This is no way corroborates the alleged behavior of Trump in dealing with the Ukrainian government and his impeachment. It is no way indicative of a thought process or a mindset....
And certainly not connected to he and Kremlin Barbie being treatened with say proof of breaking the same act in several foreign deals that has not hit the papers yet. Not like they had any dealings in Turkey or with the Iranian revolutionary guard's money laundering project in Azerbaijan. Because it would never help his defence if charged with violating a law that is off the books now. The EU and other developed nations may react by blocking or seriously restricting American companies from bidding for anything. And it would be fair.
https://www.courthousenews.com/dc-sues-over-trump-inaugural-committee-payment-to-hotel/ DC Sues Over Trump Inaugural Committee Payment to Hotel WASHINGTON (CN) — As President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial resumes Wednesday, the nation’s capital added to his legal concerns with a lawsuit claiming his company juiced the price it charged the presidential inaugural committee for event space at the hotel that bears his name. The 18-page lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C., Superior Court on Wednesday by D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine says the 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee wasted more than $1 million by “grossly overpaying” the Trump Organization and the Trump International Hotel in downtown Washington, in violation of city law that bars nonprofits from spending money to benefit private people or companies. “District nonprofit law required the [presidential inaugural committee] to seek out and pay reasonable fair market value for services rendered,” the complaint states. “The PIC did not do so, instead choosing to host its events at the Trump hotel and pay far more than market value, ultimately for the private benefit of the Trump entities.” Inaugural committee executive Rick Gates negotiated back and forth with the hotel, eventually landing on a deal to pay $175,000 per day to reserve space at the hotel for four days around the time of Trump’s inauguration. An event planner working for the inaugural committee warned the hotel was charging at least twice the going rate for event space, according to the complaint. Gates pleaded guilty in 2018 to charges of conspiracy and lying to the FBI, though the charges are unrelated to the city’s lawsuit. With the tab for food and other charges added on to the bill, the inaugural committee spent $1.03 million on space at the president’s hotel. That same week, the nonprofit hosting the inaugural prayer breakfast paid $5,000 for the ballroom the hotel charged the inaugural committee $175,000 to rent, according to the lawsuit. The price was initially even higher, with the hotel giving the inaugural committee a $3.6 million quote for eight days of event space. An event planner for the inaugural committee met with Trump and his daughter, Ivanka Trump, about the high price and the president-elect deputized Ivanka to deal with the cost, the city claims. A spokesperson for Trump Hotels denied the allegations on Wednesday, calling the lawsuit “intentionally misleading and riddled with inaccuracies.” “The rates charged by the hotel were completely in line with what anyone else would have been charged for an unprecedented event of this enormous magnitude and were reflective of the fact that the hotel had just recently opened, possessed superior facilities and was centrally located on Pennsylvania Avenue,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “The AG’s after the fact attempt to regulate what discounts it believes the hotel should have provided as well as the timing of this complaint reeks of politics and is a clear PR stunt.” The suit seeks to impose a constructive trust over the funds and an order directing them to be sent to another nonprofit group that focuses on “promoting civic engagement of the citizens of the United States of America.” “District law requires nonprofits to use their funds for their stated public purpose, not to benefit private individuals or companies,” Attorney General Racine said in a statement announcing the suit. “In this case, we are seeking to recover the nonprofit funds that were improperly funneled directly to the Trump family business.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...27a7c6-3ec5-11ea-8872-5df698785a4e_story.html Secret Service has paid rates as high as $650 a night for rooms at Trump’s properties President Trump’s company charges the Secret Service for the rooms agents use while protecting him at his luxury properties — billing U.S. taxpayers at rates as high as $650 per night, according to federal records and people who have seen receipts. Those charges, compiled here for the first time, show that Trump has an unprecedented — and largely hidden — business relationship with his own government. When Trump visits his clubs in Palm Beach, Fla., and Bedminster, N.J., the service needs space to post guards and store equipment. Trump’s company says it charges only minimal fees. But Secret Service records do not show