Tag: Trump

  • One of the more livid denunciations

    Ken White (aka Popehat) at the Atlantic walks us through yesterday’s prosecutorial briefs.

    In the first one, the Special Counsel’s Office explains how Manafort blew his cooperation agreement by lying, and it does so with great confidence; it’s clear that they have the receipts.

    In the second, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York responds to Cohen’s lawyers’ brief last week requesting no prison time.

    The prosecutors’ rebuttal of Cohen’s sentencing brief is one of the more livid denunciations I’ve seen in more than two decades of federal criminal practice. The Southern District concedes that Cohen provided some information to it, to the Special Counsel, and to the New York Attorney General. But Cohen refused to cooperate fully; he declined to engage in a full debriefing about everything he knew or commit to ongoing meetings, and he only spilled about the things he’d already admitted in his plea. That’s not how cooperation works. In this game, you either cooperate fully or you shut up; there is no middle ground.  It’s not surprising that Cohen’s stance angered the notoriously proud Southern District prosecutors.

    The New York prosecutors blast Cohen’s “rose-colored view of the seriousness of his crimes,” accusing him of a “pattern of deception that permeated his professional life.” Prosecutors portray Cohen as stubbornly obstructing his own accountant to cheat at taxes, even refusing to pay for accounting work that raised inconvenient issues he wanted suppressed. When it comes to Cohen’s campaign finance violations, the prosecutors’ fury leaps off the page.  Cohen, they say, schemed to pay for two women’s stories (Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, we now know) in violation of campaign finance laws to influence the 2016 election, and did so “in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1” – that is, the president of the United States.  As the brief puts it:

    While many Americans who desired a particular outcome to the election knocked on doors, toiled at phone banks, or found any number of other legal ways to make their voices heard, Cohen sought to influence the election from the shadows. He did so by orchestrating secret and illegal payments to silence two women who otherwise would have made public their alleged extramarital affairs with Individual-1. In the process, Cohen deceived the voting public by hiding alleged facts that he believed would have had a substantial effect on the election.

    Legal writing can be a joy. Remember the Kitzmiller ruling? That is one hell of a good read. This one right here is another goody.

    Maddow highlighted that same passage last night, with her very best intensity and clarity. It brings it all into focus, doesn’t it. Dirty Cohen used Dirty Trump’s money to silence two women whose stories could have sunk Trump’s campaign, and what happened? Trump did indeed win the election (though not the popular vote) and so now here we are stuck with this terrible, monstrous, destructive pig-man who is dragging the US into the sewer he lives in. Cohen’s intervention may have been decisive in the sense that without it Trump would have lost.

    And it was a felony. And he did it at Trump’s direction. Trump committed a felony.

    Back to Ken White:

    If the Southern District’s fury at Cohen is notable, its explicit accusation that President Trump directed and coordinated campaign finance violations is simply stunning. The prosecutors’ openness suggests they are sure of their evidence and have mostly finished collecting it. It’s a sign of a fully-developed, late-game investigation of the president’s role, one that may soon make its way to Congress.

    And last there’s Mueller’s sentencing brief in Cohen’s lying-to-Congress case.

    Mueller discloses that Cohen has “taken significant steps to mitigate his criminal conduct” by pleading guilty to lying to Congress and meeting with the Special Counsel seven times to discuss his own conduct and other “core topics under investigation.” That includes information about multiple contacts between other Trump campaign officials and the Russian government, and about Cohen’s contact with the White House in 2017 and 2018, suggesting an ongoing inquiry into obstruction of justice. Most significant, the Special Counsel indicates Cohen “described the circumstances of preparing and circulating his response to the congressional inquiries, while continuing to accept responsibility for the false statements within it.”  That statement suggests that the Special Counsel believes that someone in the Trump administration knew of, and approved in advance, Cohen’s lies to Congress. That’s explosive, and potentially impeachable if Trump himself is implicated.

    Maddow leaned on a key point in that one, which is that Cohen’s lies to Congress were public, and that that means that they functioned (and perhaps were intended) as instructions for others who might have to talk to Congress on the subject. It also means Russia knew about them, which means Cohen was compromised.

    Neal Katyal’s take is also interesting.

  • Quite extraordinary

    He got our attention.

    https://twitter.com/CillizzaCNN/status/1071086960842891265

    Good question.

    Also, the two go together, don’t they. He doesn’t read, he doesn’t like detail, he goes with his gut – all of which means he most likely has no idea what’s legal and what isn’t. He goes with his gut, and his gut always tells him that if he wants to do it, it must be legal, because hey, what else would his gut tell him? You’re not saying his gut is a disloyal traitor to him are you??! His criterion for what’s true is whether he believes it or not, so all he has to do is believe that what he wants to do is legal, and it becomes true that what he wants to do is legal.

    Update needed already. He’s seen it; he’s steaming.

  • He really is trying to act on his instincts

    At the Post, more on Tillerson’s observations of Trump:

    “What was challenging for me coming from the disciplined, highly process-oriented ExxonMobil corporation,” Tillerson said, was “to go to work for a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things, but rather just kind of says, ‘This is what I believe.’ ”

    Not even “kind of”; that’s exactly what he says. He said it just the other day in response to a question about the climate change report. “I don’t believe it,” he said, like an idiot. He doesn’t not believe it for reasons, he just “doesn’t believe it” as in he wants to ignore it so he does.

    Also: I just want to underline the point here: a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things, is not someone who should be president.

    Tillerson said Trump believes he is acting on his instincts rather than relying on facts. But Tillerson seemed to suggest that it resulted in impulsiveness.

    “He acts on his instincts; in some respects, that looks like impulsiveness,” Tillerson said. “But it’s not his intent to act on impulse. I think he really is trying to act on his instincts.”

    Yes, we know. He thinks his “gut” is reliable. He’s wrong. If he knew more, if he were capable of reading and understanding and paying attention and thinking critically, he would realize that an unaided gut is not an adequate tool for the job he’s taken on.

    At about 1:50, the bit where he says “But Mr President that would violate the law,” there is nervous laughter from the audience.

  • Trump would get very frustrated

    Last night Rex Tillerson did his first public gig since being so abruptly dropped nine months ago.  He talked to a reporter at the event and said some intriguing things.

    The honeymoon didn’t last long, Tillerson said. The relationship between him and Trump became strained after the president grew tired of the former Exxon Mobil CEO telling him that he could not do things the way he wanted.

    Tillerson said the two had starkly different styles and did not share a common value system.

    “So often, the president would say here’s what I want to do and here’s how I want to do it and I would have to say to him, Mr. President I understand what you want to do but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law,” Tillerson said.

    Trump would get very frustrated when they would have those conversations, he said.

    Aw. That wrings my heart. Poor marginalized Donnie, not respected by the elites and not allowed to do things that violate the law. Will somebody please think of the Donnie?

  • An expansive view of presidential power

    The NY Times reports that Trump has decided on Barr as Attorney General.

    Mr. Barr has criticized aspects of the Russia investigation, including suggesting that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, hired too many prosecutors who had donated to Democratic campaigns. Mr. Barr has defended Mr. Trump’s calls for a new criminal investigation into his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, including over a uranium mining deal the Obama administration approved when she was secretary of state.

    “There is nothing inherently wrong about a president calling for an investigation,” Mr. Barr told The New York Times last year. “Although an investigation shouldn’t be launched just because a president wants it, the ultimate question is whether the matter warrants investigation.”

    Mr. Barr added then that he saw more basis for investigating the uranium deal than any supposed conspiracy between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia. “To the extent it is not pursuing these matters, the department is abdicating its responsibility,” he said.

    Mr. Barr has assembled a “generally mainstream G.O.P. and corporate” reputation, Norman L. Eisen, who served as special counsel for ethics and government overhaul under President Barack Obama, said on Thursday. But he predicted that Mr. Barr would be vigorously vetted because of what he saw as blots on Mr. Barr’s record, including his push for scrutiny of the mining deal, involving a company called Uranium One.

    Mr. Barr “has put forward the discredited idea that Hillary Clinton’s role in the Uranium One deal is more worthy of investigation than collusion between Trump and Russia,” Mr. Eisen wrote in a text message. “That is bizarre. And he was involved in the dubious George H.W. Bush end of term pardons that may be a precedent for even more illegitimate ones by Trump.”

    One of his claims to fame is a sweeping justification of presidential power.

    In July 1989, shortly after his appointment to the Office of Legal Counsel, Mr. Barr sent an apparently unsolicited 10-page memo to top agency and department lawyers across the executive branch urging vigilance in pushing back against ways in which Congress might try to intrude on what he saw as the rightful powers of the president. It covered topics such as “attempts to gain access to sensitive executive branch information” and efforts to limit a president’s power to fire a subordinate official without a good cause.

    “It is important that all of us be familiar with each of these forms of encroachment on the executive’s constitutional authority,” Mr. Barr wrote. “Only by consistently and forcefully resisting such congressional incursions can executive branch prerogatives be preserved.”

    Yes, let’s make sure to protect one-person rule at the expense of the more diffuse power of the legislative branch. What could go wrong?

    Years later, in 2005, after the leaking of a secret George W. Bush administration memo blessing the torture of terrorism detainees despite anti-torture laws and treaties, Neil Kinkopf, a Georgia State law professor who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel during the Clinton administration, pointed back to Mr. Barr’s 1989 memo as a precursor to the torture memo’s vision of unfettered executive power.

