Interest Group Money and Cannibis Research

Adam Elmahrek at LAT:

When UCLA started its cannabis research initiative five years ago, the university hailed the undertaking as one of the first academic programs in the world dedicated to studying the health effects of pot.

Legalization was quickly taking hold around the country, and the cannabis industry was attempting to transform the plant’s image from an illicit substance that gets you high to a health and wellness product.

The Times asked UCLA officials whether the university accepted donations from the industry to support the program. They said no.

However, documents obtained by the newspaper, eventually released by UCLA under the California Public Records Act, show that cannabis companies and investors provided at least some of the early financial support, writing checks for tens of thousands of dollars in donations and assisting with fundraising events.

The industry support underscores potential conflicts of interest as pot goes mainstream and researchers try to assess the health and other effects of cannabis. A marijuana investor and foundations with ties to the newly legal cannabis industry have donated millions of dollars to university research programs studying claims of the plant’s medical virtues, raising questions about how independent the scientific research can be.

Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and UC San Diego are among the schools that have accepted multimillion-dollar gifts in recent years....

Private industry funding of biomedical research has become increasingly common over the decades, to the point where it is now the largest source of funding for research. Past studies have shown industry-funded research has a greater tendency to produce results favorable to the industry, according to Joanna Cohen, professor of disease prevention at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“The research is strong enough that we know the source of the funds is problematic,” Cohen said. “There’s no reason to think cannabis will be any different.”

In 2003, a study conducted at the Yale School of Medicine found that industry-funded studies were 3.6 times more likely to produce outcomes favorable to their sponsors.

Curbing Presidential Power

 At NYT, Peter Baker reports on bipartisan proposals from Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, an assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush, and Robert F. Bauer, a White House counsel under President Barack Obama.  Their ideas include:

• Provide more authority and protection for future special counsels investigating presidents or other high-level officials and have them report their findings to Congress and the public rather than to the Justice Department.
• Prohibit presidents from pardoning themselves and amend the bribery statute to make it illegal to use the pardon power to bribe witnesses or obstruct justice.
• Bar presidents from managing or supervising private businesses or establishing blind trusts for their financial assets and require any business in which they have an interest to file public reports.
• Authorize inspectors general to investigate and report on reprisals or intimidation of journalists.
• Revise the authorization of force passed after Sept. 11, 2001, to prohibit humanitarian military intervention without additional votes by Congress and limit the use of nuclear weapons to self-defense in extreme circumstances.
• Ensure that the attorney general makes decisions on prosecutions involving the president or presidential campaigns, not the F.B.I. director, as happened during the Hillary Clinton email case.

Staffing Problems

The incompetence watch continues.

Brian Klaas writes at USA Today:

The United States government is suffering from a new phenomenon: the Trump Brain Drain. For the first time in memory, the American government is having difficulty recruiting the best and the brightest at the highest levels of power.

Qualified public servants are turning down plum government jobs because they don't want to be exposed to the risks of serving in President Trump's White House. West Wing power-brokers are lawyering up (even Trump’s lawyer has hired a lawyer). A special counsel is reportedly investigating the president himself for possibly obstructing justice.

...
Less than five months into the Trump presidency, there is a record number of vacancies. Of 558 key presidential appointments requiring Senate confirmation, only 43 have been filled (less than 8% of the total). And before you echo the frequently tweeted but incorrect Trump accusation that this is due to Democrat "OBSTRUCTIONISTS”, remember that 405 of the 558 positions don’t even have a nominee yet. This snail’s pace of selecting people — which involves getting them to agree to serve — is unprecedented in modern history.

Shaun Boburg reports at the Washington Post:

President Trump’s budget calls for sharply reducing funding for programs that shelter the poor and combat homelessness — with a notable exception: It leaves intact a type of federal housing subsidy that is paid directly to private landlords.

One of those landlords is Trump himself, who earns millions of dollars each year as a part-owner of Starrett City, the nation’s largest subsidized housing complex. Trump’s 4 percent stake in the Brooklyn complex earned him at least $5 million between January of last year and April 15, according to his recent financial disclosure.

...
 HUD, meanwhile, has come under fire in recent days after news of the expected nominee to lead the department in the New York region: Lynne Patton, an event planner who has no professional experience in housing but who is a former vice president of Eric Trump’s foundation and who helped plan his wedding.
...
[Armstrong] Williams, a conservative commentator, said Patton earned Carson’s trust in just a few months while serving as his $160,000-a-year senior adviser. “She has shown a capacity not only to learn but to regurgitate, to put together tours where she shows she has a knowledge of HUD,” Williams said. “She has done a great job of briefing the secretary.”

