As Investigators Follow the Money, that poses the biggest Legal Risk for Trump….
I’m offended by Trump each & every day he is our president. I find the lying, insults, lack of decency & prioritizing optics over character extremely revolting. But whether he is just merely an abhorrent dirtbag, or his actions have risen to the level of criminality, that’s what we must wait for the investigators to let us know. When they follow the money as they’ve been doing, that trail is where answers are found. It’s possible these money flows will be found to be nothing more than typical pay to play activities from the DC swamp (& yes, Trump has made the swamp even worse). Perhaps Cohen was just selling the idea of access to the power of the presidency, as his purported sales pitch to major corporations would seem to indicate: novartis-official-michael-cohe
We feature a lot of articles below on the basic news headlines this week about the money Cohen was paid for yet unknown reasons. As for some of the important details first revealed by Stormy’s lawyer, these excerpts come fromstormy-daniels-lawyer-cohen-ma
Avenatti released a report with preliminary findings about the bank account he says Cohen used to make the payment to Daniels. That account was made in the name of the company Cohen created to transfer the money to Daniels, Essential Consultants, LLC. The report states that Cohen’s account received roughly $500,000 in payments from Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. Those payments were made from January to August 2017. “Mr. Cohen inexplicably accepted these payments while he was the personal attorney to the President and holding himself out at times as employed by the Trump Organization (with few other clients),” the report reads. “This was occurring at the same time significant questions were being raised relating to (a) the involvement of Russia and Vladimir Putin in the 2016 Presidential Election and (b) the extent of the relationship between Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump.” CNN reported Tuesday evening that special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has questioned Vekselberg about the payments.
These follow the money excerpts from how-money-flowed-through-
To keep news of a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels quiet, President Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen created a limited liability company in Delaware called Essential Consultants. Cohen said that he paid $130,000 of his own money into a bank account associated with the company and, from that account, transferred the money to Daniels’s attorney at the time, Keith Davidson. The bank account, it seems, was a little busier than just that. On Tuesday, Daniels’s current attorney, Michael Avenatti, released a document detailing a much more complex set of transactions involving the Essential Consultants account with First National Bank. In total, he alleged, more than $4 million passed through the account in 2017 and early this year, including payments from entities associated with major companies such as AT&T and the drug company Novartis. Most explosively, he claimed that Essential Consultants had received $500,000 from a company affiliated with the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.
It looks like Special Counsel has another avenue to follow in the probe: mueller-investigating-foreign-
A line has now been drawn, however tenuous, between President Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen and a Vladimir Putin-aligned Russian oligarch. Stormy Daniels’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, suggests it means Russia may have “replenished the account” Cohen used to pay off Daniels. For now that seems to be pure speculation. If nothing else, though, the episode reinforces the remarkable sloppiness of those around Trump when it comes avoiding ties to Russians. And this one might actually be worse than many of its predecessors. The situation is pretty complicated, but here are the basics: The company that retained Cohen’s Essential Consultants LLC shell company, Columbus Nova, insists it was a legitimate real estate-related business arrangement and emphasizes that it is American owned and operated. That’s despite its American owner, Andrew Intrater, being the cousin of Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, and Columbus Nova being an affiliate of Vekselberg’s Renova Group. Both men have been interviewed by Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators, but that in itself is not damning. (Mueller is nothing if not thorough, and he may have been asking the same questions we’re now asking.) The timeline here is key. According to Avenatti, Columbus Nova paid Cohen $500,000 between January 2017 and August 2017. That means the arrangement was forged after the 2016 election — even as Russian election interference was big news and the Russia investigation was getting off the ground.
And it’s not like Cohen wouldn’t have known Columbus Nova had ties to Russians. The New York Times reports, in fact, that Cohen met with both Intrater and Vekselberg when the two cousins attended Trump’s inauguration and Mr. Vekselberg attended the event together and met with Mr. Cohen there, according to a person briefed on the matter. Columbus Nova retained him as a consultant soon afterward. Trump was inaugurated on Jan. 20. Exactly two weeks earlier, the U.S. intelligence community released its big report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Between that release and the inauguration, on Jan. 10, Trump tweeted what would become his refrain about the Russia investigation: That it was a “FAKE NEWS — A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!” That same day, then-attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions was asked (and appeared to falsely deny) whether he or anyone on the Trump campaign had communicated with Russia during the campaign. And a couple days later, the administration was falsely denying incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn had discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador. We may not have known the scope of the Russia investigation and how much it would eventually close in on Trump, but we knew there were big questions. What’s more, people around Trump like Sessions and Flynn were put in the position of denying coordination with the Russians just days before. Against that backdrop, Cohen decided to enter into an arrangement with a company affiliated with a Russian oligarch after having met with that oligarch at Trump’s inauguration.
Here is the beginning to the article donald-trump-is-taking-preside
While there’s still much to piece together from the revelations involving Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, and his shell company, Essential Consultants LLC, the possibility that Trump was personally involved in Cohen’s self-dealing could make the ordeal one of the most serious corruption scandals in presidential history. First, the facts. Cohen’s company took more than $4 million in payments from various companies, including one linked to a Russian oligarch. There’s no direct evidence that Cohen was involved in a pay-to-play scheme, but it certainly looks suspicious. Cohen accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from major corporations with business before the Trump administration, including AT&T, which made four payments totaling $200,000 to Cohen’s shell company and only ceased those payments after Trump’s Federal Communications Commission repealed regulations around net neutrality. Cohen also took $500,000 in payments from Columbus Nova, an investment firm tied to Russian oligarch (and Vladimir Putin ally) Viktor Vekselberg. While we don’t know if those payments are related directly to President Trump, we do know that last year, Cohen hand-delivered to then–national security adviser Michael Flynn a plan to lift sanctions against Russia.
Rubin points out a lot might be found when we follow the money: was-this-a-slush-fund-for-more
If one wants to find a financial nexus between the Trump camp and Russia, this might be it. “The payments from Columbus Nova point to a potential new financial tie between the president’s personal lawyer and a U.S. representative of a key Russian figure,” The Post explains. “Vekselberg, who is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, was one of two dozen Russian business executives and government officials sanctioned in April as part of the U.S. response to the poisoning of a former Russian intelligence officer in southern England.”
What is clear is that anyone who definitively declares Cohen and Trump have no Russia connections isn’t paying attention. No objective viewer can deny there is a basis for investigating the money flow between Trump and Cohen and between outside funders and Cohen. We trust that the Southern District of New York’s prosecutors and FBI office, with a wealth of material seized from Cohen, will get to the bottom of this. Those who suspected the president would be far more anxious about the Cohen investigation than special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller’s probe might be proven right.
The Plum Line offers these perspectives from why-do-people-keep-showering-c
Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former “personal lawyer,” has had a remarkable career, by which I mostly mean that it’s remarkable that he hasn’t gone to jail yet. But the law is catching up to him, which may also mean that it’s catching up to the president. Cohen says he had three legal clients: Donald Trump, Sean Hannity and Elliott Broidy, a major Republican donor who used Cohen to engineer a $1.6 million payoff to a Playboy model with whom he supposedly had an affair and got pregnant. This story is full of gaping holes, not least of which is the question of why a super-rich guy like Broidy who has used some of the country’s most elite lawyers would turn to a schlub like Cohen to resolve this sensitive situation. Could it be that Broidy — who has his own lucrative matters before the government, and once pleaded guilty to “felony charge of rewarding official misconduct” — was acting as a cutout for the person who really had the affair with the model, a person with a close relationship to Cohen? Who knows. But we also have to keep in mind that this is likely not the complete story of people sending money to Cohen for any number of reasons. There’s likely a lot more to learn about Michael Cohen’s finances, and some of it may be dirty. We have no idea where that’s all going to intersect with Cohen’s main client. But to repeat, when you work with Michael Cohen, it’s probably because you’re up to something sketchy. And that applies to Donald Trump, too.
On the same theme of follow the money, these excerpts come from michael-cohen-took-cash-from-r
The Daily Beast can confirm that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen received hundreds of thousands of dollars from a company connected to Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. The allegations were initially made Tuesday by Michael Avenatti, porn actress Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, and confirmed by a source familiar with the matter. This development could put further pressure on the president’s inner circle. If Avenatti’s analysis is correct and the payments violated federal banking law, then Cohen could be in serious legal jeopardy. There are reportedly concerns in the president’s inner circle that Cohen could begin cooperating with investigators. The greater the legal jeopardy he faces, the greater pressure he will face to cooperate. And he wouldn’t be the only one; former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Trump campaign official Rick Gates are already cooperating with Mueller’s investigators.
