HOW DONALD TRUMP'S BUSINESS TIES ARE ALREADY JEOPARDIZING U.S. INTERESTS

http://www.newsweek.com/2016/12/23/donald-trump-foreign-business-deals-jeopardize-us-531140.html





The president-elect is issuing statements to world leaders that radically depart from U.S. foreign policy, and benefit his family’s corporate empire.

A real shame an ordinary American can't be elected as President in these days of billion dollar campaigns. It really doesn't matter about Trumpet because the SAME issues were apparent with HRC and the Clinton Foundation. If it walks like a duck.....

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/293404-watchdogs-warn-of-serious-conflicts-of-interest-for-clinton-foundation

But that would've been a non issue.

gatorfan wrote:A real shame an ordinary American can't be elected as President in these days of billion dollar campaigns. It really doesn't matter about Trumpet because the SAME issues were apparent with HRC and the Clinton Foundation. If it walks like a duck.....

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/293404-watchdogs-warn-of-serious-conflicts-of-interest-for-clinton-foundation

Not even close. We have discussed the Clinton Foundation at length. You may not be aware that a forensic audit was conducted prior to Mrs. Clinton's entry into the race. That means every single transaction was scrutinized...not just random sampling.

Floridatexan wrote:

gatorfan wrote:A real shame an ordinary American can't be elected as President in these days of billion dollar campaigns. It really doesn't matter about Trumpet because the SAME issues were apparent with HRC and the Clinton Foundation. If it walks like a duck.....

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/293404-watchdogs-warn-of-serious-conflicts-of-interest-for-clinton-foundation

Not even close.  We have discussed the Clinton Foundation at length.  You may not be aware that a forensic audit was conducted prior to Mrs. Clinton's entry into the race.  That means every single transaction was scrutinized...not just random sampling.

http://dailycaller.com/2016/06/27/exclusive-clinton-foundation-auditor-has-troubled-regulatory-history/

Federal regulatory agencies have repeatedly issued sanctions and fines against BKD, the small Midwestern accounting firm that for 13 years was chief auditor for the Clinton Foundation’s operations, according to an investigation by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Springfield, Missouri-based firm served as the external auditor that certified the financial soundness of the Clinton Foundation.

The foundation began as Bill Clinton’s Presidential Library, but it soon ballooned into an entity fighting global problems. The Clinton Foundation reported assets of around $200 million since 2007, with multiple operating programs in far flung corners of the world.


BKD has made news in other ways, however. It was indicted by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Depository Insurance Corporation for “unprofessional conduct” and “gross negligence,” according to federal court documents

And the Public Company Oversight Accounting Board (PCOAB), the nation’s top federal oversight agency for American accounting firms, reported that BKD violated auditor independence rules over the years, which its inspectors reported as “significant deficiencies.”

BKD — which stands for founders Baird, Kurtz & Dobson — also has been hauled into court by unhappy clients who have charged it with “malpractice” and the manipulation of accounting books.

Leslie Lenkowsky, an expert in the practice of philanthropy at Indiana University and a director of the Philanthropy Roundtable, said he was surprised that the Clinton Foundation had not used one of the top accounting companies in the nation.

“You would think, as a protective measure, the Clinton’s would use only accountants of substantial reputation. Given the visibility of the Clinton’s, you’d think they would have one of the main accounting firms overseeing their books,” Lenkowsky told TheDCNF.

“People will wonder how accurate is this audit,” he said. Lenkowsky served as a founding director for President Clinton’s Corporation for National and Community Service and President George W. Bush later named him CEO.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican who called upon the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the Clinton Foundation’s financial practices, told TheDCNF, “it would be a ‘red flag’ for me when a firm had been reprimanded and been called into accountability by professionals.”

Last year, the Clinton Foundation restated all of its tax filings from 2010 to 2013, the same four years that Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. The 2010 to 2012 restatements along with eleven previous years of tax returns were all audited by BKD.