    “Never before had the Office of Legal Counsel, known as the O.L.C., publicly articulated a policy of resisting Congress,” Mr. Kinkopf wrote in a Legal Affairs essay. “The Barr memo did so with belligerence, staking out an expansive view of presidential power while asserting positions that contradicted recent Supreme Court precedent.”

    And that will be why he is Trump’s choice.

  • A host of little laws and some great big ones

    Rebecca Solnit notes that Trump’s crimes are so many and various that we lose track of them.

    The current head of the federal government, the person who is supposed to somehow embody the rule of law, is in violation of a host of little laws and some major constitutional ones. USA Today reported in June 2016 that Trump and his businesses “have been involved in at least 3,500 legal actions in federal and state courts during the past three decades. Just since he announced his candidacy a year ago, at least 70 new cases have been filed, about evenly divided between lawsuits filed by him and his companies and those filed against them. And the records review found at least 50 civil lawsuits remain open even as he moves toward claiming the nomination.” The paper charted 1,450 cases in which he or his businesses were defendants along with his bankruptcies and mentioned the Trump University fraud lawsuit, which he eventually settled for $25m, finalized quietly this April. Our president steals from poor people: that’s what that lawsuit is about.

    Yep; I’ve been making that point regularly all along. He stiffs contractors, he hires foreign workers so that he can pay them less, he charges his many golf weekends to us.

    He has lived his life in a world without consequences – his father’s money smoothed the way for a life in which he made messes and others cleaned them up. He appears to be one of those people who was so rarely told that what he was saying was wrong, boorish, or inane that he has no sense of how he’s perceived or what people are thinking or, often, how things work. Feedback is what steers most of us straight, and power and privilege mean that you can avoid it if you want. When you’re a star they let you do stupid things, and he has done so many.

    Maybe, but he’s also a massive narcissist. He hasn’t been able to avoid all feedback, but his narcissism distorts it into an illegitimate attack by very bad people on a very special person.

    Summer Zervos sued Trump for defamation for remarks he made about her in 2016, when he suggested her allegations that he groped her were lies; lawyers suggest that his greatest risk in the lawsuit is that he will perjure himself. Another lawsuit for incitement to riot and negligence is moving forward in the sixth circuit court, by three young protesters who were attacked at a Trump rally in March of 2016 after Trump yelled: “Get ‘em out of here.” His former chauffeur is suing for unpaid wages.

    All underlings, all people with far less power and money than he has. He’s a narcissist and a bully.

    All this trouble exists in addition to whatever the Mueller investigation will bring as allegations and charges and perhaps grounds for impeachment. On 29 November, the Mueller investigation seized tax records from the law offices of Trump’s Chicago lawyer, Ed Burke. Maybe the most important new possible charge, a law professor noted to me, emerges from the report in BuzzFeed that Trump planned to offer Putin a $50m condo if he succeeded in building a Trump Tower in Moscow, while he was running for the presidency. If true, it is a spectacular violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This 1977 law makes it “unlawful for certain classes of persons and entities to make payments to foreign government officials to assist in obtaining or retaining business”. Trump seems to have admitted he was doing exactly that and apparently thinks that justifying it aloud was good enough.

    He apparently thinks that about everything. All he has to do is say on Twitter that he “lightly looked at” the Trump Tower Moscow project and everyone including Mueller will say “Oh, ok then.”

    There’s a big pile o’ stuff. Flynn is helping Mueller with at least three investigations. The waters are rising.

  • Trump’s unfitness doesn’t hang on what Mueller uncovers

    Asha Rangappa on what’s really at stake:

    Cohen’s guilty plea on Thursday demonstrates that Trump’s behavior is fundamentally incompatible with the vision of government expressed by the Constitution itself. To wit, Trump not only believes it’s OK to profit from the presidency, but he’s also willing to put the U.S. under a foreign adversary’s thumb to do it.

    …

    Candidate Trump’s secret attempt to enrich himself through a business deal with a hostile foreign adversary is the embodiment of the twin evils the Constitution seeks to prevent. That the deal didn’t materialize is immaterial from a constitutional point of view: They may still have influenced Trump’s weirdly favorable view of Russia, or the inexplicable change in the Republican Party platform on Ukraine. And by keeping it secret, President Vladimir Putin’s ability to expose Trump, at any time, gave the Russian government leverage over the highest public office in the country even after the deal fizzled out. Even if Trump began these negotiations while he was a private citizen, its impact on our relations with Russia has continued into the presidency—making it a matter of public concern that required transparency from the outset.

    Instead what it got from the outset was a long string of attempts to obstruct justice (remember, he was pushing Comey to protect Flynn just days in) and lies and concealments. Transparency was there none.

    And we don’t even know all of it.

    The public still hasn’t seen Trump’s tax returns, and what other liabilities he might have in Russia or elsewhere. The president is also facing three lawsuits—from members of Congress, the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia, and the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington—over potential violations of the emoluments clause. And without knowing what financial interests Trump has in Saudi Arabia, the public is in the dark regarding the United States’ failure to take action—at Trump’s direction—over the murder in October of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Istanbul.

    He could have multiple corrupt interests all over the planet.

    [W]hat makes Trump’s actions egregious is not just what he did, but the position he was running for—and now holds—while doing it. For example, Trump’s business entanglements in Saudi Arabia matter because as president, he holds almost sole authority over the Unites States’ foreign policy decisions with that country.

    And look at what he’s doing with that authority.

    By continuing to lie, Trump has prevented Congress from being able to effectively utilize the Constitution’s Plan B: impeachment. With the Cohen plea, however, it’s time to acknowledge that Trump’s unfitness doesn’t hang on what Mueller uncovers. It’s demonstrated by his disregard for the basic premise of the Constitution he’s sworn to uphold.

    Bam.

  • Fundamental misunderstanding

    Oh good god, Trump thinks climate change is a matter of local clean air and water.

    He’s telling us he wants clean air and water! As if that’s the (whole) issue! He has no idea what climate change is! He has no clue that it’s a global issue!

    There aren’t enough exclamation points in the world…

  • An open display of obstruction and witness tampering

    Barry Berke and Norman Eisen spell out how Trump’s tweets yesterday are evidence of his obstructing justice.

    Monday, Trump edged closer to an open display of obstruction and witness tampering: He urged potential witnesses against him to refuse to cooperate with law enforcement — and implied threats against those who do.

    Trump began by publicly attacking Michael Cohen, his former attorney and fixer, who pleaded guilty last week to lying to Congress about a Trump real estate project in Moscow and who has been cooperating with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

    Trump suggested in a series of tweets not only that Cohen is lying but also that he should receive no benefit for cooperating, as Cohen’s lawyers have requested: “‘Michael Cohen asks judge for no Prison Time.’ You mean he can do all of the TERRIBLE, unrelated to Trump, things having to do with fraud, big loans, Taxis, etc., and not serve a long prison term? … He lied for this outcome and should, in my opinion, serve a full and complete sentence.”

    I keep wondering if Trump actually understands that these tweets are or look like or flirt with obstruction of justice, and that that’s a crime, and that slapping them out there the way he does could potentially (though by no means certainly) get him in legal trouble. Is it that he understands that but thinks Republicans will save him? Or that he does but thinks his adoring fans will save him? Or that he does but he thinks They Wouldn’t Dare? Or does he just not grasp it at all? I don’t know, and it’s a puzzle.

    Obstruction and witness-tampering law prohibits retaliation by the subject of a criminal probe against those testifying against him. Trump is, of course, an identified subject of the relevant investigations. But as president, he is also ultimately responsible for the federal prosecution power — and he is openly attacking Cohen, who soon faces sentencing, with federal prosecutors who ultimately report to Trump given an important say.

    And it doesn’t get much more sleazy than that. He’s a subject and he has the power to meddle. Brilliant.

    Then Trump heaped praise on Roger Stone for refusing to squeal like Cohen.

    So where he threatened a stick against Cohen, Trump offered a carrot to Stone, signaling where their allegiances should lie. This proof of potential witness tampering and obstruction of justice is made even stronger by the fact that the messaging is from the person who holds the most powerful get-out-of-jail-free card: a presidential pardon.

    …

    Under normal circumstances, someone engaging in this type of behavior could be criminally charged. But in this case, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has previously indicated that a sitting president should not be indicted. We disagree, and the issue is unresolved: Neither the Supreme Court nor any lower court has yet addressed it. Still, Mueller is unlikely to defy the department’s guidance.

    Maybe that’s the answer to the puzzle – maybe Trump thinks the Office of Legal Counsel has given him blanket permission to commit crimes in full view.

    That makes it all the more important that Congress examine whether the pattern of evidence constitutes an abuse of power or criminal obstruction of justice. That has proved a forlorn hope with Congress in the hands of Trump’s party. But with the House about to change hands, there is reason to hope that will occur once Mueller issues his long-awaited report on obstruction.

    The president’s frenzied tweets suggest he recognizes that threat. Perhaps that’s why a later tweet in Monday’s tirade was directed at the special counsel: “Bob Mueller (who is a much different man than people think) and his out of control band of Angry Democrats, don’t want the truth, they only want lies. The truth is very bad for their mission!” Quite the opposite is the case: Congress, and all of America, await Mueller’s report on Trump’s deeply troubling behavior.