Excerpts from yet another follow the money article is inside michael-cohen-
But in the larger sense, the payments to and from the President’s personal lawyer may well be damaging to Trump on a number of fronts. They validate the continuing Justice Department probe and raise a host of questions that any prosecutor in the nation would feel compelled to answer: Was Trump aware of payments made on his behalf? Did he know where the money came from? Did he do anything in return, either in a personal or an official capacity? Moreover, the revelations underscore Trump’s disregard for presidential ethics, despite his campaign pledge to drain the swamp. They threaten to erode Trump’s grip on supporters who don’t much care about Russia but may have less patience for influence peddling.
These interesting thoughts come from is-essential-consultants-a-slu
There are other possible explanations. One is that the companies were paying Essential Consultants because they thought that Cohen could influence Trump, because Trump respected his advice. This scenario is not without shadiness. Cohen does not appear to be a registered lobbyist; and the documentation that Avenatti obtained indicates that Essential Consultants’ dealings were misrepresented to banks. Another explanation is that the companies were paying Essential Consultants because they thought that, for all intents and purposes, it was Trump. Some support for this view comes from Rudolph Giuliani, who told the Washington Post that the basic setup between Cohen and Trump was that Cohen would pay for the Clifford hush agreement and similar Trump expenses—“there probably were other things of a personal nature that Michael took care of”—and Trump, one way or the other, “was always going to make sure he got it back.” Giuliani added that getting it back meant enough to cover taxes and “a fee” for Cohen. (According to the Times, Cohen used some of Essential Consultants’ revenues for expenses such as a Mercedes-Benz and fees for a private club—an interesting venue for brushing up on “accounting standards.”) Cohen, in this scenario, was just doing the paperwork and providing a vehicle for payments. If there is anything else the companies that paid him were getting, they need to offer better explanations. To put the matter most bluntly, if Cohen was Trump’s bagman, was Essential Consultants anything more than the bag? This returns to the basic who-is-paying-whom question. Trump, at one point, said that he did not know where the money that Cohen used to pay Clifford came from. Perhaps he just let other people take care of the getting-it-back-to-Michael part; using other people’s money is a prime Trump business directive. But, again, Cohen took care of Trump’s problems—Trump’s expenses. That’s what he was being paid back for, and that is the transaction that the companies that paid him risk being drawn into. This all starts to sound pretty much like the textbook definition of a slush fund. The amounts, by Trump standards, might not be so high—what’s two hundred thousand dollars to either him or A.T. & T.?—but, at least from Trump’s perspective, it is hard to calculate the premium on the availability of funds for the discreet payment of expenses of a “personal nature.”
These excerpts from stormy-daniels-lawyer-claims-r
Avenatti’s report could launch a massive case of alleged influence-peddling and may be a real game-changer in the Trump-Russia scandal. Vekselberg, as Mother Jones has previously reported, has an unusual set of ties to Trump and his inner circle. This Russian oligarch was a partner of Wilbur Ross in rescuing and reviving a collapsed Cypriot bank that had been full of shady Russian money. Not surprisingly, Ross downplayed his curious connection to Vekselberg during his 2017 confirmation hearings for the commerce secretary position he now holds. And after the 2016 election, Vekselberg’s cousin—Intrater—donated $250,0
00 to Trump’s inauguration committee. Intrater also gave a $35,000 contribution to a joint fundraising committee for Trump’s reelection and the Republican National Committee. He had previously made no large political contributions. Avenatti’s report claims that Vekselberg’s payment to Cohen came through Intrater’s company. If Avenatti is correct, this would prompt an obvious lead for special counsel Robert Mueller to follow: Did the money Intrater donated to Trump come from his cousin the oligarch? That is, did a wealthy Russian with Kremlin contacts funnel money to Trump and the Republicans? Mueller seems to be already on this trail. As the New York Times reported last week, “Federal agents working with Mr. Mueller stopped Mr. Vekselberg, a billionaire businessman, at a New York-area airport this year, searched his electronic devices and questioned him, according to people familiar with the matter.” According to CNN, the agents asked Vekselberg about the payments to Cohen. Vekselberg also attended the now infamous December 2015 Moscow gala for RT, the Russian propaganda outlet, where ret. Gen. Michael Flynn sat at the head table with Vladimir Putin.
