Category: Breaking the Law

Trump Says U.S. Should Have Stolen Iraq’s Oil, and ‘Maybe We’ll Have Another Chance’

While addressing the CIA on Saturday, President Donald Trump took a break from lambasting the media to remind everyone that he thinks the U.S. should have stolen Iraq’s oil. He also suggested that the U.S. might get another chance to violate international law.

“Now I said it for economic reasons,” Trump said while introducing Representative Mike Pompeo, his pick to lead the agency. “But if you think about it, Mike, if we kept the oil, you probably wouldn’t have ISIS because that’s where they made their money in the first place, so we should have kept the oil. But, okay, maybe we’ll have another chance.”

National Review has noted that Trump’s “odd fixation” with taking Iraq’s oil dates back to at least 2011. He made the argument numerous times on the campaign trail, suggesting that the U.S. could take Iraq’s oil while fighting ISIS. When PolitiFact examined the claim in September, numerous experts said trying to seize Iraqi oil would not be legal, feasible, or desirable. The idea is “so out of step with any plausible interpretation of U.S. history or international law that they should be dismissed out of hand by anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of world affairs,” said Lance Janda, a military historian at Cameron University.

It’s not clear what Trump meant by “maybe we’ll have another chance,” but when you’re president, people take even offhand remarks about violating international law pretty seriously. BuzzFeed spoke with several Iraqis on the front lines of the battle against ISIS, and they said they were prepared to take up arms against Americans if they attempted to take their country’s natural resources.

“I participated in the attack against the Americans by attacking them with mortars and roadside bombs, and I’m ready to do it again,” said Abu Luay, an Iraqi security official using a nom de guerre, who is currently fighting the terrorist group in northwest Iraq. “We kept our ammunition and weapons from the time the Americans left for fighting ISIS. But once ISIS is gone we will save our weapons for the Americans.”

Several other people at a base for Popular Mobilization Units, a new branch of Iraq’s armed forces consisting of former militiamen and volunteers fighting against ISIS, said the move would be counterproductive. Iraq recently took out a $5.3 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, in part to help pay for the fight against ISIS.

“There’s no way Trump could take the oil unless he launched a new military front and it be a new world war,” said Kareem Kashekh, a photographer who works for the Popular Mobilization Units.

(h/t New York Magazine)

Reality

Specifically, the Annex to the Hague Convention of 1907 on the Laws and Customs of War, which says that “private property … must be respected (and) cannot be confiscated.” It also says that “pillage is formally forbidden.”

In addition, the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Times of War provides that “any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.”

For example, when Saddam Hussein (the former authoritarian leader of Iraq who Trump admires) invaded Kuwait in 1990, one of the justifications for international intervention was because Hussein seized and held Kuwaiti oil fields.

Media

New Trump Agency Memo Gags Staff Communications

The Trump administration is circulating a memo ordering federal employees not to communicate with Congress, a demand that Democrats are calling an illegal gag order.

“The Trump administration has issued restrictions at multiple agencies on employee communications, including, in some instances, communications with Congress,” Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., wrote in a letter Wednesday to new White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II. “These directives appear to violate a host of federal laws.”

Cummings’ letter cited a memo — dated Jan. 20 — circulating at the Department of Health and Human Services from Acting Secretary Norris Cochran that tells agency division heads that “no correspondence to public officials (e.g., members of Congress, governors) … unless specifically authorized by me or my designee, shall be sent between now and Feb. 3.”

Within the last two days, Cochran, in a follow-up message to staff that was provided to ABC News by an agency spokesperson, sought to “clarify” his earlier memo, telling employees the “memorandum should not be interpreted or implemented in any way that would preclude or in any way interfere with our HHS staff addressing their concerns to their elected representatives in person or in writing.”

He said that the language in his memo was simply intended “to coordinate the Department’s policy positions with the appropriate policy staff on agency business.”

Staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency earlier in the week told The Los Angeles Times that their new bosses ordered a media blackout, quoting one directive as telling them, “Only send out critical messages, as messages can be shared broadly and end up in the press.”

Cummings accused the administration of imposing a widespread ban on agency communication.

White House aides did not immediately respond to request for comment about alleged efforts to block employees from communicating with Congress, broadly, or about the latest in a series of letters from Cummings about the way they are handling the transition. The Associated Press reported that White House press secretary Sean Spicer said no directives to silence communication from agencies came from the White House.

