State Department Posts on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Raise Ethics Concern

Trump Mar a Lago resort

A glowing description of President Donald Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago — calling it the “winter White House” — was posted on State Department websites, bringing criticism from ethics watchdogs and Democrats.

The item, published ahead of an early April meeting with China’s president at the Palm Beach club, recounted the club’s history and Trump’s purchase and gilded redecoration of the property where he’s spent half his weekends since taking office.

Under the heading “A Dream Deferred” — drawing on a famous line from the Langston Hughes poem “Harlem” — it said the original socialite owner wanted Mar-a-Lago to be a retreat for American presidents but notes it didn’t happen until Trump won the election.

The text appeared on the website for Share America, a State Department platform intended to “spark discussion and debate on important topics;” the website for the U.S. Embassy in the United Kingdom and the Facebook page for the U.S. Embassy in Albania.

Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was among those taking to Twitter to question whether the posts violated government ethics rules.

The State Department initially declined to comment on the posts, but later unpublished them and said, “The intention of the article was to inform the public about where the President has been hosting world leaders. We regret any misperception and have removed the post.”

Three ethics watchdogs who reviewed the posts before they were taken down told NBC News they were troubling.

“They represent violations of a federal ethics regulation which prohibits the use of public office to endorse a product or enterprise,” said Kathleen Clark, a professor at Washington University Law.

“Calling it the ‘winter White House’ appears to suggest that Mar-a-Lago has an official governmental role, which would appear to provide a governmental endorsement.”

Jordan Libowitz of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said the post “reads almost like an ad for Mar-a-Lago.”

“If they weren’t trying to drive business there, you have to wonder what they were doing,” said Libowitz, who has previously sued Trump over other alleged ethics violations.

John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation said it didn’t matter that the context for the posts was Trump’s meeting with China’s Xi Jinping.

“Publishing promotional materials for the President’s private business is clearly inappropriate, whether he is using it for official business or not,” he said. “There is only one White House. If you’re telling the story of Mar-a-Lago, it’s the president’s private business.”

Mar-a-Lago has been a lightning rod for those accusing the Trump administration of conflicts of interest.

While Trump has turned over control of his businesses to his sons, critics have pointed out that initiation fees were doubled to $200,000 after his election and that the president’s frequent appearances there could provide unique access to him for those who can pay.

An encounter between Trump and two former Colombian presidents, who were invited by a Mar-a-Lago member, also raised questions — with the White House denying there was a secret meeting to discuss opposition to a Colombian peace deal with revolutionaries.

As NBC News has reported, since his January inauguration, Trump has spent seven of 14 weekends at Mar-a-Lago and at least 28 percent of his term traveling to or staying at the estate.

(h/t NBC News)

Update

The State Department has since removed the post.

Trump: ObamaCare Will Die Without ‘Big Money’

President Trump said early Sunday that ObamaCare will die “far sooner than anyone” thought if it doesn’t receive federal funds to keep it going.

The president’s message comes just days before the Democrats and Republicans must agree on a federal budget or face a government shutdown.

Both parties are pushing for funding of their own priorities. The White House is pushing for funds to build a wall along the Mexican border and enhance border security, while Democrats hope to make more inroads in healthcare coverage.

White House officials have been publicly talking about the negotiations Sunday morning.

Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said Sunday that a government shutdown is not a “desired end.” He dodged questions about what would be acceptable to the administration in negotiations.

Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly said the president will be “insistent” on border wall funding.

Congress must pass a spending bill by Friday to avoid a government shutdown.

Reality

This is an apparent threat to the possibility of ending federal subsidies to help lower-income people buy health insurance. This will remove 24 million people from health care.

 

Trump on Earth Day: ‘Rigorous science is critical to my administration’

President Donald Trump declared his support for the environment and scientific research on his first Earth Day in the White House amid harsh criticisms over his actions to roll back environmental regulations and proposed cuts to non-military spending, including at the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Rigorous science is critical to my administration’s efforts to achieve the twin goals of economic growth and environmental protection,” Trump said in a statement Saturday as thousands of marchers filled the streets of downtown Washington to support science and evidence-based research — a protest partly fueled by opposition to Trump’s threats of budget cuts to agencies funding scientists’ work.

