The Russia Investigations and other Trump-related cases

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Presumably.

[N.E. Brigand]

And then there is this.

Rubin goes on to note that the order's language gives Judge Jones access to a "full and accurate description of the corporate structure of the Trump Org., its subsidiaries, and all other affiliates, including all trusts, and of their significant liquid and illiquid assets," which means Jones can "peek under the hood to see one thing that Trump wants desperately to stop: any examination of the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, which effectively owns the Trump Org., but also could reveal his estate planning." But will that really matter much?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Meanwhile, Weisselburg tearfully took the blame for the tax scheme that the company is on trial for in New York and denied that Trump or his children authorized it. What a load of crap, but I doubt that prosecutors can prove that he is lying.

[N.E. Brigand]

Meanwhile, Weisselberg tearfully took the blame for the tax scheme that the company is on trial for in New York and denied that Trump or his children authorized it. What a load of crap, but I doubt that prosecutors can prove that he is lying.

If you and I don't believe that he's telling the truth, I wonder if the jurors will. Prosecutors have elicited testimony that despite this supposed betrayal of the firm, Weisselberg is still being paid his full salary and that similar improper financial arrangements were made -- and not by Weisselberg -- for other Trump Org. executives.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Manhattan Prosecutors Again Consider a Path Toward Charging Trump (non-paywall version of N.Y. Times article)

I'll believe it when I see it.

[N.E. Brigand]

Ivanka Trump "tried to dodge her court-appointed finanical monitor" (The Daily Beast), arguing that she's had no involvement managing anything at the Trump Org. in five years.

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Edited to add: There's no recent thread where this belongs, but since this post concerned possible financial wrongdoing by the Trump family, I thought I'd share this tidbit I learned about possible financial wrongdoing by another family here. I just learned that the Wall Street Journal was so convinced that Bill and Hillary Clinton had broken the law in the Whitewater affair that not only did they publish hundreds of pages of editorials on that subject -- as sane conservative columnist David Frum lately observed, Republicans believed "that Hillary Clinton was the central figure in an extensive web of criminality who forgave Bill Clinton's sexual misconduct so that he would protect her financial wrongdoing, up to and including drug smuggling and murder" -- but they even published those editorials in six volumes. And the WSJ is supposed to represent the reasonable vein of conservatism. That's how insane the Clintons made Republicans:

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I half expected SCOTUS to sit on this until the GOP took over the House, so this is pretty big news.

[N.E. Brigand]

I half expected SCOTUS to sit on this until the GOP took over the House, so this is pretty big news.

Finally.

[N.E. Brigand]

Tom Fitton, the activist who runs Judicial Watch and sometimes advises Donald Trump on legal matters, apparently doesn't know that the Obamas and Clintons released their tax returns annually when they campaigned for and held political office:



Here's an interesting 2017 article by Kevin Kruse in Esquire on how it became regular practice for U.S. presidents and presidential candidates to make their tax returns publican. I had no idea that Mitt Romney's father was one of the first presidential candidates to release his tax filings.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

E. Jean Carroll sues Trump for battery and defamation as lookback window for adult sex abuse survivors’ suits opens in New York

[N.E. Brigand]

I half expected SCOTUS to sit on this until the GOP took over the House, so this is pretty big news.

And the House Ways & Means Committee is now in possession of the six years of Donald Trump's tax returns that it first demanded of the U.S. Treasury Department -- as is the Committee's clear right under a century-old law, and as multiple courts have agreed they could do -- in 2019.

Just in time for Republicans to take control of the Committee and bury the returns.

I think Democrats, to prevent that from happening, should redact social security numbers and other personal information and then enter the rest into the Congressional record in the next 34 days.

[N.E. Brigand]

John Kelly, who was Donald Trump's Chief of Staff, says that Trump pushed for IRS and DOJ investigations into "former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and his deputy, Andrew G. McCabe ... former C.I.A. director John O. Brennan; Hillary Clinton; Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the owner of The Washington Post, whose coverage often angered Mr. Trump; Peter Strzok, the lead F.B.I. agent on the Russia investigation; and Lisa Page, an F.B.I. official who exchanged text messages with Mr. Strzok that were critical of Mr. Trump."

Kelly says he believes he prevented any such investigation from going forward, and yet somehow the IRS audited both Comey and McCabe.

Multiple news outlets today reported that the IRS has determined that these 2017 and 2019 audits of James Comey and Andrew McCabe, respectively, were indeed the result of random selection, but as some observers have noted, the text of the IRS report itself presents some information indicating that the IRS deviated from its regular procedures for selecting auditees in the relevant years and that some data was not available to the investigators who wrote this report. There's even a redacted passage on page 8 concerning what the selecting managers knew.

[N.E. Brigand]

Two House committees today sent this letter to the U.S. Department of the Interior, seeking more information on what appears to be a case in which a developer named Mike Ingram may have bribed Donald Trump (via a campaign donation) to obtain pardons for Dwight and Stephen Hammond, ranchers who were convicted for deliberately setting fire in 2012 to land owned by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (which is part of the DOI). Ingram was also the subject of a criminal referral from those committees earlier this year.

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Meanwhile...

John Kelly, who was Donald Trump's Chief of Staff, says that Trump pushed for IRS and DOJ investigations into "former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and his deputy, Andrew G. McCabe ... former C.I.A. director John O. Brennan; Hillary Clinton; Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the owner of The Washington Post, whose coverage often angered Mr. Trump; Peter Strzok, the lead F.B.I. agent on the Russia investigation; and Lisa Page, an F.B.I. official who exchanged text messages with Mr. Strzok that were critical of Mr. Trump."

Kelly says he believes he prevented any such investigation from going forward, and yet somehow the IRS audited both Comey and McCabe.

Multiple news outlets today reported that the IRS has determined that these 2017 and 2019 audits of James Comey and Andrew McCabe, respectively, were indeed the result of random selection, but as some observers have noted, the text of the IRS report itself presents some information indicating that the IRS deviated from its regular procedures for selecting auditees in the relevant years and that some data was not available to the investigators who wrote this report. There's even a redacted passage on page 8 concerning what the selecting managers knew.

Here's a choice selection from the report, courtesy of Allison Gill:

"Because the seed numbers were not selected independently and documented prior to subsampling, there is a risk that the seed numbers used could have ensured that specific taxpayers from the original sample remained in the subsamples."

This is the report that several reporters say exonerates the IRS.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Meanwhile, closing argument in the criminal trial of the Trump Organization were completed today, and jury deliberations will start on Monday.

ETA: Trump Org. closing arguments end after debate over role of former president

[Voronwë the Faithful]

My thoughts exactly.

[N.E. Brigand]

I've occasionally seen the name Richard Burt pop up over the course of the Trump-Russia affair. I never looked into who he was, but apparently his name was mentioned in passing at one point in the Sussmann trial. Checking his Wikipedia entry, I see that he was the U.S. ambassador to Germany in the latter part of Ronald Reagan's administration in the 1980s. Wikipedia goes on to add:

"Burt's simultaneous roles as a campaign adviser for Trump and a lobbyist for Russian interests first drew scrutiny in October 2016 following the discredited dossier. Burt is on the Alfa Capital Partners Advisory Board in which Russia's Alfa-Bank is an investor."

That's a curious pair of sentences. The phrase "discredited dossier" suggests it was written by someone skeptical of the idea that Trump colluded with Russia. Also, since the dossier prepared by Christopher Steele about Trump's Russian connections wasn't made public until January 2017, it's not at all clear what "drew scrutiny" means. Whose scrutiny? But what most interests me is that there was a much closer connection between Donald Trump and Alfa Bank! This guy both advised Trump and this Russian bank?

News from Britain today: "Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman was arrested at his multi-million-pound residence in London on suspicion of offences including money laundering, conspiracy to defraud the Home Office and conspiracy to commit perjury."

Fridman is said to be one of Russia's richest citizens. Lately I believe he's made some comments skeptical of Russia's war in Ukraine. But I cite this news here because Fridman was the founder of Alfa Bank and its chairman until earlier this year, when he stepped down to reduce the effect that U.S. and European sanctions on him could have on that firm. A few years ago, he has variously sued Buzzfeed, FusionGPS, and Christopher Steele in U.S. and U.K. courts for supposedly having defamed him in the Steele dossier. Some of those suits were dismissed, some continue, and in one case, a British judge did order Steele to pay Fridman $23,000 (per Wikipedia, which gives the amount in dollars not pounds) for having written that Fridman had been a bagman for Vladimir Putin when Putin was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. I wonder if Steele will have the last laugh.

[N.E. Brigand]

Per a new article in Forbes:

Donald Trump’s business attracted so much scrutiny during his time in office that it would be easy to conclude that all information about its foreign entanglements must be out by now. It is not. Buried in a heap of recently released financial paperwork sits a surprising revelation: Donald Trump had a foreign creditor he failed to disclose while running for president in 2016 and after assuming office in 2017.

Although the debt appeared on the Trump Organization’s internal paperwork, it did not show up on Trump’s public financial disclosure reports, documents he was required to submit to federal officials while running for president and after taking office. Trump’s former chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, told the New York Times in 2016 that his boss disclosed all debt connected to companies in which Trump held a 100% stake on the documents. That was not true.

The Trump Org. paid off the $20 million it owed to the South Korean company Daewoo in mid-2017. Prior to that it had been on the firm's books for six years. It may all be legit, and due to a loophole, President Trump may not have been legally required to disclose it. But as an ethical matter, he obviously should have.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

While the jury deliberate in the criminal trial of the Trump Organization:

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[N.E. Brigand]

About damn time. Guilty on all counts.

I assume there's no chance the Trump Org. will serve any prison time, though.

More:

The felony convictions carry fines totaling up to $1.7 million. But the collateral consequences may be more significant to Trump, who is seeking a second term in the White House. Banks could call in loans and business partners could cancel contracts if their internal policies prevent them from doing business with felons.

The trial also revealed potentially embarrassing details about Trump, including that he reported nearly $1 billion in operating losses over a two-year period in 2009 and 2010, as well as losses each year for the decade between 2009 and 2018 -- some of the same years Trump was touting his business acumen on reality television and as he was campaigning for president.