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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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A Great Big Gift Not on Trump’s Disclosure Form: Giuliani’s Legal Advice https://nyti.ms/2YMQZOS

It Was a Great Day for Trump, Except for That ‘Scam’

The president expressed delight in a “wild week” of deal making, but his frustration over impeachment was never far from the surface.

By Katie Roger's | Published Dec. 13, 2019 Updated 5:41 PM ET | New York Times | Posted December 13, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — President Trump had plenty of good news to talk about on Friday, beginning with the news from across the Atlantic that a close ally, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, had just seen his party win a decisive majority in Parliament. There were also his accomplishments at home to promote: finishing the first phase of a trade deal with China, averting a government shutdown and moving forward with House Democrats on his signature North American trade pact.

“This has been a wild week,” Mr. Trump said, stating the obvious to reporters in the Oval Office as he praised Mr. Johnson and hailed the China accord as a “phenomenal deal.”

On any other day, the session with reporters would have been an unqualified victory lap for Mr. Trump, a leader who has long felt he does not receive enough credit for his policy accomplishments, and who on Friday had several such wins to crow about. Except that earlier in the morning, the House Judiciary Committee had voted to advance two articles of impeachment against him, prompting an all-but-certain impeachment vote and Senate trial.

Nothing about the vote was a surprise, but Mr. Trump’s private frustration and embarrassment over most likely becoming the third president in American history to be impeached bubbled again to the surface, at least momentarily, dashing the hopes of advisers who have been encouraging him to keep focused on “presidenting.”

“I think it’s a horrible thing to be using the tool of impeachment, which is supposed to be used in an emergency,” Mr. Trump said, scowling as he sat next to President Mario Abdo Benítez of Paraguay. “It’s a scam. It’s something that shouldn’t be allowed. And it’s a very bad thing for our country.”

The timing and mechanics of an impeachment trial in the Republican-controlled Senate remain in flux, but Mr. Trump said he would support a lengthy proceeding, an idea his aides have long said he favors. He added that it would give him a chance to learn more about a whistle-blower whose account of Mr. Trump’s July call with the Ukrainian president formed the basis of the impeachment inquiry.

The president’s support for a more drawn-out process was at odds with a plan set forth by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, who has tried to persuade the president to support an abbreviated trial.

“I’ll do whatever they want to do,” Mr. Trump said, before adding, “I wouldn’t mind a long process because I’d like to see the whistle-blower, who is a fraud.”

Mr. Trump’s extensive comments on impeachment seemed at least momentarily to conflict with the operative stance at the White House of emphasizing what the president was getting done for the American people — similar to the approach aides to President Bill Clinton took when he was impeached. But while Mr. Clinton seethed and obsessed over the proceedings in private, Mr. Trump’s use of his preferred pressure release valve — Twitter — hit a new peak this week.

“How do you get Impeached when you have done NOTHING wrong (a perfect call), have created the best economy in the history of our Country, rebuilt our Military, fixed the V.A. (Choice!), cut Taxes & Regs, protected your 2nd A, created Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, and soooo much more? Crazy!” Mr. Trump wrote Friday morning.

Mr. Trump was in a meeting in the White House residence and not watching television as the Judiciary Committee vote began, but he kept his aides close throughout morning. That group included two in-house strategists focused on impeachment messaging: Tony Sayegh, a former Treasury Department spokesman, and Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general. Other advisers described the president, who has publicly and privately marveled over the unity he sees in the Republican Party around impeachment, as in good spirits.

Another ally in the mix was Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer whose work to dredge up unflattering information on Mr. Trump’s political opponents landed him at the center of the Democratic-led impeachment effort.

Mr. Giuliani was ushered into the White House moments before the vote, and one senior administration official said he was there, in part, to talk about a trip he had taken to interview Ukrainians in Budapest and Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, for an anti-impeachment documentary.

Last month, Mr. Giuliani told an associate that Mr. Trump had approved of his participation in the documentary when he briefed the president about it during a meeting at the Trump International Hotel in Washington.

By the time the Paraguayan president arrived at the White House just before noon, Mr. Trump was flanked by several additional advisers, including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Robert C. O’Brien, his national security adviser.

“It’s a very sad thing for our country but it seems to be very good for me politically,” Mr. Trump said. “The polls have gone through the roof for Trump.”

