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      Why is a Trump official charging taxpayers thousands for a 'girls’ night'?

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      They say money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you a really expensive girls’ night – which is exactly what Seema Verma, the Trump administration’s top Medicaid official, has been spending on – and charging the taxpayer for it too.In 2018, Verma spent $2,933 organizing a “girls’ night” at a reporter’s house and charged it to expenses, according to a 17-month investigation conducted by congressional Democrats.Maybe the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) needed a little self-care, after all, the backlash she got for making it harder for poor Americans to access healthcare can’t be good for one’s complexion (which could explain this $345 moisturizer that Verma charged taxpayers for in 2018).But that’s just the problem: Verma has been in the spotlight for her expenses for a while – last year she also came under fire for expensing $50,000 for luggage she lost on a three-day trip. Then again, considering that practically the entire Trump family, including the president himself, have made a habit of expensing random stuff to the American taxpayer (remember Donald Trump Jr’s $76,000 Mongolian shooting trip?) perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising (heck, a $3,000 party seems paltry in comparison).But that’s not all that she spent. In fact, the congressional inquiry has revealed that Verma has spent more than $3.5m in expenses, spent at times improperly, to pay for consultants who helped her to pitch op-eds and wrote her Twitter posts. Her other expenses include a $977 consultancy fee, paid to a consultant who helped her to get an op-ed about Obamacare on the Fox News website; and over $13,000 on consultants who spent months helping her to win awards.Verma has rejected the idea that her expenses have been improper: she told a House committee in October 2019 that “all the contracts we have at CMS are based on promoting the work of CMS” and her expensing habits were “consistent with how the agency has used resources in the past”.Plus, she seems like a nice person. Verma’s father once described her as having sympathy for the poor because she used to pull over and give cash to the same homeless man on her way to work every morning – something he said he was “amazed” by. Let’s just hope she wasn’t expensing that too. More

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      Disloyal review: Michael Cohen's mob hit on Trump entertains – but will it shift votes?

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      Michael Cohen is no saint. Aside from the obvious, Donald Trump’s former fixer has never entered into a formal cooperation agreement with federal prosecutors, a fact duly noted by the US attorneys’ office for the southern district of New York in its sentencing memorandum. Because of that, the “inability to fully vet his criminal history and reliability impact his utility as a witness”.On top of that, Cohen boasts in his memoir of his exposure to the mob as a teenager, and even compares his reception in federal prison to that accorded to Al Capone and El Chapo.Yes, it’s easy to distrust Cohen. On that score, Disloyal should be taken with more than a grain of salt. Its author is no hero.But that doesn’t make the book any less interesting. For all its black-hearted opportunism and self-aggrandizement, it delivers a readable and bile-filled take on Trump and his minions.What the book lacks in genuine contrition is made up for with score-settling and name-calling. Like Omarosa Manigault Newman before him, Cohen entertains, albeit at the expense of others: Don Jr, Jared Kushner, Roger Stone and Steve Bannon, for starters.Right off the bat, Cohen shares that the president lacks respect for his namesake. According to Cohen, Trump Sr would repeatedly tell him Donnie possessed the “worst fucking judgment” of anyone he had ever met. That’s saying something.Organized crime pervades the book, and Cohen does not sound at all disapprovingLikewise, asked by his oldest son if he is nervous about appearing in a televised wrestling match with the WWE impresario Vince McMahon, Trump Sr banishes him and comments: “What kind of stupid fucking question is that?”Humiliation is central to Trump and Cohen’s MOs – and it doesn’t end there.Shown a photo of his sons’ hunting escapades, Trump is angered, and again tears into his hapless offspring: “You think you’re a fucking big man? Get the fuck out of my office.” He sounds a lot like Tony Soprano. More important, he shared Melania’s displeasure over junior’s penchant for big-game hunting.As it happens, an earlier book by Ivana Trump recorded that it was she who wanted to call their son Donald Jr, to which Donald Sr replied: “You can’t do that!”His explanation: “What if he’s a loser?”Ivanka Trump is immune from the president’s derision. After all, Donald once told Howard Stern that if he weren’t her father, he’d have dated her. Cohen is not her dad, though, so is less hesitant in tattling on the favorite child.After writing about how Ivanka once joined him and his wife for lasagne dinners, Cohen recalls a brush with the law in connection with Trump Soho, an ill-fated condominium hotel in Manhattan, and Ivanka’s elaborate plans for Trump Moscow. Once again, the Trumps are caught in the headlights of the Manhattan district attorney.In Cohen’s telling, after first adopting a “hands-off policy” to the Russia project, Ivanka became enthusiastic when she learned the building would contain a health and wellness center named for her. She was prepared to hire the architect Zaha Hadid, discarding drawings supplied by Cohen.William Barr’s efforts to be Roy Cohn 2.0 – Trump’s consigliere in corridors of power Cohen could never reach – are realIn the end, Cohen laments, “all three kids were starved for their father’s love”.Jared Kushner also emerges worse for wear. Words like “inexperienced” and “unqualified” tumble on to the page. Cohen observes that “Kushner was supremely arrogant, a real snob” with an “exaggerated sense of his importance and intelligence”.Elsewhere, however, Cohen expresses admiration for macho swagger and strut. So confusing.Speaking of which, Disloyal offers a window into the president’s views of Vladimir Putin. Cohen records that on numerous occasions Trump told him the Russian president was “the richest man in the world by a multiple”.Trump is quoted explaining: “If you think about it, Putin controls 25% of the Russian economy … imagine controlling 25% of the wealth of a country. Wouldn’t that be fucking amazing.”Consistent with that take, Trump muses that a Russian oligarch who bought property from him was actually doing Putin’s bidding.“The oligarchs are just fronts for Putin,” Trump purportedly said. “That’s all they are doing – investing Putin’s money.” More

