Trump Can't Control the Process Anymore. It's Unraveling on Him.
See? This is what I'm talking about. A nice, straight, bright line, beginning in one place and ending in another, easily seen through the foul murk of the president*'s public career. From The Washington Post:
President Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty Thursday in New York to lying to Congress about a Moscow real estate project that Trump and his company pursued at the same time he was running for president...
During the campaign, Cohen acted as Trump’s point person in an attempt to build the Trump development in Moscow. He has said the project was in its early stages in fall 2015, as Trump’s presidential campaign heated up. Cohen previously said the project stalled in January 2016, prompting him to email a top aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin seeking help. Cohen previously said that he never received a response and that the project was halted that month.
In fact, according to Thursday’s court filing, the Russians did respond and Cohen discussed the project for 20 minutes on the phone with an assistant to Dmitry Peskov, a senior aide to Putin. At the time, Cohen was seeking help with both securing land and financing...Prosecutors also said that Cohen continued to have contact into summer 2016 with Felix Sater, a Russian-born developer assisting with the project. Some of those contacts were first reported by The Washington Post.
Cohen’s guilty plea - his second in four months - is the latest development in a wide-ranging investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Activity in that probe has intensified this week, as one planned guilty plea was derailed and, separately, prosecutors accused Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort of lying to them since he pleaded guilty...Trump has repeatedly said he had no business dealings in Russia, tweeting in July 2016, “For the record, I have ZERO investments in Russia,” and telling reporters in January 2017 that he had no deals there because he had “stayed away.”
It always was about the money. The president* always defined himself by it. It was the comforting myth of his public existence, the fairytale he told himself so he could sleep at night through all the failure and bankruptcy and the whoring after cash, dirty or laundered, all over the world. Take away the money-or, more accurately, the perception of the money-and there simply is nothing left of the man. Take away the money, and he can't see himself in the mirror. So he would do anything, including imperil his presidency and, therefore, the country, to save himself from the horrible realization that the money was all there was to him and there wasn't any money anymore.
What the hell? What was the presidency to him but another mirror in which he still could see a man made of money?
So comes now Michael Cohen to talk about the money, and to lie to Congress about the money, and now to tell the Court, and Robert Mueller, the truth about the money. And we discover that Robert Mueller is no fool, and that he has known, all along, that it was about the money and that it always was about the money.
Cohen worked as a top lawyer to Trump and his real estate company for a decade. After Trump took office, Cohen left the company and became a personal attorney to the president, while taking on consulting clients, including AT&T, Novartis and a New York firm that manages assets for a Russian billionaire.
Once one of Trump’s most loyal aides, he has taken a swift and thorough turn against the president in recent months. Cohen used to describe himself as Trump’s pit bull and delighted in jousting with the celebrity businessman’s enemies, once asserting that he would “take a bullet” for his longtime boss. But after pleading guilty, he said his conscience required him to tell the truth about Trump. Before the midterm elections, he urged the public to vote for Democrats, writing on Twitter that the election “might be the most important vote in our lifetime.” In recent months, he has been spending hours meeting with prosecutors, including Mueller’s team and was spotted recently arriving in Washington for additional meetings with his legal team.
The story began to move very fast. The president*, on his way to the G7 in Argentina to meet with, among other people, Vladimir Putin, blew some smoke from the White House driveway, inadvertently (perhaps) admitting that he lied during the campaign about the business he and the weak person, Cohen, were doing in Russia. But events are beginning to rhyme on him, and he can't control the process now.
At the same time that Cohen was copping his plea, over in Frankfort, German authorities were raiding the headquarters of Deutsche Bank, the one remaining financial institution willing to lend the president* money. The actions were taken in response to the latest revelations from the Panama Papers project, the massive leak of financial data that revealed precisely how governments and government officials clean their dirty money and stash it offshore all over the world. Again, from the Post:
“After an evaluation of the so-called ‘Offshore Leaks’ and ‘Panama Papers,’ ” Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office representative Nadja Niesen wrote in a statement, “the suspicion arose that Deutsche Bank AG was helping clients set up so-called ‘offshore companies’ in tax havens and that money connected to crimes was transferred to the accounts of Deutsche Bank AG.” Deutsche Bank failed to report those suspicious transactions, according to German prosecutors.
Prosecutors referred to a Deutsche Bank subsidiary registered in the British Virgin Islands. From there, 900 customers were allegedly served by the bank in 2016 alone. Deutsche Bank did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In their statement, prosecutors alleged there were “sufficient indications” for the suspicious nature of those transactions before the 2016 release of the Panama Papers. Yet bank officials did not report them.
Has Deutsche Bank been connected to laundering Russian money? Why, yes, it has. From the BBC:
Deutsche Bank has been fined $630m (£504m) by US and UK regulators in connection with a Russian money laundering plan. Under the scheme, clients illegally moved $10bn out of Russia via shares bought and sold through the bank's Moscow, London and New York offices. Authorities said Deutsche had missed "numerous opportunities" to detect, investigate and stop the scheme. Deutsche Bank said it was co-operating with regulators. It also said it had put aside money to cover the cost of the settlement.
During the investigation, New York authorities and Britain's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) found that so called "mirror" trades had been carried out through the bank between 2011 and 2015. Clients would purchase stocks in roubles in Moscow before their counterparts sold the same stock at the same price through the bank's London branch. "By converting roubles into dollars through security trades that had no discernible economic purpose, the scheme was a means for bad actors within a financial institution to achieve improper ends while evading compliance with applicable laws," according to the legal document detailing the settlement with DFS.
This, remember, is one of the only banks in the world that's been willing to do business with the president*. And Michael Cohen today pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his-and the president*'s-involvement in a proposal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. It is about the money. It's always been about the money.
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