Charles Ortel, a private investor on Wall Street who has twice served as trustee for tax exempt nonprofits, said it was “preposterous” for the foundation to stay with BKD when its mission and finances exploded.

The Wall Street expert who has examined the foundation’s reporting in depth, said using a small, under-resourced accounting firm “strikes me as a long pattern of gross negligence and willful malfeasance on the part of the trustees.”

In 2010 alone, the first year of the restatement, the foundation operated programs in 27 different countries, and reported $138 million in gifts and contributions, according to its tax return.

The foundation’s audits have been done by PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC), one of the nation’s largest accounting and auditing firms, since 2013. But Ortel said the PWC audits rely on the potentially flawed earlier audits.

“Audits build on themselves. You can’t have BKD screw up October 23, 1997 through December 31, 2009 and then Pricewaterhouse says ‘well we’ll take BKD’s work and move forward.’ You can’t do that. But that’s what they did,” Ortel told TheDCNF.

President Clinton chose the Little Rock, Arkansas office of BKD in 2001 during construction of his presidential library there. Even then there were signs of conflicts of interest as BKD was also the auditor for the construction company’s parent company. In addition, the parent company’s chief financial officer also served on BKD’s official management committee.

Nevertheless, the Clintons kept BKD and retained it after the foundation dramatically altered its mission to fight global problems and its assets reached $200 million.

The BKD office in Little Rock also was embroiled in a major Arkansas scandal of its own making. Federal regulators blamed BKD for the sudden 2010 collapse of a Batesville, Arkansas savings bank after only five years of operation. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) regulators accused BKD of failing to discover a fraudulent bond deal that cost the bank $19 million, which exceeded all of its assets.

FDIC regulators hauled BKD into U.S. District Court for Eastern Arkansas in December 2013, charging that its 2009 audit services contained “omissions constituting professional negligence, gross negligence and breach of contract by BKD.”

Court documents show that BKD had approved the bond deal that FDIC officials found fraudulent. Regulators reported the fraudulent bonds were discovered “in the course of a routine examination of the bank.” The auditing firm and the federal government eventually settled the case out of court.

Just before the Clinton Foundation engaged BKD in 1999, a federal jury in Kansas City, Kansas, found that BKD’s Wichita office committed accounting malpractice in connection with a company sale. The jury hit the accounting firm with $22 million in damages.

Another client, Thayer/Patnicef Education Holdings sued BKD in April 2003 over a flawed 1996-97 audit. The company stated, “this is yet another case of a public accounting firm that looked the other way.” The company and the education company settled out of court.

The Securities and Exchange Commission publicly censured BKD in 2014, charging that it “engaged in improper professional conduct, violated the auditor independence rules, and caused each of the broker-dealers’ failure to file an annual report audited by an independent accountant.”

The SEC said BKD “jeopardized their objectivity and impartiality” by taking its client’s data and claiming it as its own audited findings.

“To ensure the integrity of our financial reporting system, firms cannot play the roles of auditor and preparer at the same time,” said Stephen L. Cohen, Associate Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. “Auditors must vigilantly safeguard their independence and stay current on the applicable requirements under the rules.”

The Public Company Oversight Accounting Board established by the Sarbanes-Oxley financial reforms that became law in 2002 also identified many deficiencies with BKD. The PCOAB conducts periodic inspections of auditing companies, but only makes public a portion of its findings.

“A substantial portion of the board’s criticisms of a firm,” PCOAB said of its inspection reports, “occurs out of public view, unless the firm fails to make progress to the board’s satisfaction in addressing those criticisms.”

The PCOAB went public on multiple deficiencies in December 2010 it found in BKD’s auditing work, saying “the inspection team identified what it considered to be audit deficiencies. They found deficiencies of such significance that it appeared to the inspection team that the firm did not obtain sufficient competent evidential matter to support its opinion on the issuer’s financial statements.”

Three other PCOAB inspection teams again found deficiencies with BKD in 2015 at the same time the firm was restating the foundation’s tax returns.

The inspection teams did not identify a specific BKD client, but noted that it found many “material misstatements” in the audits they were evaluating.

In the 2015 audit of BKD, the board concluded that, “Many audit deficiencies involve a lack of due professional care.”

The inspectors emphasized that it requires all outside auditing firms like BKD to display “professional skepticism. These standards state that professional skepticism is an attitude that includes a questioning mind and a critical assessment of the appropriateness and sufficiency of audit evidence.”

Team A found a total of four separate deficiencies and Teams B and C found deficiencies in one area.

A BKD spokesman declined to comment. Joey Lambert, a BKD marketing specialist, told TheDCNF “this involves confidential client matters, and accordingly we’re not at liberty to discuss our experiences or relationships with any client, past or present.”

The Clinton Foundation also did not respond to requests for comment by TheDCNF.

Propaganda requires a certain level of intelligence to discern.  Trying to bootstrap an auditing firms reputation to the Clinton Foundation is really funny, because anybody familiar with not for profit corporations and foundations which I have been involved in for forty years knows that there are annual audits of the same at both the federal level with the IRS, but the state where the entity was created.   These audits are quite specific, and many of the athletic associations I created were in fact audited by the state Attorney General.  These are not for profit organizations.  There never was a conflict of interest or a scintilla of improper quid pro quo.  Nada

However, the concern of the transition is that President Trump and his children control for profit corporations and businesses which can profit at the expense of America.   Two of Trump's sons actively were in the selection process of the Secretary of the Interior.  When does President elect Trump create a buffer from his business interests and America's interest.  No propaganda, no silliness, but real and obvious conflict of interest in for profit business.  Its time for grown ups to have discussions, and put the propaganda and fantasy where it belongs.......the trash can.

Floridatexan wrote:http://www.newsweek.com/2016/12/23/donald-trump-foreign-business-deals-jeopardize-us-531140.html

The president-elect is issuing statements to world leaders that radically depart from U.S. foreign policy, and benefit his family’s corporate empire.

It seems those potential conflicts of interest from Donald Trump's business ties are already causing problems.

A new investigative report from Newsweek alleges Turkey's government is already leveraging Trump's business dealings in the country in exchange for something it wants very badly. And it all starts with the Trump Towers in Istanbul.

Trump himself didn't build these towers. Their developer, Dogan Holding, paid Trump's company millions of dollars to use the President-elect's name.

http://www.aol.com/article/2016/12/13/report-turkish-government-may-trying-leverage-president-elect-trump-arresting-business-partner/21627141/

The possibilities of conflicts between his business interests and the best interests of the country are endless. Every country, every investment, every potential for future investments posses a whole range of possible entanglements. Fun part is we don't really have a solid idea of where all these investments are. Since there has been no tax returns released we are all flying blind and taking his word for it, which ever word that is at the moment.

The fox is in the hen house . . . . . just sayin'

The Daily Caller is hardly a reliable source.

http://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/?p=33052

Fox News Doubles Down On Stupid: Tucker Carlson Gets Primetime Show

It was three months ago that Roger Ailes stepped down from his post as CEO of Fox News amid allegations of sexual harassment. Subsequently there has been much speculation as to the future direction of the network without its longstanding guiding force. Well, for anyone who thought there would be a tempering of Fox’s stridently conservative bias, you’re optimism was unfounded.

Thursday Fox News announced that the vacancy left by Greta Van Susteren’s sudden departure would be filled by Tucker Carlson. Currently Carlson is a co-host of the weekend version of the Fox & Friends morning show. In that role he has ably fulfilled the Fox mandate to spew right-wing propaganda and smear Democrats. In the process he has cultivated an attitude of smug superiority while advancing a racist, misogynistic agenda.

For the record, Carlson is also the owner of the ultra-conservative web rag, The Daily Caller. As a publisher Carlson demonstrated his aversion to ethical journalism. In one instance he spiked an article that contained a criticism of Fox News for not being sufficiently anti-immigrant. Despite the fact that the piece castigated President Obama as a lawless tyrant, Carlson could not abide any Fox bashing. The article’s author said that Carlson told him “We can’t trash Fox on the site. I work there.” In other words, the Daily Caller is Fox’s puppet where free speech, and thought, is prohibited.

