Paid to keep quiet?

I've often wondered what became of Trump's bodyguard.  You know - the one who was at that Moscow hotel and said he turned back those prostitutes outside Trump's room, but then left his guard post a short while later.  The one who hand-delivered Comey his letter of termination. And, according to Trump's once personal doctor Harold Bornstein, raided the doctor's office and took Trump's medical records.  Turns out he's on the RNC payroll, but it's not clear what he's doing to earn his $15,000 a month.

A company owned by Keith Schiller, President Donald Trump's former longtime bodyguard, has received $225,000 from the Republican National Committee for security consulting since he left his job as White House director of Oval Office operations in September 2017, according to interviews and newly released campaign filings.

Schiller was originally hired by the RNC to help select a site for the 2020 convention. But once the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, was announced in July, Schiller's firm was kept on to "work on other security needs for the committee," a party official told CNBC, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The official declined to go into detail about what the committee's security needs might be but confirmed that the work is ongoing.

  CNBC

High priced coffee boy

The official also took pains to emphasize that Schiller's $15,000 a month fee was not coming out of the same funds the party was using to help elect Republicans to office in the 2018 midterms. Instead, the official said, Schiller's firm was being paid out of a special fund set aside for convention expenses.

It is unclear whether Schiller has any other clients besides the RNC, and if so, what type of work he does for them. Likewise, details about KS Global Group are not readily available.

According to state records, KS Global Group was created in 2015 by an anonymous Delaware corporate agent, and it does not appear to have a website or any publicly available contact information.

So, you can't hire Schiller unless you know somebody who knows somebody.

As of 2017, the firm was registered at a virtual office address in Boca Raton, Florida, where Schiller lives. A filing with the Florida secretary of State's office lists Schiller as the principal of the company.

Attempts to reach Schiller were unsuccessful.

[...]

But the unique position that Schiller occupies in Trump's orbit could be seen in the RNC's careful effort last year to compartmentalize Schiller's relationship to the committee, even as it hired him just days after he left the White House, and paid him nearly a quarter of a million dollars in consulting fees over 15 months.

Pretty good pay for locating a convention site.

According to RNC records, Schiller's contract is all that remains of three unusual expenses the committee abruptly began paying in the fall of 2017, during a time in which it sought to help the Trump campaign defray the costs of the president's legal bills in special counsel Robert Mueller's probe.

[...]

The White House declined to comment on whether Trump still talks to his longtime bodyguard, or how often. But the president is known to spend hours in the White House residence calling friends and associates, often seeking their opinions on political and policy matters.

In late summer 2017, after eight months at the White House with Trump, Schiller was ready to move to Florida, make more money and get outside the Beltway, according to former White House aides. Inside the West Wing, Schiller also reportedly chafed under the newly imposed, top-down leadership style of then-chief of staff Gen. John Kelly.

At the same time, on Capitol Hill, the Republican National Committee was coming under pressure from Trump allies who wanted it to use its specially designated legal fund [originally created to pay for things like vote recounts] to help pay personal attorney fees for the president and his eldest son, Donald Jr., who were caught up in the early stages of the special counsel's Russia probe.

[...]

The RNC agreed to tap the fund. In August and September 2017, it spent more than $427,000 on lawyers for both men. But an uproar ensued when the RNC later reported the payments on its mandatory monthly campaign filings.

[...]

The last legal bill the committee paid for the Trumps was on Sept. 18, 2017, for Don Jr. Yet within days, the RNC quietly started paying three other Trump-related expenses, according to committee filings with the Federal Election Commission.

The first was a salary for John Pence, nephew of Vice President Mike Pence, who was earning around $12,000 a month from Trump's re-election campaign.

How very interesting.

Next came $37,500 a month in rent payable to the Trump Organization for office space in Trump Tower, which was used by the president's re-election campaign.

Pretty steep office rent. Could they maybe find a less expensive space?

On October 4, 2017, one week after the Trump Tower rent payments started, the RNC cut its first check for $15,000 to Schiller's KS Global Group for what it called "security services."