“My administration is committed to advancing scientific research that leads to a better understanding of our environment and of environmental risks,” Trump said. “As we do so, we should remember that rigorous science depends not on ideology, but on a spirit of honest inquiry and robust debate.

“This April 22nd, as we observe Earth Day, I hope that our nation can come together to give thanks for the land we all love and call home,” Trump added.

In a tweet later Saturday, however, Trump stated that while he is “committed” to environmental protection, people shouldn’t forget that “jobs matter.”

“Always remember that economic growth enhances environmental protection,” he said on his official Twitter account.

The Trump administration released a $1.1 trillion budget outline last month that makes good on a number of campaign promises. While the budget blueprint would increase defense spending by $54 billion in fiscal 2018, it would make corresponding cuts to the State Department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, which would lose about a third of its funding, and eliminate other federal programs.

Asked at the White House’s roll-out of the spending proposal about the cuts to climate change-related programs, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said those programs are “a waste of your money.”

“I think the President was fairly straightforward,” he said. “We’re not spending money on that anymore. We consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that. So that is a specific tie to his campaign.”

But Trump dismissed any idea Saturday that his administration will not promote policies in the best interest of the environment months after making comments that some considered dismissive of climate change.

“My administration is committed to keeping our air and water clean, to preserving our forests, lakes, and open spaces, and to protecting endangered species,” the President said in his statement.

Trump argued that advocating for greener environmental policies must not come at the expense of jobs. He vowed last month to end “the war on coal” by cutting “job-killing regulations” and putting miners back to work.

(h/t CNN)

State Dept. Official Reassigned After Conspiracy Theory Attacks From Breitbart

The Trump administration has moved a second career government employee out of a top advisory role amid pressure from conservative media outlets that have publicly targeted individual staffers, questioning their loyalty to the new administration.

Some State Department officials believe the individual, Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, was shifted because of the media attacks and are alarmed at the message such a move sends to civil service and foreign service employees, who are supposed to be protected by law from political retaliation.

“It puts people on edge,” said a State Department official familiar with Nowrouzzadeh’s situation.

Nowrouzzadeh, a civil service employee who helped shape the controversial Iran nuclear deal, had been detailed since last July to the secretary of state’s policy planning team, where she handled ongoing issues related to Iran and Gulf Arab countries. Her yearlong assignment was cut short earlier this month, after critical stories about her and others appeared in the Conservative Review and on Breitbart News, according to the State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter. Nowrouzzadeh did not want to be reassigned, according to the official.

The State Department said in a statement that Nowrouzzadeh has returned to the Office of Iranian Affairs, but it would not specify her new role or address questions about why she was shifted. The department’s statement noted that Nowrouzzadeh “has an outstanding reputation in the department and we expect her to continue to do valuable work in furtherance of U.S. national security. We’ll decline additional comment on the internal [human resources] matters of career employees.”

Nowrouzzadeh declined to comment for this story.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A second person familiar with the situation confirmed that the conservative media attacks on Nowrouzzadeh had rattled people in the upper ranks of the Trump administration.

Nowrouzzadeh is an U.S.-born American citizen of Iranian descent who joined the federal government in 2005, during the George W. Bush administration. Stories published recently on conservative websites have questioned whether she should remain in her position, calling her a loyalist to former President Barack Obama and mentioning her past links to the National Iranian American Council, an advocacy group that has come under criticism from the right.

Nowrouzzadeh is at least the second career staffer to be shifted after conservative media criticism.

Earlier this month, administration officials said Andrew Quinn, who had been appointed to the National Economic Council, was being sent back to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. No reason for the reassignment was given, but Quinn’s appointment to the NEC had drawn fire from Breitbart News and other conservative corners that noted the career government employee had helped the Obama administration negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal from which President Donald Trump has withdrawn.

Conservative media outlets first wrote about Nowrouzzadeh during the Obama years, when she served on the National Security Council and helped usher through the Iran nuclear deal, which was heavily criticized by many Republicans. Her name, which gives away her Iranian ethnicity, attracted attention from reporters, unusual for a lower-level staffer.

