Where's the Victim?

 

You probably won't believe this but this guy heads one of America's 2 major political parties. pic.twitter.com/FtdRnkVrhm

— Ron Shillman (@shillman1) December 12, 2023

I'm feeling a nagging dissatisfaction with the conduct of the New York lawsuit against Trump, his older sons, and the family business over the flagrant fraudulence of their financial "disclosures", which report wildly exaggerated values for their assets as a way of getting banks and insurance companies to get them better rates than they could otherwise get.

It's not anything wrong with the case, or any likelihood that New York will lose the case, I'm feeling very cheerful about that, but the way Trump and his attorneys seem to be playing the publicity war: 

In defiant and rambling testimony on [November 7], Trump acknowledged that his asset valuations were sometimes inaccurate but said they were not relevant to banks and insurers.

Trump's lawyer Christopher Kise built on that argument on Thursday, saying banks that did business with the Trump Organization profited from the loans.

"There's no victim. There's no complainant. There's no injury. All of that is established now,” Kise said. (Reuters)

And all the New York lawyers can say is response is that they don't have to prove there was a victim. Or the statutes were the victims ("I would just basically point out," Judge Engoron said, "that the mere fact that the lenders were happy doesn't mean that the statute wasn't violated. It doesn't mean other statutes weren't violated.") "Help, I'm being violated!" cried § 175.10. Which is no doubt true from the legal standpoint, but it's just an awful look. No harm, no foul, right? If the banks are happy with it, where's the harm?

Can't we please come up with a better argument than that?

Narratology: Jared the Spy

Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters via The Times (UK).

I realize there's an awful lot to think about at the moment, but this week-old piece by the estimable Vicky Ward (author of the 2019 Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump), really shouldn't be allowed to wash away in the flood.

It offers a very plausible account, based on Ward's own sources, of exactly what the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund was paying for with their $2 billion investment in Jared Kushner's new investment firm, in the context of a power struggle that had been going on in the kingdom since early 2015, when King Salman, who had been king for just three months, appointed his nephew Mohammed bin Nayef (MbN) as crown prince, and his own son, Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) as deputy crown prince; namely, alleging that Kushner conspired with MbS to get him named crown prince and MbN thrown in prison in 2017, including by passing him classified material to which he had access thanks to the security clearance Trump insisted on giving him.

Which would make him guilty of more than just a Foreign Agents Registration Act violation, if true (Kushner has denied passing classified material to anybody)—like espionage, or the "espionage lite" of Section 951, in which

Note on Yemen: Joe Did What?

Old City of Sanaa, 2019, screenshot by France 24.

I'm enjoying the same sense of relief as everybody else at waking up not asking myself what Trump has done today, but at the same time excitement, anticipating what the new guy may have come up with, and lovely surprises every damn day, like the announcement on Thursday that the US is withdrawing support from the Saudi war of attrition on the civilians of Yemen, not only canceling the $478-million sale of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia that the State Department approved last December over Congressional objections, which was expected, but also halting the US direct assistance to the Saudis with targeting data and logistical support, which goes back to 2015 and the Obama administration (I referred to it in October 2016 as "the worst single failure of Obama foreign policy"). 

Not that this is going to end the war! But it puts the US in a far better position to help with this terrible catastrophe (still the world's worst humanitarian disaster after six years) it we detach ourselves from the party that has the airplanes:

For the Record: Now With More Pompeo

Photo by Money Sharma/AFP/Getty Images via Intercept (I think originally used in The New Yorker).

Trump has only two ideas about China, both of which are not actually about China but about his election campaign—wanting to get his name on a "deal" to the content of which he is basically indifferent, which will enhance his view of himself as a master negotiator, and wanting to blame China for all the problems of the universe, which the rally crowds adore—and doesn't understand that they contradict each other and that the more abuse he heaps on the country the more difficult it will be for the dictator Xi Jinping to have another playdate with him. But the way he's working the coronavirus into the latter goal, pushing his people to fabricate the case that Chinese scientists created the virus in a Wuhan laboratory, is getting dangerously reminiscent of the kind of fabrication used to set up the Iraq War in 2002-03, and there's something scary about the role Secretary of State Pompeo is playing in the business:

Seems like privatizing intelligence is the way to make sure you get the intelligence the boss wants. https://t.co/86W8YQRKFN

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) May 18, 2020

So somebody asked a contractor called "MACE" to come up with it-- pic.twitter.com/n0xWg7vqj1

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) May 18, 2020

For the Record: In the Bank

Stock photo via Rosenblum Law New Jersey.

