A busy criminal enterprise that breaks laws the way a baker breaks eggsʼ!

TRUMP’S ʽWEALTH᾿ WAS‚ IN TRUTH‚ ALL DAD’S MONEY . . . 

by Selvam Canagaratna-February 23, 2019, 7:22 pm

"If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything."
– Mark Twain, Notebook, 1935.

Donald Trump has the unenviable notoriety of never having read a book in his life. Having successfully got away with literally conning his way all through the better part of seventy long years, he should have been shrewd enough – if not exactly ʽwise᾿ enough – to know a good thing when he had it. But, then, that᾿s classic Trump all over again. Truth to tell, he's too stupid to even to recognize the reality, and decided to have a shy at, of all things, the Presidency of the USA. He᾿s now paying the price for that folly.

Writing on February 7, Senior Editor of Truthout magazine William Rivers Pitt recalled having ruminated upon the idea – as far back as May 2018 – that, for his own sake at least, Donald Trump really shouldn’t run for President. He remembered that, at that time, no one cared about Trump’s mysteriously unavailable tax returns, and that a lot of folks seemed to have forgotten about it.

The issue itself, he believed, was subsumed by the avalanche of mayhem that is the President’s daily fare. The administration went from lying about it ("I can’t release them; I’m being audited," was demonstrably false) to flat-out stonewalling the matter. Anyone asking to see them now is invited to take a long walk off a short pier, but that bit of legerdemain may be coming to a close.

The folks over on the majority side of the House Ways and Means Committee, however, have not forgotten about Trump᾿s tax returns. They intend to deploy a little-known law that allows the Committee to gain access to the tax returns of any US citizen they choose – and they happen to have chosen Donald Trump. Once the returns are in hand, a majority vote by the Committee will release them to the entire House, and from there, one assumes, to the world.

Writing in The Washington Post, Paul Waldman noted: "The things in Trump’s past are appalling enough, but it’s his current debts and business interests that we really need to understand. Trump himself obviously can’t be relied on to inform us of any conflicts of interest he might have; just look at how often he lied about Russia, claiming to have no business interests there when in fact during the campaign he was pursuing a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow that could have netted him hundreds of millions of dollars."

If truth be told, the Trump administration has seen this coming for months, and is preparing to go to court to keep the tax returns under wraps, noted William Rivers Pitt. "The law is the law is the law, however, so Trump’s best hope appears to be a long effort to tie the release of his returns up in legal proceedings until after the 2020 presidential election. Given we already know about the decades-long brazen misdeeds of the entire Trump family, it is no surprise that the administration is willing to go to such lengths to keep this corner of Trump’s finances an ongoing secret.

Pitt also noted that "beyond the matter of the tax returns was the continued existence of Trump’s erstwhile lawyer, fixer and bagman, Michael Cohen. Cohen was scheduled to testify before the House Intelligence Committee recently, but that date was pushed back to February 28 "in the interests of the investigation," according to Committee Chairman Adam Schiff. This latest delay comes on the heels of Cohen canceling his scheduled testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which was also slated to take place that week."

Wrote Pitt: "While these delays certainly serve to ratchet up the drama (and the White House paranoia), they do not mean that Cohen has suddenly gone opaque and insubstantial. Far from it. The United States attorney for the Southern District of New York plopped a subpoena on Trump’s Inauguration Committee this week, right on the doorstep of the ʽState of the Union᾿ Address. That subpoena, according to reports, was inspired by a secret recording Cohen made of a conversation he had with a woman named Stephanie Wolkoff, who received a $26 million payment from the Inauguration Committee."

This situation is heavy, and will get heavier with the passage of time as prosecutors flip witnesses and draw closer to the core of the scheme, wrote Pitt. According to CNN, the subpoena lists a variety of possible crimes being investigated, including conspiracy against the United States, false statements, mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, Inaugural Committee disclosure violations, and "violations of laws prohibiting contributions by foreign nations and contributions in the name of another person, also known as straw donors."

"The new requests expand an investigation prosecutors opened late last year amid a flurry of scrutiny of the Inaugural Committee," wrote Maggie Haberman and Ben Protess for The New York Times. "And they showed that the investigations surrounding Mr. Trump, once centered on potential ties to Russia during the 2016 presidential election, have spread far beyond the Special Counsel’s office to include virtually all aspects of his adult life: his business, his campaign, his inauguration and his presidency."

According to the Times, the US attorney for the Eastern District of New York is also investigating whether foreign money was funneled to the Inaugural Committee by straw donors.[Noted Pitt, tongue-in-cheek: "Thank you, Mr. Cohen. The scum, it seems, also rises."]

Hovering over all this is Mueller, the man tasked with investigating a very busy criminal enterprise administration that breaks laws the way a baker breaks eggs, wrote Pitt. Mueller’s corner of this is Russian involvement with the 2016 election and obstruction of justice regarding same. He has most recently invited Trump ally and dirty trickster Roger Stone into his parlour, and right-wing nonsense factory Jerome Corsi may soon follow. Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker recently made noises to the effect that Mueller’s investigation will soon be coming to a close, but this may only be wishful thinking from a person who shouldn’t be holding the office to begin with.

Mueller is probably not pursuing the issue of Trump’s tax returns or the dealings of the Inaugural Committee because he simply doesn’t have enough room on his desk. Remember that the next time you hear someone accuse him of leading a "runaway" investigation. Beyond him are all the House committees now run by Democrats with subpoena power and the will to use it.

For Trump, this elevator only goes down; there is absolutely no reason to believe these investigations will simply evaporate once he leaves office. He has inspired no loyalty among the cohort of scumbags he surrounded himself with, and they will sell him out the first chance they get once Mueller tightens the screws.

Concluded Pitt: "Because justice in the US favours the wealthy and the white, and because the Justice Department itself is not fully convinced it can or should indict a sitting President, there is no reason to assume Trump will, for instance, wind up in prison. Yet the odds are increasingly canting toward his inevitable ruination as both a President and a powerful public figure, a day when his already tattered reputation is rendered to ashes. One way or another, this is likely to end poorly for him. It is only a matter of time and a question of how much damage he will do to the country before he is finally run to ground.

"Like I said, the man should have stayed home."