"Whatever you do, always fire the FBI director and get your own; that's the Solution!" - M.N. | It’s too early to take away any clear lessons from the Trump era, except one: Whatever you do, never fire the FBI director." - Lowry: Demented FBI bid | Winchester Star
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"Whatever you do, always fire the FBI director and get your own; that's the Solution!" - M.N. | It’s too early to take away any clear lessons from the Trump era, except one: Whatever you do, never fire the FBI director." - Lowry: Demented FBI bid | Winchester Star - Mike Nova’s Shared NewsLinks
"Whatever you do, always fire the FBI director and get your own; that's the Solution!" - M.N. | It’s too early to take away any clear lessons from the Trump era, except one: Whatever you do, never fire the FBI director." - Lowry: Demented FBI bid | Winchester Star
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| Lowry: Demented FBI bid | Winchester Star | |||||||||
It’s too early to take away any clear lessons from the Trump era, except one: Whatever you do, never fire the FBI director.
Yes, as president, it is fully within your power to cashier inferior executive-branch officers. But if the aftermath of the James Comey firing is any indication, it risks backlash from FBI and Justice Department officials who will take umbrage — and extraordinary steps in response.
This is the upshot of the “60 Minutes” interview of former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. The Comey firing was ham-fisted and unsettling given the ongoing investigation of Russian interference into the 2016 election. But what ensued was an embarrassing freakout by law-enforcement officials entrusted with awesome powers.
According to McCabe, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein brought up invoking the 25th Amendment.
It’s worth considering how this Rube Goldberg amendment is supposed to work: The vice president takes power if he and a majority of the Cabinet declare in writing to the Senate and the House that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
Then the president can contest the declaration, also in writing, to the Senate and the House. If the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet still say he can’t serve, Congress has 21 days to vote on the question. If two-thirds of both houses says he can’t, the vice president remains acting president.
Anyone who believes that this was a remotely plausible or appropriate means to depose Donald Trump should have his own ability to discharge his duties examined.
First of all, Trump obviously was perfectly capable of discharging his duties; he just discharged them in a way alarming to McCabe and Rosenstein. His response to an effort by his Cabinet to join such an exercise would have been to fire anyone involved, which he could have done because, again, he wasn’t incapacitated.
McCabe also says that Rosenstein twice discussed wearing a wire to record the president and wasn’t joking. (A source told The New York Times when it originally broke the story that Rosenstein meant it sarcastically; his own denials have been carefully worded.)
The FBI didn’t go this far, but it did open, per McCabe, two probes into the president to determine if he was a Russian agent or had obstructed justice.
Consider the lunacy of this: By providing Trump with a memo justifying Comey’s firing, Rosenstein participated in the scheme that the FBI considered a possible crime, or the culmination of a Russian plot. Then Rosenstein turned around and appointed a special counsel, whom he oversaw, to investigate the possible crime to which he was a party.
It’s also absurd that the FBI officials considered the firing of Comey to be potential obstruction of the investigation that they were continuing, and indeed making more serious by making the president an explicit target.
The comments that Trump made about Russia that McCabe and Co. found so disturbing were hardly damning. In his cover letter over Rosenstein’s memo, Trump mentioned that Comey had told him three times that he wasn’t under investigation. This was true, and Trump was frustrated that Comey wouldn’t make it public. That doesn’t make him a Russian agent.
In his notorious Lester Holt interview, Trump said he fired Comey because there wasn’t anything to him and Russia. He didn’t say he wanted to shut down the probe; indeed, he said he understood it would now probably go on longer.
Perhaps Trump’s comments in his ill-considered meeting with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in the immediate aftermath of the Comey firing were worse, but it’s hard to say absent a transcript.
What McCabe’s version strongly suggests is that the FBI took upon itself to be a check on the president of the United States. This is not its appointed role in our system. If the president abuses his powers, that’s a matter for Congress to take up, not for executive-branch officials whose panic eclipsed their judgment.
Rich Lowry is a political writer. His column is distributed nationally by King Features Syndicate.
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| Michael Novakhov - SharedNewsLinks℠: Trump is “married to the Mob”: literally, figuratively, or both? – Trump Investigations Report | |||||||||
 Trump - from Huffington Post
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| VIEWPOINTS: There’s a Wider Scandal Suggested by the Trump Investigations | |||||||||
There’s a wider scandal suggested by the Trump investigations
The scope of financial crimes unearthed so far by state and federal authorities investigating President Trump and his associates is remarkable.
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Paul Manafort was found guilty of bank and tax fraud, and faces another trial involving charges of money laundering.
Former campaign adviser Rick Gates pleaded guilty to financial fraud.
Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to tax evasion and illegal campaign donations. The Trump Foundation was just dissolved over what the New York attorney general described as “a shocking pattern of illegality.”
And authorities opened new investigations following a recent New York Times exposé describing hundreds of millions of dollars of potential financial fraud by the Trump family.
Even more remarkable is what these investigations tell us about the levels of criminality among America’s business and political elite.
Tax evasion, money laundering, financial fraud and campaign finance violations: Every turned stone reveals thick webs of financial misdeeds.
These white collar crimes, which often implicate the powerful and the wealthy, notoriously thrive in the loose regulatory environments created when big money exerts undue influence on politics. Mounting indications
The Trump investigations join a growing body of evidence pointing to lax enforcement of high-level financial crimes.
We know, for example, that massive fraud involved in the 2008 financial collapse – from mortgage lenders who deceived customers to banks that deceived investors – went essentially unpunished.
We know that under-enforcement is common with certain big-ticket tax evasion practices – like misstating the value of assets under the gift tax. Gift tax fraud, which may save millions of dollars to a taxpayer, is a major component of the alleged tax evasion scheme of the Trump family.
Lax enforcement and minor punishments are notoriously common with violations of campaign finance laws – the point where private and public corruption often meet.
And as for money-laundering: According to congressional testimony, regulations against it are so ineffective that “the bottom-line metrics suggest that money-laundering enforcement fails 99.9 percent of the time.”
Executive, legislative and judicial failures
The blame for this loose regulatory environment is not limited to lax executive enforcement. Legislative and judicial actions play a substantial part in the swirling financial illegalities.
Congress, for example, is responsible for the many easily abused tax deductions for the rich that populate our tax code. And legislators have long refused to fund the IRS at levels allowing effective tax enforcement.
It is also Congress that has structured the Federal Election Commission as a weak and conflict-riddenenforcer of campaign finance regulations.
The courts have similarly contributed to the lax regulatory environment. As a professor of constitutional law (and ex-prosecutor), I have watched with concern as recent Supreme Court cases extended ever-increasing constitutional protections to the alliance between big money and politics.
In recent years, the Supreme Court invalidated numerous campaign finance restrictions by declaring them unconstitutional. In doing so, the court stated that “a substantial and legitimate reason” for making a political campaign contribution is that “the candidate will respond by producing those political outcomes the supporter favors.”
What many regard as political corruption is constitutionally protected as a staple of democracy by our highest court.
Six months before Trump’s election, the Supreme Court reversed the criminal conviction of a former Virginia governor on federal corruption charges. Gov. Robert McDonnell received personal gifts and loans worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Virginia businessman.
In exchange, McDonnell sought to influence the University of Virginia to conduct free research on the man’s commercial product.
A jury convicted the governor on federal corruption charges, and a federal court of appeals affirmed. But the Supreme Court reversed the conviction after narrowing the definition of what counts as criminal corruptionunder federal law.
The conviction, said the court, raised serious constitutional concerns because it could chill interactions between politicians and their supporters.
As in McDonnell’s own case, the decision’s significance extends beyond matters of campaign finance. The case was recently cited as a cause for the acquittal, on federal bribery charges, of a high-ranking New York City police official who for years received lavish gifts from wealthy businessmen.
Business and political elite
The rich rewards of the Trump investigations suggest that big-money illegalities are rife in America. And while Trump may be in a league of his own, the problem is not limited to Trump.
Indeed, some of the people embroiled in the Trump scandals have long been situated at the heart of America’s business and political elite.
Paul Manafort, for one, also worked on the campaigns of Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole. And the Trumps themselves were always highly politically connected – contributing millions to leading state and federal politicians, both Democrats and Republicans.
“As a business person,” explained Trump in a 2015 interview, “you wanna get along with all sides because you’re gonna need things from everybody.”
Consider the recently disclosed episode involving Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. – son of the late former secretary of state under President Carter.
In 2012, Vance ordered prosecutors to drop a promising fraud case against Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. for lying to investors in a Trump project in Manhattan. The order was made after their father’s attorney paid Vance a visit.
Weeks later, the attorney became one of Vance’s largest donors for his re-election campaign.
That is the wider scandal suggested by the investigations of Trump and his cronies: The high levels of brazen big-money illegalities that ordinarily go unaddressed and unpunished. Indeed many of the alleged crimes are no longer chargeable due to the statute of limitations.
“Zero tolerance” and “broken windows” policies are terms frequently used by law enforcement in discussing low-level crime. But American law enforcement appears to avoid the penthouses.
There is deep irony in the fact that Trump and his cronies are being pursued for the sort of crimes whose chronic under-enforcement generated the inequality and resentment that helped catapult Trump to the presidency.
Ofer Raban, Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Oregon
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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| Trump is “married to the Mob”: literally, figuratively, or both? – Trump Investigations Report | |||||||||
Trump is “married to the Mob”: literally, figuratively, or both?
Read the whole story
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First Trump sold his name, at 18% commission. (I wouldn’t buy it for a penny.)
“In return for lending his name to the project, Trump would get 18 percent of the profits—without putting up any of his own money.”
Did he also sell his soul, his honor, and his country after this “first step”? For how much? Mr. Mueller, give us your estimate for this bottom line, please, for the legal accuracy and correctness. Not that these figures matter that much, it does not really make much of a difference in this instance, if he did it for $1 or $1B. What matters if he did it, which still is very hard to believe.
After denial and deception come confrontation, “bargaining”, and acceptance of this possibility. Which is also hard to do.
“If you’re in relations with the Russian mafia, they’re the boss, you’re the apprentice. They can say “fired.” And they have compromised him. And they are also an arm of the Russian government. Russia is a mafia state. And I think what’s extraordinary, what Putin’s greatest achievement is, that he has weaponized organized crime so that it’s effectively a powerful foreign policy tool, and they’ve compromised the man who happens to be president of the United States now.”
Read the whole story
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Rename the “Trump Tower” into the “Trump Russian Mob Tower”, just call the things what they are!
Dolly Lenz, a New York real estate broker, told USA Today that she sold some 65 units in Trump World Tower to Russians. “I had contacts in Moscow looking to invest in the United States,” Lenz said. “They all wanted to meet Donald.”
“Last October, an investigation by the Miami Herald found that at least 13 buyers in the Florida complex have been the target of government investigations, either personally or through their companies, including “members of a Russian-American organized crime group.” Two buyers in Sunny Isles, Anatoly Golubchik and Michael Sall, were convicted for taking part in a massive international gambling and money-laundering syndicate that was run out of Trump Tower in New York. The ring, according to the FBI, was operating under the protection of the Russian mafia…
In April 2013, a little more than two years before Trump rode the escalator to the ground floor of Trump Tower to kick off his presidential campaign, police burst into Unit 63A of the high-rise and rounded up 29 suspects in two gambling rings. The operation, which prosecutors called “the world’s largest sports book,” was run out of condos in Trump Tower—including the entire fifty-first floor of the building. In addition, unit 63A—a condo directly below one owned by Trump—served as the headquarters for a “sophisticated money-laundering scheme” that moved an estimated $100 million out of the former Soviet Union, through shell companies in Cyprus, and into investments in the United States. The entire operation, prosecutors say, was working under the protection of Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, whom the FBI identified as a top Russian vor closely allied with Semion Mogilevich. In a single two-month stretch, according to the federal indictment, the money launderers paid Tokhtakhounov $10 million.”
Read the whole story
· · · ·
Why Donald Trump and his circle were not investigated and prosecuted on money laundering charges earlier; before he started his election campaign and before he became a U.S. President?!
