FROM LAWYER MICHAEL COHEN'S BOOK DISLOYAL…'In some ways, I knew Trump better than even his family did because I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man,' he revealed. 'I stiffed contractors on his behalf, ripped off his business partners, lied to his wife Melania to hide his sexual infidelities, and bullied and screamed at anyone who threatened Trump's path to power,' Michael Cohen admitted.
Trump's Post-Election Pardons List:
War Criminals, Crooked Politicians And Family
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/12/who-expected-otherwise-trumps-post.html
De Niro: ‘Nuts’ Giuliani Used to Prosecute the Mob — Now He Represents the Trump ‘Mob Family’
Rudy Giuliani says he isn't discouraged by the recent string of federal appeals court losses..... REMEMBER THAT LAWS ARE GAMED BY THESE FILTHY LAWYERS. WE ONLY HAVE TO LOOK AT THE LIFE OF CRIMES PREPETRATED BY LAWYER BILL CLINTON, LAWYER HILLARY CLINTON, LAWYER BARACK OBAMA, LAWYER JOE BIDEN AND HIS BRIBES SUCKING SON, HUNTER AND LAWYER ERIC HOLDER, PROBABLY ONE OF THE MOST CORRUPT A.G.s IN U.S. HISTORY!
No, It Wasn’t a Coup Attempt. It Was Another Trump Money Scam.
The president knew he couldn’t prevail in the courts but he understands how to make money by failing. He did it with casinos and he’s doing it again. ROBERT SHAPIRO
Ensuring that Trump benefits even when he loses—and so never appears to fail – is an approach he has honed over his career. It nearly always involves making himself richer. He forged the strategy in Atlantic City. When he issued $100 million in junk bonds to bail out the failing Trump Plaza casino in 1993 temporarily, he used half of those proceeds to cover his personal debts. When his three casino hotels went bankrupt, he collected $160 million in management fees from the time the hotels declared Chapter 11 to the inevitable moment, years later, when he had to surrender them to his creditors.
Trump had figured out how to win while losing other people’s money. The final collapse of his Atlantic City properties also became personal paydays: He walked away with $916 million in tax losses based on $3.4 billion in defaulted debts owed to the banks and junk bondholders that actually put up the capital. To make it legal, Trump had assumed personal liability for the loans. But that was at the heart of the scam: Since he had not put up his own money, he couldn’t claim the losses without putting himself technically “at-risk” for the loans.
Rudy Giuliani is again promising good news is on the way
When it comes to the election, the facts are clear: Joe Biden, an incompetent, corrupt, possibly senile politician who campaigned from his basement, allegedly received more votes than any president in American history. The engines for that victory were media and tech propaganda and censorship, and paper and computer ballot fraud. Nevertheless, a craven judicial class that refuses to look at the evidence, corrupt political officials, and more media and tech propaganda and censorship seem to have fixed the dial on a Biden presidency. On Christmas Day, though, President Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, promised that things are “going to blow up” going forward.
Let me say that I’m a little bit worried that Giuliani is over-promising. I know how lawyers think. They get incredibly excited about a specific fact, legal argument, or procedural point, and optimistically assume that whatever excites them is going to break the whole case wide open. Sadly, lawyers are almost always wrong about that. What ends cases isn’t some Hollywood, Perry Mason moment, with a witness suddenly admitting to a lie or a fingerprint magically appearing. Instead, it’s a long slog of aggregating facts and legal arguments.
The problem with the 2020 election is that we don’t have a long slog. Instead, we have a judicial class (reaching all the way up to the Supreme Court) that has settled for a very peculiar and deeply immoral position: In an election rife with manifest fraud, America’s judiciary would prefer to see Trump’s real votes voided through fraud, than see Biden’s fake votes properly invalidated through having that fraud exposed. Put another way, they’re voting for a dishonest Biden win than an honest Trump victory.
Given this situation, we Trump supporters keep hoping that a black swan explodes onto the scene, or even better, a fiery phoenix that blasts to ashes the arguments propping up the dissolute, demented, doddering Democrat darling, Joe Biden. (I love alliteration.)
Giuliani chose Christmas day to suggest that the fiery phoenix is on its way. In his regular podcast, Common Sense, Giuliani said that Trump’s challenges to the alleged election results are “really going to blow up” in the coming days.
The video begins with Giuliani summing up the now-familiar examples of voter fraud, and the problems that come with media and tech misinformation and censorship. He then notes that, despite media and tech company efforts, Americans are learning about the fraud, with most Republicans, many Independents, and a small but growing number of Democrats realizing that something very wrong happened on November 3 and in the days after.
Next, Giuliani updates the procedural posture of the state legislatures, which will be reviewing whether they made the appropriate decision when certifying their electors. He notes that new evidence in Arizona has the legislators questioning their decision. There’s also legislative movement in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Wisconsin is particularly interesting because of potential fraud around absentee ballots that may affect 226,000 ballots.
And then, at 12:56, Giuliani makes the headline statement:
So, starting after Christmas, this is really going to blow up because the evidence that all these crooked television networks, newspapers, big tech, and the leadership of the Democratic Party will have been giving you is false – and you’re going to find it out all at once. It can be very shocking to the country.
Sadly, Giuliani doesn’t explain whether these facts will “blow up” because legislators will be discussing them or if something else will happen that will force the facts on Americans no matter how the media and tech tyrants try to suppress them.
The most important thing Giuliani says is that we shouldn’t lose hope. And that made me think of the 2006 winter Olympics, when Lindsey Jacobellis, a snowboarder, was so certain she had won her race that she celebrated too soon, fell, and ended up with a silver medal. Meanwhile, Tanja Frieden, who had been dismissed early in the race (“Frieden is out”), got the gold.
What I hope Giuliani is telling us here is that the Democrats are Jacobellis, celebrating prematurely and going down to a loss. Meanwhile, we Trump voters are Tanja Frieden, dismissed early on, but never giving up and ultimately winning the gold.
Why Did Rudy Giuliani Submarine a BCCI Probe?
"His office’s apparent mishandling of solid BCCI leads is fair criticism of him whether he did or did not know about it: he missed a golden opportunity to examine the so-called Bank of Crooks and Criminals”
by WAYNE BARRETT
SEPTEMBER 2, 2020
The Ties That Blind: Why Did Rudy’s Office Submarine a BCCI Probe?
October 19, 1993
A specter that haunted Rudy Giuliani’s first run for mayor in 1989 — the association of his then law firm, White & Case, with the notorious international drug launderers and terrorist boosters at BCCI — is coming back to haunt him. The reason it’s returning is that much of what the former U.S. Attorney said back then to deflect media attacks about the relationship was flat-out wrong. A Voice reexamination of the issue raises new conflict-of-interest questions both about Giuliani’s late 1988–early 1989 job talks with the firm — whose ties to the world’s most corrupt bank were far more extensive than it has publicly claimed — and his office’s hitherto unreported, yet simultaneous, submarining of a BCCI probe.
Giuliani maintained then that he had only asked the firm, which had hired him just a couple of months before he formally announced his candidacy that May, if it represented any clients “under investigation by my office when I served as U.S. Attorney,” not about clients “under investigation by other prosecutors.” Concluding that the BCCI prosecutions, which then appeared to be limited to the federal indictments in Tampa, had “nothing to do with my office” and “no connection to my work,” Giuliani declared the issue “irrelevant.” He was so angered by the controversy, however, that he stormed off a WNBC-TV set when asked about it, and, six days after the story surfaced, took a leave of absence from the firm.
Bill Barr: The “Cover-Up General”
by FRANK SNEPP
Contrary to Giuliani’s 1989 claims, however, his office did receive a hand-delivered, October 31, 1988, criminal referral about BCCI signed by top Federal Reserve and New York State Banking Department officials, as well as a November 8 follow-up letter listing suspected Panamanian and Colombian drug money deposits then flowing through BCCI’s New York office. These letters, as well as at least one November 4 meeting involving high-level Federal Reserve, state banking, and Giuliani officials, were spurred by the findings of an emergency joint examination of BCCI’s New York office conducted by both regulatory agencies immediately after the October 11 Tampa indictment of BCCI (surprising the bankers at a fake bachelor party orchestrated by Customs agents made the bust a nationally televised news story). In addition to noting that the joint examination had uncovered apparent violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, the referral letter stated that “a money laundering scheme may be in progress” at the New York branch — about as vivid a declaration as normally staid bank examiners are likely to make.
Giuliani’s office was also indirectly involved in the Tampa undercover operation — indeed one of the prime launderers caught in the BCCI net, Robert “the Jeweler” Alcaino, had been indicted by Giuliani’s office that September. That is why the press statement issued by U.S. Customs Commissioner William Von Raab the day of the Tampa indictments listed his own and Giuliani’s press representatives as the only media contacts on the story. It is also why one of the Giuliani assistants who attended the November 4 meeting with the banking regulators, Steve Robinson, was handling not only the Alcaino case but that of another launderer, Colombian Pedro Charria, who also was charged with running drug money through BCCI.
