Each day and in every way, Donald John Trump slowly marches his way to the end of his residency in the White House. There are a great many ways in which it’s possible he may leave, but each of those possibilities have both consequences and benefits that may continue to impact the nation and the world for generations to come.
Will Trump leave office disgraced, or will he be lionized? Will those who have held their nose at his various personal peccadilloes in order for him to implement their own personal agenda of low taxes, low regulation, isolationism, xenophobia, tariff-based trade wars, and thuggish braggadocio eventually feel vindicated in their decision? Or will all of those efforts and policies be discredited due to their abject failure and shortsightedness? Will the rule of law eventually have meaning again, with the value of our institutions restored? Will international cooperation with a focus on the protection of civil and human rights again become paramount after our country finally claws its way out of the shadow of 19th century, Luddite, robber baron-thinking into a brighter future?
We just might find out sooner than anyone expected.
For some, any abrupt interruption of the Trump regime can only come with confirmation of his personal involvement and knowledge of the illicit Russia campaign as either a co-conspirator or by aiding and abetting their efforts after the fact.
For others, any criminal acts committed prior to his election, during his campaign, or during his administration would certainly be enough to consider an indictment for those crimes. Either his temporary suspension while the case is pursued using the 25th Amendment is possible, or else he would have to be impeached and removed from office in order to be called to face these charges.
Some, such as Richard Painter, have argued that the end of Trump’s administration should be negotiated using an indictment which could be held as a threat unless he voluntarily resigns, with the promise either of no prosecution or a suspended sentence as a plea deal. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews argued that Trump would only be willing to resign as a way to protect Don Jr. and Ivanka from prosecution.
“If you did the crime, you’re going to do the time — that’s unless you’re ready to turn state’s evidence against the kingpin Donald Trump,” he noted. “Which brings us to a pair of Mueller subjects who lack that option — Donald Trump, Jr., and Ivanka Trump.”
“The president’s children stand right in the line of Mueller’s investigative progress — they stand as the next dominos to fall,” he continued.“But therein lies the problem, where earlier Mueller subjects have given Trump up, these two lack the option to do that,” he said. “They can hardly testify against their father.”
“But what if the prosecutor were to offer the president an alternative, what if he were to say he would let the children walk if the old man does the same?” Matthews wondered. “They get to go scot-free if he’s willing to take the [Spiro] Agnew way out.”
“That would mean giving up the presidency in exchange for acquittals all around, not just for himself, but for his kids,” he explained.
That would be an interesting ending for all this, but I’m not entirely convinced of this scenario. There are potential criminal cases against the Trump Foundation, which included all of his kids as members of its board,
The Donald J. Trump Foundation has been under criminal investigation in New York for more than a month for violating the state’s tax laws.
The Department of Taxation and Finance is taking the lead on the investigation, but other agencies may be involved, an aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) told Bloomberg Tax.
The aide, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the ongoing investigation, said the investigation could lead to a criminal referral to the state attorney general or the Manhattan district attorney/
Also, the way that the Trump family has handled their taxes over the years (as well as Don Jr. and Ivanka’s direct involvement in the Moscow Tower project) puts them all at criminal risk for violating the sanctions on Russia, the trading with the enemy act, and the foreign corrupt trade practices act. That was a deal that Trump personally signed the letter of intent with investors to begin; his attorney Michael Cohen lied to Congress about it, in coordination with Trump's lawyers in the White House.
CNN's Chris Cuomo
obtained a copy of the signed letter of intent that set the stage for negotiations for Trump condominiums, a hotel and commercial property in the heart of Moscow. The letter is dated October 28, 2015, and bears the President's signature.
When asked on Sunday about the letter, Giuliani incorrectly told CNN's Dana Bash that it had not been signed.
"It was a real estate project. There was a letter of intent to go forward, but no one signed it," Giuliani told Bash.
That letter signed during the campaign puts Trump
personally in collusion with Russia to implement a real estate deal. Trump already knew that deal couldn’t be implemented because of Russian sanctionsm because he’d already tried it before—and
that’s why it couldn’t go forward in 2013.
Rob Goldstone, the British publicist at the center of the latest Russia scandal to engulf the Trump administration, has reportedly said President Trump’s real-estate project in Moscow fell apart after U.S. sanctions damaged the Russian economy. President Trump has repeatedly played down the idea that he had any major business deals with Russia after a licensing deal for a Trump Tower in Moscow was abandoned last year. Under the deal, the high-rise was to be built by Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov, though it would have Trump’s name on it. In comments cited by Yahoo News late Tuesday, however, Goldstone said the plans never came to fruition because “the economy tanked in Russia” after Washington slapped Moscow with sanctions in 2014.
So why did Trump sign a new letter of intent in late 2015 when his previous attempt had failed because of sanctions in 2014? Because this time he’s running for president, and with that job he can do something about those sanctions. This is why Michael Cohen lied about the timing of this deal to Congress. This is also the only logical reason why former national security adviser Michael Flynn lied to the FBI about discussing sanctions with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, while at the same time Michael Cohen (again) was working Felix Sater to come up with a peace deal with Ukraine that would have—you, guessed it!—removed sanctions on Russia. It’s a plan which they then allegedly delivered to Michael Flynn’s desk. Was Flynn the point man on this mission, and is that why Trump wanted FBI director James Comey to “let Flynn go,” as far as investigating him?
This may also be why Trump personally authorized his adviser George Papadopoulos to reach out to Russia. When George emailed the campaign that Russia had emails related to Hillary (according to Josh Mashburn) rather than tell the FBI, Jeff Sessions apparently told him to “find out all he could” about it, which is failure to report a felony and also aiding and abetting the current ongoing crime in process. It may be why Don Jr. was willing to meet with Veselnitskaya, and in the end managed to let the Russians know that the Trumpsters were “willing to play ball on sanctions,” but only if they truly got “the goods” on Hillary. After that, the pro-Ukraine plank in the Republican National Convention suddenly disappeared and WikiLeaks started dumping the stolen DNC emails—the ones that none of the Trumpsters had ever bothered to report—all over the place.
Then even after Flynn was fired, his staff at the National Security Council again attempted to—yes, really—shut down sanctions on Russia.
“There was serious consideration by the White House to unilaterally rescind the sanctions,” according to Dan Fried, who retired in February as Coordinator for Sanctions Policy at the State Department.
Fried told veteran investigative journalist Michael Isikoff, a former national investigative correspondent for NBC News and Newsweek alumnus, that in the early weeks of the administration he got several “panicky” calls from U.S. officials. They asked: “Please, my God, can’t you stop this?”
The sanctions in question included those imposed by Obama for Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and others inflicted late last year to punish Moscow for its suspected efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. The plans Trump’s administration considered early on included returning diplomatic compounds seized from Russia in late 2016—recent reports say Trump is currently working to put this plan into action.
The strongest links between Trump and Russia during the campaign season are through Papadopoulos, but since he didn’t really cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller, has already served his prison time, and has since become a whack-job conspiracy theorist, he’ s not likely to be helpful. Next are Michael Flynn’s efforts to relieve sanctions, which were likely done on the orders of Jared Kushner. Michael Cohen was involved in the Moscow project for months during 2015-2016 on which Trump personally signed a letter of intent. Then there’s Trump associate Roger Stone, who leaked info about WikiLeaks to adviser Steve Bannon after receiving tips from Jerome Corsi and his friend Ted Malloch on the same day that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was interviewed by RT. Lastly there’s Steve Bannon again as well as Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who both worked with Cambridge Analytica, which harvested the private user data of millions of voters and was paid by a Russian oil firm.
All of that mess was collusion. It’s quid pro quo and also conspiracy, aiding and abetting, and just plain dumb.
Congress did eventually force those sanctions to go through and to stick. However, just recently and for no apparent reason, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska—who had been in communications with convicted Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort through Russian intelligence asset Konstantin Kilimnick—has had his sanctions lifted.
Why?
And then we have Trump announcing that he’s going to pull all of our troops out of Syria, even though there are still about 30,000 ISIS fighters remaining.
