Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

People are weird.

This really is a full service blog.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

“But what about the lurkers?”

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

Elections aren’t won by handwringing, cowering, and/or bashing your own candidates.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

Let’s show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Russiagate Open Thread: Every Trump “Friend” Has His Own Little Grift

Russiagate Open Thread: Every Trump “Friend” Has His Own Little Grift

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White House aides were worried enough about a visit last year by Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia, under investigation by American prosecutors who say he embezzled $3.5 billion from a state investment fund, that he was denied the customary photo in the Oval Office with President Trump.

But that did not stop a top Republican fund-raiser, Elliott Broidy, from seeking to use his White House ties to press for Mr. Trump to play a golf game with Mr. Najib, who had the authority over negotiations for a lucrative Malaysian contract with Mr. Broidy’s private defense company, according to documents obtained by The New York Times…

Mr. Broidy also explored separate plans to force the exit from the United States of a Chinese billionaire and dissident, Guo Wengui, evidently to please Chinese allies in Malaysia while reaping payoffs from both the Chinese and, improbably, the United Arab Emirates. Mr. Broidy proposed working with George Nader, an adviser to the Emiratis who is cooperating in the special counsel investigation.

Mr. Broidy and Mr. Nader met around the inauguration and worked to sway the Trump administration on behalf the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia at a time when Mr. Broidy was seeking contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars from the two countries…

The Chinese dissident, Mr. Guo, made a fortune in real estate and finance in China but fled in 2014 in anticipation of charges of corruption. He has said the allegations were fabricated by business and political opponents, and he has since styled himself as a whistle-blower exposing the corruption of the Chinese elite. He lives primarily in a 9,000-square-foot apartment overlooking Central Park that he bought three years ago for more than $67 million.

One person close to Mr. Broidy said he was interested in the case because of his friendship with Steve Wynn, another top Republican fund-raiser. Mr. Wynn, a casino mogul who himself recently resigned as a Republican finance chairman after a sex scandal, had large business interests in China and also sought to persuade the United States to expel Mr. Guo.

A representative of Mr. Wynn did not respond to requests for comment, and a representative of Mr. Guo declined to comment.

Mr. Broidy wrote a draft memo dated May 6, 2017, to Mr. Nader, the Emirati adviser, laying out a complex proposal for both men to profit from an unusual three-way trade relying on their combined influence in Washington and Abu Dhabi, the capital of the U.A.E…

 
Also, too…

… The disclosure by U.S. prosecutors came Thursday during a hearing on whether Mueller exceeded his authority in indicting Manafort on charges of laundering millions of dollars while acting as an unregistered agent of the Ukrainian government. Manafort’s lawyers say those alleged crimes have nothing to do with Mueller’s central mission — to determine whether anyone in the Trump campaign had links to the Russian government.

Defense attorney Kevin Downing argued anew to U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington that even Mueller’s appointment order permitting him to probe “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation” wouldn’t cover the political consulting work that Manafort did in Ukraine for a decade.

But Justice Department attorney Michael Dreeben said prosecutors were justified in investigating Manafort because he had served as Trump’s campaign chairman.

“He had long-standing ties to Russia-backed politicians,” Dreeben told Jackson. “Did they provide back channels to Russia? Investigators will naturally look at those things.”

Prosecutors hadn’t previously used such explicit language to describe their suspicions about Manafort. In a previous court filing, Mueller also cited business ties between Manafort and the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska…


 

Even his “strictly for business purposes” friends…

Reader Interactions

81Comments

  4. 4.

    Emma

    I am beginning to run out of question marks and exclamation points to put after my WTFs.

    Our government is turning into a telenovela version of The Sopranos mixed with a fifth-rate, trailer-park version of Scarface.

  9. 9.

    Another Scott

    Twitler is up, saying the Comey memos prove that there is NO COLLUSION and COMEY IS A LEAKER! And that hunting witches is bad!!11

    Well, alrighty then.

    (sigh)

    He’s got the mind, and the self control, of a three year old.

