Immoral, Unpatriotic, Unethical and Corrupt

Pencils or Pens: Yesterday all nine Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee signed a letter calling for Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff to resign his position as Chair of the committee and Republican Representative Mike Conaway laid into him for being “at the center of a well-orchestrated media campaign claiming among other things that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government”  In response, the somber and usually measured Schiff who admittedly has been one of Trump’s most outspoken critics, made it clear that he doesn’t regret for a moment anything he has said to date because he continues to believe that all of it was and still is more than justified.  He did that by delivering an impassioned speech where he listed each and every time that a member of the Trump campaign met with a Russian. His speech began as follows:  “My colleagues might think it’s OK that the Russians offered dirt on the Democratic candidate for president as part of what’s described as the Russian government’s effort to help the Trump campaign. My colleagues might think it’s OK that when that was offered to the son of the president, who had a pivotal role in the campaign, that the son did not call the FBI, he did not adamantly refuse that foreign help — no, instead that son said he would ‘love’ the help with the Russians. You might think it was ok that he took that meeting. You might think it’s ok that Paul Manafort, the campaign chair, someone with great experience running campaigns, also took that meeting. You might think it’s ok that the president’s son-in-law also took that meeting. You might think it’s ok that they concealed it from the public. You might think it’s ok that their only disappointment after that meeting was that the dirt they received on Hillary Clinton wasn’t better. You might think it’s OK. I don’t.” Given the number of Trump team contacts with Russians the speech went on for some time before ending with “You might say that’s all OK, that that’s just what you need to do to win. But I don’t think it’s OK. I think it’s immoral, I think it’s unethical, I think it’s unpatriotic and, yes, I think it’s corrupt, and evidence of collusion.”  If we survive the Trump era, Schiff’s speech will be remembered for its heroic eloquence, if we don’t make it out intact, Schiff will either go down as an enemy of the people or his very existence will be wiped from the history books. Later in the day, Trump, the person who would most like to see Schiff and his cohorts vanquished traveled to Michigan where he celebrated his “complete exoneration” at a rally.  During that speech Trump, hardly an Adonis, slammed “little pencil necked” Schiff while calling for the “sick” Democrats to “decide whether to stop defrauding the public with ridiculous bullsh-t, partisan investigations, or whether they will apologize to the American people."  The crowd who had broken out into an “AOC sucks” chant during preliminary remarks made by number one son Don Jr, ate it all up.  As to that whole complete exoneration thing, Democratic leadership is still trying to get the full Mueller report released so that they and the rest of us can get a better understanding of what the report says, one that goes beyond Attorney General Barr’s four page summary.  For his part, Barr who barely gave House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler the time of day during their Wednesday phone call, the one where he gave Nadler an estimate of the page length of the full report but little else, was seen dining with Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.  Kind of guessing that Graham now knows far more about the content of the Mueller report than its page count.

More Smoke and Mirrors:  David Farenthold, the Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing just how uncharitable the Trump Foundation was by writing a series of articles that led the Attorney General of New York to investigate and ultimately force the shutting of the Foundation, has moved on to reporting on Trump’s finances. Yesterday he co-authored a Washington Post article revealing how Trump inflated his net worth to investors and lenders.  He reports that Trump exaggerated his holdings and their revenue potential in his financial presentations by, among other things, claiming that he had 55 home lots to sell at his golf course in Southern California saying that those lots would sell for $3 million or more, when he had only 31 lots zoned and ready for sale; that he  claimed his Virginia vineyard had 2,000 acres, when it really has about 1,200;  and, as previously reported that he claimed that his New York Trump Tower has 68 stories even though it has only 58.  It’s not clear how much of this crossed the line from  bragging to fraud because real estate developers are known to engage in some puffery and because in most, if not all of the cases cited, Trump’s information included disclaimers and was “presented” but not audited by his accountants but a number of authorities in New York are now on the case. The Mueller Report, or at least the Barr Summary, may be behind us but that only gives authorities more time to focus on Trump’s and Trump Inc’s financial chicanery.  Then again the whole enterprise seems to be coated in Teflon so don’t get your hopes up yet.    

Other News:  NBC reports that the letters that Trump received from North Korea Kim Jong un really were love letters, they flattered Trump’s ego so much that Trump’s advisors really were concerned that he would concede almost anything during their Hanoi summit.  In particular, Secretary of State Pompeo, national security advisor Bolton and Trump’s Korea experts had to spend extra time with him, part of an urgent effort to make sure that he didn’t sell South Korea and Japan down the river.  On the staffing front, Washington DC Federal Attorney Jessie Liu who had been tapped to replace Rachel Brand, the former Associate Attorney General who early on flew the coop to go to Walmart in order to get herself far from the Trump swamp, has pulled herself out of consideration.  Apparently she was once a member of a women lawyers professional group that criticized conservative Supreme Court Justice Alito and that supported women’s reproductive rights.  To be clear, she never affixed her name to anything that “radical” but her prior association was too much for Utah’s Senator Mike Lee so she’s now out of the picture.   Homeland Security Secretary Nielsen wants Congress to give her the authority to deport unaccompanied children and to hold families in detention longer.  She plans to say that the border emergency is worse than ever, and though the number of people seeking asylum is up, it’s not as high as it was in prior years and current levels reflect usual seasonal variations.  Additionally, bottle necks at legal border crossings created by Trump administration “metering” policies, has made the situation worse than it should be, creating great “photo ops” for those who want to claim that hordes are invading the country.  For his party Trump told his BFF Sean Hannity that he isn't going to “shoot at immigrants but that shooting would be very effective.”  At least with regard to the Special Olympics and the clean-up of the Great Lakes Trump has seen the light, or at least recognizes that some of his planned budget cuts were too politically damaging so he now says that it was never his idea to defund the Special Olympics and that he will restore the $300 million that he tried to cut from the budget for a very popular Great Lakes clean-up project.  Then again, he’s also promised great health care for all, a promise that has so freaked out Senate Majority Leader McConnell that he’s told Trump he’s on his own on that one, so those Michigan people expecting cleaner lakes shouldn’t take him too seriously.         

Mueller Who?

Gone But Not Forgotten:  Special Counsel Mueller really is closing up shop but that doesn’t mean that his investigations have ended.  Yesterday, a judicial watchdog group requested that the federal judge overseeing the Mueller initiated case involving the “mystery” foreign sovereign-owned company authorize the release of details about the case and the identity of the company to the public arguing that since the Mueller Report had been delivered the case must be over.  When queried about this, the prosecutor handling the case told the judge that the case was active and that the Mueller grand jury is “continuing robustly.” So though Mueller is hitting the exits and his team is going back to their previous day jobs, others in Justice are picking up the slack and the investigations roll on.  As to the Mueller report, no one outside of Attorney General Barr, the soon to depart Deputy AG Rosenstein and their  minions have seen it, or at least that’s what we’ve been told, but Democratic leadership continues to press for its release.  Even the length of the report appears to be a secret.  House Judiciary Committee Chair Nadler says that Barr told him the length, but that he had to swear an oath of “Omerta” to even learn that much about it so he couldn’t share that information, he did leave the impression that it’s length was somewhere between 700 to 999 pages. The secrecy behind the report’s contents has led many to conclude or at least hope that there’s something or possibly many things in the report that Barr and Trump, despite his assertions to the contrary, don’t want the public to see.  That secret stuff, may reveal that while there wasn’t enough evidence to lead to criminal indictments of conspiracy or collusion or whatever you want to call it, there was a lot of truly odd behavior that walked right up to the line and that the evidence for Trump obstruction was on, or even crossed that line.  While we wait for those details, or at least the details that we’ll be allowed to see, Vanity Fair reported yesterday that former Trump lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen, who is due to start his sentence in a few weeks, was telling the truth when he told Congress that Ivanka’s lawyer Abbe Lowell had whitewashed his testimony to make it seem that Ivanka had little to do with the Moscow Tower project.  For his part, the “fully exonerated” Trump seems determined to do his best to ruin the lives and careers of all those treasonous people, FBI types, Democratic legislators and “liberal” reporters he holds responsible for the investigation to insure that no other president ever gets treated the way he’s been treated because he seems to have forgotten his own attack on all things Obama and Clinton and anyway, he never lies and always holds himself to the highest standards, right? That threat doesn’t seem to be doing much to deter Maxine Waters, the Democratic Chair of the House Financial Services Committee.  She reports that Deutsche Bank, the bank with a questionable history of lending Trump Inc lots of money has shifted into a cooperative stance and is now sharing the relevant Trump related  financial records that her committee previously requested.   