“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning in his “Mission Accomplished” moment. No serious person believes this. In fact, on Tuesday, a State Department spokesman, who clearly had no idea of the presidential announcement to come, told reporters: “U.S. forces are present in the campaign to ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS. We’ve made significant progress recently in the campaign, and — but the job is not yet done.”
Indeed, it’s not. The United Nations reported in August that the Islamic State still has 20,000 to 30,000 fighters in Iraq and Syria. Acts of terrorism attributed to the Islamic State have picked up in “liberated” areas, and experts such as Hassan Hassan, co-author of the book “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror” have been warning that the group is poised to make a comeback in Syria. We have seen the Islamic State pull off just such a resurrection in the past: Under its previous guise of al-Qaeda in Iraq, it had been all but defeated by 2011 when President Barack Obama ordered a pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq. Before long the terrorist group was stronger than ever, establishing a brutal caliphate sprawling across Syria and Iraq.
Why would he do that if not to help Russia and Turkey, the two countries that Michael Flynn was an unregistered lobbyist for?
On the basis of the Cohen conviction, Judge Andrew Napolitano stated Trump himself appears to already have been shown by official court documents from the Southern District of New York to be a felon.
“We learned that the federal prosecutors here in New York City, not Bob Mueller and his team in Washington D.C., career prosecutors have evidence that the president of the United States committed a felony by ordering and paying Michael Cohen to break the law,” he said. “How do we know that? They told that to a federal judge and under the rules, they can’t tell that to a federal judge unless they have the evidence.”
Napolitano said the prosecutors who handled this are pros—and that this increases his confidence they got it right.
[...]
Trump appears to be guilty of a felony, said Napolitano.
“The felony is paying Michael Cohen to commit a felony. It’s pretty basic,” he said, explaining how hiring someone to commit a crime makes you guilty of that crime. “You’re liable, criminally liable for the commission of that crime. That’s what the prosecutors told the federal judge.”
According to Michael Cohen’s longtime friend Donny Deutsch, Russia and Stormy Daniels are the least of Trump genuinely serious legal concerns.
“Real estate is a slimy business and Donald was the bottom of the bottom of the bottom. What is going to put him in jail, what is going to destroy everything he’s ever built and his children is a 30 years criminal enterprise.”
Trump biographers Michael D’antonio and David Cay Johnston have said essentially the same thing.
David Cay Johnston agreed, recalling an illegal gambling operation that was going on right underneath Donald’s triplex with “Russian gangsters.” The FBI ultimately shut it down.
“There was a fellow who went into one of Trump’s buildings, actually bought the unit right below Kellyanne Conway’s unit,” he explained. “He invested in it, sold it a month later for a half-million-dollar profit, [and] a year after that he gets shot to death on the sidewalk in New York City. There is such a mess in this Trump Organization. There are so many frauds to be investigated, so many crimes to be investigated.”
He went on to discuss the 2015 Trump Taj Mahal casino scandals, where the company was forced to pay a $10 million fine for money laundering.
“They had to confess to this practice going on for years,” he continued. “So, I think Congressman [Adam] Schiff (D-CA) is absolutely right. There’s a red line they should march across and deploy the troops in all directions.”
“And Donald was ‘What? What? There’s gambling going on in my building!?” Johnston joked, quoting the notorious line from Casablanca. “And the other was when Donald’s close business associate, for whom he did favors, the international cocaine smuggler Joe Wexelbaum, got out of jail he didn’t have money to pay his federal fine. I think it was $30,000. But somehow ended up living in a multimillion-dollar Trump Tower [apartment] there are just so many of these stories. The ones Michael mentioned and the one I did, and there are others, that will lead to all sorts of corruption around Trump involving money and money laundering.”
With approximately 17 different investigations in place (and that’s before the Democrats take full control of the House back), there are likely to be some fairly large criminal issues headed Trump’s way soon.
Many have argued that an indictment can’t be filed against a sitting White House resident, but Ken Starr doesn’t happen to be one of those people. He said that Clinton v. Jones established not only that a sitting president can be sued while in office, but he can also be criminally indicted.
“The Justice Department has a different view and has had a different view for almost half a century,” he said. “These are very impressive legal documents with very thorough analysis — I just happen to disagree with them.”
In the Clinton v. Jones case — one of the cases in which the former president was accused in a civil suit of sexual assault — the president asserted that he should be “immune” from such a suit because of his office, Starr explained.
“The Supreme Court, unanimously, said ‘No, Mr. President,'” Starr noted. When Clinton asked for merely a “time out,” the court again denied him.
“The public interest and the enforcement of criminal law, I believe, is even higher,” the former independent counsel concluded.
Again, Napolitano has said that not only can Trump be indicted, but that indictment might have already been secretly filed because there is a five-year statute of limitations on campaign finance violations like Cohen’s. But that clock stops running once the indictment is filed, even if it remains under seal for years while Trump remains in office. Shep Smith asked Napolitano,
"So you're saying the president is an unindicted co-conspirator?"
"Yes. I'm also saying that there's ample evidence—this doesn't require to much analysis—to indict the president. The question is: do they want to do it? The [Department of Justice] has three opinions on this: two say you can’t indict a sitting president, one says you can. But all three address the problem of 'What do you do when the statute of limitations is about to expire?' All three agree in that circumstance, you indict in secret, keep the indictment sealed and release it the day he gets out of office. You can't let a person go scot-free because they happen to be in the White House."
And again, state charges for taxes fraud, corruption, and money laundering can’t be removed with a simple pardon, whether they are against Don Jr., Ivanka, Eric,or Trump himself.
CNN analyst and former FBI special agent Asha Rangappa says that if Mueller attempts to issue an indictment —assuming he hasn’t already under Rosenstein, as Napolitano suggests—and he’s blocked either by acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker or AG Nominee Bill Barr (who happens to have written a 20-page memo against an obstruction of justice investigation of Trump), then the details of that indictment would be automatically reported to Congress, which would very likely begin the impeachment process.
“If… Mueller believes that he has gathered enough evidence that would warrant charging Trump with one or more crimes, he can provide that evidence in his final report to the attorney general, along with a recommendation that the president be indicted,” she writes. “The attorney general could approve that recommendation, in which case such an indictment would become public (with its constitutionality litigated in court).”
Even if the DOJ rejects the special counsel’s recommendation to indict, she says that rejection would in and of itself “automatically trigger the reporting requirement to Congress” and thus “might be the only way to guarantee a report goes to Capitol Hill.”
But then there are some who will simply never believe any of the charges against Trump, even if presented as an indictment or impeachment, because they have been fully and willfully indoctrinated into the conspiracy theory that the FBI and the so-called “Deep State” within the intelligence community have concocted a false case against him for purely political gain. They believe that if he is impeached but not removed by the Senate, he will be seen as a Deep State martyr, which will validate all of his efforts and practically guarantee his re-election for a second term.
As noted by Judge Napolitano:
Rudy Giuliani is a very talented lawyer. He has assumed two roles for his most famous client -- as legal strategist and as cheerleader. As a legal strategist, he brings a wealth of experience in federal criminal procedure, but he has no serious experience defending a person accused by the feds -- hence his morphing into the cheerleading role, in which he has candidly acknowledged to friends that his goal is not to dissuade the special counsel from pursuing his client but to influence public opinion so that if an indictment or impeachment of Trump were to come down, it would generally be unacceptable to the public.
Yet the more he cheerleads the more he undercuts his reputation in the legal, judicial and law enforcement communities. That's because when he was the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, he excelled at utilizing the most extreme and aggressive prosecutorial techniques that the courts permitted -- the very ones he is now attacking Mueller for using.
Giuliani is playing a political game, a PR game, which is purely intended to end-run around the House, speak to the Senate, and protect Trump from being removed.
We can see the more obvious version of this game coming from the $350 million lawsuit filed by Roger Stone pal Jerome Corsi against Robert Mueller.
The suit also accuses the special counsel's office of having threatened him with prison unless he agreed to testify falsely that he served as a liaison between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the Republican political strategist Roger Stone, who was an adviser to Trump's presidential campaign.
NBC News reported last month that Corsi sent an email alerting Stone that WikiLeaks planned to release damaging information about emails stolen from John Podesta, who was chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign — two months before WikiLeaks actually did so.
And it accuses the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency — all of whom are named as co-respondents — of having placed Corsi under illegal surveillance "at the direction of Mueller and his partisan Democrat, leftist, and ethically and legally conflicted prosecutorial staff."
The goal, the suit alleges, was to bring about a "'legal coup d'etat,' negating the will of the American voters who elected Donald J. Trump on November 6, 2016."
To them, this is a partisan, leftist, ethically and legally conflicted staff with a “legal coup d’etat’ to negate the will of the voters who elected Trump (a candidate that lost the actual vote).
If Trump is forced to resign, if he is impeached and eventually removed, even if he stays in office until 10 minutes to January 20, 2020, then pardons all his kids then quickly resigns and has Pence pardon him (which again, would only work with federal charges), the real question is: How will this period in America’s history influence the future?
Will even those who are the most hardcore of Trump supporters grow disillusioned with his false promises as The Wall goes from being paid for by Mexico to being paid for by U.S. taxpayers and then disappears entirely, as it just did this week while Congress pushed for a continuing resolution to keep the government from shutting down? I’ll tell you one thing:
Ann Coulter is pissed about that one.
At first the answer seemed to be, “Yes, he think’s they’re that dumb” because Trump has stopped following Coulter. However, after he blew off Coulter and the Senate approved the bill to avoid a shutdown placing it on his desk Trump threw a rock into the jet intake and blew up everything by again demanding his “perfect border wall” because Limbaugh, Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows and Fox News came after him for “caving”. Then he rage tweeted at Congress over the Wall sending us back into shutdown mode with just one day to go.
While this was going on he decided to follow through on his threat to yank our Troops out of Syria apparently after a series of calls from Turkish President Erdogan, prompting Defense Secretary James Mattis to finally hit that last straw, immediately resign and write a scathing letter about Trump’s haphazard, nonsensical, ignorant foreign policy as well as his dangerous subservience to Russia, copies of which he then distributed throughout the Pentagon.
The shutdown has also caused a massive amount of nervousness on Wall Street with the Dow dropping over 1,000 points in a week which has made this month the worst performing December since the beginning of the Great Recession, but it hasn’t yet hit the larger economy. All this shows that Conservatives and the GOP are starting to realize that the Faustian deal they made to get their priorities implemented by Trump come with some consequences that even they can’t stomach, particularly when Trump is capable of doing such reckless and dangerous things largely on a whim and reverse even an agreed upon deals on the turn of a dime. Is this enough to shatter the wall of protection that Trump holds in the Senate? I’m not so sure, but it is an interesting turn of events. They just might be coming to realize that Trump is a danger to the GOP brand, a danger to them politically and even dangerous to the economy and security of the nation itself. Maybe. It’s now slightly less likely that when Trump eventually and inevitably face plants in disgrace because of his latest impulsive petulant action that they’ll be able to deflect and claim that he’s only being sandbagged by the “Deep State”. For example he’s been caught repeatedly berating his Mueller-hating stooge Acting AG Matthew Whitaker to “do something about the rogues” in SDNY when they managed to get a guilty plea from Michael Cohen and implicated Trump personally in his porn-star/playmate payoff scheme. It seems to me that this is yet another example of him letting his little inner mob boss out for a romp and trying to obstruct justice again, just as he tried to do with Comey and Michael Flynn. He shouldn’t be talking to Whitaker about a case that he’s personally involved in, period. The more he keeps this up, the more it becomes obvious to even the most devout Cult45-er that this is all of his own doing, not anyone else. He’s hurt himself with this behavior, he’s rattled the GOP establishment badly, but so far the base is still with him. The question is how much longer will he hold them?
Will they understand that Trump’s policies are bankrupt of logic as the stock market goes into defib over his shutdown and trade wars?
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) released a major report on Tuesday that projected the world’s economy will grow by 3.7 percent, which is 0.2 points lower than they had estimated in April. That’s the same rate of growth as 2017, signaling a slight slowdown — and Trump’s trade policies are a major reason why.
“[T]he forecast for 2019 has been revised down due to recently announced trade measures, including the tariffs imposed on $200 billion of US imports from China,” reads the IMF’s “World Economic Outlook” report.
And the deficit explodes as a result of his tax cuts?
The amount of corporate taxes collected by the federal government has plunged to historically low levels in the first six months of the year, pushing up the federal budget deficit much faster than economists had predicted.
The reason is President Trump’s tax cuts. The law introduced a standard corporate rate of 21 percent, down from a high of 35 percent, and allowed companies to immediately deduct many new investments. As companies operate with lower taxes and a greater ability to reduce what they owe, the federal government is receiving far less than it would have before the overhaul.
The Trump administration had said that the tax cuts would pay for themselves by generating increased revenue from faster economic growth, but the White House has acknowledged in recent weeks that the deficit is growing faster than it had expected. The Office of Management and Budget said this month that it had revised its forecasts from earlier this year to account for nearly $1 trillion of additional debt over the next decade — on average, almost $100 billion more a year in deficits.
So if you run into a Trumpster sometime during the holidays, ask them to explain how the new NAFTA/USMSCA deal is going to pay for the wall when corporate tax revenues are currently at a 75-year low because of his tax cuts.
That math simply doesn’t work.
Even if Trump manages to survive to the end of his first term, even if he gets through a second term without being impeached, removed, indicted, or forced to resign, he will still have his base of supporters that will continue to claim that he was treated “unfairly” and “railroaded” by the “Deep State” and 63 million angry Democrats. They will always have their self-serving conspiracies, even if they don’t really make any sense. On the other hand if he leaves office early, they will probably lose their minds, there will probably be widespread incidents of violent retaliation against minorities, against immigrants, against women and against anyone the deluded whining QAnon gang happens to point a finger at — but we aren't there yet.
In the meantime, until the end finally comes, Trump may be doing nearly irreparable damage to our international reputation and to the rule of law; polluting our rivers, streams, poisoning our food supply with E. coli; and allowing corporations to get away with ridiculous malfeasance such as putting asbestos in our baby powder. He is ignoring the growing human crisis of refugees fleeing gangs in Central American, as well as those fleeing from from ISIS and Assad in Syria. People are fleeing Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudis’ vicious war in Yemen, which may soon induce the starvation of millions. Trump refuses to curb CO2 dispersal just when we’re rapidly approaching a climate change rubicon of cataclysmic proportions. There may be quite a bit of collateral damage before the end.
It would be great if most of the people blinded by Trump’s empty promises and hate speech were forced to face an inflection point and come to their senses, if they were forced somehow to wake up from their stupor and realize they’ve been conned by perhaps one of greatest grifters of the current and previous century.
it would be fantastic if America were to take this as a teachable moment, if we were to come out of this darkness and reverse course with a renewed sense of purpose, unity, focus, drive, honor, and pride in the values that are at the core of what it means to be American.
That would truly be awesome, and sometimes I think and hope that in some way, we may have needed to go through this experience with Trump to learn the lessons about the rule of law that we didn’t learn about George W. Bush’s failure to pay attention to al-Qaeda, or his illegal war based on stove-pipped evidence, his surveillance state, his use of war crimes and torture in our very own concentration camp in the middle of Guantanamo Bay.
We should have already learned these lessons. Maybe we’ll get it right this time.
But again, I’m a realist, and I suspect we probably won't get it right. Not yet. We’ll still have to deal with more bullshit like Trumpism and Bushism again and again and again. No matter what happens to this particular neo-tyrant, there’s always another one on the horizon. I just hope that there will be far more of us who remember and recognize the next lying, mobster, autocratic thug-in-waiting than there were last time.
Maybe that’s the best we can hope for: incremental progress.
