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Month: May 2018

Did Trump have yet another Playboy model paid off while he was president?

Did Trump have yet another Playboy model paid off while he was president?

by digby

A couple of weeks ago I wrote this post wondering if maybe Elliot Broidy wasn’t actually a client of Michael Cohen. This was based on a passing comment by Michael Avenatti about Broidy not being named as one of the three clients in open court as people assumed. (He was named in the filing.)

Anyway, law professor Paul Campos at New York Magazine had the same suspicion I had. Indeed, he wonders if the Trump and Rudy show in which they admit that Trump paid off Stormy Daniels and possibly other women as well, was a PR stunt designed to get out in front of this.

He recaps the Broidy story here:

The Wall Street Journal published a story on April 13 revealing the existence of another nondisclosure agreement involving an affair between an adult entertainer and a client of Cohen’s. The NDA employed the pseudonyms David Dennison and Peggy Peterson — the same names used in the Stormy Daniels NDA — and was otherwise very similar to the Trump-Daniels agreement.

According to this newly revealed NDA, Dennison agreed to pay Peterson $1.6 million, in exchange for Peterson’s promise not to reveal the affair or her claim that Dennison had impregnated her. This NDA, like the Trump-Daniels document, was negotiated by attorneys Keith Davidson, on behalf of Peterson, and Michael Cohen, on behalf of Dennison. Payments were also delivered through Essential Consultants LLC, the same LLC created by Cohen to facilitate payments in the Stormy Daniels deal.

Whatever source revealed the existence of this NDA to the Journalalso disclosed that, according to another document in Cohen’s office, the Dennison in this agreement was not Donald Trump but rather Elliott Broidy, a top Republican fundraiser, while Peterson was Shera Bechard, Playboy’s Miss November 2010. Apparently, Bechard had been Broidy’s mistress until he got her pregnant, at which point she hired Davidson, who contacted Cohen to demand the payment of hush money.

By a stroke of good fortune, Cohen already had a sex-scandal-with-an-adult-entertainer-hush-money-NDA template in his hard drive, since he had recently drafted at least one for Donald Trump. Indeed, Cohen didn’t even bother to change the pseudonyms. (That economical use of attorney resources explained away what otherwise could have been a very awkward detail in the narrative.)

This is the story that was leaked to the Journal — and to the New York Times, and CNN, which the Journal beat to the punch by publishing it first. It has since been repeated as fact by just about every major media outlet in the country. But there are good reasons to consider whether it might not be yet another audacious lie from Trumpworld.

Let me offer an alternative explanation of the affair and the payoff. It is still just a hypothesis, but, I would argue, it fits more comfortably with what we know about the various players than the reported version of events: Donald Trump, not Elliott Broidy, had an affair with Shera Bechard. Bechard hired Keith Davidson, who had negotiated both Playboy playmate Karen McDougal’s deal with the National Enquirer and Stormy Daniels’s NDA with Trump. Davidson called Cohen, and the two of them negotiated a $1.6 million payment to Bechard.

At this point Cohen needed to find a funding source. Cohen asserts he took out a home equity loan to come up with a mere $130,000 to pay off Stormy Daniels, so it seems clear he couldn’t have fronted the $1.6 million for the Bechard deal himself. So Cohen reached out to Elliott Broidy, a very rich Republican fundraiser with several pending and highly lucrative business deals with foreign governments: deals that hinged on whether Broidy could convince the U.S. government to take various actions. By stepping up to take responsibility for the affair and to fund the seven-figure settlement, Broidy was ensuring that he could continue to peddle his influence with Trump to governments around the world. Which is to say, it was a cover-up concealing a bribe.

So, according to this hypothesis, when Cohen’s office was raided by federal prosecutors, they found documentation of what was actually a fabricated affair, concocted by Cohen and Davidson to create a justification for funneling Broidy’s money to Bechard, while creating a paper record designed to protect Trump from further exposure.

This account — as bizarre as it may seem at first glance — is actually more plausible than the story leaked to the Journal, the New York Times, and CNN.

He then goes on to lay out in great detail a boatload of circumstantial evidence including the fact that Bechard had been Hugh Hefner’s girlfriend and Trump and Hef’s friendship ended mysteriously at that time, Broidy’s history of paying off corrupt politicians, unlike Trump, Broidy has no history of womanizing, the inexplicable contacts between the lawyers Dennison and Cohen, the fishy settlement figure and the weird idea that someone with Broidy’s wealth and connections would hire a mook like Michael Cohen out of the blue to handle such a delicate matter, all of which is worth reading in detail.

