Born in a Crossfire Hurricane

Justice and Intelligence:  Maybe it was in response to calls from Trump and his supporters like the combative Rudy Giuliani and the obsequious but cunning Pence to end the Russia investigation because one year is more than enough time to come up with a conclusion or maybe it’s just because the hurricane season is back. Whatever the reason, yesterday’s news was flooded with stories about the investigation, and none of them point to a quick end.  The Senate Judiciary Committee released the full text of the testimony about the infamous Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and her merry band of Russian spies.  The testimony from those involved or in the know reveals that Donny Jr admitted that he was eager to receive compromising information about Hillary Clinton from the Russians, as did some of the others who testified because who wouldn’t want to receive compromising information, right?  Whenever questions addressed Trump Sr’s involvement, Donny Jr experienced bouts of selective memory loss. He said that he wasn’t really sure if his father had directly dictated the parts of the statement that attempted to obfuscate the subject of the Trump Tower meeting because his communication about the drafting of the statement was with Hope Hicks not with his dad.  Donny Jr also claimed that he didn’t speak with Trump Sr about the meeting beforehand.  As to that mysterious call with someone using a phone with a blocked number, the call that took place while he was finalizing meeting details, Donny Jr has no memory as to who called and even denied knowing that his father frequently called from blocked phones, something that is totally unbelievable since almost everyone knew that Trump Sr was a frequent user of phones with blocked numbers including former campaign manager Corey Lewandoski, who confirmed that Trump used blocked phones during his testimony and a number of reporters who almost always received their calls from Trump from a blocked number. The Senate Judiciary Committee made no effort to subpoena phone records to identify the caller, but unfortunately for Trumps Jr and Sr,  Special Counsel Mueller most certainly has and to the extent that the person on the other end of that line was Trump Sr, Mueller knows all about it. Testimony also revealed that Jared Kushner, who has asserted that though he attended the meeting he knew nothing beforehand about its stated purpose, became highly agitated when the Russians started talking about the Magnitsky Act Sanctions and the so-called “adoption” problem and tried to get them to change the subject to Hillary dirt.  As to that Hillary dirt, just about everyone in attendance agrees that nothing was actually revealed at the meeting. The dirt came later in a series of possibly promised WikiLeaks.  Following the Judiciary Committee release, the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee broke with their House colleagues when Republican Chairman, Senator Burr reported that "There is no doubt that Russia undertook an unprecedented effort to interfere with our 2016 election, committee staff have spent 14 months reviewing the sources, tradecraft, and analytic work, and we see no reason to dispute the conclusions."  The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence committee, Senator Warner added that "after a thorough review, our staff concluded that the intelligence agencies conclusions were accurate and on point. The Russian effort was extensive, sophisticated and ordered by President Putin himself for the purpose of helping Donald Trump and hurting Hilary Clinton."  Unlike their dysfunctional House colleagues, the Senate Committee is still working on their investigation.  They have not yet reported out any findings on the what is likely to be the most controversial subject, whether or not the Trump team coordinated with the Kremlin.

The Persistent Press: Following on the tails of the two Senate Committees, the New York Times released a thorough, novella length article about the early days of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump team and its odd Russian activities.  They report that the investigation which was aptly titled Project Crossfire Hurricane after lyrics from the Rolling Stones song Jumpin’ Jack Flash, began with a very confidential trip to London to interrogate the Australian diplomat who had reported back to his bosses about Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos and his drunken ramblings about the imminent release of Hillary implicating emails.  Despite Trump’s assertion that those “deep state” intelligence agencies were out to get him, the article reveals that the FBI investigators were initially very skeptical and then went to great lengths to keep their investigatory activities secret by limiting the number of people who were even aware of their activities to a small group of trusted agents.  They even used unusually clandestine subpoena powers in order to further reduce the chance of any leaks about their activities.  Moreover, as we now know, though they were well into the investigation during the run up to the election, they kept the investigation quiet in part because they didn’t want to provide any fuel for Trump’s assertions that the whole election was rigged and in part because they thought the chance of Trump actually winning was remote.  Though a number of Trump’s Republican enablers in Congress continue to question the validity of the FISA warrant that authorized the surveillance of Trump campaign aide Carter Page, the article reports that there were justifiable concerns that Page wasn’t just meeting with Russians, that he was reporting back to them and was an actual agent of the Kremlin.  As to Peter Strzok, the FBI agent who has taken considerable heat for his inappropriate and sometimes anti-Trump texting, it turns out that he was also very hard on Hillary Clinton, basically didn’t trust any politicians, had little tolerance for any of their questionable activities and generally advocated for a hardline approach to all politicians.  

More Suspicious Activity:  There is so much more interesting stuff in the Times article and not enough time or space to do it justice here so I’ll just move on to the The New Yorker and Ronan Farrow’s newest and somewhat explosive piece, this one doesn’t focus on the “MeToo” movement but does go into some of its collateral damage, and by collateral damage think Trump lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen’s bank records.  Last week, Stormy Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenotti released financial information that appeared to come from one or more Treasury suspicious activity reports.  The information detailed those payments that Cohen received from several corporations seeking to influence the new Trump administration.  Once those companies including ATT and Novartis fessed up to the payments detailed in the reports, it became clear that Avenotti was speaking truth and was on to something big.  Last night Farrow reported that the source of those leaked forms is an as yet unnamed current government official who despite personal exposure felt compelled to send the forms to Avenotti out of concerns that two even more implicating forms had gone missing. The leaker says that the missing forms provide details of several million dollars of additional payments that flowed through Cohen’s Essential Consultants LLC account.  The leaker doesn’t know how those additional activity reports went missing but he (or she) is concerned that something nefarious has happened to them.  Though Farrow points out that it is possible that Mueller’s team quarantined the forms to keep them away from prying eyes, it’s not clear at this point whether the explanation for their “disappearance” is that benign or whether the forms were “disappeared” by someone trying to quash them  and their implicating contents permanently.  One thing is for certain, the flow of funds into and out of Cohen’s accounts, accounts that Cohen represented were just set up for his real estate consulting business, were so suspicious that several banks filed the reports out of concern that something unusual, possibly illegal, and with much foreign involvement was taking place.  As to unusual stuff, yesterday it was revealed that the required financial disclosure documents that Trump filed earlier in the week acknowledge the payments that he made to Cohen to repay him for advancing hush money to Stormy Daniels.  That disclosure was omitted from the forms that Trump filed last year.  In a somewhat unprecedented move, after reviewing the forms, David Apol, the acting director of the Office of Government Ethics, sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein notifying the Justice Department of the Cohen payment and saying that the Office of Government Ethics had determined "the payment made by Mr. Cohen is required to be reported as a liability" and that "you may find the disclosure relevant to any inquiry you may be pursuing regarding the President's prior report that was signed on June 4, 2017."  It’s worth noting that earlier this month, Rudy Giuliani suggested that other payments might have been made to other women, none of those payment were mentioned in any of Trump’s forms.  To the extent that Cohen made any other advances that could be another bigly problem.  More storms ahead?          

Other Things: Yesterday at a White House meeting Trump had a few choice words for undocumented immigrants and Mexico. He called those “dangerous people” clamoring to breach the country’s borders “animals” and then lashed out at Mexico,  saying that it does nothing for us, especially at the border and nothing on trade. He said this in front of the camera so this time no one can call the report of his comments “false news.”  As to all those so called alternative news stories, now that he’s out of the administration, former Secretary of State Tillerson is finally speaking his mind and calling out Trumpism.  Speaking at a commencement ceremony at the Virginia Military Institute, he not so subtlety called out Trump by saying that  American democracy was threatened by a growing “crisis of ethics and integrity.” Adding “If our leaders seek to conceal the truth, or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom.”  Too bad it took him so long to find his voice.  Lastly, a number of Republican Senators joined their Democratic colleagues and voted  to reinstate net neutrality rules.  Unfortunately their bill has little chance of passing through the House where Speaker Paul Ryan, who is also trying to block any DACA legislation, continues to stand behind anything and everything that comes out of the Trump administration.  He only has a few more months to go as Speaker but he’s taking full advantage of his time in control