March 6, 2019: This Time the Check Really Was in the Mail

 

3/6/19: Trump is awake in the wee hours, tweeting about his emergency declaration, which would give him power to grab money with both fists and build his Great Wall of Trump, whether Congress likes it or not. It’s a declaration he desperately wants GOP senators to uphold. 

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“Senate Republicans are not voting on constitutionality or precedent, they are voting on desperately needed Border Security & the Wall.” 

President Trump

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You can tell how much he reveres the U.S. Constitution if you consider his tweet in the dark: 

Senate Republicans are not voting on constitutionality or precedent, they are voting on desperately needed Border Security & the Wall. Our Country is being invaded with Drugs, Human Traffickers, & Criminals of all shapes and sizes. That’s what this vote is all about. STAY UNITED!

 

If the U.S. Constitution interferes with what Trump wants, Republicans should “STAY UNITED” and ignore what it says.

 

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IN OTHER NEWS, Michael Cohen spends another day on Capitol Hill, testifying in closed session before the House Intelligence Committee. He brings several suitcases filled with documents. 

The New York Times reports on a series of fat checks made out to Cohen, all signed by the president, or Don Jr., his dear, dumb son. These checks are part of a scheme to cover up the story of Stormy Daniels, for which scheme (in part) Cohen will soon be plunked in jail. The Southern District of New York in its filings on the case named “Individual 1,” the president himself, as an “unindicted co-conspirator,” which (based on the latest revelations) is kind of fun. 

The first check to Mr. Cohen was signed on February 14, 2017, by the newly sworn President of the United States. The day before Trump had to fire his National Security Adviser, General Michael T. Flynn, for lying to Vice President Pence about contacts with Russians. 

 

Now Trump was signing that fat check – and afterwards, he would celebrate Valentine’s Day by calling in F.B.I. Director James Comey and asking him to go easy on good old General Flynn. 

Keep all of this in mind when you hear the president insist that Comey lies and not him. 

Or Cohen lies and not him. 

There was another check to his personal lawyer for $35,000 in March, one in April (not yet found), then one in May, drawn on the president’s personal bank account. The June and July checks are still missing. Then we have another for $35,000, signed on August 1, 2017.  

On that very day, Press Secretary Pinocchio confirmed that the president had “weighed in” on a letter Don Jr. wrote about a secret meeting held in June 2016 with a group of Russian agents. 

In retrospect, you can see how ridiculous the lies told by Trump and his sycophants have been. Sanders insisted then: 

Look, the statement that Don Jr. issued is true. There’s no inaccuracy in the statement.

The president weighed in as any father would, based on the limited information that he had.

This is all discussion, frankly, of no consequence. There was no follow up. It was disclosed to the proper parties, which is how The New York Times found out about it to begin with.

That statement itself was shot through with untruths. The meeting itself was never “disclosed.” The New York Times dug up the story thirteen months after the conclave concluded. Don Jr. initially lied about the purpose of the gathering. Then dad lied too. Finally, a whole slew of aides, including Sanders, lied to cover up the president’s role in the debacle. If you had the feeling that Team Trump might be rife with liars, you wouldn’t be dreaming. 

In parallel, the checks to Cohen kept on coming – September 12, October 18, and November 21. The last of a dozen came on December 5, 2017, meaning that the president had been part of a scheme to cover up felony campaign law violations for almost a year.

 

The evidence builds. Yet, in Trumpistan it makes no dent. As the Times reports: 

“I think it’s news we knew about,” Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Reform Committee and one of the president’s staunchest allies, told reporters during a break in last week’s hearing.

 

The payments, he said, could have been for services based on a retainer, although Mr. Cohen said there was no such retainer. 

 

Trump claims to know nothing about the payments. 

Nor should anyone, not even a clueless Rep. Jordan, forget. In April 2018, Trump could still insist to reporters aboard Air Force One that he knew nothing at all about payments to Stormy. 

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

THE PRESIDENT: No. No. What else?

 

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

THE PRESIDENT: No, I don’t know. No.

 

One thing President Trump does know, is he knows how to lie.

 

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AS FOR ALL THOSE pesky “enemies of the people” trying to get the President of the United States to answer difficult questions – or address some previous answer to a previously asked difficult question, which answer in the interim has been proven to be a fat lie – we learn once more how devoted the Trump administration is to the First Amendment. 

This week an anonymous source at Homeland Security provided NBC 7, a San Diego TV station, with a trove of documents. These showed that the federal government had “created a secret database of activists, journalists, and social media influencers” who were trying to aid asylum seekers coming to the United States – or merely documenting the progress of, and reaction of authorities to, a caravan of 5,000 people from Central America as they made their way north to the U.S. border. 

 

Authorities didn’t want the public to be informed. 

No doubt, the situation on the border is complicated. Dealing with thousands of asylum seekers and others is never going to be easy, even if you manage to build a wall a hundred feet high and 2,000 miles long. But to have “agents from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Border Patrol, Homeland Security Investigations and some agents from the San Diego sector of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI)” spying on journalists – and disrupting the work they do – cannot be allowed. 

Taking pictures of migrant children separated from parents, or young asylum seekers locked in cages, means informing the public. 

The problem was authorities didn’t want the public to be informed. That meant making it as hard as possible for reporters, without going full Chinese-censorship mode or adopting the kill-the-reporter-and-be-done-with-it Saudi approach.

 

NBC 7 explains how the new tracking system worked: 

One photojournalist said she was pulled into secondary inspections three times [whenever she crossed the border] and asked questions about who she saw and photographed in Tijuana shelters. Another photojournalist said she spent 13 hours detained by Mexican authorities when she tried to cross the border into Mexico City. Eventually, she was denied entry into Mexico and sent back to the U.S. 

 

These American photojournalists and attorneys said they suspected the U.S. government was monitoring them closely…

 

Now, documents leaked to NBC 7 Investigates show their fears weren’t baseless. In fact, their own government had listed their names in a secret database of targets, where agents collected information on them. Some had alerts placed on their passports, keeping at least two photojournalists and an attorney from entering Mexico to work. 

 

Those targeted for harassment included “ten journalists, seven of whom are U.S. citizens, a U.S. attorney, and 48 people from the U.S. and other countries, labeled as organizers, instigators or their roles ‘unknown.’” 

In other words, border authorities were targeting American journalists and citizens, and not because they broke the law.

 

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ODDLY ENOUGH, the president isn’t done tweet-ranting for the day. At 6:56 p.m. on March 6, 2019, he sums up his legal predicament this way. He didn’t do anything wrong. No, the Democrats are out to get him on anything, even “a punctuation mistake in a document.” 

 

POSTSCRIPT: Judge Andrew Napolitano, perhaps Fox News’s top legal commentator, explains the dangers to Trump in Cohen’s testimony in an editorial in the Washington Examiner: 

Hidden in the Cohen testimony was an oblique reference to alleged bank and tax fraud that Cohen claimed he helped Mr. Trump commit, contributed to Mr. Trump’s wealth and has the present interest of federal prosecutors in Manhattan. Many of these events took place more than five years ago and thus are not subject to federal prosecution, so why would prosecutors be interested in them?

 

Here is where RICO comes in. RICO is the acronym for a Nixon-era federal statute, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, [emphasis added] originally enacted to target the mob. It permits federal prosecutors to reach back 10 years to find any two criminal acts, which need not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt; prosecutors need only demonstrate that they were more likely than not to have occurred. Then the feds can seize three times the wealth that the perpetrators of these schemes amassed. That could bankrupt Mr. Trump.

 

The president has serious and powerful tormentors whom he cannot overcome by mockery alone. He needs to do more than demean them with acerbic tweets, because many of those tormentors can legally cause him real harm. He needs to address these issues soberly, directly and maturely. Can President Trump survive all this? Yes — but not if he has another week like the last one.

 

First, it’s never going to be a good week for anyone who opens a newspaper and sees his or her name attached to a sentence about the RICO Act. 

Second, Napolitano is warning that Trump can only address his problems in a sober, direct, mature fashion. 

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahaha! 

Not gonna’ happen!