Informal Lobbying at Mar-A-Lago

Mar-A-Lago is Trump's country club, where members pay him $200k to join. Nicholas Confessore, Maggie Haberman and Eric Lipton report at The New York Times:

Membership lists reviewed by The New York Times show that the club’s nearly 500 paying members include dozens of real estate developers, Wall Street financiers, energy executives and others whose businesses could be affected by Mr. Trump’s policies. At least three club members are under consideration for an ambassadorship. Most of the 500 have had memberships predating Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, and there are a limited number of memberships still available.

...
Hope Hicks, a White House spokeswoman, said the president had no conflicts of interest, a reference to the fact that federal law exempts him from provisions prohibiting federal employees from taking actions that could benefit themselves financially.

“But regardless, he has not and will not be discussing policy with club members,” she said in a written statement.

Mar-a-Lago, she added, is “one of the most successful private clubs in the world,” and it “was intended to be the Southern White House, and the president looks forward to hosting many world leaders at this remarkable property.”

But unlike the real White House, there is no public access, and no official visitor log is available. When the White House press corps accompanied Mr. Trump to the club and nearby golf course last weekend, they were housed during part of the trip in a room whose windows had been covered with black plastic.

Mar-a-Lago members and their guests, on the other hand, had a front-row seat to a brewing foreign policy crisis, when Mr. Trump and his aides huddled on the dining patio to devise a response to North Korea’s launch of an intermediate-range ballistic missile in the middle of a dinner with Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, and his wife.

“No one needs to have a long sit-down with Donald Trump,” said Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “If you can whisper in his ear for 40 seconds, that can be decisive on your policy.”

The Conflict-Of-Interest President

Paul Blumenthal writes at The Huffington Post:

When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe became the first foreign head of state to meet in person with President-elect Donald Trump, a photograph taken of the official event at Trump Tower in Manhattan showed a curious attendee: Trump’s daughter Ivanka.

The appearance of Ivanka Trump, who is vice president of development and acquisitions for the Trump Organization, raises alarm bells for those concerned about the unprecedented potential for conflicts of interest involving the incoming president.

With her two brothers, Don Jr. and Eric, Ivanka has taken the reins of her father’s vast global business empire through a so-called blind trust. (It is not a blind trust.) At the same time, the three adult children are on Trump’s transition team, giving him advice and, apparently, meeting with dignitaries from countries where they could do business in the near future.

“They shouldn’t be on the transition team because they’re going to be running the business,” said Richard Painter, who was White House ethics czar under George W. Bush. “I don’t know why they’re on the transition team. It’s a clear conflict of interest.”

Federal conflict-of-interest laws do not apply to the president, but that does not mean that Trump’s business holdings do not create the appearance of conflicts if not actual conflicts. They are, in fact, unprecedented.

Jonathan O'Connell and Mary Jordan report at The Washington Post:

Back when many expected Trump to lose the election, speculation was rife that business would suffer at the hotels, condos and golf courses that bear his name. Now, those venues offer the prospect of something else: a chance to curry favor or access with the next president.

Perhaps nowhere is that possibility more obvious than Trump’s newly renovated hotel a few blocks from the White House, on Pennsylvania Avenue. Rooms sold out quickly for the inauguration, many for five-night minimums priced at five times the normal rate, according to the hotel’s manager.

To many of the guests at the reception Tuesday, accepting an invitation to tour the $212 million hotel and check out the $20,000-a-night, 6,300-square-foot “town house” suite seemed like a good idea. They spoke admiringly about the renovation and left with a goody bag of chocolates and a brochure. It listed the choices of accommodations and meeting rooms and expounded on the location’s “striking prominence” at historical moments such as the Inauguration Day parade.

“Believe me, all the delegations will go there,” said one Middle Eastern diplomat who recently toured the hotel and booked an overseas visitor. The diplomat said many stayed away from the hotel before the election for fear of a “Clinton backlash,” but that now it’s the place to be seen.

CNN reports:

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, President-elect Donald Trump's preferred choice for National Security Adviser, was running a company that was lobbying on behalf of foreign clients even as he was receiving classified intelligence briefings during the campaign.

The revelation comes as the Trump camp has taken a series steps to curb the involvement of lobbyists in the presidential transition efforts.

Robert Kelley, a former chief counsel to the House National Security Subcommittee and current general counsel and principal at the Flynn Intel Group, filed a lobbying disclosure report with Congress on September 15.

According to the official document, Kelley was working on behalf of Inovo BV, a Dutch firm owned by Turkish businessman, Kamil Ekim Alptekin.