Donald Trump and Sean Hannity Like to Talk Before Bedtime

New York Magazine, Daily Intelligencer

Donald Trump and Sean Hannity Like to Talk Before Bedtime

Life inside the bunker of Fox News’ resident Trumplegänger.

By Olivia Nuzzi May 13, 2018 Photo-Illustration By Joe Darrow

Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Pool via Bloomberg/Getty Images (Trump head); Rob Kim/Getty Images (Hannity head); Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

The call to the White House comes after ten o’clock most weeknights, when Hannity is over. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, Sean Hannity broadcasts live at 9 p.m. on Fox News, usually from Studio J in midtown, where the network is headquartered, but sometimes from a remote studio on Long Island, where he was raised and now lives.

All White House phone numbers begin with the same six digits: 202-456. Hannity calls the White House switchboard, a number listed publicly, and reaches an operator. The operator refers to a list of cleared callers, a few dozen friends and family members outside the administration who may contact President Donald Trump through this official channel — among them his adult sons, Eric and Don Jr.; private-equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman; media billionaire Rupert Murdoch; real-estate billionaire Tom Barrack; Patriots owner and also-billionaire Robert Kraft; and Hannity.

The operator then dials the president, who leaves the Oval Office around 7 p.m. and who, by this point in the evening, is almost always by himself on the third floor of the executive residence (the First Lady reportedly sleeps in a separate bedroom). He tells the operator to put Hannity through.

Their chats begin casually, with How are yous and What’s going ons. On some days, they speak multiple times, with one calling the other to inform him of the latest developments. White House staff are aware that the calls happen, thanks to the president entering a room and announcing, “I just hung up with Hannity,” or referring to what Hannity said during their conversations, or even ringing Hannity up from his desk in their presence.

Trump and Hannity don’t usually speak in the morning, which the president spends alone, watching TV and tweeting. During the first months of the administration in particular, the tweets launched at the beginning of the day landed like bitchy little grenades directed at the programming and personalities that angered him on MSNBC and CNN. “Early on, usually we could count on the president watching Morning Joe first thing, at 6 a.m.,” one White House official told me. “He’d watch an hour of that. Then he’d move on to New Day for a segment or two. Then he’d move on to Fox.”

Senior staffers worried about this pattern of behavior: By the time his day was formally under way with the daily intelligence briefing in the Oval Office — scheduled as late as 11 a.m. — the whole world was often thrown off course, wondering whether there were “tapes” of his conversations with a fired FBI director (May 12, 2017, 8:26 a.m.) or if a TV host had been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” at Mar-a-Lago (June 29, 2017, 8:58 a.m.).

Hannity Fails to Disclose Cohen Link, Blames Media for Ensuing Controversy

Cohen’s lawyers released the identities of only two of them: Trump and former Republican National Committee deputy finance chairman Elliott Broidy, for whom Cohen reportedly negotiated a nondisclosure agreement involving a love child with a Playboy model — an agreement some now speculate was in fact on behalf of the president, who may have been the actual father. At the time, Cohen was still presenting himself as a fairly conventional lawyer and these as fairly conventional clients. But on May 8, after Avenatti somehow obtained Cohen’s financial records, we learned that he’d been paid more than $1 million in total by several large corporations — among them Novartis; AT&T; and Columbus Nova, an investment firm whose biggest client is the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg — for unclear reasons.

At 2:52 p.m., the world learned that Cohen’s secret third client was Sean Hannity — meaning that he was, at least for a moment, one of four players, including Trump, at the very center of multiple investigations he had been railing against on-air for the better part of a year. “It was like a bomb went off in the courtroom,” Avenatti recalled. Several reporters described how, at the mention of his name, there were gasps. CNN, MSNBC, and momentarily even Hannity’s own network, Fox News, covered the development as if it were a missing plane. Fox News anchor Shepard Smith referred to Hannity as “the elephant in the room.”

It wasn’t as though nobody had suspected the president’s relationship with Hannity went beyond the symbiotic chumminess traditional to the social-climbing media figures and egomaniacal politicos of the Northeast Corridor (you don’t become a “media elite” by abiding). Anyone who watched Hannity’s show or listened to his radio broadcast — together they add up to four hours of talking each day, for which he is paid a reported $36 million a year — would have suspected exactly that. But its obviousness was almost too much to take in without something snapping; it was ridiculous, in the way that Law & Order can seem ridiculous if you don’t suspend your critical faculties: The same few detectives are present and central at every pivotal moment of each case, as though there were no other cops in all of New York.

At three o’clock, Hannity came on the radio as scheduled. It was “very strange,” he said on-air, describing the moment he read his own name on his own network as a breaking-news chyron. He joked about how “all these media people” had to listen to his show that day. “I actually think it’s pretty funny,” he said. He explained that Cohen wasn’t his lawyer but had offered legal advice as a friend, and Hannity had assumed their conversations — companies connected to Hannity own more than 870 homes in seven states, the Guardian quickly reported — which he said were related to real estate, were privileged.

His new phone vibrated, the hum of every friend and colleague and reporter alive going straight to the source to figure out what the hell was happening. “I am on-air,” he said later on the show. “I wish everyone would stop calling me.”

