This may seem a bit in the weeds. But if you’re trying to make sense of Michael Cohen’s role in all the money transactions being probed by the Feds, as well as the role of Fima Shusterman, his father-in-law, who appears to be his key connection into the Ukrainian immigrant money world, this is an important point.
There have been various reports that Cohen and Shusterman have loaned $26 million to the Shtayner family, another taxi baron family of Ukrainian immigrants who live in New York City but own a cab business based in Chicago. The story is that Cohen lent the Shtayner’s $6 million since 2012 and Fima Shusterman has lent them $20 million over the last eight months. This is the story according to the AP and also the weekend piece in the Times. Read More
With the next round of redistricting approaching after the 2020 Census, we’re seeing powerful movements in a number of states to end gerrymandering and ensure districts are drawn more fairly.
So it’s no surprise, as Allegra Kirkland reports, that the GOP is mobilizing to protect their right to rig the maps.
I want to follow up on a point I made over the weekend: the Trump Family’s decisive turn to paying cash as opposed to financing their projects with debt starting in 2006 isn’t just an odd and hard to explain in itself. The shift also dovetails almost perfectly with his shift to reliance on money from Russia and Ukraine. 2006 is also the year when Michael Cohen went to work for the President. It’s also the year the Trump Soho development project got underway.
There are still some important qualifiers to the story. Read More
We have a pretty stunning development about aides to Donald Trump apparently (though they deny it) hiring the same Israeli dirty ops/private intel firm that Harvey Weinstein used to cover up his history to mount an operation against public supporters of the Iran deal.
We start with this story in The Guardian. It’s very hedged and key details are not included. But the gist is that aides to Donald Trump hired an Israeli security firm to dig up dirt on two prominent supporters of the Iran nuclear deal. They are Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl, both Obama administration national security hands who were involved in the negotiation. They both continue to be prominent supporters of it into the Trump era. Last night I said that it sounded like Black Cube, the firm that surveilled and ran black ops operations against Harvey Weinstein’s accusers on his behalf. Read More
I mentioned a few days ago that just last March Rudy Giuliani went to Albania to speak before an Iranian exile group which is widely regarded as a cult and was for many years a US-government designated terrorist group. Giuliani is a long-time recipient of money (for speeches and lobbying) from the MEK and its various front groups. (There’s no word yet on what he was paid if anything for the March appearance.) Read More
We recently wrote about Todd Entrekin, the Alabama sheriff accused of taking over $750,000 for inmates’ food and using it to buy a beach-house.
But when it comes to abuses of power, another sheriff in the state is giving Entrekin a run for his money. Ana Franklin took $160,000 also meant for inmates’ food and invested it in a sketchy used-car lot. She hasn’t accounted for an additional tens of thousands of dollars she said went to charity. And when a local blogger exposed her, she had the blogger’s source arrested.
Allegra Kirkland has the crazy details.
We’ve seen an avalanche of news about the Trump legal team, the Stormy Daniels pay-off, the state of the Michael Cohen investigation and the President’s evolving legal jeopardy in the last 24 hours. It started yesterday afternoon with news about a shake up on the President’s legal team and spun out of control in that Rudy Giuliani interview on Hannity last night. We wanted to try to make sense of everything that happened, put it into a comprehensible whole. So we recorded a special “Extra” edition of The Josh Marshall Podcast this afternoon. Listen right here. And tell us what you think.
Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) is a notorious cult-like group of Iranian exiles which appears to have close to literally zero support inside Iran but has for years cultivated significant ties to DC Iran “regime change” advocates as well as a bipartisan list of shills willing to take their money (of which they have quite a lot).
It’s an odd group which mixes Islam, Marxism and neocon-inflected DC Pay-to-Play values into a bizarre amalgam run by current cult leader Maryam Rajavi. Until just a few years ago the US State Department listed them as a terrorist organization. They appear to be mainly out of the terrorism business now. But they’re still a treacherous and dangerous group. With all this you’ll be glad to learn that one of their biggest backers is none other than Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton. And perhaps they’re most high profile and ardent supporter (and recipient of their cash) is Rudy Giuliani. Read More
House Chaplain ‘unresigns’, says Ryan aide objected to his being Catholic.
Late Update: Speaker Ryan caves almost instantly, unfires Chaplain, says his decision was based on “what I believed to be the best interest of this institution”
Read what this person says. I cannot identify the person but I can vouch for the expertise.
I know everyone has a take on this Rudy/Cohen shit-show, but I thought I would give you some perspective from someone steeped in anti-corruption enforcement (both domestic and foreign) on the prosecution and defense side.