Massacre Watch, Again

Weekend Escalation:  At first it looked like the story of the weekend was going to be that Donald Trump Jr had taken another questionable meeting when three months before the end of the 2016 campaign he sat down with George Nader who was acting as an emissary for the princes running Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.  Also in attendance at that meeting was an Israeli social media specialist named Joel Zamel who was there to pitch his company’s ability to engage in “social medial manipulation” on behalf of the campaign, an activity that would be financed by the two Gulf princes.  The tete-a-tete was set up by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ brother Erik Prince, the mercenary who founded Blackwater and who seems to show up in a lot of bizarre Trumpian meetings including the one in the Seychelles that was also attended by Nader.  In any case, though it doesn’t appear that Don Jr took these guys up on their offer, the meeting was significant for a number of reasons.  First, it shows a pattern, Don Jr, who also hosted the Natalia Veselnitskaya Trump Tower meeting, was open to meeting with anyone who could help with the campaign even if they were representing foreign countries, a bigly violation of campaign finance laws.  Second, Nader went on to be more involved with the Trump dynasty after this meeting and is now cooperating with the Mueller investigation and spilling his guts about all that involvement,  and lastly, Trump’s policies with regard to Saudi Arabia and the UAE appeared to have grown increasingly chummy, possibly in response to Nader’s effective lobbying on their behalf.  In and of itself the Prince, Nader, Zemel story fueled Trump Senior’s ire, he didn’t deny that the meeting took place and was accurately portrayed but instead lambasted Mueller for going outside of his “Russian focused” mission.  Then while Trump was tweet attacking Mueller for maligning his son for meeting with the questionable cast of foreign characters, the NY Times doubled down, publishing another story that really spun him out of control.  The second story shed more light on the FBI’s use of an informant during the campaign.  The NY Times reports that after the FBI had received reports that some of Trump’s aides were having an unusual amount of questionable interaction with Russian spies, they dispatched a London based American professor, someone who has helped the intelligence agencies in the past, to sidle up to them to see if he could figure out if they were up to anything nefarious.  The targeted aides included Carter Page, George Papadopolous and Sam Clovis, who at that time had some oversight responsibility for Page and Papadopolous.  Contrary to Trump’s assertion, the professor was not implanted into the campaign, nor was the campaign infiltrated. And most notably, the FBI kept its actions secret and did nothing to upend the Trump campaign, significant especially in comparison to then FBI Director Comey’s willingness to go public with details about the Hillary investigation, something that clearly upended her presidential aspirations.    Trump already fired up by the article implicating Don Jr for his questionable meeting went ballistic.  He spent much of Sunday tweet attacking the Mueller investigation with his usual “no collusion, no collaberation” rants and anti-Hillary, anti Comey diatribes but it was his last tweet, the one that said “I hereby demand, and will do so offically tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infilitrated or surveiled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration” that really raised eyebrows.  It’s unprecedented for presidents to command “their” Justice Departments to initiate investigations into their enemies, particularly if those enemies are investigating their campaign’s acitivities.  The beleagured Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein tried to diffuse Trump’s ire by requesting that the Department of Justice’s Inspector General expand its current investigation of the process that led to the Carter Page FISA warrant, an investigation that is already taking place only to placate Trump, to include the questions raised by Trump in his Sunday tweet. It’s not clear if Rosenstein’s attempt to satisfy Trump will work.  We could be in Watergate era Saturday Night Massacre territory. If Trump pushes for more action, Rosenstein could feel compelled to resign, if he isn’t fired first.  And its not just Trump who’s taking unprecedented actions, the Congressional trio of Devon Nunes,  Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows are also doing their best to disrupt the Mueller investigation by pushing Rosenstein and FBI Director Wray to share documents that shouldn’t be shared during an active investigation.  None of this is good and it keeps getting worse. As to that worse part, late in the week it was also revealed that Trump has held several meetings with Postmaster General Megan Brennan, none of which showed up on his published scheduled.  During those meetings he pressed her to raise Amazon’s shipping rates and was not happy when she explained that those rates had been agreed to through a normal contracting process, were subject to a long term contract and that they benefited the Post Office’s bottom line.  Given his tweet history, we all know that Trump could care little about the Post Office but does care a lot about Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos and wants to punish him because he is also the owner of his arch enemy, The Washington Post, the paper that disclosed this effort to pressure the Postmaster General, a story based on three sources.  Its worth noting that the last President who attempted to force a government agency to go after his enemies was Richard Nixon who pressed the IRS to invesigate a long ”enemies” list of Democrats and others who he hated, including officials from the LA Times and the Washington Post.   That misuse of powers made up one of his articles of impeachment.  To the extent that his investigation doesn’t get upended by Trump’s increasingly hostile actions, Mueller is carrying on.  Over the weekend, Roger Stone,  one of Trump’s oddest and most nefarious outside advisors, a guy who sports a large Nixon tatoo, told Meet the Press’s Chuck Todd that he expects to be indicted on “made up charges” soon and he might be right, at least with regard to the indictment.  Mueller has already subpoenaed two of his aides, but Stone hasn’t been called in for an inteview, a sign that he probably will be indicted.   As to the whole Mueller investigation, Rudy Giuliani, to the extent that he is to be believed, reports that Mueller has promised to complete the obstruction part of his investigation by September 1 and that he will publically release a report at that time, but then again, Giuliani keeps promising that Trump will sit down with Mueller at some future date, after he solves the North Korean problem, and that doesn’t appear to be happening anytime soon.  Giuliani also suggested that Trump’s team will produce their own report, one that disputes any and all of Mueller’s findings.   

Trade Wars and Other Hostilities:  Things aren’t progressing well on the China Trade War front. Unable to resolve much, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told Fox News Sunday that “we’re putting the trade war on hold” which was his way of saying that we are delaying the implementation of tariffs but haven’t gotten anything significant from the Chinese in return beyond an amorphous promise to buy more US products.  Though, the farmers who were due to suffer the most are probably relieved, trade experts point out that by backing off Trump is following the path of those predecessors who he persistently criticized.  As to Trump’s promise to go easy on ZTE, the sanctioned Chinese telecom firm, Mnuchin contradicted him by saying that the US was not willing to revisit those penaltites, which had less to do with trade and more to do with ZTE’s theft of US intellectual property and other spy like activities.  Regarding North Korea,  Trump continues to try to salvage the on again, off again summit.  He’s been attempting to make nice to Kim Jong Un by reassuring him that when security advisor John Bolton said that the US wanted a Libya type outcome, he didn’t mean that he wanted to see regime change.  It’s been suggested that Trump would be willing to let Kim keep his nukes as long as he gets rid of some intercontinental missiles, especially the ones that could reach the US.  The ones that can reach Japan and South Korea, those he can keep.  Trump really wants to see something positive come out of the Korean Peninsual and by postive think a Nobel Prize for him and/or a boost in the upcoming mid term elections for the Republican party because those pesky Democrats are likely to initiate impeachment proceedings if they take over.   

The Women Problem:  Stormy Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenatti tends to suck up all the air in the room so it would have been easy to miss that the Summer Zervos case is making progress.  Zervos is the former Apprentice contestant who filed a lawsuit against Trump in January of last year.  She alleges that Trump defamed her by calling her a liar for claiming that he sexually assaulted her in 2007.  Last week a New York appeals court denied a motion by Trump's attorney, Marc Kasowitz, to stay her defamation case pending appeal, meaning that discovery can move forward as both parties await a ruling on the appeal.  Zervos’ lawyer, who is not Avenatti, has asked MGM, the company that holds the Apprentice tape archives, to turn over all documents, video or audio, that feature Zervos or Trump. The subpoena also seeks any recording in which Mr. Trump speaks of women “in any sexual or inappropriate manner.” Another subpoena seeks records from the Beverly Hills Hotel related to any stay by  Trump from 2005 through 2009 as well as documents related to his longtime bodyguard, Keith Schiller, his longtime assistant, Rhona Graff or Zervos.  This is about to get very interesting.