A high likelihood of rampant criminality
Adam Davidson at the New Yorker says the investigation of Trump is in the final stage. Bottom line: he’s a crook and always has been.
I am unaware of anybody who has taken a serious look at Trump’s business who doesn’t believe that there is a high likelihood of rampant criminality. In Azerbaijan, he did business with a likely money launderer for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. In the Republic of Georgia, he partnered with a group that was being investigated for a possible role in the largest known bank-fraud and money-laundering case in history. In Indonesia, his development partner is “knee-deep in dirty politics”; there are criminal investigations of his deals in Brazil; the F.B.I. is reportedly looking into his daughter Ivanka’s role in the Trump hotel in Vancouver, for which she worked with a Malaysian family that has admitted to financial fraud. Back home, Donald, Jr., and Ivanka were investigated for financial crimes associated with the Trump hotel in SoHo—an investigation that was halted suspiciously. His Taj Mahal casino received what was then the largest fine in history for money-laundering violations.
Listing all the financial misconduct can be overwhelming and tedious. I have limited myself to some of the deals over the past decade, thus ignoring Trump’s long history of links to New York Mafia figures and other financial irregularities.
He’s not a genius negotiator who cut a few corners here and there; he’s just dirty, all the way through.
The narrative that will become widely understood is that Donald Trump did not sit atop a global empire. He was not an intuitive genius and tough guy who created billions of dollars of wealth through fearlessness. He had a small, sad operation, mostly run by his two oldest children and Michael Cohen, a lousy lawyer who barely keeps up the pretenses of lawyering and who now faces an avalanche of charges, from taxicab-backed bank fraud to money laundering and campaign-finance violations.
Cohen, Donald, Jr., and Ivanka monetized their willingness to sign contracts with people rejected by all sensible partners. Even in this, the Trump Organization left money on the table, taking a million dollars here, five million there, even though the service they provided—giving branding legitimacy to blatantly sketchy projects—was worth far more.
Oh that’s what they were doing. Duh. It’s always been presented as charging a high price for the bogus “glamor” of the name – when actually it was a low price for laundering sleaze with the name.
There are important legal questions that remain. How much did Donald Trump and his children know about the criminality of their partners? How explicit were they in agreeing to put a shiny gold brand on top of corrupt deals? The answers to these questions will play a role in determining whether they go to jail and, if so, for how long.
There is no longer one major investigation into Donald Trump, focussed solely on collusion with Russia. There are now at least two, including a thorough review of Cohen’s correspondence. The information in his office and hotel room will likely make clear precisely how much the Trump family knew. What we already know is disturbing, and it is hard to imagine that the information prosecutors will soon learn will do anything but worsen the picture.
Of course Trump is raging and furious and terrified. Prosecutors are now looking at his core. Cohen was the key intermediary between the Trump family and its partners around the world; he was chief consigliere and dealmaker throughout its period of expansion into global partnerships with sketchy oligarchs. He wasn’t a slick politico who showed up for a few months. He knows everything, he recorded much of it, and now prosecutors will know it, too. It seems inevitable that much will be made public. We don’t know when. We don’t know the precise path the next few months will take. There will be resistance and denial and counterattacks. But it seems likely that, when we look back on this week, we will see it as a turning point. We are now in the end stages of the Trump Presidency.
But only a little way into the shame of it.
Oh please oh please oh please. Let it be so.
Worst case it may be that the path to publication is one where records are sealed until any significant players are dead…
At last. Real crimes that have (almost) nothing to do w/his performance of bad manners, ignorance, racism, and childishness via Twitter. And I’m glad to see Princess Ivanka and her dunce brothers named too. Lock them up!
If only…
The thing is, if he was this always this dirty, and had been for so long, and so many people knew – or at least suspected – that this was the case, why hadn’t law enforcement gone after him before?
It’s not like he’s the only one. There must be thousands of shady money-grubbing hucksters just like him, doing lots of the same things. White-collar criminals getting away with all kinds of nefarious shit every fucking day, scamming customers, suppliers, government institutions and members of the public right under our fucking noses. Why hasn’t law enforcement gone after them either? Why does one of them have to stick his head up out of the long grass as high as being the damn president before they’ll look into their shit?
Oh, right, because these fuckers contribute to mayors’ and senators’ reelection campaigns.
Re #5 – That’s a large part of it, but there’s more to it, not all unrelated.
Resources of law enforcement and prosecution are finite. The ones trained to ferret out financial crimes are likely few in number, and their output is feeding into a system of prosecution and judgment flooded by stupid little drug possession and distribution crimes. Meanwhile, those district attorneys will be elected and reelected based on the red-meat convictions that appeal to the mass of interested voters, and they’re more likely to appreciate numbers of drug traffickers put away and the occasional higher profile violent criminal – a money launderer or crooked lawyer is going to be boring at best.
All that money will mean lots of lawyers with time and interns on their hands, for all sorts of motions and trouble. When a public defender may barely meet a client, well, if a DA is considering conviction likelihood per unit time spent, the money launderer is a terrible candidate for prosecution.
And the crimes are individually murky. Possession of contraband is an easy bust. Crimes with tangible forensic evidence give people easy judgments to make, at least by comparison. Working through obscure financial transactions that are poorly recorded to violate laws that the jurors may well not understand… is no slam-dunk case.
Last, jury trials mean selling a narrative of the accused as a criminal to twelve people the defense has helped pick. All the biases your typical human has can come into play there – and when the defendants can spend money to build their public persona up, be as attractive as their genes allow, and fix an image that can crowd out the “criminal scum” identification, they’re in a much better position to benefit from those biases than impoverished, poorly educated, fairly desperate young men of color (for instance).
That awful strain of Calvinism that runs through American minds can make that even worse – having money and success is supposed to be an indicator of God’s favor and your virtue, so the very cash you get from crimes makes you look less likely to have committed them.
We’ve built the oligarchy brick by brick.
And every time it gets a crack, we rush out to patch it up as rapidly as possible.
I also suspect the American public is not as honest as they believe, or as they would like others to believe. It’s unnerving the amount of people I know who involve themselves in some tiny scam, some of them legal but thoroughly unethical, that will make them somewhere between a couple of dollars to a couple thousand dollars. That gives another incentive to look the other way, because a person doing this might see these people as doing the same thing they are, only more successfully. And they might realize that, given the opportunity, they would do the same themselves. So they push for the criminals that they would never, ever, ever emulate (except when they do) – the drug users and pushers.
Perhaps this is one impetus behind the Republican reflex to “deregulate” everything. If you can help legislate shady dealings out of the category of “crime,” then that saves a lot of hassles, paperwork and potential jail time.