New polls out today from Ohio and Florida find the Republican Party nominee now leading Hillary Clinton by several points in both swing-states. That, after several recent unforced errors by the Democratic nominee and months of misleading and often inaccurate mainstream media reporting on Hillary Clinton's email server and charitable foundation. All the while, Trump has largely received a pass from that same corporate media on his multiple cases of apparent outright fraud and even admitted illegalities.
On that score, I'm joined by Noah Bookbinder, Executive Director of the non-partisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), to discuss the new criminal complaint his organization filed yesterday with the U.S. Department of Justice, calling for a bribery probe of both Trump and Bondi (pictured above). The complaint centers on the illegal $25,000 donation solicited by Bondi in 2013 and illegally delivered by Trump's charitable foundation to her political committee just days after the Florida AG's office announced they were considering joining a New York state fraud probe of "Trump University" and the "Trump Institute".
The Trump Foundation donation, as Bookbinder explains, was unlawful. And, following CREW's civil complaint to the IRS about it in March of this year, Trump admitted the violation by paying a fine and reimbursing his own charitable foundation for the illegal payment to Bondi's political action committee. On today's show, Bookbinder explains how CREW's new criminal complaint goes even farther in calling for accountability via a new federal probe of Trump's apparent payoff to Bondi, whose office decided not to join the NY civil suit shortly after she received the Trump donation (and then what appears to be a hugely reduced rate for a fundraiser held for her at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.)
"There's a lot of evidence here that looks a whole lot like classic corruption," Bookbinder, who formerly worked on the United States Sentencing Commission, tells me. "The evidence that we do have of this timeline looks really bad, especially when you combine it with the kinds of statements that Donald Trump has regularly made about how he operates — that he gives public officials money and then they do what he wants them to do. If he did that here, it starts to look like a crime."
Then, a number of Trump supporters are arrested on assault charges for attacking protesters at a Trump rally in Asheville, North Carolina earlier this week, and another from his ever growing "basket of deplorables" is sought by police after punching out a 69-year old lady outside of the rally. Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for some good news (believe it or not) in our latest Green News Report, on fracking in California and on North Dakota's Dakota Access Pipeline, and some otherwise disturbing news following the hottest month ever recorded on Planet Earth.
You can find Brad's previous editions here.
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