One of the President's Humanoid Relationships

Inauguration Day. Photo by Joe Gromelski/Stars and Stripes.

Money quote from the Politico article on the sad breakup of Donald Trump and his friend and mentor Tom Barrack:

The key issue driving the two men apart: Barrack’s role as chairman of the president’s 2017 inauguration fund, which is under investigation by prosecutors.

Trump was “really upset” to read reports about Barrack’s role in allegedly making it easy for some foreigners and others to try to spend money to get access to Trump and his inner circle and whether some of the inauguration money was misspent, according to a senior administration official.

“The president was really surprised to read all about the inauguration and who was trying to buy access and how, because the president doesn’t get any of that money,” said the official.

Didn't bother him that Barrack was selling access to the president any more than it bothered him that Michael Cohen was (at least until after Cohen "flipped" four months after the story came out), or Corey Lewandowski, or his sons, or Zhang Yujing. Bothered him that he wasn't getting his cut.

Though then again maybe it's just Barrack's quick decision last March (in contrast to Caputo and Corsi, Parscale and I don't know who all) to supply the House Judiciary Committee with all the

documentation as it pertains to numerous issues involving the president, including foreign governments “discussing, offering, or providing, or being solicited to discuss, offer, or provide, any present or emolument of any kind,” to Trump’s inaugural committee.

The inaugural committee has been reportedly under investigation by Manhattan prosecutors about how the fund raised and spent a record $100 million.

Maybe that senior administration official thinks it's a good time to start spreading the story that Trump didn't know anything about it, buried inside the interesting tale of one of Trump's humanoid relationships ("the two men are so close, for instance, that Barrack comforted Trump during the funeral of his father, Fred") because the documents, when they come out, are going to tell a different story (the recent story on Barrack lobbying the Trump White House to share nuclear technology while trying to buy a piece of Westinghouse, the failing company that would be rescued by the deal comes from a different document dump, with the House Oversight Committee). Senior administration officials sometimes have agendas like that.