Kid Berwyn
Kid Berwyn's JournalArt as money laundering.
It’s a thing.
The relative ease of laundering illicit funds through the art market is thought to have contributed to the rise in the value of fine art in recent years.
Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-business/european-business/economists-urge-tighter-regulations-to-curb-money-laundering-in-art-market/article26217852/
DEUTSCHE BANK, TRUMP, RUSSIA, SAUDI ARABIA: WHAT'S THE CONNECTION?
From WhoWhatWhy.org, a Deutsche primer:
Deutsche Bank: A Global Bank for Oligarchs — American and Russian, Part 1 (1/08/2018)
International banking colossus Deutsche Bank has a track record of deploying illegal financial trading, money laundering, and shady offshore tax shelters in the service of the global elite. Should anyone be surprised that Deutsche is on Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation radar?
Deutsche Bank: A Global Bank for Oligarchs — American and Russian, Part 2 (1/15/2018)
What do President Donald Trump and a number of Russian oligarchs have in common? Answer: Deutsche Bank. We pick up where we left off by examining how Trump first became involved with the international colossus — a bank catering to clients who understood that sometimes the line between profit and illegality blurs.
Deutsche Bank: A Global Bank for Oligarchs — American and Russian, Part 3 (2/01/2018)
Not only is President Donald Trump personally tied up with Deutsche Bank to the tune of $300 million, but his son-in-law Jared Kushner has his own history with the global banking giant. Part 3 looks closely at these relationships, and asks just how far President Trump’s Justice Department will be willing to go in probing potential illegality on the part of Deutsche.
Deutsche Bank: Where the Dots of Russiagate Connect (1/24/2018)
Martin Sheil, a retired branch chief of the IRS Criminal Division, discusses his WhoWhatWhy series on Deutsche Bank and how nearly all the main figures involved in Russiagate also have ties to the financial institution.
House GOP Leads Russia Probe… Away From Deutsche Bank (2/27/2018)
House Republicans who are supposed to be investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election say there is no need to look at Deutsche Bank. Here is why they are wrong.
Source: https://whowhatwhy.org/2019/05/01/deutsche-bank-trump-russia-saudi-arabia-whats-the-connection/
Bill Barr: The "Cover-Up General"
"At the center of the criticism is the chief articulator of Bush's imperial presidency," we reported in 1992, "the man who wrote the legal rationale for the Gulf War, the Panama invasion, and the officially sanctioned kidnapping of foreign nationals abroad"by FRANK SNEPP
The Village Voice, APRIL 18, 2019
The Village Voice, October 27, 1992
“Attorney General William Barr is the Best Reason to Vote for Clinton”
Excerpt....
SON OF THE CIA
It was 21 years ago, in 1971, that I first encountered William Barr. Both of us were working for the CIA at the time, he as a novice China analyst, I as a member of the agency’s Vietnam task force. Jovial and unassuming, he took his cues easily from an overly politicized office chief. It was a token of things to come.
Three years before, we had brushed shoulders unknowingly on Columbia University’s roiling campus. Both of us were on the other side of the barricades as antiwar demonstrations there blasted our generation into a decade of rage. Barr, a conservative student spokesman, preached toughness to the university administration, of which his father, then dean of the engineering faculty, was a leading light. Years later, this same damn-the-torpedoes zeal would commend Barr to his ultimate father figure, George Bush. When Cuban refugees penned up at an Alabama prison rioted and took hostages in the summer of 1991, deputy attorney general Barr ordered the place stormed. Soon afterward, Bush tapped him for the attorney general slot itself.
Barr first met Bush in the CIA. In 1976, having shifted to the agency’s legislative office, he helped write the pap sheets that director Bush used to fend off the Pike and Church committees, the first real embodiments of Congressional oversight of the CIA. Intimates say the experience was formative for Barr, turning him into an implacable enemy of congressional intrusions on executive prerogative.
