Tag: Trump

  • High crimes

    The Post story by Antonia Noori Farzan continues –

    The president has long been accused of endorsing acts of violence through his incendiary rhetoric and allusions to the potential for violence at his rallies, a charge that members of his administration deny.

    Reached for comment by The Washington Post on Trump’s reaction at the Florida rally, Matt Wolking, deputy communications director for the Trump campaign, pointed to a response he had given to many critics on Twitter. The president, he noted in his tweet, had specifically said that Border Patrol wouldn’t use firearms to stop migrants from entering the country.

    Shameless ratbag. If you watch the video you can see that Trump said the Border Patrol can’t use firearms and that he made it breathtakingly obvious that he wishes they could.

    And I mean “breathtakingly” literally here. The whole thing has taken my breath away.

    The incendiary remark from the crowd came as Trump, standing before about 7,000 people who had gathered at an outdoor amphitheater in the hurricane-damaged Gulf Coast town, railed against what he described as an “invasion” of migrants attempting to enter the United States. Often, he claimed, “two or three” border agents will contend with the arrival of “hundreds and hundreds of people.”

    “And don’t forget, we don’t let them and we can’t let them use weapons,” Trump said of the border agents. “We can’t. Other countries do. We can’t. I would never do that. But how do you stop these people?”

    “But.” That “but” makes nonsense of ratbag Matt Wolking’s shameless pretense that Trump was ruling out violence.

    The fans seated directly behind Trump wore serious, perturbed frowns, which were quickly replaced by broad grins after the shouted suggestion that the solution involved firearms. Uproarious laughter rippled across the room as audience members whistled and offered a round of applause.

    Haw haw haw haw; slaughtering helpless civilians is so hilarious.

    To critics, Trump’s failure to outright condemn the idea of shooting migrants amounted to a “tacit endorsement” of the sentiment. Many pointed out that such rhetoric was especially concerning in light of the fact that an armed militia group, the United Constitutional Patriots, had been searching the borderlands for undocumented migrants and detaining them against their will.

    Oh? I missed that.

    Last month, after the group’s leader, Larry Mitchell Hopkins, was arrested on charges of being a felon in possession of firearms and ammunition, the FBI said thatthe 69-year-old claimed militia members were training to assassinate former president Barack Obama, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and prominent Democratic donor George Soros.

    Trump would smirk and grin and laugh and clap about that, too.

    During a trip to Texas last month, Trump complained that “everybody would go crazy” if soldiers deployed to the border got “a little rough” with migrants. Border Patrol agents, similarly, would be arrested if they “get tough” with people in custody, he lamented.

    And Wednesday’s rally is only the latest example of Trump laughing off brutality — or even allegedly condoning it. As The Post’s Aaron Blake has documented, he has a long history of making subtle and not-so-subtle nods toward violence, and encouraged his supporters to rough up protesters at his rallies on more than one occasion during his 2016 campaign.

    At a rally in October, Trump lavished praise on Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) for assaulting a reporter during his bid for Congress, calling the congressman “my guy.” More recently, in March, the president suggested that his supporters could potentially be tempted to rise up in response to any efforts to remove him from office.

    He has to go.

  • A roar rose from the crowd

    The Post on Trump’s Hitler moment:

    A roar rose from the crowd of thousands of Trump supporters in Panama City Beach on Wednesday night, as President Trump noted yet again that Border Patrol agents can’t use weapons to deter migrants. “How do you stop these people?” he asked.

    “Shoot them!” someone yelled from the crowd, according to reporters on the scene and attendees.

    The audience cheered. Supporters seated behind Trump and clad in white baseball caps bearing the letters “USA” laughed and applauded.

    “That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that statement,” Trump replied, smiling and shaking his head. “Only in the Panhandle.”

    He wasn’t smiling, he was smirking and grinning.

    We need to get this monster out of there.

  • More on that

    https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1126300701414522881

    The Post title isn’t right though – he doesn’t laugh it off, he laughs it in.

  • Hitler moment

    Oh, god.

    Watch the clip. Watch the clip to see and hear his glee, his smirking grinning joy.

