Tag Archives: Deutsche Bank

What Would Trump Steal That is So Ultra Top Secret and Why?

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When I heard last night that the FBI had raided Trump’s garish Florida mansion, my first reaction was, “Jesus, what took them so long?”

There’s a line of thinking that the public explanation about searching for public documents Trump illegally airlifted out of the White House is merely a cover for executing a raid that very likely will sweep evidence of all sorts of other Trump malfeasance. And that would surprise exactly no one who doesn’t sleep with a Trump-as-Rambo poster over their bed.

Among all the things that have astonished me in the context of Trump’s appeal to “conservatives” is the blindered unwillingness to see the guy as the “fraud” and “con man” his fellow Republican candidates told us he was back in 2015. Why? Because Trump’s astonishing disregard for business ethics, tax laws, SEC statutes, immigration laws and, well, you name it, was abundantly well known to anyone who did business with him in New York and anyone with a passing interest in business reporting by credible national newsapers. There was never any excuse for the Rewpublican managerial class not knowing this long before he descended on the gilded elevator. It was a known fact shortly after he began stinking up the real estate/gossip column scene in the early Eighties.

And yet … to this day … the guy has never been indicted. Hell, we’re to believe his taxes from over a decade ago are still under audit!

And a bit further down the rap sheet, there doesn’t appear to be any on-going investigation of the extremely shady, Russia-assisted “banking” he did with Deutsche Bank, the only crowd of money changers willing to loan him money … even after he sued them … after he refused to re-pay the loan they gave him for Trump Tower Chicago. (I strongly encourage anyone interested to read “Dark Towers”, New York Times financial reporter David Enrich’s briskly-paced tale of the bank’s myriad nefarious executives and endeavors, including those buttressing Trump at his most desperate moments.)

Whether this raid is the first of many dominoes to fall in the clearly broadening, deepening investigation into Trump’s January 6 behavior we must wait … a while longer.

But after consuming 48 hours of reporting and pounditry on this FBI raid. my lizard mind has focused with acute fascinatioin on the nature of these Top, Top Secret documents/information the Feds clearly believe he still possessed. This the information so ultra top secret it can not even be described.

Really? Wow.

But we do know a few things abut this stuff.

A: The Feds absolutely believed Trump had the info, and convinced a Federal judge to let it raid the home of a former President to get it back.

B: Trump quite obviously lied about having whatever it is and did not include it in the 15 boxes of trinkets and souvenirs and whatever the Feds toted away last spring.

C: The Feds and the judge agreed that Trump was unlikely to ever hand it back in a polite, professional manner.

And D: They had good reason to believe Trump would destroy what they were looking for if they gave any notice that they were coming to get it.

Hence, a raid, much like kicking in the door on a meth dealer in Albuquerque.

So then I ask myself, “What would Donald Trump steal and cling to so desperately that he’d risk this scene?”

And I answer by reminding myself that we know two things about Trump with absolute certainty, namely everything is about him and money. This leads me to suspect that whatever Super Double Secret Probation information he stole has to have very high value in terms of either protecting him from some kind of prosecution and/or can be monetized in a negotiation with another party … most likely in a highly nefarious context.

(One of the facical aspects of this episode, as one national security expert pointed out yesterday, is that Trump was obviously too stupid to realize that as POTUS he had the authority to de-classify anything, including whatever the Feds are looking for now, and therefore could have avoided this whole mess.)

Finally, as fans of John LeCarre certainly understand, whatever the Feds are looking for is not one-of-a-kind. There would be copies somewhere. Which means that other than the illegality of iut, the peril her, the risk to national security is who has this information.

And in that case it is the as-yet-unindicted careeert fraud and con man Donald Trump, who long ago demonstrated he will do anything to get what he wants.

The Grand Unifying Theory of Trump’s Demise

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Like the scene in “A Beautiful Mind” where the now fully-mad John Nash has diagrammed his Grand Unifing Theory of Everything with lengths of thread maniacally criss-crossing pins in calculations, photos and clippings, I have completed my life’s work. Or at least this past month’s work. I see where Trump is going with his full dive into reckless bigotry and corruption.

Follow this if you can.

While those who tell him such things fear his spittle-flecked wrath, Trump, since giving up on any kind of plan to fight COVID-19, has by now processed if not accepted that he is going to lose in November. He understands that he is so deeply and intensely despised by such a substantial majority of voters there’s no way short of outrageously criminal voter suppression and election manipulation he can reassemble the 77,000-votes-in-six-counties Electoral College freak act he did in 2016. Put bluntly, it’s over.

But in the mind of Donald Trump accepting that it’s over doesn’t mean he has to, you know, lose.

There’s money, big money, to be made in a grand, vain glorious defeat. But there are steps that need to be taken to prepare the final battlefield.

1: He must re-engergize the hardest core of his base. Suburban women? College educated whites? Traditional Republicans? Screw ’em. They’re not the target consumer bloc, not that they ever have been. But now, in preparation for What Comes Next/The Big Cash Out, they’re fully expendable. The people Trump has to re-commit himself to is the rock solid 35%, or roughly 40 million maskless, MAGA-loving, AR-15 brandishing, cop-cuddling, immigrant-hating, QAnon-inhaling base. They must not only be fed the same toxic offal as always, but more of it, and more ferociously with less and less “Presidential” mealy-mouthedness. And this — as we see — he has begun doing with raw abandon. (And wait until he delivers his “acceptance” speech in Jacksonvile.)

2: He must clear away as many money-sucking legal obstacles to his post-presidency while he still has Bill Barr to do it. Many of us have been startled by the brazen nature of the moves Barr has already made, flagrantly lying about SDNY Geoffrey Berman’s “resignation”, as well as his greasy paw prints all over the cases of Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and Michael Cohen. There’s nothing remotely subtle about it. Plainly Barr has been instructed to “move on this now“. The long, long list of pardon-immune SDNY prosecutions in particular. This list represents potentially tremendous legal costs to post-presidency civilian Trump, assuming a Biden administration ignores tradition and allows SDNY to continue prosecuting rather than, um, “moving on for the good of the country.”

The “now” part of Barr’s act this last couple weeks continues to baffle legal experts. What’s so important that he’d do something this naked and clumsy …now? Suspicions are that Berman and SDNY had entered a new and more dangerous phase of investigation into — well, take your pick — cases involving Trump’s Russian-curated relationship with Deutsche Bank, his influence-peddling inauguration scam, his taxes, any or all of Trump Inc.’s real esatate deals, the squirrely $13 billion scandal with that Turkish bank or, maybe, his long, close bromance with Jeffrey Epstein and the case his former Secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta signed off on prohibiting indictment of others “known and unknown.”

Point being, whatever can be done to snuff out or mitigate damage coming out of New York needs to be done …now … to protect the revenue stream produced by a righteous martyr’s defeat in November.

3: There is no money be made betting against Trump and Barr shrieking and howling about a “rigged” election. Hell, it’s already begun. Mail-in ballots! Too many polling stations in black neighborhoods! The “rigging” is already happening. But — I predict — nothing today compares with the indignant rage that will explode on election night over “serious discrepancies”, “irregularities”, “alarming misconduct”, “clear examples of voter faud” and on and on and on and on.

Such sore-loser pissiness might strike you as pathetic, futile whining, which it would be — even in the event of a Biden landslide — if it weren’t for the fact Mitch McConnell, Barr and The Federalist Society have now stocked the courts, in particular the Appelate Courts with so many Trump-sympathetic judges, there’s a better than 50-50 chance they can get one or more of them to uphold a challenge to the election results for weeks if not months. Certainly long enough for Trump to close the deal on his next chapter.

4: Money. It’s all that matters. Everyone who has known him or worked for him understands the foundation of his only ethos. A “rigged” election, even what is clearly a blow-out, has the advantage of acting like an accelerant over all the festering greivances and whack-doodle conspiracy theories of Trump’s non-college educated, self-pitying white base. And as Trump fully understands, there’s money be made in them thar rube-covered hills.

Out of the White House, (which he clearly won’t miss … too much work …not enough Donald time), Trump’s move is to tap that raging 35% base, or hell, even 10% of it with some new media platform. An ad-based rival to FoxNews (which will happily replace their affection for louche and stupid Trump in exchange for a more devious and competent version, like Tom Cotton) is a distinct possibility. A buy-out of the nitwit One America Network (OAN) would not be a bad investment. Or there’s always a subscription-driven streaming platform. That might reduce the 35% to 5%, as paying customers, but 8-9 million at $10 a month … you do the math.

Once you factor all this together, drawing 50 or 60 different colored threads back and forth across the wall, you see how Trump could actually embrace defeat, even will it.

How great would be to be a martyred hero to millions of fee-paying acolytes if you not only didn’t have to be burned at the stake but got to live in an even grander style than before?

And with that I’ll breakfast on another couple peyote buttons and await my next vision.

A Short List of Questions Post-(Redacted) Mueller Report

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As the specifics of The Mueller Report kept exploding like cherry bombs all day yesterday and into this morning, my list of questions and reactions kept getting longer and longer. As a confessed Trump/Russia obsessive nerd, here’s an abbreviated list (in no particular order) of where I’m at roughly 24 hours after release:

1: Mueller decided not to subpoena Trump for an in-person interview, the most conclusive way of determining “corrupt intent” in obstruction and a host of other wildly sketchy behaviors. He didn’t want a “protracted” fight with Trump, one that almost certainly would have gone all the way to the Supreme Court. Plus, there was the high likelihood that if Trump did get in front of a grand jury, a la Bill Clinton, he probably would have pleaded The Fifth from start to finish, rendering the whole fight meaningless. That said, Donald Trump truly is “Individual #1”, everything emanates from him and revolves around him, and the case against him (or even for him) is hobbled by not getting the best possible evidence from him. The fight for his in-person testimony should have gone forward. And let’s remember, it was only a bit over four months from the time Nixon got a subpoena for his White House tapes and the Supreme Court ruled — unanimously — that he had to turn them over. After 22 months of Mueller, we could have waited until July.

2: Likewise, how do we explain Mueller calling in the hapless Sarah Huckabee Sanders for an interview but not anyone in the immediate Trump family? Not Donald Jr., the “I love it!” recipient of the Russian offer to assist the campaign? Not Ivanka, arguably her father’s key advisor (can’t make it up), and not Jared Kushner, his Swiss Army knife of a lieutenant who had clearly demonstrated influence on obstruction by advising Trump to fire Jim Comey? I really want to hear Mueller explain that one.

3. There is nothing — zero — in the redacted report about Trump’s absurdly squirrely finances. Was a full investigation of Trump’s long, long experience with Russian “investor”/oligarch/gangsters truly not part of Mueller’s mandate? A lot of people, not just me, were believing that the presence on Mueller’s team of ace money-laundering prosecutor Andrew Weismann, was proof that Mueller was looking closely at how long-term Russian “investment” in Trump not only explained a comfortable existing relationship with Russians, but a key element in the Russians’ on-going leverage over him. Did Mueller farm all that out to the Southern District of New York? If so, what is anyone doing to prevent Bill Barr from putting a fat thumb on that scale? Never mind “collusion”. Never mind “conspiracy”. “Compromise” is the issue here.

4. Also in finances — understanding that money and the pretense of fabulous, Croesus-like wealth is absolutely essential to Trump’s highly suspect “brand” — was nothing more learned about Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank, a.k.a. the only bank who would still do business with him? Subpoenas are now out from the House Oversight Committee. But was anything investigated regarding the credibly estimated $300-plus million Trump apparently still owed Deutsche Bank as recently as early 2018, (much of it for the construction of the Trump-branded tower in Chicago)? We have good information that many, if not all of Trump’s loans came from a bank within Deutsche Bank, a private bank with assets provided by … who, exactly? In that context it’s interesting to note the number of times in recent weeks the question has been asked whether Trump’s Deutsche Bank debt has been forgiven or dramatically restructured? Wildly speculating here, but if that bank-within-a-bank is in fact a depository for well-laundered Russian money and the Russians have agreed to “relieve” some of Trump’s debt burden … well that’d be kind of interesting, wouldn’t it?

5. It’s already understood that Muller’s obstruction section is in essence a road map for Congress, (i.e. Democrats) to begin aggressive investigation … or more. And everyone is making much of all the Trump aides who just ignored his “crazy shit” and refused to cooperate in flagrant obstruction. But, come on! Since when does it matter that the perp was too stupid or lazy to actually pull off the obstruction? The fact he — the President of the United States — tried so often (and so recklessly) to obstruct investigation(s) doesn’t make it less of a crime. And  again people, this is over a matter — Russian rigging of an American presidential election — about a quadrillion and a half times more serious and relevant to you and me than Bill Clinton obstructing “justice” into sexy time with an intern.

6. Speaking of flagrant, Bill Barr’s gobsmacking defense of Trump was of course appalling, and it reaffirms a key (and politically exploitable) factor in explaining the seething in American culture today. Namely that every system that matters is gamed out in favor of the wealthy and connected — the “insiders”, the people who can leverage — via money or favors — any and all rules in their defense, no matter how naked their crimes. That said, how much do we know about Bill Barr’s private finances? Not to go all tinfoil hat here, but it’d be reassuring to take that question off the table.

7. I don’t think I’m alone in seeing the long-strategy of Barr and the White House (and Mitch McConnell and the Freedom Caucus) being basically a taunt to Democrats to press the impeachment button. Given the picture Mueller does paint and things likely to emerge out of all the other investigations into Trump’s epically sleazy business career, the rest of Trump’s term is going to be more of the same. But what turbo-charges the conflict in Trump’s favor is a full-out impeachment. Total war is where Team Trump is preparing to go anyway to win reelection (and thereby postpone an avalanche of indictments when he does leave office). But impeachment is nuclear fuel for the base. Torches, pitchforks and precious Second Amendment rights. Democrats are going to have to be especially canny in keeping the fires red-hot without setting MAGA-world aflame.

8. Finally, (for the moment), Mueller’s “no conspiracy” decision teeters on the very thin edge of the fact that he couldn’t show anyone on Team Trump with a direct, almost contractual agreement with Russians to game the election. In other words Mueller couldn’t prove that Team Trump engaged — hands-on — in the technical aspects of the hacking, the WikiLeaks dumping, the Cambridge Analytica-style social media distortion, etc. Common sense that is cutting “conspiracy” implausibly fine. Trump knew about it. Trump accepted it. Trump continues to deny the Russians had any role in the attack. What’s more, neither Trump nor Bill Barr yesterday has ever expressed any concern, much less outrage, that the attack happened.

And then there’s the fact the … Trump and everyone around him has lied about their chumminess with Russians every goddam time they’ve been asked.

 

Cohen Pleads, Deutsche Bank is Raided, Witches Darken the Skies!

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As blessed as we are to live in interesting times, today is more interesting than most. Why? Because from the get-go everyone following the Trump Criminal Farce has been saying, “Follow the money”. And what do we have today? Glad you asked. Today we learned that authorities have raided Deutsche Bank in Germany on the (extremely) probable cause of having engaged in long-term, widespread international money laundering.

I know, you’re as shocked as I am.

Put bluntly, the only bank on the planet, (not chartered in Moscow or floating on a sea of Russian money), that was willing to loan money to Donald Trump received 170 unwelcomed guests this morning, most of them wearing badges. We already know that Robert Mueller had subpoenaed records from bank, where Trump is rumored to still owe as much as $480 million, a number roughly equivalent to the amount of the fraudulent tax scam handouts he received from his father before going bankrupt … several times.

But that is just a coincidence, I’m sure.

Serious people who have followed Trump’s finances long ago relieved themselves of any doubt that his real estate “empire” is based on decades of money laundering, and that a good deal of it has come via Russian gangsters. (Incoming House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff mentions money-laundering every time he’s interviewed, which is a lot.)

Moreover, Deutsche Bank is very likely the most prominent player in the entirely unsophisticated fraud Don Sr. and the Trump siblings have been living off for the last 20-odd years. (Cherubic multi-tool statesman Jared Kushner reportedly owes the same German bank $285 million. His records have also been subpoenaed.)

What’s always been even more interesting is that Trump wasn’t getting money from the normal commercial lending arm of Deutsche Bank, but rather the company’s bank-within-the-bank, its “private bank”, where the identities of actual depositors (dare we speculate that they might be very large-scale international criminals?) are hidden from prying eyes.

So … Deutsche Bank has been raided, simultaneous with Michael “I’ll take a bullet for Mr. Trump” Cohen pleading guilty after telling Mueller everything he knows about how Trump was planning to build/finance “the tallest tower in Europe” in Moscow … as he was campaigning for the [bleeping] White House in 2016.

So yeah, all in all, a very interesting day for everyone still capable of being gobsmacked by the total, flagrant corruption of this hapless crowd.

But … maybe the most interesting thing about this raid on a gargantuan international bank is that it happened at all. I mean, in my advanced addled state I may have forgotten the time 170 agents raided Lehman Brothers, Countrywide Financial, Bear Stearns or Citigroup back in 2008 (or ever.)

While the astonishing frauds revealed in the Panama Papers is reported to be at the root of today’s episode, you gotta believe the German authorities had dead certainty that their case was made before they charged through the doors. (Likewise, I assume Deutsche Bank’s top executives made certain they had a firewall around their reputations. I see two lower level bankers have been ID’d as scapegoats for sacrifice.)

Outside of the Kremlin itself (or the House of Saud) giant banks are the most impervious institutions the world has ever seen. Fantastic sums support fantastic legal and lobbying firepower that few governments dare risk taking on in a frontal attack.

Trump’s handler, Mr. Putin, is of course a central character (albeit a step or two removed) in the Panama Papers. And there’s no indication that Mueller’s investigation has any role in this business.

But, the possibility that Mueller’s team — of career financial fraud experts, who have been pouring over Deutsche Bank records for months — may have something to do with this is way too tantalizing to dismiss as another crazy notion.

The end game approaches. Look up! The sky is full of witches in panicked flight.