As the Michael Cohen slush fund for collecting corporate cash seems to grow with each news cycle Trumpco’s pay-for-play scheme looks downright Putonian:
Ian Bassin, Obama Associate White House Counsel
(“All In with Chris Hayes”, MSNBC, 5/10/2018):
“We’ve seen things like run-of-the-mill corruption in Washington before –someone tries to line their own pockets by selling access. What we are looking at here is something that looks a little bit more like systemic corruption where the President is publicly saying he is going to potentially intervene in regulatory matters that DOJ is undertaking, or that other agencies are undertaking, sending signals that he might change the regulatory landscape for companies like Amazon that he doesn’t like, costing them a fortune. When you are a CEO and you see the president can knock $55 billion off Amazon’s market capital in a single tweet, you’re thought is ‘I gotta pay somebody to keep him off my back.’ And once that happens you really get into a situation that looks a lot more like how Vladimir Putin runs Russia, or Mubarak and el-Sisi in Egypt. Which is where what we’ve been calling Democracy becomes Autocratic Capture, where you essentially need to pay the autocrat in order to survive the regulatory state. When that happens Democracy itself is in danger.”
the twit’s own pay-for -play ploy
nytimes:
President Trump sent two private letters to Middle East allies in recent weeks complaining that the United States has spent too much money in the region and urging them to pick up more of the burden as part of a coalition to counter Iran’s influence, a person familiar with them said Thursday.
[….]
He has said repeatedly that the United States spent $7 trillion in the Middle East since 9/11 and had gotten nothing out of it, a figure that fact checkers have deemed false. He may be taking that number from a study by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University that estimated future debt from war spending by 2053 at $7.9 trillion. For “war-related activities” in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2001, the institute says the cost has been $1.88 trillion.
Either way, of course, it is a lot of money, and Mr. Trump essentially enshrined this point in a letter that was sent a few weeks ago to the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, according to the person familiar with it.
[….]
After receiving a response from the Arabs, Mr. Trump then sent a second letter about a week ago reinforcing the points. It was not clear what specific steps might follow. He made a vague offer to send a team to help resolve the Qatar conflict if it would be helpful, but the Arab states have resisted the idea, saying it was for them to handle.
The existence of the first letter was made public on Wednesday by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who appeared intent on using it to undermine the Sunni Arab states that received it. He posted a message on Twitter jabbing the Arabs a day after Mr. Trump announced that he was pulling the United States out of the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran.
“A few days ago Trump wrote a letter to leaders of #PersianGulf states, which was revealed to us,” the supreme leader wrote. “He wrote: ‘I spent $7 trillion and you must do something in return.’ The U.S. wants to own humiliated slaves.”
[…continues…]
pay for play policy permeates the place. example from amanpour report:
Fmr. official: Donors define Pruitt’s EPA policy
Former EPA official Betsy Southerland says the Environmental Protection Agency under Scott Pruitt is repealing everything political donors ask them to.
Source: CNN
the swamp abides
from la times:
….although Trump had pledged to “drain the swamp” in Washington, Cohen used his newly created company to sell his guidance — and his presumed access to the incoming president — to major corporations that had suddenly found their usual Washington lobbying and consulting firms out of the loop.
Novartis AG, one of the world’s largest drug companies, paid Cohen $1.2 million for supposed healthcare counsel despite Cohen’s lack of healthcare experience. Telecommunications giant AT&T paid him $600,000 for “insight” into the new administration as it pursued government approval for a takeover of Time Warner.
Korean Aerospace Industries dropped $150,000, purportedly for advice on U.S. accounting standards. And Columbus Nova, a New York investment firm that manages assets of an oligarch close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, paid Cohen $500,000, ostensibly for his help on real estate and other ventures.
“He desperately wanted to be a player — a person who was important, a person who wanted to throw his weight around,” said an acquaintance who requested anonymity to speak candidly. After Trump was elected, Cohen “was trying to figure out what was going to be the best place to hang his hat, to make as much money as he could.”
For watchdog groups, the payments signaled that little had changed in the nation’s capital.
“That’s the way the system works in Washington,” said Fred Wertheimer, a Washington lawyer and activist who now heads Democracy 21, a nonpartisan group focused on campaign finance reform. “This is the swamp in its full glory.”
[….continues…]
It breathes. It dreams. And, at night, beneath a low-hanging fog, it shambles through the shadows with its red eyes and funereal soul. The swamp has a spirit, and it walks on two legs. A monster that was once a man…
a year ago in the week: Donald Trump, swamp thing
But not all of this dark money is in the shadows. Sometimes the cash lies out in the open, sunbathing for all to see — as in the Trump administration, planted thick as it is with billionaires, multimillionaires, former Goldman Sachs executives, corporate lawyers, and alt-media mavens with ties to a hedge-fund fortune.
yesterday at huffpo:
Michael Avenatti Warns Michael Cohen: I Still Have More Documents To Release
“We’ve got emails, we’ve got text messages, we’ve got other financial information.”
[…continues including this vid from cnn…]
Viktor Vekselberg, the man at the center of the week’s biggest Trump-Russia news, explained…
Hey that’s our special oligarch –funding California Parks (Fort Ross) because idiots like the goopers think rich people don’t need public recreation facilities
https://www.fortross.org/renova.htm
KGC
Most people in the US don’t know why the Russian River is called the Russian River.
A piece of California history. If Alexander Baranov had been successful in his negotiations with the Spanish to offset British and US incursions into the West, virtually all of what is now the US from Tijuana in the south to the whole of Alaska would be Russian.
Instead the first Republican candidate for President, John Fremont, and then Seward’s Folly under Andrew Johnson following the death of Lincoln kept it all in the US.
Remember those $1000. bonuses to employees by AT&T? Pay to play for permanent tax cuts and pretend bonuses already negotiated by the union. Non-employee, cohen, sure gets a better bonus from the telcom giant. at&t part of the pr bs of the trumpence junta payola scheme.
Good catch BW
Trudee’s new old law firm says only he is a sleaze they are not.
yes, very good catch BW
Russian River Valley… home to some of the best wines produced in California… YUM!
Russian River Valley
Another school shooting. Schools look like small cities now…or prisons. That’s another problem. And it’s not class size that is the problem. We had 28 to 32 kids per class, but the school was small (fewer than 500 kids…closer to 400).
Washington DC has long been treated like a pay toilet.
Continue to mend there, Craig.
Happy Mother’s Day to those on the trail with kiddos.
Hmm, that Single Vineyard Night sounds like a good time. A single vineyard night in WV would be not so much fun. The food would likely be mediocre and if it’s WV wine, it would suck – I’ve tried the “best” of WV wines and done so with an open mind. They suck.
Take you off the walker, Poobah?
Just tweeted this. Feeling almost fully returned to normalcy.
Recovery from hip replacement surgery 12 days ago. Off walker, drugs, no pain, better than before. Anyone who needs this, don’t be afraid!
boss, beware of ladders for awhile. a friend of mine, thinking he was fully recovered from hip surgery a month before, made the mistake of scaling and then surprisingly and suddenly unscaling said equipment thus landing him back on his back repairing hip instead of roof.
guardian quoting trevor noah:
“This guy’s not just a swamp creature, he’s literally selling swamp tours.”
Longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen reportedly received huge payments from corporations such as AT&T in exchange for promised access to the president.
Christian science monitor:
Mueller aside, Trump now faces legal peril from a host of sources
Why We Wrote This
A web of lawsuits involving President Trump and his associates – filed by Russian oligarchs, the Democratic Party, and a porn star, among others – may seem primarily like a source of cable news entertainment. But this civil litigation could pose grave risks to Mr. Trump and his presidency.
May 11, 2018
Two ways to read the story
Quick Read Deep Read ( 7 Min. )
By Warren Richey Staff writer
President Trump and his supporters have grown increasingly critical of the expanding nature of special counsel Robert Mueller’s criminal investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. But the president and his associates are facing an even wider array of civil lawsuits involving multiple allegations from a variety of lawyers investigating various aspects of Mr. Trump’s alleged conduct. These cases are independent of Mr. Mueller’s probe, yet they could wind up being somewhat symbiotic, depending on what they unearth. And for Trump, they could potentially be even more consequential. “In each of those cases, I anticipate that the president is going to have to give depositions, and those will be done under oath,” says Andrew Wright, a law professor and former White House lawyer during both the Clinton and Obama administrations. Some of these depositions, he adds, will likely cover topics of interest to Mueller: “There’s certainly nothing stopping coordination between Bob Mueller and other people’s counsel where there are areas of overlap.”
Next Thursday I board the train to spend a week at Asilomar near Monterey. At least one day will be spent on Cannery Row and haunting the Bargetto Winery tasting room. The winery itself is in the Santa Cruz mountains, and I’ve been going there since the late 60s. This will set me up for several days by either the pool or the ocean with a glass in my hand becoming one with the universe … ommmmmm
I’ll be forced to depart kicking an screaming in protest on the 25th. Should anyone happen to be in the area between 5/8 – 5/24, let me know. Dinner at Fandango is always a good idea.
Slanders Suckabee = Baghdad Bob
cohen is trump’s rebozo
eerie how history is repeating itself…. take for instance this comment quoted at business insider in their coverage of the cohen affair:
“If you take this at face value, these are extraordinarily serious allegations that are being made,” Mitchell Epner, a former assistant US attorney for the District of New Jersey and now an attorney at Rottenberg Lipman Rich, told Business Insider.
“This is at least at the type of the level of corruption that was made between Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo,” he added, referring to the close friend of the former president.
Craig – congrats on your new life as a 26.2 runner. Or was that .001?
Just got back from a conference in Providence, R.I. The place is fun. Federal Hill has the Italian restaurants to make your tummy happy. The city is rebuilding itself as an arts and performance locale and looks like it has a good start.
I enjoyed a couple of days without SFB and his mob/cult. It seems that the output of cow pies was equal to the cow pies outputted before I left. I sure hope SFB and his cuckold are frog walked out soon.
Jamie, I saw the photograph of your Beach and the name Ansel Adams jumped into my mind. Who says photography isn’t art. I’m not talking about humanoid elephants swirling their 1,000-frame a second devices by their prehensile trunks in the hope that they may snap a banana. I’m talking about people like, um, Ansel Adams who created the photographic masterpiece of that zillion times photographed waterfall in Yosemite that graces our dining room wall.
trudeee should admit he was drunk and check into rehab
Flatus
My other favorite place is Yosemite. The art gallery there has a large collection of Ansel Adams photos of the park.
kgc, you mean this rudy? even a drunk can do better than this. 🙂
business insider:
During a phone interview with Business Insider, Giuliani said he wouldn’t debate Avenatti because the lawyer was “pimping for money.”
“I don’t get involved with pimps,” Giuliani said. “The media loves to give him room because he makes these roundabout charges and they turn out to mean nothing. I think he’s going to get himself in serious trouble.”
Avenatti fired back at Giuliani on Twitter Friday evening, posting a 2000 video of Giuliani dressed in drag with Trump performing a skit for the then-mayor’s Inner Circle Press Roast.
@MichaelAvenatti
Hey Rudy – It turns out I’m not the only “pimp” you have experience with. History evidently is repeating itself. #pimped #bastahttp://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/rudy-guiliani-donald-trump-drag-video-seduce-new-york-mayor-us-president-a8344921.html …
5:42 PM – May 11, 2018
Flatus – Ansel Adams and Edward Weston were my heroes back when I was learning photography as a lifestyle and profession. I was seventeen when I held in my hands photographs printed by Weston. The feeling I had just holding those was intense. The f64 style was what i wanted to emulate. I did good at it.
But, what was missing was the human part of life. Adams and Weston photographed nature. They did not get the human side.
So far life is good.
Jamie- Drink it all in, the wine & the view.
BB,
I’ve had perhaps ten cameras ranging from a Linhof to a Brownie. The one that I’ve done my best work on is a 1950s Rolleiflex 3.5 Xenotar. I keep on buying cameras, but I haven’t taken a picture in, maybe, twenty years. My favorite film was Agfa IFF–16asa B&W. It demanded a sturdy tripod along with a cable release–no f64. I’ve done like 36×36 enlargements with it. using ‘business’ labs with faultless results.
Flatus, those old Rolleis were wonderful cameras. My first camera was an Argus C3. Dad got it in the late 40s I think and passed it down to me. Nice primitive 35 mm. Made great color slides. Still have a few boxes of them.
Loudmouth Julie Annie’s remark about trump sinking the att-Time Warner merger might cause att to file a motion, to hear new evidence and to call the drunken bum to testify. att might even subpoena the loudmouth international piss john to testify. The latter would be an embarrassment, as it would disprove the WH lie that trump can’t be subpoenaed
x-r, thanks for alerting us to Julie’s most recent gaffe. may there be more of same.
business insider:
Rudy Giuliani appears to suggest Trump personally tried to kill the AT&T-Time Warner merger
Eisenstaedt for the human side