Daily Check-In 02/05/2019

Tuesday, February 5, 2019

THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

Trump Tower Moscow

BuzzFeed News released almost three hundred pages of Felix Sater’s communications involving Trump Tower Moscow from 2015 until July 21, 2016. This includes printouts of mails and text conversations with Michael Cohen, copies of the signed and unsigned Letter of Intent, and several in-depth pdf’s of the Tower project which included artist renderings and site surveys. The last entry was July 21, 2016. That was a week before the news of the Russians hacking the DNC broke. According to Felix, that’s when he walked away from the Trump Tower Moscow project. However, that contradicts his earlier interviews where he said he stopped working on the project on June 14th of that year. (Daily Check-In 11/30/2018)

I’m not sure what’s happening with this, or what BFN is looking to accomplish. I’ll go into that more in the Coda.

Manafort

Mercury Public Affairs (former @GOP Rep. Vin Weber), Podesta Group (Democrat lobbyist Tony Podesta) and Skadden Arps (former Obama WH counsel Greg Craig) are under federal investigation in #SDNY for their #Ukraine work with Paul Manafort.

Manafort hired Skadden to produce a smear of Yulia Tymoshenko (the opponent of Ukraine’s pro-#Russialeader), and hired Vin Weber’s and Podesta’s lobbying shops to push the false smear of Tymoshenko. Manafort paid them MILLIONS via a bank in Cyprus. NO ONE filed #FARA.

Skadden now admits they were a FOREIGN AGENT for pro-#Russialeaders in #Ukraine and recently settled with DOJ and agreed to cooperate FULLY. Gates (Manafort’s bagman) is cooperating, too. Meaning: the Feds have receipts and witnesses.

van der Zwaan (a Dutch/#Russian who worked at Skadden, pleaded GUILTY to lying. And Lordy, there are tapes

Kilimnik—“former” GRU #Russianintelligence officer/ Manafort partner—was intimately involved with the scheme. Kilimnik has close ties with Oleg Deripaska. The lawyers (Skadden), lobbyists (Podesta), and former congressman (Weber) did NOT file #FARA.

The #TrumpRussiaprobe is spread over MULTIPLE juridictions, including Mueller/DC, EDVA, and #SDNY, so firing one guy won’t stop this train. Justice is coming for all of those who sold our country for cash

Tax Returns

I hate to use the cliche “Why worry if you’ve got nothing to hide”, but the lengths that Trump is willing to go to just to prevent his income taxes from becoming public long passed the point of strange curiosity and is living in the land of the cover-up.

The question becomes what is he covering up?

Personally, I think he’s covering up three major areas in his taxes.

First, the existence of severe financial crimes including money laundering, tax fraud, and every other white-collar crime under the sun. He’s worried that since this is how they “took down Capone” that the Feds will do the same to him.

Next, he’s covering up how much, or more precisely how little he actually makes and is worth. His whole persona is built around being a billionaire deal maker, but he doesn’t act like an actual billionaire. He’s a poor man’s idea of a rich man. Releasing his taxes to the public would show that he’s a con man, and not worth anywhere near the $12-15 billion he claims he’s worth. His income is nowhere near a billion dollars a year, he’s underwater on almost all of his properties, and his licensing deals barely keep the lights on. He doesn’t own a billion dollars worth of assets outright, at least not legally. And claiming that he’s a billionaire when he owes so much on his buildings is like a dentist in California making $200,000 a year claiming to be a millionaire because he lives in a $1.3 million dollar home but owes $900,000 on the mortgage.

Finally, he could be hiding some crazy secret that he doesn’t want to get out that is listed on his taxes but isn’t known, like that he’s paying child support on a couple dozen kids or that he secretly donates money to NAMBLA or some shit like that.

I’d put money down on the first two, but given this timeline I’m half expecting him to claim Steven Segal’s love child as a grandchild that he’s supporting.

COHEN, NEW YORK, AND THE OTHER LAWSUITS

Inauguration

Remember yesterday (Daily Check-In 02/04/2019) how I said that we should expect to hear within 2-3 days how this new investigation came from the work that SDNY did with Cohen.