Mr. Trump and his advisers firmly believe they are winning the public opinion battle around impeachment. His advisers are leaning on polls they say show shifting fortunes in politically crucial swing states, and they are closely watching the behavior of House Democrats they believe are in vulnerable districts.

Frank Luntz, a longtime Republican pollster, offered a different assessment: Public opinion has remained polarized and static as impeachment moves forward, even with a strong economy and several trade accords in the making. “When taken together it’s a political home run,” Mr. Luntz said.

At least, it should be.

“The president never gets the credit he deserves because there’s always something ugly under the surface,” Mr. Luntz added. “Any other president would be in the 60th percentile after a week like this.”

The president’s approval rating continues to hover around 41 percent, according to national polls.

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Kenneth P. Vogel contributed reporting.

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Supreme Court to Rule on Release of Trump’s Financial Records

The court’s ruling, expected by June, could release information the president has tried to protect. Or the justices could rule that his financial affairs are not legitimate subjects of inquiry so long as he remains in office.

By Adam Liptak | Published Dec.13, 2019 Updated 5:47 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted December 13, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether President Trump can block the release of his financial records, setting the stage for a blockbuster ruling on the power of presidents to resist demands for information from prosecutors and Congress.

The court’s ruling, expected by June, could require disclosure of information the president has gone to extraordinary lengths to protect. Or the justices could rule that Mr. Trump’s financial affairs are not legitimate subjects of inquiry so long as he remains in office.

Either way, the court is now poised to produce a once-in-a-generation statement on presidential accountability.

The case will test the independence of the court, which is dominated by Republican appointees, including two named by Mr. Trump. In earlier Supreme Court cases in which presidents sought to avoid providing evidence, the rulings did not break along partisan lines.

To the contrary, the court was unanimous in ruling against Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton in such cases, with Nixon and Clinton appointees voting against the presidents who had placed them on the court. The Nixon case led to his resignation in the face of mounting calls for his impeachment. The Clinton case led to Mr. Clinton’s impeachment, though he survived a Senate vote on his removal.

Mr. Trump asked the court to block three sets of subpoenas, and the justices agreed to decide his appeals in all three. The court said that arguments would be held over two hours in late March or early April, but it did not specify the date.

All of the subpoenas sought information from Mr. Trump’s accountants or bankers, not from Mr. Trump himself, and the firms have indicated that they will comply with the court’s ruling. Had the subpoenas sought evidence from Mr. Trump himself, there was at least a possibility that he would try to defy a ruling against him, prompting a constitutional crisis.

One of the cases concerned a subpoena to Mr. Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA, from the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., a Democrat. It sought eight years of business and personal tax records in connection with an investigation of the role that Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization played in hush-money payments made in the run-up to the 2016 election.

Both Mr. Trump and his company reimbursed the president’s former lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, for payments made to the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels, who claimed that she had an affair with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Cohen was also involved in payments to Karen McDougal, a Playboy model who had also claimed she had a relationship with Mr. Trump. The president has denied the relationships.

Mr. Trump sued to stop his accounting firm from turning over the records, but lower courts ruled against him. In a unanimous ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, said state prosecutors may require third parties to turn over a sitting president’s financial records for use in a grand jury investigation.

In a footnote to the decision, Chief Judge Robert A. Katzmann, wrote that the information sought was in a sense unexceptional.

“We note that the past six presidents, dating back to President Carter, all voluntarily released their tax returns to the public,” Judge Katzmann wrote. “While we do not place dispositive weight on this fact, it reinforces our conclusion that the disclosure of personal financial information, standing alone, is unlikely to impair the president in performing the duties of his office.”

In their petition urging the Supreme Court to hear their appeal, Trump v. Vance, No. 19-635, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that he was immune from all criminal proceedings and investigations so long as he remained in office. But even if some federal investigations may be proper, the petition said, the Supreme Court should rule that state and local prosecutors may not seek information about a sitting president’s conduct.

“That the Constitution would empower thousands of state and local prosecutors to embroil the president in criminal proceedings is unimaginable,” Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote.

Mr. Vance responded that the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Nixon in 1974 essentially decided the central issue in Mr. Trump’s appeal. “This court has long recognized,” Mr. Vance wrote, “that a sitting president may be subject to a subpoena in a criminal proceeding.”

