Illegal actions by Trump Staff

• 2025.3.20 Product Endorsements - of Tesla

Misdeeds and deception:

• 2025 May - Trump rakes in lots of money from people bribing for pardons

• https://hartmannreport.com/p/saturday-report-51725-trump-ordered

• https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/doge-s-fraud-tracker-at-social-security-turns-into-a-massive-self-own/ar-AA1ERGhK - 2025.5.15 - DOGE clearly made the Social Security Administration significantly less efficient proven with well documented metrics.

• https://www.mediaite.com/trump/trump-touts-seemingly-doctored-photo-of-abrego-garcias-hand-in-attempt-to-prove-maryland-man-is-gang-member/ - 2025.5.10 Trump’s team fabricates evidence to try to justify imprisoning people.

• 2025.5.11 - Trump accepts luxury gift - airplane to use as air force one from Qatar - violation of emoulments clause: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-administration-poised-accept-palace-sky-gift-trump/story?id=121680511

• 2025 May - Several Democratic lawmakers walked out of a hearing in the House of Representatives on cryptocurrency policy, bringing it to a close. Maxine Waters, who led the group, suggested that Mr Trump’s “ownership of crypto and his oversight of all the agencies” amounts to a blatant conflict of interest. Some Democrats remained in the room for an informal discussion. Others joined what Ms Waters called a “shadow meeting” on “Trump’s crypto corruption”

• 2025.5.6 Some pay Trump to get fines reduced: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/unpacking-claims-trump-admin-cut-fines-of-wells-fargo-executives-in-return-for-donation-to-inauguration/ar-AA1E4ITy?ocid=BingNewsSerp

• 2025.4.17 - (From Why Evolution is True)[https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/04/17/thursday-hili-dialogue-536/] - The Harvard Crimson has an oped by Tarek Masoud and Steve Pinker, writing on behalf of a Harvard faculty organization: “Steven A. Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology. Tarek Masoud is the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. They write on behalf of the executive committee of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard.” The article is called “Harvard must not submit to a hostile takeover.”

  • On April 11, 2025, officials of three federal departments presented Harvard University with a list of demands for how the University must run its internal affairs if it is to remain eligible for federal research support.
  • The demands include changes in how the University is governed; who leads it; whom it admits, hires, and promotes; and how it handles student life. Most disturbingly, the letter requires the University to cede oversight of these reforms to government-appointed bureaucrats and approved external “auditors” in what would constitute unprecedented governmental interference in the University’s internal affairs. We therefore support University President Alan M. Garber ’76 and the Harvard Corporation in their decision to reject the government’s terms.
  • If the University were to accede to the Trump administration’s demands, it would be empowering bureaucrats in Washington to impose their own viewpoints on universities for generations to come.
  • Take, for instance, the administration’s Orwellian demand that the University “commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.”
  • It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the government seeks to impose by fiat beliefs that cannot compete on their own merits in the marketplace of ideas.
  • The impulse that animates the Department of Education’s letter is profoundly authoritarian. This is illustrated most clearly in the demand that the University not admit students “hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence.” Though this University has long sought to admit only those of the highest character and intellectual caliber, to demand that all admitted students share the same reverence for America’s founding documents in fact violates the spirit of those documents. After all, our Constitution was itself birthed out of vigorous debate and has been criticized by generations of patriots. The current administration appears to believe that this process that has served us so well for 250 years should now cease forever.
  • Similarly authoritarian, we fear, is the intent behind the administration’s demand that the University ban “any student group or club that endorses or promotes criminal activity.” Though we all agree that students should abide by the law, the administration’s letter gives us little reason to believe that its conception of lawbreaking will not be construed so broadly as to include legitimate, peaceful dissent. With the narrowest of exceptions (like incitement of imminent lawless activity), no opinion should be outlawed in a university.
  • Imposing “viewpoints” on universities means forcing them to acknowledge the relevance and legitimacy of ideas which may have been intellectually discredited or judged not worthy of finite time and resources.
  • Government bureaucrats should not be making these decisions.

• Yes, of course the government has asked Universities to adhere to standards before (Title IX and so on), but I don’t recall any threats to withhold money, nor any demands even close to being as onerous as these. They are qualitatively different from what has gone before, and they are Orwellian.

• 2025.4.28 - Harvard

  • . . .At the core of the complaint [Harvard’s lawsuit] is a simple idea: No matter what you think of Harvard’s conduct, it still enjoys constitutional rights, and the Constitution does not permit the president to unilaterally wield the power of the purse to punish his political enemies.
  • To understand why even critics of Harvard should support Harvard’s lawsuit, perhaps an analogy is helpful. Imagine that there is strong evidence that a person committed a crime. Perhaps he shoplifted from a liquor store.
  • Months later, you see a police officer beating that person in the street. When you ask why, the officer responds that the man stole from a store and is getting exactly what he deserves.
  • Even a nonlawyer could immediately identify two problems. First, why are you punishing this person without a trial? Second, the punishment for shoplifting is a fine or short jail time; it’s not a public beating. Demanding that the officer stop his unilateral punishment doesn’t excuse the man’s theft, but it does restore respect for the law.
  • If Harvard failed to protect Jewish students from harassment, for example, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act would permit the federal government to take action against Harvard (and in fact, the Biden administration opened a civil rights investigation of Harvard in late 2023), but as Harvard’s complaint notes, Congress “set forth detailed procedures that the government ‘shall’ satisfy before revoking federal funding based on discrimination concerns.”
  • The Trump administration flouted all those procedures.
  • An appeals court overturned a decision by a panel of its own judges that allowed the Trump administration to sack the leaders of two boards that oversee labour disputes. The court ruled that Cathy Harris and Gwynne Wilcox, Democrats appointed by Joe Biden, should be reinstated. Other sacked leaders of independent agencies have also sued, invoking a long-standing legal precedent that protects such officials from dismissal.

• 2025 March - https://apnews.com/article/nikola-trevor-milton-fraud-trump-pardon-3fcebb0a3820cecb205656f2dc3f6764)

• 2025.3.26 - A Turkish graduate student at Tufts University was arrested and sequestered in an unknown location, according to her lawyer. Rumeysa Ozturk was one of several authors of an essay in the university’s student newspaper criticising the institution’s stance on Israel and Gaza. Separately, the University of Alabama said that one of its students had been detained, but that it was not clear why.