National Enquirer Had Decades of Trump Dirt. He Wanted to Buy It All.

By Jim Rutenberg and Maggie Haberman

Federal investigators have provided ample evidence that President Trump was involved in deals to pay two women to keep them from speaking publicly before the 2016 election about affairs that they said they had with him.

But it turns out that Mr. Trump wanted to go even further.

He and his lawyer at the time, Michael D. Cohen, devised a plan to buy up all the dirt on Mr. Trump that the National Enquirer and its parent company had collected on him, dating back to the 1980s, according to several of Mr. Trump’s associates.

The existence of the plan, which was never finalized, has not been reported before. But it was strongly hinted at in a recording that Mr. Cohen’s lawyer released last month of a conversation about payoffs that Mr. Cohen had with Mr. Trump.

“It’s all the stuff — all the stuff, because you never know,” Mr. Cohen said on the recording.

The move by Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen indicated just how concerned they were about all the information amassed by the company, American Media, and its chairman, David Pecker, a loyal Trump ally of two decades who has cooperated with investigators.

It is not clear yet whether the proposed plan to purchase all the information from American Media has attracted the interest of federal prosecutors in New York, who last week obtained a guilty plea from Mr. Cohen over a $130,000 payment to the adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, and a $150,000 payment to a Playboy model, Karen McDougal.

But the prosecutors have provided at least partial immunity to Mr. Pecker, who is a key witness in their inquiry into payments made on behalf of Mr. Trump during the 2016 campaign.

In providing the guilty plea, Mr. Cohen had said the payments to the women came at Mr. Trump’s direction as part of a broader effort to protect his candidacy. The discussed purchase of American Media’s broader cache of Trump information appears to have been part of the same effort.

The people who knew about the discussions would speak about them only on condition of anonymity, given that they are now the potential subject of a federal investigation that did not end with Mr. Cohen’s plea.

Lawyers for Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen declined to comment for this article as did American Media.

It is not known how much of the material on Mr. Trump is still in American Media’s possession or whether American Media destroyed any of it after the campaign. Prosecutors have not said whether they have obtained any of the material beyond that which pertains to Ms. McDougal and Ms. Clifford and the discussions about their arrangements.

For the better part of two decades, Mr. Pecker had ordered his staff at American Media to protect Mr. Trump from troublesome stories, in some cases by buying up stories about him and filing them away.

In 2016, he kept his staff from going back through the old Trump tip and story files that dated to before Mr. Pecker became company chairman in 1999, several former staff members said in interviews with The New York Times.

That meant that American Media, the nation’s largest gossip publisher, did not play a role during the election year in vetting a presidential candidacy — Mr. Trump’s — made for the tabloids.

Mr. Pecker also worked with Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen to buy and bury Ms. McDougal’s story of an affair with Mr. Trump, a practice known as “catch and kill.” Mr. Cohen admitted as much in making his guilty plea last week.

In August 2016, American Media acquired the rights to Ms. McDougal’s story in return for $150,000 and commitments to use its magazines to promote her career as a fitness specialist. But American Media never published her allegations about a relationship with Mr. Trump.

Shortly after American Media completed the arrangement with Ms. McDougal at Mr. Trump’s behest, a troubling question began to nag at Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen, according to several people who knew about the discussions at the time: What would happen to America Media’s sensitive Trump files if Mr. Pecker were to leave the company?

Mr. Cohen, those people said, was hearing rumors that Mr. Pecker might leave American Media for Time magazine — a title Mr. Pecker is known to have dreams of running.

There was perennial talk about American Media’s business troubles. And Mr. Trump appeared to take a world-wearier view of the wisdom of leaving his sensitive personal secrets in someone else’s hands:

“Maybe he gets hit by a truck,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Pecker in a conversation with Mr. Cohen, musing about an unfortunate mishap befalling his good friend.

Mr. Cohen captured that conversation on a recording that his adviser released roughly a month before his guilty plea, which included two counts of campaign finance violations relating to the payments to Ms. Clifford and Ms. McDougal. The recording was given to CNN after Mr. Trump’s main lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, acknowledged its existence to The New York Times.

When The Times first reported that the recording had been discovered by the F.B.I., people close to Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump initially described it in the narrow context of Ms. McDougal’s deal.

But Mr. Cohen, in fact, indicates in the audio that he and Mr. Trump are speaking about an arrangement involving far more.

“I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info, regarding our friend David,” Mr. Cohen says in reference to Mr. Pecker.

The plan got far enough along that Mr. Cohen relays in the recorded conversation that he had discussed paying for all the information from American Media with the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg.

“I’ve spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up,” he says, adding about Mr. Pecker, “We’ll have to pay him something.”

In the end, the deal never came together.

When Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty, prosecutors said in court documents that Mr. Cohen and American Media did enter into a deal in which Mr. Cohen agreed to pay the company $125,000 for the rights to Ms. McDougal’s story.

