Aw man, with Trump’s hair that would be amazing.
If Putin does have blackmail material on Trump, I can almost see Putin going for it just to demonstrate that he can. The limited amount of time that they’ll have together, unfortunately, probably prevents it. 
Thank you for posting that.
I’m wondering about the section I quoted here, as it applies to the here and now. How much material help are the Russians getting, from Trump and his allies in the various states, with those same attempts to infiltrate “state election infrastructure” for this year’s elections?
I suppose that all we can hope for is that a combination of whistle-blowers and journalists will be on top of this—because we surely can’t trust all Republicans who are in a position to oversee election infrastructure. (Perhaps some would put country over party, but how much power do such have in today’s GOP?)
Two reports at odds with each other, today:
The Hill is reporting that Mueller may be wrapping up. He’s taking in prosecutors to take over the court cases that have been started, indicating (possibly) that he’s all done with the investigation side of things.
On the other side of things, Vox is saying that Mueller may have narrowed in on Trump’s inauguration ceremony and its strangely high take and the presence of a few Russian oligarchs.
I’m not sure that I trust The Hill’s analysis. While their source, they say, are descriptive notes from expense sheets - and that is a pretty good source - without the actual text of those descriptions, it’s just as easy to assume that he may be spinning out the court cases so that the core group can continue to focus on investigations and NOT that they are giving up investigating.
Three reasons to believe that the Mueller investigation isn’t wrapping up any time soon:
Now, I’ll grant that the third one is a bit speculative, but it certainly seems to me at least that there is sufficient evidence that Junior was seeking to receive things of value to the campaign from a foreign source and it would make the most sense for Mueller’s team to let a court decide whether the evidence was sufficient to support that conclusion or not.
But if even if I am wrong on #3 there, that still leaves #1 and #2.
As for Vox…maybe? It certainly sounds reasonable. It would be hard to prove, for example, that Rosneft’s purchase money went, in part, to Trump because he would spend the rest of his life slowly laundering it back into his business, and maybe leave it up to the next generation to grab. There’s no real hurry to move it anywhere, at the moment. But with the inauguration, the money had to be raised and spent in a hurry. You can’t do a wonderful job of laundering in that time. And then you have the real Russian oligarchs walking around the party as evidence that the money was spent by Russians for the party.
It’s pretty damning. If it was Kislyak, you could say that you invited the Ambassador to come to the event, for free. But why would you invite some random Russian rich guy with no (official) connection to the Russian government? How many people are going to pay an extra $1m so that their Russian cousin can come to a party as a +1, unless they think that it’s a viable way to curry favor with the host? It rather implies that they know the host is aware that the money was spent for that purpose.
Though, that said, even if Gates told him that he was completely unaware of the presence of those Russians at the inauguration, Mueller might still feel like due diligence demands that he question those Russians and Tom Barrack, and so you’d see what we see even if it’s a nothing burger. The Russians may have come just to screw over Trump and cause chaos and/or to blackmail him by saying, “Hey, we spent a bunch of money for your inauguration. We’ll release proof that you took it, unless you do X for us.”
It’s also possible that Gates was just working for Manafort and doing things for him. Unless you can get Manafort to confirm that he told Gates to take some Russian money for the inauguration, with Trump’s blessing, you’re at a dead end. Manafort will just say that he had some friends from Russia and told them to go to the party in order to make some new contacts. Just a business deal, not political. Oops, did that break a contribution law? Sorry.
I tend to agree about #1. It’s hard to imagine Mueller wrapping up without interviewing Trump, unless they’ve arrived at a clear stalemate over the issue. But that’s only one item. If Mueller is done with everything else, then there’s not much to do while hanging around waiting for Trump.
I’m not sure about #2. Mueller turned that over to the SDNY would indicate that he didn’t think it was integral to his investigation, and reports about the matter are also consistent with that. Note, this is not to say that Cohen’s shenanigans don’t involve Trump. Only that they don’t seem to involve collusion with Russia.
#3 is the most dubious. I’m aware that the notion that getting opposition research on opposing candidates counts as campaign contributions is popular around here, but it seems like something which has a valid technical basis but is at odds with how those laws have been interpreted and practiced in the past. I could be wrong, but it’s very possible that Mueller will be reluctant to bring charges against the president’s son based on a legal interpretation - even a sound legal interpretation - which goes against previously accepted common practice.
I supposed. But puzzle me this.
What about getting campaign contributions/help from what can be considered a hostile foreign government? A government that Trump has ties to, and likely owes a lot of money to. How about those tax returns? That set off any alarms?
(I hope the SDMB will forgive improper spelling and punctuation. I have come down with a cataract. It should be fixed this summer. Just had my second appointment with a doc today. I’m sure I’m missing things)
Say that I’m pretty certain that you murdered a prostitute and stuck her in your basement to rot. However, I don’t have sufficient evidence to get a warrant for it.
