The Trump thread: All things Donald

[Athos_131]

FBI seizes records related to Stormy Daniels in raid of Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s office

It's all coming crashing down!

#Resist

[_priapism]

FBI seizes records related to Stormy Daniels in raid of Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s office

It's all coming crashing down!

#Resist

Conspiracy, obstruction, failure to report, and tax, campaign, and ethics violations.

[Athos_131]

He's gonna sing like a bird isn't he? 

#Resist

[Jed_]

Other than a few brief moments on Syria, it’s all CNN is talking about.

I was just LMAO, Trump was just ranting about ‘What about the emails!’

[Athos_131]

To search Michael Cohen’s home and office, the FBI had to clear a higher-than-normal bar

To obtain that search warrant, then, the U.S. attorney would have had to meet six conditions, according to the manual.

Before obtaining a search warrant, investigators had to try to obtain the evidence in another way, such as by subpoena.

The authorization for the warrant had to come from either the U.S. attorney or an assistant attorney general. (Rosenstein is deputy attorney general, a higher position than assistant attorney general.)

The prosecutor had to confer with the criminal division of the department before seeking the warrant.

The team conducting the search had to “employ adequate precautions” to ensure that they weren’t improperly viewing privileged communications between the Cohen his clients.

The search team would have included a “privilege team” including lawyers and agents not working the case which would work to ensure that investigators conducting the search didn’t see privileged communications.

The investigators had to develop a review process for the seized material.

The question of what qualifies as privileged communication is complex. Not every communication between an attorney and a client is included. One type of communication that’s excluded: communications between an attorney and a client that might be predicated on committing or covering up a crime.

Even with those checks in place, the U.S. attorney wasn’t guaranteed a warrant. Search warrants granted to U.S. attorneys are approved by magistrate judges serving in U.S. District Court.

In other words, the Cohen search warrant almost certainly included decision-making or approval on the part of the second-highest-ranking person at the Department of Justice (Rosenstein), a federal judge and the U.S. attorney or an assistant attorney general. Before it was executed, the team would have needed to check a number of boxes meant to reduce the likelihood of improperly seizing privileged material.

We know, too, that this was an exceptional move by the government.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

9-13.420 - Searches of Premises of Subject Attorneys


#Resist

[Athos_131]

How the Cohen Raids and Trump’s Reactions Edge Us Toward Confrontation

The country is entering a dangerous moment—the moment of actual confrontation between the president of the United States and those who would investigate him.

This moment has been deferred for months through a combination of strategies. The president’s lawyers convinced their client for a spell that the investigation would wrap up and clear him if he just cooperated. Investigators refrained from antagonizing the president; they did not leak disparaging material about him or those close to him. They framed their indictments narrowly so as not to suggest more than they were immediately prepared to allege. Even as they moved forward, investigators left room for the president and his defenders to put off any showdown.

The result was that, for months, a confrontation has loomed over American political culture, but has ripened slowly and, while in plain view, in a fashion that has permitted  people to avert their gaze. Those who wanted to deny that the confrontation was coming at all could convince themselves that perhaps Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation would peter out; perhaps it would reveal only misconduct by expendable hangers-on in the president’s entourage; perhaps it would reveal only politically embarrassing conduct rather than conduct that required elements within the executive branch to lock horns over whether the special counsel would be meaningfully permitted to accuse the president.

On Monday, however, the space for such denial began to shrink markedly—and the time span for deferral of the confrontation has shrunk as well.

I will put this as bluntly as I know how: There is no way that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York would have sought or executed a search warrant against the president’s lawyer without overpowering evidence to support the action. The legal standard for such a search requires only probable cause that criminal activity is taking place. Under normal circumstances, which these are not, the prudential and policy factors counseling against such an action would be powerful.

For starters, the Justice Department is institutionally cautious about searches involving attorneys acting in their role as attorneys. As Paul Rosenzweig noted, “the U.S. Attorney’s Manual has an entire section that limits how and when the offices of an attorney may be searched. Realizing full well that such searches are in derogation of the value of the [attorney-client] privilege, the manual requires high-level approvals, the exhaustion of other investigative avenues, and specifies procedures that are to be followed to limit the intrusion on privileged documents.” Moreover, the Justice Department would have been additionally cautious about seeking any warrant against this particular lawyer—precisely because doing so makes clear that a ring is closing around the president. Going after a prominent person’s lawyer for matters related to his representation of the client is, after all, an aggressive act toward the client, not just toward the lawyer. And Trump is, as he puts it, a counterpuncher.

