2/8/19: IT TURNS OUT American intelligence intercepted a call in 2017. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman can be heard telling underlings he would finish off the journalist Jamal Khashoggi “with a bullet” if he refused to return to Saudi Arabia and end his criticism of the royal family.
President Trump has said he thinks the Crown Prince is a noble fellow and he’d like him to visit the new U.S. capital at Mar-a-Lago. He can even bring his favorite doctor with the bone saw.
You
never know when you might catch a journalist and need the right kind of saw
while traveling. (See: 10/16/18.)
*
“Trump is hated by everyone inside the White House.”
PRETTY MUCH everyone agrees there has never been a White House that leaks like this one, with Trump at the helm.
Experts theorize that this has something to do with the fact so many people working in the White House can’t abide the way the president acts. Reporters for Vanity Fair explain it this way:
Morale inside the White House,
never high to begin with, has turned particularly bleak, according to
interviews with 10 former West Wing officials and Republicans close to the
president. The issue is that many see Trump himself as the problem. “Trump is
hated by everyone inside the White House,” a former West Wing official told me.
His shambolic management style, paranoia, and pattern of blaming staff for
problems of his own making have left senior White House officials burned out
and resentful, sources said. “It’s total misery. People feel trapped,” a former
official said. “Trump always needs someone to blame,” a second former official
said. Sources said the leak of Trump’s private schedules to Axios – which
revealed how little work Trump does – was a signal of how disaffected his
staff has become [emphasis added throughout]. (See: 2/3/19.)
Even Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney is said
to be anxious to leave; and he’s only been on the job for eight weeks.
Well, there’s always Rudy….
Or not!
With arrival of the weekend, Rudy Giuliani remains conspicuous by his absence. He has not been seen in public since January 20, when he told The New York Times that the president informed him negotiations on a Trump Tower Moscow deal were “going on from the day I announced to the day I won.”
As the Times explained after that bombshell dropped:
The new timetable means that Mr.
Trump was seeking a deal at the time
he was calling for an end to economic sanctions against Russia….He was seeking a deal when he gave
interviews questioning the legitimacy
of NATO, a favorite talking point of President Vladimir V. Putin of
Russia. And he was seeking a deal
when, in July 2016, he called on Russia to release hacked Democratic emails
that Mr. Putin’s government was rumored at the time to have stolen.
Rudy quickly woke up to his mistake (or the president started screaming at him again) and tried to walk back his comments.
No one has seen him since, kind of like Jamal Khashoggi
walking into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
*
 |
Michael Cohen. |
THE COURT NEWS keeps coming. On Friday, U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III denied media requests for release of all court
records in the case of Michael Cohen, the president’s former personal lawyer.
Pauley ruled that documents related to Cohen’s financial crimes could be released. But documents related to two other felonies had to remain sealed or could be released only in redacted form.
An observer in court explained:
The judge said prosecutors had opposed the
media requests, saying disclosure “would jeopardize an ongoing investigation
and prejudice the privacy rights of uncharged third parties.”
…He said the search warrant applications and
affidavits supporting them “catalogue an assortment of uncharged individuals
and detail their involvement in communications and transactions connected to
the campaign finance charges to which Cohen pled guilty.”
…The judge added: “At this stage, wholesale
disclosure of the materials would reveal the scope and direction of the
Government’s ongoing investigation. It would also unveil subjects of the
investigation and the potential conduct under scrutiny, the full volume and
nature of the evidence gathered thus far, and the sources of information
provided to the Government.”
In a separate story, Politico added:
“And if the past is any
prologue, unmasking those who are cooperating with the Government’s
investigation or who have otherwise provided information to the Government
could deter further cooperation with the investigation by ‘subject[ing] those
individuals to witness tampering, harassment, or retaliation,’” the
judge added.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out who might be doing the harassing. And who was doing the witness tampering. And what corpulent orange guy might be subject of the continuing investigation.
Hint: his or her initials are DJT.
*
BUT WAIT!!!! There’s more. In separate court proceedings in Washington D.C., federal prosecutors tell a judge that Paul Manafort may have lied to them, despite a plea agreement that was in place, about “an extremely sensitive issue,” in hopes of goosing his chances for a pardon.
The person with power to pardon Manafort has the same initials as the individual hinted at two paragraphs above.
DJT.
Prosecutors also tell Judge Amy Berman Jackson that they believe Manafort lied about his contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik, a business buddy, and a man with deep connections to Russian intelligence. Those interactions, prosecutors assure Judge Jackson, go “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating.”
Jackson chastises Manafort at one point, making it clear she believes he tried to cover up the truth that he used $125,000 from a pro-Trump political action committee to pay legal bills.
Andrew Weissman, speaking for the prosecutor’s office,
describes that cozy arrangement as, “to put it charitably, a scheme.”
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