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In Pat Cipollone, Trump finds a lawyer he likes| How Much Is Donald Trump Worth: $3 Billion | Trump’s toxic relationship with Deutsche Bank – What Mueller Didn’t Cover, But Congress Can – 8:51 PM 6/11/2019
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White House counsel Pat Cipollone has built a bond with President Donald Trump, who fondly calls him "Mr. Attorney." | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
The new White House counsel is winning over his boss. Critics say it's because he's too deferential to the president.
During the 21 months of Don McGahn’s stormy tenure at the White House, he would often tell colleagues, half joking: “It’s a good week if I don’t get called into the Oval.”
Pat Cipollone, McGahn’s successor as White House counsel, doesn’t engage in the same sort of gallows humor — if only because, through what allies say is good personal chemistry with his mercurial boss and critics counter is a willingness to enable his worst instincts, he’s managed to stay on the good side of a president who fondly calls him “Mr. Attorney.”
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In six months on the job, Cipollone has turned the White House Counsel’s Office into a central hub of activity and made himself a constant presence in the Oval Office. A 53-year-old former corporate lawyer with an affable style, he has also made enough of an impression on Trump that the president has begun asking aides for their assessment of the White House’s top lawyer — a sign that, at the least, Cipollone has his client’s attention.
“He has the president’s ear, he’s earned the president’s respect and that allows people in this building not just to survive but to succeed in doing their jobs,” said Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to the president.
Cipollone is not one to seek attention — friends note that he is often found on the edge of photographs, as if he were seeking to step outside the frame. He is “a cordial but cut-throat negotiator. You never know what he’s thinking,” said a former client. “He should have been a professional poker player.”
But he has nevertheless been at the heart of the controversies that have gripped the White House since the winter, from clearing a legal path for the president to declare a national emergency on the southern border to shaping the White House’s defiant approach to congressional inquiries. Most recently, Cipollone was among the prominent voices who told Trump he could use his emergency powers to slap tariffs on Mexico — and then, alongside Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, he helped shape a last-minute deal to end the showdown.
The centrality of the counsel’s office in White House policymaking is normal, and Cipollone consulted with predecessors in both parties before taking the job. But given the abnormal nature of the Trump presidency, a legal adviser who shows the president the best way to accomplish his goals — when many in his own party are often alarmed by the goals themselves — has raised concerns, even among some of the president’s allies.
“One of the best ways to act as a restraint is to raise legal concerns or to play up the economic or political consequences of a decision,” said a former White House official, who noted that McGahn often did so, to the president’s chagrin.
Cipollone’s traditional approach to the job stands in sharp contrast to that of his predecessor, a rumpled election lawyer who didn’t gel with Trump, and who focused almost exclusively on judicial nominations and deregulation. McGahn, who departed in mid-October, frequently dispatched deputies to policy meetings and was rarely present when issues finally reached the president’s desk.
That gave hard-charging aides who happened to be lawyers like the former White House staff secretary, Rob Porter, an opportunity to build outsized portfolios and assume some of the traditional legal responsibilities of the counsel’s office.
“With this president, it’s not about what the org chart looks like, it’s about how close you are to the president. But Don didn’t care about that,” said a White House official. “For Don it was, ‘I’m going to get my judges done and I’m going to make no friends in the process. I don’t care whether the president thinks I am his guy.’”
As a young lawyer in the 1990s, Cipollone worked as an all-purpose adviser and speechwriter in the attorney general’s office during Attorney General Bill Barr’s first stint on the job. The two share an expansive view of executive authority — one they say is simply a reflection of the Constitution, but that critics charge gives the president too much power. Cipollone has expressed that view in a series of letters to congressional investigators — telling them, in effect, to pound sand.
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But while Barr is known among friends as “The Buffalo” — obstinate, stubborn and immovable — Cipollone’s pals describe somebody softer around the edges and a little more humble.
The son of Italian immigrants, Cipollone grew up in the Bronx before attending Fordham University and the University of Chicago law school. He likes to tell friends that his father, a factory worker, went to “UCLA — University of the Corner of Lexington Avenue,” according to his friend and former colleague Jonathan Missner, the managing partner of Stein Mitchell Beato & Missner, the law firm Cipollone left to join the White House.
The father of 10 children, Cipollone is also a devout Catholic. He left the tony law firm Kirkland and Ellis to serve as general counsel of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization. Later, he founded, along with Missner, a charity to strengthen ties between Catholics and Israel.
In Washington, Cipollone is part of what many in conservative legal circles jokingly call the “Catholic mafia,” a group of like-minded lawyers and coreligionists who have gained influence in the Trump administration. The others include Barr, Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, Federalist Society executive director Leonard Leo, and the Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who has praised Cipollone — the godfather of one of her children — on her show several times, calling him a “wildly talented lawyer” and a “pretty cool godfather.”
It was Ingraham who recruited Cipollone to help Trump with debate prep during the 2016 campaign, and the two men “just clicked,” said his friend Thomas Yannucci, a partner at the law firm Kirkland and Ellis who recruited Cipollone to join the firm in the 1990s.
“He’s doing this job because he supported this president from the beginning,” said a former client of Cipollone, noting that he was “one of the few who said he would win even when bad exit polls came in on Election Night.”
He later interviewed for the position of deputy attorney general, a job that went instead to Rod Rosenstein. But he helped prepare former Attorney General Jeff Sessions for his confirmation hearings and stood out as a particularly effective inquisitor, according to a Sessions confidant.
The Democrats’ seizure of the House of Representatives last November, which quashed any hopes that the administration would pass another piece of significant legislation before the 2020 election, has also made the counsel’s office a renewed locus of activity, unleashing an onslaught of Democratic investigations into everything from Trump’s real estate business to whether he obstructed justice to the impact of his short-lived child-separation policy.
“The battles we had during the first year were tax reform and health care — that was a lot of public policy, not a lot of legal stuff,” said the Federalist Society’s Leo, who spoke personally to the president this winter to recommend Cipollone for the job. “The issues now are much more about the assertion of executive power. Pat has been a very, very important player in helping to frame these things.’”
In contrast to McGahn, who studiously avoided the Mueller inquiry and eventually became its star witness, Cipollone’s office has dictated the course of the legal strategy the White House has adopted to rebuff congressional investigations into the Trump administration, which have taken up much of the oxygen in Washington since the midterms in November.
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To Democrats, Cipollone and his colleagues in the beefed up counsel’s office, which has grown to approximately 40 lawyers from a low of about 25, are enablers of a president already disinclined to abide by norms and tradition. Their attempts to fend off congressional inquiries have been characterized as “outrageous” by Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, “a joke,” in the words of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi words, and as “a massive, unprecedented, and growing pattern of obstruction” by Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings.
Others described Cipollone’s strategy as the standard posture adopted by previous White House lawyers, who have worked to stonewall Congress with the goal of forcing disputes into the courtroom. Most legal observers say the impasse between the two ends of Pennsylvania Ave. will inevitably takes months, if not years, to resolve — with the 2020 election around the corner.
“White House counsels have generally followed a fairly hostile approach to congressional inquiries touching on White House staff. One of the most hostile administrations in history was the Obama administration,” said Jonathan Turley, a professor of constitutional law at George Washington University. “The Democrats come off a bit like Claude Rains saying that they’re ‘shocked, shocked’ that a White House counsel would defy congress. These same Democratic leaders supported President Obama in a systematic refusal to turn over information to Congress.”
Cipollone and his hard-charging deputy for investigations, Michael Purpura, have articulated this view in a stream of letters to Capitol Hill that have largely relied on the argument that lawmakers have no “legitimate legislative purpose” to subpoena many of the documents they have demanded. This is the claim Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin fell back on in refusing to turn over the president’s tax returns, and one of the reasons Cipollone cited when he said the White House would not comply with Nadler’s subpoena for documents to aid in a wide-ranging corruption probe.
The president’s personal lawyers have adopted the same line in lawsuits filed against Deutsche Bank and Capital One — seeking to prevent the disclosure of a ream of financial documents related to Trump’s business, and against the president’s longtime accounting firm, Mazars. A district court judge knocked down the claim in mid-May, arguing that Mazars was required to comply with congressional subpoenas.
According to Turley, the White House is hoping only to tie up the cases in litigation — perhaps through the 2020 presidential election — not necessarily to win. “They are well beyond the navigational beacons of executive privilege. So, if they go to court they have to anticipate that they will lose,” he said. “The benefits of that strategy are magnified in this case because they general view is that the House leadership wants to run out the clock.”
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Cipollone’s newfound power has raised concerns among some of Trump’s critics within the administration who say the counsel’s office has an important role to play in tying the hands of an impulsive president who has at times displayed little respect for constitutional constraints.
These critics say, in essence, that Cipollone is treating the president too much like a normal client. Rather than shut down some of the president’s most controversial ideas, whether declaring a national emergency on the southern border, imposing tariffs on Mexico or sharply restricting the use of fetal tissue in medical research, he has found acceptable — if controversial — legal pathways for Trump to follow.
Cipollone has not always green-lighted the president’s moves, however. He cautioned against Trump’s decision in late March, for example, to change the administration’s position on the Affordable Care Act and to back a lawsuit seeking the evisceration of the entire law.
“In the law that I practiced with him, he would say to the client: ‘What is your goal? What is the best way to get to that goal? And if you want an off-ramp, let’s take it now, let’s not take it three years from now,’” Missner said. “He never imposed his views on you. But Pat’s a pitbull. He will go and he will win."
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President Donald Trump’s net worth rose to $3 billion, a 5% gain over the past year, thanks to a jump in the value of an office-building deal he once sued to prevent.
The increase in Trump’s wealth reverses two years of declines and brings his net worth back to 2016 levels, according to figures compiled by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index from lenders, property records, securities filings, market data and a May 16 financial disclosure. It comes despite setbacks at his family company, including the cancellation of two new hotel chains and reduced business at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and seven golf courses.
Trump’s higher net worth shows how reliant his wealth has become on Steven Roth, a friend who leads Vornado Realty Trust. Trump’s 30% stake in two Vornado properties -- 1290 Ave. of the Americas, a 2.1-million-square-foot tower in midtown Manhattan, and 555 California St., a 1.8-million-square-foot office complex known as the Bank of America Center in San Francisco’s financial district -- accounts for a quarter of his fortune. His partnership with Vornado, which owns the remaining 70%, resulted from a chain of real estate transactions that Trump once sued to block.
Accepting the deal has proven lucrative. Over the past year, Trump’s stake in the two properties has surged to $765 million, a 33% increase from the previous year, thanks to falling office capitalization rates and a boost in net income. A drop in marketwide capitalization rates, which track property prices against the net income they produce, can indicate increasing demand, raising valuations.
Trump’s stake in the Vornado buildings eclipses the combined value of his golf courses and resorts to become his biggest source of wealth. The value of the golf courses and clubs fell 19% to $525 million as the industry grappled with falling demand.
Financial Disclosures
The president’s financial disclosures, which provide revenues and the value of assets in broad ranges and aren’t definitive figures, offer a glimpse into his personal wealth. He manages his fortune through dozens of businesses that collectively form the Trump Organization. Before he took office, Trump placed his holdings in a revocable trust that’s for his exclusive benefit and is overseen by his two adult sons and longtime Trump Organization bookkeeper Allen Weisselberg. Amanda Miller, a company spokeswoman, and Alan Garten, its chief lawyer, didn’t respond to messages seeking comment. Neither did the White House press office.
Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg
The value of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, which has become a hangout for Republicans and favor-seekers, was little changed. Revenue rose 1% to $41 million, according to the president’s financial disclosure. But the value of the hotel fell 5% to $95 million as multiples for comparable properties declined.
Trump’s office buildings, though, continued to appreciate. Trump Tower, which has experienced lower demand for its Fifth Avenue office and residential units, is now worth $445 million, 27% more than last year. In addition to falling capitalization rates, it had higher net operating income in 2018 than the previous year and is on one of New York’s most valuable strips of land. It’s protected from decreases in the value of the condos because they’re now owned by others.
The value of 40 Wall St., Trump’s office tower in Manhattan’s financial district, increased by 13% to $480 million as the market improved.
Office buildings have been among the biggest beneficiaries of the increase in asset prices that followed Trump’s 2016 election. Years of easy financing and low supply boosted the value of buildings in sought-after cities throughout the country. Trump’s office properties, including his stakes in the Vornado buildings, appreciated by $340 million over the past year.
Photographer: Andrew Burton/Getty Images
Those gains offset declines in other parts of his portfolio. In addition to his golf courses, the value of Trump’s leasehold at 6 E. 57th St. in Manhattan, which previously housed a Niketown store, fell 9% to $420 million as retail properties in the borough saw higher capitalization rates resulting from consumers’ increasing preference to shop online.
And Trump’s luxury residential building at 502 Park Ave., where his estranged longtime fixer, Michael Cohen, lived before he began serving a three-year prison term last month, is now worth $140 million, down 13% from a year earlier, after the building’s condo owners had to offer steep discounts to prospective buyers.
Trump Debt
Trump owes his lenders at least $550 million, according to his disclosures, property records and commercial mortgage data. The amount is roughly flat from a year earlier, after taking into account estimated loan payments and a new mortgage for a home in Florida that he purchased from his sister, retired federal appeals court Judge Maryanne Trump Barry.
The president owes Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank AG about $300 million for loans related to his Washington hotel, a Chicago tower and Florida golf resort Doral, financial disclosures and property records show. The new loan, for $11 million, is from Coral Gables, Florida-based Professional Bank. It carries a 4.5% interest rate and matures in 2048.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Trump’s $3 billion fortune doesn’t qualify him for Bloomberg’s list of the world’s 500 richest people, which bottoms out at about $4 billion. The collective wealth of that group has jumped 12% to $5.39 trillion this year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The president’s own estimates of his net worth often are higher than independent appraisals. They’re also elastic. When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, his campaign said he was worth $8.7 billion. A Bloomberg assessment that year that pegged his wealth at $2.9 billion prompted him to dismiss the appraisal as “stupid.” He then said he was worth more than $10 billion.
Much of Trump’s own valuation of his net worth stems from what he calls his brand value, which he has said is as high as $4 billion, according to unaudited financial statements he has prepared for prospective business partners.
Trump’s net worth could be higher than estimated if he owns assets or has received payments that aren’t publicly known, or if he sells properties at values above market averages. It could be lower if he has undisclosed debts or partners, or if some companies for which full financial information is unavailable are less profitable than estimated.
The president’s decision to maintain his business while in public office broke with decades of tradition and prompted lawsuits alleging he’s violating the U.S. Constitution by selling services to governments in violation of the emoluments clauses. It also has invited his critics to accuse him of profiting from the presidency, a charge he rejected in October when he told Fox News Channel that being president has cost him billions of dollars.
— With assistance by Jack Witzig, Dave Merrill, and Tom Maloney
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Trump family finances
First, recent reporting by the New York Times and ProPublica on Trump’s toxic relationship with Deutsche Bank over the same period of time that it facilitated the laundering of at least $10 billion worth of rubles would be a good place to start. The House Intelligence Committee’s subpoena of Trump’s records with the bank indicates that it agrees, but it would also do well to examine Jared Kushner’s accounts, which have also been identified in Russian transactions. In conjunction with the likely eventual release of Trump’s New York State tax returns and, in time, his federal returns, Deutsche Bank’s records should provide a much clearer picture of the president’s finances, obligations, and potential exposure to foreign influence. No other modern president has been at once so boastful and so secretive about his wealth, and certainly none in modern times have refused to release their tax returns. That Trump has attempted in the past to draw a red line around his personal and company finances might as well serve as a red blinking arrow to Congressional investigators who cannot be fired by the chief executive or controlled by his political appointees.
Michael Novakhov - SharedNewsLinks℠ | ||
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| What Mueller Didn’t Cover, But Congress Can | ||
The House Intelligence Committee hearings on the first volume of the Mueller report and the FBI’s underlying counterintelligence probe are scheduled to begin Wednesday with the testimony of two former senior Bureau officials and a former Assistant US Attorney. As one of these witnesses, Stephanie Douglas, has written of Russia’s election interference efforts in Just Security, “I am not sure there are many intelligence plans which work any better than this one.” The use of the present tense is unlikely to be accidental.