At other networks, on-air personalities failing to disclose their personal relationship with a leading figure in a major news story, a figure whom they repeatedly defended, would surely suffer some kind of consequences. At Fox, things were different. “It didn’t even register. The real sin is false advertising,” said the person who knows Hannity and Trump, adding that both have gotten away with a whole lot by being seemingly up front about it. (Fox issued a statement of full support the next day.) “People can’t deal with hypocrisy and lying, but they can deal with everything else. When the Stormy Daniels story broke, it was like: Are you surprised, really? Are you kidding? He told us that. We know who he is. Was the Cohen thing like, ‘I can’t believe it?!’ It was like, Yeah, of course. Hannity says that kind of thing on-air. He’s totally transparent. You didn’t know about that, but was it plausible? Does he have dinner over there? If he wife-swapped with Melania, would you be shocked? No, of course not. If Chris Hayes was doing that, you’d be like, ‘Wait a second, what?’ This, you’re like, They probably have a vacation house in Punta Gorda.”

Earlier this year, Smith dismissed the “opinion side” of Fox News as strictly entertainment: “They don’t really have rules on the opinion side. They can say whatever they want,” he said. But the fact that the network took no action over its host’s very intimate, very strange relationship with the president and his chief fixer also reflects just how much autonomy Hannity has managed to carve out for himself since his friend took the White House.

Hannity is the designated prime-time survivor from the Roger Ailes era. But at the outset of Fox’s new post-Ailes age, there were reported speculations that James Murdoch — Rupert’s son and chief executive of 21st Century Fox, who is known to hold some liberal views — had intentions of pushing the network closer to the center, or at least bringing it back from the edge of the cliff (the Murdoch sons have said publicly they have no plans to alter the editorial direction of Fox News). Over the summer, rumors began to circulate that Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, who was fired from Fox in April 2017, were talking to Sinclair Broadcast Group, the largest owner of local TV stations in the country, about the company’s plan to purchase a cable channel and position itself as a far-right competitor to Fox. To those who knew Hannity, the rumors didn’t look like an accident. “It’s really simple: If you’re in prison and someone cuts in front of you in the chow line, you bite his nose off,” says the source. “You do that not because you care about your place in the chow line, but because if you don’t, you’re gonna get raped in the showers. You need to establish that there’s a massive cost to messing with me, and so why don’t you go mess with someone else. There are lots of people to pick on and micromanage, and there are a lot of weak people here, and go have fun wrecking their lives, but if you touch me, I will make you regret it. You have to say that right away.”

Today, a year into a very harmonious relationship with the president and despite being something like the face of Fox News, Hannity doesn’t entertain calls from network leadership, according to a source, though they rarely try to call him anyway. He’s only met James Murdoch once, at a baseball game. His relationship with Fox News management is nonexistent, according to the source. (A Fox News representative says Hannity has an excellent relationship with management.) If he wants to defend the president’s lawyer every night without telling anyone the president’s lawyer is also his lawyer, he can do it. And if he wants to broadcast from inside his own house, a few feet away from a golden retriever and a White Russian, he can do that, too.

The political divides of the Obama years were good for Hannity, but the Trump administration has been even better. In April, on average, he aired in more than 3 million homes across the country each night, according to Nielsen, a wider audience than Jimmy Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon, although you’d never know it, watching or listening to him; central to Hannity’s storytelling about himself, which is a big part of what he does every night, is maintaining the sense that he’s the underdog.

Sean Hannity has never been about the news; he’s a specific form of entertainment, a high-energy delivery device for a simplistic far-right worldview that is less about ideology and policy outcomes and more about winning. Hannity is a space in which all conversations are debates and all debates are winnable by the protagonist, Sean Hannity. When he does make news, it’s usually by accident, as when, earlier this month, Rudy Giuliani appeared on the program to throw several months of consistent lying off course by announcing that Trump had reimbursed Cohen for the $130,000 he paid Stormy Daniels. “Oh, I didn’t know,” Hannity said. “He did?”

“Hannity was always someone where, if you were a Republican and you went on his show, it would be the easiest interview possible,” a person who worked on the campaign of one of Trump’s Republican-primary rivals told me. “It was legitimately impossible to get jammed up by Sean Hannity. It wasn’t even something you’d consider. It was the softball of softball interviews.”

But almost as soon as Trump announced his candidacy, in June 2015, Hannity’s reputation changed: “I think it was just the star angle. He was just wowed by Trump’s star factor more so than anything else. Sean Hannity’s the world’s biggest starfucker. It was just kind of crazy how he went from being someone who everyone tried to have at their launch events to have a full-hour puff piece to someone who people were like, Oh, we can’t really go on. We’re not gonna get a fair shake because he’s so pro-Trump.”

That fandom may also explain Hannity’s otherwise inexplicable “legal” relationship with Cohen — an unlikely counsel for someone of Hannity’s wealth and status. “Why would anybody be nice to Cohen?” asked a person close to the president. “Because he was ‘Trump’s lawyer,’ so Hannity sees that and he assumes, If Trump thinks he’s smart, then he’s smart!” The person who knows Hannity and Trump agreed. “I think the obvious answer is the answer: He’s a total suck-up. It’s almost like getting a lock of Elvis’s hair or something.”

Even before the campaign and the FBI raid connected them through martyrdom, Trump and Hannity were men of similar habits and preoccupations, both outward-facing, projecting to the world all day long and yet prone to stretches of retreat, to a little bit of weirdness that accompanies any comparable level of fame. Both golf, both diet by cutting out carbs. (Hannity adheres to a version of the ketogenic diet, cooking often for himself, while the president removes the buns from the two Big Macs and two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches he gets from McDonald’s, according to a book written by his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.)

Although Hannity shills a custom pillow on his radio show that he says cured his insomnia, it didn’t; both he and the president are night owls who sleep for only a few hours, and however differently their days begin, they arrive to the same comfortable sense of freedom after dark, as highly visible people who are temporarily unseen. “One reason they click is because of being celebrities,” John Gomez, Hannity’s friend since elementary school, told me. “In broadcasting, you live and die by the ratings. I think they have that in common, and they’re competitors, you know? They’re competitive.”

