Trump 31: Parody of a Presidency

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump lied to me about his wealth to get onto the Forbes 400. Here are the tapes."

Spoiler

In May 1984, an official from the Trump Organization called to tell me how rich Donald J. Trump was. I was reporting for the Forbes 400, the magazine’s annual ranking of America’s richest people, for the third year. In the previous edition, we’d valued Trump’s holdings at $200 million, only one-fifth of what he claimed to own in our interviews. This time, his aide urged me on the phone, I needed to understand just how loaded Trump really was.

The official was John Barron — a name we now know as an alter ego of Trump himself. When I recently rediscovered and listened, for first time since that year, to the tapes I made of this and other phone calls, I was amazed that I didn’t see through the ruse: Although Trump altered some cadences and affected a slightly stronger New York accent, it was clearly him. “Barron” told me that Trump had taken possession of the business he ran with his father, Fred. “Most of the assets have been consolidated to Mr. Trump,” he said. “You have down Fred Trump [as half owner] . . . but I think you can really use Donald Trump now.” Trump, through this sockpuppet, was telling me he owned “in excess of 90 percent” of his family’s business. With all the home runs Trump was hitting in real estate, Barron told me, he should be called a billionaire.

At the time, I suspected that some of this was untrue. I ran Trump’s assertions to the ground, and for many years I was proud of the fact that Forbes had called him on his distortions and based his net worth on what I thought was solid research.

But it took decades to unwind the elaborate farce Trump had built to project an image as one of the richest people in America. Nearly every assertion supporting that claim was untrue. Trump wasn’t just poorer than he said he was. Over time I have learned that he should not have been on the first three Forbes 400 lists at all. In our first-ever list, in 1982, we included him at $100 million, but Trump was actually worth roughly $5 million — a paltry sum by the standards of his super-monied peers — as a spate of government reports and books showed only much later.

The White House declined to comment for this story. The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment.

I was a determined 25-year-old reporter, and I thought that, by reeling Trump back from some of his more outrageous claims, I’d done a public service and exposed the truth. But his confident deceptions were so big that they had an unexpected effect: Instead of believing that they were outright fabrications, my Forbes colleagues and I saw them simply as vain embellishments on the truth. We were so wrong.

This was a model Trump would use for the rest of his career, telling a lie so cosmic that people believed that some kernel of it had to be real. The tactic landed him a place on the Forbes list he hadn’t earned — and led to future accolades, press coverage and deals. It eventually paved a path toward the presidency.

*** *** *** ***

Malcolm Forbes came up with the idea of the Forbes 400 in 1981 and assigned me to spend a year traveling around the country and interviewing wealthy people and those who worked with them about one another. The most challenging sector was private real estate wealth. My grandfather had been an accountant to a number of major New York developers, so I had the advantage of knowing many of the players there. But the reporting was opaque, because so few of the relevant financial documents were public; we relied disproportionately on what people told us. As the project progressed, other experienced reporters and editors joined what would become the most successful annual special issue in Forbes history.

From the beginning, Trump was obsessed. The project could offer a clear, supposedly authoritative declaration of his status as a player, and while many of the super-rich wanted to keep their names off the ranking, Trump was desperate to scale it.

When I first contacted him for the inaugural issue, Trump pulled out all the stops to convince me that he was the wealthiest real estate developer in New York. At an afternoon-long meeting in his cavernous Fifth Avenue office, he argued that his family was worth more than $900 million and deserved to be higher on our list than any of the far more accomplished developers (with names like Rose and Rudin) who had spent generations building top-tier housing in the golden borough of Manhattan. His father, Fred Trump, was well known for building nearly all the apartments that the Trump Organization owned before Donald even joined the company, so it amazed me when Donald claimed that he, and not his father, possessed 80 percent of the 23,000 apartments he said they had in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. He added that these were almost debt free and worth $40,000 each.

I questioned his valuation. Trump shrugged and said, “Okay, then $20,000 each.” That would mean his family was worth some $500 million, still atop our list for New York real estate tycoons.

But that figure seemed high. I estimated the apartments to be worth about $9,000 each: They could not easily be converted to lucrative co-ops, and Trump had falsely described the location of the Queens buildings. He’d claimed they were in Forest Hills when, in fact, they were in the far less valuable Jamaica Estates neighborhood a few miles away. Since Donald’s new projects were still in development or unproven, the outer-borough apartments formed the basis of a Trump family net worth estimate of $200 million.

Six weeks after my initial interview, I received a call at my desk from Trump’s secretary and gatekeeper, Norma Foerderer . She said she wanted my work address so Trump could send me an invitation to a company party. Then she abruptly added: “Oh, Donald was just passing by! He said that he wanted to have a few words with you.”

I switched on my audio recorder — my normal practice — as Trump expressed his concern for what he called “your little article.” He invited me for a follow-up interview with him because, he said, because he was richer than the rest. “I don’t think that you have your facts 100 percent correct” about his standing vis-a-vis other New York developers. I was contemplating a too-low appraisal of his net worth, he said. “You had us down in a certain category, and then you mentioned other names, and there’s no contest, you know. I mean, there’s no contest. So I just wanted to mention that.”

Trump knew I had doubts about his assertions, so he had his lawyer, Roy Cohn, call me. Cohn spent most of his time threatening lawsuits, schmoozing with mobster clients and badgering reporters with off-the-record utterances that made his clients look good and their enemies look bad. Cohn surprised me at my Forbes desk that summer: “Jon Greenberg,” a scrappy voice bellowed, before I could connect my tape recorder. I took notes by hand. “This is Roy. Roy Cohn! You can’t quote me! But Donny tells me you’re putting together this list of rich people. He says you’ve got him down for just $200 million! That’s way too low, way too low! Listen, I’m Donny’s personal lawyer, but he said I could talk to you about this. I am sitting here looking at his current bank statement. It shows he’s got more than $500 million in liquid assets, just cash. That’s just Donald, nothing to do with Fred, and it’s just cash.” He concluded: “He’s worth more than any of those other guys in this town!”

I offered to have a messenger pick up the bank statement at his office. Cohn protested that the document was confidential. “Just trust me,” he said. I told him I wouldn’t take his word without seeing the paperwork. “It’s confidential!” Cohn yelled.

My Forbes editors and I spent many hours deliberating about where to place Trump. Based on what little we knew — his claims; a 1976 New York Times profile that said the Trump Organization owned 22,000 apartments; and Fred’s reputation for housing a generation of working-class New Yorkers in Brooklyn and Queens — we ranked Donald and Fred in the bottom tier among major real-estate developers, each with half of a $200 million apartment empire.

Even though I learned later that this was far more money than Donald possessed, it did not satisfy him for the following year’s edition. During his 1983 interview, Trump claimed that there were actually 25,000 apartments and that his net worth had ballooned because of the success of his new projects, Trump Tower and the Grand Hyatt Hotel on East 42nd Street, as well as a pending casino deal in Atlantic City.

Then Cohn called again, this time to say Trump was worth more than $700 million. I recorded our chat. He opened with an outrageous claim that Trump had personally received $250 million from the recent sale of a 50 percent interest in his new project to build a Harrah’s casino in Atlantic City. “A certain amount was cleared, say, around a hundred million,” Cohn said. “. . . But the balance was used by him to liquidate certain other things, which made his overall position very impregnable. Trump Tower has been going like a house afire, and the profits on that are much higher than had been anticipated, and the same is true with Grand Hyatt. On top of which he’s been in a series of private transactions, and he files with banks for between $700 to $750 million, as well as with Equitable” — Equitable Life Assurance, the company that financed Trump Tower — “which backs him in all of his deals.”

Again, Cohn refused to show me a statement, but armed with misinformation about Trump’s casino payout and claims about cash flow at other properties, I inflated his (and his father’s) net worth to $200 million each. In retrospect, Fred Trump was probably worth half that amount, and Donald, once again, should not have been on the list at all.

The next year I received two calls from “John Barron,” the fictitious Trump executive who told me that Donald had taken “in excess of 90 percent” ownership from Fred. He also suggested that Trump was on track to earn a $50 million profit every year from his first Atlantic City casino. And so, in 1984, we increased Donald’s net worth estimate to $400 million and left Fred in, for his last year on the Forbes 400, at $200 million. (Barron also bad-mouthed the competition, saying that developer George Klein had struck a “bad deal” to redevelop Times Square — a bid Trump had lost — and was “going to go down the tubes.”)

Although Trump, posing as Barron, asked Forbes to conduct the conversation off the record, I am publishing it here. I believe an intent to deceive — both with the made-up persona and the content of the call — released me from my good-faith pledge. In a 1990 court case, Trump testified that he had used false names in phone calls to reporters. In 2016, when The Washington Post published a similar recording, Trump denied it was him.

Fred Trump turned down my attempts to interview him for the Forbes 400. He allowed Donald to say whatever he wanted about the family’s business. In the only major interview he gave after Donald seized the limelight, Fred told the New York Times in 1983 that “Donald has a competitive spirit and I don’t want to compete with him. . . . He amazes me. He’s gone way beyond me, absolutely.”

*** *** *** ***

Eventually, nearly every one of Trump’s pronouncements about his wealth unraveled.

The number of apartments was the first problem. The commonly cited figure — that his family owned 25,000 units — began with the mention of 22,000 apartments in that fawning 1976 New York Times profile. In 1988, after I left Forbes, I counted the units and found fewer than 8,000. (I was working briefly on a documentary about Trump that was never completed.) Another Forbes reporter that year, John Anderson, found the same thing. He called the Trump residential management organization, he told me then, and asked an executive named Harry Green how many apartments the company owned. “About 10,000,” Green told him, meaning that our 1982 family valuation of $200 million should have been just $90 million (below the cutoff at that time for inclusion on the list). A few minutes later, Green called Anderson back and corrected himself: Now there were 25,000 again.

Another brazen claim was that Trump, not his father, owned the company’s outer-borough apartments, which his father built beginning in the 1930s. Based on what Trump said during our 1982 and 1983 interviews, I’d assumed that Donald and Fred each owned half, resisting the son’s insistence that he had purchased 80 percent of the units or consolidated the holdings himself. Still, this comment went into the Forbes 400 records, and in 1985, after I left the project, Trump was estimated to be worth $600 million, and his father was off the list.

It would be decades before I learned that Forbes had been conned: In the early 1980s, Trump had zero equity in his father’s company. According to Fred’s will (portions of which appeared in a lawsuit), the father retained legal ownership of his residential empire until his death in 1999, at which point he left it to be divided between his four surviving children and some of his grandchildren. That explains why, after Trump went bankrupt in the early 1990s, he borrowed $30 million from his siblings, secured by an estimated $35 million share of his future inheritance, according to three sources in Tim O’Brien’s 2005 biography, “TrumpNation.” He could have used his own assets as collateral if he’d had any worth that amount, but he didn’t.

The most revelatory document describing Trump’s true net worth in the early ’80s was a 1981 report from the New Jersey Casino Control Commission. O’Brien obtained a copy for his book. Trump had applied for an Atlantic City casino license, and regulators were able to review his tax returns and personal and corporate debt, giving them the most accurate picture of his finances. They found that he had an income of about $100,000 a year, while his 1979 tax returns showed a $3.4 million taxable loss. Trump’s personal assets consisted of a $1 million trust fund that Fred Trump provided to each of his children and grandchildren, a few checking accounts with about $400,000 in them and a 1977 Mercedes 450SL. Nowhere did the report list an ownership stake in the Trump Organization’s residential apartments. Trump also possessed a few parcels of valuable but highly leveraged real estate, financed with $22.5 million in debt, all of it secured by his father’s assets. He did not own a safe deposit box or stocks in publicly traded companies. In sum, Trump was worth less than $5 million, not the $100 million that I reported in the first Forbes 400.

During our first interview in 1982, Trump informed me that he had bought the Barbizon Plaza Hotel and the adjoining 110 Central Park West for just $13 million, a steal. While I was in Trump’s office, a broker supposedly called to offer him $100 million for the property. Trump refused the offer while looking me in the eye; he pointed out that his net worth should include an equity boost of $87 million profit. I believed then that he used a staffer to stage the call, and I resisted the fictitious valuation. But the $13 million price tag for a valuable parcel was recorded in Forbes 400 files, and it soon showed up in other publications, such as New York magazine . It remains on Wikipedia today. Yet tucked away on Page 63 of the Casino Commission report was a section describing Trump’s purchase of the property for $65 million, facilitated by a $50 million loan to Trump by Chase Manhattan Bank. As with many of his buildings, Trump’s debt was far higher, and his true equity far lower, than he claimed.

Roy Cohn had told me that Trump received $250 million from Holiday Inn for its half-interest in the Atlantic City casino. But according to O’Brien, Trump’s actual income from the deal was a construction and management fee (not profit) of about $24 million, while Holiday Inn financed the construction of the $220 million casino.

Later attempts by Trump to paint himself as fantastically wealthy were also duplicitous. In 1989, Trump sent Forbes journalist Harry Seneker a statement of his $3.7 billion net worth. I have obtained the letter. It indicated $900 million in liquid assets. “I am more liquid than any major developer in the United States,” Trump wrote, inducing the magazine to increase Trump’s listing from $1 billion in 1988 to $1.7 billion in 1989.

But according to the New Jersey Casino Commission, which issued another report in 1991, by the end of 1990 Trump’s entire cash position — in both his business and personal accounts — was just $19 million. The amount was insufficient to pay the debt on his over-leveraged casino and real estate holdings while still covering his personal expenses of $1 million per month. His net worth, the commission estimated, was $205 million — less than 6 percent of what he’d told Forbes. In 1990, the magazine dropped Trump from the list and kept him off it for five years.

Forbes declined to comment for this article, but its top editor, Randall Lane, interviewed then-candidate Trump for the Forbes 400 in 2015 and wrote about the magazine’s long struggle to accurately assess his net worth in an article titled “Inside The Epic Fantasy That’s Driven Donald Trump For 33 Years .” Of the 1,538 tycoons who had been on the “Rich List” through the years, Lane wrote, “not one has been more fixated with his or her net worth estimate on a year-in, year-out basis than Donald J. Trump.”

*** *** *** ***

I was a leading New York real estate reporter through the 1980s. I left the Forbes staff in 1983 but continued to freelance for the magazine while writing major investigative features as a contributing editor for the new Manhattan, Inc. magazine, as well as New York, Avenue and New York City Business. I knew all the key players. I thought I had a handle on this material.

But Trump was so competent in conning me that, until 35 years later, I did not know I had been conned. Instead, I have gone through my career in national media with a misinformed sense of satisfaction that, as a perceptive young journalist, I called Trump on his lies and gave Forbes readers who used the Rich List as a barometer of private wealth a more accurate picture of his finances than the one he was selling.

The joke was on me — and everyone else. Trump’s fabrications provided the basis for a vastly inflated wealth assessment for the Forbes 400 that would give him cachet for decades as a triumphant businessman.

In truth, almost nobody had a clear picture of Trump’s books. In 1990, Trump brought in Steve Bollenbach as a new chief financial officer to respond to lender concerns about his crippling debt. “When Bollenbach began delving into the organization’s finances, he got a surprise,” The Washington Post’s Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher write in “Trump Revealed,” their comprehensive 2016 biography. “The small staff on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower included three accountants. Each knew about pieces of the fraying empire — the casinos, for instance, or the condos. But no one knew the overall picture; there were no consolidated financial reports.”

In the absence of a functioning balance sheet, the list didn’t just make Trump feel like a winner, according to O’Brien; it may have provided some of the documentation he needed to borrow reckless sums of money — vast loans that he used, for years, to actually make him a winner. “The more often Forbes mentioned him, the more credible Donald’s claim to vast wealth became,” O’Brien said, arguing that Trump and the list were “mutually reinforcing”: “The more credible his claim to vast wealth became, the easier it was for him to get on the Forbes 400 — which became the standard that other media, and apparently some of the country’s biggest banks, used when judging Donald’s riches.”

Trump returned to the Rich List in 1996 with a reported net worth of $450 million and an editor’s note that he claimed to be worth $2 billion. He never fell off it again. In his book, O’Brien criticized Forbes for rewarding Trump’s fabrications, citing interviews with “three people with direct knowledge of Donald’s finances” who estimated his true net worth after debts to be “somewhere between $150 million and $250 million.” Trump, who had told O’Brien he was worth $6 billion, sued for libel — and lost. When he lost his appeal in 2011, a New Jersey appellate judge wrote, “The largest portion of Mr. Trump’s fortune, according to three people who had had direct knowledge of his holdings, apparently comes from his lucrative inheritance. These people estimated that Mr. Trump’s wealth, presuming that it is not encumbered by heavy debt, may amount to about $200 million to $300 million. That is an enviably large sum of money by most people’s standards but far short of the billionaires club.”

The opacity persists. In 2016, Trump’s presidential campaign put out a statement saying the candidate had a net worth “in excess of TEN BILLION DOLLARS.” But he has never released his tax returns, and he has said that the core Trump Organization asset is the ownership of his brand — an ineffable marketing claim that is impossible to substantiate or refute.

 

[CTRLZero]

30 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

The official was John Barron — a name we now know as an alter ego of Trump himself.

This whole article just fascinated me.  There is a lot of financial information showing Trump is not nearly as wealthy as he has always claimed, but he keeps puffing himself up.   No wonder he won't release his tax returns.  And John Barron, wtf!

[AnywhereButHere]

3 hours ago, JMarie said:

First there was the interview with George Stephanopoulos, then the ladies on The View, then both Jake Tapper and Rachel Maddow yesterday, and tonight will be a live interview with Anderson Cooper.  You know what all these people have in common?  They're not on Fox News!  It's almost like Comey's avoiding Fox News!

I think Fox News is avoiding James Comey. Can’t have any inconvenient truths (sorry Al Gore...) airing on Faux News. Their viewership might have a brain aneurism.

[GreyhoundFan]

4 hours ago, CTRLZero said:

This whole article just fascinated me.  There is a lot of financial information showing Trump is not nearly as wealthy as he has always claimed, but he keeps puffing himself up.   No wonder he won't release his tax returns.  And John Barron, wtf!

Every time I read about "John Barron", I shake my head. So, he named his fifth child after his faux alias? Who does that?

[AmazonGrace]

Trump is Pence

I guess Melania told him he should focus on sexual abstinence

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

Dumbo is tweeting again. Good morning Dumbo

 

[formergothardite]

He seems really off the rails this morning. 

[onekidanddone]

I don't get that "most people will flip if it gets them out of trouble" So does that mean Cohen is in trouble? Seems to me that is exactly what Trump is saying. Cohen did something that got him in trouble and is going to flip to save himself.

[AmazonGrace]

 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Destiny]

6 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

That's a LOT of 'fuck you's, even by my admittedly very liberal usage of same. LOLOL

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump lashes out as legal risks pile up"

Spoiler

For much of his week at Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump seemed almost reserved by the standards of his Twitter feed, save for sustained attacks on former FBI Director James Comey.

But by Friday night, the president had had enough.

In the span of 15 hours, Trump alleged that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was “established based on an illegal act,” threatened to countersue the Democratic Party, bashed a Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times reporter and called one of his former aides a “drunk/drugged up loser.”

All of this overlapped with the Saturday funeral of former First Lady Barbara Bush. While Melania Trump was due to attend the funeral, the White House said the president would not go to the ceremony “out of respect” for the Bush family. Instead, Trump spent a few hours at his Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach on Saturday morning.

He did, however, send out this message via Twitter midday: “Heading to the Southern White House to watch the Funeral Service of Barbara Bush. First Lady Melania has arrived in Houston to pay our respects. Will be a beautiful day!”

Meanwhile, Trump’s Twitter tirade diverted attention from North Korea’s Friday announcement that it’s immediately halting nuclear and missile tests, and even plans to shutter its main nuclear test facility — a major early win for the president as he seeks to negotiate a meeting with Kim Jong Un.

Trump praised the decision on Twitter late Friday, saying, “This is very good news for North Korea and the World - big progress!” But his subsequent tweets overshadowed the statement.

White House aides and outside advisers to the president had long expected this kind of outburst from the president during his Mar-a-Lago visit. Trump has been known to let loose during his trips to the private South Florida club, where he has more time to talk to friends who validate his concerns and to escape the regimentation of the White House.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit, which necessitated a busy schedule of bilateral meetings, kept Trump occupied and distracted for much of this week. But with Abe back in Japan and little on his public schedule this weekend, Trump has more time to obsess over the ever-expanding list of frustrations.

Chief among them this week is the fear, shared by many in Trump’s inner circle, that the president’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, will begin cooperating with federal authorities. Facing a wide-ranging criminal investigation that could result in prison time, Cohen is seen by some Trump allies as being at risk of flipping, as POLITICO reported earlier this week.

The president appeared to be set off by a Friday New York Times story detailing Trump’s poor treatment of Cohen over the years. “Donald goes out of his way to treat him like garbage,” Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime informal adviser, told the Times. “Ironically, Michael now holds the leverage over Trump,” former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg added in the Times story.

In response, Trump insisted on Twitter that Cohen wouldn’t flip and criticized the lead reporter on the story, Maggie Haberman, a former POLITICO reporter who just won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of Trump’s allies’ ties to Russia.

"Most people will flip if the Government lets them out of trouble, even if.... it means lying or making up stories," the president wrote on Twitter, apparently referencing the Times report. "Sorry, I don’t see Michael doing that despite the horrible Witch Hunt and the dishonest media!"

Federal agents raided Cohen's office and residences on April 9 as the government reportedly probes possible criminal violations in connection to Cohen's $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 campaign, among other things.

“The New York Times and a third rate reporter named Maggie Haberman, known as a Crooked H flunkie who I don’t speak to and have nothing to do with, are going out of their way to destroy Michael Cohen and his relationship with me in the hope that he will ‘flip,’” the president wrote.

He also alleged without evidence that the Times used “non-existent ‘sources’ and a drunk/drugged up loser who hates Michael” to boost its story. It’s unclear exactly who Trump was referring to, but the story prominently quotes Stone and Nunberg on the record.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders did not respond to an email seeking clarity on who specifically Trump is calling a "drunk/drugged up loser." Neither Stone nor Nunberg immediately responded to requests for comment.

Haberman, who has repeatedly interviewed Trump during his time in office and is considered to be one of the most well-sourced reporters covering the White House, briefly addressed the president’s criticism.

"One B, sir (or Dan?). Here’s the story that seems to have touched a nerve," she wrote on Twitter, pointing to an earlier version of the tweet that spelled her name wrong and hinting at the possibility that White House social media director Dan Scavino could be behind the morning missive.

Trump also raised the possibility of another pardon on Saturday, this time of the late boxer Jack Johnson, who was arrested and convicted on racist charges related to his relationships with white women.

“Sylvester Stallone called me with the story of heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson. His trials and tribulations were great, his life complex and controversial. Others have looked at this over the years, most thought it would be done, but yes, I am considering a Full Pardon!” Trump wrote on Twitter.

Trump has not publicly said whether he would pardon Cohen. But Trump’s public discussion of other pardons — the president pardoned former George W. Bush administration official I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby earlier this month — could nonetheless serve as a reminder to Cohen of the possibility that he could receive a presidential pardon if he is eventually charged with crimes. White House aides and others close to the president have insisted that the Libby pardon was not meant to send a message to Cohen.

On Friday night, the president continued his broadsides against former FBI Director James Comey, who is speaking out about his relationship with the president on an ongoing book tour.

"James Comey illegally leaked classified documents to the press in order to generate a Special Council?" Trump wrote, using the wrong spelling for special counsel. "Therefore, the Special Council was established based on an illegal act? Really, does everybody know what that means?"

Comey authorized the release of four memos, none of which were deemed to contain classified material when they were made public. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Comey made redactions of classified information in one of the memos ahead of its release and the other three were not considered to be classified at the time. But the Journal said the FBI now considers information in another one of the memos to be classified, prompting an investigation by the Justice Department's inspector general.

“James Comey’s Memos are Classified, I did not Declassify them,” Trump tweeted on Saturday afternoon. “They belong to our Government! Therefore, he broke the law! Additionally, he totally made up many of the things he said I said, and he is already a proven liar and leaker. Where are Memos on Clinton, Lynch & others?”

The president also responded on Friday night to the Democratic National Committee’s new multi-million dollar lawsuit alleging that the Russian government, the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks engaged in a sweeping plot to interfere in the 2016 election in Trump's favor.

The president threatened to file a lawsuit of his own.

“Just heard the Campaign was sued by the Obstructionist Democrats,” he wrote. “This can be good news in that we will now counter for the DNC Server that they refused to give to the FBI, the Debbie Wasserman Schultz Servers and Documents held by the Pakistani mystery man and Clinton Emails.”

I wonder which one of his babysitters fell asleep on the job.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s problem isn’t that he has bad lawyers. It’s that he’s a bad client."

Spoiler

Time and time again, President Trump and his associates have talked themselves into legal trouble. Trump’s splenetic tweets about foreigners were quoted in court opinions blocking his immigration initiatives. When Trump proclaimed he had no idea that his attorney Michael Cohen had paid adult-film actress Stormy Daniels for her silence, her lawyers cheered — the president had just handed them a very plausible argument that the nondisclosure agreement she signed with Cohen was unenforceable. Like his client, Cohen has caused problems for himself, careening from one ill-advised public outburst to another about Daniels, derailing his efforts to enforce the nondisclosure agreement and probably assisting the federal criminal investigation that culminated in searches of his home, office and hotel room this month. During special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, former Trump advisers Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos have pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and indictments against his former campaign manager Paul Manafort and Manafort’s associate Richard Gates include similar charges. These are all self-inflicted wounds; any good attorney would advise against them.  

When wealthy and powerful people make such bad decisions, it’s tempting to assume they must have gotten terrible legal advice. But that’s rarely true. Yes, for most people, there is a crisis of good lawyering in America: Quality legal advice is too expensive. Our public defenders are overworked and underfunded. Few Americans can afford to litigate a civil dispute at all, let alone do so aggressively with elite lawyers. But when the rich and powerful — the self-styled “masters of the universe” — make legally disastrous decisions, it’s usually because they’ve either ignored their attorneys or self-indulgently chosen the wrong lawyers for the job.

The very qualities that lead people to wealth, power and fame can make them very poor consumers of legal advice; hubris is fatal to an effective attorney-client relationship. Trump prizes “loyalty” very highly, as many powerful people do. But real loyalty from an attorney doesn’t involve fawning over a client, refraining from criticism, or congratulating them for views both right and wrong. A good lawyer’s loyalty lies in being ready to give plain-spoken advice that will get you fired if your client’s in the wrong mood. An effective advocate’s loyalty isn’t about saying “Good idea” or “You’re right,” it’s about warning “Shut up” and “No, you shouldn’t do that” and “Yes, I understand you want to do that, but here’s why it’s a terrible idea.” Real loyalty looks like Cordelia, refusing to flatter King Lear at great cost, not like her sisters, praising him effusively to get more land.

So when I see Trump and Cohen running their mouths about the hush-money contract with Daniels, thereby putting themselves in greater civil and criminal jeopardy, I don’t assume they’ve gotten bad legal advice. I assume they’ve gotten at least some good counsel but have ignored it, because running their mouths is essential to their public personas. Trump believes he is the master of the deal — the man able to talk his way into whatever he wants. Cohen imagines himself an unmatched fixer, an artful wielder of power and influence to get results for clients. Those self-images are not consistent with shutting up for your own good just because some lawyer tells you to.  

In fact, the federal criminal justice system depends on hubris for prosecutors to prevail when they take on the powerful. Flynn, Papadopoulos, Gates — and perhaps Cohen — are merely the most recent examples. Media mogul Martha Stewart was convicted in 2004 of lying to the FBI in the course of an insider-trading investigation. Former George W. Bush White House aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby, recently pardoned by Trump, was convicted of lying to the FBI during a leak investigation . Gen. James Cartwright, pardoned by President Barack Obama, was convicted of lying to the FBI about his discussions with the press. Onetime Housing and Urban Development secretary Henry Cisneros pleaded guilty in 1999 to lying to the FBI about payments to his mistress. All of these people talked themselves into a federal conviction, almost certainly against the advice of their attorneys. Their undisciplined reactions to investigations — not the underlying crimes being investigated — were their downfall.

Prosecutors and federal agents are extremely adept at exploiting human foibles. Mueller knows from long experience that powerful people think they can talk their way out of trouble and resent lawyers telling them they can’t. He also knows that powerful people tend to favor action. Often, my first advice to a client is simply “Stop doing things” — stop trying to use your influence and connections and persuasiveness and industry experience to solve the problem of being the subject of a criminal investigation. Patience and watchfulness are usually the best strategy. But people who clawed their way to the top by dynamism are no good at sitting still.

Trump doesn’t seem to be getting particularly good legal advice about Mueller’s investigation right now. His most qualified outside attorney, John Dowd, resigned last month; his attorney Jay Sekulow is an able First Amendment litigator but not a criminal defense lawyer ; and federal prosecutors just filed court papers asserting that Cohen, his longtime fixer, is not “currently engaged in any significant practice of law.” This is also because of hubris, which, when it isn’t leading the rich and powerful to ignore advice, draws them to choose lawyers based on the wrong qualifications. Masters of the universe too often hire lawyers who flatter them, defer to them and uncritically support their chosen approach to a crisis. They fire or force out lawyers who tell them the cold truth. A penchant for flattery is useful at times, but it is not an effective tool in a federal criminal investigation. The same powerful people also select lawyers who seem prestigious or ideologically consistent, but who lack appropriate expertise. As a federal prosecutor, and now as a defense lawyer, I’ve seen wealthy defendants choose lawyers who are prominent in the media but have no idea how to defend a federal prosecution. I once watched a slick attorney familiar from cable news fumble through a federal sentencing, long on rhetoric but short on any grasp of the law. Never send a fixer or a talking head to do a criminal defense attorney’s job. Trump has relied on several lawyers who are very adept in their fields but have no experience in defending sophisticated criminal matters.

Even when the masters of the universe knuckle under and hire good lawyers, they’re notorious for undermining them. Take Cohen, who may or may not be a master of the universe but certainly behaves as if he thinks he is. At a recent hearing, his lawyers stood before U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood, asking her to delay federal investigators from reviewing Cohen’s seized records. They didn’t bring Cohen to court. That was shrewd: If he wasn’t there, he couldn’t be forced into the difficult choice between incriminating himself by responding to one of Wood’s questions or else publicly refusing to answer. A sensible client would have waited patiently at home. But Cohen lounged ostentatiously on a nearby boulevard, smoking cigars in an aggressive sport coat and mugging for the press. This served to emphasize that he was deliberately absent so that he couldn’t be confronted with questions only he could answer — for instance, about his client roster. He rubbed Woods’s face in his absence and undercut his highly qualified lawyers’ credibility. (At the next hearing, the following Monday afternoon, Cohen appeared in court.)

For a lawyer, this is the job. We go to war with the client we have, not the client we wish to have. That’s a good thing: We’re all flawed; we all do foolish things. It’s a privilege to fight vigorously for someone regardless of their mistakes, just as we would want to be supported when we err.

But we’re not miracle workers. Trump sent Joanna Hendon, an extremely experienced defense attorney, to represent his interests before Wood and try to prevent the government from getting confidential communications between himself and Cohen. If it can be done, she’s the lawyer to do it. But Hendon cannot change the fact that Trump chose Cohen as his personal attorney in the first place or that he’s already talked indiscriminately about the relationship. Character is destiny.   

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

I just can't understand how this sort of thing isn't career ending

[AmericanRose]

8 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

I just can't understand how this sort of thing isn't career ending

Republicans don't care because Republican.

BT's believe either 'fake news' (because Trump is savior and we all just want to bring him down!), or it's all part of a plot to make him look just like one of those deep state/illuminati/whatever people so they don't try to assassinate him.

The weirdest thing to me is, so far as I can tell, he never tried to claim to be the world's savior... his supporters just came up with that all on their own!

[onekidanddone]

10 minutes ago, AmericanRose said:

The weirdest thing to me is, so far as I can tell, he never tried to claim to be the world's savior... his supporters just came up with that all on their own!

He did say during the campaign that he, and he alone can fix America. He also said he didn't need advisers, because he was so smart. That sounds like a delusional man with a savior complex.

[fraurosena]

Apparently the toddler is feeling the need to show the world just how infantile he can get.

Trump childishly bans Democrats from his first state dinner

Quote

In a troublingly familiar move, Trump has banned congressional Democrats from attending his first state dinner. It’s a petulant rebuke of American tradition.

On Tuesday, Trump will host French President Emmanuel Macron at the White House. But unlike his two immediate predecessors, he hasn’t invited any congressional members of the Democratic Party to attend, including leaders like Rep. Nancy Pelosi or Sen. Chuck Schumer. He has also excluded members of the media.

Lea Berman, social secretary under George W. Bush, told Politico, “It is a break with tradition.” Jeremy Bernard, President Barack Obama’s social secretary added, “It certainly doesn’t add any feeling of harmony” to completely exclude an entire party.

When President Obama hosted France’s Francois Hollande in 2014, he invited several Republican members of Congress, including then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Trump’s state dinner will also be considerably smaller than those of his predecessors. The guest list has only about 150 people on it. President Obama entertained over 350 people at his events.

This is just the latest in a long line of embarrassments highlighting Trump’s historic unpopularity and his pariah-like status.

He has never had the support of a majority of people in opinion polling. And of course, his inauguration had far lower attendance than President Obama’s.

Trump skipped throwing out the first pitch for the Washington Nationals. He also ducked out of hosting the Kennedy Center Honors, fearing boos from the public at both events.

Even when he visited territory that should be friendly ground, he has felt a backlash. When he attended the NCAA’s college football national championship game in Atlanta, fans booed him.

Normal presidents don’t have to avoid the Kennedy Center Honors or throwing out the first pitch. They certainly don’t have trouble attracting state dinner guests — reality TV stars crashed Obama’s first, it was such a hot ticket — nor do they exclude the opposing party from attending.

Most normal presidents aren’t consistently and widely disliked, nor do they openly embrace racismand sexism. And they aren’t under federal investigation for potential collusion with a hostile foreign power to attack our democracy.

But Trump is not normal. And he seems to care less and less about even trying to appear otherwise.

 

[AmazonGrace]

Jack Johnson got jailtime  for dating a white woman so pardoning him would be a good thing to do. However, he  died in 1946 so it's a bit too late to cheer him up.

 

[fraurosena]

Welp. I thought of this Jack Johnson when I first read that tweet and was quite confused!

 

[GreyhoundFan]

A good one from Jennifer Rubin: "Are Trump’s lawyers selling him a bill of goods, or is he not listening?"

Spoiler

President Trump is so unwilling to accept reality, and his advisers, even his lawyers, may be afraid of telling him the truth. Either Trump misunderstood what they’ve told him or his lawyers are making stuff up to pacify him:

• Ty Cobb said the special counsel investigation would be over last Thanksgiving. Then by the end of the year.
• Rudolph W. Giuliani tells him he’s going to get the Russia investigation to wrap up in the next week or so.
• One of his lawyers seems to have told Trump he’s in no danger if he is not a “target” of the investigation.
• Trump seems to think everything in Michael Cohen’s office and whatever they talked about fall into the category of attorney-client privilege.
• Trump’s lawyers act like it is their decision whether Trump will have to give testimony to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

These are false, in fact so preposterous that non-lawyers can tell they are nonsense. You don’t need to have gone to law school to know:

• No one has any idea when the Russia probe will end. Trump could fire Mueller, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and the investigation would go on.
• Giuliani hasn’t practiced law in decades, has no ability to influence Mueller and isn’t all that helpful with respect to the Southern District of New York, where he ended his stint as U.S. attorney in January 1989.
• Trump might be a subject of the Russia investigation now, but Mueller can decide he is a target at any time really.
• “Fixing” isn’t covered by the attorney-client privilege, and plotting crimes with your attorney isn’t covered either. Most of what Cohen did does not seem to be legal work.
• Trump can be subpoenaed by the grand jury if he refuses to make himself available for an interview. A court would almost certainly enforce it.

If Trump is buying the hooey he’s being fed, he’s really much dimmer than his supporters thought. And here’s some more bad news his lawyers might not have told him (or if they did, he chooses to forget):

• James B. Comey’s memos don’t exonerate Trump. They provide contemporaneous, highly detailed confirmation of his efforts to obstruct the investigation. Oh, and plotting to fire Mueller and then Rosenstein to get rid of the investigation evidences a corrupt intent. Based on information that is already publicly known, there are likely sufficient facts to make a case for obstruction.
• We already know about collusion — the June 9 meeting at Trump Tower with Russian associates. Moreover, Paul Manafort may, according to  prosecutors, have been the vital link between the campaign and Kremlin. No one and no document has exonerated Trump of collusion.
• The dossier has not been discredited. Some portion of it, according to Comey and others, was corroborated.
• If Trump fires Mueller and/or Rosenstein, there very likely will be mass protests, extreme pressure on the House to impeach and a batch of resignations at the Justice Department. Trump’s presidency would effectively be over. (By the way, because Sessions was so worried about Trump firing Rosenstein that he had to suggest he’d quit in protest, Republican lawmakers are flat wrong when they say there’s no chance Trump will fire Mueller or Rosenstein.)
• Trump may get subpoenaed in any number of civil cases (e.g., Summer Zervos’s defamation case, Stormy Daniels’s defamation case).

The last point is no small matter. Even the Democratic National Committee’s lawsuit against Russia’s intelligence outfit (GRU), WikiLeaks, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., Roger Stone, the Trump campaign and others for conspiracy can force Trump and members of his inner circle to turn over documents and sit for depositions where they will have to testify under oath.

“This lawsuit is well-grounded jurisdictionally and legally, dodges the difficulties that might’ve been triggered by naming Trump personally, and puts a high-powered piece on the 4-dimensional chessboard that can cause Trump’s circle endless trouble (through discovery and otherwise) after criminal proceedings have been completed and regardless of what happens on the impeachment front,” says constitutional scholar and Supreme Court advocate Laurence H. Tribe (a real lawyer).  It can also “provide a potent platform for educating the public about the ugly details of how this presidency arose from a swamp far dirtier than the one Trump promised to drain.”

Trump should get lawyers brave and persistent enough to tell him the truth. Maybe they have and he refuses to believe them or believes only what he wants. Either way, he cannot escape legal troubles by wishing them away — no matter how many times Sean Hannity tells him that he’s in no legal peril.

 

[Howl]

I'm so excited!  Tomorrow is first day of a brand new Infrastructure Week!  What will happen? Indictments?  Bimbo eruptions? Firings? Men with a sudden and compelling need to spend more time with their families?  More Scott Pruitt skulduggery?  Michael Cohen spilling his guts to Mueller?  Will Trump decide to live and golf full time at Mar-a-Loco?  What will be revealed?

[AmazonGrace]

This is a good read on several pages. (Not new but I hadn't seen it)