that. At Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, the Secret Service was charged the $650 rate dozens of times in 2017, and a different rate, $396.15, dozens more times in 2018, according to documents from Trump’s visits. And at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, the Secret Service was charged $17,000 a month to use a three-bedroom cottage on the property, an unusually high rent for homes in that area, according to receipts from 2017. Trump’s company billed the government even for days when Trump wasn’t there. These payments appear to contradict the Trump Organization’s own statements about what it charges members of his government entourage. “If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free — meaning, like, cost for housekeeping,” Trump’s son Eric said in a Yahoo Finance interview last year. The full extent of the Secret Service’s payments to Trump’s company is not known. The Secret Service has not listed them in public databases of federal spending, as is usually required for payments over $10,000. Instead, documents have come out piecemeal, through public records requests from news organizations and watchdog groups. The Washington Post compiled available records and found 103 payments from the Secret Service to Trump’s company dated between January 2017 and April 2018. The records show more than $471,000 in payments from taxpayers to Trump’s companies. But — because these records cover only a fraction of Trump’s travel during a fraction of his term — the actual total is likely to be higher. “It is more than a little disconcerting, knowing this is going on, and not knowing what the actual numbers are,” said Jordan Libowitz, of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “That’s kind of crazy that we know the president is benefiting from the presidency, and we do not know how. We do not know how many taxpayer dollars are in his pocket.” The White House did not respond to questions about Trump’s knowledge of these payments. In a statement, the Secret Service said that its spending “balances operational security with judicious allocation of resources.” By law, Secret Service agents are exempt from the government’s usual per diem spending limits while they are protecting the president. The Secret Service did not respond to a question about why the purchases weren’t listed in public databases. Trump still owns his company. In response to questions from The Post, a company spokesperson said Mar-a-Lago does not charge the Secret Service $650 per room but did not address whether it had charged that rate in the past. The company also noted that the rental cottage at Bedminster contains “multiple rooms and [includes] numerous common spaces.” The company did not answer questions about the rates it charges the Secret Service now. “We provide the rooms at cost and could make far more money renting them to members or guests,” Trump Organization Executive Vice President Eric Trump said in a statement. He gave no details about how the company calculates the “at-cost” price. During the 2016 campaign, Trump told voters that — if he was elected — he would not have time for travel. “I would rarely leave the White House because there’s so much work to be done,” Trump told the Hill in a June 2015 interview. “I would not be a president who took vacations. I would not be a president that takes time off.” But since taking office, Trump has spent more than 342 days — a third of his entire presidency — at his private clubs and hotels, according to a tally by The Post. Trump has said he works during these trips. The Secret Service always comes with him, as it does with all presidents. But the Trump Organization has assured the public that it is giving the government a great deal. Last year, Eric Trump told Yahoo Finance that when his father does visit his properties, he is legally required to charge something. Eric Trump did not say what law required Trump to charge his own government, and the Secret Service did not respond to questions asking what law he was referring to. The Secret Service is part of the Department of Homeland Security, whose internal directives state, “DHS may accept gifts to carry out program functions.” “If he stays at one of his places, the government actually . . . saves a fortune because, if they were to go to a hotel across the street, they’d be charging them $500 a night, whereas, you know we charge them, like 50 bucks,” Eric Trump said. That appears to be wrong. The Secret Service is required to tell Congress twice a year about what it spends to protect Trump at his properties. But since 2016, it has only filed two of the required six reports, according to congressional offices. The reasons, according to Secret Service officials: key personnel left and nobody picked up the job. Even in those two reports, the lines for Bedminster and Mar-a-Lago were blank. The Secret Service officials said only that they abide by the law, but they did not elaborate. They are probably referring to a provision that requires them to tell Congress about “permanent” costs. They may not consider anything they’ve done at either club permanent. Senate Democrats have asked the Trump administration to provide more