The following details are found in allegation-russian-oligarch-fu
Avenatti’s document also details multiple payments Mr.Vekselberg and his cousin made to Cohen’s LLC for eight months in 2017. From October 2016 through January 2018, Mr. Cohen used his First Republic account to engage in suspicious financial transactions totaling $4,425,033.46. Chief among these suspicious financial transactions are approximately $500,000 in payments received from Mr. Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian Oligarch with an estimated net worth of nearly $13 Billion. Mr. Vekselberg and his cousin Mr. Andrew Intraterrouted eight payments to Mr. Cohen through a company named Columbus Nova LLC(“Columbus”) beginning in January 2017 and continuing until at least August 2017. Columbus Nova is a private equity firm founded in 2000 with over $2 billion in assets. Mr. Intrater is the CEO of Columbus Nova.Columbus Nova is the U.S. investment vehicle for Renova Group, a multi-national company controlled by Mr. Vekselberg. Renova group holds investments in various interests, including mining, oil, and telecommunications. Mr. Cohen inexplicably accepted these payments while he was the personal attorney to the President and holding himself out at times as employed by the Trump Organization (with few other clients). This was occurring at the same time significant questions were being raised relating to (a) the involvement of Russia and Vladimir Putin in the 2016 Presidential Election and (b) the extent of the relationship between Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump.
Since these payments made to Michael Cohen are likely seeds to something much bigger leading to more significant findings, as investigators follow the money that might even reveal a quid pro quo deal with Russia, I’ve posted these following links from major news organizations revealing other details on this story. Please stay informed & browse through them, & trust me when I say where there’s smoke there is fire. Cohen & Trump were always closely tied on Trump’s affairs (business, women or otherwise), so whether these stories show a foul-smelling trumpist swamp or criminal activities, that’s what the investigations need to discover:
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And in the following group of links, we can do our civic duty for Trumpeters by sharing these, helping them brace for the inevitable end which is bound to come, since this is indeed going to end badly for Trump, Cohen, Rudy & many others in Trump’s orbit. It will also end badly for the GOP:
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And of course, the leftwing Daily Kos likes to chime in on these stories: Jonathan-Chait-Russia
There is madness in Rudolph W. Giuliani’s incoherence on behalf of President Trump, but there is also method. He’s following the Trump playbook: Confuse, distract, provoke and flood the zone with factoids and truthiness until nobody can be sure what’s real and what’s not. “We all feel pretty good that we’ve got everything kind of straightened out and we’re setting the agenda,” Giuliani, now the mouthpiece for Trump’s legal team, told The Post. “Everybody’s reacting to us now, and I feel good about that because that’s what I came in to do,” he said. He’s just messing with us with the bit about getting things straightened out. Let’s just say that it’s a good thing for him he’s not under oath. Giuliani revealed Wednesday that Trump reimbursed his longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, for a $130,000 payment he made to porn star Stormy Daniels to buy her silence about an affair she says she had with Trump. That made Trump’s prior claim of total ignorance about the payment a bald-faced lie. So Giuliani changed his story, or embellished it, by asserting that Trump didn’t know about the payment at the time it was made — days before the 2016 election — but found out about it later. When? Who knows?
I also believe his satisfaction with his media blitz is genuine. Following the FBI seizure of Cohen’s files, the whole truth of the Daniels payment — and any others — was likely to come out anyway. Giuliani preemptively offered several versions of that truth, allowing Trump’s supporters to choose the one they find least appalling. He also managed to voice a confident-sounding, if wholly fictitious, rationale for Trump to stonewall special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Giuliani knows full well the Constitution neither states nor implies that “a president cannot be distracted by a criminal investigation.” But some people who heard him make that ridiculous assertion to Sean Hannity probably nodded and said sure, that makes sense. Giuliani is obfuscating, not clarifying. He’s making it harder to know even what the president claims, let alone what the truth might be. As a legal strategy, this would be insane. But it’s really a political strategy. Congress poses the only serious threat to Trump, in the form of impeachment. If the president’s loyal base can be flimflammed into thinking this is all a big witch hunt, Republican lawmakers will stay in line. At least for now.
