It was a double-dip day on Thursday.

In the morning, I read this article here on Raw Story about Felix Sater.  If you find the name somewhat familiar, that's because it came up during the election.  Sater is a particularly-sleazy businessman who has occasionally partnered with Donald Trump and has a long-history of legal troubles, though Trump claimed not to really know who he was -- despite photos of them together and despite Sater being...well, an occasional business partner.

(By the way, just to clarify the term "legal troubles," Sater -- for one example -- plead guilty to racketeering in a $40 million stock fraud scheme that the Mafia organized, though he never went to jail for it -- that's because he became an informant for the FBI and CIA.  This is never a good thing when you find yourself a business partner of Felix Sater if you ever are under federal investigation yourself.  Oh, and in an interesting related-issue, Andrew Weissmann -- who was the prosecutor who handled Sater's plea deal -- has been hired by Special Counsel Robert Mueller...)

Okay, so that's who Felix Sater is.  Well, as it happens, Felix Sater has been questioned by Robert Mueller, and the Financial Times reported that he is "cooperating" with the investigation. Indeed, according to the sources, "Sater may have already flipped and given prosecutors the evidence they need to make a case against Trump."

But, hey, don't take the reporter's word for it.  Just listen to...oh, Felix Sater.  In an interview he gave with New York magazine, Sater himself hinted, "In about the next 30 to 35 days, I will be the most colourful character you have ever talked about. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about it now, before it happens. And believe me, it ain’t anything as small as whether or not they’re gonna call me to the Senate committee.”

It gets worse, if that's possible.  (We'll..."worse" depending on your point of view.  Others may be chomping at the bit.  According to a source for The Spectator magazine, Sater has already told his family that he knows he and Trump are going to prison, "someone talking to Mueller's investigators informed me."  ("Me," being the reporter, not Sater, just to clarify pronouns.)

Now, to be clear, a lot of this is "reportedly," and Felix Sater also appears to be someone who likes to talk big about himself.  But, on the core issues, he is cooperating with the investigation, and he does have a history of making plea deals to give up his associates and keep himself out of jail.

Not good for Trump.

But as I said, Thursday was a double-dip day for Trump, and the other story may actually, remarkably even be worse -- and it has a twist.  (In fact, because of the twist, that may be what makes it worse.)

Mind you, even without the twist, it's pretty terrible on its own.

Over lunch yesterday, a friend told me about a story that began with Bloomberg News and moved to other outlets, including Vanity Fair -- so these aren't fly-by-night news sources -- though it hasn't gained national traction yet, however it was discussed that morning on Thom Hartmann's radio show, where my friend heard about the article.  He said the story presents a massive conspiracy bank fraud problem for the Trump family -- pretty much all of them: Donald, Eric, Don Jr., and Ivanka.  And it's not based on rumor, but the article includes leaked emails from the Trump Organization -- not merely talked about, but the actual emails itself. 

Later, after lunch, my friend tracked down the article and sent me a link to it. The story was very convoluted -- as most bank fraud stories are -- but to give you a general overview:

The story concerns Trump's involvement with a $350 million fraud over the Trump Soho Hotel deal (a facility he talked about at length on The Apprentice TV show -- something which probably isn't a good thing to have done at this point).  Basically, his partner in the deal had committed the bank fraud with the help of the Mafia, and ultimately with other money laundering sources in Russia.  And the leaked emails show that Trump, Eric, Don Jr, and Ivanka all knew about it, and even held a meeting on it.  And not only did they never report it to the authorities, but kept it quiet to pretty much shake down their business partner and continue defrauding the banks.

Oh, one other thing.  This is that "twist" part which makes it even worse for Trump.  (Yes, even worse...)

When I got home from lunch and received the email from my friend with a link to the article, I burst out laughing about four paragraphs in.  That's where I read that the business partner is...Felix Sater!!!!!

Yes, really.

Well, that's not good for Trump.

There's something else that's very important in the article.  It talks about federal RICO racketeering charges that could be pending, and also notes that the state of New York has its own RICO racketeering laws.  Recall what I wrote here a couple weeks ago -- a presidential pardon ONLY covers federal crimes, not state or local.

​Not good for Trump, the sequel.

Also, for anyone who tries to claim these are outside the purview of Mueller's Russia investigation, they aren't.  The first story on the Trump Soho Hotel bank fraud overlaps with Felix Sauter doing money laundering with Russia.  As for the second story, not only does any story with Sater now raise the trail to Russian with his money connections there, but any story with Trump's finances and money difficulties points to the foundation of why he likely had to go to Russian oligarchs for raising money, since banks in the U.S. and around the world wouldn't lend him any.

You can read the article and leaked emails here in this piece from The Stern Facts, which puts the entire story together from the various sources.

At the moment, this is not a national story.  Neither is the one about Felix Sater cooperating with the Mueller investigation.  But that doesn't make them any less real.  The emails are real. Bloomberg News and Vanity Fair have reported them.  Felix Sater is talking with the investigators.  And Sater does have a history of making deals with the authorities -- one of whom is on Robert Mueller's staff.  It's just that all these real stories simply haven't broken through "as news" ALL the other even bigger stories that have been making the headlines.  But being a news headline is actually secondary to what the very real FBI investigators are doing, whether the stories have become headlines yet or not.  And as Felix Sater himself says, "In about the next 30 to 35 days, I will be the most colourful character you have ever talked about."

It was not a double-good day for Trump.  For other people reading about it all...that's another matter entirely.

Fifty-four years ago, back in 1963, the legendary political cartoonist, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Bill Mauldin drew what many consider one of the most memorable op-ed cartoons, when he worked for the Chicago Sun-Times.  Though it addressed a very different situation, the assassination of President Kennedy, it occurred to me that the drawing holds another resonance today, as the Party of Lincoln saw its leader give aid and comfort to white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the KKK, marching with swastikas, Confederate flags, giving sieg heil salutes and calling out Nazi chants.

I offer Bill Mauldin's powerful, heart-breaking work about another time which still holds its meaning for a very different world. 

Back in March, I wrote here about a great article in the New Yorker by Adam Davidson about Trump being involved with a fraudulent hotel in Azerbaijan, crippled with corruption and money laundering.  Davidson has a new article just out, “Trump’s Business of Corruption.”  
 
It’s actually very convoluted and a challenge to follow, with much of it laying out an intricate pattern of money laundering and corruption between Kazakhstan and the country of George, with Russian oligarchs.  Trump comes into the story for doing a licensing deal with them for a Trump Tower Batumi of luxury condominiums, that makes no legitimate business sense, most notably because there are no luxury residences in the impoverished area.  I skimmed a lot, but it’s fascinating.  I'll provide a link to the full article below, but a few particularly striking passages stand out.

In this section below, Mukhtar Ablyazov is the son of the Kazakhstan dictactor, and the man in charge of a $250 million loan from the state-owned B.T.A.  When he was about the charged with corruption, he fled the country with  around $6 billion of the bank's money.  (I also assume that the Michael Cohen referred to is the belligerent Trump lawyer who was to be the main administration spokesman on TV shows until he crashed and burned.) --


"In 2010, when a Trump Organization executive, Michael Cohen, began negotiating with the Silk Road Group about licensing Trump’s name for the Batumi tower, Ablyazov was facing eleven lawsuits in the U.K. The Kazakh government, which had indeed seized control of B.T.A. Bank, had sued him to reclaim ten billion dollars that he had allegedly siphoned out of the country. The Financial Times covered the case extensively, as did the Times, which described “a scheme by B.T.A.’s former chairman, Mukhtar Ablyazov, to direct between $8 billion and $12 billion worth of B.T.A. loans—about half of the bank’s loan book—to companies that he secretly controlled.” The article noted that Ablyazov was renting “a 15,000-square-foot mansion” in London.

"It would have taken only a Google search for the Trump Organization to discover that the Silk Road Group had received much of its funding from B.T.A. Bank, which, at the time of the Batumi deal, was mired in one of the largest fraud cases in recent history."
 
In his previous article, Davidson wrote about that among the regulations in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is one that says if you do business with a corrupt business overseas but didn't know, you are still legally liable, since it is your obligation to do due diligence and know.  Additionally, as Davidson points out in this new article that in in criminal law, the concept of “willful blindness” states even if one is not aware of all parts of a crime: a person can be convicted of the crime in which he was engaged. The ruling being that nobody can avoid responsibility for a crime "by deliberately ignoring what is obvious.”

All that leads to an important passage --


“Keith Darden is a political scientist at American University who has written extensively on the use of compromising information--kompromat—by former Soviet regimes against people they want to control. He told me that Kazakh intelligence is believed to collect dossiers on every significant business transaction involving the country. This would be especially true if a famous American developer was part of the deal, even if it would not have occurred to them that he might one day become the U.S. President. ‘There is no question—they know everything about this deal,’ Darden said.

“Darden explained that Kazakh intelligence agents work closely with their Russian counterparts. Kulibayev himself has direct ties to Russia’s leadership. In 2011, he was named to the board of Gazprom, the Russian gas behemoth, which is widely considered to be a pillar of Putin’s fortune.”
 

As I said, it's all a bit convoluted.  But good news!  Adam Davidson is scheduled to be a guest on Rachel Maddow’s show tonight, Tuesday.  I’m sure they’ll focus in on the specifics and make the story and problems for Trump far less unwieldy. 

If you can't wait, you can read the article here.  And if you haven't read his earlier article about the hotel in Azerbaijan, which I link to above, I heartily recommend that, as well.
 
 

The Independent in London had a story today about how Nigel Farage apparently gave Steve Bannon a painting of Bannon dressed as Napoleon. Personally, I hope the artist was insightful and had it post-Waterloo. And set on Elba in prison exile.
But more to the point, how tone-deaf clueless of Farage this gift is Does he not realize that this painting suggests that it is Bannon who is The General and in charge of the country -- all of which makes Trump nothing more than a foot soldier follower. And as we know, Trump *cannot stand* for people to think anyone around him is more important than he is.  The only saving grace for Bannon if Trump comes into his office and sees the painting is that I'm not sure how great his grasp of history is...

On another tact, there was a tweet today from the same Independent which chided people slamming Ivana Trump sitting in for her father at the G20 as their being "bad feminists."  I replied back that another thought is that perhaps it makes them good Americans.  And also noted how adorable it was that the Independent is co-owned by Alexander Lebredev, a Russian oligarch...

​I finally figured out what Trump means every time he claims that CNN has "fake news" -- I believe that he's referring to when Katrina Pierson, Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany are on, pulling stories out of their various bodily orifices and making up "alternative facts."

It must be hell working in this White House. 

​On Thursday, White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders explained to a roomful of reporters  (most of whom knew she was lying, because they actually watch news footage) and ultimately through them to the nation (most of whom knew she was lying, because they actually watch news footage), that Trump “in no way, form or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence. If anything, quite the contrary.”

One of life's miracles is that Ms. Huckabee Sanders didn't implode on the spot, or that her nose didn't suddenly grow four feet long, or that her pants or skirt or whatever she was wearing at the time didn't burst into flames so incendiary that the White House press room didn't burn down.  But somehow she made it through the rest of the press conference with the barest sliver of her dignity intact, though less of her soul.

It was only two days later when her boss showed as demonstrably as possible the depth of her lie.  That was when Trump did the very opposite of what she had insisted, re-tweeting an edited video from 2007 of Trump fictitiously beating up WWE CEO Vince McMahon but with the CNN logo superimposed on the fake-wrestling chief's head, presenting to the disbelieving world the pathetic, infantile sight of the  president of the United States supposedly battering a news network.

(It should be noted, that it has come to light that the person who created that video encouraging violence against the media -- which Trump happily re-tweeted as president of the United States -- was created by someone whose Twitter name included the word "assh*le"  in his name, albeit with the letter "o" in place of the asterisk.)

There are no records of what Sarah Huckabee Sanders' reaction was, though "Well, that doesn't put my credibility in very good light now, does it?" is a possibility.

A far-better reaction, though, came from CNN itself, which released the following statement --
​
"It is a sad day when the President of the United States encourages violence against reporters. Clearly, Sarah Huckabee Sanders lied when she said the President had never done so. Instead of preparing for his first overseas trip, his first meeting with Vladimir Putin, dealing with North Korea and working on his healthcare bill, he is instead involved in juvenile behavior far below the dignity of his office. We will keep doing our jobs. He should start doing his."

Well, good for them.  That's nice and properly blunt.  And accurate.  And good for them using the "lie" word.

Another good response, competing with CNN's as Best of the Day, was the one from Republican commentator Ana Navarro, who has gotten increasingly outraged at Trump over the course of the past year, when she replied, "It is an incitement to violence. He is going to get someone killed in the media."  One hopes she's deeply wrong, and that "is going to" turns out to be "risks getting," but at least she well-understands the galling and horrific danger of the matches the president has lit -- and keeps lighting and tossing into piles of dried, highly-combustible  leaves.

On the other hand, if there is no public word yet from Ms. Huckabee Sanders about the Trump violence tweet, we do know the reaction from at least one White House official, who alas was too cowardly to let his or her or its name be used in a story from the RawStory news site, but who nonetheless told the reporter.  "It’s rich that some of you people can never take a joke."

Ha, ha, good one.

Indeed, it seemed to have had White House officials slapping their collective knees, since another official there told RawStory, "I found it funny. Glad the President and Scavino did that." Dan Scavino is the White House Social Media Director.)

Of course it was an attempt at a joke. But this shows why "jokes" should be left to the professionals. Not politicians with a grudge to get across to incite their followers -- since telling a "joke" doesn't inherently make it funny.  Or less inciting to violence.  But to be fair, even if the media or other rational humans miss the hilarity, perhaps Sarah Huckabee Sanders or any White House official available will, at the very least, explain the wacky humor about violence at public figures to Rep. Steve Scalise after he gets out at the hospital.

The silence from Republican of the House and Senate about Trump's very-public tweet has been deafening, all the more so given the shooting only weeks ago of their own members, which rightly had them so outraged, sickened and saddened.

We await the day, hopefully soon, although still several months late, but better late than never (though "never" keep seeming like a craven possibility) when Republican members of the House and Senate take their oaths of office seriously and work on behalf of the United States, protecting it from a clear sociopath.

We do not wait for the day, however, when Trump himself takes his own presidential oath seriously, to "preserve, protect and defend" the Constitution, with its whole "First Amendment thing." and the country -- let alone, at the very least act like a sane, semi-mature adult -- because I believe that ship has long-since sailed.

America's Founding Fathers must be staring down with heart-wrenching revulsion at the so-called president and Republican Party this Independence Day Weekend.

This morning, the Huffington Post had an article by their Entertainment Editor Sara Boboltz about Betty White being accepted for membership into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the group that votes on the Oscars.  From the headline and opening passage, I thought the article would be questioning the Academy's decision, deriding the action which is tenuous at best.  Instead, Ms. Boboltz snarkily took them to task for taking so long to accept the beloved 95-year-old Betty White into its group after 72 years acting.

To be clear, I don't really care one way or the other if Betty White is in the Academy.  Personally, I don't think she remotely deserves membership -- for reasons I'll explain -- but if they want to make her a member for any reason, it's their club.  And it's a lovely tribute.  So, fine, not a problem.  What rubs me the wrong way is something else entirely.  It's that not only was the author was so snippy about the Academy's supposed long delay and terrible oversight, but she's the "Entertainment Editor" and one would hope she would know better.

After all, here's how she ended the piece, chiding the organization for this seemingly egregious omission.  "Apparently," she wrote, "the Academy has also used the opportunity to correct the decadeslong oversight that was not inviting Betty White to join its exclusive club. Be better, guys."

Worse, it was the silliness of her justification for why she believed Betty White long-deserved membership.  (The correct answer, by the way, is -- "Betty White is a Hollywood icon, and it's just such a nice honor for them to have made.")  What she wrote though to explain why this should have been done oh-so long ago and why the Academy has been oh-so thoughtless and male-based was --

"Aside from acting as a badge of honor for top figures in Hollywood, Academy members are given the esteemed privilege of choosing Oscar recipients. White has never been nominated for that award, but she has been nominated for four Golden Globes for her performance in “The Golden Girls” and 21 Emmy awards for various roles, five of which she won for her roles on shows including “The Golden Girls,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and others. She’s also got a Grammy. All of that, coupled with her standing as the legendary Betty White, makes her absence from the Academy membership a bit of a head-scratcher."

It is only a head-scratcher if you don't know what you're talking about.

Okay, here's the thing.  Look at that list she re references.  Pick out all the ones that are...well, y'know...MOVIES.  Zero.  None.  Nada.  The Emmys are TV.  The Golden Globe awards were for TV.  The Grammy is for audio recordings.  There is absolutely nothing Ms. Boboltz pointed to that had anything to do with movies.  And it's not terribly hard to figure out why that would be not just important, but 100% essential.  After all, just check out the frigging name of the organization.  It's the Academy of MOTION PICTURE Arts and Sciences.  You can't miss it.

I thought Sara Boboltz was going to ask "Why now"?  Why was Betty White given Motion Picture Academy admission now, when she hasn't even been in a movie in seven years?  Or that she was going to point out that in 72 years of acting, Betty White has only been in around eight movies.  And never starred in one, all small roles.  I would challenge Ms. Boboltz -- or you -- to simply name three movies that Betty White has ever even been in.

Okay, she played the grandmother in The Proposal in 2009 with Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds, and was great fun in it.  Before that, the last major film Betty White was in was Advise & Consent.  It was made in 1962, that's over half a century ago!

But pretty much the entirety of her career -- and yes, it's a legendary career -- is in TV.  And the Motion Picture Academy is for motion pictures.  Movies.  Feature films.

But again, if the Motion Picture Academy wants to honor Betty White and have her as a member -- more power to them.  Hey, who wouldn't want to have Betty White at their party?  She's had a great TV career, been in a handful of movies and appears to be pretty much beloved.  So, very nice for the Movie Academy if that's what they wanted.  They figured out a way to admit her, which is their absolutely right, so swell.  It was a nice thing to do.

But for the Entertainment Editor of the Huffington Post to take AMPAS to task in such a snide way, suggesting male bias and ageism for not having Betty White as a member -- that's utterly foolish.  (She even brings in charges the Academy has faced of race bias.) That shows ignorance of what the organization actually is.  It's really simple -- she's a TV actress.  A wonderful TV actress. But AMPAS is for movies.  One would hope that an Entertainment Editor would grasp this.

There's one unintentionally funny thing in Sara Boboltz's article that makes her snarky gaffe all the more pointed. She had a perfect set-up for a wonderful joke, but got caught up in trying to slam the AMPAS and totally missed what was sitting there on a silver platter in front of her.  (Or silver-haired platter.)  It comes in a passage where she is trying SO hard to bring out the organization's bias and writes -- "In recent years, as Oscar winners have continued to look a bit too white and male for many tastes..."

Arghhh!  What a lost opportunity for a great quip to put everything in proper, whimsical perspective.  But her blindness is making A Point (no matter how off-base) forced her to miss what was in front of her.  Because what she could have written -- and I'll even go so far as to say what she should have written -- was --

"And now the Academy has decided to make themselves even more White.  But in the best way possible."

Max Boot is an extremely thoughtful and insightful conservative analyst who is a senior fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations.  I don't agree with everything he writes, but I admire that thinking and perspective he puts into his work.

He wrote an article last week the Foreign Relations website which I was going to bring up here at the time, but other news stories got in the way.  It had a most-decided provocative title -- all the more so since he's generally a very low-key, even-handed writer -- though as blunt as the article is, he makes his points with highly-researched reasoning.  The article is "Donald Trump is Proving Too Stupid to Be President."  (The sub-heading is, "'You know, I'm, like, a smart person.'  Uh-huh."

He begins the article by saying that Trump is so far from being smart "that he may not be capable of carrying out his duties as president."  And Boot then goes on to give example after example.

Like Trump's exchange with a couple of Presbyterian pastors, bragging how well he did with evangelicals -- when they had to explain to him that they weren't evangelical.  When he demanded to know what they were, and they answered Presbyterian," he shot back, "But you're all Christians?"  The lager point isn't that they had to "reassure" him that they were -- but that Trump himself is Presbyterian.

Or the recent story where Trump tried to convince editors of The Economist that he had come up with the expression "Priming the pump."  (When I initially heard this story, it was beyond cringeworthy since I couldn't imagine Trump even having the slightest idea that pumps had to be primed.)

There are more examples, and Mr. Boot goes into a analysis of the difference between "stupidity" and "ignorance," the latter of which his defenders have been trying to explain Trump's gaffes, by his being "new on the job."  But as Boot points out, Trump is 71-years-old and has given no sense of learning on the job or wanting to.

As Boot writes, "The surest indication of how not smart Trump is that he thinks his inability or lack of interest in acquiring knowledge doesn’t matter. He said last year that he reaches the right decisions 'with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words common sense, because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.'"

To which Max Boot asks, "How's that working out?"

His analysis jumps off from here, from his firing of James Comey to his responses toward the recent London terror attacks, and leading "code-level" top secret information to Russia, as well as starting a Twitter fight with Qatar, and pulling out of the Paris climate accord because he believes global warming is a hoax.  Boot gives Trump defenders' their say -- and then explains why they're wrong.

He ends the article this way --

"The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides that if the vice president and a majority of the cabinet certify that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” he can be removed with the concurrence of two-thirds of both houses. That won’t happen, because Republicans are too craven to stand up to Trump. But on the merits perhaps it should. After nearly five months in office, Trump has given no indication that he possesses the mental capacity to be president."

You can read the whole thing here.

Hats off to CNN for bringing a courtroom artist into today's White House press briefing, where the Trump administration has been banning cameras.
​

Anything the press can do to shine a big Klieg light on the pathetic offensiveness of the Trump people blocking news access is great.  The more the merrier.  Perhaps at one point, John Oliver will do a similar thing with White House press briefings that his show has done with Supreme Court sessions, using dogs as stand-ins...