A phrase that does not appear in the Post’s article, because the reporters cannot prove it, is “money laundering.” But money laundering is the suspicion hovering over all these curious purchases, and the reason the Post is devoting so many investigative resources to the subject in the first place. “This is all about money laundering,” Steve Bannon told Michael Wolff. “[Mueller’s] path to *********** Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr. and Jared Kushner … It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner ****.”
Money laundering would be criminal activity. If you are involved in criminal activity, you are subject to blackmail. And if the criminals who can blackmail you have connections to a foreign government — say, Russia — then that government has blackmail leverage. Ten years ago, Donald Trump Jr. casually said, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” And as recently as 2014, Eric Trump told a reporter, “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia,” which is quite different than his current explanation that the Trump Organization does not require outside funding at all.
The secret sauce of Trump’s real-estate business in its early stages was his ability to manipulate the media and willingness to borrow massive sums and not pay them back. When he exhausted his ability to stiff his creditors, the new secret sauce became a willingness to take money from shady overseas sources, especially (but not exclusively) Russian oligarchs looking either to park their cash overseas, or to gain some measure of influence. Whether Russia was investing in Trump for the purpose of gaining some hidden leverage over him is not incidental to the Mueller investigation but its very heart.
Likewise, a casual reader of the Times report on Michael Cohen’s business history may have missed the significance concealed beneath its carefully measured language. The upshot is that Cohen is not the schlubby, unethical lawyer Ben Stiller portrayed him as on Saturday Night Live. Cohen’s father uncle, the Times reveals, worked closely with La Cosa Nostra and gained the organization’s trust. Cohen’s first employer was a criminal, his father-in-law was a criminal with ties to the Russian Mafia, and Cohen maintained extensive criminal associations throughout his public life. Sometimes people involved in mostly legitimate business have gangster friends, but if you’re surrounded at all stages by gangsters — including operating your business out of a criminal headquarters, as Cohen did — then your real profession is “crook.” The Times can’t prove it, nor can I, but this is the takeaway.
