Brother, Can You Spare a Billion?

The Battle Continues:  Yesterday the White House directed former White House Counsel Don McGahn not to comply with a subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee for documents related to the Mueller investigation.  Those documents are problematic for Trump because they include all of those very detailed contemporaneous notes that McGahn took during his meetings with Trump and they, together with McGahn’s 30 hours of interviews with the Mueller team, serve as the framework for the obstruction case against Trump.  It’s still not yet clear whether the White House will attempt to prohibit McGahn from testifying in front of Congress, but it remains possible that they will, or at least that they will try.  For now, McGahn, who can’t be all that happy about being stuck in the middle of an escalating battle between House Democrats and the White House, has told the House that he will comply with the White House’s request regarding his notes, until the two sides resolve their differences in court or otherwise.  It’s not clear what he will do if the White House tries to block his testimony altogether, he’s a private citizen now and to the extent that he wants he can do what former Acting AG Sally Yates did when she was called, show up and act like a patriot.  As to the whole investigation, the turtle, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, stuck his head out of his shell, went to the floor of the Senate and pronounced the “exhaustive” Mueller investigation thing over.  He insisted that it was time to stop being “consumed by unhinged partisanship” and move on.  Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer responded to the uber partisan McConnell about as would be expected saying that his declaration of “case closed” is a “stunning act of political cynicism and a brazen violation of the oath we all take” adding “the special counsel report laid out 11 instances of the president’s obstruction, and left a raft of unanswered questions about coordination between the campaign and Russia. These are not trivial or political questions — they go to the wellspring of our democracy.” Senator Elizabeth Warren spoke too, she just called for the House to begin impeachment saying that they had a moral obligation to do so.   For her part,  Speaker Pelosi called out Trump for trying to provoke Democrats into proceeding with impeachment.  She said he was “taunting, taunting, taunting” because he knows it would be “divisive” for the country, but doesn’t care because he “just wants to solidify his base.”   Trump isn’t the only one who is taunting Democrats, Attorney General Barr is at it too.  To that end, though they negotiated yesterday, his Justice Department and the Jerry Nadler chaired Judiciary Committee still haven’t resolved their differences concerning the release of an unredacted or at least a less redacted version of the Mueller Report.  So far the Justice Department has opened the viewing of a less redacted version of the report to twelve senior Senators and Congressmen who, to the extent they’re interested, are being permitted to read the report in one of those secured rooms but aren’t allowed to bring any aides, take notes, or talk about what they’ve read.  So far only House Judiciary Committee ranking member Doug Collins and Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham have taken the Justice Department up on that offer, no Democrats have because they reject those limitations.   During yesterday’s discussions Barr’s team offered to loosen up some of those rules, allowing aides and notetaking.  Nadler wants to open up the “permitted” list of reviewers to all the members of the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees and their aides.  In addition he wants Barr to ask the courts to give Congress access to the redacted Grand Jury testimony, something that has been done in the past.  At this point the two sides still haven’t resolved their differences, Nadler plans to move forward with a vote citing Barr for contempt of Congress today, with Barr countering that if Nadler does, he will direct Trump to assert executive privilege over the parts of the Mueller report that have not been made available.  As to the whole investigation, yesterday during a Senate Appropriations Committee meeting, FBI Director Chris Wray contradicted Barr’s assertion that the intelligence agencies had “spied” on Trump’s campaign, he rejected the word “spying” and said that he has seen no evidence that any illegal surveillance took place.  

One Billion Down :  Trump’s loyal minions at the IRS and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin are still sitting on his tax returns but somehow or other the NY Times managed to get their hands on a decade of Trump’s tax information, not his full returns but lots of really interesting and revealing stuff.   That “stuff” reveals that Trump had losses of $1.17 billion during the 1984 to 1995 period, that for eight of those years he paid no federal taxes and that he only paid modest amounts in the remaining two years and then only because he was subject to the alternative minimum tax.   According to high income data sampling compiled annually by the IRS, Trump lost more than double the amount lost by any other American taxpayer, quite a feat for anyone but especially for someone who won the presidency by deluding his followers into believing that he is a brilliant businessman and dealmaker.  Though a portion of those losses were attributable to depreciation, most were the result of poor business judgment, bad investments, and the mismanagement of assets.  Moreover, the few times when he did manage to make money, his profits came from “posing” as a corporate raider rather than his real estate, casino, or airline businesses and ultimately he lost most of that money as well as his raider creds because market players quickly figured out that he was gaming the market but had no interest in actually taking over any of the companies that he loudly targeted.  As previously reported, at times he was bailed out by his father whose contributions to his livelihood allowed him to continue to pretend that he was the wealthy “master of the universe” that he wasn’t.  The information uncovered by the Times also reveals $53 million in interest income in one of the covered years, an unusually high amount given his interest income in other years. Since they didn’t have complete tax returns the extremely astute reporters couldn’t figure out the source of that income, but the figure raises a number of other questions about money laundering or other possibly nefarious activities.  The response from various and sundry Trump’s spokesmen is, of course, that the NY Times report is just more fake news.  On a separate front, New York State legislators are getting closer to passing legislation that would allow state officials to provide a copy of Trump’s state returns to Congress upon request, a request that would likely come the minute Governor Cuomo signs that legislation.

Disturbing:  A while back it was reported that influential evangelist Jerry Falwell Jr had thrown his support behind Trump right before the Iowa primaries in response to some arm twisting and other such threats from Trump’s one time fixer, the now imprisoned Michael Cohen.  At the time it was suggested that Falwell had a Florida pool boy or some other such problem in his past.  Though it’s still not clear if the pool boy story is true, it turns out that Falwell had a problem with someone trying to blackmail him with the kind of pictures that “should be kept private,” that somehow or other Michael Cohen got that person to stop causing trouble, got all or most of those pictures destroyed and then allegedly used the one picture that he didn’t destroy to “convince” Falwell to become one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders.  At least that’s what Reuters reports that Cohen and Tom Arnold, the comedian and former spouse of Roseanne Barr, discussed on a phone call that Arnold taped and shared with the Reuters team.  For their part, the Falwell’s acknowledge a long relationship with Cohen but deny that anything else about this story is accurate and what else would we expect them to say?  In the real world, things are heating up in the Middle East.  Secretary of State Pompeo cancelled plans to meet with German leader Angela Merkel in Berlin instead making an unscheduled trip to Iraq to discuss the problems in the region, and by problems think “threats” from Iran.  For their part, late yesterday Iran told the remaining partners in their nuclear deal, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, China and Russia, that they have 60 days to implement their promises to protect Iran's oil and banking sectors from US sanctions or else and by or else they mean that they will start high level enrichment of uranium again.  Prelude to war?