He concludes with this:

Broidy’s behavior following the raid is simply inexplicable. The current assumption is that Broidy knew that his payments to Bechard (through the LLC) would eventually become public, given that they were now in the possession of the Feds. But in fact, it was far from certain that they would. Cohen’s lawyers and Trump’s lawyers were fighting to keep Cohen’s attorney-client communications confidential, and it is quite possible that Broidy’s payments would never come to light. And even if they did, he could surely deny to the press that they were his. Broidy claims to have paid $1.6 million to keep his affair with Bechard quiet. Why throw away that entire investment at the first sign that this secret might eventually be exposed? By reacting in the manner he did, Broidy ensured that what was still at the time only a worst-case scenario became an immediate certainty, as opposed to remaining a down-the-line possibility.

If this theory is correct, the press bears some of the blame for allowing a self-serving and corrupt lie to enter the public record as news. At the bottom of this whole tangled situation, there are two undeniable facts: Trump has a habit of having sex with women exactly like Bechard, and then paying them off to stay silent, and Broidy is a man who pays large sums of money, legally and illegally, to influence powerful politicians. That convergence should have set off alarm bells in the minds of journalists when someone decided, immediately after Cohen’s office was raided, to reveal the existence of an NDA between Broidy and Bechard.

But those alarm bells apparently never went off in the offices of the WSJ, the Times, or CNN. And it’s easy enough to understand why: Broidy’s confession seemed, at least under the pressures of deadline journalism, like a classic example of what lawyers call an admission against interest, that is, a statement that should be treated as presumptively true.

But what if Broidy was actually faced with the choice of either falsely confessing to impregnating Bechard or, in the alternative, candidly confessing to having paid a seven-figure bribe to the president of the United States? That would certainly explain his otherwise remarkable willingness to instantly confess to a reporter the very secret he had supposedly paid so much money to keep out of the public eye.

What is most striking about this affair is that the story leaked to the media has no evidence to support it, other than the assertions of people who have every reason to lie about it. Consider what the narrative would look like if, when the story broke, the public had learned that Cohen’s office had a copy of another NDA, that provided for the payment of $1.6 million to a Playboy playmate to buy her silence about an affair, and that Broidy had agreed to pay that sum into the very same LLC that Cohen had created to funnel the money paid to hush up Trump’s liaison with Stormy Daniels. Would anyone believe Broidy’s after-the-fact protestations that, despite all appearances, he wasn’t paying off yet another of Trump’s mistresses, as a quid pro quo to his beleaguered patron? At a minimum, one would hope the veracity of Broidy’s confession would actually have been investigated. (According to the Journal’s story, Bechard claimed that Broidy had been paying her for an exclusive sexual relationship that lasted one to two years. Such an arrangement should be easy to document.)

This payoff happened while Trump was president. If this is true, it’s a shocker, even for Trump.

Campos asked Avenatti about it and he said cryptically:

“There are considerable and serious questions as to this alleged settlement. Many things about it simply do not appear to add up or pass the smell test.”

Broidy, you’ll recall, was the RNC finance chairman. And he was involved in some very shady financial transactions with the middle eastern fixer George Nader who was revealed last month to have been in on the meeting in the Seychelles with Erik Prince and the Russian oligarch. This is a very tangled web.

Read the whole thing if you’re intrigued. There is a lot of detail and it’s quite convincing.

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The Four Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse

The Four Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse


by digby

My Salon column this morning is about Trump’s warriors:

In what is probably the least shocking news of the last few weeks, Politico reported on Monday that President Trump is getting fed up with Rudy Giuliani. For some reason he doesn’t think his new lawyer is helping his case by going on every TV show and repeatedly implicating his client in more and more crimes. Trump is said to be specifically upset that Giuliani failed to shut down the Stormy Daniels scandal. Apparently he actually believed the long-ago New York mayor was an “expert on campaign finance” and is disappointed to find out that he’s a phony who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. So much for the old saying, “It takes one to know one.”

Rudy’s not going to get any better at this. Since his main function is to go on television and “fight,” it’s likely that if Trump is already disillusioned with him, Giuliani’s days are numbered. He may not be the only one of Trump’s BFFs to be in the doghouse. According to the AP, the president even snapped at his “shadow chief of staff,” Sean Hannity, for using the phrase “funneled money through a law firm” because he thinks it has “illegal” connotations. Perhaps the fact that Giuliani was openly suggesting that Trump had been involved in a criminal scheme was what brought that particular image to mind.

But don’t worry. Trump still has many friends in Washington who are willing to give it their all for his cause. Indeed, there’s one group he has dubbed “the warriors” (or as I prefer to call them: the four horsemen of the Apocalypse) for their willingness to fight for him in the Congress. He name-checked them on “Fox & Friends”: Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Mark Meadows of North Carolina, Matt Gaetz of Florida and Ron DeSantis, also of Florida. According to Politico, this is the group bringing up articles of impeachment against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein over his failure to provide documents on the Mueller investigation quickly enough and, of course, his refusal to continue to pursue Hillary Clinton right into the grave.

These four are not exactly household names, or they weren’t until Trump got elected. Jordan is the veteran of the group, having first been elected in 2006, while Meadows and DeSantis have only been in Congress since 2013. Gaetz is a 36-year-old freshman and the subject of this GQ profile, which described him as the “Trumpiest congressman in Trump’s Washington.”

Meadows and Jordan are top dogs in the House Freedom Caucus, and all four are servile Trump loyalists who are often on the phone with the president and carry his sword on Fox News shows around the clock. They are denigrating the Department of Justice and Special Counsel Robert Mueller probe at least as hard as Trump. Indeed, if you want to know where the president gets his talking points (aside from Hannity), he often follows the warriors’ lead after watching them on one of his Fox shows. Their willingness to take on the DOJ by abusing their “oversight” role has made him very happy.

They are only too delighted to help. Gaetz told Politico,”The president’s been frustrated by some of the tactics that have been used against him. I think those frustrations are well-founded in fact and I appreciate him encouraging others to join our call.” Others see it a bit differently:

[T]he left-leaning public watchdog group Democracy 21 accused Meadows and Jordan of “colluding to obstruct and potentially give Trump control over” Mueller’s probe. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, says they are “trying to sabotage” Mueller, and “want to force a confrontation with the Deputy Attorney General.”

Rosenstein responded to their impeachment threat by saying that the Department of Justice will not be “extorted.”

He later gave a speech obliquely addressing this issue which concluded with this:

Our system of government is not self-executing. It relies on wisdom and self-restraint. In a democratic republic, liberty is protected by cultural norms as well as by constitutional text. Lawyers and judges bear great responsibility for implementing and explaining those principles. The further we get from the founding generation, the less we appreciate how much everything depends on people rather than paper. 

Abraham Lincoln believed that the best way to ensure the survival of our “edifice of liberty and equal rights” is to enshrine reverence for the rule of law in the hearts of the citizens. “Let reverence for the laws,” he implored, “be breathed by every American mother … let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs — let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.” And, Lincoln concluded, “let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions” keep the rule of law.

I’m sure that Trump and his warriors had a good laugh when they heard that.

House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes, R-Calif., must have been upset that Trump didn’t mention him as one of his top lieutenants. After all, Nunes was caught red-handed conspiring with the White House and blatantly lying to the public about it — but just ignored the criticism and kept right on going. He is certainly not overly endowed with “wisdom and self-restraint.” Nunes has now upped the ante on this Rosenstein impeachment business by suggesting that he may cite Attorney General Jeff Sessions with contempt of Congress. Why? Because Sessions is actually following DOJ guidelines and refusing to turn over classified evidence in a counterintelligence investigation to people who have demonstrated that they are accomplices in the cover-up of the crime.

Nunes told “Fox & Friends” on Sunday that he was dead serious about going after Sessions, and according to CNN, his committee may hold a vote on it this week. Since Sessions has recused himself from the Russia investigation he seems an odd target, but perhaps Nunes felt he needed to go above Rosenstein to get Trump’s attention. On Monday night when the congressman was asked about his threat, he told reporters, “It wasn’t a threat, it’s what’s going to happen,” which are the kind of fighting words the president likes to hear from his warriors.

White House congressional liaison Mark Short told CNN in no uncertain terms, “I think we are supportive of our Cabinet.” Paul Ryan was his usual bucket of lukewarm water. But close observers see both the move to impeach Rosenstein and the contempt citation against Sessions as possible pretexts for Trump to fire both of them. Why? For disrespecting the Constitution and the rule of law.

And yes, irony is dead.

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#ButhisCashDeals by @BloggersRUs

#ButhisCashDeals
by Tom Sullivan


Trump Turnberry golf resort, Scotland. Photo by Terry Stewart [CC BY-SA 2.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons.

“But her emails” has become a wry joke on the left. Republican fanfare over their investigations into Hillary Clinton’s emails during the 2016 presidential campaign (and after) was endless. Trumpers still love chanting “Lock her up” over unspecified crimes they imagine she committed. From Benghazi to State Department emails to Uranium One to the Clinton Foundation “scandals,” Fox News, of course, was Donald Trump’s cheerleading squad.

The not-so-vast but relentless right wing noise machine used the same gaslighting techniques on Hillary Clinton it used against her husband, this time in support of Donald Trump. In the end, there was nothing to prosecute. “But her emails” remains the go-to distraction to keep the spotlight off Trump.

