Month: March 2019

Trump and Robert Kraft’s sex-trafficking Madame hob-nobbed at Mar-a-lago

by digby

The Miami Herald reports that President Donald Trump had a very special guest for the Super Bowl:

Seated at a round table littered with party favors and the paper-cutout footballs that have become tradition at his annual Super Bowl Watch Party, President Donald Trump cheered the New England Patriots and his longtime friend, team owner Robert Kraft, to victory over the Los Angeles Rams on Feb. 3.

Sometime during the party at Trump’s West Palm Beach country club, the president turned in his chair to look over his right shoulder, smiling for a photo with two women at a table behind him.

The woman who snapped the blurry Super Bowl selfie with the president was Li Yang, 45, a self-made entrepreneur from China who started a chain of Asian day spas in South Florida. Over the years, these establishments — many of which operate under the name Tokyo Day Spas — have gained a reputation for offering sexual services.

Nineteen days after Trump and Yang posed together while rooting for the Patriots, authorities would charge Kraft with soliciting prostitution at a spa in Jupiter that Yang had founded more than a decade earlier

What are the odds?

Recall what this was all about:

Authorities say Kraft visited a Florida massage parlor for sex acts on the morning of the AFC Championship Game, which he attended in Kansas City later that day.

According to documents released by the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office on Monday, it was Kraft’s second visit to the parlor in less than 24 hours.

The documents say Kraft arrived at the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in a chauffeured 2015 blue Bentley at 11 a.m. on Jan. 20. He was videotaped receiving oral and manual sex from a woman at the spa in Jupiter. Officials say he gave her a $100 bill and another bill before leaving at 11:15 a.m.

The AFC Championship Game against the host Chiefs kicked off at 6:40 p.m. ET. Kraft, who is also the owner of the New England Revolution of MLS, was in attendance.

I don’t know what the whole story is with that “spa.” But there is a story. A bunch of extremely wealthy men patronized this tawdry little business. And somehow the proprietor ended up at Mar-a-lago with the president. WTH?

Update:

I don’t know what this is all about but these pictures have surfaced:

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What did the president know? (Everything)

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Every week seems to bring another Trump scandal. There are so many now we’re going to have to start numbering them. Up until now the sheer volume of alleged misdeeds and malfeasance has actually worked in the president’s favor. There is so much out there that it’s hard to keep the whole picture straight in your mind and that has the weird effect of making things seem less serious than they actually are.

We know that the Trump base and the vast majority of Republican voters still support the president and think it’s all nothing but a witch hunt. They are mesmerized by the president and propagandized by Fox News and other right-wing media. But I would imagine that even people who don’t like Trump but don’t follow all this closely or in much detail wonder whether maybe the whole thing is just a collection of complaints that don’t really add up to anything.

That’s why it’s meaningful when the likes of Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Axios, journalists whom the political establishment sees as avatars of acceptable mainstream thinking, decide that it’s time to take stock of how many scandals are now being investigated and how wide the scope of the alleged criminality and corruption has become. It’s rather sobering. On Thursday they wrote out a partial list, entitling it, “The biggest political scandal in American history.”

VandeHei and Allen report that historians tell them there are only two previous scandals that even come close to what we are dealing with now: One is Watergate, and even Americans who weren’t alive at the time have heard plenty about that one. The other would be Teapot Dome, a bribery scandal under the manifestly corrupt Warren G. Harding administration in the 1920s.

Trump’s scandals include the Russia investigation, of course, which the Axios authors call one of the greatest counter-espionage cases of all time; the Stormy Daniels campaign finance scandal; the lies about the Trump Tower Moscow project (which is likely also part of the Russia counterintelligence investigation); the more than 100 contacts between Russian agents or emissaries and members of the Trump campaign; Michael Flynn’s inexplicable lies to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador; the firing of James Comey and other acts of obstruction of justice; and the granting of security clearances to Trump’s daughter and son-in-law over the objections of the intelligence agencies.

