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Another ‘Russiagate’ Like Trump Scandal Which Isn’t One
Some of the 'Russiagate' fanatics dream of indicting U.S. President Donald Trump as soon as he leaves his office. But they never explain what crime he should be indicted for. What did he actually do wrong?
Yes, he killed foreigners. But no U.S. president will ever be indicted for that. It is seen as a part of the job. Trump may have old tax issues. But those are usually solved by negotiating about the amount of money in question. As soon as the negotiated amount is paid such cases get closed.
But now the Russiagaters have new hope. There is a new Trump scandal!
Russiagaters on Twitter are in an uproar about a story the Business Insider broke today:
EXCLUSIVE: Jared Kushner helped create a Trump campaign shell company that secretly paid the president's family members and spent $617 million in reelection cash, a source tells Insider
The story seems well researched but is carefully arranged to put Trump and his family into a bad light.
The first graphs:
President Donald Trump's most powerful advisor, Jared Kushner, approved the creation of a campaign shell company that secretly paid the president's family members and spent almost half of the campaign's $1.26 billion war chest, a person familiar with the operation told Insider.
The operation acted almost like a campaign within a campaign. It paid some of Trump's top advisors and family members while shielding financial and operational details from public scrutiny.
When Kushner and others created the company in April 2018, they picked Trump's daughter-in-law Lara Trump, to become its president, Vice President Mike Pence's nephew John Pence as its vice president, and Trump campaign CFO Sean Dollman as its treasurer and secretary, the person who spoke on the condition of anonymity said.
…
The shell company — incorporated as American Made Media Consultants Corporation and American Made Media Consultants LLC — allowed Trump's campaign to skirt federally mandated disclosures. The tactic could attract scrutiny from federal election regulators.
While that sounds like Trump pushed campaign money into the private pockets of his family there is no evidence in the story that he or his family did so.
There are in fact several exculpatory details in the different parts of the long story. When one puts those into chronological order the real story comes to light:
1. Trump wanted to put Brad Parscale, the successful digital media manager of his 2016 campaign, into the campaign lead:
In February 2018, Trump and Kushner elevated Parscale, the digital communication mastermind of Trump's 2016 election victory, to campaign manager.
2. But Parscale was a known grifter who had enriched himself by channeling campaign advertising money through a company he owned:
American Made Media Consultants was born out of a different scandal: rampant accusations that Parscale had been enriching himself off of Trump's reelection bid.
3. Trump asked his lawyers to come up with a construct that would keep Parscale away from the campaign money used to buy media time. That budget item is usually the biggest expense for any campaigns and 'private commissions' for media buys are not unusual. The lawyers came up with a good solution that had earlier been used by another campaigns:
One month later, a small team of campaign staff met with Trump's coterie of lawyers at the Jones Day law firm, the person familiar with the founding of AMMC said. The Jones Day lawyers, some of whom had worked on Mitt Romney's 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, said they had an idea for Parscale.
Romney had relied on a pass-through company, American Rambler, to make the most expensive purchases of his campaign: TV ads.
Ben Ginsberg — a Republican superlawyer who recently retired from Jones Day, the Trump campaign's preferred law firm — suggested Parscale and his team try the same. One month later, Kushner signed off on a plan to have Trump's family and campaign staff run the shell company, the person familiar with AMMC's operations said. American Made Media Consultants was formally incorporated on April 18, 2018, according to Delaware incorporations records.
To keep Parscale and other grifter away from the company Trump and Pence put family members onto its board. They were not paid:
"Lara Trump and John Pence resigned from the AMMC board in October 2019 to focus solely on their campaign activities, however, there was never any ethical or legal reason why they could not serve on the board in the first place. John and Lara were not compensated by AMMC for their service as board members," Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh told Insider on Friday.
4. As planned the company bundled all media buys for the Trump campaign:
Some of Trump's own campaign leaders even seemed stumped by the AMMC arrangement. Generally, they knew that AMMC was being used to buy pro-Trump TV, radio, and digital advertising and pay for other media.
5. The bundled buys of media time and the exclusion of Parscale's 'private commissions' led to less expenses:
The person familiar with AMMC said the rates its vendors charged the Trump campaign were often cheaper than what an outside political firm would have demanded.
The story, when seen as above, makes sense and is far from scandalous.
While there may have been illegal moves of money through AMMC there is nothing available in the story that would support such a claim. I for one see no legal problem in what the campaign did. The construct may have muddled reporting issues under campaign law. But that is a very minor transgression no one really cares about.
The Trump family members have long known that everything they are doing can (and will) come out. In the hostile Washington environment any misstep they would make would certainly be used against them. That is why believe that they did not illegally ask for or take any money from the campaign. The risk, especially before the lection, would simply have been too high.
Those who predicted that this or that Russiagate story would soon, anytime, lead to Trump's indictment have been disappointed. Now they have a new 'scandal' they can be OUTRAGED about. 'The walls are coming in' and any day now Trump will be led to prison.
Unfortunately for them this story will, like all others, just flame out.
snake@36 among much, much more nonsense swears Article 2 of the Constitution only applies to the president and vice-president. “The President, Vice President and all Civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” All Civil Officers include things like judges, which is why the kind of people who love Trump wanted to impeach Earl Warren back in the day (and they did, I remember.) Timothy Pickering, a federal judge, was impeached and convicted and removed from office. But Pickering was suffering from dementia it seems, so that wasn’t a strong precedent. This occurred while most of the Framers were still alive, who would have known if impeaching anyone beside the president and vice-president was impermissible, and would have said so. A Supreme Court Justice was the next impeachment, one Samuel P. Chase, who was an ardent Federalist who made John Marshall look like a pillar of integrity. (This was part of Jefferson’s attack on the judiciary after John Adams—not Alexander Hamilton—packed it.)
Now Adams by his eccentricities, attempts to dominate and simple incompetence, had rendered the vice-presidents formal duty of presiding over the Senate into a formality, save for resolving tie votes. This is an example by the way of how the letter of the Constitution never was regarded as the final word, and actual precedents set by the exercise of free governments, as the restricted franchises of the time were still more or less legitimate. How the Constitution was to be understood was always meant to be the outcome of real-life political processes. In particular, since as I understand it, the impeachment of Pickering was *not* for criminal offenses, it seems to have been regarded as an unfortunate legal technicality to get a mentally incompetent justice off the bench, a precedent not really bearing on genuine high crimes and misdemeanors, which were still somewhat undefined.
However, when the Senate presides as a jury in an impeachment trial, the role of the Vice-President as, effectively, the judge, with the Senators as the jury, was not quite so set as by Adams’ embarrassing eight years of failure. Thus, when the Senate presided over Chase’s impeachment trial, Jefferson’s Vice-President had a chance to take an unexpectedly larger role in a fashion unexpected. Burr was a very highly regarded trial lawyer, possibly even more highly regarded than Alexander Hamilton (Hamilton was more than something more than a bureaucrat, or a banker, or a publisher, or even one of Washington’s staff officers, insofar as any of his leading aides could be compared to the Prussian general staff.) Jefferson’s problem of course is that Burr knew Jefferson was going to ditch him from the vice presidency, would never let Burr become the presidential candidate of the Democratic-Republicans (Jefferson’s party, and it really was a political party, even if the Federalists weren’t, quite.) The reason for that is entirely understandable: Burr had resolutely refused to cede the presidency when the incompetent Electoral College devised for the Constitution led to a tie vote.
This happened because Jefferson and Adams had made a huge attack on every attempt to turn the Electoral College into the *real* election, with the electors as representatives, not registers of the mandate from each one’s respective state. Hamilton for one intrigued to prevent a tie vote and possibly to prevent the unfit Adams from becoming president. Again, the Constitution was never understood as the sole word, that how it actually would work would be the result of what people did, partly by the legislation by the First Congress that genuinely set up a functional government, but in shockingly important ways, by what Washington said and did. See the imbroglio over the Neutrality Act for another good example. Burr, whose flexible ideas of honor let him pretend that not openly seeking the presidency was not betraying Jefferson. I don’t think anyone else believed that though. So one of Jefferson’s enemies, a skilled trial lawyer, presided over a key political trial aimed at undoing Adams’ shenanigans with the federal courts. (Adams’ high reputation would be completely mystifying save for the political need for reactionaries to idolize—almost literally—Presidents.
In the event, the Senate narrowly focused on criminal charges, instead of the political charge of openly favoring Federalists and shameless unfair rulings designed to hurt their opponents. It is widely agreed that Chase was egregiously “guilty,” of this. To my mind the vague phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors,” used instead of the familiar and easily understood “felonies and misdemeanors,” was always meant to allow for “political” charges like deliberate discrimination. Artificially reducing “high crimes” to felony, understood as a specific infraction of an already existing law, was always meant to prevent impeachment serving as a check. That’s why most of the charges against Andrew Johnson were about breaking the Tenure of Office Act, instead of his literally murderous racism and aide to treasonous Confederates trying by terror to undo their loss of the war.
What this proves is not just that snake didn’t trouble to read Article 2, but that mere facts have nothing to do with the claims made by the reactionaries here. They only have talking points, selected from the Republicans they favor, aimed at the Democrats they dislike.
William Gruff@41 continues his campaign to misuse Marxist jargon at times to pretend to be a realistic leftist above, well, something. There is a saying about whose ox is being gored, that is, whose interests or self-image is being damaged. The gored ox is the one bellowing, and the phrase “basket of deplorables” is still provoking mighty loud noises from the fake Marxist. But for the record, I will note that “elites” is not Marxism, which relies on class analysis; that people who take the paycheck, which includes the CIA, are *not* to be assumed to be the bosses, anymore than it’s the CEOs who run the world instead of the people who own the company; that mindreading a changing group of people like the CIA is claiming supernatural powers, anathema to scientific socialism; that most of all the burial of Communism is not some CIA plot carried out to elect Obama, or even vice versa, because the purge of Communists from the US political scene was accomplished by the “McCarthyism,” which included firing numerous people, arrests and trials and imprisonment, covert intelligence operations, genuine mass propaganda campaigns quite unlike what Gruff pretends to be happening now, and so on and so forth. Nothing Gruff says has anything to do with Marxism, it’s all just a few phrases intended to cover right-wing politics. Gruff may even be a conscious fascist, but then, unlike him I can’t read single minds, much less many. T
The malignant stupidity of “Butt-gig” supposedly being the plan for 2024 is nonsense. Buttigieg got funding as a stalking-horse to fight Sanders but really only hurt Warren and Biden. He’ll never be forgiven for it either. The DOT, assuming that he even gets it, that Biden will be glad to see Buttigieg rejected while he still gets credit for diversity, is no more a path to the presidency than Secretary of State. That seemed to be true in the first decades of the republic, but, unsurprisingly to me, it turned out not to be. Buttigieg is the modern equivalent of Shirley Chisholm, an out-there candidate by the bigots’ standards, who still ran and actually got some votes. Dragging Buttigieg in is the same thing as pretending Harris is president, something to rile the, oh, well, the deplorables. Man, I hate giving Clinton credit for anything, but the woman would occasionally be honest. No wonder she is so hated.
Posted by: steven t johnson | Dec 20 2020 1:56 utc | 53
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