9:12 AM 7/21/2019 - Trump and RICO Act Statute

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Michael_Novakhov shared this story . The guilty have a head start, and retribution is always slow of foot, but it catches up. —Horace, Odes , Book III, Ode 2 I have already suggested " What The Mueller Report Will Say " about the R...

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Michael_Novakhov shared this story from "Trump and rico act statute" - Google News. Why The Trump Organization Now Risks Being Charged As A ... Forbes - Mar 6, 2019 “Racketeering activity” under the RICO Act compris...

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Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Just Security. Twitter debates erupted this week on a surprising topic: What are the relative advantages of charging racketeering versus conspiracy when considering wide-ranging criminal conduct ov...

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Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Vox - All. Part of Understanding the Trump era Donald Trump says a lot of things that aren’t true, often shamelessly so, and it’s tempting to call him a liar. But that’s not quite...

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22 MS-13 Members Charged In Murders Of Seven People Hacked ...

The Daily Caller-Jul 16, 2019

The Trump administration has made MS-13 a major focus of his crackdown on illegal ... under Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute. ... The collaborative law enforcement effort solved several murder cases and dealt ...

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A New Idea for Fighting Chinese Theft of American Defense Technology

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In 2017, President Trump released Executive Order 13773, which tasked the ... the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute, and the law ...

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When Power Runs Amuck

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The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the law that governs ... and Comey weaponized the FBI, CIA, and NSA against the Trump candidacy ... RICO-Treason, Conspiracy, Obstruction, Wire Fraud, Mail Fraud, all rolled into one violation!

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The Early Edition: June 20, 2019

Just Security-Jun 20, 2019

Could Trump use the Sept. 11 “War Law” to attack Iran without Congressional approval? Charlie Savage provides an analysis at the New York Times.

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Why The Trump Organization Now Risks Being Charged As A Criminal Enterprise
Sunday July 21st, 2019 at 9:04 AM

The guilty have a head start, and retribution is always slow of foot, but it catches up.
—Horace, Odes, Book III, Ode 2

I have already suggested "What The Mueller Report Will Say" about the Russia investigation, including the possibility that President Trump will be found to have become involved, wittingly or unwittingly, in multiple criminal conspiracies. But President Trump’s legal troubles are far from over, even if, as some implausibly suggest, that the Mueller Report turns out to be a “dud.”

Beyond Russia, Michael Cohen’s testimony last week before the House Oversight Committee pointed to the possibility of wide-ranging criminality within the Trump Organization before, during and after the 2016 presidential campaign, including election finance violations, bank fraud, charity fraud, tax fraud, insurance fraud, obstruction of justice and suborning perjury.

Michael Cohen, testifies before the House Oversight Committee (Photo by Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

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Some of these possible crimes are already under investigation by relevant prosecutors, such as the Southern District of New York, State and District authorities. Just yesterday, we learned that New York state regulators have subpoenaed documents from Trump Organization’s insurance broker. Investigations are also under way for financial irregularities in Trump’s inaugural committee, while Congress has called on the FBI to investigate the employment of undocumented workers at Trump’s properties.

The Trump Organization As A Possible RICO Enterprise

Even if only some of these multiple crimes were to be proven, then the Trump Organization would be at risk of being charged as a “RICO enterprise”, i.e. a racketeering enterprise within the meaning of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly referred to as the RICO Act. If that were to happen, then the Trump Organization, its leaders and its members could, as the New York Times suggests, be subject to draconian financial and other penalties, that could threaten the Trump Organization's very existence.

Trump Tower in New York, Photographer: Allison Joyce/Bloomberg

What is significant for the situation of the Trump Organization is that the RICO Act allows the conviction of leaders of a criminal enterprise for crimes they ordered others to do or assisted them in doing, even if they themselves didn't commit the criminal acts.

Under the RICO Act, when an organization is found to have committed at least two acts of racketeering activity within the last ten years, then prosecutors can seek to charge the organization as a criminal enterprise and pursue everyone involved in the organization as part of an organized conspiracy.

“Racketeering activity” under the RICO Act comprises some 35 types of criminal activity including bribery, extortion, fraud, wire fraud, obstruction of justice, witness tampering, money laundering, and harboring aliens, i.e. precisely the kind of criminal activity that Michael Cohen’s testimony for the Oversight Committee pointed to.

Under the RICO Act, a person who has committed at least two acts of racketeering activity within a 10-year period can be charged with racketeering if a person’s acts relate in one of four ways to the enterprise:

the person invested the proceeds of the pattern of racketeering activity in the enterprise; or
the person acquired or maintained an interest in, or control of, the enterprise through the pattern of racketeering activity; or
the person conducted or participated in the affairs of the enterprise "through" the pattern of racketeering activity; or
the person conspired to do one of the above.

In essence, the enterprise can be either the 'prize,' 'instrument,' 'victim,' or 'perpetrator' of the racketeers, or all of the above.

Those found guilty of racketeering can be sentenced up to 20 years in prison for each racketeering count. In addition, the racketeer must forfeit all ill-gotten gains and interest in any business obtained through a pattern of "racketeering activity." The RICO Act also allows the recovery of treble damages(damages in triple the amount of actual/compensatory damages).

There are also preventive measures to protect the assets of a RICO enterprise:

When the U.S. Attorney decides to indict someone under RICO, they have the option of seeking a pre-trial restraining order or injunction to temporarily seize a defendant's assets and prevent the transfer of potentially forfeitable property, as well as require the defendant to put up a performance bond. This provision was placed in the law because the owners of Mafia-related shell corporations often absconded with the assets. An injunction and/or performance bond ensures that there is something to seize in the event of a guilty verdict.

Is Cohen Credible?

Cohen’s testimony pointed to multiple possible crimes. Is he credible? As widely noted, Republican members of the Oversight Committee spent most of their time attacking Cohen’s credibility rather than defending President Trump or the Trump Organization. This may have been prompted by the fact that Donald Trump himself has made more than 9,000 false or misleading statements since taking office. Cohen made the plausible argument that working for such a habitual liar required becoming a liar himself. Cohen admitted in his testimony that he was a fool to have done so and warned Republicans not to fall into the same trap.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings,(Photo by Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

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Already at the Committee hearing, Cohen provided documentary evidence corroborating his testimony, and offered to provide more. Federal investigators already have access to some 290,000 documents and files they seized in their April raid in 2018, as well as the scores of recordings that Cohen says he made of people during his tenure working for Trump.

A Quinnipiac University poll has found that Cohen came across in the Committee hearing as plausible—indeed more credible than the president himself. One reason is that Cohen’s demeanor was thoughtful and seemingly repentant. He didn’t attack Trump on everything. For instance, he declined to say that he had proof of Trump’s collusion with Russia, although saying it was “possible” and he debunked the Steele dossier’s claim that he himself had met with Russians in Prague in 2016.

It seems that for most viewers, Cohen presented an all-too plausible picture of life working for Donald Trump, where lying and intimidation were the regular modus operandi. Cohen estimated around 500 such incidents in his ten-year stint with Trump.

Using RICO Against The Mafia And White Collar Crime

The RICO Act was introduced in 1970 to prosecute the Mafia as well as others who were actively engaged in organized crime. It was successfully used by the Southern District of New York against five leading Mafia families in the 1980s. Several top leaders of crime families effectively got life sentences. By 2000, virtually all of the top leaders of the New York Mafia had been sent to prison.

The RICO Act has also been used against white-collar crime.

On 29 March 1989 American financier Michael Milken was indicted on 98 counts of racketeering and fraud relating to an investigation into an allegation of insider trading and other offenses. Milken was accused of using a wide-ranging network of contacts to manipulate stock and bond prices… Milken pleaded guilty to six lesser felonies of securities fraud and tax evasion rather than risk spending the rest of his life in prison and ended up serving 22 months in prison.

On September 7, 1988, Milken's employer, Drexel Burnham Lambert, was threatened with RICO charges respondeat superior, the legal doctrine that corporations are responsible for their employees' crimes. Drexel avoided RICO charges by entering an Alford plea to lesser felonies of stock parking and stock manipulation… Years later, Drexel president and CEO Fred Joseph said that Drexel had no choice but to plead guilty because "a financial institution cannot survive a RICO indictment."

The Analogue To Cohen Is Joseph Valachi, Not John Dean

Thus, while many predicted that Michael Cohen’s testimony before the Oversight Committee would resemble that of John Dean’s testimony against President Richard Nixon in 1973, Garrett M. Graff argues in the New York Times that Cohen’s testimony resembled that of the mobster Joseph Valachi turning on the Cosa Nostra, around 1963.

Joseph Valachi, mafia informer. (Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

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The Valachi hearings, led by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, opened the country’s eyes for the first time to the Mafia, as the witness broke ‘omertá’ — the code of silence — to speak in public about “this thing of ours,” Cosa Nostra. He explained just how “organized” organized crime actually was — with soldiers, capos, godfathers and even the “Commission,” the governing body of the various Mafia families.

Fighting the Mafia posed a uniquely hard challenge for investigators. Mafia families were involved in numerous distinct crimes and schemes, over years- long periods, all for the clear benefit of its leadership, but those very leaders were tough to prosecute because they were rarely involved in the day-to-day crime. They spoke in their own code, rarely directly ordering a lieutenant to do something illegal, but instead offering oblique instructions or expressing general wishes that their lieutenants simply knew how to translate into action.

The RICO Act was passed in 1970 to help solve these problems.

Trump’s Mobster Vocabulary And Actions

It is unnerving in this context that Trump himself, even as president, uses the language of the Mafia. In December 2018, Trump called Cohen a “rat” in a tweet for agreeing to cooperate with investigators. The term “rat” has a specific meaning in the underworld. “Rats” are not despised for being liars. On the contrary, “rats” are reviled and punished by their fellow criminals precisely because they tell the truth. They break the vow of silence (the “omerta”) and reveal the criminal secrets of the organization to the authorities.

US President Donald Trump (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP)

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The context for President Trump applying the term “rat” to Michael Cohen, was that Cohen told a federal court that Trump had directed him to violate the law by buying the silence of two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump before he became president.

In yet another sign of Trump’s unpresidential, underworld mindset and vocabulary, Trump has criticized the practice of criminals making deals with prosecutors. “It’s called flipping and it almost ought to be illegal,” Trump has said, apparently siding with the interests of the criminal’s collaborators ahead of the State. “It’s not a fair thing.”

The president’s tweet that Cohen’s father-in-law would suffer if Cohen gave testimony to Congress also demonstrated a strong mobster vibe.

“Cohen spun a complicated tale of greed, loyalty, intimidation, and family ties that would be at home in a Martin Scorsese movie,” writes Heather Timmons in Quartz. “Cohen said he was called upon to harass journalists and people Trump owed money, while protecting the president’s children and lying to the president’s wife and to his own spouse.”

The fact that Trump and his employees talk and act like mobsters doesn’t by itself prove that Trump is one. But it doesn’t help the credibility of his denials.

The Trump Organization’s Legal Peril Under RICO

If some of the crimes to which Cohen’s testimony pointed are proven, then there is a risk that the Trump Organization could be charged as a racketeering enterprise within the meaning of the RICO Act.

In many cases, the threat of a RICO indictment can force defendants to plead guilty to lesser charges, in part because the seizure of assets would make it difficult to pay a defense attorney. Despite its harsh provisions, the RICO Act simplifies the task of proving a case in court, since it focuses on patterns of behavior rather than specific criminal acts.

Cohen's testimony described a culture of lying at the heart of the Trump Organization:

Everybody’s job at the Trump Organization is to protect Mr. Trump. Every day, most of us knew we were coming and we were going to lie for him about something. That became the norm. Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates. Mr. Trump doesn’t give orders. He speaks in code. And I understand that code.

The RICO Act was specifically designed, as Graff explains, “to charge the bosses at the top of crime syndicates—people a step or two removed from the actual crimes committed, those whose will is made real, even without a direct order. Exactly, it appears, as Mr. Trump did at the top of his family business.”

Cohen’s testimony is also consistent with Trump’s behavior with former F.B.I. director James Comey. Comey testified two years ago that Trump never directly ordered him to drop the Michael Flynn investigation, but he made it clear that this is what he wanted. The president took Comey aside, and, with no one else present, asked Comey if he could “let this go.” Comey testified: “I took it as, this is what he wants me to do.”

The Vulnerability Of The Trump Organization

The sheer number and breadth of the investigations into the Trump Organization indicates how vulnerable the Trump Organization is now to a RICO prosecution. The possible crimes that Cohen’s public testimony pointed to are enough criminal activity to build a racketeering case.

Moreover, RICO allows prosecutors to stitch together 10 years of racketeering activity into a single set of charges, which, as it happens, is the period for which Cohen worked closely with Trump.

Indicting the Trump Organization as a “criminal enterprise” would enable prosecutors to sidestep the question of whether a sitting president can be indicted in office.

Prosecutors could lay out a whole pattern of criminal activity, indicting numerous players while leaving the president as a named unindicted coconspirator. Such an action would allow investigators to make public all the known activity for Congress and the public to consider as part of impeachment hearings or reelection. It would also activate the forfeiture tools for prosecutors to seize the Trump Organization’s assets and cut off its income streams.

While impeachment would obviously be a severe personal sanction for Donald Trump, convicting the Trump Organization as a RICO enterprise could be far worse. If Trump is "only" impeached, he could always go back to his family business, sadder but perhaps wiser. But if the Trump Organization were to be convicted as a criminal enterprise under the RICO Act, there might be no business for Trump to go back to.

And read also:

What The Mueller Report Will Say

Why Trump's National Emergency Sets An Alarming Precedent

How Trump's Economic Chickens Are Finally Coming Home To Roost

The Strange Places Trump Gets His Intelligence From

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· · · · · · · · · · ·

As the Mueller Investigation Closes, New York Investigations Shift into High Gear
Sunday July 21st, 2019 at 9:02 AM

Just Security

On Friday March 21, 2019, the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller came to a close when he delivered his final report to Attorney General William Barr. Two days later, Barr informed Congress via a four page letter that Special Counsel Robert Mueller did not find a conspiracy between the Trump 2016 campaign and the Russia government to interfere in the 2016 election, and that Barr concluded the President had not obstructed justice.

While national leaders debate the conclusion of Robert Mueller’s investigation, and the timing of the release of the underlying report, the State of New York’s investigations into the Trump Organization have picked up steam.

As I write about in my forthcoming book Political Brands, state prosecutors are following up on allegations of wrongdoing made by Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer, in public congressional testimony. For example, Cohen stated in his written testimony, “It was my experience that Mr. Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes, such as trying to be listed among the wealthiest people in Forbes, and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes.” As Cohen explained during his live testimony, Trump allegedly inflated his assets when he was seeking a loan from Deutsche Bank to purchase the Buffalo Bills.

Lying to get on a Forbes list of billionaires is not a crime. But lying to a bank to get a huge loan could be a financial crime under both federal and state statutes.

So far the New York Times has reported that New York Attorney General Tish James has opened a civil investigation and has subpoenaed Deutsche Bank — a Trump lender — to provide her office with “loan applications, mortgages, lines of credit and other financing transactions in connection with the Trump International Hotel in Washington; the Trump National Doral outside Miami; and the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago…” Depending on what’s in the bank’s papers, this flurry of activity could be the predicate of a criminal investigation into how the Trump Organization conducted business.

Meanwhile, as I outlined in my last post, the New York Attorney General was also at the forefront of investigating the Donald J. Trump Foundation for malfeasance including being used to inappropriately pay commercial debts and illegally used during the Trump 2016 campaign, where foundations are not allowed to participate.

The NYAG sued to have the Foundation closed in June 2018. In November 2018, a judge agreed that it was appropriate for the NYAG to bring this suit even though it named the sitting president as one of the defendants, along with Trump’s three adult children, Ivanka, Eric and Don Jr. (Trump had asked the suit to close the foundation to be dismissed; this order from the judge citing Clinton v. Jones refused to do so).

In December 2018, the Trump Foundation signed a stipulation with the New York Attorney General agreeing to dissolve the charity under judicial supervision. Thus, the remaining money in the Foundation will be distributed for actual charitable purposes. It isn’t clear what the authorities will do with the Foundation’s painted portrait of Trump that was at the center of the allegations of malfeasance.

One thing that remains unresolved is whether the judge will grant the NYAG’s original request to bar the president and his adult children from running charities in New York.

Another open matter is referrals to federal law enforcement. The NYAG “sent referral letters to the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Election Commission, identifying possible violations of federal law for further investigation and legal action by those federal agencies.” Whether the IRS or the FEC will do anything about the Foundation’s alleged violations of law is unknown at this time. And while the Foundation matter may merely be resolved as a civil matter, it is still possible that New York State could peruse the Foundation criminally as well.

State investigations into the Trump orbit continue apace without threat of presidential interference because of the American system of federalism. Trump cannot stop or control investigations into state crimes, nor can he pardon state crimes.

As James Madison wrote in Federalist 51, “ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” in describing checks and balances in the United States government. One of those checks is that in the federal government each of the three co-equal branches will guard against the expansion of power of the others. But this check and balance is also at work between the federal government and the fifty states. The ambitions of the states and their attorneys general are an additional check on the ambitions of the president. The lack of pardon power over state crimes is particularly important. While the President Trump could seek to pardon away federal crimes that touched close to him or his inner circle, he simply cannot pardon a state crime no matter who committed it—whether that’s himself or his kids.

Image: Trump Tower stands on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan on August 24, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

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Why One of Trump’s Biggest Legal Threats Is New York’s Attorney General | FiveThirtyEight
Sunday July 21st, 2019 at 9:02 AM

Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux – FiveThirtyEight

, at

Why One of Trump’s Biggest Legal Threats Is New York’s Attorney General

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This is the Trump Docket, where we track some of the most important legal cases of the Trump presidency and how their results could shape presidential power. Questions, comments, or thoughts about cases to cover? Email us here.

After two years of legal wrangling, the Trump Foundation will soon be no more. Last month, in the midstof a dramatic month for cases that stem from President Trump’s pre-presidency life, a judge signed offon a plan to shutter Trump’s much-criticized personal foundation. Under the new agreement, the foundation will be dissolved under court supervision.

In effect, the deal implies that the foundation cannot be trusted to disburse its remaining $1.7 million to legitimate nonprofits. But even though the foundation is dissolving, the lawsuit against the foundation will continue, with the New York attorney general seeking damages for the foundation’s alleged“extensive and persistent violations of state and federal law,” including the illegal use of foundation money to pay off legal settlements, buy portraits of Trump, and promote Trump’s 2016 campaign.

The December settlement is an important reminder of the risk that the state of New York poses for Trump. In particular, New York is uniquely well-positioned to go after Trump where it could hurt him most — through his businesses. In fact, New York has been one of the most significant and I’d argue most underrated legal hazards for Trump since he began his campaign for president. Here are three reasons why.

New York has jurisdiction over Trump’s family businesses

Pursuing legal challenges against Trump has become something of a sport among Democratic attorneys general over the past two years, but most of these fights focus on actions taken by Trump’s administration rather than matters that implicate him personally. But because Trump’s businesses and his presidential campaign are registered in New York, state officials have the authority to investigate and potentially prosecute him for violations of state law.

Trump’s attorneys have argued in a separate case that involves a former “Apprentice” contestant who’s suing Trump for defamation in New York that as president, he should be immune to lawsuits in state courts. It’s an open constitutional question, but two judges have already come down against Trump, saying that when unofficial conduct is involved, there’s no reason to exempt the president from state lawsuits. The case is still being appealed, but even if it’s decided in Trump’s favor, legal actions could still be brought against his businesses or children.

Worse still for Trump, state prosecutions are pardon-proof, since the president’s power to grant clemency extends only to federal crimes. This means that while Trump could pardon an associate or family member implicated in, for example, the Mueller investigation (or even try to pardon himself), his get-out-of-jail-free card won’t work in New York. There’s even been a push to amend New York’s double jeopardy laws to make it possible for someone convicted (and, hypothetically, pardoned) under federal law to be prosecuted for corresponding violations of state law.

State prosecutors are especially tough on financial misconduct

Then there’s the fact that the offenses where Trump has the greatest potential liability in New York — for example, tax or other kinds of corporate fraud — are ones the New York attorney general’s office is particularly adept at handling. Over the past 15 years, New York has steadily stepped up its prosecutions of financial crimes. “Fraud cases are the linchpin of what most attorneys general do, and the laws are particularly strong in New York,” said Paul Nolette, a political science professor at Marquette University who studies state attorneys general.

Trump knows this firsthand, because of a previous tangle with former attorney general Eric Schneiderman. The state sued Trump University for defrauding customers in a case that was settled for $25 million. And because Trump ran for office, opening his businesses to a whole new level of national scrutiny, the Trump Foundation lawsuit may have only been the beginning. Before he resigned last year, Schneiderman was reportedly cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller on matters related to Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, and state tax officials saidthey’re looking into potential massive tax fraud by the Trump family after reporting from The New York Times last fall. Meanwhile, New York’s new attorney general, Letitia James campaigned on a promise to hold the president accountable across a wide range of issues, including his businesses and finances.

“The Mueller investigation is the shiny object everyone is watching,” Berit Berger, a former federal prosecutor and the executive director of Columbia Law School’s Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity, told me. “But under everyone’s nose are what look like much more straightforward violations of state law, including some pretty flagrant tax fraud. Depending on what happens with Mueller, that could be what actually sinks the big ship.”

New York prosecutors may have the clearest shot at indicting Trump while he’s president

Finally, legal experts told me that if New York officials have sufficient evidence against Trump and the appetite for a protracted legal battle, they may have the best chance at testing a high-stakes constitutional unknown: Is it possible to issue a criminal indictment against a sitting president?

Unlike their federal counterparts, state prosecutors are not bound by a Department of Justice policy that says that a sitting president is immune from indictment (a former president is fair game). “I think it would be hard for a judge to tell New York that it can’t pursue charges for criminal violations of its own state law by Donald Trump that occurred before he was president,” said Andy Wright, former associate counsel to President Obama.

Not everyone I spoke with agreed with this view, however. Andrew Coan, a law professor at the University of Arizona and the author of a new book about special prosecutors, said there might even be a stronger argument against allowing state attorneys general to indict a president. “The attorney general of New York only speaks for her state’s voters, not the country as a whole,” he said. “So it seems strange to let that person do something that would significantly impair the president’s ability to serve.”

But even without an indictment — which would unleash an epic constitutional showdown — New York could still threaten Trump’s business empire through civil suits or prosecutions of his family members and inflict a significant amount of political damage on the president in the process.

None of this, of course, answers one key question: If New York is such a danger to Trump, why haven’t prosecutors or the attorney general filed charges or a lawsuit against the president or his businesses?

The Trump Foundation case is actually a good example of why one shouldn’t read too much into the state’s relative inaction. Reports that the foundation was being used for Trump’s personal benefit began while he was still running for office, but the lawsuit wasn’t filed until 18 months after Trump took office. (There is currently one other case in New York involving Trump — the lawsuit from the former “Apprentice” contestant — that we’re tracking as part of the Trump Docket.) But New York officials could be waiting until after Mueller’s probe is concluded to take further legal action — or they might be investigating other instances of potential corporate fraud that we aren’t yet aware of.

Other cases

Pre-presidency Trump

Attorneys for Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chair who was recently accused of violating his plea agreement with special counsel Robert Mueller, failed to fully redact sensitive details from a recent legal filing in the case. As a result, we learned that Manafort was accused of sharing presidential campaign data with a business associate who has links to Russian intelligence, and that during the campaign he discussed a plan for peace in Ukraine — which Russia and its allies were advocating as a path to lifting Ukraine-related sanctions on Russia. On Tuesday, a subsequent, correctly redacted filingfrom Mueller spelled out a few more details, including a confirmation that Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Manafort aide with alleged ties to Russian intelligence, is still a focus of the investigation.
Sentencing may be postponed for Rick Gates, a former Trump campaign aide and business partner of Manafort, who has been cooperating with Mueller’s investigation. Prosecutors requested a two-month delay in his sentencing because Gates is still assisting with “several ongoing investigations.”

President Trump

Although the case is paused until the partial government shutdown ends, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals scheduled oral arguments in the District of Columbia and Maryland’s emoluments lawsuit against Trump for the court’s March 19-21 session.

The Trump administration

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the lower court’s injunction in a case involving Trump’s ban on transgender military service members, concluding that the previous judge had incorrectly concluded that the policy was a “blanket ban on transgender service.” The decision had no immediate impact, though, because three other lower courts still have an injunction against it.
A second trial over the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 Census concluded in California on Friday. During the trial, an expert testified that the question would deter Latinos and noncitizens from responding to the Census.
A trial also ended last week in a case involving the Trump administration’s decision to revoke temporary protected status for Haitian immigrants. During the proceedings, Trump’s use of the word “shithole” to describe Haiti and other countries came up repeatedly. Attorneys for the Haitians are arguing that the decision to end the policy was spurred by racial bias.
The Supreme Court rejected an unusual challenge to Matthew Whitaker’s appointment as acting attorney general last November. In a case involving separate issues related to gun rights, the plaintiff and his lawyers asked the Supreme Court to remove Whitaker’s name from the case — arguing that his appointment was illegal — and instead name Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as a party in the case. Without spelling out their reasons, the justices denied the request on Monday.
A district court judge in New York struck down the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, saying Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross illegally violated federal law when he added the question. Notably, the judge said that while Ross wasn’t honest about why he added the citizenship question, the plaintiffs hadn’t proved that his aim was discriminatory. The Trump administration is expected to appeal the decision to the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, and ultimately, the case could end up before the Supreme Court.

Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux is a senior writer for FiveThirtyEight. @ameliatd

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Trump and rico act statute - Google Search
Sunday July 21st, 2019 at 9:00 AM

"Trump And Rico Act Statute" - Google News

Story image for Trump and rico act statute from Forbes

Why The Trump Organization Now Risks Being Charged As A ...

Forbes-Mar 6, 2019

“Racketeering activity” under the RICO Act comprises some 35 types .... that Trump had directed him to violate the law by buying the silence of ...

Ruminations on RICO and Asset Forfeiture in the Trump Business ...

Just Security-Jan 4, 2019

The settlement of fraud allegations against Trump University could also ... But putting those questions to the side, the substantive law of RICO ...

Trump Investigations and the RICO vs Conspiracy Puzzle

Just Security-Mar 14, 2019

State Law Crimes: RICO makes it illegal to engage in a pattern of crimes that include, among other things, a long list of state crimes — which ...

Story image for Trump and rico act statute from New York Times

How Giuliani Might Take Down Trump

New York Times-Mar 4, 2019

Any onetime Mafia investigator who listened to the Trump “fixer” ... and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO, a law designed to ...

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Trump Investigations and the RICO vs Conspiracy Puzzle
Sunday July 21st, 2019 at 8:59 AM

Just Security

Twitter debates erupted this week on a surprising topic: What are the relative advantages of charging racketeering versus conspiracy when considering wide-ranging criminal conduct over a long period? Would the analysis be different for a mix of financial crimes like wire fraud, tax fraud and money laundering than more nationally significant crimes — like defrauding the United States by defeating the lawful functions of the Federal Election Commission?

This is the kind of question I might expect to hear around the water cooler in the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s Office, or across the river in the Southern District of New York — and maybe in a few other Department of Justice (DOJ) outposts in major cities.

But trending on Twitter? Such is the new normal of the Trump era.

The debate flows from substantial overlap among racketeering and conspiracy.

Prosecutor shot selection — that is, the decision which crime to charge — depends on a mix of factual and legal considerations. In addition, prosecutors consider practical realities like the hassle involved in approvals up the food chain that depend on which statute is charged.

User-Friendly Conspiracy Statutes

Those considerations tend to lead prosecutors to seek indictment for conspiracy rather than the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) act when confronted with facts supporting both a conspiracy and racketeering conviction. That is why many, if not most, of the drug trafficking organizations charged in federal court could be charged as racketeering enterprises — but very few are.

The main reason prosecutors opt for conspiracy is that it is easier to prove. To convict for conspiracy, the government need only prove the existence of an agreement among two or more persons to violate the law, the defendant’s joinder in that agreement, and commission of at least one act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

In contrast, to convict a defendant for racketeering, the government must prove much more. Under RICO, the government must prove the existence of “an association in fact,” which engaged in a pattern of racketeering activity, including commission of at least two predicate acts — that is, crimes from a specific list set forth in the statute. It must further show that the predicate acts were related, happened within a ten-year period, and threatened to continue. And, of course, the evidence must demonstrate that the defendant was an employee or associate of the enterprise who either conducted or took part in the conduct of the pattern of racketeering activities. As a result, the jury instructions for conspiracy are significantly more simple — and easier to satisfy — than the jury instructions for racketeering.

Some Racketeering Advantages

But sometimes racketeering charges are the best course. So what drives a decision to charge RICO?

There are a couple of factors that might lead toward the path of RICO:

State Law Crimes: RICO makes it illegal to engage in a pattern of crimes that include, among other things, a long list of state crimes — which means that you can charge an enterprise that commits these crimes in federal court, even if the underlying crimes are purely state law crimes. So, for example, a gang that commits a series of murders as part of its operations can be charged as a racketeering enterprise even if there is no federal hook for these murders. This has been a primary factor in driving federal RICO prosecution of Italian mafia organized crime cases in New York over the past 40 years.

Statute of Limitations: RICO allows prosecutors to charge crimes that happened so long ago that the law does not usually permit them to be prosecuted any longer — provided the enterprise’s pattern of activity extends back to when the crime happened. This can be handy for prosecuting criminal enterprises that have persisted for years without being held accountable.

Association Evidence: With RICO’s higher standard of proof comes greater latitude in the evidence admissible at trial. For example, prosecutors might offer evidence of defendants spending time together at a social club to prove the existence of the “association in fact.” Ravenite, the club where John Gotti hung out, featured prominently in his prosecution.

Avoiding the Multiple Conspiracies Trap: Charging a complicated conspiracy with many underlying crimes runs the risk the jury might conclude that there were multiple conspiracies, not one overarching conspiracy. Multiple conspiracies can mean there isn’t a single agreement to violate the law — and thus the defendants aren’t guilty of the charged conspiracy. RICO avoids this risk because the whole structure of the racketeering statute allows charging an enterprise that encompasses a broad pattern of crime.

Telling the Story: Most importantly, RICO is sometimes just the best way to tell the story — which is how you win over a jury. RICO was adopted to empower prosecutors to ferret out organized crime root and branch, from kingpin to henchman, by criminalizing participation in the sprawling enterprises that do not fit neatly into traditional concepts of conspiracy, and which are not defined by a single crime or type of crime. For this type of criminal enterprise, RICO is the only fit because it allows the prosecutor to weave together all facets of that complex enterprise with a common thread.

One Final Barrier to RICO: the DOJ Approval Process

There’s one last consideration that weighs on prosecutors: the approval process. Because of the potency of RICO and the risk of abuse, RICO charges must be reviewed and approved by the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section at Main Justice in Washington, D.C. The process is unpleasant for the front-line prosecutor — with folks who know little about the case aggressively second-guessing investigative and charging decisions. Conspiracy charges require no such approval from Washington.

Where Does that Leave Us?

So what do all these considerations mean for the various investigations into the Trump family and the people around them? It mostly depends on the facts. The publicly-reported allegations include a dizzying array of possible crimes, spanning decades — insurance and tax fraud, money laundering, bribes of foreign officials, and campaign finance violations, perhaps involving foreign governments.

No statute, conspiracy or racketeering, could cover that full gamut of potential crimes. If the Trump Organization truly indulged in the years of financial crimes and cover ups that some have alleged, racketeering seems like a strong fit. But it would be a stretch to fit campaign-related crimes into that racketeering enterprise absent a claim that the Trump Organization is not only a racketeering enterprise, but has effectively taken over the U.S. government.

Conspiracy has proven to be the prime vehicle for the Special Counsel — with good reason. While it doesn’t carry the satisfaction of weaving the full story with just one thread, using a series of conspiracies lightens the load for proving the case, and tells the story in bite-sized chapters in the most efficient and effective way, without introducing the challenges of Main Justice pre-clearance that would come with RICO.

The Southern District, on the other hand, is a group of prosecutors and agents well-practiced in the art of RICO. And their investigative threads — hush money and other suspect financial transactions — more readily lend themselves to racketeering charges. Where they go remains to be seen.

Image: People outside of Trump Tower after it re-opened to the public following the departure of U.S. President Donald Trump on August 16, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

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rico act statute - Google Search
Sunday July 21st, 2019 at 8:57 AM

7:51 AM 7/21/2019 - Investigate Melania Knauss Trump, and the whole Trump-Kushner Crime Family!
Sunday July 21st, 2019 at 8:08 AM

The Trump Investigations Blog By Michael Novakhov - Review Of News And Opinions

7:51 AM 7/21/2019

Investigate Melania Knauss Trump, and the whole Trump-Kushner Crime Family!

FBI: Investigate Melania Knauss Trump for possible ties, connections, and communications with the Foreign Intelligence Services, including via Jeffrey Epstein. She is not protected by any of the executive privileges, and the criminal charges can be brought against her, (with all the side or mitigating issues as being irrelevant). Investigate the whole Trump-Kushner Crime Family.

This had to be done more than 5 years ago, but is not too late now. I do not know if it was worth to wait all this time and to allow this situation to unfold as it did, with the enormous "soft factors" (prestige, standing, confusion, etc.) damage.

I think that we are inching towards the clear and true formulation of the issues, as expressed at various points, and in various actions, by Mr. Mueller, Mr. Comey, the US Intelligence Community, and the logic and focus of the Inquiry, which shifted from the general criminal and the Counterintelligence Investigations to the specific anti-Mob investigations, mainly by SDNY, underRICO Act statute. Apparently, the legal system and the regular laws were not designed for this type of the situations.

We are witnessing the attempt to take over the US Government and State structures by the Transnational Organized Crime, under the guise of the Donald Trump's Presidency.

This working hypothesis has to be elaborated further, maybe always doubted (this is our human nature, to doubt the bad things), but it should never be discounted, and the dangers should not be underestimated.

Michael Novakhov

7:56 AM 7/21/2019

___________________________________________

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Sunday July 21st, 2019 at 6:54 AM

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Sunday July 21st, 2019 at 6:52 AM

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Whom are you Trump, trying to bullshit? The American People? - Google Search
Sunday July 21st, 2019 at 6:09 AM

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Whom are you Trump, trying to bullshit? The American People? - Google Search
Sunday July 21st, 2019 at 6:09 AM

The Bullshitter-in-Chief - Vox
Sunday July 21st, 2019 at 6:06 AM

Vox - All

Part of Understanding the Trump era

Donald Trump says a lot of things that aren’t true, often shamelessly so, and it’s tempting to call him a liar.

But that’s not quite right. As the Princeton University philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt put it in a famous essay, to lie presumes a kind of awareness of and interest in the truth — and the goal is to convince the audience that the false thing you are saying is in fact true. Trump, more often than not, isn’t interested in convincing anyone of anything. He’s a bullshitter who simply doesn’t care.

In Trump's own book, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, our now-president describes himself in a way that Frankfurt could hold up as the quintessential example of a bullshitter. Trump writes that he’s an "I say what’s on my mind" kind of guy. Pages later, he explains that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily an honest guy.

"If you do things a little differently," he writes of the media, "if you say outrageous things and fight back, they love you." The free publicity that results from deliberately provoking controversy is invaluable. And if a bit of exaggeration is what it takes, Trump doesn’t have a problem with that. "When," he asks "was the last time you saw a sign hanging outside a pizzeria claiming ‘The fourth best pizza in the world’?!"

When Trump says something like he’s just learned that Barack Obama ordered his phones wiretapped, he’s not really trying to persuade people that this is true. It’s a test to see who around him will debase themselves to repeat it blindly. There’s no greater demonstration of devotion.

In his first and best-known book, The Art of the Deal, Trump writes a passage that is one of the most remarkable ever set to paper by a future American president. It’s deeply telling about Trump’s views on the distinction between integrity and loyalty. Trump sings the praises of Roy Cohn — Joe McCarthy’s infamous legal attack dog later turned Trump mentor:

Just compare that with all the hundreds of “respectable” guys who make careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty. They only care about what’s best for them and don’t think twice about stabbing a friend in the back if the friend becomes a problem. What I liked most about Roy Cohn was that he would do just the opposite. Roy was the kind of guy who’d be there at your hospital bed long after everyone else had bailed out, literally standing by you to the death.

Trump, ironically, would not stand by Cohn’s deathbed as he perished of AIDS; instead, he disavowed his friend. For Trump, loyalty is a way to size up those around him, suss out friend from foe. It is not a quality he cares to embrace in his personal life. Now president, it’s the same in his political life.

The two passages taken together illuminate an important facet of Trump’s personality, and of his presidency. He’s a man who doesn’t care much about the truth. He’s a man who cares deeply about loyalty. The two qualities merge in the way he wields bullshit. His flagrant lies serve as a loyalty test.

Trump’s tactics, in a different context, would be understood as typical authoritarian propaganda — regimes often propound nonsense more to enforce expectations on their citizens than because they are expecting anyone to actually believe it. The United States isn’t the kind of place where that can work. There’s a free and vibrant press and political debate operating wholly outside the world of Trump’s bullshit. But by filling the heads of his fans — and the media outlets they consume — with a steady diet of bullshit, Trump is nonetheless succeeding in endlessly reinscribing polarization in American politics, corroding America’s governing institutions, and poisoning civic life.

Harry Frankfurt’s theory of bullshit

As Frankfurt put it in his groundbreaking essay “On Bullshit,” “one of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”

Frankfurt attempts to give the term definition that distinguishes the bullshitter from the liar, with the most salient distinction being that the liar is genuinely trying to trick you.

“The bullshitter,” by contrast, “may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be.”

The liar wants to be seen as the one telling the truth. The bullshitter just doesn’t care. That’s Trump. During the course of the 2016 campaign, he said over and over again that America is “the highest-taxed nation in the world,” which isn’t even remotely close to being true. But he kept saying it, despite having been called out repeatedly, and then he said it again in a recent interview with the Economist.

Trump says, over and over again, that he won one of the greatest Electoral College landslides in history. It’s not true, it’s obviously not true to anyone who bothers to look it up or remembers any past presidential elections, and it’s not even remotely clear why it’s important. But Trump keeps on saying it.

This is just how Frankfurt defines bullshit:

For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

This is a perfect portrait of a typical Trump statement. His assertions about policy matters are often so garbled as to make it nearly impossible to work out what he’s even trying to say in order to evaluate its truth or falsity.

The reason is that Trump is often completely indifferent to accuracy. His administration, like all administrations, sometimes tries to sell the public on something or other using tactics that are at times deceptive. But where he breaks from the mold is in the sheer quantity of things he seems to say for no reason at all, utterly outside the context of a planned sales pitch.

The annals of Trumpdown are simply littered with this kind of casual, fundamentally pointless falsehood:

He told the Economist that he invented the phrase “prime the pump.”
He says China stopped manipulating its currency only after he won the election.
He says “millions” of illegal voters cost him the popular vote.
He claims to have had an incredibly productive first 100 days in office.
He says labor force dropouts are counted as employed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
He says Germany and other NATO members owe money to the United States.

None of this is useful in moving the ball forward on any kind of policy goal. And indeed, Republicans on Capitol Hill and even in the executive branch typically groan about these outbursts of Trumpian bullshit that throw their work into chaos and tend to at least temporarily derail the GOP’s substantive goals. But Trump not only keeps bullshitting, he tends to demand that his team offer a zealous defense of whatever bullshit he happens to spout on any given day — putting staffers and legislative allies in the untenable position of defending the indefensible.

The function of bullshit in the Trump regime

Trump launched his term in office by dispatching White House press secretary Sean Spicer to deliver an inaugural press briefing dedicated to disputing clear photographic evidence about crowd size.

It seemed insane, and one popular interpretation was that Trump had, in fact, lost his marbles and simply couldn’t stand the blow to his ego implied by mocking media coverage. But George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen argues that this kind of thing can serve a strategic role.

The key issues are trust and loyalty. By asking subordinates to echo his bullshit, Trump accomplishes two goals:

He tests the loyalty of his subordinates. In Cowen’s words, “if you want to ascertain if someone is truly loyal to you, ask them to do something outrageous or stupid.”
The other is that it turns his aides into members of a distinct tribe. “By requiring subordinates to speak untruths, a leader can undercut their independent standing, including their standing with the public, with the media and with other members of the administration.”

Both of these things allow Trump to do a better job of operating in a low-trust environment. All presidents face a mild form of a principle-agent problem in which their subordinates’ interests are only imperfectly aligned with their own. In the past, presidents like Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy tended to solve this by selecting White House staffs full of longtime personal loyalists.

In more recent years, ideological polarization of the parties has produced what Richard Skinner calls the “partisan presidency” — White House teams are made up primarily of generic party operatives who have deep party ties that transcend their personal connection with the president. This works for a president like George W. Bush or Barack Obama because the president himself is also a long-term party loyalist who does not perceive there to be a huge divergence between the party’s priorities and his own.

Trump is clearly not a longtime Republican Party loyalist, so he can’t rely on this solution. In part, he is reaching for a personal presidency — installing, for example, his son-in-law in a senior advisory position. But an old-school personal presidency wouldn’t work for Trump. For one thing, he needs the support of congressional Republicans, which means he needs people they trust on his team. But beyond that, unlike Ike or JFK, Trump has no experience in politics or government, so a team of pure personal loyalists would have no idea what they’re doing.

He needs to operate in the context of a mostly partisan presidency, even though he knows most of the members of his party would probably prefer to see Mike Pence sitting in the Oval Office. Throwing out a constant stream of bullshit simultaneously helps the president assess whom he should regard as loyal, and also serves as a filter to increasingly bind a growing circle of politicians and political operatives to him and his family.

Post-totalitarian bullshit

Frankfurt initially wrote his essay in 1986 (it found a lay audience on the internet in the early 21st century and was published as a book in 2005) largely as an amusing observational piece about life in comfortable capitalist liberal democracies. He did not, primarily, have the practical conduct of politics in mind — though he did suggest that bullshitting about politics is a particularly common form of bullshit, he regarded it primarily as a recreational habit of citizens rather than as a governing tactic.

Eight years earlier, the Czech dissident (and later president of his country) Václav Havel wrote on a similar theme of truthlessness in “The Power of the Powerless,” taking as his backdrop the very different situation of what he called “post-totalitarian” communist dictatorships in Central Europe.

He considers the case of the grocery store manager who places in the shop window a sign emblazoned with the slogan “workers of the world unite.” The poster would have been delivered from headquarters along with the vegetables and placed in the window “simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be.” As Havel writes, the display of the sign surely communicates something, but it equally surely does not communicate a desire to see unity among the world’s workers:

Obviously the greengrocer is indifferent to the semantic content of the slogan on exhibit; he does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: "I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace."

Yet equally crucially, the regime itself does not post these signs in the hopes of convincing anyone of anything, or of conveying any kind of meaningful information about the world. The sign — the slogan itself — is mere bullshit. But according to Havel, it serves an important function:

The greengrocer had to put the slogan in his window, therefore, not in the hope that someone might read it or be persuaded by it, but to contribute, along with thousands of other slogans, to the panorama that everyone is very much aware of. This panorama, of course, has a subliminal meaning as well: it reminds people where they are living and what is expected of them. It tells them what everyone else is doing, and indicates to them what they must do as well, if they don't want to be excluded, to fall into isolation, alienate themselves from society, break the rules of the game, and risk the loss of their peace and tranquility and security.

Trumpian bullshit involves the transplantation of the kind of social and political role that Havel envisioned into a society that is much closer to the one Frankfurt lived in. Nobody in America is coerced into parroting the Trumpian line, and indeed, elements of the media that lie outside the Trumposphere appear to be prospering and flourishing under his regime.

But it is still true that Trumpian bullshit serves not only as a test of elite loyalty, but as a signifier of belonging to a mass audience. One chants, “Lock her up,” at a rally not to express a desire or expectation that Hillary Clinton will serve jail time for violating an obscure State Department guideline, but simply because to be a certain kind of member of a certain kind of community these days requires the chant.

The big, beautiful wall that Mexico will allegedly pay for, the war on the “fake news” media, Barack Obama’s forged birth certificate, and now the secret tape recording that will destroy James Comey are not genuine articles of faith meant to be believed in. Their invocation is a formalism or a symbol; a sign of compliance and belonging. The content is bullshit.

Bullshit as a coping mechanism

Critically, though bullshit plays a genuine functional role for the Trump regime, there is no particular reason to believe its adoption as Trump’s primary rhetorical mode is a strategic choice. Trump is wildly unfit for the presidency in obvious and well-known ways, including, critically, a total lack of knowledge of or interest in any area of public policy.

Trump lacks the knowledge to govern, the patience to learn how to govern, or the humility to admit it. Consequently, he bullshits, telling Time that he “only needed a short time to understand everything about health care” and the Economist that his tax cut plan doesn’t benefit the rich because “I mean I can tell you this, I get more deductions, they have deductions for birds flying across America, they have deductions for everything.”

As Frankfurt writes:

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant.

Nobody, needless to say, could actually have predicted Trump’s ascension to the presidency. But Frankfurt’s 30-year-old analysis perfectly forecasts the consequences of electing a profoundly ignorant man to the most powerful political office in the world — an unprecedented explosion of bullshit.

The president bullshits because he is ignorant. But his aides, in order to manipulate Trump into governing in ways they find reasonable or ideologically congenial or both, must echo his bullshit to prove their loyalty. This winds up creating substantial levels of second-order bullshit as flunkies pony up an outlandish series of pro-Trump claims — claims that are then echoed in a large and vibrant ecosystem of pro-Trump media.

This sphere of bullshit ultimately ends up encompassing not only flunkies like Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway but aides such as Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein or National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, who entered Trump’s service with sterling reputations yet inevitably find themselves fronting for one form or another of flimflam.

Trump’s bullshit is contagious

For somebody who is so poorly informed, Trump is by all accounts a voracious news consumer. Shane Goldmacher reports for Politico that on a typical morning, “Trump reads through a handful of newspapers in print, including The New York Times, New York Post, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal — all while watching cable news shows in the background.”

He watches, most of all, to see who is defending him zealously. The Washington Post reports that in the wake of Comey’s firing, Trump “sat in front of a television watching cable news coverage of” the firing and “noticed another flaw: Nobody was defending him.” As a result, he was “irate” and “pinned much of the blame on Spicer and [White House Communications Director Michael] Dubke’s communications operation,” even as allies of Spicer and Dubke complained to the press that it was unreasonable to expect them to have a surrogate strategy to roll out when Trump had given them no advance notice of the move.

But the president doesn’t want a well-planned communications strategy; he wants people who’ll leap in front of the cameras to blindly defend whatever it is he says or does.

And because he’s the president of the United States, plenty of people are willing to oblige him. That starts with official communicators like Spicer, Conway (who simultaneously tries to keep her credibility in the straight world by telling Joe Scarborough she needs to shower after defending Trump), and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. But there are also the informal surrogates. Trump is tapping Callista Gingrich to serve as his ambassador to the Holy See, an honor that Jonathan Swan reports he was initially reluctant to grant “because he likes seeing her husband Newt defending him on TV.” When reassured that there would be a satellite link for Newt in Rome, Trump agreed.

House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes embarrassed himself but pleased Trump with a goofy effort to back up Trump’s wiretapping claims. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who certainly knows better, sat next to Trump in an Economist interview and gave him totally undeserved credit for intimidating the Chinese on currency manipulation. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross hailed a small-time trade agreement with China consisting largely of the implementation of already agreed-upon measures as “more than has been done in the whole history of U.S.-China relations on trade.”

This kind of bullshit, like Trump’s, couldn't possibly be intended to actually convince any kind of open-minded individual. It’s a performance for an audience of one. A performance that echoes day and night across cable news, AM talk radio, and the conservative internet.

The growing bullshit zone threatens reality

Havel’s post-totalitarian bullshit would be reinforced and undergirded by a state-controlled media apparatus. In Peter Pomerantsev’s evocative phrase about media and society in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, in such a place, “nothing is true and everything is possible.”

Trump’s America is, obviously, not like that. The United States lacks a major state-run broadcast agency, and PBS television is more likely to show you old episodes of British TV shows than government propaganda. America has a large and vibrant independent media sector that is, if anything, prospering financially as a result of Trump’s ascension to power.

What we have instead is Fox News, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and other talkers — a constellation of conservative-themed commercial mass media outlets that decided during the 2016 primary that ratings were more important than ideology and that now serve as a nonstop amen chorus for the White House.

Slate’s Will Oremus wrote on May 10 that “Fox News is covering James Comey’s firing from an alternate reality”:

No one familiar with the network's popular prime-time opinion shows will be surprised to know that they responded to the news unanimously with full-throated Trump boosterism. But even a jaded Sean Hannity viewer might have been brought up short by just how hard he spun the Comey firing throughout the course of his 10 p.m. show. The FBI director had been blasted by Hillary Clinton supporters for publicizing the agency’s investigation into her emails at the height of the presidential campaign — a criticism echoed in the memo from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that Trump used to justify Comey’s dismissal. Yet Hannity suggested that Comey’s real failing was that he let Clinton off the hook. The host called him “a national embarrassment” who “has failed you, the American people, on a spectacular level” by not going after Trump’s election rival more aggressively. Hannity closed his show with what he called “the most important question of the night”: With Comey gone, will Clinton finally face the criminal prosecution she deserves? All three members of his expert panel proceeded to agree that she was a felon who should be indicted, though they differed on whether that would actually happen.

Bill Kristol, the veteran conservative operative and longtime proprietor of the Weekly Standard, told a Mediaite podcast that the tenor of Fox’s Trump coverage is “ridiculous, honestly, and depressing.”

National Review’s Kevin Williams has been in a long-running Twitter feud with Hannity, in which the more thoughtful and more ideology-oriented writer calls the radio host and television personality a “sycophant” who is also “dumb and dishonest and has no self-respect” (he is not wrong).

The problem with Hannity is that he is dumb and dishonest and has no self-respect. https://t.co/RZRVGtgUcD
— Kevin D. Williamson (@KevinNR) May 12, 2017

He's a sycophant. He does what sycophants do, that's all. https://t.co/QqAizJctYZ
— Kevin D. Williamson (@KevinNR) May 12, 2017

Rush Limbaugh opened his May 15 show, by denouncing all interest in the Comey story as just a feeble effort to take down the president, arguing that “the real Watergate comparison here would be Barack Obama ordering the FBI to spy on Republican campaigns, maybe not just Trump’s.”

CNN long ago sidelined its normal roster of conservative pundits in favor of reliable Trump defenders Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany. George Will lost his contract with Fox News in favor of a new gig on MSNBC. Trump critic Bret Stephens is gone from the Wall Street Journal op-ed page and over to the New York Times, while over at the Journal, you can read Daniel Henninger explain that the Clintons are to blame for Comey’s firing.

In the United States of Bullshit, anything can happen

For Trump, the constant bullshitting serves as a highly effective filter. Senators like John McCain and Ben Sasse, who’ve overwhelmingly voted with Trump when it counts, have nonetheless refused to echo his bullshit — proving their integrity to the world and their disloyalty to Trump. But formerly obscure figures such as Lord and Nunes who’ve proven their subservience to Trump are on the upswing, while other longtime players in conservative politics are debasing themselves on Trump’s behalf.

“Since his selection as vice president,” Abby Phillip writes at the Washington Post, “[Mike] Pence has been unflagging in his loyalty and deference to Trump. But in return, the president and White House aides have repeatedly set Pence up to be the public face of official narratives that turn out to be misleading or false.”

The upshot is a conservative movement and a Republican Party that, if Trump persists in office, will be remade along Trumpian lines with integrity deprecated and bullshit running rampant. It’s clear that the owners and top talent at commercial conservative media are perfectly content with that outcome, and the question facing the party’s politicians is whether they are, too.

The common thread of the Trumposphere is that there doesn’t need to be any common thread. One day Comey went soft on Clinton; the next day he was fired for being too hard on her; the day after that, it wasn’t about Clinton at all. The loyalist is just supposed to go along with whatever the line of the day is.

This is the authoritarian spirit in miniature, assembling a party and a movement that is bound to no principles and not even committed to following its own rhetoric from one day to the next. A “terrific” health plan that will “cover everyone” can transform into a bill to slash the Medicaid rolls by 14 million in the blink of an eye and nobody is supposed to notice or care. Anything could happen at any moment, all of it powered by bullshit.

Understanding the Trump era

Read the whole story

· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

Whom are you Trump, trying to bullshit? The American People? - Google Search
Sunday July 21st, 2019 at 6:05 AM

Whom are you Trump, trying to bullshit? The American People? - Google Search
Sunday July 21st, 2019 at 6:03 AM

Whom are you Trump, trying to bullshit? The American People? - Google Search
Sunday July 21st, 2019 at 6:02 AM

Who are you Trump, trying to bullshit? The American People? - Google Search
Sunday July 21st, 2019 at 6:01 AM

On Trump's Bullshit - The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/on-trumps-bullshit/593062/

Jul 1, 2019 - President Donald Trump's penchant for out-and-out deception—lies, ... I mean, you know, there aren't that many ways you're going to get people to schools. ... idea of republican governance developed in Europe and America.

Donald Trump Speech Transcript at North Carolina Rally 'MAGA ... - Rev

https://www.rev.com › Blog › Political Transcripts

3 days ago - Donald Trump held a 'MAGA' rally in Greenville, North Carolina on ... Mike Pence: 00:00:00 … of America, President Donald Trump. ... I don't want any part, but that's when you saw the people say, what the hell is going on? What? ... So I will not say that this guy said, if we didn't have the bullshit, that's all.

"Ridiculous Bullshit": Donald Trump's Rambling Rally in Michigan ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rzAlNtEKxc

Mar 29, 2019 - In his first rally since the release of Robert Mueller's report to US Attorney General William Barr, Donald Trump gave a 90-minute diatribe ...

Missing: ~~People?~~

Donald Trump claims opponents are trying to take him out with 'bullshit ...

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03.../donald-trump...trying...bullshit/10865652

Mar 2, 2019 - Close up shot of Donald Trump hugging an American flag on a pole ... and said his political opponents were "trying to take me out with bullshit". ... a report by people who weren't elected," Mr Trump said of the Mueller report, ...

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