After the deal was signed but before Mr. Cohen paid, prosecutors said, American Media backed out of the arrangement and warned Mr. Cohen to shred the paperwork (he did not).

Prosecutors said there had been discussions between Mr. Pecker and Mr. Cohen in which Mr. Cohen said American Media would be reimbursed for the payment to Ms. McDougal.

The notoriously frugal Mr. Trump balked at doing so, causing Mr. Pecker anxiety about explaining the payout to his board, according to a person briefed on the discussions. It was unclear whether Mr. Trump ever provided a reimbursement.

Mr. Weisselberg ultimately provided information about Mr. Cohen under a deal that protected him from self-incrimination. As prosecutors continue in their investigation, Mr. Weisselberg could serve as a particularly helpful guide through the Trump Organization’s operations.

Mr. Pecker, whose company is expected to be of continued interest in the investigation, has a similar arrangement with prosecutors. Potentially as worrisome for Mr. Trump and his advisers, Mr. Pecker could be a particularly knowing guide through any other potentially illegal efforts made to protect Mr. Trump’s candidacy from his own less savory exploits.

“The only thing better than a single piece of evidence is multiple pieces of evidence,” said Jeff Tsai, a lawyer now in private practice who, as a Justice Department public integrity section lawyer, had served on the team that prosecuted Senator John Edwards on campaign finance charges in 2012.

He added, “Look to whom the government is reportedly giving immunity to. Those individuals are the ones who would have knowledge about what, if anything, the campaign at the highest, or lowest, or any level in between had on this issue.”

People with knowledge of American Media’s operations, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, described the files on Mr. Trump as mostly older National Enquirer stories about Mr. Trump’s marital woes and lawsuits; related story notes and lists of sensitive sources; some tips about alleged affairs; and minutia, like allegations of unscrupulous golfing.

As The Associated Press reported last week, some of the information was kept in a safe devoted to particularly sensitive material.

Many of the older National Enquirer stories are often not accessible through Google or databases like Nexis.

Several former American Media staff members said that at the very least, the material the company had on Mr. Trump would have put its flagship, The Enquirer, in a prime position to dominate on coverage of Mr. Trump’s scandalous past.

Michael Cohen Pleads Guilty & Implicates Trump as Paul Manafort Is Convicted. Is Impeachment Next?

Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: Talk of the possible impeachment of President Trump is growing in Washington after Tuesday’s stunning legal developments. In New York, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges, including tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations. Two hundred miles away in Virginia, Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort was found guilty of eight charges related to tax and bank fraud, as well as hiding a foreign account.

The Cohen case is likely to put the president in the most legal jeopardy. Michael Cohen worked for Trump from 2006 until this year. He admitted in court he arranged to illegally pay out money to two women—an adult film star and a Playboy model—to keep them from speaking during the 2016 campaign about their affairs with Donald Trump. Cohen said the payments were made, quote, “in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office” and that they were made, quote, “for the principal purpose of influencing the election,” unquote.

Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, wrote on Twitter, “If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?” Davis later appeared on MSNBC and said Cohen is willing to speak with special counsel Robert Mueller about, quote, “a conspiracy to collude” with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. Davis also told The Washington Post Cohen knows about Trump’s participation in a criminal conspiracy to hack into Democratic Party officials’ emails during the 2016 election.

Michael Cohen becomes the fourth former Trump official to plead guilty to criminal charges. He joins former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Trump’s former campaign—deputy campaign manager Rick Gates and former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos. Michael Cohen will be sentenced on December 12th. He’ll likely be sentenced to four to five years in prison.

Meanwhile, in Virginia, a jury convicted Paul Manafort on eight of 18 charges, but the jury could not reach a verdict on the other counts. Sentencing experts expect him to receive a prison term of about 10 years. The Manafort charges stem from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, but the case against Manafort focused on the work he did before he became President Trump’s campaign manager. Manafort was accused of hiding millions of dollars earned in Ukraine in overseas bank accounts and failing to pay taxes on the money. On Tuesday, President Trump briefly spoke with reporters about the Manafort verdict.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I feel badly for both. I must tell you that Paul Manafort is a good man. He was with Ronald Reagan. He was with a lot of different people over the years. And I feel very sad about that. It doesn’t involve me, but I still feel—you know, it’s a very sad thing that happened. This has nothing to do with Russian collusion. This started as Russian collusion. This has absolutely nothing to do—this is a witch hunt, and it’s a disgrace.

AMY GOODMAN: The question now is whether Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort will cooperate with Mueller’s investigation in exchange for lesser sentences. Or will President Trump pardon one or both men? To help answer these questions and more, we’re joined by investigative journalist Marcy Wheeler. She runs the website EmptyWheel.net, joining us from Michigan.

Marcy, welcome to Democracy Now! An epic day yesterday, when two of President Trump’s—well, his closest adviser, fixer, his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, and his former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, both guilty. Talk about the verdicts yesterday.

MARCY WHEELER: Yeah, it’s not often we need a split screen for guilty verdicts. Usually that’s reserved for sporting events. But the Manafort guilty verdicts were pretty much expected, because the case against him was a slam dunk. It was tax fraud. It was some bank fraud.

The charges that the jury was not able to reach a verdict on involved charges where Rick Gates’s testimony was central, so it seems like some people on the jury may not have found him all that credible, and also one charge where—Trump says it didn’t involve him. That’s not actually true. There was one charge where Manafort was trying to get a loan in 2016 from a banker in Chicago and promising him positions once Trump took the White House. And the impression is the jury decided that he was going to get that—Manafort was going to get that loan regardless of what kind of claims he made to the banker. And so, those are the charges that he wasn’t found guilty on.

But they’re both tax cheats. They’re both involved in other crimes. As you emphasized, the very interesting thing for Trump are the two hush money payments involved with the Cohen crime, because, there, he quite clearly said, and the criminal information said—I think it was the 46th word in the criminal information, named—named Trump, basically—didn’t name him by name, but said, you know, the person went on to become president of the United States—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s go—

MARCY WHEELER: —and named him as—

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead.

MARCY WHEELER: Go ahead. And named him as being part of the conspiracy to pay off these women so as to hide these affairs for the election.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to U.S. Deputy Attorney Robert Khuzami announcing the felony charges that Michael Cohen pled guilty to yesterday.

ROBERT KHUZAMI: Today, as you heard, Michael Cohen pled guilty to eight felony charges. Five of those dealt with tax evasion for the years 2012 through 2016, in which he failed to report approximately $4.1 million in reported income. … In addition, Mr. Cohen pled guilty to two campaign finance charges, one for causing an unlawful corporate contribution and a second one for personally making an excessive personal contribution, both for the purpose of influencing the 2016 election. In addition, what he did was he worked to pay money to silence two women who had information that he believed would be detrimental to the 2016 campaign and to the candidate and the campaign. In addition, Mr. Cohen sought reimbursement for that money by submitting invoices to the candidate’s company which were untrue and false.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Marcy Wheeler, this the—really the biggest news. While Paul Manafort was the campaign chair for President Trump, you have Michael Cohen not only saying he committed a crime—he wasn’t even indicted, he just pled guilty yesterday, in a kind of unusual move where this happened all very fast. He not only said he was guilty, but he said that the president was guilty of ordering him to do this.

MARCY WHEELER: Right. In his statement in the courtroom—we don’t get cameras there, so we can’t play it. But in his statement in the courtroom, he was very clear that he did this with the involvement, at the behest of Donald Trump. So, while the Russian investigation is going to name Trump, and technically sort of did in the GRU indictment, it made it clear that he asked for Russia to hack Hillary, and they immediately did. But here, he is named explicitly, so it’s the first time in these wide-ranging legal investigations that he is being named and being accused of committing a crime—to cheat to get elected, basically.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to Michael Cohen’s attorney, Lanny Davis, speaking Tuesday night on MSNBC.

LANNY DAVIS: Mr. Cohen has knowledge on certain subjects that should be of interest to the special counsel, and is more than happy to tell the special counsel all that he knows, not just about the obvious possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election—which the Trump Tower meeting was all about—but also knowledge about the computer crime of hacking and whether or not Mr. Trump knew ahead of time about that crime and even cheered it on. And we know he publicly cheered it on. But did he also have private information?

AMY GOODMAN: Now, that’s Michael Cohen’s attorney, Lanny Davis. Talk about the significance of what he’s saying, and what kind of information he’s offering to Robert Mueller, to Mueller.

MARCY WHEELER: Well, it’s not actually clear. Cohen has been pursuing a cooperation agreement for well over a month, probably a couple of months, and Mueller did not take him up on that, at least as far as has been made public. Clearly, Cohen implicated Trump in the hush payments, but he has not—as part of yesterday’s plea agreement, he has not publicly implicated Trump in any of the Russia-related crimes. So I’m not convinced that this guilty plea is more important than Manafort’s guilty verdicts yesterday, because Trump a long time ago said, “I think I’m OK, so long as Paul Manafort doesn’t flip on me. Paul Manafort is the only one who can really bring me down,” because it is true, or Cohen claims that he knows information about when Trump knew certain things about the hack and leak. But even Omarosa says that she already talked to Mueller’s people about that.
 
So, it’s possible—I mean, several things are possible, Amy. One is that Cohen’s right, and he will go talk to Mueller, and he will get some lesser sentence because he does it. It’s possible that Mueller doesn’t need Cohen’s cooperation, and Mueller wants to indict Cohen for part of the conspiracy, as well. And it’s possible that Mueller just doesn’t want to cooperate with Cohen because he’s been spending so much time talking to the press. We know that he—with George Papadopoulos, for example, as soon as Papadopoulos went to the press, he stopped trying to cooperate with Papadopoulos entirely. So, we don’t actually know.

What we do know is that, according to Trump’s own understanding of the circumstance, for whatever that’s worth, Paul Manafort is the one person who can bring him down. Now, Rick Gates has been cooperating since February, and Rick Gates knew most of what Paul Manafort knew, and Rick Gates is the only one of the many people that you said, that you described as who had already plead, who got a very sweet plea deal. I mean, he got excused from all of the financial crimes that Paul Manafort was found guilty of yesterday, some other ones in D.C. He was excused from some of his own role in the conspiracy with Russia. So, Rick Gates, as far as we know, is the one who’s offering the big cooperation. And that puts both Cohen and Paul Manafort on much shakier grounds if they believe they’re going to get a lesser sentence by cooperating with Mueller.

AMY GOODMAN: And who exactly is Lanny Davis? Which is very interesting. Michael Cohen has chosen him as his lawyer, the former Clinton legal adviser. That’s President Clinton in the 1990s, when he was president.

MARCY WHEELER: Right. But Lanny’s function here is not to be a lawyer. Cohen’s got a different lawyer, who used to work in Southern District of New York. That lawyer was picked because he knows the people who were prosecuting him in New York, and he has the ability, to the extent that it’s possible, to negotiate a plea deal. Lanny Davis’s job is to go on TV and make statements like he did yesterday. That’s really been his function for a long time now. He’s in some ways the Democratic equivalent of Paul Manafort. He’s about press these days, more than he is about lawyering.

But again, I’m not sure that working the press is going to get you a plea deal with Robert Mueller. He has made it very clear he doesn’t want any of this in the press. He doesn’t want to work via the press. He’s been unbelievably good at not leaking anything. And so, hiring a Democratic lawyer to go and appear on TV and make allegations about the president isn’t necessarily going to help Cohen’s legal plight at all.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about Burr and Warner, who are heading up the Senate committee that is investigating Russian interference, saying that this might influence, what Michael Cohen has said, might want to question him? And what this means, Michael Cohen going before Congress?

MARCY WHEELER: Right. So, Cohen already testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee. And there, he said he didn’t know of any prior knowledge of the June 9th meeting. And some of the public statements that he and Lanny Davis have made seem to contradict that. And so, yesterday, the Senate Intelligence Committee, in the wake of this plea deal, basically contacted his lawyers and said, “Does his prior testimony before the committee—does it still hold?” And they’ve threatened to call him back to test the claims that he’s made before.

You know, yeah, I’m a little bit jaded about what Richard Burr is doing here. The investigation, yes, it is credible. Yes, it is bipartisan. There are only seven people investigating it, according to public reports. They’re still working on reviewing what the Intelligence Committee knew by January 2017. So they’re not getting to the guts of whether there really was collusion. So it’s sort of Richard Burr’s job to go and test these claims, and go on TV and claim that there was no collusion, rather than to really get to the core of whether there was or not. And I think that’s more of what’s going on here than really trying to get to the bottom of things. But we will—because the Senate Intelligence Committee already got testimony from Michael Cohen, we will learn quickly whether he’s backing off his prior testimony because of yesterday’s move.

AMY GOODMAN: Right, and might want to get more testimony from him. But I’d like to turn to Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, who said in a statement on Tuesday that the White House is looking increasingly like a criminal enterprise. This is Blumenthal speaking on CNN with Wolf Blitzer last night.

SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: We’re in a Watergate moment, where the two parties have to come together. We need bipartisanship now more than ever, to protect the special counsel and to stop—and I must underscore stop—any consideration of pardons, which undoubtedly will be another—

WOLF BLITZER: President has a right to pardon Paul Manafort, for example, if he wanted to.

SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: He has the power to pardon Paul Manafort, but he would be screaming to the world, “I am guilty.” And he would so undermine the credibility of his office that it would be a disaster for the nation. And it would very possibly be an obstruction of justice, because he would be misusing that power to protect himself as a target of that investigation.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Senator Blumenthal speaking on CNN. Marcy Wheeler, the possibility of pardoning Manafort and Michael Cohen—and/or Michael Cohen?

MARCY WHEELER: Right, and Cohen, this morning, is already out saying he won’t take a pardon, which I doubt, but that’s what he’s saying, or Lanny Davis is saying on TV. Back in January or February, The New York Times actually reported that Trump had preemptively offered both Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort pardons. And a lot of what has happened in the Manafort case, you sort of have to believe that, because yesterday’s verdicts were not a surprise. The case was overwhelming against him. And so it was sort of suicidal for him to go through trial, because his sentence will be much stiffer—I mean, just as a comparison, as you said, he is expected to get at least 10 years, whereas Cohen is going to get five or fewer. Similar kinds of crimes, right? So, for having gone to trial, Manafort is going to get twice the sentence. And so, one of the most logical explanations for that is he’s expecting a pardon.