The expense was disclosed by the committee on its next campaign filing in October, as required by law. But it went unnoticed by reporters for another three months.

[...]

The RNC wasn't the only pro-Trump group helping Schiller to make ends meet, however. Also not yet reported at the time was the fact that Schiller's lawyers were being paid, at least in part, by the Trump campaign. Between January and April 2018, the campaign paid more than $94,500 to Schiller's attorney's law firm, according to campaign finance reports.

His lawyers. He did sit for an interview with the House Intelligence Committee under Nunes. I wonder if maybe the Nadler-headed Committee wil recall him.

As for the other two expenses, Pence's salary and the Trump Tower rent, which had been explicitly taken over from the campaign, they were both stopped within weeks of CNBC's first identifying them and questioning the committee about them in February. By mid-March 2018, the Trump campaign was back to paying its own rent and paying Pence's [nephew's] salary.

Of the three expenses the committee had begun paying during those last two weeks of September 2017, only Schiller remained on the books.

But now that the original task of selecting a convention site is complete, and Schiller is still on the payroll, the issue of what Trump's former bodyguard is being paid to do is not clear. When CNBC pressed the RNC official for details this week, the official would say only that Schiller was "working on other security needs for the committee."

[...]

CNBC asked the RNC on Monday whether Schiller is still being paid with convention funds, and the official did not respond.

[...]

Schiller is one of several former White House aides who left their government jobs and were quickly hired by Trump-allied political groups. In March 2018, Trump's personal aide Johnny McEntee was fired from the White House for online gaming. Trump's reelection campaign announced that it had hired McEntee as a senior adviser the very next day.

Is he getting $15,000 a month, too? Why, yes. Yes he is. At least he was as of August last year.

A number of former Trump aides – including two who served in sensitive positions in the White House – have been paid roughly $15,000 per month by either the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee or America First PAC, a political action committee dedicated to Trump’s re-election for various services described only briefly in filings.

[...]

Campaign finance records show several former aides to President Donald Trump have received payments of roughly $15,000 per month from campaign or party accounts, bolstering part of former aide Omarosa Manigault Newman’s claim that she was offered the same amount to keep quiet about her time in the White House.

The Apprentice contestant turned White House aide Manigault Newman has alleged that multiple former Trump Administration aides have been taking money for their silence since leaving their posts, a hush money payment under the guise of a no-show job that she says she turned down.

"They were not offering me a real job," Manigault Newman told NBC on Sunday. “They didn't really care if I showed up. In fact, there are several former employees from the White House who actually signed this agreement, who are all being paid $15,000 for their silence.”

[...]

Campaign or party coffers made monthly payments to former director of Oval Office operations Keith Schiller for “security services,” former personal assistant to the president John McEntee for “payroll,” former digital media director of the Trump campaign Brad Parscale for “digital consulting [and] management consulting” and former director of advertising for the Trump campaign Gary Coby for “media services [and] consulting.”

  ABC

RNC must have a shitload of income. NRA? Russia? The Mercers? Sheldon Adelson? Corporations and billionaires? I wonder what Republican candidates for various positions think of where that money's going.

As an interesting bit of background on Schiller, who worked as Trump's bodyguard for almost twenty years, is before that, he worked for the NYPD as an undercover officer in the drug enforcement division and the Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit.

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

Mueller subpoena

Axios reviewed a Grand Jury subpoena Mueller's team served on a witness.  The witness is not named.  But what is revealed is that the subpoena was for any recorded communication from November 1, 2015, to the present, with each of the following people:

Carter Page
Corey Lewandowski
Donald J. Trump
Hope Hicks
Keith Schiller
Michael Cohen
Paul Manafort
Rick Gates
Roger Stone
Steve Bannon


I'll let someone else analyze that.

UPDATE 3/5: Apparently the subpoena was issued to whackadoodle Sam Nunberg.