  • Sarah Sanders says House Judiciary Chairman should be embarrassed

    Meanwhile the House Judiciary committee is working on holding Barr in contempt while Trump is countering with a declaration of “executive privilege”…over an investigation of his own scummy maneuverings. To put it another way we’re busy displaying to the world what a disastrously flawed system we have, in which The One Top Guy (yes always guy, it has to be guy) gets to do whatever he feels like doing and wrap himself in a fiction called Executive Privilege to nullify any attempts to stop him.

    Moments after the White House announced President Trump would assert executive privilege over special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders slammed House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, whom she said is seeking to “break the law” with his requests for the unredacted report.

    “They’re asking for information they know they can’t have. The attorney general is actually upholding the law,” Sanders said, adding, “Chairman Nadler is asking the attorney general of the United States to break the law and commit a crime by releasing information that he knows he has no legal authority to have. It’s truly outrageous and absurd what the chairman is doing and he should be embarrassed that he’s behaving this way.”

    She attacked Nadler’s understanding of the law, saying that she feels she “(understands) it better than he does.”

    Thanks to all the time she has put in telling lies for Donald Trump.

  • In case there was any doubt

    Acolyte of Sagan has already quoted it but I want to go to the source.

    “I’m a tax cheat, plus also the Times story reporting that I’m a tax cheat is fake news.”

    This is the president of the United States.

    Siva Vaidhyanathan comments:

    The fact that Donald Trump stayed in business for more than 40 years despite spectacular graft and incompetence shows how badly America’s institutions eroded over that same time. No federal prosecutor indicted him? No IRS charges? Banks continued to lend to him?

    Then he follows up:

    I want some reporter to ask Preet Bharara why the US Attorney for SDNY never seriously investigated Trump’s foundation, business dealings, money laundering, bank fraud, or tax fraud. Why should federal prosecutors skate as well? They let us down.

    Big time.

    This is why Jesse Eisinger wrote The Chickenshit Club.

    James Comey has become a household name over the past few months, and for good reason. Following his controversial handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails while she was Secretary of State, the former director of the FBI has become a key witness in the probe into the Trump campaign. Comey’s dismissal from the FBI in May of this year — along with his subsequent Senate testimony — has placed him in a position to help uncover a scandal that threatens to eclipse Watergate. The Chickenshit Club, the latest book from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jesse Eisinger, unravels a culture of cowardice, incompetence and corruption — one that has allowed the FBI, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and above all the Department of Justice to flounder in their efforts to hold not only the government, but America’s financial institutions, accountable for their crimes.

    …[T]he book focuses its lens on the corporate bungling and greed of the past few years, most notably the 2008 financial crisis and its roots in Wall Street’s web of risky investments and banking malfeasance — all enabled by loose regulatory enforcement, cozy Washington connections, and the implicit promise of government bailouts…

    …Lanny Breuer, a former assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division of the DOJ, is portrayed as a showboater who, along with his boss Eric Holder, backed down from major fights against financial institutions out of a fear of political and popular fallout should they fail. As Eisinger notes, “Those who fought hard against the large corporations incurred costs, not rewards” — a frightening assessment that, while not surprising, reinforces the widely held perception that America’s corporate elite have maneuvered themselves into a position of relative untouchability.

    And now here we are.

  • In deep financial distress

    The Times has scored some Trump tax information and found that he was basically setting fire to billions in the late 80s-early 90s.

    By the time his master-of-the-universe memoir “Trump: The Art of the Deal” hit bookstores in 1987, Donald J. Trump was already in deep financial distress, losing tens of millions of dollars on troubled business deals, according to previously unrevealed figures from his federal income tax returns.

    Mr. Trump was propelled to the presidency, in part, by a self-spun narrative of business success and of setbacks triumphantly overcome. He has attributed his first run of reversals and bankruptcies to the recession that took hold in 1990. But 10 years of tax information obtained by The New York Times paints a different, and far bleaker, picture of his deal-making abilities and financial condition.

    …

    The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.

    In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.

    So he’s the best at something!

    Boy, I bet his Twitter machine is going to melt by the time he’s finished raging about this one.