That the subpoena in the Nixon case came from a federal court rather than a state grand jury made no difference, Mr. Vance wrote. “The states’ strong interests in operating a fair and just criminal judicial process should be respected no less than the federal government’s parallel interests recognized in Nixon,” he wrote.

The Justice Department filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the court to hear Mr. Trump’s appeal seeking to keep his financial records private. The brief did not adopt the broad position taken by Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers — that he is immune from criminal investigation while he remains in office. Rather, the department’s brief said that courts should require prosecutors to meet a demanding standard before they are allowed to obtain the information.

The second subpoena, also directed to the accounting firm, came from the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which is investigating the hush-money payments and whether Mr. Trump inflated and deflated descriptions of his assets on financial statements to obtain loans and reduce his taxes.

When Mr. Trump’s lawyers went to court to try to block the subpoena, they argued that the committee was powerless to obtain his records because it had no legislative need for them. They said the panel was engaged in an improper criminal inquiry and was not seeking information to help it enact legislation.

In October, a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit refused to block the subpoena.

“Having considered the weighty interests at stake in this case, we conclude that the subpoena issued by the committee to Mazars is valid and enforceable,” Judge David S. Tatel, who was appointed by President Clinton, wrote for the majority. Judge Patricia A. Millett, appointed by President Barack Obama, joined the majority opinion.

In dissent, Judge Neomi J. Rao, appointed by Mr. Trump, wrote that “allegations of illegal conduct against the president cannot be investigated by Congress except through impeachment.”

In a brief urging the Supreme Court to deny review in the case, Trump v. Mazars USA, No. 19-715, lawyers for the committee argued that they had a legitimate need for the information they sought.

“The election of a president who has decided to maintain his ties to a broad array of business ventures raises questions about the adequacy of existing legislation concerning financial disclosures, government contracts with federal officeholders and government ethics,” the brief said. “Whether new legislation on these subjects is needed is a natural subject of congressional inquiry.”

The third set of subpoenas came from the House Financial Services and Intelligence Committees and were addressed to two financial institutions that did business with Mr. Trump, Deutsche Bank and Capital One. They sought an array of financial records related to the president, his companies and his family.

A different three-judge panel of the Second Circuit ordered most of the requested materials to be disclosed. It made an exception for sensitive personal information unrelated to the committee’s investigations.

“The committees’ interests in pursuing their constitutional legislative function is a far more significant public interest than whatever public interest inheres in avoiding the risk of a chief executive’s distraction arising from disclosure of documents reflecting his private financial transactions,” Judge Jon O. Newman wrote for the majority.

In urging the Supreme Court to block the Second Circuit’s ruling while the justices decided how to proceed in the case, Trump v. Deutsche Bank AG, No. 19A640, Mr. Trump wrote that “these ‘dragnet’ subpoena look nothing like a legislative inquiry.”

The committees responded that they need the information to address interference in American elections.

“Legislative efforts to secure the financial system from abuse have obvious importance,” lawyers for the committee told the justices. “And nothing is more urgent than efforts to guard against foreign influence in our systems for electing officials, particularly given the upcoming 2020 elections.”

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A Great Big Gift Not on Trump’s Disclosure Form: Giuliani’s Legal Advice

By Jim Dwyer and Eric Lipton | Published Dec. 13, 2019, 4:39 PM ET | New York Times | Posted Dec.13, 2019 |

For the past 20 months, President Trump has received free personal legal services from one of America’s highest-paid lawyers, who has traveled around the country and across the ocean to defend him in the special counsel’s inquiry and press Ukraine to investigate a political rival and unfounded conspiracy theories.

The lawyer, of course, is Rudolph W. Giuliani, but Mr. Trump did not mention Mr. Giuliani or his unpaid labor on the annual financial disclosure he filed in May, which requires that the value and source of gifts — including free legal work — be publicly listed.

That requirement is cut and dried, said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She cited guidance from the Office of Government Ethics, issued in November 2017, that states federal officials must disclose “gifts of legal defenses — in kind or by payment of the fees.”

“The purpose is to ensure the public has an opportunity to see whether there is any kind of corrupting influence,” said Ms. Clark, who has written on ethics issues involving government employees in need of lawyers.

During the presidency of Bill Clinton, for example, congressional Republicans and others suggested that some donors to Mr. Clinton’s legal defense funds were currying favor. The names of the donors and the amounts of their gifts were disclosed.

For his paying clients, Mr. Giuliani has been able to provide access to senior officials across the Trump administration.

Elizabeth Horton, a spokeswoman for the Office of Government Ethics, said she could not discuss whether Mr. Giuliani’s pro bono services should have been included in Mr. Trump’s financial disclosure. But in the past, when the agency has received complaints suggesting that information is missing, it has typically followed up with the office where the person works — in this case, the White House.

Scott F. Gast, the top White House ethics lawyer, did not respond to requests to discuss the matter; neither did Mr. Giuliani and his lawyer. Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary, also declined to comment.

Mr. Giuliani, who is at the center of events that have led to the impeachment process now underway, began representing the president around April 2018, during the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. “Based on a 30-year relationship with Mr. Trump, he was asked to serve in his capacity without compensation,” Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer, Faith Miller, said during divorce proceedings last year.

The economic value of his services to the president could be considerable. Mr. Giuliani has said that at the height of the Mueller inquiry, representing Mr. Trump amounted to a full-time job. Partners at major law firms can bill their clients as much as $1,500 an hour. To serve as Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Mr. Giuliani left a firm where he was making $6 million a year.

“I knew when I took it on that it would reduce my income,” he said in September.

Late last year, Mr. Giuliani, who has described the president as being treated “very, very unfairly,” pursued leads on debunked conspiracy theories involving Ukraine’s meddling in the 2016 election that he said might show the special counsel investigation was built on a faulty premise.

And though the special counsel finished his work in March, Mr. Giuliani has continued to act on the president’s behalf by pressuring officials in Ukraine to announce an inquiry into former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., one of the Democratic front-runners to oppose Mr. Trump in 2020.

These actions were “100 percent in my role as the defense lawyer of the president,” Mr. Giuliani said in October. He traveled extensively, paying his own expenses, he said, or piggybacking them onto work for other clients.

Throughout the Trump presidency, Mr. Giuliani has enjoyed a robust business serving wealthy clients by providing advice and extraordinary access to the highest level of government.

On behalf of a Turkish money launderer, Mr. Giuliani brought his case directly to the president and secretary of state in the Oval Office; for a Venezuelan oil oligarch, he met with senior officials at the Justice Department in Washington. He escorted a former penny-stock trader seeking Ukrainian energy deals to the state funeral of former President George Bush.

In 2017, Mr. Trump failed to disclose that he owed more than $100,000 to a previous personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, who had paid hush money on the president’s behalf to the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels. After omitting it from his 2017 form, he listed it in a footnote the following year.

The president’s annual financial disclosure is required under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, adopted after the Watergate scandal to “promote the integrity of public officials and institutions.” The purpose is to let the public know about businesses or property that top government officials have a stake in, or other financial ties that could create a conflict of interest.

Unlike other federal employees, presidents and vice presidents are allowed to accept gifts with few limitations. They face one major requirement: They must list the value and source of any goods or services, currently above a threshold of $390, on their annual forms.

There remains one possible loophole that Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump could turn to as an explanation.

Under federal campaign finance law, if an individual lawyer provides legal advice to a candidate without compensation, “the work is considered personal volunteer activity,” the Federal Election Commission says.

But the law limits any unpaid travel expenses associated with the free legal services — meaning a trip to Europe by Mr. Giuliani as part of this work would turn into an illegal contribution to Mr. Trump, unless the expense was reimbursed by the campaign.

“It kind of puts him in a box,” said Matthew T. Sanderson, a campaign finance lawyer who has advised several Republican presidential hopefuls, including Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Rick Perry, the former Texas governor and energy secretary.

Mr. Giuliani, other campaign finance lawyers said, might have a hard time defending the assertion that all of his legal advice to Mr. Trump relates to his status as a candidate, given that much of the effort involves actions Mr. Trump has taken while serving as president. It also would add weight to the argument that the work Mr. Giuliani was doing on Ukraine was related to Mr. Trump’s re-election effort, two of the lawyers said

“If what he is doing for the president is for the campaign, how does he argue that the Ukraine corruption issue is not about the election?” asked Larry Noble, the F.E.C.’s former general counsel. “They are inconsistent arguments.”

In late November, a liberal watchdog organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, asked the Justice Department and the Office of Government Ethics to investigate the nondisclosure, saying it “seemingly violates federal law and undermines the integrity of the public financial disclosure program.”

