Tag: Trump

  • A ravenous appetite for risk

    The NY Times dropped a big article on Deutsche Bank and Trump late yesterday, which Everyone Is Talking About.

    Before Trump stole the presidency he and DB had a mutually beneficial relationship. It’s obvious how he benefited; how they did, not so much.

    Mr. Trump used loans from Deutsche Bank to finance skyscrapers and other high-end properties, and repeatedly cited his relationship with the bank to deflect political attacks on his business acumen. Deutsche Bank used Mr. Trump’s projects to build its investment-banking business, reaped fees from the assets he put in its custody[,] and leveraged his celebrity to lure clients.

    I’m not sure what it means to “build” an investment-banking business via bad loans to a cheat, but maybe the fees and celebrity were enough to offset that.

    When Trump succeeded in stealing the election, DB got nervous. Employees were told not to utter the word “Trump.”

    More than two years later, Mr. Trump’s financial ties with Deutsche Bank are the subject of investigations by two congressional committees and the New York attorney general. Investigators hope to use Deutsche Bank as a window into Mr. Trump’s personal and business finances.

    Deutsche Bank officials have quietly argued to regulators, lawmakers and journalists that Mr. Trump was not a priority for the bank or its senior leaders and that the lending was the work of a single, obscure division. But interviews with more than 20 current and former Deutsche Bank executives and board members, most of them with direct knowledge of the Trump relationship, contradict the bank’s narrative.

    In other words, the bank is lying.

    The bank always knew he was dangerous.

    But Deutsche Bank had a ravenous appetite for risk and limited concern about its clients’ reputations. Time after time, with the support of two different chief executives, the bank handed money — a total of well over $2 billion — to a man whom nearly all other banks had deemed untouchable.

    What kind of lunatic has a ravenous appetite for risk? What were they doing?

    It’s like this:

    In the late 1990s, Deutsche Bank, which is based in Germany, was trying to make a name for itself on Wall Street. Its investment-banking division went on a hiring binge.

    The bank recruited a handful of Goldman Sachs traders to lead a push into commercial real estate. One was Justin Kennedy, the son of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Another was Mike Offit, whose father was the writer Sidney Offit.

    The Kennedy connection, as we saw, cast a big shadow on Justice Kennedy when he retired at a moment convenient for Trump. As far as I know nothing has happened to disperse that shadow.

    At Deutsche Bank, Mr. Offit’s mandate was to lend money to big real estate developers, package the loans into securities and sell the resulting bonds to investors. He said in an interview that one way to stand out in a crowded market was to make loans that his rivals considered too risky.

    Jesus tapdancing christ. Oh yes those loans that other bankers considered too risky – the ones that sank the global economy and erased the savings of millions of people. Those loans. Whatever’s good for Mr Offitt, and screw everyone else; that’s capitalism.

    So of course Trump was one such risky. Offitt approved loan after loan for Donnie Two-scoops.

    Not long after, Edson Mitchell, a top bank executive, discovered that the signature of the credit officer who had approved the Trump Marina deal had been forged, Mr. Offit said. (Mr. Offit was never accused of forgery; the loan never went through.)

    Not long after that Offitt was fired for being reckless. He says he wasn’t reckless.

    Over the next few years, the commercial real estate group, with Mr. Kennedy now in a senior role, kept lending to Mr. Trump, including to buy the General Motors building in Manhattan. Occasionally, Justice Kennedy stopped by Deutsche Bank’s offices to say hello to the team, executives recalled.

    Ick.

    Starting in 2003 DB had a team selling bonds on behalf of Trump. They were a tough sell because people didn’t trust Donnie Two-scoops. Donnie promised the team a freebie at Mar-a-Lago if they sold the bonds; they sold lots of bonds; Donnie pretended he’d forgotten about the freebie but the executive in charge made him cough up. Then…

    A year later, in 2004, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts defaulted on the bonds. Deutsche Bank’s clients suffered steep losses. This arm of the investment-banking division stopped doing business with Mr. Trump.

    But the other arms went right on hugging him.

    Trump wanted another loan to build a 92-story skyscraper in Chicago.

    As Deutsche Bank considered making the loan, Mr. Trump wooed bankers with flights on his private plane, according to a person familiar with the pitch. In a Trump Tower meeting, he told Mr. Kennedy that his daughter Ivanka would be in charge of the Chicago project, a sign of the family’s commitment to its success.

    Or, rather, a sign of the family’s weird confidence in itself.

    But there were warning signs.

    Mr. Trump told Deutsche Bank his net worth was about $3 billion, but when bank employees reviewed his finances, they concluded he was worth about $788 million, according to documents produced during a lawsuit Mr. Trump brought against the former New York Times journalist Timothy O’Brien. And a senior investment-banking executive said in an interview that he and others cautioned that Mr. Trump should be avoided because he had worked with people in the construction industry connected to organized crime.

    You’d think those would be enough in the way of warning signs, wouldn’t you? A massive lie about his net worth and mafia connections? Wouldn’t you?

    Nonetheless, Deutsche Bank agreed in 2005 to lend Mr. Trump more than $500 million for the project. He personally guaranteed $40 million of it, meaning the bank could come after his personal assets if he defaulted.

    By 2008, the riverside skyscraper, one of the tallest in America, was mostly built. But with the economy sagging, Mr. Trump struggled to sell hundreds of condominium units. The bulk of the loan was due that November.

    Then the financial crisis hit, and Mr. Trump’s lawyers sensed an opportunity.

    A provision in the loan let Mr. Trump partially off the hook in the event of a “force majeure,” essentially an act of God, like a natural disaster. The former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan had called the financial crisis a tsunami. And what was a tsunami if not a natural disaster?

    They’re kidding, right? No. Trump thought it was a brilliant idea.

    Days before the loan was due, Mr. Trump sued Deutsche Bank, citing the force majeure language and seeking $3 billion in damages. Deutsche Bank countersued and demanded payment of the $40 million that Mr. Trump had personally guaranteed.

    Was it all over between them then? Nah.

    In 2010, Deutsche Bank and Mr. Trump settled their litigation over the Chicago loan. Mr. Trump agreed to repay most of what he owed by 2012, Mr. Schlesinger said.

    Then Trump wanted another loan.

    Deutsche Bank dispatched a team to Trump Tower to inspect Mr. Trump’s personal and corporate financial records. The bankers determined he was overvaluing some of his real estate assets by as much as 70 percent, according to two former executives.

    By then, though, Mr. Trump had become a reality-TV star, and he was swimming in cash from “The Apprentice.” Deutsche Bank officials also were impressed that Mr. Trump did not have much debt, according to people who reviewed his finances. Aside from his history of defaults, he was an attractive borrower.

    I beg your pardon? “Aside from his history of defaults, he was an attractive borrower”? How is that a fact claim rather than a punchline?

    Mr. Trump also expressed interest in another loan from the private-banking division: $48 million for the same Chicago property that had provoked the two-year court fight.

    Mr. Trump told the bank he would use that loan to repay what he still owed the investment-banking division, the two former executives said. Even by Wall Street standards, borrowing money from one part of a bank to pay off a loan from another was an extraordinary act of financial chutzpah.

    “I want to borrow money from you to pay back the money I owe you.” I can’t see any problem with that, can you?

    There were people at DB who said let’s not, but others said yes let’s.

    And then the campaign and the election happened.

    After Mr. Trump won the election, Deutsche Bank’s board of directors rushed to understand how the bank had become the biggest lender to the president-elect.

    A report prepared by the board’s integrity committee concluded that executives in the private-banking division were so determined to win business from big-name clients that they had ignored Mr. Trump’s reputation for demagogy and defaults, according to a person who read the report.

    Hey that would make a nice name for a Trump bar and grill – Demagogy and Defaults.

    Two years after Mr. Trump was sworn in, Democrats took control of the House of Representatives. The chamber’s financial services and intelligence committees opened investigations into Deutsche Bank’s relationship with Mr. Trump. Those inquiries, as well as the New York attorney general’s investigation, come at a perilous time for Deutsche Bank, which is negotiating to merge with another large German lender.

    Next month, Deutsche Bank is likely to start handing over extensive internal documents and communications about Mr. Trump to the congressional committees, according to people briefed on the process.

    We look forward to it.

  • The deniability really isn’t all that plausible

    Aaron Blake on Trump’s semi-veiled threats:

    Trump’s public comments are often more strategic than his critics give him credit for. He will routinely suggest something without technically saying, “This is what I want.” And he will generally lather himself in plausible deniability. “It would be very bad” and “I hope they stay that way” allow him to say he doesn’t actually want this thing he’s hinting at to happen.

    Not really. It’s so obvious that he’s lying that it’s probably worse for him to say it than not to say it. Nobody is dumb enough to think he means it when he says “I hope they stay that way.” He means it only in the sense that he hopes the threats will be sufficient.

    But it’s clear from these comments, and the repetition of this formula, that he’s suggesting his supporters from the military, law enforcement and even bikers could be tempted to rise up if things don’t go Trump’s way. He’s at the very least toying with the idea that things could become violent.

    In other words he’s threatening us with violence. Can we please not talk about it as if it were maybe slightly alarming but still normal? Even if he’s not likely to go through with it, even if he can’t go through with it however much he wants to, it’s still not normal. It’s not normal and it’s not ok. The fact that he muses aloud about the police and the military and biker gangs going to war against all of us who want him gone is not normal. Beware of what we get used to.

    [E]ven if a coup seems patently ridiculous, that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be unrest, and it doesn’t mean that Trump isn’t proactively wielding that possibility for leverage against his opponents. Hinting that efforts to remove him from office — either via the 2020 election or impeachment — could be met with this kind of violence serves notice to his foes that they better play nice . . . and maybe investigators should back off.

    The idea that anything like the scenes Trump is describing would ever happen is difficult to believe. But that’s not really the point. Musing about this kind of thing is a great way to plant a seed in certain people’s minds, and the fact that Trump keeps fertilizing that seed shouldn’t escape notice.

    The fact that the president likes the idea of soldiers and bikers rioting against the populace is a grotesque horror.

  • The losers all want what you have

    Oof, the crazy level has taken a big jump today.

    Yes indeed. The Federal Election Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the police, the army, the Vatican, the UN, the International Criminal Court, the WTO – they should all look into this. It’s a scandal that people are free to mock and dispute Donald Trump.

    I love the juxtaposition. Venom, venom, happy holiday!

    But let’s be serious here.

    Two days after a racist massacre and he’s telling us to be not politically correct i.e. to be racist.

    But hey, happy Saint Patrick’s day!

  • A favorable omen?

    Good lord. Trump has tweeted or retweeted (usually himself) 26 times today. So far.

    Bill Kristol sees it as a favorable portent.

    I gotta say, though, what’s with the bad-mannered rubes in the huge hats?

    I know, we’re supposed to think “Texas Rangers – hooray – manly men – saving us from the Invasion By Brown People.” But I don’t think big hats will save anyone from anything.

    Anyway. Donnie Two-scoops is in a lather.

  • Makes them all look good

    Ah. Smart move.

    Makes us look good! Especially when we announce that’s what we’re doing! Appearances are EVERYTHING.

  • Warmest and best but oh so fleeting

    Trump 5 hours ago, 7:30 in the morning in DC:

    Trump one hour later:

    Trump an hour after that:

    His mind is never off himself for long.

  • He totally predicted it

    First, this, starting at 1:02 if you don’t want to listen to him explaining Brexit for the first minute. He says he predicted Brexit, people laughed, but he was right. He was at Turnberry and he predicted it.

    But

    He predicted it the day after it happened.

    What a genius.

    (Also he said Obama predicted the opposite, and he Trump was right.

    Obama made no prediction.)

  • Overthinking

    The essence of Trump.

    He sees all thinking as “overthinking” because thought is so profoundly alien to him. He doesn’t know how to think. He reacts, he blurts, he exclaims, he feels angry or conceited, he watches Fox. That’s it, that’s his mental life.

    He wants the issues to be “very simple” because very simple is all he can understand, and that is because he is lazy as well as stupid, so he’s never made any effort to improve the unpromising intellectual capacity he started with.

    And the “should not be thought of any other way” is so classically trump-bully mode. “Think of it the way I tell you to think of it!” shouted the slumlord from Queens.

  • Unkoo Tham Thaying hith pwayoows

    Trump retweeted this last night.

  • An easy way to save time & words

    Oh, Donnie, so touchy (and yet so quick with the insults), and so helpless to respond cogently.

    No, you didn’t. Come on now. You, save time and words? You love nothing better than talking on and on and on and on with no one getting a word in. That explosion in a word salad factory at CPAC the other week? You went on for more than two hours. You’re a world-class blabbermouth, you’re the bore in the adjacent airplane seat or barstool or chair at the corporation dinner, you’re the guy people run from because they don’t want to get stuck listening to you.

    Also “of Apple” doesn’t take all that long to say, and you didn’t actually want to say it anyway, because you sort of get that the adults in the room already know who is from where. It would be weird for you to address everyone as Name Name of Corporation every time you said his (it’s pretty much always his) name. In short, that’s not a thing, and you know it.

    You looked dumb, and the news media reported it. This tweet doesn’t make you look clever.

  • Overt rather than clandestine

    Adan Gopnik observes that Trump’s protection is that he does it all in plain sight. (Well not all, but a lot. He does so much in plain sight.)

    Any one of a dozen things that Trump has done overtly would have resulted, if done clandestinely by another President, in near-universal cries for impeachment, if not for immediate resignation. Just for a start, his firing of the director of the F.B.I. and then confessing to both a journalist and the Russian foreign minister that he did it to end an investigation into his own campaign’s contacts with Russians follows the exact form of one of the impeachable offenses—obstruction of justice—that was applied against Richard Nixon. The “smoking gun” tape smoked because it showed that Nixon had tried to stop the F.B.I. from investigating the Watergate break-in on phony “national security” grounds.

    Trump just does it right in front of us – in an interview for a network news program! His boast to the Russian foreign minister wasn’t meant to be right in front of us, but nobody’s perfect.

    Pragmatism is not a way of negating principle but, rather, the realist’s way of pursuing principle. The arguments against impeachment today are primarily pragmatic, the arguments for it primarily principled, but the principled course could, before long, turn into the only practical course. Impeachment may be too good for Trump. It may yet prove just the thing for the country.

    In other words it’s not really all that pragmatic to let flagrant criminality and corruption proceed unhindered.

  • Their vital role

    Whoever wrote Trump’s prezzidenshul statement on International Women’s Day did a crap job of it.

    On International Women’s Day, we honor women worldwide for their vital role in shaping and strengthening our communities, families, governments, and businesses. We celebrate their vision, leadership, and courage, and we reaffirm our commitment to promoting equal opportunity for women everywhere.

    Their vital role, the precious darlings; it’s so kind of the to assist us, the real people, by playing their vital role in shaping and strengthening that which we (the real people) have made. Would one of them like to step forward so that I can pat her head or perhaps grab her by the pussy?

  • On a busy day at the White House

    Trump can multitask, at least he can when he has to pay off his consigliere.

    On a busy day at the White House, President Trump hosted senators to talk about tax cuts, accused a Democratic congresswoman of distorting his condolence call to a soldier’s widow and suffered another court defeat for his travel ban targeting Muslim countries.

    And at some point on Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2017, Mr. Trump took the time to sign a $35,000 check to his lawyer, who had made hush payments to prevent alleged sexual misconduct from being exposed before the 2016 presidential election.

    As one does, you know.

    At the heart of last week’s congressional testimony by Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, was the sensational accusation that the sitting president of the United States financed an illegal cover-up from inside the White House. The dates on the newly available checks shed light on the parallel lives Mr. Trump was living by this account — at once managing affairs of state while quietly paying the price of keeping his personal secrets out of the public eye.

