Wishing Her Well

-- President Trump, on child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

A terrible president. An even worse human being.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) July 22, 2020

Donald Trump is a terrible President and possibly the worst human being in the country, aside from a murderer or rapist. However, he also is smart. Approximately an hour before President Trump commuted the sentence of Roger Stone, the latter told journalist/columnist Howard Fineman

I had 29 or 30 conversations with Trump during the campaign period.He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t. They wanted me to play Judas. I refused.

Neal Katyal and Joshua Geltzer explain

Sure, Trump helped Stone by invoking his extraordinary constitutional powers to relieve Stone of the consequences of his 2019 conviction for lying to investigators, obstructing a congressional inquiry, and witness tampering. But Trump, characteristically, did as little as possible: He commuted Stone’s sentence but didn’t pardon him. That means—as Special Counsel Robert Mueller wrote on Saturday—that Stone “remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.” A commutation does nothing to erase or even call into question a convicted defendant’s guilt.

Because of the prohibition of double jeopardy, Stone cannot be retried for the exact same offense. However, he can face charges for similar offenses and

A future Justice Department would be well within its rights to open a new investigation into Stone’s activities. Such an investigation wouldn’t be hard: The very facts the jury found sufficient to convict Stone suggest that he may be guilty of other criminal offenses.

This includes obstruction of justice and/or perjury, maybe aiding and abetting the email dump. Such crimes

have different elements from the ones Stone was convicted of, so they are not the same—and being forced to prove different facts to establish different elements of a crime is, in general, a key indication that prosecutors are not running into constitutional double-jeopardy concerns.

If the President had pardoned Stone for all offenses which might be related to this affair, Stone would be free-and-clear of all federal charges. But Trump didn't do so because he wanted the possibility of further criminal charges to hang over the notorious dirty trickster. 

That's how it's done in the underworld. Asked by David Letterman in 2013 about the Mafia, Trump responded "You just don’t want to owe them money. Don’t owe them money."

Better for them to owe you.  Now Stone owes Trump for pardoning him, with the implied threat of more legal trouble if he chooses to speak up.

Currently, Ghislaine Maxwell doesn't owe Trump. She has the goods on him, which was made clear when the President wished her well. It's the best of both worlds for him, with both the implied promise of a pardon or a commutation of sentence if she keeps her mouth shut- and much worse if she doesn't.

It's the way of La Cosa Nostra, which Donald Trump has played ball with for decades.  He has done it effectively with Roger Stone and now he's playing with Ghislaine Maxwell, who needs to makes sure she's paid up on her life insurance. She's not up against anyone stupid.

 

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Mobbed Up?

In the 1980s, Wayne Barrett reported on Donald Trump's dalliance with La Cosa Nostra.  as did Michael Isikoff  in March, and now David Cay Johnston has broached the almost-forbidden subject. He notes

No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks. Professor Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, said the closest historical example would be President Warren G. Harding and Teapot Dome, a bribery and bid-rigging scandal in which the interior secretary went to prison. But even that has a key difference: Harding’s associates were corrupt but otherwise legitimate businessmen, not mobsters and drug dealers.








Still, the "liberal" mainstream media (video above from Thom Hartmann from September) has been loathe to look at the organized crime connections of the fellow who has nearly an even chance of being the next President of the United States.

Steve M. identifies a few possible reasons:  it seems like old news; The Sopranos, Scarface, and rap music have made organized crime figures into heroes; and the belief "that you can't make a fortune in East Coast real estate without some ties to the mob. We assume he just had no choice."

One of S.M.'s commenters (sdhays) acknowledges those factors but adds

unlike "violent drug gangs" or cartels, "the mob" is made up of white people. Or, at least, that's the way it's thought of. They're the "respectable" organized crime. It even has a civilized name: "organized crime". So it's a "respectable" cultural fixture of the Northeastern US, especially in NYC.

I'll just add to your point of "the mob" being sexy that the vast majority of Americans do not live in a society where they personally experience "the mob's" existence. We experience it solely through popular culture or the national news out of NYC or Boston. It's distant, and almost from a bygone era, "The Sopranos" not withstanding. 

So it all comes back to: the media shouldn't say he has "Mob ties". They should say he has ties to violent criminal organizations. Throw "violent drugs" into it, and you might penetrate the national discussion for a few days.

If the message that Donald Trump has been involved in violent crime is continually repeated, it will penetrate the national consciousness for a few days and become a major issue. Connecting Trump to violent crime should not be difficult, especially now that he has scored the full-hearted endorsement of the National Rifle Association, perhaps America's foremost pro-crime organization. The NRA's opposition to legislation preventing individuals on the terrorist watch list from buying firearms is one place to start, and I'd probably substitute "individuals on the terrorist watch list" to "terrorists."   Let 'em squeal.

The primary reason Trump's former dealings with the Italian-American mob has been ignored is there is no tie-in.  There is no video, nothing visual to make the connection.  The next best thing would be linking Trump's associations to violent criminal organizations involved in drugs. That would be devastating, and nearly effective if drugs were not put into the mix.

Organized crime has become somewhat glamorous.  However, Americans remain fearful of violent street crime and the people involved in it.









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Vice-Presidential Consideration

In an article on salon.com on 6/6/08, Walter Shapiro argues that Barack Obama is unlikely to select as his running mate any of the usual suspects. Shapiro notes that the practice of the nominee choosing the V.P.-designate began only in 1960 and frequently has produced "a national embarassment- or worse." Think Agnew, Eagleton (a little unfair- but it was an embarrassment), Ferraro, Quayle, Lieberman, Cheney.

By contrast, through 1956 the convention iself selected the head guy's running mate. And in 1960, that process led to a fight among four giants: John F. Kennedy, Estes Kefauver, Al Gore Sr., and Hubert H. Humphrey.

Think about that a moment. We all remember John Kennedy. Then there was Albert Arnold Gore, whose son became Vice-President before being elected President in 2000, of whom it was said "never ran a negative campaign." The Tennessee senator who helped create the Interstate Highway System, was dedicated to fighting poverty, opposed the Vietnam War, and was one of only three southern Senators who refused to sign the segregationist Southern Manifesto. He supported the Voting Rights Act of 1965 after he had opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964- but later wrote in his memoirs of his regret over his position.

The other two senators opposing the Southern Manifesto? Lyndon B. Johnson and Estes Kefauver. That was Estes Kefauver, a supporter of antitrust activity and opponent of "the concentration of U.S. economic and political power under the control of a wealthy, exclusive elite." He served as chairman of the Special Committee on Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce (Eighty-first and Eighty-second Congresses), whose televised hearings in 1950-1951 threw light on the danger of organized crime before American society, a la The Sopranos, began to glorify La Cosa Nostra.

And then there was Minnesota Senator, and Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey, who tirelesly fought for justice for the less fortunate in American society. At the Democratic Presidential Convention on July 14, 1948, Humphrey helped spark the walkout of Strom Thurmon's Dixicrats with a speech in which he declared

To those who say -- My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say -- To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.

Years later, we have a presumptive nominee whose slogan is "we are the ones we've been waiting for" and little experience by which to judge him; and a vanquished candidate, the spouse of a former president, who during the campaign compared her opponent unfavorably to the presumptive Republican nominee. The decline in the caliber of the national candidates of our party is disturbing. And stunning.