Digby posted yesterday on David Fahrenhold’s Washington Post report on the buying spree Trump undertook in the years ahead of running for president. More than $400 million in nine years, Fahrenhold found. After years as the self-described “King of Debt” who bragged, “If the world goes to hell in a handbasket, I won’t lose a dollar,” Trump suddenly reversed course. He began buying properties, some of them money-losers, wholly with cash:

The year before he launched his campaign for president, Trump made the two most expensive all-cash purchases that The Post found in its review. In 2014, he shelled out $79.7 million for the huge golf resorts in Doonbeg, Ireland, and Turnberry, Scotland — both of which were losing money at the time.

The strategy flies in the face of convention and common sense. Trump embraced borrowing “until he didn’t,” Fahrenhold writes.

Which brings up Eric Trump’s reported explanation for how the Trump organization got its money at a time banks quit lending to it: “We have all the funding we need out of Russia.” Eric Trump now denies saying that to golf journalist James Dodson. Once again, a question arises Benghazi-like.

It took MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhl and Washington Post’s David Fahrentold most of the interview yesterday to get around to mentioning Russian money, but along with suspicions of Russian money laundering (which the Post cannot prove) it was hanging in the air the entire time:

“Where on earth did they get the cash from?” the host asked Fahrenhold, who responded that he and his reporting team only know what the Trump son relayed to them — that they made enough on other business ventures to purchase the properties in cash in spite of reports about the company’s borrowing habits.

Charlie Pierce is less loathe to speculate:

But there is an explanation that can cover all the questions arising from this mysterious mid-career course correction in how the president* did business. Perhaps someone–or several someones–needed to wash some money. A possible reason that Mueller’s people are looking into this kind of maneuvering is that they suspect the Trump Organization was laundering money for the kind of people who need their money laundered.

#ButhisCashDeals

* * * * * * * *

For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

The right has been doing “fake news” a lot longer than Russian bots

The right has been doing “fake news” a lot longer than Russian bots

by digby

Amanda Marcotte at Salon has a nice interview with outgoing Planned Parenthood president Cecil Richards. I was struck by this:

AM: You write in the book that Planned Parenthood was dealing with fake news before that term even became famous. You were subject to a series of hoaxes, falsely accusing the organizations of all sorts of terrible things, including that you sell baby parts. You were called in front of Congress to defend yourself against these ridiculous hoaxes. What is your advice to the rest of us in the age of Trump, when lying and hoaxes unfortunately becoming normal in politics?

CR: Yeah. Look it’s a big problem. I wish I had the magic solution. And I will say that because in many ways, Planned Parenthood was up first, we have worked with so many other organizations who’ve also been targets of these kinds of fake news attacks and undercover videos. I think it’s really important that what we did is to stand up for what we’re about and what we do.

I think that certainly being called in front of Congress wouldn’t be how I’d spent my time, nor be the topic of all these really awful attacks, and some terrible things happened, I don’t want to minimize that. But we also had try to find a way to use it, to educate people about Planned Parenthood. Even the hearing before Congress, that ended up growing the knowledge base, frankly, for people around the country, for us to be able to tell our story about the important health care that we provide and what we do for our patients.

But there isn’t any simple way. I think one of the things that’s really important is taking this stuff seriously. We learned early on that you can’t let a lie or a misinterpretation sit for even a second, and again, this is a capacity that I think progressive organizations now have to have in a very serious way. A capacity to be in a 24/7 news cycle and communications framework and also really have the capacity to monitor what’s being said and done on social media. I will say I think the progressive movement is far behind the right on this, and it’s something we all have to invest in.

AM: It does seem to me that there has been an escalation of these kinds of attacks on nonprofits like Planned Parenthood. What do you think accounts for that?

CR: I don’t exactly know what accounts for it. Obviously, there were a couple of groups that specialize in this. I think that one of the things that I see on the right is they are so much more willing to lie, cheat, steal, deceive, break the law — tactics that frankly we don’t use in the progressive community. I do think that they have that advantage. The other is, they’ve got a lot of money. People who really probably could care less about the issue, but have complete focus on undermining any progressive institution that has either capacity or political power.

I remember when we were first under attack, actually, you may remember, I mean, this is when they had essentially done the same thing to ACORN and were able to, essentially, completely destabilize ACORN and the organization shut down. I was very aware of that when we were next. In fact, going to the United States Senate and talking about the attacks we were under, people were very aware of that many progressive folks voted to defund the ACORN.

There’s a history of success that the right has had; that’s why I think it’s important that we not let them succeed. Now we work with other groups — environmental groups, voter registration groups, progressive groups, education groups — that have been under attack as well.

AM: One piece of your book that’s getting a lot of press is your encounter with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. They offered to protect Planned Parenthood’s funding in exchange for the group ending abortion services. That they tried to bribe you, I think, is obviously objectionable, but I want to give you an opportunity to explain why that deal will not fly, just on its surface.

