Donald Trump goes even further down the cellphone company bribery rabbit hole with ZTE
Yesterday, Palmer Report asked the one question about Donald Trump’s AT&T bribery scandal that everyone seemed to have overlooked: if Trump sought out and accepted bribe money from AT&T over the Time Warner merger, why did he never approve the merger? We raised two possibilities: either he went back and demanded even more money from AT&T and didn’t get it, or some competitor stepped in with a bigger bribe. Now Trump himself may have just given us a crucial clue about this.
Here’s what Donald Trump tweeted today: “President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!” Wait a minute now, Trump’s entire schtick all along has been about taking jobs away from other nations and bringing them to the United States. He’s brought precisely zero jobs home, and he’s spent a lot of time lying about imaginary jobs he’s brought home, but the point is that suddenly he’s worried about creating jobs in China – specifically with a cellphone company. Hmm.
Here’s what we know about ZTE. Its cellphone carrier business accounts for about half its business model, but it’s not really an AT&T competitor. In fact in the United States, AT&T sells some ZTE hardware. The trouble with ZTE is that it’s been overwhelmingly accused of corruption. In fact portions of the U.S. government have shunned ZTE under the belief that it’s been helping the government of China carry out its spy work. ZTE has also gotten into trouble for selling phones to North Korea. It’s that kind of shady company.
So now, just days after it was exposed that Donald Trump was previously taking bribe money from AT&T, suddenly Trump is making a big deal out of trying to save a shady and dying major cellphone company in China. It’s not yet clear how these fit together, but they can’t possibly be coincidence. Is ZTE bribing Trump? Is China bribing Trump in exchange for helping save ZTE? How does AT&T play into this? At least Trump was dumb enough to tweet about it today, helping steer investigators in the right direction.