They were born 15 years apart — Trump at Jamaica Hospital to rich parents and Hannity at Metropolitan Medical in upper Manhattan to a county-jail official and a family-court officer — and they were raised 12 miles from one another, in Jamaica, Queens, and Franklin Square, Long Island, respectively.

Hannity leans on his personal narrative 70 percent like a person running for office and 30 percent like someone just dumbfounded by his luck, or his “blessings,” as he characterizes it. He was an uninspired student who found outlets for his restlessness and need to connect with others through odd jobs during his childhood and early adulthood: paperboy, busboy, line cook, bartender, housepainter, dishwasher, finishing one shift only to walk into the next, like so many other men and women for whom better fortune never comes.

Trump, meanwhile, was getting into the casino business in Atlantic City, where he would stiff guys like young Hannity left and right. Only in America could they end up in the same green room, convinced they look at the world the same way. At the Cheesecake Factory in Islip, Gomez told me he didn’t think Trump would’ve fit in with him and Hannity growing up. That they were different types of guys. “I do not see those two guys growing up together. I don’t see it,” Gomez said. “He just wouldn’t be attracted to us.” He added, with a laugh, “You could fit Hannity’s plane inside his plane. He’s a helluva lot more flamboyant than Hannity is.” Hannity had been using the same beat-up old grill, which he lit with newspaper, for decades, he said, taking it with him from modest house to bigger house to mansion to compound. He always drove the same model car, an Escalade. “It would be nice if Hannity, you know, forked over a few bucks for an Aston Martin or something,” Gomez said. “That I would borrow.”

“He really didn’t have a pot to piss in, pardon the expression, and he did everything on his own,” Lynda McLaughlin told me. McLaughlin’s been the executive producer of Hannity’s radio show for the past eight years and his sidekick for 12 (“People refer to me as his Robin,” she said). Of Hannity’s listeners, she theorized, “I think they get him. He was their dream, you know?”

As a dropout 29 years ago, Hannity was hired as a shock jock on a college-radio station, KCSB, in Santa Barbara, hosting a show called “The Pursuit of Happiness.” Listeners protested when Hannity, on-air, said gays were “disgusting people” who were “brainwashing” the public. When he was fired, he enlisted the ACLU to defend his right to free speech. The case, which he won, brought him publicity, and he moved to Alabama to accept a job with WVNN, and then to Georgia to work for WGST. In 1996, Roger Ailes hired him. (Hannity, married for 25 years, has a 19-year-old son and a 16-year-old daughter; when he was asked, by Playboy, how he would feel if one of his children were gay, he said he would love them unconditionally and would only be upset if they were Democrats.)

Hannity first met the future president during his early years at Fox. In 2011, he provided Trump with a platform to discuss birtherism, the racist conspiracy theory that Obama wasn’t born in America and therefore was not a legitimate president. “The issue could go away in a minute,” Hannity said to Trump. “Just show the certificate.” During the campaign, as Trump attempted to argue that he’d been against the Iraq War from the beginning, even though he was on the record as initially having supported it, Hannity came to his aid, claiming that, after his shows back then, Trump would call him to argue.

But Gomez told me he didn’t think Hannity and Trump were truly friends before 2016, when Hannity helped Trump get elected and Trump helped Hannity become the most popular person on cable news — an entanglement that has now made Hannity a secondary character in the drama of a major federal investigation.

Every morning, Hannity meets Glenn Rubin, a man he calls his “sensei,” who coaches him through two hours of “street martial arts.” He does this for fitness and, despite carrying a firearm (which he once reportedly took out and pointed at Juan Williams on set), for self-defense. On his show, he once aired footage of his training session with former UFC heavyweight champion Chuck Liddell. “This is my fist,” he said, pointing it at the camera. “You can pan in on that.” The shot got tighter around his balled-up hand. On Twitter, he proved an easy mark for trolls who detected a weak spot: “Do you even lift, bro?” one asked. “Street martial arts for 5 years. A lot of core work,” he said flatly in response. Another time, he listed the number of push-ups (100) and sit-ups (100) he does each day. He’s discussed this hobby with such frequency that, in 2016, he inspired the Washington Free Beaconto create a 2:23 supercut titled Sean Hannity Karate Update. (Applying the term karate to his workouts greatly agitates him. “Why does everyone say karate? Not even close to what I do,” he tweeted once. A year later, he tweeted again: “Oh and by the way, I never did ‘karate’ in my life. Another lie.”)

When he’s not doing karate, he’s golfing, but the rest of the time, he’s often alone, fussing over his dogs: a Bernese mountain dog, Gracie, and an English cream golden retriever, Marley. (“I love dogs!” he once said in a tweet.) He’s trying to breed Marley, whom he got from Majestic Manors, a high-end breeder in Indiana, and if he doesn’t renew his contract when it’s up, he dreams of moving to a farm full of dogs. He maintains constant contact with a million people all at once, texting his friends as compulsively as he vapes (he likes Njoys) all throughout his radio show and even on TV during commercial breaks and whenever the camera isn’t on him. At home, he watches movies (GoodFellas, Braveheart, Schindler’s List) and TV (Homeland, Billions). He drinks White Russians or Coors Lite or vodka with Sprite Zero or, if he’s at Del Frisco’s, a frozen concoction of vodka and pineapple juice that they describe as a martini (it is not). He cooks for himself, and is especially proud of a dish he calls “turkey chop” — a “Hannity special.”