Despite these many warnings about a bank already charged with $31 million in drug laundering, Giuliani’s office never got back to the bank regulators and never opened a grand jury inquiry. Several months later, a congressional investigator frustrated by Justice Department resistance to any broad-based BCCI investigation went to Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and convinced him to launch one. With the cooperation of the same state and federal banking officials mystified by the lack of response from Giuliani’s office, Morgenthau indicted and convicted a host of BCCI officials in 1991 and 1992.
His case included counts that flowed from the money-laundering charges described in the ignored 1988 referral, which was sent to top Giuliani aide Bruce Baird. Contacted by the Voice, Baird, a Washington lawyer who contributed to Giuliani’s campaign as recently as August, said he doesn’t “have a clue” about what happened in response to the letter, and can’t recall receiving it. Robinson said he was not aware a referral letter had been sent and was not involved in any action the office took after the meeting with the regulators.
The 1988 bulletins about BCCI were arriving at Giuliani’s office just as he and his top aide Denny Young, who remained at the U.S. Attorney’s office until the end of January 1989 and joined White & Case (W&C) on February 16, were having their initial discussions about possibly joining the firm. A headhunter long friendly with Giuliani who was the unofficial go-between in these negotiations, Wendeen Eolis, first talked to Giuliani about W&C’s interest in November. The Manhattan Lawyer reported at the time that formal Giuliani talks with the firm began in December after a lunch involving Young and a partner there. Eolis says: “In the fall of 1988, there were lots of law firms chomping at the bit to talk partnership to Rudy, but White & Case was one of the select few Rudy and Denny chose to consider.” A source close to the discussions says the early meetings with W&C preceded by weeks their consideration of the only other serious bidder, Proskauer, Rose, Goetz and Mendelsohn.
While W&C would later claim that its role with BCCI had “never been significant,” figures obtained by the Voice reveal that the firm earned at least $4 million in the fiscal year ending September 30, 1987, from a half dozen BCCI-related clients. Two of the partners who met with Giuliani early in the negotiations and who participated in the four-member management committee vote to offer Giuliani and Young a combined million-dollar package ($780,000 for Giuliani and $300,000 for Young, with Giuliani taking almost twice the draw of the average partner) were directly involved in the BCCI-related business — W&C chair James Hurlock, and Eugene Goodwillie Jr. Hurlock became a major Giuliani donor, raising $19,500 while contributing $2000 to the 1989 campaign himself; Goodwillie, the principal partner in charge of the BCCI work, gave $1000; W&C lawyers gave a total of $48,000.
Rudy’s Long History of Quashing Trump Probes
W&C’s 1987 client billings list $624,302 directly from BCCI and another $429,675 from the booming BCC affiliate in Colombia, which had two branches in Medellín, was closely tied to the drug trade and even became the multimillion-dollar depository for druglord Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez. It earned a mere $16,000 from the Republic of Panama that year, but that was a sharp dip from the 1986 total of $109,000, and was on top of the $300,000 Giuliani associates acknowledged in 1989 that W&C had earned over a period of a few years from the Panamanian national bank (BCCI and the Panama bank combined to hide $23 million of Noriega loot). The firm was so deeply involved with Ghaith Pharaon, the now fugitive Saudi tycoon and BCCI shareholder eventually indicted for illegally fronting for BCCI in the acquisition of three American banks, that in 1987 it listed $1.1 million in fees from Pharaon’s holding companies, Redec and Interredec; $643,000 from his oil company Attock; and $98,000 from the Pharaon Group.
W&C also reportedly earned substantial fees over the years involving Pharaon’s bank transactions, including two much-investigated ventures: his sale of the National Bank of Georgia to Clark Clifford’s First American, and the purchase of the California-based Independence Bank. Fueled by over $300 million in sometimes secret loans from BCCI, Pharaon spent years scouting and occasionally buying American banks as an apparent agent of BCCI, which was effectively barred by federal regulators from directly taking over one.
A few weeks after Pharaon’s principal representative here, Amer Lodhi, began cooperating with investigators in March 1989, he was told by W&C brass that Pharaon had issued an ultimatum: either it dropped Lodhi, who had recently taken a counsel position at W&C, or Pharaon would walk away from the firm. Lodhi, who was first involved with W&C as a young associate back in the ’70s, was shown the door within weeks of Giuliani’s ironic arrival.
When Clifford, the legendary Washington lawyer still under indictment with Morgenthau, appeared before a Senate committee probing BCCI in October 1991, he was asked about his billings to the bank. Distinguishing it from the mountain of fees he’d collected from the BCCI-backed First American, Clifford said his direct work for the bank was “an occasional matter because they used White & Case.” (Clifford added that BCCI also “sometimes used Sullivan & Cromwell” as well as one California and Florida firm.) “I think, as a matter of fact,” he concluded, “they used them a good deal more than they used us.”
The association was so strong that Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Zaccaro says it was W&C’s actions in the 1985 Independence deal that have become the legal hook giving federal prosecutors jurisdiction to bring a still-pending $37 million civil claim against Pharaon in New York courts. Zaccaro also says that W&C is “probably conflicted out” of the ongoing case because of the role the firm played in the BCCI-connected acquisition. A Federal Reserve affidavit in the case spells out two aspects of W&C’s involvement — indicating first that W&C “drafted an investment advisory agreement” naming BCCI as Pharaon’s investment adviser on the deal (a device that concealed the fact that BCCI was actually buying the bank); and second, that W&C then participated in discussions surrounding Pharaon’s repayment of a loan that had partially financed the “Independence acquisition” (the $12 million Pharaon used to repay this loan came from BCCI). The Fed document does not say that W&C had any knowledge of the full scope of BCCI’s hand in this acquisition.
Since W&C represented both Pharaon and BCCI, as well as other apparent fronts for BCCI like the First American Bank of New York (FABNY), investigators have also pondered the question of whether partners in the firm were aware of the bank’s or Pharaon’s deceptive practices with regulatory agencies. These questions have involved practices reaching back to the early ’80s when W&C, knowingly or not, helped pave the way for BCCI’s covert entry in the New York market by assisting in the sale of over 35 Bankers Trust branches to FABNY — the key to establishing the new bank as a force in this region (BCCI could only run an office, not a real branch in New York, and was thus barred by regulators from taking domestic deposits here in its own name). Bankers Trust was W&C’s largest and oldest client, and FABNY became a client too, paying the firm over $330,000 in fees from 1984 through 1986.
It was difficult for any observer not to notice the stark signs of BCCI’s involvement with FABNY since it was BCCI officials, not First American, who initiated the Bankers Trust purchase, and BCCI that ran a yearly average of $10.6 million through FABNY (more than any other American bank), with 47 BCCI affiliates maintaining accounts there. FABNY was even headquartered virtually next door to the BCCI agency on Park Avenue and took its top executives from BCCI ranks and recommendations.
No proof of any W&C misconduct in all of these dealings, however, has ever been alleged, and the firm has never even been legally targeted. When The American Lawyer reported in 1991 that Morgenthau and the Fed had subpoenaed documents related to Pharaon from W&C, a W&C spokesman said: “None of the services we have rendered to Dr. Pharaon have been called into question, nor do we expect them to be.” He has so far been proven correct. (As some measure of the depth of W&C involvement with FABNY, the firm billed the First American trustee $30,000 for gathering its extensive files related to Morgenthau’s subpoena, with Hurlock and Goodwillie’s names appearing on the bill.)
But, in view of Pharaon’s still-pending New York and federal indictments, Federal Reserve orders permanently barring him from participating in the banking business in the U.S., and the continuing civil proceedings that involve W&C, it is certainly possible that the firm was concerned in 1989, when it hired Giuliani, that the already spreading BCCI scandal might turn in Pharaon’s direction. Since Hurlock, Goodwillie, the firm’s spokesman, and the Giuliani campaign declined to answer Voice questions about these issues, it is unclear whether any of W&C’s attraction to Giuliani might’ve been connected to concerns about the expanding BCCI case.
It’s also unclear if Giuliani himself knew about the 1988 BCCI referral, follow-up letter, meeting, and other discussions that involved his office. The then deputy attorney general at Justice in Washington, Robert Mueller, did a retrospective review in August 1991, though he could not recall how his review began (“I know we had some allegation that a referral wasn’t followed through on,” he said). The Mueller review came on the heels of several events that presumably embarrassed the Justice Department into trying to come up with some explanation for how it managed to miss the biggest international bank robbery in history. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York — under Giuliani or in the years after his departure — was hardly the only federal law enforcement agency in the Reagan/Bush era to look the other way when BCCI appeared on its radar screen.
One event that may have prodded Mueller’s review was Morgenthau’s sweeping indictments, virtually all of which have led to convictions, on July 29, 1991, and the D.A.’s press statement at the time, which pointedly thanked the Federal Reserve and state banking officials who’d met with Giuliani’s staff but never said a word about any cooperation from Justice. Another was the August 1, 1991, hearing of Senator John Kerry’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, when Customs chief Von Rabb and Kerry counsel Jack Blum took turns blasting the Justice stonewall on BCCI, and when Federal Reserve counsel Virgil Mattingly mentioned for the first time that the 1988 New York referral had been sent.
Newly assigned to oversee Justice’s BCCI investigations, Mueller may have been pushed as well by two House probes. On September 5, New York congressman Charles Schumer released a report that, after several discussions with Mueller, faulted federal efforts, concluding “more could and should have been done to put BCCI out of business, sooner rather than later.” (A year later Schumer issued a much tougher review, saying law enforcement secrecy made it impossible to determine if the reason for what he described as pervasive governmental inaction on BCCI was a lack of coordination “or something more ominous, such as the possibility that criminal prosecutions may have been deflected or interfered with for illegal or nonlegitimate purposes.”)
What’s Wrong With Rudy Giuliani?
by DAN COLLINS
On September 11, when Clifford testified for the first time in a much-ballyhooed public appearance, House Banking Committee staff distributed a Federal Reserve chronology that spelled out the details of the 1988 referral, as well as a committee minority report that revealed that Fed officials had “briefed Assistant U.S. Attorneys, FBI agents and IRS agents in the Southern District of New York concerning BCCI money laundering” in November of 1988.
In response to Mueller’s 1991 questions, the two Giuliani assistants, Robinson and Mary Lee Warren, who attended the 1988 meeting with the regulators began to put together their own explanation of what happened. Both of them, to varying degrees, tried to minimize what the Fed and state officials told them. Robinson prepared a letter contending that the meeting was a getting-to-know-you session in which general information was exchanged, with BCCI discussed only intermittently and without apparent purpose. “They clearly thought there were irregularities at the bank,” Robinson told the Voice, “but they did not suggest we open an investigation.” Unaware of the referral letter to Baird, Robinson could not quite figure out what the Fed wanted his office to do, though he says they did make it clear that they could not legally provide the prosecutors with detailed information on suspect BCCI accounts unless the Southern District “opened a formal investigation” and “issued a grand jury subpoena for the documents.” He said maybe that was a “cryptic suggestion” Giuliani’s office should’ve taken. Insisting that the meeting and the bank were “no big deal” to him at the time, Robinson says that the whole issue just “fell off my map” after the session. He wrote the memo about it at the request of Warren, who was the narcotics chief in Giuliani’s office in 1988 but had become the head of the narcotics division in Washington, working under Mueller, by the time she called Robinson in 1991.
Warren, who is still at Justice and who also talked to Mueller, dismissed the meeting as a “hospitality session,” adding that the regulators “might have mentioned a bank” and that it “might have been BCCI” (though she could not recall what, if anything was said about any bank, she did remember that the group “ate cold cuts” and that she and Robinson had “a hard time finding” the Federal Reserve office). Angrily declaring that there “absolutely was not” any referral letter sent to Giuliani’s office, and refusing to listen to the three references to it in congressional documents, Warren also claimed to have “no recollection” of the follow-up memo sent to her by the Fed four days after the meeting, which sources say listed specific bank customers who may have committed criminal violations.
While a Fed participant indicated later that the session was arranged at the request of Giuliani’s office, Warren says it “certainly wasn’t us who asked for it” and that the meeting “came out of the blue” — coincidentally, just five days after the referral letter. Robinson suggested that the meeting occurred because their Charria and Alcaino probes had resulted in subpoenas for BCCI records that the regulators were aware of, though Warren says she knew nothing at the time about either drug launderers’ use of the bank.
The only aspect of this disputed meeting that both sides agree on is that “nothing ever came of it,” as Warren puts it. Fed officials later told Morgenthau’s office they could not explain why the Southern District never followed through, but Mueller did not question the regulators, nor did he review their detailed notes of the meeting. Indeed, he has no recollection of ever seeing the Fed referral letter or Robinson’s memo. “I can’t tell you I did a thorough investigation,” says Mueller, who nonetheless says he was “satisifed” that whatever was done was appropriate. “I do recall the question coming up generally why Morgenthau was doing such a good, aggressive job and yet there was no Southern District involvement. Ultimately the answer was that the case was being driven by the Federal Reserve and I don’t know why they weren’t working more closely with the Southern District.” He added that he knew none of the details of the Fed’s early efforts to enlist the Southern District in the probe, but said that he vaguely recalled that whatever was referred to Giuliani’s office “fell within the ambit of the Tampa money laundering probe” and “perhaps” wound up passed along to Florida officials. There is no evidence, in fact, that it ever was.
Baird’s memory lapse, Warren’s statement that she doesn’t know if she discussed the Fed meeting with any superiors, and Robinson’s fleeting acquaintance with the case leave no one who was associated with it who can answer questions about Giuliani’s knowledge. Giuliani won’t get on the phone either, but it is hard to imagine that this hands-on prosecutor, with his own press officer listed as fielding questions about BCCI defendants associated with the Tampa operation, had no idea that these BCCI red flags were being waved in his direction. His simple disavowal of any knowledge about the actions of his own top investigator — revealed in last week’s Voice — seemed to be enough to silence any further assessment or exploration in the media.
Rudy Guiliani: The Friend Within
Curiously, the press had no such response in 1989, continuing a drumbeat of stories about W&C clients and internal practices even when Giuliani adamantly denied any knowledge of them. Giuliani was particularly tarred with a Noriega brush in that campaign, though he insisted he had no way to know the firm represented the druglord dictator prior to press revelations. However, the Voice has obtained a W&C prospectus then used to attract new lawyers that specifically said the firm represented “foreign sovereigns” on an array of banking issues and listed Panama as one of 10 such clients. (Indeed the press had no such tolerance in the Liz Holtzman affair this year, hammering away at her though she swore under oath she had no idea her office had selected Fleet Bank as an underwriter, and all that countered her denial were reasonable inferences.)
With Giuliani’s extraordinary record as one of the country’s most effective federal prosecutors, he is certainly due the benefit of the doubt on issues involving his old office. But his service as U.S. attorney is all the public has to evaluate when it considers Giuliani, and, if he is running on that record, it is the press’s job to take a look at its possible underside. His office’s apparent mishandling of solid BCCI leads is fair criticism of him whether he did or did not know about it; he missed a golden opportunity to examine the so-called Bank of Crooks and Criminals that even loaned $9.5 million to the most ruthless Arab terrorist, Abu Nidal, who maintained a $60 million account at BCCI’s fashionable Sloane Street branch in London.
It cannot be emphasized too strongly that no one knew in 1988 when Giuliani’s top staff passed on these BCCI leads that Morgenthau would manage to put the BCCI pieces together inch by inch over a period of years, ultimately bringing this corrupt colossus down. The congressional investigator who came to Morgenthau — just six months after the federal referral to Giuliani — convinced him to take on this hunt by pointing to all the allegations in his own backyard, from the Fed laundering to the possible false filings involving FABNY. Had Morgenthau not responded, the Southern District stonewall could very well have resulted in protecting BCCI from the deathblow it deserved, leaving the investigation in the hands of the Justice officials elsewhere who had stopped short.
Rudy Giuliani’s White World
Giuliani is also responsible for his choice of a law firm. His deal with W&C was widely assailed in the legal press at the time, which found its price tag inexplicable, especially for a lawyer who was hired to run for mayor by a firm that did no real municipal work (The American Lawyer‘s Steve Brill said Giuliani was using the firm as “a meal ticket and a mail drop”).
It hardly looks now like this potential mayor did the requisite due diligence before going there, and though no one in the media has reminded the public, he went back to the firm — despite all the hard questions — when he lost. He stayed there for half a year, finally drifting away in 1990. All those W&C partners who believed so deeply in his 1989 candidacy that they dug in their pockets for dough have stopped contributing, adding to the curiosity of this temporary marriage.
As Erwin Cherovsky notes in his “Guide to New York Law Firms,” W&C “scarcely resembles the prototypically white shoe law firm which went by that name 15 years ago,” with “business connections and a gentlemen’s club atmosphere” having given way “to the hustle and bustle of a firm on the cutting edge.” Cherovsky concluded that while the firm has been on the upswing in recent years, “it still has not regained the standing it once enjoyed.” The collection of clients detailed here for the first time does little to enrich that reputation; and the vigilant Giuliani should’ve noticed.
David Dinkins has a four-year record as mayor to defend; it merits much of the criticism Giuliani has leveled. All Giuliani has is his legal practice — as a public and private advocate. Before we make him mayor, we are entitled to know as much as possible about that record. ■
Research: Jon Bowles, David Carnoy, and Adam Macy
Giuliani Not Discouraged by the Judges, Says 'We Don't Need Courts'
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Source: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
Rudy Giuliani says he isn't discouraged by the recent string of federal appeals court losses. The courts rejected lawsuits from the Trump campaign in six key states - Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada and Wisconsin. Arizona became the most recent setback on Friday when the state court threw out Arizona GOP chairwoman Kelli Ward's lawsuit alleging that ballots were switched from President Trump to Joe Biden. But Giuliani says they have a way to get around all of this.
"The simple fact is, we don't need courts," the Trump lawyer said on Hannity Friday night. "The United States Constitution gives sole power to the state legislature to decide presidential elections."
He added: "In fact, if we go back to the Founding Fathers, they'd tell us we're making a mistake. This should be thrown right to the House of Representatives and to the Senate in each state and they should hold hearings, they should have factual determinations and they should decide what the right voting account is."
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 5, 2020
"I wanted to get around the courts," he said, "so the facts could get out."
And the Trump campaign has forged ahead by presenting witnesses who say they saw some shady things going on at polling centers. For instance, the team recently provided video footage of election workers in Fulton County, Georgia hauling out suitcases full of ballots after poll watchers were told to go home. Witnesses rightly wondered why those ballots were separate from all the other ballots.
Video footage from Georgia shows that poll workers were told to stop counting and leave, while 4 people stayed behind to continue counting ballots in private pic.twitter.com/bEYdFMAvsa
— Team Trump (@TeamTrump) December 3, 2020
The above tape, Giuliani said, is "dynamite" and "represents theft of more than enough votes to turn the election around."
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What If the Deep State Has No Bottom?
Jeff Davidson
President Trump still believes in his team's effort to restore election integrity.
The only thing more RIGGED than the 2020 Presidential Election is the FAKE NEWS SUPPRESSED MEDIA. No matter how big or important the story, if it is even slightly positive for “us”, or negative for “them”, it will not be reported!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2020
No, It Wasn’t a Coup Attempt. It Was Another Trump Money Scam.
The president knew he couldn’t prevail in the courts but he understands how to make money by failing. He did it with casinos and he’s doing it again.
November 24, 2020
irraa is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
Picture of Donald Trump at at the Trump Taj Mahal, 2007
President Trump’s post-election machinations are not a bungled coup attempt; they add up to a scam to enrich himself. A coup would require broad collaboration from the courts and, failing that, from the military. The evidence suggests that Trump may not even be serious about election fraud. If he were, he would have recruited serious election law experts in the states he has contested. Instead, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell blanketed the country with a blizzard of lawsuits, offering fever dreams from the dark web as their legal justification and evidence.
The president’s post-election campaign demonstrates his singular talent for taking care of himself even when he loses. It is a momentous historic attack on the democratic process, on the order of Reconstruction. But for Trump, as Michael Corleone put it, “it’s just business.” Ultimately, Trump’s goals are to remain a star, make money, and solidify his clout. The corrosive effects on democracy are collateral damage.
Donald Trump has always craved fame, a drive common to national politicians. But he alone honed his approach to politics through his stint as a reality TV star. That’s where he learned how he could weave a narrative around his personality that tapped into the fantasies of a national audience. His quixotic claim to have won an election that he knows he lost rests entirely on his curated public persona. And as long as he pursues his claims, he is the center of attention instead of an ignored, sad, lame duck.
Trump’s intrigues embody his drive to come out ahead whether he succeeds or fails. His campaign hardly touched on the pandemic, the economy, or even his signature complaints about immigrants. Instead, he offered a narrative about systemic voter fraud and a stolen election. The strategy was smarter than Trump’s consultants and most media understood. It strengthened his connection to Americans who feel vulnerable to powerful shadowy forces beyond their reach, sufficient to drive nearly enough of them to reelect him.
This approach also laid a foundation for Trump to come out on top again, albeit not as president, and monetize the loss. Soon after the polls closed, his campaign announced an “Official Election Defense Fund” to help pay for his election challenges – with much of the proceeds diverted to his personal PAC, Save America. And by mobilizing his millions of true believers around a false narrative that his enemies have cost them their leader, Trump secured an enormous fan base for whatever he does as an ex-president. Millions will pay to attend more rallies or perhaps subscribe to a new Trump streaming service or cable network.
The strategy will give Trump a global stage to spotlight
his inevitable grievances with President Joe Biden. It
could become a means to mobilize public pressure
against ongoing criminal investigations and possible
indictments. Even from Mar-a-Lago, he could keep
officeholders aligned with his interests, even as an ex-
president.
Ensuring that Trump benefits even when he loses—and so never appears to fail – is an approach he has honed over his career. It nearly always involves making himself richer. He forged the strategy in Atlantic City. When he issued $100 million in junk bonds to bail out the failing Trump Plaza casino in 1993 temporarily, he used half of those proceeds to cover his personal debts. When his three casino hotels went bankrupt, he collected $160 million in management fees from the time the hotels declared Chapter 11 to the inevitable moment, years later, when he had to surrender them to his creditors.
Trump had figured out how to win while losing other people’s money. The final collapse of his Atlantic City properties also became personal paydays: He walked away with $916 million in tax losses based on $3.4 billion in defaulted debts owed to the banks and junk bondholders that actually put up the capital. To make it legal, Trump had assumed personal liability for the loans. But that was at the heart of the scam: Since he had not put up his own money, he couldn’t claim the losses without putting himself technically “at-risk” for the loans.
As president, Trump continues to profit from losing other people’s money. He owns 16 golf courses, all financed by accommodating lenders who put up the money to buy and operate them. As any real estate operator knows, golf courses are notorious money losers. Here too, Trump is personally “at-risk” for those loans – because otherwise, he couldn’t write off their annual losses. Based on the tax returns described in the New York Times, he claimed $15.3 million in those tax losses in 2017, his first year in the White House. For that year, he also reported personal income of nearly $14.8 million from branding deals, income tied to his old reality TV show, and revenues from favor seekers joining Mar-A-Lago and taking suites at his hotels. The losses Trump claimed for ventures paid for with other people’s money enabled him, even as president, to avoid paying personal income tax on all of his $14.8 million income.
Winning by failing has been Donald Trump’s signature business strategy, and now it is his political strategy. Since he couldn’t force the Justice Department to arrest Biden or coerce the courts to overturn the election results, he is left to enrich himself and maintain his influence with his fans and GOP elected officials. Thankfully for democracy, Americans now face not a coup d’état but yet another scam from Donald Trump – and probably not his last.
Robert Shapiro
Robert Shapiro is the chairman of Sonecon and a senior fellow at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He served as undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs under Bill Clinton.
Chris Christie: Trump’s Legal Team Has Been a ‘National Embarrassment’
22 Nov 2020606
2:11
Former Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that President Donald Trump’s legal team has been a “national embarrassment.”
Anchor George Stephanopoulos said, “Last night we saw Pat Toomey, the Senator for Pennsylvania say it’s time for the president to enable this transition. It’s time for the president to concede. The president’s response was to attack Pat Toomey on Twitter. Is it finally time for this to end?
Christie said, “Yes, and here’s the reason why. The president has had an opportunity to access the courts, and I said to you starting at 2:30 a.m. on Thursday, if you have got the evidence of fraud, present it. What’s happened here, quite frankly, the conduct of the president’s legal team has been a national embarrassment. Sidney Powell accusing Brian Kemp of a crime on television, yet being unwilling to go on TV and defend and lay out the evidence that she supposedly has. This is outrageous by any lawyer and notice, George. They won’t do it inside the courtroom. They allege fraud outside the courtroom, but when they go inside the courtroom, they don’t plead fraud, and they don’t argue fraud. This is what I was concerned about at 2:30 in the morning on Wednesday night.”
He added, “Listen, I have been a supporter of the president. I voted for him twice, but elections have consequences, and we cannot continue to act as if something happened here that didn’t happen. You have an obligation to present the evidence. The evidence has not been presented, and you must conclude. As Tucker Carlson even concluded the other night, that if you are unwilling to come forward and present the evidence, it must mean the evidence doesn’t exist. That’s what I was concerned about on election night, and I remain concerned today. I think it’s wrong. I think what you have heard a lot of Republicans start to say this. I said it on election night. I hope more say it going forward because the country is what has to matter the most. As much as I’m a strong Republican and I love my party, it’s the country that has to come first.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
De Niro: ‘Nuts’ Giuliani Used to Prosecute the Mob — Now He Represents the Trump ‘Mob Family’
20 Nov 202061
1:35
Actor Robert De Niro said Friday on ABC’s “The View” it was “nuts” that former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani as the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York prosecuted the mob and now he works for the Trump’s which De Niro called a “mob family.”