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      Is democracy in America under threat? – podcast

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      As the US election draws closer, the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington hears from civil leaders on their fears for the integrity of the process and the future of their democracy

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      When Barack Obama spoke at the Democratic national convention recently he had as his backdrop a facsimile of the US constitution. He spoke pointedly about the importance of that document and criticised Donald Trump, a reality TV star who had damaged the reputation of the United States with “our democratic institutions threatened like never before”. It is a concern shared by many across the US and the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington tells Anushka Asthana that he was alarmed by what he heard in interviews with some of the most prominent figures in civil rights, the law and academia on the state of democracy in America. He spoke to Michael Waldman, the head of the Brennan Center for Justice; Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP; Deirdre Schifeling, the campaign director of Democracy For All 2021; K. Sabeel Rahman, the head of Demos, and Vanita Gupta, the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. All told him versions of the same story: democracy in America is in peril like never before. More

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      US justice department seeks to defend Trump in lawsuit tied to rape allegation

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      The US justice department is seeking to take over Donald Trump’s defense in a defamation lawsuit from a writer who accused him of rape, and federal lawyers asked a court on Tuesday to allow a move that could put the American people on the hook for any money she might be awarded.After New York state courts turned down Trump’s request to delay E Jean Carroll’s suit, justice department lawyers filed court papers on Tuesday aiming to shift the case into federal court and to substitute the US for Trump as the defendant. That means the federal government, rather than Trump himself, might have to pay damages if any are awarded.The filing complicates, at least for the moment, Carroll’s efforts to get a DNA sample from the president as potential evidence and to have him answer questions under oath.Justice department lawyers argue that Trump was “acting within the scope of his office” when he denied Carroll’s allegations, made last year, that he raped her in a New York luxury department store in the mid-1990s. She says his comments – including that she was “totally lying” to sell a memoir – besmirched her character and harmed her career.“Numerous courts have recognized that elected officials act within the scope of their office or employment when speaking with the press, including with respect to personal matters,” the DoJ attorneys wrote.The White House echoed the argument. “Last year, the president vehemently denied allegations made by Jean Carroll about a supposed incident from some 25 years ago,” a senior White House official told the Guardian in a statement. “The president was acting within the scope of his office when he publicly responded to these false allegations.”Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, called their argument “shocking”.“Trump’s effort to wield the power of the US government to evade responsibility for his private misconduct is without precedent,” she said in an email to the Guardian.Carroll told the Guardian by email: “Today’s actions demonstrate that Trump will do everything possible, including using the full powers of the federal government, to block discovery from going forward in my case before the upcoming election to try to prevent a jury from ever deciding which one of us is lying.”It will be up to a federal judge to decide whether to keep the case in federal court and to allow the US to become the defendant.Carroll is trying to get a DNA sample from Trump to see whether it matches as-yet-unidentified male genetic material found on a dress that she says she was wearing during the alleged attack and didn’t wear again until a photo shoot last year.Her suit seeks damages and a retraction of Trump’s statements. More

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      US veterans and soldiers divided over Trump calling war dead ‘suckers’

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      Donald Trump was struggling to retain support of active US service members, according to polls, even before last week’s bombshell report that the commander-in-chief referred to fallen and captured US service members as “losers” and “suckers”. But some veterans and military family members remain conflicted. The Atlantic magazine’s story – in which four sources close to Trump said he cancelled a visit to pay respects at an American military cemetery outside Paris in 2018 because he thought the dead soldiers were “losers” and “suckers” and did not want the rain to mess up his hair – prompted an outpouring of condemnation, and comes less than two months before the 3 November election.Several former Trump administration officials confirmed the report. Trump and the White House have denied it, with the president insisting: “There is nobody feels more strongly about our soldiers, our wounded warriors, our soldiers that died in war than I do.”Polls in 2016 showed active service members preferred Trump to Hilary Clinton by a large margin, but polling from late July and early August conducted by the Military Times showed the continued steady drop in opinions of the commander-in-chief since he was elected, with almost 50% of respondents reporting an unfavorable view.“I recommend all veterans to use their Military pics as a profile pic to let Trump know how many people he has offended by calling fallen soldiers losers and suckers. #NewProfilePics,” army veteran David Weissman, who describes himself as an “apologetic” former Trump supporter, wrote on Twitter last week, in a post that went viral. More