    We should keep LOLGOP’s comment tonight (on Twitter) in mind:

    “It terrifies me that the only thing keeping us from full tyranny is guys who are willing to work for Donald Trump.”

    ‘night all.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  10. 10.

    Fair Economist

    A convicted pedophile was bribing an RNC finance chair

    A number of us have been saying there was going to be a sex trafficking link show up in all this Trump corruption.

  12. 12.

    Millard Filmore

    @Another Scott:

    “It terrifies me that the only thing keeping us from full tyranny is guys who are willing to work for Donald Trump.”

    The move to full tyranny is not going forward because the guys willing to work for Donald Trump are stopping it ???
    Or the guys willing to work for Donald Trump and not talented enough to pull it off ???

  14. 14.

    B.B.A.

    Yes, but this is what crucial Waukesha County wanted so under the Constitution as handed down on stone tablets to our holy forefathers we “libtards” are required to “suck it.”

  15. 15.

    chopper

    A convicted pedophile was bribing an RNC finance chair while setting up covert backchannel between the Trump transition and sanctioned Russian bankers via war criminal mercenaries

    I just can’t even try with the whole “what if a democrat did it” shit anymore. we blew past that before trump even took office. this is just cray cray.

  16. 16.

    chopper

    honestly if shonda rhimes wrote this up as a story arc in one of her shows the producers woulda been all naw, this is too nuts even for teevee.

  17. 17.

    Cheryl Rofer

  19. 19.

    Another Scott

    @Millard Filmore: It was a little ambiguous. He was replying to this:

    Josh Dawsey Verified account @jdawsey1

    Some news in our story tonight: Trump has disturbed his advisers this week with calls to prosecute Comey, McCabe & Clinton. So far, he’s not taking any action. He has also griped about Gorsuch loudly this week. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-hires-giuliani-two-other-attorneys-amid-mounting-legal-turmoil-over-russia/2018/04/19/8346a7ca-4418-11e8-8569-26fda6b404c7_story.html?utm_term=.84903457077a …

    6:58 PM – 19 Apr 2018

    IOW, some of the horrible people who work for Trump are unwilling to carry out his demands because they’re that far out there.

    So, yeah, that’s pretty terrifying. But it also shows that it’s not inevitable that Donnie will get his way.

    Not as long as we fight them every single day. And not as long as we all turn out and vote in 201 days…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  21. 21.

    Fair Economist

    @Cheryl Rofer: lol, but I agree with the theory that they were leaked by the DOJ. The House Russian Rats’ MO is to release with extremely misleading redactions.

  24. 24.

    NotMax

    Will Dolt 45 tweet out birthday wishes to a certain Mr. A.H. on the 20th of April?

    Not outside the realm of the conceivable.

  26. 26.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et Al.)

    There’s no fucking way to keep up with this shit. There just isn’t. There are, what, 487 separate scandals going on here? Sex scandals. Money scandals. Russian scandals. Incompetence scandals. You need a fucking scorecard to keep every God damned low life straight. This Nader guy is a pedophile? This Broidy shitstain was running some kind of graft operation to send money to his business? Who can keep all of this shit straight? I can’t.

  28. 28.

    SFAW

    Well, as the saying goes: “Lock him up!”

    Now, the more advanced students will say “Who?” (or “Whom?” for those who insist on talking gud English).

    And, of course, the response is “All of ’em, Katie. Every fucking one. For the rest of their (un)natural lives.”

  29. 29.

    Millard Filmore

    @Cheryl Rofer: Perhaps it had to be worded that way, what with the Innocent Until Proven Guilty thing that Mueller has to abide by.

    ETA: added possible source of the reason.

  30. 30.

    hitchhiker

    The last couple of days I’ve had a lot of walking/driving/ferry-riding time, and I decided to use it to listen to Comey read his book to me. The whole thing. I hadn’t read any reviews or watched any of the interviews or any of that.

    I come away thinking

    (a) that he’s definitely a Republican, by which I mean he radiates that “we deserve to be in charge because we’re men of honor” thing. He surprised himself, I think, by liking Obama as much as he did — I found him patronizing af. Also, he says he didn’t vote for Obama, which I think means he did vote for McCain … he would have been okay with a President Palin?!

