January 9, 2019: Trump, the "Big Orange Enchilada"

 

1/9/19: The president’s big, beautiful Oval Office speech, on the need for a border wall, lands with a Trump Thud. 

No one is moved by what he says and most of us know he’s lying from first syllable to last. He doesn’t mention terrorists pouring across the border – because the “Fake News” folks have been catching his surrogates lying about the numbers all week. Was it 3,000 terrorists pouring in from Mexico? Or 40,000? Or a billion? Trump and his toadies couldn’t make up their minds. 

They all agreed it was a lot! 

We know Don Jr. and Don Sr. lied about the purpose of the June 2016 meeting.

 

The Big Orange Enchilada. 

Meanwhile, if you were hiding in your Safe Room, loading your weapons to repel lepers and people carrying smallpox – you might have missed critical developments in the Russia probe. 

First, the Grand Jury empaneled by Special Counsel Mueller has been extended for six months. 

That means when Trump sticks his head out of the White House on February 2, he’s going to see his fat shadow and know there’s six more months of Mueller. 

Second, we learn that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has decided to step down once a new Attorney General is in place. We know that William Barr, Trump’s choice to take over at Justice, is scheduled for Senate confirmation hearings next week. At first blush, the president must be excited to think that another nemesis is bowing out of the Russia fight. Yet, before the Big Orange Enchilada (see: Watergate, for reference) breaks out the champagne he might want to puzzle out what this means. It’s a distinct possibility that Rosenstein knows the investigation is guaranteed to draw Trump blood – and copious amounts. He may see the chance to be a stronger voice in defense of the rule of law on the outside of government than in, giving warning about what he, Mueller and others already know.

 

The bullets keep flying past the president – and just missing. But the law of averages says, metaphorically, that Trump can’t dodge them all. Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee (HIC) have announced that the first witness they call back and place under oath will be his son, Don Jr. 

 

Staffing up the always-critical Joint Committee on the Library! 

Republicans helped stall that process till the end of January, by refusing to name any of the members they’d place on HIC, meaning no official business could be conducted until they acted. They did attend to more serious matters, staffing up 23 other committees, including the Joint Committee on the Library. And you thought Congress couldn’t get anything important done. 

Why might Don Jr. be sweating through his shirts of late? We need to go back to the infamous Trump Tower meeting (June 2016), which he and everyone else involved forgot about holding. One participant, Paul Manafort, has already been convicted on ten felony counts. Now a second, Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who attended, has been indicted. 

If you’re a Trump lover, keep in mind this wasn’t Mueller’s call. This investigation comes out of the Southern District of New York, a federal attorney’s office headed up by a Trump appointee. This case may not be tied to the Mueller probe, but it hints at where Mueller is going. Veselnitskaya is accused of obstruction of justice. Allegedly, she was covering up a trail of Russian money-laundering.

 

Money-laundering! Of course! A highly-secret court challenge, believed to be related to a demand for documents filed by Mueller and his team, has now reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The case involves a “mysterious foreign-owned company” that has so far refused to comply with a subpoena for documents. The lower courts have said that a fine of $50,000 per day shall be imposed, so long as the company remains in contempt. The company appealed. 

Now the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected that appeal, without a single dissenting vote. 

I try to be realistic in my assessments. I still don’t see evidence to impeach the Big Orange Enchilada. 

But I’m getting the sense Mueller may have seen enough. 

I will, however, venture a guess. I am guessing the company is Deutsche Bank. It could be the Bank of Cyprus, where Manafort and Russian oligarchs used to hide their loot. Or it could be any number of Russian money-laundering fronts. My money, never laundered, is on Deutsche Bank. 

 

Get your senses checked: You may be dead. 

I am going to say this development is definitely NOT good news for President Trump and his pals. 

That brings us back to Manafort. In a filing blunder this week, his lawyers failed to redact portions of a court document that offers a window into what Mueller and his team already know. If you don’t read the documents, whereas I’m retired, so I do, you don’t realize that Mueller always knows more than targets of the investigation realize. Here we learn that Manafort shared polling data with the Russians, while leading the Trump campaign. Mueller is alleged to have evidence that puts Manafort in a secret meeting with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Russian intelligence officer, in August 2016 and another secret meeting in Madrid in early 2017. This passage of data would likely have been meant to aid the Russians in refining their efforts to disrupt U.S. elections. 

I know, I know. “NO COLLUSION,” as the Big Orange Enchilada likes to tweet. But if you don’t sense 

CONSPIRACY, you had better have your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin checked. 

None of your senses are working and you may already be dead.

 

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THERE ARE also reports that Manafort expected to be paid as much as $2.4 million for the polling data in his hands. His alleged intent was to feed it to two Ukrainian oligarchs, with whom he had previously worked, who would pass it on to their Russian buds. 

Payday for Paul Manafort!