Multiple stories on Breitbart and other conservative sites pointed out that she once worked for the National Iranian American Council, which some critics allege has links to the Iranian government. But Nowrouzzadeh’s defenders note that she was merely an intern at NIAC as a college undergraduate, and that the advocacy group did not take positions on U.S. policy while she was there. NIAC, which is now more politically active, has denied working on behalf of Iran’s government.

Nowrouzzadeh is “very smart, deeply knowledgeable about Iran,” said Philip Gordon, who served as a top Middle East adviser to Obama and who has publicly defended Nowrouzzadeh in the past. “Like many civil service experts and career foreign service officers, she possesses just the sort of expertise political leaders from either party should have by their side when they make critical and difficult foreign policy decisions.”

Since Trump took office, a fresh round of stories in the Conservative Review, Breitbart and other outlets have raised questions about Nowrouzzadeh, as well as several other career government officials who have dealt with sensitive issues such as Iran, Israel and trade. Some stories have questioned why Trump kept the career staff in their roles, singling them out as “Obama holdovers,” even though some joined government years before Obama became president.

In general, U.S. law is supposed to protect career government employees from politically motivated firings and other retaliation not related to work performance. However, the political appointees of incoming administrations have wide latitude in terms of where to assign people or whom to promote, so it’s possible to shuffle people around without breaching their legal protections.

The State Department official familiar with the situation said there’s been no announcement about a replacement for Nowrouzzadeh on the policy planning team, which acts as an in-house think tank for the secretary of state.

When asked about the media attacks against her and others several weeks ago, a State spokesman said the stories in the conservative press contained a slew of misleading information. Some of the conservative media reports about Nowrouzzadeh, for instance, relied on Iranian state-run media, which often publishes “propaganda and falsehoods,” the spokesman said at the time.

Gordon said the conservative media attacks on individual government staffers may be roundabout attempts by some on the right to influence Trump’s policy agenda, especially on some sensitive issues that animate the Republican base.

“If people writing these pieces are not happy with the Trump foreign policy that may be because the president and vice president and Cabinet officers decided not to do things that are not in their interest,” Gordon said. “If Donald Trump hasn’t torn up the Iran nuclear deal, it may be because he realized that would be a bad idea. And it’s not because one of his policy planning staffers has a family of Iranian origin.”

(h/t Politico)

President Trump Held Secret Pay to Play Mar-a-Lago Meeting with Two Colombian Ex-Presidents

President Trump secretly met with two former Colombian presidents critical of an Obama-era peace agreement between their home country’s sitting government and a far-left rebel group, according to a report.

Without listing it in his daily schedule or disclosing it to reporters, Trump met with Alvaro Uribe and Andres Pastrana at his Mar-a-Lago estate last weekend, the Miami Herald first reported on Thursday.

The stealthy meeting was apparently facilitated by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who has been openly skeptical of the landmark peace agreement between Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos’ government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year for brokering the peace deal, which prompted outrage from some Colombians who say the FARC rebels are getting away with murder.

President Obama last year dedicated $450 million in foreign aid to help solidify the peace deal, which effectively ended a bloody 50-year power struggle between the leftist guerilla group and government forces. Obama faced backlash over the move, especially from Republicans.

It’s unclear what was discussed during last week’s Mar-a-Lago meeting, though speculation swirled that it might have been facilitated in an effort to tilt Trump’s opinion in a certain direction ahead of his sit-down with President Santos next month.

Santos is expected to ask Trump to make good on the Obama administration’s $450 million pledge.

The White House initially declined to discuss the matter, setting off a wave of speculation among Colombian media outlets.

A Trump administration spokeswoman eventually confirmed that the meeting occurred, but downplayed its significance, claiming that the two former Colombian heads of state just happened to be at the club at the same time as President Trump.

“There wasn’t anything beyond a quick hello,” the spokeswoman said, adding that the Colombian presidents were in the company of a Mar-a-Lago club member.

But Uribe and Pastrana, who are both staunch opponents of the peace deal with FARC, had a completely different take on the meet.

“Thanks to @POTUS @realDonaldTrump for the cordial and very frank conversation about problems and prospects of Colombia and the region,” Pastrana tweeted in Spanish after the meeting.

Uribe’s former vice president, Francisco Santos, echoed those comments, telling the Herald that the meeting was concise but to the point.