Additionally, the Daily Caller embraces the white supremacist alt-right movement that has adopted Donald Trump as its leader. In a wide-ranging essay about the budding “ethno-nationalism” crusades, Luke O’Brien writes for the Huffington Post about the relationships between America’s hate groups and the media. He singles out Carlson’s Daily Caller saying that:

“Other conservative sites, even ones that prefer bowties, appear to have accepted that angry right-wing populism translates into clicks. Take The Daily Caller, which now runs its fair share of immigrant knife-attack stories and Jew-baiting George Soros exposes. The reader comments on the site are at times indistinguishable in tone and racist content from those on Breitbart.”
That’s the same Breitbart News whose chairman, Stephen Bannon, is currently the CEO of Trump’s campaign for president. Bannon is also chairman of the Government Accountability Institute whose president, Peter Schweizer, authored the book “Clinton Cash.” Despite being filled with errors and lies, that book has been cited as the source for the FBI’s fatally biased review of the Clinton Foundation. It was also the subject of an hour-long special on Fox News. Oh, what a tangled web.

Prior to joining Fox News, Carlson’s career was a pitiful collection of failures. He had been canceled by PBS, CNN, and MSNBC. And if that wasn’t embarrassing enough, he was the first contestant voted off of Dancing with the Stars. He seemed to be a recidivist loser with no reasonable hope for redemption. He had even burned bridges with regard to Fox News when, after a childish prank (by both of them), he called Fox “a mean, sick group of people.”

Fortunately, For Carlson, Fox News has a policy of dredging the sewers of pseudo-journalism and rescuing the most offensive and desperate rejects, giving them a second chance at salvation. Of course that forgiveness comes at the cost of their soul. It rests on their willingness to supplicate themselves to their new savior. So when Fox called, Carlson went crawling back with his tail between his legs and fully prepared to obey.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Carlson knows his place and did what was expected of an indentured servant to the Wingnut Overlord. His reward is a spanking new program in primetime access where he can deliver his radically rightist, poorly reasoned rants. And he’ll fit right in with Bill O’Reilly, Megyn Kelly, and Sean Hannity. Proving that Fox News intends to continue being a fount of conservative propaganda, and a mouthpiece for Republican dogma, for many years to come.

And for your entertainment pleasure, here is the classic episode of CNN’s Crossfire where Jon Stewart called Carlson a “dick” and humiliated him so badly the show was cancelled soon after.

Floridatexan wrote:
The Daily Caller is hardly a reliable source.

http://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/?p=33052t,

And "NEWSCORPSE" is? Thanks for the laugh.........

othershoe1030 wrote:

Floridatexan wrote:http://www.newsweek.com/2016/12/23/donald-trump-foreign-business-deals-jeopardize-us-531140.html

The president-elect is issuing statements to world leaders that radically depart from U.S. foreign policy, and benefit his family’s corporate empire.

It seems those potential conflicts of interest from Donald Trump's business ties are already causing problems.

A new investigative report from Newsweek alleges Turkey's government is already leveraging Trump's business dealings in the country in exchange for something it wants very badly. And it all starts with the Trump Towers in Istanbul.

Trump himself didn't build these towers. Their developer, Dogan Holding, paid Trump's company millions of dollars to use the President-elect's name.

http://www.aol.com/article/2016/12/13/report-turkish-government-may-trying-leverage-president-elect-trump-arresting-business-partner/21627141/

The possibilities of conflicts between his business interests and the best interests of the country are endless. Every country, every investment, every potential for future investments posses a whole range of possible entanglements. Fun part is we don't really have a solid idea of where all these investments are. Since there has been no tax returns released we are all flying blind and taking his word for it, which ever word that is at the moment.

