Trump 41: Waiting For My Impeachment

[fraurosena]

That tangerine-tinged thin skin is smarting... 

 

[Howl]

One has to admit that Trump and his twitter ghost writer know how to stay on message. 

[AmazonGrace]

Impeach him before he starts WWIII 

 

[Smash!]

Can anyone with more insight tell me why the GOP still support Trump, a president who clearly wants to build a authoritarian government? I just don‘t get it.

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, Smash! said:

Can anyone with more insight tell me why the GOP still support Trump, a president who clearly wants to build a authoritarian government? I just don‘t get it.

I'm not claiming to be more insightful, but here are my thoughts anyway. I think the answer to your question is multi-layered: 

1. Trump is enabling the far-right's agenda, and the far-right is the main driving force within the GOP 
2. The GOP wants authoritarian rule just as much, or maybe even more so than Trump himself. Because they know that they could never win fair and democratic elections. They want power at any and all costs. Democracy and the Constitution mean absolutely nothing to them. In fact, I believe they find them to be hindrances to the fulfilment of their plans.
3. The GOP are enthralled to adversarial foreign entities, who want Trump in office, because he is also in thrall to them and they effectively have control over America, it's economy and most frighteningly, its considerable military might. 

 

Edited May 20, 2019 by fraurosena

[Smash!]

Thank you @fraurosena for your explanation. I wasn‘t aware of the fact that a lot of republicans don‘t care about the constitution and democracy. This explains a lot. I thought they supported Trump because he‘s Republican and pretend not to see what‘s happening. But this is even scarier, holy sh*** ?

So why the hell are there voters, normal people who still support this party? Do they not see the signs? Or do they not care about living in an authoritarian regime (or worse dictatorship) as long as babies don‘t get aborted?

As an outsider I just don‘t get it. The signs are here that the GOP and Trump are up to no good beyond cutting Medicaid, building a wall and maybe questioning the constitution and people just don‘t care. ???

Edited May 20, 2019 by Smash!

[SassyPants]

2 hours ago, Smash! said:

Thank you @fraurosena for your explanation. I wasn‘t aware of the fact that a lot of republicans don‘t care about the constitution and democracy. This explains a lot. I thought they supported Trump because he‘s Republican and pretend not to see what‘s happening. But this is even scarier, holy sh*** ?

So why the hell are there voters, normal people who still support this party? Do they not see the signs? Or do they not care about living in an authoritarian regime (or worse dictatorship) as long as babies don‘t get aborted?

As an outsider I just don‘t get it. The signs are here that the GOP and Trump are up to no good beyond cutting Medicaid, building a wall and maybe questioning the constitution and people just don‘t care. ???

It’s the minority holding the majority hostage. That damn electoral college which prevents a true true democracy and will of the people.  American Nations is a really good read for anyone who is interested in how the settling of the US affects and influences us today. Those founding fathers did not want to lose their power to the will of the people. This needs to stop.

 

1 person, 1 vote, a true democracy!

[AnywhereButHere]

The electoral college needs to go. In return, liberal and moderate politicians need to understand that there is a middle of the country, and they have vital issues, concerns and needs that do affect the entire country. They can't just focus on the major, coastal cities and all but ignore the people who grow our food. Moderate republicans need to step up and shake off the screaming minority who seem to only care about guns and fetuses. Voters need to go back to being able to focus on messages that are longer than 160 characters. I have little hope that any of this will happen, but it needs to.

[GreyhoundFan]

Dumpy is upset because it came out that Deutsche Bank found discrepancies in his and Jared's finances.

Edited May 20, 2019 by GreyhoundFan

[GreyhoundFan]

And the corruption continues:

 

[laPapessaGiovanna]

5 hours ago, Smash! said:

Can anyone with more insight tell me why the GOP still support Trump, a president who clearly wants to build a authoritarian government? I just don‘t get it.

Because Republicans want an oligarchy run by rich middle aged white men, exactly as it was in the 18th century.

[Alisamer]

2 hours ago, Smash! said:

So why the hell are there voters, normal people who still support this party? Do they not see the signs? Or do they not care about living in an authoritarian regime (or worse dictatorship) as long as babies don‘t get aborted?

I think some of them are rich, and know that with the Rs in power, they'll keep getting richer, and they don't need any government services (they seem to forget who pays for the interstates, FDA, all the other agencies that keep them safe in various ways). If they don't need government services, why should they help pay for them for other people?

I think some of them are under-educated and un-informed. The ones who only watch Fox News miss out on a TON of the ridiculous stuff that is going on, as Fox either ignores it or spins it as something democrats are accusing Trump/republicans of doing, so they assume it isn't true.

I think some of the more sheltered religious fundies may know little more than "if they have an R after their name, they don't support abortion".

I think some people are unrealistically aspirational. They vote in favor of the rich guys, because they hope to somehow become a rich guy themselves some day. I know one guy in particular who votes republican because he says "If I was rich, I wouldn't want the government taking that much of my money either!" Spoiler: he's in decent middle class financial shape, but he's not likely ever to be wealthy enough to benefit from Trump's "tax cuts". But he thinks "maybe someday..."  

I think some are convinced that democrats will "take away my guns". I think some "want the government to stay out of my business!" (Unless you're a woman wanting an abortion, then the government is welcome to get all up in your business.) I think some are terrified of the word "socialism" even if they don't really understand why.

And I know some of them are racist. And some of those were pretty shaken when a black man was elected president, twice. Some of them are voting, when they may not have bothered before. They're hearing the dog whistles and "unintentional" references to racist or nazi related slogans, symbols, etc. And they're really happy about the way immigrants are being treated by the government now.

Some of them are homophobic, and shocked at the very idea of trans people. Democrats as a whole at least try to treat people as people, which offends people who think anyone in the LGBTQ (add other letters as necessary, I'm not sure if there are new ones now) spectrum is an "abomination" who is going to "go to hell" because Bible (and also "eww, anal"). 

And some of them are classist. That may be because of a lack of perspective, or an inability to empathize, or something like that, or it may be just conceit. That same aspirational guy I mentioned above thinks people should "pick themselves up by the bootstraps", "get a job", "don't mooch off the government", etc. Sadly, many of these people are one emergency away from being in the same situation as people needing help, but they can't see it.

The guy above has no answer when I informed him that food stamps don't pay for toilet paper. Or mention a woman whose husband/boyfriend ran off or died leaving her with a child but no means of support (despite his first wife's mom having been in that exact same position at one point). Or ask him about someone with a severe disability - he once said to me that he didn't believe a disabled, especially mentally disabled, person's life was worth as much as a "normal" person. (Then his stepdaughter gave birth to a baby that was deprived of oxygen for quite a while during birth, and is likely to be at least somewhat disabled... not sure if his view on that has changed lately.) He refuses to support charities that help poor people in any way, like Habitat for Humanity, but he'll donate to a cancer foundation and more importantly the humane society -" the puppies and the kitties" seem to be worth more than a poor or disabled person, to him. He and his first wife THREW AWAY an entire house worth of items after her mother died, rather than donate any of it to a charity to sell. 

These people don't really care HOW someone got poor. They don't care if they're sick, or disabled, or anything else. They shouldn't have got sick. They should have got a job. They should have worked harder before they got sick. They should have picked a better guy in the first place. They should have kept their legs shut. It's not the government or anyone else's job to help them, they should help themselves. If they were born into poverty their mom should have kept her legs shut, or placed the child for adoption by a family that is not poor. (But she can't have an abortion, no.) These are all things I have actually heard republican everyday people say.

My sister isn't republican, but she literally did not know Hillary actually won the popular vote until I told her a few months ago. She didn't vote (yes, I fussed at her about it, and she IS voting next time even if I have to drag her out of the house) because she "just didn't like Hillary" and like many people, didn't think it was truly possible for Trump to win.

Some people are gullible, some people are clueless, some people are just terrible. Some associate democrats with colleges and universities and people who have fancy degrees, and like to assume they are all  'elites' who look down on people who "actually work for a living" - despite that being really not true for the majority of democrats. 

I don't get it either, but there are a zillion tiny reasons why someone might support the GOP, even though some are holding their noses while they do it. I think some are so focused on one issue, and others are assuming nothing will really effect them, so they can't see the big picture, and have no clue of the authoritarian way things are starting to go. 

Some people can't see past their own nose. They won't see anything wrong until it directly hurts them.

I read an article yesterday about a Trump voter who is married to an "illegal" (his word) woman from Mexico. He liked the idea of the wall. He liked the idea of cracking down on immigration. He liked the plan to deport all the "bad hombres". He kept telling his sweet, stay at home mom wife that she would be fine, she's a good person, she has an American son, she's married to an American, etc. Until she got deported and banned from re-entering the country for at least ten years. Their son will be nearing high school graduation before she even has a chance to TRY to come back home. The husband saw the squalor of her hometown, and moved her to a nicer Mexican town. Seeing that, he realized just why she, and others, would risk so much to come to the US to better their lives. But he still votes republican. Because abortion.

[Dandruff]

6 hours ago, Smash! said:

Can anyone with more insight tell me why the GOP still support Trump, a president who clearly wants to build a authoritarian government? I just don‘t get it.

No insight, just an opinion:  The corruption is at the very top and is being supported by some very bad and powerful people who are not subject to US laws.  The high-level GOPers, in order to get and stay where they are, needed to make a commitment to support the "team".  If they step out of line they become potential targets.  I suspect some of them wish they had chosen another path, but there's not much they can do about it now except quit.  So they're enjoying the perks and waiting for someone to get out of office.  At that point, I think many may turn on him, so the goal is to stay in office for as long as possible and set up whatever protections are possible for afterwards.  As far as what the GOP voters are thinking, I agree with:

7 minutes ago, Alisamer said:

I don't get it either, but there are a zillion tiny reasons why someone might support the GOP, even though some are holding their noses while they do it. I think some are so focused on one issue, and others are assuming nothing will really effect them, so they can't see the big picture, and have no clue of the authoritarian way things are starting to go. 

Some people can't see past their own nose. They won't see anything wrong until it directly hurts them.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"U.S. judge denies Trump bid to quash House subpoena for years of financial records"

Spoiler

A federal judge on Monday denied President Trump’s bid to quash a House subpoena for years of his financial records from his accounting firm and stayed his order seven days to allow the president’s lawyers time to appeal.

The ruling handed an initial defeat to Trump’s vow to defy subpoenas by House Democrats and came in one of the first courtroom challenges to a series of lawmakers’ investigative demands for his bank records, accounting statements and tax returns.

U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta of Washington, D.C., refused to block the records request to Mazars USA from the House Oversight and Reform Committee while litigation continues. Attorneys for Trump and associated businesses filed suit April 22, arguing Congress is not entitled to investigate his past personal financial dealings for potential corruption.

“So long as Congress investigates on a subject matter on which ‘legislation could be had,’ Congress acts as contemplated by Article I of the Constitution,” Mehta said in a 41-page opinion. Mehta ruled the committee’s claims that Trump’s records will help it consider strengthening ethics and disclosure laws and enforce a constitutional ban on acceptance of foreign gifts by a president were “facially valid,” saying, “It is not for the court to question whether the Committee’s actions are truly motivated by political considerations.”

In court, Douglas N. Letter, general counsel of the House of Representatives, has charged that the lawsuit would dismiss Congress’s constitutional oversight powers as “a nuisance . . . getting in [Trump’s] way while he’s trying to run the country.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s private attorney, Jay Sekulow, said when the lawsuit was filed that the president’s team “will not allow Congressional Presidential harassment to go unanswered.”

An appeal would test decades of legal precedent that have upheld Congress’s right to investigate, arguing the novel theory that a president’s past dealings are irrelevant to the legislative branch’s fundamental job of writing bills. The legal battle comes as House Democrats seek to probe Trump’s finances, his campaign and allegations he sought to obstruct justice in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation.

Trump, his three eldest children and companies raised similar arguments in a bid to block a subpoena by the House Financial Services Committee for Trump’s bank records issued to Deutsche Bank AG and Capital One Financial Corp. which a federal judge in Manhattan will hear Wednesday.

The White House is also resisting House demands for former White House counsel Donald McGahn’s records and testimony pertaining to federal investigations of Trump, as well as by testimony by Mueller himself over his recently concluded report on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.

Democrats have called the lawsuits long-shot bids to delay the unearthing of politically damaging information about Trump until after the 2020 election, and to obscure from the public ongoing conflicts of interest by officials charged with executing the nation’s laws.

Trump’s attorneys fire back that Democrats’ true purpose is not governance but political advantage, to expose the Trumps’ “private financial information for the sake of exposure, with the hope that it will turn up something that Democrats can use as a political tool against the President.”

In the Mazars case, Mehta cut down Trump lawyers’ arguments that the oversight committee’s inquiry into whether Trump misled his lenders by inflating his net worth violated the Constitution’s separation of powers, by having Congress assume the Justice Department’s powers to investigate “dubious and partisan” allegations of private conduct.

Cue the twitter meltdown.

[SassyPants]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"U.S. judge denies Trump bid to quash House subpoena for years of financial records"

  Hide contents

A federal judge on Monday denied President Trump’s bid to quash a House subpoena for years of his financial records from his accounting firm and stayed his order seven days to allow the president’s lawyers time to appeal.

The ruling handed an initial defeat to Trump’s vow to defy subpoenas by House Democrats and came in one of the first courtroom challenges to a series of lawmakers’ investigative demands for his bank records, accounting statements and tax returns.

U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta of Washington, D.C., refused to block the records request to Mazars USA from the House Oversight and Reform Committee while litigation continues. Attorneys for Trump and associated businesses filed suit April 22, arguing Congress is not entitled to investigate his past personal financial dealings for potential corruption.