Shifting the Spotlight:  Instead of taking a few weeks to enjoy the glow of the Barr spin of the Mueller Report, Trump has jumped right into the thorny thicket of health care politics leaving Republican leadership in a tizzy. Trump insists that the Republicans have an Obamacare replacement plan waiting in the wings, he even has some of his surrogates out claiming that one exists, but there isn’t one so he’s told Republican leadership, the same group of geniuses who couldn’t come up with a viable alternative last time around, to come up with a plan pronto, or at least by the time that the lawsuit challenging Obamacare makes it out of the courts.  Despite their efforts to get him off of the health care cliff, he remains fixated.  To the extent that the courts rule against the red states attorneys generals challenge and overrule what is widely viewed as a bad decision by the Texas lower court judge who ruled that Obamacare is unconstitutional, no replacement plan will be necessary but if the case makes it to the Supreme Court and if SCOTUS rules against Obamacare, Republicans will face the specter of running for reelection just as 20 million or so Americans lose their insurance.  Speaker Pelosi, who has got to be happy about this shift in focus, isn’t sitting on her hands.  On Tuesday, House Democrats unveiled legislation to shore up the Affordable Care Act and expand enrollment to millions more people.  She also has her crowd focused on climate change.  To that end yesterday she unveiled another bill called the Climate Action Now Act which aims to block Trump from pulling out of the Paris climate agreement. Under the bill, Trump would also have to submit a new plan to Congress outlining how the U.S. will continue to meet the goals established in the Paris agreement.  In all likelihood, neither of these bills will see the light of day in the Republican controlled Senate where the turtle like Senate Majority Leader McConnell will do his best, which is frequently more than enough, to hide them in his shell.  On the budget front, the Defense Department has redirected $1 billion of its funding from last year to Trump’s vanity border wall project. Democratic appropriators are furious and have notified Acting Defense Secretary Shanahan that there will be consequences, they plan to strip the Defense Department of its right to reprogram funds in the future. The frustrated Shanahan’s appears as frustrated as they are, he says that he had no choice but to shift the money to WALL because he is just following the orders of his Commander in Chief.  Health Secretary DeVos is still defending her decision to defund the Special Olympics however, her argument is going nowhere on either side of the aisle.  Republican and Democratic legislators plan to override her request, in fact they plan to fund all the Special Olympics projects and may even include an bump up in program funding, a serious slap back at DeVos and by extension Trump’s attempts to cover his “tax reform” generated shortfalls with social program cutbacks.     

International Update: Reuters reports that Energy Secretary Rick Perry has approved six secret authorizations for US companies to sell nuclear power technology and assistance to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia plans to build at least two nuclear power plants and several countries including the United States, South Korea and Russia are in competition for that deal.  Though these authorizations relate to power plans, Saudi Arabian officials have previously said that if Iran builds nuclear weapons they will too. Another nuclear race, this one with Jared Kushner’s good buddy, the vindictive Khashoggi killer Crown Prince  Mohammed bin Salmon in the driver’s seat, what could go wrong?  Egypt is trying to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza to defuse the increase in hostilities that resulted after Israel responded to Hamas missile attacks on its civilians with a missile barrage of its own. To the extent that Egypt is unsuccessful, Hamas is expected to follow-up with another march of demonstrators to the Gaza border fence, an action that is likely to lead to escalating violence. All of this is taking place in the run up to Israeli elections which are scheduled to take place on April 9. With deadlines looming, a resolution to the British Brexit catastrophe remains out of reach. Parliament’s efforts to pass any plan continue to fall short with the stoic but desperate Prime Minster May saying that she’ll step down as soon as something passes, her way of saying, pass something, anything so that I can get out of here.    

Back to the Future

Jekyll and Hyde:  The first polls out since the Sunday release of Attorney General Barr’s summary of the Mueller report, the one that Trump insists totally exonerates him even though it doesn’t, show that voters haven’t been moved very much, Trump’s approval ratings remain where they’ve been all along, hovering in the high thirties to low forties, depending on the pollster with the usual outlier showing him a little higher.  Those who think that Trump is great still think he is, others who don’t approve of him still don’t like him and despite Trump’s assertion that he was fully exonerated a few more think that he did engage in obstruction.  As to obstruction, no one, including the so-called experts, understands the rationale behind Mueller’s lack of a conclusion on that point but most agree that by deferring to Barr he allowed what was supposed to be an apolitical report to get politicized.  Additionally, a whopping 86% of respondents want to see the Mueller report released in its entirety.  It’s doubtful that the entire report will ever be released to the public but the Justice Department reports that it should be able to release an “appropriately” redacted one in a few weeks, a timetable that goes way beyond the Democrat’s early April demand but since no one in the White House seems to care about Democratic demands, it’s probably the best that can be hoped for. Similarly, Barr has already committed to testify before the Lindsey Graham chaired Senate Judiciary Committee sometime in April, presumably he’ll also be called to the House Committee where Chairman Nadler unlike his Senate counterpart is likely to also seek a Mueller appearance.  Despite calling him and his team out as a bunch of angry Democrats for the past two years, Trump now says that Mueller is an honorable guy but Trump’s lawyer/fixer Giuliani disagrees, he says that since he was in the trenches more, he saw the real Mueller and he believes that the investigation was a “Jekyll and Hyde” thing, good when it refuted bad things said about Trump but bad when it didn’t and especially bad because of the way former campaign manager Paul Manafort was treated, a possible nod to Manafort that a pardon, or at least a federal pardon is in his future.  George Papadopoulos the “coffee boy” who pleaded guilty to lying and actually served some time in prison, is now seeking to change his plea if that is even possible and reports that he has applied to Trump for a pardon.  And why not, more curious things have happened, for some inexplicable reason and over the objections of Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the city’s police commissioner, prosecutors have dropped all charges against Jussie Smollett, the Empire actor who the Mayor and police chief still believe orchestrated his own take down.  

The Basics are Back:  Voters might not be all that influenced by the Mueller outcome but one thing we learned from the outcome of the 2018 midterm elections is they do care a lot about their health care, which is why the Trump administration’s decision to ask the courts to invalidate all of Obamacare is so baffling.  Politico reports that the decision to go that route was made over the objections of the two cabinet members who know the most about the subject:  Secretary of Health and Human Services Azar and Attorney General Barr.  Azar argued against overturning Obamacare, specifically citing the Republican party’s lack of any alternative health care plan with Barr skeptical about the legal basis for seeking to have all of Obamacare invalidated.  Despite their concerns, they were overruled, mostly because of the efforts of Acting Chief of Staff Mulvaney, who as a former Tea Party Congressman has a long history of opposing Obamacare.  His position is that the only way to get a new plan in place is to kill the current one and he isn’t all that concerned about disrupting health care coverage for millions of Americans especially if he can achieve a decrease in Medicaid spending and permanently eliminate any Obamacare related subsidies. Additionally, facing an out of control budget and increasing deficits, a result of the tax cuts implemented last year, Mulvaney just wants to cut social spending and doesn’t really care much about where those cuts take place.  Trump, the spin master in chief, is now saying that the GOP is the “party of health care” which given his history of saying the opposite of what he means, is fairly ominous for anyone who thinks that health care is a right, and maybe even more ominous for Republicans seeking reelection in 2020.  One of those Republican politicians, Senator Susan Collins, wants us all to know that she is really concerned about Trump’s decision to again target Obamacare, or at the very least is very upset about the decision to put it back under the Klieg lights so she’s writing a letter expressing her opposition and we all know how effective she can be, after all she did vote for the tax cut plan only after extracting a promise from Senate Majority Leader McConnell that he would support legislating a fix to the Obamacare subsidy payments.  That turned out well, didn’t it?  Also on the budgetary front, yesterday Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos made a feeble attempt to defend the administration’s decision to cut her budget by ten percent by pushing back at concerns about the elimination of Special Olympics funding.  The billionaire DeVos wants us all to know that she donates all of her $199,700 salary to the Special Olympics, an amount that should go far in offsetting the $17 million cut, right?  When asked by Wisconsin Congressman Pocan whether she knew how many children would be affected by the elimination of federal funding to the Special Olympics, DeVos said she did not know.  He responded “Okay, I’ll answer it for you, it’s 272,000 kids that are affected."  DeVos wasn’t the only Republican in trying to defend the indefensible.  Yesterday, Majority Leader McConnell put the Green New Deal up for a procedural vote, his attempt to weaponize climate control politics rather than to address the problem.  All but two Democrats responded by voting present instead of for or against and that in and of itself should have been the story.  However, Senator Mike Lee managed to steal away some of the attention that McConnell wanted focused on what he believes is the “folly” of the aspirational Green New Deal so he proposed his own solution to climate change saying: “You know where the solution can be found, in churches, in wedding chapels, in maternity wards across the country and around the world… this is the real solution to climate change: babies.” He added “The planet does not need us to think globally so much as think family and act personally. The solution to climate change is not this unserious resolution that we’re considering this week in the Senate but rather the serious business of human flourishing. The solution to so many of our problems at all times and in all places is to fall in love, get married and have some kids.”  Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the sponsor of the Green New Deal, slammed back, tweeting “Like many other women + working people, I occasionally suffer from impostor syndrome: those small moments, especially on hard days, where you wonder if the haters are right. But then they do things like this to clear it right up. If this guy can be Senator, you can do anything.”  She has a point.

Other News:  At a not so off the record luncheon for Republican Senators Trump went on one of his anti-Puerto Rico tirades, telling the audience that he doesn’t want to spend another dime helping the island, the one that he still refuses to acknowledge is part of the country.  He erroneously claimed that Puerto Rico had received $91 billion in disaster relief, an amount that he said was four times as much as it would cost to buy the whole island.  For the record that figure is an estimate of Puerto Rican hurricane damage, the amount of aid that has been allocated to the island is far less, somewhere in the range of $20 billion.  A number of politicians from both sides of the aisle, including Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader McConnell attended this week’s AIPAC convention. In an effort to push back at Trump’s newest rallying cry, that Democrats hate Jews and Israel,  Pelosi said “Israel and America are connected now and forever. We will never allow anyone to make Israel a wedge issue.” Senate Majority Leader McConnell spoke too but despite his pro-Israel message received a fairly “tepid” response.  He criticized Democrats, particularly the presidential contenders who weren’t there and also made some remarks meant to criticize those who tweet anti-Semitic and anti-Israel memes. Apparently McConnell doesn’t know or more likely has chosen to ignore that some of his Republican colleagues, including House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, fall into that category alongside his intended targets Democratic Congresswoman Tlaib and Omar.

Barrtending

The Barr Report:  Republicans are in celebratory mode, Democrats not so much, they’ve taken to calling the four page summary of the Mueller report that Attorney General Barr provided to Congress, the Barr Report.  They have a point, it’s only a summary, one seen through the eyes of Barr and maybe departing Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein,  and we don’t even know how long the actual report is.  Even Barr admits that Mueller made no decision about whether or not Trump obstructed justice, that the decision to conclude there was insufficient evidence to move forward on obstruction was all  Barr’s, a conclusion that Democrats view as too conveniently consistent with his long term and very publicly stated view that presidents can’t really obstruct because, well, they’re presidents.  Yesterday we learned that Barr has known about  Mueller’s lack of a recommendation about that “little” obstruction of justice issue for a few weeks.  He could have, and probably should have passed Mueller’s conclusion or lack of one on to Congress, leaving the decision on whether to pursue Trump for obstruction up to them, that’s what happened during the Nixon-Watergate investigation, but he didn’t.  Anyway, while Trump and his team of Trumpkins continue trumpeting their message of full exoneration, polls indicate that somewhere around 80% of the country would like to see the whole report to get a better understanding of why all those “Russian curious” meetings took place.  Democrats are doing their best to see that happen, or at least to get as much of it into the public domain as soon as possible.  Republicans who before they’d seen Barr’s summary wanted the whole report out there too so that they could pick apart anything they didn’t like have now changed their views.  One time House Intelligence Chairman Devon Nunes, who’s had to cancel some planned campaign meetings due to calls by parody tweeter @DevonCow, the guy he is suing,  to send zillions of cowbells to the site of those meetings, now says that it should just be destroyed and Senate Majority Leader McConnell has blocked a Senate vote on a resolution to push for its release, a resolution that was already passed unanimously by the House.  Kind of makes you wonder why they are so concerned about all of seeing a report that “exonerated” Trump?  Yesterday, while telling Barr that his summary report was insufficient, six House committee chairs sent him a letter requesting that he submit the full Mueller report to Congress by April 2.  Not all that surprisingly given his nature, Trump, who is thoroughly over the moon about his so called “total exoneration” is now seeking retribution against those who spent the last two years pushing the Russia collusion mantra.  To that end yesterday his campaign team sent a memo to  several media companies instructing them to "employ basic journalistic standards when booking" six current or former government officials that the campaign said "made outlandish, false claims, without evidence" while on air.  The memo targets four Democratic lawmakers, including Senator Blumenthal of Connecticut and House Judiciary Chairman Nadler of New York, as well as Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez and former CIA Director John Brennan but made no mention of people like Kellyanne Conway, the inventor of the Bowling Green Massacre, or any of Trump’s other even more questionable surrogates because it’s still okay for Republicans to push false narratives.  So yesterday when NBC’s Savannah Guthrie asked Sarah Huckabee Sander if she would “acknowledge it is incorrect” for Trump to call the Mueller report a “total exoneration,” Sanders responded "Not at all. It is. It is a complete and total exoneration." Adding to the onslaught, Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy called for House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff to step down.  That’s not happening, as he is widely supported by his Democratic colleagues. Separately, with Trump now emboldened Barr has now also weighed in on the lawsuit against Obamacare, the lawsuit being pressed by several Republican Attorneys General. Former AG Sessions had opted not to defend Obamacare in response to that lawsuit;  Barr, who danced around committing to what he would do during his confirmation hearings, has now weighed in, and not in a good way.    On Monday, the Justice Department filed a brief saying that the administration supports a recent district court decision that invalidated all of Obamacare. So it is now the official position of Trump’s administration that all of Obamacare including the private insurance option that covers 15 million people, the Medicaid expansion that covers another 15 million, and the protections for people with preexisting conditions, should be nullified.  Just another slap back at former Senator McCain and his errant thumb?  As to McCain, Trump also holds him responsible for sharing the Steele Dossier with the FBI, the dossier that Trump continues to insist started the whole Russia investigation even though it didn’t.  Yesterday, Senator Lindsey Graham, the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said that his committee will probe alleged abuses of the FISA Act at the start of the Russia investigation.  He then went on to call on Barr to appoint a new special counsel to investigate the “other side of the story.” At the same time he admitted that he’d had some involvement with the dossier revealing that after his one-time BFF, McCain showed him the copy that had been delivered to him by one of his aides, he told McCain to take it to the FBI which is what McCain did. Really, why didn’t we hear about that before now?

Collateral Damage:  It took only six days for New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to change her country’s gun laws after the Christchurch mosques massacre.  Not only have ours not changed, but the collateral damage from our tragic shootings continues to pile up.  A second student from Parkland’s Stoneman Douglas High School and the father of one of the children killed during the Newtown Connecticut Sandy Hook Elementary school massacre have now committed suicide.  Despite those tragedies, several gun activists groups are seeking to overturn the recently imposed ban on  bump stocks, the devices that turn semi-automatic weapons into even more lethal automatic ones. That ban is due to go into effect today.   And then there is Michael Avenatti, yesterday he was arrested in New York for allegedly trying to extort $25 million from Nike by disclosing some “damaging” claims about the company.  Shortly before his arrest Avenatti had tweeted about plans to hold a news conference where he was expected to air his claims which allegedly have to do with “evidence that one or more Nike employees had authorized and funded payments to the families of top high school basketball players and/or their families and attempted to conceal those payments.” Avenatti is now out on bail but it’s fair to assume that the that press conference has been “postponed.” Simultaneously with his NY arrest, Avenatti was charged in California in a separate federal case for embezzling a client's money "in order to pay his own expense and debts," and of "defrauding a bank in Mississippi." He claims that it’s all part of a Trump plot to get back at him for his role in bringing Trump’s porn star and playmate campaign related hush money payments to light; probably not but the timing of his denouement is quite ironic. Michael Cohen, meet your new cellmate?  

Teflon Don

Read and Weep:  Well you’d have to have been hiding under a rock to not know what happened yesterday afternoon so, like Attorney General Barr, I’ll keep this brief, not sweet, just brief.  After just forty eight hours of review of the Mueller report, a report based on an investigation that took two years to produce, resulted in nearly 200 charges against three Russian companies and 34 people, 6 of whom were former Trump advisors, 26 of whom are Russian nationals, and 7 of whom have either been found guilty or pleaded guilty with 5 already sentenced,  Barr sent Congress a four page letter saying that Mueller’s investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”  The Attorney General  also noted that Mueller, who never actually interviewed Trump, could not exonerate him of obstruction of justice, but that he, Barr, who had auditioned for the Attorney General position by writing and distribution a memo that said he didn’t believe that presidents could obstruct justice, had decided that the evidence provided by Mueller was “insufficient to establish” that Trump had obstructed justice.  A triumphant and emboldened Trump, who had spent the weekend at a fund raiser, hanging with his lawyers and playing golf but uncharacteristically not tweeting immediately announced that he had been fully and totally exonerated even though he hasn’t been.  Nevertheless, Trump does have a point, as a result of Mueller’s conclusion that there was “no collusion” and  Barr’s decision not to pursue obstruction charges, he has been handed a huge political victory.  Just two weeks ago the House voted unanimously for Mueller’s entire report to be released, that vote never took place in the Senate after Trump ally and Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Lindsey Graham blocked it saying that wouldn’t support it since it didn’t include a provision to investigate Hillary Clinton.  At that time Trump also called for the entire report to be released; however, now that he’s been “fully” exonerated, Trump and his allies are mostly saying never mind, we don’t really need to see any of those details and we most certainly do not want to know why Mueller couldn’t rule out obstruction.  As expected Democrats, to put it mildly, aren’t all that happy with what transpired yesterday.  Speaker Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Schumer issued a statement saying that “the fact that Special Counsel Mueller’s report does not exonerate the president on a charge as serious as obstruction of justice demonstrates how urgent it is that the full report and underlying documentation be made public without any further delay.”  Jerry Nadler, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee followed by saying “in light of the very concerning discrepancies and final decision making at the Justice Department following the Special Counsel report, where Mueller did not exonerate the president, we will be calling Attorney General Barr in to testify before the House Judiciary Committee in the near future.” This morning the editors of the NY Times added that part of the reason that Mueller couldn’t establish a direct connection between the Trump campaign and the Russians was because the Trump team didn’t have to engage directly, the Russians were already helping them adding that “we know that the Russian government interfered repeatedly in the 2016 presidential election, by hacking into computer servers of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. We know that it did this with the goals of dividing Americans and helping Donald Trump win the presidency. We know that when top members of the Trump campaign learned about this interference, they didn’t just fail to report it to the F.B.I. They welcomed it. They encouraged it.”  In any case, so many questions remain unanswered.  Among other things, Roger Stone’s trial won’t even take place until the Fall, there’s still that strange case against the unknown sovereign related company,  we still don’t have an understanding of Trump’s financial ties to Russia, nor do we understand why he is so in love with all things Putin, why so many people in the Trump orbit lied about their contacts and discussions with Russian officials about sanctions and why, if he was innocent, Trump tried so hard to obstruct the investigation.  There’s still all those other cases in New York and other places against and Trump and Trump Inc but first daughter Ivanka doesn’t appear to be concerned about any of that, yesterday she tweeted "Truth is generally the best vindication against slander. - Abraham Lincoln."  Then she probably went back to sending official emails off of her personal account, because when you’re a Trump you can get away with anything, or so it appears.    

Business as Usual:  The aftermath of the Mueller findings will likely reverberate for a while but the bottom line is that neither Trump nor his policies and ham handed approach to governance are going anywhere any time soon. The courts are still being packed with very conservative, frequently unqualified judges, migrant kids are still being held in cages, the effort to erode Obamacare continues, Republicans are back to calling for cuts in Medicare and want to slash Medicaid and at $234 billion, the February budget deficit was the largest monthly deficit on record.  Environment protecting policies are being dismantled and despite alarming evidence of its dire effects, the Trump administration and a large portion of the Republican party continue to deny that climate change is a threat.  Moreover, Russian “collusion” or not Trump is still an irrational player.  Senator Lindsey Graham who remains desperate to insure his own 2020 reelection, continues to call for an investigation into Hillary and all of those FBI guys who triggered the Mueller investigation.  Moreover, Trump’s international policy remains impetuous and tweet driven, on Friday he cancelled sanctions against North Korea that the Treasury Department announced on Thursday, by tweeting "It was announced today by the US Treasury that additional large-scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea. I have ordered the withdrawal of those additional sanctions.”  His advisors were so taken back by that totally irrational reversal that a scrambling Sarah Huckabee Sanders said he made the change because he kind of likes strongman Kim Jung un.  Following that absurd explanation, Trump’s spokespeople tried another one, saying that he really meant to say that he was cancelling some as yet to be issued future sanctions.  Also on Friday, Trump announced that he was nominating Stephen Moore a Heritage foundation economist who is not a real economist but who frequently appears on cable espousing Trump’s views on interest rates and monetary policy and criticizing current Fed Policy and who Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin said could be “charitably described as a moron” for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board.  She went on to say that the appointment was unique in that it was near-universally panned as a horrible idea.  She cites University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers who said “Call your favorite economist. Whether they’re left, right, libertarian or socialist, none of them will endorse Stephen Moore for the Fed. He’s manifestly unqualified.” Wolfers added that he thought that “Ivanka would be a better pick for the Fed than Stephen Moore.”  He was serious about that.

