Tag: david cay johnston
Former President Trump

Trump Makes A Stunning Confession

Reprinted with permission from DC Report

In an astonishing admission, Donald Trump said Thursday that instead of hiring only "the best people," as he promised voters, he hired "garbage."

He also complained Thursday that these former appointees didn't follow his version of omerta after a new book revealed that he wanted to execute an unidentified White House leaker. Omerta is the ancient Sicilian mob tradition of never talking outside their criminal gang, an offense punished by death.

Each day America's beggar-in-chief issues "Save America" statements via email. Most are petty, many deranged, but now and then, truth inadvertently comes through because of his utter lack of self-awareness, his emotional immaturity and his rank incompetence as a leader. I've shown for three decades his failures to his furious denials.

Now the people he chose for his White House team are telling their stories of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the White House years.

Here is what Trump declared at 12:49 on Thursday afternoon:Let's dissect this unintended confession.

First, many of the people Trump says are "all of a sudden" talking to reporters have been talking to them for months and years. Trump doesn't read books nor did he read his Presidential Daily Brief when he was president. Not reading more deeply than the cover of a book often leaves Trump badly, sadly — and when he was president — dangerously misinformed.

If Trump cracks the spines of the bookshelf of tell-alls coming out now, he would know that the authors carefully cultivated these sources and won their trust while he was president.

Second, notice that people who worked with Trump and now speak about him, other than as he wants, are "losers."

The reason Trump made oh so many people sign nondisclosure agreements, even some 2016 campaign volunteers, was that anyone who gets inside could see the truth about Trump: He is and always has been a fraud.

The reality: He's the self-made man who blew daddy's fortune. He's the Don Juan sued repeatedly for groping and allegedly raping women because he lacked the charm to seduce them. And now he's the beggar-in-chief, a faux billionaire reduced to pleading for alms from the people he says he loves, the "poorly educated" whom he hurt so badly while in office.

Third, Trump is back to his "many say" device, as if that lends credence to what he says.

The fact is that many say he is the worst president of all time. Many say he is a Kremlin stooge. If these documents published in The Guardianon Thursday are true, Vladimir Putin owned him. Many say he is a lousy businessman.

I could go on here with enough examples to fill three books—oh, wait, Thursday I finished my third Trump book, The Big Cheat, out September 28.

Fourth, who conflates stars and garbage? There are great metaphors, there are mediocre metaphors, and then there are Trumpian trash metaphors.

But at least this one was honest trash in which Trump admitted, finally, that he didn't hire the best and the brightest, but a bunch of losers.

Trump Is Finally Number One — In Number Of Newly Unemployed Americans

Trump Is Finally Number One — In Number Of Newly Unemployed Americans

Reprinted with permission from DCReport

Here's an awful truth our government will tell you but not for some weeks to come: as of today more than 20 percent of American workers are unemployed.

That means more than 32 million Americans in the labor force are without work, the vast majority because of the coronavirus pandemic.

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Report: Deutsche Bank Officials Ignored Possible Trump Money Laundering

Report: Deutsche Bank Officials Ignored Possible Trump Money Laundering

Employees of Deutsche Bank called attention to suspicious activity indicating possible money laundering in the accounts of organizations tied to the Trump and Kushner families, according to a report in Sunday’s New York Times. But bank officials rejected both the warnings and the recommendation that the bank call those issues to the attention of federal authorities

The Times reported:

The transactions, some of which involved Mr. Trump’s now-defunct foundation, set off alerts in a computer system designed to detect illicit activity, according to five current and former bank employees, Compliance staff members who then reviewed the transactions prepared so-called suspicious activity reports that they believed should be sent to a unit of the Treasury Department that polices financial crimes.

The paper says that five current and former Deutsche Bank employees told reporter David Enrich about concerns with the Trump and Kushner accounts. Tammy McFadden, a former employee, said she was fired from her job at the bank for raising those issues, a charge the bank denied.

Both Trump and Deutsche Bank, the only financial institution willing to lend to him over the past two decades, have been embroiled in past money-laundering charges. Both denied that the Times story is accurate, as did a spokesperson for Jared Kushner.

On MSNBC, David Cay Johnston predicted that these new findings would cause serious trouble for Trump. “We know for a fact that Donald Trump has been involved in money laundering in the past, fined for it,” he said. “We know that Deutsche Bank was fined over $600 million just for laundering money for Russian oligarchs.”

The revelations may ignite additional investigations of the bank — which is already being probed by the House Financial Services Committee chaired by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA).

 

 

Cohen Testimony Offered Roadmap Of Trump Crimes

Cohen Testimony Offered Roadmap Of Trump Crimes

Reprinted with permission from DCReport.

