Trumps financial disclosure triggers Office of Government Ethics!
9 replies, posted
https://twitter.com/AriMelber/status/996805188232065024
This just gets better and better by the minute!
Good God... I reeeeeally hope this turn of events today isn't just more piss in the water.
Hopefully this is handled coolly by Mueller and he can restore a bit of sense out of this forsaken administration.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-new-financial-disclosure-trump-reports-apparent-payment-through-his-personal-attorney-to-adult-film-star/2018/05/16/cf6171f2-592c-11e8-b656-a5f8c2a9295d_story.html
Well, Trump's confirming that he lied on Air Force One.
And Giuliani pretty conclusively described it as a campaign-related payment despite trying his best to build a word wall between the payment and the campaign, so the fact that it wasn't disclosed until it was forcibly revealed by Avenatti selectively leaking Cohen's shell company's financial records is another big hmmmm.
Lying to the public in an interview isn't a crime -- lying on a financial reporting document is. This document is in direct conflict with one filed earlier this year, and if it can be shown that Trump intentionally and knowingly withheld the information in question, it is fairly conclusive evidence of at least one more federal crime. How can we prove that he intentionally and knowingly withheld that information? Well, the feds have just about everything Michael Cohen has ever touched in an evidence locker right now, so basically all it would take is Trump mentioning this payment prior to his previous financial disclosure was filed.
So, behind the immediate Cohen/Trump drama, there's a secondary fire raging: Who leaked Cohen's financial disclosure forms to Michael Avenatti? Doing so is an illegal act punishable by up to five years in prison.
Well, the government employee who leaked it has contacted the New Yorker to explain why (PROBABLY PAYWALLED):
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/missing-files-motivated-the-leak-of-michael-cohens-financial-records/
Last week, several news outlets obtained financial records showing that Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal attorney, had used a shell company to receive payments from various firms with business before the Trump Administration. In the days since, there has been much speculation about who leaked the confidential documents, and the Treasury Department’s inspector general has launched a probe to find the source. That source, a law-enforcement official, is speaking publicly for the first time, to The New Yorker, to explain the motivation: the official had grown alarmed after being unable to find two important reports on Cohen’s financial activity in a government database. The official, worried that the information was being withheld from law enforcement, released the remaining documents.
The payments to Cohen that have emerged in the past week come primarily from a single document, a “suspicious-activity report” filed by First Republic Bank, where Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants, L.L.C., maintained an account. The document detailed sums in the hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to Cohen by the pharmaceutical company Novartis, the telecommunications giant A.T. & T., and an investment firm with ties to the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.
The report also refers to two previous suspicious-activity reports, or sars, that the bank had filed, which documented even larger flows of questionable money into Cohen’s account. Those two reports detail more than three million dollars in additional transactions—triple the amount in the report released last week. Which individuals or corporations were involved remains a mystery. But, according to the official who leaked the report, these sars were absent from the database maintained by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or fincen. The official, who has spent a career in law enforcement, told me, “I have never seen something pulled off the system. . . . That system is a safeguard for the bank. It’s a stockpile of information. When something’s not there that should be, I immediately became concerned.” The official added, “That’s why I came forward.”
The official discovered that the FINCEN database did not contain the two Suspicious Activity Reports, or SARs, filed by the bank managing Essential Consultants LLC's accounts. When the official saw them missing when they absolutely should not, he leaked the rest of Cohen's reports to safeguard them from also being edited out of the record.
There is speculation that the records could possibly have been censored from view on a temporary basis by request of Mueller's investigation, but this would be unusual. Of course, everything surrounding the Mueller investigation, including its targets, is unusual.
Breitbart, of all places, is reporting on the New Yorker's exclusive in a non-paywalled format. I expect more non-paywall news coverage to emerge soon.
https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/996807561402863616
This week keeps getting better. The Senate Intelligence Committee issued a bipartisan statement that Russia was definitely favouring Trump when it interfered in the election, contrary to what the House Republicans want everyone to believe. These tons and tons of transcripts are the gift that just keeps giving. And now pretty concrete proof that Trump has been deliberately hiding financial matters from mandatory disclosure, adding yet another instance (or many instances) of the President very visibly trying to cover something up.
Hey, Nunes, what do you think of this? "That's nice" again?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trumps-personal-attorney-solicited-1-million-from-government-of-qatar/2018/05/16/e787e716-592c-11e8-858f-12becb4d6067_story.html?utm_term=.f7ff4fb8092c
Oh also this is a thing. Whoops!
now who in the treasury would have access to and authority to even see cohen's files, let alone remove them from archives?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/probe-of-leaked-banking-records-related-to-michael-cohen-expands-after-new-yorker-report/2018/05/17/943c133c-59e2-11e8-8b92-45fdd7aaef3c_story.html
The Treasury Department has expanded its probe to include not only finding the leaker but investigating if records were removed from the FINCEN database.
It’s pretty clear by now that the document was intentionally falsified, so whoever leaked it actually performed a crucial public service and should be protected under the WPA. Accordingly, we should be less concerned with the source of the leak than with verifying its contents. But of course we can expect this administration to move heaven and earth to find the source, all in attempt to manufacture a distraction from the contents of the leak itself.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.