“We’re very worried,” Santos told the newspaper. “You have a perfect storm, and the (Santos) government says everything is going fine and we’re living in peace. And that’s not true.”

Trump’s secret meeting raises a number of questions, including his inclination to meet with people who are either connected to, or willing to themselves pay the $200,000 Mar-a-Lago membership fee.

Colombia’s ambassador to the U.S., Juan Carlos Pinzon, criticized Uribe and Pastrana for going through back channels to discuss sensitive matters with Trump ahead of Santos’ visit.

“We need to address these issues at home,” Pinzon told a Colombian radio station. “We need to wash our dirty laundry at home.”

(h/t New York Daily News)

Reality

President Trump has been in office for 91 days. He has spent 25 of them at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, often mingling with members and guests.

Since the election, the cost of membership has doubled to $200,000.

Mr. Trump often railed against pay-to-play politics on the campaign trail, repeatedly slamming a “broken system.”

Yet the access at Mar-a-Lago is unparalleled. Last weekend, two former presidents of Colombia were guests and quietly met with Mr. Trump.

Former Colombian President Andres Pastrana later tweeted about the meeting, thanking Mr. Trump for “the cordial and very frank conversation about the problems and prospects in Colombia and the region.”

The two men are opponents of current Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who has not yet met with Mr. Trump. The encounter was not on Mr. Trump’s public schedule.

Five days later, White House press secretary Sean Spicer seemed surprised to hear about it.

“I’m just saying I’m unaware of the circumstances,” Spicer told reporters.

The White House later said the men “briefly said hello when the president walked past them.”

Club members have posted photos with military officers and even with the president himself.

Trump: ‘Media Will Kill’ Success of First 100 Days

President Trump took aim at the media early Friday morning, accusing journalists and news outlets of belittling and disparaging his early accomplishments in the White House.

Trump is set to hit the symbolic 100-day mark in his presidency on April 29. Those early days are typically considered a bellwether for a presidential administration and its ability to govern.

With little legislative achievement to speak of, Trump has focused on executive actions to roll back Obama-era regulations and climate policy.

The biggest success of Trump’s young presidency, alluded to in his tweet, has been the nomination and confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, whom Trump picked to replace the late Antonin Scalia.

But some of the president’s highest-profile campaign promises have foundered in his first months in office.

Two controversial executive orders barring citizens of certain Muslim-majority countries and refugees from entering the U.S., for example, were blocked by federal judges amid concerns that the orders amounted to a ban on a religious group.

And a House GOP measure to repeal and replace ObamaCare ultimately failed after Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) pulled it amid dwindling support from Republican lawmakers.

Still, Trump has managed to make good on other promises, such as his vow to crack down on illegal immigration. He has already directed his administration to more aggressively enforce immigration laws and has authorized the construction of a long-touted wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Also casting a shadow over Trump’s first 100 days is a set of ongoing investigations into Russian election interference and potential ties between members of Trump’s presidential campaign and Moscow. Both the Senate and House Intelligence committees are probing the matter, and the FBI is conducting its own investigation.

Trump and his aides have repeatedly denied any collusion with Moscow, and the president himself has called the investigations a “witch hunt” akin to McCarthyism during the Cold War.

(h/t The Hill)

Reality

Trump made some really big promises during the campaign during his first 100 days, and has come through in none of them.

Dow Chemical Donates $1 Million to Trump, Asks Administration to Ignore Pesticide Study

Chlorpyrifos, diazinon, and malathion are a group of pesticides that are a big money-maker for Dow Chemical, with the company selling approximately 5 million pounds of chlorpyrifos in the U.S. each year, according to the Associated Press. Dow Chemical, however, has a small problem on its hands, and it’s not the fact that the pesticide was “originally derived from a nerve gas developed by Nazi Germany,” per the AP, though that’s certainly not great for marketing materials. In this case, it’s the fact that studies by federal scientists have found that chlorpyrifos, diazinon, and malathion are harmful to almost 1,800 “critically threatened or endangered species.” Historically, groups like the Environmental Protection Agency would want to avoid killing frogs, fish, birds, mammals, and plants, which is why the regulator and two others that it works with to enforce the Endangered Species Act are reportedly “close to issuing findings expected to result in new limits on how and where the highly toxic pesticides can be used,” the AP reports.

