The Russia Investigations and other Trump-related cases

[N.E. Brigand]

My impression is that other legal commentators tend to find Kirchner too glib.

[N.E. Brigand]

Will we ever learn the truth about what happened in this meeting?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

No.

[N.E. Brigand]

I am concerned by this development:

2 Prosecutors Leading N.Y. Trump Inquiry Resign, Clouding Case’s Future (New York Times)

"The prosecutors had abruptly stopped presenting evidence to a grand jury in the high-stakes criminal investigation into the former president’s business practices. ... Carey R. Dunne and Mark F. Pomerantz, submitted their resignations after the new Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, indicated to them that he had doubts about moving forward with a case against Mr. Trump, the people said. ... Without Mr. Bragg’s commitment to move forward, the prosecutors late last month postponed a plan to question at least one witness before the grand jury, one of the people said. They have not questioned any witnesses in front of the grand jury for more than a month, essentially pausing their investigation into whether Mr. Trump inflated the value of his assets to obtain favorable loan terms from banks."

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I just saw that as well. I couldn't be less surprised.

[N.E. Brigand]

In December, Bragg, newly elected but not yet in office, said this about Dunne and Pomerantz: "I can say that you’ve got two very good lawyers that have been looking at it for a while. I think it would be a disservice to Manhattan to lose them."

[N.E. Brigand]

I mean, we're just a week out from learning that Trump's accounting firm told him, effectively, that they were firing him because he lied to them about his finances.

[N.E. Brigand]

And just today, Forbes reported that the General Services Administration relied on the financial statements provided by Trump's accountant -- the statements now known to be incorrect -- when determining whether or not he owed additional rent to the federal government for his D.C. hotel, which is in a former U.S. Post Office building leased from the government. Trump is now trying to sell that lease to another firm and could make hundreds of millions from that sale.

A number of legal observers said several months ago that the New York D.A.'s case would be a difficult one to prove, because to show that all this financial skullduggery is actually criminal, you probably need the cooperation of witnesses like Trump's CFO, Allen Weisselberg (who has been charged with a lesser financial crime and apparently decided not to flip on Trump). In that context, today's news about the D.A.'s office apparently giving up on the case makes sense. But given the events of last week, that Mazars has abandoned him and that a New York judge ruled that Trump and his children must sit for depositions in the New York Attorney General's parallel civil suit, it certainly seemed like the tide was turning. It doesn't help that the two prosecutors leading the case for the D.A.'s office seem to have resigned in protest because the D.A. decided against pursuing the case.

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Edited to add: It may be that Bragg made the right call given the evidence, but this really just again emphasizes a bigger problem: that our financial and legal systems appear to be set up to allow powerful people to get away with crimes.* And in this case, the powerful criminal became the president of the United States and then came darn close to ending the nation's democratic system of government.

(Plus he keeps getting away with it even in the most blatant cases, even when other people go to jail for doing what he ordered them to do. Michael Cohen didn't pay off Stormy Daniels for no reason!)

*Just as another example, here's a story about how a Ukrainian oligarch named Ihor Kolomoisky (an oligarch apparently on the side of the current Ukrainian government, by the way, which by no means excuses Russia's attack!) who appears to have laundered billions of dollars into the purchase of U.S. properties for years without either the banks or the U.S. government attempting any oversight until very recently.

[N.E. Brigand]

Per a report in Business Insider, in 2019 and 2020, the legal counsel at the Federal Election Commission, having been referred the case by New York's attorney general, determined that Donald Trump appeared to violate campaign finance law in 2016 and twice recommended that the FEC officially investigate:

At stake was whether Trump violated laws prohibiting "soft money" spending — using unregulated, non-campaign funds for political purposes — in connection with his 2016 presidential campaign. Specifically, Trump funneled roughly half of the $5.8 million he raised at the Des Moines veterans event on January 28, 2016 to his now-defunct Donald J. Trump Foundation. The Trump campaign then steered how the foundation, a separate entity, spent $2.8 million in charitable funds just ahead of the Iowa Republican caucuses.

But the FEC had no quorum in 2019, and in 2021, the Commission's six members deadlocked 3-3, with all the Republicans voting against, so the case is dead.

Why have an FEC at all if they can't enforce the laws they're supposed to?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

That's a good question. Another good question is when did what party someone was with become more important than whether they actually violated the law?

[N.E. Brigand]

It's been buried by Ukraine war news, but apparently some reporters have seen the forthcoming book by Trump's attorney general, William Barr, in which Barr is said one the one hand to defend his decision to let Trump off the hook for obstructing the Russia investigation (but Barr apparently ignores most of the details) but on the other hand to describe Trump as a narcissist who lost the 2020 election fairly and should not be the Republican nominee in 2024.

[N.E. Brigand]

I am concerned by this development:

2 Prosecutors Leading N.Y. Trump Inquiry Resign, Clouding Case’s Future (New York Times)

"The prosecutors had abruptly stopped presenting evidence to a grand jury in the high-stakes criminal investigation into the former president’s business practices. ... Carey R. Dunne and Mark F. Pomerantz, submitted their resignations after the new Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, indicated to them that he had doubts about moving forward with a case against Mr. Trump, the people said. ... Without Mr. Bragg’s commitment to move forward, the prosecutors late last month postponed a plan to question at least one witness before the grand jury, one of the people said. They have not questioned any witnesses in front of the grand jury for more than a month, essentially pausing their investigation into whether Mr. Trump inflated the value of his assets to obtain favorable loan terms from banks."

There was new reporting about how New York's district attorney didn't feel that Michael Cohen's testimony would be convincing enough in a trial of Donald Trump. (I can't help but think how Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, who killed 19 people, was considered reliable enough to be a witness in the trial of John Gotti, the "Teflon Don.")

[N.E. Brigand]

The hits keep coming for the formerly on the top of the world Cuomo brothers.

CNN suspends Chris Cuomo indefinitely

CNN has now terminated Chris Cuomo.

And now CNN's CEO, Jeff Zucker, has resigned.

During the Cuomo investigation, Zucker was asked about a personal relationship with a subordinate. He didn't answer truthfully, and that lie caught up with him.

Zucker has been at CNN since 2013. Prior to that, he was president of NBC's entertainment division starting in 2000 and then was CEO of NBC as a whole until 2010. In the former role, he signed Donald Trump for The Apprentice, which played a significant role in making Trump seem like a capable executive.

Investigators hired by CNN found that Zucker's misdeeds went beyond failing to disclose a romantic relationship with a subordinate. Rolling Stone has a long new piece about Zucker's extensive history of unethical behavior regarding the interaction of the journalists who worked for him and the people they were reporting on, both at NBC and at CNN. To me, the piece's central message is, as someone who worked with Zucker when he ran NBC put it: “Jeff will do anything for good ratings and buzz, journalistic ethics be damned. He’s like, ‘Everybody’s talking about it. It’s great TV.’ But great TV doesn’t always translate to great journalism.”

Much of the article concerns how Zucker and some other executives at CNN were improperly supporting New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2020 and 2021 -- and the reporter has texts that back this up. But the report also notes that Zucker effectively made Donald Trump a star (with disastrous consequences for the world):

On Feb. 3, 2005, Trump settled into a plush chair at Studio 1A in Rockefeller Plaza, ready to cross-promote The Apprentice alongside that show’s producer, Mark Burnett, who was appearing remotely ... Lauer [i.e., Matt Lauer, the morning news anchor on Today later revealed to have sexually assaulted his coworkers] affectionately referred to Trump as “the Donald,” while the guests prattled about the series’ soon-to-be-launched spinoff with Martha Stewart. Then Lauer did the unthinkable: Noting that The Apprentice’s audience numbers had been on a downward trajectory after a smash-hit first season, he asked Trump, “Why do you think that is?”

Trump spun the truth — claiming the ratings were actually up, and “in the number-one demographic, are very substantial” — but Lauer pushed back. “The information I have is in the premiere the ratings were better, but since then they’ve been down about 20 percent. That’s not what you have?”

After the segment, Trump stormed into the control room, orange face turned red, “and had a hissy fit,” according to [producer Tom] Touchet, who was then running Today. Zucker followed, and, at first, commended Touchet in front of the staff for pressing their guest on a difficult question. Then, Touchet says, Zucker pulled him aside and — borrowing a line from Trump — told him, “You’re f[---]ing fired.”

“Trump was the worst guest we ever had to deal with, and he was serially abusive to my staff,” Touchet says. “I heard from Jeff and Mark Burnett daily. Trump was on the show constantly.”

Within a few months, Touchet says he was officially shown the door with years left on his contract. (“Tom Touchet was not fired because of any interview with Donald Trump,” Heller says.) Later that year, Today literally rolled out a red carpet for Trump before one of his appearances on the show, playing “The Imperial March” — Darth Vader’s theme from Star Wars — as he walked on, with Al Roker introducing him as the “king of the universe.” Jokey though it may have seemed, gambits like this helped to burnish the image of Trump created via The Apprentice: that of an accomplished, authoritative leader to be both feared and lauded. For millions of Americans outside New York City — where Trump was largely viewed as nothing more than a carnival barker — the cartoon character that Zucker and Co. had drummed up to goose ratings was becoming real.

Given that Trump had previously expressed political ambitions (including a brief presidential run on the Reform Party ticket in 2000), this TV-star glow-up was dangerous enough. But the reality behind the scenes was even worse: Trump’s growing stardom seemed to amplify some of his most insidious qualities. Already a reputed racist who decades earlier had been sued for housing discrimination against Black renters and had called for the death penalty against five Black and Latino teens wrongly accused of rape in the notorious Central Park Jogger case, Trump reportedly used the n-word liberally on the set of The Apprentice, according to sources in former contestant Omarosa Manginault Newman’s book about her time in the Trump White House, Unhinged. It was also around this time that the infamous Access Hollywood tape, where Trump casually bragged to host Billy Bush (during an interview for one NBC program about his guest spot on another NBC program, the soap Days of Our Lives) about grabbing beautiful women “by the [-----]” was recorded.

....

After a couple of years executive-producing his old colleague Katie Couric on her short-lived Disney-ABC syndicated talk show, Katie, Zucker left in January 2013 to run CNN — a job Trump bragged he’d secured for his old friend. The degree of Trump’s involvement is murky. Beyond a couple of tweets endorsing Zucker (“Great move by CNN if they sign Jeff Zucker. He was responsible for me and The Apprentice on NBC — became #1 show!”), a source familiar with the interaction says Trump did put in a good word with then-Turner Broadcasting System chairman and CEO Phil Kent at a gala dinner for the American Turkish Society in 2012, calling Zucker “a genius.” (Kent declined to comment for this piece, but has recently told friends that he has no regrets about his decision.)

....

Zucker appears to have been widely liked by CNN staffers, particularly the high-paid anchors whose careers he championed. ... But as the years went on, Zucker was taking fire from outside critics for giving a disproportionate amount of airtime to his onetime superstar, Trump. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, CNN was mocked for its breathless coverage of the candidate’s rallies, which the network frequently aired from start to finish. Sometimes producers went so far as to leave a camera fixed on an empty podium with a chyron that read: “Trump About to Take the Stage.” Trump also regularly guested on the network’s political shows, having reasonably civil conversations with its anchors about his divisive rhetoric. The tactic worked: CNN routinely trounced rivals MSNBC and Fox in ratings during the election cycle, and boasted its most-watched year ever in 2016.

At a December 2016 dinner held at the Harvard Institute of Politics, Zucker was heckled and booed when the conversation turned to CNN’s coverage of Trump. “The crowd did not react positively,” says one attendee. “It wasn’t just GOP people. It was people on the left who were upset over CNN’s role in giving that kind of attention to Trump.” But Zucker appeared to be neither surprised nor contrite. Instead, he argued that Trump was great for ratings and profitability. And he insisted that his old Apprentice buddy was the only Republican candidate willing to call into CNN’s morning show. “Cable news in general, and CNN in particular, should not be held responsible for the fact that Donald Trump said yes to those interviews and the others didn’t,” he said.

Sources say that in the run-up to the 2016 election, Zucker and Trump spoke directly about coverage, as well as through disgraced Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who was a frequent guest on CNN. Cohen denied any involvement to Rolling Stone.* Still, in a 2020 segment of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the host ran audio clips he said were from a 2016 phone call between Cohen and Zucker. In the recording, the CNN exec praised Trump’s campaigning, offered advice for that night’s Republican debate, and said he wanted to discuss giving Trump a weekly show.

*This example may further show how Cohen could be a difficult witness on which to base a prosecution against Trump.

[N.E. Brigand]

Per the AP, a judge has ruled against Donald Trump's attempt to countersue E. Jean Carroll, who has accused Trump of defamation for claiming that he didn't rape her.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Also, US District Judge Amit Mehta dismissed Eric Swallwell's claims against Mo Brooks with regard to the 1/6 insurrection, leaving only claims against Trump himself, after she previously also dismissed the claims again Giuliani and Donald Trump, Jr. I find the fact that she was willing to dismiss the claims against all the other defendants, but not against Trump himself, quite telling as to how strong the claim against Trump is.

[N.E. Brigand]

I had forgotten that in September 2019, after we learned about Donald Trump's call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Fox News host Tucker Carlson co-wrote an op-ed in the Daily Wire that said, "Donald Trump should not have been on the phone with a foreign head of state encouraging another country to investigate his political opponent, Joe Biden. Some Republicans are trying, but there's no way to spin this as a good idea. ... Like a lot of things Trump does, it was pretty over-the-top. Our leaders' official actions should not be about politics. Those two things need to remain separate. Once those in control of our government use it to advance their political goals, we become just another of the world's many corrupt countries. America is better than that."

Carlson's spin then was that while the phone call was wrong, it wasn't technically impeachable. But most Republicans pretty quickly decided it wasn't even wrong.

[N.E. Brigand]

It's the resignation letter that Attorney General Jeff Sessions submitted on May 18, 2017. Donald Trump refused to accept it.

When Reilly originally asked the Department of Justice for this letter in 2017, they wouldn't even acknowledge that it existed.

Sessions did eventually resign in November 2018. Robert Mueller's report, published in April 2019, actually quotes from the letter.

But the letter itself was only made public today.

[N.E. Brigand]

Not a Trump "case" as such, but as noted in this reporting at the Guardian, last night on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show, singer Kid Rock said that President Trump (whom he still thinks very highly of), asked him in the White House for his thoughts on American foreign policy regarding North Korea and ISIL -- Rock says he told Trump he wasn't qualified to respond -- and also that Trump showed him maps that he's not sure he should have seen.

edited to fix typo

[elengil]

[RoseMorninStar]

Just how can anyone think Trump was remotely qualified. Especially after an experience like that? Oh.. yeah. Kid Rock.