Co-host Sunny Hostin said, “I wanted to ask you about Giuliani because Rudy Giuliani is still trying to fight the results in court with ridiculous claims. Yesterday he quoted “My Cousin Vinny” in a press conference. Earlier this week, he claimed the mafia of Democrats rigged the votes for Biden. Giuliani used to prosecute actual mob bosses in the ’80s in federal court. What happened to him?”
De Niro said, “I know. I know. He’s the one who was prosecuting under the RICO Act the way I understand it, and now he’s representing a mob family. It’s crazy. It’s crazy.”
He continued, “I don’t know what happened to him. I feel bad for him.”
Hostin said, “Why do you think he would do this?”
De Niro said, “I think just for the attention, maybe desperation, maybe whatever else. That’s the only way. I can’t understand because it’s just as easy to say, ‘Look. I can’t buy into this. I can’t go along with this. It’s over. I’m out.’ He would have so much respect, and people would hire him and want to hire him, and he’s gone this other way. It’s just nuts.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
The prospect of fitting the orange man for an orange jumpsuit would create new problems of its own.
Lock Him Up?
For the Republic to survive Trump’s presidency, he must be tried for his crimes. Even if that sparks a constitutional crisis of its own. JONATHAN CHAIT
In the end, the most salient fact about Donald Trump may simply be that he is a crook. He has been defying the law since at least the early 1970s, when he battled the Department of Justice over his flagrant refusal to allow Black tenants into his father’s buildings. He has surrounded himself with mafiosi, money launderers, and assorted lowlifes. His former attorney, national security adviser, and adviser, and two of his campaign managers, have been arrested on or convicted of an array of federal crimes ranging from tax fraud to perjury to threatening witnesses. He employs the lingo of the underworld: People who cooperate with law enforcement are “flippers” and “rats”; investigators pursuing his misconduct are “dirty cops.” To him, the distinction between legal and illegal activity is merely an artificial construct enforced by sanctimonious hypocrites.
And although President Trump’s opponents have been warning Americans what will happen to their 230-year-old constitutional government if our gangster president gets another four years in office, the truth is much of the damage has already been done. An electoral defeat in November is, of course, necessary. But Trump has set off a profound crisis of democratic legitimacy that even a resounding Joe Biden victory may not completely resolve. It may not take a fully developed fascist movement to bring down the Republic. All that may be required is one well-placed criminal.
The prospect of an electorally defeated Trump, though glorious, would immediately set off a conflict between two fundamental democratic values: the rule of law and mutual toleration. The rule of law is a banal yet utterly foundational concept that the law is a set of rights and obligations, established in advance, that apply equally to everybody. It is an ideal rather than a lived reality. Black America, to take one obvious example, has never experienced equal treatment from institutions like the police and the courts. But this serves only to illustrate its essential value. The civil-rights movement has consisted in large part of fighting to extend the protection of the rule of law to Black people.
The experience of Black racial oppression shows that the absence of the rule of law is a pervasive, terrifying insecurity. A society without the rule of law is one in which the strong prey upon the weak. The small-scale version is a town where you need the local warlord or mafia boss to solve any problem or dispute; the nation-state version is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where the mafia is the government and bribery is endemic.
Mutual toleration means that political opponents must accept the legitimacy and legality of their opponents. If elected leaders can send their opponents to prison and otherwise discredit them, then leaders are afraid to relinquish power lest they be imprisoned themselves. The criminalization of politics is a kind of toxin that breaks down the cooperation required to sustain a democracy. This, along with the misogyny, was what made Trump’s embrace of “Lock her up!” so terrifying in 2016. He was already using the threat of imprisoning opponents as a political-campaign tool.
If the government is run by lawbreakers, though, the state faces a dilemma: Either the principle of equal treatment under the law or the tradition of a peaceful transition of power will be sacrificed. It’s hard to imagine any outcome under which the rule of law survives Trump unscathed.
One of the most corrosive effects of Trumpism upon the political culture has been to detach the law from any behavioral definition and to attach it to political identity. As Trump likes to say, “The other side is where there are crimes.” He has trained his supporters to understand this statement as a syllogism: If Trump’s opponents are doing something, it’s a crime; if Trump and his allies are doing it, it isn’t. The chants, which applied enough pressure to force James Comey to announce a reinvestigation of Hillary Clinton in October 2016, simply to protect the FBI from being delegitimized by Republicans after an expected Clinton victory, showed how the field had been sown for Trump even before he took office.
It is because Trump views the law as a morally empty category, a weapon for the powerful to use against their enemies, that he has spent his presidency calling for the prosecution and/or imprisonment of a constantly growing list of adversaries: Joe Biden and Barack Obama (for “spying” and “treason”), House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (for paraphrasing Trump’s Ukraine phone call in a speech), John Kerry (for allegedly violating the Logan Act), John Bolton (for writing a tell-all book), Joe Scarborough (for the death of a former staffer), Nancy Pelosi (for tearing up his State of the Union Address), and social-media firms (for having too many liberals). Trump has alleged a variety of crimes against at least four former FBI officials and three Obama-era national-security officials.
Trump has eagerly seized upon the sporadic riots and looting that followed George Floyd’s murder, but no actual violence is required for him to equate his opposition in general with illegal subversion of the state. “You don’t hand matches to an arsonist, and you don’t give power to an angry, left-wing mob,” he said in 2018. “And that’s what the Democrats are becoming.” Just as the term fake news used to describe deliberately false stories written by pseudo-journalists but was repurposed by Trump as an insult for very real reporting about his administration, crimes has ceased to denote violations of written law and become instead a catchall description for any anti-Trump activity.
Even though it is staring us in the face every day — or perhaps for that reason — we have failed to grasp how profoundly Trump has undermined the rule of law and how irreversible the damage may be. His contempt for the law is not merely incidental. He never put himself forward as a straight arrow. As a first-time major-party candidate, he depicted his history of dealing with politicians as a sequence of successful bribes. He spent years railing against the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a law banning bribes of foreign officials, and tried to weaken its enforcement as president, reportedly complaining, “It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas.” When he sought to collect a portion of the fee for brokering the sale of TikTok, Trump cited the long-standing practice of tenants paying off landlords to get rent-controlled apartments: “It’s a little bit like the landlord-tenant. Without a lease, the tenant has nothing. So they pay what’s called key money, or they pay something.” His vision of the good society is one in which powerful businessmen grease palms to get things done.
Two years ago, the New York Times, using documents supplied by his niece, Mary Trump, proved that the president had engaged in widespread fraud involving a fake company and falsifying financial information to steal millions of dollars. Also that year, the federal government said he had ordered a felony by directing hush money to his former mistresses during his campaign. His business paid millions for defrauding enrollees in a fake university. And he admitted using the Trump Foundation, supposedly a charity, to funnel money to his campaign and business.
At some point, the impunity will end. The law is coming.
Unsurprisingly, an enormous number of his political aides have been charged with, or convicted of, felonies: Michael Cohen (tax fraud, lying to Congress), Paul Manafort and Rick Gates (several financial crimes), Roger Stone (obstruction, witness tampering, and lying to Congress), Michael Flynn (lying to the FBI), Steve Bannon (fraud), Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman (illegal campaign donations and falsifying statements and records), so far.
That Trump made it to 2017 without being personally convicted of a crime is itself a testament to the ineffectiveness of white-collar-criminal-law enforcement. That Trump has not been charged since taking office is owed to the privileges of being president of the United States. Because the Justice Department has a policy against charging the president with crimes, it did not indict him for the same crime Cohen went to jail for — even though Trump had ordered Cohen to commit it. The same protection held back Robert Mueller from officially describing the many actions Trump had taken to obstruct the FBI’s investigation as “obstruction of justice.” And his standing as president has allowed him to keep his tax returns out of the hands of New York prosecutors.
But at some point, the impunity will end. The law is coming.
At the moment, Trump is reportedly the subject of three investigations. Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., New York State attorney general Letitia James, and Southern District of New York acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss are all probing reported crimes by the Trump administration, ranging from tax fraud to embezzling funds at his suspiciously expensive inauguration, a large proportion of which was spent at his own properties. (Strauss took over after William Barr clumsily attempted to remove her boss, who had clashed with Barr over his investigations into Trump’s misconduct, but is reputed to be independent.)
Even beyond these ongoing probes, the potential for criminal liability is vast. Trump was impeached for leveraging support from Ukraine for an announcement of an investigation of Joe Biden. But the plot reportedly involved Rudy Giuliani and his clients hitting up Ukrainians for business deals, even as Giuliani was representing Trump’s agenda — which is to say, they were apparently seeking a personal payoff in addition to a political one. The Washington Post has pried loose from the Secret Service just a portion of the records of its spending at Trump properties, giving evidence of, at minimum, severe conflicts of interest.
