You might have heard that a case against Gov. Eric Greitens was dismissed yesterday. This was the felony invasion of privacy charge that centered on a photograph Greitens allegedly took of his hairdresser-mistress without her consent. As I understand it, the prosecutors decided they didn’t have the evidence they wanted — in particular, the photograph — and asked for the case to be dropped while jury selection wasn’t yet finished, which means that double jeopardy hadn’t attached. They can reopen the case if they get more evidence.

(One of Greitens’s lawyers, Scott Rosenblum, has a reputation for being able to get anybody out of anything. He recently defended a guy indicted for murdering his neighbor. The neighbor was on his own property and unarmed, and forensic evidence showed he was on his knees when the defendant shot him in cold blood. There was a videotape of the shooting and a credible eyewitness. The jury acquited the defendant. I’m not kidding.)

Anyway, local pundits had been saying all along that the invasion of privacy case probably wouldn’t stand up, for a whole lot of reasons. But Greitens still faces a more credible charge of misusing a mailing list in his 2016 campaign for governor. That one involves  misappropriation of the mailing list and tampering with computer data. Plus, the legislature is still thinking of impeaching him. They might yet do it. Greitens is, apparently, a five-alarm asshole, and even his fellow Republicans dislike him.

What I want to talk about, though, is the way Greitens and the state legislature are still working together to screw unions. Last year the legislature passed, and Greitens signed, a so-called “right to work” law that allows employees at union work sites to opt out of paying union dues. We all know how that weakens unions; I don’t need to explain it here.

Missouri might be a right-wing state, but it’s still pro-union. A petition drive got more than 300,000 signatures, putting a reforendum to repeal the law on the November ballot.

Greitens and his political cronies formed a committee called Freedom to Work that tried to get enough signatures to put a “right to work” referendum on the same ballot. In spite of spending more than $750,000, they failed to get enough signatures. Meanwhile, a number of other measures qualifed to be on the ballot without anybody having to spend that kind of money.

The Kansas City Star editorial board on May 13 explained the next move:

Last week, lawmakers resorted to Plan B: If actual voters won’t sign on to a right-to-work measure, then legislators can ram through their own proposal. There was no time to waste. The legislative session ends at 6 p. m. Friday.

In the span of a few hours Wednesday evening, two Missouri House committees gave their approval to put a right-to-work law in the state’s constitution. The bill received initial approval Friday.

I believe amending the state constitution has to be approved by a statewide vote.

… But lawmakers weren’t done yet. Also on Friday, a Senate bill to shift the union-backed referendum from November to the August ballot received approval.

The August ballot is the primary election. Obviously, the legislators are assuming fewer people will turn out, giving the popular pro-union measure less of a chance to pass.  But it gets better.

It should be noted that Greitens’ nonprofit, A New Missouri Inc., was a driving force behind the right-to-work push and a big source of the money that went to Freedom to Work.

So the governor’s backers gave to the nonprofit, then saw the money transferred to Greitens’ allies in the form of payments for work on the unsuccessful right-to-work amendment.

Got that? Lots of money changed hands among friends of the governor, but they didn’t manage to gather the needed signatures.

Here is where the money trail goes dark. A New Missouri does not have to report where its funds come from, yet it donated $1.2 million in January to Freedom to Work. On Wednesday, A New Missouri gave another $500,000.

And some of the players receiving payments on the right-to-work campaign are also the same people that Greitens surely wants to keep in his corner as he goes to trial this week on a felony invasion of privacy charge and then faces down the possibility of impeachment.

The whole episode highlights how freely dark money flows across Missouri’s political landscape and how many built-in advantages lawmakers and elected officials have.

So, yes, Greitens is dirty as all get-out. And here’s the punch line, which I’m sorry is behind a subscription wall. In 2015 Joe Klein published a book titled Charlie Mike: A True Story of Heroes Who Brought Their Mission Home. From an Amazon blurb: This true story of two decorated combat veterans who find a new way to save their comrades and heal their country is “a great look at two of the best veteran organizations going and the incredible humans who make the effort work” (Jon Stewart).

