You Will Anyway: Meanwhile, the Trump Cabal Is Still Under Investigation

Thursday, October 5, 2017

Meanwhile, the Trump Cabal Is Still Under Investigation

Criminals and frauds. Every last one.

New York prosecutors had investigated Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr. for allegedly giving false information to prospective buyers of condo units in their troubled Trump SoHo development, according to a joint investigation out Wednesday from ProPublica, WNYC and The New Yorker.

While the report found prosecutors gathered significant evidence for a criminal case, no indictment ever came down against the siblings. As the report revealed, Mark Kasowitz, one of Trump’s longtime personal attorneys who had donated thousands of dollars to the reelection campaign of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, asked Vance to drop the investigation. The district attorney ultimately did so, overruling his own prosecutors.

[...]

Kasowitz donated $25,000 to Vance’s reelection campaign in January 2012, and Vance returned that money so as not to accept funds from a donor with a case before his office, according to the report. Shortly after Vance returned his donation, Kasowitz met with the district attorney in May to repeat the defense’s arguments that there’d been no wrongdoing; Vance dropped the case three months afterward, and Kasowitz subsequently donated and helped raise an additional $50,000 for Vance’s campaign.

Both men denied to the reporters that there was anything improper about how the case played out.

[...]

The evidence accumulated by Vance’s team included emails in which the Trump siblings discussed how to coordinate misleading information they would provide to people interested in their condo units, according to the report. Trump Jr. told a broker in one message that no one would ever find out about those false statements because the deception was kept strictly within the Trump Organization, according to a person who saw the email.

TPM

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE: Vance returned $32,000 to Kasowitz - five years late - now that the story is out. (Not sure why the NY Times needed to note that Vance is a Democrat in this story.)

FURTHER UPDATE 11/22/17: The company that actually owns the Soho is paying the Trump organization to end their contract. Apparently the Trump name has become an albatross.

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"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

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"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

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Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.