December Has Been a Cruel Month for President Trump

We continue follow the twists and turns, the tribulations and tweets of President Trump.

For further reading, go to Part V. Here we pick up the trail of the worst president in U.S. history once more. 

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In one stunning month, (December 2018) the president suffers one blow after another to his fragile ego. Secretary of State James Mattis quits in disgust. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly gets ousted and tells reporters his greatest success will be measured by what he kept the president from doing. Nobody wants to sit next to Trump at anybody’s funeral. North Korea refuses to give up any of its nukes. The Saudis murder a journalist and the only person in the world who seems to believe their cover story is our president, and Republicans finally uncover the massive voter fraud they’re always complaining about.

Sadly, it’s committed by Republicans.

Meanwhile, Mueller moves in for the kill. Roger Stone gets closer and closer to being indicted. Horndog Rudy, Trump’s current lawyer, says Trump’s old lawyer, Michael Cohen can’t be trusted because he keeps changing his story, and Rudy and his boss both keep changing their stories. On Fox News, Judge Jeanine Pirro makes one of the worst predictions in history and the judge in General Flynn’s sentencing  case tells him he sold out his country. Investigators recommend jail time for Cohen and hint that Individual 1 may be complicit.

Trump goes to Iraq to visit the troops and all he has to do is show up, be friendly, and not blow it.

Naturally, he blows that, too.

And for the first time since 2008, the stock market suffers a decline for the year.

Does it smell like Nixon yet, or am I imagining?

12/31/18: The U.S. government ends the year as it began, shut down, this time for a tenth straight day. The same nut job is at the helm, only a little nuttier than before, steering the Ship of State to no discernable port.

Still, the stock market did bounce up a bit on the day, ending at 23,327 for the year. Sadly, this marked the first yearly decline for the Dow since 2008, following eight straight years of gains under Obama and one under Trump. In fact, while Old Twitter Thumbs loves to brag about how great he’s done leading the markets to new heights, it’s kind of fun to compare his performance with Mr. Obama’s. In Barack Hussein Obama’s first year in charge (2009) the Dow rose 25.94 percent. In Trump’s first year (2017), the market also fared well, rising 21.64 percent. In Mr. Obama’s second year, the market continued to rise, up 14.82 percent.

Trump in his second year, not so much. The Dow began the year at 24,719. It ended today, down 5.7 percent.

The markets have now declined seven times since 1980. Reagan saw a drop in 1981, Bush 41 in 1990, Clinton in 2000, Bush 43 in 2001, 2002 and 2008, and now Donald J. Trump in 2018.

And that’s going to leave another orange bruise on his ego, you can bet.

HAPPY NEW YEAR, AMERICA, WE SURVIVED ANOTHER YEAR OF PRESIDENT TRUMP!!!!

See below for the rest of the month: 

December 1, 2018: Trump is in Argentina for the G-20 Summit. And he actually makes it through an entire day without insulting anyone on Twitter.

People wonder if he’s being held hostage.

He and the First Lady even manage to issue a nice letter of condolence upon the death of former President George H. W. Bush. The missive is well-written and thoughtful. So everyone knows Mr. Trump didn’t write it.

And let’s use this as a chance to mention why liberals respect old-fashioned conservatives even if they do disagree on policy matters. Bush was a true patriot, having flown 58 combat missions. Bush married the first woman he ever kissed and stayed married to her for 73 years. Bush was respectful of others, including those with whom he had political disagreements.

He also pegged Trump perfectly in November 2017. “I don’t like him,” Bush admitted. “I don’t know much about him, but I know he’s a blowhard. And I’m not too excited about him being a leader.” 

12/2/18: Trump flies back from Argentina. For a second day, he refrains from insulting anyone. Rumors begin to fly.

Trump is dead! Some guy in a fat suit with a terrible wig is appearing in his stead. Or: Trump has fled to Russia. Or: Melania caught him texting a porn star and stomped on his phone.

12/3/18: Trump is ALIVE!!! He returns to Washington and gets back to his regular job of tweeting insults and tampering with witnesses. Clearly, he realizes the Mueller investigation is closing in.

He knows, if he ends up in jail, Melania is not coming to visit.

First, he attacks Michael Cohen, his former fixer and personal lawyer, for pleading guilty and fingering him in the process. According to Trump the rat should go to jail forever. His wife and parents ought to go to jail too—and his children—and his dog and his three goldfish! Trump is judge, jury and asshole rolled into one. Trial by tweet! It takes the president two shots to lay out his “case:” 

“Michael Cohen asks judge for no Prison Time.” You mean he can do all of the TERRIBLE, unrelated to Trump, things having to do with fraud, big loans, Taxis, etc., and not serve a long prison term? He makes up stories to get a GREAT & ALREADY reduced deal for himself, and get.....

 ....his wife and father-in-law (who has the money?) off Scott Free. He lied for this outcome and should, in my opinion, serve a full and complete sentence.

Next, we have a little not-so-subtle witness tampering! Trump tried this gambit with Cohen back in April, insisting he’d never turn against him. (Wink, wink: Michael, hold out and you can expect a pardon!)

But Cohen flipped. Now, Trump says, Cohen is “weak.”

Knowing the circle is being closed around him, Trump flails away again. This time he’s hinting at a pardon for a different underling:

“I will never testify against Trump.” This statement was recently made by Roger Stone, essentially stating that he will not be forced by a rogue and out of control prosecutor to make up lies and stories about “President Trump.” Nice to know that some people still have “guts!”

Stone is a man, who, “if he’s talking, he’s lying,” according to former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. (See: 11/27-28/18.)

Stone said he never met with any Russians. Not even one.

Stone is the guy who testified in front of Congress that he never met with any Russians during the campaign. Then he had to amend his testimony and admit he did (after the “Fake News” people uncovered the details). Stone said he forgot meeting with the Russian—and forgot the Russian was offering dirt on Hillary Clinton—and forgot the guy asked for $2 million to share it with the Trump campaign.

Finally, Trump lashes out at Special Counsel Mueller: “Bob Mueller (who is a much different man than people think and his out of control band of Angry Democrats, don’t want the truth, they only want lies,” Trump tweets. “The truth is very bad for their mission!”

In other words, Stone has “guts” because he’ll lie to protect Trump. Mueller is not the man people think he is.

Coming from Trump, there’s a bit of irony in what he tweets. Mueller had the “guts” to protect this country. He joined the Marines and went to fight in Vietnam. When Trump’s feet hurt too much to serve, Mueller was bleeding for our nation. As a Marine officer he was caught in a firefight and awarded a Bronze Star with “V” for valor.

In a second firefight, on 22 April 1969, Mueller was “seriously wounded.”  For his actions that day he was awarded the Navy Commendation Medal with “V” for valor. A squad-size patrol under his command came under heavy fire from a large enemy force in ambush. “Completely disregarding his own safety,” the commendation reads,

First Lieutenant Mueller led the remainder of his platoon in an attempt to relieve the beleaguered squad…By his courage, aggressive leadership and steadfast devotion to duty in the face of great personal danger, First Lieutenant Mueller inspired all who observed him and upheld the finest traditions of the Marine Corps and of the United States Naval Service.

Stone had “guts,” like Trump had “guts.” He managed to avoid serving in the U.S. military. Born in 1952, he was the perfect age to enlist in 1970 if he desired. Instead, he desired to head off to college, where he remained safe and sound and un-punctured by enemy fire. In 1972 he did go to work for the Nixon campaign—making him part of the most corrupt administration (until now) in U.S. history.

In 1976 Stone was elected president of the Young Republicans. His campaign manager was Paul Manafort.

In 1980 the two men formed a lobbying partnership with a third individual; and because they lobbied for a number of brutal dictators, the firm won the nickname, “The Torturers’ Lobby.”

Stone is Trump’s kind of guy. He’ll do anything for money.

12/4/18:  A man has got to tweet; and Trump is gonna tweet stupid crap. Tuesday, he refers to himself as “Tariff Man” on Twitter. Investors, already skeptical of his claim that he has struck an “incredible” tariff deal at the G-20 Summit with China, react like an attractive young woman stuck alone in a room with the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief. The Dow plunges 800 points.

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C.I.A. DIRECTOR Gina Haspel heads to Capitol Hill to brief a group of U.S. senators. Previously, she had failed to show up for a meeting to discuss the grisly murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

What Haspel says behind closed doors leaves them fuming. The tweeting “Tariff Man” has insisted the evidence is not clear. Maybe Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing, maybe he didn’t. Trump is just the President of the United States. How should he know?

Why should he care?

The senators who listen to Haspel have no such doubts. Sen. Bob Corker tells reporters after the meeting there can be no doubt the prince “ordered, monitored, the killing” of the father of four. “If he were in front of a jury, he would be convicted of murder in about 30 minutes.”

A visibly angry Sen. Lindsey Graham seconds that assessment. “There’s not a smoking gun,” he fumes, “there’s a smoking saw. 

“You have to be willfully blind,” Graham continues, “not to come to the conclusion that this was orchestrated and organized by people under the command of MBS and that he was intrinsically involved in the demise of Mr. Khashoggi.”

Willfully blind? Yeah, that’s Trump.

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WELL, AT LAST! Republicans finally uncover the kind of massive voter fraud Donald J. Trump has been railing about for years. The president was right! The election in North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District was rigged.

By Republicans!

Finally! Republicans uncover massive voter fraud.

An “independent contractor” working for the campaign of Mark Harris, the GOP candidate, helps Harris beat Democratic opponent Dan McCready by 905 votes. Then evidence of widespread voter fraud surfaces. Absentee ballots had been sent to hundreds of individuals who never requested them. Then workers paid by a convicted felon go door-to-door and collect the completed ballots. If you are asking yourself, “Hey, isn’t that illegal?” you are not the only one to wonder.

That is, in fact, flagrantly illegal.

Citing, “claims of numerous irregularities and concerted fraudulent activities related to absentee mail ballots,” The State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement refuses to certify the results in the Ninth District.

The testimony of Stacy Holcomb, a Ninth District voter, is typical. He tells reporters “a woman wearing a Mark Harris t-shirt came by his apartment asking if he wanted to cast an absentee ballot by mail. He accepted her help getting a ballot and gave the woman the marked, sealed ballot after it arrived.”

Who hatched this scheme? That would be the convicted felon, Leslie McCrae Dowless.

An article in the Charlotte Observer provides the background:

Leslie McCrae Dowless was convicted of felony fraud in 1992 in Iredell County, according to court records. Dowless and his wife were accused of taking out an insurance policy on a dead man and collecting nearly $165,000 from his death, according to a 1991 Fayetteville Observer article. He served more than six months of a two-year prison sentence, according to court records.

Dowless, now 62, was convicted of felony perjury in 1990, according to court records.

No one knows—but a new election may result.

The GOP still has Rep. Chris Collins.

Well, at least the GOP can still count on Chris Collins to uphold cherished conservative principles and values in Congress! Rep. Collins recently eked out a narrow win in New York’s Twenty-Seventh Congressional District. The incumbent defeated his Democratic challenger by 2,560 votes, in an election where roughly 277,000 were cast. And no one has even claimed the numbers were rigged!

Now Collins needs at least one more vote—a jury holdout—since he’s under indictment on charges of insider trading.

If he loses in his upcoming trial, he’ll be bounced out of the House next.

(His margin of victory is slightly lower than his win in 2016, by 113,063 votes; but, still, a win is a win.)

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OTHER THAN COLLINS’ VICTORY, is there any other good news for Team Trump? Yes and no.

Former Team Trump member and leader of “Lock her up!” chants, General Michael T. Flynn appears in court Tuesday. Special Counsel Mueller recommends 0 days behind bars for Flynn!

Cue the chant from the Oval Office, “Don’t lock him up!” It’s party time for Trump and all his aides and Don Jr.

Or not.

General Flynn is likely to avoid spending time in jail not because he’s innocent but because he quickly pled guilty and began cooperating with the investigation. We now learn that he has sat down nineteen times for talks with Mueller’s team. “Given the defendant’s substantial assistance and other considerations set forth below,” the court filing reads, “a sentence at the low end of the guideline range—including a sentence that does not impose a term of incarceration—is appropriate and warranted.”

On Fox News, Trump’s cheerleaders insist this court filing proves Mueller and his team are coming up empty-handed and Trump should be re-elected in 2020, even if he loses the popular vote by twenty-six million! Lou Dobbs angrily demands that President Obama produce his birth certificate, Harvard transcripts, and his hat and shoe sizes. Tucker Carlson spends an entire show looking perplexed. Liberals, he basically says, don’t you just hate ‘em!

In reality, the White House has to be boiling. No one knows what Flynn told investigators during those nineteen meetings. Don Jr. has to hope Flynn knew nothing about his June 2016 meeting with Russians in Trump Tower. Jared has to wonder. What did Flynn tell investigators about the secret meeting he and Flynn had with a Russian banker in December 2016? Paul Manafort has already been cooked in court. Now the leftovers of his career may end up microwaved for a snack. Roger Stone? He has to hope Flynn didn’t mention him in any way, shape or form, because nothing Stone did during the campaign was ever legit.

“Multiple false statements…on multiple occasions.”

We already knew that Flynn and his son flew to Russia in December 2015 and stayed in a luxury hotel for several days, at Russian expense. We know General Flynn plunked down beside Vladimir Putin at dinner—and then gave a speech for which he was handsomely paid ($45,000). So: What did Flynn tell Mueller and his team about efforts inside the Trump campaign in 2016, including offers to end crippling financial sanctions, to curry favor with the Russians?

And did he finger the president himself?

How bad could Flynn be for Trump and his gang? First, we have long known that he pled guilty to one charge of lying to the F.B.I. The sentencing document, however, notes, “As described in the Statement of Offense, the defendant made multiple false statements, to multiple Department of Justice (“DOJ”) entities, on multiple occasions.”

That means there was plenty Flynn felt he needed to lie about. And Flynn was definitely President Trump’s boy.

Secondly, anyone who has ever watched an episode of CSI: Miami, or CSI: Special Victims Unit, or CSI: Jaywalking Unit, knows criminal investigators work their way up, trying to turn small fish against big fish before they are eaten.

A heavily redacted supplemental document leaves court reporters, pundits and ordinary Americans guessing. On page one we learn, “The defendant has assisted with several ongoing investigations, a criminal investigation [REDACTED].” Flynn has “provided documents and communications” that have to do with “links or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald J. Trump” [REDACTED].

On page two we learn that Flynn has provided “substantial assistance,” but that some of the benefits “may not be fully realized at this time because the investigations in which he has provided assistance are ongoing.”

 An entire section of the document is [REDACTED] including the name of the investigation itself.

On page four, prosecutors note that “several senior members” of the Trump transition team repeated false statements Flynn made about contacts with Russia. “The defendant also provided useful information concerning” [REDACTED]. And another full page is reduced to heavy black lines.

Black lines in a court filing mean black days and nights of doubt and confusion in the White House.

12/5/18: The funeral of George H. W. Bush proves to be a tribute to a man who fought and nearly died for his country, a fine family man, a compassionate conservative and a gentleman at all times.

By comparison, albeit unspoken, in the front row you had the Big Orange Buffoon. The Bush family had to promise beforehand that no one would take shots at Trump in their eulogies to Bush 41.

Otherwise, Trump wouldn’t even come.

Who would speak well of Trump when he’s gone?

I, for one, found myself pondering who might speak well of Trump at his funeral someday. His first two wives? The Playboy Bunny he was boinking while Melania was pregnant and caring for Barron, their baby boy?

Any of a wide variety of former aides, now convicted felons?

Perhaps, when Trump finally waddles over the rainbow, his tax accountant will finally reveal the secrets of how he avoided paying a single dollar, most years, to support the government he would one day be elected to lead. An X-ray of his bad foot might be displayed, the foot that kept Trump from serving heroically in Vietnam. And we would finally know which foot it was—since Donald J. Trump could never remember. Family members might cite wisdom he passed along in his tweets. Sarah Sanders might wander up to the podium and start lying out of habit, pointing out how mean the press always was to her old boss—what with reporting on all the stupid crap Trump said and did and did and said.

12/6/18: Want to understand how grave a threat President Trump is to the rule of law? Consider the open letter signed by 400 former officials at the Department of Justice. In it veterans of both Democratic and Republican administrations call upon him to remove Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker from his post.

Every American, including the president, is subject to the law.

The letter reads in part:

Because of our respect for our oaths of office and our personal experiences carrying out the Department’s mission, we are disturbed by the President’s appointment of Matthew Whitaker to serve as Acting Attorney General. We know that overseeing the Department of Justice is one of the most important roles in our government. The Attorney General is responsible for ensuring that we are a nation of laws and that every citizen and every government official — including the President himself — is equally subject to those laws. Because of the profound responsibilities the position entails and the independence it requires, it can only be filled by someone who has been subjected to the strictest scrutiny under the process required by the Constitution.

Whitaker, of course, has not been confirmed by the Senate. In fact, Whitaker’s main qualifications seem to be: his former work shilling for World Patent, a company fined $26 million for scamming customers; his comments—going back a year—that the Mueller probe was a “witch hunt,” a “hoax” and a potpourri of fishy legal antics by investigators who kept tripping up suspects who then had to confess; and his complete and utter lack of principles.

In any case, Whitaker is still on the job today; and the president has to be sweating orange, knowing his former National Security Adviser, General Flynn, has been talking at length to Mueller and his team.

As in, 19 meetings “at length.”

This cannot be good for Trump or top aides and officials in his administration. But defense lawyer and one-man clown show Rudy Giuliani insists investigators, not the confessed felons, are “sick puppies.” Flynn was convicted of a crime no more serious than “spitting on the sidewalk.”

Actually—and even the dimmest Trump fan can look this all up—Flynn lied multiple times in meetings with the F.B.I. and other authorities. Not to mention taking $530,000 from the Turkish government—when he was supposedly working for the good of our country.

Mueller and his team don’t have “bupkis,” Rudy says, perhaps the first time in history anyone has ever shrugged off more than half-a-million dollars as nothing.

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Well, with Trump, at least the stock market is going great because if Hillary had been elected it was going to plunge!

Damn it! The market drops another 600 points.

12/7-10/18: President Trump’s terrible no good weekend/week/month/presidency continues to spiral downward.

First, the president announces that White House chief of staff General John Kelly is leaving; but everything at 1600 Pennsylvania is just ducky. Then we learn Nick Ayers will be taking the job.

Then we learn Ayers won’t be taking the job.

Then we learn the president is pissed.

Why not pick a Russian?

As for me, I would like to offer this helpful suggestion: Why not pick a Russian for the job and cut out the middle men?

On the international front we have new reports that North Korea is expanding missile-launching bases located along the Chinese border, where it would be beyond dangerous for the U.S. to strike them. The North Koreans also appear to be ramping up production of nuclear weapons and missiles.

Total number of nuclear weapons Kim Jong-un has relinquished since June, when Trump declared his country no longer a nuclear threat:

0.

While we’re on the subject of rogue leaders, CNN acquires a transcript of the tape of the last minutes journalist Jamal Khashoggi spent on earth. According to the translation, Khashoggi can be heard gasping three times, “I can’t breathe,” as a Saudi hit team finishes him off.

Soon a bone saw is heard. A doctor wielding it tells other members of the team to use ear plugs or listen to music, as he is, if the sound of dismemberment bothers them. The head of the hit squad can be heard talking on the phone. Turkish authorities, who have passed the transcript on to reporters, claim intercepts prove the calls are going to a number at the Saudi royal palace. The other end of the conversation can’t be heard but the assassin tells his listener the “job is done.”

Yet, none of this bothers our president—or Jared, his son-in-law. Trump continues to insist there’s no direct link between the murder and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. Jared does a fluff interview with Sean Hannity. Hannity chooses not to ask about the Crown Prince and Jared never brings him up. According to Jared, U.S. intelligence agencies are still trying to figure out who murdered the journalist. And it doesn’t much matter in the end. He and “Dad” are focused on other matters.

“We’re focused now on the broader region, which is figuring out how to hopefully bring a deal together between the Israelis and the Palestinians,” Jared tells his host.

Apparently, neither Jared, nor Sean, nor the president himself realize: Hey, we’re the United States! We could work on more than one foreign policy issue at a time.

Marco Rubio, one of about a hundred U.S. senators to call for a different tack, responds, “The bottom line is that there is no way that 17 people close to [the Crown Prince] got a charter plane, flew to a third country, went into a consulate, killed and chopped up a man and flew back, and he didn’t know about it, much less order it.”

Meanwhile, the foreign policy hits keep coming. Trump needs a new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and pickings are slim. So: He looks at his nearly empty bench and sends in Heather Nauert to guard the goal. Because nothing says, “We intend to bolster America’s preeminent role on the world stage,” like elevating a former Fox News host to this crucial diplomatic post. 

Did someone mention diplomacy? Why, yes.

In an interview with CBS news, Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reveals the secrets of President Trump’s foreign policy “success.” On numerous occasions, he tells an interviewer, he had to tell Trump that what he wanted done on the international stage was either:

A)   illegal

B)    a violation of some existing treaty or two

C)   or both

Trump doesn’t like to read briefing reports

Tillerson proves less than complimentary in describing the president’s decision making processes. It was difficult, he says, “to go to work for a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things. But rather just kind of says, ‘Look, this is what I believe and you can try to convince me otherwise,’ but most of the time you’re not going to [be able to] do that.”

In other words, the president has been winging it.

Trump responds with typical maturity in a tweet rant. “Rex Tillerson,” he howls, “didn’t have the mental capacity needed. He was dumb as a rock and I couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. He was lazy as hell.” 

While we’re on the topic of “winging it,” we should note that the president is flying in aimless circles and just announced he wants to increase defense spending for Fiscal Year 2019.

In October he said a request for $716 billion for defense was “crazy” but, luckily for us, he wasn’t crazy. He was going to trim defense spending to $700 billion.

Now he thinks $750 billion would be about right.

Tomorrow he may ask Congress to appropriate an extra $10 billion so that all the troops can have t-shirts emblazoned with life-size pictures of his face.

Meanwhile, Trump and his GOP pals aren’t doing so well on the home front, either. For example, we learn that Democrats have netted 40 seats in the House of Representatives and won—nationally—the total vote by 8.4%, or nearly nine million. That’s the largest margin in midterm elections since Watergate.

In addition, the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School reports that there have been 94 school shooting incidents in the country this year, topping the old record of 59 in 2006 by far.

So that’s not so good.

Still, there’s semi-positive news for Team Trump in regard to at least one of several current investigations. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, has been chastised by prosecutors from the Southern District of New York for his less than completely truthful cooperation.

So who’s going to believe that guy in court—when he says his old Boss is a crook?

He acted in coordination with Individual 1.

In fact, Trump tweets on Friday that recent developments in the Russian investigation have totally cleared his name. “Totally clears the President,” he tweets at one point. “Thank you!” he adds.

In reality, of course, prosecutors note that while Cohen paid off a pair of women who had dirt on his Boss: “with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of [Individual 1].”

In other words, Cohen is admitting to a pair of felonies—and prosecutors believe he committed both at then-Candidate Trump’s request.

It gets worse, if you are a fan of Donald J. Trump. Court papers filed on Cohen and Flynn, and a third filing on Paul Manafort this past Friday hardly clear the president or any other man, woman or child who has ever been part of his team.

First, consider what Cohen’s plea deal really means. Trump likes to insist that Mueller and his team of 10,000 “Angry Democrats” are out to get him at any cost. So his base should not believe prosecutors no matter how much compelling evidence they can pile up. But the problem for Trump, when it comes to trying to convince supporters to discount cases originating in the Southern District of New York, is that the man in charge is a Republican and an appointee of Donald J. Trump. And while the court filings in Cohen’s case in New York recommend he serve up to four years in jail, and question his full cooperation, in another filing, by Mueller and his team, prosecutors also note that Cohen has provided what may well be “useful information about matters relating to ongoing investigations being carried out by this office.” In these matters, prosecutors “assessed Cohen to be forthright and credible, and the information he provided was largely consistent with other evidence gathered.”

You don’t have to be smarter than a rock to understand the danger lurking in those simple sentences for Team Trump.

Other evidence gathered.

There are other investigations continuing, related to Cohen and his work for then Candidate Trump.

And investigators have “other evidence” they can use.

Records show, for example, that the Trump Organization itself paid Cohen back $130,000, after he paid off a porn star to keep her quite during the campaign. Then Cohen was paid an extra $60,000 to “gross up” his take—that is, enough to also pay any taxes he’d owe. In all, Cohen received $420,000 during the 2016 campaign and all payments were labeled “legal fees.” That would seem to indicate a conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws and cover it up.

We already know that Adam Weisselberg, Chief Financial Officer of the Trump Organization, has been granted immunity to testify. So what would he be likely to testify about? A person “not authorized to speak” told reporters that Weisselberg might not have known these payments, including another to silence a Playboy Bunny who also had a story about Trump she wanted to sell, were illegal. He might not have known what they were for and that would mean he, Weisselberg, had done nothing illegal. But The New York Times quoted this person as saying, in effect: “Mr. Cohen often did personal legal work for the president and his family. That kind of work was generally performed with few, if any, questions asked.”

In other words, Cohen was close enough to Trump to do the dirty work, no questions asked.

“Core topics under investigation.”

For Trump, it only gets worse when we consider the sentencing recommendation filed in a separate matter by Mueller and his team. Prosecutors say Cohen has been forthright and has provided valuable information “on core topics under investigation.”

What topics? Team Trump doesn’t know.

Finally, court filings in the case of Paul Manafort hint at additional minefields Trump and members of his administration will soon have to cross. Investigators say Manafort lied even after signing a plea agreement.

Currently residing in jail, Manafort has, nevertheless, repeatedly contacted members of the administration not currently in jail, during this time, while insisting he had not. How do investigators know? They have written and electronic communications in their hands.

That means:

A)   Any member of Team Trump that has talked to Cohen about Russian outreach to the campaign could be in jeopardy.

B)    Anyone who urged Flynn to cover up contacts with Russia could soon be hurting, legally.

C)   Anyone at the White House who talked to Manafort recently, including floating the possibility of a pardon, could be involved in a criminal conspiracy and would surely be indicted.

And Mueller’s team already has documentation.

The pressure is obviously getting to the president. Sunday, he tweet-blasted James Comey, who testified before Congress on Friday:

On 245 occasions, former FBI Director James Comey told House investigators he didn’t know, didn’t recall, or couldn’t remember things when asked. Opened investigations on 4 Americans (not 2) - didn’t know who signed off and didn’t know Christopher Steele. All lies!

Leakin’ James Comey must have set a record for who lied the most to Congress in one day. His Friday testimony was so untruthful! This whole deal is a Rigged Fraud headed up by dishonest people who would do anything so that I could not become President. They are now exposed!

Then, feeling sorry for himself, he decided he had to brag about himself and, second, attack the free press:

The Trump Administration has accomplished more than any other U.S. Administration in its first two (not even) years of existence, & we are having a great time doing it! All of this despite the Fake News Media, which has gone totally out of its mind-truly the Enemy of the People!

Monday he rose again early and kept on tweet-screaming. The first yowl came at 6:46 a.m., the second fourteen minutes later:

“Democrats can’t find a Smocking Gun tying the Trump campaign to Russia after James Comey’s testimony. No Smocking Gun...No Collusion.” @FoxNews That’s because there was NO COLLUSION. So now the Dems go to a simple private transaction, wrongly call it a campaign contribution,...

....which it was not (but even if it was, it is only a CIVIL CASE, like Obama’s - but it was done correctly by a lawyer and there would not even be a fine. Lawyer’s liability if he made a mistake, not me). Cohen just trying to get his sentence reduced. WITCH HUNT!

Let’s dissect that last pair of tweets. Is the President of the United States finally losing it? He had fourteen minutes to look at his first tweet and didn’t have the sense to fix “smoking,” not once, but twice.

As for Comey, he manages to shrug off Trump’s attacks. The usual right-wing outlets claim he covered himself in shame after testifying in front of Congress about the decision of the F.B.I. to end the investigation of Hillary Clinton and open an investigation into the Trump campaign.

First, his testimony before a Republican-controlled panel on Friday showed a man who was relaxed.

Last September, for example, Trump told a reporter Mueller and Comey were “best friends…And I could give you 100 pictures of him and Comey hugging and kissing each other.”

Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), a member of the House panel, asked Mr. Comey: “Are you best friends with Robert Mueller?”

“I am not,” Comey said. “I admire the heck out of the man, but I don’t know his phone number, I’ve never been to his house, I don’t know his children’s names. I think I had a meal once alone with him in a restaurant. I like him.”

Nadler reassured Comey he’d not ask “whether he had ever hugged and kissed him.”

“A relief to my wife,” Comey smiled.

As usual, Republicans on the panel tried—again, again, again—to prove that Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, two F.B.I. agents who had shared highly critical emails about Candidate Trump, were secretly involved in a plot during the 2016 campaign to insure Trump would never be elected.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) quoted a text from March 2016, which read, “Hillary should win 100 million to zero.”

Comey and Strzok never revealed the investigation.

Didn’t that sound nefarious, he inquired? Comey said no. Then he pointed out the obvious for the forty-fifth time. He and Strzok and a handful of others knew well before the election that members of the Trump campaign were under investigation because of contacts with Russians.

And they said not a word to the public.

They could have easily derailed his candidacy. They did not.

12/11/18: God damn those Mexicans! I was so sure they were going to pay for the Great Wall of Trump!

Now, Trump is mad because the Democrats won’t give him $5 billion to build his pet project and he’s too lame-assed to work out a compromise. So he’ll just go off to his bedroom and pout.

“I am proud to shut down the government.”

In a televised confrontation with Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, Trump grumbles, “If we don’t get what we want one way or the other...I will shut down the government. I am proud to shut down the government for border security... I will take the mantle of shutting it down.”

Considering who’s in charge of the federal government, it might not be a bad idea to close up shop for a year.

It couldn’t get much worse.

*

IN RUSSIA-INVESTIGATION NEWS, Maria Butina, the hot young Russian redhead who infiltrated the N.R.A. and spent the last presidential campaign hanging out with leading conservatives, has agreed to a plea deal and will cooperate with prosecutors. That includes testifying in front of a grand jury.

Her crime: conspiring to act as a Russian agent without registering with the Justice Department, a felony.

Now we may find out how it happened she was called on during a campaign rally in 2015 to ask Candidate Trump what he thought about sanctions on Russia. He said he didn’t think we needed them—which would be sweet music to Putin’s ears.

Butina may spill a whole new can of beans.

We might learn a great deal. We might learn what Paul Erickson, a much older conservative leader who had spoken publically in favor of warmer relations with Russia (and with whom Butina was sleeping) was up to behind the scenes, when not fostering warmer relations with Butina between the sheets. We might learn whether or not the N.R.A. accepted Russian money and funneled it to the Trump campaign, as at least one U.S. senator has wondered. We might get to the bottom of odd connections between the N.R.A., Alexander Torshin, a Russian placed under sanctions earlier this year, and Ms. Butina, his protégé. We might learn how the young redhead maneuvered in close for a picture with Don Jr. (and pictures with an assortment of lecherous old Republicans), why an N.R.A. delegation traveled to Russia in 2015, and why Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), the leading suck-up to Russia in Congress, spent four hours chatting with Torshin and Butina at a prayer breakfast gathering in Washington D.C. in 2017.

This Russian investigation—actually several investigations now—isn’t going to end any time soon.

12/12/18: The nations of the world gather in Poland for a United Nations summit on climate change. Nearly two hundred nations agree we face a growing threat to the planet.

Screw environmental sustainability—also future generations.

The U.S. shows up and basically calls for burning more coal. Wells Griffith, sent by the Trump administration, announces: “The United States has an abundance of natural resources and is not going to keep them in the ground. We strongly believe that no country should have to sacrifice their economic prosperity or energy security in pursuit of environmental sustainability.”

