Carl Icahn Steps Down As Trump Adviser

[Fenton Lum]

... just before publication of this New Yorker article. Must be "fake" n shit.

Icahn’s role was novel. He would be an adviser with a formal title, but he would not receive a salary, and he would not be required to divest himself of any of his holdings, or to make any disclosures about potential conflicts of interest. “Carl Icahn will be advising the President in his individual capacity,” Trump’s transition team asserted.

In the months after the election, the stock price of CVR, Icahn’s refiner, nearly doubled—a surge that is difficult to explain without acknowledging the appointment of the company’s lead shareholder to a White House position. The rally meant a personal benefit for Icahn, at least on paper, of half a billion dollars. There was an expectation in the market—an expectation created, in part, by Icahn’s own remarks—that, with Trump in the White House and Icahn playing consigliere, the rules were about to change, and not just at the E.P.A. Icahn’s empire ranges across many economic sectors, from energy to pharmaceuticals to auto supplies to mining, and all of them are governed by the types of regulations about which he would now potentially be advising Trump.

Janet McCabe, who left the E.P.A. in January, and now works at the Environmental Law and Policy Center, told me, “I’m not naïve. People in business try to influence the government. But the job of the government is to serve the American people, not the specific business interests of the President’s friends. To think that you have somebody with that kind of agenda bending the President’s ear is troubling.”

Conflicts of interest have been a defining trait of the Trump Administration. The President has not only refused to release his tax returns; he has declined to divest from his companies, instead putting them in a trust managed by his children. Questions have emerged about the ongoing business ties of his daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who, since Trump took office, have reaped nearly two hundred million dollars from the Trump hotel in Washington, D.C., and from other investments. Although Trump promised to “drain the swamp,” he has assembled a Cabinet of ultra-rich Americans, including two billionaires: Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education, and Wilbur Ross, the Secretary of Commerce.

But Icahn is worth more than the Trump family and all the members of the Cabinet combined—and, with no constraint on his license to counsel the President on regulations that might help his businesses, he was poised to become much richer. Robert Weissman, who runs the watchdog group Public Citizen, told me, “This kind of self-enrichment and influence over decision-making by an individual mogul who is simultaneously inside and outside the Administration is unprecedented. In terms of corruption, there’s nothing like it. Maybe ever.” In conversations with me, financiers who have worked with Icahn described his appointment as a kind of corporate raid on Washington. One said, “It’s the cheapest takeover Carl’s ever done.”

Carl Icahn’s Failed Raid on Washington

 

[Marion Morrison]

TL;DR

 

[Lakhota]

Billionaire Carl Icahn Resigned As Trump Adviser Ahead Of Critical Story

The New Yorker probes the investor’s possible conflict of interest involving an ethanol regulation.

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who resigned as President Donald Trump’s special adviser on regulations on Friday, did so just hours before The New Yorker magazine published a critical article that detailed his potential conflict of interest and questioned whether he had acted illegally.

Icahn, an early endorser of Trump’s presidential bid and longtime acquaintance, said in a letter he was resigning from the adviser’s post because he “did not want partisan bickering” to distract from the president’s agenda. He also denied any conflict of interest, stating that he “never had access to nonpublic information or profited from my position.”

The New Yorker, however, reported on Friday that Icahn had been pushing to overturn an environmental regulation the investor considered onerous and one that had been costing him hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Under the rule in question, passed by Congress during President George W. Bush’s administration in order to promote biofuels and renewable energy, oil refineries are required to blend ethanol into their products, or, alternatively, to purchase credits known as Renewable Identification Numbers. Icahn in 2012 bought a controlling stake in one such refinery, Texas-based CVR Energy, whose business had depended on buying so-called RINs. Their cost had fluctuated so much by 2016, however, that it had seriously depressed the company’s stock price.

Several weeks after Trump’s victory last November, Icahn was named as an adviser to the president and CVR’s stock doubled on the expectation that the regulation would be repealed, according to The New Yorker.

In February, news leaked that Bob Dinneen, who runs the Renewable Fuels Association, a leading ethanol trade group, had struck a deal with Icahn to change the ethanol blending requirement. The development surprised observers and industry experts because the association had long opposed such a change, the magazine said.

Dinneen told The New Yorker that Icahn had told him that Trump would change the rule through executive order whether or not the ethanol lobbyist objected. Dinneen agreed to the change because he “apparently felt that his only option was to secure whatever concessions he could for his industry,” according to the magazine article.

Trump administration officials denied that any such ethanol executive order was in the works. But one official, speaking anonymously to The New Yorker, the draft of such an order “was something Icahn sent to us.”

The suggested order was never acted upon, according to the administration officials, in part because changing the congressionally approved regulation is a complex process. But the episode raises questions as to whether Icahn had used his position inappropriately; whether, as The New Yorker puts it, Icahn thought “that he could bluff his way to a change in federal regulation.”

In his statement on Friday, Icahn stressed that he did not use his title and association with the president for personal gain.

Read the whole story at The New Yorker.

More: Billionaire Carl Icahn Resigned As Trump Adviser Ahead Of Critical Story

Carl Icahn’s Failed Raid on Washington

Sounds pretty shady to me.

 

[Aldo Raine]

All this winning!

 

[Lakhota]

Rachel Maddow is currently doing a segment on this story. She called this banana republic corruption.