    The president hosted a foreign leader in the Oval Office, then wrote a check. He haggled over legislation, then wrote a check. He traveled abroad, then wrote a check. On the same day he reportedly pressured the F.B.I. director to drop an investigation into a former aide, the president’s trust issued a check to Mr. Cohen in furtherance of what federal prosecutors have called a criminal scheme to violate campaign finance laws at the direction of Mr. Trump.

    Some days were more corrupt than others.

    Jim Jordan says meh it’s no big deal plus we knew that already. Others disagree.

    “The $35,000 is an indication of the quality of that evidence, and it both shows the extent of Trump’s leading role and now leaves little doubt that he faces criminal prosecution after he leaves office for the same offenses for which Cohen will serve time,” said Robert F. Bauer, a law professor at New York University and former White House counsel for President Barack Obama.

    Indeed, some people close to Mr. Trump have privately predicted that he will ultimately choose to seek a second term in part because of his legal exposure if he is not president. While there is no legal consensus on the matter, Justice Department policy says that a president cannot be indicted while in office.

    Ok that would be a first – a president seeking a second term as a cunning plan to avoid prison.

    The Times tells us what else Trump was doing on the day he signed each check the Times has (a couple are missing). This one has a certain drollness to it, until one gets to the Putin part:

    After the Oct. 18 check came one on Nov. 21, just two days before Thanksgiving when Mr. Trump pardoned a turkey, saying, “I feel so good about myself,” and then defended Roy S. Moore, the Republican Senate candidate in Alabama who had been accused of sexual misconduct with teenage girls. Mr. Trump also spoke by telephone that day with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

    Let’s make him feel bad about himself.

  • Tainting the process to favor his family

    It’s not just Prince Jared, it’s also Princess Ivanka. Well of course it is.

    President Donald Trump pressured his then-chief of staff John Kelly and White House counsel Don McGahn to grant his daughter and senior adviser Ivanka Trump a security clearance against their recommendations, three people familiar with the matter told CNN.

    The President’s crusade to grant clearances to his daughter and her husband, Jared Kushner, rankled West Wing officials.

    While Trump has the legal authority to grant clearances, most instances are left up to the White House personnel security office, which determines whether a staffer should be granted one after the FBI has conducted a background check. But after concerns were raised by the personnel office, Trump pushed Kelly and McGahn to make the decision on his daughter and son-in-law’s clearances so it did not appear as if he was tainting the process to favor his family, sources told CNN. After both refused, Trump granted them their security clearances.

    Ah now that’s an interesting detail. So he did manage to grasp that it would look taintish if he simply ordered it, so instead of deciding it would look taintish because it was taintish and therefore he shouldn’t do it, he pushed others to do it and then ordered it when they balked. I think that kind of thing is seen as damning by prosecutors in criminal cases? Evidence that the defendant was aware of breaking the law? Trump does a quite convincing job of appearing completely blind and deaf to all norms and rules and laws, so it’s useful to learn that at least in this case he was deliberately covert about what he was doing.

    The latest revelation also contradicts Ivanka Trump’s denial to ABC News three weeks ago, when she said her father had “no involvement” regarding her or Kushner’s clearances.

    Yeah well. Princess I. is a stone cold liar and fraud. Don’t let the window dummy appearance fool you.

    CNN says several sources told them she could have been unaware of Donnie’s machinations. Whatever. She should, at a minimum, be well aware she shouldn’t be working for Daddy’s administration at all. She’s not so brain-dead that she couldn’t have done some research on the rules around nepotism and corruption.

    On Tuesday, the White House rebuffed a request from House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland, who asked for documents pertaining to the security clearance process. White House counsel Pat Cipollone said the committee’s request for the information was “without legal support, clearly premature, and suggests a breach of the constitutionally required accommodation process.”

    The White House’s rejection increases the chances of a subpoena from the House.

    Do it.

  • A terrible example for Donnie Junior

    These days Trump is all about the “No YOU are!”

    This week, however, the current president seems to have taken his fondness for projection to a new level.

    * Friday, March 1: Facing allegations that he’s committed a variety of crimes, Trump insisted “real crimes were committed” by Democrats. He echoed the argument two days later.

