Did The Kremlin Send In Manafort To Insure The Trump Campaign Played Its Game?

THE DAILY BEAST

It has been fascinating -- in the grotesque sort of way that a slow-motion train wreck is fascinating -- to watch the Russia scandal unfold.  From the first intimations in late 2016 that the dark hand of Vladimir Putin was at work to elect Donald Trump to our dawning realization that the Trump campaign colluded in that effort to our astonishment at how enormous and successful the effort was, there has been one revelation after another.  And so prepare your addled self for the possibility of another jaw dropper: The Kremlin may have sent Paul Manafort into a campaign he was soon to manage to insure that Trump insiders helped Putin play his game. 

That would have seemed preposterous even a few weeks ago, but now seems increasingly possible.   

For openers, Manafort's entire career has been one exercise in evil after another.  He lobbied on behalf of a rogue's gallery of corrupt foreign leaders, including Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seiko in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angolan guerrilla heavyweight Jonas Savimbi, and his penultimate act prior to joining the Trump campaign was to engineer a social media-based disinformation campaign for Putin's puppet president in Ukraine that anticipated what Russia and its army of trolls did in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.   

Add to that the fact it was Manafort who lobbied Trump to join his campaign, that there was a spike in campaign contacts with Moscow almost immediately after he joined the campaign and a further uptick when he was named campaign manager, and you have a pretty strong circumstantial case. 

This is further bolstered by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner's assertion, later picked up by others in defense of Trump, that the campaign was too chaotic and incompetent to collude.  But Manafort was the secret antidote to that: A competent inside player with ample experience in the collusion game.

The distance between circumstantial and provable can be substantial.  But if the Russia scandal has taught us nothing else beyond the fact that virtually every key Trump player is a bad actor, it is that if something looks like a coincidence, it almost certainly is not. 

That is the big takeaway from a blockbuster April 5 story by veteran Russia investigative reporter Luke Harding in The Guardian. 

Harding's lede paragraphs:

Donald Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort authorized a secret media operation on behalf of Ukraine's former president featuring "black ops," "placed" articles in the Wall Street Journal and U.S. websites and anonymous briefings against Hillary Clinton. 

The project was designed to boost the reputation of Ukraine's then leader, Viktor Yanukovych.  It was part of a multimillion-dollar lobbying effort carried out by Manafort on behalf of Yanukovych's embattled government, emails and documents reveal. 

The strategies included: 

* Proposing to rewrite Wikipedia entries to smear a key opponent of the then Ukrainian president. 

* Setting up a fake thinktank in Vienna to disseminate viewpoints supporting Yanukovych. 

* A social media blitz "aimed at targeted audiences in Europe and the U.S." 

* Briefing journalists from the rightwing website Breitbart to attack Clinton when she was U.S. secretary of state. 

Manafort's Ukraine strategy anticipated later efforts by the Kremlin and its troll factory to use Twitter and Facebook to discredit Clinton and to help Trump win the 2016 US election.  

In fact, what Manafort did in Ukraine and what Russia would do three years later in the U.S. are carbon copies. 

"We will utilize specially crafted social media campaigns to target users interested and ideologically in favor of the content to engage them," wrote Manafort of the strategy behind his Ukraine campaign.  "[We will] bring them into the circle of allegiance allowing us to organically flow into outer spheres of social participants that don't necessarily have the same strong views but are guided by the thought leaders they respect." 

When it came time to target Clinton with cyber-espionage attacks in 2016, Russia had a field-tested accomplice in Manafort, who was close to Oleg Deripaska and other members of Putin's inner circle and traveled to Moscow at least 18 times from late 2004 through 2015.   

Aluminum magnate Deripaska is on the list of Russian oligarchs on whom the Trump administration belatedly imposed sanctions last Friday.  (As opposed to enforcing sanctions, which are another matter altogether given the president's unwavering personal support for Putin, which persists although Russian-U.S. relations otherwise are at their lowest point since the Cold War.) 

Deripaska has longtime ties to Konstantin Kilimnik, the Kiev office manager for the lobbying business run by Manafort and Rick Gates and a sometimes translator for them for many years.  Kilimnik, in turn, worked for the Main Intelligence Directorate -- or GRU -- the shadowiest of the Kremlin's spy agencies and a major player in Russia's cyber-espionage of the Clinton campaign. 

Manafort was the target of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court warrant allowing the FBI to wiretap him when he reached out to Trump on February 26, 2016 with a five-page, single-spaced proposal in which he touted his expertise in assisting political leaders, whom he took pains to mention included Russian oligarchs.   

He also was in dire financial straits, yet he offered to work for free. He was hired by the campaign on March 26 and became campaign manager on June 20. Gates was named his deputy. 

Meanwhile, Manafort met with Kilimnik in New York in April 2016 and again on August 2, the later meeting at Trump Tower 16 days before he was fired as campaign manager following a Washington Post report on the millions of dollars he received from Yanukovych.  

Court filings by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller last week and in March indicate that he has tacked away from investigating Manafort's financial crimes and is now focusing on Manafort's role in the campaign. 

The filings hint at Manafort and Gates being cutouts to convey information between the campaign and Putin's cyberwarriors, with GRU spy Kilimnik being the conduit.  After Gates agreed to cooperate, Mueller also obtained a new search warrant for five sets of phone records and bank account information pertaining to Manafort.  The phone records may be what are called "historical cell site information" in investigative parlance, meaning that Mueller is endeavoring to track the timing of Manafort's previous movements. 

Returning to the grotesquery of watching the scandal unfold that I mentioned at the top of this post, there is the Steele dossier, which seems like so much ancient history at this point. 

It is anything but. 

Perhaps the biggest lesson from the dossier in the here and now is that what Steele's confidential sources said was happening and predicted would happen were stunningly accurate.   

It was the view of these sources that Manafort managed the stateside arm of the Kremlin's conspiracy to exploit hacked emails and other documents embarrassing to Clinton, worked with the Kremlin regarding how to take maximum advantage of the hacked materials, made cash payments to some of the hackers, and worked to "sideline" Ukraine as a campaign issue, which is exactly what happened after Manafort assisted the Trump campaign in strong arming the anti-Russia Republican Party establishment and rewriting the GOP's convention platform on Ukraine to reflect a pro-Putin view.   

Meanwhile, Manafort also was in touch with Deripaska during the summer of 2016, at one point offering to give him back-channel briefings on the campaign before he got the boot.    

Among his creditors is Deripaska, to whom he still owes almost $20 million.

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal

and related events.

   

Russia Scandal Update: Where Maximum Bob Has Been & Where He's Headed

RUSSIAN ROULETTE DUST JACKET DETAIL

It was yet another Washington Post blockbuster: Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has told Donald Trump's lawyers he is not currently a criminal target of his intensifying investigation into the Russia scandal.  But behind that headline lurked something else altogether.  The president is in greater legal peril than ever. 

Say what?   How to reconcile the these seemingly polar opposites? 

Here's how: While Mueller did tell Trump's lawyers (now in the singular with the departure of John Dowd) last month that the president was not currently a target, he still is a subject, a person whose conduct falls within the scope of a grand jury investigation.  

While Trump must have been elated to hear he wasn't a target, when you break down what else the April 3 WaPo story states Mueller had to say, a different and considerably darker picture emerges that should scare the bejesus out of the president and his sycophancy:

It is the first clear evidence that the president's own conduct is being investigated. 

That investigation is twofold: Obstruction of justice and collusion-interference. 

Mueller is preparing a report on obstruction but needs to first interview the president. 

The president is a subject of the collusion-interference investigation but not (yet) a target. 

It is wishful thinking that the president will not be a criminal target in the future. 

This is because Mueller will continue the collusion-interference aspect of the investigation. 

And what of the obstruction report? 

