Trump & Putin By The Book: Five Must-Reads About Two Profoundly Awful People

MOTHER JONES

The problem with writing a definitive history of the Russia scandal is that the scandal is still writing itself.  Revelations come thick and fast, sometimes daily.   

What authors are left with is writing primers that background the scandal, and with publication last week of Seth Hetenna's Trump/Russia: A Definitive History, there are now five books in particular that provide comprehensive overviews while providing the details that get lost in the 24/7 drumbeat of news. 

Three of the books focus on Donald Trump's rise to the presidency and two on Vladimir Putin's consolidation of power.   

The two men could not be more different in background.  One was the son of privilege who learned the fine art of fleecing people at his father's knee in an affluent Queens backwater.  The other was the son of parents of modest means and had suffered grievously in the Second World War who learned the dark art of spycraft early on.   

Yet Trump and Putin are remarkably similar in one very frightening respect: Both are classic bullies and amoral narcissists for whom power and money are holy grails.   While Putin by dint of position has been especially ruthless, both will stop at nothing to slake their greed.   And both are profoundly awful people who are methodically destroying the nations they purport to lead.  

Here are the five books, in alphabetic order: 

COLLUSION: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win (Luke Harding, 2017) Harding is the longtime investigative guru of The Guardian.  This, his third Russia-related book, is an explosive exposé that powerfully makes the case that the Trump campaign colluded with Putin's henchmen to cybersabotage the Hillary Clinton campaign through telling the story behind the Steele Dossier and Putin's years-in-the-making puppet mastery of Trump.  Harding is British, and his perspective on the U.S. and this sordid tale as an outside observer is priceless.  

ORDERS TO KILL: The Putin Regime and Political Murder (Amy Knight, 2017) Knight is the prolific and scholarly author of over 30 papers on Putin and Russia.  She makes the compelling case that Putin and the criminal empire he created has survived because dissidents -- be they political activists or muckraking journalists -- can be slain without any consequence at home or abroad, which has been a recurring theme in Russian history from the tsars onward. Knight shatters the notion that Putin will play nice if only the West (read Trump) is nice to him.     

THE RED WEB: The Kremlin's Wars on the Internet (Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogon, 2015-2017) Putin once feared the Internet and believed it was a CIA plot to mobilize his opponents.  These Russian journalists, deeply knowledgeable about technology and the feared Kremlin security services, explain how in a few short years the Russian leader came to embrace the 'Net as a vehicle for repression, control and geopolitical cyberwarfare against emerging democracies that reached new heights in interfering in the 2016 presidential election to Trump's advantage.  They also sound the alarm about government surveillance everywhere.  

RUSSIAN ROULETTE: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump (Michael Isikoff and David Corn, 2018) The story these ace investigative reporters tell is by now well know, but they provide rich detail and great insight into the international intrigue and superpower rivalries that informed the 2016 election debacle, most interestingly how the Obama administration struggled to deal with the Kremlin attack and in the end utterly failed in no small measure because of an institutional naiveté, obdurate congressional Republicans and unhelpful responses of the hapless FBI and CIA.

TRUMP/RUSSIA: A Definitive History (Seth Hettena, 2018) Hettena, a former Associated Press reporter, chronicles the many years Trump spent wooing Russian money and power beginning with the collapse of his casino empire through to his improbable ascendancy to the White House.  Along the way, we meet Paul Manafort, Felix Sater, Michael Cohen and his extended family, an extraordinary assortment of bad people whom Trump fully understood were crooks -- but were his kind of crooks.  You will end up being convinced beyond a doubt that the forty-fifth president is deeply indebted to Russia. 

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal

and related developments. 

(UPDATED) Trump Bagman Got Millions From A Russian Oligarch & Corporations

INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS TIMES

I have long believed that the many shady deals that Donald Trump, his fixer Michael Cohen and their associates made with Russians, Ukrainians and others in the years before he became president are of less importance to Special Counsel Robert Mueller and other investigators than the individuals involved in those deals.  That has been borne out in another stunning week of revelations about how profoundly corrupt this crowd is, so stunning that they threatened to push aside Trump's deeply reckless scuttling of the Iran nuclear agreement and North Korean prisoner release dog-and-pony show.  

Leading this hit parade is Viktor Vekselberg, a billionaire industrialist who is one of the richest men in Russia, a member of Vladimir Putin's inner circle and guest of honor at Trump's inauguration. 

Vekselberg first came to the attention of investigators when a pattern emerged beginning with the 2015-16 election cycle.  Emigrees from the former Soviet Union and Russia were making millions of dollars in contributions to the Trump campaign and Republican politicians after becoming American citizens, thereby circumventing a ban on foreigners contributing directly to U.S. political campaigns.  Several such U.S. citizens had associations with Vekselberg and Oleg Deripaska, who is another Putin pal and key Russia scandal figure. 

Vekselberg was stopped by FBI agents working for Mueller when his private jet landed at a New York area airport in early March and his electronic devices were searched.  He and Deripaska were among the seven Russian billionaires and 17 top government officials sanctioned by the Trump administration on April 6 in the most aggressive effort to punish Putin's inner circle for interference in the 2016 election and other Russian aggressions. 

The trickle of revelations became a flood on Tuesday night when Stormy Daniels' attorney Michael Avenatti posted what he called a "Preliminary Report" on Cohen's financial transactions.   

Long story short, the porn star's bulldog lawyer says that Vekselberg funneled more than $500,000 through Columbus Nova, a U.S. investment firm he controls, into Essential Consultants LLC, the shell company that Cohen had used in late October 2016 -- a few days before the election -- to make his infamous $130,000 hush payment to the porn star and later to arrange another hush agreement for billionaire Elliott Broidy, a then-Republican National Committee (RNC) financial chair who knocked up a Playboy bunny.  

Columbus Nova said it retained Cohen as a consultant "regarding potential sources of capital and potential investments in real estate and other ventures." 

Meanwhile, it appears that Cohen, finding himself on the outside of the Trump White House looking in early in 2017, cold-called major corporations, which were as surprised and nervous about Trump's ground shaking victory as anyone.  Cohen noted that he was still the new president's lawyer and offered them access to him -- for a price. 

Swiss drug manufacturer Novartis paid Cohen $1.2 million for work it now says he was "unable" to do, but paid him the full amount anyway because it didn't want to piss off the president.  AT&T made payments totaling $600,000 and Korea Aerospace Industries paid $150,000 in what The New York Times preliminarily estimates to be at least $4.4 million in payments to Essential Consultants.  The corporations have confirmed the payments and amounts, while Novartis and AT&T said they had been contacted by officials from Mueller's office in November of last year.  

In other words, Essential Consultants was used not just to silence uppity women, but took beaucoup bucks from at least one Russian oligarch and several Fortune 500 companies looking for access to President Trump by making off-the-books payments to what has all the earmarks of being a slush fund. 

Ginormous. 

The corporate payments appear to be "just garden variety corruption," as Josh Marshall astutely characterizes these pay-to-play transactions at Talking Points Memo.   They also probably explain why Mueller handed off to the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan certain information he had uncovered in the course of his investigation, information that may have led to the raids on Cohen's office, apartment and hotel room early last month. 

If that isn't odiferous enough, what stinks to high heaven is the Vekselberg dough, which reveals not just collusion between Trump's bag man and a Russian, but collusion at the highest level.  

Vekselberg recently increased his share to 26.5 percent in the aluminum firm Rusal, which was owned by Deripaska, the Russian billionaire whose ties to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort are under scrutiny by Mueller.   Columbus Nova's chief U.S. executive is Vekselberg's cousin, Andrew Intrater, a U.S. citizen.  Intrater and another of Vekselberg's American partners donated more than $1 million to Trump's inaugural committee, and Vekselberg also has had business ties Trump Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. 

Vekselberg and the corporations trotted out ad hominem statements that Cohen was paid for so-called legitimate services.   

AT&T gets extra points for saying that the telecom had contracted with him "to provide insights into understanding the new administration," while not noting it had announced its intention to merge with Time Warner, whose television division includes CNN, the president’s leading cable news adversary, and Novartis gets bonus points for saying it went with Cohen because it thought he could advise them on U.S. health care policy, something about which he knows squat but happens to be thisclose to Trump.  Not to be left out of the dumb derby, Korea Aerospace solemnly said it had hired Cohen "to inform reorganization of our internal accounting system."   

If everything was so kosher, why then did the oligarch and corporations funnel payments through a shell company created for the sole purpose of hiding financial transactions?

Avenatti says he knows more than he's telling, including where all the dough went after it left the shell company, and it's pretty obvious that he has gained access to bank records, possibly those of First National Bank, where Essential Consultants had an account, or Suspicious Activity Reports filed by the bank with the Treasury Department.  The Treasury Department's inspector general obviously is thinking along those lines since it was announced Wednesday afternoon that he is investigating whether confidential banking information related to Essential Consultants may have been leaked. 

All of this is not really about Cohen, although he is the primary perp here.   

It is all about Trump, who regardless of how much he knew about Cohen's influence pimping after he got shut out of a White House job because he was too toxic even by Trump administration standards, has relied extensively on Cohen to fix, cover-up and intimidate when anyone has threatened the man with the small hands and peculiar hair over the last 12 years.

We also know, thanks to some ace reporting from The Washington Post as the week began, that with Cohen's emergence in 2006 as a conduit for money from Russia and Ukraine, Trump moved dramatically from accumulating enormous bank debt into paying cold cash.  

To call the latest bombshell a smoking gun may be premature, but it further confirms what the real smarties have been saying all along -- that it will be the money that brings Trump down, not obstruction of justice or collusion.  And begs the question of whether Cohen, who is in scalding hot water, will turn on his master.  

§  

The crap and corruption that Donald Trump has visited upon America has produced some fabulous long-form journalism beyond the multiple blockbusters published by The New York Times and The Washington Post. 

Check out "The First Porn President" by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic.  It has real bite and is beautifully written.

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal

and related developments. 

  

Remembering The Roaring Fork Rope Bridge Adventure

(My dear friend Rochelle left this mortal coil in 2005. I republish this tribute each year on the anniversary of her passing.)

I have a lifetime of wonderful memories of Rochelle, from the first time we met at a party when we were high school seniors to her radiant presence at my sister's birthday celebration last November. We had many adventures over those 40 years, but I've recalled one in particular since her passing. Let’s call it the Great Roaring Fork Rope Bridge Adventure. 

First some background: The Roaring Fork River starts near Aspen, Colorado and runs undisturbed, which is to say undammed, to its confluence with the Colorado River some 70 miles north near Glenwood Springs.  The Roaring Fork is a river of many personalities as it wanders through meanders created over the millennia.  At its source above Aspen's toney chalets, it is a rivulet.  At its terminus near the Glenwood cemetery where "Doc" Holliday of Shootout at OK Corral fame is buried, it is fairly wide, comparatively docile and navigable by raft and shallow draft boat. 

At more or less the halfway point in the aspen and pine forests above the village of Carbondale, the Roaring Fork more than lives up to its name as it shoots through a basalt and limestone canyon. This is where our adventure unfolded in August of 1978. 

The Roaring  Fork Valley was a second home of sorts for Rochelle.  She lived in Carbondale during the period when, as the joke went, it was first attracting the attention of the millionaires who were being driven out of Aspen by the billionaires.  On her return visits, she was treated like royalty by the many friends she had made. She couldn’t pay for a coffee at the Village Smithy or a beer at the Hollywood Saloon. 

Easterners would call the Hollywood a bar, and we were from a farm back East that Coloradans would call a ranch, but in any event had taken on mythical proportions.

§  

As befitted Rochelle as a Libra, she was romantic, idealistic and pacifistic.  She also was deeply spiritual, an extraordinary cook, practiced practical joker and namer of names.  Few people escaped her nom de plumage.  The resident beekeeper at the farm where Rochelle and I lived in Chester County, Pennsylvania was a former battlefield medic and PhD candidate and thus was dubbed Doctor Doc by her to differentiate him from another roommate, Doctor Duck.  A mutual friend's Italian surname morphed into Eatabunny.  I was Captain Cab because I would ferry the farm's multitudes around the block -- or around the country -- in my VW bus. 

In this particular instance it was to a house outside of Carbondale where three friends whom Rochelle called The Slow Children lived.  She had so named them because of the

SLOW
CHILDREN

sign on the road near their driveway, but now that I think about it, maybe for another reason as well.  Rochelle immediately set about squaring away the Slow Children's kitchen, which was in the kind of toxic condition you would expect for three guys who spent their days building houses for those millionaires and their nights throwing back cold ones at the Hollywood.  

