A very succinct explanation from Jeff Toobin of the vulnerability this week's Russia news has created for President Trump. pic.twitter.com/WXyDgpOg37
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 30, 2018
Small point in the rapidly unfolding batches of information about the Trump campaign’s dealing with Russia in the summer of 2016. There’s this thing called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). The gist of it is that American business people can’t bribe people abroad to do business overseas. There are some questions on the margins about what entails bribery or related corrupt practices. But offering a $50 million penthouse to the strongman of the state where you’re trying to build a luxury real estate development is definitely not legit. Read More
Sometimes it’s worth stepping back and stating the obvious. Over the course of these thirty months of cover-ups, every player in the Trump/Russia story has lied about their role in the conspiracy. And not hedging and spinning fibs but straight up lies about the core nature of their involvement, their overt acts. Most – though here what we know is a bit more tentative – seem to have lied under oath, whether to congressional committees or a grand jury. Not a single one of them told a story that wasn’t eventually contradicted and disproved. Not a single one. Read More
You’ve seen that President Trump has now canceled his meeting with Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the G20 summit. That’s a shift. You may think it’s good news. The real issue here is that the President’s most crucial foreign policy decisions (remember, major crisis right now between Russia and Ukraine) are being driven both by his financial interests and, in this case, the fall out of his criminal acts. Meeting with Putin or not, Saudi-friendly or not – these have never been the core issue. The core issue is the root of his foreign policy, which is driven by personal enrichment and perceptions of threat. That’s a pressing danger for the state on all fronts.
Read the new Michael Cohen plea agreement and criminal information, which implicates both President Trump and his family.
This goes way back into the archaic age of TPM, even one of the obsessions I brought from my pre-TPM days at The American Prospect. But look at this …
Corsi has hired Larry Klayman, an attorney known for taking on long-shot conservative causes, to assist in his defense. Klayman founded and later split with conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch and has more recently represented former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore.
This is a fascinating dimension of the story of the 2016 campaign. How the right’s obsessions with Hillary’s emails led them to Wikileaks.
It’s easy to lose track of President Trump’s various instances of criminal behavior. Because there’s so much of it. But when he says about a possible pardon for Paul Manafort “Why would I take it off table?” he says clearly that he sees it as a tool to defend himself against the Mueller probe. And that’s a high crime in and of itself. He doesn’t have to issue the pardon to use it as such a tool.
Manafort maintaining JDA with Trump while ostensibly cooperating with Mueller was “freakishly unusual,” Tierney Sneed reports for Prime subscribers.