Never Trump Ex-Republican: Why I Will Vote for Any 2020 Democratic Nominee

While driving between my law firm's offices today, I heard Thomas Nichols as a guest on the POTUS - Politics of the United States - channel on satellite radio.  The topic was his column last week in USA Today as to why he would vote for almost any Democrat nominee (other than Tulsi Gabbard and Marianne Williamson) in the 2020 presidential election.  Nichols is a former Republican, a Never Trumper, and is an academic specialist on international affairs, currently a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and at the Harvard Extension School. He's no intellectual slouch and knows much about the U.S. Constitution and foreign affairs. His work deals with issues involving Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security affairs.  His radio remarks were so strong that I found the USA Today piece which ought to be required reading for every voter in America since it makes it clear (i) why people MUST get to the polls in 2020, and (ii) why virtually anyone other than Trump would put the nation on a safer course.  Here are column excerpts:

I don’t care if Sen. Elizabeth Warren is a mendacious Massachusetts liberal. She could tell me that she’s going to make me wear waffles as underpants and I’ll vote for her. I don’t care if Sen. Kamala Harris is an opportunistic California prosecutor who wants to relitigate busing. She could tell me that I have to drive to work in a go-cart covered with Barbie decals and I’ll vote for her. I don’t care if Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is a muddle-headed socialist from a rural class-warfare state (where I once lived as one of his constituents). He could tell me he’s going to tax used kitty litter and I’ll vote for him.

All of the policy “what about” hypotheticals from my conservative friends are diversions. They’re trying to move the argument to policy to blind us to the reality that President Donald Trump is both unstable and compromised.

As I have argued for well over two years, there is plenty of evidence that the president is compromised by our most dedicated enemy. Even before the Mueller report laid bare the degree to which the Trump campaign welcomed Russian help, it was obvious that Trump feared Russian President Vladimir Putin — not only because Putin knew how much Trump had lied to the American people during the campaign about his dealings with Russia, but also likely because Moscow holds Trump’s closest financial secrets after years of shady dealings with Russian oligarchs.

Compulsive lying, fantastic and easily refuted claims, base insults and bizarre public meltdowns, however, are indeed signs of serious emotional problems. Trump has never been a reasonable man, but for two years, he has gotten worse. He literally cannot tell the truth from a lie, he often seems completely unable to comprehend even basic information, and he flies off the handle in ways that would make most of us take our children to a pediatrician for evaluation.

This is why policy doesn’t matter. I have only two requirements from the Democratic nominee. First, he or she must not be obviously mentally unstable. Second, the nominee must not be in any way sympathetic — or worse, potentially beholden — to a hostile foreign power. This rules out Gabbard, Williamson and maybe New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, although in de Blasio’s case it’s hard to tell whether he is unstable or just a terrible person.

As for the rest of them, I am willing to live with whoever wins the Democratic primary process. I will likely hate the nominee’s policies, but at least I will not be concerned that he or she is incapable of understanding “the nuclear” or “the cyber.” I will feel like I have a shot at trying to convince my elected representatives that they should listen to the policy preferences of normal human beings instead of two old men wearing shirts that say they’d “rather be a Russian than a Democrat,” or a woman in a shirt indicating that she is willing to have the president grab her genitalia.

The Democratic candidate will promise to nominate people into Cabinet posts who will make me tear my hair out. But at least I will be confident that they are in charge of their own inner circle, instead of surrounded by unprincipled cronies who keep their own boss in the dark while taking a hatchet to the Constitution. Is there anyone that Warren or former Vice President Joe Biden could bring to, say, the Justice Department, whom I would fear more than an odious and sinister courtier like William Barr?

It is a sign of how low we have fallen as a nation that “rational” and “not compromised by an enemy” are now my only two requirements for the office of the president of the United States. Perhaps years of peace and prosperity have made us forget the terrifying responsibilities that attend the presidency, including the stewardship of enough nuclear weapons to blow the Northern Hemisphere to smithereens.

As long as the Democrats can provide someone who can pass these simple tests, their nominee has my vote.

Sadly, the analysis is 100% on point. Trump Must be defeated in 2020.

18 Reasons Trump Could be a Russian Asset

When asked during a Fox News, a/k/a the Trump Propagandaministerium, whether he was working for Russia, Donald Trump gave a rambling, convoluted non-responsive answer but never said a simple "no."  With two bombshell reports out last week and over the weekend, many Americans - other than Trump's cultist followers and Fox News viewers - are perhaps beginning to fully comprehend the magnitude of the danger that the Trump/Pence regime poses to the nation.  Conservative columnist and former Republican Max Boot has a column in the Washington Post that looks at the reasons by his own behavior Trump has signaled that he may well be a Russian asset.  Here are highlights:

On Friday, the New York Times reported that “in the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests.” That investigation may well be continuing under the auspices of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. We don’t know what Mueller has learned. But we can look at the key, publicly available evidence that both supports and undercuts this explosive allegation.

Here is some of the evidence suggesting “Individual 1” could be a Russian “asset”:

— Trump has a long financial history with Russia. As summarized by Jonathan Chait in an invaluable New York magazine article: “From 2003 to 2017, people from the former USSR made 86 all-cash purchases — a red flag of potential money laundering — of Trump properties, totaling $109 million. In 2010, the private-wealth division of Deutsche Bank also loaned him hundreds of millions of dollars during the same period it was laundering billions in Russian money. ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,’ said Donald Jr. in 2008. ‘We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia,’ boasted Eric Trump in 2014.”