details on the costs of Trump’s travel as part of negotiations over a bill governing the Secret Service. But Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has told the Senate committee that he opposes a requirement to deliver those details until December 2020 at the earliest, which falls after the election. “They’ve really stonewalled us,” said Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.). “He’s trying to hide the details from the public, because he knows how bad it looks. That’s the truth of it. He’s a billionaire, but we’re spending millions of dollars to support his for-profit clubs and for-profit businesses.” The Post sought to quantify one part of that spending — the money that goes directly to Trump’s own businesses. Most of the 103 payments discovered by The Post went to just three Trump properties: the Trump International Hotel in Washington and the president’s clubs at Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster. They showed that Trump had quickly shattered past precedent. Other recent presidents have allowed the Secret Service to use their properties — George H.W. Bush’s compound in Maine, Bill Clinton’s home in suburban New York, George W. Bush’s ranch in Texas — free, according to the Secret Service and spokespeople for those former presidents. The Post could find only one other recent example of a president or vice president charging his own Secret Service rent. Former vice president Joe Biden charged $2,200 a month for a cottage on his property in Delaware. Unlike the payments to Trump, Biden’s payments were listed in public spending databases. Biden was paid a total of $171,600 over six years. Trump exceeded that total within three months, records show. In February 2017, for instance, Trump made his first presidential trip to Mar-a-Lago — a for-profit club with guest rooms and suites available to members. The Secret Service sent dozens of people. Most of them stayed at other hotels nearby. But they also rented at least three rooms at Mar-a-Lago, records show. The rate: $650 per night, according to two people who saw receipts. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter. That was more than triple the normal limit on federal spending for a hotel room in that area, which was $182. It was even more than what the State Department paid for rooms at Mar-a-Lago around the same time, which was $520 to $546. “The operational needs of the Secret Service can differ from those in the Department of State,” a Secret Service spokeswoman said, to explain why their rooms had cost more than the State Department’s. Presidents are exempt from federal conflict-of-interest rules. And the Secret Service is exempt from hotel-room spending limits. So Trump’s company was free to charge what it wanted. And, according to one former senior administration official with direct knowledge of the operation, his club often treated the Secret Service like any other customer. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships with the Trump administration. “The club wanted to charge the rack rate,” the former official said, saying that sometimes officials had to call Eric Trump to lobby for a lower rate. “The club managers were not always that accommodating.” In 2018, the room rate charged to the Secret Service was lower: $396.15 per night, according to public records obtained by the watchdog group Judicial Watch. One possible reason for the drop in price: The 2018 receipts list the Secret Service as an “honorary member” of the club, which could have made it eligible for a member discount. But in 2018, receipts show, the Secret Service tended to book more rooms and stay longer than they had in 2017 — in one case, when Trump came for two weekends in a row, the Secret Service rented four rooms for nine nights apiece. They stayed all week, even while Trump was gone. In Bedminster, records show, the Secret Service went further: It paid not by the day — but for a whole month at a time. The Secret Service rented the club’s “Sarazen Cottage,” a three-bedroom building near Trump’s own villa, from July 1 to Oct. 1, 2017. The former senior administration official said the cottage was needed to store equipment and provided living space for five or six agents. So — even though Trump was only there about a third of the time — the equipment was there every day. So they paid every day. “You can’t rent the villa part of the year to someone else because it has to stay a Secret Service space,” said the official. The Trump club does not publish data on the normal rates for these cottages — even to its own members. They are told to contact management for a quote, according to member brochures obtained by The Post. But the rate of $17,000 per month seems unusually high for a monthly rental. Since fall 2017, there have been 100 rental listings for homes with three or more bedrooms in Bedminster, according to the website Zillow.com. None were anywhere near Trump’s rate; the average rental rate was $3,400, and the highest rent listed on Zillow was $8,500. Trump charged twice that. It is unclear whether the monthly payments to Trump’s company began earlier or continued after the date of the last record. Documents obtained