Their list does not include all the administration officials under suspicion of corruption while in office or the scandals swirling around the president’s family business, which he refused to give up upon taking office and is still closely involved with, even promoting his resort properties and private clubs with personal appearances nearly every weekend. Top executives and foreign representatives seeking favor from the administration ostentatiously spend money at Trump hotels to gain the attention of the president and his family. In the wake of a recent unfavorable court ruling over his golf course in Scotland, Trump even posted a promotional tweet openly promising foreign policy considerations:

Very proud of perhaps the greatest golf course anywhere in the world. Also, furthers U.K. relationship! https://t.co/3xTzzJH6Iq

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 2, 2019

The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York is investigating Trump’s inaugural committee and various financial issues regarding the Trump Organization. New York’s attorney general and insurance regulators are looking into various charges of fraud. And the House of Representatives has launched at least half a dozen different probes into various of the matters mentioned above.

Even the purveyors of Beltway conventional wisdom are starting to see that regardless of what Robert Mueller’s eventual report may conclude, what we already know makes this the most scandal-plagued presidency in history. And the big question that hangs over all of it is the proverbial one uttered years ago by Sen. Howard Baker, who was the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate Committee: “What did the president know and when did he know it?”

It’s tempting to believe that Donald Trump is just too dim to have known what he was doing. That theory goes like this: He had no experience in government and just didn’t realize that his ruthless tactics, which were customary in the business world, would be seen as corrupt and possibly criminal. He was busy running for president and then being president.

That is almost certainly wrong. First of all, Trump’s business history is full of examples of corrupt practices, from his days as a casino magnate to redlining of rental housing, fraudulent development projects and partnering with the mob. Not long ago, we saw a massive exposé of the fraudulent scheme Trump’s father set up, from which his family massively profited for decades. It’s not as if he’s ever operated with integrity.

Let’s take one example from the recent revelations by Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer. Cohen produced checks signed by Trump, after he became president, that Cohen says were to pay him back for the hush money Cohen had paid to Stormy Daniels. It has been suggested that perhaps Trump didn’t know what those checks were for. After all, he’s a wealthy man who signs $35,000 checks all the time and he might have assumed they were for general legal work. But Donald Trump doesn’t operate that way. He told the New York Times during the transition:

[I]n theory, I can be president of the United States and run my business 100 percent, sign checks on my business, which I am phasing out of very rapidly, you know, I sign checks, I’m the old-fashioned type. I like to sign checks so I know what is going on as opposed to pressing a computer button, boom, and thousands of checks are automatically sent. It keeps, it tells me what’s going on a little bit and it tells contractors that I’m watching.

Is it reasonable to believe that he signed those checks in the Oval Office without knowing what they were for?

Bloomberg recently reported that Trump was heavily involved in the inauguration festivities. His inaugural committee chair, Tom Barrack, said Trump wanted to know everything about the finances. There remain big questions about what happened to the massive sums of money collected for that lame inaugural celebration. We know that in at least one case foreign donors to the inaugural committee were told to send their money directly to vendors in order to hide the origins of the money. Is it remotely conceivable that Trump wouldn’t have known about such arrangements, or that he had no idea where any of that money was going?

Big questions remain about whether the then-candidate knew in advance about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian emissaries who had promised dirt on Hillary Clinton. After all, he had a big deal brewing in Moscow at the time. Are we really expected to believe that Donald Trump Jr., who was heavily involved with that deal, didn’t mention the meeting to dear old Dad? Not bloody likely. Hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake.

Donald Trump is a narcissistic control freak, particularly when it comes to his cashflow. When it comes down to it, most of these scandals are about money — including his Russia entanglements, now that we know about the Moscow project. So to answer Howard Baker’s question: It’s pretty clear that the president knew everything, and knew it all from the very beginning.

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Still a rich, white man’s world
by Tom Sullivan

Yes, sir, all you’ve gotta be is white in America…

The 47-month sentenced former Donald Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort received yesterday in a Virginia courtroom drew wide condemnation for its leniency.

Convicted as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigations, Manafort faced 19 to 24 years per guidelines of the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Criminal sentences across the U.S. are excessive, in general. But even after Manafort expressed no regret for his crimes, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis felt the recommended range was excessive for a rich, connected white man known as a lobbyist for torturers who, Ellis said, had lived “an otherwise blameless life.”