A call and an email to HHS requesting comment was not immediately returned.

Cummings, the senior Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, refers to a memo circulating in the federal health agency that appears aimed at halting any effort to finish work on regulations that began during the prior administration. It is in that context that the acting agency head prohibited employees from talking with Congress.

Cummings and co-signer Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., cite a series of laws meant to protect open communication between federal employees and members of Congress, including one that ties agency funding to the free flow of information.

That provision, Cummings wrote, specifically prohibits agencies from issuing any order that “threatens to prohibit or prevent any other officer or employee of the federal government from having any direct oral or written communication or contact with any member, committee or subcommittee of the Congress in connection with any matter.”

(h/t ABC News)

Gingrich: Congress Should Change Ethics Laws for Trump

Newt Gingrich has a take on how Donald Trump can keep from running afoul of U.S. ethics laws: Change the ethics laws.

Trump is currently grappling with how to sufficiently disentangle himself from his multibillion-dollar business to avoid conflicts of interest with his incoming administration, and the president-elect has already pushed back a promised announcement of an ethics firewall.

Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and one-time potential running mate for Trump, says Trump should push Congress for legislation that accounts for a billionaire businessman in the White House.

“We’ve never seen this kind of wealth in the White House, and so traditional rules don’t work,” Gingrich said Monday during an appearance on NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show” about the president-elect’s business interests. “We’re going to have to think up a whole new approach.”

And should someone in the Trump administration cross the line, Gingrich has a potential answer for that too.

“In the case of the president, he has a broad ability to organize the White House the way he wants to. He also has, frankly, the power of the pardon,” Gingrich said. “It’s a totally open power. He could simply say, ‘Look, I want them to be my advisers. I pardon them if anyone finds them to have behaved against the rules. Period. Technically, under the Constitution, he has that level of authority.”

Trump’s own tweets — will include handing over the management of his real estate and investment portfolio to his two adult sons and a team of longtime executives. But key details of the Trump plan also remain a work in progress, prompting suggestions from outside Trump Tower that range from a complete selling off for all Trump assets to Gingrich’s call for a sweeping review of the country’s ethics laws themselves.

Gingrich — who says he is not joining Trump’s administration — didn’t provide many details for what a new approach would entail, other than reiterating his support for an outside panel of experts Trump should convene that would regularly monitor how his company and government are operating and “offer warnings if they get too close to the edge.”

The former Georgia GOP lawmaker did concede Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress can’t ignore the potential ethical challenges facing the president, including the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which prohibits U.S. government employees from taking payments from foreign governments or the companies they run.

“It’s a very real problem,” Gingrich said. “I don’t think this is something minor. I think certainly in an age that people are convinced that government corruption is widespread both in the U.S. and around the world, you can’t just shrug and walk off from it.”

But Gingrich said Trump is on solid political ground as he prepares to take the White House while maintaining ownership of his business. In fact, Gingrich argued that Trump’s résumé and financial history were among the reasons why the Republican won the presidential election.

“I think there was a general sense that the president had the ability, that this was going to be a billionaire presidency. I don’t think anyone who voted for him was not aware that he was a very, very successful businessman,” he said.

Gingrich also argued that Americans shouldn’t be surprised that there are certain changes that Trump shouldn’t be expected to make, including giving up licensing on his iconic last name or his communications with his adult sons, Eric and Donald Jr., who are slated to take over the business.

“You can’t say the Trump Tower is not the Trump Tower, or the Trump hotel is not the Trump hotel. And you can’t say that the kids who run it aren’t his children,” Gingrich said.

But it was Gingrich’s suggestion that Trump could sidestep potential problems inside his administration — through his constitutional right to issue pardons — that prompted an incredulous reply from the NPR program’s host and two of her guests.

“That level of authority strikes me as rather broad and perhaps ought to be in the hands of Congress rather than within his own hands,” said Rehm, who is set to retire at the end of this week after a more than 30-year run.

“Speaker Gingrich’s statement that wealth trumps the rule of law, basically that’s what he was saying, is jaw-dropping,” added American University government professor James Thurber. “I can’t believe it. He’s a historian. He should also know that we did not want to have a king. A king in this case is somebody with a lot of money who cannot abide by the rule of law.”

