sister” was believed to be Nicole Kushner, who is involved in the family business, not Dara Kushner, who generally stays out of the spotlight. But the woman’s face was not clearly visible from the back of the ballroom, where reporters were told to remain.

Saturday’s event in Beijing was hosted by the Chinese company Qiaowai, which connects U.S. companies with Chinese investors. The tagline on a brochure for the event: “Invest $500,000 and immigrate to the United States.”

Qiaowai is working with Kushner to secure funding for Kushner 1, a real estate project in New Jersey. Promotional materials tout the buildings’ proximity to Manhattan and note that the project will create more than 6,000 jobs.

“This project has stable funding, creates sufficient jobs and guarantees the safety of investors’ money,” one description reads.

Although there was no visible reference to Trump, the materials noted the Kushner family’s “celebrity” status. Wang Yun, a Chinese investor who attended the event, said the Kushner family’s ties to Trump, via son-in-law Jared, were a part of the project’s appeal-- but also a source of concern.

“Even though this is the project of the son-in-law’s family, of course it is still affiliated,” Wang.

Wang reasoned that the link to Trump would be a boon if the presidency goes well but could be disastrous if it does not: “We heard that there are rumors that he is the most likely to be impeached president in American history. That’s why I doubt this project.”

Many of the people who attended the event declined to be interviewed, citing privacy concerns, or they were blocked by organizers from speaking to the news media.

Indeed, though the event was publicly advertised in Beijing, the hosts were exceptionally anxious about the presence of reporters.

Journalists were initially seated at the back of the ballroom, but as the presentations got underway, a public relations representative asked The Post to leave, saying the presence of foreign reporters threatened the “stability” of the event.

At one point, organizers grabbed a reporter’s phone and backpack to try to force that person to leave. Later, as investors started leaving the ballroom, organizers physically surrounded attendees to stop them from giving interviews.

Asked why reporters were asked to leave, a public relations representative, who declined to identify herself, said simply, “This is not the story we want.”

Republican Party Civil War Heats Up On A New Front: Meet The Congressional Grifters

Much to the chagrin of corporate whores who had infected the DEmocratic Party-- think Rahm Emanuel, Harold Ford, the Blue Dogs and New Dems-- Howard Dean coined and popularized the phrase, "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." Here at DWT we often talk about the corollary, the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. Over the weekend, former Ohio Republican Congressman Steve LaTourette, a mainstream conservative, sought to duplicate Dean's strategy by terming the now dominant right-wing extremists in his party as the Grifting Wing. In a post he did for Politico, The Grifting Wing v. The Governing Wing, LaTourette defends Boehner and attacks the Tea Party Republicans for being "busy lining their pockets."

He turns to Vocabulary.com to define Ted Cruz (R-TX), the likely 2016 Republican presidential candidate, as a grifter and a con artist, "someone who swindles people out of money through fraud. If there’s one type of person you don’t want to trust, it’s a grifter: Someone who cheats someone out of money." He pretty much likened Ted Cruz to a snake oil salesman "who rolled into town promising a magical, cure-all elixir at a price. The grifter was long gone by the time people discovered the magical elixir was no more magical than water. They were the sideshow con men offering fantastic prizes in games that were rigged so that no one could actually win them. They were the Ponzi scheme operators who got rich promising fantastically high investment returns but returning nothing for those sorry investors at the bottom of the pyramid."

The most important battle being waged in Washington today, asserts the GOP congressman who was first elected in 1994 and served until he retired last year, "isn’t the one about which party controls the House or the Senate, it’s about who controls the Republican Party: the grifting wing or the governing wing."

Political grifting is a lucrative business. Groups like the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks and the Tea Party Patriots are run by men and women who have made millions by playing on the fears and anger about the dysfunction in Washington. My former House colleague Chris Chocola is pocketing a half-million dollars a year heading the Club for Growth; same for Matt Kibbe heading up FreedomWorks (and I don’t think Kibbe’s salary includes the infamous craft beer bar that FreedomWorks donors ended up paying for). The Tea Party Patriots pay their head, Jenny Beth Martin, almost as much. These people have lined their pockets by promising that if you send them money, they will send men and women to Washington who can “fix it.” Of course, in the ultimate con, the always extreme and often amateurish candidates these groups back either end up losing to Democrats or they come to Washington and actually make the process even more dysfunctional.

Just look at what happened this past week, when hard-right House members with extensive ties to these outside groups, egged on by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, snarled up a sensible effort to pass a bill that would at least begin to address the crisis of undocumented children at the U.S.-Mexico border. It was an embarrassing display of congressional dysfunction, and it showed that the grifting wing has learned nothing from last fall’s shutdown fiasco.

The grifting wing of the party promises that you can have ideological purity-- that you don’t have to compromise-- and, of course, all you have to do is send them money to make it happen. The governing wing of the Republican Party knows that’s a damn lie. Our Founding Fathers set up a system of government that by its very nature excludes the possibility of one party or one ideological wing of one party getting everything it wants. Ted Cruz, who quotes the founders almost every chance he gets, ought to know this.

While the grifters hold a great deal of sway over the Republican Party for now, they are not the majority-- not by a long shot. As with any good Ponzi scheme, there are relatively few grifters; the challenge is exposing their scam.

Exposing the grifters is exactly what is happening in the Republican Party today. Groups like the organization that I head, groups like the Chamber of Commerce, business groups and traditional Republican organizations are working to run the political snake-oil salesman out of town-- or at least out of our party.

This isn’t about ideology. The Republican Party is a conservative party. This fight is about whether we will govern or continue to let the grifters profit off of the dysfunction in Washington.

Our beef isn’t with the rank and file Tea Party members, either. We understand their justifiable frustration with Washington. Our beef is with the grifters who run the organizations in Washington that are fleecing these hardworking men and women.

Except fro Cruz, LaTourette hasn't called out any of his former Republican colleagues in Congress as grifters. So we asked an aid to one of his closest friends still in the House. I wanted to know if he was talking about David Joyce, who took over for LaTourette in northeast Ohio when he retired. "Not at all," he told me. "David does what he's told-- always and without question. He feels the same way about these assholes that Steve does." So who, I asked?

"You know who," he insisted. "King, Bachmann…"

Don't stop there, who else? He didn't want to go any further. But he agreed to shake his head up and down if I hit on any names that he was certain LaTourette considers part of the grifters caucus. These are the ones I guessed right: Steve Scalise. Boehner's Chief Whip, Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Mo Brooks (R-AL), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Jim Bridenstine (R-OK), Blake Farenthold (R-TX), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Tim Huelskamp (R-KS), Matt Salmon (R-AZ), and the new kook, Curt Clawson (R-FL), who just took over for the GOP coke dealer who got busted.