On the other hand, I have uncovered evidence that you have also been training dogs to fight and abusing them. Any action that I would take on the front would mean searching your house for animals and their pens - and so I would expect to also find my evidence of the murder that I believe you committed. Unfortunately, I’m not part of the animal welfare department.
Easy solution: Talk to animal welfare, let them do the dirty work, and ask them to notify me if there’s a body or other evidence relevant to my case in the basement.
Cite?
That happened to me last year. The visual deterioration was so gradual I didn’t pick up on it until I realized I was almost blind in one eye. And I had a 3 month wait for the surgery.
The doctor said it was one of the worst cataracts she had ever seen despite my being younger than most of her patients. She almost wasn’t able to get it with outpatient techniques. I did NOT have to wait to get the other eye done.
Sorry for the diversion.
Paul Manafort is being held in solitary confinement 23 hours a day for his safety.
I generally believe solitary confinement to be cruel, and I think it’s overused in the US. But there’s a part of me that immediately thought “Womp womp” when I saw this.
Of course I don’t know jack about prisoner security, but if the Russians wanted to silence Manafort, I’d think they’d be less likely to have him shanked in the exercise yard than to slip him some polonium soup. I wonder if keeping him in solitary really protects him from much, or if it’s just being used to pressure him.
I imagine poisoning soup is more difficult than paying the Aryan nation or whoever, to stab him.
Nothing explicit. But much of the discussion around this legal issue suggests that this is a novel interpretation of that statute (as a practical matter), and those who pushed that angle have struggled to distinguish this case from the more common situations that they wish to exclude. See e.g. here (note the final paragraph).
It’s looking like the financial path from Manafort to Trump may be shaking out:
I mentioned Stephen Calk back in November and Mueller started digging into him at least by February. He seems to have been a “friendly” banker to Trump and his interests since 2014 and, it seems, Trump loaned him out to Manafort for some of his financial misdeeds.
Based on this report, it looks like Mueller believes that Calk tried to buy a position in the White House, by lending to Manafort without looking too hard at the loan request. (I’m not sure what crime it is to try and “buy your way into the White House”?)
Too bad for Calk, obviously, but he seems like a pretty easy flip. And given that he worked with Trump for a few years previous to the campaign, it is quite likely that he could point out a few financial crimes of the president’s.
ETA: Some articles on Calk that I missed before:
Here’s a lengthy article in New York magazine that lays out much of the information supporting the case that Trump is, effectively, a Russian asset. The article doesn’t present any new information, and it’s not likely to shift the position of anyone in this thread. But it does lay out the case cleanly and pretty comprehensively. The main argument is that many in the media continue to treat the idea that Trump is a Putin patsy as outlandish, when it is, in fact, the most likely explanation for everything we can see. The article does go a little further than most in suggesting that Trump was drawn into the orbit of Russian intelligence as far back as 1987. I think the case for that is one of the weaker pieces of the article, but given everything that’s happened the past few years, I would not be surprised at all if it turns out to be true.
I read that article today, and it did make me think. I think the issue for Trump is not as much 1987, as it is his financial world over the last 15-20 years. He had to go to Russia to get capital, because New York banks stopped lending him money years ago.
Icthink the most important takeaway from that article is that our caution to not sound like conspiracy theorists is biting us in the ass. We keep thinking “surely this is the end of the links” and keep being wrong. That’s something worth considering.
Canada (?) leaks information about Russian finances backing Trump Tower Toronto:
I’ve long wondered how it is that revelations about Trump haven’t been popping up abroad. I guess they all decided that they’d rather have the blackmail material themselves?
Wow; serious paywall at that link! :eek:
Try this -
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+tower+toronto&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us
the pick the article.
This link might work a few times: Subscribe to read | Financial Times
First come, first serve!
Clicking the first story (not the video links) got me there and all they wanted this time was to put a cookie on my machine, not a $1-for-4-week-trial subscription; thanks!
I will say, if Putin had Trump as his blackmail bitch, could freely demand that he do just about anything and have it happen, and wanted to get back at the US for imposing sanctions, it would look a lot like the trade war we’re in. And I’ll be damned if I can think of any reasons that Trump would do it - including his tariffs against Europe and Canada - that actually have any pro-American purpose by any branch of logic, including bad logic.
My fear was never collusion. My fear was that Russia might have something on the President of the United States of America.
And I’ll say, as a person who has played a whole bunch of board games with traitor roles, this is what it always feels like when there is a traitor in the game, using every available rule and excuse to destroy the team, and you know exactly who it is.
We might not have conclusive evidence as of yet, but I strongly hope that Congress passes an anti-tariff act quickly. And I’m rather fearing that we might uncover evidence that Trump is being blackmailed. The result of election meddling is sanctions. But the result of using our President as a puppet…how can that not be war?