    Personally, I would like to see Trump dragged away in handcuffs kicking and screaming.

  • “Why should I lose lots of opportunities?”

    The emoluments case is going ahead.

    A U.S. district court judge has now ruled that discovery can proceed in a lawsuit that the attorneys general of Maryland and the District have filed against Trump. The president had tried to stall the lawsuit, but failed.

    This discovery process will now entail an effort to peer into the finances of the Trump International Hotel in D.C., which has become a magnet for spending by foreign governments and dignitaries. The lawsuit alleges that by profiting in this way, Trump — who declined to divest himself of his business holdings as president — is violating the emoluments clause, which bars federal officials from taking such benefits from foreign (or state) governments unless Congress okays it.

    …

    To grasp the real significance of this, we need to look at why the court has allowed this lawsuit to move forward. In July, the court denied Trump’s motion to dismiss the suit. Trump had tried to define “emoluments” very narrowly. But the judge instead accepted the plaintiffs’ argument that they constitute “profit,” “gain” or “advantage,” i.e., the sort of profits that go to Trump’s businesses.

    Importantly, in so doing, that ruling affirmed the idea that the goal of the constitutional ban on emoluments is to remove any doubt that a federal official is letting his private profiteering influence his decision-making on behalf of the public. The framers “made it simple,” the ruling said. “Ban the offerings altogether.”

    The thing about Trump, of course, is that he couldn’t possibly care less about that. The money is almost the whole point for him. I say almost because there’s also the narcissistic reward, but the money is key. Being president is a golden opportunity to make big bucks, and any ideas about putting the country ahead of his personal profit might as well be the tooth fairy as far as Donnie Two-scoops is concerned.

    [T]his case goes directly to the core of Trump’s blending of private and public interests, which this presidency has taken to an extraordinary degree. For instance, we have no clear idea of just how much money his family made off the corporate tax cuts he signed. Meanwhile, in recent days, questions have mounted on other fronts. We cannot dismiss the possibility that Trump’s refusal to hold the Saudi crown prince responsible for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi is related to his financial entanglements with the Saudis, something that Democrats will separately be investigating.

    I’d call it the likelihood rather than the possibility.

    Meanwhile, in this context, it’s worth looking back at Trump’s response to Cohen’s admissions. Trump blithely conceded that he pursued the Moscow project, and said there was nothing wrong with it:

    “I was running my business while I was campaigning,” Trump told reporters Thursday. “There was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won, in which case I would have gone back into the business and why should I lose lots of opportunities?”

    That. That idiot corrupt question has been haunting me since last week. Why should you lose lots of opportunities, you greedy sack of shit? Because you’re supposed to be working for the country now, not for your bank account. Because a president needs to be free from direct financial motivations, that’s why.

    (It would be nice if they could also be required to be free of indirect financial motivations too. I think both Clintons were way too keen to make rich and powerful friends while they were in the White House, but that’s a kind of corruption that would probably be impossible to legislate out.)

    For Trump, it’s simply not part of the equation that American voters might have been entitled to know that he was pursuing a lucrative real estate deal that required Kremlin approval, even as he campaigned on a promise to pursue better relations with Russia — and even as he publicly absolved Russia of the direct assault it was wagingon our democracy on his behalf. Of course, Trump was aware that revealing this would be bad for him, so he lied to keep it concealed.

    But steady, insistent inquiry by news organizations and law enforcement — and, now, via the advancing of the emoluments lawsuit — is cracking the fortress. And the cracks are only likely to widen.

    Here’s hoping.

  • Not the end but the beginning

    Charles Blow says it’s only going to get worse.

    I expect Trump to admit nothing, even if faced with proof positive of his own misconduct. There is nothing in the record to convince me otherwise. He will call the truth a lie and vice versa.

    I also don’t think that Trump would ever voluntarily leave office as Nixon did, even if he felt impeachment was imminent. I’m not even sure that he would willingly leave if he were impeached and the Senate moved to convict, a scenario that is hard to imagine at this point.

    I don’t think any of this gets better, even as the evidence becomes clearer. I don’t believe that Trump’s supporters would reverse course in the same way that Nixon’s did. I don’t believe that the facts Mueller presents will be considered unassailable. I don’t believe Trump will go down without bringing the country down with him.

    In short, I don’t believe we are reaching the end of a nightmare, but rather we are entering one. This will not get easier, but harder.

    Cheerful.

  • They all knew

    Greg Sargent at the Post reminds us what we now know:

    I’m talking about the seven weeks or so that began in June 2016, when Donald Trump Jr. planned the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russians, and ended in late July, with GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump publicly calling on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.