Richard Painter, a former George W. Bush White House ethics lawyer, said Gingrich was off on his reading of the Constitution. “If the pardon power allows that, the pardon power allows the president to become a dictator, and even Richard Nixon had the decency to wait for his successor to hand out the pardon that he received for his illegal conduct,” Painter said. “We’re going down a very, very treacherous path if we go with what Speaker Gingrich is saying, what he is suggesting.”

(h/t Politico)

Trump Foundation Admits to Self-Dealing in New Tax Filing

President-elect Donald Trump’s charitable foundation transferred assets to a disqualified person, possibly Trump himself, according to a 2015 tax filing submitted to the nonprofit watchdog group GuideStar and posted online Tuesday.

Trump has been under heavy scrutiny in recent months for using tax-exempt foundation money to pay for personal expenses, such as legal settlements with governments and personal expenses, including paintings of himself.

On page five of the Donald J. Trump foundation’s 2015 tax filing, the preparers checked the “yes” box to the question about whether the New York-based nonprofit organization had transferred “any income or assets to a disqualified person (or make any of either available for the benefit or use of a disqualified person.”

The preparers checked yes again in another box that asked if the foundation had transferred money to disqualified people in previous years. Trump signed past filings under penalty of perjury, and the forms for several earlier years indicated the foundation had not transferred money to a disqualified person.

The IRS Manual states that transactions involving a disqualified person “bears importantly upon the treatment and status of exempt organizations as private foundations in several situations.”

It was unclear Tuesday whether the nation’s tax agency had received an identical document from Trump’s nonprofit. The IRS said it could not discuss any tax filing or comment on whether the tax agency was investigating the person or organization associated with a filing.

Trump presidential transition spokespersons also did not immediately respond to questions from USA TODAY.

However, the apparent admission of self-dealing “could be assessed as an IRS penalty against the person who received the benefit, potentially at three times the value,” said Robert McKenzie, a tax law expert who is a partner at the Arnstein & Lehr law firm in Chicago.

The IRS potentially could also seek penalties against the directors of the foundation — who include Trump and three of his children — “for allowing such a transaction,” said McKenzie.

However, attorneys for charitable organizations often are able to negotiate lower penalties than those proposed by the IRS, said McKenzie.

The foundation’s new admission could potentially result in separate penalties by state agencies that oversee the nonprofit, added McKenzie. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had been conducting an examination of filings submitted by Trump’s charitable organization.

That investigation is continuing, Amy Spitalnick, Schneiderman’s press secretary, said Tuesday.

Schneiderman last month ordered the foundation to cease any fundraising in New York, saying the charity had not filed the required registration with his office.

The New York official also demanded, and received, written confirmation that the foundation would pay no part of the $25 million settlement reached last week over fraud allegations against Trump University — the now-defunct real estate training program created by the billionaire developer and reality television star.

According to Guidestar spokesperson Jackie Enterline Fekeci, the new tax filing was “was uploaded by a representative from Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP directly onto the foundation’s GuideStar Nonprofit Profile on November 18. We allow organizations to submit their 990’s voluntarily because sometimes the form’s route through the IRS causes a delay before we get the officially filed version. We do that in the good faith that the version they upload onto GuideStar is identical to the version they submit to the IRS.”

The Washington Post has reported in great detail about problems with the Trump foundation and its spending, citing how it paid $258,000 in foundation money to settle Trump’s personal legal issues. The Post was the first to report on the new filings Tuesday.

The 2015 tax filing showed that Trump’s company donated $566,370 to the foundation last year, while it received another $50,000 from Trump Productions LLC.

It’s possible these contributions came from Trump, because they listed the donations as coming from a “person.” These contributions are the first that Trump or his companies have made to Trump’s own charity since 2008. His foundation’s tax return for 2008 showed a $30,000 contribution from Donald J. Trump, care of The Trump Organization.

The foundation’s new filing also show the nonprofit received $150,000 from the British office of a foundation run by Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk, who owns four Ukrainian television stations and a variety of industrial companies. Pinchuk and his foundation were donors to the foundation run by former President Bill Clinton and his wife, former secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the defeated Democratic nominee for president, Clinton Foundation records show.

Trump spoke at a conference in Ukraine in 2015 hosted by Pinchuk. Then, according to a report in Politico, he said: “Viktor, by the way, is a very, very special man, a special entrepreneur. When he was up seeing me I said, ‘I think I can learn more from you than you can learn from me.’”

(h/t USA Today)

Links

Trump Foundation 2015 990 form

Donald “Never Settle” Trump Settles University Lawsuit

Donald Trump has agreed to a $25 million settlement to end the fraud cases against his now-defunct Trump University, New York’s attorney general said — a move that the president-elect said Saturday was done in order to “focus on the country.”

The settlement likely means that Trump will avoid becoming possibly the first sitting president to testify in open court.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman called the settlement on Friday “a major victory for the over 6,000 victims of his fraudulent university.” Lawyers involved in the cases say the settlement applies to all three lawsuits against Trump University including two cases filed in California.

Trump commented on the settlement via Twitter on Saturday, telling his 15 million followers that the only “bad thing about winning the presidency” was not being able to fight the “long but winning” Trump University trial.

(h/t NBC News)

Reality

Remember this?

And this?

And this?

 

 

Megyn Kelly Says Trump Offered Gifts to Influence Coverage

The Fox News presenter Megyn Kelly has claimed Donald Trump tried to influence her to cover him positively by offering gifts including free hotel stays.

She said she was not the only journalist who had been offered gifts, saying this was “one of the untold stories of the 2016 campaign”.

The claims are in her memoir, to be released on Tuesday.

In her memoir, Ms Kelly alleges that Mr Trump offered to fly her and her husband to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, or let her and her friends stay at his New York City hotel for free for the weekend. She said she did not accept his offers.

She said Mr Trump had attempted to influence journalists by praising them.

“This is smart,” she writes, “because the media is full of people whose egos need stroking.”

Publication of Ms Kelly’s memoir was originally planned for November 2015, but it was delayed. It is called Settle for More.

(h/t BBC News)

Reality

It may be smart but this is quid pro quo, something Trump accused his political rival of, and it is highly illegal and unethical.

For months Trump and Fox News claimed quid-pro-quo in the emails of Hillary Clinton, which never materialized once investigators looked into the allegations.

Trump Foundation Lacks Certification To Operate As Charity

The Trump Foundation, which is under investigation by the New York Attorney General’s office, never obtained the necessary certification to solicit money from the public during its nearly 30-year existence, an investigation by the state’s attorney general’s office has found, a source briefed on the investigation tells ABC News.

New York State law requires any charity that solicits more than $25,000 a year from the public to obtain a specific kind of certification.

The allegation about the Donald J. Trump Foundation’s lack of certification, first reported by the Washington Post, comes about two weeks after New York State attorney general Eric Schneiderman — a Hillary Clinton supporter — announced he had opened a broad inquiry into the foundation.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment and the AG’s office declined comment.

In a statement released when the inquiry was announced earlier this month, Trump campaign Jason Miller blasted Schneiderman.

“Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is a partisan hack who has turned a blind eye to the Clinton Foundation for years and has endorsed Hillary Clinton for President,” he said. This is nothing more than another left-wing hit job designed to distract from Crooked Hillary Clinton’s disastrous week.”

Tax forms for the foundation list Trump as its president and Allen Weisselberg, the CFO of the Trump Organization, as the treasurer. As of 2006, Trump’s three eldest children -— Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump —- have been listed as directors of the charity.

The broad inquiry into the foundation focused on a $25,000 donation the organization gave to a group supporting Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. The donation drew scrutiny because Bondi’s office declined to join a lawsuit against Trump’s now-shuttered Trump University.

Both Trump and Bondi have denied the allegations or any impropriety. But Trump did pay a $2,500 fine to the IRS because charities are not allowed to give to political causes. Trump also reimbursed the foundation $25,000

As ABC News previously reported, the foundation’s financial forms for 2001 through 2014 are currently available.

The biggest contributor from 2011 to 2014 was Richard Ebers, a man associated with an event-ticketing company, Inside Sports and Entertainment, according to the 990 forms.

Ebers donated more than $1.8 million to the foundation from 2011 to 2014, and he was the largest contributor each of those years.

(h/t ABC News)

Trump Broke Cuban Embargo, Report Says

Donald Trump’s hotel and casino company secretly spent money trying to do business in Cuba in violation of the U.S. trade embargo, Newsweek reported Thursday in a story that could endanger the Republican presidential nominee’s Cuban-American support in South Florida.

Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts paid at least $68,000 to a consulting firm in late 1998 in an attempt to give Trump’s business a head start in Cuba if the U.S. loosened or lifted trade sanctions, according to the front-page Newsweek report, titled “The Castro Connection.” The consulting firm, Seven Arrows Investment and Development Corp., later instructed the casino company on how to make it look like legal spending for charity.

