I’ve written about the lengths the Trump Organization went to build Europe’s tallest skyscraper in Moscow during the 2016 campaign, and about why those efforts (and the lies they told about them) constitute impeachable offenses. I don’t want to rehash all of that here. Instead, I just want to paint a portrait that I hope will illustrate my point.
The president’s attorney Michael Cohen is going to jail in part because he lied to committees in both the House and Senate about the details and timing of the Moscow Trump Tower deal. Thanks in large part to electronic records obtained by BuzzFeed, we have an extraordinary amount of detail about the work Cohen and his childhood friend Felix Sater did in an effort to make a tower deal happen. In fact, we even have some insight into how much effort the Trump Organization put into it, including detailed architectural plans and a lot of man-hours from their legal department as they hammered out the contractual language.
A key part of Cohen’s perjury has to do with his false claim that he decided to shut down the project in January, 2016, “before the Iowa caucus and months before the very first primary.” In truth, the effort continued on much later into the year. One major reason Cohen initially thought he could get away with this lie is that in January he and Sater stopped using regular chat and email to correspond with each other.
Sater has told investigators that during the first months of 2016, he and Cohen were using Dust, at Cohen’s suggestion, to communicate secretly about the Moscow project. Those messages, which were encrypted and are deleted automatically, have disappeared forever, Sater told BuzzFeed News.
Presumably, it’s true that Cohen and Sater’s communications in the late winter and early spring of 2016 have been lost forever. But there are other records from the time period that demonstrate that Sater was still working feverishly to make a deal, and as part of that he was trying to get both Cohen and Trump to travel to Russia to meet with top Kremlin officials, possibly including Vladimir Putin himself.
By May, with the Republican nomination all but secured for Trump, Cohen and Sater were back to communicating on unencrypted channels. They discussed whether Trump should travel to Russia before or after the July 18-21 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Cohen said he would travel prior to the convention but that Trump’s trip would have to wait until after “he becomes the nominee after the convention.”
Working, he claimed, with Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov, Sater won Cohen an invitation to attend the June 16-18 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. However, he ran into a snag trying to get Cohen a visa in time for the trip. On June 13, he received the documents he needed Cohen to fill out, but realized that it would take Russia five days to process the application. On June 14, he received a “visa support letter” from someone at the Roscongress Foundation who was helping to organize the forum and was assured that he could use it to get an expedited visa within 24 hours. Early that morning, he began texting Cohen to let him know that they needed to take care of the visa that day, but Cohen did not immediately respond. It wasn’t until shortly after noon that Cohen finally got back to him.
Around 11:35 am, approximately a half hour before Cohen told Sater he would call him in two minutes, the Washington Post broke the story that Russian hackers had broken into the DNC and stolen documents, including the Democrats’ opposition research file on Trump. If Cohen was not aware the story had been published at 12:06 pm, he certainly was aware of it by 2:41 pm when Sater arrived at Trump Tower to pick Cohen up to deal with the visa issue.
Cohen marched down from his office high up in Trump Tower to meet with Sater in the atrium snack bar. It was there that he explained to Sater that he would not be making the trip to St. Petersburg after all. Here is how the meeting is described in the Office of Special Counsel’s indictment of Cohen, in which Sater is referred to as “Individual 2.”
The Russians were trying to be clever when they made the first thing they released from the stolen documents the opposition research file on Trump. This made it look like Trump was the one being harmed by the breach. But no one was fooled for very long, and certainly within the Trump Organization it was immediately understood that the Moscow Trump Tower project was going to have to be shelved. That explains why Cohen did an abrupt about-face and cancelled his plans to get a visa that day.
Yet, Sater did not give up.
Sater kept holding out hope — working his sources in Russia right through the convention — until July 26, 2016, when Sater, while relaxing in the backyard of his Long Island home, read a tweet by Trump and knew right then that the deal was dead.
For the record, I have ZERO investments in Russia.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2016
“Fuck me, I thought to myself. All that work for nothing,” Sater told BuzzFeed News.
He poured himself a big glass of scotch, he recalled, and lit a cigar.
What finally convinced Sater that the Moscow Trump Tower deal was dead was seeing Donald Trump explicitly deny on July 26, 2016 that he had any investments in Russia. It was far from the first time that Trump had made that kind of denial, but the context was now different. On July 22, WikiLeaks did their first major dump of DNC files, timed to prevent the unification of the Clinton and Sanders camps at the Democratic National Convention and leading to the immediate resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Sater knew that there was no longer any way that Trump could be seen as seeking a business deal with Moscow.
What he also knew is that he and the Russians now had absolute leverage over Trump and his campaign. At any time, they could reveal all the work they had been doing on the tower during the primaries while Trump was denying that he had financial ties or interests in Russia.
Ending the effort to build the tallest skyscraper in Europe didn’t make the candidate’s vulnerability go away in the least. The vulnerability did not disappear when he won the election or when he became the president. Trump was compromised and would never actually escape from the net he had created for himself.
It’s hard to envision anything that would be more of an impeachable offense.
Potentially awkward typo in fifth ¶ from end:
Thank you, kindly.
I simply have no idea how you can generate so much lucid and coherent prose for publication so quickly. Frankly, I’m in continuing awe that little potentially misleading slips such as this are so infrequent (especially as I become increasingly blind to my own, no matter how carefully I try to proof).
Agreed.
Martin has been very kind to us, creating a small separate planet in the Internet universe, where we get the explanations first. Everyone else has played catch up. For us, it’s been in `real time’.
He deserves a column at The NY Times, or the Washington Post.
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The challenge is going to be getting the American public to understand why this is an impeachable offense.
I was talking to someone who is a relatively intelligent person not long after Trump took office, but before he fired Comey, and the talk was of his being in violation of the Emoluments Clause, because of his refusal to put his businesses in blind trust and having his kids run them, business at the Trump Hotel in DC, etc. I explained to her why that was a problem, e.g. a president cannot use his position to profit from, and she was dumbfounded to think that would be a “big deal” that could lead to Trump being removed from office. Besides, she said, he’s a “businessman” and why should a businessman not be able to keep his businesses just because he’s president.
This is not a diner-dwelling wingnut, but your average, educated apolitical voter who doesn’t follow politics like those of us who read and post on blogs do. Many of not most people think like this. So unless Mueller’s indictments can be explained beyond the technical legalese, it may be hard for many to grasp why Trump should be impeached for these things.
What’s frightening is even reasonably intelligent people know so little about how our government works, and many of them could not pass the citizenship test that requires knowledge of it. Democrats in congress doing investigations are going to have to take care to present evidence they find in ways the average person out there can grasp.
That’s why this article is so strong. It’s not about some vague ‘business’ thing. It’s not ‘Trump lied about his schemes,’ because we all expect that. It’s ‘Trump lied and Russia has the receipts to blackmail him.’
I have a real problem with an educated person saying and believing:
I don’t consider a person who believes this educated. Rather, this person has been brainwashed or simply conditioned to believe that being a businessman is the be all and end all and should be exempt from the rules that the rest of us must live by.
This was not what I got from my lowly public education in an impoverished part of the county in the 1950’s. No one worshiped at the feet of businessmen. Guess I now know why some of those 63 million voters from 2016 voted for the obviously ethically, morally, and unqualified candidate.
I’m reasonably intelligent and have been following the Russia thing on Seth Abramson’s twitter feed. I read this post and totally don’t get why this is impeachable. Mostly because it is framed as things that happened before DT became president.
I think it is going to require an easily understood body of evidence of the kinds of crimes people see as crimes to get the public to wrap their heads around impeachment. Violating the Emoluments Clause doesn’t translate to a crime for the person on the street.
I could relate to Nixon’s crimes because they seemed like crimes: breaking and entering, bugging the Democrats. I was completely politically unaware back then and could still wrap my head around why what Nixon did was impeachable.
I don’t see the media framing what DT is doing as criminal. They can’t even bring themselves to use the term lying.
The president has been a pawn of Vladimir Putin because he gave Putin the power to destroy him. It’s not complicated.
Complicated doesn’t matter. Seeing that as a crime is something the average person won’t get. It doesn’t look like a crime, just poor judgment.
As I said several times here, I do not believe this is the only thing they’ve got on him. Far from it.
