Month: June 2018

Daily Check-In 06/01/2018

Friday, June 1st.

 

THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

WASHINGTON — A close friend of Jared Kushner has come under scrutiny by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for his proximity to some key meetings between Trump associates and foreign officials, according to five people familiar with the matter.

Richard Gerson, a hedge-fund manager in New York, was in the Seychelles in January 2017, less than two weeks before President Donald Trump’s inauguration and around the time Trump associate Erik Prince secretly met with Russian and United Arab Emirates officials, including Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, four of the people said.

While in the remote Indian Ocean island nation, Gerson met with Prince Mohammed — also known by his initials as MBZ — and communicated with a Lebanese-American businessman with close ties to the UAE, George Nader, who had organized the Erik Prince meeting, according to text messages Gerson sent at the time and a person familiar with the meeting.

…

Mueller’s interest in Gerson is another sign that he is examining connections between the UAE and Trump associates. Counterintelligence investigators have been scrutinizing UAE influence in the Trump campaign since before Mueller was appointed as special counsel, and the probe has continued in coordination with Mueller’s team, according to two people briefed on the investigation.

Surely this is the only crazy thing to come from this story, right?

Gerson had met Nader just weeks earlier when Trump officials, including Kushner, gathered for a secret meeting with MBZ at a Four Seasons hotel in New York, four people familiar with the meeting said. Trump’s incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn and chief political adviser Steve Bannon, as well as the UAE’s ambassador to the U.S., Yousef Otaiba, also attended the meeting.

The Four Seasons Meeting took place in December 2016, and served as the launching board for the Seychelles backchannel meeting.

The spokesman said Gerson’s involvement in the December meeting at the Four Seasons in New York was limited to escorting former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to the meeting

Tony Blair was at the December Four Seasons meeting?

Rick Gerson was Kushner’s man at the Seychelles meeting. He was at the Four Seasons meeting with MBZ in December, and was known to everyone involved.

I’m honestly not surprised that Kushner had someone at the meeting representing his interests. I’m amazed that it’s taken this long to hear anything about him.

Remember, George Nader has been a known cooperating witness since at least March. Everything he knows, Mueller knows.

 

PUERTO RICO

 

 

COHEN

Freidman pled guilty recently, and is a cooperating witness against Michael Cohen.  It looks like the lawyer who helped Freidman also flipped.  I’d wage dollars to donuts that this is for taking down Cohen.

 

TARIFFS, COAL BAILOUTS, INSIDER TRADING

The term for this is Insider Trading.  How much do you wanna bet that he contacted some of his buddies like Carl Icahn?

 

ZTE

And two weeks after it hired Bryan Lanza, an account manager at lobbying giant Mercury Public Affairson May 14, the White House announced that a tentative deal had been struck with ZTE to relieve the crippling restrictions, The Daily Beast reported on Friday.

Mercury Public Affairs is currently involved in the Manafort investigation for allegedly covering up his ties to Ukraine.  A “lobbyist” from the very same firm knee deep in the Manafort case and Mueller investigation helped coordinate the ZTE deal.

 

TRUMP MEETS NORTH KOREAN SPYMASTER IN OVAL OFFICE

As if this wasn’t stupid enough…

 

 

WHITE HOUSE CHAOS

 

#NEVERAGAIN

 

COLD WAR 2.0

 

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

 

GOP:  THE PARTY OF LINCOLN IS DEAD

Former state Sen. Jim Barnett announced that Rosie Hansen is his pick for lieutenant governor. Hansen is a Kansas native and a former foreign services officer who has been posted at several U.S. embassies overseas.

 

IMMIGRATION

 

WTAF?!

 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

 

PROGRESS IS PROGRESS

 

RUMOR MILL

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That’s it for today.  Looks like we’ve got a new name in the game with Rick Gerson.  Jared’s friend, and involved in multiple meetings, including the Seychelles meeting.

Rick’s role was very simple.  He was Jared’s stand-in.  There was too much heat on Jared for him to attend the meeting in the Seychelles less than two weeks before the inauguration.   There was no way he could go to this meeting without half of the journalists in America finding out.  Then, as soon as they found out where he was going, they’d look into who else was there, and BAM! backchannel blown.

Also, we might have a second cooperating witness against Michael Cohen for tax fraud in New York.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see charges against Cohen by the end of Summer, but part of that could depend on if and when New York modifies their double jeopardy standards to exclude presidential pardons.  To truly get around the possibility of a pardon, assuming Trump isn’t already under a sealed indictment (very likely) or at least an unindicted co-conspirator, the state double jeopardy exception would need to be stricken from law before charging Michael Cohen in Federal court.  If Cohen were pardoned in federal court with the protections in place, his lawyers could easily argue that any following attempts to prosecute him in state court would be an ex post facto action.

Ex post facto is a latin term meaning after the fact, or retroactive.  Per the U.S. Constitution, a person cannot be charged with a crime or punished for doing something that was legal at the time but made illegal afterward.  For example, there were many things “people that I knew” did with computers in the early days of the internet that were legal then, but became illegal later on.  Or like laws outlawing smoking in restaurants.  A woman can’t be fined today for smoking in a restaurant 3 years ago when it was legal 3 years ago.

The New York gameplan probably goes as follows; State legislature passes the change to the legal code concerning pardons and double jeopardy.  Shortly thereafter, Cohen gets charged with about 30 or 40 felonies.  He then makes a choice.  Cohen could either take his chances with a pardon, which only means that New York state would charge him with the same crimes, and probably more, or he flips on Trump.  Considering he’s already looking at a 7 figure legal bill, he might flip for that reason.

Finally, we might be on the verge of the first Presidential Divorce while in office.  Melania Trump hasn’t been seen in public in about 3 weeks, and the only peeps from here were tweets that didn’t fit her normal cadence.  Multiple rumors have her in New York City, and her and her son are not going to Camp David this weekend.  Not a glimpse in front of the press pool, not a single confirmed meeting.  Hell, not even an Instagram or Twitter Video post from inside the White House.

I’m wondering, did she flip on Donald?  A person cannot be compelled to testify against in New York, but that wouldn’t stop voluntary testimony.

I’ll try to write something this weekend, if just to stretch the writing legs.  I’m not sure about what, but I have about 20 or 30 things I could attack.  As far as the next couple weeks, I may have to disappear for a few days at some point.  I’ll explain why when it happens, but in those cases, I’ll try to do a “What’d I miss?” post for those days.

 

Thank you, and have a good one.

 

“Without Journalists, it’s all just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Daily Check-In 05/31/2018

Thursday, May 31st.

 

SAY GOODBYE TO THE ECONOMY:  THE TARIFF EDITION

TORONTO (AP) — Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Thursday he offered to go to Washington this week to complete talks on renegotiating the North American Free Trade agreement but that Vice President Mike Pence called and told him a meeting with the U.S. president would only happen if Trudeau agreed to put a five-year sunset clause into the deal.

Trudeau said he refused to go because of the “totally unacceptable” precondition. He made the comment while outlining Canada’s response to U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.

In a call to President Donald Trump last Friday, Trudeau offered to meet Trump because he felt they were close to an agreement that only required a “final deal-making moment.”

Trudeau said Trump seemed agreeable before Pence called him on Tuesday.

 

 

PARDONTOWN

President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he will pardon Dinesh D’Souza, a right-wing commentator, author and filmmaker was was convicted in 2014 of using a “straw donor” to make an illegal campaign contribution.

 

TRUMP HATES IMMIGRANTS

 

THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

But in the meeting at the Justice Department, Mr. Rosenstein added a new detail: He said the president had originally asked him to reference Russia in his memo, the people familiar with the conversation said. Mr. Rosenstein did not elaborate on what Mr. Trump had wanted him to say.

Mr. McCabe’s memo reflects the F.B.I.’s early efforts to discern Mr. Trump’s intentions in firing Mr. Comey, an effort that continues today.

