With the indictment of former President Trump on charges of conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election I thought of a couple unposted stories in the link-vault.
The first of these stuck with me at the time because I thought the headline (above) was cute. Re-reading it now is interesting to say the least.
From Bloomberg, January 4, 2018:
Steve Bannon's charge against Trump's son isn't the worst thing he's saying about the president's inner circle.
Trump watchers have been treated to a world-class cage match over the last couple of days between President Donald Trump and one of his political svengalis, Steve Bannon.
Lots of attention has been lavished on Bannon's charge, leveled in a new book by the journalist Michael Wolff, that Trump's son, Donald Jr., engaged in "treasonous" behavior by meeting with a Russian lawyer in Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential campaign.
There are also requisite antics involving others in the Trump clan and the White House.
All of that is entertaining, as is Trump's furious counterattack. He posits that Bannon has "lost his mind" and on Wednesday night unleashed one of his lawyers to warn his former chief strategist that if he kept yapping about life with the Trumps he’d get taken to court and suffer other miseries. (Wolff apparently has recordings of his Bannon interviews and Trump granted Wolff access to the White House, so legal remedies for the president may be elusive.)
But one of the more substantive issues Bannon has surfaced shouldn't get lost in the cacophony. Bannon, in his interviews with Wolff, has invited us to consider the families of Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner as possible targets of a significant federal money-laundering investigation.
Bannon is dismissive of the Trumps and how haphazard and reckless they were during the campaign — in part, no doubt, because they didn't think they'd win. That lens allows Bannon to understand exactly why the Trump campaign has drawn the attention of the Justice Department's special counsel, Robert Mueller, who is investigating possible links to the Kremlin (and who has already indicted Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security adviser, and Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, on an array of criminal charges).
Bannon also knows, as any street-fighter would, that Mueller's probe is perilous for the president because it is much more than an investigation into Russia's election meddling on Trump's behalf — and Bannon zeroes in candidly and coolly on that fact.
"This is all about money laundering," Wolff quotes Bannon saying. "Their path to [expletive] Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr. and Jared Kushner." For good measure he added, "It’s as plain as a hair on your face."
"It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner stuff," Bannon adds. "The Kushner stuff is greasy. They’re going to go right through that." (He used a nastier word than "stuff," but let's keep things family-friendly around here.)
Bannon then roasts the Trump White House for how ill-prepared it is to take on Mueller's team: "They’re sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five."
The Trump family has had longstanding real estate and licensing dealings with questionable business associates, some of them Russian and some of them not, as I and reporters like the late Wayne Barrett have written about for years. The family's recent departure from its ill-fated Trump SoHo hotel project, and its partnership with career criminals like Felix Sater, are reminders of how problematic some of those deals will be in the context of Mueller's investigation.
While Trump allies have recently targeted Mueller's probe as ill-founded, tainted with prosecutorial bias, and the work of a conspiracy orchestrated with Democratic partisans and the "deep state," the reality is that Mueller — a well-regarded, veteran prosecutor — has been running a by-the-books investigation....
....MUCH MORE
