Hey, What Ever Happened To…

October 21, 2019 // 21 Comments »

-How’s the water in Flint? That used to matter, too.

-The Yazidi’s? Obama started a whole re-war win Iraq over their supposed genocide.

-How come Assad stopped “gassing his own people” right around the time American politicians stopped caring about excuses to make war in Syria?

* Wait, no, seriously, what happened to the Kids In Cages? All the articles I can find go back to the summer, and in August we were debated whether or not these were actual concentration camps inside the United States. There were some very mediagenic visits to the border by Democrats, full of drama about people drinking from toilets. Congress voted a bunch of money, and some policy changes took place. So, did Trump… resolve the problem? If so, we should probably talk about that. Are there still kids in cages? Then we should be talking about that. Instead, nothing.

People who will Google “Kurds” and link to some random article, alert! This is basically sarcasm, not a plea to search the web. I am trying to show how people are manipulated into weekly outrages by the media, only to forget when some new outrage is the rage. The hope is to wake someone up before they overreact on cue to the next thing. Thanks!

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Why Trump is Unlikely to Be Indicted or Impeached for Campaign Finance Crimes

December 12, 2018 // 14 Comments »

Almost overnight the focus of Russiagate shifted from treason and Trump as a Russian asset to a hyperfocus on payoffs to two women Trump slept with years ago. But even if it can be shown Donald Trump’s actions toward those two women are actually chargeable crimes, he will not be indicted while in office.

That leaves impeachment, over acts the president did before being elected. We are in a load of trouble if there is a way to impeach a president essentially retroactively, for things done before he assumed office. This is Twitter-think gone wild, destroying people for old Tweets written in some cases years ago, or holding a Supreme Court nomination hostage to yearbook scribbles. The politics of personal destruction. Let’s see where things stand.

Indictment?

Before getting into the specifics of Trump, Cohen and those payoffs, it is clear the attorneys of the Southern District of New York (SDNY), under the control of the U.S. Department of Justice, will not be permitted to break long tradition (here’s the document from the Office of the Legal Counsel which establishes it would be unconstitutional to indict) and indict a sitting president. No one will say it, but no one wants that door opened, even to get Trump; if it is, every future president can expect to find himself endlessly enveloped in frivolous indictments from prosecutors seeking to make a name for themselves and/or score political points by turning an opinion into a headline. Nope, nobody is throwing Baby political safety out with the bathwater of Trump.

There is also crazy talk SDNY is preparing the indictment against Trump now, to file against him the day he leaves office in 2021 (assuming he loses the election to Hillary/Beto or whomever), a new level of pointless revenge in America that won’t happen. No newly-elected Democratic president wants to send that Third World vengeance message alongside of obligatory “time to heal” rhetoric. And of course if Trump is elected to a second term the SDNY indictments disappear; there is a five year statute of limitations on any 2016 election finance crimes such as Trump might be accused of. As New York magazine put it in a headline, “Trump 2020 Shaping Up to Be a Campaign to Stay Out of Prison.”

Indictment of trump, now or in the future, seems headed nowhere. But we’ll talk about it endlessly anyway.

A Tale of Two Women

So bottom line: SDNY isn’t going to do anything. It’s impeachment or nothing from the Democratic House starting in January.

There are two women, Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, at the center of all this. Both are alleged to have had affairs with Trump, and both are said to have received money to not speak of those affairs (though they have.) You can in fact pay people to shut up about affairs. That happens all the time. It is not illegal.

The fact is Trump could have made the payment himself without violating the law. In the simplest version, if Trump had paid the women with money clearly his own, with a note attached saying “No politics, this is only to spare my family shame, you filthy bimbo,” there would be absolutely no crime. Sleaze, disgrace, cravenness, yes, of course. But the crime, if it exists, is based on the way this was done, not that it was done. So can any of this be criminalized to the extent that it becomes the “high crime or misdemeanor” necessary to impeach Trump?

Let’s start with Stormy.

Stormy Daniels

For Stormy’s $130,000 payoff to morph into something illegal, it will be necessary for someone to determine the money paid her came from campaign funds, that it was a donation. If it was 100% Trump’s private money, there is no case. Nothing Mueller or the SDNY has released has said where the money came from. Think about think how complex Trump’s finances are. Proving the money was campaign funds is a critical part of this. Keep in mind the idea that campaign funds are illegal to use here hinges on none of this cash was Trump’s own money, even money he donated himself to his own campaign. The illegal part is based mostly on a $2,700 donation limit imposed on the supposed “giver,” Michael Cohen in this case, a limit which does not apply to the candidate himself. The campaign funds part comes in in tracking the source of the cash used to reimburse Cohen.

In short, the payment is not a donation if it was made for an expense that was independent of the campaign – that is, money that would have been paid even if there were no campaign.

If the money can be shown to be campaign funds or a donation by Cohen, one next has to prove the purpose of the payoff was to influence the election, not say to prevent shaming Trump’s family. Absent hard information to the contrary, Trump could claim he wanted to hide the affair say from his young son reading about it in the media, and maybe even show he’s been paying off women for decades, long before he ran for president, as proof that Stormy was just another in a long line of galpals paid to shut up after the deed.

If the money can be shown to be campaign funds and somehow intent was clear, then impeachment would still require tying all that to Trump, because as things stand at this moment, it was Trump lawyer Michael Cohen who paid the money out with whatever intent Cohen himself had at that time. Trump himself did not pay anything to Stormy per se.

Cohen, in his guilty pleas seeking lenient sentences on his unrelated tax cheating convictions, says that was the case, for him, that his intent was to influence the election. We currently have only his word that it was also Trump’s intent when (again, only on Cohen’s word) Trump ordered him to make the payoff. Absent additional information, those key elements of the crime depend on convicted felon Michael Cohen’s impeachment testimony from his jail cell as to culpability and intent of the president.

Then there is the question of the money again. Cohen claims he paid Stormy using his own personal funds, and then was reimbursed by Trump. Assuming that is true, then step one (above) would be to prove the reimbursement money came from campaign donations and Trump knew the money was being reimbursed for the payoff specifically. Intent is very much a factor in proving a crime here. So if say Cohen sent an unitemized invoice (as Rudy Giuliani has suggested) to Trump for a dollar amount simply for “services rendered” (call it plausible denial), Trump can claim he had no idea the money was being used illegally. So hopefully someone will produce a receipt annotated “Shady Payoff to Stormy.”

This is a complicated case to prove — that the payoffs were in fact “campaign donations,” that the intent was to influence an election after Trump had already made clear to the electorate his sleazy background with women, that Trump knew in detail what Cohen said was done by him, and that Trump ordered these things to happen. That would mostly leave Trump guilty of some sort of “conspiracy to…” charge, something second hand the public might see as short of impeachable.

The fact that Cohen chose to plead guilty to campaign finance crimes seeking a lighter sentence means that none of these questions were ever contested in a court, nothing was proven, no evidence produced, and no witnesses called and examined. Cohen’s choice to plead guilty is not prima facie evidence of the truth of any of this. His guilty plea is not “evidence” in the impeachment of Trump, though Cohen would obviously be a key witness.

One can imagine the media circus as Cohen, maybe clad in an orange jumpsuit on day pass from some Federal prison, testifies alongside Stormy Daniels, whose skills at anal sex are watchable on Porhub turning breaks in the proceedings. Also,

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Stormy Daniels to pay nearly $300,000 in legal fees to Trump over a defamation lawsuit dismissed on October 15 to add to the gathering of shame. Bazinga!

Karen McDougal

If the number of elements which must be proven to impeach Trump over what happened with Stormy seems a long road, the case of Karen McDougal is even more complex.

In McDougal’s case, Cohen claims he paid $150,000 in Trump money to David Pecker (you can’t make this stuff up), who runs American Media, which controls the National Enquirer. Pecker then supposedly used that money to buy exclusive rights to McDougal’s story of sex with Trump with the intent of never publishing the tale, thus burying it. Although Cohen said he would reimburse Pecker (and then Cohen would be reimbursed by Trump), the reimbursement did not happen. So the crime here is Cohen causing a third party (Pecker) to make an illegal contribution.

Illegal contribution? Well, that’s another point in both cases, Stormy and McDougal. For these cases to add up to crimes, instead of a legal payoff to remain quiet/buy the rights to a story, the House would have to somehow conclude the money was actually a contribution to Trump’s campaign, a contribution either made illegally beyond allowable limits, or made illegally to influence the election, or made illegally just because it wasn’t disclosed. If the whole mess was to be heard in a real court, this point of law would be a showstopper, and a focal point for both sides to contest. How it will be adjudicated in front of Congress is anyone’s guess, but expect Trump’s defense team, if things get that far, to try and move the question out of Congress and into a real court.

