It’s true that Robert Mueller knows more than we do. It’s also true that what we already know is damning enough. But I’ve been digging at this story for a long time now, and what I know is far more than what the average person knows, including a lot of people who are trying to cover it every day. I’m pretty sure if we just stuck to the things I’ve written about and forgotten it would make up a pretty serious set of indictments.
When the shithammer comes down, trust me, it is going to make a splash.
I’ll bet you have a lot of info that we don’t. And I have been so pleased that Mueller seems to be a steady, thorough, intelligent investigator. No leaks, no whispers, no kidding around. By comparison, the Trump team looks like a clown convention.
I can’t guess what comes of all this. I feel nervous that the Republicans in Congress are feeling the heat and will do their best to discredit or get rid of Rosenstein and Mueller. Will that matter, Martin? Do they have the power to do that, and does the Mueller team have everything protected? I wish it was all close to being over, but I know I’d rather have everything done and tied up than have it be rushed.
I loathe this president and his entire administration. Whatever happens, I do want that shithammer to come down like fury. And I want them gone.
Yes, that is the problem. There is still no guarantee that the hammer will fall. As long as the Republicans in congress will allow, the investigation can and will be aborted.
As we near the end of the school year, I’m getting way behind on my reading. But I skimmed a couple of stories, including the Washington Post story this week, about the large cash purchases of real estate made by the Trump Organization. Apparently this happened during the decade before he ran for president.
You may have written about this already; if so, sorry I missed it.
I was a finance guy before I became a teacher (don’t ask – it was either a stupid mid-life crisis or an annoying bout of conscience.) We never, ever, EVER financed a transaction unless we knew who was putting cash into the deal. If money appeared in an account without a clear explanation, we asked more questions.
I worked for mid-sized outfits that did residential and commercial lending. We weren’t angels, but we didn’t want to be involved in money laundering, and we REALLY didn’t want to go to jail. So, we “followed the money.” I’m sure we sometimes transacted with dirty money – but it certainly had to be so well-laundered that we could be held blameless.
As good as I think we were at tracking cash, the federal regulators and Secret Service guys we dealt with were rock stars. These, ladies and gents, were serious hard-asses. They were absolutely relentless. I vowed to myself that I would never, ever try to hide anything from them, because they were very good at sniffing out any kind of subterfuge or bad record-keeping. I like to keep my chubby pink body out of places with bars on the windows!
I was strictly small-time – so I can only imagine that the financial bloodhounds working for Mr. Mueller must be top guns, aces of their craft. I would love to see their files on the Trump organization.
Forget about pee tapes, follow the money. I agree, Martin – the indictments are going to be epic. Unfortunately, the Trumpistas don’t care if our judicial and law enforcement institutions have any legitimacy, and they will try to ruin all loyal public servants who oppose them. They may also trigger a real constitutional crisis.
We’re about to find out how many people in the U.S. are willing to put the rule of law ahead of their political preferences. I pray for there to be enough of us.
How did Cohen and Trump Org manage to get away with it all these years with that kind of scrutiny at play?
Avenatti seems to have a lot of information as well. I enjoy how he routinely keeps what he knows in the headlines. Pretty savvy guy.
Good question.
Probably has some correlation with how the FBI was more focused on leaking against Clinton than fighting crime.
Fighting crime is hard, leaking is easy.
I’m cautiously not-pessimistic.
. . . not-pessimistic” is good.
Whether it’s warranted is a separate issue. I’m . . . er . . . cautiously not without hope?
The donald got caught money laundering through the casinos in Atlantic City. He was fined $10 million. I have never seen an explanation of how much or how the money was laundered.
Also, I have never understood the Trump Tower business. People buy apartments and the Trump Corp turns them into hotel rooms. How do all the parties make money from this arrangement or is not making money the purpose?
Here’s how money is laundered through a casino. You come in with a bag of illicit cash and exchange it for chips. You play for a short time, then cash in all your chips, taking the payment as a check or at least a receipt. You then claim the money as gambling winnings.
Casinos are supposed to keep careful records and to report suspicious activities. I can’t imagine why — but the Taj did not do this.
Or to be slightly more subtle, buy chips and then pass them on to a confederate. You show a loss, for your confederate, winnings.
Most days my news feed is a mashup of All the President’s Men and (pick one) Goodfellas, the Godfather saga, or Casino.
How did they get away with it?
They took advantage of the general downslide of the entire system, that’s how.
The rot that infects DC has also infected the forces that angry teacher so prudently avoided.
Plus…he says that he switched careers quite a while ago. I do not know how long ago that was, but corporate entities have been quite successful in buying off investigators for well over 50 years, it seems to me. Maybe those ace detectives of which he speaks were simply not being allowed to prosecute the big boys, only the smaller, weaker fish. They investigated only on order from above.
Just as it’s always been.
Never forget…the fish rots from the head.
Bet on it.
AG
It would seem reasonable that this investigation is so complex that Mueller must have determined early on to divide it up into buckets (if only to bring clarity) which will protect the various buckets if one of them gets tossed out.
What intrigues me is the way that Mueller’s team must have structured and strategized what goes in each bucket and how and when each bucket will be revealed. Some say he’s relying on his experience with mob investigations and using that playbook. Considering that the Russian Mob & GRU morphed into a single entity around 1998, it goes without saying that just like the 13 oligarchs he indicted, whatever bucket holds the state-sponsored Russian or even Ukrainian actors is a mixed bag of what can be prosecuted.
The rollout will be the best part of the story…until we reach the rollup!
I don’t want a shithammer. I want it made of hardened cement, studded with nails and razors.
I think Hunter Thompson’s phrase BooMan is citing was “million-pound shithammer”. When it drops, it will hit plenty hard enough.
We’ll see. My guess is he wins the republican nomination two years from now.
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I see Mueller and the press as the presently very thin reed holding back a tottering dam of excremental kleptocratic fascism. If the reed fails and breaks an historical corner will have been turned and there won’t be any going back to decency.
I think you underestimate the rage felt by the majority of Americans, towards these traitorous gangsters. Shutting down Mueller’s investigation would itself be a lawless act. If our government cannot clean this up, I suspect the people will clean it up for them.
Then again, maybe I underestimate the American people.
60 million Americans elected a man they witnessed boasting about sexual assault and ridiculing a man for his physical deformity. I didn’t think that was possible. I underestimated Americans.
And he is currently supported by 88% of Republicans so apparently he is doing exactly what they want him to do.
I read the news every day and constantly find myself shaking my head in disbelief.
Is this really the country I grew up in and loved all these years? Have I been blind to this ugliness all along?
Is Lincoln’s statement of hope now just a distant dream?
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
The fully sufficient evidence of this is Trump successfully calling forth the Nazis and their fellow deplorables to flaunt their bigotry, out and proud. Then the Worse-Than-Useless Corporate Media normalizing him and them, including fawning profiles.
You do. The overwhelming majority of self-described Republicans believe that the FBI is trying to frame the president. So do a surprising number of other people.Viz. Digby
When Mueller and SDNY produce reports and indictments, these people will be seething with anger over Trump and his people being railroaded. They will stay angry too,even after convictions or whatever, they are all-in on Team Trump forever.
I’m convinced enough info is available to compile a list of damning indictments. I’m also convinced the strongest evidence is hiding in broad daylight and Trump’s crimes are losing shock value by the day.
Ho hum, the POTUS doesn’t care if Putin meddles with elections. He doesn’t care about protecting future elections, doesn’t mind that election systems and the power grid were aggressively hacked? Yawn. That’s old news. If Congress isn’t concerned, why should anyone else be?
I wish I believed the shithammer is going come down with a thunderous boom. I think we’re exhausted, scandal-hardened, so accustomed to the bi-weekly unprecedented breach of ethics that the hammer coming down will be business as usual.
Nunes will call for a Mueller investigation again. Hannity will fume about the deep state again. Mitch will lay low until the storm passes over.
I hope I’m wrong. I sincerely and desperately hope I’m wrong.
I still wonder if I imagined a twenty-minute news story about Trump sending goons to steal records from his doctor’s office.
You ask:
There is now so much contradictory “news” available…much of it patently false, promulgated to serve one or another wing of the system…that one outrage after another fades away with each news cycle. There is so much to be outraged about!!! Our outrage carriers fill up and need to be purged so that we can consume even more outrage.
Until there is some kind of outrage outage? Something I cannot even imagine happening on a level broad enough to make a serious difference? (Or perhaps an outrage overdose…after all, outrage is our newest and most dangerous drug.)
Until something changes?
The news cycle rules.
Trump plays it better than anyone else that I have ever seen.
Outraged at last week’s Trump actions?
Wait.
He’ll top himself next week.
It’s what he does for a living.
Watch.
AG
He does play it better than anyone else; he’s even convinced otherwise-intelligent people that ‘fake news’ is evenly distributed across various wings of the system. That’s like the sting of the tarantula wasp. Once we believe that lie, he can lay his eggs in us and watch as we helplessly hatch his brood.
We shall see about that evenly distributed fake news, Steggies.
Or…we shall not.
The fake news about Obama being some sort of Peace President was certainly evenly distributed in the leftiness media. So was the equally fake news that Bernie Sanders, Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich and Ross Perot were all dangerous heretics of one kind or another. As was the idea that HRC was anything other than simply the preferred candidate of the
centrist…errr, ahhh I meant “Liberal,” of course…DemRats.We shall see.
Won’t we.
Some of us.
AG
I guess if you cannot distinguish between opinion and fact, then yeah. Both sides.
It is very difficult these days to tell what is “opinion,” what is “fact” and what is sheer mainstream bullshit.
You write:
Those distinctions have become so blurred that mainstream Dem presidents and candidates who collaborated in an endless series of movements that were all meant to strengthen the corporate middle are lauded as “liberals” and “progressives,” while people who realized that the so-called “middle” is where our problems really reside are non-personed…right and left…by the Corporate/Government Media Complex.
Yeah.
Both sides.
Deal wid it.
AG
. . . but it sure as fuck is breathtakingly dishonest.
I think we were dreaming it. Nice story though.
A lot of what we call ‘white-collar crime’ isn’t actually criminal.
It’s covered by the free exercise clause of the first amendment — so long as you worship money, that is.
If that’s even possible. Somehow I doubt it.
When the shithammer comes down, its going to make a splash, no doubt. Just based on what we know now, its heavy enough. And I believe what we know may be just a fraction of what Mueller knows and will use to add splash power to that hammer.
That said, I liken this to a forest fire. When the planes fly over carrying a shitload of water and/or chemicals to put out the fire, when its dropped, sure, its awesome and makes a noteworthy splash, if you will, that is not without some significant affect. But will it be enough to put out the damned fire? Will this be a case of the fire being put out by Mueller’s hammer? That scenario relies on the system working, and that means many more republicans than we see now must suddenly behave differently than they have, show some integrity and actually put “the good of the country” above their own self interest. That’s a very heavy lift.
The other scenario is the fire burns itself out. And that happens when there is literally nothing left for the fire to consume. Meaning, we’ll be rid of Trump only when he and the republicans have done everything they could possibly do with the power they have. That means living with this shit through 2024, and all they could “accomplish” in all that time. Now that’s some scary shit.