Franklin Foer issued an angry rebuttal to Ellis’ opinion of a man found guilty — among his other crimes — “of tax evasion on an industrial scale.” Foer spits:

In an otherwise blameless life, Paul Manafort lobbied on behalf of the tobacco industry and wangled millions in tax breaks for corporations.

In an otherwise blameless life, he helped the Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos bolster his image in Washington after he assassinated his primary political opponent.

In an otherwise blameless life, he worked to keep arms flowing to the Angolan generalissimo Jonas Savimbi, a monstrous leader bankrolled by the apartheid government in South Africa. While Manafort helped portray his client as an anti-communist “freedom fighter,” Savimbi’s army planted millions of landmines in peasant fields, resulting in 15,000 amputees.

Foer was just getting wound up. He has more. Much more. But whatever Manafort’s personal history, he was convicted and sentenced for a specific subset of criminal acts, not for being a career criminal. That’s how the system is supposed to work. For rich, connected white men, leniency is de rigueur.

"Blood money," his own daughter described his work. https://t.co/yI9TbpyrmZ— emptywheel (@emptywheel) March 7, 2019

Former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade recommends the blind-justice-minded maintain a degree of patience. Manafort may have received a light touch from the Eastern District of Virginia owing to “class and racial disparities” in the system, but he faces a second sentencing next week from a court in the District of Columbia. There, Judge Amy Berman Jackson has already signaled she is not so favorably disposed toward him. Manafort faces sentencing for “two conspiracy counts encompassing violation of the Foreign Agent Registration Act, money laundering, tax fraud and obstruction of justice” for which he may face 10 additional years in prison.

For context on Manafort’s 47 months in prison, my client yesterday was offered 36-72 months in prison for stealing $100 worth of quarters from a residential laundry room.— Scott Hechinger (@ScottHech) March 8, 2019

Manafort may be angling for a pardon from Trump, McQuade explains:

Manafort gave up the benefit of a recommendation for a lenient sentence when he lied to prosecutors about a number of matters, including his communications with Konstantin Kilimnik, who Mueller says has ties to Russian intelligence. What about that topic does Manafort so desperately want to conceal that he would risk a longer prison sentence rather than disclose it? Was Manafort’s failure to fully cooperate an effort to curry favor with Trump in hopes of a pardon down the road?

FYI in 2018, #JudgeEllis sentenced Frederick Turner, 37, to a mandatory minimum of 40 years in prison for dealing methamphetamine: "I chafe a bit at that, but I follow the law. If I thought it was blatantly immoral, I'd have to resign. It's wrong, but not immoral." #PaulManafort— Laura Coates (@thelauracoates) March 8, 2019

Perhaps, but there may be more coming down the pike from Mueller:

And finally, Mueller may still find evidence of a conspiracy between Russia and Manafort or other Trump campaign officials to attack the 2016 presidential election. After the sentencing, Manafort’s lawyer said that the case exposed no evidence of “collusion with any government official from Russia.” The specificity of that statement begs several questions—was there collusion with Russians who were not government officials? Was there collusion with government officials from other countries? Is “collusion” the word of choice because collusion in this context is not a crime? The fact that Manafort’s case is over does not mean that Mueller is done investigating all of his activities or the activities of others relating to Russia.

Certainly there is more to come, but when? “We’re 10 days after the Mueller report was going to be released after it didn’t show up 14 days after it was going to be released,” Marcy Wheeler tweeted on Thursday. As this is another Friday, journalists will be watching their feeds for news not just of a report, but for a batch of high-level indictments Mueller is rumored to have saved for last.

But beyond the Russia investigation, the amount of damage this old republic has endured continues to mount. Fairness of elections is in question. Justice is a shadow of our lofty ideals. Congress remains gridlocked. Trump and his Senate enablers are packing the courts. Even keeping a list of Trump administration scandals up to date is exhausting.

Wheeler writes, “It seems that we need to start trying to quantify this not in terms of names or actions but instead in terms of harm to the nation.” The deepest wounds are psychological, involving loss of faith in America itself. That faith will not be restored until justice is blind and elite criminals face an accounting. Chief among them, the Trump Organization run by Chauncey Gardner‘s evil twin. But that will not happen so long as there is a system of soft justice for the rich and white, and another more punitive for everybody else.