“We’re not saying that President Trump can’t accept the free legal work,” said Virginia Canter, a lawyer for the group, which frequently sues the Trump administration. “What he does have to do is disclose the value and nature of any pro bono services.”

Mr. Clinton, who was under investigation by Congress and a special counsel for much of his time in office, raised more than $10 million through two funds to pay legal bills. Donations were capped at $1,000 in the first of the funds, and at $10,000 in the second.

During the his presidency, a conservative watchdog, Judicial Watch, claimed in a lawsuit that Mr. Clinton’s personal insurer was bending its coverage rules to pay some of his legal bills, saying it was trying to win “gratitude and favor” to create an agreeable “regulatory environment.” The suit did not succeed.

Ms. Clark, the law professor, said that Mr. Clinton and Mr. Trump were in parallel situations, in that both relied on donations to meet substantial legal costs, but reiterated that donations to the Clinton fund were capped at $10,000 a year. The value of a single day of Mr. Giuliani’s donated services would far exceed that. “There is no comparison in the size of the individual gifts,” she said.

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Kenneth P. Vogel contributed reporting.

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biofunmy · 5 years

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NASA Ended The Apollo Moon Landings After The First Astronauts Went There 50 Years Ago

With the Apollo 11 landing’s 50th anniversary at hand, US lawmakers and the Trump administration are newly enthused with moon landings, directing the space agency to hurry up and get us there in the next five years.

“It’s hard to believe it has been a half century since the US won the space race,” Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi said on Wednesday at a Senate hearing on NASA’s moon plans. He and other lawmakers were asking NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine why the space agency stopped, and can’t easily restart, the moon landings mastered from 1969 to 1972, a time when phones had cords, computers relied on punch cards, and chunky eyeglasses weren’t a fashion statement.

From 1969 to 1972, Apollo carried a dozen astronauts on six missions to the surface of the moon, part of a program that cost from $112 billion to $146 billion (in 2019 dollars), and returned some 842 pounds of moon rocks to Earth.

“It’s really two questions,” space historian John Logsdon of George Washington University told BuzzFeed News. “Why did Apollo end? And separately, why did we stop going to the moon?”

The answers are a bit more complicated than the US running out of money for moon shots in the 1970s. For one, the striking success of the Apollo missions themselves seeded the demise of more moon landings to come.

A prime reason for the efforts, beating the Soviet Union, disappeared as soon as Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon. “It stopped because it was over, first and foremost,” former NASA chief historian Roger Launius, author of Reaching for the Moon: A Short History of the Space Race, told BuzzFeed News. “They could have stopped at Apollo 11 and declared victory.”

Instead NASA rolled the dice by hoping that Congress would pay for shiny new things after Apollo, freeing up money for a space shuttle and Skylab, an early orbiting lab, instead of just killing the agency off entirely with the moon landings done.

“NASA said we’ll bet on the future,” said Logsdon. And it won the bet, he added: “They got a shuttle and now they have a space station, seemingly forever.” It just wasn’t a future that included moon missions, and now, it’s one that looks like a dead end.

You can blame NASA for the halt of the Apollo moon landings. But as to why we haven’t been back, Logsdon says to blame President Richard Nixon.

In 1969, even as Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins enjoyed a ticker-tape parade down the streets of Chicago after their return from the moon, the future of NASA was under review by a task group commissioned by the newly elected Nixon and headed by then–vice president Spiro Agnew. (Going back to LBJ, vice presidents have steadily been handed the space portfolio of US presidential administrations.)

A month later, the group proposed three options for the space agency’s future: one ended with astronauts landing on Mars in the 1980s; one ended with uncrewed precursor Mars missions around that same time; the least expensive proposal ended with a space shuttle and space station but a decision on Mars deferred to the end of the century. Annual costs ranged from as high as $10 billion down to $4 billion, at a time when NASA’s budget was around $3.7 billion (around $26 billion in 2019 terms, where NASA’s budget now is about $20.7 billion) a year.

The reaction from Congress, the public, and, perhaps most surprisingly, scientists was overwhelmingly negative, with a NASA science adviser calling a Mars mission “utmost folly.” It looked like too much money and too much risk.

“There really wasn’t any appetite for these more expansive efforts at the time,” Launius said. “And that was largely about cost.” NASA’s budget, never all that popular, had been under protest since 1963. A people’s march right at the Apollo 11 launch led by Rev. Ralph Abernathy had protested that money wasn’t being spent alleviating poverty.