Trump keeps barking the Mueller probe is a partisan witch hunt, which obviously isn’t true since it’s already produced numerous indictments & guilty pleas, plus it’s a fact Russia did interfere in our election. So there’s a lot more we need to find out. And Mueller is above reproach & it’s not nearly the partisan witch hunt the Starr investigation was: kenneth-starr-was-a-
White House Chaos
Inside the White House this week, Trump’s despicable character was again on full display. He berated a cabinet member in front of the others, reportedly going ballistic for a half-hour. Something must have stuck in Trump’s craw about not fulfilling the promise to his base to build a wall: homeland-security-secretary-
Under the category of Trump corrupts all those he touches is this: trump-is-no-longer-the-worst-p
We’ve also learned more about the extent of the Russian attacks on our election campaigns through Facebook, as seen in these-are-the-most-popular-
International Issues
We can be cautiously optimistic about the coming North Korean talks, but if they don’t go well, it’s Trump who could become dangerous: if-trumps-foreign-policy-gambl
I acknowledge liberals who read my site love all the Trump & GOP bashing, but they’re not in line with my more hawkish views. Believe me when I say as terrible as war is, there are times it is necessary to avert a bigger disaster down the road. In recent decades, the world in unison has done a remarkably effective job of establishing norms that no other nations should be allowed to join the league of nuclear states, so the proliferation of nuclear weapons in various places has been mostly contained. If the situation degenerates to where Iran becomes a nuclear state, that could be the point the genie is let out of the bottle, setting the precedent where nuclear proliferation escalates throughout the Middle East & around the world. It’s at that point the world may have basically signed their own death warrant. We cannot afford to lose the momentum where the whole world has generally adhered to the belief we cannot allow any more countries to join the nuclear club, even if that vital mantra needs enforced through force.
While everything possible should be done to prevent a nuclear Iran, don’t believe for a moment there’s any coherent strategy to what we’re currently doing: a-state-department-horr
By making brash and risky moves on the world stage — from shredding the Iran nuclear deal to negotiating nuclear disarmament with the North Koreans to imposing tariffs on Chinese imports — Trump has a chance to change the way voters evaluate his presidency. Trump is trying to convince Americans that they have good reasons — not only foreign policy advances but also a growing economy — to protect his presidency from the threats posed by the Russia investigation, not to mention impeachment charges that Democrats might file next year should they retake control of the House in the midterm elections. For Trump, each bold stroke is like a spritz of Febreze on his narrative of domestic scandal, momentarily masking the expanding Russia probe of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Or the federal criminal investigation into his longtime attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen.
Trump is not the first president to focus on foreign policy in a period of personal political crisis. As the Watergate investigation intensified in 1973, President Richard M. Nixon tried to play up his role as commander in chief. “Nixon tried to make the point that ‘you Americans may be upset by my scandal, but I am doing such important things in foreign policy that you should think twice before wanting to throw me out,’” presidential historian Michael Beschloss said. What was expected to be explosive Senate testimony by White House counsel John Dean that summer had to be delayed because Nixon was welcoming Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to the United States for a summit. And later that year, after Nixon ordered the firing of a number of Justice Department officials in what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” he opened a news conference not by defending his actions to intervene in the Watergate investigation but by updating Americans on the Arab- Israeli conflict. “The tougher it gets, the cooler I get,” Nixon told reporters.
“If you have the biggest stack of chips at the poker table, you can get a whole bunch of people to fold against you, all the time,” Bremmer said. “That’s what Trump has done with the North Koreans, with the South Koreans, all over the world. But eventually your bluff is going to be called. That strategy works very well until it doesn’t, and at some point Trump’s number of wins may lead to a big loss.” Then there is the possibility that no number of wins in foreign policy could compensate for destructive developments at home. One year after trying to focus on the Soviet Union and the Middle East, Nixon resigned under the threat of impeachment. “There is no example in history where accomplishments like that save a president who is otherwise in dire trouble,” Beschloss said. “They may help him, but not save him.”
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