Gobbledy-gook!

An otherwise blameless life

by digby

That nasty federal judge in the first Manafort case, let the treasonous bastard off easy today, sentencing him to 47 months less  9 months for time served.  He said the sentencing guidelines are excessive, compared Manafort’s crimes to low level types involved in the Mueller cases, and said that he’s a good friend and has led “an otherwise blameless life.”

Sure except for all the money laundering and bank fraud for years and years and years, he’s been a real angel.

I guess all those crimes he’s admitted to committing in the DC case mean nothing. Or the witness tampering and the repeated lying to prosecutors.  Not to mention the fact that he’s been known as the “torturers lobbyist” for decades. And that includes that psycho he worked for in Ukraine over the past decade.

He’ll be facing Judge Amy Berman Jackson in the DC court next week. She could add another 10 years on to this slap on the wrist. But I expect that even if she does, Trump will commute his sentence or give him a pardon.

How do we know this? Manafort’s lawyer only said one thing after the sentence was handed down:

I think most importantly what you saw today was the same thing that we had said since day one. There is absolutely no evidence that that Paul Manafort was involved was involved with any collusion with any government official from Russia.

Donald Trump , if you’re listening …. 


And note that he was very specific — “no government official in Russia.”

Meanwhile, think about these innocent boys that Trump insisted needed to be executed before they even had a trial:

They want to slash the budget for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable energy

by digby

Bloomberg reports:

The Trump administration is again seeking severe cuts to the U.S. Energy Department division charged with renewable energy and energy efficiency research, according to a department official familiar with the plan.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy would see its $2.3 billion budget slashed by about 70 percent, to $700 million, under President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2020 budget request, which is set to be released on Monday.

The request is unlikely to be granted by Congress, especially with Democrats in charge of the House, but the figure represents an opening bargaining position for negotiations by the White House.

The Energy Department declined to comment and the White House Office of Management and Budget didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

“It’s a shutdown budget,” said Mike Carr, who served as the No. 2 official within the division under President Barack Obama. “That’s apparently what they want to signal to their base — they still want to shut these programs down.”

The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which provides hundreds of millions of dollars a year in grants and other financial assistance for clean energy, has financed research into technologies ranging from electric vehicles to energy projects powered by ocean waves. It has been credited with financing research to help make the cost of wind power competitive with coal, and cutting the costs of LED lighting.
[…]
In the past, Trump administration officials have defended the cuts, arguing they are justified by the falling costs of renewables and other emerging energy technologies.

In testimony before a House panel Thursday, Daniel Simmons, the Energy Department assistant secretary who heads the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, said he couldn’t talk about the budget proposal. But he noted the division had recently completed funding announcements for research into hydrogen and batteries for heavy-duty trucks among other technologies.

Michigan Republican Representative Fred Upton told him at the hearing that lawmakers expects the office “to carry out the law as Congress intended and utilize the resources Congress provides.”

Meanwhile, conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation have called for the office to be eliminated entirely, saying energy innovation is best left up to the private sector.

The budget for energy efficiency and renewable energy “is completely out control and even with the reduction it would still be one of the largest budgets in the Energy line,” said Tom Pyle, who led Trump’s Energy Department transition team and serves as president of the American Energy Alliance, a free-market advocacy group.

Oh look:

The American Energy Alliance (AEA) describes itself as “the independent grassroots affiliate of the Institute for Energy Research (IER). AEA’s mission is to enlist and empower energy consumers to encourage policymakers to support free market policies. It was founded in 2008 by Thomas Pyle, who previously lobbied on behalf of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association and Koch Industries and who previously worked for Congressman Tom Delay (R-TX), when Delay served as Whip and before Delay, as House Majority Leader, stepped down from the U.S. House of Representatives under an ethical cloud.

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Corruption big and small, all the way down

by digby

Just one more little story of Trump’s Mar-a-lago buds putting money directly into his pockets for their own financial benefit:

In late 2017, on one of President Donald Trump’s retreats to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Florida, he caught up with an old friend: Albert Hazzouri.

When Hazzouri is not at Mar-a-Lago, he’s a cosmetic dentist in Scranton, Pennsylvania. At a campaign rally there in 2016, Trump gave him a shoutout: “Stand up, Albert. Where the hell are you, Albert? Stand up, Albert. He’s a good golfer, but I’m actually a better golfer than him. Right?”

Shortly after Hazzouri and Trump saw each other in late 2017, Hazzouri followed up with a message, scrawled on Mar-a-Lago stationery. Here’s the letter:

In a telephone interview, Hazzouri said he sent the note as a favor to the 163,000-member American Dental Association. He said he had only the vaguest sense of what proposal he was vouching for.

“I’m really not involved in any politics, I’m just a small-time dentist,” he said. “I guess there’s a lot of money spent on veterans’ care and American Native Indians’ care, and I guess they wanted to have a little hand in it, the American Dental Association, to try to guide what’s going on or whatever.”

The idea seemed to intrigue Trump. He took a thick marker and wrote on top of Hazzouri’s note, “Send to David S at the V.A.,” referring to David Shulkin, then the secretary of veterans affairs. Next to the Mar-a-Lago coat of arms, an aide stamped: “The president has seen.”

It was not the first time Mar-a-Lago membership had bestowed access to the VA. As ProPublica revealed last year, Trump handed sweeping influence over the department to club member Ike Perlmutter, who is the chairman of Marvel Entertainment and was a major donor supporting Trump’s campaign, along with a physician and a lawyer who are regular guests at the resort. The trio, known as the “Mar-a-Lago Crowd,” acted as a shadow leadership for the department, reviewing all manner of policy and personnel decisions, including budgeting and contracting. The House veterans committee is now investigating the trio’s “alleged improper influence.”

Beyond the VA, Trump’s presidency has been rife with examples of special interests seeking influence through business associates or friends and family, rather than going through the normal channels. Shortly after the election, the Australian ambassador reportedly managed to contact Trump not through the State Department but thanks to golfer Greg Norman, and Trump’s post-election call with the Vietnamese premier was facilitated by Marc Kasowitz, a personal lawyer for Trump. Megadonor Sheldon Adelson helped a friend’s obscure company secure a research deal with the Environmental Protection Agency, and inaugural chairman Tom Barrack provided support to a company seeking to export nuclear power technology to Saudi Arabia.

In Hazzouri’s case, the details of his pitch to “create an oversight committee” are murky. A spokeswoman for the American Dental Association, Katherine Merullo, declined to elaborate on the proposal. Michael Graham, who heads the ADA’s lobbying arm in Washington, recalled that one of his staffers raised the topic with Hazzouri, but Graham said he didn’t know the details. In general, Graham said, the organization wants the government to pay for more dental services.

“The ADA has been looking into how we can get involved in veterans’ issues,” Graham said. “Lots of vets may not be eligible but need care.”

The VA provides dental care only in limited instances, primarily when veterans have a dental injury related to their service. Many veterans also have Medicare, but that doesn’t cover most dental services either. The ADA has lobbied on bills that would expand dental services for veterans, arguing that better dental care leads to better health overall. Of course, it would also lead to more billable patients for the ADA’s members.
[…]
Hazzouri declined to explain why his note to Trump addressed him as “King,” calling it an inside joke from long before Trump became president. “I call other people King,” he said. “It’s a very personal thing.”

I think Vets should get dental care. Of course. But it’s not as if Trump was ever going to actually do anything about it. He just took his pal’s money and his note and that was the end of it for him.

Update:

The RNC holding their Spring Retreat at Mar-a-Lago is a great way for Republican donors to circumvent campaign finance law and put money in the pocket of the President of the United States while they bend his ear on policy issues.— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) March 7, 2019

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They really messed up in North Korea

by digby

This story about the North Korean summit is actually quite terrifying. We managed to avoid a terrible deal simply because somehow Pompeo was able to pull Trump away from his bff enough to stop him. But they all screwed up. They are clueless and it’s a miracle we’ve avoided a catastrophe (so far.)

President Donald Trump’s second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was floundering from the start — and it ended with a last-ditch effort by the North Koreans to keep the US at the negotiating table and stop Trump from walking away.