2020:  The Trump campaign team, who raises money on anything, is now out raising money on the Mueller report and in addition to shouting “NO COLLUSION” Trump continues repeating his newest talking point, that the Democrats hate Israel and by extension Jews, a disturbingly awful and hypocritical statement by someone who refuses to condemn white supremacism and thinks that there are “good people on both sides.”  The Democrats really need to get it together, stop racing to the left and start focusing on a unifying message that addresses the kind of core issues that unite voters or else, and by else think another Trump term.  Yikes!!

But Her Emails

Mueller Watch: It’s not clear if it’s really Mueller time yet but it most certainly is Mueller watch time.  The special counsel and his team are now being followed by hordes of reporters who are tracking their every move in hopes that they will be the first to catch one or more of them delivering Mueller’s much anticipated final report to Attorney General Barr.  Earlier in the week we were shown pictures of departing prosecutor Andrew Weissman dressed in a sporty tan suit rather than the usual somber grey typically worn by all the members of the Mueller squad and yesterday many of the cable news shows shared shots of Mueller himself, arriving at his office wearing a baseball cap.  The assorted pundits got particularly excited when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and AG Barr showed up at the White House but it turned out to be nothing more than a regularly scheduled meeting, or so we’ve been told.  In any case, it is March and it is Friday something could happen……or not!  Regardless of what happens on the Mueller front, things are most definitely heating up on the Congressional side of the investigation.  Yesterday Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings sent a letter to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone demanding, as if demanding anything from the White House ever bears fruit, more information about Jared Kushner’s email and messaging application usage.  It turns out that Cummings and then Chairman of the Oversight Committee Trey Gowdy learned that Kushner was still using WhatsApp, the encrypted service owned by Facebook, rather than any required official White House communication device during a December meeting from Kushner’s attorney Abbe Lowell but since he wasn’t chairman at that time there was little that Cummings could do about it.  Cummings indicated that Lowell said that he doesn’t know if any of Kushner’s communications involved highly classified matters because that’s “beyond his pay grade” but not to worry Kushner promises that he’s keeping screen shots of all of his conversations  in order to avoid violating the Federal Records Act.  Lowell also told Cummings and Gowdy that Ivanka uses her personal email but tries really hard to send any work related emails on to her work email, but only the ones that she actually reads, the others she destroys because that gnarly records act thing doesn’t really concern her.  It’s highly likely that some of those WhatsApp conversations that Kushner may or may not have saved for posterity were with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the charming royal who everyone but Trump and Kushner acknowledge was responsible for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Apparently, using unapproved devices is quite the thing in the Trump White House, Steve Bannon and one time deputy security advisor KT McFarland used their own too, in fact McFarland used her AOL email address for White House business because what could be more secure or un-hackable than AOL? That primal screen you just heard, it’s coming from Casa Clinton in Chappaqua. Lock. Them. Up.  As to all of the other documents that Jerry Nadler, Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has requested from the White House and an assortment of former Trumpies, so far the White House is not proving to be all that cooperative, in fact they aren’t all that into sharing but a number of others including Steve Bannon, George Papadopoulos and Sam Numberg  have forwarded their documents.  However Roger Stone sent a letter saying that on the advice of his counsel, he won’t be sharing any of his trove, he’s pleading the fifth because of his upcoming trial. Former Communications guru and Gal Friday Hope Hicks has also indicated that she plans to cooperate with the document requests and with the House Intelligence Committee too, the last time she met with them she told them that she had lied one or two or a hundred times for Trump but didn’t go into too many details.  The committee expects her to be more forthcoming this time around.  For his part, Trump continues to knock the very dead John McCain. In response to his assertion that he gave permission for McCain’s funeral to be held at the National Cathedral, a Cathedral representative said you don’t need presidential permission to have your funeral held at the Cathedral and countering Trump’s assertion that no one thanked him for facilitating the McCain funeral, a number of media outlets released an old tape of a McCain family representative thanking Trump for helping the family out, though to be fair to Trump, there are no tapes of the departed McCain saying thank you.  And of course George Conway weighed in too, once again calling Trump a narcissist and a liar.          

International Yet Domestic:  Yesterday European Union leaders agreed to extend the deadline for Britain’s “looming” exit from the bloc otherwise known as Brexit from March 29 to May 22  in order to give the Brits more time to get their act together, as if that’s going to happen.  Though he claimed that he wasn’t all that focused on the upcoming Israeli elections, Trump decided it was time to throw another bone Prime Minister Netanyahu’s way so yesterday he tweeted “"After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability."  Though Trump’s tweet represents a significant change in official US policy it doesn’t really change much on the ground. The reality is that maintaining control of the Golan Heights high ground as a buffer zone and protection from missile attacks has always been viewed by Israeli leadership as essential to the nation’s security, something more important than ever given the instability and turmoil in Syria so it’s always been a stretch to believe that the Israelis would ever agree to return the Golan to Syria. Besides that’s where all the good Israeli wineries are located. Anyway, Trump’s tweet was clearly timed to help Netanyahu.  Separately under pressure from the “progressive/liberal” organization MoveOn to boycott of the upcoming AIPAC annual conference, all the Democratic presidential candidates have indicated that they will not be attending.  It’s not clear that any or all of them were actually planning to attend anyway, Sanders has never been much of an AIPAC or Israel supporter.  However, instead of boycotting the others might have found it more effective to show up and express their views, they’d find that a number of the attendees share their concerns about Netanyahu and his attempt to insure his reelection by aligning with the far right ultranationalist Jewish Power party, something that AIPAC leadership criticized recently by issuing a statement saying that “AIPAC has a longstanding policy not to meet with members of this racist and reprehensible party.” Following the MoveOn boycott call just feeds into Trump’s call for “Jexodus” from the Democratic party.  Anyway, Speaker Pelosi, New York Mayor Bill De Blasio and Senate Minority Leader Schumer are still planning to speak. For their part, taking a page from the Trump “raise money on controversy” playbook, MoveOn sent out a text this morning seeking to raise money off their boycott success, a text that includes the hashtag #SkipAIPAC. Separately, yesterday it was reported that former VP Biden who isn’t a candidate, yet, was considering asking one time Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams to be his running mate. Just the leak of that nugget of news, raised enough eyebrows and attacks of gimmickry to provoke critics.  Gimmick or not, that could be a winning combo in the general election but the primaries come first and any effort to circumvent them would probably not be received all that well. Fasten your seatbelts, election season is upon us and it is going to be a bumpy, very bumpy ride.

Bizarre Things

 The Narcissist Speaks:  Something, perhaps the imminent release of the Mueller report, the ongoing investigations taking place in New York or maybe an anticipation of some new indictments, has Trump even more bent out of shape than usual.  That can be the only explanation for his obsession with and continued attacks on the very dead John McCain.  Yesterday during a speech to workers at a Lima, Ohio tank manufacturing plant he continued his tirade against McCain missing that the crowd included a significant number of veterans, few of whom were happy to hear one of their heroes get slammed by Cadet Bone Spurs. Among other things, Trump attacked the dead McCain for failing to thank him for giving him the “kind of funeral he wanted, which as president I had to approve” and though he did approve the use of a military transport to carry McCain’s body to Washington from Arizona, he had little to do with the rest of the funeral arrangements for the funeral that he was specifically asked not to attend and anyway expecting a thank you from a dead man is kind of nuts. Senator McCain’s daughter Megan, called Trump’s newest “broadside” against her father a bizarre new low adding “if I had told my dad, 'Seven months after you’re dead you're going to be dominating the news and all over Twitter,' he would think it's hilarious.” Her mother, Cindy, responded by sharing a hate and expletive filled message that she had received from someone inspired by Trump’s attacks, a chilling example of how Trump’s cruelty can bring out the “best” in others. Melania, too busy with her own “Be Best” campaign and tweeting birthday wishes to son Barron who turned 13 yesterday had little to say about her husband’s diatribes. Republican Senators Mitt Romney and Johnny Isakson did weigh in calling Trumps attacks of McCain deplorable, but most of their Republican colleagues fearful of getting some of the Trump wrath sent their way remained either silent or like Senators McConnell, Graham (McCain’s one time bestie), and McSally (McCain’s Arizona replacement), said something nice about McCain while intentionally omitting any criticism of their exalted leader Trump.  Trump also continued to rage at George Conway, the man that he’s taken to calling Mr. Kellyanne while Kellyanne continued to defend him, Trump not her husband, saying well after all it’s not like her husband is a psychiatrist or anything. George doesn’t seem all that swayed by either Trump or Kellyanne’s comments, he’s now started referring to Trump by his court name: Individual 1.  As to the Mueller report, the one that is supposed to be released “imminently” or so we hope and Trump fears, Trump asserted that he wants to see it made public in its entirety but that he will defer the details of that release to Attorney General Barr which is his way of saying that he’ll do his best to see it squashed or so thoroughly redacted that any parts of it that don’t exonerate him remain outside of the public domain but will blame any of that on Barr.  Trump then went on to attack Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein who he appointed and who was confirmed by the Senate for being just an unelected “deputy” who hired that “conflicted” guy Mueller, who he described as a friend of that “bad cop” Comey, finishing by saying that “it’s sort of interesting that a man, out of the blue, just writes a report….it’s ridiculous.”  Trump may or may not know what will be in the report, but he's taking no chances so he’s doing his best to knock it’s credibility by going after its authors and the basis for its creation.  And sadly, the same people who think that sending Cindy McCain hate filled messages is acceptable are probably buying his message hook, line and sinker.  Getting back to the Lima, Ohio audience of tank workers at the tank factory, Trump told them the only people to blame for the recent closing of the nearby General Motors auto plant, the one that he promised would stay open, was the United Auto Workers Union, not GM and most certainly not him.

Come What May:  Trump is kind of trying to stay out of the Brexit fray or at least look like he’s staying out of the fray because even he knows that being seen weighing in on another country’s domestic affairs, especially when that country is our “special” friend  isn’t a good thing so instead he’s got his surrogates, national security advisor John Bolton and son Don Jr, delivering his message for him.  Both hit British media scolding the country’s political leadership over Prime Minister May’s plan to request a delay in Britain’s “seemingly endless divorce” from the European Union. In an opinion piece published in Britain’s Daily Telegraph that someone must have written for him largely because it’s highly likely that he’s much of a whiz at authoring political commentary, Don Jr said “Next Friday, March 29, is supposed to be the British people’s Independence Day but because the elites control London from Brussels, the will of the people is likely to be ignored.”  He then went on to say that had May taken his father’s advice the whole Brexit thing would have gone much more smoothly.  For his part Bolton gave an interview to British broadcaster Sky News, accusing political leaders in London of failing voters who “chose more than two years ago to quit the European Union and its collective trade policy.”  He then went on to “dangle” a separate trade deal between Britain and the United States once Brexit gets done, assuming that it ever gets “done” saying “we are ready to go.” So much for staying out of other country’s politics. Nervous that the outcome of the Israeli elections could damage any chance that son in law Kushner’s peace plan will see the light of day, Trump also appears to be weighing in on the Israeli elections.  He’s sent Secretary Pompeo to Israel to discuss security with Prime Minister Netanyahu, a visit that is seen as bolstering Netanyahu’s position with his electorate and he plans to host Netanyahu at the White House next week for a working dinner and dinner.  

Other News:  The Department of Defense Inspector General is looking into complaints raised by outside group  Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics that Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, who was employed by  Boeing for 30 years, might have promoted Boeing during conversations about the awarding of lucrative military contracts even though he had promised to recuse himself from anything related to Boeing.  Given recent concerns about Boeing’s senior management’s too tight relationship with Trump and the impact that might have had on the US decision to keep the Boeing Air Max flying longer than every other country, those concerns have become more difficult to ignore. Shanahan’s chances of becoming the permanent Secretary of Defense have now taken a serious hit but then again this is the Trump administration so maybe not.  A federal judge has temporarily blocked oil and gas drilling on 300,000 acres of federal land in Wyoming ruling that the Interior Department “did not sufficiently consider climate change” in its assessments of whether to lease the land for drilling.  In their defense it’s kind of hard to take the time to consider climate change when you don’t believe or pretend not to believe that it’s a thing.  Lastly, @devoncow the parody Twitter account that likes to make fun of Congressman Devon Nunes now has 500,000 followers up from the 1000 it had before the Nunes lawsuit.      

Mothers and Cows

Warrant Reveal:  As ordered by the Judge overseeing his case, the Justice Department released several search warrants related to the investigation of one time Trump lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen yesterday.  As a result of the warrant release, we now know that that Mueller’s team began their investigation into Cohen’s misdeeds earlier than was previously known, a little more than nine months before the dramatic FBI raid of Cohen’s premises took place. In fact, within two months of Mueller’s May 2017 appointment the agency had already collected enough information to obtain warrants for Cohen’s Gmail accounts and cell phones, an indication that at that point, Mueller’s team already had more than enough probable cause to believe Cohen had violated several laws: making false statements to a financial institution, money laundering, and two statutes acting as an unregistered foreign agent.  The warrants also reveal that the investigation into Trump’s “campaign season” hush money payments to his playmate and adult film star paramours were originated by the Southern District of New York after Mueller passed the Cohen investigation into their hands.   A large amount of the released information was redacted including eighteen pages related to those hush payments, an indication that the investigation into those campaign finance violations remains active, leading many of those pundits with expertise about such things to surmise that details regarding the involvement of Trump, Trump Jr and one or more other members of Trump Inc are being held back from public view, another possible indication that that some if not all of them could still suffer the consequences of their actions.  The warrants also reveal that for the most part Mueller and the Southern District investigators have been way ahead of the press, for example they were onto Cohen’s interaction with and accepting of payments from Russian financier Victor Vekselberg way before the rest of us added that name to our Russian playlist. As to the Mueller investigation, yesterday NBC reported that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein who had previously indicated that he would be leaving in mid-March now plans to stick it out a little longer.  Apparently, his services are still needed, an indication that the wind up of the investigation is taking longer than he previously thought it would and/or an indication that as he's gotten up to speed on the whole investigation, new Attorney General Barr has come to the realization that it’s not a big nothing burger or a witch hunt but something more substantive and that he still needs Rosenstein’s involvement.  For their part Mueller’s team does appear to be very busy on something.  Yesterday his office asked a court for an 11-day extension on a filing deadline, claiming that, for the time being, key attorneys on his team were too busy with “the press of other work.”   

