Donald Trump’s grip on the electoral systems – Morning Briefing

it sounds like a passage from a Dan Brown novel, but what about Donald Trump and those around him doesn’t evoke political fiction? According to the Washington Post, after the ex-US President’s election defeat, a group of Trump lawyers hired a team of computer experts to copy sensitive data from the US state of Georgia’s electoral system.

Apparently it was part of the plan to get access to such data in at least three important states – in addition to Georgia also in Nevada and Michigan. For example, the company Sullivan Strickler from Atlanta received an order for the work, documents show. “The breach is much bigger than we thought,” said attorney David D. Cross, who represents suing constituencies. The government in Washington rightly classifies voting machines as “critical infrastructure”. A theft could have allowed Trump’s people to use manipulated evidence to claim that his government office had been stolen from him.

Georgia is also at the center of criminal investigations into Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. This is also about a possible influence on the 2020 presidential election, which is why a public prosecutor began investigating in 2021. In a phone call, Trump is said to have asked Chief Election Supervisor Brad Raffensperger to “find” the missing votes in order to overturn Joe Biden’s narrow election victory in this southern state. That’s why Giuliani is due to testify before the jury in Georgia’s capital Atlanta tomorrow, Wednesday – and will rely entirely on attorney-client privilege.

Top jobs of the day

Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.

Robert Habeck appeared again yesterday as emergency economics minister and not as climate protection minister. He presented “bitter medicine”, the new gas surcharge of 2.419 cents per kilowatt hour, which all gas customers have to pay from October – in addition to the rising gas prices, which are caused by the Russian strategy of blackmail and shortages. The annual burden for an average household is between 432 and 576 euros.

The general public is paying for an energy policy by Eon, BASF, Angela Merkel and Gerhard Schröder that went completely wrong in order to save a gas supply giant like Uniper from bankruptcy. Habeck did not include any relief proposals for the socially disadvantaged or for companies threatened by gas inflation in his documents. This will be a separate press conference with sweeter medicine.

Holger Loesch, Deputy General Manager of the Federation of German Industries (BDI), expresses fundamental criticism before the medicine man’s next appearance: “In times of exorbitantly rising energy costs, the surcharge represents an additional burden that not only affects the energy-intensive sectors, but the industry in its full breadth.”

And Ulrich Schneider from the German Parity Welfare Association found the watering can interventionism to be rather bad in the “Berliner Zeitung”: “It shows the citizen that the consumer is being consulted regardless of the economic situation of the corporations. It is also passed on if a company does not get into trouble at all or is very far from bankruptcy.”

It has as much to do with the market economy as Putin has with democracy.

The fact that the “Big Four” of the auditing scene have major conflicts of interest has been an issue for a long time. On the one hand, they should radically critically examine balance sheets on a public mandate so that there is no Wirecard disaster, on the other hand, they also advise their customers on how to trick taxes and how to proceed strategically.

New PwC Germany boss Petra Justenhoven: The 55-year-old has been leading Germany’s largest auditing and consulting company since July.

(Photo: PwC/ Frank Rumpenhorst, Thomas Berger (M))

Petra Justenhoven, PwC’s new head of Germany, has no intention of following the example of the big rivals EY and Deloitte, who are currently splitting into a consulting branch and an auditing business. A split is “not an option,” she tells my colleagues, the rules on independence are “strict” and are “strictly observed” internally: “It’s part of our DNA.” Quod esset demonstrandum.

The champagne mood is spreading again on the stock exchanges, especially in the USA. For example, Disney stock is currently shooting up because activist investor Dan Loeb has increased his stake and is calling for the sports network ESPN to be spun off. One who does not trust the roast at all is star investor Michael Burry. Ever since Wall Street’s nonconformist predicted the financial crisis in 2007, he’s thrilled a number of fans.

He is currently seeing another very serious crisis brewing and has sold all the well-known shares in his hedge fund Scion Asset Management: Meta, Alphabet, Booking, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cigna, Warner Bros and Stellantis. Burry only holds 500,000 shares in one stock: the prison operator Geo Group. It should be an extremely crisis-proof business model.

Gina Lollobrigida, 95, Italy’s big screen diva, is actually running in September’s general election – because she’s had enough of “arguing politicians”. While she supported Romano Prodi and his democrats in the 1999 European elections, she is now a little further to the left. She wants to become a senator for the Italia Sovrana e Popolare (Sovereign and National Italy) party, which includes communists, socialists and other left-wing populist Eurosceptics.

She feels inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, but after a court decision she is no longer allowed to freely dispose of her assets. Her son complained after the assistant from “La Lollo Nazionale” had sold three apartments, a Jaguar and 350 items.

Actress Maria Furtwängler and Hubert Burda apparently go their separate ways after 30 years of very public marriage.

(Photo: imago/Karo)

And then there are Hubert Burda, 82, and Maria Furtwängler, 55, who announce the end of earthly happiness on the Ascension Day. They’ve been going “separate ways for quite some time,” they said, but remain “friends and family members.” Whenever press studies in the past few years suggested that the marriage was “on the rocks”, the two simply continued with their teamwork. He is a rich aristocrat of the colorful papers, devoted to art as well as to the digital, a child of the 1960s, when you heard the Beatles at breakfast. She is a scion of the very upper educated middle class, with a family residence on Lake Tegernsee, doctor, activist against discrimination and “Tatort” actress, a creature of the 2000s emancipation.

Now, after 30 years of very public marriage, the two brands are no longer compatible. It looks like the surprising lance ride of a woman who was denied succession – and who is very close to her children Jakob and Elisabeth, the owners of the capital. As Aenne Burda (1909 to 2005) once said: “It’s easy to make friends, but difficult to keep.”

I wish you, in all friendship, a successful day.

It greets you cordially
Her
Hans Jürgen Jakobs
Senior editor

source site-18