    (b) that it’s a shame he never met HRC. I think he would have liked her, because they share a heartfelt impulse to work hard, do well and do good. It’s obvious that he thinks he’s objective and fair, but also that he dislikes her. Toward the end of the book he talks about how America faced “2 very flawed choices in the 2016 election,” which was the only time he really had anything negative to say about her … but what a thing to say! He KNOWS Trump is a dangerous, dishonest fool and has spent a bunch of time alone with him. He’s never met Hillary, but assumes, I guess, that there’s just something very flawed about her. And that’s in spite of having concluded that there was no reason to believe she ever meant any harm with that private server business. His own determination is that it was exactly what she always said it was — an attempt to be productive in her job.

    (c) that the extent to which right wing vicious media has constrained and shaped our government is horrifying. Comey himself seems unaware of all the times he had to do this or that because of “how it would look,” never noticing that there’s an entire industry making sure it all looks bad if you’re a Democrat. There is no right way.

    (d) that the point of the book is to remind people why we care about having an independent FBI, functional and trustworthy. That’s what it’s really about, and to the extent that non-junkies like ourselves read it and take that on board, I’m a fan.

    The Trump Repubs are going to hate this thing; Comey does not hold back even a little, plus he’s extremely complimentary of Obama’s intelligence, humanity, discipline, and grace — which they’ll hate even more.

    I think the day will come when Comey can admit to himself that his decision to make a show of not charging her plus another show of the re-opening on Oct 28 did influence the outcome. It’s obvious. He’s clearly given those decisions a whole lot of thought, and he knows that a whole lot of people (his wife!) believe that he helped elect Trump. He comforts himself at the very end by saying we’ll all get over it & come out stronger.

    I guess I wanted to say that it’s worth listening to, and there were only a couple of places where I heard myself saying, Oh, eff you. I thought I’d hate it, but I didn’t. He’s a good storyteller with, dog knows, a lot of good stories.

  33. 33.

    Anne Laurie

    @hitchhiker:

    He’s never met Hillary, but assumes, I guess, that there’s just something very flawed about her.

    Well, does she have a… you know… Y chromosome, let’s call it? No? How could she possibly be qualified, if she’s missing that most vital body part?

    A hundred years from now, historians — assuming there still are any — will be amazed by the way we blandly treat misogyny as a natural fact, like water to a fish. Just as today, those of us who are not Republicans are amazed when we read century-old books that just assume people of color are inherently inferior to “real” (white) people, because how could they not be, when all the rules so clearly specify such inferiority? You don’t have to spell it out, because “everybody knows”!

  35. 35.

    hervevillechaizelounge

    @Another Scott:

    Am I the only one surprised the 11 reps calling for Clinton et al to be prosecuted isn’t getting any media traction?

    Calling for political foes to be prosecuted—especially someone like Clinton who’s been investigated and cleared—is text book fascist. The jamokes calling for this unconstitutional action are SITTING REPRESENTATIVES, not valued Breitbart commenters.

    I have a theory: the call to prosecute political enemies and Trump’s offhand comment about declaring himself dictator for life are trial balloons testing the political push-back.

    We’re screwed.

  36. 36.

    hitchhiker

    @Anne Laurie:

    Yes, there’s that element. If you read this book, you’ll notice how he also goes out of his way to pay tribute to a couple of women, one of them a boss he had early in his career, and the other his own wife. I did have the sense that (maybe not consciously) this was a protective cover for misogyny in the case of HRC.

    But I think stronger than that was the success of the Bill Clinton hate-mongers back in the 90s. They set out to make a monster out of him (and her, just by extension) and it’s been definitive. Part of what it MEANS to be a Republican is that you despise the Clintons.

  38. 38.

    Mike J

    @hitchhiker:

    Part of what it MEANS to be a Republican is that you despise the Clintons.

    Which is why I really want to smack any Democrat that refers directly* to “the Clintons” in the mouth.

    * you were referring to others referring to them. I didn’t mean like that.

  39. 39.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @SFAW:

    And, of course, the response is “All of ’em, Katie. Every fucking one. For the rest of their (un)natural lives.”

