Letters from an American 2/18/2020
My guess is that a pardon for Stone is still very much on the table, but more than that, my guess is that Trump has his eye on the fact that the Supreme Court in March will begin to hear three cases concerning whether or not two banks and his accounting firm must hand over his financial records to congressional investigators, as lower courts have ordered.
In one of the cases, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance has asked for financial records as he looks into potential lawbreaking in New York related to hush-money paid to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal. Trump’s lawyers are objecting to that investigtion, building on the 1973 Justice Department memo that says sitting presidents cannot be indicted to argue that sitting presidents cannot be investigated, either. Lower courts have demolished this argument.
In the other two cases, Congress has subpoenaed the financial records on two grounds: first, to see if more ethics-in-government legislation is needed (this is to address the requirement that Congress must have a legislative reason to make such inquiries); and—this is the kicker—to pursue an investigation into foreign money laundering. There have long been questions about how Trump went from a developer who specialized in debt to one who paid lavish amounts of cash for real estate just as Russians were looking to launder ill-gotten gains, and it is well-known that the bank from which Trump borrowed more than $2 billion and which handled his assets—Deutsche Bank—has been deeply embroiled in Russian money-laundering.
I could be entirely off base about this. Perhaps Trump was using these pardons simply to try to line up money and goodwill for the upcoming election. But it seems to me as if Trump is working to dismantle and to undercut the reputation of the FBI’s financial crimes division… just as he is in danger of being investigated for financial crimes.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/
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