 

COHEN

 

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump a feckless cunt.  Feckless means lacking strength of character or irresponsible.  I take issue with Samantha calling Ivanka a cunt.  Ivanka Trump has neither the depth nor warmth of a cunt.

The second group, roughly speaking, is the culturally affronted crowd you see reflected on social media all the time.

These voters don’t think much about an economic future; they want a time machine that will take them back to an orderly America ruled by white dudes, where you could say whatever you wanted without being labeled a bigot or a sexist, where you didn’t have to worry about gay rights and women’s rights, and where black guys getting dragged out of a coffee shop for no reason was called Wednesday.

I’m a skeptic of reflexive political correctness, as I think a lot of mainstream voters are. The pseudo-intellectual bullying on college campuses today is enough to make any thinking person recoil.

But the cultural right isn’t really opposed to the silly lexicon of liberalism as much as to liberalism itself. What they call PC is really just the modern concept of tolerance.

These voters represent a shrinking slice of the electorate, if you take any kind of long view, and they’re hardly misunderstood. They have the loudest voice in America, in fact — a president who stars in his own round-the-clock reality show, a miner of nostalgia who lives only for their applause.

The problem for coastal liberals who run news and entertainment media is that in trying to speak to the economically disenchanted first group, they inevitably get dragged down into the netherworld of the culturally outraged second.

 

WHITE HOUSE CHAOS

 

COLD WAR 2.0

 

 

GOP:  THE PARTY OF LINCOLN IS DEAD

 

#NEVERAGAIN

 

PUERTO RICO

 

PROGRESS IS PROGRESS

The constitutional amendment, which declares that equality of rights “shall not be denied by the U.S. or any state on account of sex,” was first introduced in Congress in the 1920s. It was sent to the states for ratification in 1972, but only 35 states ratified the amendment by the congressionally set 1982 deadline — three states short of the 38 required to append it to the Constitution.

The issue languished in the intervening decades and was generally assumed to be a lost cause. But last year, debate around the amendment was revived when Nevada, in part spurred by the anti-sexual harassment #MeToo movement, chose to ratify it.

With Illinois now on board, just one more state is required in order to ratify the amendment. According to the State-Journal Register, Congress will then need to remove the deadline for it to be included in the Constitution.

The other states that have yet to ratify the amendment are: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah.

 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

 

Federal prosecutors on Wednesday dropped seven cases against people charged with rioting in Washington, DC, during President Donald Trump’s inauguration, after getting in trouble in court for how they handled evidence provided by the right-wing activist group Project Veritas.

The announcement came after a judge concluded last week that the government wrongly withheld the full version of a video of a pre-protest planning meeting secretly recorded by a Project Veritas operative. The revelation of that video led to the discovery of other undisclosed Project Veritas videos, prompting defense lawyers to protest and a judge to find that prosecutors committed a “serious violation.”

 

RUMOR MILL

 

 

That’s it for today.  Thankfully.

Today was exhausting, and not the good kind of exhausting from after a workout.  Watching things unfold today was stressful.  Enacting sanctions against most of America’s allies, while Dotard threatens to pardon every celebrity criminal he can think of.

This is bad, but these moves reek of one main characteristic: Desperation.

The tariffs are desperate attempts to either cash in and force bribes, or a desperate attempt to distract from all of the shit coming his way.  This is by far the stupidest thing he could have done.  If by some unholy miracle he doesn’t get removed from office by 2020, costing 150,000 Americans their jobs from areas that “voted” for him in 2016 and leading the country into a recession or worse is political suicide.

Pardoning Dinesh D’Souza and talking about pardoning others screams of desperation.  I’ve mentioned before in GTKYG-Pardon Limitations why Trump can’t pardon his way out of this, but here’s a quick recap; pardons can’t be used to cover up one’s own crimes, can’t be used for obstructing an investigation, and don’t work on state crimes.

It’s hard to stay positive in the moment as all of the craziness happens.  It’s harder when the craziness comes flying out at such an obnoxious pace.

I’m confident that we will get through this.  But we have to go through it first.

 

Thank you, and have a good one.

 

“Without Journalists, it’s just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur