18 Jul 2017 2:58 pm
That's what I keep saying.
It Was Always About the Money - Russia and the Trumps: A Grift Story.
It was always about the money.
The reason we never saw the tax returns was because of what they would show about the money.
The reason we can't get a straight answer about the family's dealings with the Russians is the money.
Preet Bharara got fired because of the money and how the money had been allegedly laundered.
James Comey got fired because of the money.
Without the money, specifically the money from Russia, the Trump empire likely would have collapsed under a hail of writs and the paterfamilias would have been rendered invisible, even in the mirrors of Mar-a-Lago.
It always was about the money.
The meeting on June 6, 2016 ultimately was about the money, as we learned today from CNN.
The network reported that it had identified the eighth participant in that now-famous Trump Tower confab.
Contrary to the previous load of hooey dispensed by Junior and the first family, this dude was not a translator. I am sure that, like most wealthy Russians in the Putin era, old Ike there is on the up and up.
Let's go to the phones.
Here's Ray from The New York Times:
It's hard to believe that Junior wanted this guy's name kept out of the stories, especially now that, as the guy's attorney says, Robert Mueller has come knock, knock, knocking at the door.
(Sarah Kendizor, whose electric Twitter machine account is an essential follow on this stuff, has even more about Ike, including Ike's complaint that the money-laundering probe was a "witch hunt." These guys need new material.)
The fact is that the president* was never as rich as he said he was, a circumstance that was of outsized importance to nobody except his own narcissistic self.
(I don't think it would have changed a single vote if it had been revealed that he wasn't as rich as he was saying he was.)
He did, however, always have an outsized sense of himself in the world.
He had to keep acquiring to stay true to his self-image.
I believe the collision between these two factors left him with no options to obtain loans except overseas, and the Russian money was easy money.
Then he got elected president and it all unraveled.
Future historians are going to read this stuff and get out of the business.