Yeah, one of the heroes is Eric Greitens. Zachary Roth writes for Talking Points Memo,

In 2015, the Time magazine writer Joe Klein published his latest book, “Charlie Mike.” Named for the military slang meaning “Continue Mission,” it follows the efforts of a group of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans as they build a charity designed to help their fellow vets keep serving their country as volunteers.

The book’s central character is the charity’s founder, a former Navy SEAL named Eric Greitens, who Klein portrays as a kind of paragon of warrior-scholar virtue: physically brave, determined, and rugged, but also humble, loyal, morally upright, intellectually curious, and rigorously self-sacrificing — constantly pushing himself to do more in his quest to make the world better.  

Klein depicted Greitens as unfailingly noble, selfless, clean, loyal, brave, reverent, etc. I actually wasn’t aware of this book until now, but it must have helped Greitens get elected governor. All I saw of him were his campaign ads of shooting up corn fields with various military weapons. Joe Klein should stop writing books.

Today will be the opening ceremony of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. According to the most recent reports, 37 Palestinians have been killed and about a thousand more injured in demonstrations.

Haaretz is reporting that the minister Trump chose to speak at the opening today has said that Jews go to hell. That’s in the headline, which I suspect every Israeli has read today. And even better, Robert Jeffries has a bunch of anti-Islamic crap on his public website that I’m sure everyone in the Middle East is reading today. Plus,

Jeffress once said that “the dark dirty secret of Islam” is that “it is a religion that promotes pedophilia,” and that Islam is “a heresy from the pit of hell.”

Here is Jeffress’s take on the cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

Why is there so much conflict between Muslims and Jews today? Muslims cannot accept the fact that the eternal covenant God made to Abraham in Genesis 12 went through Isaac and not through Ishmael. Thus, the land that God promised Abraham and his descendants rightfully belongs to the descendants of Isaac (Jews), not to the descendants of Ishmael (Arabs).

Muslims didn’t like the Scripture, so they rewrote it. They came up with a fanciful story that Abraham and Hagar took Ishmael and fled to Mecca. There, Ishmael became the forerunner of Muhammad and all Muslims. They took the story of God’s blessing Abraham and Isaac, and they said, “No, it was really Abraham and Ishmael.” They took the story of Genesis 22, when Abraham took Isaac to Mount Moriah to offer him as a sacrifice, and said, “No, it was Ishmael who was offered on Mount Moriah.” They completely fabricate a story to make their point.

I’m sure Muslims are loving that. And now everyone in the Middle East knows that this creep is one of Trump’s favorite advisers. Just days after ending the Iran nuclear deal. And, of course, an hour after the Iran deal ended, Israel just coincidentally attacked Syria.

My question is, would it have been possible for Trump to screw up in the Middle East even more? What — short of nuking Jordan — would it take for Trump to screw up even worse?

ABC News reports,

Special counselRobert Mueller’s team has questioned several witnesses about millions of dollars in donations to President Donald Trump’s inauguration committee last year, including questions about donors with connections to Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, sources with direct knowledge told ABC News.

Those interviewed included longtime Trump friend and confidant Thomas Barrack, who oversaw the fundraising effort, as well as individuals familiar with the massive inaugural fund, according to sources with direct knowledge. …

… The billionaire runs a fund with hundreds of millions in real estate and private equity holdings in the Middle East. Barrack oversaw the largest inaugural fundraising effort in U.S. history, bringing in $107 million — more than double what President Barack Obama raised for his first swearing-in festivities.

According to a source who has sat with the Mueller team for interviews in recent weeks, the special counsel is examining donors who have either business or personal connections in Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Several donors with those ties contributed large sums to the non-profit fundraising entity — gifts that topped out at $1 million dollars, according to public records.

According to the FED, it’s illegal for foreign nationals to contribute to a presidential inauguration committee. If any of that money can be traced to foreign sources, it’s a problem.

However, there’s another problem with Trump’s inauguration fund, because it’s widely suspected a huge amount of it wasn’t really spent on the inauguration.

