While driving back from New York City this afternoon, I briefly listened to AOC and fellow Democrats question one of Donald Trump’s former lawyers. I learned that Trump was a successful criminal mastermind who had escaped attention from the authorities and prosecutors for decades. Then he decided that the best way to keep a low profile and avoid close scrutiny of his misdeeds would be to run for and become President.
A specific part that I remember concerned the valuation of a Trump golf course. AOC noted that the management valued the course different for investment purposes than for property tax. Yet this would apparently be true for hundreds or thousands of golf courses in the U.S. (see this article for how golf clubs may be taxed based on a low valuation due partly to a belief that it is beneficial to have some open/green space: “In Pennsylvania, for instance a golf facility can apply for inclusion in the ‘Clean and Green’ Act 515 program, which preserves open space in return for a reduction in taxes.”).
Representative reaction from my virtuous Facebook friends:
Well, I was wrong about Trump. I substantially underestimated his perfidious criminal conduct, if half of what Cohen says is true, and I suspect most of it is.
Readers: Did you watch the hearing? Learn anything new?
[Separately, if you want to see what a country looks like when it can’t support any additional people with its infrastructure, try driving Boston to New York and back during what used to be the mid-day off peak. The forecast on Monday morning was for 47-knot wind gusts at Teterboro, of which 37 knots would have been a crosswind component. It would have been 1.5 hours of moderate-to-severe turbulence to get there in the Cirrus. So it was time for the Honda Odyssey to show off its immunity to crosswinds (fairly impressive!).]
Related:
- “Cohen: Trump asked me to mislead public about hush money payments” (CNN), i.e., a young woman supposedly had sex with an older man and definitely received cash
- “Even as President, Trump Focused on Hush Money, Cohen Says” (NYT), i.e., a young woman was got paid as a result of having had sex with an older man
- “Michael Cohen: I probably threatened people for Trump hundreds of times” (Vox): over a 10-year period, Trump needed this one lawyer to threaten people 500 times. I.e., every week the two had a meeting and Trump gave him the name of a new person to threaten. (Cohen was thus threatening more people than the book Bad Blood describes the entire firm of Boies Schiller Flexner threatening on behalf of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos).
I have a question — for one of the lawyers who comments here. Cohen has given legal advice to Congress that Trump committed a crime in having sex with Sammy Daniels but Cohen had been disbarred as a convicted felon before giving Congress this legal advice. Does a disbarred lawyer giving legal advice to the US Congress constitute practicing law without a license — which I believe is a crime? If so, in which jurisdiction should he be prosecuted — the jurisdiction where he gave the advice (presumably the District of Columbia) — or the jurisdiction where he was recently disbarred (the Empire State)?
He was giving evidence of crimes he had witnessed, not practicing law. Can you really not tell the difference?
henry: Your comment raises a good question… What could he have witnessed?
This guy wasn’t a tax lawyer, was he? Why would he have known anything about what the accountants and real tax lawyers were doing?
The media told us six months ago that everything illegal would be revealed by the testimony of the Trump CFO (see https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-08-24/allen-weisselberg-immunity-is-potential-trump-game-changer for example). This CFO was at least in a position to know something. What did he ultimately say?
“who had escaped attention from the authorities and prosecutors for decades” – is it a surprise that white collar crime is largely ignored? Broken window theory is based around attacking visible crime, not what happens in boardrooms.
Phil, your quandary is due to your assumption that Individual 1 isn’t mentally ill. A sane person would have kept a low profile, I agree.
My oh My, what corruption; and erbdy gettn RICH in the meantime. No Cohen is a RAT but Even they know how to tell sum truth. Rich white ppl’s issues that affect the whole country. I learned TRUMP is a bigger FOOL than originally thought
I learned that there was no collusion. I learned that even if you are rat you need to report your income. In another case, I learned that riding one color Bentley one day and another color Bentley the next day does not help disguise a billionaire’s trips to the local rub and tug.
This is very simplistic but I’ve always thought that the “Lock Her Up!” chants at the campaign rallies – which he exulted in – were going to have enormous repercussions if he won. I say that as someone with a background in liberal legal academia. I know how the people I know would have reacted to that, and I can guarantee you that the first time he had The Chant and he didn’t try to take the edges off, to tamp it down, and then kept encouraging it, the people from the Clinton team and all her friends in New York State leaned forward, got on their cellphones, fired off emails and texts, and started working the network with this in mind: “You just wait, you idiotic prick. We’ll see who winds up behind bars, Donald.”
When he won the election I told one of my relatives who was really happy about it: “Don’t feel too good. The Democrats are going to use every means at their disposal to destroy everything he has ever had, including his family. They are not going to accept defeat, they are not going to accept his victory. They are going to act as though not only didn’t he win, but that he is completely illegitimate. Every day they are going to launch new efforts to destroy him – professionally, in business, as a politician, and personally.”
“No, no. They have to work with him now. He’s the President! He has the House and Senate too!”
“You’re wrong. And they won’t.”
The tone was set a few days later on The View when Mike Bloomberg and Joy Behar had an exchange about how to move forward from this colossal mistake of history. Bloomberg’s idea was to “work with this President, he’s our President now.” Behar practically slapped him upside the head with a pipe and said something like: “We have to RESIST!” It has nothing to do with anything else. He threatened to put Hillary Clinton in prison and then he won the election. Most of his important assets from a business perspective are in New York. The Clintons own New York, lock stock and barrel. And they’re gonna show him who runs the show.
By the way, I don’t buy that he’s a criminal mastermind, either. I think at most he has done what lots of people have done, and been more unsuccessful than most. His sister was a federal judge, though, and probably helped him out from time to time with advice, if he ever asked for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryanne_Trump_Barry
I did not watch the hearing but followed up on it in the news.
The following video [1] I found to be very interesting and paints a clear picture of how fast our representatives switch sides and glorify a person that only 6 months ago were painting him as the devil.
In this video, you will see how Cummings over and over shows that Cohen is not a bad person but a victim — simply because Cohen is now speaking against Trump.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/02/27/elijah-cummings-closing-michael-cohen-testimony-sot-vpx.cnn
Another point to be made here about Cohen’s testimony.
If you ever been to a cooperated board or executive meetings or know someone who has, you will be surprise how different those folks are (even ladies) in front of the camera and in public vs. in the meetings or private life. Don’t be surprise to hear them use foul, racial and back-stabling languages throughout the meeting — it is very common. They have a very different personality in public vs. in private.
This is also true with our politician too. Off the email leaks of Hillary Clinton’s personal server, there were a good deal of foul language and name calling; you can Google it but here is one: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37639370