I WAS BORN WITH A CURIOUS MIND

I JUST COULDN’T HELP MYSELF, ‘CAUSE I WAS BORN WITH A CURIOUS MIND:  Donald Trump, normally incurious about the details of his own administration, suddenly has a few questions.  For instance, “Why is A.G. Jeff Sessions asking the Inspector General to investigate potentially massive FISA abuse. Will take forever, has no prosecutorial power and already late with reports on Comey etc. Isn’t the I.G. an Obama guy? Why not use Justice Department lawyers? DISGRACEFUL!”

I expected Sessions to keep his head down, but he issued what was for him defiant response later in the day, basically daring Trump to fire him.  One of the strangest aspects of Trump’s presidency is that, for all his bluster, he appears to be so uncomfortable with personal confrontation that he can’t bring himself to fire subordinates he clearly wishes were gone.

The best part of this public feud between Trump and his Attorney General is that it hasn’t even been the strangest story of the week. 

After a period of uncharacteristic quiet, Trump launched a barrage of tweets early Tuesday morning, ending with “WITCH HUNT!”  Goodman Mueller is preparing the dunking chair, and Trump is clearly spooked.

Trump’s weekly series of unfortunate events continued as Mueller dropped the most recent charges against Rick Gates.  That can only mean that Gates is telling everything he knows about Paul Manafort – and Donald Trump.  

Meanwhile, John Kelly FINALLY lowered the boom on doofus-in-law Jared Kushner, taking away his top secret security clearance.  The Washington Post reports that the intelligence community has intercepted conversations between officials in four separate countries (the United Arab Emirates, Mexico, Israel, and China) indicating that they believe Kushner can be bribed, or at least manipulated.

Why might they have formed that opinion?  Kushner is way over his head in debt.  He owes various lending institutions $1.2 billion, mostly because he badly overpaid for a property at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.  Hey, who among us hasn’t spent an extra half-billion on something we couldn’t really afford?  Now Robert Mueller is investigating Kushner’s finances.  Because what self-respecting witch hunter wouldn’t take an interest in a man who bought a property bearing the Mark of the Beast?

You have to wonder how much of Kushner’s diplomacy-related travel last year was actually spent trying to borrow money.  Let the word go forth – any country with deep pockets and an interest in cultivating influence with the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has a potential friend in Jared Kushner.

One of the interesting common denominators among people in Trump’s orbit is a tendency to acquire massive debt.  As private citizens, that would be between them and their creditors.  As elected officials, it makes them targets for bribery, blackmail, or more subtle forms of persuasion. 

Paul Manafort, for instance, latched onto Trump in the first place because he owed millions to pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine.  It’s an open question whether it was Manafort’s own idea to approach Trump with an offer to work for free, or whether one of the oligarchs suggested that he could return to their good graces if he were able to persuade Trump to do a favor or two for Russian interests.  One way or the other, those favors were done.

In the Watergate scandal, Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein to “follow the money.”  Late last year, Robert Mueller turned his attention to Deutsche Bank (DB).  Donald Trump is reported to owe Deutsche Bank $364 million, which also holds a big chunk of Jared Kushner’s debt. 

Deutsche Bank isn’t your normal lending institution.  One of its former employees told a reporter from the NEW YORKER that “Deutsche Bank was structurally designed by management to allow corrupt individuals to commit fraud.”  In the past ten years, they’ve paid over $9 billion in fines for various financial crimes.  Their specialty appears to be helping Russian oligarchs move large sums of money outside Russia, via a practice called “mirror trading.”  First you buy stock in a Russian company with rubles, and then immediately sell that stock on a western stock exchange.  Voila, your rubles are now dollars or Euros, which you can then transfer to a private account in an offshore tax haven. 

So Donald Trump and Jared Kushner are deeply in debt to a foreign bank that appears to be a money laundering front for Russian criminals.  Might that be one motive for Trump’s refusal to implement congressionally approved sanctions against Russia?

On another Russiagate front, NBC reports that Mueller has been asking members of the Trump campaign whether Trump himself knew about the DNC server hack before it became public.  Pro tip of the day: If you’re ever called to testify at a Mueller inquiry, it would be smart to assume that he already knows the answer to the questions he asks.  The purpose of the question is to find out if you’re a liar.  It would be smart not to lie.

I would be remiss not to mention a couple of other bizarre events from the end of February.  On the international scene, there’s an armed standoff at a Trump hotel in Panama, while in Thailand there’s a Russian model/sex worker (currently incarcerated) who claims she can verify the famous “pee tape” if only someone will get her out of jail.  This kind of news is a refreshing change from the sordid tales of President Obama putting his feet up on the desk in the Oval Office.

The first half of the week ended with the audacity of hope – Hope Hicks, that is, who announced her impending resignation after admitting that she told an occasional white lie for her boss.  The White House will need a new Communications Director soon, as well as a pants steamer for Donald Trump, which is a real job that Hope Hicks did. 

I don’t know what  kind of communications director that Russian lady in Thailand would make, but she could probably steam Trump’s pants real good.