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Rev. Ralph Abernathy with Thomas Paine at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

“The crisis had passed,” said Launius. Nationwide panic after the launch of Sputnik in 1957, followed by the Soviet Union launching the first person into space in 1961, had kicked off the space race. But the feeling was that the US had pulled ahead at the finish line by landing first on the moon. “The sense on both sides of the aisle was that the money could be better spent on other priorities.”

In light of the opposition, NASA Administrator Thomas Paine faced a choice over the future of the agency, just at the moment when the agency was enjoying its greatest triumph. The agency could continue spending money on moon landings, or it could follow a new path.

NASA management in Houston, where the astronaut program was based, realized it was pushing the Apollo spacecraft “right up to the edge of its safe performance,” Logsdon said. These combined landing and ascent modules landed astronauts on the moon, barely saved the lives of the astronauts of Apollo 13 in 1970, and had made everyone nervous thereafter. That meant Apollo had to end.

Within months of Agnew’s space proposals release, NASA first suggested killing Apollo 20, the planned final mission of the program, and then announced it was extending the moon landings until 1974 in a bid to save money.

Paine next announced a halt to production of the mighty Saturn V rocket that carried the lander into space. No Saturn V meant no moon landing.

Then in March 1970, about a month ahead of the ill-fated Apollo 13’s launch, Nixon released a statement on the future of space exploration, a crucial nail in the moon mission coffin. “What we do in space from here on in must become a normal and regular part of our national life and must therefore be planned in conjunction with all of the other undertakings,” said Nixon.

“His reading of the American public, a correct one I think, was [that it was] not interested in funding an expensive space program,” said Logsdon. “He, being a fiscal conservative, was fine with that.”

Rather than enjoying its status as the favored son, NASA was suddenly competing with the likes of the Justice and Commerce departments, which approach the same congressional spending subcommittee for money every year. The space agency has since declined from its high of 4% of the overall federal budget in the ’60s to today’s share of less than 0.5%.

The Apollo 13 mission, launched and aborted a month after Nixon’s decision, did nothing to suggest the moon landings should be extended. The rupture of a spacecraft oxygen tank nearly killed the crew, who had to use their landing module as a lifeboat to return to Earth, a rescue chronicled in the 1995 movie Apollo 13.

After the near calamity, even NASA was inclined to play it safe. The attitude at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston was “Let’s quit while we are ahead, before we kill somebody,” said Logsdon. Concerns centered on the ascent rocket of the Apollo lander module, which threatened to strand astronauts on the moon forever if it malfunctioned or broke, since it didn’t have a backup.

Facing budget cuts by the end of that pivotal year, 1970, NASA canceled the last three planned Apollo flights, leaving Apollo 15, 16, and 17 as the final moon landings concluding two years early, in 1972. “The canceled missions freed up resources for NASA’s Skylab and Space Shuttle — programs that were slated to launch over the next two decades,” George Abbey, senior fellow in space policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and former Johnson Space Center chief, told BuzzFeed News.

It could have been worse, Abbey added. One year later, Nixon wanted to kill Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 as well.

The normally budget-cutting Caspar Weinberger, director of the Office of Management and Budget, talked him out of the idea, arguing “large numbers of valuable (and hard-to-employ-elsewhere) scientists and technicians are kept at work,” by Apollo in a 1971 memo. “America should be able to afford something besides increased welfare, programs to repair our cities, or Appalachian relief and the like,” he added. (He really said that.)

That convinced Nixon, particularly after Weinberger promised to find money elsewhere in the federal budget to cut. And so, Apollo 17’s Gene Cernan was the last astronaut to stand on the moon, departing the lunar surface on Dec. 14, 1972.

Since then, a parade of vice presidents — George H.W. Bush, Dan Quayle, and just this March, Mike Pence — have promised to send astronauts back to the lunar surface. Somehow it never happens. The public’s attitude toward NASA might play a big part in that — people seem to like the space agency as an idea, but don’t want to fund moon bases, according to a July C-SPAN/Ipsos poll. Only 8% of the US public wants to see a return of astronauts to the moon, that poll found.

“Everyone loves Apollo. Apollo is cool, you like it, I like it, it was just a great achievement,” Launius said. ��But our politicians seem to have discovered they get just as much bounce from announcing we’ll go back to the moon — without having to actually pay for it.”

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