Another element is it must be shown Pecker spiked the McDougal story to influence the election, not simply as an editorial decision. Fun fact: prosecutors first granted Pecker (and another American Media executive, Dylan Howard) immunity to testify in this case. They then announced a “Non-Prosecution Agreement” with American Media, which quickly said the whole thing was political. No one is above the law, unless you are willing to testify against someone more important than you, in which case you get off scot-free for your own crimes!

And maybe someday we can talk about the third world system we are watching play out where plea bargains and lesser sentences are bartered for nasty testimony.

The Jury of Us

Proving the many legal points is hard enough, but that’s just the beginning of the real test. This is all about the politics of destruction; Democrats couldn’t beat Trump n 2016, they couldn’t gin up enough Russia-fever to get him, and so may choose to settle on working these payoffs as their last act.

Keep in mind all of the above elements will need to be proven in hearings held in the House, with witnesses and defense teams, all no doubt televised. There is a difference between what a prosecutor asserts in a one-sided filing designed (see the job title, “to prosecute,” the other side is called the defense) to present someone as guilty, and proving those same elements of an actual on-the-books crime, with evidence. There is a difference between what you so desperately want to believe is true, and what actually is true under the Rule of Law you also believe is so in danger but would throw away in a heartbeat to oust Trump.

Democrats will have to answer in a way average Americans will agree with how this is all so different from when it was discovered Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was guilty of violations involving nearly $2 million – an amount that dwarfs the $280,000 in Cohen’s case – the Obama Justice Department decided not to prosecute. Instead, the matter was quietly disposed of by a $375,000 fine by the Federal Election Commission. How’d we go from a fine to impeachment anyway?

To be sure, SDNY prosecutors have charged election finance violations as felonies before, most notably in 2014 against conservative Dinesh D’Souza, whom Trump later pardoned. That no doubt displeased the folks at SDNY, so there’s an element of shallow revenge for the public to chew on as well.

Politics

The story will unfold in the context of hearings where the real jury are the Americans who’ll vote in 2020. Since absent some bombshell the Republican Senate will never convict Trump no matter what the House does, this is all for show, and we’re the audience. Democrats thinking this all through must remember the dumpster fire of the Bill Clinton impeachment, where in return for their efforts to trump up similar charges and their actual impeachment vote against Clinton, they ended up with the voters turning against them, sick of the whole thing and ultimately taking Bill’s side more or less-ish.

Can the Democrats really expect to convince a large number of Americans that in his third year in office, Trump needs to be impeached over a violation of conspiracy to violate Section 30116(a)(7)(A) of the election laws which occurred before he was even elected? That the 2016 election needs to be overturned for that, for the good of the country, and that this wasn’t just the politics of personal destruction out of control again, as we saw with Kavanaugh?

They might. The Democrats from Day One have wanted to put an asterisk by Trump’s election. The Russiagate-collusion narrative has turned dusty and old. It isn’t as easy to understand or as sexy as a pee tape, but in its place Dems may try and use Trump’s payments to two mistresses as a way of locking in their narrative that Trump won by cheating. Mueller is a man of the Deep State, a fixer for them, and his dirty hands are being well-employed with fixing the problem of Trump being elected when the Plan was always for Hillary.

Or maybe not. I don’t think the Dems will risk it. I don’t think Trump is going to face impeachment, or indictment. There will be a flow of noise and threats and dire Maddow-esque predictions, but this all ends one way or another with the election of 2020, not impeachment or indictment.

BONUS

It’s easy to forget the special prosecutor who sent Bill Clinton into impeachment began with the financial mess of Whitewater and ended with Monica Lewinsky and lying to Congress, even as Mueller started with Putin controlling the Oval Office and seems likely to end with payoffs to a porn star.

The concept of appointing a Special Prosecutor with the task of finding SOMETHING to try and overthrown an election is an ugly one. While so many Americans are near-joyful over each crumb that suggests Trump is in deeper trouble, I wonder how they’ll feel when a Special Prosecutor becomes a standard opposition weapon used against a president they like. A reminder you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

BONUS BONUS

And yes, to save some time, let’s just assume all the people who have commented for 2.5 years “But just wait!” have already done that again here, ‘kay?

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Mueller’s End Game

December 11, 2018 // 12 Comments »

A baby born when Robert Mueller started his investigation would be talking by now. But would she have anything to say?