How big is the discrepancy between what was taken in and what was spent? I found this at Annenberg FactCheck.org:

Inauguration costs are divided up into two categories. In one category is all the fun stuff: the inaugural balls, luncheons and Springsteen appearances. That’s also the category for things like the 20 JumboTrons placed around the National Mall and the special payment to keep the Smithsonian Institution open for the day. The fun events don’t cost taxpayers a dime. Presidential inauguration committees raise money from private donors for all the fun stuff. A spokesperson for Obama’s inaugural committee told ABC News that the committee raised about $45 million to cover the costs of events in the fun category. (A full accounting will eventually be filed with the FEC, probably in April.) Adjusting for inflation, Obama’s estimated total is about $41.4 million in 2005 dollars — or slightly less than the $42.3 million Bush raised for his second inauguration.

I found a more recent source that said Obama’s committee raised $53.2 million, although I’m not sure if that was for the first or second inauguration. There are other expenses related to the inauguration that taxpayers do pay for, and if you add it all together it can come up to $170 million or so. And of course you can find old articles in right-wing media complaining that Obama’s inauguration cost $170 million and Bush’s only $42.3 million, but they are confusing apples with apples, oranges and the rest of the farm. In fact, Bush’s and Obama’s inaugurations cost about the same, figuring for inflation. But right now, we’re only talking about the “fun stuff” paid for by the inauguration fund and not taxpayers.

So Trump’s inaurugation committee raised $107 million. In tax filings released this year, the Trump inauguration committee claimed to have spent $104 million on the “fun stuff.” But how? How was Trump’s inauguration twice as expensive as anyone else’s? Especially since the best Trump could do for a headliner was … Toby Keith?

And note that the Obamas had ten official inaugural balls after the 2009 ceremony; Trump had only three. And spent twice as much money?

I’m betting Trump’s committee spent no more than $50 million, if that. Money got shuffled around on paper to hide it somewhere. For example:

The company that received the biggest payment — $26 million — was WIS Media Partners of Marina del Rey, Calif. Records show that the firm was created in December 2016, about six weeks before the inauguration, and its founder, according to a person familiar with the firm, was Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a longtime friend of Mrs. Trump’s. Otherwise there is very little information available about the company.

Another $25 million went to another even-production company in Maryland. There’s $51 million right there. The tax filings don’t tell us what these two event-production companies did with the money.

To add to the suspicion, at various times last year, the White House claimed all the money had been audited and the audit would be made publicly available by various dates that came and went. It seems to have taken someone a long time to cook the books properly.

At ProPublica, Ilya Marritz wrote in March,

In this week’s episode of “Trump, Inc.,” we dig into the inauguration. We’ve found that even experienced inaugural planners are baffled by the Trump committee’s massive fundraising and spending operation. We also noticed that two members of the inaugural committee have been convicted of financial crimes, and a third — the committee’s treasurer — was reportedly an unindicted co-conspirator in an accounting fraud.

Of course.

Greg Jenkins led former President George W. Bush’s second inaugural committee in 2005, which raised and spent $42 million (that would be $53 million in today’s dollars). Asked about how Trump’s team managed to spend so much more, Jenkins said, “It’s inexplicable to me. I literally don’t know.”

“They had a third of the staff and a quarter of the events and they raise at least twice as much as we did,” Jenkins said. “So there’s the obvious question: Where did it go? I don’t know.”

Steve Kerrigan, who led both of former President Barack Obama’s inaugural committees, agreed. “There was no need for that amount of money,” said Kerrigan. “We literally did two inaugurations for less than the cost of that.”

According to Trump’s filing, slightly more than half of the money went to four event planning companies, including the firm owned by the first lady’s friend, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff. Her company, WIS Media Partners, paid the co-creator of “The Apprentice,” Mark Burnett, to help with the festivities, as The New York Times reported.

Melania Trump has since cut off her work with Wolkoff after the disclosure of the spending. Wolkoff and WIS Media Partners did not respond to a request for comment.

Ooo, Elliott Broidy has a lot to answer for.

Another inaugural organizer was Rick Gates, the former deputy to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Gates pleaded guilty this year to lying to the FBI and to conspiracy in a vast money laundering scheme, charges that came from Mueller’s office.

At the time that Gates worked on the inauguration, he had not been indicted, but his dealings with former Ukrainian strongman Viktor Yanukovych had already come under scrutiny. Gates’ business partner, Manafort, was forced off of the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016 after it was reported he got nearly $13 million of undisclosed payments from Yanukovych. Gates did not respond to requests for comment.

And then there’s this:

We found one more thing that set this inauguration apart: Some of the donations are almost impossible to trace. As the Center for Responsive Politics reports, two “dark money” groups, which do not disclose their donors, gave $1 million each. Trump’s inaugural committee appears to have been the first to accept significant donations from dark money groups.

So, I’m saying that at least $50 million raised by the inauguration committee was not spent on the inauguration and probably is sitting around in a slush fund somewhere, if it hasn’t already gone into a lot of pockets belonging to the Trump family and their various enablers-in-crime.

The simplest explanation for the recent Michael Cohen revelations is that Cohen was merely cashing in on his relationship to Donald Trump any way he could.

Trump’s unexpected win left corporations scrambling for someone who could give them insight into how the new administration would operate, and anyone with real or perceived access to Trump had plenty of opportunities to cash in.

“Everyone was hiring ‘Trump whisperers’ in 2017 — every single hanger-on in the Trump orbit made a fortune in 2017,” one Republican consultant told Politico. “And not necessarily to influence them, just to try to figure out who are the right people to talk to.”

“The question was ‘Who is the real influence?’” the consultant said. “Is it Gary Cohn? Steve Bannon? Wilbur Ross? How do we get to Jared and Ivanka? Does anyone know Dina Powell? Does anyone listen to Steven Mnuchin? There’s no point talking to Reince Priebus, right? Every single client we had was trying to figure it out.”

Cohen portrayed himself as the one person who could answer these questions. One GOP strategist described his pitch to CNN: “I don’t know who’s been representing you, but you should fire them all. I’m the guy you should hire. I’m closest to the president. I’m his personal lawyer.”

However, we don’t know where all the money went. And until we do …

Greg Sargent has a taxonomy of possibilities for what went on with Cohen’s “Essential Consultants” shell company.

1. Trump didn’t know about “Essential Consultants” and received no benefits from it, except for the payment to Stormy Daniels, which he reimbursed.
2. Trump didn’t know about “Essential Consultants” but benefited from it quite a bit. Cohen might have used it to pay off a lot of other people on Trumps behalf, for example.
3. Trump knew about “Essential Consultants” and knew he was benefiting from it.
4. Trump knew about “Essential Consultants’ and received money directly from it.

Cohen could get into deep trouble under all of these scenarios, but Trump probably wouldn’t for possibilities #1 or #2. And even under #3 and #4 he might not get into trouble unless someone can show there was a direct quid pro quo discussed with these payments.

Consider that none of the companies that paid Cohen can offer explanations for what they paid him for that aren’t downright laughable. As Amy Sorkin points out, Essential Consultants looks a whole lot like a Trump slush fund.

Cohen, in this scenario, was just doing the paperwork and providing a vehicle for payments. If there is anything else the companies that paid him were getting, they need to offer better explanations. To put the matter most bluntly, if Cohen was Trump’s bagman, was Essential Consultants anything more than the bag?

This returns to the basic who-is-paying-whom question. Trump, at one point, said that he did not know where the money that Cohen used to pay Clifford came from. Perhaps he just let other people take care of the getting-it-back-to-Michael part; using other people’s money is a prime Trump business directive. But, again, Cohen took care of Trump’s problems—Trump’s expenses. That’s what he was being paid back for, and that is the transaction that the companies that paid him risk being drawn into.

Consider that Trump may have actually baited some companies into giving money to Cohen:

What is important to keep in mind here is that when Trump came into office the pharmaceutical companies were terrified and flying blind as to what would happen under President Trump. There was actually an out of the blue statement Trump made in the second week of January 2017 about cracking down on the Big Phrma that had the big companies terrified. He told a press conference on January 11th that the pharmaceutical companies were “getting away with murder.” He had repeatedly talked about reining in drug prices on the campaign trail. But in January he seemed to be upping the ante dramatically. It even crosses my mind, in retrospect, whether this comment wasn’t intended to scare companies into Cohen’s arms.

So they sign up Cohen, based it seems simply on being a friend of the President. Then they meet with Cohen, decide he can’t deliver and have no more communication with him. Notwithstanding this, they decide to pay him the entire $1.2 million. “As the contract unfortunately could only be terminated for cause, payments continued to be made until the contract expired by its own terms in February 2018.”

