Stephen Miller’s Financial Stake in ICE Contractor Palantir

Link: Nick Schwellenbach at the Project on Government Oversight.

This is obviously an enormous conflict of interest:

"Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s powerful deputy chief of staff and homeland security advisor [...] disclosed from $100,001 up to a quarter million dollars of stock in Palantir, a tech company woven into the operations of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and used by other federal agencies such as the Pentagon."

Other staffers in the Trump White House also own Palantir stock; most have a smaller stake ($15,000 or less), aside from Miller's senior policy advisor Kara Frederick, who owns somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 of stock in the firm.

That this was openly declared demonstrates how little this administration sees to care about proprietary or avoiding corruption. Obviously, actions directly taken by Miller and these other members of the administration could have a serious impact on Palantir's stock.

Perhaps nothing matters anymore. But there have been bipartisan efforts to prevent elected officials from owning stock; this seems like an overtly good idea, and should be extended to unelected appointees.

As the article notes:

"ICE recently announced it would award a contract to Palantir without competition, claiming no other company could meet its needs in a timely way."

And there's now no way to know if this was really the case, or if there was no other company that could line the administration's profits in the same way.

Of course, these deportations themselves represent a constitutional crisis and a humanitarian disaster that is ripping apart families and sewing fear in entire communities. But in addition to those things - which always were and should remain the main story - it turns out to also be corrupt to its core.

[Link]