I was wrong. It took 2-3 hours.

Also, these subpoenas came after the Feds requested interviews with several executives at Trump Organization. And let me remind everyone that Andrew Weisselberg, the Trump Org CFO, was granted immunity for becoming a cooperating witness. (2018 Retrospective, Daily Check-In 08/29/2018)

According to reports, the focus of the interviews was on how much Trump Org coordinated with the Trump Campaign. That, combined with how wide of a net they’re casting for the inauguration, the foundation, and anything else with the Trump name on it leads me to believe that we might be looking at a RICO case later this year.

Scotland

Trips

SHUTDOWN & IMMIGRATION

STATE OF THE UNION

I’m not going into this now. I didn’t watch it, haven’t read the speech, or done anything else about it yet. I’ll go into the reactions and details more on Wednesday.

TRUMP THE RUSSIAN ASSET A.K.A. INDIVIDUAL-1

TRAITOR TOTS

FIGHTING BACK

CONGRESS

RIGHT WING TERRORISM & WHITE NATIONALISM

#METOO & WOMEN’S RIGHTS

Why are female lawmakers wearing white for State of the Union address?

A century ago, U.S. suffragists carefully chose the colors of their flag. Purple represented loyalty and was a nod to England’s suffragettes. White symbolized purity and contrasted with the flag’s darker colors. Gold paid homage to the sunflowers in Kansas, where Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had campaigned for the right to vote.

The suffragists’ outfits of purple and gold sashes over white dresses were intended to look appealing in newspaper photographs, Boggs Roberts said. The white was also intended to look nonthreatening so people would have a harder time criticizing the women’s appearance as aggressive or masculine.

“When the biggest publicity tool was newspapers and images were black and white, (if) you make a good photo, it gets reproduced everywhere,” Boggs Roberts said. “And there is nothing they did that they did not consider the visual element to.”

COLD WAR 2.0

#NEVERAGAIN

FIXING THE INTERNET

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

Tulsi Gabbard

Poll Dancing

SHS

Fact Checking

WHITE HOUSE CHAOS

TRADE WAR, HEALTH CARE, AND ECONOMY

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

PRIESTS & RELIGION

Pope says priests kept nuns as sex slaves

ENVIRONMENT & SCIENCE

ELECTIONS

Zero tolerance or rush to judgment? In the Trump era, Democrats hasten to push out the accused

THINKING AHEAD

IN OTHER NEWS…

RUMOR MILL

That’s it for Tuesday. Like I said yesterday, it’s going to be a crazy week.

So, what’s BuzzFeed News up to? Are they releasing all of their receipts to build credibility? Are they trying to destroy a potential trial? Or are they like Honey Badger, just not giving a fuck?

I’m not sure. I don’t know. And at this point, I’m not sure what direction they’re heading in. The last couple days have seen them release more information about Trump Tower Moscow, and they’ve been ahead of the curve on that story. At this point, I’m waiting for the White House to say “We didn’t do anything extensive on that building” only to find out that BFN has construction permits, vendor schedules, and the building is half constructed under a different name and will be renamed once Trump finds a way to get rid of the Magnitsky Act.

Also, I didn’t watch the SOTU. I spent a long time reading the emails and texts from Felix Sater. The bitchiness between him and Cohen reminded me of two wannabes acting like they’re harder than rock, but would cry like a little bitch the first time they get punched in the face.

In other words, the texts portrayed them perfectly.

A spoiler for Wednesday, there’s some secret shit going on in Mueller’s Cohen case, and Cohen has postponed his February 8th hearing with House Intel until February 28th. Adam Schiff said it was done so that it wouldn’t interfere with any ongoing investigations. Oh, and they also authorized the committee to send the official interview transcripts over to Mueller.

Expect some indictments in the next three weeks.

Thank you, and have a good one.

“Without Journalists, it’s just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur

Daily Check-In 02/05/2019

Published by noneofthisisnormal

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