Her domestic diva duties done, we headed out with two of the three Slow Children for an explore along the Roaring Fork River canyon, which is situated a few miles below Marble, a mountaintop ghost town that was once home to thousands of people who worked what was then the world's largest marble quarry, supplying the enormous building blocks for the Lincoln Memorial, Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and many other edifices.  

The day was gloriously sunny and quite hot, and it being late summer, the meadows we crossed as we climbed to the canyon were a riot of columbine, primrose, lavender and sage.  While our hike was not technically difficult, neither was it for the faint of heart. 

There was only one way to cross the canyon for miles in either direction -- a crude wood and rope footbridge straight out of an Indiana Jones movie that screamed DANGER!  A goodly number of the wood slats were missing, providing a vertiginous view of the Roaring Fork hurtling through the canyon 75 or so feet below, while the ropes holding the bridge together were not in very good shape, either. 

One of the Slow Children was two or three steps onto the bridge when I sensed that Rochelle was no longer behind us.  When I turned around, I saw that she had stopped dead in her tracks.  There was a "You've gotta be nuts" look on her face that I had seen other times when she sensed, usually correctly, that sanity -- along with Elvis – had left the building. 

As the smarties among you will know, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom did not premiere until a few years later, but the following snippet of dialog between Indy (Harrison Ford) and Willie (Kate Capshaw) from that movie fits the moment perfectly:

INDY: Anything can happen. It’s a long way to Delhi. 

WILLIE: No, thanks, no more adventures with you, Dr. Jones. 

INDY: Sweetheart, after all the fun we've had together? 

WILLIE: If you think I'm going to Delhi with you, or anyplace else after all the trouble you've gotten me into, think again, buster!  I'm going home to Missouri where they never feed you snakes before ripping your heart out and lowering you into hot pits!  This is not my idea of a swell time.

§  

We backtracked into the shade of the aspens, where a canteen and orange slices were passed around.  A magpie squawked off in the distance, but other than the thrum of the Roaring Fork coursing through the canyon, it was quiet. 

One of the Slow Children finally broke the silence. 

"So what if we carry you across?" he offered.  "You can close your eyes," he said as he made binoculars with his hands and scanned the horizon as if looking for a rescue ship. 

Fire leapt from Rochelle's eyes. 

More silence. 

"Well, we could always throw the Ching . . . ," I suggested without much conviction. 

The fire had gone out and there were now only wisps of smoke. 

" . . . Or we could just backtrack," I added unhelpfully. "No big deal." 

"Screw all of you," Rochelle replied. 

It probably was as close as I ever heard her get to using profanity. 

"I'm going to do it," she added with an unchallenged finality.  "I know how to fly this plane, I'm just not always sure about landing it." 

And then the most amazing but Rochelle-like thing happened.  She suddenly was on the other side of the bridge waving her sun hat at us. 

"Come on you Slow Children!" she laughed.  "What's taking you so long?"

All The President's Lies: They'll Catch Up To Him, But It's Taking A Really Long Time

The news last week that the president of the United States lied repeatedly about the $130,000 hush payment to porn star Stormy Daniels was greeted less with outrage than a practiced yawn, and with every passing lie -- which come at the rate of four or five a day and a mind-boggling 3,000-plus since Donald Trump took office -- that attitude becomes increasingly dangerous.  This is because the pandemic of lies is so blatant and so vast that we risk becoming numb, and when we become numb the lies are so much background noise. 

Not to give Trump too much credit, but that is exactly what he wants to happen. 

Trump is a career liar whose rearrangement of reality about anything and everything to serve his narcissistic cravings and keep at bay his secret phobias (such as the true state of his health being revealed), is taken for granted by his family, his associates and Vichy congressional Republicans.  And plays neatly into his exploitation of mob emotions and the kind of propaganda ploys used by Joseph Goebbels to cement Hitler's power.    

The president's lies even have an officially-authorized name -- "alternative facts." 

That Machiavellian phrase entered the popular lexicon courtesy of Trump senior abetter Kellyanne Conway, who two days after Trump took office defended Sean Spicer's lie about the size of the crowds at the inauguration at his first press conference to widespread amazement.   What was a "provable falsehood," in the words of Chuck Todd, became an "alternative fact" in Conway's unapologetic recasting for the benefit of the gobsmacked NBC News correspondent. 

Fortunately, the Goebbels comparisons fall apart quickly.   

As Hitler's Reichsminister for Propaganda and National Enlightenment, Goebbels controlled radio, press, cinema and eventually all German culture.   Conway should be so lucky, but the foundation stones of American democracy like a free press remain relatively robust.  This although Trump has "upset presidential norms," in the prim view of establishment pundits, who in the service of helping the rest of us become numb to the torrent of lies have managed to make Trump's assault on the very things we value about our once-great country seem like a matter of using the wrong fork at a state dinner.

Nor should the view that lying in politics transcends party and era get any traction. 

Nixon said he was not a crook.  He was.  Reagan said he was not aware of the Iran-Contra deal.  He was.  Clinton said he did not have sex with that woman.  He did.  Bush said he had evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  He did not.  But the Founding Fathers did not foresee a president who lies with the regularity of bowel movements, let alone America's greatest foreign enemy interfering in an election to elevate a man profoundly unfit for any public office into the highest office.   

Goebbels, like Hitler, also was an hypnotic orator, which Trump is not even on his best days.  In fact, Trump is a fool and his disregard for the truth will have consequences.  It's just that they're taking an awfully long time to catch up to him. 

As democratic foundation stones go, the constitutionally mandated responsibility of Congress to check Trump's excesses is in ruins and will remain so at least until the November election, after which the Democrats may have an opportunity to screw up things.  Or not.  But Trump's very lies about the Russia scandal have opportunely if inadvertently led to his own Justice Department erecting a firewall against them. 

This is the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate Russia's cybersabotage of Hillary Clinton's campaign with the assistance of Trump's campaign, the interference having been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt while the collusion is quickly exiting the realm of the possible and entering the realm of the probable. 

Mueller's mandate is broad, his tool kit extensive and all four of the guilty pleas he has obtained stemming from his 19 indictments are based on charges of perjury -- lying. 

Yet the special counsel may yet not confront Trump and his lies.   

Everyone except the president, including his own defense lawyers, know that Mueller will eat him alive in a face-to-face interview where he will have only one alternative to lying, pleading the Fifth Amendment against self incrimination.  The alternative to an interview -- a subpoena for Trump to appear before a federal grand jury -- would be tied up endlessly in appeals and counter appeals, which brings us back to that election thing. 

If the Democrats retake the House, which it appears they may do for the same reason they lost it in 2010 (it's called Obamacare), impeachment proceedings against Trump -- a political process as opposed to Mueller's criminal process -- would be initiated by the House Judiciary Committee.   

Getting the full House to approve articles of impeachment is less likely.  Even more remote is that the Senate, which would be judge and jury in an impeachment trial, would muster the two-thirds vote to convict no matter how compelling the evidence in a Mueller impeachment referral would be. 

But none of this takes into account that while the election is six months away and possible Democratic House control more distant still, Trump will continue lying and Mueller will continue indicting. 

As Rupert Murdoch's right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial page, of all places, pointed out in the wake of the Stormy Daniels lieapalooza:

Mr. Trump is compiling a record [of incessant lying] that increases the likelihood that few will believe him during a genuine crisis — say, a dispute over speaking with special counsel Robert Mueller or a nuclear showdown with Kim Jong Un.  Mr. Trump should worry that Americans will stop believing anything he says.

Which was followed by Neil Cavuto, a commentator for Murdoch's right-wing Fox News:

Your base probably might not care [about the incessant lying].  But you should.  I guess you're too busy "draining the swamp" to stop and smell the stink you are creating.  That's your doing.  That's your stink. Mr. President, that's your swamp.

Wow. 

A lot can happen before when and if Democrats wake Congress from its slumber.  This includes a certain porn star taking down the president, an Ivanka Trump indictment driving the president over the edge, or fixer Michael Cohen turning state's evidence and precipitating a bone spur flair-up or other ailment that hastens the president's exit. 

Any of these would work for me.  In the meantime, please try not to become numb.  Even if Trump is nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal

and related developments. 

It Was The Week We Learned How Sharp Mueller's Spear Really Is. (Hint: Very Sharp)

© NANCY OHANIAN / USED WITH PERMISSION

The Senate and the House are net fishing.  The special counsel is spearfishing. They know what they are aiming at and are deadly accurate. ~ Former Trump campaign aide MICHAEL CAPUTO 

It was the week of the Forty-Nine Questions.  And then some as Donald Trump shed one criminal defense lawyer and hired another versed in the ways of impeachment, Rocket Man played him for the fool he is, we learned Trump's bodyguard had stolen his medical records for him, Rudy Giuliani made Sean Hannity pee all over his Pradas, the president further undercut his own Justice Department, and we learned just how sharp Robert Mueller's spear really is. 

Very sharp. 

All of this would be uproariously funny, and aspects were undeniably clownish.  Like when we learned that one of Trump's lawyers actually told Mueller that a man who has spent one out of four days of his presidency playing golf was "too busy running the country" to submit to an interview.  But we (or me, anyway) are brought up short when we realize that this isn't a season of "Saturday Night Live" skits.  They are far from comic episodes crammed into a mere week of our once proud nation's history starring a thug who happens to occupy the Oval Office and a benighted Republican congressional sycophancy doing a pretty good imitation of Hitler's brownshirts to further undermine a democracy already on the ropes as they subvert or destroy everything we value.

Giuliani recently joined Trump's depleted legal team because of the bombast he would bring to appearances on Fox News, where he could reassure Trump's base that together they would repel Mueller's insidious deep-state plot to undermine the Make American Great Again presidency in revenge for Hillary Clinton losing the 2016 election.   

But when Giuliani went way off script in a Wednesday night appearance with Fox prime-time host Hannity in a bumbling attempt to curry favor with the boss but instead tripped up Trump and his spokesmouths while highlighting their contradictory statements about porn star Stormy Daniels, an astonished Hannity tried and failed to get America's Mayor to put a cork in it.   

Undeterred and seemingly unaware, Giuliani prattled on that the very $130,000 hush payment made to Daniels courtesy of Trump fixer Michael Cohen that the president swore he knew nothing about when queried by reporters on April 5 on Air Force One not only existed and Trump not only knew about it, but he had paid back Cohen, which is more than you can say for a lot of other people to whom Trump has owed money over the years, including legions of lawyers. 

"I want to clarify something," said Hannity, now a bilious shade of green, in offering Giuliani a do-over.   

But instead of taking a mulligan, as Trump has been know to do out on the links at Mar a Lago and Bedminster, Giuliani repeated the assertion, possibly prompting a new scandal atop an existing one.  And allowed that this would clear the president of assertions the hush payment was a campaign finance law violation.  

"That money was not campaign money.   Sorry, I'm giving you a fact now that you don't know," Giuliani continued.  "It's not campaign money. No campaign finance violation.   They funneled [italics mine] through a law firm, and the president repaid it."   

True, but this is akin to a surgeon amputating a leg instead of an arm, and Rudy ain't no surgeon.   

This is because Giuliani's admission that Trump had paid back Cohen (actually some $460,000 or $470,000 in all, which also included money for "incidental expenses" that he had incurred on Trump’s behalf) is another serious campaign finance law violation since candidate Trump -- who by law could make unlimited contributions to his own campaign -- didn’t violate any laws so long as he reported the payment, which he of course failed to do.  Giuliani's use of the word funneled is a red flag for criminal activity and suggests the true source of the money is being hidden, or possibly its use by Cohen as a slush fund to pay off people like Stormy.

And lost in all the backing and filling is one overriding fact: The payment, no matter the fine print, was made to influence the election and prevent a potential scandal by shutting Stormy's pie hole. 

Not content to leave it at that, Giuliani stumbled on and said there will be public hell to pay if Ivanka Trump is indicted by Mueller, which she very well may be.  Her husband Jared Kushner, not to much outrage, although he is even more likely to be speared by Mueller. 

"Jared is a fine man, you know that," Giuliani told Hannity in a comment that was intended to be chivalrous but came out chauvinistic.  "But men are, you know, disposable.  A fine woman like Ivanka, come on!" 

Trump, by the way, continues to deny that he and Stormy had what she describes as a nearly year-long affair (during which time The Big White Hat was back at the shack with Baby Barron).  And in a tweet storm on Thursday morning that gave a boost to Stormy's defamation lawsuit against the president, he further muddied the swamp waters by explaining that he is a "celebrity" and part of the "people of wealth" who are constantly entangled in rarefied legal complications that we lowly folks cannot understand.  Like having to funnel money to our lawyers to pay off porn stars with whom we did not have affairs. 