The story is that Novartis had its first and only meeting with Cohen early in 2017, and at that meeting they realized he was an empty suit who was cashing in. They had no more dealings with him, yet they continued to pay him. Was that because they were afraid if they didn’t pay him they’d piss off Trump?

Plus you’ve got payments from AT&T (which wanted approval for a controversial merger with Time Warner) and Korea Aerospace Industries (looking for defense contracts), etc. Cohen had nothing to offer them except access to Trump.

WaPo also reported today that a Russia-linked company that hired Michael Cohen registered alt-right websites during election.

Columbus Nova, a company whose U.S. chief executive, Andrew Intrater, and Russian investment partner Viktor Vekselberg have both reportedly been interviewed by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team, is listed as the registrant behind a handful of domains for websites named after the alt-right that were created during the 2016 election.

It is unclear if any of these websites were launched or ever hosted content.

Scratch anything close to Trump, and there’s a Russian.

It appears Michael Cohen was operating a shell company that was receiving major payments from a Russian oligarch and various Fortune 500 companies looking for access to President Trump. More details to come, I’m sure.

https://bullshit.ist/the-land-of-silly-97522e4819c

The Creature just screwed the planet by announcing he is dumping the Iran deal, and Eric Schneiderman resigned as AG of New York after sexual assault allegations.

There is no way the first item won’t made the world worse instead of better. The second may or may not be a problem, depending on who gets put into Schneiderman’s place. May I suggest … a woman? Someone who is up to speed on Michael Cohen and the Kushner Company?

So after more than a year of irrational whining about how dirty and illegal it was for Democrats supporting Hillary Clinton to pay for opposition research on Donald Trump leading up to the 2016 elections — even though everybody does oppo research on election opponents and there’s nothing illegal about it, and even though Clinton didn’t seem to use anything in the Steele dossier, that I can think of, anyway  — now we’re learning that Trump (allegedly) paid for oppo research on our most recent actual President, Barack Obama, and officials supporting the Iran deal. Not election opponents, note; civil servants doing their jobs.

The idea was that if these public officials doing their jobs as public officials could be personally smeared, and their careers ruined, it would give Trump an excuse to dump the Iran deal. Never mind making a rational argument why dumping the Iran deal would be good for America, because there is no such argument that can be made. Trump wants to do it because he wants to do it — if President Obama had cured cancer, Trump would be trying to bring cancer back — and dirt on the officials who did the deal would cover his ass, he thinks.

The difference between oppo research on an election opponent and oppo research to be used to pull a con on the American people to make stupid policy changes is lost on the Right, of course. Drawing that line requires a level of critical thinking their lizard brains are incapable of. But Juan Cole calls it —

There is only one word for a sitting US administration that deploys a foreign intelligence firm linked to that of a foreign government with a vested interest in shaping US intelligence to bamboozle Congress and the US public by smearing dedicated (and as it turns out upright) public servants. That word is treason.

Unfortunately, it isn’t treason in the narrow criminal sense. But by now no one with half a brain doesn’t understand that Trump would abolish the Constitution and representative democracy itself if he could.

All that said, there are still a lot of “allegedlies” surrounding this story, because everyone allegedly involved in it is denying it. Josh Marshall explains,

We have a pretty stunning development about aides to Donald Trump apparently (though they deny it) hiring the same Israeli dirty ops/private intel firm that Harvey Weinstein used to cover up his history to mount an operation against public supporters of the Iran deal.

We start with this story in The Guardian. It’s very hedged and key details are not included. But the gist is that aides to Donald Trump hired an Israeli security firm to dig up dirt on two prominent supporters of the Iran nuclear deal. They are Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl, both Obama administration national security hands who were involved in the negotiation. They both continue to be prominent supporters of it into the Trump era. Last night I said that it sounded like Black Cube, the firm that surveilled and ran black ops operations against Harvey Weinstein’s accusers on his behalf.

Then overnight Kahl came forward with a story from around the time the firm was reportedly hired in which someone approached his wife about investing in their children’s charter school. You can read the thread here. There was a backstory and details. But it sounded to the Kahls like an intelligence operation — not altogether uncommon for people in that line of work to see. So they eventually cut off communication.