“So long as Congress investigates on a subject matter on which ‘legislation could be had,’ Congress acts as contemplated by Article I of the Constitution,” Mehta said in a 41-page opinion. Mehta ruled the committee’s claims that Trump’s records will help it consider strengthening ethics and disclosure laws and enforce a constitutional ban on acceptance of foreign gifts by a president were “facially valid,” saying, “It is not for the court to question whether the Committee’s actions are truly motivated by political considerations.”

In court, Douglas N. Letter, general counsel of the House of Representatives, has charged that the lawsuit would dismiss Congress’s constitutional oversight powers as “a nuisance . . . getting in [Trump’s] way while he’s trying to run the country.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s private attorney, Jay Sekulow, said when the lawsuit was filed that the president’s team “will not allow Congressional Presidential harassment to go unanswered.”

An appeal would test decades of legal precedent that have upheld Congress’s right to investigate, arguing the novel theory that a president’s past dealings are irrelevant to the legislative branch’s fundamental job of writing bills. The legal battle comes as House Democrats seek to probe Trump’s finances, his campaign and allegations he sought to obstruct justice in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation.

Trump, his three eldest children and companies raised similar arguments in a bid to block a subpoena by the House Financial Services Committee for Trump’s bank records issued to Deutsche Bank AG and Capital One Financial Corp. which a federal judge in Manhattan will hear Wednesday.

The White House is also resisting House demands for former White House counsel Donald McGahn’s records and testimony pertaining to federal investigations of Trump, as well as by testimony by Mueller himself over his recently concluded report on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.

Democrats have called the lawsuits long-shot bids to delay the unearthing of politically damaging information about Trump until after the 2020 election, and to obscure from the public ongoing conflicts of interest by officials charged with executing the nation’s laws.

Trump’s attorneys fire back that Democrats’ true purpose is not governance but political advantage, to expose the Trumps’ “private financial information for the sake of exposure, with the hope that it will turn up something that Democrats can use as a political tool against the President.”

In the Mazars case, Mehta cut down Trump lawyers’ arguments that the oversight committee’s inquiry into whether Trump misled his lenders by inflating his net worth violated the Constitution’s separation of powers, by having Congress assume the Justice Department’s powers to investigate “dubious and partisan” allegations of private conduct.

Cue the twitter meltdown.

Per Trump, “ bad decision by an Obama appointed judge.” He’s feeding his base.

[GreyhoundFan]

"In Fox News interview, Trump expresses concern about E-Verify"

Spoiler

President Trump said in an interview airing Sunday that he has concerns about a verification system that checks whether someone can work in the United States legally — a tool that his namesake business began using company-wide earlier this year. 

In an interview with Fox News Channel conducted last week, Trump said a new White House plan to overhaul portions of the legal immigration system could “possibly” include the use of E-Verify. But he also said that the verification system could be overly onerous on certain employers, such as farmers, who Trump said were “not equipped” to use it.

“I used it when I built the hotel down the road on Pennsylvania Avenue,” he said, referring to the Trump International Hotel in Washington. “I use a very strong E-Verify system. And we would go through 28 people — 29, 30 people — before we found one that qualified.”

He continued: “So it’s a very tough thing to ask a farmer to go through that. So in a certain way, I speak against myself, but you also have to have a world of some practicality.” 

The president’s comments about E-Verify draw attention back to the hiring practices of the Trump Organization, which has employed undocumented immigrants as waiters, groundskeepers and housekeepers even as Trump made battling undocumented immigration a signature issue.  

Trump said during his presidential campaign that his company used E-Verify and he called for it to be made mandatory.

“I have hired tens of thousands of employees, many Hispanic, over the years. Many, many. They’re fantastic,” Trump said during a campaign rally in 2015. “But I have — and I think, to me, it’s very important — E-Verify.”

But the Trump Organization did not begin using the system at all of its properties until January, after The Washington Post reported that about a dozen undocumented workers from Latin America had been employed at the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, N.Y., but were abruptly fired that month.

“We are instituting E-Verify on all of our properties as soon as possible,” Trump’s son Eric Trump, who is executive vice president of the Trump Organization, said at the time. “We’re starting with the golf properties, and we are going to be doing all of them.”

The president’s resistance to E-Verify is also likely to further disappoint advocates of immigration restrictions, who were already displeased when the White House introduced an immigration plan that would not reduce the overall number of green cards issued per year. 

Good grief. He is such a moron.

[GreyhoundFan]

The depravity knows no bounds: "Trump is planning a cruel twist in border policy"

Spoiler

Despite President Trump publicly backpedaling on his threat to restart his widely condemned family separation policy, reports reveal that the administration is vetting plans to revamp the scheme — euphemistically rebranding it as “binary choice.” In reality, this bland term belies a cruel ultimatum to parents at the border: either be separated from your children indefinitely or waive your child’s rights so they can be sent to jail with you.

A choice between family separation and family detention is not a choice at all. As cruel as separation is, children simply do not belong in prison. A number of pediatric associations agree that the effects of detention, including family detention, are uniquely traumatizing for children and can cause irreparable, lifelong harm.

The Trump administration’s record on family separation hints at what a “binary choice” would look like in practice: parents forced to make split-second decisions in coercive conditions and without legal advice — probably after spending several days in dirty tent camps and freezing cells.

I have worked with refugees in El Paso for almost a decade — meeting thousands of families and hearing countless stories of the rape, torture and murder that forced them to flee their home countries. This job makes you familiar with tragedy.

But the trauma inflicted by the Trump administration’s family separation policy has been like nothing I’ve ever experienced. This is why it’s unfathomable that — as the first anniversary of Trump’s Executive Order, which supposedly ended family separations, approaches — the same administration is considering circumventing the will of the courts and disregarding the will of the people by re-implementing this horrific practice.

Last summer, after the courts ordered an end to the family separation policy, I watched more than 300 mothers and fathers be reunited with their children at the shelter where I work. Many were toddlers who regarded their parents with wariness and uncertainty instead of recognition and relief.

I’d expected a brighter tone, but the reality was more somber; children and parents alike appeared shellshocked as they tried to adjust to the new normal. I listened to a 5-year-old girl, coloring furiously, tell me in a singsong voice how her “papi” had left her all alone because she thought he didn’t love her enough. Some brooding kids wouldn’t look their parents in the eye, angry and blaming them for a separation that was far beyond their parent’s control. Other children clung to their parent’s legs, refusing to let them out of their sight.

After the horrifying images of separated children began flooding the country last summer, causing nationwide shock and outrage, family detention might at first appear to be the better alternative to family separation. However, the reality of detaining families together more closely resembles a concentration camp than a safe haven.

Family detention exists in a limited capacity now. But allowing the Trump administration to implement “binary choice” as a policy would greatly expand the practice — placing more children in detention camps, probably for longer periods.

At a family detention camp in New Mexico, I met a suicidal 4-year-old whose face was covered in bloody, self-inflicted scratches. Every time she and her mother walked past the drainage ditch — running along the chain-link and barbed-wire fence that enclosed them — this little girl would beg her mother to get in the water. She didn’t want to swim. She wanted the “crocodillos” to eat them so they could go to heaven and escape that place. Another young child had to be restrained by his mother because he kept running full-speed into metal lockers. He was covered in bruises.

I have seen numerous heartbroken mothers break down in family detention camps and give up on their asylum cases, despite knowing they’d be deported back to danger. They couldn’t face spending one more day, let alone months, with their children subjected to the psychological torture of family detention.

This is the fate “binary choice” would be forcing on vulnerable children and families: brutal separation or traumatic imprisonment.

Working alongside volunteers and pro bono attorneys over the past year, my colleagues and I have done our best to advise separated parents on their “choices.” But under this administration, there is no good advice, no real answers and no honest choices.

Parents keep blaming themselves, saying that maybe they would have been reunited had they signed the form the “right” way. Could they change their answers? Could we help them?

There were other, less legalistic, questions too: Would their children be able to understand they made that “choice” to protect them, not because they didn’t love them? Would their children ever stop blaming them? Would they ever be able to stop worrying that they made the wrong choice?

The truth is there is no right choice when the options are bringing your child to prison with you or signing your child away to strangers indefinitely. Family detention through “binary choice” is a sinister, ironic twist that merely extends the horrors of family separation instead of ending them. As Americans — and as mothers, daughters, fathers and sons — we cannot let those horrors repeat themselves.

Suicidal four year olds? That's appalling.

[GreyhoundFan]

Here's more on the NYT article that caused Dumpy's panties to be in a bunch this morning: "Deutsche Bank Staff Saw Suspicious Activity in Trump and Kushner Accounts"

Spoiler

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Anti-money-laundering specialists at Deutsche Bank recommended in 2016 and 2017 that multiple transactions involving legal entities controlled by Donald J. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be reported to a federal financial-crimes watchdog.

The transactions, some of which involved Mr. Trump’s now-defunct foundation, set off alerts in a computer system designed to detect illicit activity, according to five current and former bank employees. Compliance staff members who then reviewed the transactions prepared so-called suspicious activity reports that they believed should be sent to a unit of the Treasury Department that polices financial crimes.

But executives at Deutsche Bank, which has lent billions of dollars to the Trump and Kushner companies, rejected their employees’ advice. The reports were never filed with the government.

The nature of the transactions was not clear. At least some of them involved money flowing back and forth with overseas entities or individuals, which bank employees considered suspicious.

Real estate developers like Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner sometimes do large, all-cash deals, including with people outside the United States, any of which can prompt anti-money laundering reviews. The red flags raised by employees do not necessarily mean the transactions were improper. Banks sometimes opt not to file suspicious activity reports if they conclude their employees’ concerns are unwarranted.

But former Deutsche Bank employees said the decision not to report the Trump and Kushner transactions reflected the bank’s generally lax approach to money laundering laws. The employees — most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve their ability to work in the industry — said it was part of a pattern of the bank’s executives rejecting valid reports to protect relationships with lucrative clients.

“You present them with everything, and you give them a recommendation, and nothing happens,” said Tammy McFadden, a former Deutsche Bank anti-money laundering specialist who reviewed some of the transactions. “It’s the D.B. way. They are prone to discounting everything.”

Ms. McFadden said she was terminated last year after she raised concerns about the bank’s practices. Since then, she has filed complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators about the bank’s anti-money-laundering enforcement.

Kerrie McHugh, a Deutsche Bank spokeswoman, said the company had intensified its efforts to combat financial crime. An effective anti-money laundering program, she said, “requires sophisticated transaction screening technology as well as a trained group of individuals who can analyze the alerts generated by that technology both thoroughly and efficiently.”

“At no time was an investigator prevented from escalating activity identified as potentially suspicious,” she added. “Furthermore, the suggestion that anyone was reassigned or fired in an effort to quash concerns relating to any client is categorically false.”

Amanda Miller, a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization, the umbrella company for the Trump family’s many business interests, said: “We have no knowledge of any ‘flagged’ transactions with Deutsche Bank.” She said the Trump Organization currently has “no operating accounts with Deutsche Bank.” She did not respond when asked if other Trump entities had accounts.

Karen Zabarsky, a spokeswoman for Kushner Companies, said: “Any allegations regarding Deutsche Bank’s relationship with Kushner Companies which involved money laundering is completely made up and totally false. The New York Times continues to create dots that just don’t connect.”

Deutsche Bank’s decision not to report the transactions is the latest twist in Mr. Trump’s long, complicated relationship with the German bank — the only mainstream financial institution consistently willing to do business with the real estate developer.

Congressional and state authorities are investigating that relationship and have demanded the bank’s records related to the president, his family and their companies. Subpoenas from two House committees seek, among other things, documents related to any suspicious activities detected in Mr. Trump’s personal and business bank accounts since 2010, according to a copy of a subpoena included in a federal court filing.

Mr. Trump and his family sued Deutsche Bank in April, seeking to block it from complying with the congressional subpoenas. The president’s lawyers described the subpoenas as politically motivated.

Suspicious activity reports are at the heart of the federal government’s efforts to identify criminal activity like money laundering and sanctions violations. But government regulations give banks leeway in selecting which transactions to report to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Lenders typically use a layered approach to detect improper activity. The first step is filtering thousands of transactions using computer programs, which send the ones considered potentially suspicious to midlevel employees for a detailed review. Those employees can decide whether to draft a suspicious activity report, but a final ruling on whether to submit it to the Treasury Department is often made by more senior managers.

In the summer of 2016, Deutsche Bank’s software flagged a series of transactions involving the real estate company of Mr. Kushner, now a senior White House adviser.

Ms. McFadden, a longtime anti-money laundering specialist in Deutsche Bank’s Jacksonville office, said she had reviewed the transactions and found that money had moved from Kushner Companies to Russian individuals. She concluded that the transactions should be reported to the government — in part because federal regulators had ordered Deutsche Bank, which had been caught laundering billions of dollars for Russians, to toughen its scrutiny of potentially illegal transactions.

Ms. McFadden drafted a suspicious activity report and compiled a small bundle of documents to back up her decision.

Typically, such a report would be reviewed by a team of anti-money laundering experts who are independent of the business line in which the transactions originated — in this case, the private-banking division — according to Ms. McFadden and two former Deutsche Bank managers.

That did not happen with this report. It went to managers in New York who were part of the private bank, which caters to the ultrawealthy. They felt Ms. McFadden’s concerns were unfounded and opted not to submit the report to the government, the employees said.

Ms. McFadden and some of her colleagues said they believed the report had been killed to maintain the private-banking division’s strong relationship with Mr. Kushner.

After Mr. Trump became president, transactions involving him and his companies were reviewed by an anti-financial crime team at the bank called the Special Investigations Unit. That team, based in Jacksonville, produced multiple suspicious activity reports involving different entities that Mr. Trump owned or controlled, according to three former Deutsche Bank employees who saw the reports in an internal computer system.

Some of those reports involved Mr. Trump’s limited liability companies. At least one was related to transactions involving the Donald J. Trump Foundation, two employees said.

Deutsche Bank ultimately chose not to file those suspicious activity reports with the Treasury Department, either, according to three former employees. They said it was unusual for the bank to reject a series of reports involving the same high-profile client.

Mr. Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank spans two decades. During a period when most Wall Street banks had stopped doing business with him after his repeated defaults, Deutsche Bank lent Mr. Trump and his companies a total of more than $2.5 billion. Projects financed through the private-banking division include Mr. Trump’s Doral golf resort near Miami and his transformation of Washington’s Old Post Office Building into a luxury hotel.

When he became president, he owed Deutsche Bank well over $300 million. That made the German institution Mr. Trump’s biggest creditor — and put the bank in a bind.

Senior executives worried that if they took a tough stance with Mr. Trump’s accounts — for example, by demanding payment of a delinquent loan — they could provoke the president’s wrath. On the other hand, if they didn’t do anything, the bank could be perceived as cutting a lucrative break for Mr. Trump, whose administration wields regulatory and law enforcement power over the bank.

In the past few years, United States and European authorities have punished Deutsche Bank for helping clients, including wealthy Russians, launder funds and for moving money into countries like Iran in violation of American sanctions. The bank has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and is operating under a Federal Reserve order that requires it to do more to stop illicit activities.

On two palm-tree-lined campuses in Jacksonville, Deutsche Bank has thousands of employees who vet customers and transactions. Six current and former bank employees there said the operations were deeply troubled.

Anti-money laundering workers were pressured to quickly sift through transactions to assess whether they were suspicious, the employees said. As a result, they often erred on the side of not flagging transactions.

Two former employees said that they had raised concerns about transactions involving companies linked to prominent Russians, but that managers had told them not to file suspicious activity reports. The employees were under the impression that the bank did not want to upset important clients.

Several employees said they had complained about the bank’s anti-money laundering processes to Joshua Blazer, the head of Deutsche Bank’s financial crimes investigations division in Jacksonville, and had then been criticized for having a negative attitude. One employee said she resigned last summer over concerns about the bank’s ethics.

Mr. Blazer, hired by Deutsche Bank in 2017 to strengthen the bank’s financial crime-fighting apparatus, declined to comment.

Ms. McFadden’s job at Deutsche Bank was to inspect clients and transactions in the company’s private-banking division — the unit that lent money to Mr. Trump. She joined the bank in 2008, after working for Bank of America, also in Jacksonville.

Ms. McFadden had left Bank of America in 2005, and later sued for racial discrimination and wrongful termination. According to court records, her lawsuit was settled on confidential terms the same year she joined Deutsche Bank, where she went on to win multiple performance awards.

Around the time she flagged the Kushner Companies’ transactions, Ms. McFadden said, she also complained about how the bank was scrutinizing the accounts of high-profile customers, such as those in public office. Those customers — known as politically exposed persons — are regarded as at heightened risk of being involved in corruption. As a result, their accounts are subject to extra vetting.

Ms. McFadden said she had told her superiors that dozens of politically exposed clients of the private-banking division, including Mr. Trump and members of his family, were not receiving that added attention. Her superiors told her to stop raising questions, according to Ms. McFadden and the two former managers.

After taking her complaint to the human resources department, Ms. McFadden was transferred to another division. She was terminated in April 2018. The bank told her that she was not processing enough transactions.

Ms. McFadden disputed that. She said her superiors had reduced the number of transactions she was assigned to review after she voiced her concerns. She and the two former managers said they perceived her termination as an act of retaliation.

“They attempted to try to silence me,” she said. “I’m at peace because I know that I did the right thing.”

 

[fraurosena]

This is the ultimate irony. 

 

[SassyPants]

15 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Here's more on the NYT article that caused Dumpy's panties to be in a bunch this morning: "Deutsche Bank Staff Saw Suspicious Activity in Trump and Kushner Accounts"

  Hide contents

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Anti-money-laundering specialists at Deutsche Bank recommended in 2016 and 2017 that multiple transactions involving legal entities controlled by Donald J. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be reported to a federal financial-crimes watchdog.

The transactions, some of which involved Mr. Trump’s now-defunct foundation, set off alerts in a computer system designed to detect illicit activity, according to five current and former bank employees. Compliance staff members who then reviewed the transactions prepared so-called suspicious activity reports that they believed should be sent to a unit of the Treasury Department that polices financial crimes.

But executives at Deutsche Bank, which has lent billions of dollars to the Trump and Kushner companies, rejected their employees’ advice. The reports were never filed with the government.

The nature of the transactions was not clear. At least some of them involved money flowing back and forth with overseas entities or individuals, which bank employees considered suspicious.

Real estate developers like Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner sometimes do large, all-cash deals, including with people outside the United States, any of which can prompt anti-money laundering reviews. The red flags raised by employees do not necessarily mean the transactions were improper. Banks sometimes opt not to file suspicious activity reports if they conclude their employees’ concerns are unwarranted.

But former Deutsche Bank employees said the decision not to report the Trump and Kushner transactions reflected the bank’s generally lax approach to money laundering laws. The employees — most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve their ability to work in the industry — said it was part of a pattern of the bank’s executives rejecting valid reports to protect relationships with lucrative clients.

“You present them with everything, and you give them a recommendation, and nothing happens,” said Tammy McFadden, a former Deutsche Bank anti-money laundering specialist who reviewed some of the transactions. “It’s the D.B. way. They are prone to discounting everything.”

Ms. McFadden said she was terminated last year after she raised concerns about the bank’s practices. Since then, she has filed complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators about the bank’s anti-money-laundering enforcement.

Kerrie McHugh, a Deutsche Bank spokeswoman, said the company had intensified its efforts to combat financial crime. An effective anti-money laundering program, she said, “requires sophisticated transaction screening technology as well as a trained group of individuals who can analyze the alerts generated by that technology both thoroughly and efficiently.”

“At no time was an investigator prevented from escalating activity identified as potentially suspicious,” she added. “Furthermore, the suggestion that anyone was reassigned or fired in an effort to quash concerns relating to any client is categorically false.”

Amanda Miller, a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization, the umbrella company for the Trump family’s many business interests, said: “We have no knowledge of any ‘flagged’ transactions with Deutsche Bank.” She said the Trump Organization currently has “no operating accounts with Deutsche Bank.” She did not respond when asked if other Trump entities had accounts.

Karen Zabarsky, a spokeswoman for Kushner Companies, said: “Any allegations regarding Deutsche Bank’s relationship with Kushner Companies which involved money laundering is completely made up and totally false. The New York Times continues to create dots that just don’t connect.”

Deutsche Bank’s decision not to report the transactions is the latest twist in Mr. Trump’s long, complicated relationship with the German bank — the only mainstream financial institution consistently willing to do business with the real estate developer.

Congressional and state authorities are investigating that relationship and have demanded the bank’s records related to the president, his family and their companies. Subpoenas from two House committees seek, among other things, documents related to any suspicious activities detected in Mr. Trump’s personal and business bank accounts since 2010, according to a copy of a subpoena included in a federal court filing.

Mr. Trump and his family sued Deutsche Bank in April, seeking to block it from complying with the congressional subpoenas. The president’s lawyers described the subpoenas as politically motivated.

Suspicious activity reports are at the heart of the federal government’s efforts to identify criminal activity like money laundering and sanctions violations. But government regulations give banks leeway in selecting which transactions to report to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Lenders typically use a layered approach to detect improper activity. The first step is filtering thousands of transactions using computer programs, which send the ones considered potentially suspicious to midlevel employees for a detailed review. Those employees can decide whether to draft a suspicious activity report, but a final ruling on whether to submit it to the Treasury Department is often made by more senior managers.

In the summer of 2016, Deutsche Bank’s software flagged a series of transactions involving the real estate company of Mr. Kushner, now a senior White House adviser.

Ms. McFadden, a longtime anti-money laundering specialist in Deutsche Bank’s Jacksonville office, said she had reviewed the transactions and found that money had moved from Kushner Companies to Russian individuals. She concluded that the transactions should be reported to the government — in part because federal regulators had ordered Deutsche Bank, which had been caught laundering billions of dollars for Russians, to toughen its scrutiny of potentially illegal transactions.

Ms. McFadden drafted a suspicious activity report and compiled a small bundle of documents to back up her decision.

Typically, such a report would be reviewed by a team of anti-money laundering experts who are independent of the business line in which the transactions originated — in this case, the private-banking division — according to Ms. McFadden and two former Deutsche Bank managers.

That did not happen with this report. It went to managers in New York who were part of the private bank, which caters to the ultrawealthy. They felt Ms. McFadden’s concerns were unfounded and opted not to submit the report to the government, the employees said.

Ms. McFadden and some of her colleagues said they believed the report had been killed to maintain the private-banking division’s strong relationship with Mr. Kushner.

After Mr. Trump became president, transactions involving him and his companies were reviewed by an anti-financial crime team at the bank called the Special Investigations Unit. That team, based in Jacksonville, produced multiple suspicious activity reports involving different entities that Mr. Trump owned or controlled, according to three former Deutsche Bank employees who saw the reports in an internal computer system.

Some of those reports involved Mr. Trump’s limited liability companies. At least one was related to transactions involving the Donald J. Trump Foundation, two employees said.

Deutsche Bank ultimately chose not to file those suspicious activity reports with the Treasury Department, either, according to three former employees. They said it was unusual for the bank to reject a series of reports involving the same high-profile client.

Mr. Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank spans two decades. During a period when most Wall Street banks had stopped doing business with him after his repeated defaults, Deutsche Bank lent Mr. Trump and his companies a total of more than $2.5 billion. Projects financed through the private-banking division include Mr. Trump’s Doral golf resort near Miami and his transformation of Washington’s Old Post Office Building into a luxury hotel.

When he became president, he owed Deutsche Bank well over $300 million. That made the German institution Mr. Trump’s biggest creditor — and put the bank in a bind.

Senior executives worried that if they took a tough stance with Mr. Trump’s accounts — for example, by demanding payment of a delinquent loan — they could provoke the president’s wrath. On the other hand, if they didn’t do anything, the bank could be perceived as cutting a lucrative break for Mr. Trump, whose administration wields regulatory and law enforcement power over the bank.

In the past few years, United States and European authorities have punished Deutsche Bank for helping clients, including wealthy Russians, launder funds and for moving money into countries like Iran in violation of American sanctions. The bank has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and is operating under a Federal Reserve order that requires it to do more to stop illicit activities.

On two palm-tree-lined campuses in Jacksonville, Deutsche Bank has thousands of employees who vet customers and transactions. Six current and former bank employees there said the operations were deeply troubled.

Anti-money laundering workers were pressured to quickly sift through transactions to assess whether they were suspicious, the employees said. As a result, they often erred on the side of not flagging transactions.

Two former employees said that they had raised concerns about transactions involving companies linked to prominent Russians, but that managers had told them not to file suspicious activity reports. The employees were under the impression that the bank did not want to upset important clients.

Several employees said they had complained about the bank’s anti-money laundering processes to Joshua Blazer, the head of Deutsche Bank’s financial crimes investigations division in Jacksonville, and had then been criticized for having a negative attitude. One employee said she resigned last summer over concerns about the bank’s ethics.

Mr. Blazer, hired by Deutsche Bank in 2017 to strengthen the bank’s financial crime-fighting apparatus, declined to comment.

Ms. McFadden’s job at Deutsche Bank was to inspect clients and transactions in the company’s private-banking division — the unit that lent money to Mr. Trump. She joined the bank in 2008, after working for Bank of America, also in Jacksonville.

Ms. McFadden had left Bank of America in 2005, and later sued for racial discrimination and wrongful termination. According to court records, her lawsuit was settled on confidential terms the same year she joined Deutsche Bank, where she went on to win multiple performance awards.

Around the time she flagged the Kushner Companies’ transactions, Ms. McFadden said, she also complained about how the bank was scrutinizing the accounts of high-profile customers, such as those in public office. Those customers — known as politically exposed persons — are regarded as at heightened risk of being involved in corruption. As a result, their accounts are subject to extra vetting.

Ms. McFadden said she had told her superiors that dozens of politically exposed clients of the private-banking division, including Mr. Trump and members of his family, were not receiving that added attention. Her superiors told her to stop raising questions, according to Ms. McFadden and the two former managers.

After taking her complaint to the human resources department, Ms. McFadden was transferred to another division. She was terminated in April 2018. The bank told her that she was not processing enough transactions.

Ms. McFadden disputed that. She said her superiors had reduced the number of transactions she was assigned to review after she voiced her concerns. She and the two former managers said they perceived her termination as an act of retaliation.

“They attempted to try to silence me,” she said. “I’m at peace because I know that I did the right thing.”

 

God this pisses me off. I am so tired of the “powers that be” getting in the way of processes that were put in place to stop illegal behaviors. Sick to effing death of it. Powerful people playing by their own set of rules and getting away with it time after time is what really saps my hope for our collective future. They make the rules, break the rules, avoid the consequences , which then get turfed to the rest of us. They think we are stupid, and we are held hostage to these asshats. Aside from the people who are in the group, the only other people who support this are those who hope to get into that group.

Edited May 21, 2019 by SassyPants

[GreyhoundFan]

"The narrator in chief: Trump opines on the 2020 Democrats — and so much more"

Spoiler

President Trump assessed the 2020 Democratic primary field in the unvarnished style of a cable news pundit — or as a brash sports radio host belittling the opposing team’s roster.

He dismissed former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke as “made to fall like a rock,” asking: “What the hell happened?”

He reduced Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to an offensive nickname and a single sentence: “Pocahontas, I think, is probably out.”

And he opined on the relative merits of former vice president Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.): “Bernie’s crazy, but Bernie’s got a lot more energy than Biden, so you never know.”

The rat-a-tat-tat overview — delivered during a speech last week ostensibly about energy policy in Hackberry, La. — illustrated Trump’s compulsion to be the nation’s omnipresent political commentator, even while competing as a candidate himself. 

On Monday, Trump was at it again, offering a play-by-play of his perceived Democratic rivals on Twitter. “Looks like Bernie Sanders is history,” Trump wrote. “Sleepy Joe Biden is pulling ahead and think about it, I’m only here because of Sleepy Joe and the man who took him off the 1% trash heap, President O! China wants Sleepy Joe BADLY!”

Trump’s handicapping of the Democratic presidential race is one part of his much broader role as the country’s de facto narrator in chief — inserting himself into nearly every major cultural moment or controversy, and putting his own commentary and jeers at the center of the conversation.

Trump in recent weeks has weighed in on actor Jussie Smollett’s case in Chicago (“It is an embarrassment to our Nation!”), instructed the French government on how to fight the fire that engulfed Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral (“flying water tankers”), and disparaged what he viewed as the “political correctness” of the Kentucky Derby (“It was a rough & tumble race on a wet and sloppy track”). He routinely acts as TV critic — taking aim at “Saturday Night Live” and other shows he doesn’t like — or as sports commentator, such as when he congratulated Trump-supporting player Nick Bosa for being No. 2 in the NFL draft.

“He brings you into his narrative. You can’t resist. It’s kind of a mind trap,” said Bret Easton Ellis, the provocative writer whose latest nonfiction book, “White,” details how many liberals feel both alarmed by Trump and unable to escape “the orange monster,” as he dubs the president, whether in their social media feeds or at dinner with friends. 

Ellis, who has chronicled Trump’s exploits since the 1980s, said the president has effectively fused his celebrity tabloid persona with political power, becoming a rare mass cultural touchstone in a fractured modern age.

“Everything has become so niche that not even ‘Game of Thrones’ is able to unite everyone into having an opinion or forcing themselves to not have an opinion,” Ellis said. “Trump is a great unifier in some horrible way.” 

Trump’s naked eagerness to make any story or occasion about himself stems from his self-conception as both a star and a producer, a director and a writer, according to friends, advisers and critics. And now, they say, he is able to deploy the platform of the presidency to amplify that vision of himself as a leading man.

Or, said Trump biographer Tim O’Brien, as the most influential caller into a talk radio show.

“ ‘Oh, hi, this is Don from Queens and I’m sick and tired of people being politically correct about the Kentucky Derby,’ ” O’Brien said, imagining dialogue with Trump as talk radio chatter. “And he’s sitting in an arm chair — a Barcalounger — with the newspaper and a burger, getting progressively cantankerous.” 

O’Brien, executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion, added that Trump is “constantly narrating his own reality television series, and it now just happens to be the presidency.”

Trump’s desire to capture the nation’s collective attention can make him seem inescapable — a cascade of alerts on a phone, the all-caps headline on cable news, and the unavoidable presence at work and family gatherings alike. Voters may love him, they may hate him, they may even mute him — but he never disappears. 

Shortly after Tiger Woods won the 83rd Masters Tournament by a single shot, Trump invited him to the White House to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, basking in Woods’s moment as he placed the medal around the golfer’s neck. And after the Boston Red Sox visited the White House on May 9 — a trip that divided the team largely along racial lines — the president took to Twitter, claiming credit for the team’s recent on-field success.

“Has anyone noticed that all the Boston @RedSox have done is WIN since coming to the White House!” he wrote.

Trump has even moved to commandeer Washington’s annual Fourth of July fireworks celebration, potentially transforming a celebration of the nation’s independence into something closer to a “Make America Great Again” political rally. 

Trump’s relentlessness can be disorienting and frustrating, especially for his political rivals and critics. Alex Conant, a senior adviser to the failed 2016 presidential bid of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), said Trump “is either setting the agenda or commenting on it, but he’s always in the story, and so when you’re running against him, you’re constantly finding yourself having to talk about things on his terms.”

Conant said Trump’s outsize impact on the national discourse was crystallized for him in the wake of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, including a mass shooting at the Bataclan theater. Less than a month later, Trump called for a “total and complete” ban on Muslims entering the United States — and, Conant said, “instead of the fact that hundreds of people died in the streets of Paris, we’re talking about Trump again.” 

It is unsurprising, then, that Trump has also cast himself as the play-by-play announcer for the sprawling 2020 Democratic field, injecting his voice into a topic already gripping much of the country more than a year from Election Day. Speaking at a rally in Panama City Beach, Fla., earlier this month, Trump briefly adopted the tone of a television emcee, attempting to instruct the crowd on how to pronounce the last name of Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind.

“We have a young man, boot-edge-edge,” said the president. “Edge-edge. They say edge-edge.”

The same day, Trump offered his assessment of the race on social media, writing: “Looks to me like it’s going to be SleepyCreepy Joe over Crazy Bernie. Everyone else is fading fast!” 

There is evidence Trump’s freewheeling assessments of the 2020 landscape are already trickling down to the electorate. Sandra Sanzone, 63, of Chillicothe, Ohio, is a Trump supporter who recently attended a Warren rally. In an interview, she adopted the president’s nicknames, calling Biden “Sleepy Joe” and in a later conversation referred to him as “Creepy Joe.”

“I’ve seen enough of Joe Biden touching women that he creeps me out, so I named him ‘Creepy Joe,’ too,” she explained, referring to controversy over Biden’s physical behavior toward women. 

In an April interview with The Washington Post, Trump said he was watching the election closely. Citing his “very good political instinct,” Trump said of Buttigieg: “I don’t think he stands a chance.” 

The president also ranked those he viewed as the most likely Democratic victors. 

“I would say that it’ll be ‘Sleepy Joe’ against ‘Crazy Bernie,’ ” he said. “Those will be the two finalists. I may be wrong about that, but I don’t really care too much who it is. Whoever it is, we’ll be ready.”

On Thursday, after New York Mayor Bill de Blasio became the latest Democrat to enter the contest, Trump posted a video of himself aboard Air Force One critiquing the latest comer.

“It will never happen. I’m pretty good at predicting things like that,” the president said, his expression veering between a furrowed brow and smirk. “I wish him luck, but really it’d be better off if you got back to New York City and did your job for the little time you have left.”

Several academics say Trump’s commentary may be aimed in part at keeping his core political base engaged, particularly those who relish Trump’s bravado but have never cheered, for instance, the Republicans’ tax law.

“He’s turning politics from something that is intellectual and abstract to something really simple, keeping them charmed enough to support him,” said Jon A. Krosnick, a professor at Stanford University who studies political communication and psychology. “He makes it accessible for them to be engaged, pitting good guys against bad guys.”

The president’s nicknames, for instance, help transform politics “from a complex, technical multiplayer debate” into something more basic and relatable, like sports or cable television, Krosnick said.

“How do you connect with someone in rural Pennsylvania without knowing what their life is about?” he said. “You grab onto the things you think will be in their life at that moment — make them think, ‘He’s sitting here with me, watching the same program I am.’ ”

Nonstop, bite-size news cycles, along with social media platforms like Twitter, allow Trump to dominate the nation’s discourse in a way that his predecessors could not. 

“If Millard Fillmore wanted to express himself about his opponents or the weather or arcane aspects about life in America, he could have given a speech or given an interview, but it just wasn’t there for the 24-hour-a-day type of communication from a president,” said Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian. 

Trump is so entrenched in the minutiae of society that sometimes his interjections are inadvertent. In early May, the president griped on Twitter about special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, lamenting what he called the “stollen two years” of his presidency — misspelling the word “stolen” in an initial tweet. The typo turned his intended word into a German bread with dried fruits and nuts enjoyed at Christmastime — and the Internet hummed with images and jokes about the confectionary treat.

Trump’s sheer pervasiveness, Ellis said, makes a post-Trump world “kind of chilling to imagine.”

“Where’s the fun in that?” he asked. “Where’s the laughter?”

So, in Dumpy's vein, I have a new nickname for him: Dumbass Donnie.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth said of her father, Teddy Roosevelt: "My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening." Trump is 1,000,000,000,000 times worse about being an attention whore.

[GreyhoundFan]

I'm guessing they include dirty Russian money and the fact that he's not as rich as he pretends to be: "We don’t know what Trump’s tax returns are hiding. But the hints are troubling."

Spoiler

When you look at the short span of President Trump’s political career, one question jumps out: How much of his craziest, most paranoid and norm-violating behavior is motivated by a desire to keep his financial arrangements secret?

It began with Trump’s bizarre refusal to release his tax returns, in defiance of both a nearly half-century practice and Trump’s own promise that he’d do so.

Then there was his refusal to divest from his sprawling multinational empire, or even put it into a blind trust — either of which would have forced at least some information disclosure to a third party.

There were also the interviews and tweetstorms calling journalists who report on his finances “enemies of the people,” and suggestions that federal officials who audit him are anti-Christian.

As well as his implicit threat in 2017 that he would fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III if he crossed a “red line” by examining Trump’s personal financial dealings.

Also, his curious personnel priorities. Once it became clear that House Democrats would exercise their explicit statutory authority to get Trump’s tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service, Trump asked Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to prioritize confirmation of Trump’s IRS general counsel nominee ahead of confirmation of a new attorney general. This IRS general counsel pick, mind you, also happened to have previously advised the Trump Organization on tax issues.

Trump’s treasury secretary has also been spending so much time safeguarding Trump’s tax returns, in violation of that explicit statute, that the activity is reportedly crowding out his day job.

All of which raises the question: Why exactly is Trump (and the rest of his administration) expending so much energy and political capital to keep these documents hidden? What could possibly be so disturbing or incriminating to justify such an effort?

One theory is that, maybe, if Trump’s tax returns or other financial records become public, his supporters would learn that he’s not nearly as rich as he says. Another is that his finances are not exactly on the up and up.

Of course, both explanations could be true.

Thanks to dogged reporting from the New York Times, we know that Trump lost more than $1 billion over a decade beginning in 1985, more than nearly any other taxpayer in the country. We know that he inherited a fortune from his father — including through legally questionable tax dodges — but frittered much of that fortune away.

We also know, thanks to other matters of public record — including testimony from the president’s own former attorney, as well as a sworn deposition from Trump himself — that Trump has inflated his net worth when it suited him.

So yes, whatever information Trump’s financial documents reveal about his actual net worth could potentially undermine the core tenet of his sales pitch to his voters.

But what he might be a wee bit more worried about relates to the other red flags raised over the years.

Issues such as: Why international transactions involving multiple Deutsche Bank accounts controlled by Trump set off alerts in a computer system designed to detect money laundering and other financial crimes, as the Times reported Sunday.

Or why Trump purchased a house for $40 million and flipped it for more than twice that amount in a sale to a Russian oligarch, another transaction that might raise suspicions of money laundering.

Or why, about a decade ago, the self-proclaimed “King of Debt” suddenly began making huge, all-cash real estate purchases, including of money-losing golf courses. Debt is highly tax-advantaged in real estate finance. The fact that Trump went on a cash spending spree while interest rates were near zero is fishy at best. Not least because a golf reporter said Trump’s son Eric told him that the organization wasn’t borrowing from banks because it had “all the funding we need out of Russia.” (Eric Trump later denied making the statement.)

We don’t know what Trump is working so hard to hide, but we have a lot of hints. They’re all troubling. Which is precisely why it’s so important that Congress — as part of its constitutionally mandated oversight duties — conduct a forensic audit of Trump’s worldwide financial dealings. That means learning whom he’s been getting money from, whom he owes money to, and what individuals or entities could be using financial influence to exert pressure over policy.

Almost as troubling as whatever it is Trump is trying to hide: Why do all those supposed national security hawks in Trump’s party exhibit so little curiosity about the answers?

 

[SassyPants]

I think DJT is far more worried about his financials being exposed than he is about being impeached, removed from office or of losing the 2020 election. He is more afraid of losing his pre-Presidency easy life and  smoke and mirrors business dealings and financing than he is of losing his current position. He’s a fraud, has always been a fraud, and he is deathly afraid of that jig being up. I also think his ego is so big that he believes he is untouchable.

[Smash!]

I think DJT is far more worried about his financials being exposed than he is about being impeached, removed from office or of losing the 2020 election. He is more afraid of losing his pre-Presidency easy life and  smoke and mirrors business dealings and financing than he is of losing his current position. He’s a fraud, has always been a fraud, and he is deathly afraid of that jig being up. I also think his ego is so big that he believes he is untouchable.

And rightly so. Let‘s be realistic, he won‘t be impeached and it‘s likely he will get re-elected in 2020 unless the Dems step up their game and find a weapon against Trump. I was really impressed by Pete Buttigieg who appeared on FOX news and did extremely well. In my opinion that‘s the way to go in order to reach all those Trump voters and bring some facts to the audience.

[SassyPants]

Go Nancy P... she used the word “cover-up”, and has drawn Trump out. He must be feeling some heat. He’s on the boob tube bloviating and obfuscating and playing to his base.