See the Newsweek article I just posted.  Also, there's this:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/12/guide-donald-trump-debt

And this:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/10/was_a_server_registered_to_the_trump_organization_communicating_with_russia.html

Lol... I posted that source specifically because of the sources you gobble up. And mine gutted your's.

PkrBum wrote:

Floridatexan wrote:

gatorfan wrote:A real shame an ordinary American can't be elected as President in these days of billion dollar campaigns. It really doesn't matter about Trumpet because the SAME issues were apparent with HRC and the Clinton Foundation. If it walks like a duck.....

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/293404-watchdogs-warn-of-serious-conflicts-of-interest-for-clinton-foundation

Not even close.  We have discussed the Clinton Foundation at length.  You may not be aware that a forensic audit was conducted prior to Mrs. Clinton's entry into the race.  That means every single transaction was scrutinized...not just random sampling.

http://dailycaller.com/2016/06/27/exclusive-clinton-foundation-auditor-has-troubled-regulatory-history/

Federal regulatory agencies have repeatedly issued sanctions and fines against BKD, the small Midwestern accounting firm that for 13 years was chief auditor for the Clinton Foundation’s operations, according to an investigation by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Springfield, Missouri-based firm served as the external auditor that certified the financial soundness of the Clinton Foundation.

The foundation began as Bill Clinton’s Presidential Library, but it soon ballooned into an entity fighting global problems. The Clinton Foundation reported assets of around $200 million since 2007, with multiple operating programs in far flung corners of the world.


BKD has made news in other ways, however. It was indicted by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Depository Insurance Corporation for “unprofessional conduct” and “gross negligence,” according to federal court documents

And the Public Company Oversight Accounting Board (PCOAB), the nation’s top federal oversight agency for American accounting firms, reported that BKD violated auditor independence rules over the years, which its inspectors reported as “significant deficiencies.”

BKD — which stands for founders Baird, Kurtz & Dobson —  also has been hauled into court by unhappy clients who have charged it with “malpractice” and the manipulation of accounting books.

Leslie Lenkowsky, an expert in the practice of philanthropy at Indiana University and a director of the Philanthropy Roundtable, said he was surprised that the Clinton Foundation had not used one of the top accounting companies in the nation.

“You would think, as a protective measure, the Clinton’s would use only accountants of substantial reputation. Given the visibility of the Clinton’s, you’d think they would have one of the main accounting firms overseeing their books,” Lenkowsky told TheDCNF.

“People will wonder how accurate is this audit,” he said. Lenkowsky served as a founding director for President Clinton’s Corporation for National and Community Service and President George W. Bush later named him CEO.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican who called upon the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the Clinton Foundation’s financial practices, told TheDCNF, “it would be a ‘red flag’ for me when a firm had been reprimanded and been called into accountability by professionals.”

Last year, the Clinton Foundation restated all of its tax filings from 2010 to 2013, the same four years that Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. The 2010 to 2012 restatements along with eleven previous years of tax returns were all audited by BKD.

Charles Ortel, a private investor on Wall Street who has twice served as trustee for tax exempt nonprofits, said it was “preposterous” for the foundation to stay with BKD when its mission and finances exploded.

The Wall Street expert who has examined the foundation’s reporting in depth, said using a small, under-resourced accounting firm “strikes me as a long pattern of gross negligence and willful malfeasance on the part of the trustees.”

In 2010 alone, the first year of the restatement, the foundation operated programs in 27 different countries, and reported $138 million in gifts and contributions, according to its tax return.

The foundation’s audits have been done by PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC), one of the nation’s largest accounting and auditing firms, since 2013. But Ortel said the PWC audits rely on the potentially flawed earlier audits.

“Audits build on themselves. You can’t have BKD screw up October 23, 1997 through December 31, 2009 and then Pricewaterhouse says ‘well we’ll take BKD’s work and move forward.’ You can’t do that. But that’s what they did,” Ortel told TheDCNF.

President Clinton chose the Little Rock, Arkansas office of BKD in 2001 during construction of his presidential library there. Even then there were signs of conflicts of interest as BKD was also the auditor for the construction company’s parent company. In addition, the parent company’s chief financial officer also served on BKD’s official management committee.

Nevertheless, the Clintons kept BKD and retained it after the foundation dramatically altered its mission to fight global problems and its assets reached $200 million.

The BKD office in Little Rock also was embroiled in a major Arkansas scandal of its own making. Federal regulators blamed BKD for the sudden 2010 collapse of a Batesville, Arkansas savings bank after only five years of operation. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) regulators accused BKD of failing to discover a fraudulent bond deal that cost the bank $19 million, which exceeded all of its assets.

FDIC regulators hauled BKD into U.S. District Court for Eastern Arkansas in December 2013, charging that its 2009 audit services contained “omissions constituting professional negligence, gross negligence and breach of contract by BKD.”

Court documents show that BKD had approved the bond deal that FDIC officials found fraudulent. Regulators reported the fraudulent bonds were discovered “in the course of a routine examination of the bank.” The auditing firm and the federal government eventually settled the case out of court.

Just before the Clinton Foundation engaged BKD in 1999, a federal jury in Kansas City, Kansas, found that BKD’s Wichita office committed accounting malpractice in connection with a company sale. The jury hit the accounting firm with $22 million in damages.

Another client, Thayer/Patnicef Education Holdings sued BKD in April 2003 over a flawed 1996-97 audit. The company stated, “this is yet another case of a public accounting firm that looked the other way.” The company and the education company settled out of court.

The Securities and Exchange Commission publicly censured BKD in 2014, charging that it “engaged in improper professional conduct, violated the auditor independence rules, and caused each of the broker-dealers’ failure to file an annual report audited by an independent accountant.”

The SEC said BKD “jeopardized their objectivity and impartiality” by taking its client’s data and claiming it as its own audited findings.

“To ensure the integrity of our financial reporting system, firms cannot play the roles of auditor and preparer at the same time,” said Stephen L. Cohen, Associate Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. “Auditors must vigilantly safeguard their independence and stay current on the applicable requirements under the rules.”

The Public Company Oversight Accounting Board established by the Sarbanes-Oxley financial reforms that became law in 2002 also identified many deficiencies with BKD. The PCOAB conducts periodic inspections of auditing companies, but only makes public a portion of its findings.

“A substantial portion of the board’s criticisms of a firm,” PCOAB said of its inspection reports, “occurs out of public view, unless the firm fails to make progress to the board’s satisfaction in addressing those criticisms.”

The PCOAB went public on multiple deficiencies in December 2010 it found in BKD’s auditing work, saying “the inspection team identified what it considered to be audit deficiencies. They found deficiencies of such significance that it appeared to the inspection team that the firm did not obtain sufficient competent evidential matter to support its opinion on the issuer’s financial statements.”

Three other PCOAB inspection teams again found deficiencies with BKD in 2015 at the same time the firm was restating the foundation’s tax returns.

The inspection teams did not identify a specific BKD client, but noted that it found many “material misstatements” in the audits they were evaluating.

In the 2015 audit of BKD, the board concluded that, “Many audit deficiencies involve a lack of due professional care.”

The inspectors emphasized that it requires all outside auditing firms like BKD to display “professional skepticism. These standards state that professional skepticism is an attitude that includes a questioning mind and a critical assessment of the appropriateness and sufficiency of audit evidence.”

Team A found a total of four separate deficiencies and Teams B and C found deficiencies in one area.

A BKD spokesman declined to comment. Joey Lambert, a BKD marketing specialist, told TheDCNF  “this involves confidential client matters, and accordingly we’re not at liberty to discuss our experiences or relationships with any client, past or present.”

The Clinton Foundation also did not respond to requests for comment by TheDCNF.

Just the kind of accounting firm the Clinton's wanted!

Sal wrote:How 'bout Donald releases his tax returns.

Then you'll have a valid comparison.

How?