Then a short time ago, Laura Rozen confirmed with Kahl that the purported firm which reached out to the Kahls was ‘Reuben Capital Partners’. That’s the same name used by Black Cube in the Weinstein operations, first reported in The New Yorker by Ronan Farrow last year.

Apparently Black Cube didn’t find any sufficiently dirty dirt, since the targeted parties were not publicly smeared. I’m surprised The Trumpettes bothered with oppo research, though. It’s so much more efficient to just make shit up, which is what the Right usually does.

Anyway — here’s the original UK Independent/Guardian article. See also Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker, Chas Danner and Margaret Hartmann at New York and Steve M.

Yesterday the Washington Post published a long examination of Trump’s real estate business, pointing out that suddenly in 2006 he switched from being the “king of debt” to paying cash.

The question is, where did that cash come from? It’s a secret.

Trump’s vast outlay of cash, tracked through public records and totaled publicly here for the first time, provides a new window into the president’s private company, which discloses few details about its finances.

It shows that Trump had access to far more cash than previously known, despite his string of commercial bankruptcies and the Great Recession’s hammering of the real estate industry.

Why did the “King of Debt,” as he has called himself in interviews, turn away from that strategy, defying the real estate wisdom that it’s unwise to risk so much of one’s own money in a few projects?

And how did Trump — who had money tied up in golf courses and buildings — raise enough liquid assets to go on this cash buying spree?

It’s well known that Trump was way over-leveraged at one point, deeply in debt and no longer able to get credit from U.S. banks. But suddenly in 2006 he was flush with cash, and the origins of that cash cannot be accounted for by the sale of properties or other assets. It was just, suddenly, there. And it continued to be there through the 2008 financial crisis when money was just not anywhere for awhile.

The WaPo article does not speculate where the money came from. Others, however, have.

The phrase “money laundering” doesn’t appear in the piece and this is known as “subtext.” https://t.co/A4nZZM8dmW

— Jon Lovett (@jonlovett) May 5, 2018

Josh Marshall points out (premium content):

Note that year, 2006. That’s the same year when Michael Cohen came to work for the Trump Organization and, as I’ve noted many times, Cohen was brought into the Trump Organization as a conduit for money from Russia and Ukraine. To be clear, I’m not saying all this cash came from or through Michael Cohen. But there’s good reason to think these two things are related, that the shift toward cash purchases coincided with Trump’s increasingly heavy reliance on post-Soviet cash and that Cohen was a important part of that transition.

Josh also remembered an interview in which James Dodson described a 2014 outing at the Trump golf course in Charlotte.

“Trump was strutting up and down, talking to his new members about how they were part of the greatest club in North Carolina,” Dodson says. “And when I first met him, I asked him how he was — you know, this is the journalist in me — I said, ‘What are you using to pay for these courses?’ And he just sort of tossed off that he had access to $100 million.”

$100 million.

“So when I got in the cart with Eric,” Dodson says, “as we were setting off, I said, ‘Eric, who’s funding? I know no banks — because of the recession, the Great Recession — have touched a golf course. You know, no one’s funding any kind of golf construction. It’s dead in the water the last four or five years.’ And this is what he said. He said, ‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.’ Now that was [a little more than] three years ago, so it was pretty interesting.”

Eric Trump has since denied he said that, of course. But there’s also this, from a WaPo article published in 2016:

“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Yesterday the New York Times published a long examination of Cohen’s businesses that pretty much spells out that Cohen is in the pocket of somebody in Russia and the Ukraine, and the Russian mob also, without actually saying so. Here is just a bit:

He has spent much of his personal and professional life with immigrants from Russia and Ukraine. His father-in-law, who helped establish him in the taxi business, was born in Ukraine, as was one of Mr. Cohen’s partners in that industry. Another partner was Russian. And Mr. Cohen used his connections in the region when scouting business opportunities for Mr. Trump in former Soviet republics.

More recently, Mr. Cohen and his father-in-law lent more than $25 million to a Ukrainian businessman who has a checkered financial record and a history of defaulting on loans. And Mr. Cohen long held a small stake in his uncle’s catering hall, which was frequented by Russian and Italian mobsters.

Yes, you have to ask.

