Russian Leverage Over Trump Is Not Just a Theory. It's Now Fact.

[DonViejo]

By Jonathan Chait
@jonathanchait

May 8, 2018
11:03 pm

In the waning weeks of 2016, when the intelligence community and many politicians were passing around terrifying reports about Donald Trump’s links to Russia like samizdat, the frightening possibility arose that the sanctity of the United States government might be compromised in a way no living American had experienced. This was just one of the unnerving things about the rise of Trump, and it was one that many well-informed observers doubted. Russia, after all, was poor and weak. To imagine that a country with an economy smaller than Canada’s or Italy’s could leverage a superpower ten times wealthier beggared the imagination. And yet that paranoid, absurd belief seems to be creeping closer to reality than seemed possible even in those dark postelection days.

The New York Times has confirmed the explosive claims made by Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stormy Daniels, that Columbus Nova — a New York investment firm whose biggest client is a company controlled by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg — deposited half a million dollars into a secret account set up by attorney Michael Cohen to pay off Trump’s sexual partners. The possible reasons for this arrangement run from brazenly corrupt to far worse. Columbus Nova said the hefty sum was a “consulting fee” paid to Cohen, hardly a benign explanation.

Columbus Nova reportedly retained Cohen’s services after Andrew Intrater, the company’s American chief executive, met him while attending Trump’s inauguration with Vekselberg, who is his cousin. Like all Russian oligarchs, Vekselberg operates in cooperation with the Putin government. The payments gave Russia several sources of possible leverage over Cohen and Trump. First, the money itself could amount to some kind of bribe, in return for which a favor would be expected. Second, Russia had knowledge of the secret payoff, which it could always expose. Third, the possibility (at minimum) exists that Russia knew the account was being used to silence Trump’s mistresses, yet another source of kompromat.

For all the speculation about the existence of the pee tape, the latest revelations prove what is tantamount to the same thing. Russia could leverage the president and his fixer — who, recall, hand-delivered a pro-Russian “peace plan” with Ukraine to Trump’s national-security adviser in January 2017 — by threatening to expose secrets they were desperate to keep hidden. Whether those secrets were limited to legally questionable payments, or included knowledge of sexual affairs, is a question of degree but not of kind.

Perhaps even more alarming has been the response of the political system to this crisis. The House of Representatives has assigned Devin Nunes, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, as its point man to defend Trump against the Mueller investigation. The Department of Justice has a long-standing policy of keeping Congress out of acting investigations, for the obvious reason that elected officials have a powerful incentive to interfere. Nunes has demanded the virtually unlimited right to get inside the Mueller probe. Officials in the Department of Justice have come to suspect his goal is to compromise the investigation by handing information from the prosecutors over to Trump.

more
https://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/russian-leverage-over-trump-fact-michael-cohen-stormy-daniels-devin-nunes.html

[yallerdawg]

1. Putin's puppet - as accurately described by Hillary during debate while Comey stayed silent -

is finishing up Putin's original goal of discrediting the United States government and our democracy.

Everything else is 'lagniappe' as we say in the South.

[dalton99a]

2. The Trump crime family is controlled by the Russian mob.

[Wellstone ruled]

3. Well well,

so there is a Media source that wants to talk about what we all learned from Mother Jones,Rolling Stone and other fact based Media Sources.

Better late than never. And still not a word about this on Cable News today. Comcast Media has prostituted it's self to the GOP to the max.

[neohippie]

4. with all of these new revelations about Cohen

Does anyone know if Cohen would have been legally required to register as a lobbyist or foreign agent since he was getting paid for access/insight into Trump administration?

[erronis]

5. And has been stated here before, this is why drunken ghouliani is allowed to spout

All sorts of statements counter to the "official" line(s).

By making sure that the slimy details of dump's actions have already been spilled into the newfeeds then the bombshell revelations seem a bit less incredible.

I hope that someday all these machinations, the people and the methods and the rationales, will be aired so they can be studied for future psy-ops. Whether by the alpha-brigade or the pluto-crats or the roaches that inherit the earth.

[Gothmog]

6. Trump's Stormy Daniels tweets show how easy he is to blackmail

The latest revelations show that trump is easy to blackmail. Trump paid $130,000 to cover up a one night stand. This is not a good thing https://www.vox.com/2018/5/3/17314586/trump-stormy-daniels-blackmail-tweet

Whether that argument succeeds on its own narrow legal terms is, of course, interesting and important (as is the question of whether Trump’s current story is true or if he is once again lying). But the broader issue posed by the Stormy situation is simpler: A president who is in the habit of cutting secret six-figure checks is a president who is subject to a wide range of implicit and explicit blackmail by anyone ranging from a porn actress to a foreign intelligence service.

Indeed, Trump’s most recent account of the situation manages to both underscore how easy it is to gain leverage over him and how vanishingly unlikely it is that Daniels is the only scandal that’s been swept under the rug.

And while the particulars of the Daniels situation have attracted media attention in part specifically because of how tawdry and comical it is, we have some indications that similar considerations of cover-up and damage control are meaningfully influencing Trump-era policy....

Indeed, to this day, Trump is continuing his legal efforts to prevent Daniels from speaking in public either because her story is extremely damaging to Trump or (more likely) to discourage other people with whom Trump has signed nondisclosure agreements from speaking.

This is an extraordinary level of vulnerability for a man in a uniquely powerful position, and it’s made all the more extraordinary by the fact that he is non-transparent in completely unprecedented ways. We have virtually no knowledge of the president’s business interests or finances, and we recently learned that even something as basic as the physical exam of his personal health that was released to the public is a sham.

Putin may have an extensive file on trump including the pee tape. If trump is willing to jump through this many hoops and tell this many lies just for an one-night stand, think what trump will do to keep the pee tape quiet.