Mr. Cohen did not seem to have extensive expertise in the arcana of New York City condo rules. But he had something Mr. Trump seemed to value more: devotion to the Trump brand. He had already purchased a number of Trump properties and had persuaded his parents, in-laws and a business partner to buy apartments in Mr. Trump’s flashy new development, Trump World Tower.
.. With Mr. Cohen’s help, Mr. Trump regained control of the board, orchestrating a coup that culminated in a standoff between his security detail and private guards hired by the disgruntled owners, according to people who were there. Details of the dispute’s resolution are secret because of a confidentiality agreement, but Mr. Cohen said that his task was “masterfully accomplished.”
.. He went on to serve as a key confidant for Mr. Trump, with an office near the boss at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. Officially, his title was special counsel, but he appears to have served more as a kind of personal arm-twister. If anyone crossed Mr. Trump or stood in his way, Mr. Cohen, who was known to sometimes carry a licensed pistol in an ankle holster, would cajole, bully or threaten a lawsuit, according to a half-dozen people who dealt with him over the years.
“If somebody does something Mr. Trump doesn’t like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump’s benefit,” Mr. Cohen once said during an interview with ABC News. “If you do something wrong, I’m going to come at you, grab you by the neck, and I’m not going to let you go until I’m finished.”
.. An unverified dossier prepared by a retired British spy and published this year said that Mr. Cohen had met overseas with Kremlin officials and other Russian operatives, which he has denied.
.. He has also attracted attention for playing a role in a failed effort to open a back channel for peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, where his wife’s family is from.
.. On the networking site LinkedIn, Mr. Cohen refers to himself as the “personal attorney to President Donald J. Trump,”
.. Those who have known him for years said Mr. Cohen had a penchant for luxury, like Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen was married at the Pierre, a legacy luxury hotel overlooking Central Park, drove a Porsche in college and at one point owned a Bentley.
.. he moved into an office previously used by Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump.
.. Mr. Cohen did some scouting and groundwork for possible Trump condominium towers in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Kazakhstan, but those deals never materialized.
.. Some people who worked with him also declined to describe Mr. Cohen’s tenure, with several of them saying they feared being sued.
.. would have made a good contestant on Mr. Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice.”
.. “I believe that my brother represents the type of person that the show depicted that Trump liked and appreciated,” Bryan Cohen said. “He had a combination of smarts, street smarts, and those things are not mutually exclusive. He’s successful, aggressive. That seemingly was a winning combination on the early seasons of ‘The Apprentice.’”
.. The Republican National Committee named him to its finance leadership team this year, and in April, the international law firm and Washington lobbying powerhouse Squire Patton Boggs formed a “strategic alliance” with Mr. Cohen’s law practice.
Several people with knowledge of Mr. Cohen’s involvement with Squire Patton Boggs said he had been brought on as a sort of rainmaker because of his business contacts in the United States and abroad.
.. At a $35,000-a-plate fund-raiser last week at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, Mr. Trump acknowledged the efforts of his former employee
GOP Operative Sought Clinton Emails From Hackers, Implied a Connection to Flynn
Peter W. Smith portrayed the former general as an ally in an effort, independent of the Trump campaign, to find personal emails deleted by Hillary Clinton
Before the 2016 presidential election, a longtime Republican opposition researcher mounted an independent campaign to obtain emails he believed were stolen from Hillary Clinton’s private server, likely by Russian hackers.
In conversations with members of his circle and with others he tried to recruit to help him, the GOP operative, Peter W. Smith, implied he was working with retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, at the time a senior adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump.
“He said, ‘I’m talking to Michael Flynn about this—if you find anything, can you let me know?’” said Eric York
.. reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary
.. Mr. Smith’s focus was some 33,000 emails Mrs. Clinton said were deleted because they were deemed personal. Mr. Smith said he believed that the emails might have been obtained by hackers and that they actually concerned official matters Mrs. Clinton wanted to conceal—two notions for which he offered no evidence.
.. Mr. Smith said he and his colleagues found five groups of hackers who claimed to possess Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails, including two groups he determined were Russians.
“We knew the people who had these were probably around the Russian government,” Mr. Smith said.
.. In the early 1990s, Mr. Smith helped publicize Arkansas state troopers’ claims that then-Gov. Bill Clinton had enlisted them to arrange trysts with women, an unproven allegation denied by the Clinton White House.
Mike Morell on Trump Withdrawal from Paris Climate Agreement
Michael Morell, fmr. deputy director of the CIA, discusses President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement.
- The climate will be worse than it would have been
- Preservation of the nation
- nuclear war with Russia
- naturally occurring biological agent
- climate change is that serious over the long term
- Specific national security implications
- water shortages: conflicts over water.