Then on Friday morning, Trump contradicted himself and undercut Giuliani, telling reporters his attorney "will get his facts straight" regarding the hush payment.  
Everything "has been said incorrectly.  It's actually very simple," the president said without elaboration.  Then, in a statement issued a few hours later, Giuliani said the $130,000 payment would have occurred regardless of whether Trump was on the presidential ballot and was made "to resolve a personal and false allegation in order to protect the president's family." 

Meanwhile, not having already done enough damage, Giuliani had gone on Fox & Friends on Thursday morning and, pushing the deep-state plot meme, declared that Mueller is seeking to "trap" the president into committing perjury with his perfectly appropriate request for an extended interview with a critical witness whose testimony could affect potential charges against himself and his pals, others, including Cohen and Paul Manafort. 

"What they're really trying to do is trap him into perjury, and we're not suckers," Giuliani said, blithely ignoring that Trump's lie aboard Air Force One is but one of hundreds he has uttered.  Oh, and four of the five people that Mueller has indicted pleaded guilty to a perjury charge.  And are cooperating with the special counsel.  

"This silly deposition is about a case in which he supposedly colluded with the Russians but there's no evidence," Giuliani added. 

Silly.  

© NANCY OHANIAN / USED WITH PERMISSION

This brings us to the week's "really big news," as Ed Sullivan used to say when Trump was sitting at father Fred's knee as a youth and was learning the fine art ripping off people. 

The Forty-Nine Questions. 

Like everything else involving Trump, this is a convoluted tale liberally (pardon the word) seasoned with lies and misrepresentations. Just this week, the president surpassed a head spinning 3,000 false or misleading claims since taking office, according to The Washington Post, an average of 6.5 per day. 

The tale begins in early March when John Dowd, by default Trump's lead defense attorney at the time, met with Mueller to negotiate the terms of an interview with Trump.  After saying that Trump was too busy running the country to sit for an interview, Mueller replied that he had to question Trump to determine whether he had criminal intent when he took actions like firing FBI Director James Comey and raised the icky possibility of subpoenaing Trump to appear before a grand jury. 

Mueller's team agreed to provide the president's lawyers with more specific information about the subjects that prosecutors want to discuss with the president, and Dowd sidekick Jay Sekulow then compiled a list of 49 questions that the president's lawyers believe he would be asked.   

The list was discussed at a second meeting a few days later.  After reviewing the list, according to later published reports, Dowd suffered an attack of apoplexy and become even more convinced that allowing the president to be interviewed would be a disaster. 

When The New York Times published Sekulow's questions on Monday night, unquestionably leaked by someone in the White House, Trump flew into one of his patented Twitter rages, tweeting on Tuesday morning that it was "disgraceful" that Mueller's questions -- which actually were his own lawyer's questions -- had been publicly disclosed, noted that there were no questions about collusion and said for the umpteenth time that collusion was a "phony" crime.  

While no one would accuse Trump of having an eye for detail, several of the 49 questions indeed did pertain to collusion. 

Meanwhile, Dowd had thrown in the towel on March 22, and his cohort Ty Cobb helpfully resigned later on Tuesday, undoubtedly to spend more time with his family, leaving Sekulow to fend for himself.  Which he will not have to do for  too long because Emmet Flood is in the hood. 

Flood served as special counsel in the George W. Bush administration, where he helped fend off congressional investigations into the political firing of federal prosecutors who did not bow down to Dubya, and represented President Clinton during House proceedings to impeach him.   

But the really big news about the really big news is that The Forty-Nine Questions further reveal that Trump is in seriously big trouble because . . . well, Mueller's spear is very sharp.  And Flood knows that. 

This is because the questions get to the heart of not just what Trump knew about Russia's cybersabotage of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, but what his motivations were in firing Comey and National Security Director Michael Flynn, cowing Attorney General Jeff Sessions and enlisting the congressional brownshirts to help him try to obstruct Mueller's investigation.  

A common thread in the questions is obstruction of justice.  What Trump knew and when he knew it is secondary.   Several of the questions reveal that Mueller's pursuit of whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia is very much alive, notably what he knew of the activities of campaign manager Manafort in seeking possible assistance from Moscow. 

Even if many of Trump's supporters already assumed that he was lying about Stormy, Mueller will not be so understanding when -- and a very big if --  he sits for an interview and lies. 

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal

and related developments.