Middleboro Review and so on

Today in Politics, Bulletin 410. 7/2/26 Ron Filipkowski Jul 2 ∙ … Journalists digging into Trump’s financial reports from his first year in office are discovering an orgy of corruption and greed as he and his family make staggering profits off the presidency while Republicans look the other way and remain silent. … NYT: “Trump returned to the WH with an epiphany about mixing business and politics during his first term in office. ‘I found out that nobody cared, Trump said, revealing a remarkable indifference to potential conflicts of interest. Trump’s latest financial disclosure revealed that he made about $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses during his first year back in office - even as the Trump admin has relaxed regulation of crypto companies.” … “By tradition, American presidents have generally tried to avoid appearing to profit from the presidency, often taking actions to separate themselves from the kinds of corporate entanglements that could create conflict...

  I haven’t written to you in three months because I decided to take a little break and focus on finishing my book, which has evolved into a memoir of our landmark $10 billion pollution judgment against Chevron. We even have a tentative title that I hope to reveal soon. I’m going to share with you the beginning of the book here: The driveway up the steep hill to enter the Danbury federal prison in Connecticut had been traversed by thousands of inmates since it opened in 1940. I never in my wildest imagination thought I would be confined here in the same place as some of the most infamous criminals in U.S. history. I had graduated in the same Harvard Law School class as President Barack Obama and Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. A guy like me – a respected lawyer who had fought on behalf of human rights victims for years and who had won a landmark pollution case in the Amazon – was not supposed to end up in a place like this. Worse, I thought that once inside there was a chance I...