“The most radical period I had probably was when I was sort of a moderate Republican,” he later acknowledged. Sure enough, Barr stayed safe within conservative clutches even after leaving the agency in 1977. Armed with a night-school law diploma, he asked for — and got — Bush’s backing for a clerkship appointment to Malcolm Wilkey of the Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. Years later, as attorney general, Barr would name Wilkey to investigate the House Banking scandal. Wilkey repayed the favor with a wrenchingly partisan inquiry. Feeding the press overheated charges of wrongdoing, he scored points off the Democratic Congress just as the administration itself was being pilloried for its failed economics.
Source...
https://www.villagevoice.com/2019/04/18/attorney-general-william-barr-is-the-best-reason-to-vote-for-clinton/
Chapter and verse since Jimmy Carter crossed paths with the Safari Club,
It’s Big Oil to the Rescue — or — the Seven Sisters Escape Justice Once Again with this guy Barr.
Absolutely GOP
Hidden Motives behind Key GOP Leaders’ Cooperation with Trump & Russia: An Evidence-based Examination of Irrational Behaviors & the Republican Congress Members Who Exhibit Themhttps://medium.com/@leannewattphd/hidden-motives-behind-key-gop-leaders-cooperation-with-trump-russia-an-evidence-based-bdd5694b7c3b
Senate Republicans Meet Lavrov in Moscow Ahead of Trump-Putin Summit
https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/senate-republicans-meet-lavrov-moscow-ahead-trump-putin-summit
One guy especially...
McConnell Has Done Everything in His Power to Hide the Truth
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/03/26/mcconnell-has-done-everything-in-his-power-to-hide-the-truth/
In the Oval Office in the merry month of May 2017
President Trump gestures to Russia's ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, as he speaks to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office on Wednesday, May 10, 2017. (Alexander Shcherbak/TASS/Getty Images)
“I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job," Trump said, according to The Times. "I faced great pressure because of Russia. That's taken off.”
"I'm not under investigation," he added.
Sources:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/10/527755991/trump-meets-with-russias-lavrov-at-the-white-house-today
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-nut-job-james-comey-russia-2017-5
Suddenly, conservative lawyers are condemning Trump for abuses of power
Suddenly, conservative lawyers are condemning Trump for abuses of powerBy DOYLE MCMANUS
Los Angeles Times, MAY 12, 2019 | 4:00 AM
| WASHINGTON
Excerpt...
Even as Republicans in Congress have fallen in line to defend Trump at every turn, a surprising number of conservative lawyers have broken ranks and are condemning the president for abuses of power and denouncing his blanket claims of executive privilege.
Last week, John Yoo, the former Justice Department official who drafted a notorious memo justifying the torture of detainees under President George W. Bush, warned that Trump had gone too far in asserting unbridled presidential power.
Snip...
“This president is undermining the basic principle of checks and balances,” one of the 11, former Deputy Atty. Gen. Donald B. Ayer, told me. “It’s really kind of tyrannical. It’s un-American. It’s the sort of expansion of government power you would expect Republicans to worry about.”
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In addition, more than 800 former federal prosecutors, many of them Republicans, signed a statement declaring that the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, far from exonerating Trump, showed that he deserved to be indicted for obstruction of justice.
Continues...
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-republican-lawyers-20190512-story.html
——————————
John Yoo is so pro-president conservative, he once wrote Smirko Bush could crush a child’s testicles for America.
Trump is a moron fixated by fabric swatches.
Trump, the billion-dollar loser — I was his ghostwriter and saw it happenCharles Leerhson
Yahoo.com, May 9, 2019
EXCERPT...