This is the kind of step that would predictably elicit a reaction. The Justice Department simply would not take such an action lightly or without evidence that emphatically supports it. Add these prudential, legal and policy factors together and they cumulatively suggest that the evidence supporting the warrant application likely exceeds—probably by far—what is legally required.

Put another way, Cohen’s situation, and thus Trump’s situation, is grave.

This seriousness is not simply a function of the apparently advanced state of some of the evidence involved. The nature of the warrant shows that the investigation itself is spreading. According to the New York Times, “The F.B.I. agents who raided the office of President Trump’s personal lawyer on Monday were looking for records about payments to two women who claim they had affairs with Mr. Trump, and information related to the publisher of The National Enquirer’s role in silencing one of the women, several people briefed on the investigation said.”

In short, this search warrant is apparently not about L’Affaire Russe. The FBI raided the office of the president’s personal lawyer on a matter related to L’Affaire Stormy. That means that prosecutors were able to show probable cause of criminal activity connected to Cohen’s representation of the president on matters far removed from Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, obstruction of justice or any of the other matters within Mueller’s purview. Notably, this subject matter metastasis coincides with a bureaucratic metastasis as well. It was not, after all, Mueller who sought or received the warrant. As Rosenzweig notes:

Muller referred the matter to the Justice Department, where the investigation was assigned to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. That office (run by a Trump appointee) then procured the warrant—with the approval of a magistrate judge—and worked with the FBI to conduct the search. In this regard, the special counsel’s actions, and the Justice Department referral are completely unlike the Starr investigation on which I worked many years ago. There, Attorney General Janet Reno kept expanding the Starr investigation into new areas—mostly, I think, as a matter of convenience. Here, the department seems intent on cabining the Mueller investigation to the scope it was originally initiated for—and to also be willing to spin off unrelated matters to the relevant local U.S. attorney’s office.

This bureaucratic distribution of the investigation is actually a good thing. It will have the effect of diffusing responsibility for the investigations as they develop away from Mueller. One of the problems with Reno’s decision to concentrate so many investigative matters in Starr’s hands was that Starr became the locus of all things related to investigations of Bill Clinton. This proved damaging to Starr’s credibility, as people were able to accuse him of being on a far-flung series of vendettas against Clinton. He was also accused of mission creep, and there was some truth to that charge. But Starr also suffered from the repeated assignments of unrelated matters to his office by Reno and the Justice Department.

Rosenstein, who worked for Starr, does not appear to be making the error of concentrating things in Mueller’s hands. Bloomberg reports that Rosenstein made the decision to refer the Cohen raid to the Southern District of New York, rather than keeping it within Mueller’s exclusive purview. Likewise, the Times reports that Rosenstein “personally signed off on Monday’s F.B.I. decision to raid the office of Mr. Cohen.” Rosenstein, in other words, chose to spread responsibility around, taking some of the heat of the president’s wrath off of Mueller. This was the right move. But it also carried risks—specifically, the danger of making Rosenstein himself so central to the investigations that he becomes a target of the president’s ire. The metastasis may protect Mueller, but it also may endanger Rosenstein.

Trump clearly understands the gravity of the situation. He went on an extended rant Monday in which he openly contemplated the firing of Mueller, railed against Rosenstein and complained yet again about the decision by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. From the White House transcript:

It’s, frankly, a real disgrace. It’s an attack on our country, in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for.

...

[T]his is the most conflicted group of people I’ve ever seen. The Attorney General made a terrible mistake when he did this, and when he recused himself. Or he should have certainly let us know if he was going to recuse himself, and we would have used a — put a different Attorney General in. So he made what I consider to be a very terrible mistake for the country. But you’ll figure that out.

Q: Why don’t you just fire Mueller?

THE PRESIDENT: Why don’t I just fire Mueller?

Q: Yeah, just fire the guy.

...

Well, I think it’s a disgrace what’s going on. We’ll see what happens. But I think it’s really a sad situation when you look at what happened. And many people have said, “You should fire him.” Again, they found nothing. And in finding nothing, that’s a big statement. If you know the person who’s in charge of the investigation, you know about that. Deputy Rosenstein — Rod Rosenstein — he wrote the letter, very critical, of Comey.

...

But he signed — as you know, he also signed the FISA warrant. So Rod Rosenstein, who’s in charge of this, signed a FISA warrant, and he also signed a letter that was essentially saying to fire James Comey. And he was right about that. He was absolutely right.

Trump has contemplated Mueller’s dismissal before; he reportedly ordered it once, in June 2017, and demanded it again in December, albeit unsuccessfully. And he has certainly complained before about Mueller’s supposed “conflicts” and the Justice Department’s failure to investigate Hillary Clinton for her many infamies.

There was, however, something different about his performance Monday—and the difference involves both the ferocity of his comments and their timing. Prosecutors—not Mueller himself, but the Justice Department in response to information unearthed by Mueller—took an action that the president (correctly) perceived as threatening to him, and the president responded by threatening to remove Mueller from office and by once again menacing Rosenstein. CNN reported Tuesday that Rosenstein’s job may be in danger.

The risk to Mueller and Rosenstein is not new. It’s been obvious for a long time that Trump could wake up any day and decide to fire either or both of them. But the combination of the mounting investigative pressure on the president and his open contemplation of their dismissal makes the concern more acute. If the confrontation is upon us, or if it has grown imminent, the immediate question is whether the president will be content to let the investigation take its course—or whether he will use the powers of his office to frustrate it. And if he chooses the latter course, will our political system endeavor to stop him? While some congressional Republicans have pushed back against the president’s latest threats—Sen. Chuck Grassley declared that dismissing Mueller would be “suicide,” and Sen. Thom Tillis has reportedly begun lobbying the Senate Judiciary Committee to take up his legislation protecting the special counsel—others responded with little more than shrugs.

To make the whole picture more unsettling, the confrontation is brewing against a backdrop of increasing policy instability. National security officials are dropping like flies. The most recent casualty is Tom Bossert, the president’s counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, who was removed Tuesday morning in an apparent power play by incoming national security adviser John Bolton. Bossert has been a loyal servant of the president. He was also an establishment figure whose substantive views on national security matters are refreshingly conventional. His removal comes as the administration contemplates how to respond to the latest chemical weapons attack in Syria, and it extends the pattern of staff disruption that has left the administration shorthanded when dealing with the sort of major issues that arise in a world that isn’t getting less dangerous. In other words, in the past 24 hours the White House has not merely taken a few steps closer to a major confrontation with the Justice Department and the special counsel but has also made sure that the government is badly positioned to handle security crises that may erupt in tandem with that confrontation.

I’m not one to spend time psychoanalyzing Donald Trump. I don’t know whether he’s going to fire Mueller, Rosenstein, both or neither, and I also don’t know the pace at which the investigations will move. But the country has moved closer to confrontation—and the belief, particularly on the president’s part, that the confrontation is coming may well help to precipitate it.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

President Trump has never been in more trouble than right now

As you’ve heard, federal agents raided the office and home of Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer. Yet despite how rare an action it is to pierce attorney-client privilege this way, the big-picture story here seems inevitable: Once a serious prosecutor with resources and authority began taking a good long look at Trump and his associates, a bunch of people were going to be in big trouble, with some winding up behind bars.

I checked in with Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney, to get context on the Cohen raid. She emphasized how rare it is for prosecutors to get a warrant for privileged material: Breaching attorney-client privilege in this way only happens when the attorney himself is directly implicated in possible crimes. She also stressed that, because it is such a radical step for prosecutors to take, a complex system of safeguards has been established to make sure it can’t be abused.

First, if the Cohen raid took special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into a new area of investigation, he would have had to get the permission of Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who oversees the inquiry. Then, to get this kind of warrant, according to Justice Department rules, Mueller needed to get the permission of the U.S. attorney — in this case, Geoffrey Berman of the Southern District of New York, who was appointed by Trump — and had to consult with the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, giving them detailed information on exactly what he was seeking and why. Then a judge would have to be persuaded to issue the warrant. (ABC News reported this morning that Berman has recused himself from the investigation, which means that others in his office are handling it.)

The upshot: The Cohen raid isn’t a “fishing expedition,” and didn’t happen because Mueller suspected he might find something interesting, despite how Trump himself and his defenders would like to characterize it as a case of a special prosecutor out of control.

“A judge has found probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime is housed in the office of Michael Cohen,” McQuade told me. “They may have a goal of flipping him, but there’s also evidence of a crime here.”

McQuade also stressed that Mueller didn’t raid Cohen’s office. Instead, it was conducted by the Southern District of New York. “They would have drafted the warrant, supervised the agent affidavit, presented it to the judge, and supervised the execution of it,” McQuade said. “So the idea that Mueller raided Cohen is wrong.”

The raid on Cohen’s office and home could produce all kinds of evidence — some related to his relationship with his client, and some not. They’ve got files, computers, cellphones, everything. Anyone who knows Cohen knows there is bound to be a whole lot of interesting stuff to be found.

The privileged information will then go to what’s sometimes referred to as a “taint team,” a group of Justice Department officials who will review it and decide whether it shows enough evidence of a crime that it falls outside attorney-client privilege. They will then pass that information on to a judge, who could then permit it to be used by Mueller, the U.S. Attorney’s office, the New York state attorney general, or the Manhattan district attorney. In other words, Cohen — and by extension, Trump — has to now worry about more than just Mueller.

Let’s take a step back. One remarkable thing about the 2016 election is the way Trump’s business career was given such a superficial examination by the media as a whole. Again and again, some crazy story or unusual aspect of his financial life would be the topic of one or two investigative stories, but those stories wouldn’t get picked up by other outlets.

Making this more problematic, Trump isn’t someone who played close to the line a time or two, or once did a shady deal. He may well be the single most corrupt major business figure in the United States of America. He ran scams like Trump University to con struggling people out of their money. He lent his name to pyramid schemes. He bankrupted casinos and still somehow made millions while others were left holding the bag. He refused to pay vendors. He exploited foreign workers. He used illegal labor. He discriminated against African American renters. He violated Federal Trade Commission rules on stock purchases. He did business with the mob and with Eastern European kleptocrats. His properties became the go-to vehicle for Russian oligarchs and mobsters to launder their money.

So it was no accident that when he ran for president, the people who joined him in his quest were also a collection of grifters, liars, and crooks — people such as Paul Manafort. Those were the kind of operators Trump has attracted all his life. Honest, upright people with a deep respect for the law don’t go to work for Donald Trump.

As for Cohen, he may be called “Trump’s personal attorney,” but Trump has plenty of lawyers. Cohen’s real job was to be a dealmaker and fixer. He’s the guy Trump would use when he wanted to do a shady deal with a Kazakh oligarch to build a tower in the Republic of Georgia. He’s the guy Trump would have used to negotiate a payment of hush money to a porn star. He’s up to his eyeballs in Trump’s business. I don’t know what they’re going to find when they start combing through Cohen’s computers and cellphone records, but I know it’s going to be pretty darn interesting.

One more thing. Yesterday, the president once again mused publicly about whether he should fire Mueller, but at least with regard to whatever turns up from the Cohen raid, it’s already too late.

“If Mueller gets fired,” McQuade told me, “this case will live, because it’s being handled by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.”

Things were bad for Trump before. But they just got a whole lot worse.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump, Mueller teams prepare to move forward without presidential interview

Three sources familiar with the investigation said the findings Mueller has collected on Trump’s attempts to obstruct justice include: His intent to fire former FBI Director James Comey; his role in the crafting of a misleading public statement on the nature of a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between his son and Russians; Trump’s dangling of pardons before grand jury witnesses who might testify against him; and pressuring Attorney General Jeff Sessions not to recuse himself from the Russia investigation.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Michael Cohen and the End Stage of the Trump Presidency

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump’s first tweet about Stormy Daniels makes no sense — and he may even regret it

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump’s Lawyer Forgets to Pretend He’s Innocent, Also Compares Him to Mobster

Maybe next time the GOP shouldn't hitch their wagon to racist, misogynistic, greedy crooks.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Behind James Comey’s ‘A Higher Loyalty’

A tyranny cannot have independent law enforcement and remain an effective tyranny. A would-be tyrant thus must purge government of law enforcement that would be independent. He simply must get the law enforcement apparatus under his control—that is, protecting his friends and himself and arrayed against his enemies.

#Resist

[Lois]

Trump keeps claiming that Comey leaked classified information, but he doesn't seem to know what information Comey supposedly leaked.

Actually, Trump is/was the biggest leaker.  It seems he calls his buddies and vents to them, and then he blames others when his complaints show up in the news.

[Athos_131]

Trump has some explaining to do about his 2013 Russia trip

But Trump's timeline is now in serious doubt, if not obliterated. According to Bloomberg, the jet owned by Trump's business partner Phil Ruffin departed Asheville, N.C., for Moscow on a Thursday night and arrived Friday morning at 6:15 a.m. It left Moscow in the wee hours of Sunday morning at 3:58 a.m. — about 46 hours after it landed.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Are Trump’s lawyers selling him a bill of goods, or is he not listening?

President Trump is so unwilling to accept reality, and his advisers, even his lawyers, may be afraid of telling him the truth. Either Trump misunderstood what they’ve told him or his lawyers are making stuff up to pacify him:

Ty Cobb said the special counsel investigation would be over last Thanksgiving. Then by the end of the year.

Rudolph W. Giuliani tells him he’s going to get the Russia investigation to wrap up in the next week or so.

One of his lawyers seems to have told Trump he’s in no danger if he is not a “target” of the investigation.

Trump seems to think everything in Michael Cohen’s office and whatever they talked about fall into the category of attorney-client privilege.

Trump’s lawyers act like it is their decision whether Trump will have to give testimony to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

These are false, in fact so preposterous that non-lawyers can tell they are nonsense. You don’t need to have gone to law school to know:

No one has any idea when the Russia probe will end. Trump could fire Mueller, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and the investigation would go on.

Giuliani hasn’t practiced law in decades, has no ability to influence Mueller and isn’t all that helpful with respect to the Southern District of New York, where he ended his stint as U.S. attorney in January 1989.

Trump might be a subject of the Russia investigation now, but Mueller can decide he is a target at any time really.

“Fixing” isn’t covered by the attorney-client privilege, and plotting crimes with your attorney isn’t covered either. Most of what Cohen did does not seem to be legal work.

Trump can be subpoenaed by the grand jury if he refuses to make himself available for an interview. A court would almost certainly enforce it.

If Trump is buying the hooey he’s being fed, he’s really much dimmer than his supporters thought. And here’s some more bad news his lawyers might not have told him (or if they did, he chooses to forget):

James B. Comey’s memos don’t exonerate Trump. They provide contemporaneous, highly detailed confirmation of his efforts to obstruct the investigation. Oh, and plotting to fire Mueller and then Rosenstein to get rid of the investigation evidences a corrupt intent. Based on information that is already publicly known, there are likely sufficient facts to make a case for obstruction.

We already know about collusion — the June 9 meeting at Trump Tower with Russian associates. Moreover, Paul Manafort may, according to  prosecutors, have been the vital link between the campaign and Kremlin. No one and no document has exonerated Trump of collusion.

The dossier has not been discredited. Some portion of it, according to Comey and others, was corroborated.

If Trump fires Mueller and/or Rosenstein, there very likely will be mass protests, extreme pressure on the House to impeach and a batch of resignations at the Justice Department. Trump’s presidency would effectively be over. (By the way, because Sessions was so worried about Trump firing Rosenstein that he had to suggest he’d quit in protest,

Republican lawmakers are flat wrong when they say there’s no chance Trump will fire Mueller or Rosenstein.)

Trump may get subpoenaed in any number of civil cases (e.g., Summer Zervos’s defamation case, Stormy Daniels’s defamation case).

The last point is no small matter. Even the Democratic National Committee’s lawsuit against Russia’s intelligence outfit (GRU), WikiLeaks, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., Roger Stone, the Trump campaign and others for conspiracy can force Trump and members of his inner circle to turn over documents and sit for depositions where they will have to testify under oath.

“This lawsuit is well-grounded jurisdictionally and legally, dodges the difficulties that might’ve been triggered by naming Trump personally, and puts a high-powered piece on the 4-dimensional chessboard that can cause Trump’s circle endless trouble (through discovery and otherwise) after criminal proceedings have been completed and regardless of what happens on the impeachment front,” says constitutional scholar and Supreme Court advocate Laurence H. Tribe (a real lawyer).  It can also “provide a potent platform for educating the public about the ugly details of how this presidency arose from a swamp far dirtier than the one Trump promised to drain.”

Trump should get lawyers brave and persistent enough to tell him the truth. Maybe they have and he refuses to believe them or believes only what he wants. Either way, he cannot escape legal troubles by wishing them away — no matter how many times Sean Hannity tells him that he’s in no legal peril.

#Resist

[Lois]

A big blue wave is coming.  Vote blue and tell The Donald: Better Dead Than Red!

(LOL!)

[Jed_]

So been on a dating site for a week now, and noticed something interesting regarding politics of the female profiles I have viewed which number in the hundreds by now.  Only 3 women so far actually make a political statement, and I’m paraphrasing here as best as I can remember:

a) I’m a Trump supporter and if you’re not, don’t contact me.
b) If you voted for Hillary, do not contact me.
c) I voted for the current president.

There were no liberals saying if you voted for Trump, don’t contact me.  So who are the more open minded?

I’ve been throwing hearts at the women I find interesting, thrown lots of hearts.  I actually threw a heart at c).  She was rather belligerent about enjoying being spanked, obviously realizing the shock value of it and not giving a shit.  As a Trump supporter, she also obviously needs severely spanked.

[Athos_131]

There is no way I would date someone who supports a racist, misogynistic, homophobic, ablist, grifting, lying, traitor. 

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Did Donald Trump Jr. Admit to Violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?

#Resist