Trump gave his second State of the Union Tuesday night. He called for his border wall to be built, continuing his rhetoric about the danger of immigrants crossing the southern border, and he warned Democrats not to investigate him.
Russia Investigation
Buzzfeed News, which has been tracking reports of questionable wire transfers in 2016, now reports that the recipient of much of those transfers is a Russian lobbyist who was present at the Trump Tower meeting.
Buzzfeed News also released a load of documents they had obtained about Trump Tower Moscow. They place key docs side by side to illustrate that Trump’s praise of Putin in 2015-16 were designed to encourage the Putin’s approval of the Trump Tower deal.
Marcy Wheeler scoured the docs and came to this conclusion: “At that point, Sater told Cohen there was a “very strong chance” he would meet Russia’s President, which Cohen and Don Jr would have both believed meant that the Trump Organization could make $300 million by lending Trump’s name to the tallest tower in Europe. Quid pro quo, all executed on social media.”
There was a close door hearing in the Manafort case on Monday that surfaced some nuggets (the transcript was released late Thursday). Prosecutors claimed that Manafort lied about a sensitive undisclosed issue because telling the truth might have “negative consequences in terms of the other motive that Mr. Manafort could have, which is to at least augment his chances for a pardon.” The sensitive issue has to do with an August 2, 2016 meeting between Manafort, Gates and Kilimnik.
Marcy Wheeler’s interpretation of the significance of this meeting: “Manafort knows well what he did in August 2016. But he — and his lawyers, and whoever lied anonymously to the NYT — continue to lie about it in hopes that, by refusing to confirm that he conspired with Russia to get Trump elected, Trump will pay him off with a pardon. The truth appears to be that Manafort walked Konstantin Kilimnik through recent, highly detailed polling data at a clandestine meeting in NYC on August 2, 2016, in part because even if it didn’t help Trump, it might help his own fortunes down the way. And he’s willing to bet that lying about that fact is his best chance for a pardon.”
Also at issue was the potential that Trump could end the conflict over Russian invasion of Crimea and end the sanctions: “This goes to the larger view of what we think is going on, and what we think is the motive here,” Mr. Weissmann said. “This goes, I think, very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating.” These “cryptic comments suggest that the special counsel’s investigation … is still pursuing the central question of whether there was some kind of deal between Russia and the Trump campaign.”
Whitaker testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Friday. He said he had not interfered with the Mueller investigation, and that Mueller was honest, but declined to say if he thought it was a witch hunt. He often tried to obfuscate the questions–especially about if he talked with Trump about Mueller, the SDNY or pardons–and some suspect he was trying to curry favor with Trump for another post in the administration after Barr takes over as AG next week.
Non-Russia Related Legal Troubles
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have subpoenaed the Trump inaugural committee for all records about payments and donors.
Jeff Bezos accused Pecker and AMI of extortion in a blogpost published on Medium. He reprinted emails sent to him that described sexted images of himself that they would publish in the National Enquirer if he did not call off his investigation of their investigation of how they acquired knowledge of his affair and of the hacked texts.
In the post Bezos confirmed that he had a career investigator on the case named Gavin de Becker. He “confirmed to The Daily Beast on Jan. 31 that he was leading the investigation into the matter of how the Enquirer had obtained the text messages. Not long afterward, The [Washington] Post prepared an article exploring competing theories about the motivation behind the publication of the tawdry tale” of the affair. This is what prompted AMI to threaten Bezos with detailed descriptions of the images they had obtained. The entire situation is connected to Trump’s legal problems because AMI signed a non-prosecution agreement with the SDNY: the “agreement, signed in September, stipulated that A.M.I. ‘shall commit no crimes whatsoever’ for three years, and that if it did, ‘A.M.I. shall thereafter be subject to prosecution for any federal criminal violation of which this office has knowledge.’
On Friday the board of AMI announced it was starting an investigation into Bezos’s claims.
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Trump’s Job Approval: 40.2%