Wackadoodle Sideshow:  In the parallell universe of Trump world a number of other ridiculous things that shouldn’t be happening but sadly are also got a lot of attention yesterday.   Trump continued to go after John McCain because he just doesn’t get or more likely just doesn’t care that attacking dead war heroes is not all that classy or even remotely presidential.  When asked about his cruel anti-McCain weekend tweets during a press conference with Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, another one of those autocratic world leaders with Trump like tendencies, Trump justified his McCain fixation by saying that he never liked or respected him and would never, ever forgive him for voting against the repeal and replacement of Obamacare, as if that’s a justifiable reason to slam a dead guy.  The very public marital spat between George and Kellyanne Conway rages on.  After George tweeted out pages from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as “proof” that Trump suffers from a narcistic personality disorder or worse, Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale followed up by tweeting “We all know that @realDonaldTrump turned down Mr. Kellyanne Conway for a job he desperately wanted. He barely worked @TheJusticeDept and was either fired/quit, didn’t want the scrutiny? Now he hurts his wife because he is jealous of her success. POTUS doesn’t even know him!”  As if the absurdity of Trump’s campaign manager feeling it was necessary to weigh in on Kellyanne’s husband’s tweet, wasn’t enough, everything in the tweet was a lie.  George Conway is a very respected lawyer who shortly after the election showed sincere emotion as he very publicly congratulated his wife for “getting Trump elected.”  Not only did  Trump know and respect George but he sought out his advice on a number of subjects including about whether or not to retain Preet Bharara as US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.  Later, once he got to see Trump in action, George turned down an offer to serve as the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division because he was so offended by Trump’s actions.  To be clear  Conway wasn’t fired because he refused to work for Trump in the first place.  Yesterday when asked about George Conway, Trump called him a “total loser.”  For her part Kellyanne says that she doesn’t think that Trump is crazy which may mean that she does think that he’s crazy but doesn’t really care.  By the way George justifies his tweets by saying that its better for him to tweet than for him to tell his wife what he thinks of her boss and her job over coffee and pancakes in front of their four kids.  Proving that he fits in well in the Trump loony bin, Congressman Devon Nunes, the one time chair of the House Intelligence Committee, who made a fool of himself early on by pretending to have obtained exculpatory documents in a faux midnight run to the White House is now suing Twitter and two tweeters, one who goes by the parody name of “DevinCow” and the other who purports to be his mother, for $250 million. Mostly Nunes is very upset that both tweeters, who until yesterday didn’t have many followers but now thanks to Nunes have tens of thousands, have been making fun of him.  The lawsuit more or less contends that Twitter has a negative bias against conservatives like Nunes.  It’s worth noting that Nunes once introduced legislation intended to ban spurious lawsuits.  Though Trump loves it, the lawsuit should go nowhere but like many of Nunes other actions it will feed many more jokes about his ridiculous stupidity and will be applauded in some corners of the Fox/Trump Media empire.  On a more concerning note, following his meeting with Brazil’s Bolsonaro Trump announced that he plans to advocate for Brazil to become a full member of NATO.  Apparently he either doesn’t know that the “N” and “A” in NATO stand for “North Atlantic” or hasn’t looked at a map lately.  Anyway, he really likes Bolsanaro, another “nationalist whose populist appeal comes partly from his use of Twitter and his history of making crude statements about women, gay people and indigenous groups,” or as Trump said yesterday, he’s the Donald Trump of South America.

Deutsche Duet

Financial Shenanigans:  Late yesterday, the NY Times published a story revealing details regarding the depth and longevity of Trump’s unusually close ties to Deutsche Bank. The relationship is all that more remarkable when you consider that Trump’s reputation and history of “misconduct” and defaults was so troubling that most other banks, including, after one particularly bruising transaction, the institutional side of Deutsche Bank, wouldn’t lend him money. Of course the story also has a Jared Kushner angle; apparently after Trump’s relationship with the institutional side of Deutsche deteriorated the son- in-law introduced Trump to his private banker, Rosemary Vrablic, who arranged for the bank to continue lending Trump relatively large sums despite his troubled past with the institution.   The article contains a few revealing gems and bolsters the assertions that one time fixer/lawyer Michael Cohen made during his recent testimony to the House Oversight Committee about Trump’s habit of overstating the value of his real estate portfolio to secure the funds he needed for the refinancing of  loans and for the acquisition of new properties, including his unsuccessful bid for the Buffalo Bills football team.  In one case Trump told Deutsche Bank that his net worth was about $3 billion, but when bank employees reviewed his finances, they concluded he was worth only a mere $788 million.  It’s more than likely that Trump’s misrepresentations constituted bank fraud.  Among the nuggets included in the article is a mention that since his son ran Deutsche Bank’s commercial mortgage group, former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy frequently stopped in to the bank to say hello.  That family tie bolsters the validity of suggestions that Trump used his influence with Kennedy’s son to influence the Justice’s decision to step down when he did, paving the way for newest Justice Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court. The article also details how Trump pushed the bank’s fixed income salesforce  to sell some bonds for Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts to institutional investors who despite their eagerness to meet Trump on the marketing road show had little interest in actually purchasing his bonds. Trump managed to spur the salesforce on by promising them an expense paid trip to Mar a Lago.  After the bond sale was completed, Trump said that he wasn’t really serious about that promise, but when pressed he did host the crowd.  The bonds didn’t fare as well as the salesforce, they defaulted a year later.  As to Deutsche Bank, the article reports that management knew they were dealing with a flawed client, but continued the relationship through several changeovers in leadership because of a belief that having such a “prominent” client would help secure other higher quality business.  It’s not clear how that business part worked out but the relationship has finally garnered some “attention,” the Trumps and Deutsche are now the subject of prosecutorial scrutiny and another Trump related investigation.     

Investigatory News: A number of pundits have suggested that Trump’s most recent bout of frantic tweeting reflects his concern about the imminent release of the Mueller report and/or fears that an indictment of Don Jr may be forthcoming soon, possibly true, but then again waiting for Mueller’s report is starting to feel a lot like waiting for Godot.  That said, a number of other things that Trump would rather we not hear about have hit or are about to hit the news.  Yesterday,  ProPublica reported that Federal authorities conducted an “aggressive” raid of the office of Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy last summer, seeking records related to his dealings with foreign officials and Trump administration associates.  Broidy was the national deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee until he resigned in April 2018, when it was revealed he had worked with Michael Cohen to secretly pay off a former Playboy model in exchange for her silence about their affair and her discontinued pregnancy.  The search warrant shows that among other things federal authorities are interested in Broidy’s alleged work for the Malaysian financier Jho Low, who is at the center of the “1MDB” international bribery and money laundering scandal.  In November, the Justice Department alleged that Broidy was paid by Low to lobby Trump administration officials to “ease off” on US investigations into Low. The White House was given a heads up about the ProPublica story so Trump knew it was coming before he began tweeting last weekend.  Additionally, later today, a redacted copy of the search warrant that authorized the FBI raid on the homes and office of Michael Cohen will be released. It is possible the search warrant will disclose how investigators became aware of the hush payments that Cohen made on behalf of Trump, “what crimes or information investigators had established early in their probe, and what items they sought to search and gather when they executed the warrant last April.”  The warrant is being released by order of a Southern District Court of New York judge involved in the Cohen case in response to a request by several news outlets.  The Judge ordered the release after concluding that  “the public interest in the underlying subject matter of the materials, which implicates the integrity of the 2016 presidential election, is substantial.” Just another one of those things that could be causing Trump’s increasingly frenetic tweeting.

2020:  Over the weekend when asked about his fundraising, Beto O’Rourke said that he could but wasn’t ready to disclose how much money he had raised in the twenty-four hour period following his announcement that he was running for the presidency. Some took that as an indication that O’Rourke hadn’t raised much money.  To put it bluntly they were bigly wrong.  Beto’s take was $6.1 million, an amount that exceeded the $5.9 million that the impressive Berniac machine took it following Bernie Sanders’ announcement.  Though Beto continues to be the subject of much criticism for being  too white, too moderate, a guy and/or too vague about his positions, he certainly has a dedicated following and as Jeb Bush certainly knows, though fund raising success isn’t necessarily a good predictor of campaign success, it certainly doesn’t hurt. As to two of the other presidential wannabees, NY Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has been out talking about her transition from a moderate, A-rated by the NRA, upstate NY Congresswoman to the progressive Senator that she has become, arguing that her upstate roots will help her appeal to a wide voter base and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren called for ending the Electoral College, something that Democrats who have a habit of winning the popular vote but losing presidential elections would love to see, but Republicans who keep on winning presidential elections while losing the popular vote are unlikely to go for.          

