Jeffrey Yohai, who worked with his father-in-law on real-estate deals, hasn’t been charged with any crime
.. Mr. Manafort’s daughter, Jessica, filed for divorce from Mr. Yohai earlier this year. Records show a divorce judgment was issued in August.
.. Mr. Manafort, his wife and daughter put at least $4.2 million into house-flipping projects, federal bankruptcy-court records show. Mr. Yohai put the four properties into corporate bankruptcy in December 2016, as the lender, Genesis, was moving toward foreclosure, records show.
.. In September, Mr. Yohai said in a federal court filing in Santa Ana, Calif. that Mr. Manafort and associates had “conspired to mislead” the judge about purchase offers that had materialized for the properties.
.. Mr. Manafort told his tax preparer that the construction loan would allow him to fully pay off the mortgage on another apartment.
.. After Genesis went to court to foreclose on the Brooklyn property, Mr. Manafort obtained loans from another bank based in Chicago, run by a Trump campaign adviser
.. Mr. Mueller accused Mr. Manafort of subsequently defrauding a bank when applying for a mortgage on the property. Although the property was used to generate rental income, Mr. Manafort told the bank that it was a second home for his daughter and Mr. Yohai, so he could get a greater loan amount, for $3.185 million, than he could have otherwise, the indictment says.
.. The indictment says that on Jan. 26, 2016, Mr. Manafort wrote to his then son-in-law about a visit from an appraiser to the condominium, saying, “[r]emember, he believes that you and” Jessica Manafort “are living there.”
The Threat in President Trump’s Interview with Lester Holt
President Trump is a selfish liar, and a vain one. Those traits, together, can cause chaos, as they did on Thursday, when, in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, Trump undermined his own alibi for firing the F.B.I. director, James Comey
- Vice-President Mike Pence and other dependents repeated this story all day Wednesday, with Pence portraying the President as solemnly resolved to follow the best advice he had, and
- Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy press secretary, throwing in some smears of Comey, who she said had committed “atrocities” while at the F.B.I. and was disliked by its rank and file.
.. But, when Holt asked him about heeding Sessions and Rosenstein, Trump seemed to bristle. Could Holt think that he, Trump, needed to hear what anyone had to say—that he had his mind changed by subordinates?
.. “when I decided to just do it”—that is, to fire Comey: “I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story; it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.” His aides, needless to say, had spent the day saying that Comey’s firing had nothing to do with Russia.
.. Instead, it leaves open the possibility that some sort of public confession in which Comey would “admit his errors” might be an alternative, in terms of restoring “trust.”
.. Instead, in both the letter that Trump sent to Comey and in his interview with Holt, Trump claimed that he got something else from Comey: an assurance that he was not under investigation. Trump doesn’t bother to conceal that he regarded such an assurance as something of a condition of employment.
.. Trump would rather raise the possibility that he’d had an improper, if not actually illegal, conversation with Comey than leave anyone with the impression that he couldn’t instruct the people who worked for him to do anything he desired.
.. Trump seems to treat the idea of being investigated the same way that he regards the idea of losing money. He is not personally being investigated; he never personally declared bankruptcy—only some of his various businesses did.
.. McCabe added that he personally regarded serving with Comey as the honor of his life. Sanders countered that many F.B.I. officers of her acquaintance had told her the opposite, which she treated as definitive despite adding, with a note of pleased and oblivious self-contradiction, “And I don’t even know that many people in the F.B.I.!”
.. She answered questions about the propriety of the Trump-Comey dinner by seeming to cite lawyers she’d seen comment on television.
.. In a way, she is the perfect Trump spokesperson. Her incoherent answers revolved around the greatness of Trump and the perfidy of his enemies.
It’s Chicken or Fish
.. are there a few good elected men or women in the Republican Party who will stand up to the president’s abuse of power as their predecessors did during Watergate?
.. But we already know the answer: No.
The G.O.P. never would have embraced someone like Trump in the first place — an indecent man with a record of multiple bankruptcies, unpaid bills and alleged sexual harassments who lies as he breathes — for the answer to ever be yes.
.. Virtually all the good men and women in this party’s leadership have been purged or silenced; those who are left have either been bought off by lobbies or have cynically decided to take a ride on Trump’s Good Ship Lollipop to exploit it for any number of different agendas.
.. Are there tens of millions of good men and women in America ready to run and vote as Democrats or independents in the 2018 congressional elections and replace the current G.O.P. majority in the House and maybe the Senate?
Nothing else matters — this is now a raw contest of power.
.. they enjoy, exercising raw power against their opponents.
.. Democrats and independents should not be deluded or distracted by marches on Washington, clever tweets or “Saturday Night Live” skits lampooning Trump. They need power.
.. they have power and are not afraid to use it, no matter what the polls say.
.. they will use that power to cut taxes for wealthy people, strip health care from poor people and turn climate policy over to the fossil fuel industry until someone else checks that power
.. The party has lost its moral compass.
.. Just think about that picture of Trump laughing it up with Russia’s foreign minister in the Oval Office, a foreign minister who covered up Syria’s use of poison gas. Trump reportedly shared with him sensitive intelligence on ISIS, and Trump refused to allow any U.S. press in the room. The picture came from Russia’s official photographer. In our White House!
.. it is a threat to the rule of law,
freedom of the press,
ethics in government,
the integrity of our institutions,
the values our kids need to learn from their president and
America’s longstanding role as the respected leader of the free world.
Trump Uses and Betrays His Collaborators
Spicer was determinedly dour and looked miserable. He was puffy, pinched and pale. And little wonder: Trump has sucked the lifeblood out of him.
.. Washington is abuzz with speculation about when Spicer will be shown the door, but it doesn’t really matter. His credibility, and his dignity, have already been defenestrated.
.. Trump has a long history of walking out of disasters unscathed. It’s those around him — the Spicers of the world — who are destroyed.
- Trump entities filed for bankruptcy protection six times. Investors, lenders and workers took hits — and Trump moved on.
- Trump was caught on tape boasting to Billy Bush about sexually assaulting women — and Billy Bush lost his job.
- Corey Lewandowski and
- Paul Manafort poured themselves into Trump’s campaign and were unceremoniously dumped.
- Michael Flynn is out and potentially in legal trouble.
- The FBI’s Comey arguably handed Trump the election — and learned of his dismissal from TV.
- Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein tarnished his sterling reputation in just two weeks.
- Vice President Pence has been “unflagging in his loyalty,” only to be made “the public face of official narratives that turn out to be misleading or false.”
- Trump humiliated Steve Bannon by publicly downplaying their association.
- Trump repaid House Speaker Paul Ryan’s loyalty by winking at calls for Ryan’s ouster.
- Attempts to defend Trump by aides Reince Priebus and Kellyanne Conway and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have left them sounding clownish.
.. avoided answering questions by saying no fewer than 22 times how very “clear” he or Trump had been about this or that.
.. And, as many a Trump loyalist has discovered, you are useful to Trump until you are not — and then you are cast aside.