CR:I just want to also add one other piece of it. I don’t think they had any idea what they were doing. I mean, I know what they were trying to do, but it’s almost laughable to think that someone would actually meet with Planned Parenthood and say, “if you will do this, I’ll go guarantee your funding” in a Republican-led Congress. I mean just on the face of it. Even if that was something we would consider, which we never would. They couldn’t guarantee anything. I just think that there’s an aspect to it that’s pretty surreal.

Ivanka and Jared are f-ing morons.

This is more evidence that this stuff didn’t just happen overnight. It’s been coming on for a long time and in the last decade really picked up momentum. The Russians were just exploiting existing terrain.

It’s a good interview, well worth reading.

Melania disses Trump

Melania disses Trump

by digby

Either that was her subliminal message or she is as delusional as he is:

Maybe she could talk to her 71 year old toddler about this. He’s trying to blow up the world.

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Politics and Reality Radio: Amanda Marcotte on Troll Nation | Incels’ Deadly Misogyny | Bruce Bartlett: “Reverse Racism” and Trump

Politics and Reality Radio: Amanda Marcotte on Troll Nation | Incels’ Deadly Misogyny | Bruce Bartlett: “Reverse Racism” and Trump

with Joshua Holland

We kick off this week’s show with Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte. Amanda tells us all about her new book, Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself.

Then we’re joined by Robyn Pennachia, who has the unfortunate task of covering the bizarre misgonyistic murder cult known as “incels” forWonkette. Robyn helps us answer a key question: Just what the Hell is wrong with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and other commenters who take these sick freaks’ twisted grievances seriously?

Finally, we speak with former Reagan official and conservative apostate Bruce Bartlett about how Donald Trump capitalized on the surprisingly widespread view that white people are the victims of discrimination in the US.

Playlist:
Pixies: “Debaser”
Walter Murphy: “5th of Beethoven”
Eek-a-Mouse: “Atlantis Lover”
Benny Goodman Orchestra: “Old Man River”

As always, you can also subscribe to the show on iTunes, Soundcloud or Podbean.

Follow da money

Follow da money

by digby

Josh Marshall has an interesting bit of analysis over at TPM (subscription required — highly recommended) about Trump and Cohen’s business model based on the big NY Times report on Michael Cohen and the Washington Post expose on Trump’s real estate “cash flow” in the Washington Post. This is an excerpt:

The gist of the Post piece is that Trump, like many high profile real estate investors, has always been about debt, getting investors and banks to shoulder a lot of the risks of his investments. This is the standard in that line of business. But Trump always took it much further than almost anyone else. That is, until 2006, when as Post explains, he moved decisively into paying cash. From 2006, Trump spent over $400 million in cash on various investments, often paying for new properties entirely on his own and 100% in cash. Not only was this deeply out of character for Trump. It was out of character for almost everyone in Trump’s business. And it came in the midst of the real estate financial crisis.

Now credit was super tight during the crisis. So not using bank loans would make sense. In fact, investors who had access to lots of cash did very well since they could buy up distressed assets when others had little or no access to capital. But that still doesn’t explain where the cash came from. And the shift started about two years before the crash.

Note that year, 2006. That’s the same year when Michael Cohen came to work for the Trump Organization and, as I’ve noted many times, Cohen was brought into the Trump Organization as a conduit for money from Russia and Ukraine. To be clear, I’m not saying all this cash came from or through Michael Cohen. But there’s good reason to think these two things are related, that the shift toward cash purchases coincided with Trump’s increasingly heavy reliance on post-Soviet cash and that Cohen was an important part of that transition. In a new book to be released this week, Seth Hettana explains that Cohen got his job with Trump in part as a favor to Cohen’s father-in-law, Fima Shusterman, a Ukrainian emigre who appears to have been a silent partner in Trump ventures and does have lots of money. As The Chicago Times revealed last month, just in the last 8 months Shusterman has loaned between $20 and $40 million to another Cohen and Shusterman connected immigrant family, the Schtayners, who have major holdings in the Chicago taxi business. That’s at least $20 million in loans to a family in a collapsing industry backed by collateral that is worth far less than the loans.

He mentions that Eric Trump says they did this because they were so successful that they didn’t need loans, which is as fatuous as it gets. First, they were not successful and second, nobody does business like this. And anyway, there was this report from journalist James Dodson who asked Eric Trump in 2014 how they were buying up all these golf courses at a time that banks were not lending to any resort properties:

“So when I got in the cart with Eric,” Dodson says, “as we were setting off, I said, ‘Eric, who’s funding? I know no banks — because of the recession, the Great Recession — have touched a golf course. You know, no one’s funding any kind of golf construction. It’s dead in the water the last four or five years.’ And this is what he said. He said, ‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.’ Now that was [a little more than] three years ago, so it was pretty interesting.”