    What we now know is this. During much of that period, the Trump Organization was secretly pursuing a business deal in Russia that required Kremlin approval — even though the most senior members of Trump’s own campaign, and possibly Trump himself, knew at the time that Russia was waging an attack designed to sabotage our democracy on Trump’s behalf, which they eagerly sought to help Russia carry out.

    We didn’t know that, but they did.

    Over the weekend, the legal team working for Michael Cohen, President Trump’s estranged fixer and personal lawyer, filed a new document requesting leniency, now that Cohen has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress to conceal efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow that continued at least into June 2016, around when Trump clinched the nomination. The new filing says Cohen was in “close and regular contact” with White House advisers and Trump’s legal team while he prepared to lie to Congress — raising the possibility that they were actively consulted on this plan.

    Why would Cohen want to conceal that timeline, which Trump, too, lied about? Because as Democrats pointed out on the Sunday shows, revealing it would show that Trump was likely compromised, because the Russians knew that Trump had concealed that he had pursued lucrative financial dealings with Russia even as he publicly called for an end to sanctions on them, giving them potential leverage over him.

    One, he was lying to us in his successful effort to win the election, and two, because he was lying he was compromised with respect to Russia.

    Russia. It couldn’t be India or Peru or Thailand, it had to be Russia – Russia with all those nukes, Russia with Putin’s iron grip on power, Russia whose bosses do not like us – it had to be Russia he was all corrupt and cozy and compromised with. A dirty corrupt deal with a friendly country would be bad enough, but this ain’t that.

    The new revelations also make Trump’s statement absolving Russia of any blame for the DNC hack look much worse. Trump had self-interested political reasons for absolving Russia of this blame, obviously, but now we learn he appears to have had self-interested financial reasons for doing so — again, which he concealed from American voters.

    Finally, in light of the new revelations, Trump’s exhortation to Russia to hack Clinton’s emails becomes an even more emphatic exclamation point on this stretch of events. His openly proclaimed desire to politically benefit from a hostile foreign power’s efforts to undermine our democracy was bad enough. In retrospect, it looks even worse, now that we learn that up until that point, he’d been trying to reach a lucrative deal with that foreign power — while keeping that effort hidden from the voters.

    Yet Republicans are still defending and protecting him.

    Image result for alice through the looking glass tenniel

  • Bully pulpit in every way

    The Post collects more lawyers who point out that Trump is witness tampering in plain sight.

    In another tweet Monday, Trump praised another longtime associate, Roger Stone, who also has drawn Mueller’s scrutiny, for having said he would never testify against Trump.

    “This statement was recently made by Roger Stone, essentially stating that he will not be forced by a rogue and out of control prosecutor to make up lies and stories about ‘President Trump,’ ” Trump wrote. “Nice to know that some people still have ‘guts!’ ”

    The tweet about Stone drew immediate criticism from several lawyers, who said it amounted to witness tampering.

    Among those who chided Trump was George Conway, the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and a frequent Trump critic. On Twitter, he referenced Trump’s tweet and wrote: “File under 18 U.S.C. §§ 1503, 1512,” citing sections of the federal code that deal with obstruction of justice and witness tampering.

    Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) weighed in later.

    “This is serious,” Warner, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote on Twitter. “The President of the United States should not be using his platform to influence potential witnesses in a federal investigation involving his campaign.”

    It’s disgusting that he’s doing it at all, and it’s disgusting that he’s doing it on Twitter where anyone and everyone can see it. It’s so mobsterish, so law-contemptuous, so brazen, so openly criminal. It’s as if Don Corleone went on The Tonight Show to say “Make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

  • Witness tampering du jour

    Trump is losing it again.

    Twitter is of course overflowing with jokes about this new person, Scott Free.

    Norm Eisen crisply points out that that right there is witness tampering.

    Said by the biggest liar ever to sit in that chair.

  • To make money

    Adam Schiff sums it up: Flynn and Trump and Cohen all said things about when the Trump Tower Moscow deal ended that were not true, and the Russians knew they were not true, so they were all compromised. Trump was arguing for doing away with sanctions while he campaigned and while he was working on a deal that would require an end to sanctions for him to make money. The corruption is broader and deeper than we knew.

  • What if it’s all the same story?

    I just watched Rachel Maddow’s opening segment from yesterday and it’s a stunner. Sometimes I get restless as she spins things out with a lot of repetition for emphasis, but not this time.

    MSNBC seems not to provide urls for segments, you just have to find the right one and click directly on it, so if you want to watch go to the Maddow show and click on Lifting Russian sanctions key to Trump deal exposed by Cohen. It’s currently at the top.

    What’s it about? It’s about why did Flynn and K. T. McFarland lie about talking to Russia about sanctions before Trump took office? Why did they take the risk of perjury when their punishment for talking to Russia wouldn’t have amounted to much?

    It’s like this: Trump was working on the Trump Tower Moscow deal, and financing was supposed to come from VTB, a Russian bank which was…sanctioned. Lifting sanctions would make the tower deal work.

    There are some surprise details in the story, including one that made me jump the way one jumps at a horror movie.

    One of the key points is that Flynn and McFarland were compromised as soon as they lied to Congress and the FBI about those conversations. Russia knew they had lied, so just as with Trump, Russia had that over them.

    It’s all so seamy it’s beyond belief.

  • Wary of how frequently their client engages in falsehoods

    Sharon LaFraniere at the Times notes that one thing Mueller has for sure exposed is what an entrenched determined liar Trump is and how that has shaped his gang. They all know he expects lying-for-Trump and they all oblige.

    Mr. Trump looks for people who share his disregard for the truth and are willing to parrot him, “even if it’s a lie, even if they know it’s a lie, and even if he said the opposite the day before,” said Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer. They must be “loyal to what he is saying right now,” she said, or he sees them as “a traitor.”

    Part of what’s so odd and extreme it is is how obvious it is. He tells lies on Twitter that everyone knows are lies. His missing theory of mind makes lying second nature to him, because he can’t grasp the fact that other people are not necessarily as stupid as he is; he thinks a clumsy obvious absurd lie is just as convincing as an artful one that few people will spot. That seems to rub off on the people who work for him – like Spicer and Sanders for instance.

    Mr. Trump’s own lawyers, wary of how frequently their client engages in falsehoods, are trying to hold the special counsel at bay. Jay Sekulow, one of the president’s lawyers, has already been forced to pull back his own public remarks about an issue of concern to Mr. Mueller.

    In a confidential memo to the special counsel, Mr. Trump’s legal team admitted that the president, not his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., drafted a misleading statement about a Trump Tower meeting between a Kremlin-tied lawyer and campaign officials in 2016. That statement could figure in the special counsel’s scrutiny of whether the president obstructed justice.

    A “misleading” statement. A lying statement, is what it was.

    Fearful of more deceptions, the president’s legal team has insisted that Mr. Trump answer questions only in writing. They delivered replies to some of the special counsel’s queries on Nov. 20 after months of negotiation. If unsatisfied, Mr. Mueller could try to subpoena the president to testify.

    But the new acting attorney general, Matthew G. Whitaker, a vocal critic of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry who now supervises it, would have to sign off. And even if he did, the White House could still mount a legal battle to squash it.

    Note: Matthew Whitaker himself is an energetic liar, also a lawyer who uses his lawyer cred to bully people cheated by the fraud company on whose board he sat.

    But many witnesses or subjects of the inquiry lack the president’s negotiating power or resources. Some have been stunned by their encounters with prosecutors, who arrive armed with thick binders documenting their text messages, emails and whereabouts on any given date.

    Sure they’re stunned. They’re used to working for an empty-headed bladder who sits behind an empty desk and watches hours of Fox News every day. People who actually document things are an alien species to them by now.

  • Certain details

    The Times reported Thursday that Giuliani was claiming that Trump’s written answers to Mueller were consistent with what Cohen is now admitting.

    Although Mr. Trump’s lawyers have long worried that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is trying to catch Mr. Trump in a lie, they said Mr. Cohen’s new account of the Trump Organization’s abortive hotel project in Moscow essentially matches what Mr. Trump himself stated in written answers delivered to prosecutors just nine days ago.

    Mr. Cohen might have lied to the authorities about aspects of the deal, as the complaint charges, they said, but the president did not.

    “The president said there was a proposal, it was discussed with Cohen, there was a nonbinding letter of intent and it didn’t go beyond that,” said Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, who with others negotiated the president’s responses to Mr. Mueller’s questions for nearly a year. He said prosecutors did not raise certain details that Mr. Cohen now says he misled Congress about — including how long the hotel project stayed alive — and that the president did not volunteer those details.

    That’s not very credible. How long the hotel project stayed alive is not exactly a “detail”…it’s pretty central. The reporting about Cohen’s confession has been that it radically changes the story by changing the timeline: January 2016 is very different from June 2016. Why? Because of the change in Trump’s status during that window. In January he was just some random bozo with delusions of grandeur, and in June he was the all but certain Republican presidential candidate. In January he wasn’t particularly useful to Putin; in June he was.

