I’ve noted on a number of occasions that the Trump Soho project, a major building project in lower manhattan, was the one where Russian and post-Soviet cash seemed to play the clearest role. That is, that’s the biggest place to look if we’re trying to get to the bottom of the Trump Russia story. Trump business partner Felix Sater was running the Trump Soho project, with heavy involvement by the Trump family.  And a key source of the Russia money was an investment fund in Iceland called the “FL Group”, one known to be a repository of choice for cash from Putin-aligned Russian oligarchs. Well, it turns out it wasn’t just Trump Soho. The two other roughly contemporaneous projects, Trump Merrimac in Ft Lauderdale and Trump Tower Pheonix, also got money from FL Group. FL also appears to have loaned money to the man behind Trump Tower Toronto. It seems like  Sam Thielmann has the story.

I want to let you know about a renewed emphasis I want to bring to how TPM covers the news: not a new topic area, but better, more consistent and deeper ways to do what we already do best: dogged coverage of core TPM stories over days, weeks and months.

Let me explain what I mean. Read More

In the new episode of The Josh Marshall Show (#18) I talk to Professor Stephen Shoemaker about how the source and text critical methods which have been applied to the early histories of Judaism and Christianity for more than a century can shed dramatically new light on the origins of Islam. Specifically we talk about Shoemaker’s book The Death of a Prophet, one of the most fascinating books I’ve read in quite some time.

10:56 PM: Trump just threatened to shut down the federal government over the border wall.

10:45 PM: Note that so far Trump has name-checked the victimization of Jeff Lord – who was fired for using a Nazi slog – but not Heather Heyer, the woman killed in Charlottesville.

10:40 PM: The media is “trying to take away our history and our heritage.”

10:33 PM: Trump name-checks victimization of Jeffrey Lord who was canned by CNN for using a Nazi slogan.

10:25 PM: Crowd seems to agree: Trump killed it on Charlottesville response.

10:19 PM: Trump seems to again go for the both-sides-ism version of condemning Charlottesville. But in his attack on the media he does name check neo-nazis and white supremacists.

10:19 PM: Notably, Trump looks to civil society to emulate on duty soldiers.

10:11 PM: Fascinating. The guy who runs the “Blacks for Trump” cult site has again managed to position himself right behind Trump.

Let me try to take some stock of President Trump’s speech. There were a lot of random weird asides through the speech, some of which I flagged in real time. One example: In the course of defending himself on Charlottesville he gave a shout-out to CNN Trump supporter Jeffrey Lord who was recently fired for using a Nazi slogan in a Twitter fight. He had kinder and lengthier words for Lord than he did for Heather Heyer. He had kinder words for Kim Jung Un. Everyone said “you won’t bring [quarterly economic growth] up to 1%.” What?

Aside from the rambling weirdness, the big things are these. President Trump spent something like forty-five minutes in a wide-ranging primal scream about Charlottesville, ranting at the press, giving what might generously be called a deeply misleading and dishonest summary of what he actually said. It all amounted to one big attack on the press for supposedly lying about him.

There were some other points that were momentary and perhaps easy to miss but quite important. Read More

Yesterday, TPM’s Allegra Kirkland published this piece on how numerous tech platforms, social media networks, payment services and others have shut down access to alt-right, Nazi and white supremacist groups. I was also interested to read this piece in the Times about how this mass banning – even if salutary in this instance – points to the massive and arbitrary power of private companies in controlling the venues in which a vast amounts speech occur today. Read More

I wanted to note briefly the news of this new Russia-related email in the news today. The email is from Rick Dearborn, a key Trump staffer, whose role in the drama we’ll return to in a moment. We don’t have the email itself but rather descriptions of it. And it appears to reference an effort by an individual from West Virginia (who knows?) to set up a meeting between Trump campaign officials and Vladimir Putin. Notably, the email dates from June 2016, around the time of the notorious Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr and just as Russian intelligence operatives were kicking their election disruption campaign into high gear. Read More

Take a moment and watch this video. It’s only 45 seconds long. But you need to listen to the words. Really take a moment and watch.

Russell Walker filed a lawsuit in York SC, demanding confederate flags be returned to the main courtroom @SpecNewsCLT pic.twitter.com/MVDYSEBIEe

— Yoojin Cho (@Yoojin_Cho) August 24, 2017

Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump’s rhetoric about the confederacy and the death of “our culture” maps to the language and lures skinheads and white supremacists use to lure people into hate groups.

If there’s one thing Donald Trump has been consistently good at over 40-plus years in public life it’s been finding other people to pick up the downside of his bad or failed investments and projects. Sometimes that process has simply been crafty and ingenious. Other times it’s amounted to criminal fraud. Most often it’s been some combination of both. We now appear to be moving toward Trump’s most audacious attempt to accomplish the same thing – only now with the Republican party. Read More