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Just Security.
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The House Intelligence Committee hearings on the first volume of the Mueller report and the FBI’s underlying counterintelligence probe are scheduled to begin Wednesday with the testimony of two former senior Bureau officials and a former Assistant US Attorney. As one of these witnesses, Stephanie Douglas, has written of Russia’s election interference efforts in Just Security, “I am not sure there are many intelligence plans which work any better than this one.” The use of the present tense is unlikely to be accidental.
Despite its thoroughness in investigating certain aspects of Russia’s election interference, the Mueller report addresses only a narrow slice of a larger intelligence story that is still unfolding. President Donald Trump’s curious relationship with Russia did not begin with the Trump Tower Moscow deal and it has not ended with his inauguration—more or less the time frame analyzed in the first volume of the report. Chairman Adam Schiff’s committee’s oversite mandate certainly includes the activities and relationships described in volume one, but is not limited to them. There are many questions to be asked, therefore, not only about why Mueller framed his investigation as he did, but also about what he left outside of the picture entirely.
So what exactly are the potential lines of further inquiry for Congress to pursue?
Questions for Mueller
Mueller’s statement on May 29 that he would provide no new information to Congress beyond what he has already concluded in writing appeared to back-foot Democrats who had hoped to make his testimony the showpiece of their enquiry. They were naïve if their surprise was genuine. Over two years, the Mueller investigation was a model of professionalism, with prosecutors maintaining essentially absolute silence in the knowledge that even the smallest verbal misstep could undermine their final report. The notion that Mueller would now affirmatively embrace testifying in a politicized public forum, in which verbal missteps are easy to make, seemed improbable. Nevertheless, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler has indicated that he may subpoena Mueller in the coming weeks or days, and his committee may not be the last to do so.
Volume one of the report raises numerous questions for which Mueller alone is the most appropriate witness, whether or not he feels able to answer. These questions include many of those proposed by the minority members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, but their list is only the beginning.
As a threshold matter, Congress and the country require a clearer explanation of exactly why Mueller’s inquiry into Russian electoral interference took the form that it did—the narrow investigation of evidence of conspiracy in Moscow’s social media interference and hacking and release of Clinton campaign emails. Specifically, what Justice Department directives or other considerations led the Special Counsel’s Office to focus only on these facets of Russia’s electoral interference and Americans’ potential involvement in those particular activities, while overlooking other activities or referring them to FBI counterintelligence?
That line of questioning seems particularly acute when Mueller’s apparent lack of investigation into the finances of candidate Trump are compared with the special counsel’s extensive forensic analysis of Paul Manafort’s accounts. At its root, Russia’s election interference was an effort to aid and compromise the Trump Organization and campaign. Trump’s personal eagerness to solicit Russian help was damning, but not necessarily compromising at least insofar as it was out in the open. Trump’s personal finances are another matter. Just as Manafort’s business dealings put him at the center of both criminal and reportedly counterintelligence investigations, an understanding of the president’s finances and potential business ties to Russia prior to the campaign are a crucial starting point for understanding the scope of the Russian effort. Mueller didn’t give us that.
Unfinished Business
Opening the House Intelligence Committee hearings with an overview of counterintelligence more generally is a wise move. Schiff would do well to ask his witnesses to lay out clearly what such an investigation consists of, how it is predicated, and how its standards differ from those of a criminal prosecution. The committee should also elicit clear answers as to when and how information learned through counterintelligence can be legally used to establish criminal predicates. Finally, the witnesses’ testimonies will hopefully emphasize the importance of counterintelligence operations to national security regardless of whether they result in prosecutions.
Any counterintelligence inquiry, much less one into the President of the United States, risks both taxing Congress’ investigatory powers and creating the appearance of a partisan fishing expedition. For that reason, the Intelligence Committee must be able to clearly articulate, for itself and for the American people, its justifications for its subpoenas of witnesses and documents.
At least four substantial lines of inquiry easily satisfy that requirement without duplicating the work of the Mueller report.
Trump family finances
First, recent reporting by the New York Times and ProPublica on Trump’s toxic relationship with Deutsche Bank over the same period of time that it facilitated the laundering of at least $10 billion worth of rubles would be a good place to start. The House Intelligence Committee’s subpoena of Trump’s records with the bank indicates that it agrees, but it would also do well to examine Jared Kushner’s accounts, which have also been identified in Russian transactions. In conjunction with the likely eventual release of Trump’s New York State tax returns and, in time, his federal returns, Deutsche Bank’s records should provide a much clearer picture of the president’s finances, obligations, and potential exposure to foreign influence. No other modern president has been at once so boastful and so secretive about his wealth, and certainly none in modern times have refused to release their tax returns. That Trump has attempted in the past to draw a red line around his personal and company finances might as well serve as a red blinking arrow to Congressional investigators who cannot be fired by the chief executive or controlled by his political appointees.
Real estate
Second, the negotiations over Trump Tower Moscow and any other projects in the region involving potentially illicit finance deserve deeper scrutiny. Trump’s interest in Moscow real estate development dates to the late Soviet era, and his latest efforts must be understood as part of a long-term strategic campaign on both sides to court one another. Since the mid-2000’s, the Trump Organization has focused largely on foreign licensing deals and extensively targeted the former Soviet republics, largely with the assistance of figures such as Michael Cohen and Felix Sater. Trump pursued but failed to execute deals in Georgia, Latvia, and Kazakhstan. In Baku, Azerbaijan, a Trump tower went up, with the design closely overseen by Ivanka Trump personally and the Trump Organization evidently unconcerned that its partners on the ground were the close family of Transportation Minister Ziya Mammadov, a man described in diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks as “notoriously corrupt even for Azerbaijan.”
One need not, however, license a tower in Baku to engage in corruption through luxury real estate. All-cash deals for overpriced properties is money laundering 101, a phenomenon Eric Trump is reported to have inadvertently described while bragging about Trump SoHo. “As the experience of the past few years shows, the best property buyers now are Russian,” he said. “They’re different in that they can go around without a mortgage loan from American banks, that require income checks and they can buy apartments with cash.” The journalist Craig Unger has identified numerous instances of Russian criminals laundering assets through Trump apartments and casinos since at least 1984, but notes, “no one has ever documented that Trump was even aware of any suspicious entanglements….”
The particular incarnation of Trump Tower Moscow at issue in the Mueller report is, of course, especially incriminating because it was contemporaneous with Trump’s campaign for president. Mueller’s conspiracy inquiry did not include within its scope any possible quid pro quo understanding that arose from these negotiations, but the timing is highly reminiscent of Russia’s apparent financial support offered to other populist movements such as Brexit, Marine Le Pen’s party in France, and Italy’s Lega Nord.
The vehicle for such support may well have been Genbank, which was prepared to support a visa application for a 2016 Trump visit. Arising swiftly from obscurity when it became a leading bank in Russian occupied Crimea, Genbank is under sanction by the Treasury Department. What’s more, the bank is partially owned by Evgeny Dvoskin, who was deported from the United States after pleading guilty in federal court to tax evasion charges. Dvoskin previously lived in Brighton Beach in much the same milieu as Sater.
As former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told ProPublica/WNYC in a recent podcast, “From a strictly counterintelligence perspective, these are exactly the sort of connections and historical overlaps that you look for when you’re trying to determine whether or not a person or an organization could be subject to foreign influence …. Why is it that there are so many … people who have official connections to sanctioned entities or banks in Russia who are interacting with the president, with his associates, with his family members. Have we ever seen that before …?”
Neither a quid pro quo relationship with the Kremlin nor corrupt financing arrangements or money laundering are necessary, however, for Trump’s behavior to pose a national security threat. His lieswere probably sufficient. That a major party candidate was pursuing a sweetheart real estate deal with a foreign hostile power while seeking the personal support of that regime’s president is bad enough. Just as dangerous was the leverage given to Russia by the Trump Organization’s eagerness to come to an agreement while lying about it repeatedly to the American public. That President Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov was even in a position to lie to the American press on behalf of the U.S. president is deeply concerning and raises the obvious question of what else is being kept from the public.
Secret communication channels
Third, while Mueller’s report identifies several backchannels attempted between the Trump campaign and transition teams and Russia, the broader counterintelligence probe must also consider Trump’s relationship with Russia while in office. Although close congressional monitoring of the executive branch’s foreign policy deliberations is atypical, this is an atypical case of a president’s diplomacy constituting a potential intelligence threat.
Consider the case of Jared Kushner, who, according to the Mueller report when informed by Michael Flynn “that there was no secure line in the Transition Team offices,” asked Ambassador Kislyak, “if they could communicate using secure facilities at the Russian Embassy. Kislyak quickly rejected that idea.” That’s where the Mueller report leaves it, and where Congress can surely pick up the thread.
Any efforts by the president to establish further backchannels while in office should be examined alongside his practice of meeting with the Russian president without note takers. In January, the Washington Post reported that “US officials said there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years.” The White House called this “outrageously inaccurate,” without denying its substance.
Political campaign
Fourth and finally, conspicuous by their absence from the report are the storylines of the National Rifle Association’s connection with Russian spy Maria Butina and of Cambridge Analytica’s potential connections to WikiLeaks and Russians. The latter has already been issued document requests by the House Judiciary Committee, but both are fundamentally matters of counterintelligence. Congress can and should investigate the roles these entities played in the 2016 election.
Volume One and the Investigation Moving Forward
Chairman Schiff has his work cut out for him both in ensuring that his committee does not descend into partisan hysterics and in finding suitable witnesses to address a complex counterintelligence investigation that has now occupied the FBI for several years. Whereas the Judiciary Committee’s hearings on obstruction perhaps suffer from the surfeit of evidence in the report—evidence both damning and quite clear, if not accepted as reality by many Republicans—much of the intelligence committee’s work will need to break new ground. On Wednesday, perhaps we will get a hint of how deep they think they can dig.
IMAGE: Chris McGrath/Getty Images
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Riddle me this: exactly how did the Deep State, anti-Trump conspirators in the FBI and CIA persuade Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to hand over sensitive internal polling data to a Russian spy? Not to mention, what did Konstantin Kilimnik do with it?
More to the point, how is Attorney General William Barr going to explain it away? Particularly in view of the fact that Manafort remains locked up in a federal slammer, having violated a plea agreement with special counsel Robert Mueller for lying to investigators about that very thing.
Because if Barr can’t explain, then all of his weasel-worded insinuations about FBI “spying” on the Trump campaign stand revealed for what they are: the desperate rationalizations of a cunning political operative willing to play along with an absurd conspiracy theory concocted to appease Donald J. Trump and distract his fervid supporters.
According to hardcore Trumpists, see, the only real misconduct that took place during the 2016 presidential election was the Russia investigation itself: a hoax cooked up by a cabal of intelligence professionals directed by the Obama White House. A “coup” attempt, Trump calls it. He’s even used the word “treason,” as if he himself were the United States.
Hint: he’s not.
More excitable Trump cultists are even predicting election year show trials in 2020. Appearing recently on Fox News, longtime Trump associate Corey Lewandowski listed several high-ranking FBI officials he expected to see indicted, especially former director James Comey for “crimes…against the Fourth Amendment.” Whatever those are. He also mentioned former CIA director John Brennan and national intelligence director James R. Clapper, Jr.
Can we pause for a moment here to observe that the U.S. government purging its own intelligence agencies would be a fulfillment of Vladimir Putin’s dreams? Such a spectacle could only make the one-time KGB agent and Russian dictator nostalgic for the Soviet Union’s glory days.
But back to Trump campaign director Paul Manafort’s secretive meeting with Kilimnik, the Russian spy, which deputy campaign manager Rick Gates also attended. A longtime Manafort employee since the American consultant’s days working for pro-Russian Ukrainian strongman Viktor Yanukovych, Kilimnik flew in from Moscow.
Hardly, then, a casual get together. They referred to Yanukovych, deposed and exiled to Russia, in coded messages as “the guy who gave you your biggest black caviar jar.” The meeting took place at the height of the campaign on August 2, 2016 in the Grand Havana Room, a penthouse cigar bar with dramatic views of the Manhattan skyline, very near Trump Tower.
Tellingly, all three left by separate exits.
According to the Mueller Report, they discussed a Ukraine “peace plan” Kilimnik had in mind, essentially a free hand for Moscow. He hoped Trump would endorse it, which, given the candidate’s repetition of Russian talking points about the occupation of Crimea, certainly seemed possible, although it never happened. (Media accounts of Manafort’s previous political work for Yanukovych led him to resign from the Trump campaign soon afterward.)
Only days before, Wikileaks had published the first batch of stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee to great fanfare. Democrats blamed Russian hackers, an accusation U.S. intelligence agencies ultimately confirmed.
Manafort has never come clean about that Kilimnik meeting. Perhaps seeking a pardon from Trump, or possibly fearful of crossing the Russians, he has chosen prison—a standup guy if you learned your ethics from “Godfather” films.
The Mueller Report says bluntly that Manafort “lied to the Office [of Special Counsel] and the grand jury about the peace plan and his meetings with Kilimnik, and his unreliability on this subject was among the reasons that the district judge found that he breached his cooperation agreement.”
Even so, Mueller established that something else the three chums discussed in the Grand Havana Room was Trump campaign tactics for the so-called “battleground states” of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota. In short, information useful for anybody planning an online disinformation campaign like the one Russian operatives successfully deployed.
Detailed internal polling would have been critical to any such effort. But Manafort lied and the Russians aren’t talking. So in the end, no conspiracy could be proved. For all the circumstantial evidence, the Mueller Report concluded that “because of questions about Manafort’s credibility and our limited ability to gather evidence on what happened to the polling data after it was sent to Kilimnik, the Office could not assess what Kilimnik (or others he may have given it to) did with it.”
That said, an innocent explanation for Manafort’s actions would be hard to imagine. But that’s not the point. Is there any way James Comey made him do it? Indeed, if they knew the facts, most Americans would think that it would be a dereliction of duty for FBI counterintelligence officers NOT to investigate.
Put Comey on trial? Not a chance.
William Barr may be an opportunist, but he’s not fool enough to volunteer to lose the trial of the century.
IMAGE: Paul Manafort, senior advisor to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, exits following a meeting of Donald Trump’s national finance team at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City, U.S., June 9, 2016. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
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| Trumpworld Insider: Trump Puffery ‘All A Lie,’ ‘Make Believe’ | The Beat With Ari Melber | MSNBC |
Trump backs down after threatening Mexico tariffs but touts a “secret” deal to avert a crisis. A Mexico official exposes Trump’s bluff, declaring “no secret deal” was ever made. Ari Melber examines Trump’s history of creating a fake crisis and then falsely claiming to solve them. Michael Wolff, author of “Siege: Trump Under Fire” takes you inside Trump’s world of “make believe.”
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5:15 PM 6/11/2019 – Trump says CIA won’t spy on Kim Jong Un after half brother’s killing – Post Link
| Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠ | ||
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| Trump says CIA won’t spy on Kim Jong Un after half brother’s killing | ||
President Donald Trump was asked on Tuesday about a Wall Street Journal report that Kim Jong Nam, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s slain half brother, was a CIA source.
Trump said he had seen the story but that nothing like that would occur under his watch.
“I saw the information about the CIA with respect to his brother or half brother, and I would tell him that would not happen under my auspice that’s for sure,” Trump told a press gaggle before boarding the presidential helicopter.
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President Donald Trump was asked on Tuesday about a Wall Street Journal report that Kim Jong Nam, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's slain half brother, was a CIA source.
Trump said he had seen the story but that nothing like that would occur under his watch.
"I saw the information about the CIA with respect to his brother or half brother, and I would tell him that would not happen under my auspice that's for sure," Trump told a press gaggle before boarding the presidential helicopter.
"I just received a beautiful letter from Kim Jong Un. I can't show you the letter, obviously, but it was very personal, very warm, very nice letter," Trump told the press. "North Korea, under his leadership, has great potential."
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