Eric says this never happened, but Don Jr said much the same thing a few years before. Weirdly the fake news media was planting these stories long before Trump ran for president.

Marshall emphasizes that we know very little about Trump’s finances and that we have to reserve judgement. Maybe Trump really was so successful that he had 400 million in ready cash to spend at a time. We just don’t know. But let’s just say that it’s a little bit suspicious that a man with that much money was slapping his name on every cheap consumer item he could find, including water, and defrauding thousands of people with Trump University.

But that’s the problem. There were all these Russians circling around this campaign, all this interference, all this money coming from somewhere, these quotes from membrs of his own family, Michael Cohen and his deep Russia connections, Paul Manafort, Trump stubbornly refusing to criticize Vladimir Putin and blatantly obstructing the investigation — and a Republican party that was and is fine with having a suspected money launderer in the White House.

Maybe it’s all a big coincidence but I doubt it.

He didn’t even ask

He didn’t even ask

by digby

… before he pulled his gun

According to security footage of the encounter at a convenience store in Buena Park, California, Arreola went into the store on March 16, asked how much the mints were, and began paying for them. As he was getting his change back, he put the mints in his pocket.

An off-duty cop, who has yet to be identified, stepped in. “Hey, give that back. I’m a police officer,” he said, brandishing his gun.

Arreola, clearly startled, repeatedly said, “I paid for that.”

After a brief back-and-forth, the officer told the cashier, “He tried stealing that from you.” The cashier then confirmed three times that Arreola actually paid for the mints. The officer began a mea culpa: “My apologies, sir. My apologies.” Arreola took his candy and left.

“The hardest thing for me was, believe it or not, it wasn’t really the gun,” Arreola told a local CBS affiliate. “It was his arrogance, his way of talking to me. … He treated me like a piece of trash.”

The incident has drawn widespread attention following a report by Tony Saavedra for the Orange County Register.

As Daniel Politi noted at Slate, the video “appears to illustrate how police officers can overreact to what they perceive as tiny slights and often have a hard time accepting when they’re wrong.” It also shows how even minor transgressions can escalate into potentially deadly encounters.

Arreola told a local NBC affiliate that he believes he was racially profiled.

The Buena Park Police Department is investigating the incident.

“I want you to know that after I watched the video I found it to be disturbing, as I’m sure it was to you,” Buena Park Police Chief Corey Sianez said in a statement. “However, because there is an ongoing personnel investigation and potential litigation pending against the city, I am unable to discuss the details of our investigation.”

It’s the arrogance. He could have just asked the guy, “hey, did you pay for that?” Instead he assumed that he stole it. And he pulled out his fucking gun over a pack of Mentos! What if the guy had panicked and reached into his pocket?

There’s a longstanding criminological concept at play: “legal cynicism.” The idea is that the government will have a much harder time enforcing the law when large segments of the population don’t trust the government, the police, or the laws.

This is a major explanation for why predominantly minority communities tend to have more crime than other communities: After centuries of neglect and abuse, black and brown Americans are simply much less likely to turn to police for help — and that may lead a small but significant segment of these communities to resort to its own means, including violence, to solve interpersonal conflicts.

There’s research to back this up. A 2016 study from sociologists Matthew Desmond of Harvard, Andrew Papachristos of Yale, and David Kirk of Oxford looked at 911 calls in Milwaukee after incidents of police brutality hit the news.

They found that after the 2004 police beating of Frank Jude, 17 percent fewer 911 calls were made in the following year compared with the number of calls that would have been made had the Jude beating never happened. More than half of the effect came from fewer calls in black neighborhoods. And the effect persisted for more than a year, even after the officers involved in the beating were punished. Researchers found similar impacts on local 911 calls after other high-profile incidents of police violence.

But crime still happened in these neighborhoods. As 911 calls dropped, researchers also found a rise in homicides. They noted that “the spring and summer that followed Jude’s story were the deadliest in the seven years observed in our study.”

That suggests that people were simply dealing with crime themselves. And although the researchers couldn’t definitively prove it, that might mean civilians took to their own, sometimes violent, means to protect themselves when they couldn’t trust police to stop crime and violence.

“An important implication of this finding is that publicized cases of police violence not only threaten the legitimacy and reputation of law enforcement,” the researchers wrote, but “they also — by driving down 911 calls — thwart the suppression of law breaking, obstruct the application of justice, and ultimately make cities as a whole, and the black community in particular, less safe.”

That’s why, especially in the context of racial disparities in police use of force, experts say it’s important that police own up to their mistakes and take transparent steps to fix them.

At least this cop apologized after the fact. But this is wrong and it shouldn’t be tolerated. A cop should not pull a gun over Mentos, ever.

