Tag Archives: Robert Mueller

Repeat After Me, “It Will Never Be ‘Normal’ Again.”

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Forget raining, it’s pouring Trump scandal books. The past few days I’ve been toggling between Jeffrey Toobin’s, “True Crimes and Misdemeanors” and Brian Stelter’s, “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth.”

There are separate discussions to be had about both, as there are over Bob Woodward’s “Rage”, the New York Times’ Michael Schmidt’s, “Donald Trump v. The United States” and top Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissman’s “Where the Law Ends.”

But one stark takeaway from Toobin and Stelter is how completely unprepared “the establishment” was for Donald Trump. More to the point both are argue, is how unprepared traditional legal bureaucracies and journalism organizations still are even today, nearly four years and 20,000 lies after Trump was elected … the first time.

Toobin (and Weissman, based on interviews he’s already given), both lament the overly-cautious, tradition-bound behavior of Robert Mueller as he confronted Trump’s total obstruction of his investigation. A creature from an era when people in high offices showed basic respect for legal “norms”, Mueller (and at least one key deputy) refused to push a direct face-to-face confrontation with Trump or any of his family over the source of their wealth, despite clear indications that its roots were in Russia and therefore they were all highly likely to be compromised by Vladimir Putin.

The spectre of litigating against … the President of the United States … over large scale money laundering for Russian oligarch/gangsters was simply a place Mueller didn’t want to go. Better to deliver a narrowly-investigated, bridled report that suggested as much but left all the ugly charging business to Congress.

Stelter’s book is a dizzying trip into Fox’s alternate universe. The naked careerism and mendacity. The all but total dereliction of journalistic duty in favor of locking down and pandering to an audience with a nearly-religious allegiance to a “norm-busting” celebrity figure. It’s all there, plus some.

Bad as all that is, the problem both Toobin and Stelter suggest is that “normal”, “traditional” politicians, courts and media are still off-balance and indecisive about how to respond to Trump. And this comes barely a month before the next election and with Trump plainly setting up to deny the results of the election should he lose.

Fundamentally, the problem is that the people in control of response to Trump’s (and Bill Barr’s, and Mitch McConnell’s) flagrant norm and tradition-breaking are almost all figures groomed and elevated to their positions from what appears to be a lost era. An era when editors and judges and sensible, civic-minded politicians always gave presidents the benefit of the doubt, always sought to present a “balance” between “both sides” and always avoided the word, “lying.”

But if you watch the Trump spectacle day after day and if you read what you can, the only conclusion is that we don’t live in that era or world anymore, and given social media and every other platform of disinformation, we never will again. The evolution of “normal” has passed our institutions by and is rocketing into a new time zone.

The Eisenhower-era of journalism, courts and politics is long gone. And we’re at a point, right now today where tradition-groomed and bound judges, politicians and journalists are have to ask themselves if they’re really going to play this moment as Robert Mueller did? Are they going to continue to respect the “norms” of their professions, all of which have been mocked, abused and degraded by Donald Trump, in the anachronistic hope that eventually, at some point, if not now, November or a decade from now, normal respect for tradition will prevail again?

Or, are they going to accept a harsh reality and adapt to change?

Frankly, if Trump is able to create enough chaos to declare and sustain victory I don’t see how old time tradition will hold sway in the US of A ever again.

Does Bill Barr Really Think He Can Get Away With This?

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One week later, The Big Question is: does Bill Barr really think he can pull this off?

As many of us know, less than 48 hours after Ken Starr wrapped up his (far longer and more expensive) investigation of Bill Clinton’s sexual hijinks he dropped a 400-page report Congress and the public. Oooo, stained dresses! Cigars! Dirty talk! Love it!

By contrast, Barr, arguing that Robert Mueller’s work, because it operated under a different legal arrangement, needs, you know, a lot of time-consuming finessing and redacting and re-phrasing and, well … mostly it needs delaying, in order for Trump’s claim of “total exoneration” to settle in.

Unlike say, Rudy Giuliani or Matt Whitaker or some other of Trump’s other legal “talent”, Barr doesn’t seem to be a sad fool with no regard for history’s verdict or his reputation. That said, he is playing a perilous game in those regards. He has to be smart enough to know that his narrow and vaguely paternalistic interpretations of law (i.e. “I’m the legal savant here, you lesser people just go on about your petty business”) could quite easily backfire on him, and badly when — not if — Mueller’s full volume of information is released … or leaked.

He’s heard the name, Robert Bork, I’m quite sure.

