Tag: Politics

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Daily Check-In 05/30/2018

Wednesday, May 30th.

 

COHEN:  THE SHREDDER

Michael Cohen is a fucking idiot, part 317:  Types of shredders.

Straight cut shredders use cutting blades that move in one direction and produce long, skinny strips of paper.  Cross-cut shredders use blades that cut in two directions which produce tiny diamonds.  Micro-cut shredders turn the paper into dust.

Straight-cut documents can be put back together “fairly easy.”  Cross-cut is harder, requiring scanners and computer software.  Micro-cut shredders require a time machine.

A smart person looking to destroy things in 2018 would use a micro-cut shredder, or at the very worst a cross-cut.  Micro-cut shredders exist across all price points.  Someone could get one of these from Staples for less than $100.

Michael Cohen uses a straight-cut shredder.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s ten years old and has a name, like Old Cutty.  The FBI will have recreated everything they found in Old Cutty within the next couple weeks.

Michael Avenatti has withdrawn his request to represent adult film star Stormy Daniels in the case centered on the FBI raid of President Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen.

Shortly after a conference hearing Wednesday in a federal district court in Manhattan, Avenatti withdrew his request to weigh in on the case.

…

In the document Avenatti filed in court Wednesday, he said he is withdrawing his request to intervene and will re-file it, if necessary, at a later time.

There’s a lot of legalese involved, but the short version is that Avenatti’s still representing Stormy Daniels.  It’s just that he’s not currently involved in the evidentiary process of United States vs. Cohen because he’s already working with them, and another lawyer working with Stormy that is natively licensed in New York can speak for them.

The cost to perform this review is substantial.  How much?  Let’s figure that out…

According to the transcripts, Cohen’s lawyers have been working “day and night” for weeks.  They have 15 high priced lawyers, plus 2 data entry folks.  Per yesterday’s report on the Special Master (Daily Check-In 05/29/2018), an hourly rate of $700 per hour is not unreasonable for this work.  The data entry folks will cost less, but I’ll say $100 per hour.

To me, “working day and night” is a minimum of 16 hours per day, but to keep from killing people, I’ll use 80 hours per week.  That’s a full shift on top of normal work, but enough to be spread out over the weekends.

So, we have 15 lawyers at $700 per hour working 80 hours a week, plus 2 data entry people at $100 per hour at 80 hours per week.  [(15 * 700 * 80) + (2 * 100 * 80)] = [ 840,000+ 16,000] =$856,000 per week.  Considering this has been going on for weeks, and assuming this lawyer wasn’t blowing smoke up the judge’s ass, Cohen’s legal bills from this procedure will approach $4 million, and that’s before they go to trial.

He might flip just to avoid going broke.

The fact that the inauguration meeting included all three parties could perhaps be understood as a coincidence. Vekselberg, after all, is Intrater’s cousin in addition to running an affiliated company, the Renova Group. And the inauguration is an event with many attendees and perhaps some impromptu introductions and meetings. That idea that Cohen may have met Vekselberg there without them forming a relationship and without Vekselberg being involved in Columbus Nova’s hiring of Cohen is plausible.

But three meetings involving both Intrater and Vekselberg? That reduces the likelihood that this was just happenstance. The Times reported a couple of days ago that Vekselberg met with Cohen “multiple times.” Now we know the details of the first meeting and that there was a third — which may have even come after Columbus Nova hired Cohen (he was hired in late January, after the inauguration). That’s a lot of meetings to have, in relatively proximity, with a third party who had nothing to do with the arrangement between Columbus Nova and Cohen.

Are we to believe Cohen’s business relationship with Columbus Nova didn’t come up at these meetings? Are we to believe Vekselberg somehow didn’t know about it and didn’t use it to push for influence over the Trump administration’s Russia policy (which was the stated subject matter for the first meeting)? At the very least, having a Russian oligarch in these meetings at a time when the Trump campaign’s Russia ties were at-issue would seem to be a bad decision just from a pure public relations perspective. And since then, Vekselberg has featured on a list of oligarchs who have been sanctioned by the Trump administration.

Three meetings in a short time span with Vekselberg and his cousin.  Like Admiral James T. Kirk said in the Wrath of Khan, “This is damn peculiar.”

 

COLD WAR 2.0:  BILL BROWDER ARRESTED, RELEASED

Bill Browder was arrested earlier this morning on an Interpol warrant issued by Russia.  This isn’t the first time Russia has tried this shit.  This happened a few months ago, but it doesn’t usually result in Bill getting arrested.

Fortunately, he was able to get this cleared up, and he’s back in London.

 

THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

 

PUERTO RICO DEATH TOLL 

 

TRUMP HATES IMMIGRANTS

 

VOTING STORIES

 

WHITE HOUSE CHAOS:  WHERE’S MELANIA?

 

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE: AMBIEN DOES NOT CAUSE RACISM

 

#NEVERAGAIN

 

NFL:  THE F IS FOR FASCISM

 

GOP:  THE PARTY OF LINCOLN IS DEAD

 

PROGRESS IS PROGRESS

 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

 

RUMOR MILL

 

That’s it for today.  There is a difference between the parties, and I think I’m going to write about it when I get time.  That’s the joke now.

 

Thank you, and have a good one.

 

“Without Journalists, it’s just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur

 

Daily Check-In 05/29/2018

Tuesday, May 29th.

 

THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

For the second time in six days, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has moved to begin the process for sentencing a cooperating defendant in his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, this time a California man charged with a Russian Internet trolling operation in February.

Richard Pinedo, 28, of Santa Paula, Calif., pleaded guilty Feb. 12 in Washington to creating hundreds of bank accounts, often using stolen identities, and selling some to unidentified offshore users, including suspects connected to the Russia probe.

And when individuals like that are in the orbit of a major political campaign in America, the FBI, who is in charge of counterintelligence investigations, should look at people like that,” Rubio said. “But they’re not investigating the campaign, they’re investigating those people.”

Read that last sentence again.  They’re investigating the people.

Here’s a question that Trump’s team has never answered.  Why did his campaign have at least four foreign agents working on it?

“Mr. Trump, who had told aides that he needed a loyalist overseeing the inquiry, berated Mr. Sessions and told him he should reverse his decision (to recuse from the Russia investigation), an unusual and potentially inappropriate request.”

Yeah, anyone who’s wondering, that’s not the reaction of an innocent man.

Arkady was shot and killed in Kiev earlier today.

 

PUERTO RICO DEATH TOLL

 

COHEN:  FOLLOW THE MONEY

Michael Avenatti, the attorney for the adult-film actress known as Stormy Daniels, released emails on Tuesday that he claims show that The Wall Street Journal sat for months on a story about the $130,000 hush-money payment made to his client days before the 2016 presidential election.

The emails were between Wall Street Journal reporter Joe Palazzolo — one of two reporters to break the story on the Daniels payment earlier this year — and Keith Davidson, Daniels’ initial attorney who had negotiated the agreement between Daniels and President Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen.

…

In sharing the emails between Palazzolo and Davidson, Avenatti wrote that The Journal “had the story in the closing days of the campaign but sat on it” and “Davidson lied to them and conspired with Mr. Cohen in 2016.”

“This is why we have demanded to see all of Davidson’s” documents for months “and will sue if need be,” he tweeted.

The email exchange showed that Palazzolo reached out to Davidson just before the 2016 election to ask him about women he was representing in connection to Trump. Palazzolo did not make any mention in the email of Daniels, a hush-money agreement, Cohen, or women such as Karen McDougal, a Playboy model whom Davidson had represented in a similar hush-money agreement before the 2016 election.

 

The special master assigned in the criminal case against Michael Cohen announced Tuesday that Cohen, President Donald Trump and the Trump Organization had made 252 claims of privileged or “highly personal” material out of the initial items reviewed.

Investigators seized the materials during raids on Cohen’s home, office and hotel room on April 9.

 

VOTER SUPPRESSION

 

WHERE ARE THE CHILDREN?

 

WHITE HOUSE CHAOS

She might be in New York for good.  Check the Rumor Mill for more details.

 

GOP:  THE PARTY OF LINCOLN IS DEAD

 

#NEVERAGAIN

 

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE: THE “ROSEANNE BARR IS RACIST” EDITION

The tweet came early in the morning.  The anger on Twitter was palpable by lunchtime.  How long will it take ABC, the network airing Roseanne’s show, to respond?

Well, that was quick.  By early afternoon, a couple hundred people were fired from their jobs because the star, creator, and executive producer of their show is a racist pig.

 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT:  MISSOURI GOVERNOR GREITENS RESIGNS

We’ve covered Missouri politics a little bit here, but

SAN FRANCISCO—A 23-year-old man who hacked into Gmail accounts on behalf of Russian intelligence was sentenced to five years in prison Tuesday, less than the government sought in a case trumpeted as a warning to cybercriminals and foreign intelligence services alike.

Karim Baratov, a Canadian citizen born in Kazakhstan, pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy and identity theft charges last November in connection with a black market no-questions-asked hacking service he operated from 2010 until his arrest in March 2017. Baratov charged customers about $100 to obtain another person’s webmail password, using phishing attacks that tricked users into entering their passwords into a fake password reset page. He cracked more than 11,000 accounts in Russia and the US before he was caught.

One of Baratov’s clients was an officer with Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, who used an alias to commission hacks on 80 targets in all, including people in other Russian agencies, and government officials in neighboring Eastern European nations. Prosecutors had sought a sentence of seven years, 10 months in prison, in part to make other hackers think twice about offering their skills—knowingly or unknowingly—to hostile intelligence agencies.

 

COLD WAR 2.0

 

OPIODS

 

RUMOR MILL

Pace has had a couple interesting tweets over the past weekend about Melania Trump’s whereabouts.

According to Pace, Melania left D.C. for New York at least a week ago.  She spent the last couple days at the Waldorf Astoria, and spent today looking for a new condo.

He has a source that’s a recently retired Secret Service agent.  Considering he is one, and has posted proof in the past backing up this claim, that part is feasible.  I’m not making any claims on the accuracy of them, simply reporting what’s being reporting.  I’m also not inferring that Melania left the Dotard.

But, I wouldn’t surprised if she’s finally had enough.

 

 

That’s it for today.  Most of Washington is still on break, so it’s a bit of a “slow news day.”  Ok, by the new definition of slow, in which we get to watch the complete collapse of a cultural icon in less time than it takes to make chili in a CrockPot, the death toll in Puerto Rico is about two orders of magnitude greater than originally told, enough details come out about Trump trying to obstruct the Russian Investigation that there’s no doubt about his guilt, Mrs. Trump hasn’t been seen in public in two weeks, and a corrupt governor resigned right before he got bitchslapped by his own party.

 

Thank you, and have a good one.

 

“Without Journalists, it’s just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur