Timing Of The Virginia Giuffre - Trump Connection

 

National security analyst Marcy Wheeler examines the timeline of the Malignant Fascist's links to teenager Virginia Giuffre, who worked at the Mar-a-Lago spa, and according to the MF was "stolen" by pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to work for him.  Here's an excerpt, but read the entire excellent post:

"What I’m interested in with the possibility that Trump cut off Epstein for recruiting at Mar-a-Lago is the timing Trump just laid out.

Epstein stole an employee (hypothetically, Giuffre, in 2000). Trump told Epstein not to do it again. And then — possibly the event that led to the 2007 removal — “he did it again.”

Right in-between those incidents, in 2002, Trump told New York Magazine that Epstein liked his girls (Trump called them 'women') young. [snip]

And then, according to WSJ, in 2003, Trump or his staff sent Epstein a birthday letter referencing secrets and enigmas, with Trump’s signature appearing like pubic hair. [snip]

If Donald Trump learned what happened to Giuffre and warned Epstein never to recruit sex slaves at Mar-a-Lago again, it would mean he was aware of what happened to Giuffre, aware years before law enforcement first started investigating Epstein. It would mean he learned Epstein was trafficking girls, which that New York Magazine quote sure seems to reflect, and rather than do something to make Epstein stop, Trump just told him not to do it at Mar-a-Lago." (our emphasis)

As Wheeler suggests, the MF apparently acknowledged that he was aware of Epstein's abuse of the underage girls that he "poached" from Mar-a-Lago over a period of years.  That knowledge could only come from someone who participated in covering up Epstein's crimes, and who may have been part of them at some point.  Giuffre sadly took her own life earlier this year, but her testimony / statements in the trials of Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell would tell the story.  It fills in some of the blanks that would explain the MF's desperate attempt to keep the files on Epstein hidden, and to distract the public from them. 

QOTD -- What You CAN Control

 

As our Quote of the Day noted yesterday, now is not the time for angsting over polls 9 months before the election, but rather to be volunteering / donating/ advocating for the re-election of the Biden-Harris administration.  Emptywheel's Marcy Wheeler has a similar message worth repeating, this time focusing on angsting about the Malignant Loser's legal perils, concluding,

... No judicial outcome will ever be sufficient, by itself, to beat Trump. No realistic Democrat should be staking their electoral hopes on one or some guilty verdicts — not because they wouldn’t help, but because you can’t control that.

Every single person reading this has in their power the ability to do something — whether it’s local electoral work, repeating discussions of Trump’s corruption so much that it begins to drown out stories about Hunter Biden, or educating your neighbors about Trump’s central role in rolling back reproductive choice — to help defeat Trump. Every second you spend worrying about Karen Henderson is time you’re not doing whatever it is that will be most useful in defeating Trump.

Stop making yourself impotent by worrying about the court cases. Stop hoping that any court case is going to be the Magical Sparkle Pony that makes this easy. Stop wallowing in provably false conspiracy theories about the January 6 investigation that ignore a bunch of public things the TV lawyers don’t talk about.

This is not going to be easy, I promise you. Find some way to make yourself useful to make it, at least, easier.

To coin a cliche, "Keep Calm and Carry On."

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

The story of the "entrepreneur" from China who owned a chain of spas and massage parlors (including the one where New England Patriots owner and friend of Trump Robert Kraft got a happy ending), Li "Cindy" Yang, is starting to grow into an all- too- typical narrative of Trump family sleaze:

... Beyond this sordid tale, there is another angle to the strange story of Yang: She runs an investment business that has offered to sell Chinese clients access to Trump and his family. And a website for the business—which includes numerous photos of Yang and her purported clients hobnobbing at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Palm Beach—suggests she had some success in doing so.

Yang, who goes by Cindy, and her husband, Zubin Gong, started GY US Investments LLC in 2017. The company describes itself on its website, which is mostly in Chinese, as an “international business consulting firm that provides public relations services to assist businesses in America to establish and expand their brand image in the modern Chinese marketplace.” But the firm notes that its services also address clients looking to make high-level connections in the United States. On a page displaying a photo of Mar-a-Lago, Yang’s company says its “activities for clients” have included providing them “the opportunity to interact with the president, the [American] Minister of Commerce and other political figures.” The company boasts it has “arranged taking photos with the President” and suggests it can set up a “White House and Capitol Hill Dinner.” (The same day the Herald story about Yang broke, the website stopped functioning.) 

This story has legs.  It also includes a Trump rarely heard about:  his sister Elizabeth.

Marcy Wheeler explains how criminal conspiracies work in light of ever- changing goal posts set up by Trumpists arguing, essentially, "no benefit, no foul":

Putin doesn’t care if Trump benefits from all this — though he is happy to keep toying with Trump like a cat plays before he eviscerates his mouse. He cares about whether he and his cronies win. And there are multiple ways for him to get a win out of this, whether or not Trump manages to eke out any kind of real payoff past the election.

And let’s be honest, Putin isn’t the only one playing this game. Certainly, Mohammed bin Salman feels the same way, even if his record of ruthless dealmaking is shorter and sloppier than Putin’s. The truth is that Donald Trump and Jared Kushner are easy marks for a whole range of skilled operators willing to stroke their egos and dangle loot, and over and over again they’ve let themselves be bested in foreign policy negotiations, to the detriment of the interests of the United States. That they are so bad at deal making in no way disproves their culpability.

There is no Trump Tower in Moscow. But there never had to be. All that was needed was the promise of a ridiculously lucrative narcissism-stroking deal for the Trump family to agree to shit that would hurt this country. And all the evidence suggests that they did, and continue to do so.

Try as they will, they won't be able to polish a turd:

President Trump and his advisers are launching a behemoth 2020 campaign operation combining his raw populist message from 2016 with a massive data-gathering and get-out-the-vote push aimed at dwarfing any previous presidential reelection effort, according to campaign advisers, White House aides, Republican officials and others briefed on the emerging strategy.

Trump’s advisers also believe the Democratic Party’s recent shift to the left on a host of issues, from the push for Medicare-for-all to a proposed Green New Deal, will help the president and other Republicans focus on a Trumpian message of strong economic growth, nationalist border restrictions and “America First” trade policies. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan will become, in signs and rally chants, “Keep America Great!”

The president’s strategy, however, relies on a risky and relatively narrow path for victory, hinged on demonizing Trump’s eventual opponent and juicing turnout among his most avid supporters in Florida, Pennsylvania and the Upper Midwest — the same areas that won him the White House but where his popularity has waned since he was elected. Some advisers are particularly concerned about the president’s persistent unpopularity among female and suburban voters, and fear it will be difficult to replicate the outcome of 2016 without former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton as a foil.

Greg Sargent illustrates just how much of a turd they're trying to polish:

Asylum-seeking families have spiked, unmasking cruel deterrence as an unnecessary and ineffective disaster. This is also true on trade: The trade deficit in goods has ballooned, a huge pratfall by his own (demented) metric. Trade wars have not proved “good and easy to win,” because the issue turns out to be far more complicated than he ever allowed. Now he’ll probably make a face-saving deal with China, getting few concessions even as all the damage this has done is unlikely to be forgotten.

On top of all that, Trump went all in with GOP economic orthodoxy, trying to strip health care from millions and signing an enormous tax giveaway to corporations, both of which have proved deeply unpopular, and also helped fuel the GOP loss in the midterms.

In short, Trump’s economic nationalist agenda has proved to be both a failure and a fraud. This is the prism through which swing voters will likely judge his promise of four more years of the same. Yet Trump appears certain that for those voters, he can make 2020 all about the Democrats’ alleged “socialism,” and not about his own disastrous presidency.

Also, congrats to Milwaukee, the site of the 2020 Democratic National Convention.  It's a great city by a Great Lake in a great state.  It also doesn't take itself too seriously: the big story right now is not the convention; it's that Wahlburgers is opening a restaurant in the Third Ward by the end of the year. You gotta love it.

As always, Infidel 753's blog round- up should be your next destination, where links run the gamut from the beauty of an iced- over Lake Superior to the ugliness of Republican politicians.

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the complete articles/ op eds.

Anxious human windsock Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins' home state newspaper has seen the real Brett "KavaNut" Kavanaugh, and therefore has seen enough:

...Based on what he demonstrated in his own testimony, Kavanaugh lacks the character and judgment to serve on the Supreme Court. 

In his widely watched appearance, Kavanaugh revealed that he has an explosive temper and resorts to bullying when he feels threatened. He was understandably under stress and fighting a high-stakes battle for his reputation, but his temperament was tested during the hearing, and he failed the test. 

Kavanaugh also showed himself to be impermissibly political for a job that is supposed to be above politics. We’re not naive. We understand that federal judges are nominated by presidents and confirmed by senators, and that electoral politics influences their decisions about who gets to serve. 

RIPPING OFF THE MASK 

But we have never had a Supreme Court nominee who ripped off the nonpartisan mask the way Kavanaugh did Thursday and identified himself as an enemy of a political party that represents the policy preferences of millions of Americans. He blamed his predicament on bizarre conspiracy theories, claiming that his troubles stemmed from “pent-up anger about President Trump” and opponents seeking “revenge on behalf of the Clintons” and were not the result of allegations that emerged while he was being evaluated for an important job. After his partisan rant, Kavanaugh will never be able to judge a case without the animus he expressed being considered a factor in his decision. This is not the road we want to take.  (our emphasis)

Are you paying attention, Sen. Collins?

Meanwhile, the FBI background investigation initiated by fellow anxious human windsock and retiring Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake has been (contain your shock) sharply constrained by the White House, despite pathological liar Donald "Rump" Trump's claims to the contrary:

Officials said the F.B.I.’s “limited” supplemental background check of Judge Kavanaugh could be finished by Monday morning. Set in motion late last week by three Senate Republicans, the inquiry was supposed to shed further light on accusations that Judge Kavanaugh engaged in sexual misconduct during his high school and college years and help resolve the fierce national debate over whether he should win confirmation to the Supreme Court. 

But the investigation’s apparent narrow reach has infuriated the judge’s critics, who said he should be subjected to a wide-ranging examination of his drinking and possible sexual misconduct. 

Instead, the F.B.I. was directed by the White House and Senate Republicans to interview just four people: Mark Judge and P.J. Smyth, high school friends of Judge Kavanaugh’s; Leland Keyser, a high school friend of one of Judge Kavanaugh’s accusers, Christine Blasey Ford; and Deborah Ramirez, another of the judge’s accusers.

Marcy Wheeler has an unvarnished take on the "fig leaf" investigation (and faults Dems and the media for their early buy-in):

This was about the easiest thing in the world to predict. Jeff Flake issues some hollow self indulgent bullshit to make himself look like the last great reasonable man, and it is all garbage being run as cover for a complicit Trump White House and weak Senate Republicans (and at least one faux Democrat) desperately and cowardly seeking any fig leaf possible to allow them to put a craven, partisan, angry and drunkard historical sex offender on the United States Supreme Court for the next three to four decades.

They're steering the FBI away from corroborating evidence that could be provided by both Dr. Ford's and Ms. Ramirez's contemporaneous friends and acquaintances.  Also, no checking into the lies KavaNut told during multiple confirmation hearings.  We'll have to leave that up to investigations by the new Democratic House.

The Miami Herald has a heart- wrenching article about the continuing suffering of our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico, over a year after Hurricane Maria:

The face of forgotten Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria could well be that of José Luis “Chegüi” Aponte Cruz, who lost his livelihood and everything in his home when the ferocious storm pushed the roiling sea a mile into this poor beachfront community, sweeping away much of what lay in its path. 

Maria smashed apart the bright yellow concrete beach kiosk where people once came for Chegüi’s famed bacalaítos, or codfish fritters. The storm took his freezer, his fridge and his stove, his tables and chairs, all uninsured. A year later, denied loans or government aid to reopen in a food truck, he has — like much of Puerto Rico — barely begun to recover. [snip]

An analysis by Miami Herald parent McClatchy of public data for FEMA’s housing assistance program found that, as of June 1, Maria survivors in Puerto Rico received an average of $1,800 for repair assistance. In contrast, survivors of Hurricane Harvey in Texas last year got $9,127. 

In many if not most cases, advocates and homeowners say, FEMA grants were hardly enough to replace lost appliances, furnishings and clothing, much less to make repairs sufficient to allow people to remain living safely at home, the purpose of the emergency aid.  (our emphasis)

As the article points out, Puerto Rico has been left to fend for itself by the incompetent, racist Trump regime and a Republican House and Senate only interested in enabling that rotted out regime.

We conclude, as always, with a strong recommendation to check out Infidel 753's excellent round- up of links to interesting blog posts from the last week (the post we did yesterday on 1914 Paris in color was via him).

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

Paul Krugman on dangerous Republican complicity:

Make no mistake: if Republicans hold both houses of Congress this November, Trump will go full authoritarian, abusing institutions like the I.R.S., trying to jail opponents and journalists on, er, trumped-up charges, and more — and he’ll do it with full support from his party. 

But why? Is Trumpocracy what Republicans always wanted? 

Well, it’s probably what some of them always wanted. And some of them are making a coldblooded calculation that the demise of democracy is worth it if it means lower taxes on the rich and freedom to pollute. 

But my guess is that most Republican politicians are spineless rather than sinister — or, more accurately, sinister in their spinelessness. They’re not really ideologues so much as careerists, whose instinct is always to go along with the party line. And this instinct has drawn them ever deeper into complicity.

This will be the most existentially important mid- term election ever.

Marcy Wheeler points to areas where White (Supremacist) House Counsel Don McGahn may have cooperated with the Mueller probe, other than the obstruction of justice theme that was presented in the New York Times:

...[A]t least three of the areas where Mueller’s team might find a conspiracy with Russia (or other foreigners) to win the election involve campaign finance issues — Don McGahn’s expertise. Those are:
    o Whether knowingly employing British Cambridge Analytica employees without getting them proper visas constitutes illegal foreign influence?    

o Whether accepting a Trump Tower meeting with Russians offering dirt on Hillary Clinton constitutes accepting a thing of value?    

o Whether the campaign was sufficiently firewalled from the  dodgy shit Roger Stone was doing (which has been a focus of the last six months of Mueller’s time)?

That exposure likely is what's dawning on un- indicted co- conspirator Donald "Rump" Trump and what is triggering his most recent unhinged tweets.

Former Rump "fixer" Michael Cohen is potentially facing more serious charges:

Federal authorities investigating whether President Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, committed bank and tax fraud have zeroed in on well over $20 million in loans obtained by taxi businesses that he and his family own, according to people familiar with the matter. 

Investigators are also examining whether Mr. Cohen violated campaign finance or other laws by helping to arrange financial deals to secure the silence of women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump. The inquiry has entered the final stage and prosecutors are considering filing charges by the end of August, two of the people said. [snip] 

At this late stage of the inquiry, it is still possible that Mr. Cohen may plead guilty rather than face an indictment. He has hinted publicly and has stated explicitly in private that he is eager to tell prosecutors what he knows in exchange for leniency. 

A cooperation agreement would likely include a provision that Mr. Cohen also provide information to the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who is investigating possible involvement by the Trump campaign in Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.

They're going for maximum leverage over this guy. Expect a breakthrough (cooperation agreement) before Labor Day.

Finally, please check out Infidel's blog round- up, full of the usual interesting "stuff" he finds on the Internet.  It's a supermarket -- browse all the aisles!