Jonathan Chait:Mueller must expose Trump's crooked business dealings

[MBS]

Last edited Tue May 8, 2018, 11:02 AM - Edit history (1)

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/robert-mueller-must-expose-trumps-crooked-business-empire.html

. . . President Trump has made it perfectly plain that he views any scrutiny of his finances as a mortal threat. Trump “was especially disturbed after learning [Robert] Mueller would be able to access several years of his tax returns,” the Washington Post reported last summer, and his allies have homed in on the theme that Trump’s finances are the room in the crime scene that Mueller should not go into because there is nothing to see there.. . This weekend, the New York Times and the Washington Post published detailed investigations into the financial history Mueller is investigating. While carefully couching the findings within the bounds of the facts they were able to prove based on publicly available data, these reports made it perfectly clear that Trump’s business empire is not only dirty, but dirty in a way that leads directly into the national-security threat that produced Mueller’s investigation in the first place.
. . .
A phrase that does not appear in the Post’s article, because the reporters cannot prove it, is “money laundering.” But money laundering is the suspicion hovering over all these curious purchases, and the reason the Post is devoting so many investigative resources to the subject in the first place. “This is all about money laundering,” Steve Bannon told Michael Wolff. “[Mueller’s] path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr. and Jared Kushner … It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit.” Money laundering would be criminal activity. If you are involved in criminal activity, you are subject to blackmail. And if the criminals who can blackmail you have connections to a foreign government — say, Russia — then that government has blackmail leverage. . .The secret sauce of Trump’s real-estate business in its early stages was his ability to manipulate the media and willingness to borrow massive sums and not pay them back. When he exhausted his ability to stiff his creditors, the new secret sauce became a willingness to take money from shady overseas sources, especially (but not exclusively) Russian oligarchs looking either to park their cash overseas, or to gain some measure of influence. Whether Russia was investing in Trump for the purpose of gaining some hidden leverage over him is not incidental to the Mueller investigation but its very heart.. .

. . . Cohen’s . . . uncle. . . worked closely with La Cosa Nostra and gained the organization’s trust. Cohen’s first employer was a criminal, his father-in-law was a criminal with ties to the Russian Mafia, and Cohen maintained extensive criminal associations throughout his public life. Sometimes people involved in mostly legitimate business have gangster friends, but if you’re surrounded at all stages by gangsters — including operating your business out of a criminal headquarters, as Cohen did — then your real profession is “crook.” The Times can’t prove it, nor can I, but this is the takeaway. Cohen, of course, was also involved in dealings with Russian government sources. . . . even beyond whatever direct dealings Cohen had with Russian intelligence, his legal and financial vulnerability create a serious national security risk. If the American public doesn’t know the full extent of Cohen’s alleged misdeeds, we can be fairly confident the Russian Mafia does, and nearly as confident that its information has made its way to the Kremlin.

Trump’s business empire provided the entire basis for his claim to be qualified to be president. It was the proof of his genius, that he alone possessed the deal-making skills and knowledge of the political system to fix it. He managed to conceal the nature of that business empire by withholding his tax returns, and media scrutiny of his business dealings has still only scratched the surface. Those secrets carry alongside them national-security risks of unknown scale. . . .

[3Hotdogs]

1. Muller exposing the results of his investigations?

A guest on Smerconish said the law providing for special council was changed after Ken Starr.

Muller has to release to the Justice Department and to Senate Judiciary Committee. Those entities are not required to release to the public.

[genxlib]

2. I am bookmarking this thread

Two years from now, we will point back to this story as the one that came closest to the truth when it was difficult to actually prove anything. It ties all of the circumstantial evidence into a single narrative that actually explains everything.

My prediction at the beginning of this is that he could likely get away with the political shenanigans but would go down for money laundering. It was just so obvious to me that his business empire was built on it.

[MBS]

3. exactly what I thought when I first read this article.

Just pulls the threads together in a way that made me think: BINGO.

[MBS]

4. And here's the next chapter:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/russian-leverage-over-trump-fact-michael-cohen-stormy-daniels-devin-nunes.html?
The headline pretty much says it all:

Russian Leverage Over Trump Is Not Just a Theory. It’s Now Fact.

Excerpts from the article itself:

In the waning weeks of 2016, when the intelligence community and many politicians were passing around terrifying reports about Donald Trump’s links to Russia like samizdat, the frightening possibility arose that the sanctity of the United States government might be compromised in a way no living American had experienced. This was just one of the unnerving things about the rise of Trump, and it was one that many well-informed observers doubted. Russia, after all, was poor and weak. To imagine that a country with an economy smaller than Canada’s or Italy’s could leverage a superpower ten times wealthier beggared the imagination. And yet that paranoid, absurd belief seems to be creeping closer to reality than seemed possible even in those dark postelection days.. . For all the speculation about the existence of the pee tape, the latest revelations (about Cohen payments, etc) prove what is tantamount to the same thing. Russia could leverage the president and his fixer — who, recall, hand-delivered a pro-Russian “peace plan” with Ukraine to Trump’s national-security adviser in January 2017 — by threatening to expose secrets they were desperate to keep hidden. Whether those secrets were limited to legally questionable payments, or included knowledge of sexual affairs, is a question of degree but not of kind.

Perhaps even more alarming has been the response of the political system to this crisis. The House of Representatives has assigned Devin Nunes, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, as its point man to defend Trump against the Mueller investigation. The Department of Justice has a long-standing policy of keeping Congress out of acting investigations, for the obvious reason that elected officials have a powerful incentive to interfere. Nunes has demanded the virtually unlimited right to get inside the Mueller probe. Officials in the Department of Justice have come to suspect his goal is to compromise the investigation by handing information from the prosecutors over to Trump.

The Washington Post tonight reports another, and even more fanatical, step in Nunes’s crusade. Last week, Nunes demanded a piece of information that the FBI and other intelligence officials believed would “endanger a top-secret intelligence source.” They prevailed on Trump to support their request to withhold the information which, they argued, would “risk severe consequences including potential loss of human lives.” Nunes is not only demanding the secret be revealed to him, but threatening to vote to hold Attorney General Jeff Sessions in contempt. And officials who secured Trump’s support may have left out the fact that the source provided information to the Mueller investigation. As a result, “several administration officials said they fear Trump may reverse course and support Nunes’s argument.”

Think for a moment what this report tells us. The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who enjoys the full backing of his party’s leadership, is willing to risk what his own government describes as the betrayal and potential loss of life of an intelligence source. And officials within this government believe the president would do the same, all in order to obstruct an investigation into the president’s secretive ties to a foreign power. They are acting as though Trump is compromised by Russia, or at the very least, that he cannot be trusted to defend his own country’s security against it. The sordid Russia scandal has already brought some version of a very dark nightmare scenario to life.