NO WAY TO DELAY THE TROUBLE COMING EVERY DAY

Donald Trump’s pardon of Arizona’s resident evil, Joe Arpaio, is widely assumed to have been a signal to people like Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, and other targets of Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Russian election hack:  Protect my secrets and I’ll make sure you don’t go to jail. 

But yesterday, Mueller popped that balloon, letting it be known (Politico was the first mainstream outlet to cover the story) that he’s working with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.  Schneiderman is waiting eagerly for anyone involved in the Russia scandal who accepts a Trump pardon.  They’re better off cutting the best deal they can with Mueller than admitting guilt via the pardon process and finding themselves in a jurisdiction where asset forfeiture is one of the possible outcomes.  Mueller is playing chess, while Trump is playing tic-tac-toe.  And Trump is currently in check.

In the meantime, there is other information that spells bad news for Donald Trump.  First, the Financial Times reports that a certain Rinat Akhmetshin, one of the many Russian agents who attended the now infamous meeting with Donald Trump, Jr., last year, has already testified before one of Mueller's grand juries.  That meeting was arranged by yet another Russian, an attorney for the Agaralov family.  The Agaralovs played a role in another important story that broke a few days ago – the saga of Trump Tower Moscow.

Both the Washington Post and the New York Times published stories confirming that Donald Trump, while denying financial connections with Russia, was actively pursuing a major real estate deal in Moscow, via his minions Felix Sater and Michael Cohen.  Sater is a career criminal who worked with Trump on and off for years.  Cohen is Trump’s personal attorney and executive vice president of the Trump Organization.  The two men grew up together in Brooklyn, and during the early part of Trump’s campaign, they collaborated on negotiations with the Agaralov family to build Trump Tower Moscow. 

Depending on who you believe, that deal either fell through or is simply on hold.  But there was more on Sater’s and Cohen’s minds than real estate.  The newspaper stories included leaked emails containing some remarkable boasts that Sater made to Cohen. 

·         “Can you believe two guys from Brooklyn are going to elect a president?” 

·         "Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin's team to buy in on this, I will manage this process." 

·         “We both know no one else knows how to pull this off without stupidity or greed getting in the way. I know how to play it and we will get this done.”

·         "I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected." 

And so they did.  The real estate deal may be on hold, but Sater and Cohen did in fact get Putin on their side, and two guys from Brooklyn, plus one from Leningrad, elected a president.  Donald Trump claims he barely knows Sater, despite their lengthy ties.  That’s to be expected, since Trump often suffers convenient memory lapses when news of his shady business dealings surfaces. 

The latest bit of good news on the Trump-Russia scandal confirms another story originally published by citizen journalist Louise Mensch weeks ago.  The Dallas News and the Washington Journal have reported that top congressional Republicans accepted campaign donations from a Russian oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin.  Call me cynical, but I can’t help but wonder if that explains the Republicans’ lack of enthusiasm for digging too deeply into Russian interference into last year’s election.

There’s another citizen journalist story that has yet to be confirmed by “legitimate” sources.  They say that the Washington Post is, at Robert Mueller’s request, temporarily sitting on a huge story about Donald Trump’s Moscow connections.  They expect an all clear from Mueller soon, at which point the Post will be free to drop the biggest story to date on Trump-Russia.