by Property of the People — a watchdog group set up to seek documents on Trump’s administration — also appear to show the $17,000 per month rate being paid in May 2017. And former housekeepers from the Bedminster club have said that the Secret Service continued to use the cottage long after these records end, through 2018. Another visitor to the club — who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve access to the club — reported seeing Secret Service agents in the cottage as recently as December. The Secret Service did not answer questions about whether it was still paying. The many gaps in the Secret Service data leave many unanswered questions. Among them: Why were these payments to Trump’s clubs not listed in public databases of federal spending, such as usaspending.gov? The Secret Service has publicly listed many other transactions related to Trump’s stays at his clubs — rentals of golf carts, tents and portable toilets. But it has not listed any of these payments to Trump’s own businesses. “It is a surprise” that these payments are not listed, said Sean Moulton of the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight. Without public data about payments to Trump, he said, “the public doesn’t even know the questions they should be asking.” Also: Why did the Secret Service spend so much at Trump’s D.C. hotel, a place where — unlike Bedminster and Mar-a-Lago — Trump has not stayed overnight since taking office? In response to records request from NBC News, the Department of Homeland Security released a listing of 39 payments there during Trump’s first year, totaling $159,000. The documents do not give the reasons for those payments — or give the rate that Trump’s company charged.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...-prompt-whistleblower-complaint-idUSKBN20425G Exclusive: Justice Department anti-human trafficking grants prompt whistleblower complaint WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. Justice Department anti-human trafficking grant program is facing internal complaints, after two nonprofits were denied funding in favor of two less established groups whose applications were not recommended by career DOJ officials. Members of the Berkeley County Sheriff's Office take part in a training session on human trafficking held by the Tri-County Human Trafficking Task Force, a project funded through the Lincoln Tubman Foundation at the Berkeley County Emergency Services Training Center in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, U.S. January 23, 2020. REUTERS/Randall Hill The awarding of more than $1 million total to the two groups, Hookers for Jesus in Nevada and the Lincoln Tubman Foundation in South Carolina, has triggered a whistleblower complaint filed by the Justice Department’s employee union to the department’s Inspector General. An internal department memo seen by Reuters shows that as of September 12, two long-established nonprofits – the Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Palm Beach and Chicanos Por La Causa of Phoenix – were originally on the list of recommended grant winners after receiving high marks from outside contractors hired to review applications. The annual grants help nonprofits and local governments aid human trafficking victims. Later that month, those two organizations were replaced as recommended recipients by Hookers for Jesus and the Lincoln Tubman Foundation, which both received lower rankings from the outside reviewers. The reason, a September 23 memo says, was an effort to “distribute funding across as many states as possible.” The change was ultimately approved by Katharine Sullivan, head of the Office of Justice Programs, OJP, which awards the grants. Sullivan defended the process as proper. “Our funding decisions are based on a merit-based review system,” she said. In December, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees local 2830 filed a complaint in which it asked the inspector general to investigate whether politics factored in the two grant awards. An inspector general’s office spokeswoman declined comment. In a statement, union president Marilyn Moses said the grants call into question the department’s mission to serve the public. “Our employees take their … responsibility to the taxpayer very seriously,” she said. This is the second time recently the union has challenged the grants review process. Chicanos Por La Causa has opposed the Trump administration’s immigration policies. The head of Catholic Charities in Palm Beach has participated in past Democratic National Committees as a delegate or standing committee member. Both groups said they filed strong applications and intended to continue competing for grants. Each, Reuters found, was ranked as a Tier 1 applicant, the highest level, after scrutiny by outside reviewers. Hookers for Jesus and the Lincoln Tubman Foundation were ranked in Tier 2, one level lower. To help select grant recipients, the Justice Department contracts with outside experts called “peer reviewers” who evaluate and score applicants. The reviewers’ identities were not listed next to their comments, so Reuters couldn’t contact them. Career department officials then receive a blind copy of the average weighted scores and divide them into tiers, with the top scores being closer to 100. They review the applications, scores and reviewers’ comments to help inform their recommendations, which get the final sign-off from OJP leadership. DOJ staffers recommended the two Tier 1 groups. The subsequent decision to bypass two higher-scoring groups in favor of those with lower scores deviates from past practices, said several Department of Justice veterans. “Tier 1 generally is your default. They all get funded unless there is some kind of legitimate reason not to fund them,” said Jean Bruggeman, a former DOJ Office for the Victims of Crime fellow who is now executive director of the Freedom Network USA, a coalition aiding trafficking victims. Hookers for Jesus, which received $530,190 over three years, is run by a born-again Christian trafficking survivor who has lobbied against decriminalizing prostitution, a policy position aligning with many in the Republican Party. Hookers for Jesus operates a safe house for female adult trafficking victims that, in 2010 and in 2018, maintained a policy of requiring guests to participate in religious activities, internal program manuals obtained by Reuters through public records requests show. The safe house’s manuals had rules that included a ban on reading “secular magazines with articles, pictures, etc. that portray worldly views/advice on living, sex, clothing, makeup tips.” Other rules limited everything from who victims could call to banning them from bringing their purses with them on weekly shopping trips. Rule-breakers could be penalized by being assigned chores such as washing windows. Hookers for Jesus founder Annie Lobert denied that her organization requires safe house residents to attend services at her church. “We are not going to discriminate toward anyone,” she said. “But,” she added, “we are Christian. And there is an understanding before they come in here that we are Christian.” If the policies described in the 2018 manuals continue after the federal grant money is dispersed, they would likely violate anti-discrimination laws that prohibit using federal funding to engage in explicitly religious activities, some lawyers said. “The fact the federal government is funding this is problematic,” said Dallas Hammer, an attorney specializing in discrimination law. “The decision-makers here could be walking the federal government right into a clear violation of the First Amendment,” which protects freedom of religion. Sullivan, the OJP’s principal deputy assistant attorney general, said the policies described to her by Reuters from the manuals are “inappropriate.” She added: “This might be something that may be appropriate for our civil rights department to look at. Those are not facts or things that we would know ahead of time.” In its grant application, Hookers for Jesus did not discuss its religious focus in detail, and the department did not have access to its program manuals before the award was announced. But Sullivan disputed the notion that Tier 2 scores are significantly inferior and said the department was justified in awarding the two grants because there were no other Tier 1-scored applications in Nevada or South Carolina for that grant category. Geography is among factors that can be considered, but experts said it typically comes into play when deciding between two groups rated at the same level. In 2019, OJP offices collectively awarded more than $100 million in grants to help human trafficking victims, with much of the funding to be paid out over three years. Of that, $53 million went to 77 groups, including Hookers for Jesus and the Lincoln Tubman Foundation, that provide direct services to trafficking victims. The Lincoln Tubman Foundation, awarded $549,345 over three years, was launched by the daughter of a prominent local Republican who supported President Donald Trump as a delegate at the 2016 convention and is close to South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott. Its founder Brooke Burris told Reuters that services for adult trafficking victims in the Charleston area are severely lacking. She said the foundation will fund her Tri-County Human Trafficking Task Force project to offer more direct services and train law enforcement to better spot victims. “We have almost no resources,” she said, noting that South Carolina’s state laws did not outlaw human trafficking until 2012. Slideshow (14 Images) The need for more awareness was apparent during a recent training session her task force hosted with law enforcement: Few officers raised their hands when a former FBI agent asked if they had ever dealt with human trafficking. In September, South Carolina’s Sen. Scott wrote a letter calling on OJP to do a “prompt review” of the application. A Scott spokesman said such letters are standard for grant requests and that he “didn’t endorse” the project. OJP’s Sullivan said the grant review process was the same for all recipients and a letter from a senator “would not influence a funding decision.” Reviewers cited the Lincoln Tubman Foundation’s lack of experience. The task force is still in its “infancy” with “little to no