Month: August 2017

I wrote most comprehensively about Felix Sater in a piece we published in February called Trump’s SoHo Project, the Mob, and Russian Intelligence and in an April piece entitled Trump, Felix Sater, and the FBI. I also mentioned him and his relationship with Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen in How Did Alex Oronov Die and Why Does It Matter?, a piece I wrote in March. You might also be interested in the Mobbed Up article that Mike Lofgren published with us in February.  In any case, if you’ve been following along, the name Felix Sater should be somewhat familiar to you. If you haven’t been keeping up with Sater here, perhaps you’ve been following the coverage at Talking Points Memo where Josh Marshall has been on the case like white on rice.

As a brief recap, Felix Sater was born in Moscow in 1966. His Russian Jewish family briefly emigrated to Israel before coming to the United States and eventually settling in 1974 in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn that is known for its large Russian population. As a child be became acquainted with Michael Cohen, who would go on to represent Donald Trump. In 1991, Sater was arrested for stabbing a commodities trader “in the cheek and neck with the stem of a margarita glass, breaking his jaw, lacerating his face, and severing nerves, creating a wound that would require 110 stitches to treat.”

In 1998, “Sater was convicted of fraud in connection to a $40 million penny stock pump and dump scheme conducted by the Russian Mafia.” The scam may have served as inspiration for a storyline in the HBO show The Sopranos where mafia “soldier” Christopher Moltisanti ran the same kind of racket.

Sater decided to become an FBI informant after the latter arrest, and that’s a Forrest Gump story all on its own. I’m not going to describe the whole saga of Sater’s life for you again right now (that’s what the links above are for) but it’s important to know the basics of what kind of guy he is. He’s a violent criminal with long associations with the Russian mob who somehow managed to be an informant against that mob for the FBI for more than a decade without winding up in a shallow grave. He’s also someone who has worked extensively with Donald Trump on various projects, including the SoHo development and “the Trump International Hotel & Residence in Phoenix, Arizona, the Conrad Fort Lauderdale and Midtown Miami in Florida, and Cornwall Terrace and 1 Blackfriars in London.” Trump once stated under oath that he wouldn’t know Felix Sater’s face if he walked into the room, but that was perjury.

This will all become painfully obviously soon.

Trump has been telling a lot of lies, and maybe foremost among them has been the lie that he has had no business deals in Russia or anything to do with Russia at all. Felix Sater’s testimony and his documents will prove otherwise.

While Donald Trump was running for president in late 2015 and early 2016, his company was pursuing a plan to develop a massive Trump Tower in Moscow, according to several people familiar with the proposal and new records reviewed by Trump Organization lawyers.

As part of the discussions, a Russian-born real estate developer urged Trump to come to Moscow to tout the proposal and suggested that he could get President Vladimir Putin to say “great things” about Trump, according to several people who have been briefed on his correspondence.

The developer, Felix Sater, predicted in a November 2015 email that he and Trump Organization leaders would soon be celebrating — both one of the biggest residential projects in real estate history and Donald Trump’s election as president, according to two of the people with knowledge of the exchange.

Sater wrote to Trump Organization Executive Vice President Michael Cohen “something to the effect of, ‘Can you believe two guys from Brooklyn are going to elect a president?’ ” said one person briefed on the email exchange. Sater emigrated from what was then the Soviet Union when he was 6 and grew up in Brooklyn.

There’s a tremendous amount of stuff to unpack here, and the intelligence committees in Congress will have to pore over Sater’s documents and question him carefully. Special Counsel Bob Mueller will be looking, too, although we won’t hear anything from him unless and until someone gets indicted or there is an impeachment referral.

For now, let’s just try to remember why Trump denied having business deals in Russia. He denied it because he demonstrated an abnormal tendency to praise Vladimir Putin that was hard to understand absent some financial incentive for doing so. That he either had Russian deals that were vulnerable or wished to pursue Russian deals and didn’t want to jeopardize them was such an obvious inference that it didn’t need to be explained to anyone. He was asked if these were the explanations for his behavior and he said the whole idea was made up and ludicrous.

But people’s suspicions were 100% accurate. He was lying the entire time.

(or maybe five or six)

Reference Points:

June 2001 (June 5-June 10 – TX weather event) Tropical Storm Allison

The storm dropped heavy rainfall along its path, peaking at over 40 inches (1,000 mm) in Texas. The worst flooding occurred in Houston, where most of Allison’s damage occurred: 30,000 became homeless after the storm flooded over 70,000 houses and destroyed 2,744 homes. Downtown Houston was inundated with flooding, causing severe damage to hospitals and businesses. Twenty-three people died in Texas. Along its entire path, Allison caused $9 billion (2001 USD) in damage and 41 deaths. Aside from Texas, the places worst hit were Louisiana and southeastern Pennsylvania.
…
…Houston experienced torrential rainfall in a short amount of time. The six-day rainfall in Houston amounted to 38.6 inches (980 mm)
…

[Note: George W Bush signed his 2001 tax giveaway on June 7, 2001.  Didn’t stall that federal emergency funds to Texas.]

Texas flood damage could top $3 billion for 2015  Houston Memorial Day weekend and other areas later in the season.

A Week-Long Siege of Heavy Rain Triggers Flash Flooding in Texas in May, June 2016

Houston (24.84 inches) has also seen their second wettest spring on record. Houston’s two wettest springs have now been in consecutive years (26.61 inches at Bush Intercontinental Airport in 2015).

A Primer on Houston Metro flood risks and what has been and is being (not) done about it:
Propublica/The Texas Tribune – December 7, 2016 Boomtown, Flood Town This is part of a series on Houston’s flood risk. Read about why Texas isn’t ready for the next big hurricane.

Too soon to tell if Fort Bend County, cited as more responsible in the Propublica report, is doing better than Houston and Harris County in the 2017 “500 year flood.”  Fort Bend County – OEM

Note: those “500 year floods” in the Houston metro area are getting closer to being “5 year floods.”

…
And the Army Corps of Engineers, which regulates development in coastal wetlands, only has about 10 people in charge of making sure the rules are followed for all of Texas and Louisiana.

“Our budget is fixed by Congress, and it’s been flatlined for three or five years,” said Kimberly Baggette, chief of the regulatory division at the Army Corps’ Galveston District. (Whether that will change under the new president remains to be seen.)
…

Wasn’t that budget on Trump’s chopping block?

…
Aside from the distant reservoir plans, it remains unclear whether many Houstonians realize that nothing is being done to address floods like the one that happened on Tax Day. Democratic Congressman Al Green said he was counting on his colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives to fund some key bayou-widening projects in the coming months — though he understands they only aim to protect against much smaller events.

“I’m going to maintain a level of optimism,” he said. “We should not have another catastrophic event and then bemoan the fact that we didn’t do what we could have and should have done, so that’s an argument that I make.”
…

Well, here it is, another “catastrophic event.”  Optimism — or hope — isn’t a plan.

Post-“catastrophic events” costs aren’t cheaper than proper zoning/building restrictions and infrastructure planning and construction.  They do, however, have two major advantages over responsible government actions.  First the costs get dispersed with those individuals directly impacted bearing a larger share and insurance picks up a share of those costs as well.  It’s like Gov Abbot calling in only 3,000 National Guard members for relief work (subsequently raised to 4,000 and today, Monday increased to 12,000) (that was 3,000 out of a population of near 28 million) and relying on local (and not so local) volunteers (free labor) to take on the task of rescuing people.  Second, federal and state disaster relief money is much easier to get than all the money required to do the job right in the first place.  The downside is that little of the disaster relief monies makes its way back to correcting what was wrong in the first place.

However, the larger impediment to “doing it right” is the corporate and individual mindset in TX.   The “keep government out of my business” and “don’t tax me, bro” mentality with a heaping dose of anti-science thrown into the pot.  A majority of Texans and the people they vote into public office never seem to stop screaming no help for irresponsible people while being some of the most deeply irresponsible people themselves.

(Much more to discuss about the unfolding and management of this “catastrophic event.”  I’ll add a couple as a comment even though they aren’t responsive to the topic of this diary.)

One week ago, I wrote a piece called September Will Be a Meat Grinder in which I explained (once again) that the Republicans will need to, among other things, avoid a government shutdown, raise the borrowing limit, and pass a new budget with specific tax-related reconciliation directives if they want to avoid a filibuster and pass tax reform with a mere fifty Senate votes. Today, I read this at Axios:

The Hill agenda for September is punishing, with colossal fights on debt limit, government funding to avoid a shutdown, and the budget (to provide a reconciliation vehicle for a tax overhaul). Steve Bannon called it the “meat-grinder” month.

Maybe Steve Bannon did call it “the ‘meat-grinder’ month.” All I know is that I didn’t get the phrasing from him. In fact, the first reporting I saw accurately describing how the budget and reconciliation need to work for tax reform came from the New York Times two days after my piece.

The president wants to push through a tax overhaul by year’s end, but first Republicans must approve a budget for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 to trigger special procedures that would allow the package to pass the Senate with only 51 votes, instead of the 60 required for most legislation.

And that’s the same piece that first reported on Bannon talking about September as a meat-grinder:

Before his exit, Mr. Bannon repeatedly warned Mr. Trump and John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, that September could be the breaking point for the Trump presidency — “a total meat grinder,” Mr. Bannon told them.

So, either some strange kismet and coincidence were involved here, my words were mixed up and plagiarized, or I’m just ahead of the game. To be clear about the meaning of my analogy, I didn’t intend it the way John Godfrey Saxe did when he said “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” What’s going in the top of the meat-grinder next month isn’t a bunch of proposed laws, but the Trump administration itself. The rest of the Axios fragment seems to borrow from me on that point, too.

The Hill agenda for September is punishing, with colossal fights on debt limit, government funding to avoid a shutdown, and the budget (to provide a reconciliation vehicle for a tax overhaul). Steve Bannon called it the “meat-grinder” month.

These fights will require complex tradeoffs, with the House and Senate leadership in the driver’s seat. So the path to even getting to a tax reform bill is long and precarious. And Trump has little political capital outside his shrinking base.

There is one original insight from the Axios piece, though, and that pertains to the president’s state of mind:

President Trump’s understaffed, self-conscious administration faces a cascade of crises and heavy lifts this fall that it’s ill-equipped to shoulder simultaneously:

What Trump is thinking, per a source: “The president’s state of mind is that he is doing fine, and the media/establishment are in denial.”

It’s like pulling teeth to get the media/establishment to accurately report the battlefield for September and the true scale of Trump’s challenges, so I should perhaps be a little forgiving if Trump doesn’t understand the odds against him. But I am not in a forgiving mood and the most I can muster is a little gratitude that the president is waddling so confidently into the thresher blades.

We’ve got a birthday to celebrate here at the cabin today and considering the biblical aspects of what’s happening in southeast Texas, I don’t feel like getting political. So, just use this thread to discuss Hurricane Harvey and I’ll see y’all tomorrow when we’ll be releasing the new Washington Monthly College Guide.

Update [2017-8-28 8:40:13 by BooMan]: New College Guide is live. Check out our rankings.

At last the British Labour party has decided to do what oppositions are supposed to do and put clear blue water between its policy on Brexit and that of the Tories:

Labour is committing itself to continued UK membership of the EU single market and customs union during a transition period following the official Brexit date of March 2019.

In a dramatic policy shift, the party’s shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer has announced that a Labour government would abide by “the same basic terms” of Britain’s current EU membership during the transition, which some observers expect to last as long as four or five years.

And in an article for the Observer, he made clear that the party is open to the possibility of negotiating new single market and customs union terms which the UK could sign up to on a permanent basis.

At June’s general election, Labour promised to seek to “retain the benefits” of the single market and customs union as part of a “jobs-first” Brexit, but leader Jeremy Corbyn has so far stopped short of committing to continued membership beyond the date of Brexit.

It remains to be seen whether Labour’s policy shift is purely tactical – to wrong foot the Tories – or a long term change of policy. It is also questionable whether the EU would agree to the UK maintaining membership of the Single Market and Custom’s union without considerable access payments – something not alluded to in Shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer Observer interview.

What seems clear, however, is that Labour has now put itself in a position to unambiguously oppose the hard Brexit favoured by PM Theresa May and her Brexit team, which makes it more likely that a hard Brexit deal (or a no deal Brexit) would not be approved by parliament in due course.

In addition, by raising the possibility of an indefinite future membership of the Single Market and customs union, Labour puts the whole rationale for Brexit in doubt.  What is to be gained from having to adhere to all the same rules that it currently does, without having a direct say in their development?

At the very least, Labour’s new position would, if adopted, by the UK, put any final Brexit beyond the term of the current parliament, and thus amenable to reversal by the next, always assuming the EU would agree to such a long term extension of the A50 negotiation period. Given that that would the unanimous agreement of the European Council, that prospects of that must seem doubtful at best.  

But what if the actual Brexit deal, approved by Westminster parliament and by qualified majority vote in the EU Council, provided for (say) 5 years continued membership of the Single Market and Customs Union after which both parties could agree to “review” the deal, with the review including all options, including all options up to and including full membership of the EU? The UK would, in essence have left the EU for a trial period with the option of returning without having to go through the full A49 membership application process which requires unanimous EU Council approval.

There is a long tradition of Parliament not being able to bind future parliaments, so it could be argued that such a clause would simply keep all options on the table for a future Parliament.  The Brexiteers will scream betrayal, of course, and it is difficult to see how Theresa May’s government could reverse course to such a degree without her losing the leadership, and quite probably, the Tories losing office.

So any scenario which might result in Labour’s new position actually becoming a real possibility depends on the Tory’s hard Brexit deal (or no deal) being voted down by Parliament first.  Closet Remainers within the Tory camp would have to grow some backbone and vote against to overturn her narrow majority. Sinn Fein are also coming under increasing pressure to end their historic policy of abstentionism in Westminster to tip the balance further towards a May defeat…

But Labour’s new policy also has the potential to undermine May’s negotiating position in Brussels.  Why should Brussels make concessions to May to make it easier for her to sell her Brexit deal to Parliament?  Best to be as hard line as possible, offer her a terrible deal, and wait for her slim Parliamentary majority to implode.  Force May to sell her self imposed “no deal” option to parliament, and if necessary to the British people in a new general election.  

After all, what has the EU got to lose? Worst case, the UK is gone anyway once the A50 period elapses, so give them as little as possible and make exiting the EU utterly unattractive for any future discontented EU member. Best case, when faced with the abyss, a chastened UK comes back into the fold. It’s “have cake and eat it” strategy exposed for the utter sham it always was. What’s not to like?

In a stunning display of solidarity with the other nations of the world, N. Korea declares war on the oceans.  

Who amongst us doesn’t deserve a presidential pardon for committing crimes like these?

The rules of the tent city were strict, arbitrary and brutally enforced. There are no newspapers allowed; Arpaio hated newspapers. The only food allowed for those of us in the work furlough program was the food in the vending machines, which was grossly overpriced.

During the sweltering summer, the temperature could reach 115 or 120 degrees. I was in the tents when we hit 120. It was impossible to stay cool in the oppressive heat. Everyone would strip down to their underwear. There was no cold water, only water from vending machines; and eventually, the machines would run out. People would faint; some had heatstroke. That summer, ambulances came about three times. One man died in his bed.

But the winter was even worse. During the winter, there were no heaters. Most jackets and heavily insulated pants weren’t allowed; they don’t want you to be comfortable.

When the temperatures dropped, we were forced to come up with makeshift ways to keep ourselves warm. The showers were kept scalding hot during both summer and winter. We hated to shower, but we would fill our empty water bottles up with the nearly boiling water and put the bottles between our blankets when it was freezing outside. We also would save the plastic bags we found when we cleaned up the jail yard and wrap our feet with them, tucking hot water bottles inside to keep our feet warm while we slept.

He kept Arizona safe!

Between when Trump verbally committed to pardoning former Sheriff Joe Arpaio and when he actually did so last night, law professor Martin H. Redish of Northwestern University wrote a piece for the New York Times about the parameters of the presidential pardon power. What are the limits, and what can be done if the power is clearly abused?

Many legal scholars argue that the only possible redress is impeachment — itself a politicized, drawn-out process. But there may be another route. If the pardon is challenged in court, we may discover that there are, in fact, limits to the president’s pardon power after all.

The only effective means courts have to prevent or stop governmental violations of constitutional rights is through injunctions. But injunctions have teeth only when they have the potential of a contempt conviction behind them. In other words, in issuing an injunction, a court is saying, “stop doing that or else.” The “or else” is a criminal conviction for contempt, leading to a fine, imprisonment or both. Absent the “or else,” the injunction is all but meaningless.

But if the president signals to government agents that there exists the likelihood of a pardon when they violate a judicial injunction that blocks his policies, he can all too easily circumvent the only effective means of enforcing constitutional restrictions on his behavior. Indeed, the president could even secretly promise a pardon to agents if they undertake illegal activity he desires.

In one sense, the pardon power pertains to any “offense” against the United States, and therefore would seem to cover anything that might happen in a federal court that brings punishment. Show up late to court and get slapped with contempt? Tell the judge to screw herself in the ear? Deliberately urinate on the floor? All of it can be construed as an “offense” against the United States’ federal government. But, as Prof. Redish notes, these aren’t things that bring people into court in the first place. They can be done as easily by the lawyers or the plaintiff as they can be done by the defendants. The court has the power to impose order and rules on its courtroom and on the procedure with which the trial will proceed. They can demand that jurors don’t talk to each other or that lawyers don’t talk to the press. They can demand that defendants not engage in certain behaviors or that police not enforce certain crimes while the issues at hand are adjudicated. These are more process issues than matters of guilt or innocence.

If we let the president pardon people for these types of things, we let the president interfere in the administration of justice, and there is at least an argument to be made that this was not the intent of the pardon power in the Constitution.

Arpaio’s case is a little more complex than this. It has recently been established that people who are accused of criminal contempt of court, as Arpaio was, can get a jury trial if the penalty is potentially more severe than six months. The idea is that anything less than six months is for “petty crimes” but a longer sentence shouldn’t be imposed without the defendant getting an actual trial with all the rights attendant to that. This is an effort to strike a balance between letting judges impose order and not letting judges mete out long, harsh punishments without the oversight and approval of a jury. Arpaio was only facing six months in prison, so by precedent he did not deserve a jury trial and he lost his appeals in his effort to get one.

But it could be argued that since at least some criminal contempt cases are treated as actual trials instead of mere matters of court administration that the whole category qualifies as an offense against the United States.

My point here is that this stuff could be litigated to explore where the lines might be drawn limiting the presidential pardon power. The Courts will not want to grant the president the power to contravene their court orders. It’s obviously recognized that the president can nullify the sentence imposed after a trial or even to preemptively pardon a crime that hasn’t even come to trial (as President Ford did in the case of Richard Nixon). And that can be interpreted to allow anything, no matter how abusive and corrosive to the administration of justice. But it’s also possible that the Courts could argue that offenses against the Court are not synonymous with offenses against the United States. An offense against the United States could be defined as an original charge brought by a prosecutor rather than a charge arising out of a trial. Perhaps the same distinction used to determine eligibility for jury trials in criminal contempt cases could be carried forward for presidential pardons.

If so, the only limitation on the pardon power would be for cases of contempt that carry a penalty of six months or less, but it would protect the integrity of the court system and prevent the president from orchestrating a systematic scheme to ignore and abuse people’s civil rights.

Likewise, we may soon have to litigate if there are any remedies short of impeachment for a president who pardons witnesses for the purpose of obstructing an investigation against himself, or whether a president can pardon themselves for crimes they have committed.

The Courts are an independent branch of the federal government and they have the ability to fight back against a rogue president. The pardon power provided in the Constitution is explained in incredibly succinct language: “he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”

The only wiggle room in there seems to be over how we define “offenses.” We’ve never had to decide exactly what that means before, but I think now we do.

Beyond the semantics, there’s also common sense. Is it plausible that the authors of the Constitution intended to give the president the authority to commit crimes with impunity, to obstruct investigations into his own conduct with his power to grant preemptive pardons? We know that they provided impeachment as a remedy for these types of behaviors, but it would to make sense to draw some lines around how much mischief a president can create.

One thing seems absolutely clear to me. Even under the broadest possible interpretation of the presidential pardon power, a clear abuse of the privilege is possible and since the only remedy (in this interpretation) is impeachment, the abuse would have to be grounds for impeachment.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the Grand Canyon painting.  I’m not working from a photo this time, just from the images left in my mind’s eye from both our visit to the north rim and the gallery images.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I’ve now begun to overpaint the various elements barely visible in last week’s version.  Note the tortured junipers and underbrush.  Out in the distance I’ve added more color to the buttes and shadowed area.  It’s starting to come together.  Next week more definition.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

Good luck, Texas and Louisiana. I hope it’s not as bad as it looks, but if it is the Mid-Atlantic will be ready to help even if some folks didn’t want to help us after Superstorm Sandy.