In his third try at naming a Secretary of the Army, President Trump has turned to a longtime lobbyist for the arms industry, raising serious questions of ethics and conflicts of interest that are nothing new to this administration. Mark Esper has been vice president for government relations at Raytheon, a major weapons contractor, since July 2010. In a July 2017 conference call with investors, Raytheon CEO Tom Kennedy enthused that the Trump administration “has opened several doors for us.”read more
Attorneys said the Trump administration will “lose badly” for failing to respond to a family’s petition regarding Border Patrol agents' killing of their loved one at the border. The family claims human rights abuses over the agents’ extrajudicial killing and an allegedly botched investigation by U.S. officials. The U.S. has remained silent – breaking decades of tradition of cooperating with the human rights agency IACHR, even with regard to abuse of prisoners kept at Guantanamo Bay.read more
Krebs joined the George W. Bush administration as a policy adviser to Bob Stephan, then the assistant secretary for infrastructure protection. Krebs helped develop and implement DHS’ Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards regulatory program. Krebs left government in 2009 to join Dutko Risk Management, a lobbying firm, as a VP in a new division to focus on consulting with governments and businesses on risk-management issues involving threats and disaster recovery.read more
Mitchell has spent his career since 2004 at CEPA, a foreign policy analysis firm. In 2015, Mitchell and CEPA secured a contract with the Pentagon to produce a study that supported moving NATO troops and “prepositioned equipment” closer to Russia to protect Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. Mitchell believes that Russia, China and Iran want to challenge U.S. power by nibbling away at smaller countries and that the U.S. needs to challenge this strategy.read more
Craft is primarily an activist in GOP politics. After getting assurances from Donald Trump that he would not try to oust Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell or Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, Craft and husband Joe gave $431,000 to Trump Victory, which supported Trump’s 2016 campaign, the RNC and state Republican parties. They also donated $750,000 to Future45, a pro-Trump PAC that produced attack ads against Hillary Clinton. Joe Craft once gave more than $3 million to Karl Rove’s super PAC.read more
