Twisting in the Wind

Moscow Calling:  The plot twists keep coming. Just as Trump and his team of legal wizards were patting themselves on the back for pulling one over on Special Counsel Mueller by turning cooperator Paul Manafort into a triple agent, Mueller struck back with his own turncoat.  Yesterday, former Trump lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to one count of lying to Congress, yes lying to Congress really is a thing.  He admitted that he had participated in a cover-up when he told Congressional staff that negotiations with the Russians about a Moscow Trump Tower project had ended in  January 2016, in reality they continued until June 2016.  He said that he lied because he wanted his statements to be consistent with Trump’s public assertions during the campaign that he was not engaging in any business or any discussions of business opportunities with Russians  Additionally, though he told Congressional staff that his efforts to connect with Dmitry Peskov, a close advisor to Vladimir Putin, had failed when Peskov’s office didn’t respond to his email, Peskov’s office did respond to his outreach and he and Peskov’s assistant discussed ways to advance the project. He also admitted that he had lied about his plans to travel to Russia to meet with Russian officials about the project, he had planned to go and had even discussed arranging for Trump to go too, but cancelled his plans in June around the time that the project finally died, or went on hiatus. Lastly, Cohen disclosed that he had kept Trump who was named in Cohen’s “information” as Person Numero Uno, as well Don Jr and Ivanka updated on the status of his skyscraper negotiations. That last thing could turn into a bigly problem for Don Jr who is thought to have told Congressional questioners that he wasn’t involved in the Moscow project.  It appears that Trump learned about Cohen’s impending plea on Wednesday night when he was brought up to date by Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker, the stooge he planted in the Justice Department to make the Mueller investigation go away; at least for now that strategy doesn’t appear to be working out all that well, Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein and Mueller seem to be making end runs around Whitaker. That update may explain why Trump and Melania ditched the traditional White House tree lighting ceremony they were hosting earlier than anyone expected.  Yesterday morning as he departed for the G20 meeting in Argentina, Trump responded to questions from the press by saying that Michael Cohen wasn’t to be believed because he was “very weak” and that he was inventing stories to minimize his future jail time. At the same time he partially contradicted himself by saying that even if Cohen’s version of events was true, it wouldn’t matter because there was nothing wrong with pursuing Russian business during the campaign because had he lost he would have needed something to fall back on. Though it’s not immediately clear that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s current lawyer/fixer, is much of a truth teller, later in the day he kind of confirmed Cohen’s version of the Moscow tower story by saying that Trump had revealed a similar timeline in the written response to collusion related questions that was submitted to Mueller last week.  It’s not clear whether Giuliani made that up on the fly, in any case if Trump’s response was inconsistent with Cohen’s than Trump was just caught in one of those “perjury traps,” if it’s accurate then Trump admitted to lying to the public to win the Republican nomination and the election, to the extent that his base really cares.   Trump’s other former business associate Felix Sater, the convicted felon and friend of Cohen who used to have an office in Trump Tower and who has been involved in a number of Trump real estate endeavors including the Moscow Tower project confirmed Cohen’s version of events and also confirmed an interesting tidbit that first showed up in Buzzfeed but has now made it to the more mainstream press, that little tidbit reveals that as a marketing ploy the Trump team considered gifting a $50 million residence in the Moscow Tower project to Putin, something that would have brought Putin on board while helping to sell the building’s other luxury residences to oligarchs who’d be happy to shell out extra dough to be close to their exalted leader.  Sater figured that they would make back the $50 million by overcharging those “gullible” oligarchs.  Although the Moscow hotel project went cold in June 2016, Russian cannoodling with Trump continued, the infamous NY Trump tower meeting between Don Jr, Kushner,  Manafort and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya took place that June, the emails that the Russians mined sometime around March  from the DNC server were released in October and the rest is history, or at least history that is still being uncovered. Members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, at least the Democratic members, are now scouring their interview transcripts for other Trump team “inconsistencies” and by inconsistencies think lies and Adam Schiff the soon to be Chairman of the House committee is getting ready to share those transcripts with Mueller’s team.  It’s also reported that a number of the current and former White House denizens who testified in front of Congress are kind of freaking out.  Apparently, some of them didn’t realize that lying to Congress wasn’t exactly a good thing.  As to Michael Cohen, he spent upwards of seventy hours talking with Mueller’s team. It’s highly likely that the Moscow Tower stuff was just a small part of what he disclosed, the best is yet to come and we still haven’t heard from Trump accountant Alan Weisselberg.  

More Drama:  That Mueller picks Trump travel days to announce indictments or plea deals is probably not much of a coincidence. He appears to love pulling Trump’s chain.  He indicted a number of Russian players right before the Helsinki summit shining a bad light on Trump’s cozying up to Putin during their meeting and joint news conference.  This time around it looks like Mueller’s Cohen surprise is having an influence on Trump’s meeting plans.  After boarding his flight to Argentina, Trump’s team announced that he had decided to cancel his planned private meeting with Putin.  The purported reason for the cancellation is to deliver the message to Vlad that his increasingly aggressive actions against Ukraine are intolerable however, it’s also likely that the meeting was cancelled because the optics of Trump hanging with his BFF right now would be a bit too much even for Trump.  Trump also cancelled plans to meet with Turkey’s Erdogan, clearly he’s not up for a tough discussion about why the US is isn’t taking Turkey’s version of the Khashoggi murder events into account and why despite his pleas, plans to release Erdogan’s arch enemy Fethullah Gulen, the cleric residing in Pennsylvania, aren’t going anywhere.  Away from Argentina, two other odd things happened yesterday.  German police raided the offices of Deutsche Bank, Trump’s favorite and sometimes only lender, seeking out files related to Russian money laundering.  Though there is no indication that the raid had anything to do with Trump the timing is awfully coincidental.  Also too coincidental, yesterday morning Federal agents showed up unannounced at the Chicago City Hall office of Alderman Ed Burke, kicked everyone out, papered over the windows and then left with a box or two.  Burke’s law firm served as Trump’s property tax attorney from 2006 to 2018, the relationship ended over what Burke called “irreconcilable differences.”  During the time that he worked for Trump Burke’s law firm saved Trump $14.1 million in property taxes.

No Judgeship for You:   Senator Jeff Flake is not flaking out this time.  To the consternation of Majority Leader McConnell and a number of his other Republican colleagues, Flake continues to refuse to vote for any more of Trump’s judicial nominees until Mueller protecting legislation is brought to the Senate floor for a vote. Flake’s intransigence helped to doom the nomination of Thomas Farr, one of the architects of North Carolina’s racially gerrymandered districts.  Yesterday, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott announced that he would vote against Farr.  He based his decision on a Washington Post article that detailed a Justice Department investigation into former Senator Jesse Helms 1992 racially tinged campaign tactics, those tactics involved intimidating Black voters by sending  out postcards that suggested they were not eligible to vote and that they could be prosecuted for fraud if they tried.  Farr was involved in that campaign. With all of the Democrats voting against Farr, Flake and Scott’s no votes have effectively killed his nomination.  In explaining his decision Senator Scott said that the Republican Party is  “not doing a very good job of avoiding the obvious potholes on race in America.”  A little bit of an understatement from the Republican Party’s sole African American Senator.