"Follow the money" — a still shot of Deep Throat in All The President's Men. See video at:
All the President's Men (8/9) Movie CLIP - Deep Throat (1976) HD - Duration: 2:33. Movieclips 28,971 views
The advice is still as good as it was in the Watergate episode when Deep Throat whispered it to Bob Woodward in a shadowy parking garage over 40 years ago:
"Follow the money."
With Trump and Co. the advice is even more pertinent because Trump and Co. are supremely motivated by money, whereas Nixon's crimes arose from his desire to preserve his power.
As I've said before, Trump and Family view the White House as their own cash register. Ka-ching, it goes! Music to their ears, as money flows into Trump golf courses and hotels because of his presidency.
But that stuff is comparatively chump change. So is Trump's daughter's line of expensive gim-crackery jewelry, etc. and her newly-acquired brand protections in China. So is Jared Kushner's sister's attempt to peddle American visas using the Trump status.
The real money is off-shore. Way off-shore. It's in Trump dealings with Azerbaijania and Moscow and Ukraine and Cyprus. It's in the billions being laundered by the Trumps for the Moscow/New York Mafia and for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. It's in the loans given the Trumps by Russian banks when US banks would no longer pony up after being burned repeatedly by Donald Trump's business practices and Jared Kushner's recklessly paying double the going price for Manhattan real estate footage.
Donald Trump is not a big businessman. He's a crooked one. His favorite ploy is like that depicted in the wonderful Mel Brooks' comedy "The Producers", in which a down-and-out Broadway producer and his accountant raise far more money than their latest production, "Springtime for Hitler", requires. "Springtime"is carefully designed to be a sure-fire failure so it can close after the first night and be declared a bankruptcy, while Producers Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder walk off with all the money they raised and didn't spend.
That's how Trump has managed casinos and hotels. He borrowed bigtime to create hotels and casinos. Then he stiffed the guys who built the projects and the suppliers who sold him the construction materials. He stiffed the little working guys too and the people who helped the facilities function. He pocketed the money he had been loaned to pay these people and then declared bankruptcy so he could walk away with the banks' money.
He also stiffed his attorneys in the flock of lawsuits brought on by his crooked ways. In fact a New York attorney was laughing his head of on MSNBC last week at the news that Trump is lawyering up. "Not in New York City", the attorney said. "The word is out on him in the New York legal community that he stiffs his attorneys."
Want an amazing example of Trump's crookedness? This involves not only crooked business practices re raising money on false pretenses, but violates at least three major federal laws: dealing with the forbidden Iranian Revolutionary Guard, money laundering, and violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This last not only carries huge fines, but unlike most white-collar crime, also carries stiff prison sentences. Read about this huge Trump-brand hotel and why it never opens because of its criminal parentage.
Donald Trump's Worst Deal - The New Yorker (Also see footnote below.)
Trump's "worst deal", this pictured Azerbaijanian project, not only violated various business laws but also constituted a form of treason. As the New Yorker article explains, the Azerbaijanian hotel deal involved the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. This gang of hoods not only controls Iran's oil proceeds but is the godfather of the Iranian nuclear bomb efforts. Trump is footsie with people designing a nuclear weapon with our name on it. Further, Americans are expressly forbidden to do business with Iran about oil, this being one of the sanctions that drove Iran to agree to halt development of a nuclear weapon.
Playing footsie with these Iranian guys is clearly aiding and abetting an enemy of the United States. Trump is supporting a force that threatens our very survival. He is a traitor.
And it's all for money.
That will be his undoing. Money dealings leave paper trails. They have to because the crooks don't trust each other. Money trails are harder to defend against than the "he said v. they said" of witness testimony in, for example, collusion trials. Hopefully one or more of the current investigations, including the one by the fraud unit of the Treasury Department, will indeed follow the money.
Ka-ching may thus turn to Ka-clunk, the latter being the sound of the closing of a prison door.
It is a consummation devoutly to be wished.
__________________________
FOOTNOTE: The excellent article in the New Yorker referred to here — "Donald Trump's Worst Deal" — came out in March. The mainstream print media saluted it, but it got little traction on TV or social media. No investigators or Trump critics have made anything of it. Perhaps it's a little too complicated for them. But not for us, right! Because we know that the more complicated the coverup, the bigger the underlying crime. In due course this chicken will come all the way home from Azerbaijania to roost on Trump. I wrote about this "worst deal" once before and will do so again.
This money must be followed.
No comments:
Post a Comment