Trump has fired and intimidated the inspectors general who monitor the executive branch for misconduct and has virtually halted all cooperation with congressional oversight. It stands to reason that turning over more rocks will reveal even more crimes. Upholding the rule of law is going to lead straight to the kind of grisly spectacle Americans associate with banana republics: the former president leaving office and going on trial.
“Usually, these kleptocracies are the ones that hang on to power most bitterly,” says Daniel Ziblatt, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of How Democracies Die. Trump is particularly dependent on his incumbency. His various legal appeals to keep his financial information from prosecutors have relied on his status as president, and he has used campaign funds to finance his legal defenses. Most important, he has bluntly wielded his power either to pardon his allies or to get the Justice Department to withdraw its charges as a signal of the benefit of remaining loyal.
The political climate will not easily permit a peaceful, straightforward prosecution. The maniacal Republican response to the past two Democratic administrations shows that the prospect of any real Republican cooperation is a fantasy. The fever is not going to break. So what is a post-Trump administration to do?
Biden’s position on this problem is easy enough: He will leave it up to the prosecutors. But what will the prosecutors do? The prospect of fitting the orange man for an orange jumpsuit, delicious as it may seem for MSNBC viewers (or readers of this magazine), would create new problems of its own. To begin with, it would be essential that any prosecution of Trump not only be fair and free of any political interference but be seen as fair. A prosecution that appears vindictive would serve only to confirm the politicization of the law that Trump has done so much to advance. Prosecutors in New York and the Justice Department can make every effort to apply the law neutrally, not singling out Trump for punishment, but it will be difficult to avoid the impression of banana-republicanism formed by the sequence of a Trump criminal trial following an election defeat — especially when his supporters have been primed to fight “witch hunts” for years. Want to lock up the “Lock her up!” guy? Good luck avoiding the appearance of turnabout, however legally legitimate the process.
An incoming Biden administration is going to need a peaceful transition — not least because the federal government will probably be either distributing or in the final stages of approving vaccines and treatments for a pandemic that has killed nearly 200,000 Americans and is crippling the economy. Biden will require months of some form of broad social cooperation with measures like mask wearing and vaccine uptake, all of which could easily and legally be sabotaged by a cornered Trump.
The prospect of fitting the orange man for an orange jumpsuit would create new problems of its own.
Biden has emphasized some measure of social peace as a campaign message and will be tempted to offer a pardon as a gesture of magnanimity — why not use all his partisan chits on substantive policy goals?
Perhaps the closest American analogue is Richard Nixon, whose fate was sealed by Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon. After an immediate backlash, Ford came to be seen in later decades as a statesman and was given the Profile in Courage Award by the John F. Kennedy Library a quarter-century later in recognition of what became a bipartisan consensus about the greater need for mutual toleration than the rule of law.
From the standpoint of 2020, that decision has a different cast. The president has emulated Nixon, borrowing everything from his slogan (even Nixon and his vice-president Spiro Agnew resigning in disgrace somehow did not prevent their “Law and Order” slogan from surviving them in unironic form) to his position that if the president does something, it’s not illegal. The reforms put in place after Nixon, such as establishing the offices of inspector general and walling off the attorney general from political prosecutions, are in ruins. Trump adviser Roger Stone has a massive tattoo with Nixon’s likeness on his back and revels in crookedness. Stone gave Trump a campaign back channel to the stolen Clinton emails, then openly promised not to “roll” on the boss and was duly pardoned.
Had Nixon faced prison, rather than walking away a statesman, would Stone have set out to help elect a crook to the highest office in the land? And would that president have gleefully mimicked so many of his crimes? If Trump isn’t prosecuted, what will his successors do?
To think about a society in which Trump’s gangster-state logic prevails, consider Russia. Putin is one of the richest people in the world, having amassed a net worth believed to range up to $200 billion. Obviously, one doesn’t make that kind of money honestly while spending decades in public service. Putin’s political network is honeycombed with criminals, whose impunity is a direct function of their ties to him. The way you can tell whether wealthy Russians have fallen out of favor with the regime is that they’re charged with crimes. While Americans tend to think of Putin as an autocrat, it’s more accurate to see him as the boss of a criminal syndicate that gained control of a failing state. Even in a second Trump term, America would be many steps removed from an oligarchy like Russia’s but still several steps closer than it had been a short while before.
Trump deeply admires Putin. (This is, in fact, the most innocuous explanation for the submissive devotion he gives the Russian president.) Using the tools available to him, Trump has tried to replicate a version of the Putin approach to criminal justice. He has lavishly used the pardon power to exonerate a wide array of criminals loyal to him or his party: Joe Arpaio, Scooter Libby, Dinesh D’Souza, Rod Blagojevich (who, not coincidentally, is the highest-ranking Democrat to endorse the president), and Stone. Trump promised pardons to officials who would violate the law on his behalf.
Legal scholar and Social Democrat Ernst Fraenkel fled Germany in 1938 and three years later published The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. The “dual state” describes the way in which Nazi Germany continued to operate under the formal, democratic legal apparatus that had predated Hitler, while running a parallel state that violated its own laws. Legal impunity for the ruling party is the key pillar in a system that can destroy the rule of law even while retaining laws, judges, and other formal trappings of a working system.
Trump hasn’t created a dual state, but he has laid the groundwork for it, not only in his rhetorical provocations but also as a kind of legal manifesto. In a series of letters, Trump’s lawyers have argued that he enjoys almost complete immunity from investigation by law enforcement or Congress. “The President not only has unfettered statutory and Constitutional authority to terminate the FBI Director, he also has Constitutional authority to direct the Justice Department to open or close an investigation, and, of course, the power to pardon any person before, during, or after an investigation and/or conviction,” they wrote in 2017. Last year, the president and his lawyers described impeachment as “illegal,” “unconstitutional efforts to overturn the democratic process,” and “no more legitimate than the Executive Branch charging members of Congress with crimes for the lawful exercise of legislative power.” One of his lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, wrote that Trump could not be impeached even if he handed over Alaska to Russia.
Trump’s incredible claim to be both the sole arbiter of the law and beyond its reach was on vivid display at his nominating convention, a festival of televised lawbreaking. The Hatch Act, passed in 1939, prohibits using government property to promote any candidate for office. It has been observed continuously, often in exacting detail. Political scientist Matt Glassman recalled working as a staffer at the lowly Congressional Research Service, where he had to remove old political memorabilia, like a 1960 Kennedy poster and an 1884 Blaine-Logan handkerchief, lest those items be mistaken by passersby as endorsements for a living candidate.
Trump has smashed the Hatch Act to bits, to the point where he turned the White House into a stage for his party convention. It isn’t that he was simply willing to pay the price of breaking the law in order to get the best backdrop. Trump’s aides told the New York Times he “enjoyed the frustration and anger he caused by holding a political event on the South Lawn of the White House, shattering conventional norms and raising questions about ethics-law violations,” and “relished the fact that no one could do anything to stop him.” Unashamed legal impunity was itself the message.
A democracy is not only a collection of laws, and norms of behavior by political elites. It is a set of beliefs by the people. The conviction that crime pays, and that the law is a weapon of the powerful, is a poison endemic to states that have struggled to establish or to maintain democracies. If the post-election period descends into a political crisis, having all the relevant prosecutors promise immunity for Trump would be the most tempting escape valve. Yet the price of escaping the November crisis, and simply moving past Trump’s criminality by allowing him to ease off to Mar-a-Lago, is simply too high for our country to bear.
Gulag, Anne Applebaum’s 2003 history of Soviet concentration camps, argues in its conclusion that the failure to come fully to terms with the crimes of the old regime had “consequences for the formation of Russian civil society, and for the development of the rule of law … To most Russians, it now seems as if the more you collaborated in the past, the wiser you were.” This observation, written in the early years of Putin’s regime, captures a cynicism that pervades Putin’s now-almost-unchallenged autarky.
Ziblatt likewise suggested to me that Spain’s handling of the post-Franco era has soured in retrospect. In the immediate wake of Spanish democratization, letting many of Franco’s fascist collaborators walk away scot-free seemed like a masterstroke. But over time, a “growing resentment of a collusive bargain between elites” discredited the system and fueled the growth of extremism.
Before 1945, the international norm held that deposed rulers, however crooked or abusive, should be allowed exile. Kathryn Sikkink’s The Justice Cascade: How Human-Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics captures the modern norm, which emphasizes the social value of transparent and fair prosecutions as a deterrent. These cases apply most often, though, to states transitioning from dictatorship to democracy. There is less precedent for what to do when a reasonably healthy democracy elevates a career criminal to the presidency.
Trump’s unique contribution to the decay of the rule of law has been to define criminality in political terms, but he has also joined a very old project in which the political right has long been engaged: associating criminality with a category of people, so that knocking over a 7-Eleven makes you a “criminal” but looting a pension fund does not. Trump’s unusual level of personal crookedness dovetails with a familiar reactionary agenda of combining permissive enforcement of white-collar crime with a crackdown on street crime — or, as Trump calls it, simply “crime.” The implicit meaning of “Law and Order” is that order is distinct from lawfulness and that some crimes create disorder while others do not.
Trump’s reversals of Obama-era police reforms and his open contempt for the law send a signal about whom the law constrains and whom it protects. The fashioning of a more equal society means sending a different message: The rule of law must bind everyone, just as it protects everyone. A world where the power of the state can be brought to bear against a person who was once its most famous symbol of wealth is one where every American will more easily imagine a future in which we are all truly equal before the law.
*This article appears in the September 14, 2020, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!
POLITICS 5:30 A.M.
The People v. Donald J. Trump
The criminal case against him is already in the works — and it could go to trial sooner than you think.
By Jeff Wise
The defendant looked uncomfortable as he stood to testify in the shabby courtroom. Dressed in a dark suit and somber tie, he seemed aged, dimmed, his posture noticeably stooped. The past year had been a massive comedown for the 76-year-old former world leader. For decades, the bombastic onetime showman had danced his way past scores of lawsuits and blustered through a sprawl of scandals. Then he left office and was indicted for tax fraud. As a packed courtroom looked on, he read from a curled sheaf of papers. It seemed as though the once inconceivable was on the verge of coming to pass: The country’s former leader would be convicted and sent to a concrete cell.
The date was October 19, 2012. The man was Silvio Berlusconi, the longtime prime minister of Italy.
Here in the United States, we have never yet witnessed such an event. No commander-in-chief has been charged with a criminal offense, let alone faced prison time. But if Donald Trump loses the election in November, he will forfeit not only a sitting president’s presumptive immunity from prosecution but also the levers of power he has aggressively co-opted for his own protection. Considering the number of crimes he has committed, the time span over which he has committed them, and the range of jurisdictions in which his crimes have taken place, his potential legal exposure is breathtaking. More than a dozen investigations are already under way against him and his associates. Even if only one or two of them result in criminal charges, the proceedings that follow will make the O. J. Simpson trial look like an afternoon in traffic court.
It may seem unlikely that Trump will ever wind up in a criminal court. His entire life, after all, is one long testament to the power of getting away with things, a master class in criminality without consequences, even before he added presidentiality and all its privileges to his arsenal of defenses. As he himself once said, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” But for all his advantages and all his enablers, including loyalists in the Justice Department and the federal judiciary, Trump now faces a level of legal risk unlike anything in his notoriously checkered past — and well beyond anything faced by any previous president leaving office. To assess the odds that he will end up on trial, and how the proceedings would unfold, I spoke with some of the country’s top prosecutors, defense attorneys, and legal scholars. For the past four years, they have been weighing the case against Trump: the evidence already gathered, the witnesses prepared to testify, the political and constitutional issues involved in prosecuting an ex-president. Once he leaves office, they agree, there is good reason to think Trump will face criminal charges. “It’s going to head toward prosecution, and the litigation is going to be fierce,” says Bennett Gershman, a professor of constitutional law at Pace Law School who served for a decade as a New York State prosecutor.
Here, according to the legal experts, is how Trump could become the first former president in American history to find himself on trial — and perhaps even behind bars.
You might think, given all the crimes Trump has bragged about committing during his time in office, that the primary path to prosecuting him would involve the U.S. Justice Department. If Joe Biden is sworn in as president in January, his attorney general will inherit a mountain of criminal evidence against Trump accumulated by Robert Mueller and a host of inspectors general and congressional oversight committees. After the DOJ’s incoming leadership is briefed on any sensitive matters contained in the evidence, federal prosecutors will move forward with their investigations of Trump “at the fastest pace they can,” says Mary McCord, the former acting assistant attorney general for national security.
They’ll have plenty of potential charges to choose from. Both Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee — a Republican-led panel — have extensively documented how Trump committed obstruction of justice (18 U.S. Code § 73), lied to investigators (18 U.S. Code § 1001), and conspired with Russian intelligence to commit an offense against the United States (18 U.S. Code § 371). All three crimes carry a maximum sentence of five years in prison — per charge. According to legal experts, federal prosecutors could be ready to indict Trump on one or more of these felonies as early as the first quarter of 2021.
But prosecuting Trump for any crimes he committed as president would face two significant and perhaps fatal hurdles. First, on his way out of office, Trump could decide to preemptively pardon himself. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he issues a broad, sweeping pardon for any U.S. citizen who was a subject, a target, or a person of interest of the Mueller investigation,” says Norm Eisen, who served as counsel to House Democrats during Trump’s impeachment. Since scholars are divided on whether a self-pardon would be constitutional, what happens next would depend almost entirely on which judge ruled on the issue. “One judge might say, ‘Sorry, presidential pardons is something the Constitution grants exclusively to the president, so I’m going to dismiss this,’ ” says Gershman. “Another judge might say, ‘No, the president can’t pardon himself.’ ” Either way, the case would almost certainly wind up getting litigated all the way to the Supreme Court, perhaps more than once, causing a long delay.
Even if the courts ultimately ruled a self-pardon unconstitutional, another big hurdle would remain: Trump’s claims that “executive privilege” bars prosecutors from obtaining evidence of presidential misconduct. The provision has traditionally been limited to shielding discussions between presidents and their advisers from external scrutiny. But Trump has attempted to expand the protection to include pretty much anything that he or anyone in the executive branch has ever done. William Consovoy, one of Trump’s lawyers, famously argued in federal court that even if Trump gunned someone down in the street while he was president, he could not be prosecuted for it while in office. Although the courts have repeatedly ruled against such sweeping arguments, Trump will continue to claim immunity from the judicial process after he leaves office — a surefire delaying tactic. “If federal charges were ever brought, it is unlikely that a trial would be scheduled or start anytime in the foreseeable future,” says Timothy W. Hoover, president of the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. By the time any federal charges come to trial, Trump is likely to be either senile or dead. Even if he broke the law as president, the experts agree, he may well get away with it.
But federal charges aren’t the likeliest way that The People v. Donald J. Trump will play out. State laws aren’t subject to presidential pardons, and they cover a host of crimes beyond those committed in the White House. When it comes to charging a former president, state attorneys general and county prosecutors can go places a U.S. Attorney can’t.
According to legal experts, the man most likely to drag Trump into court is the district attorney for Manhattan, Cyrus Vance Jr. It’s a surprising scenario, given Vance’s well-deserved reputation as someone who has gone easy on the rich and famous. After taking office in 2010, he sought to reduce Jeffrey Epstein’s status as a sex offender, dropped an investigation into whether Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. had committed fraud in the marketing of the Trump Soho, and initially decided not to prosecute Harvey Weinstein despite solid evidence of his sex crimes. “He has a reputation for being particularly cautious when it comes to going after rich people, because he knows that those are the ones who can afford the really formidable law firms,” says Victoria Bassetti, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice who served on the team of lawyers that oversaw the Senate impeachment trial of Bill Clinton. “And like most prosecutors, Vance is exceptionally protective of his win-loss rate.”
But it was Vance who stepped up when the federal case against Trump faltered. “He’s a politician,” observes Martin Sheil, a former IRS criminal investigator. “He’s got his finger up. He knows which way the wind’s blowing, and he knows the wind in New York is blowing against Trump. It’s in his political interest to join that bandwagon.”
Last year, after U.S. Attorneys in the Southern District dropped their investigation into the hush money that Trump had paid Stormy Daniels, Vance took up the case. Suspecting that l’affaire Stormy might prove to be part of a larger pattern of shady dealings, his office started digging into Trump’s finances. What Vance is investigating, according to court filings, is evidence of “extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization,” potentially involving bank fraud, tax fraud, and insurance fraud. The New York Times has detailed how Trump and his family have long falsified records to avoid taxes, and during testimony before Congress in 2019, Trump’s longtime fixer Michael Cohen stated that Trump had inflated the value of his assets to obtain a bank loan.
Crucially, all of these alleged crimes occurred before Trump took office. That means no claims of executive privilege would apply to any charges Vance might bring, and no presidential pardon could make them go away. A whole slew of potential objections and delays would be ruled out right off the bat. What’s more, the alleged offenses took place less than six years ago, within the statute of limitation for fraud in New York. Vance, in other words, is free to go after Trump not as a crooked president but as a common crook who happened to get elected president. And the fact that he has been pursuing these cases while Trump is president is a sign that he won’t be intimidated by the stature of the office after Trump leaves it.
In writing up an indictment against Trump, Vance’s team could try to string together a laundry list of offenses in hopes of presenting an overwhelming wall of guilt. But that approach, experts warn, can become confusing. “A two- or three-count indictment is easier to explain to a jury,” says Ilene Jaroslaw, a former assistant U.S. Attorney. “If they think the person had criminal intent, it doesn’t matter if it’s two counts or 20 counts, in most cases, because the sentence will be the same.”
