Salon - There have been a few stories over the past several days that may have Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner feeling a bit more nervous than usual. Last Friday among the cascading breaking news, one factoid was mostly overlooked in the big Washington Post story reporting that the Russia investigation had expanded to include a member of the White House staff who is close to the president:
Although the case began quietly last July as an effort to determine whether any Trump associates coordinated with Russian operatives to meddle in the presidential election campaign, the investigative work now being done by the FBI also includes determining whether any financial crimes were committed by people close to the president …
While there has been a loud public debate in recent days over the question of whether the president might have attempted to obstruct justice in his private dealings with Comey, whom Trump fired last week, people familiar with the matter said investigators on the case are more focused on Russian influence operations and possible financial crimes.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo observed that the investigation may be homing in on the story he’s been following for some time about Trump’s business and financial dealings over the decades with a whole cast of nefarious characters, including authentic mobster Felix Sater, who has ties to Russian oligarchs and gangsters and may be a U.S. government informant. Over and over again in Trump’s past you find connections to criminals and shady characters who operate on the very edge of legality. Marshall notes that for the past couple of decades, Trump has had a specific business model:
Cut off from capital from the big banks and most people interested in
not losing their money, he had to do business with people with decidedly
sketchier reputations. Those people, often looking for places to park
wealth in real estate, had to accept much higher levels of risk than
people with clean reputations. That seemed to lead them to Trump.
2 comments:
presidnt Toxic Dump is a criminal through and through. Kleptocrats are the only people who will put up with his crap.
Like with the Senate aide Roy Cohn, or Jack Ruby who once worked for Nixon, the mob has been a de facto constitutional office ever since J. Edgar Hoover. One difference now is that the US Congress is an openly criminal organization. Confronted with an ongoing and notorious violation of the emoluments clause, even Dems are like so what. This is somewhat of a change from the JFK hit where the beltway had to at least come up with a cover story that well the bullet zigged and zagged and came out unscathed somehow. Now, it's more procedural like with Hillary's emails, sure it's a felony but we'll let her go with a warning this time. After Garrison, it has been like sure we killed some Kennedys, MLK and shot at Wallace, Ford, Reagan, did 911, so what, you lost your freedom of speech in mainstream media and we are untouchables. The Dulles cabal that targeted Russia, as had the Axis, reversing the policy of conveniently dead FDR, does not want to relinquish its power to name our enemies, ever since Truman. Presidents who are unpursuasive usually lose such disputes. Obama could isolate the Iran deal from that they remain an enemy and similarly Cuba. But voters confused by such ambiguity attempted to give Trump a mandate to call the shots, if he had actually won enough of the vote. Because of his personality the propaganda is far less dissonant to give a clear victory the Dulles establishment.
Post a Comment