As Air Force One made its way toward Hanoi, Vietnam, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was already on the ground, expecting to meet once more before the summit with North Korea’s lead envoy on the nuclear negotiations, Kim Yong Chol. After weeks of negotiations that yielded less progress than US officials had hoped for, Pompeo was eager to gauge North Korea’s willingness to strike a deal before Trump sat down with Kim Jong Un.

But Kim Yong Chol, North Korea’s vice chairman, wouldn’t meet with Pompeo, three US officials and a source familiar with the matter told CNN. The US secretary of state waited several hours hoping Kim would agree to meet, but ultimately turned in for the night, frustrated.

It was not the first time North Korean officials had stood up their US counterparts, but the high-level snub just a day before Trump and Kim were scheduled to sit down was a worrying and ultimately portentous signal that the second summit would not be the triumph Trump had hoped for. Two days later, after a final Hail Mary effort from the North Koreans, it ended without any new agreements and what Trump has come to call “the walk” after North Korea demanded significant sanctions relief in exchange for shutting down one of its major nuclear facilities.
[…]
The negotiations were coming to a close at Hanoi’s Metropole Hotel when a North Korean official rushed over to the US delegation.

With Trump preparing to leave the hotel, North Korean Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Choe Son-hui hurriedly brought the US delegation a message from Kim, two senior administration officials and a person briefed on the matter said. The message amounted to a last-ditch attempt by the North Koreans to reach a deal on some sanctions relief in exchange for dismantling the Yongbyon nuclear complex.

US and North Korean officials had been haggling over a shared definition of the sprawling, three-square-mile site and the last-minute overture sought to advance the North Koreans’ proposal for dismantling it. But the message did not make clear whether the North Koreans shared the US’s expansive definition of the facility and US officials asked for clarity.

Choe rushed back to get an answer. Kim replied that it included everything on the site.

But even when Choe returned with that response, the US delegation was unimpressed and didn’t want to resume the negotiations. Within hours, Trump would be wheels up for Washington.

“We had to have more than that,” Trump said when asked about Yongbyon before leaving Hanoi. “We had to have more than that because there are other things that you haven’t talked about, that you haven’t written about, that we found.”

The last-gasp effort would still have left the US and North Korea at odds over the extent and pace of sanctions that would be removed in exchange for the nuclear facility’s dismantlement. But some US officials believe that the final outreach from the North Koreans is a sign that the Kim is eager to strike a deal — but whether it’s the kind of deal the US would accept remains an open question.
[…]
Top US officials continued to question North Korea’s willingness to fully denuclearize and Trump was told that he needed to be ready to walk away if Kim didn’t show a readiness to go beyond the position North Korean officials laid out in those lower-level talks.

Still, as Trump headed to Hanoi’s posh Metropole Hotel for his first meeting with Kim in eight months, he still trusted in the power of his personal diplomacy with Kim, believing he might be able to charm Kim into an agreement once they met face-to-face. That approach collapsed amid North Korea’s demand for relief from the major economic sanctions enacted since 2016 in exchange for dismantling its Yongbyon nuclear complex.

“I just I felt it wasn’t good. Mike (Pompeo) and I spent a long time negotiating and talking about it to ourselves. And just — I felt that that particular, as you know, that facility, while very big, it wasn’t enough to do what we were doing,” Trump said at his post-summit news conference in Hanoi.

Standing alongside him, Pompeo added: “Even the Yongbyon facility and all of its scope — which is important, for sure — still leaves missiles, still leaves warheads and weapons systems. So there’s a lot of other elements that we just couldn’t get to.”

The path forward now remains unclear, with no working-level discussions or a third Trump-Kim summit on the books.

And satellite images released on Tuesday appear to show that North Korea has begun rebuilding a part of a long-range missile test facility, according to analysts from two respected North Korea monitoring websites.

US officials are now working toward organizing the next round of working-level discussions with North Korea within the next month, but North Korea has yet to confirm the timing and location of future talks, an administration official familiar with the negotiations said.

Privately, some of Trump’s top advisers on North Korea remain skeptical that Kim will be willing to move close enough to the US position on full, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization. And the latest summit demonstrated the wide gap that remains between the two sides.

He really, truly believed that he had “chemistry” with Kim Jong Un and that the “love letters” were sincere.

Incredible.

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The Trump Scandals crib sheet

by digby

Yes, The Trump Scandals are the worst in history. Are you surprised?

This piece by Mike Allen at Axios is a bit shocking if only because he is the font of Beltway conventional wisdom. It’s anything but comprehensive but it’s still worth mentioning that people are finally starting to see the overwhelming comprehensiveness of the Trump Family criminal enterprise:

Even without seeing Robert Mueller’s report, or knowing what prosecutors with the Southern District of New York have unearthed, or what congressional investigators will find, we already have witnessed the biggest political scandal in American history.

Historians tell Axios that the only two scandals that come close to Trump-Russia are Watergate, which led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, and the Teapot Dome scandal of the early 1920s, in which oil barons bribed a corrupt aide to President Warren Harding for petroleum leases.

Mueller has already delivered one of the biggest counterintelligence cases in U.S. history, author Garrett Graffpoints out — up there with Aldrich Ames (a former CIA officer convicted in 1994 of being a KGB double agent), or Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (executed in 1953 for spying for the Soviets).

Watergate yielded more charges than Mueller has so far: A total of 69 people were charged in Watergate; 48 people and 20 corporations pleaded guilty. Mueller so far has indicted 27 people; seven have been convicted or pleaded guilty.

But historians say that both Watergate and Teapot Dome were more limited because a foreign power wasn’t a central player, and a much narrower band of potential offenses was under investigation.

A fourth notable scandal, the Iran-Contra affair of the mid-1980s — in which arms were traded for hostages held by Iran, with the money used to fund rebels in Nicaragua — also involved a more limited range of issues.

The “biggest” realization might strike Trump supporters as overblown or plain wrong. But consider what we already know about actions of Trump and his associates:

Scandal 1: Trump secretly paid hush money to two mistresses on the eve of his presidential victory, and lied about it. His longtime personal lawyer is going to prison after carrying out the scheme on his behalf.

The historical parallel: Bill Clinton was impeached (but acquitted by the Senate) for lying under oath about an affair with a White House intern. 

Clinton impeachment Article 3, passed by the House, was obstruction of justice.

Earlier presidents, or their friends, had also been known to pay off mistresses.

Scandal 2: During the presidential campaign, Trump confidantes continued negotiating for a tower in Moscow, potentially one of Trump’s most lucrative deals ever. He hid this from the public and lied about it. His lawyer is going to prison for making false statements to Congress about the deal.

The historical parallel: None.

Scandal 3: Russian officials had more than 100 contacts with Trump associates during the campaign and transition, including his son, his closest adviser, his lawyer, and his campaign manager. The Russians offered assistance in undermining Hillary Clinton. The FBI and other government authorities weren’t alerted about this effort to subvert our election. 

The historical parallel: None.

Scandal 4: Michael Flynn was national security adviser at the same time U.S. intelligence officials believed he was compromised by the Kremlin. He pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts.

The historical parallel: None.

Scandal 5: Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, and told NBC’s Lester Holt it was at least in part because of the Russia investigation: “[T]his Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.”

The historical parallel: In the “Saturday Night Massacre” of 1973, Nixon tried to stop the Watergate investigation by abolishing the office of Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox; and accepting the resignation of Attorney General Elliot Richardson, and firing Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, when they refused to fire Cox.

Scandal 6: Trump overruled the advice of his lawyers and intelligence experts, and granted his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a top-secret clearance. This so alarmed his White House chief of staff John Kelly that he recorded his opposition in a memo. Trump and his family repeatedly denied he had interfered.

The historical parallel: None.

The big picture: Presidential historian Jon Meacham tells us that this “transcends scandal — it’s a national crisis in the sense of a period of elevated stakes, high passions, and possibly permanent consequences.”

“We’re in the midst of making history more than we are reflecting it.”

Naturally, however, it’s no biggie:

Be smart: Trump himself might survive all of this — and even more. Republican voters seem basically unmoved by the mounting evidence.