We last looked at what Mueller had publicly, and what he didn’t have, some ten months ago, and cautioned skepticism that he would prove “collusion.” It’s worth another look now, but we’ll give away the ending: there is still no real evidence of, well, much of anything significant about Russiagate. One thing clear is the investigation seems to be ending. Mueller’s office reportedly even told various defense lawyers it is “tying up loose ends.” The moment to wrap things up is politically right as well; the Democrats will soon take control of the House and it is time to hand this all off to them.

Ten months ago the big news was Paul Manafort flipped; that seems to have turned out to be mostly a bust, as we know now he lied like a rug to the Feds and cooperated with the Trump defense team as some sort of mole inside Mueller’s investigation (a heavily-redacted memo about Manafort’s lies, released by Mueller on Friday, adds no significant new details to the Russiagate narrative.) George Papadopoulos has already been in and out of jail — all of two weeks — for his sideshow role, Michael Avenatti is now a woman beater who is just figuring out he’s washed up, Stormy Daniels owes Trump over $300k in fees after losing to him in court, there is no pee tape, and if you don’t recall how unimportant Carter Page and Richard Gates turned out to be (or even remember who they are), well, there is your assessment of all the hysterical commentary that accompanied them a few headlines ago.

The big reveal of the Michael Flynn sentencing memo on Tuesday was he will likely do no prison time. Everything of substance in the memo was redacted, so there is little insight available. If you insist on speculation, try this: it’s hard to believe something really big and bad happened such that Flynn knew about it but still wasn’t worth punishing for it, and now, a year after he started cooperating with the government, nobody has heard anything about whatever the big deal is. So chances are the redactions focus on foreign lobbying in the U.S.

This week’s Key to Everything is Michael Cohen, the guy who lied out of self-interest for Trump until last week when we learned he is also willing to lie, er, testify against Trump out of self-interest. If you take Cohen’s most recent statements at face value the sum is failed negotiations we all knew about already to build a Trump hotel in Moscow went on a few months longer than originally stated. Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York submitted a sentencing memo Friday for Cohen recommending 42 months in jail. In a separate filing, Mueller made no term recommendation but praised Cohen for his “significant efforts to assist the special counsel’s office.” The memos reveal no new information.

Call it as sleazy as you want, but looking into a real estate deal is neither a high crime nor a misdemeanor, even if it’s in Russia. Conspiracy law requires an agreement to commit a crime, not just the media declaiming “Cohen was communicating directly with the Kremlin!” Talking about meeting Russian persons is not a crime, nor is meeting with them. The takeaway this was all about influence buying by the Russkies falls flat. If Putin sought to ensnare Trump, why didn’t he find a way for the deal to actually go through? Mueller has to be able to prove actual crimes by the president, not just twist our underclothes into a weekly conspiratorial knot. For fun, look here at the creative writing needed to even suggest anything illegal. Doesn’t sound like Trump’s on thin ice with hot shoes.

Sigh. It is useful at this point of binge-watching the Mueller mini-series to go back to the beginning.

The origin story for all things Russiagate is a less-than-complete intelligence finding hackers, linked to the Russian government, stole emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2016. The details have never been released, no U.S. law enforcement agency has ever seen the server/scene of the crime, and Mueller’s dramatic indictments of said hackers, released as Trump met with Putin in Helsinki, will never be heard of again, or challenged, as none of his defendants will ever leave Russia. Meanwhile, despite contemporaneous denials of the same, it is now somehow accepted knowledge the emails (and Facebook ads!) had some unproven major affect on the election.

The origin story for everything else, that Trump is beholden to Putin for favors granted or via blackmail, is opposition research purchased by the Democrats and carried out by an MI6 operative with complex connections into American intelligence, the salacious Steele Dossier. The FBI, under a Democratic-controlled Justice Department, then sought warrants to spy on the nominated GOP candidate for president, based on evidence paid for by his opponent.

Yet the real origin story for all things Russiagate is the media, inflamed by Democrats, searching for why Trump won (because it can’t be anything to do with Hillary, and “all white people and the Electoral College are racists” just doesn’t hold up.) Their position is Trump must have done something wrong, and Robert Mueller, despite helping squash a Bush-era money-laundering probe, lying about the Iraq War, and flubbing the post-9/11 anthrax investigation, has been resurrected with Jedi superpowers to find it. It might be collusion with Russia or Wikileaks, or a pee tape, or taxes, all packaged as hard news but reading like Game of Thrones plot speculation. None of that is journalism to be proud of, and it underlies everything Mueller.

As the NYT said in a rare moment of candor, “From the day the Mueller investigation began, opponents of the president have hungered for that report, or an indictment waiting just around the corner, as the source text for an incantation to whisk Mr. Trump out of office and set everything back to normal again.”

The core problem is Mueller just hasn’t found a crime connected with Russiagate someone working for Trump might have committed. His investigation to date hasn’t been a search for the guilty party, Colonel Mustard in the library, but a search for an actual underlying crime, some crime, any crime. All Mueller has uncovered are some old financial misdealing by Manafort and chums that took place before and outside of the Trump campaign, payoffs to Trump’s mistresses which are not in themselves inherently illegal (despite what prosecutors simply assert in the Cohen sentencing report, someone will have to prove to a jury the money was from campaign funds and the transactions were “for the purpose of influencing” federal elections, not say simply “protecting his family from shame.” Cohen’s guilty pleas cannot legally be considered evidence of someone else’s guilt), and a bunch of people lying about unrelated matters.

And that’s the give away to Muller’s final report. There was no base crime as the starting point of the investigation. With Watergate there was the break-in at Democratic National Headquarters. With Russiagate you had… Trump winning the election (remembering the FBI concluded the DNC hack was done by the Russians forever ago, no Mueller needed.)

Almost everything Mueller has, the perjury and lying cases, are crimes he created through the process of investigating. He’s Schroeder’s Box; the crimes only exist when he tries to look at them. Mueller created most of his booked charges by asking questions he already knew the answers to, hoping his witness would lie and commit a new crime literally in front of him. Nobody should be proud of lying, but it seems a helluva way to contest a completed election as Trump enters the third year of his term.

Mueller’s end product, his report, will most likely claim a lot of unsavory things went on. But it seems increasingly unlikely he’ll have evidence Trump worked with Russia to win the election, and even less likely that Trump is now under Putin’s control. If Mueller had a smoking gun we’d be watching impeachment hearings by now.

Instead Mueller will end up concluding some people may have sort of maybe tried to interfere with an investigation into what turned out to be nothing, another “crime” that exists only because there was an investigation to trigger it. He’ll dump that steaming pile of legal ambiguity into the lap of the Democratic House to hold hearings on from now until global warming claims the city of Benghazi and returns it to the sea. Or the 2020 election, whichever comes first.

BONUS:

The uber-point of all this Ocean’s Nineteen-level conspiracy is supposedly so Putin can, whatever, sow dissent in America. Because if he wanted a puppet in the Oval Office it has been a damn poor return on investment — sanctions are still in place, NATO is still on Russia’s border, Montenegro joined NATO, Trump approved arms sales to the Ukraine, RT and Sputnik are sidelined as registered foreign agents, Cold Warrior-like hardliners Bolton and Pompeo are in power, the U.S. just delivered Russia an ultimatum on an arms control treaty that could return some American missiles to Europe, and more. On the plus side, there were those friendly Tweets.

Along the way new journalistic “norms” were created: Trump is too stupid to have made his money, so it must be ill-gotten. Trump did real estate deals in NYC and so is mobbed up. Trump’s taxes (albeit available to the IRS and Treasury for decades, the FBI and Mueller via warrant for years) hide secrets. Meanwhile, everyone in Russia with a few bucks is an oligarch, and everyone who anyone from the Trump side spoke with is “connected to Putin.” Trump doesn’t have lawyers, he has fixers and consigliere.

These tropes allow journalists to communicate in a kind of shorthand with the rubes who still imagine something will happen to annul the 2016 election. They allow each mini-development to appear to be a major event, as in the mind of the media everything is related, and everything accumulative. So a lie about a real estate deal in Russia is HUGE because it has something to do with Russia and see that connects all the dots!

None of that is journalism to be proud of, and it underlies everything Mueller. It is almost sad looking back at the old articles and TV tales to see how excited everyone got — Flynn was indicated! Sessions recused himself! Comey will save us! The Nunes Memo! They all used to matter sooooo much. Outlets like the NYT and WaPo rolled out a “source close to the White House” to comment whatever just happened means Mueller is getting close to nailing Trump. The nutters who took over once cogent places like HuffPo and Salon run “reporting” that reads like Game of Thrones plot speculation. Everybody runs the same headlines: BREAKING: Reports: Sources: Trump Fixer to Flip; Avenatti Says “Orange is the New Black, Buttercup!”

As one writer puts it, “For the last two years the mass media machine has been behaving very, very strangely, and it isn’t getting better, it’s getting worse. Not since the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq have we seen mainstream media outlets trying to shove narratives down our throats so desperately and aggressively.”

Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy