Many years ago, the Israeli Bedouin expert Clinton Bailey told me a story about a Bedouin chief who discovered one day that his favorite turkey had been stolen. He called his sons together and told them: “Boys, we are in great danger now. My turkey’s been stolen. Find my turkey.” His boys just laughed and said, “Father, what do you need that turkey for?” and they ignored him.
A few weeks later the Bedouin chief’s camel was stolen. His sons went to him and said, “Father, your camel has been stolen. What should we do?” And the chief answered, “Find my turkey.”
A few weeks later the chief’s horse was stolen, and again his sons asked what they should do. “Find my turkey,” the chief said.
Finally, a few weeks later his daughter was abducted, at which point he gathered his sons and told them: “It’s all because of the turkey! When they saw that they could take my turkey, we lost everything.”
.. how and why we failed to contain the egregious behavior of both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
They each started by — metaphorically speaking — stealing a turkey. And when we didn’t respond, they kept ratcheting up their wretched behavior to the point where Trump thinks he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and Putin thinks he could poison a wayward spy in London, and get away with it.
Trump’s turkey was his tax returns. During the campaign he promised to release them after the I.R.S. finished auditing him. Then, after he was elected, Trump said, sorry, not going to release them ever. And nothing happened. Trump, I am reliably told, has actually said to people close to him, “Can you believe I got away with that?”
.. Once Trump saw that he could get away with not disclosing his tax returns, he knew he could get away with anything.
.. Any Bedouin chief who watched the steady acceleration in the breadth and pace of Trump’s lying — like his recent boast that he had fabricated a trade deficit with Canada in talks with Canada’s prime minister or his dishonest statements to discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation — would tell you: Get me Trump’s tax returns.
.. Because there must be something very important in them that he wants to keep hidden.
.. Maybe it’s just the embarrassment that he is not as rich as he claims, or, maybe, it’s something more fundamental — like how dependent he is on Russian oligarchs for financing
.. Putin’s turkey was even more serious. It was the shooting down of that Malaysian civilian airliner, Flight MH17
.. Putin’s proxies in eastern Ukraine had requested that Russia send them an SA-11 surface-to-air missile launcher.
.. Putin did not push the button on that missile, but he created the conditions for it to shoot down that plane — and he walked away from it as if the plane were brought down by lightning, making up one implausible story after another. He got slapped on the wrist with a few sanctions, but his complicity faded away into a mist of baldfaced lies.
.. Who wanted to confront Russia, with all its gas exports to Europe and all its oligarchs throwing money around London or buying condos in places like … Trump Tower in New York?
.. Why not poison a former Russian spy in London with a banned military nerve agent or perpetrate genocide in Syria? Who’s going to stop me?”
Trump and Putin are cut from the same cloth. Their strategy is: keep pushing, keep grabbing, keep lying, keep denying, no matter how implausible the denials — and never apologize. Because when you lie on an industrial scale, it overwhelms everyone else. Normal people just don’t behave that way, and the sheer shamelessness eventually exhausts them.
.. when people keep eroding the norms of society, stealing — turkeys or the truth — eventually becomes the norm.
.. That steady erosion of norms is what Trump is doing to America and Putin is doing to the world.
.. American voters have to go to the polls and deal a resounding electoral defeat to this Republican Party, which Trump has taken over like an invasive species.
.. America needs a healthy conservative party in our two-party system. But this G.O.P. is not a conservative party and it is not healthy.
.. As for Putin, the only way to brush him back is with economic sanctions that truly hurt him and his corrupt clique of oligarchs, and an offensive cyber campaign that exposes just how much money they have all stolen from the Russian people.
.. Bullies like Trump and Putin are relentless. They will keep driving through red lights, smirking all the way, as long as we let them.
.. As the great philosopher Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.”
Come see us, Mr. President. We have questions.
It has been more than a year since Donald Trump held his one and only full-fledged news conference as president.
.. President Trump took two questions, both from friendly news outlets, neither of which asked about the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, even though Trump’s former deputy campaign chairman was entering a guilty plea at that very time.
.. Please outline what role you played in drafting your son Donald Trump Jr.’s statement about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting? Did you say that the statement should describe the meeting as being “primarily” about adoption? What was your basis for saying that? When did you become aware of the meeting?
.. Are your taxes still being audited?
Special counsel Mueller files new charges against Manafort, Gates
Paul Manafort was using fraudulently obtained loans and tax-cheating tricks to prop up his personal finances as he became chairman of the Trump campaign in 2016, according to a new 32-count indictment filed against him and his business partner Thursday.
The indictment ratchets up pressure on Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, who were already preparing for a trial
.. Mueller accused the men of lying on their income-tax returns and conspiring to commit bank fraud to get loans.
.. these are two fellows on a multiyear tear of lying to every bank they could find about their income. To a federal prosecutor, it’s fairly crude. It’s extensive and bold and greedy with a capital ‘G,’ but it’s not all that sophisticated.”
.. there was one hero in the special counsel’s tale — a bookkeeper who refused an alleged request by Gates to falsely inflate a revenue claim
.. they could be facing de facto life prison sentences.
.. from 2006 to 2015, Manafort, with help from Gates, avoided paying taxes on income from Ukraine by disguising it as loans from offshore corporate entities
.. using foreign bank accounts to make payments to businesses in the United States on Manafort’s behalf.
.. unidentified co-conspirator wrote that a document looked doctored and asked them to “do a clean excel doc” and send that instead.
.. When Manafort joined the Trump campaign as an adviser in early 2016, he agreed to work with no pay
.. prosecutors alleged Manafort was taking out multimillion-dollar loans in those same months, including $5.5 million that he sought in the same month he joined the campaign.
.. Manafort was under significant financial pressure even as he ascended to the top of the Trump campaign in mid-2016.
.. One bank lender “questioned Manafort about a $300,000 delinquency on his American Express card, which was more than 90 days past due. The delinquency significantly affected Manafort’s credit rating score.”
.. On Oct. 25, 2017 — just days before the first indictment was revealed — Gates submitted a false tax document for the 2013 tax year
.. Three of his lawyers had asked to leave the case
.. Thomas C. Green
.. Green is an experienced white-collar attorney with a reputation for cutting plea deals on behalf of his clients.
We’ve Got the Memo. Now What About Trump’s Tax Returns?
what other evidence did the intelligence court rely on in finding probable cause to issue the warrant? The memo doesn’t say. What about the court’s rationale for issuing three separate extensions, each of which required investigators to present new evidence beyond the dossier?
.. Was any significant piece of information in the dossier found to be inaccurate? The memo doesn’t say.
.. You know what would help to answer questions like these? Even more transparency. It would be useful, for instance, if we could see all of the supporting evidence in the warrant application — with necessary redactions, of course, to protect sources and methods.
.. Also helpful would be the 10-page response memo prepared by Representative Adam Schiff, the committee’s ranking Democrat, who, unlike Mr. Nunes, has actually seen the intelligence underlying the application.
.. investigators did in fact tell the court that the dossier was politically motivated.
.. Since the Republicans are now on board with greater transparency, they will no doubt push President Trump to release his tax returns
.. How about the White House visitor logs
.. Or, say, the names of all foreign governments and officials who have stayed — at their own or at American taxpayers’ expense — at Mr. Trump’s Washington hotel, at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida or at his golf courses and his other businesses
.. Or the names of every foreign business with which the Trump Organization has a financial relationship, especially in countries where America has sensitive foreign policy interests, like China, India, Russia, Turkey or Saudi Arabia?