But because Mueller already knows—in fact, this is one of the questions that he wants to ask Trump, apparently—Mueller already knows that this pardon has been offered preemptively, I think that that would count as obstruction of justice. It’s also not that easy to do well. The last time we were in this kind of situation, George Bush commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence right when he was about to go to prison. And that meant that Libby wasn’t going to prison, but also still retained his Fifth Amendment privilege against testimony. That’s the kind of thing he would have to do with Manafort. And it’s not clear that that would be enough to silence Manafort going forward, because if he pardons Manafort today, then Manafort—depending on how broad the pardon is, then Manafort can be asked to testify, without incriminating himself, on the Russia stuff, which is what Trump has already said is what Manafort is most threatening to him for. So, it’s sort of hard to do. It’s unclear whether he will do—I mean, he’s pardoning everyone anyway, but it’s not clear that that’s going to achieve the objectives that he really wants, which is to skate free of what he himself has done with the conspiracy to win the election—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Marcy—

MARCY WHEELER: —with multiple, now, we can say—

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead. “We can say”?

MARCY WHEELER: Sorry—with multiple conspiracies. I mean, there’s the conspiracy to silence the women and the conspiracy to work with Russia to win the election. So now we can speak in multiple terms.

AMY GOODMAN: Trump’s current personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, said in a statement, “There is no allegation of any wrongdoing against the President in the government’s charges against Mr. Cohen. It is clear that as the prosecutor noted Mr. Cohen’s actions reflect a pattern of lies and dishonesty over a significant period of time.” On Sunday, Giuliani appeared on Meet the Press with Chuck Todd to defend President Trump.

RUDY GIULIANI: What I have to tell you is, look, I’m not going to be rushed into having him testify so that he gets trapped into perjury. And when you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well, that’s so silly, because it’s somebody’s version of the truth, not the truth. He didn’t have a conversation about—

CHUCK TODD: Truth is truth. I don’t mean to go like—

RUDY GIULIANI: No, it isn’t truth. Truth isn’t truth. The president of the United States says, “I didn’t”—

CHUCK TODD: “Truth isn’t truth”? Mr. Mayor, do you realize what—I mean—

RUDY GIULIANI: No, no, no. What—

CHUCK TODD: This is going to become a bad meme.

RUDY GIULIANI: Don’t—don’t do—don’t do—don’t do this to me.

CHUCK TODD: Don’t do “Truth isn’t truth” to me.

RUDY GIULIANI: Donald Trump—Donald Trump says, “I didn’t talk about Flynn with Comey.” Comey says, “You did talk about it.” So tell me what the truth is.

AMY GOODMAN: Rudy Giuliani saying, “Truth is not truth.” But, Marcy Wheeler, I want to go a step further, to this issue of impeachment and what can happen here. We are so close, 11 weeks away from the midterm elections. Also, you know, Brett Kavanaugh, they’re trying to push him through before the election, the possibility of a flipping of the House or the Senate or the House and the Senate. But what about this possibility of impeachment?

MARCY WHEELER: Well, we don’t know. I mean, Rudy Giuliani, both of those clips are him playing games. Neither of those are credible. It’s not clear he even understands the legal risk that the president is under. He really should stop being invited on TV to go and just play with the press, because he’s not providing any news or anything credible. But Mueller knows that. Mueller knows that Rudy is playing games. Mueller knows that Rudy is trying to stall. Mueller knows that Rudy is trying to stall long enough to get Kavanaugh confirmed. And so we don’t know, and Mueller is not telling, what he plans to do in response.

One of the things that was interesting and less newsworthy yesterday is he extended the cooperation, the continuation of Mike Flynn’s sentencing, but only until September 17th, which is shorter than any of the other extensions, continuations. And so that suggests that Mueller has got some things up his sleeve in the next 24 days. And I wouldn’t be so surprised to expect some major moves from Mueller, while Rudy is on TV kind of playing with the press and uttering nonsense. So, we don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m sure Mueller recognizes the risk of the stall games that Rudy and Trump are trying to play. I guess we just wait to see how Mueller is going to respond to that.

AMY GOODMAN: Marcy, before we end, I wanted to ask you about your personal connection to the Mueller probe. Last month, you wrote, quote, “Sometime last year, I went to the FBI and provided information on a person whom I had come to believe had played a significant role in the Russian election attack on the US.” This led you to being a witness in special counsel Mueller’s investigation. Explain.

MARCY WHEELER: Sort of. I went to the FBI about something that was not part of the Mueller investigation. And as I understand it, it subsequently got moved under the Mueller investigation. So, yeah, I’ve got a little bit of insight into things that are not yet public about people unrelated to Trump. I did, in that post, note that the person in question knew what Trump was doing within 15 hours of the polls closing last year—or, in 2016, after the election. But beyond that, I can’t really explain what the person that I went to the FBI about did. It just—it does lead me to believe that there are a lot of things about the Mueller inquiry, or the things that are now under Mueller’s investigation, that people just aren’t aware of in public and that I think will surprise people.