Actually, in the course of negotiations with Trump's lawyers/lawyer over an interview with the president, Mueller's team has indicated that he is considering writing reports on the team's findings in stages with the first report focused on the obstruction issue and possibly due out in June or July. 

That in and of itself may be bad -- no, make that terrible -- news for Trump.   

This is because the special prosecutor appears to believe he has an obligation to issue a report and that doesn't happen when someone is exonerated, case in point being . . . you guessed it . . . when then-FBI Director James Comey exonerated Hillary Clinton in the great State Department email server flap.  And remember that there is no aspect of what we do know about the Russia scandal more incriminating for Trump than his repeated efforts to shut down the investigation, including firing Comey. 

Under the regulations governing appointment of the special counsel, Mueller would provide a confidential report explaining his conclusions to the attorney general -- or, in this case, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein since AG Jeff Sessions kept lying about his contacts with Russians during the Trump campaign, and to the president's everlasting anger, recused his sorry-assed self. 

Rosenstein would then decide whether to make the report public, but in any event must provide the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate judiciary committees with an explanation about any decision to conclude the investigation, or at least the obstruction phase of it, whether in the form of a memo about the report or the report itself, which might lay out the case for impeachment. 

Really.  

Under those special counsel regulations, whether or how Rosenstein releases the report would be based on a determination of whether  that would be "in the public interest," a much-battered concept as it regards Trump's congressional allies.   

Given the behavior of those Capitol Hill allies when it comes to oversight and their proclivity for launching counter-investigations against Mueller, Clinton and the other usual Democratic suspects on flimsy or nonexistent grounds, they could sit on the report or block a vote to release it.  Which would then set up other possibilities: Democrats could campaign against that decision in the midterm elections.  Or the report might be leaked.  

Are we having fun yet? 

Mueller's statement last month that Trump was not then a criminal target may also have to do with the question as to whether a sitting president can be indicted (a criminal process) as opposed to impeached (a political process).   

Justice Department legal opinions issued in 1973 and 2000 say a sitting president cannot be indicted criminally while in office, nor do I believe the savvy Mueller would waylay his own investigation by trying to break new legal ground by calling for an indictment, an action that would grind on endlessly and then some through the courts. 

Finally, there is the collusion-interference aspect of the investigation. 

We have long passed the point where there is any question about whether Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election.  The evidence is overwhelming, while evidence that members of the Trump campaign team like Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and Roger Stone colluded grows by the day. 

That aspect of Mueller's investigation hinges, to an extent, on how the obstruction aspect plays out, including how big a fool Trump makes of himself when and if he submits to an interview.  But the big hinge is whether any campaign team members or Trump willingly coordinated their actions with Russia. 

Complicating or clarifying matters -- which depends on whether you believe Trump is as pure as the driven snow or a dirty, rotten scoundrel -- it now appears that the Justice Department views collusion as a criminal activity. 

That conclusion is peeking out between the lines in a court document released earlier this week in which Mueller lays out counter-arguments against Manafort's suit charging that the special counsel overstepped his mandate in charging Trump's former campaign manager with a slew of financial law violations, including money laundering. 

In response to this claim, Mueller states that he asked Rosenstein for specific authorization as to the areas he wanted to investigate.  Rosenstein spelled out the scope of Mueller's jurisdiction in a memorandum, and it includes 

Allegations that Paul Manafort: Committed a crime or crimes by colluding with Russian government officials with respect to the Russian government’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 election for President of the United States, in violation of United States law [and] Committed a crime or crimes arising out of payments he received from the Ukrainian government . . . 

If collusion is a crime, what crime is it? 

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin says Mueller's own actions in indicting those 13 Russians and three Russian entities for using social media to help Trump win provide a big clue.  It's called conspiracy to defraud the United States.  

Interestingly, most of the rest of Rosenstein's memo is redacted.  Mueller clearly has the go-ahead to investigate other individuals for collusion.   He is not yet revealing their identities, but one wonders if they include President Donald Trump. 