UPDATE 3/6:  Charlie Pierce has an analysis:

Here’s what all this means. This means that Mueller and his staff have likely concluded now that the entire Trump For President campaign was a corrupt enterprise in one way or another almost since the moment it was first conceived and that the same can be said of the Trump presidency*. It’s the money. It’s the Russians. The whole damn dirty deal is one great writhing ball of poisonous snakes and Mueller seems to be perilously close to untangling it.

  Esquire

Sounds about right.

The subpoenas go back to 2015 and woe betide anyone, as the nuns used to tell us, who fed any subpoenaed material into the shredder. At least a few of those people on that list have already flipped or likely have announced their intentions privately to do so. All of them except Cohen will have left the White House when Hicks leaves in a few weeks.

And Mueller likely has copies of all those emails subpoenaed from Sam Nunberg anyway. Cross-checking what people want to hide is a form of information gathering, too.

The working presumption of the Mueller investigation now is that nobody is clean in all of this. Everybody has something to tell about everybody else. Absent the promise of a presidential* pardon—a promise that is prima facie worthless simply because it comes from this president*—the stampede for the lifeboats is going to be deafening this week.

Trump's affairs

Not that any of this will save us.

In June, 2006, Donald Trump taped an episode of his reality-television show, “The Apprentice,” at the Playboy Mansion, in Los Angeles [...] with dozens of current and former Playmates, including Karen McDougal. [...] Trump had been married to the Slovenian model Melania Knauss for less than two years; their son, Barron, was a few months old. Trump seemed uninhibited by his new family obligations. McDougal later wrote that Trump “immediately took a liking to me, kept talking to me - telling me how beautiful I was, etc. It was so obvious that a Playmate Promotions exec said, ‘Wow, he was all over you - I think you could be his next wife.’ ”

Trump and McDougal began an affair, which McDougal later memorialized in an eight-page, handwritten document provided to The New Yorker by John Crawford, a friend of McDougal’s.

[...]

Afterward, McDougal wrote, she “went to see him every time he was in LA (which was a lot).” Trump, she said, always stayed in the same bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel and ordered the same meal—steak and mashed potatoes—and never drank. McDougal’s account is consistent with other descriptions of Trump’s behavior.

[...]

McDougal describes their affair as entirely consensual. But her account provides a detailed look at how Trump and his allies used clandestine hotel-room meetings, payoffs, and complex legal agreements to keep affairs—sometimes multiple affairs he carried out simultaneously—out of the press.McDougal describes their affair as entirely consensual. But her account provides a detailed look at how Trump and his allies used clandestine hotel-room meetings, payoffs, and complex legal agreements to keep affairs—sometimes multiple affairs he carried out simultaneously—out of the press.

  New Yorker

I don't see that. Where's the complex legal agreement? No payoff happened. She assumed he was trying to pay her for services rendered. That seems like a fair assumption.

There must be more.

On November 4, 2016, four days before the election, the Wall Street Journal reported that American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, had paid a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for exclusive rights to McDougal’s story, which it never ran. Purchasing a story in order to bury it is a practice that many in the tabloid industry call “catch and kill.” This is a favorite tactic of the C.E.O. and chairman of A.M.I., David Pecker, who describes the President as “a personal friend.”

Okay, now we're into shady territory.

McDougal, in her first on-the-record comments about A.M.I.’s handling of her story, declined to discuss the details of her relationship with Trump, for fear of violating the agreement she reached with the company. She did say, however, that she regretted signing the contract. “It took my rights away,” McDougal told me. “At this point I feel I can’t talk about anything without getting into trouble, because I don’t know what I’m allowed to talk about. I’m afraid to even mention his name.”

[...]

A.M.I. said that an amendment to McDougal’s contract—signed after Trump won the election—allowed her to “respond to legitimate press inquiries” regarding the affair. The company said that it did not print the story because it did not find it credible.

[...]

Six former A.M.I. employees told me that Pecker routinely makes catch-and-kill arrangements like the one reached with McDougal. “We had stories and we bought them knowing full well they were never going to run,” Jerry George, a former A.M.I. senior editor who worked at the company for more than twenty-five years, told me. George said that Pecker protected Trump. “Pecker really considered him a friend,” George told me. “We never printed a word about Trump without his approval.” [...] “In theory, you would think that Trump has all the power in that relationship, but in fact Pecker has the power—he has the power to run these stories. He knows where the bodies are buried.”

[...]

Summer Zervos, a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” alleged that Trump assaulted her at a private dinner meeting, in December of 2007, at a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Trump, Zervos has claimed, kissed her, groped her breast, and suggested that they lie down to “watch some telly-telly.” After Zervos rebuffed Trump’s advances, she said that he “began thrusting his genitals” against her. (Zervos recently sued Trump for defamation after he denied her account.)

[...]

All three women [inclding Stormy Daniels] say that they were escorted to a bungalow at the hotel by a Trump bodyguard, whom two of the women have identified as Keith Schiller.

The guy who says he saw Trump to his Moscow hotel room where the pee tape was allegedly made and then left, so doesn't know whether prostitutes came up. Right.

Over the course of the affair, Trump flew McDougal to public events across the country but hid the fact that he paid for her travel. “No paper trails for him,” she wrote. “In fact, every time I flew to meet him, I booked/paid for flight + hotel + he reimbursed me.”

According to the report, he was having an affair with Daniels and McDougal at the same time. His base will only be jealous.

McDougal’s account, like those of Clifford and other women who have described Trump’s advances, conveys a man preoccupied with his image. McDougal recalled that Trump would often send her articles about him or his daughter, as well as signed books and sun visors from his golf courses. Clifford recalled Trump remarking that she and Ivanka were similar and proudly showing her a copy of a “money magazine” with his image on the cover.

Having her spank him with it, as I recall.

Trump also promised to buy McDougal an apartment in New York as a Christmas present. Clifford, likewise, said that Trump promised to buy her a condo in Tampa.

I think Clifford said she knew it was a bogus promise.

McDougal ended the relationship in April, 2007, after nine months. [...] The decision was reinforced by a series of comments Trump made that McDougal found disrespectful, according to several of her friends. When she raised her concern about her mother’s disapproval to Trump, he replied, “What, that old hag?” (McDougal, hurt, pointed out that Trump and her mother were close in age.) On the night of the Miss Universe pageant McDougal attended, McDougal and a friend rode with Trump in his limousine and the friend mentioned a relationship she had had with an African-American man. According to multiple sources, Trump remarked that the friend liked “the big black dick” and began commenting on her attractiveness and breast size.

What a guy.

And he's not the only one. Her "friend" and two others who were involved in getting her the $150,000 payment for her story (which AMI buried), each took a cut, leaving her with an actual payment of $82,500. One of those was the same guy - attorney Keith Davidson - who negotiated the NDA between Daniels and Trump's lawyer for $130,000. I wonder how much of that he took.

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

On with the book saga

Donald Trump’s lawyers threatened legal action on Wednesday night against his former right-hand man Steve Bannon, marking a fresh escalation after a day of turmoil that left the White House reeling.

A cease and desist letter accuses Bannon of violating a non-disclosure agreement by speaking about his time on Trump’s election campaign to Michael Wolff, whose new book has caused shockwaves in Washington.

  Guardian

I'm not at all surprised by a threat to sue. This is standard Trump. The "cease and desist" part is meant to stop publication of the book.  And, of course, apologize to the president.  Apparently, they sent a cease and desist to both the publisher and Bannon individually for violating prior agreements.

Charles Harder, the president’s lawyer, told ABC News that Bannon’s communications with Wolff “give rise to numerous legal claims including defamation by libel and slander, and breach of his written confidentiality and non-disparagement agreement with our clients. Legal action is imminent.”

[...]

Bannon hosted Breitbart News Tonight on Sirius XM radio as usual on Wednesday night, CNN reported, and made little reference to the acrimony. But when a caller brought up the issue, Bannon replied: “The president of the United States is a great man. You know I support him day in and day out.”

[...]

Now executive chairman of the conservative Breitbart News website, Bannon is known to be planning to throw his weight behind several candidates that share his hardline nationalist agenda.

Surely they don't want him to cease and desist from that.

“Aides thought they had more time to prepare for the book’s formal release,” the Washington Post reported on Wednesday night. “Trump spent much of the day raging about the book to top aides, officials and advisers said … As he fumed, some aides were still frantically searching for a copy of the book, and even senior aides like [Hope] Hicks had not seen it by the afternoon, officials said.”

[...]

Wolff said in an author’s note that the book was based on more than 200 interviews, including multiple conversations with the president and senior staff. But [spokeswoman Sarah] Sanders claimed that Wolff “never actually sat down with the president” and had spoken with him just once, briefly, since Trump had taken office. She dismissed the book as “trashy tabloid fiction”.

Which liar are we supposed to believe?  Reportedly, Wolff has tapes.  Darn those tapes.  Always getting Old Lard Ass in trouble.

The furious controversy consumed time and energy in the west wing just as Trump prepared for a weekend retreat at Camp David with Paul Ryan, the House speaker, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to discuss Republicans’ plans for 2018. The stakes could not be higher with the president’s approval rating at rock bottom and mid-term elections looming in November.

Think they'll tell him they don't need his services any more?

The Trump administration is also going to start barring White House employees and guests from using their personal cellphones at work, press secretary Sarah Sanders said early Thursday.

Sanders said in a statement that the "security and integrity of the technology systems at the White House is a top priority for the Trump administration."

  The Hill

I bet that's right.

It won't stop the leaking.

And here's that Hollywood Reporter article promised yesterday ( THR's Matt Belloni is going on CNN in a few minutes to talk about it.  You know who will be watching.  We'll be watching for the ensuing tweets.)

Excerpts:

Since the new White House was often uncertain about what the president meant or did not mean in any given utterance, his non-disapproval became a kind of passport for me to hang around — checking in each week at the Hay-Adams hotel, making appointments with various senior staffers who put my name in the "system," and then wandering across the street to the White House and plunking myself down, day after day, on a West Wing couch.

[...]

The nature of the comedy, it was soon clear, was that here was a group of ambitious men and women who had reached the pinnacle of power, a high-ranking White House appointment — with the punchline that Donald Trump was president. Their estimable accomplishment of getting to the West Wing risked at any moment becoming farce.

[...]

Kellyanne Conway, who would put a finger-gun to her head in private about Trump's public comments, continued to mount an implacable defense on cable television, until she was pulled off the air by others in the White House who, however much the president enjoyed her, found her militancy idiotic. (Even Ivanka and Jared regarded Conway's fulsome defenses as cringeworthy.)

[...]

Steve Bannon tried to gamely suggest that Trump was mere front man and that he, with plan and purpose and intellect, was, more reasonably, running the show — commanding a whiteboard of policies and initiatives that he claimed to have assembled from Trump's off-the-cuff ramblings and utterances. His adoption of the Saturday Night Live sobriquet "President Bannon" was less than entirely humorous.

  Hollywood Reporter

And therein lay his downfall, I have no doubt. One is not allowed to be more important, more famous, smarter, or more admired than The Most Notable Loser.

"How much influence do you think Steve Bannon has over me? Zero! Zero!" Trump muttered and stormed.

[...]

Jared and Ivanka were against Priebus and Bannon, trying to push both men out. Bannon was against Jared and Ivanka and Priebus, practicing what everybody thought were dark arts against them. Priebus, everybody's punching bag, just tried to survive another day.

[...]

How to get along with Trump — who veered between a kind of blissed-out pleasure of being in the Oval Office and a deep, childish frustration that he couldn't have what he wanted? Here was a man singularly focused on his own needs for instant gratification, be that a hamburger, a segment on Fox & Friends or an Oval Office photo opp. "I want a win. I want a win. Where's my win?" he would regularly declaim. He was, in words used by almost every member of the senior staff on repeated occasions, "like a child." A chronic naysayer, Trump himself stoked constant discord with his daily after-dinner phone calls to his billionaire friends about the disloyalty and incompetence around him.

[...]

"It's a littleee, littleee complicated …" [Trump] explained to Priebus about why he needed to give his daughter and son-in-law official jobs.

[...]

By July, Jared and Ivanka, who had, in less than six months, traversed from socialite couple to royal family to the most powerful people in the world, were now engaged in a desperate dance to save themselves, which mostly involved blaming Trump himself. It was all his idea to fire Comey! "The daughter," Bannon declared, "will bring down the father."

"Littleee"? So maybe he really does say "bigly".

[Anthony] Scaramucci, a minor figure in the New York financial world, and quite a ridiculous one, had overnight become Jared and Ivanka's solution to all of the White House's management and messaging problems. After all, explained the couple, he was good on television and he was from New York — he knew their world.

[...]

There was, after the abrupt Scaramucci meltdown, hardly any effort inside the West Wing to disguise the sense of ludicrousness and anger felt by every member of the senior staff toward Trump's family and Trump himself. It became almost a kind of competition to demystify Trump. For Rex Tillerson, he was a moron. For Gary Cohn, he was dumb as shit. For H.R. McMaster, he was a hopeless idiot. For Steve Bannon, he had lost his mind.

Aha! Now I see where Trump came out yesterday with the "Steve Bannon has lost his mind" bit.

There was more: Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he'd repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions — he just couldn't stop saying something.

Can we add OCD to his list of mental issues?

By summer's end, in something of a historic sweep [...] almost the entire senior staff, save Trump's family, had been washed out: Michael Flynn, Katie Walsh, Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon. Even Trump's loyal, longtime body guard Keith Schiller — for reasons darkly whispered about in the West Wing — was out. Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Rick Dearborn, all on their way out. The president, on the spur of the moment, appointed John Kelly, a former Marine Corps general and head of homeland security, chief of staff — without Kelly having been informed of his own appointment beforehand.

Okay. I have to stop here a moment. Earlier, I wondered if George Papadopoulos was the person Fusion GPS refers to when they say the Steele dossier merely confirmed things the FBI already knew from intel and "someone inside the Trump camp." Then, I wondered if it could be Bannon. Now I have a third possibility: Keith Schiller. Recall that when he left the White House it was reported that he had testified regarding the Moscow hotel room (Pee Tape) claims. Could he have been"flipped" by Mueller's team early on? He would indeed be someone who knew lots of intimate things about Trump. ??

Insiders believed that the only thing saving Mueller from being fired, and the government of the United States from unfathomable implosion, is Trump's inability to grasp how much Mueller had on him and his family.

[...]

Donald Trump's small staff of factotums, advisors and family [...] came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.

At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.

And there, Wolff ends the article. Somebody look into that, ok? That's a major problem.

The pee tape just got that much more believable

September 20

[Longtime Trump aide Keith] Schiller, a former security chief to Trump who is close to the president, had been telling confidants for weeks that he was close to leaving, according to numerous reports. Schiller was said to be unhappy about having his access to the president reduced by new White House chief of staff John Kelly

The former Trump aide has also reportedly been unhappy with the reduced paycheck he was forced to take upon joining the administration. CNN reports his White House salary at $165,000, a significant drop from his former earnings in the Trump Organization, where he earned $294,000 a year.

Schiller has worked for Trump in New York since at least 1999 and began serving as Trump’s director of security in 2004. Until Wednesday, he served in the White House as director of Oval Office operations.

[...]

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters earlier this month that rumors of Schiller's departure were "not true" and that Schiller planned to stay in the administration.

  The Hill

She lies every time she opens her mouth.

But...that's not the point here.

November 10

[President Donald Trump's long-time confidant Keith] Schiller privately testified that he rejected a Russian offer to send five women to then private-citizen Trump's hotel room during their 2013 trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant.