Another bit of recent news is that a buddy of Trump’s named Tom Barrack was interviewed by Mueller’s team awhile back.  Barrack was instrumental in bringing Paul Manafort and Rick Gates into the Trump campaign. Both Manafort and Gates are better known for their ties to Russia than for their political accomplishments.

No collusion, my ass.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/228040710/mexican-costume-for-horses-mexican

Here’s something cheerful that Paul Waldman wrote a couple of days ago. At least some Democrats have stopped talking about “reaching across the aisles” and “working with Republicans” and “moving to the center” and what not and are focusing on appealing to the base. In other words, they are going on offense instead of perpetually playing defense. For example, Rep. Swalwell of California wrote an op-ed in USA Today proposing some pretty tough bans on some semiautomatic weapons. Not all, which is what I advocate, but some.

Instead, we should ban possession of military-style semiautomatic assault weapons, we should buy back such weapons from all who choose to abide by the law, and we should criminally prosecute any who choose to defy it by keeping their weapons. The ban would not apply to law enforcement agencies or shooting clubs.

Waldman comments,

This is just one congressman, but for decades you couldn’t find an elected Democrat who would even suggest such a thing. The prevailing strategy has been to reassure gun owners that they aren’t interested in confiscating anyone’s guns; they just want some sensible measures to increase safety.

Swalwell has apparently reached the point at which he says screw the gun nuts; they won’t compromise. This is what we want, so let’s ask for it. Waldman continues,

The NRA and Republicans in Congress are even opposed to universal background checks, which are supported by over 90 percent of the public. They take that position because they’ve made a calculation that there isn’t much point in trying to look reasonable or win over those who might disagree with them. Instead, the way you get what you want is to follow this formula:

1. Take maximal positions that excite your base
2. Win elections
3. Pass bills you like and kill bills you don’t like

Yes. Exactly.

This isn’t just about guns. Democrats are now starting to propose extremely progressive ideas on all kinds of other issues, like Medicare for all (or most, at least) and even a federal job guarantee. They know these ideas will find no support among Republicans, but they no longer care. They remember well how Barack Obama crafted a health care plan with roots in the Heritage Foundation and Mitt Romney’s reform in Massachusetts, then spent months trying to convince Republicans in Congress to come to a compromise with him, only to be strung along and ultimately get zero Republican votes in either house.

Finally. A clue emerges.

I also think that, ironically, this approach is likely to appeal to more swing voters, not fewer. Democrats have no idea how much they don’t stand for anything any more. See, for example, “They Voted for Obama, Then Went for Trump. Can Democrats Win Them Back?” in the New York Times.  It’s estimated that 9 percent of voters who went for Obama in 2008 and 2012 ended up voting for Trump in 2016. Among white voters who had never been to college, it was 22 percent. What do these interviews with Obama-to-Trump voters tell us?

One, they aren’t politics nerds. They aren’t focused on the midterms yet. One assumes they are not big newspaper readers.

Two, a lot of these people were lifelong Democratic voters, but the “D” after her name wasn’t enough reason for them to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Several of them had misgivings about Trump, but they had more misgivings about Clinton. Put another way, they didn’t really like either candidate but disliked Trump less.

I think this lady needs to be listened to:

I started to call this post the “rich man’s burden.” Perfectly innocent rich men, you see, are just perpetually having to pay large amounts of money to women of ill repute. It goes with the territory. Anna North wrote at Vox,

If anyone in America still needed an explanation of how rich people use their money to silence others, President Donald Trump has you covered.

In a series of tweets Thursday morning, he laid out the process by which “celebrities and people of wealth” like himself use nondisclosure agreements to keep people from talking about them in public. Trump specifically explained that he reimbursed his lawyer, Michael Cohen, for paying porn actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 for her silence.

I believe Trump is still claiming he didn’t have sex with that woman (he changes his story so much it’s hard to keep track), which makes me wonder why more women don’t get on this gravy train. All you have to do to get $130,000 is threaten to tell the world that you’ve had sex with Mr. Bigbucks! Easiest scam in the world! It must happen all the time!

Of course, the flip side to NDAs is that they perpetuate a system by which the very wealthy can get away with anything by buying their victims’ silence. I think NDAs should be done away with, except perhaps in regard to legitimate proprietary business information.

Conor Friedersdorf compiled a list of Trump’s changing stories about the $130,000 payment.

And that brings us to Wednesday night. Now, Rudy Giuliani says that Trump repaid the $130,000 to Michael Cohen. The lawyer didn’t use his own money after all. The new story produced a remarkable followup segment on Fox News, in which Laura Ingraham grudgingly implied that Trump and his allies have proven themselves to be liars by blatantly contradicting themselves–then quickly softened that heretical conclusion by reframing it as though the important thing is what the left will say, not the actual truth of the matter.

At about the 1:26 mark, Ingraham speculates, “Well did Trump pay it after April 6?” It would be odd to wait that long to reimburse one’s lawyer for a six-figure expense, but that would allow Trump to claim he wasn’t lying on Air Force One. What Ingraham could not have known then is that after the Hannity interview, Giuliani gave an interview to Robert Costa of The Washington Post.

What Guiliani told Costa is that the reimbursement was over a period of time, in monthly payments of $35,000. Which means the reimbursement began long before April. (Trump’s tweets today suggested that the $35,000 a month was merely a legal retainer, which must have been a sweet deal for Cohen, considering he does very little legal work.)

It probably didn’t occur to Giuliani that he was throwing the Fox News crew under the bus along with Trump. But no statement coming out of the White House can ever be trusted. Something that’s a “disgusting” rumor and “fake news” one day turns out to be true the next day. This happens a lot.

The problem, as I understand it, is that Giuliani seemed to believe that if Trump paid the $130,000 out of his own pocket, he’s off the hook for campaign finance violations. However, all kinds of commentary today says that if the $130,000 was paid in connection to the campaign in any way, and not reported, it’s still a campaign finance violation.

On Thursday morning, Trump tweeted that Cohen “received a monthly retainer, not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign … used to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her about an affair despite already having signed a detailed letter admitting that there was no affair.”

“Money from the campaign, or campaign contributions, played no roll [sic] in this transaction,” the president insisted.

But Giuliani quickly contradicted that explanation in an interview with Fox and Friends Thursday morning, indicating that the payment to Daniels was meant to prevent damaging information from emerging in the latter days of the 2016 campaign. “Imagine if that came out on October 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton,” Giuliani said. “Cohen didn’t even ask. He made it go away. He did his job.”

That statement, legal experts said, appears to confirm that the payment was a campaign expenditure. “This is good circumstantial evidence this was campaign-related,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine. “Giuliani did Trump no favors.”

Jonathan Turley asks, “Is Rudy Giuliani working FOR Donald Trump or AGAINST him?” See also Josh Marshall, “Rudes in Twillight.”

My best guess is that Guiliani and Trump and other members of the legal team had discussed this story (true or not) as a way to escape a claimed FEC violation. They did so with what appears to have been a fairly limited understanding of campaign finance law. But they thought it was a good idea. Giuliani then meandered his way into floating it during his interview with Sean Hannity. Note how he immediately fixes on the point that this solves the campaign finance problem (even though it appears not to). He’s adamant and cocky about it. He is then caught off guard when Hannity — himself caught off guard and scrambling in response to the initial claim — reminds him that the story is that Trump never knew anything about the Daniels deal at all and did not know where the money was from.

Later in the interview and now this morning he has groped his way to a new hybrid story which is that Trump reimbursed Cohen for the payment without ever knowing that the payment had been made, who it had been made to or how much it was for. With sufficient grease and spit and oblong pieces of cardboard, Rudy is halfway able to make this make sense. But by any real measure, it makes no sense. …

…What you have are a half dozen brainstorms cooked up by a group of old men in a room used to bending reality to their purposes when something goes wrong. That’s much more difficult on a national stage in front of intense scrutiny. That’s what happened last night. Rudy Giuliani is far, far past his prime, used to the accommodating hothouse world of Fox News cronies and cash and carry deal-making in his law firm gigs. This was as sloppy as it looked and did his client no favors.

In other news: NBC reports that the feds had tapped Michael Cohen’s phones. We don’t know when the tap started, but it was before the raids on his home(s) and office(s). At least one call between Cohen and the White House was intercepted.