The following year, Trump flirted with a Reform Party presidential run, giving a November 1999 speech to the Cuban American National Foundation in Miami where he cast himself as a pro-embargo hardliner who refused to do potentially lucrative business on the communist island until Fidel Castro was gone.

Neither Trump nor Richard Fields, the head of Seven Arrows consulting, responded to Newsweek’s requests for comment. Trump later sued Fields, and former Trump adviser Roger Stone suggested to Politico Florida that Fields might have acted on his own, without Trump’s approval, in exploring doing business in Cuba. Newsweek cited an anonymous former Trump executive who claimed “Trump had participated in discussions about the Cuba trip and knew it had taken place.” Trump hired the same consulting firm to try to develop a Florida casino with the Seminole Tribe.

When Seven Arrows billed Trump’s company to reimburse its Cuba work, according to Newsweek, it suggested using “Carinas Cuba” as charitable cover to get an after-the-fact Cuba license from the U.S. Office of Foreign Asset Control. OFAC doesn’t issue licenses after companies have already gone to Cuba, and the Catholic charity is actually named Caritas Cuba.

The report comes as Trump has worked to shore up Hispanic support in Miami-Dade County, where Cuban Americans comprise about 72 percent of registered Republicans. He met with a group of mostly Cuban Americans Tuesday in Little Havana, and earlier this month in Miami he blasted President Barack Obama’s reengagement policy with the island, after sounding OK with it last year.

Trump’s most prominent local Cuban-American supporter, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, called the Newsweek report “troubling.”

“The article makes some very serious and troubling allegations,” he said in a campaign statement. “I will reserve judgment until we know all the facts and Donald has been given the opportunity to respond.”

Recent polls show Trump tied in Florida with Hillary Clinton. While Cuban Americans lean heavily Republican, a Florida International University poll showed Miami-Dade Cubans only narrowly backed Trump over Clinton. The Democratic nominee favors lifting the trade embargo, a position the same poll shows is favored by a majority of local Cuban Americans.

Bloomberg Businessweek reported in July that Trump Organization executives traveled to Havana in late 2012 or early 2013 to scout potential business sites and investments.

Nelson Diaz, the Cuban-American chairman of the Miami-Dade Republican Party, questioned whether Trump would have really had a hand in the 1998 Cuba business exploration.

“I don’t know what the true story is,” he said. “If it’s true and evidence comes out that Trump himself personally sanctioned a violation of U.S. law, yes, that’s a problem, but the chance of that sort of evidence coming out — I don’t know.” There’s better evidence, he added, that Clinton tried to hide her emails as secretary of state from the public.

The Newsweek story got immediate morning drive-time play on Miami’s Spanish-language radio station.

“Everybody’s done business in Cuba,” one WAQI-AM 710 Radio Mambí listener said, sounding defensive about Trump.

“Yes,” host Bernadette Pardo said, “but here it’s illegal.”

Evidence Shows Trump Violated Laws, Used His Charity as a Slush-Fund

The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold on Tuesday published a series of stunning revelations about Donald Trump’s charitable foundation, reporting that the Republican presidential nominee used money from the Trump Foundation to pay legal fees related to his businesses.

The report, citing tax records, said Trump had not made a single donation to his charity since 2008 and sometimes used money from others through the foundation to pay off legal expenses.

The money relating to those expenses, which reportedly amounted to $258,000 from the Trump Foundation, may have violated “self-dealing” laws that prohibit nonprofit leaders from using charity money for self-benefit or the benefit of their for-profit businesses, according to The Post.

“I represent 700 nonprofits a year, and I’ve never encountered anything so brazen,” Jeffrey Tenenbaum, who advises charities at the Venable law firm in Washington, told The Post, later describing the details as “really shocking.”

“If he’s using other people’s money – run through his foundation – to satisfy his personal obligations, then that’s about as blatant an example of self-dealing [as] I’ve seen in a while,” he continued.

Trump could be found in violation of self-dealing rules from the Internal Revenue Service, The Post said, which could require him to pay penalties or reimburse the foundation’s money. He is also facing scrutiny from the New York attorney general’s office, The Post added, which could find him in violation of the state’s charity laws.

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign fired off a response to the Post story soon after it was published.