    It’s become very obvious that this is the lesser, and least radical, of two options available to us.

    The other being a reenactment of Paris, 1792.

  40. 40.

    Yarrow

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et Al.):

    There’s no fucking way to keep up with this shit. There just isn’t. There are, what, 487 separate scandals going on here? Sex scandals. Money scandals. Russian scandals. Incompetence scandals. You need a fucking scorecard to keep every God damned low life straight.

    It’s really just one scandal with a bunch of parts. But I know what you mean. Can you imagine the boards Mueller’s team must have up to work on this thing. The ones with photos and lines and all the connections between the various players. It must take up every wall in a large room.

  44. 44.

    SectionH

    @SFAW: It’s probably “Who” – I could grammar ‘splain when “whom” is correct, but fuckit. Just use Who, it’ll be the right choice most of the time.

  45. 45.

    hitchhiker

    @Mike J:

    I share the impulse to smack people in the mouth. I saw today that Comey was perfectly ready to say that Andy McCabe is a good person even though he lied to the FBI. Not once in 8 hours + of listening did HRC get that same treatment, even though she didn’t lie.

    I’ve never understood the depth or intensity or lastingness of this hatred.

  46. 46.

    Chet Murthy

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et Al.): This reminds me of The Bezzle:

    “John Kenneth Galbraith’s greatest contribution to economics is the concept of the bezzle, that increment to wealth that occurs during the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it. The gross national bezzle has never been larger than in the past decade.”

    What we’re experiencing now is the moral equivalent of when the recession comes, and all those petty embezzlements unravel. We learn that during the good times, the Rethugs all turned, one-by-one, to moral iniquity as their way life. And now, with the great unraveling, it’s all revealed, and we’re surprised that the rot could be so widespread, so deep.

  47. 47.

    frosty

    @Chet Murthy: Good analogy. I always liked the idea that shady financial deals came to light as the tide went out, like dead fish stinking on the sand. That the same can be true for moral rot is an interesting observation.

  48. 48.

    ? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?

    Was in the grocery store the other day. Saw a time magazine special that was a propaganda piece for Saudi Arabia on the rack, talking up the Saudi king, promising to tell readers of his bold plan for the New Kingdom

    One of the features even described the KSA as “one of our closest middle eastern allies that is destroying terrorism.”

    Also talked about the the king controlling a “$4 billion business empire” and building a “$640 million sci-fi city of the future”.

    Another good one “Improving the lives of his people and hopes for peace”

  49. 49.

    Major Major Major Major

    @hitchhiker:

    I’ve never understood the depth or intensity or lastingness of this hatred.

    I imagine it’s roughly on par with the depth, intensity, and duration of the hatred I have for people who treated Hillary like garbage in 2016.

  51. 51.

    Mnemosyne

    @Major Major Major Major:

    Do they have actual otters on hand, or is it just otter-themed?

    I seriously am starting to plan a trip to Portland just so I can visit the zoo and see Lincoln with my own two eyes. And it’s a nice city that would be a good quick getaway vacation, of course.

  53. 53.

    Mnemosyne

    @Major Major Major Major:

    Hmm. I’m not sure how I feel about wild animal cafes (as opposed to domestic animal cafes like cat or dog cafes). But it would be pretty cool.

    If I do manage to sell my book, my treat for myself is going to be the behind-the-scenes octopus and otter tour at the Aquarium of the Pacific. At $350 for the day, it’s too expensive for me to justify as an ordinary excursion, but not too expensive for me to be able to justify it for something like that.

  57. 57.

    Yarrow

    @Mnemosyne: No kidding. And someone commented above that he spoke highly of his wife and one other woman. Speaking highly of his wife hardly means means he’s not a misogynist. So that’s one woman he supposedly respects.

  59. 59.