South Korea pays close to a billion dollars a year to US in "host-nation financial contributions" and US is asking them to quintuple that. https://t.co/kWq2AuHpSE Pentagon tries to carry out Trump's wishes, but Trump doesn't know, as these obviously out-of-his-ass numbers show.

— Perfect Particularity (@Yastreblyansky) January 11, 2020

The mercenary subject only comes up because that's how Trump thinks of it--he lacks any concept of national interest or international cooperation, so the only thing he can imagine is that foreign deployments should make income. Either we "take the oil" or they write a check.

— Perfect Particularity (@Yastreblyansky) January 11, 2020

But anyway the US deployment to Saudi Arabia really does seem mercenary-like to me, based on secret negotiations between Kushner and MbS, and something clearly not in national interest (backing KSA's massacre of Yemenis--Congress voted in April to end US support but Trump vetoed)

— Perfect Particularity (@Yastreblyansky) January 11, 2020

While he focuses on his TV performance as president and whatever crimes are hidden in his financial records, the government has to work around his ignorance, hoping he doesn't hear something about them on Fox that he doesn't like and assault them with a Twitter howler. It's bad.

— In the Bank (@Yastreblyansky) January 11, 2020

For the Record: Planked Salman

Once you've done a sword dance with a guy, you just can't stay mad. Screenshot from video by AP/Reuters via The Guardian.

Trumpy getting applause for tough talk aimed at the Saudi monarchy:

What Salman really said: Thanks for vetoing that nasty bill to cut off helping out with my Yemen war, Donald! You've been such a great little friend! Want to come over and touch my orb again? https://t.co/PdMlHXybTu

— The Young and the Vibrant (@Yastreblyansky) April 29, 2019

But impunity for the murderous Crown Prince (Salman, the father, is 83 and has been developing Alzheimer's dementia for a few years now and doesn't in fact rule the kingdom) who masterminded the killing of Jamal Kashoggi, and this (via news.com.au):

Literary Corner: Born Under a Trump Sign

Donald's Blues

By Donald J. Trump

I was treated really badly during the election.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that I’m treated even worse.
I’m treated bad.
And I’m working hard.

This job is from an economic —
you know, I get a kick out of these people saying
“Oh, a rich Arab stayed at his hotel,”
you know, I’ll bet you,
between opportunity cost and actual cost, you know
but I lost massive amounts of money doing this job.

I was treated really badly during the election.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that I’m treated even worse.
I’m treated bad.
And I’m working hard.

This is not the money.
This is, this is one of the great losers of all time.
You know fortunately I don’t need money.
This is one of the great losers of all time.

But they’ll say that somebody from some country stayed at a hotel.
And I’ll say “Yeah.” But I lose, I mean, the numbers are incredible.

I was treated really badly during the election.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that I’m treated even worse.
I’m treated bad.
And I’m working hard.

If it wasn't for Arabs, wouldn't have no guests at all. Text from A.G. Sulzberger's interview of the president of the United States.

Trust me, Clinton wouldn't have done this

MBS couldn't stop himself from cracking up during his March visit as Trump bragged on the "deal" he'd made with the cheesy visual aids his staff prepares for him. "Look! Airplanes!" Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP. Don't believe Saudi Arabia is America's generous pal. And his claim that MBS is giving the United States $110 billion worth of business is bullshit, as you probably know by now. As Yglesias writes today, Saudis are far more dependent on the US than the other way around; this special relationship has been out of date for many years.

A couple of years ago, during the presidential campaign, America was all exercised about the fact that the Saudi Arabian government seemed to have made donations, some of them possibly while Hillary Clinton was serving as secretary of state, totaling over $10 million, conceivably as much as $25 million, to the charitable organization run by Clinton's husband and daughter, where the money would be used for things like buying AIDS drugs for patients in impoverished countries, microcredit for poor business owners, and programs to empower women and girls, which never seemed to get a mention in the news stories, along with the fact that Norway had put in approximately the same amount, and other countries donating smaller but still big sums included not just the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and Qatar and Morocco and Algeria but also Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, UK, and Germany.

They did sometimes mention that Clinton's opponent, Donald Trump, was also vaguely rumored to have some funky business relationships with some other countries, as in this 20 August 2016 story by Amy Chozick (remember her?) and Steve Eder:

Semantics: Update

Damage done to the HSV Swift, leased by United Arab Emirates, in a missile attack that the Houthi rebels admitted to the week before. Via USNI News.

There was another much more important Yemen event last week that the Times hardly seems to have covered, let alone NPR, that should have figured into the way I wrote the previous post: after the horrifying attack of October 8 when the Saudis bombed a Yemeni funeral party, killing 140 people and wounding several hundreds more, the US announced that it was going to do a big review of the policy of giving assistance to KSA.

I was aware of this for about five minutes—

US will review its policy on Saudi Arabia war against Yemeni people https://t.co/H8nF1GHQES via @sharethis late, but better than never

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 9, 2016

—but forgot it as the Trump continues to occupy larger and larger swaths of our overtaxed brains.

Juan Cole seems to have bypassed it too, but it turns out that the review is ongoing, and serious, at least according to anonymous officials quoted in Missy Ryan's story in the Washington Post:

West of Eden, and hopefully on the way north

Aylan Kurdi alive, apparently threatening the cultural integrity of Mr. Orbán's continent, though I don't quite see that. Photo via The Independent.

I've heard of governments hating foreign refugees so much they'd seal the border with a razor-wire fence, or a Great Wall as the case may be, so they can't get in, but I've never heard of one like the Hungarian Fidesz regime that won't let them out either.

Why are there 500 Syrians stuck on a train in the town of Bicske, and thousands more haunting the central station in Budapest? When crypto-fascist* prime minister Viktor Orbán says,

“Those arriving have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims,” he said. “This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity.

“Is it not worrying in itself that European Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian? There is no alternative, and we have no option but to defend our borders.”

Not because the migrants want to be the guests of such a narrow-minded and unwelcoming government. They're just passing through on their way to Germany, which has agreed to take on 800,000 refugees. Hungary is holding them under the theory that they are legally required to herd them into camps.

Note on Yemen

Image by Noa Angel, via Digital Journal.

Emptywheel noted yesterday:

Eid Mubarak. Today Ramadan ends, a big celebration in the Muslim community.

Saudi Arabia chose to celebrate by doing what they’ve been doing for over a hundred days: bombing Yemen....

That’s particularly notable given that according to the formal readouts, every conversation the President has had with Gulf allies about the Iran deal has also included some discussion of Yemen... 

Given the way the Obama Administration has tied some solution to Yemen with the Iran deal, I think it fair to ask whether there has been some kind of understanding that even as Obama pursues this deal, the US will continue to facilitate Saudi Arabia’s efforts to extend its hegemony at the expense of Shias (in Yemen, but also in Syria).

I think it's certainly fair to ask what the administration is offering KSA (and Israel) in the effort to persuade them to shut up about the agreement having "worse consequences than the failed agreement with North Korea" according to Prince Bandar, and so on, if you also note that it certainly hasn't worked until now.

But if she thinks Obama is giving KSA Yemen like a new pony ("C'mon, Dad, Iran got one, am I adopted or something?"), then she's certainly misreading the situation.

Note on Yemen

Photo by NAIYF RAHMA/REUTERS via Al Jazeera.

That was weird yesterday. NPR was telling me about how Saudi Arabia had finished its operations in Yemen on the radio, while the Times was claiming online that they'd already started bombing again. Both, as it eventually turned out, were true: KSA continues to insist it has won: