Tag Archives: Jared Kushner

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Rx for Your Psychic Health: Enjoy Trump as an Epic Farce

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 2For everyone exhausted by Trump’s Follies and terrified the world as we know it is about to collapse in a steaming pile of Keystone Cops criminality, I urge you to chill just a bit. Try this: Tamp down the stress by absorbing this absurd drama less as a nightmare and more as trashy reality TV on an epic scale.

Sure, sure there is no end of reasons to spike your blood pressure over things like the “unimaginable cruelty” of Trump’s budget. But that thing, like virtually all of his promises/threats/delusions isn’t going anywhere. (You gotta love the minor $2 trillion math error involved in its grand design.)

In fact, one of the truest things I’ve heard recently was some talking head urging calm by reminding viewers that, “As long as doing nothing is the default option” all this incompetence and venality is survivable. What he meant is that with 98% of Trump (i.e. Steve Bannon’s) ideas doomed to fail, we can get through Trump with the rudder and sails still attached to the ship of state. Obamacare will remain (perpetually imperiled, but “un-repealed”), the tax code will go “unreformed” (meaning another GOP giveaway to the rich will wait for a later day) and Big Bird will not be plucked and roasted (by government, although maybe eventually by the commercial marketplace.)

So with the normal consequences of incompetence in mind, it may be beneficial to our psychic health to dial back the grim expressions of stress and view this story as a kind of slapstick Ring Cycle. Instead of The End of Days, think of the Trump presidency and its inevitable collapse as a sprawling, time-consuming tale of dozens of strange, silly, improbable characters and lots of noise. True, like “Big Brother” or “Jersey Shore”, “The Trump Show” its a crass epic lacking anything in the way of moral grandeur and honorable tests of mortality. Just the opposite in fact. The whole thing is playing like the Farrelly brothers reimagined Wagner. It’s “Dumb and Dumber” inflated to international proportions.

This is why I don’t share the sense of dread and panic of some of my fellow liberals.

Unlike say Richard Nixon, much less truly psychopathic thugs like Benito Mussolini, Stalin and what’s his name back in Germany, Trump is both ideology-free and resoundingly lazy. Beyond ego-gratification he doesn’t really know what he wants and is not about to put in the effort to find out. Moreover, since he has no friends in D.C., and no deeply connected Dick Cheney-like consigliere to work the system and connive with a deep closet of corporate cronies, Trump’s more isolated with every passing pratfall. And they’re coming at the rate of about one an hour.

Hell, the only guy he could imagine defending him against this Robert Mueller investigation is his long-time apologist Marc Kasowitz, a guy — wait for it — who also includes among his best clients, Russia’s biggest bank. (See above for “slapstick”.)  The word “literally” is getting a work out these days, but … literally … every move Team Trump makes to defend itself from accusations of collusion adds a new layer of farce.

Add to this the stage whispering that the White House “person of interest” mentioned in that Washington Post story last week is over-ambitious, over-burdened son-in-law Jared Kushner, he of recently reported Baltimore litigious slumlord infamy.

(Since young Jared has been in the Middle East this past week we can assume he’s got the handle on that little problem and will be having Hezbollah and the Israelis over for a Shavuot barbecue.)

If true, and it fits so perfectly it’s in the range of “very highly likely”, Jared-as-person-of-interest suggests a laser point on Trump family financial machinations vis a vis Russian “investors.” (For my money Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has been as good as anyone at connecting the bizarre characters on the money trail between Trump and Russian oligarchs/mobsters.)

The story even has standard issue domestic farce, like the First Lady uh, rebuffing, the touch of the guy proud of being able to grab any woman anywhere anytime he wanted. (I keep thinking our old friend Tom Arnold may have the best explanation for that particular chill.)

One of the next acts in this grand burlesque will be crushing legal bills dropping on the Kellyanne and Spiceys of the world. Will the narcissistic emperor pick up those tabs? Would you count on it if you were them? Moreover, who would be stupid enough to step in and replace them once they are reduced to “losers”, the absolute worst thing you can say about someone? (See above for “isolated”.)

Shortly after that the spillway will open wide when Michael Flynn, the show’s paranoid general, (think Sterling Hayden as Gen. Jack D. Ripper), realizes he’s not going to get immunity and spills everything he knows in the hope of the court’s mercy.

Point being friends, there is a choice here. You can laugh or cry. I prefer to laugh. It’s easier on the nerves.