These are the kind of financial entanglements that intelligence services such as the FSB typically use to ensnare foreigners, and they could leave Trump vulnerable to blackmail.

— The Russians interfered in the 2016 U.S. election to help elect Trump president.

— Trump encouraged the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails on July 27, 2016 (“Russia, if you’re listening”), on the very day that Russian intelligence hackers tried to attack Clinton’s personal and campaign servers.

— There were, according to the Moscow Project, “101 contacts between Trump’s team and Russia linked operatives,” and “the Trump team tried to cover up every single one of them.”

— The Trump campaign was full of individuals, such as Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and Michael Flynn, with suspiciously close links to Moscow.

— Manafort, who ran the Trump campaign for free and was heavily in debt to a Russian oligarch, now admits to offering his Russian business partner, who is suspected of links to Russian intelligence, polling data that could have been used to target the Russian social media campaign on behalf of Trump.

— Trump associate Roger Stone, who was in contact with Russian conduit WikiLeaks, reportedly knew in advance that the Russians had hacked Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails.

— Once in office, Trump fired Comey to stop the investigation of the “Russia thing” — and then bragged about having done so to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister while also sharing with them top-secret information. . . . . Trump has been effectively protecting the Russians by trying to impede the investigation of their attack on the United States.— Trump has refused to consistently acknowledge that Russia interfered in the U.S. election or mobilize a government-wide effort to stop future interference.

— Like no previous president, Trump attacks and undermines the Justice Department and the FBI (“a cancer in our country”) — two institutions that stand on the front lines of combatting Russian espionage and influence operations in the United States.

— Again, like no previous president, Trump attacks and undermines the European Union and NATO . . . . The E.U. and NATO are the two major obstacles to Russian designs in Europe.

— Trump supports populist, pro-Russian leaders in Europe, such as Viktor Orban in Hungary and Marine Le Pen in France, just as the Russians do.

— Trump has praised Putin (“a strong leader”) while trashing just about everyone else from grade-B Hollywood celebrities to leaders of allied nations.

— Trump was utterly supine in his meetings with Putin, principally in Hamburg and Helsinki. Even more suspicious, according to a Post article on Saturday, Trump “has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with . . . Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials. . . .

— Trump defends the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and repeats other pro-Russian talking points.

— Trump is pulling U.S. troops out of Syria, handing that country to Russia and its ally Iran.

— Trump has effectively done nothing in response to the Russian attack on Ukrainian ships in international waters, thereby encouraging greater Russian aggression.

— Trump is sowing chaos in the government, most recently with a record-breaking partial government shutdown and “acting” appointees in key posts such as the Defense Department and Justice Department, thus furthering a Russian objective of undermining its chief adversary.

Now that we’ve listed 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset, let’s look at the exculpatory evidence. . . . I can’t think of anything that would exonerate Trump aside from the difficulty of grasping what once would have seemed unimaginable: that a president of the United States could actually have been compromised by a hostile foreign power.

Foreign Dark Money Is Threatening American Elections

I close a great number of real estate transactions every year and know first hand how easily such transactions done as "cash purchases" without bank confirmation of identities could be used to launder money.  Indeed, there have been numerous stories on Russians buying Trump properties as a likely method to launder dirty money from questionable sources.   In addition, since I set up numerous limited liability companies each year, I also know that in many states - Virginia being one of them - there is no public records that identify the actual owners of the company.   All that is shown is the name of the registered agent and a physical address - which may in fact be a UPS store "office."  A piece in Politico looks at the threat foreign money routed through such entities and/or PACs' to circumvent bans on foreign campaign contributions is to the security of our election system.  Indeed, the NRA has been documented to have  received foreign funds during the 2016 election.  With corrupt politicians like Der Trumpenführer,  it is crucial that more be done to stop foreign interference in our elections by this so-called dark money.  Here are article highlights:

Whatever Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation ends up revealing about Russia’s efforts to subvert our democracy, one thing is already clear from the media attention this topic has received: America’s democratic institutions are highly vulnerable to foreign influence.

Foreign powers use three basic tools to interfere in democratic politics: cyber operations, disinformation and dark money. Thanks in part to Mueller’s indictments of members of Russia’s military intelligence agency (GRU) and the St. Petersburg troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency, we have begun to address election-related cyber attacks and foreign disinformation. But when it comes to foreign dark money – money from unknown foreign sources – we remain woefully unprepared.

The lack of transparency in our campaign finance system combined with extensive foreign money laundering creates a significant vulnerability for our democracy. We don’t know how much illicit money enters the United States from abroad or how much dark money enters American political campaigns, but in 2015, the Treasury Department estimated that $300 billion is laundered through the U.S. every year. While foreign funding of campaigns is prohibited by federal statute, the body that enforces campaign finance laws – the Federal Election Commission (FEC) – lacks both teeth and resources. Sophisticated adversaries like Russia and China know how to bypass the ban on foreign funding by exploiting loopholes in the system and using layers of proxies to mask their activities, making it difficult for the FEC, the FBI, and the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network to follow the money. One of the key loopholes is the ability of so-called super PACs to accept money from U.S. subsidiaries of foreign corporations. And while super PACs are required to file financial disclosure reports, non-profit 501(c) organizations (for example, the National Rifle Association or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) are not. So if a foreign entity transfers money to a 501(c), that organization can in turn contribute funds to a super PAC without disclosing the foreign origin of the money.