That’s true to a point. But you could—for example—burn coal and also require coal-fired plants to capture more of the escaping carbon dioxide burning produces. You could extract natural gas just like now—but try to control the extraneous release of methane into the atmosphere.

Or you could be the Trump administration. You could roll back regulations put in place under Obama to do both. And you could slap a bumper sticker on the White House limousine:

Donald ♥’s coal!

(And he doesn’t care because he won’t be around when shit starts rolling downhill.)

As for the rest of the world, the U.S. can proudly announce, we do not stand alone. We have Saudi Arabia (bone saws!) on our side. We have Russia (Don’s buddy Vladimir!) backing our play.

Also: Kuwait (already hot!).

The rest of the world realizes climate change is a serious threat.

*

IN RELATED LET’S-BURN-MORE-COAL NEWS, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration releases the “Arctic Report Card” for 2018. Leading government scientists warn that temperatures at the top of the world are rising twice as fast as temperatures at lower latitudes. This year readings were 3° Fahrenheit above normal. Thomas Mote, who contributed to the report, explains: “The changes we are witnessing in the Arctic are sufficiently rapid that they cannot be explained without considering our impacts on the chemistry of the atmosphere.”

CNN does a good job of outlining the main points in the report; but the president won’t read the report or watch CNN because only Fox News can give him the warm feeling he now craves, what with Melania always sleeping in a separate room.

At any rate, CNN explains:

The rapid warming of the Arctic is known as “Arctic amplification,” which is due to multiple feedback loops that the report describes. Warmer temperatures lead to less ice and snow, which means less sunlight is reflected and more is absorbed by the darker oceans. This warms the ocean further, which in turn decreases the sea ice even more. The lack of sea ice and more ocean surface leads to additional cloudiness later in the fall season, which keeps the Arctic region warmer even later into the winter.

Feedback loops will continue to accelerate.

The feedback loops will continue to accelerate. Only 1% of Artic ice is now what scientists refer to as “old ice,” more than four years old. Old ice tends to be thicker and much less likely to disappear.

Since scientists began measuring the age of the ice in the mid-1980s, multi-year ice in the Arctic has decreased in size from 2.54 million square kilometers (roughly the size of Mexico and all of Central America combined) to 0.13 million square kilometers (roughly the size of Nicaragua in Central America)—a 95% reduction in a little over 30 years [emphasis added].

Sea life and animals on land have been dramatically affected. Polar bears hunt from thick ice and their survival is now threatened. Algae spreads in waters were it could not survive before and algal toxins are released, killing walrus and seals. Reindeer and caribou populations have declined by 50% in twenty years. As for humans, melting permafrost in higher latitudes causes roads to buckle and as the permafrost thaws carbon dioxide from ancient, decayed vegetation is released. This adds to the climate threat. Ocean levels round the world will rise as the Greenland Ice Sheet gradually retreats. Low-lying coastal areas, including Mar-a-Lago in Florida, may face lapping waves. So let’s all burn some coal. Screw the next two or ten generations!

12/13-15/18: In two years of fighting the sanguine “War on Coal,” Trump and his warrior band have managed to put 2,500 miners back to work. Not really much bang for a buck. But these are truly boom times for the legal profession. I believe the president, alone, has put at least that many lawyers in new jobs.

The Orange Teletubby says crimes are not crimes.

Of course, we need to subtract one lawyer’s job, first. Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal fixer for more than a decade, is now unemployed (except for talking to investigators) and soon headed to jail. According to Trump, of course, Cohen didn’t really commit any crimes. Yes, prosecutors charged him with two felonies in regard to campaign finance violations. Yes, Cohen pled guilty to two felonies in that regard. Yes, the judge sentenced him to jail in part because of commission of those felonies and six others. But the Orange Teletubby insists crimes are not crimes.

Oddly enough, Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, says Trump knew all about illegal payments to two women, Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, to keep their salacious tales out of the news. The president insists he never. He says Cohen is a liar.

We can tell the president is telling the truth because his propaganda pals at Fox News say he is. But he and they are hoping you won’t remember that moment last April, when Trump, aboard Air Force One, enjoyed this chat with reporters:

Question: Mr. President, did you know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels?

THE PRESIDENT: No. No. What else?

Q: Then why did Michael Cohen make those if there was no truth to her allegations?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, you’ll have to ask Michael Cohen. Michael is my attorney. And you’ll have to ask Michael Cohen.

Q: Do you know where he got the money to make that payment?

THE PRESIDENT: No, I don’t know. No.

Q: Did you ever set up a fund of money that he could draw from?

Trump never answered that last question, choosing instead to talk about E.P.A. head Scott Pruitt, who he said was a “good man,” doing a “fantastic job.”

And here we should give a shout out to Pruitt for his role in helping bring the legal profession back to full employment. Pruitt resigned as head of the E.P.A. in July. At the time, even Fox News had to admit Pruitt was implicated in all kinds of swampy deeds: including using E.P.A. funds—taxpayer money—to hire a GOP media firm to “praise Scott Pruitt.” By the time Pruitt quit and crawled out of the D.C. swamp, he was the subject of “13 federal inquiries into his spending and management practices.”

But—Cohen—we were talking about Cohen!

Trump’s personal lawyer eventually managed to produce a tape of Trump talking about illegal payments to the second woman, Karen McDougal. You could listen as Cohen said he was going to set up a company to disguise the source of the payment. He mentions “David.” “I’ve spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up with…” Cohen continues.

“So what do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?” Trump interrupts.

Trump doesn’t interrupt to say, “I never boinked that Playboy Bunny and I’m not paying $150,000 through a shell company to keep her story out of the news to protect my campaign. You know me, Michael. I never bend or break or completely ignore the law.” The two men then discuss how to make the payment, cash or check.

Trump really said, “Don’t pay!”

The tape seems damning from first word to last. So you need more lawyers to do some fast talking. Rudy Giuliani tells reporters Trump really said Cohen shouldn’t pay. But that claim makes no sense if you listen to the conversation. Rudy sticks with it and keeps sending Trump the legal bills. (For a similar play on words, see: 7/17/18.)

Once the tape leaks, the president rage-tweets about what a terrible, creepy skunk Cohen has always been! (For a different view, expressed by Trump, see: 4/19/18.)

Unfortunately for Trump and his enablers, federal prosecutors revealed in court this week that “David” and his company, David Pecker and American Media, Inc., had signed an immunity deal and ratted out Trump. Pecker, Cohen and then-Candidate Trump had in fact met in August 2015 to discuss ways to silence the women—and protect the campaign—meaning campaign finance violations were committed and laws were broken.

And Trump knew about the payments all along!

Trump and Cohen—with the aid of AMI—had conspired to create a fake company to hide payments they knew were probably illegal; and then the Trump Organization, likely with the approval of Allen Weisselberg, disguised repayments to Cohen under the guise of “legal fees.”

So—again—these are boom times for the legal profession. In fact, we learn this week that the Trump inauguration committee, which raised $107 million, more than twice as much as any other presidential campaign, is also under investigation.

According to a report by Reuters, based on a story in the Wall Street Journal:

The early-stage investigation by the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office is examining whether some of the committee’s donors gave money in exchange for policy concessions, influencing administration positions or access to the incoming administration, the Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Naturally, Rudy and Press Secretary Pinocchio were at pains to point out that the president wasn’t involved with any crooked deals related to his inaugural committee. Rudy claimed Trump was too busy getting ready to be president at the time to worry about fund-raising.

Just for fun, of course, I would like to point out that the highest paid vendor for the committee happened to be Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who happened to be a close friend of the First Lady. And Wolkoff happened to to cash in and take home $25.8 million for organizing the festivities.

And who else shows up in the story? Cohen! Cohen has a tape of Wolkoff discussing the committee payments. For some odd reason, she’s expresses concern about a possible audit.

Reuters continues:

The Journal said prosecutors are also seeking documents from Franklin Haney, a Tennessee developer who gave $1 million to the inaugural committee and later hired Cohen to help him obtain a $5 billion U.S Department of Energy loan. A loan application by Haney’s company is still pending with the department, the Journal reported.

Haney has now hired more attorneys!

Paul Manafort—on a yacht—with a very rich Arab.

If that wasn’t bad enough, on Friday, The New York Times reported that prosecutors were investigating whether or not illegal payments were made by foreign donors to both the Trump inaugural committee and a Trump Super PAC, Rebuilding America Now. At a time in the summer of 2016, when Trump’s campaign looked like it was doomed and campaign donations had dried up, Rebuilding America Now went to work and raised $23 million.

As the Times notes:

The inquiry focuses on whether people from Middle Eastern nations — including Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — used straw donors [emphasis added] to disguise their donations to the two funds. Federal law prohibits foreign contributions to federal campaigns, political action committees and inaugural funds.

Thomas Barrack, a close friend of the president, raised money for both groups and he too has now hired a fresh set of lawyers.

(Am I the only one who worries that this great nation may soon face a critical lawyer shortage?)

Even better, Paul Manafort pops up in this story. After he gets axed by the Trump campaign (because of dicey involvement with Russian organized crime figures), we spot him cruising the Mediterranean Sea on Barrack’s fabulous yacht. There, he and Barrack meet with “one of the world’s richest men, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, the former prime minister of Qatar.” 

Investigators soon started asking for information from a businessman, Rashid Al Malik, “an associate of Mr. Barrack’s, who heads a private investment firm in the United Arab Emirates.” Mr. Malik also has a lawyer, but that lawyer did not respond to a request for comment from the Times.

If you are trying to keep track of all the lawyers on your fingers and toes, I realize you are already short a few toes. We already know that Sam Patten, a well-connected Republican fund raiser, pleaded guilty to arranging for a Ukrainian oligarch and another foreigner to buy $50,000 worth of tickets to one of the Trump inaugural events, using an American as a straw purchaser.

In addition, ProPublica, reports that there are warning signs that the Trump inaugural committee was overpaying for services provided by—good grief—the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Who handled the payments? The Trump Organization!

ProPublica picks up the story:

The inauguration paid the Trump Organization for rooms, meals and event space at the company’s Washington hotel, according to interviews as well as internal emails and receipts reviewed by WNYC and ProPublica.

During the planning, Ivanka Trump, the president-elect’s eldest daughter and a senior executive with the Trump Organization, was involved in negotiating the price the hotel charged the 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee for venue rentals. A top inaugural planner emailed Ivanka and others at the company to “express my concern” that the hotel was overcharging for its event spaces, worrying of what would happen “when this is audited.”

When ProPublica asked various lawyers for various individuals to comment on this facet of the story, pretty much all the lawyers decided they did not really feel up to commenting at this time.

We do know from emails that several individuals working on inaugural festivities were nervous because they felt the Trump hotel was overcharging the Trump committee. So Ivanka Trump became involved. Eventually, the hotel agreed to cut the price (the original price is not known) for use of its Presidential Ballroom and meeting facilities to $700,000 for four days.

In an email to Ivanka Trump and Gates [Rick Gates, another now-convicted felon in the story], Wolkoff, who had previously managed the Metropolitan Museum’s annual gala and fashion shows at Lincoln Center, expressed discomfort with the price.

“I wanted to follow up on our conversation and express my concern,” Wolkoff wrote in the December email.

“These events are in PE’s [the president-elect’s] honor at his hotel and one of them is for family and close friends. Please take into consideration that when this is audited it will become public knowledge,” she wrote, noting that other locations would be provided to the inaugural committee for free.

“I understand that compared to the original pricing this is great but we should look at the whole context,” Wolkoff wrote, suggesting a day rate of $85,000, less than half of the Trump hotel’s offer.

In fact, in just a twelve-month period, the Trump Foundation has been hauled into court, as have the Trump Organization, the Trump 2016 campaign, the Trump Inaugural Committee and the Trump administration. Since a two-year investigation into the Trump Foundation, based on “allegations of misused charitable assets, self-dealing and campaign finance violations during the 2016 presidential campaign” is ongoing, 2019 promises to be another banner year for barristers. That last investigation names the president and his children, Ivanka and Eric, as defendants.

Or, to put it another way, the only adult in the family not likely to usher in the New Year under investigation is Tiffany.

Someone is ripping someone off.

*

WITH TRUMP AND HIS CREW there’s always more legal news and Special Counsel Mueller has been making plenty recently. Last Thursday, lawyers for convicted felon General Flynn, filed court papers insisting that even though their client had pled guilty to one charge of lying to the F.B.I. he hadn’t really been lying.

Crimes are not crimes with this bunch.

Trump tweets support for lying to the F.B.I.

Flynn, his lawyers said, had been tricked into lying when F.B.I. agents interviewed him about contacts with Russians during the 2016 campaign. Flynn, they insisted, did not know it was a crime to lie to F.B.I. agents.

Naturally, Trump heard the news and had to tweet support for lying which was not, apparently, lying:

They [prosecutors] gave General Flynn a great deal because they were embarrassed by the way he was treated - the FBI said he didn’t lie and they [Mueller’s team] overrode the FBI. They want to scare everybody into making up stories that are not true by catching them in the smallest of misstatements. Sad!...... 

And, of course, we had a second pithy tweet to sum it up: “WITCH HUNT!”

On Friday Mueller’s team filed a blistering rebuttal in court. Prosecutors pointed out that Flynn lied to Vice President Jesus and several White House officials about this same matter—secret contacts with Russians during the transition period—long before he talked to agents from the F.B.I.

Flynn was already committed to a set of lies and F.B.I. agents didn’t need to “trick” him into repeating them. In fact, Flynn lied multiple times during multiple interviews (see: 12/6/18). Investigators reminded anyone who cared to get to the bottom of this mess that Flynn covered up more than half a million dollars he received from the government of Turkey, that he pled guilty to one felony because his son was also implicated in taking money from the Turks, that both father and son failed to report such income, and that was this was the best deal the father could get, when he might have been charged with a half-dozen felonies.

Mueller may have subpoenaed President Trump.

In our final court-related story for today, we would note that in a most unusual development on Friday, the entire fifth floor of the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C. was closed to reporters and onlookers.

Sniffing out hints that a case filed by Special Counsel Mueller was on the docket, a number of media types staked out spots outside the courtroom, hoping to glean hints about what was being discussed inside, based on who entered and exited. It was clear something odd was afoot, because the case, known only as “In re: Grand Jury Subpoena,” has been sealed in the public records.

“To this day,” national security lawyer Bradley Moss told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “ I can’t fathom what the heck it could be that would move this fast [through the court system] and get this much secrecy.”

I, for one, as humble blogger, can fathom what the heck it might be. In fact, I am ready to venture a guess. I am predicting that Mueller has already filed a subpoena for President Donald J. Trump.

If so, we know Trump’s defense team will fight it to the death. There’s probably not a lawyer in America by now who doesn’t realize that the current President of the United States can’t possibly testify under oath without lying about everything, from his current weight, to payoffs to women, to business ties with Russians, and any other topic prosecutors might ask about, including his favorite foods and color.

(Author’s note, 1/1/2009: I was in error it appears. It turns out to be a foreign company fighting a demand for records from the Mueller team. Legal experts now wonder if it might be Deutsche Bank trying to evade the subpoena—which might also have bearing on Trump and the whole Russia investigation.)

*

ON SATURDAY EVENING, December 15, Judge Jeanine Pirro, on Fox News, does her best to bolster a president sagging on the national and international stage. Railing against the Mueller investigation, Pirro promises viewers that Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, presiding over a sentencing hearing for General Michael T. Flynn the following Tuesday, will put Mueller in his place.

“We are in a dark and dangerous place in America tonight,” Pirro begins, “where politics is driving our system of justice, instead of Lady Justice being blind to politics. At its core,” she says of the Flynn case, “this is a story of injustice.”

With her poor viewers now thoroughly terrified, she continues. It is our system of justice, she points out, that distinguishes us from other countries. “No one is above our law and no one is beneath it.”

(Meanwhile, in its regular programming, Fox continues to advance the argument that Trump can pardon himself.)

Flynn is the victim; top F.B.I. officials are crooks.

The people going after General Flynn, Pirro yowls, are “leakers,” “liars” and they are “corrupt.”

She’s emphatic. She’s loud. She’s sure of her position. She’s in the know. And her audience loves it.

The real target of investigators, Pirro says, has always been Trump; but Mueller and his bunch are not going to get Trump. In fact, the conversation Flynn had with the Russian ambassador during the transition period—the one which he lied about to Vice President Pence, and for which lie he was convicted of a felony, “was legal, perfectly legal. Take that one to the bank.”

Yes, take that to the bank!

As Pirro paints the picture, the F.B.I. assured Flynn that when they asked to talk no lawyers were necessary. It would be a friendly chat. This, she thunders, was “a clear violation of his constitutional rights.”

Fortunately, Judge Sullivan was demanding all the documents explaining why Flynn was charged and why he was about to be sentenced. The documents arrived late, Pirro sneered, “incomplete and redacted.” Still, they showed that the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. “hatched a plan” to “deliberately entrap” Flynn. Or so Pirro claims. Director James Comey, head of the F.B.I. at the time, was scum. Pirro insists he “prided himself on what any other decent man of honor would have been horrified to admit, that the rules, the law and the Constitution matter not.”

Yes, Flynn lied, she admits. He should have known better. “But what is a lie?” she asks. Did Flynn have “intent” to tell an untruth? He had no reason to lie, she says, pounding her desk to emphasize the point. “Even more compelling,” two F.B.I. agents “who interviewed Flynn say he did not lie!”

“Quote,” she says, “‘both had the impression at the time that Flynn was not lying and [they] did not think he was lying.’”

“They even said he was ‘unguarded and friendly,’” Pirro sneered once more. The judge sneers a lot.

Pirro is pissed and if she’s doing her job her viewers are going to be pissed too. According to the Fox playbook, poor Flynn was a man who served his country for 33 years, an “honorable man.” The opposite of Comey, in other words. “You’re probably asking yourself, Why would Flynn even plead guilty to lying, when he wasn’t lying?” Pirro adds. Maybe he pled guilty because he was running out of money, she suggests, noting that he’d had to sell his house to pay his legal fees. Perhaps he pled guilty to protect his son, “also in the crosshairs of these people.”

“These people!” They made Pirro sick. And she wanted them to make her loyal viewers sick, too.

For those of you who think the FBI was just trying to get to the truth, you’re wrong. If they wanted information, if they wanted the truth, they could have shown Flynn his transcript of his conversation to refresh his recollection to get at the truth. But, no, they didn’t want the truth. They wanted to take down a bit player to get to the big player. 

“A jurist unafraid of the Swamp.”

But don’t worry, she concluded. They’re not going to get “the big player,” they’re not going to get Donald J. Trump! Even General Flynn would be saved! All parties are set to appear in court Tuesday, December 18, in front of Sullivan, “a jurist unafraid of the Swamp, a judge who has a track record of calling out prosecutorial misconduct, a man who does not tolerate injustice or abuse of power.”

Sullivan, Pirro says finally, “can throw out this guilty plea” if he concludes Flynn has been framed. (See: 12/17-21/18.)

12/16/18: Climate change? Who cares about climate change—unless you’re young and might still be around 50 years from now? 

Trump isn’t interested in the science.

The Associated Press reports:

The head of the government agency that monitors climate change says that in nearly two years he has never discussed the issue with President Donald Trump.

Acting National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Adm. Timothy Gallaudet said in a press conference at a scientific meeting this week, “I personally have not briefed the president on climate change.”

…By contrast, Oregon State University marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco, who served as NOAA chief in the first four years of the Obama administration, said she talked with President Barack Obama about climate change every two to three months.

…Obama, she said, “consistently highlighted science as a key underpinning of his administration.”

As for Trump, he has consistently ignored warnings about climate change from his own administration’s scientists. And frankly, the Big Orange Buffoon can’t tell the difference between weather and climate.

“There is no sign that President Trump is interested in input from anybody on the scientific facts around climate change,” said Holdren, now a professor of environmental policy at Harvard. “And his uninformed rejection of those facts — reflected in his administration’s misguided policies on coal, offshore drilling, automotive fuel economy, clean-energy R&D, the Paris Agreement, and assistance to developing countries on climate-change mitigation and adaptation — is doing immense damage to the prospects for averting a wholly unmanageable degree of global climate change.”

The president could, of course, seek guidance from the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology and Policy. There’s just one slight problem. The office has yet to be filled. Trump waited more than eighteen months after he took office to nominate anyone to take that role.

Now it’s up to the U.S. Senate to complete the confirmation process. Oh, god, it’s in the hands of Milksop Mitch.

*

ON THE OTHER HAND, there’s finally good news about the environment from the Trump administration. The air will be a little purer tomorrow, the water a little sweeter. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke is stepping down from his position in large part in hopes Congress will forget he ever rode into town on his horse and maybe not pursue all the investigations in which he’s a target. He was told he’d either have to ride back out of town or be fired.

12/17-21/18: We all know the cliché about the wheels coming off the bus. This week, the bus is headed for the cliff and the terrified children are screaming for the driver to hit the brakes.

Remember what Judge Jeanine said on Fox News on Saturday night? Well, Mueller was going to get put in his place. She could hardly wait!!!! (See: 12/15/18.)

Well, all the parties in the Flynn sentencing did show up for court on Tuesday. Judge Sullivan did study all the documents, including the portions redacted, that neither you, nor I, nor the furious Ms. Pirro had seen. He looked at everything the F.B.I. presented. He looked at it all.

He was, as Pirro said, “unafraid of the Swamp.”

He was, in fact, a judge who did “not tolerate injustice or abuse of power.”

Judge Sullivan studied the evidence the F.B.I. had. If you are a fan of Judge Jeanine’s show you know with certitude what’s about to happen. He’s going to bang his gavel. He’s going to bang it so hard the head will break off and fly across the courtroom and knock some prosecutor out. Because he’s that mad. “Mr. Flynn,” he’s going to say, “You are the victim of injustice. I’m throwing your case out! You are a free to go. And say ‘hello,’ to President Trump and any Russians you meet.”

Judge Sullivan: “Arguably, you sold your country out.”

Only that’s not what Sullivan says. He glares at Flynn and explains, “There’s a great deal of non-public information in this case.” He’s going to be careful about what he says. He tells the principals in court that if he begins to reveal non-public information, they should not be shy in reminding him to refrain. Then he tells Flynn, “I am not hiding my disgust, my disdain for your criminal offense…Arguably, that undermines everything that this flag over here stands for,” the judge says, gesturing toward an American flag behind the bench. “Arguably, you sold your country out.” 

And if Pirro is watching, she probably passes out.

Whatever Sullivan had seen in the redacted portions of the filings, it had to be bad. And if it was bad for Flynn—and it was apparently very bad—it almost certainly had to be very bad for Trump.

*

ON FRIDAY, four days before Christmas, the president is planning to escape the nation’s capital for a sixteen-day vacation at the Trump Bunker in sunny Mar-a-Lago. If all goes well, fleeing Washington will allow him to hang out with those folks we see in red MAGA hats at his rallies—at least those who can afford to pay the $200,000 initiation fee and the $14,000 annual dues to join his private club.

Even the cruelest of liberals, of course, would not begrudge the President of the United States his rest, particularly in light of the fact his fingers must be falling off from all the tweeting he does.

Six in ten Americans think the president is lying about Russia.

We do know the president badly needs a rest. First, he has proven totally unable to convince Mexico to pay for his wall. Nor are Democrats in Congress inclined to ask taxpayers to foot the bill.

There is, however, a GoFundMe page launched by Trump fans—to fund the wall with donations themselves. And, perhaps not grasping basic math, his fans are stoked to raise $10.9 million in just the first few days. One anonymous donor chips in $50,000 all by him- or herself.

At Fox News, where ever story is about right-wing success, they point out that the fund is already “a full hundredth of its way to its goal of $1 billion.” Which reminds me, I need to watch my diet; but I’m already a full hundredth of the way to losing that ten pounds I’ve been meaning to lose for the last ten years.

So, time to celebrate!

Anyway, the president doesn’t want to wait for the donations to pile up, so that he can start construction on the wall. Therefore, unless Congress can sort out the mess, he promises he will cancel his trip to Mar-a-Lago and shut down parts of the U.S. government until he gets his way.

If that isn’t bad enough, Trump’s plate is crammed with additional problems. The stock market, for example, is in a dive. After hitting a high of 26,828 on October 3, by Friday afternoon, December 21, the market will have shed 4,383 points, ending the day at 22,445. If that means the president can’t brag about the market always going up while he’s in charge, the bad news doesn’t stop there.

In a recent poll 62% of Americans say they don’t believe the president is being honest about his dealings with Russia.

Only 34% think he is.

“The President’s not under oath.”

Certainly, recent developments in the Mueller probe cannot be soothing to the president’s jangled nerves. In the course of five days, Rudy Giuliani goes on TV to offer the “I’m rubber, you’re glue” defense of his Boss. If Michael Cohen says Trump directed him to make illegal hush money payments and to lie during testimony before Congress, Rudy insists you can’t believe a guy like Cohen! Cohen’s going to “sing” as loud as he has to, Horndog Rudy says, in order to avoid spending three years in jail. He can’t be trusted. “He’s changed his story four or five times.”

George Stephanopoulos, hosting the show on which Rudy is appearing, replies: “So has the president.”

“The President’s not under oath,” Rudy smiles and shrugs. Then, to make his position clear, he adds that he’s not about to let his client testify under oath. “Over my dead body,” he says.

So let’s recap. According to Rudy:

A)   The president can’t lie as long as he’s not under oath.

B)    The president is never going to testify under oath if Rudy can stop him.

C)   And if Trump does lie under oath, and Trump does get caught, he can pardon himself.

Still, it’s clear the president is unnerved and he spends much of his time tweeting angrily about the investigation and how unfair it is. In one tweet—which raises legal experts’ eyebrows—he refers to Cohen as a “rat” because Cohen is cooperating with both state and federal prosecutors.

Yeah. What president would ever want a suspect to cooperate with prosecutors! Am I right, Trump fans!

Stop a moment and consider the matter of who has changed his story most often, Cohen or Trump. Originally, the president told everyone, including the First Lady, that he didn’t know anything about hush money payments to two women during his campaign, even if Cohen testified under oath that he did. When it was revealed that documents backed Cohen up, the President of the United States admitted he did know, but insisted payments had nothing to do with his 2016 campaign. So they weren’t campaign violations! Then David Pecker, head of American Media Inc., who has an immunity deal from prosecutors, testified that Trump knew about the payments all along and asked Pecker to hide them to protect his campaign.

With each passing day, the story spun more and more out of control. Cohen had once claimed that any deal to get a Trump Tower built in Moscow was ended by January 2016. Now he admitted, and documents in the hands of prosecutors supported his testimony, that the deal was in the works as late as the summer of 2016.

That would be around the time Don Jr. and Jared and now-convicted-felon Paul Manafort held a secret meeting in Trump Tower—New York, not Moscow—to get dirt from the Russians on Hillary.

The fishy story became even fishier after Giuliani appeared on TV again and admitted, well—come to think of it—Trump and his pirate pals were pursuing the deal up until November 2016. Possibly that business deal—with the Russians—was in the works up to Election Day.

Rudy says Trump never signed the letter.

Even Trump has admitted that working on deal would be a conflict (see: 11/29-30/18), and so he had never pursued it, Giuliani had no other recourse than to argue that there where there is no harm there is no foul. A presidential candidate trying to cash in big with the Russians? That candidate perhaps having worked secretly with Russians hoping to swing the U.S. election? Where’s the harm in that?

So what if the “Fake News” people said there was a letter of intent, dated 10/28/15, to go forward with the deal. Trump said repeatedly during the campaign and later as president, that he had no dealings in Russia. Now, Rudy admitted, “There was a letter of intent to go forward, but no one signed it.”

Almost as soon as that line of BS spewed from his lips, CNN revealed it had in fact obtained a signed contract.

Okay, Rudy admitted lamely, Trump signed it after all. What are you going to do? Rudy wasn’t under oath.

*

SO THE WEEK got off to a terrible start and then, day by day, it grew worse. On Thursday, Trump announced—via Twitter, which is how he leads America’s armed forces—that ISIS had been defeated! (Sort of like: North Korea is no longer a nuclear threat.)  He was going to pull U.S. troops out of Syria immediately and he was going to reduce our military footprint in Afghanistan by at least half.

You could sense this wasn’t going to go over well with most Americans when the Russians checked in. A U.S. withdrawal in the Middle East? Yeah, they thought that was a brilliant idea.

The Taliban loved the move too. “The 17-year-long struggle and sacrifices of thousands of our people finally yielded fruit,” said one senior Taliban commander. “We proved it to the entire world that we defeated the self-proclaimed world’s lone super power.”

In fact, Trump’s decision to withdraw was so brilliant that Defense Secretary James Mattis resigned the next day. If you read his resignation letter, the former four-star general didn’t waste two consonants and one vowel in praise of his Boss.

His letter to the president was a stinging rebuke:

One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships. While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies. Like you, I have said from the beginning that the armed forces of the United States should not be the policeman of the world. Instead, we must use all tools of American power to provide for the common defense, including providing effective leadership to our alliances. NATO's 29 democracies demonstrated that strength in their commitment to fighting alongside us following the 9-11 attack on America. The Defeat-ISIS coalition of 74 nations is further proof.

…It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model - gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions - to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbors, America and our allies. That is why we must use all the tools of American power to provide for the common defense.

My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues…

Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position. The end date for my tenure is February 28, 2019, a date that should allow sufficient time for a successor to be nominated and confirmed as well as to make sure the Department's interests are properly articulated and protected at upcoming events to include Congressional posture hearings and the NATO Defense Ministerial meeting in February.

…I very much appreciate this opportunity to serve the nation and our men and women in uniform.

*

THEN, ON FRIDAY NIGHT, the last shoe fell. Senate Democrats refused to give Trump the billions he wanted to build his favorite wall.

With that, large parts of the federal government ran out of money and had to shut down.

12/22/18: Americans wake to the realization that for a third time since reciting the oath of office the Orange Teletubby is throwing a tantrum and the government is partially shuttered. Naturally, Trump blames the shutdown on Democrats, even though just days earlier he had said he’d be “proud” to shut the whole show down if that’s what it took to get funding for his big, beautiful wall.

Press Secretary Pinocchio Sanders is forced to go before reporters and say that anyone who doesn’t support building a wall really wants the Huns to invade Texas and march north to sack Washington, D.C.

“Absurd and almost childish.”

Ironically, Time and other media outlets soon discover that Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney expressed a dim view when asked if a wall would solve our nation’s immigration problems. In a late 2015 radio interview, the host put the following question to him: “Donald Trump says, ‘build a wall. Deport all illegal immigrants…’ What challenges does this plan pose?”

“A bunch,” Mulvaney responded.

“The fence doesn’t solve the problem…Is it necessary to have one? Sure. Would it help? Sure. But to just say build the darn fence and have that be the end of an immigration discussion is absurd and almost childish for someone running for President to take that simplistic of a view.”

Mulvaney went on to say…that a wall will not stop anyone trying to get across the border. He said people trying to get across the wall can go under, around and through it. Mulvaney told [the host] that the best border protection strategy would be more manpower, enforcement and better technology.

“There are parts of our border that are secure and parts of our border that are not…A lot of that comes down to whether or not we are just willing to enforce the law as it exists. So it’s easy to tell people what they want to hear, ‘build the darn fence, vote for me.’”

And that’s what Trump did—he duped his fans.

The rest of the day the bad news piles up for the embattled president. Brett McGurk, the top State Department envoy coordinating the fight against ISIS, quits in protest of the president’s spur-of-the-tweet-decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria.

“A shock…complete reversal…bewildered…no plan”

In an email to staff, McGurk explains:

I am extremely proud of what we achieved together. We built the largest coalition in history, accomplished what nobody thought possible in Iraq and Syria, and established global networks and patterns of interaction that will help keep our nation safe.

The recent decision by the president came as a shock and was a complete reversal of policy that had been articulated to us by [National Security Adviser John] Bolton and others. It left our coalition partners confused and our fighting partners bewildered with no plan in place…

“ISIS is on the run, but it is not yet defeated,” McGurk adds. He had worked to “help manage some of the fallout” from Trump’s impulsive decision, but “ultimately concluded that I could not carry out these new instructions and maintain my integrity at the same time.”

So he resigns, like Mattis, citing integrity, a word I’m sure Trump has never used to describe his own actions.

Naturally, the president feels the need to attack McGurk in a petty tweet: “Brett McGurk, who I do not know, was appointed by President Obama in 2015. Was supposed to leave in February but he just resigned prior to leaving. Grandstander? The Fake News is making such a big deal about this nothing event!”

Several foreign policy experts quickly point out that, perhaps, it might have been nice if the President of the United States had known who the man in charge of the fight against ISIS was.

12/23/18: Angered by all the attention given to the resignation of Secretary of Defense Mattis, Trump does what he does best. He follows the craven course. He announces, via Twitter, that Mattis is out on January 1.

“Just vindictive.”

Reaction to this and other recent presidential moves is almost unanimously negative. Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden, offers this fairly typical reaction: “And now Trump gets rid of SecDef Mattis almost immediately. No smooth transition. No effort at reassurance to allies. Just vindictive.”

President Emmanuel Macron of France criticizes the president’s snap decision to withdraw American forces from Syria, saying that “an ally must be reliable.” French forces have been fighting by our side against the Islamic State, but it is now unclear what will happen to that effort. Mattis was always “reliable,” Macron says, delivering a back-handed slap to the fool in the Oval Office.

“Presidential Harassment.”

Feeling bad about all the criticism he’s taking, Trump tweet-whines before heading for bed.

At 11:26 p.m. we get this, including the quote from Fox News:

“The President has been remarkable. I do not doubt that he will thrive in this new environment, and he will be a constant reminder of what populism is.” Thank you to Tammy Bruce and Steve Hilton. Presidential Harassment has been with me from the beginning!

12/24/18: “Merry Christmas, everyone!” Unless you’re a Jew, a Muslim, etc., or not religious at all.

Then, “Happy Holidays.”

Well, here we are on Christmas Eve, and the president has made it safe to say, “Merry Christmas” again.

Then again, we learn that Secretary of Defense Mattis thought Trump was really a nut. The Washington Post explains:

Mattis reportedly told the commander of the Strategic Command to keep him directly informed of any event that might lead to a nuclear alert being sent to the president. He even told the Strategic Command “not to put on a pot of coffee without letting him know.”

Congressional leaders interpreted this to mean that Mattis would either deal with a possible threat before it reached Trump or ensure he was present to advise Trump when such an alert arrived.

Now, Mattis will be gone in just a few days and Trump will have his pudgy finger on the red button. There are almost no responsible adults left in the White House to tell the president not to sit on it by mistake or fire a nuclear weapon at the headquarters of CNN or The New York Times just because he believes reporters are the enemy of the people.

POSTSCRIPT: We do get a snippet of good news, albeit symbolic in nature. The family of Otto Warmbier, tortured and killed by the North Koreans, triumphs in a federal lawsuit and a judge awards the parents $500 million in damages against the regime. Fred and Cindy Warmbier realize they’re unlikely to ever collect a penny, but tell reporters, “We put ourselves and our family through the ordeal of a lawsuit and public trial because we promised Otto that we will never rest until we have justice for him.”

Kim Jong-un is a murdering despot—and his regime has tortured tens of thousands of its own people.

And yet, our president loves him. (See: 9/29/18.)

12/25/18: While the Christian world celebrates the birth of Jesus, it would be harder and harder, even for the Son of God, to walk on water in modern-day Israel. In the last 60 years, the Israelis, Jordanians and Syrians have been depleting the Sea of Galilee and Jordan River, sources of the Dead Sea. As a result the surface area of the Dead Sea has shrunk by a third.

It’s too bad Trump never worries about the environment because there are all kinds of warning lights blinking.  

The day does end on an up note for President Trump, when we he and the First Lady secretly fly to Iraq to greet the troops, his first trip to a war zone in almost two years as Leader of the Free World.

Then again, any good will the president might have garnered is marred when he gives a campaign-style speech to the troops, who have no choice but to stand listening while he babbles on in Babylon.

Trump’s main points appear to be:

A)   Democrats won’t pay for the wall; therefore Democrats want illegal immigrants to murder us all.

B)    Forget I said Mexico would pay for the wall; I’m shutting the government until I get the money I want.

C)   Other countries are ripping us off and they should pay more to help us fight all our wars; because that’s why we fight: we want a healthy balance sheet.

D)   You great young servicemen and women (and not so great transgender service persons) haven’t had a raise since the winter at Valley Forge. I got you “a 10% raise” this year.

E)    America has been played for a “sucker” for years. Other presidents were “suckers.” We were “suckers” for going to war in Iraq to begin. I, Donald J. Trump, am not a “sucker.”  Please applaud and cheer now. (For similar comments, see: 4/30/18.)

Lying to the troops and bragging; what Trump does best.

There are numerous problems with this speech but for the sake of sanity, let’s stick to just two. First, here’s exactly what Trump said to his audience of soldiers, sailors and Marines:

“Is anybody here willing to give up the big pay raise you just got? You haven’t gotten one in more than 10 years. More than 10 years. And we got you a big one. I got you a big one. I got you a big one.”

I’m sure his little speech left many in the audience checking their wallets to see if perhaps they had more cash than they thought. In reality the troops received a 2.6% increase in pay in 2018. Not 10 percent.

And Trump lied again when he said there had been “no raise for ten years.”  According to the Department of Defense, the troops have seen a pay increase every year since 1983 and only an anomaly meant there was technically no raise that year.

Even worse, I would argue, was telling the troops who are still fighting and have been fighting terrorists for seventeen years in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and hot spots round the globe, that we have been “suckers.” First, Trump had to brag about all the progress made defeating ISIS since he took charge. Apparently, there was no progress on any battlefield until he took over. God, he’s the greatest leader ever, if he does say so himself. Then he had to say this:

While American might can defeat terrorist armies on the battlefield, each nation of the world must decide for itself what kind of future it wants to build for its people, and what kind of sacrifices they are willing to make for their children.  America shouldn’t be doing the fighting for every nation on Earth not being reimbursed, in many cases, at all.

If they want us to do the fighting, they also have to pay a price — and sometimes that’s also a monetary price — so we’re not the suckers of the world.  We’re no longer the suckers, folks.  And people aren’t looking at us as suckers.  And I love you folks because most of you are nodding your head this way.  We’re respected again as a nation.  We’re respected again.

The first paragraph starts off well enough. Yes, we do want other nations to do their own fighting. But did he then intimate that we’d be okay getting our troops killed and maimed as long as we were “reimbursed?”

Yes. Yes he did.

The second paragraph is a four-alarm mess. First, Trump attacks—one must assume—an array of predecessors. You know he itches to name Obama right then and there. Only he’s talking to the troops and he’s not supposed to get political at all. George W. Bush must be on his mind—and you blame Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, for the fight in Vietnam. George H. W. Bush was a “sucker,” too, since he spent a lot of money saving Kuwait, and Reagan was a “sucker,” I guess, because while he was in office he spent a lot of money to keep the Russians from taking over Europe and arming the Taliban to fight them in Afghanistan. (Okay, that last idea did backfire, now that I think about it, myself.) And we can go back to Ike, again, and Harry, who led the battle to save South Korea in 1950. And did we get paid? No we did not. So, if we follow the Trump Doctrine (see: 7/11/18) , yes, all those presidents were suckers and not nearly as great at leading the nation as Trump claims he is.

As for those in the audience, I think Trump meant, “Hey, think about this when you leave. America has been ‘suckered’ into all these fights; and you’ve been bleeding and dying for no good reason at all.”

It was implied, then, that the men and women who listen to President Trump on Christmas night, who believed in the mission laid out by Trump’s predecessors, who had carried the greatest burden for so many years, were the biggest “suckers” of all because they had and still would.

(I don’t know about anyone else, but listening to Trump, I wanted to puke.)

Heading for Iraq. I suspect Donald wouldn't go unless Melania held his hand.

12/26/18: The stock market reverses course and rises 1,086 points in one day, its best single-day performance in history.

President Trump can now brag again, because we’re not headed for a second Great Depression.

You know who is lying.

Then again, maybe this isn’t the best time to brag. The New York Times tracks down the daughters of the podiatrist who helped Draft Dodger Don avoid military service back in the day, by claiming his feet hurt too much to shoot. Dr. Elysa Braunstein, one of the daughters of Dr. Larry Braunstein, who died in 2007, tells reporters her father made the diagnosis of crippling bone spurs for Trump, as a favor to Fred Trump, his father, and her father’s landlord.

“It was family lore,” she said, adding that “it was something we would always discuss.” Her sister, Sharon Kessel, backed her up; but neither could say for sure if their father actually examined the future president or not.

There are no documents to support their claim, and the sisters admit they’re Democrats who dislike Trump. Still, if you had to guess who was lying, the sisters or Trump, you can go with past experience.

You know it’s Trump.

12/27/18: Nineteen months ago, Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed to lead an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

And today a possible bombshell exploded.

Cell phone signals allegedly put Cohen in Prague—with Russians.

Just hours ago, McClatchy reported that cell phone records in the hands of Mueller’s team show signals from a phone number registered to Michael Cohen were bounced off a tower near Prague in August 2016.

To understand the explosive nature of this development—if proved true—you have to go back to the famous Steele dossier, which first came to light in January 2017. The handiwork of Christopher Steele, a former British spy, the most salacious revelations involved Donald Trump—in a Moscow hotel in 2013—with Russian prostitutes peeing—a kind of nightmare version of Clue. That story, of course, has never been proven and the president has labeled the dossier “a pile of garbage” ever since.

Nevertheless, a number of other allegations have since proven true. Keith Schiller, Trump’s bodyguard has admitted that while he and Trump were staying in Moscow, the Russians did offer to send five prostitutes up to the Boss’s room. Schiller claims Trump never took them up on the offer. But nothing we have learned about Trump in the last few years would incline us to believe he wouldn’t accept such an offer. We do know General Flynn visited Moscow and was paid by the Russians to give a speech. Steele reported that first. Steele claimed the Russians were involved in a sophisticated internet campaign to harm Hillary Clinton and boost Trump. Again, Steele’s sources and conclusions were correct. Steele was right again when he reported that Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, met with Russian officials in Moscow in the summer of 2016.

Hackers working under the Kremlin’s direction.

More recently, we learned that the dossier was spot on again. “The Kremlin’s cultivation operation on TRUMP also comprised offering him various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia,” Steele reported. Michael Cohen—who also figures in the dossier—has now admitted negotiations  related to building a Trump Tower in Moscow continued until at least June 2016. And Rudy Giuliani let slip that business negotiations for the deal continued right up to Election Day, when for obvious reasons the deal had to be killed.

And covered up?

Now, today’s revelation threatens to drive one of the last nails required to seal up the Trump coffin. Steele’s sources told him two years ago that Cohen had traveled to Prague in the summer of 2016.  Cohen was there “to clean up the mess” created by media reports about Paul Manafort’s “corrupt relationship” with Russian oligarchs and Page’s suspicious Moscow trip. According to Steele, “Kremlin officials” were going to help Cohen with a cover up if they could.

Here’s how he put it in the dossier:

“The agenda [for the meeting/s] comprised questions on how deniable cash payments were to be made to hackers who had worked in Europe under Kremlin direction against the CLINTON campaign and various contingencies for covering up these operations and Moscow’s secret liaison with the TRUMP team more generally.”

In other words, Cohen’s meeting with Russians, if it can be proved, would be the very essence of collusion, or what would legally be “conspiracy,” beyond any doubt.

The question is what is Cohen saying behind closed doors?

Can we be sure? We do know Cohen has always waved his passport at reporters when asked about any such trip, showing that it had never been stamped for a visit to the Czech Republic. And for a long time the trail—if there was a trail—appeared to end there. Last April, however, McClatchy reported that sources were saying Mueller could prove Cohen traveled to Germany and then hopped a train to Prague. Since he never left the confines of the European Union, his passport would never have been stamped and he could cross the border into the Czech Republic without notice.

Cohen has denied this latest report, too. Since he has been cooperating with Mueller’s team, a denial, at first glance, seems to put the rumor to rest. “Why would he lie now?” the logic goes.  The question is what is Cohen saying behind closed doors? If he admits, or has already admitted, that as representative of the Trump campaign he and the Russians were working on a cover up, this would be akin to the Watergate moment when it was revealed Nixon liked to make tapes.

We do know this. Investigators have been gathering all kinds of evidence against suspects in the Russia probe. At every step of the way, Mueller has shown in court that he has bank records, emails, electronic intercepts and corroborating witnesses, too. For that reason, I would suspect that prosecutors might want Cohen to issue a denial. If he’s cooperating in this instance—and he’s been cooperating extensively, we know—Mueller would not want as-yet unindicted subjects of the investigation to know. And if you’re Don Jr., or Jared Kushner, or Roger Stone, or especially President Trump, you have yet more reason to sweat.

(Author’s note: this is supposition; I am not ready to bet my house on the question of what Cohen has already said. I do try to stick to the facts.)

12/28/18: Trump is often peevish and petulant. Today he plumbed the depths of stupidity. If he can’t get the money he wants to build his wall—a fate he fears will make him look like a fool in the eyes of his base—he’s just going to…

Well…this is so dumb…why don’t we let him explain it in a tweet:

We will be forced to close the Southern Border entirely if the Obstructionist Democrats do not give us the money to finish the Wall & also change the ridiculous immigration laws that our Country is saddled with. Hard to believe there was a Congress & President who would approve!

Hard to believe! Yes, it is. Why, it’s hard to believe no one has come up with a “brilliant” plan like this before! It’s as if a patient interested in plastic surgery went for a nose job and all the surgeon did was cut off his or her nose and toss it in the trash, announcing, “Your nose is fixed.”

As usual, the president has not thought this out and he’s just tweeting random shit. In actuality trade in goods and services between Mexico and the United States topped $615.9 billion in 2017. So each day of closure (allowing for traffic electronically and transactions of that sort) might mean a loss of $1.5 billion as a result. If the border were closed, Americans traveling in Mexico would be stuck there. Four thousand trucks crossing daily would be parked. Rail traffic would cease. Supply chains for auto manufacturers would be severed and production at plants far from the border would halt. A million workers crossing for work every day would fail to show for their jobs.

Bloody corpses in plaid pants.

Of course, if we listen to Trump we all know we must do whatever it takes to curb the flood of illegal immigrants crossing our borders, or America will welter in gore. Today it turns out we may not be safe even when walking the golf course. I haven’t played golf since 1969, when I managed a 17 on one hole, so I guess I shouldn’t care. But, oh, the humanity! I can only imagine the bloody corpses in plaid pants littering the fairways on the ninth hole or the greens on the tenth.

Therefore, in an effort to alert the golfing public, I would like to point out that federal and state authorities have evidence that fake green cards and fake Social Security numbers have allegedly been supplied to illegal immigrants working at a New Jersey golf course. Here you have these “murders” and “rapists”—probably nine out of every ten being members of MS-13—working in the clubhouse, wiping down tables in the club bar and cutting grass on the course. At every turn, these dangerous individuals have access to deadly implements and might at any moment set upon rich private club members, stabbing them with kitchen knives, whacking them over the head with putters or finishing them off with lawn care tools of their choice.

Thankfully, authorities have broken up the alleged ring—in the town of Bedminster—and they are gathering evidence as we speak. Two potential killers, Victorina Morales and Sandra Diaz, who had been posing as cleaning ladies, turned over fake document this week and threw themselves on the mercy of the court.

For the sake of all golfing Americans and their loved ones, let’s pray New Jersey police and F.B.I. agents called in on the case can get to the bottom of this mess at Trump National Golf Club, owned by the president himself.

I mean, think of it. Trump’s own help might have been plotting to get him—might have run him down with a golf cart with ease. Let’s face it. We all know he’s too fat to run or even roll himself out of the way.

“Build that wall!” as the president says.

  

Watch out, that killer has a putter.

12/29/18: The blows to the president’s ego just keep coming as the year nears an end. Top executives from The Apprentice offer a fresh take on their former star. What they make clear is that Trump was Trump even back then.

“Like making the court jester the king.”

Newsweek relays the story, which first appeared in The New Yorker:

Editor Jonathan Braun…said…Trump would fire contestants on the show on a whim, forcing editors to “reverse engineer” programs to make Trump’s decisions seem coherent. 

Show producer Mark Burnett remarked, “We know each week who has been fired, and therefore, you’re editing in reverse.” Amid a series of firings and resignations in the Trump administration, he remarked, “I find it strangely validating to hear that they’re doing the same thing in the White House [emphasis added].”

 “Most of us knew he was a fake,” Braun, who worked on six series of the show, said. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.”

This wasn’t the first time people who worked with Trump on the show admitted they came away less than impressed. “Did we think this clown, this buffoon with the funny hair, would ever become a world leader? Not once,” producer Bill Pruitt told reporters in an interview in 2016. 

12/30/18: The folks who worked with Trump on The Apprentice aren’t the only ones to have a negative opinion of the man in the Oval Office. Retired four-star Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal was asked Sunday if he’d ever work for President Trump if asked. “No,” he responded pithily.

“Someone we wouldn’t want to do a business deal with.”

“Why not?” wondered Martha Raddatz, who was hosting the general for an appearance on ABC’s This Week.

“I don’t think he tells the truth.”

Did the general think Trump was “immoral,” Raddatz wondered?

McChrystal explained:

“I think he is.

“What I would ask every American to do is again, stand in front of that mirror and say, what are we about? Am I really willing to throw away or ignore some of the things that people do that are pretty unacceptable normally just because they accomplish certain other things that we might like. If we want to be governed by someone we wouldn’t do a business deal with because they’re their background is so shady, if we’re willing to do that then that’s in conflict with who I think we are.

“And so I think it’s necessary in those times to take a stand.”

*

General John Kelly, who steps down Wednesday from his job as White House chief of staff, also leaves with, dare we say, less than glowing praise for Boss Trump. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times he describes taking over the White House job in July 2017. Trump was “frustrated” at the time. “It was a huge decision to make,” whether he wanted the job, “and frankly there was no system at all for a lot of reasons—palace intrigue and the rest of it—when I got there.”

Indeed, the Times explains, as rocky as his time on the job was, his success would “best [be] measured by what the president did not do when Kelly was at his side.” That’s about as negative an assessment as you can offer if you’re going to leave it up to outsiders to read between the lines.

As the Times tells the tale, “Kelly’s supporters say he stepped in to block or divert the president on dozens of matters large and small. They credit him, in part, for persuading Trump not to pull U.S. forces out of South Korea, or withdraw from NATO” as he said behind closed doors he wanted to do.

Keeping America safe—from the President of the United States.

So—as chaotic as it had often been—Kelly and his supporters were saying, “It could have been much worse!”

Kelly is no shrinking violet. He served with the Marines for 46 years, his career spanning the years from Vietnam to the rise and fall of the Islamic State. That made him the nation’s longest-serving general when he retired in 2016 and joined the Trump administration. Yet, he describes working in the White House under this president as a “bone-crushing hard job, but you [had to] do it.”

Kelly was asked why he stayed as long as he did, despite policy differences, despite the president’s mercurial personality, despite the volatile outbursts, despite the sixteen-hour days, seven days a week.

“Duty,” he said. “Military people don’t walk away.”

So there he was—for almost a year-and-a-half, stuck in what he told friends was “the worst job in the world,” working for a man he thought was not up to the job.

He stuck it out—and he made some serious mistakes, himself—because it seemed to him to be his duty, as it had been for half a century with the Marines, to keep the nation safe. In this case, however, it seems he was keeping the country safe from the President of the United States.

POSTSCRIPT: Kelly’s interview has already ruffled the president orange feathers. In particular, Trump has expressed displeasure with his chief of staff’s comments regarding the border wall.

Originally, Kelly served as Director of Homeland Security in the Trump cabinet, a job he loved. One of his first steps in that role was to talk to Customs and Border Protection agents about what they needed to guard the border. Kelly called these men and women “salt-of-the-earth, Joe-Six-Pack folks.”

“They said, ‘Well we need a physical barrier in certain places, we need technology across the board, and we need more people,’ ” Kelly told the Times.

What about the idea, then, that what was really needed along the border was a 1,954-mile-long, 30-foot high wall?

Again, the Los Angeles Times explains,

 “To be honest, it’s not a wall,” Kelly said.

“The president still says ‘wall’ — oftentimes frankly he’ll say ‘barrier’ or ‘fencing,’ now he’s tended toward steel slats. But we left a solid concrete wall early on in the administration, when we asked people what they needed and where they needed it.”

Asked if there is a security crisis at the southern border, or whether Trump has drummed up fears of a migrant “invasion” for political reasons, Kelly did not answer directly, but said, “We do have an immigration problem.”

And that much is true—and that much almost every liberal, and every conservative, and everyone in between would admit.

But paying $25 billion (or more) for a vanity project—shutting down the government because the president can’t have his way—tweeting idiotically about how Democrats don’t care if illegal immigrants kill us all (even on golf courses)—you have to wonder if Trump really has a grip?

Reading between the lines, you get the idea Kelly doesn’t believe he does.

Why did I agree to do this job?