I tend to see my time with him — the first part of it, anyway, before things started going bad in a hurry — as his “King Midas” period. I never said this to him; if I had, he probably would have thought I was suggesting he enter the muffler business. But there was a stretch of months when everything he touched turned into a deal. The banks seemed to accept the version of him depicted in his first book, “The Art of the Deal,” which we now know from his previous ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, was entirely invented. They believed it over what they saw on his balance sheets or heard coming out of his mouth, and they never said no to his requests for more money. Often they came up with things he could say yes to before he could think of them himself. As a result, a failing real estate developer who had little idea of what he was doing and less interest in doing it once he’d held the all-important press conference wound up owning three New Jersey hotel-casinos, the Plaza Hotel, the Eastern Airlines Shuttle and a 281-foot yacht.
A real go-getter, right? But Trump’s portfolio did not jibe with what I saw each day — which to a surprisingly large extent was him looking at fabric swatches. Indeed, flipping through fabric swatches seemed at times to be his main occupation. Some days he would do it for hours, then take me in what he always called his “French military helicopter” to Atlantic City — where he looked at more fabric swatches or sometimes small samples of wood paneling. It was true that the carpets and drapes at his properties needed to be refreshed frequently, and the seats on the renamed Trump Shuttle required occasional reupholstering. But the main thing about fabric swatches was that they were within his comfort zone — whereas, for example, the management of hotels and airlines clearly wasn’t. One of his aides once told me that every room at the Plaza could be filled at the “rack rate” (list price) every night, and the revenue still wouldn’t cover the monthly payment of the loan he’d taken out to buy the place. In other words, he’d made a ridiculous deal. Neither he nor the banks had done the math beforehand. Or perhaps Trump knew it because someone had told him, but didn’t want to think about it. The one thing he is above-average at is compartmentalization.
Source:
https://news.yahoo.com/trump-the-billiondollar-loser-his-ghostwriter-recalls-the-king-midas-years-090000640.html
Putin Accomplice Mitch McConnell Says Case Closed
Putin Accomplice Mitch McConnell Says Case ClosedBy Jonathan Chait
New York Magazine, May 7, 2019
During the 2016 election, CIA director John Brennan informed congressional leaders that Russian intelligence was interfering in the election in an effort to help Donald Trump win. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed the conclusion, and depicted it as a frame-up. “You’re trying to screw the Republican candidate,” he charged, warning that he would refuse to sign a bipartisan statement warning Russia to back off. If blocking Russia meant hindering the Trump campaign, McConnell wasn’t interested.
This morning, McConnell took to the Senate floor to deliver a coda to this historic act. In a speech that was notably smarmy even by his standards, the Senate Majority Leader declared the Mueller report to be “case closed,” accused Democrats of refusing to accept the legitimacy of Trump’s election, and called for an end to all investigation or inquiries of Mueller’s findings.
SNIP...
McConnell framed his speech as a call for unity, insisting Russia’s goal was to divide the public. “Russia set out to sow discord. To create chaos in American politics and undermine confidence in our democracy,” he said. To continue pursuing the massive evidence of corruption and misconduct in the Mueller report would somehow help Putin. If Americans “remain consumed by unhinged partisanship,” McConnell said, “and keep dividing ourselves … Putin and his agents need only stand on the sidelines and watch as their job is done for them.”
Note here that McConnell is again denying the same thing he denied in 2016: that Russia intervened not just to “divide” Americans but specifically in order to help Trump win. If American political leaders in both parties had closed ranks and rejected Russia’s intervention, it might have backfired. Instead, McConnell assisted their effort.
CONTINUES...
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/mitch-mcconnell-case-closed-trump-russia-mueller-collusion.html
Laurence Tribe: 'Trump will talk to Putin about Mueller, but...'
“...Trump won’t talk to Mueller about Putin.”
https://www.msnbc.com/hardball/watch/laurence-tribe-if-we-don-t-impeach-trump-we-might-lose-our-souls-59061317750
Harvard professor of law sums up where we’re at as a nation, politically and strategically:
“Trump is willing to talk to Putin about Mueller, but not to Mueller about Putin. What kind of president has that kind of disloyalty to the United States?” — Laurence Tribe
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