The Russia Investigations and other Trump-related cases

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Meanwhile,

[RoseMorninStar]

Here is the very excellent letter (other than one typo; why is that other people's typo's are so much easier for me to spot than my own?)

Fresh eyes/not knowing what will be conveyed. In your own correspondence you know what you want to say and see/read it as it is in your head.


It was on the news that Trump wanted to be handcuffed and 'perp walked' because creating a spectacle is good for his current fundraiser.

[N.E. Brigand]

It now looks like it won't happen until next week (if at all).

Wait, are you saying that Donald Trump was wrong about something?

Meanwhile, Trump today posted two pictures side by side. One shows him holding a baseball bat. The other shows Alvin Bragg. The impression of the two photos juxtaposed is to suggest that Trump wishes to take a swing at Bragg. Trump also referred today to Bragg as an "animal".

[RoseMorninStar]

It now looks like it won't happen until next week (if at all).

Wait, are you saying that Donald Trump was wrong about something?

I don't think he was wrong. I think he intentionally put out something false to incite his 'base' and elicit donations to his fundraiser.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Meanwhile, Trump today posted two pictures side by side. One shows him holding a baseball bat. The other shows Alvin Bragg. The impression of the two photos juxtaposed is to suggest that Trump wishes to take a swing at Bragg. Trump also referred today to Bragg as an "animal".

I'm not the only to notice the juxtaposition of these two stories.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

And now this:

[N.E. Brigand]

Also: Russian Emails Behind DA Bomb Hoax Amid Trump Probe.

[River]

This is starting to resemble a subplot in a Batman movie. New DA who won't be bought is going after a really big fish so the big fish is trying to save himself. Except in the movie it's mobsters teaming up with a supervillain and in Reality 2023 it's an ex-President teaming up with his superfans.

[Frelga]

Same difference. Although it's funny how presidents are usually heroic badasses in movies like Airforce One and White House Down, and its clone. Or at least nobly stoic, as in Iron Man 3.

I realize TFG is hoping for massive rise of his henchpersons, but last week Proud Boys got their asses kicked in NYC where they showed up to harass a drag performance.

Still, in all seriousness, this is a dangerous moment for the survival of the democratic society.

[N.E. Brigand]

Yesterday the Nation published this article about an "elaborate covert operation personally directed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that aimed to use secret intelligence to clandestinely intervene at the highest levels in the [2016 U.S.] presidential election on behalf of Trump." The primary motivation appears for this alleged interference seems to be Netanyahu's fears that a Hillary Clinton presidency would continue to take a softer line than a Donald Trump presidency would as regards Iran's nuclear development efforts. As the article notes, there was a wisp of a suggestion of this in the Mueller report (one point I don't see in the article is that there were questions about whether George Papadopoulos was working for Israel), and a few journalists have pulled on some of these threads before. This new reporting appears to be based on some secondhand knowledge of an FBI investigation. If this new article is correct, it does clear up something that was puzzling about Roger Stone's trial. Stone was found guilty of obstructing an official proceeding, false statements, and witness intimidation. Stone had threatened Randy Credico to get Credico to testify to Congress that he and not Jerome Corsi was Stone's connection to Wikileaks. But even the supposedly "true" story that Stone was covering up -- by which Corsi was the channel through which Stone learned in advance of Russia's plans to hack-and-dump Democratic emails -- felt fishy to a number of observers. This article says that Corsi was merely Stone's initial contact to Israeli agents, who were monitoring Russian activity and thus learned about these plans. I wonder if we'll ever get more information about how accurate this article is.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The latest twist in the Manhattan grand jury saga.

[N.E. Brigand]

This might just be U.S. intelligence paranoia during the final years of the Cold War, but Bloomberg reports that the heavily redacted first 190 pages of the 900-page FBI file on Donald Trump's first wife, the late Ivana Trump, which is apparently being released in tranches in response to FOIA requests, reveals that she was the subject of a counter-intelligence investigation launched in 1989 and continuing into the 1990s.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Legally imminent strikes again!



Honestly, from what I have been able to glean about relevant NY law, it is not even clear that they have a case against him because the statute requires an intent to defraud and it doesn't seem like Trump's misclassification of the hush money payments as legal fees meets the courts' interpretation of what that means. Whether or not that is why Bragg and company have backed off from now remains to be seen.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

But the plot thickens even more.



And:

[N.E. Brigand]

If Alvin Bragg's team indeed is struggling with the need to prove Donald Trump's intent to defraud -- and I agree (as a layman) that Randall Eliason raises some reasonable concerns on that subject -- then they must have been struggling with that issue for many months: there's no way they'd been overlooking that requirement until the past few weeks. So either prosecutors were bluffing by offering Trump the chance to testify to the grand jury, which typically only happens to the target of an investigation just before indictments are issued -- but do we have anything but stories sourced to Trump's lawyers to prove that Trump actually was asked to testify? (the past two weeks show how Trump & co. can get the media to print misleading news) -- or something else entirely is afoot. Maybe the case wasn't as far along as we were led to believe. Maybe Bragg's focus is on some other crime like obstruction of justice. Maybe they were close to indictment and then some late development convinced them to wait. It could be that Robert Costello's testimony was successful at undermining the case. Or it could be that prosecutors had been leaning on Allen Weisselberg and he finally flipped. (As regards Weisselberg, could it just be that he's decided not to appeal and thus doesn't need the attorneys anymore?) I think we're much more in the dark than we realize.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

(As regards Weisselberg, could it just be that he's decided not to appeal and thus doesn't need the attorneys anymore?)

I think that is highly unlikely, given the previous news that Braggs team had been discussing charging him with insurance fraud. However, none of the reports that I have seen have discussed who Weisselberg is now being represented by, only that he is no longer being represented by the attorneys paid for by the Trump org.

ETA: However I just saw this:


And this:

I think we're much more in the dark than we realize.

That is definitely true!

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I've been wondering why the focus seemed to only be on the payment to Stormy Daniels when the reimbursement to Cohen covered both that payment and the Karen McDougal payoff. Apparently, that is no longer true.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I split off the discussion about the indictment to a new thread: Trump Indicted by Manhattan District Attorney

[N.E. Brigand]

Reviving this thread to note this interesting point that Marcy Wheeler makes about the Steele dossier. Several weeks ago, the Columbia Journalism Review published a long and rather dodgy negative analysis by Jeff Gerth of the New York Times' and Washington Post's coverage of the Trump-Russia affair. CJR hosted a talk with Gerth about this article on Tuesday that was largely overlooked in the focus on Donald Trump's indictment. Today, Elon Musk's late ally Matt Taibbi cited Gerth's talk while referencing something that Rachel Maddow said when interviewing him (Taibbi) in 2017. Maddow had asked Taibbi (I paraphrase): If the FBI had confirmed the Steele dossier to be false, would it not be in their best interest to say so publicly? Doesn't the fact that the FBI has not said so mean that either it's not false or they don't know? Taibbi's position is that one generally should assume the FBI is lying, sometimes by omission, and that their silence here about something they might have leaked to the press was just part of their effort to undermine Donald Trump's presidency, but Wheeler explains that the FBI had good national security reasons to keep quiet: "One reason FBI didn't go out and say, 'STOP! Dossier is full of lies!' is because they were about to spend 10 months pitting Igor Danchenko against Christopher Steele to figure out how the dossier got put together. You can't do that if FBI runs out to debunk breathless reporting."

[Voronwë the Faithful]