“Clearly the Trump Foundation is as much a charitable organization as Trump University is an institute of higher education,” Christina Reynolds, the campaign’s deputy communications director, said in a statement. “Trump’s version of charity is taking money from others to settle his own legal issues and buy at least two pictures of himself, which experts say is a clear violation of laws governing charitable organizations.”

“Once again, Trump has proven himself a fraud who believes the rules don’t apply to him,” she continued. “It’s past time for him to release his tax returns to show whether his tax issues extend to his own personal finances.”

Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from The Post.

Here are some of the other revelations from Fahrenthold:

  • Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida faced $120,000 in unpaid fines from the town of Palm Beach stemming from a dispute over the size of a flagpole. The tallest a flagpole could be in Palm Beach was 42 feet, but Trump insisted on an 80-foot pole, claiming that “you don’t need a permit to put up the American flag.” The town agreed to waive the fines if Trump’s club made a $100,000 donation to a specific veterans charity. But Trump instead sent a check from his foundation, Fahrenthold reported.
  • Trump’s New York golf courses agreed to settle a lawsuit by making a donation to the plaintiff’s chosen charity, but the $158,000 donation was instead made by the Trump Foundation, according to The Post. The lawsuit was filed after a man, Martin Greenberg, hit a hole-in-one on the 13th hole at Trump’s Westchester, New York, golf course during a charity tournament, briefly winning $1 million, which was taken away after it was revealed that the shot did not travel a required 150 yards. Trump’s course was accused of intentionally making the hole too short.
  • Trump spent $30,000 of foundation money on two portraits of himself, one was found hanging in a Trump resort which is clearly not a charitable use.
  • Trump spent $5,000 of foundation money to buy advertisements for his hotel chain.
  • Trump spent $12,000 of foundation money to buy a football helmet signed by former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow.

(h/t Business Insider)

Trump Surrogate Rudy Giuliani on War Crimes: ‘Anything’s Legal’ During War

Donald Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani on Sunday claimed that “anything’s legal” during war, including the theft of private property.

Speaking on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” Giuliani said that the United States should have seized oil fields in Iraq following the 2003 invasion, to prevent the resource from falling into the hands of terrorists.

It is a position that Trump has argued for years, but it has only garnered serious attention since the former reality TV star became the Republican nominee for president.

Asked why such a move would not amount to theft, Giuliani scoffed. “Of course it’s legal,” he said. “It’s a war. Until the war is over, anything’s legal.”

This is patently false. The seizure of private property in war has been prohibited under international law for more than a century.

That Giuliani, a lawyer and former U.S. attorney, would dismiss decades of international law was unexpected, but it was in keeping with Giuliani’s recent adoption of many of Trump’s most unsubstantiated claims.

The tenor and tone of Giuliani’s media appearances on behalf of Trump have caused a number of his former colleagues to worry publicly that the former mayor of New York is throwing away his legacy.

Giuliani went on to claim that Trump never meant that the United States should have literally removed Iraq’s chief natural resource from the country, only that American troops should have remained in Iraq to ensure it was divided up evenly. “Leave a force back there and take [the oil] and make sure it’s distributed in a proper way,” he told Stephanopoulos.

“If that oil wasn’t there, we wouldn’t have the Islamic State,” Giuliani continued. “That oil is what makes the Islamic State so rich. Had we held that oil, made sure that it was equitably distributed within Iraq, we [could] have some say, some control over the distribution of it.”

For Trump, however, the notion of taking Iraq’s oil has always held an appeal as a sort of plunder. Speaking to Stephanopoulos in 2011, Trump explained: “In the old days, you know when you had a war, to the victor belong the spoils. You go in. You win the war and you take it. … You’re not stealing anything. … We’re taking back $1.5 trillion to reimburse ourselves.”

On the presidential campaign trail, Trump has moderated his statements, leaving out the part about Iraq reimbursing the United States for the cost of our blundered invasion of their country.

(h/t Huffington Post)

Reality

Specifically, the Annex to the Hague Convention of 1907 on the Laws and Customs of War, which says that “private property … must be respected (and) cannot be confiscated.” It also says that “pillage is formally forbidden.”

In addition, the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Times of War provides that “any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.”

For example, when Saddam Hussein (the former authoritarian leader of Iraq who Trump admires) invaded Kuwait in 1990, one of the justifications for international intervention was because Hussein seized and held Kuwaiti oil fields.

Media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgfuFLIxKbk

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