And Then There Were Four

 

I don't know why no. 4 pleases me so much, or actually I do, I just want to savor it more. It was such an exciting day starting with the story of an indictment with Trump's name appearing on the Atlanta docket and then getting withdrawn again. Everybody understood that today was going to be the earliest possible date for an indictment, and then the last witnesses were told they weren't going to be needed, and in the early evening NBC found that grand jury was in the process of voting, and then if you had TV on you could be watching Judge McBurney, a man of great panache, shuffling papers and affixing his signature to some of them, and you realized if you stayed up late enough you'd see the thing. It wasn't even particularly late when it happened.

It's the best indictment so far because of the RICO element (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act), which is so much the best way to think of Trump's organization, as a racket, or organization devoted to doing any number of things, some of them not necessarily criminal, in pursuit of some particular shared criminal goal. Each defendant is charged with racketing (count 1 in the Trump indictment) and a minimum of two predicate offenses within the organization's general program (counts 2 through 41), though many, of course, are charged with more than two (Trump's got thirteen). (I've heard TV reporters suggest that "Willis only has to prove two crimes" for the entire trial, which is not true at all.)

Why can't there be a federal RICO indictment? Most of the reporters telling you about the difference between federal and Georgia law evidently don't know, and try to get away with saying vaguely that the Georgia statute is "broader", but that's not it. One important answer, in an explainer from Al Jazeera, isn't from the statutes themselves but court interpretations: the Supreme Court had held that federal racketeering cases have to deal with conduct over an "extended" period of time (establishing the existence of the association as a real gang, like a Mafia family, with a history of up to ten years), not just a few weeks or months, and Georgia's supreme court has found that doesn't apply to the state law. The attempt to overturn the Georgia election, taking place almost entirely between November 2020 and January 2021, doesn't qualify in federal court.

My dream RICO indictment for Trump World would start with crimes or preparations for crimes in 2016, with the interactions of the various actors (Flynn, Papadopoulos, Caputo, Stone, Donald Junior, Manafort) with their various Russian or Russia-related interlocutors, and the history of Trump's obstruction efforts to hide this stuff; and at the same time Trump's and Stone's preparations for a Stop the Steal movement after their expected loss in the 2016 election. 

From there it would move on to the Ukraine matter starting with the plans proposed by Manafort, and later Sater and Cohen, and Giuliani's activities, up through the extortion effort on Ukraine for which Trump was impeached, which is where the criming begins to focus clearly on the 2020 election and the expected Biden candidacy. It's about how a real estate organization with longstanding political connections (Stone, Manafort, and Giuliani) and a long history of very ordinary real estate crime (bank fraud and tax fraud) takes a turn toward politics that the boss has long contemplated out of sheer vanity, and without any very clear aims beyond his plans for flagship hotels in Moscow and D.C., and maybe the idea of using Congress to make his tax position easier, while his confederates had ambitions of their own, which adds up to a long-term effort on the part of the gang to take over the US government.

And did take over the Republican Party, most of which was generally pretty ready for it, though I'm constantly shocked at the self-humiliation of figures like Kevin McCarthy and Ronna McDaniel and the amount of power they've been willing to relinquish, especially over the party finances.

That indictment is certainly not what we're ever going to get for Trump, I'm sorry to say, in any court, though maybe it will make its way into historiography, and the snapshot provided by Fani Willis may well have to suffice. But it's cheering to see the picture taking shape.

The Man in the Net

I think what I'm going to be using the Substack for might be less bloggy, more formally organized approaches to things I've touched on here, as in this piece, on the current legal situation of the Former Guy. The literary work is literary, but supposed to be clarifying the material, not making it fancier. The work involved in tightening it up somehow generates new stuff, whether it's new metaphors or new bibliographical references. Still free!

The Crime That Disappeared

One of the things that's always bothered me about the Ukraine-shaped Gestalt of the House's ongoing impeachment strategy may just have begun emerging, according to reporting from CNN (via TPM):

Ukrainian officials are discussing ways to improve their country's standing with President Donald Trump amid the continuing fallout from the impeachment inquiry, two sources told CNN.

Those sources, who recently met with Ukrainian officials, said that the Ukrainian government could still announce new investigations which could be seen as politically beneficial to the US President. However, it is unclear what exactly those potential investigations would cover or when they would be announced. One source told CNN that Ukrainian officials recognized that any potential investigations would need to look into current issues and not just those of the past.

It's that, at least over the short term, the Ukrainian government has an interest—I almost want to say a "legitimate interest"—in acting as if all this stuff is perfectly normal. Because, as I was saying, ever since the inauguration (and the awful Vogel and Stern story accusing the Poroshenko government of trying to "sabotage" the Trump campaign), the central goal of Ukraine's US policy has of necessity been don't make Donald mad.

As we saw at the UN meeting between presidents Trump and Zelenskyy after the shit hit the fan:

Racket

Drawing by Alfredo Martirena.

At the risk of being boring, because I spent a bunch of time on it, I'd like to work back through the timeline of Ukraine Quid Pro Quo no. 1, about which I think we know quite a bit more than we did a few weeks ago. In fact the story as we first imagined it, as a kind of prequel to Quid Pro Quo no. 2, in which Trump gives Ukraine the missiles in return for Ukraine dropping their cooperation with the Mueller investigation, falls apart entirely, but there are some jewels we can pick out of the rubble.

This comes in the first place from the testimony of Catherine Croft, the NSC veteran who served as Kurt Volker's deputy in the special envoy to Ukraine department, to the House Intelligence Committee. Her main function was to talk about the crazy vendetta against Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch (led by lobbyist Bob "I'm Not a Lobbyist" Livingston, formerly the seniormost congressman who was an implacable supporter of the Clinton impeachment and almost became Speaker before his own fervent adulterousness was revealed by Larry Flynt, ha ha ha, and who now may be facing criminal charges for his pains), but Democratic counsel Dan Goldman asked her about the military aid, with particular attention to the long months in 2017 when Trump was unwilling to yield to the pressure from McMaster, Mattis, and Tillerson to let Ukraine have the $47 million worth of military aid, including 210 Javelin antitank missiles and 37 launchers as well as nonlethal communications equipment, armored vehicles, and radar that are actually much more important than the missiles to the Ukrainian soldiers in their day-to-day tasks.

Not for the boring reasons the Obama administration had chosen—that giving them the weapons might lead Russia to escalate the conflict in Russia—but at least officially because he just doesn't like foreign aid: