The 3 Truest Words in Journalism: Follow the Money Even

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May 12, 2017 at 10:27 AM 152

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The 3 Truest Words in Journalism: Follow the Money

Even in the era of cheap clicks and fake news.

By Charles P. Pierce May 12, 2017

What fresh hell greeted the sun on Friday?

There is no question in my mind that Richard Nixon is now and forever history's yard waste. But, at the very least, he tried to bury the White House tapes. He didn't go on CBS and do a half-hour with Walter Cronkite to explain how he'd erased the 18-and-a-half minutes.

And it's impossible to imagine the old crook's capping off a week in which his primary descriptor was "Nixonian" by adding another count to the indictments—Witness Intimidation? Obstruction of Justice?—with a tweet like this one

Donald J. Trump
✔ ‎@realDonaldTrump

James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!

At 8:30 a.m.? Is somebody running the country?

The more I think about it—and I've been thinking about it a lot—the more I think that the hard criminal core of this whole episode will be found to involve money laundering or something like it. On May 9, the Senate Intelligence Committee sent a request to the Treasury Department's criminal division for documents relating to the president*, his campaign aides, and various hangers-on. From CNN:

The news comes just a few days after the revelation that Senate investigators sent broad-based requests for documents to four key potential witnesses in their probe: former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former adviser Roger Stone and former foreign policy adviser Carter Page. Warner added that until the Treasury Department responds with documents, that he will withhold his support for Trump's nominee to oversee terrorism and financial at the Treasury Department, Sigal Mandelker. "Chairman Burr and I requested that information -- until we get it, I'm not going to support the administration's nominee for undersecretary of Treasury finance, for terrorism and finance, because they owe us these documents first," Warner said.

Moreover, somehow, immediately before he took his golden escalator ride down into the presidency, the news that the president* paid a $10 million fine because his busted Atlantic City casino was found to have failed to follow anti-laundering standards.

This story got lost amid all those spiffy shots of an empty podium and noisy rallies, but it certainly is worth a second look now. USA Today had more:

• A member of the firm that developed the Trump SoHo Hotel in New York is a twice-convicted felon who spent a year in prison for stabbing a man and later scouted for Trump investments in Russia.

• An investor in the SoHo project was accused by Belgian authorities in 2011 in a $55 million money-laundering scheme.

• Three owners of Trump condos in Florida and Manhattan were accused in federal indictments of belonging to a Russian-American organized crime group and working for a major international crime boss based in Russia.

• A former mayor from Kazakhstan was accused in a federal lawsuit filed in Los Angeles in 2014 of hiding millions of dollars looted from his city, some of which was spent on three Trump SoHo units.

• A Ukrainian owner of two Trump condos in Florida was indicted in a money-laundering scheme involving a former prime minister of Ukraine.

Here's what I think. The president* needed money. The Russians oligarchs needed a laundromat. There is an obvious common interest here. That the Russians could gain more leverage over him than he had over them in this arrangement should be obvious.

I think that he will always value his dreams of financial empire more than the national interest, and that he would do anything to keep those dreams alive, even demolish the institutions of free government along the way.

His alleged subornation of the national interest by means of helping undermine the presidential election simply was a means to keep his businesses afloat and his own inflated self-image intact. That's what he's fighting so hard, and so clumsily now.

I think Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is in it to fasten his outraged-saltine sense of law and order onto the nation. I think Donald Trump is in it to hang onto every last, crisp and freshly clean buck. Democracy is fluffed and folded along the way.

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