AMY GOODMAN: And did you reveal your sources to him? Explain further what you did explain publicly.

MARCY WHEELER: I went and talked to the FBI about something that I believed this source had done, roles that I believed he had played in the election. And I did that—the way I did it was, in part, an effort to protect my other sources and to protect my readers, because I believed if I had not done that, the FBI would come and start getting call records for everyone who goes to my site. I went to them, and I said, “You can have this, but you can’t—you know, I’m not going to talk to you about any of my other sources or any other journalists or what have you.” So, it was sort of a preemptive effort to stop what I viewed as somebody doing ongoing damage, without impacting my other equities, I guess. So, we’ll see whether I made the right decision, but I—

AMY GOODMAN: So, originally, he was a source, and then you came to be—

MARCY WHEELER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —very concerned about him, and so told the FBI who he was.

MARCY WHEELER: Correct.

AMY GOODMAN: And he, you believe—what was it that he did, that you felt needed to be exposed?

MARCY WHEELER: Yeah, I’m not going to say that. I think it’ll—you know, it’ll become clear in the future. But it was just—it was clear at the time I made the decision to go to the FBI that he was engaged in ongoing serious damage and hurting other people, and hurting innocent people. So I felt like I could not stay silent about that any longer. But I also felt like I couldn’t go to the press. I couldn’t just publish it, because, in my understanding, that would probably exacerbate things. It would lead him to do something unreasonable, and it might lead to increasing the damage rather than decreasing it.

America is slouching toward autocracy

By E.J. Dionne Jr.

Columnist -The Washington Post

 

In their book, “How Democracies Die,” political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write: “How do elected authoritarians shatter the democratic institutions that are supposed to constrain them? Some do it in one fell swoop. But more often the assault on democracy begins slowly. . . . The erosion of democracy takes place piecemeal, often in baby steps.”

Our nation is divided in many ways, and one of the most important chasms involves the question of whether President Trump poses a threat to our constitutional foundations. Is he merely a loud-mouthed demagogue, or is he an autocrat in the making, willing to strike at the underpinnings of republican government?

Those of us fearful that Trump is subverting basic freedoms and the arrangements that sustain them are frequently dismissed as alarmists who fail to recognize the endurance of checks, balances and other circuit-breakers. In this view, asserting that Trump imperils our liberties demonstrates a lack of appreciation for the genius that is the American experiment.

It is certainly true that most of our rights are still intact. We still have free speech and a free press, despite Trump’s assaults on both. After all, I am writing this column, and you are able to read it — and to disagree with it if you wish.

The opposition party, moreover, has a good chance of taking over at least one house of Congress in this fall’s elections. At levels below the Supreme Court, judges have blocked many of Trump’s most egregious actions, among them the separation of immigrant children from their parents.

For all of this, one can be grateful. But it is precisely because citizens of enduring republican democracies easily fall into complacency that Levitsky and Ziblatt’s warnings are so pertinent.

Begin with those much-touted checks and balances. Their health depends — as my colleagues Norman Ornstein, Thomas Mann and I argued in our book, “One Nation After Trump” — on the willingness of those in the legislative and judicial branches to put their institutional loyalties and their stewardship of the system as a whole above their partisan loyalties.

The opposite is happening in the GOP-led Congress. With the exception of a few Republican elected officials at the periphery, Congress has worked to enable Trump’s abuses (witness the behavior of California Republican Rep. Devin Nunes to undercut special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation) and to minimize the outrageousness of his conduct.

When Trump revoked former CIA director John Brennan’s security clearance in retaliation for Brennan’s criticism of him (and, as Trump confessed in a Wall Street Journal interview, because he objected to Brennan doing his job in 2016 by probing connections between Trump’s campaign and Russia), the response from most Republicans was pathetic.

Trump’s actions were an abuse of presidential power far beyond anything Republicans used to complain about bitterly during President Barack Obama’s term. They are aimed directly at intimidating critics and interfering with a legitimate investigation. Where was House Speaker Paul D. 

Ryan on the issue? When Trump first threatened the security clearances of his critics last month, Ryan (R-Wis.) shrugged it off and said Trump was “just trolling people.” We still await a robust response from party leaders now that the president has shown he had more than “trolling” in mind.

And long before Trump ran for office, Republicans were eager to change the rules of the game when doing so served their purposes, as Michael Tomasky argued last week in the Daily Beast. Consider just their aggressive voter-suppression efforts and their willingness to block even a hearing for Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia.

The list of ominous signs goes on and on: Trump invoking Stalin’s phrase “enemies of the people” to describe a free press; the firing, one after another, of public servants who moved to expose potential wrongdoing, starting with then-FBI Director James B. Comey; Trump’s effusive praise of foreign despots; his extravagantly abusive (and often racially charged) language against opponents; and his refusal to abide by traditional practices about disclosing his own potential conflicts of interest and those of his family. Add to this the authoritarian’s habit of institutionalizing lying as a routine aspect of governing, compressed into the astonishing credo Rudolph W. Giuliani blurted out on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday: “Truth isn’t truth.”

This is not business as usual. Yet our politics proceeds as if it is. Slowly, Trump has accustomed us to behavior that, at any other recent time and with just about any other politician, would in all probability have been career-ending.

We know what a military coup looks like. But as Levitsky and Ziblatt note, a slow-motion dismantling of rules, norms and expectations can be more insidious because we don’t even notice what’s happening to us.

Noam Chomsky: U.S. Must Improve Relations with Russia and Challenge the Expansion of NATO

Russian President Vladimir Putin has invited President Trump to Moscow just days after the White House postponed a planned meeting between the two leaders in Washington until after the midterm elections. The invitation to Moscow comes after Trump and Putin met for a summit in Helsinki, Finland, earlier this month. For more about U.S.-Russian relations, we speak with world-renowned political dissident, author, and linguist Noam Chomsky. He is a laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for more than 50 years.

Transcript:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has invited President Trump to Moscow just days after the White House postponed a planned summit between the two leaders in Washington until after the midterm elections. To talk more about U.S.-Russian relations and much more, we’re spending the hour with the world-renowned political dissident, author and linguist, Noam Chomsky. He is now laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for more than 50 years. His recent books include Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy and Requiem for the American Dream: the Ten Principles of Concentration of Wealth and Power. He joined us from Tucson, Arizona, last week. I asked him about the recent Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki and played for him a short pinwheel of U.S. media coverage of the summit.

ANDERSON COOPER: You have been watching perhaps one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president at a summit in front of a Russian leader, certainly that I’ve ever seen.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: All of you who are watching today will be able to tell your friends, family, your children, your grandchildren, you were watching a moment of history. It may not be for the right reasons.

NORAH O’DONNELL: This Helsinki summit was one for the history books. President Trump’s refusal to challenge the Russian strongman drew widespread condemnation from members of his own party and administration. The summit that might have been about U.S. condemnation instead ended with President Putin giving President Trump a soccer ball from the World Cup and Mr. Trump handing Putin a gift of absolution.

AMY GOODMAN: So that was CBS’s Norah O’Donnell, George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, and CNN’s Anderson Cooper reporting after the July 16th joint press conference with Trump and Putin. I asked Noam Chomsky for his response to the Helsinki summit.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Trump has basically one principle: me first. That’s almost all of his policies, and wild statements and so on are perfectly well explicable within—under the assumption that that’s what’s driving him. Now, that—crucially, for him, he has to ensure that the Mueller investigation is discredited. Whatever they come up with, if it implicates him in any way, the way the media and political culture function, that will be considered of enormous significance, much more significance than his pursuing policies on the environment which may destroy human civilization. But given that, those highly skewed circumstances, he has to make sure that the Mueller investigation is discredited. And that was the main core part of his interview with Trump. Putting aside the way he behaved—you know, the soccer ball, which apparently had a listening device embedded in it and so on—yes, that was strange and unpleasant and so on.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, actually, that World—that soccer ball, that particular ball has that little device in it, and that’s how it’s sold. It was a World Cup soccer ball, and that’s what it—that’s one of its attributes that people like, that they can put their iPhone next to it and get information.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, well, Putin was plainly treating Trump, more or less, with contempt, so whatever you think about that. Nevertheless, his main concern was pretty obvious, and that was the central part of the Putin-Trump interviews. And so, yeah, I think—I just don’t see the great significance of his acting in a silly and childish way in an interview. OK, let’s—he did. Now let’s go to the important issues which are not being discussed. The issue of improving relations with Russia is of overwhelming significance as compared with the remarks saying, “Well, I don’t know whether to trust my own intelligence agencies.” Saying that for perfectly obvious reasons: to discredit the Mueller investigation and to ensure that his fervently loyal base stays supportive. That’s not an attractive policy, but we can understand very easily what he’s doing.

AMY GOODMAN: Those intelligence agencies—former CIA Director John Brennan tweeted, “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of 'high crimes & misdemeanors.' It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???” Again, the former CIA Director John Brennan’s tweet. Noam?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, his remarks were certainly incorrect. Whatever you think of Trump’s behavior, it has nothing to do with high crimes and misdemeanors or treason. That’s just not true. But again, the same point I’ve been trying to make throughout—we are focusing on issues of minor significance and putting aside problems of enormous importance and significance, whether we’re thinking of how to deal with immigration or whether we’re dealing with the question of survival of organized human life on Earth. Those are the topics we should be thinking about, not whether Trump misbehaved in a press conference.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, I wanted to ask you about NATO. President Trump has questioned a key provision of the NATO military alliance, the mutual defense of NATO member countries. He made this remark during an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson. He made his remarks during an interview with Tucker Carlson just a week ago.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack? Why is that…?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I understand what you’re saying. I’ve asked the same question. Montenegro is a tiny country with very strong people.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I’m not against Mont…or Albania.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No. By the way, they’re very strong people. They’re very aggressive people. They may get aggressive, and congratulations, you’re in World War III.