But he’s not entirely bunkered in, out on Long Island — he has bursts of manic sociability, too. Gomez told me of a typical invite to lunch at Peter Luger — the Great Neck spinoff, of course, not the Brooklyn original — with all signs suggesting it’d be just the two of them and their steaks. Somehow, in the few hours between the end of their call and the beginning of lunch, Hannity would accumulate 23 additional guests, having invited seemingly every living being to cross his path, such is his inability to turn off the thing that drives him to connect with others. “ ‘You hungry? You like steak?’ ” Gomez said, impersonating his friend’s distinct, cheerful bark. “ ‘Meet me at Luger’s!’ ”

Privately, Hannity has expressed openness to a different kind of retirement, far removed from a dog farm: running for office, something he hadn’t considered in the past. Gomez, whose own unsuccessful congressional race Hannity advised on, said he thought the only way he’d do it is if he didn’t think there was anybody else for the job — something, incidentally, Trump used to say before the beginning of his political career. McLaughlin burst out laughing when I asked about Hannity 2024; she doesn’t believe he has any interest. But on the show, the two of them joke often, lately, about how Hannity might as well run, since he’s “being vetted more than Obama.”

“The job itself creates such intense isolation that you’d go crazy if you didn’t have … people do go crazy. They all go crazy,” said the person who knows both Trump and Hannity.

“You have two choices: You can either go insane, or you can create your own separate world. And that’s what he’s done. He hired his brother-in-law as his producer. And people look on at that and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s nepotism.’ No, that’s his effort to build a world that he’s safe in, because it’s so crazy that you have to do that.” The only thing you could compare it to, this person said, would be the presidency.

*This article appears in the May 14, 2018, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

Giant Hog Farms Are Fighting for the Right to Keep Polluting.

Mother Jones

Giant Hog Farms Are Fighting for the Right to Keep Polluting. The Trump Administration Is on Their Side.

“This industry in particular has incredible influence over all levels of government.”

Tom Philpott May 5, 2018

Triton Tree/iStock

If you enjoy bacon or ham, chances are you’ve eaten pork from North Carolina, where about 16 million hogs—10 percent of the US total—are raised each year. The great bulk of that production takes place in a handful of counties on the state’s coastal plain—places like Baden County, home to more than 750,000 hogs but only 35,000 humans. Recently, a federal jury awarded more than $50 million in damages to 10 plaintiffs who live near one of the factory-scale hog operations.

The hog facility in the case, which raises hogs under contract for Murphy Brown, a subsidiary of China-owned pork giant Smithfield, is called Kinlaw Farm. Here’s a Google Earth image of it:

Those white buildings in three clumps of four are hog barns. A typical barn holds around 1,000 hogs. The brownish splotches are open-air cesspools known as lagoons, which store manure from all those animals before it’s sprayed on surrounding fields. I’ve been near operations like this, and the stench is blinding—pungent gases like ammonia and hydrogen sulfide permeate the air. In addition to revulsion, these gases can trigger ill health effects in neighboring communities, including eye irritation, chronic lung disease, and olfactory neuron loss.

As Leah Douglas recently noted in a Mother Jones piece, all 10 of the plaintiffs in the case are black. This isn’t surprising, because in North Carolina, “people of color are 1.5 times more likely to live near a hog CAFO than white people.”

If you play around with Google Earth, you can find several residences within a half-mile of the site. That’s not unusual—a recent analysis of satellite data by the Environmental Working Group found that around 160,000 North Carolinians, representing more than 60,000 households, live within a half-mile of a hog confinement or a manure pit.

The Bladen County case is the first of 26 lawsuits pending in North Carolina hog country—the next is due to begin trial this month. (Smithfield, meanwhile, has vowed to appeal last week’s court decision.) Will the legal onslaught force the industry to stop siting intensive high production so close to people’s homes? Iowa is the site of even more hog production than North Carolina, and people who live near facilities there have similar complaints.

If the federal court’s Bladen County decision withstands Smithfield’s appeal, “it could motivate the company to change its ways,” says Danielle Diamond, executive director of the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project. But she doesn’t anticipate broader changes in the industry, because “other courts are not required to follow this decision.” (The decision could, however, influence the 25 additional cases pending in the same federal district court that awarded the $50 million.)

Real change, Diamond says, won’t come until governments force the industry to clean up its act through tighter regulation. But “this industry in particular has incredible influence over all levels of government,” she says. North Carolina’s state legislature is notoriously cozy with Big Pork; and as the money-in-politics tracker Open Secrets notes, the meat lobby wields tremendous power in Washington.

Indeed, chatting with reporters last Monday, USDA chief Sonny Perdue aired his view on the North Carolina case: The ag secretary called the decision “despicable,” adding, “I feel certain that kind of award has to be overturned.”

Tom Philpott is the food and ag correspondent for Mother Jones. He can be reached at tphilpott@motherjones.com

Michael Cohen is ‘in business’. But just what sort of business is he in?

The Guardian

Michael Cohen is ‘in business’. But just what sort of business is he in?

For a man who was meant to fix problems for Donald Trump, his personal lawyer has left an awful lot of problems unfixed

Richard Wolffe May 12, 2018

Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen arrives at his hotel in New York City this week. Photograph: Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters

The fixer is in a fix.

Michael Cohen, the most personal of the president’s personal attorneys, has cut an extraordinary figure in this totally abnormal administration.

You might be forgiven for thinking his fixing was confined to mysterious payments to porn actors and Playboy models, in exchange for their silence. These are mind-grabbing, if not body-grabbing, stories involving actual sex, movies about sex, a president and one of his major donors.

But unlike fixers of yore, Cohen has been unable to fix anything without requiring a good deal of cosmetic after-fixing.

