Because, of course he does:
The hard-charging New York lawyer President Trump chose to represent him in the Russia investigation has prominent clients with ties to the Kremlin, a striking pick for a president trying to escape the persistent cloud that has trailed his administration.
Marc E. Kasowitz’s clients include Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who is close to President Vladimir Putin and has done business with Trump’s former campaign manager. Kasowitz also represents Sberbank, Russia’s largest state-owned bank, U.S. court records show.
Kasowitz has represented one of Deripaska’s companies for years in a civil lawsuit in New York and was scheduled to argue on the company’s behalf May 25, two days after news broke that Trump had hired him, court records show. A different lawyer in Kasowitz’s firm showed up in court instead, avoiding a scenario that would have highlighted Kasowitz’s extensive work for high-profile Russian clients.
No one has ever tried less hard to look innocent than our current president.
Trump seems unaware of the seven degrees of incrimination.
He’s gotten away with everything he’s ever done before, so why should he worry now? He’s the king! He can’t be touched!
I really think that’s the key to everything. He’s using the same tactics he’s gotten away with all his life which he was mentored in by Roy Cohn – “always ATTACK!”
At one time I thought this will all finally end with him in a cell next to Madoff. But with the national security Russian angle and the yuuuggge money laundering Mueller’s probably going to uncover, ADX Florence now seems more likely.
I wish I shared your optimism. Far more likely, IMO, IF Trump is removed from office – a very large if – he will be pardoned for all past crimes by his successor. For the good of the country, healing, moving forward, etc. And then he returns to life as a private citizen, a martyr to his base and hugely enriched by his time in the Oval Office.
He can’t lose. The very rich never, ever lose. So much winning.
A lot like heads, he wins, tails, we lose.
Yep, it’s the money that will eventually get them.
.
Here we are rolling around to another summer. I begin to feel like what we got on the Orange Man is a nothing burger. Lots of smoke but no pony in there. And Trump has just taken another victory lap. I feel like they may have something on Flynn but then how does that get connected to Trump? Unless this turns out to be a slam dunk, and sometime this decade, the republican congress is not likely to do anything about it. Felling a little depressed about it. So where do we go from here?
Everyone feels that futility — that sensation of spinning wheels and not getting anywhere; of nothing making any difference — and we have to remind ourselves that real, potent investigations are actually happening, much faster than Watergate or Iran/Contra or anything else, and that (as much as people like David Brooks want to shrug and compare this to Whitewater) Trump and his gang are genuinely facing some serious penalties for what they’ve done.
The argument that the ACA is successfully imperiled by McConnell and the Senate and that therefore none of this “matters” is, I think, a false one. It matters a great deal, and the whole world is watching (as they said in ’68).
All our allies are watching us. If we can’t clean this up, the Western Alliance is done, b/c which Western country would trust our word, our bond, when they know Putin calls the shots?
If we don’t clean out this Russian infestation, America’s place in the world is over. And even if we do, the fact that we let it happen, means our allies have to mistrust us. It could happen again. Next time, with a more-skilled demagogue.
Dude!
If they have something that sticks on Flynn colluding with the Russians to subvert our democracy and/or line the pockets of himself and others…
…then the President will have to answer not just for the actions of this (and, most likely, other senior campaign surrogates), but he will have to explain why he refused to take the advice of people both within and outside his transition team to not select Flynn as the National Security Advisor.
For a brief time, Flynn had access to the most top secret information our government holds across all security and law enforcement agencies, including information about the Russians. Multiple investigations may allow us to learn enough to presume that Flynn may have passed top secret information that we have gathered about the Russian Federation in multiple spheres to Putin and his administrators. And he doesn’t even need to have done that in order to be in legal and political trouble.
Flynn was in the meeting with the Russian Ambassador and Kushner where they discussed setting up secret communications which could not be accessed by American intelligence services. Many presume that was just talked about and not executed. I don’t see that as a safe presumption.
If Flynn and other campaign and transition leaders are guilty, then Trump is politically guilty. The President is responsible for the organizational leader he hired and directed.
Don’t worry about Trump and his “victory lap” psyops. He’s persuading a base which started out small for a newly elected President and is becoming smaller. He’s failed before, he’s failing again, and his money and lawyers can’t get him out of this one nearly as easily as they have his other messes.
We should proceed with confidence in the middle of the swirling political and social chaos.
Isn’t this just expediency? He can’t get anyone else — he tried for Sullivan, Boies etc. and they don’t want it.
Being in bed with Russians is something Trump literally doesn’t (or, didn’t) see anything wrong with, just like dealing with organized crime figures or illegal Polish workers without hard-hats or mail-order grifters (Trump U.) or any of the other sleazeballs he’s associated and worked with over the decades.
To Trump, that’s “the real world” — that’s how it all gets done. The rest of us live in a world of community boards and academics and think-tanks and non-profits and cultural institutions and museums and theater groups and Sierra Clubs and magazines that Trump can’t even see, even when he’s looking right at them. All he sees is casinos, steakhouses, condos, golf clubs, and gold plating. That’s the world to him.
I love how one of the lawyers who rejected Trump’s request to become one of his personal attorneys boiled it down:
“Trump doesn’t listen and he doesn’t pay.”
Our President, ladies and gents.
Trump in a nutshell.
Here it is:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/four-top-law-firms-turned-requests-represent-trump-122423972.html?soc_src
=mail&soc_trk=ma
At least somebody is not afraid to speak the word. From today’s article on Huffpo:
About two weeks ago, Representative Green (D-Texas) stated in an official presentation on the House floor that President Trump should be impeached.
Kasowitz is in way, way over his head. His bully boy routine doesn’t work at this level.
Let’s remember that a lawyer who was an early mentor for Trump, Roy Cohn, ultimately couldn’t run roughshod over the Federal government with these methods either and died in ignominious shame:
http://www.maryellenmark.com/text/magazines/vanity%20fair/925E-000-007.html
I keep hearing that “it’s very unlikely that Trump has recordings.”
What is the basis for this statement, SVP? (And I am not joking: I don’t understand why so many people – people much smarter than I am – believe that no recordings exist …)
Item: Trump is known to have recorded employees’ office conversations. I’ve read stories of employees warning new employees that Trump might be monitoring them.
Item: There are stories from Mar-a-Largo of Trump listening in on guest rooms.
Item: Multiple presidents have recorded their conversations.
I’ll be astonished if Trump hasn’t recorded his conversations with Comey … so I must be missing dispositive evidence.
What is that dispositive evidence, SVP?
RE your first item. When the donald got the nomination and started getting his intel briefings, did the secret service/FBI clear his office, home, cars, planes, clubs, etc for bugs/cameras? That is the question someone on the intel committee should have asked Comey.
Interesting point. I continue to see claims (which might be OBE) that Trump is still using his antique Android – a known security risk – so it isn’t necessarily the case that a recording system would have been vetted by security services.
But I think your point is that security services should be able to ground hearsay reports of recording systems with evidence.
Perhaps a question to put to Adam Schiff or a staffer on the House committee, should they interview Comey. Or the House or Senate committee could file an information request.
Not sure whether a private citizen would get much joy from a FOIA request.
You write:
This is true.
But why?
Cui bono?
I often wonder whether the whole strategic goal of his candidacy has been to so disjoint the working federal system…barely working, but still functional to at least some degree…that it shakes itself apart and he takes over in a coup of some sort.
A digital Kristallnacht, so to speak.
This is very Bannon, to say the least.
Is a puzzlement.
Bet on it.
AG
This is why:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/30/15631710/trump-bullshit