  • Very legal & very cool

    This is a highly enjoyable read by a professor at the US Naval War College and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer:

    This was the week that the bottom fell out of Donald Trump’s presidency. After almost two years of White House denials that Candidate Trump had any ties to Russia in 2016, that turns out to be just one more Trumpian lie. No amount of “NO COLLUSION” tweets from the Oval Office can undo the damage that has now been done.

    See what I mean by enjoyable?

    Cohen explained that he knowingly lied to the Senate and House intelligence committees regarding his client’s efforts during Trump’s presidential run to develop a luxury hotel and condominium complex in Moscow. This relationship is something the president repeatedly denied, most famously with his January 2017 tweet, days before his inauguration: “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”

    His own attorney just stated that was a flat-out lie. Cohen reached out to Russians multiple times during 2016 in futile efforts to get Trump Tower Moscow going, at last. Donald Trump sought to develop “his” luxury tower in Russia’s capital for decades. This was the reason for Trump’s flashy trip to the Soviet Union way back in the summer of 1987. Three decades later, Trump Tower Moscow remained a mirage that the presidential contender was determined to make reality. This clearly mattered more to Trump than winning the White House.

    That forlorn quest will cost President Trump more than he could possibly imagine. Cohen and other members of the Trump Organization amateurishly reached out to Kremlin officials. They even tried to entice the Kremlin by offering to give Russian President Vladimir Putin a penthouse in Moscow’s Trump Tower, valued at $50 million.

    Putin didn’t take the bait and this bizarre offer reveals the stunning ineptitude of Cohen and everybody else involved in the failed ploy to make Trump Tower Moscow happen. They tried hard to get the Kremlin to play ball with their development plans, to no avail. Trump’s representatives reached out to senior Russian government officials, not just private businesspeople. They seem never to have realized that the line between Kremlin bigwigs, Russian spies, and organized crime players, never thick in Moscow, has been erased entirely during two decades of Putin’s rule.

    Hey, listen here, they’ve watched the Godfather trilogy several times, what more do you want?

    Just how bad Cohen’s flipping is for the president would be difficult to overstate.

    Such a delightful read.

    Just how bad Cohen’s flipping is for the president would be difficult to overstate. For starters, Cohen kept detailed records of his work for Trump, including taping phone calls; it’s safe to assume that whatever Cohen tells Mueller about his former client can be backed up with evidence.

    Worse, Cohen is the first direct public connection made by Mueller and the Special Counsel between President Trump and his concealed business ties to Russia. In a revealing flourish, Mueller personally signed Cohen’s cooperation agreement with the Special Counsel’s office.

    As in: Gotcha, homey!

    It seems the president knows that Mueller is coming for him and his family, and at this point there’s nothing he can do except buy a bit of time with his customary histrionics before the Special Counsel’s boom falls. Twitter rage may still motivate the dwindling ranks of MAGA true believers, but it does nothing to deter Team Mueller.

    This morning, President Trump finally admitted that, lo-and-behold, he had business interests in Russia in 2016 after all. As hetweeted from Argentina, where he arrived for the G20 summit: “I decide to run for President & continue to run my business-very legal & very cool, talked about it on the campaign trail…Lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia. Put up zero money, zero guarantees and didn’t do the project. Witch Hunt!”

    Well I’m sure Mueller will take that as sworn testimony and wholly exculpatory.

    But Putin not so much. Putin is pissed at Trump for not backing him all the way on Ukraine.

    Then Trump had the impudence to cancel (via tweet, naturally) his scheduled sidebar meeting with Putin at the G20 summit in Argentina because of “the fact that the ships and sailors have not been returned to Ukraine from Russia.”

    Moscow’s response was furious, not least because they learned of the meeting’s cancellation from Trump’s tweet. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov stated, “We regret the decision of the U.S. administration to cancel the scheduled meeting of the two presidents in Buenos Aires,” adding that Trump’s rude move “means that discussion of serious issues on the international and bilateral agenda is being postponed indefinitely.”

    In other words: you don’t get to cancel meetings, we do—and if you think the Kremlin will help you out, Don, have we got news for you. Peskov’s statement leaves no doubt who the Kremlin thinks runs the Trump-Putin relationship. Given how distracted President Trump is with the Mueller investigation as it closes in on the Oval Office, it would be tempting for the White House to ignore the Kremlin.

    That would be a bad idea, as Moscow just made clear. As always, the threat of what Vladimir Putin knows about Donald Trump is unspoken but indelible. Kompromat is the coin of the realm in Putin’s Russia, and his Kremlin wants everybody—above all President Trump—to know it.

    Between Mueller and Putin…Donnie Two-scoops is going to be squashed like a bug.

  • But it’s all over now

    Uh oh.

    Putin and Trump at the G20 Summit welcoming ceremony on November 30, 2018 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.