This is not a good look for any self-respecting fixer, or for the large corporations that paid him millions for his insights into Trump’s inner thoughts. AT&T paid Cohen’s firm $600,000 last year, while Novartis paid $1.2m. Columbus Nova, an investment firm linked to the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, paid Cohen $500,000. Korea Aerospace Industries paid him a measly $150,000.

That’s a total of almost $2.5m – as far as we know – paid to the deliciously titled Essential Consultants, the company also used to pay hush money to a porn star and a model on behalf of Donald J Trump and a donor.

Most of the coverage of this giant wheelbarrow of cash has focused on the corporate giants who were so happily fleeced by the fixer, until the deals became public. AT&T now says the deal with Cohen was “a big mistake” and its head lobbyist is taking early retirement. Novartis blames its previous CEO for a relationship that involved all of one meeting with Cohen.

Some reporters claim these relationships and sums are normal in the influence-peddling business that thrives in the nation’s capital. Rest assured, they are not. Retainers of $100,000 a month are few and far between.

But the real mystery is not about the revenue: there are always suckers out there ready to believe the patter of a supposedly well-connected fixer. No, the unanswered questions are about where the money was going.

Most of the influence-peddlers have to support large teams and offices. They burn cash on glass-tabled conference rooms close to the White House, hugely inflated salaries for former congressmen, and steak dinners on Pennsylvania Avenue. That’s not true for Essential Consultants, whose staff amounted to one Michael Cohen. What was the fixer doing with all that money?

You’d think it was to pay off all those pesky women, right? But you would be wrong, because there are several public statements identifying other sources of cash for the hush money.

Stormy Daniels speaks outside US federal court in Manhattan with her lawyer Michael Avenatti. Michael Cohen’s story about the $130,000 payment to her has evolved. Photograph: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AFP/Getty Images

According to the president’s less-competent lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, Trump himself paid Cohen a retainer to cover the $130,000 so generously handed over to Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election for a relationship Trump says never existed.

Cohen also facilitated the payment of an astonishing $1.6m in hush money to another woman, Playboy model Shera Bechard – who had an abortion – supposedly on behalf of another man. But Elliott Broidy, now former deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, apparently paid the money himself. So it’s still not clear how Cohen spent as much as $2.5m last year.

Now it’s true that his sideline business in taxi medallions has been more than a little distressed since Uber and Lyft burst on the scene. But Essential’s known revenues are trivial compared with the scale of Cohen’s taxi troubles. Cohen recently put up his $9m Park Avenue apartment as collateral, to back up reportedly as much as $12.8m of debt previously backed by his taxi medallions.

Donald Trump: Michael is a businessman. He has got a business. He also practices law … probably the big thing is his business

Who or what could Essential be paying? He does have one client with a remarkable ability to steer cash to his own enterprises, and we’re not talking about Sean Hannity of Fox News. Trump has managed to monetize his presidency thanks to foreign diplomats spending money at his hotel in Washington. He has monetized his Secret Service protection at his golf courses and in Trump Tower in Manhattan.

Until we see the accounts of Essential Consultants, we don’t know if any cash has been spent at Trump-related businesses.

One thing is for sure. We can’t rely on Cohen’s account of his own fixing. Earlier this year, he claimed he paid the Stormy Daniels hush money out of his own pocket, without Trump’s knowledge or involvement. He said he had dipped into his home equity line of credit to do so. By the time Rudy Giuliani started blabbing to Fox News, and Trump started tweeting about the hush money, it was clear none of that story stood up.

That does raise a few questions about the $1.6m paid in the affair somehow involving Broidy. For some unusual reason, Cohen used the same alias for Trump and Broidy in the hush payment contracts. Inventing names must be difficult or costly.

Broidy was not known as a big spender on illicit affairs, but he was a big spender on government officials, pleading guilty to $1m in bribes and illegal gifts to New York state officials and their families to win $250m of investment from them.

Who could have known, back in mid-2015, that Cohen was capable of anything less than the highest standards of public service when he threatened a Daily Beast reporter with untold pain – economic, legal and unspecified.

“So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting,” he told the reporter. “You understand me?”

Yes we do, Mr Cohen. We understand very clearly that you are not a traditional lawyer advising a traditional president. You are instead the kind of lawyer who has carved out a series of businesses – including real estate deals, a casino boat and multiple taxi medallions – with immigrants from the former Soviet Union. And we all know how much the Trump administration admires immigrants.

Perhaps the most memorable (and least lawyerly) business was El Caribe, a Brooklyn catering hall that has been a beloved location for Russian and Italian mob weddings and Christmas parties.

Until 2016, Cohen had a minority stake in an establishment owned by his uncle, Morty Levine, who according to a sworn FBI affidavit was a personal doctor and fixer to a Lucchese crime family. Fixing is what you might call a family business. After all, Cohen is a businessman above everything else. At least that’s what his biggest client called him, in his recent jaw-dropping interview with Fox & Friends.

“Let me just tell you that Michael is in business,” Trump explained. “He’s really a businessman. Fairly big businesses, as I understand it. I don’t know his business. But this doesn’t have to do with me. Michael is a businessman. He has got a business. He also practices law. I would say probably the big thing is his business. And they are looking into something having to do with his business. I have nothing to do with his business.”

This may be the most reasonable thing Trump has ever said on Fox News, even if it is the least believable. Go on, admit it. You wouldn’t want to have anything to do with Cohen’s business either.

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The Real Cost of Corruption

Represent.Us

May 2018

Martin Sheen’s unscripted take on corruption will stop you in your tracks.