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The Trump and Rudy Show: week-end edition

The Trump and Rudy Show: week-end edition

by digby

My Salon column today about the dynamic duo:

Last Friday, as President Trump was leaving the White House and then again while he was preparing to board Air Force One, he took a few questions from the gathered media horde. It sure sounded as though he was distancing himself from his new mouthpiece, Rudy Giuliani, after the latter’s wild TV appearances and other media interviews on Wednesday and Thursday. Presumably, once the aghast White House staff, Trump’s other attorneys and every TV pundit in the land pointed out what a mistake it all was, Trump abandoned his BFF, claiming that “everybody loves Rudy,” but he really didn’t have his facts straight yet because he’d only been on the job for one day. (In reality he had been hired two weeks earlier, but time operates strangely in the Trump administration.)

It seemed as though Giuliani might be sidelined the way Anthony Scaramucci was after his disastrous appearances last summer. After all, this is serious business: Trump is in the middle of two separate investigations by two different federal prosecutors. Letting his pal go on TV and stick his foot in his mouth repeatedly is counterproductive. It’s also redundant. The president can do that job very well all by himself.

Apparently Trump was satisfied with Giuliani’s garbled “clarification” and undeterred by the whirlwind, because the former mayor was all over the place this weekend. Even after being chastised for going on TV and announcing that three Americans held by North Korea would be released that day — something the president’s personal attorney has no business knowing, much less talking about in public — on Saturday he gave a speech to an Iranian-American group and told its members that the president is “committed to regime change” in Tehran. Why the president’s attorney is giving foreign policy speeches at all, and whether he has authorization to speak for the president, is unclear. Giuliani desperately wanted to be secretary of state after Trump’s election, and it looks as if he’s decided to take on the role anyway.

Then the man once known as “America’s mayor” appeared on Fox News with Jeanine Pirro, and things got really weird:

He claimed that he isn’t yet an expert on the facts but is an expert on campaign finance law because he ran for president. He clearly is not.  Just ask KellyAnne Conway’s husband, the Martha Mitchell of the Trump administration:

Finally, Giuliani went on “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos and put on a show that will probably be remembered as one of the more bewildering Sunday-morning TV appearances ever. He said he didn’t want Trump to sit down for an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller and that he couldn’t be confident the president would not invoke the Fifth Amendment. “I’ve got a client who wants to testify,” he said. “I hope we get a chance to tell him the risk that he’s taking.” I think he just did.

Stephanopoulos brought up Giuliani’s interview with BuzzFeed last week, in which Giuliani said that Michael Cohen had complained after the election that he hadn’t been paid back for the Stormy Daniels hush money. At some point he told Trump about it, in Giuliani’s account, and they agreed on the $35,000-a-month retainer or reimbursement that was paid personally by the president last year. Stephanopoulos logically followed up on Trump’s Air Force One assertion that he hadn’t known about the payment by asking Giuliani,“So the President did know about this after the campaign?”

Giuliani sputtered, “Can’t say that. At some point, yes, but it could have been recently, it could have been awhile back. Those are the facts that we’re still working on and that, you know, may be in a little bit of dispute. This is more rumor than anything else.” (The man could ask his client. He would know.)

Stephanopoulos pointed out that Giuliani had given a pretty clear account of what happened. He replied, “Well, maybe I did. But right now, I’m at the point where I’m learning. And I can’t prove that. I can just say it’s rumored. I can prove it’s rumor. But I can’t prove it’s fact. Maybe we will.” When pressed further, Giuliani responded, “How do you separate fact and opinion? When I state an opinion, I’ll say this is my opinion. When I state a fact, I’ll say this is a fact.”

Later on he provided a completely different story, saying that Cohen and Trump had a longstanding agreement for Cohen to take care of Trump’s apparently endless need to pay out hush money. Giuliani even admitted that there may very well be more such arrangements out there.

Let’s just say, Rudy isn’t helping.

Then The Washington Post published a story on Sunday that raised a lot of eyebrows. It was about Trump’s unexpected turn a few years back, when he went from being known as the “king of debt” in the real estate world to paying for risky properties in cash at a time when borrowed money was cheap. It was also around the same time Trump hired Cohen, whose “shadowy business empire” was profiled this weekend in The New York Times. These people were clearly up to something and that something looks a lot like money laundering, something that’s been suspected for some time. Steve Bannon, as you may recall, apparently said this to Michael Wolff, as quoted in “Fire and Fury”:

You realize where this is going. This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose [senior prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to f***ing Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr., and Jared Kushner. … It’s as plain as a hair on your face. It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit. The Kushner shit is greasy. They’re going to go right through that. They’re going to roll those . . . guys up and say play me or trade me.

