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When the Trump administration came to power, the chairman of the PCAOB, James Doty, was in the middle of trying to negotiate a new arrangement with Beijing. But Doty was removed in 2018 by Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Jay Clayton, who was chosen by Mnuchin. Clayton was also a legal adviser to Alibaba. As he had so many times before, Trump’s pro-business Treasury secretary had effectively short-circuited America’s response to China’s economic aggression. The massive fraud and corruption these practices allowed eventually became well known enough that a cottage industry of short sellers cropped up. By simply performing basic research on these companies, firms like Muddy Waters Research were able to expose fraud after fraud. They were featured in a 2018 documentary called The China Hustle, which chronicled the efforts of Wall Street whistleblowers to call attention to the huge scope and scale of the probtem. But as so often happened, when China’s economic aggression was exposed, it simply changed its tactics.
Chaos Under Heaven
Josh Rogin
When Laura’s here, though…I wouldn’t go so far as to say she actively likes my parents, but she certainly thinks that parents generally are a good thing, and that therefore their little quirks and idiocies are there to be loved, not exposed. She treats my father’s fibs and boasts and non sequiturs as waves, giant breakers, and she surfs over them with skill and pleasure.
Perhaps the most damning comment Bolton offers, in the end, isn’t about foreign policy but Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. “Trump’s reflex effort to talk his way out of anything . . . even a public-health crisis, only undercut his and the nation’s credibility, with his statements looking more like political damage control than responsible public-health advice.” John F. Kelly, Trump’s harassed chief of staff, mutters to Bolton at one point, “Has there ever been a presidency like this?” To which Bolton replies tartly: “I assured him there had not.”
Book Review of the Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir by John Bolton - The Washington Post
washingtonpost.com
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