    The new information also suggests that Mr. Trump’s 1990 collapse might have struck several years earlier if not for his brief side career posing as a corporate raider. From 1986 through 1988, while his core businesses languished under increasingly unsupportable debt, Mr. Trump made millions of dollars in the stock market by suggesting that he was about to take over companies. But the figures show that he lost most, if not all, of those gains after investors stopped taking his takeover talk seriously.

    Isn’t that…how shall I put this…against the law? Fraudulent trading type of thing?

  • Boss says no

    Everything is subject to “executive privilege.” Everything. Nobody can give anything to any Congressional hearing ever because “executive privilege.” It’s an eternal law and it covers everything in this universe and all others.

    The White House on Tuesday invoked executive privilege to bar former White House counsel Donald McGahn from complying with a congressional subpoena to provide documents to Congress related to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation.

    In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone said McGahn does not have the legal right to comply with its subpoena for 36 types of documents — most relating to Mueller’s nearly two-year probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Rather, Cipollone argued the committee needed to send the request to the White House — and even hinted that they would assert privilege to block the information.

    Because executive privilege is an absolute, and not subject to the whims of such a trivial body as the legislative branch.

    McGahn emerged as a central player in Mueller’s findings, a senior confidante who documented in real-time Trump’s rage against the Russia investigation and efforts to shut it down. Democrats were hoping to have him testify for a national television audience.

    The special counsel has identified two episodes in which McGahn was a critical witness and in which investigators say they have substantial evidence Trump was engaged in obstruction of justice that would normally warrant criminal charges.

    In mid-June of 2017, Trump tried to pressure McGahn to intervene with the Justice Department to try to push for Mueller’s removal from office based on alleged conflicts of interest, the report said; in February 2018, Trump summoned McGahn to the Oval Office and urged him to deny a news account that suggested the president asked for his help in ousting Mueller.

    But Trump is His Majesty King Executive, so none of that matters. God save the King Executive.

  • Hooray for war crimes?

    Oh, this is ugly.

    President Donald Trump on Monday granted a pardon to a former first lieutenant in the US Army who was sentenced to prison in 2009 for killing an Iraqi detainee, according to the White House.
    …

    Behenna deployed to Iraq in 2007, according to The Washington Post. The following year, two soldiers and friends of Behenna were killed in a roadside explosion and he was on the scene, the newspaper reports.

    Shortly after the soldiers’ death, there was an intelligence report saying then-Iraqi operative Ali Mansur possibly helped organize the explosion, the Post reports.

    Mansur was interrogated but then freed, the Post reported, because the military did not have conclusive evidence tying him to the explosion.

    Less than a month later, Behenna went to interrogate Mansur on his own, without authorization, stripped Mansur naked and shot him twice, according to the Post.

    Behenna left the body and didn’t tell anyone, and the next day Iraqi police found Mansur’s body, the Post reported.

    According to the report, Behenna maintained he acted in self-defense.

    Military prosecutors told the jury at his 2009 court-martial that they believed Behenna killed Mansur to avenge the loss of the two soldiers, according to the Post.

    Pardoning war crimes now. What next – Medal of Freedom for Lieutenant Calley?

  • Bumps ahead

    Pelosi isn’t the only one who thinks Trump might refuse to leave if he loses the next election.

    Allan Lichtman, a distinguished professor of history at American University, reiterated Pelosi’s worries, telling Salon, “I think Trump will do everything he possibly can to hold on to his power.”

    “Remember Trump cannot be embarrassed— cannot be shamed. You can’t appeal to morality, because he has none. You can’t appeal to compassion, he has none. You can’t appeal to the law, he doesn’t care,” Lichtman added. “And if he thinks he can get away with it — absolutely, he will do anything.

    Lichtman’s concerns were also echoed by Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb university professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard University.

    “President Trump has sent troubling signals that he might well contest the results of any presidential election he fails to win — and any House or Senate election his preferred candidate fails to win,” Tribe told Salon by email. “Trump has even retweeted his agreement with the absurd and indeed radically anti-constitutional claim by Jerry Falwell Jr. that Trump’s first two years as president were ‘stolen’ from him by the supposedly illegitimate Mueller probe into Russia’s attack on the 2016 election. The ‘argument,’ though I hesitate to call it that, claims that Trump is ‘owed’ an extra two years as ‘reparations’ for the distraction of the investigations into what went awry in 2016.”

