It’s all about the money. It’s always about the money.
Trump has remained afloat since his multiple bankruptcies solely because of infusions of cash from Russian mobsters laundered thru Cyprus. NY real estate is a well known haven as a vehicle for laundering foreign mob money so it only makes sense that the other end of Trump’s leash are in the hands of Russian oligarchs who financed his projects and probably his entire campaign with dirty money. Trump knows this is the smoking gun that would not only end his presidency, but perhaps even worse, expose him for the fraud and non-billionaire that he really is.
When the Kremlin talks about having compromising information on Trump it has to be the knowledge and threat of exposing his personal financial ties with the Russian mob. Why else would Trump be so deferential to Putin? Also another reason Trump won’t release his tax records which would definitely indicate the source of his imaginary wealth.
That’s his house of cards. Financial ties to dirty money. He knows this is illegal and he will do everything in his power to keep it out of the light.
He also gets money going the other way. For example, unloading a white elephant mansion in Florida on a Russian fertiliser oligarch (you can’t make this stuff up) for $100-million.
Well, given that there have already been some connections established, unlike with McCarthy, who made unfounded accusations that generally turned out to be built on a house of sand… he kept changing the number of people on the list and never actually came forward with that list. Where as with this stuff, we keep finding out about actually connections between Trump people and Russian politicians, that they lied about to congress. Several people have already lost their jobs, after doubling down about not having done anything wrong.
So, yes, not the same thing at all. So far, nothing has implicated Trump, but his son in law (and close adviser) and his personal lawyer have been. We’ll see if the GOP cares more about national security than they do about the stability of the American political system.
Nothing strange about a Russian oligarch significantly overpaying sight-unseen for a Florida mansion presumably with cash. That doesn’t reek of money laundering one bit.
Coincidentally, the purchaser, Dmitri Rybolovlev, was at one time the largest shareholder of the Bank of Cyprus - whose vice-chairman just happens to be Trump Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.
As the head of the Justice Department’s fraud section in the Obama administration, Weissmann’s specialties have included corporate wrongdoing and foreign corruption. He has overseen investigations into Volkswagen AG over diesel-cheating, global banks over market manipulation and Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobras over corrupt payments. He also started a pilot program that offered companies incentives to self-report possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits bribing foreign officials.
He’s also been a defence attorney, so he knows the other side. In other words, this is a guy who specialises in unravelling cross-border money laundering schemes, public-private sector corruption, bribery, tax evasion and more. Meanwhile, I highly doubt that the likes of Jared Kushner are 1% as devious as a senior VP at Volkswagen or Petrobras. This is getting good.
For his whole life, McCarthy was obsessed with rooting out Communists. He began his career by asserting, without proof, that the State Department had been infiltrated by members of the Communist Party. After that, he began investigating the Army for the same reason. There were never any specific allegations; the McCarthy investigations were little more than dragnets to find Communists (and also homosexuals) in order to prove his point.
Here, in contrast, we have specific individuals in TrumpWorld having specific contacts with high-ranking members of the Russian government. Unlike the McCarthy investigations, which didn’t produce much, in this case we find more dissembling the more we investigate. Mike Flynn forgot to mention some contacts with the Russians. Jeff Sessions forgot to mention some contacts with the Russians. Jared Kushner forgot to mention some contacts with the Russians.
Normally, someone forgetting to note certain contacts on his or her background check form wouldn’t be cause for concern. But with people in TrumpWorld, it’s always the Russians.
Fun fact: Roy Cohn, a loathsome man and McCarthy’s right-hand-man during the McCarthy hearings, was later Trump’s lawyer in the government’s Fair Housing Act lawsuit against Trump. The two were fairly good friends, and Cohn apparently taught Trump a lot.
Edit: Sessions’s excuses regarding his conversations with Russian Ambassador Kislyak are laughable. First, he said he never had any meetings with Kislyak. Then he said he did have meetings (only after it became undeniable that such meetings occurred), but he didn’t remember what they talked about specifically. And even though he couldn’t remember what they talked about, they certainly didn’t talk about sanctions against Russia!
Its a great tape. The best piss tape you´ve ever seen. Its so yuge that you´ll forgett that you never wanted to see something like it in the first place.
This blog post, by a guy who is actually just a professor of middle-eastern studies, did a good job of pulling together the reporting on Don the Con’s various financial ties to Russia. It was written before the nomination inauguration, and more ties have been revealed since then. But its pretty amazing how much was already out in the open but drowned out by the avalanche of more trivial crap about Don the Con.
AND Roy Cohn was spectacularly both in AND out of the closet, more or less at the same time. He tried to keep his lover from being drafted during the Korean War. This somehow never seemed to bother McCarthy much.
The Tydings Report labeled McCarthy’s charges a “fraud and a hoax”, and said that the result of McCarthy’s actions was to “confuse and divide the American people […] to a degree far beyond the hopes of the Communists themselves”.
So yeah, this is very similar in the respect that the current administration use fraud and hoax to confuse and divide the American people.
Rachel did a good segment on The King of Fertilizer and our boy Ross. It’s hard to keep track of the many levels of fucktitude going on right now. We need a chart.