A final thought: Mueller's seeming lack of independence has been viewed as a vulnerability to be exploited by the White House and his other foes.  But it turns out to be a strength because he has sought and received Rosenstein's permission regarding the scope of his investigation and Rosenstein -- a Trump appointee who in Sessions' absence is the ranking Justice Department official on the matter -- has repeatedly and publicly affirmed his confidence in and approval of the special counsel.

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal

and related events.

If Dr. King Looked Beyond The Grave Today, He Would Be Bitterly Disappointed

MATT DAVIES / NEWSDAY

(PORTIONS OF THIS POST, ADJUSTED FOR THE CURRENT REALITY,
 HAVE APPEARED ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF DR. KING'S DEATH FOR YEARS.) 

When I was first cutting my teeth in the newspaper business, my editors sent me out on "house ends," visits to homes where I would interview families of interest because something very bad of interest had happened to them. 

It was the late 1960s and many of these house ends were the result of the death of a young man in Vietnam, usually an Army or Marine Corps infantryman who had been drafted or given the choice between prison or the military by a judge.  Most of these young men were African-Americans and virtually all were from poor families. 

After a while, these visits took on a certain surreal sameness. 

Although I once found myself in the horribly awkward position of having arrived before the uniformed bearer of the bad-news telegram, I always was welcomed into these humble homes.   I always was treated with respect.  These were good people and they knew that I would give their now departed son or brother a respectful sendoff in the next day's newspaper. 

The living rooms always were modest and always had a photograph of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in a place of honor, often the same color rotogravure portrait scissored from an old Sunday Philadelphia Bulletin magazine. 

I have no idea how many times I sat on a lumpy couch, ballpoint pen and spiral-bound A6 reporter's notebook in one hand, a snapshot of the victim in the other, with the wizened Dr. King looking down on me as I listened to the story of a young life snuffed out by a war that none of us understood, few supported and Dr. King adamantly opposed because he understood, as few others did, that there was a common link between the civil rights and peace movements. 

I do know that too many of these young men perished because of a lethal one-two punch -- their skin color and economic status.  They were not white and did not have have college deferments, as did a Dick Cheney, or a daddy with friends in high places, as did a George W. Bush.  Or a son of privilege eager to invent draft-deferring physical ailments like Donald Trump. 

IT WAS THE SPRING OF 1968 and I had taken a week off from the house-end grind to join college friends in Daytona Beach, Florida.  

Our sunburns had not yet turned to tans and we had barely finished the first of several cases of Old Milwaukee beer (with pull tops, a recent innovation) when President Johnson shocked the nation by announcing that he would not seek another term.  The Vietnam War had worn him down -- and out.  

And then four evenings later -- some 50 years ago today -- there was a commotion.  

"They killed the nigger! The nigger's dead!" cried a group of drunken college students from Tennessee as they danced and whooped in the parking lot of the motel adjacent to ours.  "They killed the nigger!"  

My Old Milwaukee high evaporated in a flash. We turned on the television.  Dr. King had been gunned down at a Memphis motel.  I wanted to hurt those students.  I wanted to throw up.  

We drove north the next morning.  As we approached Washington, there were huge black clouds of smoke over the city.  We overtook a convoy of troop carriers filled with National Guardsmen, rifles slung over their shoulders.  The riots following Dr. King's murder were well underway, and the New York Avenue corridor of tenements, flophouses, liquor stores and churches in Northwest Washington was in flames.  

The rioting spread, and the next night I was again in newspaper reporter's mufti. 

I took my Daytona tan down to The Valley, a poor neighborhood in Wilmington, Delaware where young blacks were skirmishing with the city police and National Guard.  There were fires and intermittent gunfire from snipers atop the row houses.  At one point a bullet whizzed over my head.  Yes, just like in the movies.  

I was still shaking when I got back to my apartment the next morning.  I cried over the inhumanity of my fellow man, for my black friends and for Dr. King. 

MY TEARS CAME HONESTLY.  My mother's father was a German Jewish immigrant who worked tirelessly for civil rights and went out of his way to hire blacks at his department store for jobs that did not involve dustpans and mops.  He took his oath of citizenship so seriously that he paid a printer to publish a pocket-sized booklet with the Bill of Rights, an American flag on the cover, which he distributed to high school civics classes.  

My parents took up the civil-rights mantle, and to use the parlance of the time, some of their best friends were Negroes.  My father was the campaign manager for the first black elected to the local school board.  That and my parents' habit of inviting black friends to swim in our backyard pool alienated them from some of their white "friends;" one neighbor forbade her children from playing with my brother and sister and I.  

We went on bus trips to Washington for the big civil rights and antiwar protest marches.  My father, never a religious man, found the experience of bearing witness on the Mall with several hundred thousand other people to be deeply spiritual.  

Like me, they were heartened by the sea change in civil rights in the 1960s and 70s that Dr. King and his acolytes worked for so tirelessly.  But they believed until the day they drew their last breaths that America remained a deeply racist society, perhaps just not as overtly so, and that much work remained to be done.  

IF DR. KING WERE TO LOOK beyond the grave today he surely would be bitterly disappointed.  Although he would be cheered by the advances in civil rights, and there have been many, he certainly would wonder if the progress he and his brothers and sisters bled and gave their lives for is being reversed even after eight years of an African-American president. 

One bright spot -- and there are too few -- is the Black Lives Matter movement, which is a logical contemporary successor to Dr. King's crusade.  It is fair to say that a Chicago police officer would not be charged with the murder of Laquan McDonald, as well as the resolution of other high-profile cases where there has if only rarely been a semblance of justice -- even if it has been justice delayed -- without the consciousness raising of the movement. 

Barack Obama pretty much avoided addressing racism head on during his presidency, and that's okay with me.  The lives of black Americans improved during his two terms because of his trademark quiet determination, not fire and brimstone, while I find offensive the notion that just because he's black things would or should automatically be better.  It's going to take a lot more than eight years to undo hundreds of years of racism.  

That racism is so deeply rooted in our culture that a beast like Trump is president. 

Trump received endorsements from white supremacist groups, and that was just fine with him, while racists everywhere have put down their dog whistles with relative impunity to deliver blatantly anti-minority messages.  In fact, one of the greatest lessons not learned in the 2016 campaign by our feckless news media was that while it would treat Trump's outrageous behavior as disqualifying, his supporters believed otherwise.  This is not to say that many of these supporters voted for Trump although he was a bigot and racist, which is another post-election media delusionment.  They voted for him precisely because he was. 

Meanwhile, the Republican Party has become America's biggest hate group with the first black president still its chief target.  Which begs a question: Is it Obama's fault that the U.S. is not more openly intolerant?  Of course not.  Many Americans, and were not just talking garden-variety racists here, were not ready for a transformational leader like Dr. King, let alone a transformational president.  

Republicans represent the They're Agin' Us view when they claim that if Dr. King were alive today, he would be "appalled" by the Black Lives Matter movement's focus on the skin color of the people who are disproportionately killed in encounters with the police.   

Besides being patently false, this argument betrays an indifference to black suffering and an ignorance of the history the civil rights movement. 

From its infancy, that movement focused on bringing an end to violence against African-Americans.  Lest we forget, as so many people conveniently have, Dr. King's goal was to force the White House and Congress to confront the fact that African-Americans were being killed with impunity for "offenses" like trying to vote and for equal protection under the law.  

The views of Republicans, beginning with but not confined to Trump, are pathetic in historic and contemporary contexts, but then they are merely standing at a figurative schoolhouse door like George Wallace did.

Has Mueller Finally Found That Witch? And Does Manafort Now Fear For His Life?

Has Special Counsel Robert Mueller finally found the witch that Trump keeps claiming the special prosecutor is looking for?   

The president has complained incessantly that the criminal investigation into his campaign's collusion with Russia is nothing more than a "witch hunt," but now the special prosecutor may have found that broom-riding phantom dressed in black with a crooked nose, gnarly chin and a peaked hat. 

He's Konstantin Kilimnik. 

This Ukrainian-Russian does not look anything like your stereotypical witch.  But he was the Kiev office manager for the lobbying business run by Paul Manafort and Rick Gates and a sometimes translator for them for many years and has intelligence ties reportedly involving the Main Intelligence Directorate -- or GRU -- the shadowiest of the Kremlin's spy agencies and a major player in Russia's cyber-espionage of the Hillary Clinton campaign, which was a key factor in her shocking loss to Trump. 

Kilimnik was in regular communication with Manafort and Gates while Manafort was Trump campaign manager and Gates his deputy.  The implication being that Manafort and Gates were cutouts to convey information between the campaign and Putin's cyberwarriors, and GRU spy Kilimnik was the conduit. 

Kilimnik's ties to Putin run deep. 

He taught the Russian leader judo and is an associate of mobbed-up aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, a close friend of Putin's with whom Manafort has had a longtime business relationship.  Manafort was in touch with Deripaska during the summer of 2016, at one point offering to give him back-channel briefings on the campaign.  His name keeps coming up in connection with the Russia scandal, including outrageous but plausible claims being made by a U.S. political asylum-seeking high-end Belarus prostitute and self-described "sex expert" jailed in Thailand since February 25 who is a former mistress of Deripaska.  

When the Trump campaign worked behind the scenes in July 2016 to transform the Republican National Convention platform on Ukraine from an anti-Moscow to a pro-Putin stance, Kilimnik bragged to friends in Kiev that he was involved in the effort. 

Kilimnik hews to a familiar line in professing innocence. 

"Ukraine and Ukrainians are being used as scapegoats in the U.S. political and media battles," a dynamic that Kilimnik said has been made "abundantly evident from how my own circumstantial relationships were misrepresented, exaggerated and overblown." 

Gates, of course, is cooperating with Mueller while Manafort continues to hang tough despite facing 30 counts of money laundering and tax and foreign lobbying law violations that the judge supervising his case has said pretty much guarantees he will spend the rest of his life in prison.   

DOES MANAFORT FACE A LIFE OR DEATH CHOICE and that explains his refusal to flip? 

A former federal prosecutor calls Manafort's refusal to join Gates, Papadopoulos and former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn in cooperating "the most enduring mystery to date" in Mueller's inquiry, but it may not be as mysterious as it seems. 

In a March 8 post on the disappearance of George Mifsud and poisoning of Sergei Skripal, I first broached the possibility that Manafort, because of the tales he could tell about the role he played between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence, may have more to fear from Putin's long hand than he does from Mueller and prison.   

Mifsud is the Maltese professor who baited Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos with tales of Russian officials who had "dirt" on Clinton and "thousands" of her emails.  He went missing on November 2, 2017, three days after Manafort and Gates were indicted by Mueller and there was a court filing in which Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to a charge of lying to the agents about his meetings with Mifsud and agreed to cooperate with the special prosecutor's investigation. 

Skripal was a colonel in the KGB, had been recruited by MI6, the British intelligence service, and became a double agent who revealed the identities of several Russian spies working in Britain.  He and his daughter were poisoned on March 4 with Novichok No. 5, a powerful nerve agent used in several Putin-sanctioned political assassinations, in Salisbury, England, and remains in critical condition. 

There have been at least 30 other possible victims of Putin's use of assassination as a political weapon.  These murders sometimes involve exotic, hard-to-trace poisons and often are carried out by hitmen for the FSB, a state security agency headed by Putin until he became prime minister and then president, and sometimes by mobsters loyal to Putin.   

To suggest that the long arm of the Kremlin does not extend to the the U.S. beggars belief, and the modus operandi employed in the Skripal hit is fraught with deadly symbolism. 