There are two main charges that Vance is likely to pursue. The first is falsifying business records (N.Y. Penal Law § 175.10). During Cohen’s trial, federal prosecutors filed a sentencing memorandum that explained how the Trump Organization had mischaracterized hush-money payments as “legal expenses” in its bookkeeping. Under New York law, falsifying records by itself is only a misdemeanor, but if it results in the commission of another crime, it becomes a felony. And false business records frequently lead to another offense: tax fraud (N.Y. Tax Law § 1806).
If Trump cooked his books, observes Sheil, that false information would essentially “flow into the tax returns.” The first crime begets the second, making both the bookkeeper and the tax accountant liable. “Since you have several folks involved,” Sheil says, “you could either bring a conspiracy charge, maximum sentence five years, or you could charge each individual with aiding and abetting the preparation of a false tax return, with a max sentence of three years.”
To build a fraud case against Trump, Vance subpoenaed his financial records. But those records alone won’t be enough: To secure a conviction, Vance will need to convince a jury not only that Trump cheated on his taxes but that he intended to do so. “If you just have the documents, the defense will say that defendant didn’t have criminal intent,” Jaroslaw explains. “I call it the ‘I’m an idiot’ defense: ‘I made a mistake. I didn’t mean to do anything.’ ” Unfortunately for Trump, both Cohen and his longtime accountant, Allen Weisselberg, have already signaled their willingness to cooperate with prosecutors. “What’s great about having an accountant in the witness stand is that they can tell you about the conversation they had with the client,” Jaroslaw says.
Through appeals, Trump has managed to drag out the battle over his tax returns. The case has gone all the way to the Supreme Court, back down to the district court, and back up to the appeals court. But Trump has lost at every stage, and it appears that his appeals could be exhausted this fall. Once Vance gets the tax returns, Eisen estimates, he could be ready to indict Trump as early as the second quarter of 2021.
Sheil, for one, believes Vance may already have Trump’s financial records. It’s routine procedure, he notes, for criminal tax investigators working with the Manhattan DA to obtain personal and business tax returns that are material to their inquiry. But issuing a subpoena to Trump’s accountants may have been a way to signal to them that they could face criminal charges themselves unless they cooperate in the investigation.
Once indicted, Trump would be arraigned at New York Criminal Court, a towering Art Deco building at 100 Centre Street. Since a former president with a Secret Service detail can hardly slip away unnoticed, he would likely not be required to post bail or forfeit his passport while awaiting trial. His legal team, of course, would do everything it could to draw out the proceedings. Filing appeals has always been just another day at the office for Trump, who, by some estimates, has faced more than 4,000 lawsuits during the course of his career. But this time, his legal liability would extend to numerous other state and local jurisdictions, which will also be building cases against him. “There’s like 1,037 other things where, if anybody put what he did under a microscope, they would probably find an enormous amount of financial improprieties,” says Scott Shapiro, director of the Center for Law and Philosophy at Yale University.
Even accounting for legal delays, many experts predict that Trump would go to trial in Manhattan by 2023. The proceedings would take place at the New York State Supreme Court Building. Assuming that the judge was prepared for an endless barrage of motions and objections from Trump’s defense team, the trial might move quite quickly — no longer than a few months, according to some legal observers. And given the convictions that have been handed down against many of Trump’s top advisers, there’s reason to believe that even pro-Trump jurors can be persuaded to convict him. “The evidence was overwhelming,” concluded one MAGA supporter who served on the jury that convicted Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman. “I did not want [him] to be guilty. But he was, and no one is above the law.”
Trump’s conviction would seal the greatest downfall in American politics since Richard Nixon. Unlike his associates who were sentenced to prison on federal charges, Trump would not be eligible for a presidential pardon or commutation, even from himself. And while his lawyers would file every appeal they can think of, none of it would spare Trump the indignity of imprisonment. Unlike the federal court system, which often allows prisoners to remain free during the appeals process, state courts tend to waste no time in carrying out punishment. After someone is sentenced in New York City, their next stop is Rikers Island. Once there, as Trump awaited transfer to a state prison, the man who’d treated the presidency like a piggy bank would receive yet another handout at the public expense: a toothbrush and toothpaste, bedding, a towel, and a green plastic cup.
*This article appears in the September 14, 2020, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!
George Clooney Trashes Trump as a ‘Charismatic Carnival Barker’
Actor George Clooney once again slammed Republicans and President Donald Trump, who the Midnight Sky actor trashed as a “charismatic carnival barker.”
The New York Times asked the Argo star about his impression of Joe Biden presidency and whether or not Biden will be able to reach across the aisle to Republicans like he claims he can. Clooney replied that Biden will not be able to work with the GOP and used Texas Sen. Ted Cuz as an example of why Biden’s effort to work with Republicans will fall apart.
Clooney added that many of the Republicans in the Senate won’t want to work with Biden because they want to be president themselves.
“Every single one of these guys have aspirations for bigger things — Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Mike Pence, all of them,” Clooney told the Times. “They think people will travel with them because, ‘I’ve stuck with you, Don,’ but the truth is, they won’t. They stay with Donald because Donald, for all of his immense problems as a human being, is a charismatic carnival barker.”
Clooney also slammed the president for refusing to support a coronavirus mask mandate, which already exist in most states.
“The idea that we politicize things like this is crazy,” Clooney said, ignoring the left’s efforts over the very issue. “Had Trump come out at the very beginning and said, ‘We’re all going to wear masks because it’s the right thing to do and it’s going to save a lot of lives,’ the whole country would have gotten behind him, and he would have been re-elected. But he thought it would affect his economy, so he chose to say it didn’t exist. And now we’re going to have 350,000 people dead.”
Clooney, a supporter of far-left, Democrat causes and candidates, who has donated millions to the Democrat Party, closed his discussion of politics by denying any interest in running for office himself.
“That’d be fun, wouldn’t it? Gee, what a great way to spend the last third of my life, trying to make deals with people that have no intention of making deals,” he said drily.
Watch below:
Earlier this week, Clooney gushed over Joe Biden, calling him “very smart, wise man,” which the Ocean’s 8 star said America’s “going to need that after we’ve lost probably close to 400,000 people by the time we get [the coronavirus pandemic] in our rear-view mirror.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston.
Rev. Franklin Graham: ‘Pray God’ Spares the Nation ‘from the Evil Before Us’
On Christmas Eve evangelical leader Rev. Franklin Graham asked Christians to pray that America will be spared “from the evil that is before us.”
A supporter of President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, Graham asked his Twitter followers to pray for the president, that God will grant him “wisdom in the coming days.”
I would like to ask you to especially pray for our nation & our president this weekend. Pray that God’s hand would be on President @realDonaldTrump, & that He would give him wisdom in the coming days; & pray that God would spare our nation from the evil that is before us.
— Franklin Graham (@Franklin_Graham) December 24, 2020
On Saturday he posted to Facebook that Trump “has been maligned, falsely accused, and attacked on every front since before the election in 2016.”
“When President Trump says that this election has been rigged or stolen, I tend to believe him,” he wrote. “He has a track record of being right.”
The president of international aid charity Samaritan’s Purse, Graham also acknowledged the effects of the coronavirus lockdowns in an op-ed at Fox News.
“This is a Christmas unlike any other,” he wrote, one that finds many Americans filled with “fear and anxiety.”
God doesn’t guarantee we’ll have perfect health or financial security throughout the pandemics and storms of life, but he does promise a life filled with his peace, joy, freedom, purpose and love… https://t.co/tNDA2PuqAX
— Franklin Graham (@Franklin_Graham) December 24, 2020
“Large family gatherings and office parties have been replaced with grim lockdowns, quarantines and isolation,” he observed. “What used to be the warmest and most welcoming time of the year can now feel sterile and cold.”
The Christian leader also noted that while there is hope in new vaccines to combat the infection caused by the coronavirus, still “there isn’t a vaccine on Earth that can protect us from worry, depression, or fear.”
The only way to heal a “sick spirit,” Graham said, is “to find healing for deep, spiritual needs, and that’s in Jesus Christ – the hope of Christmas.”
Jesus, he continued, is “the only cure for a disease of the heart that has infected all mankind – sin.”
God’s “rescue mission to save us from our sins,” Graham said, happened on that first Christmas morning.
Franklin Graham: ‘I Am Grateful to God’ for ‘the Last Four Years’ https://t.co/wbSLJ4snxX via @BreitbartNews Thank you Franklin!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 16, 2020
“When Christ was born of a virgin in the town of Bethlehem on that first Christmas morning, true hope was born for you and me,” he explained, adding:
While everything else may lock down, isn’t it reassuring to know there is a God who never shuts down? He will never isolate or leave those who trust in him alone.
“This is the good news of Christmas,” Graham wrote. “Jesus Christ changed the world on that first Christmas day and he has the power to change your life today and for all eternity.”
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