This is the great error of omission on the part of the FBI.
Investigate the FBI investigators! Reform the FBI! Prevent this scandal, this historical drama and political tragicomedy, this humiliation of the American political culture on the world stage, from happening ever again!
This quote is an example and an illustration of the FBI’s ineptness:
“The FBI also struggled to figure out where Ivankov lived. “We were looking around, looking around, looking around,” James Moody, chief of the bureau’s organized crime section, told Friedman. “We had to go out and really beat the bushes. And then we found out that he was living in a luxury condo in Trump Tower.””
FBI: think deeper, search better, including under your very noses, and very possible, among your own “valiant midst”.
Read the whole story
· · ·
Before the start of business, Just Security provides a curated summary of up-to-the-minute developments at home and abroad. Here’s today’s news.
TRUMP-RUSSIA INVESTIGATION
Ways to limit or weaken special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation are being explored by some of President Trump’s lawyers after Trump asked his advisers about his powers to pardon aides, family members and even himself in connection with the investigation, with Carol D. Leonnig, Ashley Parker, Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger report at the Washington Post.
Trump’s legal team is also reportedly amassing allegations of conflicts of interest against Mueller, an allegation disputed by a source with knowledge of the discussion who spoke to Eli Watkins at CNN.
It would be “extremely disturbing” if President Trump were thinking of pardoning aides who could be implicated in the Trump-Russia investigation, the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee Sen. Mark Warner (Va.) said yesterday following reports that the president was consulting with advisers on his pardoning powers in connection to the probe. The Guardian reports.
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1 sentence that explains Donald Trump and the Russia investigation
CNN-Feb 19, 2019
(CNN) The New York Times published a 4,536-word opus on President Donald Trump's two-year-long (and running!) attempt to thwart the ...
On Politics: Inside Trump's War on the Investigations Encircling Him
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Washington Post-14 hours ago
President Trump on Wednesday sought to discredit a news report that ... could be put in charge of an investigation that included Trump's role in ...
Trump denies report he asked to install ally to oversee hush money ...
<a href="http://ActionNewsJax.com" rel="nofollow">ActionNewsJax.com</a>-12 hours ago
Intimidation, Pressure and Humiliation: Inside Trump's Two-Year War ...
Highly Cited-New York Times-Feb 19, 2019
Michael S. Schmidt Describes the Times' Reporting on Trump's ...
In-Depth-The New Yorker-Feb 19, 2019 Report: Trump Tried to Muzzle Investigation into His Porno Payoffs
Vanity Fair-Feb 19, 2019
Over at The New York Times today, you will find a lengthy look at the various tactics Donald Trump has employed over the last two years in his ...
The Top 5 Highlights from the Blockbuster NY Times Report on Trump ...
Local Source-Mediaite-Feb 19, 2019  McCabe: Congressional leaders didn't object to counterintelligence ...
Politico-Feb 19, 2019
On Tuesday, McCabe disputed the insinuation made by some of his critics that he had decided to investigate Trump on his own, arguing that ...
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| Michael Novakhov - SharedNewsLinks℠ | Justice Department preparing for Mueller report in coming days - The Washington Post | Mueller news: 2 reports say Trump-Russia investigation could conclude next week - 2:51 AM 2/21/2019 | |||||||||
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| Justice Department preparing for Mueller report in coming days - The Washington Post | |||||||||
 Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III on Capitol Hill in June 2017. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
Justice Department officials are preparing for the end of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s nearly two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and believe a confidential report could be issued in coming days, according to people familiar with the discussions.
The special counsel’s investigation has consumed Washington since it began in May 2017, and it increasingly appears to be nearing its end, which would send fresh shock waves through the political system. Mueller could deliver his report to Attorney General William P. Barr next week, according to a person familiar with the matter who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations.
Regulations call for Mueller to submit to the attorney general a confidential explanation as to why he decided to charge certain individuals, as well as who else he investigated and why he decided not to charge those people. The regulations then call for the attorney general to report to Congress about the investigation.
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An adviser to President Trump said there is palpable concern among the president’s inner circle that the report might contain information about Trump and his team that is politically damaging, but not criminal conduct.
Even before he was confirmed by the Senate, Barr had preliminary discussions about the logistics surrounding the conclusion of Mueller’s inquiry, a second person said. At that time, though, Barr had not been briefed on the substance of Mueller’s investigation, so the conversations were limited.
Close
Barr says he'll release the Mueller report — with a caveat
President Trump’s attorney general nominee William P. Barr on Jan. 15 said he would release the Russia report “consistent with” regulations. (Video: JM Rieger/Photo: Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
CNN first reported Wednesday that Mueller could send a report to Barr as early as next week.
A spokesman for Mueller declined to comment, as did a Justice Department spokeswoman.
How detailed either Mueller’s report and the attorney general’s summary of the findings will be is unclear. Lawmakers have demanded that Mueller’s report be made public, but Barr has been noncommittal on that point, saying that he intends to be as forthcoming as the regulations and department practice allow. He has pointed, however, to Justice Department practices that insist on saying little or nothing about conduct that does not lead to criminal charges.
The special counsel’s office, which used to have 17 lawyers, is down to 12 now, and some of those attorneys have recently been in touch with their old bosses about returning to work, according to people familiar with the discussions. All but four of the remaining 12 lawyers are detailed from other Justice Department offices.
The end of the special counsel’s probe would not mean the end of criminal investigations connected to the president. Federal prosecutors in New York, for instance, are exploring whether corrupt payments were made in connection with Trump’s inaugural committee funding.
Congress and the Justice Dept. are fixed for a fight over the Mueller report
Just how much will be released about special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's Russia investigation is up to Mueller, the attorney general and Congress. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
If Mueller does close up shop, government lawyers on his team would likely return to their original posts, but would be able to continue to work on the prosecution of cases initiated by the special counsel’s office.
That was the case for two special counsel lawyers, Brandon Van Grack and Scott Meisler, who have left the office formally but are still working on cases begun by Mueller.
When the special counsel brought the case against Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser and friend, accusing him of lying to Congress, attorneys from the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington were assigned to it from the start — an indication that Mueller expects to hand off the investigation soon.
The four prosecutors remaining who aren’t part of the Justice Department are some of the special counsel’s highest-ranking lawyers: Aaron Zebley, who is effectively Mueller’s chief of staff; James Quarles, who is a senior executive in the office; Jeannie Rhee, the lead prosecutor in the case against Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney; and Greg Andres, the lead prosecutor in the trial of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman.
According to people familiar with the special counsel’s work, Mueller has envisioned it as an investigative assignment, not necessarily a prosecutorial one, and for that reason does not plan to keep the office running to see to the end all of the indictments it has filed.
Mueller’s work has led to criminal charges against 34 people. Six Trump associates and advisers have pleaded guilty.
Among those who have pleaded guilty are Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn; former deputy campaign manger Rick Gates; and former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, as well as Manafort and Cohen.
Most of the people charged in Mueller’s investigation are Russians. Because there is no extradition treaty with that country, those 26 individuals are unlikely to ever see the inside of a U.S. courtroom.
None of the Americans charged by Mueller are accused of conspiring with Russia to interfere in the election. Determining whether any Trump associates had plotted with the Kremlin in 2016 was the central question assigned to Mueller when he got the job, in a moment of crisis for the FBI, the Justice Department and the country.
Days earlier, Trump had fired FBI Director James B. Comey. The purported reason for the dismissal was Comey’s handling of the 2016 investigation of Hillary Clinton, but Trump said in an interview with NBC shortly after the firing that he was thinking about the Russia inquiry when he decided to fire Comey.
Because FBI directors are appointed to 10-year terms to ensure their political independence, the Comey firing rattled Washington, setting off alarms not just in the Justice Department but in Congress, where lawmakers feared the president was determined to end the Russia investigation before it was completed.
In the wake of Comey’s firing, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein chose Mueller as special counsel in part to quell the burgeoning political crisis.
Mueller, a Vietnam War veteran, prosecutor and former FBI director, was highly regarded. Politicians on both sides of the aisle — as well as law enforcement and intelligence veterans within federal agencies — had long admired and trusted Mueller, a Republican.
Trump has repeatedly denounced the Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt” and accused Mueller’s prosecutors of political bias because a number of them had made donations to Democratic candidates in the past. Some congressional Republicans who back the president have repeatedly attacked Mueller’s work as corrupted by anti-Trump bias among Comey and his senior advisers at the FBI.
When Mueller’s investigation ends, it is likely to set off a fresh political firestorm.
Democrats are already demanding a detailed public accounting of what Mueller found, beyond what is in the public indictments and trial evidence to date. Republicans, meanwhile, are poised to escalate their attacks on the special counsel’s work as a waste of time and money — and paint the end of the investigation as final proof that there was nothing to the suspicion that the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin.
Much of Mueller’s time was spent trying to determine whether the president attempted to obstruct the investigation. Toward that end, Mueller questioned those closest to the president about his private statements about the inquiry, his public tweets that attacked law enforcement officials, and internal White House documents that might shed light on Trump’s behavior.
Months and months of negotiations over a possible interview of Trump came to little. Ultimately, Mueller and the Justice Department did not serve the president with a subpoena, which could have led to a fight at the Supreme Court, and Trump’s lawyers submitted written answers to questions from the special counsel.
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| Mueller news: 2 reports say Trump-Russia investigation could conclude next week | |||||||||
Could special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation at last be reaching its conclusion?
According to reports from NBC News and CNN, the answer is yes. Both outlets reported this week that the special counsel could submit his final report to the attorney general as soon as next week.
These reports have been met with a torrent of skepticism from Mueller watchers on social media, and even fears of interference from Trump appointees at the Justice Department, such as Attorney General Bill Barr. And given President Trump’s past efforts to interfere with the investigation, and Mueller’s own secrecy about his plan, some caution is certainly warranted for these reports.
But there have long been potential signs that Mueller’s work is nearing its conclusion. Some prosecutors have left his office in recent months. In other court filings, Mueller’s team has worked together with other DOJ prosecutors, such as the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. Tea leaf readers have long viewed this as preparation for an imminent handoff.
In fact, in December, NBC News’s Pete Williams and Ken Dilanian reported that Mueller was “nearing the end of his historic investigation” and even wrote that he could submit his report “as early as mid-February” — that is, around now. On Tuesday, Williams reiterated this assessment, and added the timing that the report could be filed “possibly this week, maybe next week, that soon.”
Then on Wednesday, CNN’s Evan Perez, Laura Jarrett, and Katelyn Polantz also wrote that a Mueller report could be filed next week. They reported other potentially telling new details, including:
We don’t know for sure what Mueller’s plans are, but all of this could certainly suggest that Mueller is close to completing his main findings about President Trump and Russian interference in the election, and is referring other unresolved matters elsewhere in the Justice Department.
What will Mueller’s report look like — and what will it say?
Many in Washington seemed to expect the Mueller report would serve to answer the public’s questions regarding Trump and Russia, or lay out a purportedly damning case like the Starr report did for President Bill Clinton.
But we have little idea what such a report would look like, and this is all the regulation in question says about it:
One thing to note here is that the report envisioned by the regulation is meant for the attorney general — not Congress and not the public. It seems particularly not meant for the public, since the report is said to be “confidential.” The only specific information we have on its contents is that it should explain Mueller’s “prosecution and declination decisions,” but the level of detail it will include is not clear.
Once the report makes it into Barr’s hands, the next question is whether it will be made public in some form. Barr is under no formal obligation to make the report public, but he’ll face immense pressure from congressional Democrats to release as much of the special counsel’s findings as possible. And if the AG did try to bottle things up, there are other avenues through which Mueller’s findings can become public — through leaks, or even perhaps congressional testimony by the special counsel himself.
But the big question is, of course, what Mueller found. Has he laid out a damning fact pattern implicating the president of the United States in potential crimes? If so, and if that becomes known, House Democrats may well push for impeachment — meaning there will be months more of Trump-Russia drama. But if Mueller did not end up implicating Trump after his long investigation, the political world will likely view that as an exoneration for Trump, and the conclusion of the scandal that’s overshadowed his presidency more than any other.
For more on the Mueller probe, follow Andrew Prokop on Twitter and check out Vox’s guide to the Trump-Russia investigation.
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| Trump's new attorney general could announce end of Mueller investigation by next week: report | |||||||||
New U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr is preparing to announce the end of the special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, according to CNN. This could come as soon as next week.
Here's what we know
CNN cited "people familiar with the plans" who said that the Mueller report would be coming shortly. The exact date could depend on the timing of President Donald Trump's summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. NBC News had previously said that the investigation was likely to wrap up in the middle of February.
Mueller was appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on May 17, 2017, to oversee an investigation into potential collusion between Trump's campaign and Russia. Rosenstein had taken over the investigation after former Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself on the grounds that he had been a Trump campaign surrogate. Rosenstein is expected to resign next month.
When Mueller's investigation wraps up, he will submit a full report to the attorney general. In this report, Mueller will have to detail why he chose to prosecute (or not prosecute) each matter he investigated.
It's not clear how much of that report will be released to the public or Congress, if any of it is released at all. During his confirmation hearings, Barr indicated that rather than release the report from Mueller directly, he might choose to instead release a report of his own summarizing Mueller's findings.
What did the president say?
On Wednesday, Trump said that he would leave the decision of whether or not to release the report with Barr.
Trump has repeatedly criticized the investigation, calling it a waste of time and taxpayer money and a "hoax."
While Mueller's team has so far not revealed any information that could incriminate Trump, the investigation has led to convictions for multiple people connected to the president, including former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen on charges unrelated to the campaign.
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| House probe of Deutsche Bank and Trump should be taken seriously | |||||||||
The surest sign that House Democrats plan to conduct an in-depth investigation of Deutsche Bank’s dealings with President Trump — rather than the sort of slapdash, shallow probe that Congress often stages — came in a little-noted recent hiring decision.
The House Financial Services Committee reportedly added to its staff Bob Roach, a seasoned congressional investigator who specializes in complex financial inquiries and has a long history of tangling with Deutsche.
During Roach’s tenure as a staffer on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, he worked for Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who staged lengthy hearings where he grilled famous witnesses such as Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Roach did much of the behind-the-scenes work that led to those on-camera showdowns. He also had a hand in at least five separate Senate reports that examined Deutsche Bank.
Those five reports, which were released between 2003 and 2014, ought to be required reading for lawyers representing both Deutsche and President Trump. They offer a glimpse of the kind of congressional scrutiny that’s coming.
Before I joined American Banker as a reporter, I worked in 2009 on the early stages of one of the Senate subcommittee’s investigations, as part of a fellowship on Capitol Hill.
I got to know Roach as a good-humored lawyer who was quite serious about the investigative work he was conducting. I recall him once lamenting that Congress no longer had the staff-level expertise that it once enjoyed.
Roach’s own expertise as a financial investigator is apparent in the various work the subcommittee has published on Deutsche Bank. All five reports are thorough, and they all deal with the sort of financial industry arcana that typically makes eyes glaze over in Washington.
Four of the five reports drew bipartisan support — an outcome that seems far-fetched in any probe of President Trump’s finances, since that topic is far more politically charged than the issues that Roach has typically examined in the past.
In 2003, Roach played a key role in a Senate report that examined the role of Deutsche, the accounting firm KPMG and other companies in the development, marketing and implementation of tax shelters that investigators deemed abusive.
A follow-up Senate report in 2005 delved further into the tax shelter industry — looking at the role of Deutsche, as well as other banks, accounting firms, law firms, investment advisory companies and even charitable organizations.
The 2005 report found that Deutsche provided billions of dollars in lending that was critical to transactions that the bank knew facilitated potentially abusive or illegal tax shelters.
Within 10 months of the second report’s release, federal prosecutors in Manhattan had reportedly begun investigating Deutsche Bank’s role in questionable tax shelters.
In 2010, the German megabank admitted criminal wrongdoing and agreed to pay $553.6 million. A nonprosecution agreement between Deutsche and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan cited many of the same specific tax shelters that Roach and his colleagues had identified years earlier in the Senate reports.
Deutsche again came under an unwelcome spotlight in 2011 when the Senate subcommittee issued a massive report on the role of Wall Street in the financial crisis. (Although I worked for the subcommittee during the early stages of that investigation, I was not involved with the portion that dealt with Deutsche Bank.)
The report’s 46-page section on Deutsche focuses on the activities of a trader named Greg Lippmann, who made a large bet against the U.S. housing market even as his employer was pumping out collateralized debt obligations made up of subprime residential mortgage-backed securities.
Lippmann was also the basis of the character played by Ryan Gosling in the 2015 film “The Big Short” — adapted from a best-seller by Michael Lewis — which focused on a small number of short sellers who correctly predicted the housing market crash that began in 2007.
Gosling’s character, who serves as the movie’s narrator, says at one point, “I never said I was the hero of this story.” The 2011 Senate report spells that point out in great detail.
The report explains that while Lippmann referred to certain housing-related securities as “crap” and “pigs,” he simultaneously did not object to inclusion of those same securities in collateralized debt obligations that Deutsche was marketing to clients.
One of those clients, M&T Bank, eventually wrote down the value of its securities in a CDO called Gemstone 7, which was underwritten by Deutsche, to $1.87 million. Their original value was $82 million.
“M&T Bank told the subcommittee that had it known about Mr. Lippmann’s views, it might have ‘thought twice’ before purchasing Gemstone 7 securities,” the Senate report stated.
Roach also worked on a 2008 report that looked at how offshore entities dodge taxes on U.S. stock dividends. Deutsche was one of six investment banks whose role came under examination.
In 2014, Roach and his colleagues published a report that looked at the use of structured financial products to avoid taxes and leverage limits. It examined the conduct of hedge funds and the British bank Barclays, in addition to Deutsche Bank.
Roach has also worked on Senate investigations involving money laundering, though those probes did not focus on Deutsche.
The House Financial Services Committee, chaired by California Democrat Maxine Waters, is reportedly planning to investigate allegations that Deutsche Bank helped launder money on behalf of Russian customers, in addition to looking into the bank’s business dealings with the president and his family. Trump is said to have borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars from the German lender.
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The House Financial Services Committee did not provide comment for this article. Deutsche Bank confirmed that it has received an inquiry from the House financial services and intelligence committees.
“Deutsche Bank is engaged in a productive dialogue with those committees to determine the best and most appropriate way of assisting them in their official oversight functions,” the bank said in an emailed statement. “We remain committed to providing appropriate information to all authorized investigations.”
The German bank knows the drill here. Another comprehensive probe is coming.
 Kevin Wack
Kevin Wack is a California-based reporter for American Banker who covers the U.S. consumer finance industry.
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| M. N.: The New Abwehr enjoys and employs the deep and intimate connections with the criminal Underworld which go back to the early 1920-s... - 5:48 PM 2/20/2019 | |||||||||
 M. N.: The New Abwehr enjoys and employs the deep and intimate connections with the criminal Underworld which go back to the early 1920-s, the conditions after the Germany's defeat in the WW1 and the resulting "Restrictions" (I almost typed "Sanctions") which made the symbiotic and sometimes parasitic relations with Police and Criminals the matter of survival for the Abwehr which based itself at that time at the Military Police Stations. Money Laundering is another, related sub-specialty which was a matter of survival and necessity at that time, and the Abwehr under Canaris (which really is the Abwehr we are talking about) made both areas the traditional historical "fields of excellence". Money Laundering, from Deutsche Bank to Chabad dealers to Oligarchs, e.g. Lev Leviyev and others, and most notably by our pretty laundry girls and boys from the Trump-Kushner Crime Family, was and is one of the truly heart felt activities for the Abwehr, and after the WW2, for the New Abwehr. It is reasonable to assume that it is the New Abwehr which ultimately controls the organised crime today, precisely because it is itself their creator and organizer. This thesis or the working hypothesis has to be looked into, researched, and investigated. Michael Novakhov 2.20.19
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