Skripal was not shot or killed in a staged accident.  The nerve agent was left on his front door handle where Putin's thugs knew it would be identified and linked to Russia, sending a loud and clear message to others who would think of defecting to -- or informing for -- the West.  And by conducting the operation in a British town some distance from London that is so rich in history, the attack also sent a message that no place is out of reach of Russian assassins.  

And so the ghastly possibility that Manafort may fear for his life while modeling his two home confinement bracelets -- one for each of his forthcoming trials -- at his suburban Washington condo or home in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida is gaining currency. 

Writes Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo: 

I agree that it is hard to imagine that either the Russian government or powerful figures from the former Soviet Union would take such a reckless step on American soil.  But look at the simple facts of the matter.  Russia has killed a number of enemies abroad in recent years — not just in obscure lawless parts of the world but in major western metropoles.   Manafort is deeply enmeshed with and apparently deeply in debt to a man the U.S. government has said for a decade is tied to Russian organized crime networks.  It seems silly not to consider the possibility that a person in that position might realistically fear the consequences of shedding all his secrets.

That man is Deripaska. 

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline on the Russia scandal

and related events. 

Trump May Have Run Out Of Luck As His Bad Karma Finally Catches Up To Him

© NANCY OHANIAN / USED WITH PERMISSION

Repeated misbehavior almost always has a way of biting perps in the ass.  It's called bad karma, and Donald Trump has accumulated several lifetimes worth of it.  But Trump may finally have run out of luck as he faces the greatest crisis of his presidency not involving a porn star with capacious breasts.  He has been abandoned by his most able and most experienced lawyers as he scrambles to spare his neck from Robert Mueller's ever tightening Russia scandal noose. 

This turn of events could not have come soon enough.  The country Trump pledged to make "great again" has been diminished by his attacks on the core values that once made it truly great, he has filled the Washington swamp to overflowing with a rogues gallery of platinum-tinged hoodlums, he has insulted allies and abandoned international agreements while lauding Vladimir Putin as a friend and attacking journalists enemies because of the truths they inconveniently convey.  Yes, Trump's base is unmovable, but even it is shrinking (hullo Ann Coulter!) as his outrages and moral mockeries pile up. 

We have suffered terribly at Trump's small hands, and while the end of his presidency may not be as near as we would hope, it's coming. 

THE BIGGEST REASON THAT THE END is coming is a confluence of all that bad karma. 

The reason Trump's legal team -- the people defending him against the canny Mueller -- now consists of Jay Sekulow and Andrew Ekonomou, two Bible thumpers with no criminal law experience and, in Ekonomou's case, virtually no experience, period, unless you consider a master's degree in medieval history as sufficient to take on Mueller.  With a broadsword, perhaps, but not in a courtroom. 

Trump's lawyer crisis has its roots in three decades of bad behavior: A reputation as a deadbeat who sues at the slightest provocation (an extraordinary 4,000-plus lawsuits), reliably keeping bad company, repeated adulteries, sexual harassment and assaults (including a couple of credible rape allegations) and the belief that he's smarter than any lawyer and wilier than any adversary.  And oh, the lying! 

As he often does, Trump showed his hand in a desultory Tweet as the exodus of experienced criminal lawyers from the West Wing commenced:

Many lawyers and top law firms want to represent me in the Russia case . . . don’t believe the Fake News narrative that it is hard to find a lawyer who wants to take this on. Fame & fortune will NEVER be turned down by a lawyer, though some are conflicted.

Conflicted.   

That would include a Who's Who of the white collar criminal defense bar, who one by one have turned aside Trump's pleas to represent him in what under other circumstances would be the chance of a legal lifetime -- defending the president of the United States.  The deal-breaking reasons are many, but one that is not getting a lot of notice should.  Prestigious major law firms have female partners these days, and many of them would object strenuously if a partner were to agree to represent the cretin at the center of the Stormy Daniels scandal. 

Ted Olson, who was famously one of Bill Clinton’s most dogged legal antagonists during the '90s, says Trump is toxic for lawyers: "I think everybody would agree, this is turmoil, it's chaos, it's confusion, it's not good for anything . . . This (White House) seems to be beyond normal." 

And when asked whether he knew of any lawyers who want to work for Trump, Olson replied, "Not at all." 

THEY'RE GIVING TRUMP THE BUSINESS and he doesn't like it one damned bit. 

Shattering 40 years of presidential tradition and against the advice of the ethics police, Trump maintained ownership of the privately-held Trump Organization through a trust managed by his sons rather than fully divesting its assets when he became president. This way he could keep raking in dough while running the country and use his Oval Office imprimatur to steer business to his hotels and resorts. 

But what seemed like a shrewd arrangement has collided with all that bad karma and it is facing intense legal scrutiny as Mueller subpoenas Trump Organization documents, and Maryland and the District of Columbia sue Trump for illegally accepting gifts known as emoluments from state and foreign governments through his businesses.  They are demanding that he reveal a portion of his sacred tax returns. 

Oh, and this is especially sweet: Stormy Daniels is seeking internal Trump Organization business correspondence as part of her effort to void a nondisclosure agreement stemming from her affair with Spanky. 

Meanwhile, when Trump was running for president, he vaguely but threateningly promised to "open up our libel laws." 

Since then court decisions in two such cases not only have gone against him, but his sexual escapdes, combined with the force of the #MeToo Movement, have resulted in a jump in victories for women in sexual harrassment cases in which they are accused of being liars and are sued for libel. 

WHEN BAD KARMA MEETS BAD KARMA, what do you get? 

For Jared Kushner, who thought that a sinecure as his father-in-law's senior adviser would give him unprecedented power and access, as well as respect and redemption from his many financial ills, and perhaps a presidential pardon for his jailbird father, you get a world of well-deserved hurts. 

Kushner is deeply embroiled in Mueller's investigation, including his suspicious contacts with Russians during and after the campaign, whether he discussed the beleaguered family business's desperate need for cash bailouts with foreign officials while serving in his official government position, and the real sleeper: As head of the Trump campaign digital team and with the help of Cambridge Analytica, he may have been responsible for making sure that Russian hackers knew which voters to target with a sophisticated cyber onslaught of fake news in the Kremlin's successful effort to sabotage Hillary Clinton and hand the election to Daddy-O.   

Investors are shunning the Kushner family's real estate empire because of his toxic ties to Trump.   Two of the family's major Manhattan properties are on creditors' watch lists. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn are investigating the terms under which Deutsche Bank refinanced a Kushner property in Times Square, while New York state regulators are examining Kushner loans from that bank and two others, including lines of credit.  The Office of Government Ethics has asked the White House counsel to examine meetings in the White House between Kushner and two companies that later loaned the family business  more than a half-billion dollars.   

Kushner has been stripped of his top-secret security clearance, which severely impacts his ability to do a job that never has been properly defined.  And federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission are studying whether one of Kushner's sisters used the lure of White House influence and shortcuts to a visa program that fast-tracks citizenship to entice Chinese investors. 

All of this, of course, comes as no surprise. 

Kushner has parlayed his well-honed skills as a manipulator, blame shifter, liar and poster boy for nepotism for whom everything is about money, as well as marriage to an attractive young woman of means as phony as he is, into the ultimate deal -- an intimate working relationship with Donald Trump.   

But like Daddy-O, his business plan did not account for bad karma.   

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline on the Russia scandal

and related events.

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

MORE HERE.

New York Times Reports That World Ends: Women & Minorities Are Hit Hardest

Among my all-time favorite April Fools Day hoaxes is the Great Swiss Spaghetti Hoax in which the respected BBC news show "Panorama" announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. 

The announcement was accompanied by footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees.  Huge numbers of viewers were taken in and many called the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree.   

To this the BBC diplomatically replied, "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best." 

More great hoaxes here.