[...]

Schiller was asked about the Daily Caller article, and he confirmed a Russian made the offer to send the women to Trump's room which was raised around lunch-time, sources said. He was asked who made the offer, but he could not recall the identity of the individual, sources said.

[...]

Multiple sources said the offer to send women to Trump's room came from a Russian who was accompanying Emin Agalarov, a pop star whose father is a billionaire oligarch close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and who worked with Trump to bring the pageant to Moscow. But Schiller said the offer did not come from Agalarov himself, the sources said, disputing the Daily Caller report on that matter.

[...]

On their way up to Trump's hotel room that night, Schiller told the billionaire businessman about the offer and Trump laughed it off, Schiller told the House intelligence committee earlier this week.

After several minutes outside of Trump's door, which was Schiller's practice as Trump's security chief, he said he left.

  CNN

Really? Who was guarding Trump's very large body after that?  And, who went in?

Schiller denied knowing about the salacious allegations contained in the dossier. He was also asked about a wide-range of issues, including meetings between Trump associates and Russians, and he denied having knowledge of many of those interactions, sources said.

[...]

Moreover, he denied knowing about the deliberations around the firing of FBI Director James Comey, saying he was only called into (sic) deliver a letter with the news to the FBI.

I know nothing. I.e., there's a lot to know.

I offer the following with the caveat that I haven't tried to verify the claims.

Okay on the first part, but I don't see how that ensures Congress won't look for any other guard.

While it may protect Kremlin agents (or at least be intended to do so), I don't see how this limits potential witnesses.  On the contrary, I would think it would encourage Mueller to seek out other witnesses for verification of Schiller's tesitmony.

Here's that thread.  Read it for yourself.  It does indeed sound like Putin was setting Trump up to be compromised, something I understand is SOP for high profile Americans in Russia.  Especially if they're as easily stroked as Trump.

Here's a bit that I hadn't heard before and have not corroborated...

And, purportedly peed on the bed the Obamas slept in at Trump's direction.  Stupid stuff, but compromising nonetheless if on tape.  Well, it might have been at election time.  Although, for the life of me, if he'd already gotten away with the pussy grabbing tape, why would he worry about this one?  There's even more to the story, I think.

Schiller is hoping to stay out of the deal.

But he's not compromised by women peeing on a bed.  He's compromised by dealing with Russian mobsters and money laundering.  It's the business aspects of whatever it was he did in Moscow.

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

Like Flies

President Donald Trump's longtime aide [bodyguard] and current director of Oval Office operations Keith Schiller has told people he intends to leave the White House, three sources familiar with the decision told CNN.

[...]

Schiller's potential departure will leave Trump without one of his most loyal and trusted aides at his side at a time of tumultuous change at the White House. Schiller has been a constant presence at Trump's side for nearly two decades and was among a handful of aides from Trump's previous life as a businessman to follow Trump onto the campaign trail and into the White House.

  CNN

Story is that he's not making enough money at $165,000 when he was making $294,000 at Trump Org and his own private security firm.

At least it's more original than needing to spend time with his family.

The sources stressed that Schiller's reasoning was primarily financial, but one source said Schiller has also grown frustrated with the new system installed by White House chief of staff John Kelly aimed at restricting access to the President. Schiller has complained that he must call into the White House switchboard to reach Trump over the phone, one source said.

In other words, Kelly make get the boot before Schiller leaves, and he can then ask for a raise? Or is it something else?

The former New York Police Department detective was entrusted with one of the most sensitive and controversial decisions of Trump's presidency, delivering a letter to FBI headquarters notifying then-FBI Director James Comey that Trump had decided to fire him.

I wonder if this is related to this morning's Trump tweet:

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

Things Are Going to Get Rougher

Keith Schiller, Trump's head of security, also punched Latino protester outside Trump Tower after taking his signs: https://t.co/drpBjkTpVJ

— Gabe Ortíz (@TUSK81) December 19, 2016

Keither Schiller is a retired NYC cop.

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

UPDATE:

President-elect Donald Trump has continued employing a private security and intelligence team at his victory rallies, and he is expected to keep at least some members of the team after he becomes president, according to people familiar with the plans.

The arrangement represents a major break from tradition. All modern presidents and presidents-elect have entrusted their personal security entirely to the Secret Service, and their event security mostly to local law enforcement, according to presidential security experts and Secret Service sources.

  Politico

Clearly, he doesn't trust the Secret Service. Or, clearly, he means to beat the shit out of any naysayers who get close.

The private security team has been present at each of the seven rallies on Trump’s post-election “Thank You Tour,” and has removed protesters — sometimes roughly — at many stops.

That included about a dozen protesters during a rally here on Dec. 9 in a minor-league arena called the Deltaplex, where Trump mostly shrugged off the interruptions until he became impatient with a particularly disruptive protester. “Get ‘em out!” the president-elect instructed his private security. That appeared to spur Trump’s security director Schiller to venture away from the stage, where he arrived with Trump, and wade deep into the crowd to assist other private security personnel with the removal.

[...]

The Trump associates say Schiller is expected to become a personal White House aide who would serve as the incoming president’s full-time physical gatekeeper, though he might not be able to offer his boss the wide range of services he has in the past. For instance, federal law prohibits anyone other than law enforcement officers from bringing firearms into federal buildings, and there are even stricter rules about who can carry on the White House grounds or around Secret Service protectees.

Laws are for losers. Also, laws can be changed.

The associates say Schiller provides more than just security. Trump has been known to ask Schiller’s opinion on all manner of subjects. When people want to reach Trump, they often call Schiller’s cell phone and he decides who gets through to the boss.

[...]

And Schiller, a registered Republican, showed signs of reveling in Trump’s campaign, creating his own Twitter account just before the first primaries to promote the campaign and chronicle his unique perspective from the trail. He occasionally channeled his boss’s attacks on rivals like Ted Cruz (“Wow Lyin Ted is becoming unhinged! So sad...” he tweeted as Trump was clinching the GOP nomination over the Texas senator), and spread false claims about Democrats, including that 20 percent of Clinton’s campaign cash came from people who were responsible for the September 2001 terrorist attacks, that a grand jury had been convened to investigate her use of a private email server for State Department business and that Obama encouraged undocumented immigrants to vote illegally.

[...]

Photos often show Schiller looming over Trump’s shoulder as he works crowds, standing sentry by the stage as Trump speaks, or ejecting protesters from rallies. He’s developed a small, but avid fan base on Twitter, where Trump supporters cheer Schiller’s confrontations with protesters, pose for selfies with him at events and backstage, and praise him as a brave “American Eagle” who kept Trump “safe & sound.”

[...]

“Keith is kind of a consigliere,” said a transition team official. “He knows all the players, all the properties. He has the confidence of Trump and of the family. To describe him as a body guy would be very, very beneath the role that he actually plays.”

Oh, yeah. Fascism is on the rise.

The article describes how Schiller reacted too slowly and was in the way of Secret Service agents at one of Trump's rallies where someone jumped a barricade and rushed the stage.

Stressing that he wasn’t assessing the response to the Dayton incident, [Joe Funk, a former Secret Service agent who worked several presidential campaigns] said “without any slight to Keith or to any of the guys on his team, they just haven’t had the opportunity to go through the Secret Service training that would allow them to respond to a situation like a Secret Service agent would.”

Maybe they can employ and train him up. That is, if the Donald isn't too afraid to let him out of his presence long enough.

“I was under the impression that at some point this would be weeded out,” or that the private security would revert to more of a traditional staff role, said Funk, who is senior vice president at a private security firm called TorchStone Global. As for why that appears not to have occurred, Funk said “there may be a very good reason for it, but as a lay person on the outside looking in, I’m just kind of scratching my head. In my experience, this is unprecedented.”

I think he means unpresidented.