This diary is just a shout-out to a piece of Trump reporting which has been, in my opinion, undeservedly overlooked and underappreciated. Just brilliantly relentless reporting, which chases down and connects a myriad of dots. And yes, if the subject of this reporting had been Vlad Putin, I would have advised the reporters involved to review their life insurance instructions and invest in a polonium detector...
With the release of the Fusion GPS transcript, there has been yet another mention of Felix Sater and Trump’s involvement with a coterie of shady Russian business characters. This reminded me of the Podcast series on NPR entitled ‘Embedded’. One episode in particular was absolutely riveting — “Trump Stories: Trump So” from November 4, 2017 tells the convoluted, sordid tale of this development and I dare you to stop listening after the first ‘reveal’ which describes how several million dollars mysteriously appeared in the project’s bank account when they encountered a cash-flow problem...
Mark Salter on this blog has relentlessly hammered in on the thesis that the best way to grok Donald Trump is to simply posit that, at his core, he nothing more than a skeezy money launderer. This reporting brings that lesson home in spades.