Irish Eyes Not Smiling

Crooning All Day Long:  On St Patrick’s Day, while some were running the NYC Half, others like me were slogging the race, and still others were engaging in holiday revelry, Trump was tweeting furiously. Before he and Melania headed to church, in and of itself an infrequent occurrence for someone so embraced by the religious right, Trump slammed his frequent nemesis the departed former Senator John McCain, Saturday Night Live, Fox, a United Auto Workers union official for some reason calling him out by name over a GM auto plant closing, and, of course his favorite target immigrants.  Notably he had little to say about the avowed white supremacist who slaughtered 50 worshipers at a New Zealand mosque or the horror of that attack.  As to those tweets, Trump falsely alleged that McCain had leaked the infamous Steele Dossier before the 2016 election in an effort to hurt his campaign; the facts are that after the campaign a member of McCain’s staff was given a copy of the dossier, he shared in with McCain who turned it over to the FBI who already had a copy. That Trump slammed SNL wasn’t unusual, but it was particularly odd that he targeted an SNL repeat, the Christmas episode that featured a Trumpified version of A Christmas Carol with Trump visited by the ghosts of his past, present and future, an episode he’s seen and commented on before, although given his ever diminishing mental capacity maybe he doesn’t remember that?  Given his unique relationship with Fox, Trump’s Fox tweets were particularly unusual.  He attacked a few of the station’s more mainstream news anchors, the ones that attempt to tell things as they are instead of as Trump wants them purveyed, including Shephard Smith and the Fox weekend anchors, saying that they belonged at the failing CNN rather than Fox and then launched into a defense of Tucker Carlson and Jeanine Pirro, two of his staunchest supporters, who have recently been bleeding or temporarily bleeding advertisers due to their increasingly hateful rhetoric.  In particular he lambasted Fox’s decision to cancel the airing of Janine Pirro’s Saturday night episode, a recognition by Fox management that in light of the New Zealand shooting, giving more time to Pirro right after she made some particularly anti-Muslim remarks about Representative Ilhan Omar was a step too far even for them.   As to New Zealand, during his Friday press conference, the one where he ceremoniously “signed” his first veto opposing the legislation against his declaration of emergency, Trump denied that there has been an uptick in racists acts by white supremacists or that his rhetoric had contributed to creating an atmosphere that fostered their heinous acts, instead he attributed the New Zealand shooter’s murderous rage to the random rage of madman.  For the record, though it’s probably a reach to directly track any one attack to Trump, it’s even more of a reach to ignore that white supremacism is a bigly problem especially given that a less than comprehensive list of recent attacks by self-described white supremacists includes the killing of 12 Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue, the murder of 9 Black Christian parishioners in Charleston and the murder of 6 Muslims in a Quebec City mosque to name a few.  The number of hate groups operating across America rose to a record high, 1020, in 2018, an indication that fanning the flames of white resentment over immigration and changing demographics can be scarily effective in inspiring hateful acts.  Moreover, 2018 was the fourth straight year of hate group growth, a 30 percent increase that roughly coincides with Trump’s campaign and presidency, following three consecutive years of decline near the end of the Obama administration. Trump, who is quick to condemn any terrorist event that involves a Muslim assailant, just can’t find it within himself to acknowledge that white supremacism is a problem and his staff seems okay with that.  Kellyanne Conway called the New Zealand murderer an eco-terrorist, conflating his reference to himself as an eco-fascist with the fight to protect the environment and this weekend, while defending Trump against accusations that he was a racist, Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney took things one step further, suggesting that calling Trump a racist was like blaming Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the New Zealand killings because of the Democrat’s position on climate change.  Kellyanne’s husband George, whose tweeting against Trump continues unabated, weighed in too, after Trump’s McCain and SNL diatribes, he tweeted five words: “His condition is getting worse.”  Meghan McCain’s response was more personal, she tweeted out to Trump that “no one will ever love you like they loved my father.”  Sadly, a lot of people actually do love Trump, some of them because of his tax cuts and court appointments but a lot because of his hateful tweets and bigotry.  And proving that people from both parties can say things that they really shouldn’t, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib continued to litigate the almost, but apparently never to be forgotten remarks, that dominated last week’s news cycle, again defending Congresswoman Omar by saying that there is Islamophobia on “both sides” of the aisle.

2020:  The Democratic presidential wannabees were out in full force this weekend.  Now that he’s finally announced his candidacy Beto O’Rourke is getting a disproportionate amount of attention, some good some bad.  His policies are still unformed, something that he says is a good thing, he’ll work them out after he talks to as many voters as possible, an approach that may or may not work for Beto but would certainly not work out all that well for any of the women out on the campaign trail. That said, Trump and the RNC seem particularly concerned about Beto.  The RNC re-released a mug shot photo of Beto doctored to include a Leprechaun hat on his head, reminding everyone that Beto, who despite his nickname is of Irish heritage, had once been busted for a DWI, something that is not new news, it was disclosed during his Senate run.  They RNC ad managed to slam all Irish people at once, tying the huge group of voters to excessive drinking leading spokespeople for a number of other Republican politicians including Rand Paul and John Kasich to speak out. The tweet was called “vile” and “indicative of the bottom feeding” Republican Party led by Trump and RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. For his part Beto shrugged it off saying he wasn’t getting involved in any negativity.  When asked about Beto’s statement to Vanity Fair that he was born to run, a statement that Beto also tried to shrug off, Senator Amy Klobuchar said that she wasn’t born to run, probably because when she was growing up in the 1970’s women weren’t raised to even think that they could be president.  Klobuchar then went on to discuss some fairly well thought out positions, ones that might be too moderate given the current leftward tilt of the policy, but that sound fairly rational nevertheless.  That other moderate guy, former VP Biden made one of his “charming” gaffes, accidentally saying that he was running before pulling his statement back,  during a campaign stop that wasn’t a campaign stop.  Senator Bernie Sanders who hasn’t released his taxes yet is shutting down his “think tank,” the one that pays his wife and son and cut his head and received seven stiches this weekend but he’s Bernie so few if any of his supporters care.  Can you imagine what we’d be hearing about Hillary if she banged into a glass door and needed stiches?  Senator Kirsten Gillibrand formally announced that she is running which wasn’t much of a surprise because though she’s failed to gain much traction, its been clear to all that she is running. And then there’s Mayor Pete Buttigieg, it might be a stretch to think that he stands any chance of actually winning the Democratic nomination, however he continues to be quite impressive and has raised enough money to appear on the debate stage.  He sent out the most presidential missive of the weekend, a calming assurance to the Muslim residents of South Bend that they should feel safe to pray in his city as well as a fulsome condemnation of the attack in New Zealand.     

Singing Angels?  Well despite expectations that Mueller time is fast approaching,  the special counsel isn’t ready to serenade us yet.  However, we did learn on Friday that Rick Gates, the onetime Manafort sidekick who’s far from an angel is still singing.  Mueller informed the court that he’s not ready to provide a sentencing recommendation for Gates since Gates is still providing useful information and/or testimony in a few other cases.  It’s not clear what those cases involve, at least one of them may involve other lobbyists and might have little or nothing to do with the Trump/Russia probe but another is likely to involve misdeeds related to the Trump inaugural committee.