The Trumps have often been compared to a mob family. Certainly, in the White House, they have created a dark alternative universe with an inverted ethical code, where the main value is loyalty to the godfather above all else.
An anti-Trump group called Mad Dog PAC has a billboard reading: “MAGA, Mobsters Are Governing America.”
.. As Michael Daly noted in The Daily Beast, “Traditionally, rats begin wearing a wire after they get jammed up.”
.. In the taped call, Cohen tells Trump that he has talked to the mogul’s trusted money manager and “Apprentice” guest star, Allen Weisselberg, about how to set up a company to reimburse David Pecker, the National Enquirer owner, for buying off Trump goomah Karen McDougal. Federal investigators in Manhattan now want to interview Weisselberg.
“Long term, this could be the most damaging,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien told me, “because it gets into Trump’s wallet.”
.. Cohen the Fixer claims Trump knew about the Russian meeting during the campaign with his son and Paul Manafort. The president hit the mattresses on Twitter, denying it all.
.. Rudy Giuliani has somersaulted from a RICO-happy prosecutor to a man acting like a Mafia lawyer, telling Chris Cuomo that Cohen is an “incredible liar” when only three months ago he pronounced him “an honest, honorable lawyer.”
.. If the White House seems more and more like “Goodfellas,” it is not an accident.
“Trump has a very cinematic sense of himself,” O’Brien said. Like many on social media, he is driven to be the star of his own movie. He even considered going to film school in L.A. before he settled into his father’s business.
.. O’Brien recalled that Trump told him that he thought Clint Eastwood was the greatest movie star. “He and Melania model their squints on Eastwood,” the biographer noted. Trump also remarked, while they were watching “Sunset Boulevard” on the Trump plane, that a particular scene was amazing: the one where Norma Desmond obsessively watches her silent films and cries: “Have they forgotten what a star looks like? I’ll show them!”
.. Trump is drawn to people who know how to dominate a room and exaggerated displays of macho, citing three of his top five movies as
- “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,”
- “Goodfellas” and
- “The Godfather.”
.. As a young real estate developer, he would hang out at Yankee Stadium and study the larger-than-life figures in the V.I.P. box:
- George Steinbrenner,
- Lee Iacocca,
- Frank Sinatra,
- Roy Cohn,
- Rupert Murdoch,
- Cary Grant.
He was intent on learning how they grabbed the limelight.
.. “In his first big apartment project, Trump’s father had a partner connected to the Genovese and Gambino crime families,” said Michael D’Antonio, another Trump biographer. “He dealt with mobbed-up suppliers and union guys for decades.
.. “When Trump was a little boy, wandering around job sites with his dad — which was the only time he got to spend with him — he saw a lot of guys with broken noses and rough accents. And I think he is really enchanted by base male displays of strength. Think about ‘Goodfellas’ — people who prevail by cheating and fixing and lying. Trump doesn’t have the baseline intellect and experience to be proficient at governing. His proficiency is this mob style of bullying and tough-guy talk.”
As Steve Bannon noted approvingly, Trump has a Rat Pack air, and as O’Brien said, Trump was the sort of guy who kept gold bullion in his office.
.. Trump’s like a mobster, D’Antonio said, in the sense that he “does not believe that anyone is honest. He doesn’t believe that your motivations have anything to do with right and wrong and public service. It’s all about self-interest and a war of all against all. He’s turning America into Mulberry Street in the ’20s, where you meet your co-conspirators in the back of the candy store.”
Michael Cohen is now alleging what would be the Trump team’s worst cover-up yet
1. Trump didn’t know about the Trump Tower meeting
.. Again, Cohen’s version is secondhand and unconfirmed, but he’s apparently willing to testify to it. And if other people know about it, we can bet they’ll be forced to testify to that effect, too.
Were this denial to fall apart, it would be perhaps the most serious false denial, given the Trump Tower meeting’s centrality to the Russia investigation and the fact that it could open Trump Jr. to potential perjury allegations. It would also be among the most incontrovertibly false denials on this list.
2. Trump wasn’t involved in the response to the Trump Tower meeting
.. The Washington Post soon reported that Trump had dictated Trump Jr.’s initial, misleading statement on the meeting.
And last month, in court filings, Trump’s legal team for the first time admitted that on the record.
3. The Trump team didn’t talk to Russians
.. We now know about the Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer tied to Vladimir Putin (and other Russians), of course. We also know about various contacts between now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Russian ambassador. We also know about Erik Prince meeting in Seychelles with a Russian close to Putin, possibly to set up a back channel of communication.
The Post’s Philip Bump details all the connections here.
4. The Trump team didn’t know about the National Enquirer/Karen McDougal payment
.. Trump had spoken with Cohen about buying the rights to the story on a September 2016 tape that Cohen released publicly this week. It is not clear how many details of the situation Trump himself knew — apart from the purchase price and apparently that he was buying something from AMI head David Pecker — but he clearly knew enough for Hicks not to offer such an absolute denial. And Cohen clearly knew a lot.
5. Trump didn’t stay overnight in Moscow in 2013
.. Flight records indicated that Trump’s plane was in Moscow from Friday to Sunday morning — meaning he had to have stayed over at least one night.
Faced with this evidence, Trump denied that he had ever told Comey that he didn’t stay overnight in Moscow. “He said I didn’t stay there a night. Of course I stayed there,” Trump told Fox News. “I stayed there a very short period of time, but of course I stayed. Well, his memo said I left immediately. I never said that. I never said I left immediately.”
.. 6. Trump didn’t know about the Stormy Daniels payment
Rudolph W. Giuliani eventually spilled the beans, saying Cohen “funneled it through a law firm, and the president repaid it.” Trump later confirmed Cohen was placed on a retainer.
Trump Denies He Knew Beforehand of Meeting With Russian Lawyer
President responds to what his former lawyer Michael Cohen plans to tell special counsel Robert Mueller
President Trump on Friday said he had no prior knowledge of a June 2016 meeting his eldest son had with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower, disputing an account that a person familiar with the matter says his former lawyer Michael Cohen is planning to tell the special counsel.In a series of tweets Friday morning, Mr. Trump wrote, “So the Fake News doesn’t waste my time with dumb questions, NO, I did NOT know of the meeting with my son, Don jr.” He also took a shot at Mr. Cohen and Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis.
.. “Sounds to me like someone is trying to make up stories in order to get himself out of an unrelated jam (Taxi cabs maybe?),” Mr. Trump wrote. “He even retained Bill and Crooked Hillary’s lawyer. Gee, I wonder if they helped him make the choice!”.. Mr. Cohen is willing to tell Special Counsel Robert Mueller that he was present when the younger Mr. Trump informed his father about the meeting before it took place.. Mr. Mueller is also examining statements issued by the younger Mr. Trump and the White House, with the president’s approval, that were initially misleading about the purpose of the Veselnitskaya meeting.. Mr. Mueller is investigating whether the president and his aides sought to obstruct justice in releasing an initial statement that said the meeting focused only on adoptions.
The evidence doesn’t prove collusion. But it sure suggests it.
.. In Helsinki, Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted he wanted Trump to win — something Trump continues to deny to this day.
.. there were 82 known “contacts between the Trump team and Russia-linked operatives.”
.. the June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower between the Trump campaign high command and Kremlin emissaries promising dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of the Kremlin’s “support for Mr. Trump.” “If it’s what you say, I love it,” Donald Trump Jr. gushed. When this was revealed last summer, President Trump personally orchestrated an attempted coverup by claiming the meeting was about adoptions.
This was shortly after Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey to stop the investigation of “this Russia thing,” as he put it in an interview with “NBC Nightly News” — showing just how much he fears this inquiry.
.. Trump’s deputy campaign manager, Rick Gates, was in touch in 2016 with Konstantin Kilimnik, a business associate with “ties to Russian intelligence.” Campaign chairman
Paul Manafort, who has a long history of representing Russian interests and was running the campaign for no pay, also reportedly met with Kilimnik in 2016.
Manafort was also in contact with the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska (whom he owed at least $10 million) , offering him “private briefings” that would no doubt have been instantly conveyed to Putin.
.. Russians first tried to hack into Clinton’s email on July 27, 2016, hours after Trump asked them to do just that (“Russia, if you’re listening”).
.. Both Stone and Donald Trump Jr. were also in contact with WikiLeaks, the Russians’ conduit for releasing stolen emails. Surely it is no mere coincidence that Stone predicted on Aug. 21, 2016 — nearly seven weeks before Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s stolen emails were released — that “it will soon [be] Podesta’s time in the barrel.”
.. the indictment also reveals that the Russians stole not just emails but also the data analytics Democrats used to run their campaign. This happened in September 2016. A few weeks later, the Trump campaign shifted its “datadriven” strategy to focus on the states that would provide the margin of victory, raising the question of whether it benefited from stolen Democratic data.
.. The application, approved by four Republican judges, notes that “the FBI believes that the Russian Government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with Candidate #1’s [Trump’s] campaign.” It also says that Putin aide Igor Diveykin “had met secretly with Page and that their agenda for the meeting included Diveykin raising
a dossier or ‘kompromat’ that the Kremlin possessed on Candidate #2 [Clinton] and the possibility of it being released to Candidate #1’s campaign.”
.. Helsinki, where Trump refused to criticize Putin and insisted on meeting with him alone for two hours. Why doesn’t Trump want his own aides in the room when he talks with Putin? What does he have to hide?
.. Former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. , among others, suspects that Putin has “something” on Trump — perhaps evidence of financial wrongdoing. But, by now, any such “kompromat” could well include the help that Russia provided in 2016. Trump certainly gives the impression that he knows how much he owes Russia and how important it is to repay that debt lest Putin release the evidence that might bring him down. And the
Putin Republicans give the impression that they couldn’t care less if the president plotted to win power with help from a hostile foreign state.