The last time Congress took on dark money was after 9/11, in the Patriot Act, when we made it illegal for banks to be “willfully blind” to money laundering and requiring them to verify their customers’ identities. But the lack of any requirement to disclose the beneficial (i.e. “true”) ownership of limited liability companies (LLCs) makes it easy for foreign entities to establish shell companies in the United States.

Fortunately, there are steps we can take to secure our system and shine a light on these murky transactions.

In August, two dozen state attorneys general asked Congress to pass legislation to disclose the beneficial owners of LLCs. A federal solution to this issue is necessary because individual states compete for incorporation revenue and therefore have little incentive to reform on their own. In Nevada, for example, the process of registering a company has been described as “easier than getting a library card.” A federal requirement to disclose the true owners and controlling interests of LLCs would allow law enforcement to scrutinize the “ghost corporations” that pop up overnight in states like Nevada or Delaware – and that could be used to funnel dark money into our politics.

Real estate deals are also susceptible to foreign money laundering because they are largely exempt from the “know your customer” rules that apply to the banking industry.

This allows foreign entities to use shell companies to park their wealth in the United States or to channel that money to U.S. political interests (for example, by purchasing real estate at above-market prices). Implementing more comprehensive disclosure requirements in high-end real estate and prohibiting all-cash sales above certain thresholds would help create transparency in this sector.

The fact that we don’t know exactly how much foreign dark money is being channeled into U.S. politics is precisely why we need to reduce our vulnerabilities. There is ample evidence of dark money penetrating other democracies, and no reason to believe we are immune from this risk.

[W]e can’t ignore the threat posed by foreign dark money. With a new Congress about to be sworn in, there’s an opportunity to finally end the permissive environment for foreign dark money in this country. Campaign finance reform is certainly a necessary part of the solution, but so too is disclosure of beneficial ownership and greater transparency in real estate transactions. As matters of national security, these are issues that should be of interest to both Democrats and Republicans who want to reduce our vulnerability to foreign corrupt influence.

Manafort is Screwed — and Trump Knows It

Having worked with the FBI as a expert witness and/or consultant on several occasions and one large bank fraud/wire fraud case in particular, I know first hand that it is rare that a prosecution case will be filed unless there is an extremely high expectation that the defendant will be convicted. True, the FBI doesn't always prevail in its case, but their loss rate is very low.  Applying these realities to the ongoing trial of Paul Manafort, it is reasonable to expect Manafort will likely be convicted for tax fraud, bank fraud and/or related  charges. Then the question becomes what Manafort will offer Mueller in an effort to negotiate a lesser sentence. This latter point is what worries Der Trumpenführer the most.  If there was a conspiracy with Russians to tilt the 2016 presidential election to Trump, odds appear good that Manafort was the nexus for information sharing and outright conspiracy.  A piece in The Week looks at Manafort's prospects and why Trump is ranting and raving via Twitter.  Here are highlights:

The trial of Paul Manafort, President Trump's former campaign chair, is officially underway. The many charges against him include tax and bank fraud. Special Counsel Robert Mueller likely has a strong case against Manafort, since the federal government rarely takes charges to court otherwise. But another way of knowing that the trial is unlikely to end well for Manafort is the tweetstorm by his former boss, in which Trump cursed Mueller and distanced himself from Manafort. Aside from demonstrating general contempt for legal restraint, Trump's threats portray a president who knows his former campaign chair is guilty, and is worried about what that means for him.

The most notable revelations from the first few days of Manafort's trial were about his lavish lifestyle.

But what's important is not what Manafort bought, it's how he paid for it all. He spent nearly $1 million at the exclusive Manhattan boutique Alan Couture, and nearly all of those purchases were made by wire transfers from foreign accounts. According to a salesperson, Manafort was the only customer to pay this way. His spending on homes was also generally done through secret accounts.

The prosecution's theory is that Manafort used secret offshore accounts to fund his lavish lifestyle because he was hiding money for tax purposes and submitting fraudulent loan applications. Whether further evidence will persuade the jury remains to be seen, but it is enormously unlikely that all of this was on the level.

[Trump] The president knows this, and it has him worried.

As Manafort was in federal court, Trump engaged in one of his patented Twitter tantrums, railing against the prosecution. He did not claim that Manafort would be vindicated and found innocent. Rather, he tweeted that "this is a terrible situation and Attorney General Jeff Sessions should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now, before it continues to stain our country any further." . .  .  . that Trump would encourage his attorney general to stop an investigation that potentially implicates his own campaign is disturbing nonetheless.

Trump also played the victim with respect to Manafort.  . . . . It's not exactly shocking that someone who had extensive ties to Eastern European oligarchs and plutocrats and agreed to nominally serve as Trump's campaign manager for free would be up to his neck in shady behavior.

Trump is nonetheless worried, as he should be. As David Eckles-Wade argues at Reuters, the Manafort trial is ultimately — if indirectly — "about how Russia moves money and buys influence." It seems that, owing to his lavish lifestyle, Manafort was in serious debt when he agreed to run Trump's campaign "for free." Considering his extensive ties to the Kremlin and his surreptitious meetings with Russians during the 2016 campaign, the implications of Manafort being found guilty are obvious.

Manafort's trial will not in itself prove collaboration between the Trump campaign and Russian electoral meddling. But it would be a major step in that direction, which is precisely why Trump wants Mueller's investigation shut down.

I hope Manafort is found guilty and ends up facing the rest of his life in prison.  I also hope that at some point he opts to spill his guts in order to save his hide and set Trump up for impeachment or worse.  

Are Republicans Covering for Trump, or for Themselves?

As a former Republican, I find it disturbing that the GOP now seems fine with covering up Donald Trump's possible collusion with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election due to the flawed Electoral College. In the House of Representatives, Devin Nunes has acted as if he is on Putin's payroll. Other Republicans such as Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell continually look the other way with a wink and a nod as new disturbing information and indictments come from the Mueller investigation. Are they simply covering for Trump, or does the possible treason go deeper?  As a column in the New York Times argues, perhaps Trump is not the only Republican beholden to Russia and/or Russian money, some of which may have been funneled through the National Rifle Association.  The irony, of course, is that most Republicans and the NRA posture and boast of being "patriotic" and supporting "real Americans," yet questions now grow as to their allegiance to Russia.  Here are column excerpts:

Of all the interlocking mysteries of the Trump-Russia scandal, one that I’ve found particularly perplexing is the utter servility of congressional Republicans before a president many of them hate and believe to be compromised by a foreign power.

Yes, I know they’re thrilled about tax cuts and judges. Given how Russia has become a patron of the right globally over the last decade, some Republicans might welcome its intervention into our politics, believing that the Democrats are greater enemies of the Republic. And some are just cowards, afraid of mean tweets or base blowback.

But that doesn’t explain why, for example, Speaker Paul Ryan, a Russia hawk who is retiring in January, allowed his party to torpedo the House Intelligence Committee investigation into Russian interference in the election. Ryan, after all, knows full well who and what Donald Trump is. In a secretly recorded June 2016 conversation about Ukraine, obtained by The Washington Post, the House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy, said, “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” Far from disagreeing, Ryan said, “What’s said in the family stays in the family.” If he were patriotic — or even if he just wanted to set himself up for a comeback should Trump implode — he would have stood up for the rule of law in the Russia inquiry. It’s hard to see what he got in return for choosing not to.

This week, however, a new possibility came into focus. Perhaps, rather than covering for Trump, some Republicans are covering for themselves.

Last Friday, Robert Mueller, the special counsel, indicted 12 members of Russian military intelligence for their interference in the 2016 election. The indictment claims that in August 2016, Guccifer 2.0, a fictitious online persona adopted by the Russian hackers, “received a request for stolen documents from a candidate for the U.S. Congress.” The Russian conspirators obliged, sending “the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate’s opponent.” Congress has, so far, done nothing discernible to find out who this candidate might be.

Then, on Monday, we learned of the arrest of Maria Butina, who is accused of being a Russian agent who infiltrated the National Rifle Association, the most important outside organization in the Republican firmament. Legal filings in the case outline a plan to use the N.R.A. to push the Republican Party in a more pro-Russian direction.

If the N.R.A. as an organization turns out to be compromised, it would shake conservative politics to its foundation. And this is no longer a far-fetched possibility. “I serve on both the Intelligence Committee and the Finance Committee,” Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, told me. “So I have a chance to really look at this through the periscope of both committees. And what I have wondered about for some time is this whole issue of whether the N.R.A. is getting subverted as a Russian asset.” 

This is not a question that Republicans are eager to answer. Before Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee abruptly closed their investigation into Russian election interference, committee Democrats wanted to interview both Butina and Erickson. Their Republican colleagues refused. It is not surprising that Republicans would want to protect the N.R.A. According to an audit obtained by the Center for Responsive Politics, the N.R.A.’s overall spending increased by more than $100 million in 2016. “The explosion in spending came as the N.R.A. poured unprecedented amounts of money into efforts to deliver Donald Trump the White House and help Republicans hold both houses of Congress,” the center wrote.

McClatchy has reported that the F.B.I. is investigating whether Torshin illegally funneled money to the N.R.A. to help Trump. Wyden has also been trying to trace foreign money flowing into the N.R.A., but has found little cooperation from the organization, his Republican colleagues or the Treasury Department.

On Monday, a few hours after news broke of Butina’s arrest, the Treasury Department announced a new rule sparing some tax-exempt groups, including the N.R.A., from having to report their large donors to the I.R.S. Wyden called the move “truly grotesque,” saying it would “make it easier for Russian dark money” to flow into American politics. You might ask who benefits. The answer is: not just Trump.

NRA Admits Accepting Foreign Funds; Did Funds Go To Campaigns?

For some time there have been questions swirling around about whether or not the National Rife Association ("NRA") laundered Russians funds and directed them to the Trump campaign or the campaigns of other Republicans bought by the NRA.  Indeed, the Federal Elections Commission and FBI are investigating this very issue. Now, it has come out that the NRA has in fact accepted foreign funds although it has offered a mealy mouth story line that (i) none of these foreign funds came from Russia, and (ii) none of the funds have been given to any political campaigns. Never mind Russia's use of shell corporations in Cyprus and other locales to hide Russia as a funding source and/or that once cash is deposited into a bank account, the funds are fungible and can easily find their way to political campaigns.  Talking Points Memo looks at this breaking story which, if we are lucky, will cause immense problems for both the NRA and the Trump/Pence regime.  Here are highlights:

The National Rifle Association is acknowledging that it accepts donations from foreign entities, and that it moves money between its various accounts “as permitted by law.”

The gun group insists it has never received foreign money in connection with an election. But campaign finance experts say that, since money is fungible, that assurance doesn’t mean much.

Though it’s a long way from being confirmed and may never be, the NRA’s new admissions offer perhaps the most compelling evidence yet that foreign money could have allowed the group to conduct political activities boosting Trump.

The admissions came in a recent letter to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has sought answers about the group’s foreign funding, following reports that the FBI is probing whether a Russian banker funneled money to the NRA to benefit the Trump campaign. As TPM has reported, that makes it difficult to trace if the NRA legally received foreign money into its general accounts, then transferred the same amount into an account that can be used for political spending.

“Even if the NRA segregated the foreign money that it received, money is fungible,” Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance expert at the Campaign Legal Center, told TPM. “Foreign money in one account frees up money that can be used for elections in another account.”

“This is a very carefully worded letter that appears designed to give the impression that the NRA does not take foreign money for its election work, but reading between the lines, it does not actually say that,” Fischer added. “The NRA said it did not receive foreign money in connection with the U.S. election. It does not say that foreign money was not used in a U.S. election.”

Paul S. Ryan, Vice President of Policy and Litigation at good-government group Common Cause told TPM that the system described in the gun organization’s letter means that “foreign money subsidizes the NRA’s U.S. political spending.” [I]nvestigative bodies might have access to additional evidence that could determine how Russia or other foreign entities wanted their money to be spent. The FBI is reportedly investigating whether Russian banker and lifetime NRA member Aleksandr Torshin channeled money to the group with the express purpose of helping Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential race. In a follow-up letter sent Tuesday, Wyden asked Frazer for an in-depth account of how foreign donations were used over the past thee years, and whether Russian nationals were members of the NRA’s donor programs, among other questions.

One issue of interest to Wyden: how the organization makes “transfers between accounts are made as permitted by law,” as Frazer acknowledged it does.

FEC Probing Whether NRA Funneled Russian Funds to Trup

I love spy and special agent novels that feature international intrigue and bad actors in the federal government.  Now, every day news stories are being reported on happenings and questions that seem right out of such thrillers - things that once would have been thought too far fetched to be real.  As Politico is reporting, the Federal Election Commission is investigating the NRA to determine if that organization - a front for gun manufacturers - may have funned Russian funds to the Trump campaign.  In an earlier time with a different occupant in the White House, such a possibility would have seemed impossible.  Now, it seems all too possible.  Here are highlights from the piece in Politico:

The Federal Election Commission has launched a preliminary investigation into whether Russian entities gave illegal contributions to the National Rifle Association that were intended to benefit the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election, according to people who were notified of the probe.

The inquiry stems in part from a complaint from a liberal advocacy group, the American Democracy Legal Fund, which asked the FEC to look into media reports about links between the rifle association and Russian entities, including a banker with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
A spokesman for the NRA . . . . declined to comment on the FEC’s probe.
An FEC spokesman also declined to comment, saying the agency is prohibited by law from confirming or denying any investigations until they’re complete.
Under FEC procedures, the preliminary investigation is likely to require the NRA to turn over closely guarded internal documents and campaign finance records. Depending on what FEC investigators and lawyers find, the agency could launch a full-blown investigation, impose fines or even make criminal referrals to the Justice Department and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, people familiar with the probe said.
The preliminary investigation focuses on issues similar to those raised recently by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, as part of his investigation into possible collusion between the NRA, the Trump campaign and Russia.
Wyden is particularly interested in whether Russian-backed entities helped the Trump campaign by funneling contributions to the gun-rights group that “inappropriately and illegally influenced our election,” according to a Feb. 2 letter Wyden sent to the NRA.
Woodhouse, a longtime Democratic Party activist, said the FEC inquiry is a significant step in getting to the bottom of a very complicated series of relationships between the NRA, the Trump campaign and Russian entities.
“This story sounds more like a Tom Clancy novel than a reality,” said Woodhouse. “But in the age of Donald Trump and possible collusion with Russia, not only is it possible that it’s true, but it’s possible enough that it needs to be fully investigated.”
The FEC . . . can look at whether or not the NRA is taking illegal foreign money to conduct political activity, and whether money is passed on to support the campaign,” Woodhouse said. “They would have to investigate all of those linkages to determine whether there was any illegal election activity.”

Odds Are, Russia Owns Trump

As regular readers are likely aware, I personally believe that the Trump/Pence campaign was in deep collusion with Russian agents, if not Vladimir Putin, during the 2016 presidential election.  Between all of the reported contacts between campaign personnel and all of the Trump projects into which money poured (saving Trump's ass financially) there is nothing normal about the Trump/Russia relationship. Now, a new book is out, entitled  "Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win,” that links together the dots and provides a much clearer picture of just how bad the collusion has been.  A column in the New York Times looks at the book and the frightening picture it paints.  A picture that means nothing to Congressional Republicans who place their party and tax cuts to the wealthy above the nation's well-being. Here are column highlights:

Three months ago, The Washington Post reported that even as Donald Trump ran for president, he pursued plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. The next day, The New York Times published excerpts from emails between Felix Sater, a felon with ties to Russian organized crime, and Michael Cohen, one of Donald Trump’s lawyers and Sater’s childhood friend, about the project. Sater was apparently an intermediary between Trump and Russia, and in a Nov. 3, 2015, email to Cohen, he made the strange argument that a successful deal would lead to Trump’s becoming president. Boasting that he was close enough to Vladimir Putin to let Ivanka Trump sit in the Russian president’s desk chair, Sater wrote, “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected.” These stories were, at the time, bombshells. At a minimum, they showed that Trump was lying when he said, repeatedly, that he had “nothing to do with Russia.” But three months feels like three decades in Trump years, and I mostly forgot about these reports until I read Luke Harding’s new book, “Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.” One uncanny aspect of the investigations into Trump’s Russia connections is that instead of too little evidence there’s too much. . . . . Incidents that would be major scandals in a normal administration — like the mere fact of Trump’s connection to Sater — become minor subplots in this one.

That’s why “Collusion” is so essential, and why I wish everyone who is skeptical that Russia has leverage over Trump would read it. This country — at least the parts not wholly under the sway of right-wing propaganda — needs to come to terms with substantial evidence that the president is in thrall to a foreign power.

Harding, the former Moscow bureau chief of The Guardian, has been reporting on shady characters like Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was indicted last month, long before Trump announced his candidacy. He was able to interview Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier attempting to detail Trump’s relationship with the Kremlin, and who describes the conspiracy between the American president and the Russians as “massive — absolutely massive.” There’s no longer any serious question that there was cooperation between Trump’s campaign and Russia, but the extent of the cooperation, and the precise nature of it, remains opaque. Harding’s book is invaluable in collating the overwhelming evidence of a web of relationships between the Kremlin, Trump and members of Trump’s circle. He suggests, convincingly, that Russia may have been cultivating Trump since the 1980s. At that time, Harding writes, the K.G.B. was working to draw “prominent figures in the West” — as the K.G.B. described them — into collaboration. According to Harding, a form for evaluating targets asked, “Are pride, arrogance, egoism, ambition or vanity among subject’s natural characteristics?” Trump, the gaudy huckster who treats closing a sale as the height of human endeavor, is a quintessentially American figure. His campaign of racial and religious grievance drew on the darkest currents of American history. At most, Putin appears to have recognized an opportunity that American political dysfunction created. It’s a sign of how deep that dysfunction goes that the substantial evidence that the president is not a patriot hasn’t caused more of a political earthquake. America, stunned and divided, appears incapable of metabolizing all we’re learning about the man in the White House. Yes, we have investigations, but the business of government plods on; right now the Senate is working on the Roy Moore of tax bills, a piece of legislation that magnifies right-wing pathologies into a cartoonish grotesque.

It wasn’t Putin who fashioned a Republican Party willing to tolerate something close to treason if it’s the price of corporate tax cuts. Even if all the Republicans in Congress read Harding’s book, they probably wouldn’t act. But at least they’d know what they’re abetting.

This is yet another piece in the picture that makes me proud that I left the morally bankrupt Republican Party close to two decades ago.   Were I still a Republican, I would feel both treasonous and bankrupt morally. 

Russia and the Trumps: It Was Always About the Money

Other than trying to satisfy his own insatiable ego and narcissism, Donald Trump has only one god: money and acquiring more money.   Like far to many, Trump needs things and money to instill a sense of self-worth.  Whatever he got, he needed - and still needs - more.  In light of his numerous business bankruptcies and literally thousands of lawsuits against his entities, American banks ultimately learned that he was a bad risk and the money spigot so crucial to supporting his purported real estate empire was turned off.  That left him seeking loans from the Bank of China and from Germany's Deutsche Bank the latter of which is facing subpoenas and questioning from special prosecutor Robert Mueller as The Guardian reports:  

Executives inside Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump’s personal bankers, are expecting that the bank will soon be receiving subpoenas or other requests for information from Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating possible collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign.

A person close to the matter who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity said that Mueller’s team and the bank have already established informal contact in connection to the federal investigation.

Deutsche’s relationship with Trump and questions about hundreds of millions in loans have dogged the German bank and the White House for months. They have also been the subject of intense scrutiny among some Democrats on Capitol Hill, who have demanded the bank turn over detailed information about the president’s accounts.

Any move by Mueller’s team to pursue Trump’s personal financial record comes as the bank continues to negotiate a settlement with the Department of Justice over its so-called mirror trading scheme, in which the bank’s former Moscow branch is alleged to have allowed $10bn to flow out of Russia. 

According to an analysis by Bloomberg, Trump now owes Deutsche, his biggest creditor, around $300m. He has four large mortgages, all issued by Deutsche’s private bank. The loans are guaranteed against the president’s properties: a new deluxe hotel in Washington DC’s old post office building, just around the corner from the White House; his Chicago tower hotel; and the Trump National DoralMiami resort.

Tellingly, Deutsche Bank ceased making new loans to Trump quite some time ago.  This left Trump ultimately with one source of funding: Russia and Russian oligarchs eager to move money out of Russia, much of it in need of laundering.  A column in Esquire looks at how the quest for Russian money has now perhaps begun to unravel for Trumpenführer.  Here are highlights:

It was always about the money. The reason we never saw the tax returns was because of what they would show about the money. The reason we can't get a straight answer about the family's dealings with the Russians is the money. Preet Bharara got fired because of the money and how the money had been allegedly laundered. James Comey got fired because of the money. Without the money, specifically the money from Russia, the Trump empire likely would have collapsed under a hail of writs and the paterfamilias would have been rendered invisible, even in the mirrors of Mar-a-Lago.

It always was about the money. The meeting on June 6, 2016 ultimately was about the money, as we learned today from CNN. The network reported that it had identified the eighth participant in that now-famous Trump Tower confab. Contrary to the previous load of hooey dispensed by Junior and the first family, this dude was not a translator.  . . . Here's Ray from The New York Times:

In a nine-month inquiry that subpoenaed bank records, the investigators found that an unknown number of Russians and other East Europeans moved more than $1.4 billion through accounts at Citibank of New York and the Commercial Bank of San Francisco. The accounts had been opened by Irakly Kaveladze,  . . . . More than $800 million was wired from abroad to 136 accounts that Mr. Kaveladze opened at Citibank for Russian clients, and most of that was then sent to overseas accounts . . .

It's not hard to believe that Junior wanted this guy's name kept out of the stories, especially now that, as the guy's attorney says, Robert Mueller has come knock, knock, knocking at the door.

The fact is that the president* was never as rich as he said he was, a circumstance that was of outsized importance to nobody except his own narcissistic self. (I don't think it would have changed a single vote if it had been revealed that he wasn't as rich as he was saying he was.) He did, however, always have an outsized sense of himself in the world. He had to keep acquiring to stay true to his self-image. I believe the collision between these two factors left him with no options but to obtain loans except overseas, and the Russian money was easy money. Then he got elected president and it all unraveled.

If obstruction of justice doesn't take Trump - and his children and son-in-law - down, money laundering and other financial crimes likely will do so.  Just imagine Ivanka in bright orange prison garb.  

Eighth Person in Trump, Jr., Meeting Linked to Money Laundering

For years Donald Trump, Sr., has skirted the edge of the law and cut deals with both domestic and Russian mobsters, often in connection with his real estate projects.  The latter have for years provided a means for dirty Russian money to be used to acquire real estate in America - the USA, unlike many other nations has few restrictions on foreigners buying property - which when sold effective launders the money and makes it "clean."  Hence it should be no surprise that the now identified 8th person in the June, 2016, meeting with Trump, Jr., at Trump Tower had ties to money laundering. Literally, with every passing day some new sleazy and/or questionable detail of the meeting unfolds which further underscores the lies that were first used to explain the meeting which sought to collude with Russian operatives.  Here are details from Politico on this new information (Note Senator Mark Warner's pointed comment): 

The eighth attendee at a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between top Trump associates and a politically connected Russian lawyer is a business associate of a top Moscow oligarch and was once the focus of a congressional money-laundering probe.

Irakly "Ike" Kaveladze, until now the mysterious eighth person in the room, attended the meeting on behalf of Aras Agalarov, a billionaire real estate magnate with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and a Trump family friend. A lawyer for Agalarov has confirmed Kaveladze’s attendance to other news outlets, though he did not respond to requests for comment from POLITICO.

Business filings list Kaveladze as founder of a company called IBC Group, which shares a New Jersey address — 333 Sylvan Ave. in Englewood Cliffs — with several shell companies connected to Aras Agalarov.

One of those firms is Saffron Property Management, which Agalarov reportedly used to purchase an $11 million condo in Florida last year.

A POLITICO reporter visiting the nondescript office building where all of these companies are based found that the suite linked to Agalarov and Kaveladze was empty, with unopened mail by the door. A sign in the lobby indicated that the suite belonged to IBC and Russian Art Mall, which was founded in 2000 and registered to Emin Agalarov, who is a partner in his father's business.

"They're current on the rent. They're on our rent roll, they're just quiet," said George Sayrafe, who said he has managed the building for 20 years. "I hadn't heard anything. Some tenants bother you, you know what I mean? These people, I haven't seen them in a long time."

Kaveladze’s identity is among many facts about the 2016 meeting that Donald Trump Jr. has failed to disclose in multiple public statements. And his background may add to the questions members of Congress and investigators have about the meeting, which Trump officials say was brief and inconsequential but which Democrats call evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

“I doubt if this individual who had a history of setting up thousands of fake accounts in Delaware was really there to talk about Russian adoptions,” Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, told reporters on Tuesday.

Kaveladze was named in a round of news stories in November 2000, after the General Accounting Office issued a report on Russian money laundering through U.S. financial institutions.

At the time, Kaveladze was identified in contemporaneous news reports as the originator of thousands of Delaware-based shell corporations.

Through his company, which was at the time called International Business Creations, Kaveladze formed 2,000 corporations for Russian brokers, which helped steer more than $1.4 billion in wire transactions through U.S. banks, according to the congressional inquiry.

The Agalarovs and Kaveladze are represented by Scott Balber, a New York white-collar defense attorney and former legal partner with Abbe Lowell, an attorney handling Russia matters for Kushner. Balber told The Washington Post on Tuesday he got a call this weekend from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office seeking an interview with Kaveladze — an ask that marks the first public signal the special counsel is investigating the Russia meeting.

Jared Kushner Now a Focus in Russiagate investigation

While Der Trumpenführer is on his first foreign trip -  and no doubt hoping he can distract the media from Russiagate coverage here at home - the Washington Post and New York Times, among others, continue to have new stories that are not only keeping Russiagate alive, but breathing even more new life into the roiling scandal,  Now, the Washington Post has released a story that reveals that Jared Kushner is a target in the probe due to (i) his numerous meetings with Russian officials and bankers, and (ii) his failure to report such meetings when he applied for security clearance.  Frankly, it makes sense that Trump would have used Kushner as his go between with Russian operatives since he is both a family member and reportedly one of Trump's closest advisers.  That said, Mike Flynn, who had received payments from Russia, also remains a target of the investigation.  Here are highlights from the story:

Investigators are focusing on a series of meetings held by Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and an influential White House adviser, as part of their probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and related matters, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Kushner, who held meetings in December with the Russian ambassador and a banker from Moscow, is being investigated because of the extent and nature of his interactions with the Russians, the people said.

FBI agents also remain keenly interested in former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, but Kushner is the only current White House official known to be considered a key person in the probe.

The Post has not been told that Kushner is a target — or the central focus — of the investigation, and he has not been accused of any wrongdoing. “Target” is a word that generally refers to someone who is the main suspect of investigators’ attention, though prosecutors can and do bring charges against people who are not marked with that distinction.

In addition to possible coordination between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election, investigators are also looking broadly into possible financial crimes — but the people familiar with the matter, who were not authorized to speak publicly, did not specify who or what was being examined.

In early December, Kushner met in New York with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, and he later sent a deputy to meet with Kislyak. 

Kushner also met in December with Sergey Gorkov, the head of Vnesheconombank, which has been the subject of U.S. sanctions following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its support of separatists in eastern Ukraine.

In addition to the December meetings, a former senior intelligence official said FBI agents had been looking closely at earlier exchanges between Trump associates and the Russians dating to the spring of 2016, including one at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. Kushner and Kislyak — along with close Trump adviser and current attorney general Jeff Sessions — were present at an April 2016 event at the Mayflower where then-candidate Trump promised in a speech to seek better relations with Russia. It is unclear whether Kushner and Kislyak interacted there.

In many ways, Kushner is a unique figure inside the White House.   He is arguably the president’s most trusted adviser, and he is also a close member of the president’s family. His list of policy responsibilities is vast — his foreign policy portfolio alone includes Canada and Mexico, China, and peace in the Middle East — yet he rarely speaks publicly about any of them.

A small group of lawmakers known as the Gang of Eight was recently notified of the change in tempo and focus in the investigation at a classified briefing.

Investigators are continuing to look aggressively into the dealings of Flynn, and a grand jury in Alexandria, Va., recently issued a subpoenas for records related to Flynn’s businesses and finances, according to people familiar with the matter.

Separately from the probe now run by Mueller, Flynn is being investigated by the Pentagon’s top watchdog for his foreign payments. Flynn also received $45,000 to appear in 2015 with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a dinner for RT, a Kremlin-controlled media organization.

Keep the popcorn coming.  To be honest, I want to see Trump - and Pence - go down and whoever needs to go with them is fine with me.  

Politico: Flynn's Lobbying Payments May Have Come From Russia

Trump and Flynn - laugh over all the Russian money?

Even as the White House is refusing to turn over requested documents to Congressional investigators Politico has broken a story that suggests that payments received by former Trump BFF, Mike Flynn, ostensibly from Turkey may have in fact come from Russia.  Flynn received these payments while involved in the Trump campaign and failed to register as a foreign agent of Turkey, much less Russia. Indeed, the smoke is becoming thicker and thicker and suggesting that there indeed is a fire that could take Mike Flynn,  Der Trumpenführer, and many others down, if not put them in prison.  No wonder Flynn is seeking immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony about the Trump campaign's ties to Russia.   Here are excerpts from Politico (there is much more and the rule to remember is "follow the money back to its source"):

The Turkish man who gave Mike Flynn a $600,000 lobbying deal just before President Donald Trump picked him to be national security adviser has business ties to Russia, including a 2009 aviation financing deal negotiated with Vladimir Putin, according to court records.

The man, Ekim Alptekin, has in recent years helped to coordinate Turkish lobbying in Washington with Dmitri “David” Zaikin, a Soviet-born former executive in Russian energy and mining companies who also has had dealings with Putin’s government, according to three people with direct knowledge of the activities.

This unusual arrangement, in which Alptekin and Zaikin have helped steer Turkish lobbying through various groups since at least 2015, raises questions about both the agenda of the two men and the source of the funds used to pay the lobbyists.

the hiring of Flynn by Alptekin came at a time when Flynn was working for Trump’s campaign and Putin’s government was under investigation for interfering with the U.S. election.

Flynn’s lawyer, Robert Kelner, declined to comment. In a filing with the Justice Department, Flynn said he relied on assurances from Alptekin that he was not directly or indirectly funded by a foreign government. But shifting explanations and a web of business ties raise questions about the arrangement.

Flynn has offered evolving accounts of his lobbying work for Alptekin. In September, Flynn reported his client as a Dutch shell company owned by Alptekin. After being forced to leave the White House — reportedly because he lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations during the transition with the Russian ambassador — Flynn filed new paperwork in March acknowledging that his lobbying work “principally benefitted” the Turkish government.

The revelation of Russian business ties to the man who hired Flynn threatens to complicate the White House’s struggle to escape the shadow of the FBI investigation into whether members of the Trump campaign coordinated with Russian agents.

His original White House ethics disclosure failed to include payments from Kremlin propaganda network RT and two other Russian companies. The RT payment was for a paid speech Flynn gave at a Moscow gala where he sat at the same table as Putin.

A White House spokesman declined to comment.

Alptekin, in an interview, said he hired Flynn with his own money and did not coordinate any lobbying for the Turkish government.

Siberian Energy Group’s dealings under Zaikin were characteristic of the equity trades, offshore financing schemes and consulting agreements that Putin’s allies have used to protect and hide assets.