I wouldn’t dismiss the skyscraper, but it’s a lot more than just that. Without Russian capital, Trump would have zero ability to do any business whatsoever, and that’s been true for a long time. And most of it is money laundering. He went through his whole campaign from beginning to end knowing that, and it didn’t end when he became president. It’s the same kind of thing, but he can’t cancel it, they are his bankers and he owes them, permanently. To run for president under those conditions and to lie constantly to conceal it, that’s the crime. Real estate moguls are always in debt to big creditors, but presidents are not supposed to be in massive debt to unfriendly countries. He doesn’t get the difference because he only has one way of thinking; he doesn’t understand basic civics or what a president is supposed to do.
Many people in direct and indirect contact with Trump have been charged with, found guilty of and pled guilty to crimes. There is zero doubt that crimes have been committed, and it is extraordinarily likely that more crimes will be charged against people closer and closer to the President. Next will be the decision the DOJ will have to make: does the Constitution allow the sitting President to be indicted?
But it’s much more serious than crimes, and much worse than poor judgment. Trump has handed one of our primary enemies blackmail material. This provides an identifiable motivation for many of Trump’s damaging actions which go beyond his admittedly bad judgment. It has been apparent for a while that many of the President’s highly peculiar and inexplicable actions are meant to serve the interests of Putin and Russia. No one is more impeachable than a President who takes multiple actions to hurt our domestic governance and internal and external security at the behest of another Nation.
“It’s hard to envision anything that would be more of an impeachable offense.”
How about using government resources to gather private text messages, then passing those on to AMI so the National Inquirer can attempt to blackmail a rival oligarch?
That seems pretty bad.
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If that’s how things happened impeachment should follow immediately.
Bezos and his investigators believe that is what happened.
Think about this……Bezos text messages were hacked….yet he has access, and has used, the most advanced protection systems that are available. Not the ones available to ordinary people…but the ones available to those people who are so rich that everything in life is essentially free. He hired the absolute best he could find to look into the hack, and gave them an unlimited budget to find answers.
And they believe it.
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I would guess tying that to DT will be nearly impossible. And who would do the investigating? It’s not in the mandate of Mueller.
If it’s actually true the feebs were involved in liberating the information to the Inquirer I suspect it wouldn’t be hard at all to tie it to DJT. Identifying the source is the tricky part. Once you get past that step everything else is just rolling up the underlings.
My spidey sense is telling me Jared and Ivanka had some intense words last night, after the Bezos post.
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I think this isn’t plausible. DT would have to have spooks in the NSA get into Bezos’ phone, and there’s no way in the present climate of loathing between the WH and the intelligence community that he would risk asking that.
Bezos makes plenty of references to the Gulfies in his post however, so maybe we should look at this reuters article about the “Raven” team of American-contractor-led-and-trained hackers using an NSA tool called “Karma” to infiltrate any iPhone they want, just by loading the number into the app.
https://reut.rs/2Rv6vK8
They started out with rules about spying on Americans, but once the Emiratis were trained up, they started doing such spying for themselves and kept it compartmentalized away from the US contactors.
As the article states, tools like Karma are built around “0-day” exploits of software (in this case a flaw in iMessage for the iPhone) and spy agencies like NSA pay top dollar for such exploits, then rather than revealing them to the SW companies, keep them stockpiled to use in their tools like Karma. Chances are good that the UAE and Saudis are still working with NSA approved contractors with top secret US clearances, using NSA tools, but with non-US spooks looking at US persons all they want.
It took one day for the Feds to look into it.
Don’t forget, AMI made a declaration with their guilty plea that they would not commit further crimes. Now the richest man in the world has made an accusation. I’m not sure if that declaration was made to Mueller, or if Mueller handed the AMI case to the NY prosecutors, but whomever AMI made that declaration to, they now have an obligation to see if AMI committed a crime.
Somewhere, right now, there is an FBI agent opening up a folder.
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It’s long since been established, by dint of sheer repetition, and calculately so, that nothing except surveillance video of VVP and DJT fiddling around with the guts of voting machines in Macomb County, MI, is going to be sufficient evidence to warrant impeachment.
And probably not even that…
I seem to recall, from times when Bill’s sexual activity was a matter of rampant public speculation, that impeachment is not a matter for the courts. If you want to bet that corruption is cause for his peers to give him a bye-bye, you may have misunderstood the realities of Power Politics, Graft and Corruption. Perhaps the Clintons could give orange top pointers.