Martin Sheen: The Real Cost of Corruption

Martin Sheen's unscripted take on corruption will stop you in your tracks.

Posted by Represent.Us on Saturday, May 5, 2018

The anti-Obama: Trump’s drive to destroy his predecessor’s legacy

The Guardian

The anti-Obama: Trump’s drive to destroy his predecessor’s legacy

From the Iran deal to TPP to climate change, ‘the whole thing that animates and unites his policy views is antipathy towards Obama’

David Smith in Washington, The Guardian May 11, 2018

Donald Trump advertised his ambitions to dismantle Barack Obama’s achievements throughout the election campaign. Photograph: Pool New/Reuters

When Donald Trump pulled out of the deal to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions, hardline conservatives celebrated, European leaders winced and Barack Obama made a rare, lengthy public statement.

Trump’s decision was “misguided” and “a serious mistake”, Obama said, as his signature foreign policy achievement was tossed away.

It was just the latest example of Trump’s all-out assault on the Obama legacy. From climate change to criminal justice to international relations, rarely has one occupant of the Oval Office appeared so obsessed with taking a chainsaw to the work of another.

Tommy Vietor, a former national security council spokesman under Obama, told the Guardian: “The whole thing that animates and unites his policy views is antipathy towards Obama. It’s fucking pathetic. He’s a vindictive person so there is an element of this that is about sticking it to Obama. He knows, probably better than anyone, how to find all the Republican erogenous zones because he spent years whipping people into a frenzy and telling lies about Obama.”

From the start, it has been hard to imagine two men more different than Obama, 56, a mixed-race intellectual married to one woman for a quarter of a century, and Trump, 71, a white, thrice married businessman and reality TV star who has boasted about grabbing women’s private parts. One reads books voraciously; the other, it is said, barely reads at all. There were few reasons for their paths to ever cross except, perhaps, on a golf course, their one common passion.

But then came the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Trump, pushing a racially charged conspiracy theory questioning whether the president was born in America, was among the tuxedo-wearing guests. Obama mocked his nascent political ambitions without mercy. “Obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience,” he said, recalling an episode of Celebrity Apprentice in which the men’s cooking team fell short and Trump fired actor Gary Busey.

“And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night,” the president continued to roars of laughter. “Well handled, sir. Well handled. Say what you will about Mr. Trump, he certainly would bring some change to the White House. Let’s see what we’ve got up there.”

The room erupted as Obama pointed to a Photo-shopped image of the then fantastical idea of a Trump White House, with three extra storeys, a giant “TRUMP” sign, a hotel, casino and golf course, a giant crystal chandelier, four gold columns and two women in swimwear drinking cocktails in the north lawn fountain.

Four years later, Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker magazine would recall: “Trump’s humiliation was as absolute, and as visible, as any I have ever seen: his head set in place, like a man in a pillory, he barely moved or altered his expression as wave after wave of laughter struck him … he sat perfectly still, chin tight, in locked, unmovable rage.”

Future historians may well ask: was this the moment that Trump resolved to storm the White House and tear down the Obama legacy?

For sure, from the day he formally launched his election campaign in June 2015, branding Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, he cast himself as the anti-Obama in style and substance. His act enraptured rightwing media and the Republican base, who saw Trump as a vessel into which they could pour their hopes and frustrations. David Litt, a former speechwriter for Obama, said this week: “It’s not only Trump who says, ‘If Obama is for it, I’m against it.’ This was the guiding philosophy for eight years of the Obama administration. Trump is a catalyst of the movement but he’s also a product of it.”

President Barack Obama greets President-elect Donald Trump in the White House Oval Office on 10 November 2016. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

During his battle with Hillary Clinton, Trump duly promised to unravel Obama’s accomplishments. He described the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a proposed free trade deal with Asia, as “a rape of our country”. He said he is “not a great believer in manmade climate change” and vowed to cancel the Paris agreement. He called the Iran nuclear accord a “disaster” and “the worst deal ever negotiated” and warned that it could lead to a “nuclear holocaust”.

John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think-tank in Washington, said: “The president ideologically disagrees with much of what President Obama accomplished but it’s important to remember these were campaign promises. It’s not out of nowhere. It’s what his voters wanted. Very little of what the president is doing is shocking, considering his campaign rhetoric.”

Soon after the stunning election outcome, Obama hosted Trump at the White House for about an hour and a half. Trump seemed surprised and a little impressed by the welcome, Obama appeared to be walking on eggshells.

But extraordinarily, since inauguration day, the men have not spoken. Hudak described this as “odd”, noting a past example: the first person Obama called after the killing of Osama Bin Laden was George W Bush.

“But it’s important to remember President Trump doesn’t like to hear ideas that he does not believe. If he called President Obama and said, ‘Can you talk me through this Iran deal?’ he would hear things that wouldn’t fit with that mindset. He could call Bill Clinton or George Bush, but why waste their time?”

At the recent funeral of former first lady Barbara Bush, the Bushes, Clintons and Obamas were joined by the first lady, Melania Trump, but the current president was conspicuously absent.

In the meantime, Trump is working through his Obama checklist at a rapid clip. He made good on his promises to withdraw from the TPP, Paris and Iran agreements. He partially reversed what he called a “terrible and misguided deal” with Cuba, reinstating some travel and commercial restrictions. He ordered the Pentagon to reverse an Obama-era policy that allowed transgender people to serve in the military.

Trump has also struck a radically different tone from the 44th president, expressing admiration for strongmen, confounding America’s longstanding allies and apparently viewing international relations through the prism of personal chemistry. The steady hand of “no drama Obama” has been replaced by chaos, unpredictability and Twitter diplomacy.