How many crimes did Michael Cohen reveal in his testimony? By my count 14.

If you missed many of the crimes, it’s not surprising. Fascinating as much of his testimony was, Cohen did not articulate the various crimes in an orderly fashion. Instead, he just threw a lot of them out there like so many dots.

And for good measure, he said, in response to a question, that he was not confident that Trump would peacefully transfer power to the next president, which would be a 15th crime if his speculation proves accurate.

Worse, the House Oversight and Reform Committee majority never connected Cohen’s dots into a compelling picture of White House criminal culture—with three notable exceptions that we will get to in a moment.

Scattered among Cohen’s 20-page opening statement and its attached exhibits, together with his hours of public testimony on Feb. 27, was plenty of evidence that Trump is running a criminal organization whose offices and key staff simply moved its headquarters from his Manhattan high rise to the White House.

To those who have followed our coverage of Trump, much of this is not news. But, to the vast majority of Trump supporters, it would be, if the committee had asked questions to give sense and context to Cohen’s revelations.

Luckily for our democracy, this was just the first hearing. Chairman Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat, promised more hearings with witnesses and documents.

Cohen in detail or in passing revealed 11 kinds of fraud: accounting, bank, charity, insurance, mail, wire, federal income tax, state income tax, local property tax fraud, campaign finance disclosure and federal ethics disclosure.

Many of these were overlapping or interconnected. That’s how white-collar crime works. It’s not akin to a crude stickup with a gun, it’s a slight-of-facts designed to fool the gullible, enrich the bribable and to slip through the wide gaps in the weak legal walls Congress has erected to address financial crimes.

Fraud is, everywhere and always, a crime.

Whether any or all of these frauds, assuming they are proven, rise to the political standard in our Constitution of “high crimes and misdemeanors” is yet to be determined. But for sure they are proper subjects of criminal indictment, even if trial must be delayed until Trump is out of office in 2021 or 2025. And, to be clear, we think a sitting president can be indicted while in office—and should be if he has committed serious felonies.

Cohen also accused Trump of suborning perjury. Cohen indicated that others may have worked in concert to mislead election and ethics officials, Congress and voters.

Then there are the denials concerning a Trump Tower Moscow and hush money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels involved more people. That also raises the specter of conspiracy, which can be a crime.

The Moscow real estate negotiations continued well into the 2016 campaign. That matters because no large project gets done in Russia without the blessing, explicit or tacit, of Vladimir Putin, the modern czar who runs his country with a criminal gang commonly called the oligarchs and a host of lesser crooks.

Lying about the tower gave Putin leverage over Trump, kompromat far more powerful than any supposed videotape of Trump watching hookers wet a hotel bed where the Obamas once slept.

Trump’s previous statements show that Cohen’s testimony about the Moscow real estate deal is accurate. After all, Donald said, if he did not win the presidency, he had a business to run and he was not going to let lucrative opportunities pass him by.

Let that sink in for a moment. In Trump’s mind, national security is secondary to profit, a view that the Star Trek Ferengi would applaud.

According to Cohen, he was instructed to lie to Congress by the person identified in his criminal case as “Individual 1.” Cohen said that person is Donald Trump.

And finally consider the biggest and most disturbing crime of all: conspiring through intermediaries with a hostile foreign power to win the presidential election.

Trump’s intermediary, according to Cohen, was Roger Stone, who boasts of both being a hedonist and a political dirty trickster. Putin’s intermediaries included WikiLeaks.

What we don’t know yet is just how the 12 indicted Russian cyber-military officers were involved, but Robert Mueller’s prosecutors charged with extraordinarily fine detail that they were central to Kremlin interference with our 2016 elections.

During the Feb. 27  hearing we heard a lot of efforts by Republicans to demonize Cohen, but not one word about why Trump would have employed him as his consigliere for more than a decade.

No Republican tried to deny that Trump had done what Cohen said, other than vague assertions that Cohen was lying.

The most illuminating testimony came during the 10 minutes spit between three freshman Democratic lawmakers: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Katie Hill of California and also Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois.

They asked pointed questions that elicited useful information about where to pursue more facts. Bravo.

If the Democrats are serious, they will tell members in future hearings by the Oversight and other House committees to stop preening for the cameras and useless recitations of facts known and instead ask what the fictional William Forrester (Sean Connery) called “soup questions” in the film Finding Forrester.

A soup question is designed to elicit information that matters.

Ocasio-Cortez, Hill, and  Krishnamoorthi, none of  them lawyers, asked concise questions about what matters. They each conducted a better examination of Cohen than any of the committee members who are attorneys.

Let’s hope the veterans in Congress learn from the newcomers because nothing less than the future of our liberty depends on it.