    Ruckus

    @hitchhiker:
    She didn’t do anything
    She didn’t earn that hate.
    She’s like a woman in old Salem, she might be whatever it is that makes them mad, let’s hold her head under water and she if she survives. She did and that proved that she did whatever it is that they wanted her to have done. It isn’t any more complicated than that.
    Conservatives thrive on hate because conservatism is about not liking anything new, the old way is always better. And the old way is that old rich white guys get richer by various means of theft and that anyone that doesn’t look and act like an old rich white man can never have anything. And HRC isn’t a rich old white conservative man therefore she is bad.

  62. 62.

    ? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?

    @hitchhiker:
    Literally nothing, except being a woman and a successful politician at the same time. That threatened them. And like Ruckus said, her enemies are mainly conservatives and conservatives are obsessed with tradition and keeping the status quo, no matter if that makes sense or not or is fair to others.

  65. 65.

    ? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?

    @Major Major Major Major:
    Is it legal/humane to have them as pets?

    ETA: Never mind. I looked it up myself and only a few states ban them, none of which I live in. Perhaps someday I’ll get one.

  67. 67.

    ? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?

    @Major Major Major Major:
    The article I looked at brought the nocturnal thing up as an issue. I would be sure to let the hedgehog keep to its natural circadian rhythm. I’m very much a night owl anyway and tend to stay up late. My real con with hedgehogs are they don’t live very long compared to other pets like cats and dogs, living between 4-6 years.

  68. 68.

    Anne Laurie

    @Major Major Major Major: Breeders have been working to produce “more sociable” hedgehogs for at least 15 years now, since people decided to keep them as pets. That’s a whole *lot* of tiggie generations. Russian scientists could produce “almost dog-like” foxes in two decades, and wild foxes aren’t that much more social than hedgehogs.

    Not sure I’d recommend them for cafe / petting zoo situations, but I’d guess you could successfully bond as well one-on-one as you could with a pet hamster / guinea pig / gerbil.

  70. 70.

    hitchhiker

    @Anne Laurie:

    Right. It’s been interesting to look at those memos tonight after finishing the book. Comey left out some telling details, including that one. He also doesn’t mention in the book the time that he said it would be good to put a “head on a pike” in the context of making an example out of someone caught leaking.

    This business with McCabe is fascinating in that context. McCabe’s pitch is that he told WSJ reporters (not for attribution) that the Clinton Foundation was under federal investigation as part of the normal course of his job.

    I wonder how being a blind source for the press fits in with Comey’s paeans to FBI integrity? I wonder how often he was having staff plant leaks while he himself was able to say that he never did?

  73. 73.

    sanjeevs

    Theres a rumour that Broidy is covering for Trump with his statement that he is also David Dennison.

    Which makes some sense if you think about it. Last year, relatively obscure, Broidy pays 1.6M for an NDA with the woman who had an abortion.
    Now with the whole country’s press on the story, Broidy admits to being the party in the NDA. Why? Why not just admit to being Cohen’s client and claim that it was for Cohen’s property advice or something.
    Unless the second David Dennison is in fact the first David Dennison and Trump really did not want it coming out that he paid off a woman who had an abortion 1.6M during the campaign.

  74. 74.

    Chet Murthy

    @sanjeevs: [IANAL But] How interesting. Y’know, it seems to me that while a party to such a nondisclosure agreement can neither confirm nor deny that they’re a party to that agreement, nor the details of that agreement, the woman in question here isn’t in an NDA with Broidy. So she could in fact confirm that she’s not in an NDA with Broidy. She could confirm that she never was in a long-term affair with Broidy. And she could confirm that she never had an abortion due to being impregnated by Broidy.

    Two issues: (a) safety, and (b) maybe she’s moved on with her life (we can all hope) and such revelations could be damaging to her current life circumstances. Even in the case of #b, one supposes that such attestations as above, could be made thru attorneys.

    Eh, IANAL, so what do I know.

  79. 79.

    mere mortal

    “Stupid Watergate”

    Alright, I’m losing my patience with this. Watergate was Stupid Watergate.

    The expert wet-works super-spies couldn’t infiltrate an empty office building in the middle of the night, and the brilliant crime-boss president intentionally taped his own self admitting to the whole thing.

  81. 81.

    Amir Khalid

    Siapa sangka, there would be a Malaysian angle to the ongoing scandal of the Trump presidency?

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