THE NOOSE AROUND US IS SLOWLY TIGHTENING
Josh Marshall says it’s misleading to frame the Russiagate scandal as an attack on our democratic process. That’s accurate, but it’s also way too general. Russia deliberately and illegally helped elect Donald Trump, a man with a history of financial ties to shady Russian oligarchs and mobsters. Republican congressional leaders were presented with evidence of these facts prior to the election, and refused President Obama’s request to join him in a bipartisan rejection of Russian interference in our electoral process.
The question before Congress, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and the American public is not WHETHER this happened, but HOW it happened, and what laws were broken in the process.
Trump sycophants have largely abandon their claims that no Russian collusion took place, and have adopted the fallback position that even if the Trump campaign did work with Russian agents, it wasn’t illegal. Where’s the crime, they ask. Why haven’t all the investigations turned up any evidence of wrongdoing?
First of all, it’s not true that no evidence of wrongdoing has been found. There is clear evidence of perjury on the part of Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and Jeff Sessions. The investigations would be further along if Trump hadn’t repeatedly fired people (Preet Bharara, Sally Yates, James Comey) leading some of those investigations; and if Republicans like Devin Nunes and Jason Chaffetz hadn’t done everything in their power to derail the work of their oversight committees.
Special Counsel Mueller was appointed in mid-May. He has recruited a team of investigators whose reputations are impeccable, and Trump is clearly spooked. Mueller is known to be methodical and meticulous. This is a complicated case, and I’d rather he get it done right than get it done fast. The Watergate investigation lasted over two years. My guess is that Mueller won’t take that long.
Moving to the question of what part of all this is actually illegal, here are some possibilities.
We know that Russia hacked the emails of the Democratic National Committee, and that Wikileaks released those emails (some of which were fakes, written by Russian agents). We also know that Trump associates Rudy Giuliani and Roger Stone bragged about having advanced knowledge of the impending release of the hacked emails. These two points are a matter of public record. The crime: Email hacking violates laws against computer fraud, wire fraud, and identity theft. If two or more people were involved in committing these crimes, they would also carry a charge of conspiracy.
It is also illegal to solicit campaign aid (in the form of money or any other type of assistance) from foreign nationals. Russians are foreign nationals, and they obviously assisted Trump’s campaign. Was any of that assistance solicited? Trump’s famous “Russia, if you’re listening” speech sure sounds like solicitation. It also suggests that he knew that his campaign was working closely with Russia.
On the financial side, there’s also the question of whether Trump, Kushner, or even the Republican National Committee itself engaged in money laundering – for instance, accepting money from mobbed up Russian oligarchs and running it through a series of dummy corporations to disguise its origins. Real estate moguls and casino operators in New York and Florida have ample opportunities to engage in money laundering. The Miami Herald has covered the curious tendency of Russians to wildly overpay Donald Trump for his Florida properties. Trump’s Taj Mahal casino violated money laundering laws over a hundred times in the 1990s alone.
Other potential crimes include obstruction of justice and witness intimidation. Like for instance, hypothetically trying to persuade the FBI and the National Security Agency to shut down its investigations of your friends, or firing investigators when they refused to cooperate.
And then there’s espionage. That sounds melodramatic, until you remember that some of Donald Trump’s associates – including Mike Flynn (National Security Advisor) and Paul Manafort (campaign manager) – have admitted that they failed to register as paid agents of foreign governments. Both men – as well as Jared Kushner – are known to have been in contact with Russian agents in the United States and overseas. Robert Mueller is undoubtedly curious about whether one or more of them spoke with Donald Trump about their adventures.
I get the sense that another shoe is about to drop in this investigation, because Trump and his pals have spent the week issuing increasingly hysterical attacks on the media. On Wednesday morning, Donald Trump tweeted “The #AmazonWashingtonPost, sometimes referred to as the guardian of Amazon not paying internet taxes (which they should) is FAKE NEWS!”
There’s so much weirdness in that statement that I couldn’t decipher it without help. The consensus is that Trump was trying to say that the Washington Post is somehow helping Amazon avoid paying taxes on its internet sales. Jeff Bezos owns both Amazon and the Post, but doesn’t appear to exert any editorial control of the paper. Amazon collects the all taxes it’s legally obligated to collect, and not a penny more, which seems perfectly sensible to me.
If Trump wants to ask Congress for a law mandating new internet taxes, all he has to do is propose one – although creating new taxes hasn’t been a winning issue in the Republican Party since it turned on George H.W. Bush for breaking his “read my lips” pledge in 1990. I’m a guy who doesn’t mind paying taxes, but Trump’s internet tax would annoy me.
(I can’t resist sharing a couple of fun facts about Amazon. More people subscribe to Amazon Prime than voted for Donald Trump in 2016. And in Kentucky, more people work for Amazon than work in the coal industry.)
Trump’s attack on the Post is one of several barrages against major national news outlets this week. He also blasted the New York Times as “A Fake News Joke!” on Wednesday, and reached peak Trump pettiness on Thursday morning with a bizarrely personal attack against MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. He and his pal Sean Hannity have also relentlessly attacked CNN.
What this suggests to me is that Trump is expecting more bad news in the near future. Of course, bad news for Trump is almost guaranteed to be good news for the country.
What might that bad news be? There are so many possibilities. At the end of this post, I’ll include a link to a recent blog entry from Louise Mensch, outlining what she claims to know about who did what, what the evidence is, and where it came from Remember that many people, including most of mainstream media, think she’s crazy. She’s definitely eccentric, but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong. She has contacts among American and international intelligence agencies, and she has scooped the national press on Russiagate several times already this year.
This post has been long, even by my standards, but I urge you to check out the link. If even ten percent of what she says is true, Trump and his associates are going down hard.