experience,” they wrote. “I knew those were some of our weakest points,” Burris said. Formed in 2018, the foundation is headquartered in a mansion owned by her parents, but she said she is looking for new office space. Meantime, she said she has been fielding calls at all hours to help adult trafficking victims find hotels. EARLIER GRANT QUESTIONS This is not the first time Hookers for Jesus has received federal grant money. In 2017, Nevada announced it was giving Lobert’s group nearly $300,000 through the federal Victims of Crime Act. In her grant application at the time, Lobert said church participation was voluntary. The funding was not renewed in 2018 after the state obtained Hookers for Jesus program manuals saying it was “mandatory” for guests of the group’s shelter, Destiny House, to attend services and volunteer at a specific church. Its staff training manual said homosexuality is immoral and abusing drugs for pleasure is “witchcraft.” Reuters obtained the manuals through a public records request. One Nevada grant reviewer in 2018 questioned whether Hookers for Jesus treated victims like “prisoners,” while another observed the program seemed too controlling and expressed concern it forced victims to attend Bible study, the grant review documents show. “We felt their policies were not victim-focused or evidence based,” said Kelsey McCann-Navarro, whose office in Nevada’s Division of Child and Family Services decided not to renew the funding. Lobert denied having policies requiring religious participation. She declined to provide Reuters a copy of her updated manuals. She added that she did not recall that the 2018 versions denounced homosexuality. “That is probably something we don’t have anymore,” she said. Reviewers evaluating its 2019 federal application said Hookers for Jesus staff had little experience handling forms of human trafficking involving minors, men and foreign nationals. In an interview, Lobert questioned the expertise of the reviewers. “I really caution when someone says they are an expert,” she said. Unless they run a safe house or have survived trafficking themselves, “they don’t have true expertise.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politic...ner-coronavirus-testing-oscar-company/609139/ Exclusive: Kushner Firm Built the Coronavirus Website Trump Promised The extent of Oscar Health’s work on coronavirus testing hasn’t been previously reported. On March 13, President Donald Trump promised Americans they would soon be able to access a new website that would ask them about their symptoms and direct them to nearby coronavirus testing sites. He said Google was helping. That wasn’t true. But in the following days, Oscar Health—a health-insurance company closely connected to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner—developed a government website with the features the president had described. A team of Oscar engineers, project managers, and executives spent about five days building a stand-alone website at the government’s request, an Oscar spokesperson told The Atlantic. The company even dispatched two employees from New York to meet in person with federal officials in Washington, D.C., the spokesperson said. Then the website was suddenly and mysteriously scrapped. The site would not have helped many Americans even if it had launched. Today, more than two weeks after the president promised a national network of drive-through test sites, only a handful of such sites have opened, and fewer than 1 million Americans have been tested. The full extent of Oscar’s work on the project has not been previously reported. The partnership between the administration and the firm suggests that Kushner may have mingled his family’s business interests with his political interests and his role in the administration’s coronavirus response. Kushner’s younger brother Joshua is a co-founder and major investor in Oscar, and Jared Kushner partially owned or controlled Oscar before he joined the White House. The company’s work on the coronavirus website could violate federal ethics laws, several experts said. For the past several weeks, Kushner has led a “shadow task force” on the coronavirus, separate from Vice President Mike Pence’s official committee, according to The Washington Post. Kushner’s team, composed of federal officials allied with Kushner and outside corporate executives, has met in the headquarters of the Department of Health and Human Services. A senior official at that agency called Oscar to ask for its help on March 13, the day of Trump’s press conference, the Oscar spokesperson said. Kushner’s group has focused on expanding and publicizing coronavirus testing, especially at drive-through locations. Oscar’s website would have asked users if they were experiencing symptoms of COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus, and surveyed them about other risk factors, including their age and preexisting conditions. It also would have listed a limited number of testing locations nationwide, including some of the drive-through sites that Trump promised. It was designed to look like a government-developed product, provided freely by the Department of Health and Human Services to the American public. Oscar posted the source code for the site to Github, where The Atlantic reviewed it. The site resembled a version of a tool Oscar had already built for its customers in response to the crisis, but it was “adjusted to meet the specifications and requirements set by the federal government,” Jackie Kahn, the Oscar spokesperson, said in an emailed statement. That Oscar had already been working on a coronavirus-testing website when HHS called to ask for help was a coincidence that had nothing to do with Kushner, Kahn suggested. She declined to say whether Oscar had discussed that site with Joshua Kushner or any board members or investors before Trump’s March 13 press conference. Oscar donated its work freely and never expected to be paid for the project, Kahn said. The company is “not, nor has ever been,” a contractor or subcontractor for the government, she said, which would make it harder for the government to pay Oscar for its work. The work was “all at the direction of HHS,” she said. “The website never saw the light of day,” she added in an interview today. That may not matter from an ethics perspective. The ad hoc nature of Kushner’s task force has already collided with federal laws. Oscar’s involvement deepens Kushner’s ethics and conflict-of-interest problems. “It’s not typical. It’s usually not allowed,” Jessica Tillipman, an assistant dean at the George Washington University School of Law and an expert on anti-corruption law, told me. Oscar’s relationship with the Trump administration could breach federal law in two ways, Tillipman and other experts told me. First, companies are generally not supposed to work for the federal government for free, though some exceptions can be made in a national emergency. “The concern, when you have some free services, is that it makes the government beholden to the company,” Tillipman said. More important, she said, any Kushner involvement may have violated the “impartiality rule,” which requires federal employees to refrain from making decisions when they even appear to involve a conflict of interest. The rule also prohibits federal employees from making a decision in which close relatives may have a financial stake. Such a situation would seem to apply to Kushner and Oscar. In 2013, Jared and Joshua were the “ultimate controlling persons in Oscar’s holding company,” according to a New York State report that Mother Jones dug up earlier this month. When the elder Kushner joined the White House, he disclosed that he had been on the board of Oscar’s holding company from May 2010 to January 2017. He also said that he had sold his shares in the holding company for somewhere between $1.2 million and $7 million. Joshua still holds a stake in the company. When Jared joined the administration, he sold his shares to either Joshua or a trust controlled by their mother, according to his financial disclosures. Kushner did not divest all the assets that he owned jointly with his brother when he joined the White House. Earlier this month, he sold his stake in Cadre, a real-estate investment firm that he owned with Joshua. The stake was worth tens of millions of dollars as recently as last year, Kushner said in his disclosures. There was nothing wrong with Oscar’s arrangement with the government, Kahn argued. “This was the right thing to do, both legally and ethically, and if anyone has any doubt that COVID-19 is an emergency, he’s lost his mind,” she said. “We are enormously proud of our people who put serving the nation ahead of everything during this time of crisis.” Oscar’s description of its work for the administration has changed over time. Two weeks ago, the company told Business Insider that it had “shared code” with the Department of Health and Human Services, but it did not disclose that it had actually made a website. Last week, Kahn told me in an interview that the company had merely “shrink-wrapped” its code, a piece of jargon that meant it had disconnected the code from its in-house technical platforms so that it could work on other servers. Her statement today admitted that Oscar had gone much further. When viewed earlier today, the URL coronavirustesting.gov offered an Amazon Web Services error, suggesting that someone with access to the .gov domain had registered the website. The Department of Health and Human Services declined to produce paperwork authorizing Oscar’s donation of the website work. “Multiple vendors worked on proposals, and we appreciate their work,” an HHS spokeswoman said. “Ultimately, Apple launched the new tool.” But Apple’s COVID-19 tool is a page on Apple.com, not a stand-alone government site like the one Oscar built. Oscar’s creation more closely resembled the website Trump described on March 13. The site would “determine whether a test is warranted and … facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location,” Trump said, adding that Google had 1,700 engineers working on the project. Google, it was quickly revealed, didn’t have any such plans. Google’s parent company is a major investor in Oscar. And Oscar, which has roughly 1,500 employees, did build a site like the one Trump described. The White House declined to comment.