If Barr is so stupid as to play along with a White House strategy to declare victory, parade around the country and the Twitter-verse calling everyone who has followed the Russia case in extreme detail “losers” and “pencil necks” he’s in for a very rude awakening. While Trump and his usual crowd of “libtard”-hating dead-enders, the folks who only know what Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity tell them, are still doing their touchdown celebration ..,. they haven’t noticed that they’ve spiked the ball 40 yards short of the goal line.

Moreover, on a human-reputational level, this clumsy game Barr is playing with the non-release of everything Mueller found out — which is dead certain to be chockfull of damning details about how badly Trump may be “compromised” by his corrupt activities — is accelerating the infuriation of not just the Adam Schiffs and Elijah Cummings and Jerrold Nadlers of the world, but the mainstream press as well. None of those people — all of whom have invested thousands of hours analyzing Trump/Russia/obstruction — are any too happy about being smeared (by fools) with the assertion that they’ve been both wrong and “biased.”

Put another way, anyone who cares to know knows damn well that Trump has engaged in a Vegas buffet of corrupt business and campaign activities. How so? Because it’s been out there for everyone to see for years.

The country beyond the MAGA crowd wants this story told. In full, with all the juicy “blue dress” details. And they expected Mueller to tell it.

So now, in this interlude between Barr getting the report and figuring out how to release it with as little damage as possible to the man who appointed him, American adults are disappointed-to-disheartened that this storytelling is being twisted up into yet another round of rancid partisan legalisms.

In that context, if Barr “succeeds” in redacting or murking-up the most damaging evidence Mueller produced, I ask you, has there been a better, more righteous excuse for a Daniel Ellsberg – Pentagon Papers-style leak than this?

The Russians hacked into a presidential election on behalf of the improbable, disreputable character now in the Oval Office. A character now simultaneously alienating allies and abetting long-standing Russian goals at every possible turn … without ever … ever … acknowledging what the Russians did.

Seriously smart people are not going to put up with this.

Buh-lieve me.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Sorry Stormy, It’ll Be Facebook/Cambridge Analytica That’ll Take Out Trump

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For all of us braced to see some gag-inducing GoPro video of Donald Trump struggling out of his gold lame thong for a little sexy time, the Stormy Daniels interview was kind of anti-climactic. Note to Daniel’s pitbull attorney: Next time, don’t let the hype get so far out ahead of the available facts.

On other fronts though, the demise of The Donald is continuing on pace, perhaps even speeding up. I’ve been telling people for a while now that sometime late spring to mid-summer the sleazy farce we think of as The Trump Epoch will shift into a whole new, batshit gear. I base that on both the pace and qualities of the indictments Robert Mueller has produced to date, which leads anyone watching this dumpster fire to expect indictments of Americans connected either to Trump’s career-long money laundering for Russian gangsters and/or the weaponizing of voter data in the 2016 election.

If one of those indicted is a principal in the Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon or Robert Mercer camp the [bleep] will not only hit the fans, it’ll be a finely pureed mist.

For your betting records, I’m also adding at this point my wager that the best, most damning direct link to collusion will come through the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal churning right now.

Here the primary American players — Kushner, Bannon, Mercer and we have to assume Donald Jr. and Manafort — all converge, lacking only the link to some specific Russian player, and people … with thirty or forty Rooskie thugs/spies floating around in the conversation, it may only be a matter of drawing a name from a hat.

For what it’s worth, I also expect that given a new round of indictments rolling in those with whom Trump shares actual DNA, (instead of, you know, just exchanging it in glitzy hotels), Trump will snap and fire Mueller, or at least attempt to can him by firing Jeff Sessions and replacing Sessions with a completely conscience-less hit man like Scott Pruitt or Mick Mulvaney. (That move would require Senate confirmation, which would create a proxy fight over the whole investigation, in which Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell would continue to genuflect before The Altar of Craven Expediency. But the point is that at that point, with a Don Jr. or Kushner indictment, Trump will be so desperate and have so few other choices he’ll try anything and hope Sean Hannity can rally the goobers in his defense.)

But on the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, which is fascinating on so many levels, let me toss out something I came across preparing for a class and panel discussion on “fake news” up in Grand Rapids last week.

An early, mostly innocent character in the scandal is a guy named Michal Kosinski, currently teaching at Stanford. His (apparently genuine) scientific interest in working with freely (i.e. way too loosely) available Facebook data is what eventually lead to the very precise “psychographic profiles” of individual voters in the 2016 election by the Mercer/Bannon/Kushner-funded/directed Cambridge Analytica scheme.

Many of us, not just average schmoes like you and me, but bona fide tech heads have been gobsmacked by not only how much data about individual Americans was harvested via Facebook, but how astonishingly specific it was, down to names, faces, street addresses and very personal misapprehensions and prejudices.

From a 2015 article in the Swiss periodical Das Magazin (a sort of poor European’s New Yorker) that was only translated into English and re-published 14 months ago, and has now been contextualized by Vice, we learn this:

Psychometrics, sometimes also called psychographics, focuses on measuring psychological traits, such as personality. In the 1980s, two teams of psychologists developed a model that sought to assess human beings based on five personality traits, known as the “Big Five.” These are: openness (how open you are to new experiences?), conscientiousness (how much of a perfectionist are you?), extroversion (how sociable are you?), agreeableness (how considerate and cooperative you are?) and neuroticism (are you easily upset?). Based on these dimensions—they are also known as OCEAN, an acronym for openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism—we can make a relatively accurate assessment of the kind of person in front of us. This includes their needs and fears, and how they are likely to behave. The “Big Five” has become the standard technique of psychometrics. But for a long time, the problem with this approach was data collection, because it involved filling out a complicated, highly personal questionnaire. Then came the Internet. And Facebook. And Kosinski.

And …

Remarkably reliable deductions could be drawn from simple online actions. For example, men who “liked” the cosmetics brand MAC were slightly more likely to be gay; one of the best indicators for heterosexuality was “liking” Wu-Tang Clan. Followers of Lady Gaga were most probably extroverts, while those who “liked” philosophy tended to be introverts. While each piece of such information is too weak to produce a reliable prediction, when tens, hundreds, or thousands of individual data points are combined, the resulting predictions become really accurate.

Kosinski and his team tirelessly refined their models. In 2012, Kosinski proved that on the basis of an average of 68 Facebook “likes” by a user, it was possible to predict their skin color (with 95 percent accuracy), their sexual orientation (88 percent accuracy), and their affiliation to the Democratic or Republican party (85 percent). But it didn’t stop there. Intelligence, religious affiliation, as well as alcohol, cigarette and drug use, could all be determined. From the data it was even possible to deduce whether someone’s parents were divorced.

The strength of their modeling was illustrated by how well it could predict a subject’s answers. Kosinski continued to work on the models incessantly: before long, he was able to evaluate a person better than the average work colleague, merely on the basis of ten Facebook “likes.” Seventy “likes” were enough to outdo what a person’s friends knew, 150 what their parents knew, and 300 “likes” what their partner knew. More “likes” could even surpass what a person thought they knew about themselves.

Here is a link to Kosinki’s scholastic work:

And here is another.

And, if you’re so creeped-out ny what Facebook knows about you and exploits to add to its fantastic fortune, read this.

When Manafort Met Trump.

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I would love to have been in the meeting where Paul Manafort pitched his services to Donald Trump. What those two grifters saw in each other may be the wet kiss that seals both of their fates.

The suspicion today, before the inevitable avalanche of more damning details, is that Manafort was in hock to Russian paymasters — i.e. oligarch/gangsters — and badly needed to “get whole” ASAP. We know that almost immediately after getting the job to run Trump’s campaign he uses that very phrase in a correspondence seeking ideas about how to monetize his new presidential candidate connection.

But come on! The guy, who has been a DC system parasite for over 30 years, with a career of shady deals in his treadworn baggage, has no concern about walking into the spotlight of a presidential campaign? No concerns that at long, long last the Justice department or US Attorney or someone will take a more focused look at what he’s been up to or … what he will now do to win an election?

Talking Points’ Josh Marshall speculates that Manafort was so desperate to resolve his debt(s) to Oleg Deripaska (and likely others) that he decided the lesser risk was in the spotlight working for Trump. As we know, Manafort, a character who regards every breath he takes as an opportunity to make a buck off someone, worked for free.

Now that’s a motivated employee.

Says Marshall in the context of Manafort suddenly increasing his value to the Russians, “… spies look for people who are crooked and people who are desperate. Manafort looks like he was both.”

So what did Trump see in Manafort? We’re told they were well acquainted with each other, but not close. Besides a relationship with (yet another career long grifter) Roger Stone, the one thing they absolutely had in common, and which I suspect they knew about each other, were long-term relationships with Russians laundering money, in Trump’s case through wildly over-priced purchases of Trump real estate.

But what does Manafort promise to deliver? As of yesterday we now know Team Trump was being baited with the prospect of Hillary e-mails as far back as March, months before they eventually dropped, (within hours of the Access Hollywood tape.) Did Manafort promise to make that delivery happen? Did he convince Trump that he knew the right people to make it happen? Had he heard offers of cooperation from the Russian hacking operation? Did Trump see in him, a veteran grifter, a guy who could weaponize such information and not screw up?

We know that Manafort had some kind of role in dropping that plank about arming Ukrainians against the Russians. That move — though symbolic — had to have impressed Russians watching to see what they might get for their money, or at least their continued patience until Manafort delivered the money he owed.

But now that he’s under house arrest, with no chance of repaying whatever he owes Deripaska (and other Russian mobsters) how does Manafort see a way to defeat these first charges, much less all the others very likely to come down thanks to George Papadopoulos’ guilty plea, and “proactive cooperation”, (i.e. wearing a wire to talk to campaign and White House supervisors)? Russian oligarchs with millions in property all over Western Europe and the United States have to see a Manafort under arrest as worse than useless to them. If he starts singing, aggressive US attorneys (if there are any left after the Trump purge) will be delighted to move on those empty $5 million condos glutting markets in New York, London, San Francisco and everywhere else.

And then, as has been noticed, let’s not forget Gen. Flynn, about whom nothing was said yesterday. If Mueller kept Papadopoulos’s guilty plea under wraps for months, fair speculation says he’s got something similar going with Flynn.

 

 

 

 

Trump’s Resignation Imminent? There’s A Logic To It.

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I take this with a 50-pound block of salt. But the guy saying it has spent an unusual amount of time with Donald Trump and has insights into his, uh, business ethics and intellectual discipline unlike few others outside Trump’s immediate family.

“Art of the Deal” ghost writer, Tony Schwartz, is predicting a Trump resignation is imminent  — fueled by looming, bankrupting indictments from Robert Mueller’s investigation.

 

Skepticism is always a virtue. But given how recklessly Trump has conducted his business affairs and the vast trail he has left with Deutsche Bank, Russian banks, quasi-Russian banks in Cyprus and on and on, Mueller’s heavyweight team of financial investigators can not being having all that difficult a time building some kind of a case against him. Put another way, they may already have so many choices for indictment their biggest dilemma is picking the worst of the lot.

And remembering that Al Capone ended up at Alcatraz for tax fraud rather than garroting and machine gunning his booze-running rivals and cops, any kind of indictment that puts Trump’s “fortune” in lethal jeopardy would likely be enough for Trump to squeal like a pig and cut, you guessed it … a deal.

The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson has been doing some of the best work explaining Trump’s preposterously foul-smelling [i.e. money-laundering] deals in former Russian provinces. In his latest piece, titled “Trump’s Business of Corruption” he writes about (yet another) absurd-on-the-face-of-it Trump deal, this time in Soviet Georgia.

“I recently spoke with John Madinger, a retired U.S. Treasury official and I.R.S. special agent, who used to investigate financial crimes. He is the author of “Money Laundering: A Guide for Criminal Investigators.” When I told him what [long time Trump advisor Michael] Cohen had said to me [that Trump didn’t have any obligation to know the cash for the deal was being routed through a fraud-riddled Kazakhstan bank], he responded, “No, no, no! You’ve got to do your due diligence. You shouldn’t do a financial transaction with funds that appear to stem from unlawful activity. That’s like saying, ‘I don’t care if Pablo Escobar is my secret business partner.’ You have to care—otherwise, you’re at risk of violating laws against money laundering.”

By now Team Trump has to know what Mueller is probing hardest at, and it is almost certainly squalid crap like these cheesy Russian “deals”, all of which give Putin blackmail leverage on Trump, overt collusion or not. Moreover, as has been noted several times since the raid on Paul Manafort’s luxury condo, getting Trump’s tax returns/records requires Mueller et al meet a lower legal bar than getting a search warrant for Manafort’s property.

Point being, Schwartz is simply doing the math. Seized tax returns + heavyweight financial crimes investigators pouring over ludicrous “licensing deals” in former Russian kleptocracies + nearly total isolation from Congress and U.S. business communities after making common cause with neo-Nazis = Trump alone in a corner where even the 80% support of Republicans can’t protect either his money or prevent him from being re-branded as one of history’s most flagrant swindlers.

I also wonder how much thought Mueller is giving to Trump’s increasingly irrational mental state as that lonely spot in the corner gets tighter and darker?