Luckily for Dow, the E.P.A. is now run by climate-change skeptic and general enemy of living things Scott Pruitt, who last month said he would reverse “an Obama-era effort to bar the use of Dow’s chlorpyrifos pesticide on food after recent peer-reviewed studies found that even tiny levels of exposure could hinder the development of children’s brains.” Plus, Dow Chemical C.E.O. Andrew Liveris is good buddies with President Donald Trump. So, you can see how the company, which the AP reports also spent $13.6 million on lobbying last year, might feel like it is in the clear.

According to the AP, lawyers representing Dow and two other companies that manufacture the pesticides in question (known as organophosphates) have sent letters to the heads of the E.P.A, the Department of Commerce, and the Fish and Wildlife Service, asking them to “set aside” the results of the studies, claiming that they are “fundamentally flawed.” Not surprisingly, the scientists hired by Dow “to produce a lengthy rebuttal to the government studies” have come up with diverging results.

In addition to Pruitt’s long history of, per the AP, aligning “himself in legal disputes with the interests of executives and corporations,” Dow has another reason to be hopeful the government will conveniently ignore any lingering concerns about killing off entire species: Andrew Liveris is a close adviser to Donald Trump who was literally standing next to the president in February when he signed an executive order “mandating the creation of task forces at federal agencies to roll back government regulations.”

Dow also donated $1 million to underwrite Trump’s inaugural festivities, the AP reports, but God help the person who dares to wonder aloud if the check was some sort of an attempt to curry favor with the administration. As Rachelle Schikorra, Dow’s director of public affairs, told the AP, any such suggestion is “completely off the mark.”

(h/t Vanity Fair)

Jeff Sessions Dismisses Hawaii as ‘an Island in the Pacific’

Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke dismissively about the State of Hawaii while criticizing a Federal District Court ruling last month that blocked the Trump administration from carrying out its ban on travel from parts of the Muslim world.

“I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power,” Mr. Sessions said this week in an interview on “The Mark Levin Show,” a conservative talk radio program.

Mr. Sessions’s description of Hawaii, where the federal judge who issued the order, Derrick K. Watson, has his chambers, drew a rebuke from both of the United States senators who represent the state. Annexed as a territory of the United States in the late 19th century, Hawaii became the 50th state in 1959.

“Hawaii was built on the strength of diversity & immigrant experiences — including my own,” Senator Mazie Hirono, Democrat of Hawaii, wrote on Twitter. “Jeff Sessions’ comments are ignorant & dangerous.”

The other senator from Hawaii, Brian Schatz, who is also a Democrat, expressed similar sentiments, writing on Twitter: “Mr. Attorney General: You voted for that judge. And that island is called Oahu. It’s my home. Have some respect.”

Asked for a response from Mr. Sessions, Ian Prior, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said in an email: “Hawaii is, in fact, an island in the Pacific — a beautiful one where the attorney general’s granddaughter was born. The point, however, is that there is a problem when a flawed opinion by a single judge can block the president’s lawful exercise of authority to keep the entire country safe.”

(The State of Hawaii is a chain of islands, one of which is also called Hawaii; the judge’s chambers, however, are in Honolulu, which is on the island of Oahu.)

Judge Watson, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, was confirmed in 2013 by a 94-to-0 vote; Mr. Sessions, then a United States senator from Alabama, was among those who cast an approving vote. A former federal prosecutor, Judge Watson earned his law degree from Harvard alongside Mr. Obama and Neil M. Gorsuch, the newly seated Supreme Court justice. He is the only judge of native Hawaiian descent on the federal bench.

Last month, Judge Watson issued a nationwide injunction blocking President Trump’s travel ban, ruling that the plaintiffs — the State of Hawaii and Ismail Elshikh, the imam of the Muslim Association of Hawaii — had reasonable grounds to challenge the order as religious discrimination. He cited comments dating to Mr. Trump’s original call, during the 2016 campaign, for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

During the arguments, the government had contended that looking beyond the text of the order to infer religious animus would amount to investigating Mr. Trump’s “veiled psyche,” but Judge Watson wrote in his decision that there was “nothing ‘veiled’” about Mr. Trump’s public remarks. Still, Mr. Sessions reiterated that line of argument in the radio interview, saying he believed that the judge’s reasoning was improper and would be overturned.

“The judges don’t get to psychoanalyze the president to see if the order he issues is lawful,” Mr. Sessions said. “It’s either lawful or it’s not.”

(h/t New York Times)

Media

 

The Trump administration just quietly admitted that the Iran deal is working

In February, President Donald Trump said that the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement with Iran was “one of the worst deals I’ve ever seen.” His comments were a direct echo of candidate Trump’s rhetoric: In one 2016 speech, he said, “My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.”

While Trump refused to commit to tearing it up on day one, he repeatedly suggested that the deal was a “disaster” and that his administration would enforce it more harshly or perhaps seek to renegotiate its terms and make it a “totally different deal.”

Tuesday night, the Trump administration quietly took a very different line.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sent a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan that “certifies” Iran is complying with the terms of the deal, including the terms that place strict limits on its ability to develop a nuclear weapon. The deal, Tillerson said, was working.

Tillerson was careful to note that Tehran was “a leading state sponsor of terror,” and announced that Trump was initiating a review that will “evaluate whether suspension of sanctions related to Iran pursuant to the [Iran deal] is vital to the national security interests of the United States.”

But that kind of high-level review of major policy initiatives is actually quite normal for new administrations. According to experts across the political spectrum, the clear upshot of this letter is that the Iran deal is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

“My sense is the deal will be left largely intact,” Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow in the Brookings Center for Middle East Policy says. “[Tearing it up] is more trouble than it’s worth.”

That’s not to say that the US and Iran will be on good terms. The Trump administration is likely to take a more confrontational line on Iran when it comes to other issues, like Tehran’s support for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and the Iranian ballistic missile program.

But it does mean that US-Iran relations, which focused on the nuclear standoff for years, won’t be changing as much under Trump as the president’s own words had suggested.

(h/t Vox)

Ivanka’s Company Won Approval for Chinese Trademarks on the Same Day She Dined with President Xi

Ivanka Trump’s $100 million made-in-Asia clothing line got a boost in early April when the Chinese government granted Donald Trump’s daughter with new trademarks. From the Associated Press:

On April 6, Ivanka Trump’s company won provisional approval from the Chinese government for three new trademarks, giving it monopoly rights to sell Ivanka brand jewelry, bags and spa services in the world’s second-largest economy. That night, the first daughter and her husband, Jared Kushner, sat next to the president of China and his wife for a steak and Dover sole dinner at Mar-a-Lago.

What a coincidence, right? The same day Ivanka Trump is rubbing elbows with the President of China and his wife, the Chinese government makes moves favorable to her company and her wallet. Needless to say, this is running into an ethically murky, swamp-like area:

Using the prestige of government service to build a brand is not illegal. But criminal conflict of interest law prohibits federal officials, like Trump and her husband, from participating in government matters that could impact their own financial interest or that of their spouse. Some argue that the more her business broadens its scope, the more it threatens to encroach on the ability of two trusted advisers to deliver credible counsel to the president on core issues like trade, intellectual property, and the value of the Chinese currency.

“Put the business on hold and stop trying to get trademarks while you’re in government,” advised Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush.

Hitting the pause button on the pursuit of international trade deals and overseas construction projects seems like the least the Trump family should be doing to separate themselves from their businesses while they oversee the people’s business.

Based on booming sales, don’t expect that to happen anytime soon. Some retail chains have decided not to carry Ivanka Trump’s clothing line, but her company reports online sales are at a record high. After Kellyanne Conway’s unethical sales pitch on Fox & Friends, in which she instructed viewers to buy Ivanka’s clothing online, the company reported a 207 percent increase in online orders in February. The same week President Xi dined with Ivanka Trump at Mar-a-Lago, a huge shipment from China arrived in the U.S.:

The week of the summit, 3.4 tons of Ivanka Trump handbags, wallets and blouses arrived in the U.S. from Hong Kong and Shanghai. U.S. imports of her merchandise grew an estimated 40 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to Panjiva Inc., which maintains and analyzes global shipping records.

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