The Russia Investigations and other Trump-related cases

[N.E. Brigand]

Of course, the harm is largely already done as a result of the stay that was entered while they decided to reinstate the order, giving Trump a chance to make extensive posts attacking Allison Greenfield, Judge Engoron's chief clerk, as recently as yesterday.

Trump also made comments about Judge Engoron's wife yesterday.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Indeed, he did (in the same post that he attacked Ms. Greenblatt). Of course, neither Judge Engoron nor his wife Dawn are currently covered by the gag order that is in place, though I expect the judge will likely extend the order to cover his wife.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

With the caveat that these are allegations that still need to be proven, as an attorney who represents employees in cases like this, I have to agree that this is the most appalling attorney misconduct I've have ever heard of.

[N.E. Brigand]

As Lisa Rubin reported yesterday, the Trump legal team in the New York case tried and failed to secure timely reconsideration to an appeals panel having upheld Judge Engoron's gag order because "they did not appeal the November 30th order until today, and even then, they did not get the procedure right, asking a single judge to essentially overrule a four-judge panel." That means that the earliest Trump's request will be reconsidered is next Monday, December 11th, which is also the day that Trump himself is scheduled to testify as part of his defense.

Adam Klasfeld reports that today, Trump's lawyer, Chris Kise, "made a lengthy request to postpone the former president’s testimony until an appeals court rules on the gag order," which was followed by this brief exchange:

Judge: “Plaintiff?”

The State: “Absolutely not.”

Judge: “Absolutely not. No way. No how. It’s a nonstarter.”

Eric Trump was scheduled to testify as part of the defense tomorrow, but today the defense team announced that he would not be doing so after all.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

As Klasfield also observed, the only possible reason why they would want to postpone the testimony until they are able to get a ruling on the gag order is if Trump wants to trash Allison Greenfield on the stand, and there is no conceivable reason why doing so would be relevant to the case. Truly bizzaro. I love this part of the exchange:

Justice Engoron then told Kise, jovially: “You tried."

After a slight pause, the judge added: "And I gave it a deep thought, as well.”

Guess who was not pleased?

[N.E. Brigand]

As Lisa Rubin reported yesterday, the Trump legal team in the New York case tried and failed to secure timely reconsideration to an appeals panel having upheld Judge Engoron's gag order because "they did not appeal the November 30th order until today, and even then, they did not get the procedure right, asking a single judge to essentially overrule a four-judge panel." That means that the earliest Trump's request will be reconsidered is next Monday, December 11th, which is also the day that Trump himself is scheduled to testify as part of his defense. And Adam Klasfeld reports that today, Trump's lawyer, Chris Kise, "made a lengthy request to postpone the former president’s testimony until an appeals court rules on the gag order," which was followed by this brief exchange:

Judge: “Plaintiff?”
The State: “Absolutely not.”
Judge: “Absolutely not. No way. No how. It’s a nonstarter.”

Eric Trump was scheduled to testify as part of the defense tomorrow, but today the defense team announced that he would not be doing so after all.

As Klasfield also observed, the only possible reason why they would want to postpone the testimony until they are able to get a ruling on the gag order is if Trump wants to trash Allison Greenfield on the stand, and there is no conceivable reason why doing so would be relevant to the case. Truly bizzaro. I love this part of the exchange:

Justice Engoron then told Kise, jovially: “You tried."
After a slight pause, the judge added: "And I gave it a deep thought, as well.”

Guess who was not pleased?

Early this evening, Donald Trump issued a long post on social media site that ends: "I WILL NOT BE TESTIFYING ON MONDAY MAGA"

In that post, Trump says that Mar-a-Lago is worth $900 million to $1.8 billion, not $18 million (I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but closer to the lower end); that this case should have received a jury trial (he had the opportunity to ask for one but didn't do so until just before the trial started, long after the deadline had passed); that "biased" Judge Engoron "refused to accept" that an appellate court has already ruled in Trump's favor, that Trump's expert witness has already and will continue to provide testimony that will win this case; and that the whole case is "complete & total election interference (Biden campaign!)". And like the last sentence about not testifying tomorrow, the whole post is in all-caps. I guess that makes it both complete and total.

At the link, Dan Alexander of Forbes suggests that Trump is afraid of perjuring himself (or strongly advised by his lawyers about that). Trump already was called by the state as a witness, and during that testimony he claimed that someone else, not him, mistakenly listed the size of his New York apartment in financial statements as 30,000 square feet rather than its actual size of 10,996 square feet. After he testified, Forbes published audio of Trump telling someone that the apartment -- a triplex, i.e., three-floor, residence -- was three times larger than it was: "So there's like 11,000 feet on a floor. So I have three. So 33,000." In his testimony, Trump said that other people had made that very mistake and that he had personally corrected it. And he also testified that as president, he only gave his company's statements a cursory review -- but it was during that time that the Trump Org. finally corrected the figure.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Regarding the value of Mar-a-Lago, as Judge Engoron himself has noted, what the actual value is not the point. The point is that Trump can't claim that it is worth $18 million for tax purposes (which is based on large part of the limitations on the use of the property which limits what its value really is), and then turn around and claim that it is worth dozens of times more than that for the purposes of applying for loans. A classic case of "you can't have your cake and eat it too." A lesson which Trump has never really had to learn before.

Regarding the jury trial issue, what most commentators keep saying is not really correct. Under the law that the AG is suing under, Trump would NOT have been automatically entitled to a jury trial if his attorneys had timely requested one. As I understand it, they could have requested that Judge Engoron grant him a jury trial despite what the law says, but there is almost no way that he would have granted that request. However, almost no one reports it that way.

Regarding Trump's decision not to testify (following the same thing happening a few days ago with his son Eric), a few days ago his "attorney" Alina Habba* said this about Trump testifying: " People who are afraid cower. President Trump does not cower."

* A couple of weeks ago I saw that there was a lawsuit filed that alleged that a woman had been sexually harassed by the manager of one of Trump's golf clubs and then was "befriended" by Habba, who then convinced the woman to fire her attorney and sign a settlement agreement drafted by Habba for a nominal sum that included an illegal NDA, after lying to the woman about whether she would have to pay taxes on the settlement funds, and then ghosting her after the settlement agreement with the illegal NDA was signed. These are, of course, only allegations at this point, but if true that is among the most horrible unethical conduct by an attorney I have ever heard of.
Here's the lawsuit: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/ ... m-club.pdf

[N.E. Brigand]

Donald Trump says that Michael Cohen chocked yesterday.

I completely agree with Marcy Wheeler that Michael Cohen is still very shady and that his probation should not be allowed to conclude early as he has requested. It has long seemed clear to me that from the start, Cohen has been holding out on telling the full truth in the various cases where he has charged or testified. (Wheeler is concerned that Cohen will renege on his obligations to Alvin Bragg's criminal case against Donald Trump.) I hope the fact that his lawyer apparently turned to an artificial intelligence program to write his brief, and that the AI program then generated phony precedents, will make it less likely that Cohen will get what he seeks.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

To be fair, it was his former lawyer, not his present lawyer, and it was his present lawyer who first pointed out that the case don't seem to exist. That having been said, I agree with you and Marcy that Cohen is not trustworthy, and it makes me both a little amused and a little angry to see how he has been hero-worshipped by some on the left simply because he turned on Trump.

[N.E. Brigand]

Early this evening, Donald Trump issued a long post on social media site that ends: "I WILL NOT BE TESTIFYING ON MONDAY MAGA"

In that post, Trump says that Mar-a-Lago is worth $900 million to $1.8 billion, not $18 million (I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but closer to the lower end); that this case should have received a jury trial (he had the opportunity to ask for one but didn't do so until just before the trial started, long after the deadline had passed); that "biased" Judge Engoron "refused to accept" that an appellate court has already ruled in Trump's favor, that Trump's expert witness has already and will continue to provide testimony that will win this case; and that the whole case is "complete & total election interference (Biden campaign!)". And like the last sentence about not testifying tomorrow, the whole post is in all-caps. I guess that makes it both complete and total.

At the link, Dan Alexander of Forbes suggests that Trump is afraid of perjuring himself (or strongly advised by his lawyers about that). Trump already was called by the state as a witness, and during that testimony he claimed that someone else, not him, mistakenly listed the size of his New York apartment in financial statements as 30,000 square feet rather than its actual size of 10,996 square feet. After he testified, Forbes published audio of Trump telling someone that the apartment -- a triplex, i.e., three-floor, residence -- was three times larger than it was: "So there's like 11,000 feet on a floor. So I have three. So 33,000." In his testimony, Trump said that other people had made that very mistake and that he had personally corrected it. And he also testified that as president, he only gave his company's statements a cursory review -- but it was during that time that the Trump Org. finally corrected the figure.

LOL. Donald Trump today said that he wanted to testify Monday after all, but he couldn't because "the Judge, Arthur Engoron, put a GAG ORDER on me, even when I testify, totally taking away my constitutional right to defend myself." After noting that he is appealing the gag order, he asks" "how would you like to be a witness and not be allowed free snd [sic] honest speech"? It's complete baloney.

The gag order is pretty specific and has nothing to do with the subjects Trump might reasonably be expected to have testified about!

[Voronwë the Faithful]

(Wheeler is concerned that Cohen will renege on his obligations to Alvin Bragg's criminal case against Donald Trump.)

It is becoming increasingly likely that that will be only criminal case against Trump that goes to trial before the election, so hopefully Cohen will not renege in his obligations in that case. However, since he has already been charged and convicted for his role in that matter, there shouldn't be any difficulty in compelling him to testify. I'm not too worried about that. And despite his general untrustworthiness, he will be a compelling witness in that case.

[N.E. Brigand]

Donald Trump says that Michael Cohen chocked yesterday.

I completely agree with Marcy Wheeler that Michael Cohen is still very shady and that his probation should not be allowed to conclude early as he has requested. It has long seemed clear to me that from the start, Cohen has been holding out on telling the full truth in the various cases where he has charged or testified. (Wheeler is concerned that Cohen will renege on his obligations to Alvin Bragg's criminal case against Donald Trump.) I hope the fact that his lawyer apparently turned to an artificial intelligence program to write his brief, and that the AI program then generated phony precedents, will make it less likely that Cohen will get what he seeks.

So it turns out that Michael Cohen himself provided these non-existing cases to his lawyer, Michael Schwartz. Cohen claims that he mistakenly believed that Google Bard, which he says he used to look for cases relevant to his motion, was merely an advanced search engine: he didn't realize that it was an artificial intelligence program that would generate phony cases that appeared to be real. (I can believe this. I'd never even heard of Google Bard before now, although the name would give me pause.) He also says that he assumed Schwartz would review the details of those cases before including them in the motion. For his part, Schwartz says that he should have checked but he mistakenly believed that another of Cohen's lawyers, E. Danya Perry, had provided these citations, but Perry actually joined Cohen's team after Schwartz made the filing, and it was she who brought the matter to the attention of the judge, Jesse Furman. In a new filing, Perry is at pains to note that Cohen, who is no longer a practicing lawyer, had no obligation to verify these cases, but Schwartz did. You will not surprised to learn that Schwartz himself is represented in this matter by his own lawyer, Barry Kamins.

Donald Trump's lawyers are naturally pointing to this screw-up as evidence that Cohen can't be trusted.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

There are much better reasons to point to prove that Michael Cohen can't be trusted! But that doesn't mean that he won't be able to provide compelling evidence in a case that alleges conduct that is directly related to a crime that Cohen already pleaded guilty to.

[N.E. Brigand]

Closing arguments were presented Friday morning. The jury deliberated for about six hours (Friday afternoon and this morning), and Michael Sussmann has been found not guilty.

Notice how the mainstream Los Angeles Times is misleadingly presenting the case. Sussmann "pushed information meant to cast suspicions"? Why that framing?

I would say that, having been given information concerning apparent mysterious communications between the Trump Org. and the Kremlin-connected Alfa Bank, and not having the ability to check on the legitimacy or meaning of that information himself, he provided it both to some reporters and to the FBI for them to determine what it meant. The reporters were free to determine on their own whether or not the information merited publication. The FBI was free to determine on its own whether the information merited investigation. And we now know that the FBI never did figure out what it meant. They closed the case (1) without even interviewing the Georgia Tech computer scientist who first analyzed the data and (2) after having asked Alfa Bank for their own analysis of what was going on. So even if Sussmann had lied, then that means the prosecution's argument is that, if the FBI had known he was representing a political client, then rather than doing a bad investigation they would have done no investigation at all?

There's reporting tonight from NBC that the infamous Chinese spy balloon that overflew the U.S. earlier this year:

used an American internet service provider to ... send and receive communications from China, primarily related to its navigation. Officials familiar with the [U.S. intelligence agencies'] assessment said it found that the connection allowed the balloon to send burst transmissions, or high-bandwidth collections of data over short periods of time. The Biden administration sought a highly secretive court order from the federal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to collect intelligence about it while it was over the U.S., according to multiple current and former U.S. officials. How the court ruled has not been disclosed.

In light of this, Marcy Wheeler argues that Special Counsel John Durham made it easier for this Chinese activity when his investigation attempted to criminalize researchers' investigation into what may have been similar efforts by the Russian government using Alfa Bank servers in Trump Tower: "the thing Durham deliberately burned, wittingly or not on behalf of Russians, was DNS tracking. He burned it to the ground." In other words, independent researchers now dare not examine this sort of suspicious activity, for fear that they will be prosecuted (although in this case, it's possible that official American intelligence was able to take up the slack).

[N.E. Brigand]

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have released a report, based on documents it took years to obtain from Donald Trump's former accounting firm, Mazars, which finds that Trump received $7.8 million in payments from 20 foreign governments in two of the four years that he was president. They don't have information on the other two years, apparently because House Republicans upon taking control last year terminated the agreement requiring Mazars to produce them. $5.5 million came from China. Other countries listed include Qatar, India, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Kuwait. Much of this came as payments to Trump's businesses. And Trump is unlikely ever to be held accountable for this activity, which should have been investigated as bribery, because the courts more or less decided that the foreign emoluments clause of the constitution doesn't really mean anything.

[N.E. Brigand]

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have released a report, based on documents it took years to obtain from Donald Trump's former accounting firm, Mazars, which finds that Trump received $7.8 million in payments from 20 foreign governments in two of the four years that he was president. They don't have information on the other two years, apparently because House Republicans upon taking control last year terminated the agreement requiring Mazars to produce them. $5.5 million came from China. Other countries listed include Qatar, India, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Kuwait. Much of this came as payments to Trump's businesses. And Trump is unlikely ever to be held accountable for this activity, which should have been investigated as bribery, because the courts more or less decided that the foreign emoluments clause of the constitution doesn't really mean anything.

I'm not the first today to point to this, and today is not the first time people have made this connection, but in light of today's report, it bears revisiting:



And then four days later:

Jan. 28: Trump gets another intelligence briefing. He is told that China is “withholding data” and that the virus is “spreading outside of China.” At a press conference, [Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex] Azar says: “The president and I have been speaking regularly about this outbreak, and I have been speaking with the senior officials at HHS and the White House multiple times each day since the outbreak began to represent an international threat. The president is highly engaged in this response and closely monitoring the work we’re doing to keep Americans safe.”

That evening, at a rally in New Jersey, Trump says he has “signed a fantastic new trade agreement with China that will boost New Jersey exports and defend New Jersey jobs.”

Also, given the news today about ISIS killing scores of people in Iran at a memorial commemorating the fourth anniversary of the death (by a U.S. strike in Iraq) of Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani -- which resulted in Iran pounding U.S. bases in Iraq with a heavy missile barrage -- it's fascinating to see that the first (extant) reply to Trump's Jan. 24, 2020 tweet about Covid-19 is this:

hey, aren't you the guy who said that no one was hurt in the Iran missile attack and then the story was 11 soldiers had concussions and now the story is that 34 soldiers have brain trauma? so why should anyone believe a single word you say about coronavirus? or anything else

And yes, it had been earlier that very day that the number of U.S. personnel injured in the Iranian attack had been officially raised to 34. But four days later, the Pentagon reported that 50 troops had been "diagnosed with TBI," i.e., traumatic brain injury, and nearly a month after that, the number of injured had increased to 110. More than a year later, one of those injured servicemembers, a man who had been awarded the Purple Heart, committed suicide "as a result of vision and hearing problems and constant headaches and memory loss caused by the TBI inflicted in the attacks."

The repeated rising numbers certainly do seem like an advanced taste of the pandemic. That Twitter respondent was quite right.

[N.E. Brigand]

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have released a report, based on documents it took years to obtain from Donald Trump's former accounting firm, Mazars, which finds that Trump received $7.8 million in payments from 20 foreign governments in two of the four years that he was president. They don't have information on the other two years, apparently because House Republicans upon taking control last year terminated the agreement requiring Mazars to produce them. $5.5 million came from China. Other countries listed include Qatar, India, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Kuwait. Much of this came as payments to Trump's businesses. And Trump is unlikely ever to be held accountable for this activity, which should have been investigated as bribery, because the courts more or less decided that the foreign emoluments clause of the constitution doesn't really mean anything.

The report also notes that Mazars was unable to find the registry of guests who stayed at the Trump Hotel in D.C. during his 2017 inauguration.

And other documents that would be needed for a full report were likewise not provided.

[N.E. Brigand]

Closing arguments in the Trump civil fraud trial in New York are scheduled for next Thursday. Today both sides filed motions:

New York Attorney General Letitia James is calling for a $370 million fine against former President Donald Trump and his companies and a lifetime ban on him and two of his former company executives from the real estate industry in the state.

Attorneys from James' office requested the punishment in post-trial motions filed Friday in the Trump fraud case. They said that Trump owes $168 million of interest allegedly saved through fraud; $152 million from the sale of the Old Post Office building in Washington, D.C., the site of one of Trump's hotels; $60 million through the transfer of the Ferry Point Golf Course contract; and $2.5 million from severance agreements for former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Howard Weisselberg and ex-Trump Organization controller Jeff McConney.

James also called for lifetime bans for Trump, Weisselberg and McConney from participation in the real estate industry as well as from serving as officers or directors in New York corporations or entities. The attorney general also asked for five-year bans for Trump's eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, with the same conditions.

This is nearly 50% more than the $250 million that James has said in 2022 that Trump should have to pay.

Trump's motions argue, among much else, that no one was actually damaged by the financial misstatements described in the trial.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

In the most bizarre news of the day,

[Voronwë the Faithful]

And the entirely predictable result.