    * Sunday, March 3: After House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) raised the prospect of Trump running afoul of the law, Trump tweeted that Schiff may have run afoul of the law.

    * Tuesday, March 5: Accused of obstructing justice, Trump said via Twitter that Democrats “are obstructing justice.”

    You know how it is – he hears an exciting new phrase so he has to try it out a lot, and the Twitter is just lying there so why not use it?

    It’s unsettling just how often this comes up.

    Take the Russia scandal, for example. Confronted with allegations that his political operation colluded with Russian attackers, Trump said Democrats colluded with Russia. Told that the Kremlin supported his candidacy, Trump responded by saying Russia supported Democrats. Accused of being a manipulated pawn for Vladimir Putin, Trump accused Barack Obama of being Putin’s “patsy.”

    As we discussed last summer, like an intemperate child, his I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I instincts are finely tuned after extensive practice.

    Well in all fairness it doesn’t take a whole lot of practice to know how to swap “Democrats” for “Trump” in every sentence. Even Trump can figure out how that works without too much brow-furrowing.

    Look no further than the 2016 campaign: whenever Hillary Clinton would criticize Trump, it was a near certainty that Trump would then made the identical accusation against Clinton. After a while, as regular readers may recall, this got a little creepy.

    Clinton accused Trump of being unstable and reckless, so Trump said Clinton is “unstable” and “reckless.” Clinton said Trump mistreated women, so Trump saidClinton mistreated women. Clinton accused Trump of bigotry, so Trump said Clinton’s a “bigot.” Clinton questioned Trump’s temperament, so Trump said Clinton had a bad “temperament.” Clinton said Trump makes a poor role model for children, so Trump said Clinton sets “a terrible example for my son and the children in this country.”

    Hahahahahahahahahahaha that’s genuinely funny.

  • Favorites

    In another “you have got to be kidding” moment, Trump announces on Twitter that he’s giving special treatment to Alabama.

    Many observers are asking, with some heat, why he is “telling FEMA directly” to give Alabama “the A plus treatment” when he didn’t do so in the case of Puerto Rico or of California. Shouldn’t “the A plus treatment” be standard after a major disaster? Isn’t that what FEMA is for? Surely the president of the US isn’t directing better emergency relief to states that vote Republican than he directs to states that vote Democratic or have too many brown people…is he? (I wonder if he realizes African-Americans make up about 25% of Alabama’s population. Legacy of cotton-belt slavery, my dude.)

  • A flurry of document demands

    Meanwhile…the House is swinging into action.

    The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee delivered a flurry of document demands to the executive branch and the broader Trump world on Monday that detailed the breadth of the Democrats’ investigation into possible obstruction of justice, corruption and abuse of power by President Trump and his administration.

    …

    Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the Judiciary Committee chairman, made clear on Monday that the new majority intends to train its attention on actions at the heart of Mr. Trump’s norm-bending presidency — actions that could conceivably form the basis of a future impeachment proceeding.

    It will be interesting if the hearings clearly establish that Trump has committed multiple crimes, and he gets re-elected anyway. “Interesting” isn’t quite the right word, but…

    The letters from Mr. Nadler, dated March 4, went to 81 agencies, individuals and other entities tied to the president, including the Trump Organization, the Trump campaign, the Trump Foundation, the presidential inaugural committee, the White House, the Justice Department, the F.B.I. and dozens of the president’s closest aides who counseled him as he launched attacks against federal investigations into him and his associates, the press, and the federal judiciary. The committee will also investigate accusations of corruption, including possible violations of campaign finance law, the Constitution’s ban on foreign emoluments and the use of office for personal gain.

    …

    Republicans assert that Democrats have already decided to target Mr. Trump for impeachment, saying repeatedly in recent weeks that despite public statements to the contrary, the new majority is determined to kick Mr. Trump out of office. (Even if the House were to impeach Mr. Trump, the Republican-controlled Senate would have to hold a trial and is unlikely to remove the president without an overwhelming case of wrongdoing.)

    Like, how overwhelming? What do they need? He’s done much of his wrongdoing right out in the open where we can all see it, including Republican senators. Firing Comey to protect himself? Saying so in public? Telling the Russian ambassador and foreign minister so? Bullying Sessions for recusing himself? Forcing Sessions out? Selecting an apparently more compliant AG? Threatening witnesses on Twitter day in and day out? Getting McCabe fired? Getting FBI agents fired? Meeting alone with Putin? Advertising his golf course on Twitter? Lying about the payout to Stormy Daniels?

    Dangerous times.

  • As the witness broke omertà

    There were historical echoes in that hearing room last week.

    Any onetime Mafia investigator who listened to the Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen testify Wednesday would have immediately recognized the congressional hearing’s historical analogue — what America witnessed on Capitol Hill wasn’t so much John Dean turning on President Richard Nixon, circa 1973; it was the mobster Joseph Valachi turning on the Cosa Nostra, circa 1963.

    Also perhaps any consumer of popular movies and tv shows would recognize the broad plot outline, even if Joseph Valachi didn’t come to mind.

    And it’s had that overtone all along – the story is packed to the rafters with prosecutors, serving and former; packed with feds, packed with rats and stool pigeons, packed with a mob boss and his filthy hangers-on.

    The Valachi hearings, led by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, opened the country’s eyes for the first time to the Mafia, as the witness broke “omertà” — the code of silence — to speak in public about “this thing of ours,” Cosa Nostra. He explained just how “organized” organized crime actually was — with soldiers, capos, godfathers and even the “Commission,” the governing body of the various Mafia families.

    Fighting the Mafia posed a uniquely hard challenge for investigators. Mafia families were involved in numerous distinct crimes and schemes, over yearslong periods, all for the clear benefit of its leadership, but those very leaders were tough to prosecute because they were rarely involved in the day-to-day crime. They spoke in their own code, rarely directly ordering a lieutenant to do something illegal, but instead offering oblique instructions or expressing general wishes that their lieutenants simply knew how to translate into action.

    Those explosive — and arresting — hearings led to the 1970 passage of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO, a law designed to allow prosecutors to go after enterprises that engaged in extended, organized criminality. RICO laid out certain “predicate” crimes — those that prosecutors could use to stitch together evidence of a corrupt organization and then go after everyone involved in the organization as part of an organized conspiracy. While the headline-grabbing RICO “predicates” were violent crimes like murder, kidnapping, arson and robbery, the statute also focused on crimes like fraud, obstruction of justice, money laundering and even aiding or abetting illegal immigration.

    Andrew McCabe was talking about “predicates” the other week; it was a new term to me. The Trump takeover has been an unwanted education in organized crime for me.

    Prosecutors weren’t sure how to use RICO at first but then they got the hang of it.

    [B]y the mid-1980s, federal investigators in the Southern District of New York were hitting their stride under none other than the crusading United States attorney Rudy Giuliani, who as the head of the Southern District brought charges in 1985 against the heads of the city’s five dominant Mafia families.

    And now he’s working for an upstart mob family that has stolen the entire federal government. How did we get here?

    What lawmakers heard Wednesday sounded a lot like a racketeering enterprise: an organization with a few key players and numerous overlapping crimes — not just one conspiracy, but many. Even leaving aside any questions about the Mueller investigation and the 2016 campaign, Mr. Cohen leveled allegations that sounded like bank fraud, charity fraud and tax fraud, as well as hints of insurance fraud, obstruction of justice and suborning perjury.

    RICO was designed to include the people at the top who don’t issue criminal instructions, but who also don’t have to because they use a code that everyone understands.

    Exactly, it appears, as Mr. Trump did at the top of his family business: “Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates,” Mr. Cohen said. Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen said, “doesn’t give orders. He speaks in code. And I understand that code.”

    What’s notable about Mr. Cohen’s comments is how they paint a consistent (and credible) pattern of Mr. Trump’s behavior: The former F.B.I. director James Comey, in testimony nearly two years ago in the wake of his firing, made almost exactly the same point and used almost exactly the same language. Mr. Trump never directly ordered him to drop the Flynn investigation, Mr. Comey said, but he made it all too clear what he wanted — the president isolated Mr. Comey, with no other ears around, and then said he hoped Mr. Comey “can let this go.” As Mr. Comey said, “I took it as, this is what he wants me to do.”

    Only…you’re not supposed to use the code when you’re talking to a fed. Not unless you know for sure he’s dirty. Trump seems to have been kind of confused about that part.

    He also does it to all of us, of course, on Twitter every day – but again, that could end up biting him. I certainly hope so.

  • Trust but verify

    Tick tick tick tick

    Rep. Adam Schiff, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said that as far as he’s concerned there’s “direct evidence” of collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia. Specifically, Schiff says that the 2016 offer from a Russian lawyer for information on Hillary Clinton to members of Trump’s campaign is the smoking gun. “I think there is direct evidence in the emails from the Russians through their intermediary offering dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of what is described in writing as the Russian government effort to help elect Donald Trump,” Schiff said on CBS’ Face the Nation, when he was asked if he had “direct evidence of collusion with Russia.”

    “They offer that dirt,” Schiff went on. “There is an acceptance of that offer in writing from the President’s son Don Junior and there is overt acts in furtherance of that.” Beyond that though “there’s also abundant circumstantial evidence,” Schiff added. “There is, for example, evidence of Manafort sharing internal polling data with someone linked to the Russian intelligence services.”

    Direct, and circumstantial. Both. Ticktickticktick

    Schiff wasn’t alone in talking about evidence that incriminates Trump in terms of Russia contacts. Sen. Mark Warner, who is the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said there is “enormous evidence” of possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia during the election. “I’m going to reserve judgment until I’m finished, but there’s no one who can factually say there isn’t plenty of evidence of collaboration or communication between the Trump Organization and Russians,” Warner told NBC’s Meet the Press. “I have never in my lifetime seen a presidential campaign, from a person of either party, have this much outreach to a foreign country and a foreign country that the intelligence community [says], and our committee has validated, intervened massively in our election and intervened with an attempt to help one candidate, Donald Trump, and hurt another, Hillary Clinton.”

    But he says there was no collusion. Can’t we just take him at his word?

  • Basking in adulation

    Trump has been talking at the right-wing shindig CPAC for nearly two hours now.

    That ^ was 15 minutes ago and new tweets are still coming in.

    The Guardian is watching.

    Basking in adulation at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the president said: “You know I’m totally off script right now and this is how I got elected, by being off script. And if we don’t go off script, our country’s in big trouble, folks, because we have to get it back.”

    “Off script” aka corrupt, malevolent, destructive, reckless. Let’s go back on script now.

    The president described the justice department’s Russia investigation as “a phoney witch-hunt” and claimed that since no collusion has yet come to light, Democrats in the House now want to look into his personal finances. He dismissed such oversight efforts with an unpresidential word: “Bullshit.”

    Yes, why would anyone possibly want to look into Trump’s personal finances? It’s such a puzzle.

    Trump went on to rail against James Comey, whom he fired as FBI director, and Jeff Sessions, his former attorney general, even mocking the latter’s southern accent.

    Ooh, ooh, can we mock his Queens accent? Can we mock his Queens-Trump accent? Can we mock his robot gestures, Pinch & Point?

    He then went on to make remarks that some interpreted as an inflammatory attack on foreign-born members of Congress.

    “Right now we have people in Congress that hate our country and you know that,” he said. “And we can name every one of ’em if they want. They hate our country. Sad. It’s very sad. When I see some of the things being made, the statements being made, it’s very, very sad.

    “And find out, how did they do in their country? Just ask ’em, how did they do? Did they do well, were they succeeding? Just ask that question. Somebody would say, ‘Oh, that’s terrible that he brings that up.’ But that’s OK, I don’t mind, I’ll bring it up. How did they do in their country? Not so good, not so good.”

    Oh, some interpreted that as an inflammatory attack on foreign-born members of Congress? Some? What else would you call it? He makes it clear he’s talking about foreign-born members of Congress, and his words are hostile, so what else would you call it?

    We have met the swamp and it is trumps.