Envy Apartment

President Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson step off Air Force One upon their arrival in Reno, Nev., Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2017. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)Donald Trump and WASHINGTON (AP) — Legal experts said Wednesday that Housing Secretary Ben Carson likely did not violate federal law when he appeared with President Donald Trump at a campaign rally. After the appearance Tuesday night , questions were raised on Twitter about whether Carson had violated the federal law known as the Hatch Act, which bars most executive branch officials from using their government positions to influence elections. Kathleen Clark, an attorney and law professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, says Carson isn’t prohibited from speaking at a campaign event, but Hatch would bar him from invoking or using his official position to engage in partisan political activity . Housing and Urban Development spokesman Jerry Brown said the agency doesn’t think Carson did anything ...

One day in August, 2016, the financier Carl Icahn made an urgent phone call to the Environmental Protection Agency . Icahn is one of the richest men on Wall Street, and he has thrived, in no small measure, because of a capacity to intimidate. A Texas- based oil refiner in which he had a major stake was losing money because of an obscure environmental rule that Icahn regarded as unduly onerous. Icahn is a voluble critic of any government regulation that constrains his companies. So he wanted to speak with the person in charge of enforcing the policy: a senior official at the E.P.A. named Janet McCabe . Icahn works from a suite of offices, atop the General Motors Building , in midtown, that are decorated in the oak-and-leather fashion of a tycoon’s lair in a nineteen-eighties film. During that decade, Icahn made his reputation as one of the original corporate raiders , pioneering the art of the hostile takeover and establishing himself as a human juggernaut—a pugnacious deal machine ...