    I hope he chokes on a bite of BigMac and nobody around him can remember how to do the Heimlich.

  • “Reparations”

    Trump appears to be laying the groundwork for a coup.

    https://twitter.com/RVAwonk/status/1125151549943054336

  • Only in these days of political correctness

    Trump is such a genius, nothing escapes his attention. Well ok some things escape his attention, like Puerto Rico and Kim’s missile launches and the dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi and little things like that, but the important stuff is front and center at all times.

    Of…political correctness? Is the horse who unfairly won a woman? Disabled? Puerto Rican? What’s he talking about?

    The Times explains.

    For the first time in the history of the legendary horse race, the horse that crossed the finish line first was disqualified for interference and stripped of its win.

    The first-place finisher, Maximum Security, was disqualified because he jumped a puddle on the very wet track and slid to the outside, preventing his rival, War of Will, from moving forward and forcing its rider, Tyler Gaffalione, to squeeze his knees just to stay on his horse.

    Erm…I’m not seeing the political correctness. Puzzle as I might, I still can’t see it. Is the idea that sliding on a wet track is accidental and the accidental shouldn’t be disqualifying? But if the physics of it works out to: War of Will would have crossed first if Maximum Security hadn’t slid, then surely that has to do with whatever the rules are.

    Of course Trump cheats at golf…maybe that’s it! There’s been a lot of reporting on his cheating at golf, including not just moving his own ball to a better spot but moving the other golfer’s ball to a worse spot – maybe Trump has decided to his own satisfaction that all that reporting is just Political Correctness, i.e. they don’t like him because Political Correctness so they say he cheats because Political Correctness even though it’s true that he cheats but still talking about it is sheer Political Correctness. Therefore Maximum Security’s foul wasn’t a foul, he shoulda won, it’s an outrage!

  • How bad is it?

    Benjamin Wittes urged us to give Barr the benefit of the doubt until he’d had time to act; he now feels burned.

    Where Barr has utterly failed, by contrast*, is in providing “honest leadership that insulates [the department] from the predations of the president.” I confess I am surprised by this. I have never known Barr well, but I thought better of him than that.

    *By contrast with what he did with the report, which Wittes thinks was not too bad.

    The core of the problem is not that Barr moved, as many people worried he would, to suppress the report; it is what he has said about it. I have spent a great deal of time with the Mueller report, about which Barr’s public statements are simply indefensible. The mischaracterizations began in his first letter. They got worse during his press conference the morning he released the document. And they grew worse still yesterday in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

    Barr did not lie in any of these statements. He did not, as some people insist, commit perjury. I haven’t found a sentence he has written or said that cannot be defended as truthful on its own terms, if only in some literal sense. But it is possible to mislead without lying. One can be dishonest before Congress without perjury. And one can convey sweeping untruths without substantial factual misstatement. This is what Barr has been doing since that first letter. And it is utterly beneath the United States Department of Justice.

    What he’s been doing, Wittes says, is systematically translating Mueller’s “we didn’t find enough evidence to charge/convict” to “they found that nothing happened.”

    In other words, Barr is not merely translating the absence of sufficient evidence for charges into a crime’s not taking place; he is translating the crime’s not taking place into an absence of misconduct in a more colloquial sense. He is also using the president’s specific talking point in doing so. This pair of mischaracterizations has the effect of transforming Trump into an innocent man falsely accused.

    Barr amplifies this transformation with his third layer of misrepresentation: his adoption of Trump’s “spying” narrative, which states that there was something improper about the FBI’s scrutiny of campaign figures who had bizarre contacts with Russian-government officials or intermediaries. Barr has not specified precisely what he believes here, but yesterday’s Senate hearing was the second congressional hearing at which he implied darkly that the FBI leadership under James Comey had engaged in some kind of improper surveillance of the Trump campaign.

    There’s a lot more, all of it valuable. Wittes doesn’t know if Barr knows he’s bullshitting us or if he actually believes that Trump is a great president maligned by sinister opponents.

  • The compromises necessary to survive Trump

    Comey has thoughts on William Barr.

    People have been asking me hard questions. What happened to the leaders in the Trump administration, especially the attorney general, Bill Barr, who I have said was due the benefit of the doubt?

    How could Mr. Barr, a bright and accomplished lawyer, start channeling the president in using words like “no collusion” and F.B.I. “spying”? And downplaying acts of obstruction of justice as products of the president’s being “frustrated and angry,” something he would never say to justify the thousands of crimes prosecuted every day that are the product of frustration and anger?

    How could he write and say things about the report by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, that were apparently so misleading that they prompted written protest from the special counsel himself?

    How could Mr. Barr go before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday and downplay President Trump’s attempt to fire Mr. Mueller before he completed his work?

    I wonder all those things too. I wonder why these people don’t feel too encrusted with filth to keep going.

    And how could Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, after the release of Mr. Mueller’s report that detailed Mr. Trump’s determined efforts to obstruct justice, give a speech quoting the president on the importance of the rule of law? Or on resigning, thank a president who relentlessly attacked both him and the Department of Justice he led for “the courtesy and humor you often display in our personal conversations”?

    Comey says he doesn’t know for sure, but his months of watching Trump, especially Trump manipulating others, gave him some clues.

    Amoral leaders bring out the good stuff in people who have it and the other thing in people who don’t.

    Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from. It takes character like Mr. Mattis’s to avoid the damage, because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.

    It starts with your sitting silent while he lies, both in public and private, making you complicit by your silence. In meetings with him, his assertions about what “everyone thinks” and what is “obviously true” wash over you, unchallenged, as they did at our private dinner on Jan. 27, 2017, because he’s the president and he rarely stops talking.

    [shudder]

    I know the type; I’m allergic to the type; and Trump is the type x a thousand. He rarely stops talking and he never has anything of value to say, so it’s a ceaseless flow of garbage. I don’t claim to have Inner Strength, but I have a pretty good working substitute in the shape of a violent aversion to ceaseless flows of garbage. I’d be out of there in seconds not because I have a steely core of virtue but because I know what I don’t like and I run away from it. No status or riches or fame would be worth having to be around That Man.

    (Trump did the “everyone knows” thing just the other day when he was lying about Robert E. Lee. I hate that thing he does.)

    Speaking rapid-fire with no spot for others to jump into the conversation, Mr. Trump makes everyone a co-conspirator to his preferred set of facts, or delusions. I have felt it — this president building with his words a web of alternative reality and busily wrapping it around all of us in the room.

    That “no spot for others to jump into the conversation” part – you can see him doing that, in interviews or when reporters ask questions. He does things like inserting an “aaaaaaand” or “soooooooo” to give himself time to form the next sentence while closing the spot for others to jump into the conversation. It’s like a body block but done with the flapping mouth.

    Comey says the ones who yield do it thinking they can be the bulwark that saves the country.

    Of course, to stay, you must be seen as on his team, so you make further compromises. You use his language, praise his leadership, tout his commitment to values.

    And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.

    I don’t think that’s why Barr is doing it though. He came in way too late to think he could be any kind of bulwark.

  • None of your business

    Trump and his corrupt brood are trying to prevent us from discovering what they’re up to.

    Donald Trump, three of his children and seven of his companies have filed a US federal lawsuit against Deutsche Bank and Capital One in an attempt to stop them complying with subpoenas investigating his financial dealings.

    Well isn’t that just a perfect illustration of why there’s a law against presidents sticking their families into their administrations.

    Filed late on Monday in a federal court in New York, the lawsuit stated that demands for records by Democrat-controlled house committees have no legitimate or lawful purpose.

    “The subpoenas were issued to harass President Donald J Trump, to rummage through every aspect of his personal finances, his businesses, and the private information of the president and his family,” the lawsuit said.

    But his “personal” finances and his businesses and the “private” information of Trump and his corrupt children are no longer “personal” and “private” because he has made them all a matter of intense public concern. He’s done that by being so reckless and corrupt and authoritarian. That’s not our fault, it’s not the Dems’ fault, it’s his fault.

  • Incendiary

    CNN puts it more strongly:

    President Donald Trump made an incendiary remark at a rally Saturday night, veering from criticism of Wisconsin’s Democratic governor to a false claim that mothers and doctors have the option to “execute” babies.Speaking at a rally he hosted in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Saturday, Trump pointed to former Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who was in attendance, and said Walker’s successor, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers “shockingly stated that he will veto legislation that protects Wisconsin babies born alive.”

    According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Evers planned to veto a GOP-backed state bill that could have meant life sentences in prison for doctors who intentionally did not provide medical care to babies born alive after a failed abortion.

    Trump continued on the theme after his initial comment to claim that mothers and doctors are given the choice to “execute” a baby.

    Which is a crock of shit.

    Asked why abortions would happen at a later stage of pregnancy, Dr. Jennifer Conti, a fellow with the advocacy group Physicians for Reproductive Health and co-host of The V Word podcast, said, “Those exceptionally rare cases that happen after 24 weeks are often because a fetus has a condition that cannot be treated and will never be able to survive — regardless of the gestational age or trimester.”

    “It’s this exact reason that it’s nonsensical to legislate these cases: Nobody arrives at the decision to have an abortion after 24 weeks carelessly,” Conti said. “Rather, it’s the rare case of rapidly decompensating maternal heart disease or a delayed diagnosis of anencephaly, where the fetus forms without a complete brain or skull, that bring people to these decisions.”

    It’s not a matter of “Oh I want to go to a party that weekend.”

  • Whether or not they will execute the baby

    He did say it. I just watched the clip in which he says it.

    If you want to skip the part where they all cheer Scott Walker and Walker takes a bow and yadda yadda, skip ahead to about 1 minute in.

  • A small group of people that have very, very serious problems

    The Guardian points out, in case we’d missed it, that the shooting of the week yesterday doesn’t make Trump look good. You don’t say.

    Trump unequivocally condemned the shooting, telling a rally on Saturday evening in Wisconsin: “Our entire nation mourns the loss of life, prays for the wounded, and stands in solidarity with the Jewish community. We forcefully condemn the evil of anti-Semitism and hate, which must be defeated.”

    Oh stop. Trump read words that someone wrote for him. He doesn’t “forcefully condemn the evil of hate”; he stokes it every time he opens his mouth or taps his phone.

    But the president stated last month, following a hate-inspired mass shooting that left 50 Muslim worshipers dead in Christchurch, New Zealand, that he did not believe white nationalism presented a growing threat.

    “I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems, I guess,” Trump told reporters in March.

    Of course he says that when asked. It’s a small group of people far far far away from him, on a tiny island in the Pacific somewhere, with Problems.

    The shooter in Saturday’s attack in Poway, near San Diego, was named as a white 19 year-old man, John Earnest. Authorities were examining a series of online posts linked to the suspect that are littered with anti-Semitic and racist language.

    Much as Trump’s tweets and speeches at rallies are, although he tends to rant about football players and asylum seekers more than people in synagogues.

  • He is a young vibrant man

    Oy.

    Vibrant. He thinks he’s vibrant. That’s not vibrant, it’s shouty and loud and choleric.

  • The bank is in the process of turning over documents

    No wonder Trump is agitated. Deutsche Bank is spilling.

    Deutsche Bank has begun the process of providing financial records to New York state’s attorney general in response to a subpoena for documents related to loans made to President Donald Trump and his business, according to a person familiar with the production.

    Last month, the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James issued subpoenas for records tied to funding for several Trump Organization projects.

    The state’s top legal officer opened a civil probe after Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen testified to Congress in a public hearing that Trump had inflated his assets. Cohen at that time presented copies of financial statements he said had been provided to Deutsche Bank.

    Donnie Two-scoops can’t be happy about that.

    The bank is in the process of turning over documents, including emails and loan documents, related to Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC; the Trump National Doral Miami; the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago; and the unsuccessful effort to buy the NFL’s Buffalo Bills.

    …

    The bank is already the subject of a joint investigation between the House Financial Services and Intelligence committees into Trump’s businesses and money laundering.

    Deutsche Bank has been one of the few big banks willing to lend to the Trump Organization in recent years.ling to lend to the Trump Organization in recent years.

    To the tune of more than $300 million. The question is why they are willing when others are not.