It’s possible that Trump sent out Giuliani to try to keep Cohen in the family, but it looks like the stakes may be much higher than hush money and campaign finance violations, and Rudy now appears completely clueless.

MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch reported that he spoke with Michael Cohen last week and Cohen told him that Giuliani “doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Look, there’s two people that know exactly what happened, myself and the president, and you’ll be hearing my side of the story.” I’m sure Trump is thrilled to hear that.

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Where is all the money going? by @BloggersRUs

Where is all the money going?
by Tom Sullivan


Image by Picutres of Money, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

Gigantism may or may not precede extinction over time. A more immediate question is, extinction for whom?

Axios reports that as tight as the labor market seems, corporations seem determined to hold on to their high profits for as long as possible before sharing with the workers producing them. The growing consensus, writes Steve LeVine, is because they can:

“As long as firms have the clout to hold back pay increases, they will,” Jared Bernstein, chief economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden during the Obama administration, told Axios today.

The standard narrative for explaining the lag in pay is lower productivity growth and increasing automation. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, however, cites less-noted statistics that suggest wages may be slowly catching up. At least in the short term.

Bernstein believes there is still slack in the job market, but adds that some of the remaining workers face barriers to reentry including “health or skill deficits, criminal records and long periods of joblessness. Others live in places where there aren’t enough jobs.” (That last part lawmakers overlook when imposing nationwide measures forcing those on public assistance to look harder for jobs that don’t exist in their communities.) But lack of bargaining power, Bernstein writes, contributes to the lag in wage increases. Monopolistic concentration and low union membership allows large corporations to fend off wage increases.

For all the backslapping over the official unemployment rate declining below four percent, wage growth continues to lag over time. In a paper presented at the University of Chicago last month, economist Simcha Barkai noted a 10 percent decline in the share of income going to labor over the last 30 years. Matt Stoller writes that while there is some evidence for cheap Chinese imports depressing wages, as well as the expansion in the use of robots, Barkai found no evidence robot use is holding down wages:

So where is all the money going? “Profits have been rising over time,” Barkai said last week. And he put a number on it. “To give you a sense of how large these profits are, if you look over the past 30 years… per worker, how much have these dollars increased? It’s about $14,000 per worker. And that’s a really big number because, in 2014, personal median income was about $28,000.” Barkai’s models show that this effect is more pronounced in concentrated industries and less pronounced in competitive ones. Had concentration remained at the levels we saw 30 years earlier, one model in his paper suggested that wages, output, and investment would be substantially higher.

That they are not may be a function of policy rather than globalization pressures and changes in technology. Sabeel Rahman, Assistant Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, studies the interaction between money and democracy. He told the conference, “Economic power and concentration increases inequality while also undermining economic dynamism.” It is no accident. Antitrust enforcement is all but dead.

David Dayen (“Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud“) concurs that political corruption and market concentration go hand-in-glove. Writing at The Nation, Dayen observes, “Concentrated economic power begets concentrated political power, with big business rigging the game in its favor.” Julie Morgan and Rohit Chopra argue in their report for the Roosevelt Institute, “Unstacking the Deck,” the problem is not simply money in politics, but money in government. Chopra tells Dayen, “as Congress reduced its level of activity, [industry influence] has shifted much of the energy to executive and regulatory agencies.”

Jeff Spross writes at The Week that the price and inflation spikes of the 1970s translated into radical policy changes in the 1980s:

Many businesses hated high wage growth; it translates into higher labor costs. Not surprisingly, in the 1970s, an organized business lobby first really emerged on a national scale, pushing for deregulation and a rollback of worker power. Unionization levels began to decline in earnest, as businesses got serious about beating back labor. The turn toward right-wing economic policy began, culminating in the Reagan revolution.

Fed Chair Paul Volcker crushed inflation by hiking interest rates into the stratosphere. This set off a massive recession in 1981 — rivaling the 2008 collapse in some ways. Millions of working-class Americans were thrown out of jobs for years, and already-struggling unions went into a tailspin.

American macroeconomic policymaking since the start of the Reagan era, writes Spross, “is built on the implicit assumption that properly managing the economy requires breaking workers’ bargaining power and continuously swatting down their demands for better compensation.” Spross concludes:

This wasn’t the result of a failed economic strategy. It was the result of a successful one. Now we have low unemployment and low inflation and booming business profits. And it’s all made possible by widespread stagnation in living standards for everyone in the middle class on down. Workers can no longer put serious pressure on their employers: They’ve been scattered, demoralized, stripped of their unions, and transformed into disposable commodities.

The sitting president won his office by appealing to the simmering grievances of middle class Americans. He blamed globalization, foreigners, and bad deals with foreign countries for their feeling left behind and disposable. We are animals. We identify enemies by their faces more easily than adverse policy decisions. Policies have no faces, but they can have fat wallets.

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