Tag: Trump

Sunday morning meltdown

~ susie

The Orange Cheato:

He sounds a little… worried, doesn’t he?

Judge denies Manafort’s motion to dismiss

~ susie

Robert Mueller scores a victory as federal judge allows criminal case against Paul Manafort to move forward

Manafort doesn’t have any good options, he may as well take the deal. But he won’t:

Paul Manafort has struck out again in his efforts to get Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s case against him thrown out or curtailed on the basis that Mueller’s investigation was improper.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Tuesday denied Manafort’s request that she throw out the indictment brought in the criminal case against him in Washington D.C. She had previously thrown out a civil lawsuit Manafort filed against Mueller seeking to narrow his investigation. Manafort’s motion to dismiss the case Mueller brought against him in Virginia is still pending.

Manafort had argued that since the charges Mueller brought against him stemmed from Ukraine lobbying work predating the 2016 campaign, they were outside the scope of the Russian collusion investigation for which Mueller had been appointed. Jackson, in her 36-page opinion, rejected Manafort’s claims that the Ukraine business dealings were outside Mueller’s scope.

Referring to Mueller’s appointment order, she said that the charges fell “squarely within that portion of the authority granted to the Special Counsel that Manafort finds unobjectionable: the order to investigate ‘any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign.’ (Manafort had also challenged the provision of the appointment order that said that Mueller could investigate matters “that arose or may arise directly” from the probe).

Additionally, Jackson said that the Justice Department regulations created for special counsel investigations are not enforceable for defendants in court.

What a tangled web we weave

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Our Mikey’s been very busy and it’s very bad — watch for Trump to change the subject by starting a war soon:

John Edwards redux

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Shera Bechard

I just assumed all along that Broidy was fronting for Trump in this abortion:

Let me offer an alternative explanation of the affair and the payoff. It is still just a hypothesis, but, I would argue, it fits more comfortably with what we know about the various players than the reported version of events: Donald Trump, not Elliott Broidy, had an affair with Shera Bechard. Bechard hired Keith Davidson, who had negotiated both Playboy playmate Karen McDougal’s deal with the National Enquirer and Stormy Daniels’s NDA with Trump. Davidson called Cohen, and the two of them negotiated a $1.6 million payment to Bechard.

At this point Cohen needed to find a funding source. Cohen asserts he took out a home equity loan to come up with a mere $130,000 to pay off Stormy Daniels, so it seems clear he couldn’t have fronted the $1.6 million for the Bechard deal himself. So Cohen reached out to Elliott Broidy, a very rich Republican fundraiser with several pending and highly lucrative business deals with foreign governments: deals that hinged on whether Broidy could convince the U.S. government to take various actions. By stepping up to take responsibility for the affair and to fund the seven-figure settlement, Broidy was ensuring that he could continue to peddle his influence with Trump to governments around the world.

Which is to say, it was a cover-up concealing a bribe. Indeed, it turns out that Broidy not only has a history of bribing public officials, but of bribing them in an uncannily similar fashion to the method which I hypothesize he employed in this case.

So, according to this hypothesis, when Cohen’s office was raided by federal prosecutors, they found documentation of what was actually a fabricated affair, concocted by Cohen and Davidson to create a justification for funneling Broidy’s money to Bechard, while creating a paper record designed to protect Trump from further exposure.

This account — as bizarre as it may seem at first glance — is actually more plausible than the story leaked to the Journal, the New York Times, and CNN.

We, of course, do not know what actually happened. But it is worth noting that, two weeks after the story broke, Michael Avenatti, the lawyer Stormy Daniels hired to replace Davidson, hinted to Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC that the real story might be quite different from that which had been reported so far: “I think at some point we are going to find out, if in fact the client in connection with the [$1.6 million] settlement was, in fact, Mr. Broidy,” Avenatti said. “I’m going to leave it at that.”

Trump pays cash

~ susie

Trump International Hotel and Tower

Whose cash is he laundering, I wonder? Via the Washington Post:

In the nine years before he ran for president, Donald Trump’s company spent more than $400 million in cash on new properties — including 14 transactions paid for in full, without borrowing from banks — during a buying binge that defied real estate industry practices and Trump’s own history as the self-described “King of Debt.”

Trump’s vast outlay of cash, tracked through public records and totaled publicly here for the first time, provides a new window into the president’s private company, which discloses few details about its finances.

It shows that Trump had access to far more cash than previously known, despite his string of commercial bankruptcies and the Great Recession’s hammering of the real estate industry.

Why did the “King of Debt,” as he has called himself in interviews, turn away from that strategy, defying the real estate wisdom that it’s unwise to risk so much of one’s own money in a few projects?

And how did Trump — who had money tied up in golf courses and buildings — raise enough liquid assets to go on this cash buying spree?

Rep. Schiff: Trump will have to comply with subpoena

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Adam Schiff admits Donald Trump’s ‘unpredictability’ helped open North Korea nuclear talks

When are any of Trump’s lawyers going to get anything straight?

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said Sunday that President Trump will need to comply with a subpoena despite his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, telling a news outlet that Trump does not need to do so.

“No, he’s going to need to comply with a subpoena. If they take that case to court, they’re going to lose,” Schiff told CNN’s “State of the Union.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper had specifically asked Schiff about remarks from Giuliani, who told ABC’s “This Week” that the president and his legal team do not need to comply with a subpoena from special counsel Robert Mueller.

“Well, we don’t have to. He’s the president of the United States. We can assert the same privilege as other presidents have,” Giuliani said early Sunday.

Trump says he’s going to lower drug prices

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

White medicine pills on green background

There will be a press conference, and he’ll tell everyone what he’s going to do — and then, as soon as the pharma lobbyists straighten him out, nothing will happen:

WASHINGTON — In his State of the Union address in January and again in New Hampshire in March, President Trump made a bold promise: “You’ll be seeing drug prices falling very substantially in the not-too-distant future,” he said, “and it’s going to be beautiful.” Not if the pharmaceutical companies can stop it.

Big Pharma is pouring money into a lobbying campaign to thwart any serious efforts to rein in prescription drug prices ahead of a presidential speech this month where Mr. Trump plans to lay out his drug pricing proposals.

“There is apprehension across the industry,” said Bruce Artim, who retired recently after 11 years as the director of federal affairs at Eli Lilly and Company. “Pharma folks are nervous.”

Drugmakers spent $171.5 million lobbying the federal government last year — more than insurance, electronics, oil and gas or any other industry, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, an independent group that tracks money in politics.