It's Gangland

 

From Kash Patel, The Plot Against the King.

So nothing is illegal any more:

Inauguration funds are the bribe-iest funds. No reporting requirements on expenditures from inaugural funds. Trump can pocket them outright.

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— David Waldman (@kagrox.bsky.social) December 12, 2024 at 6:45 PM

Bezos following on Zuckerberg, who chose the same nice round number for his inauguration donation, but it doesn't occur to Washington Post to call that one a bribe either:

The donation, which was confirmed by Meta spokesman Andy Stone, is the latest effort by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to mend fences with the political right, which has persistently criticized him following the company’s 2021 decision to ban Trump from Meta’s social platforms. The donation arrives nearly two weeks after Zuckerberg dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November.

And today it's reported that Sam Altman of Open AI has also joined the million-dollar inauguration club, is that cool or what? And Apple's Tim Cook, Tim Apple as Trump has called him, has a dinner date coming up with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, so I suppose he'll be ponying up his million soon.

Hardly anyone is using the word "bribe", despite the fact that we basically know Trump pocketed donations from his first inauguration, in 2017, another million dollars, as it happens, in the form of grossly inflated charges paid by the Inauguration Committee to the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania for the inauguration events held there; I'd forgotten, but DC Attorney General Karl Racine brought a lawsuit against the committee and the Trump Organization over it and won a $750,000 settlement out of them. Or course there's also a fig leaf of denial: the defendants say they are settling only to avoid the cost and trouble of litigating, and do not admit any "wrongdoing, unlawful conduct, or liability".

You Never Talk to Rudy About a Pardon

Donald and Rudes at the groundbreaking of the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Columbus Circle in 1995, the year (The New York Times notes) he would declare losses of $915.7 million in his federal tax return. Photo by Francis Specker/New York Post Archives, via NYP Holdings, Inc., via Getty Images.

A note on Rudolph and the claim of his rape victim Noelle Dunphy that he told her he was selling presidential pardons at two million dollars a pop and then splitting the proceeds with the president: I remembered some talk of pardon lobbying among the scandals of Trump's last month in office—of people taking money to intercede with Trump for a pardon, with no guarantees—in the informal process, run by Jared Kushner, of doling them out to Trump allies like Manafort and Stone, somehow including Kushner's father, and was Giuliani involved in that?

In fact I did a pretty good post myself about it at the time, which repays rereading (especially the bit about Trump's former personal attorney John Dowd, who also seems to have been in charge of offering pardons to criminals from Mike Flynn to Lev Parnas in exchange for silence on the subject of their activities on Trump's behalf), and sure enough, there was Giuliani in the mix, marketing a pardon to John Kiriakou, the CIA officer who'd been busted for outing the name of a fellow officer involved in the torture of an Al-Qa'eda fighter captured in Pakistan in 2002, for which he served 30 months in 2013-15. What's especially interesting right now is Giuliani's price tag:

Supreme Irony

 

NO WISDOM, NO COURAGE! IT'S UNBELIEVABLE HOW BAD SUPREME COURT JUSTICES ARE NOWADAYS! WHERE DO THEY EVEN FIND THESE PEOPLE?https://t.co/MXGQHgGCfL

— Yas Just a Lightweight (@Yastreblyansky) December 12, 2020

One more time: the conservatives on the Supreme Court are not our friends, but that doesn't mean they won't rule the right way when it serves their purposes. They have a good idea how to do it, for one thing: nominations master and Federalist Society Dark Lord Leonard Leo doesn't want to put people without a certain level of formal competence in these jobs, and he was never going to give us Rudy Giuliani or Judge Jeannine or Scott Baio, as might have happened if Trump himself were allowed to be in charge, or for that matter the kinds of clueless tyros Leo himself sometimes nominates as circuit judges.

And they were never going to overturn this election, because (1) there was nothing wrong with the election, and Trump's lawyers could give them no material to work with (Bush v. Gore was pretty terrible, but compared to this it was ready-mix concrete); (2) they don't owe Trump anything, as he seems to think they do, because it was Leonard Leo and Mitch McConnell that gave them the jobs, and any Republican president, as Steve was saying, would have complied; and (3) they don't have any particular reason to want him to keep being president, as there's not much he can do beyond embarrassing them with his continual hints that he bribed them—he hasn't done anything they want but nominate Federalist Society judges, to the point where they're down to about 23 vacancies in the federal judiciary out of a total of maybe 890 judgeships, so that while it may not be quite true that Trump has totally remade the judiciary, there isn't much more he'd be able to do in another four years. And they have little to fear from a Biden presidency, hobbled as he is likely to be by a difficult Congress (even if the miracle in Georgia happens). He certainly won't be pushing through a federal abortion rights statute, or taxing churches, or expanding the Court itself.

Call Me Sherlock Holmes: Never Mind

 

So no, I was pretty totally wrong. The guy whose name ends in -s buying the pardon in the case Judge Howell was dealing with was nobody we know at all:

A federal judge in Washington unsealed heavily redacted court documents on Tuesday that disclosed the existence of the investigation into possible unregistered lobbying and bribery. The people said it concerned efforts by the lawyer for Mr. Kushner, Abbe Lowell, and the fund-raiser, Elliott Broidy, who pleaded guilty in October to a charge related to a different scheme to lobby the Trump administration.

A billionaire San Francisco real estate developer, Sanford Diller, enlisted their help in securing clemency for a Berkeley psychologist, Hugh L. Baras, who had received a 30-month prison sentence on a conviction of tax evasion and improperly claiming Social Security benefits, according to the filing and the people familiar with the case. Under the suspected scheme, Mr. Diller would make “a substantial political contribution” to an unspecified recipient in exchange for the pardon. He died in February 2018, and there is no evidence that the effort continued after his death.

No Giuliani, no Dowd. I'll admit I'm a little disappointed. Glad to see Abbe Lowell in trouble, of course, and not sorry to see it piling on that turd Broidy, but a little disappointed over my brilliant reconstruction, which turns out not to be actually applicable to the case.

Still, the joy is in the hunt. Also everything I said about the Lev Parnas case could still be true! Except for, you know, it being this case. And all the other cases it could be, because, you know, Trump could be selling pardons all the time.

Call Me Sherlock Holmes. II

Photo via The Mary Sue.

Carrying on a bit from last night:

https://t.co/fHtFgWCU74

— Yas Just a Lightweight (@Yastreblyansky) December 2, 2020

I know I'm an idiot but he actually was in BOP custody for a couple of weeks after his arrest in October 2019. He later said Dowd visited him there and "told him to cooperate and sacrifice himself for the president".

— Yas Just a Lightweight (@Yastreblyansky) December 2, 2020

For the Record: Call Me Sherlock Holmes

Photo by Miami Herald.

If you don't know about the remarkable case emerging under so much redaction you can't be sure at all what it is, it starts out like this:

 

Unregistered lobbyists allegedly tried to coax senior White House officials while pushing a “Bribery-for-pardon” scheme involving a “substantial political contribution in exchange for a presidential pardon or reprieve of sentence,” a federal judge revealed in a heavily redacted order released on Tuesday.

The bombshell investigation became public during a fight over attorney-client privilege that secretly has been underway in federal court in Washington, D.C. since at least Aug. 25 this year, when prosecutors sought permission a judge’s permission to override attorney-client privileged communications because of the crime-fraud exception.

“In the course of the ongoing review by the government’s filter team of the ‘over fifty digital media devices, including iPhones, iPads, laptops, thumb drives, and computer and external hard drives, totaling several terabytes of data)’ seized […] email communications have been identified ‘indicat[ing] additional criminal activity,'” Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who leads the federal jurisdiction inside the nation’s capital, summarized in a 15-page opinion and order detailing a “secret lobbying scheme” where undisclosed individuals allegedly acted as undisclosed lobbyists to senior White House officials. (Adam Klasfeld/Law & Crime)

And, for what it's worth, Emptywheel thinks Trump got paid for it already, based on I'm not exactly sure what, but it has to do with the fact that he had a three-hour meeting with attorney general Barr today and the presumption that they couldn't have spent all that time with Barr explaining to Trump why there wasn't any election fraud (Trump wasn't convinced):

Shoe Dropping

Chuck C. Johnson making what looks like a white nationalist hand sign and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, Ecuadorian Embassy, London, August 2017, via DCCC.

Don't know if you'll remember the story from about 80 years ago, wait no I mean in February, about how then-congressman Dana Rohrabacher (representing Orange County CA for the United Russia Republican party) had traveled to London to meet in the Ecuadorian embassy with Mr. Assange with a proposal:

Assange’s lawyers alleged that during a visit to London in August 2017, congressman Dana Rohrabacher told the WikiLeaks founder that “on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr Assange … said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC [Democratic National Committee] leaks.”...

Rohrabacher denied it, of course, but in a curious way:

It's the Bribery, Stupid

In 2018, according to Dan Alexander at Vanity Fair, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), 70% owned by the Chinese government, or, as the Republicans have taken to (inaccurately) calling it, THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA, which had been renting some 20,000 square feet on and around the 20th floor of Trump Tower for its US headquarters for some years, certainly well before Trump got into politics, took out a lease on 99,000 square feet a few blocks away in Paramount Plaza, on Broadway at 51st Street, leaving the market to assume they'd be moving out of Trump Tower, but they didn't:

“They are keeping a couple of floors,” Eric Trump conceded onstage at a business conference weeks before the original lease was scheduled to expire [in 2019]. According to the Trump Organization’s own marking materials, the floors inside Trump Tower contain roughly 15,000 square feet. So by keeping “a couple of floors,” the Chinese bank was apparently staying in most—if not all—of its previously occupied 20,000 square feet. These days, it’s unclear exactly how much the China-owned bank is paying the president. If the rent is the same as it was before, then Trump will collect $7.8 million from the bank by the end of his first term in office. 

Alexander calculates that this represents about $1.2 million in profits for the Trump Organization for the first two years (2017-18), when Trump donated $343,000 to the Treasury as his "total profits from foreign governments" for those two years, with no specifications as to where the number came from. Since his profits from one single foreign-government tenant were nearly three times that, you can get a feeling for how dishonest this plan always was.

Domestic Emoluments

GORGEOUS 3 BD 2 FULL BTH 2 HALF BTH COUNTRY FARM HOUSE W/HEATED AND COOLED 700 SQ FT OFFICE/STUDIO OVER 3 CAR GARAGE, IN-GRD HEATED POOL, 5 STALL BARN ON OVER 7 ACRES IN THE HEART OF BEDMINSTER. $6.,000.month as opposed to almost three times that if Secret Service is writing the check. Via Zillow. 

Something I'm not hearing, as in this otherwise perfectly good NBC story—

On Wednesday night, when President Donald Trump addressed supporters from behind a Trump Hotels lectern in a room at his Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C., one of his company's most faithful customers accompanied him.

The U.S. Secret Service.

The government agency charged with protecting the president has paid his businesses at least $471,000 to fulfill its congressional mandate, according to documents The Washington Post recently obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. That's money from U.S. taxpayers flowing to the Trump Organization, with a venerable 155-year-old law enforcement organization being used like one of Michael Cohen's Delaware shell companies and serving as a conduit for presidential profit. And that $471,000 figure? It's only through April 2018.

—is that it's another violation of the Constitution, just as serious as taking money from the Saudi Arabian government, when he gets money from our own government; a violation of Article II, section 1, clause 7, the Domestic Emoluments Clause,

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