Donald Trump’s ‘only guiding principle seems to be to undo what Obama did’, says one Democratic strategist. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Domestically, his tone on abortion rights, gun control and race relations represents another 180-degree turn. He announced plans to scrap Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), a program created under Obama to allow people brought to the US illegally as children the temporary right to live in America. He has rolled back hundreds of government regulations in areas such as immigration, net neutrality and clean air and water.

Some reversals have gained less public attention but could have more lasting consequences. Whereas the Obama administration directed federal prosecutors to be less aggressive in charging non-violent drug offenders, Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has reverted to a hard-line stance, raising the prospect of a resurgence in mass incarceration just as the prison population had begun to dip.

Lanhee Chen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, said: “It’s not unusual for a president to want to do things differently from his predecessor. I will say the scope and ambition of Trump’s effort to do that is breathtaking. Whether it’s breathtakingly good or breathtakingly bad depends on your point of view.”

But there have been setbacks in the anti-Obama crusade. Trump was unable to steer Republicans to agree on a replacement for the Affordable Care Act, the flagship of Obama’s domestic program, though critics argue they have since done their best to sabotage it through a sweeping tax reform and other measures.

Some believe the effort failed because Trump has little grasp of or interest in policy details. Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist, said: “His only guiding principle seems to be to undo what Obama did. His driving motivation seems to be his animosity towards Obama. We know he has no deep convictions of his own so Obama became his negative reference point.”

Trump averaged one false claim every 83 seconds of his speech on the Iran deal.

Mint Press News

Hands OFF Syria

May 9, 2018

Trump Lies on the Iran Nuclear Deal..
Trump averaged one false claim every 83 seconds of his speech on the Iran deal.

Trump Lies on the Iran Nuclear Deal

Trump Lies on the Iran Nuclear Deal.. Trump averaged one false claim every 83 seconds of his speech on the Iran deal.

Posted by Hands OFF Syria on Wednesday, May 9, 2018

Mike Pence called for Mueller to wrap up his investigation and it sounds an awful lot like Nixon’s plea for an end to Watergate…

Occupy Democrats: Video

May 11, 2018

Mike Pence just called for Mueller to wrap up his investigation into Trump’s collusion and it sounds an awful lot like Nixon’s plea for an end to Watergate…

Trump's team sounds EXACTLY like Nixon's in calls to end special investigations

Mike Pence just called for Mueller to wrap up his investigation into Trump's collusion and it sounds an awful lot like Nixon's plea for an end to Watergate…Video by Occupy Democrats. Like our page for more!

Posted by Occupy Democrats on Friday, May 11, 2018

The emerging scandal over Michael Cohen’s consulting could take presidential corruption to another level.

Slate – Politics

A New Low

The emerging scandal over Michael Cohen’s consulting could take presidential corruption to another level.

By Jamelle Bouie May 9, 2018

President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen exits a hotel in New York City on April 13. Photo edited by Slate. Photo by REUTERS/Jeenah Moon.

While there’s still much to piece together from the revelations involving Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, and his shell company, Essential Consultants LLC, the possibility that Trump was personally involved in Cohen’s self-dealing could make the ordeal one of the most serious corruption scandals in presidential history.

First, the facts. Cohen’s company took more than $4 million in payments from various companies, including one linked to a Russian oligarch. There’s no direct evidence that Cohen was involved in a pay-to-play scheme, but it certainly looks suspicious. Cohen accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from major corporations with business before the Trump administration, including AT&T, which made four payments totaling $200,000 to Cohen’s shell company and only ceased those payments after Trump’s Federal Communications Commission repealed regulations around net neutrality.

Cohen also took $500,000 in payments from Columbus Nova, an investment firm tied to Russian oligarch (and Vladimir Putin ally) Viktor Vekselberg. While we don’t know if those payments are related directly to President Trump, we do know that last year, Cohen hand-delivered to then–national security adviser Michael Flynn a plan to lift sanctions against Russia.

It’s possible this is all innocuous, that Cohen—a “fixer” for Trump who, with his knowledge, used cash from this shell company to pay hush money to a pornographic actress for an extramarital affair—also maintained an aboveboard consulting firm, for which these payments are legal and legitimate. But if that isn’t true, if what we’re looking at is the outline of a broad network of improper payments and illegal contributions, then we have something truly unprecedented. No, it’s not Watergate or Iran-Contra—where the president and his executive branch took extraconstitutional actions that threatened the integrity of the entire system. But it is the kind of blatant self-enrichment—corruption in the traditional sense—that we rarely see at this level of American politics, or at this scale.

It is the kind of blatant self-enrichment—corruption in the traditional sense—that we rarely see at this level of American politics, or at this scale.

Indeed, past examples of presidential corruption didn’t actually involve the presidents tarnished by them. Ulysses S. Grant was savaged throughout his presidency for the self-dealing and personal enrichment that plagued his administration. Most notorious was the Whiskey Ring scandal of 1875, wherein whiskey distillers successfully bribed Treasury Department agents, helping them evade millions of dollars in taxes. But, once he became aware of this wrongdoing, Grant gave Treasury Secretary Benjamin Bristow full freedom to pursue an investigation that eventually ended with criminal indictments against multiple officials, including Grant’s secretary, Orville Babcock.

The gold standard for presidential corruption, the Teapot Dome scandal under President Warren Harding, involved Interior Secretary Albert Fall. Fall had taken more than $400,000 in cash and no-interest personal loans in exchange for arranging low-rate, noncompetitive contracts for friendly oil companies. In today’s dollars, that’s nearly $6 million in bribes. Harding’s offense was managerial—indifferent to allegations of wrongdoing against Fall, he took no action to investigate claims of quid pro quo. It wasn’t until after the president’s death in 1923 that an investigation would uncover the breadth of Fall’s deceit, earning him a $100,000 fine, nine months in prison, and the dubious honor of being the first former Cabinet member convicted of a felony committed while in office.

By contrast, President Trump is directly involved in this unfolding scandal. He now admits that he reimbursed Cohen to buy Stormy Daniels’ silence. And given his close relationship with Cohen, it’s possible he knew Fortune 500 companies and Russian oligarchs were funneling millions of dollars to the same account used to pay for his liaisons. Even if Trump is nominally disconnected from some of Cohen’s activities, what we already know about Daniels and the web of payments to keep her silent is damning. Add the ongoing scandal of Trump’s self-enrichment from the office of the presidency, and you have a previously unseen level of corruption from the White House.

This is all the more egregious because, in addition to his own corruption, Trump is presiding over a host of corruption scandals in his Cabinet, from nepotism and abuse of taxpayer funds at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to the torrent of petty graft at the Environmental Protection Agency, where Administrator Scott Pruitt is under fire for his ties to lobbyists and other unethical behavior.

The permissive attitude toward this type of graft has filtered down to others in the Republican Party. On Tuesday, ABC News interviewed West Virginia voters as they cast their ballots in the state’s Republican Senate primary. One of those voters lost three cousins in the mine explosion overseen by Don Blankenship, one of the three candidates for the nomination. Still, that voter backed the former coal baron, who went to prison for his culpability in the accident. “I want an honest crook, and that’s Blankenship,” said the voter.

Blankenship lost, but that same sentiment helped Trump become president. And it continues to buoy Trump as he is beset by scandal. It reflects the broad idea that Washington and its denizens are corrupt; that politicians are corrupt; and that open corruption is better than the alternative. But while Washington is marred by self-dealing and countless conflicts of interest, it’s also true that the casual corruption and graft of a Trump or Pruitt or Blankenship are rare. And what seems present from Michael Cohen, and potentially the president, is extraordinary.

A certain amount of cynicism about the process is warranted. But most politicians aren’t crooks, and to believe otherwise is to give license to those who only care to line their pockets, and will betray the public to do it.

Giuliani: Trump said he was unaware of Cohen payments.

All In with Chris Hayes

May 10, 2018

New details raise questions about whether Cohen’s consulting work crossed a line beyond typically venal Washington influence peddling.

Trump denies knowledge of Cohen payments

New details raise questions about whether Cohen's consulting work crossed a line beyond typically venal Washington influence peddling.

Posted by All In with Chris Hayes on Thursday, May 10, 2018

Trump’s judges, U.S. attorneys overwhelmingly white men

Politico

Trump’s judges, U.S. attorneys overwhelmingly white men

The analysis of the president’s nominees was released by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

By Matthew Nussbaum May 10, 2018

According to the report, the diversity of President Donald Trump’s judicial picks lags behind his predecessor, Barack Obama. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo

President Donald Trump’s picks for top prosecutors and judges are overwhelmingly white men, according to an analysis released by the Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

The report slams Trump for what the Democrats describe as “degradation of the judicial nominations process, the lack of diversity among President Trump’s nominees, and this administration’s commitment to nominate ideological, often-unqualified candidates.”

The report found that just 8 percent of Trump’s nominees for U.S. attorney positions are women, and just 8 percent are people of color. The report found a similar, if slightly less stark, trend when it comes to judgeships: 25 percent of Trump’s district court nominees and 19 percent of his circuit court nominees are women; 8 percent of Trump’s district court nominees and 11 percent of his circuit court nominees are people of color.

The report contrasts the numbers with former President Barack Obama, who made diversity in the judiciary a priority. In Obama’s first year, 42 percent of his judicial nominees were women and 52 percent were people of color.

But in the process of highlighting the demographics of Trump’s nominees, the Democratic report also underscores Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s success in confirming judicial nominees with rapid speed — a top priority for the Kentucky Republican and his party.

“President Trump’s first 15 circuit court nominees took an average of 131 days to be confirmed. In contrast, President Obama’s first 15 circuit court nominees took an average of 254 days to be confirmed — more than twice as long,” the report states.

“On average, President Trump’s first 15 circuit court nominees waited just 20 days from approval by the Judiciary Committee to confirmation on the floor. On average, President Obama’s first 15 circuit court nominees waited 167 days from approval by the Judiciary Committee to confirmation on the floor — eight times longer than President Trump’s nominees.”

Conservative activists made a reshaping of the judiciary — and especially filling Antonin Scalia’s vacancy on the Supreme Court — a crucial element in the argument in favor of electing Trump. Trump has kept up his end of the bargain with alacrity, making judicial nominations a central part of his agenda on Capitol Hill, and McConnell has used the reshaping of the courts to help maintain unity within his occasionally fractured conference.

“Along with significant legislation benefiting the middle class and a growing economy, Sen. McConnell has made the confirmation of judicial nominations a top priority,” McConnell spokesman Don Stewart said in an email. “The fact that the Republican Senate has been able to confirm so many nominees despite historic and relentless obstruction from Senate Democrats, is a testament to the priority the Leader, our Conference and the White House have put on nominating, vetting and confirming well-qualified nominees.”

The judiciary is not the only area in which Trump has been criticized for not emphasizing diversity. Democrats have been critical of Trump for naming just one African-American to his Cabinet, and having no African Americans serving as senior aides in the White House.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Elana Schor contributed reporting.

Category: “Dead Skunk in The Middle of The Road”