- instability caused by growing deserts
- food scarcity
- US leadership: worse than not enforcing red line in Syria
- This undermine allies’s faith in US: Angela Merkel sees greater prospects with China than US
- Thought US did well to reassure Middle East Allies in Middle East (vis-a-vis Iran)
- Failure to reassure Europe over Article 5. They feel like America doesn’t have their back
- George Shultz: the US helped to forge
- Say what you mean: have clearly articulated policty
- Do what you say: draw red line, if you forge treaty, don’t abandon it
- I’ve been an analyst of other countries. Now I’m an analyst of my own country:
- Nationalists: Bannon, etc: very narrowly focused
- Globalists: McMaster, Mattis, Pompeo, Tillperson, Dan Coats, Gary Cohn: traditional Republican foreign policy
- Jared Kushner: not ideological, not long-term interests of US, looking out for Reputation of Family: Barak Obama of Administration
- President Trump: view was framed on campaign trail, what resonated with people: if there is a threat to US, we will crush it. Otherwise we will withdraw.
Middle East
Is it wise to make Iran an enemy? Yes, Iran is a threat to strategic interests
- They conduct terror through Kuds force conducts terrorism against Jews, and neighbors
- Support terror
- Support Shia insurgent groups to overthrow Sunni regimes
- It is policy to destroy Israel
- It is policy to dominate region
- We need to push back agains bad behavior, but give them an out if they want to change.
- We need to reassure the allies
- We need to talk to our allies about democracy privately
- John Kerry says if we do more sanctions, they walk
- then that is them walking away from the table
- we should leave the door open to them
- they have to pay a price for their bad behavior, and I think that happens through sanctions
What is the significance of the James Comey firing and testimony
- Did any Trump associates conspire with Russians, help choose material, timing for maximal impacy
- Did Russian organized crime help launder money. Donald Jr. said that money was flowing in from Russia. Did they do due diligence to know where the money was coming from?
- Is there anyone in the Trump administration, particularly with classified info, with inappropriate relationship with Russian Intelligence
- Did the president obstruct justice by
- asking for loyalty
- asking to let Flynn issue go
- firing Comey
- Jared Kushner meeting with ambassador, asking for backchannel
- facts in public domain may not be accurate
- Russians talking to each other about meeting
- Officials leaking to reporters
- Reporters reporting on this: this is not a great chain of evidence
- This isn’t just about Kushner, Michael Flynn was there and would have known better than to ask for secure communications
- Its less the desire to set up a channel, supposedly to talk to Russian military about Syria. Why the secrecy? Maybe they were worried about leaks.
- Was this Flynn and Kushner’s acting on their own, or did Trump, Pence have permission?
- I’m more interested in what they were doing before the election than after.
- The facts as we know them do not indicate that there was something criminal.
- Hillary asked about whether anyone in the Trump camp helped weaponize stolen data and what fake news to promote.
Middle East: Syria: we’re entering a new phase
All of our focus is on the defeat of ISIS, but there is a growing risk of conflict between: US-Iran and US-Russia
Civil War:
- Assad-Opposition: as they are winning, they are getting closer to US allies
- US & Allies – ISIS:
- US: struck Syrian government forces
- Russia struck US allies getting closer to their base
A Russian Takes On The Benedict Option
the next step towards the Omega point of the history of Western Civilization will be society’s full acceptance of the idea of “open marriage.”
.. Susan Dominus. In her article, “Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage?”, Dominus argues that, in general, yes it is happier, especially in the case where it is the woman who acquires many partners: jealousy spurs the sexual appetite of the man, and the sexual life of the partners comes into a nice balance.
.. Christianity, when you come right down to it, is really not a very demanding religion. It permits believers to eat pork and drink wine except on days of fast. On lay people it does not impose particularly harsh domestic norms. In fact, the only strictly tabooed side of life in Christianity relates to sexuality. Sex is permissible only in marriage and preferably for the purpose of giving birth to children, while deviations from this norm give rise to various suspicions.
.. It is either, as Chesterton once said, “the glad good news” of original sin, or else it is, along with other Abrahamic religions, an apparatus for suppressing something important and necessary in sexual life, something which, apparently, is stifled by traditional marriage and is of little use for the continuation of the species.
.. Among the things common to all religions is that they all impose taboos on female promiscuity, and on same-sex sex, but it is Christianity that adds that a person is obliged not only externally, but also internally, to be free from attraction to what is prohibited by the tradition.
.. How invulnerable to the threat of “sexual liberation” will remain Russia, China, the Islamic world?
.. should one remain politically loyal to one’s state even after you notice that it’s well on its way to hell?
.. Instead of fighting for the dominance of our faith in the public sphere, we are only trying to achieve corporate independence from the pressures of the secular state. Alas, I think this position is strategically untenable.
.. In one religious community, let’s say, all women could be subject to regular beatings on the principle that all of them are known to be sinners by nature. In another religious community women could be forbidden from entering into extramarital affairs, but if they do, they are threatened with divorce and exclusion from their community.