The Solution is.....More Guns

More Guns:  Teachers with guns, that’s Trump’s solution to school massacres. During another one of his study meetings he rambled on about the importance of hardening schools by putting weapons into the hands of all willing teachers.  He suggested that gun toting teachers be recruited from the ranks of the military and that winners of shooting contests be sought out as future educators.  He held out Chief of Staff Kelly as the kind of guy he wants to see teaching impressionable youth about civics and social justice. He also decried active shooter drills, not because he has a problem with schools preparing for worse case scenarios but because he objects to their title, saying that the idea of an active shooter was too scary for young students.  His solution for that was a rebranding. With all the attention on guns he managed to slip in a barely noticed call for the mass incarceration of “crazy” people who would be deposited in previously shuttered mental institutions. As to those armed teachers, Trump suggested that they be paid a modest bonus to encourage them to carry weapons, a budget busting idea that, to the extent that his target goal of arming 40% of the teacher population was achieved, would result in an additional $1 billion requirement for school security.  Trump’s current budget proposal cuts funding for school security, he didn’t suggest where the $1 billion would come from, maybe by supplementing bake sales with a few more semi-automatic weapon auctions or cutting down on school supplies like books?  As to legislative solutions, Trump appears to be supportive of strengthening the background check system and has expressed an interest in raising age limits for the purchase of semi-automatic rifles, however, that last suggestion is opposed by his sponsors, the NRA so it probably won’t go very far. Speaking at the annual Conservative Political Action conference (CPAC), Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s EVP, took a hard line against those calling for gun restrictions and attacked liberals, Democrats, Pelosi, Schumer, Connecticut Senator Murphy, the FBI and just about anyone else he could think of for their failure to prevent the Parkland attack and for exploiting the death of the murdered students and teachers. He went on to call all of them socialists, a hugely offensive term to a conservative audience, for trying to take away Second Amendment rights.  In many respects his speech echoed statements and themes that Trump uttered during his meandering remarks, leaving the impression that they share the same speech writer.  In her remarks, NRA’s spokeswoman Dana Loesch was even more combative, she attacked the “legacy media” for their “love of mass shootings.” Adding "Now, I'm not saying that you love the tragedy. But I am saying that you love the ratings. Crying white mothers are ratings gold to you and many in the legacy media."  Though the NRA’s remarks and its calls to leave gun rights alone were received warmly by most of the CPAC attendees and a large part of Trump’s base, the Parkland students and parents pleas for actions are having an impact with corporate America. Yesterday, Enterprise Holdings, the owner of the Alamo, National and Enterprise car rental companies announced that it is cancelling its discount program for NRA members and the First National Bank of Omaha announced the end of its NRA VISA affinity card.  It’s far from clear that the House and the Senate will pass any gun restricting legislation or that Trump, who will be speaking at CPAC today, will follow through on anything other than trying to arm teachers so it’s too early to call this a tipping point but the Parkland kids are proving to be very persistent, so its also too early to count them out.      

More Manafort Indictments:  The Mueller guys are at it again, doing their best to get Paul Manafort to flip on Trump.  Yesterday we learned that Andrew Weissman, one of Mueller’s most dogged team members, filed a new 32 count indictment charging Paul Manafort and Rick Gates with additional counts of tax and bank fraud for understating their income from 2010 to 2014 and for fraudulently obtaining three bank loans totaling $20 million.  Manafort made around $30 million off of his work for Viktor Yanukovych, the Russia aligned former Ukrainian president.  He hid that income from US tax authorities by laundering it through off shore bank accounts in several countries known to be havens for those trying to avoid paying taxes.  Manafort brought his money back to the US by investing in several expensive real estate properties, the asset of choice for money launderers.  After his lucrative Ukraine business dried up his income dwindled but his lifestyle didn’t so he lied to several banks to obtain loans secured by those real estate assets.  Gates helped him obtain the loans by falsifying financial documents to make it look like Manafort’s income was substantially higher than it really was.  The paper trail for these activities includes several incriminating emails, one in which a complicit bank employee asks Gates to redo a faked document to make it look less doctored. The case against the two also includes statements from some of the people who refused to abet their criminal actions.  Manafort and Gate’s fraudulent loan activities overlap with their time working with the Trump team and though, at least at this point, no one is suggesting that Trump or members of his team had any involvement with Manafort’s fraudulent loans, it is problematic that two of his most senior campaign officials were suffering severe financial problems, committing fraud and were indebted to Russian friendly Ukrainians all while working for the campaign. Though he’s long denied it, while serving as Trump’s campaign chairman, Manafort is believed to be responsible for making changes to the Republican party’s platform with regard to Ukraine, making the party position more favorable to Russian interests, an act that may have been a payoff to some of his Russian patrons. Despite the compelling evidence against him, Manafort is still holding out, yesterday his spokesman again asserted his innocence. Manafort, who faces spending the rest of his life in jail, may be counting on one of those Trump pardons in exchange for his silence.  Though it had been reported that Gates was about to reach a plea agreement with Mueller, that arrangement, to the extent that it ever existed, appears to be off the table, at least for now although it’s notable that Gates remains curiously silent.  The Trump party line continues to be that Manafort and Gates’s crimes have nothing to do with Trump.  We will have to wait for future Mueller indictments to learn whether or not that’s true.         

The Kushner Effect:   Today is the day that Chief of Staff Kelly’s new rules concerning security clearances for White House personnel are set to go into effect.  White House Senior Advisor and son in law extraordinaire Jared Kushner still doesn’t have permanent clearance and according to CNN, his problems go beyond his multiple erroneous filings and complicated real estate entanglements.  Citing several of those innumerable unnamed sources otherwise known as White House leakers CNN reports that Kushner’s clearance is being held up because he is being investigated by Mueller and that as long as he remains a subject of that investigation the FBI won’t give him a clean bill of health.  Separately, CNBC reports that Security Adviser McMaster and Chief of Staff Kelly are both adamant that Kushner should not be allowed to continue reading the super-secret stuff that he’s had access to until the he gets the clearance he can’t get.  CNBC also reports that both are considering resigning if they don’t get their way.  In McMaster’s case there have been reports that he’s been out of favor for a while because he refuses to kowtow to Trump’s irrational demands, yesterday’s news that he’s completed his analysis of the impact of having transgender soldiers in the military and plans to tell Trump that he is recommending that they be allowed to stay despite Trump’s desire for them to be ousted provides another indication that he has no interest in being a Trump tool.   Trump is the final arbiter, he can override recommendations and grant Kushner clearance if he wants and he probably can boot the transgender soldiers but if he does either he may lose McMaster and/or Kelly, on their terms, not his.

Men Behaving Badly:  Eric Greitens, the Republican Governor of Missouri, is in bigly trouble. Yesterday, the married Governor was arrested for threatening to release compromising pictures of his former mistress showing her blindfolded, bound up and partially undressed, as payback if she ever disclosed their relationship.  Although he has now admitted the affair and has been forgiven by his wife, or so they both say, he denies ever trying to blackmail the accusing ex-girlfriend.  This scandal has been in the news for a while,  the Governor had already been resisting calls to step down, however yesterday’s arrest may be his tipping point.  The local Republican party, no fan of Greitens in the first place, is growing increasingly concerned that his scandal, bad under any circumstances but even worse in this “me too” year, is bolstering the chances that Missouri’s Senator Claire McCaskill, one of the most vulnerable red state Democrats, will win reelection in November.  The road to the midterms continues to be unpredictable and that’s putting it mildly.