AMY GOODMAN: There is President Trump questioning the whole idea of NATO. Well, if you could specifically address this. Interesting he chose Montenegro, where, well, many months ago, when he was with the G7, the G8, he pushed aside the prime minister of Montenegro. But the bigger point about—well, he wasn’t making this point, but I’d like to ask you—about whether you feel NATO should exist.

NOAM CHOMSKY: That’s the crucial question, not whether Trump made an ugly and demeaning comment about a tiny country. But what is NATO for? From the beginning, from its origins, we had drilled into our heads that the purpose of NATO was to defend us from the Russian hordes. We can put aside for the moment the question whether that was accurate. But in any event, that was the dominant theme, overwhelming, in fact, unique theme. OK, 1991, no more Russian hordes. So, the question is: Why NATO?

Well, what happened was very interesting. There were negotiations between George Bush, the first; James Baker, secretary of state; Mikhail Gorbachev; Genscher and Kohl, the Germans, on how to deal with the—this was after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev made an astonishing concession. Astonishing. He agreed to allow Germany, now unified, to join NATO, a hostile military alliance. Just look at the history of the preceding years. Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia, at an extraordinary cost, several times during the preceding century. But he agreed to allow Germany to—a rearmed Germany to join NATO, a military alliance that was set up to counter Russia. There was a quid pro quo, namely that NATO not—meaning NATO means basically U.S. forces—not expand to East Berlin, to East Germany. Nobody talked about anything beyond that. Baker and Bush verbally agreed to that. They didn’t put it in writing, but they essentially said, “Yeah, we will”—in fact, the phrase that was used was “not one inch to the east.” Well, what happened? NATO immediately moved to East Germany.
Under Clinton, other countries, former Russian satellites, were introduced into NATO. Finally, NATO went so far, as I mentioned before, 2008, again in 2013, to suggest that even Ukraine, right at the heartland of Russian strategic concerns—any Russian president, no matter who it was, any Russian leader—that they join NATO.

So, what’s NATO doing altogether? Well, actually, its mission was changed. The official mission of NATO was changed to become to be—to control and safeguard the global energy system, sea lanes, pipelines and so on. And, of course, on the side, it’s acting as an intervention force for the United States. Is that a legitimate reason for us to maintain NATO, to be an instrument for U.S. global domination? I think that’s a rather serious question. That’s not the question that’s asked. The question that’s asked is whether NATO made—whether Trump made some demeaning comment about Montenegro. It’s another example of what I was talking about before: the focus of the media and the political class, and the intellectual community in general, on marginalia, overlooking critical and crucial issues, issues which do literally have to do with human survival.

Trump’s Crony Capitalists Plot a New Heist

The Treasury secretary floats a plan to hand $100 billion in capital gains tax savings to his moneyed friends. It’s almost certainly illegal. 

By The Editorial Board

It seems that last year’s $1.5 trillion tax-cut package, despite heavily favoring affluent investors and corporate titans over workers of modest means, was insufficiently generous to the wealthy to satisfy certain members of the Trump administration. So now Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin offers an exciting plan to award an additional $100 billion tax cut to the richest Americans. 

Specifically, Mr. Mnuchin has directed his department to explore allowing investors to take inflation into account when calculating their capital gains tax bill. (Instead of determining how much value a stock had gained by subtracting its selling price from its original purchase price, investors would first adjust the purchase price to reflect what it would be in inflation-adjusted dollars.) Fans of the move argue that it would benefit the wide swath of middle-class Americans who own stocks, along with all those older Americans whose homes have appreciated in value over the decades. And, indeed, many middle-class Americans could wind up with a sliver of savings. But not all investors are equal. 

Independent analyses say that a whopping 97 percent of the savings from Mr. Mnuchin’s plan would go to the highest 10 percent of income earners. (For the severely math challenged, that would leave a paltry 3 percent to be divvied up by the remaining 90 percent of the country.) Two-thirds of all savings would go to the top 0.1 percent of income earners.

 

So in rough dollar terms, the administration is looking to hand $66 billion-plus to the ultrarich like — just to name a few — Mr. Mnuchin, who did very, very well during his years at Goldman Sachs (and already has a net worth estimated at $252 million); Wilbur Ross, the loaded secretary of commerce (estimated net worth: $506.5 million); Betsy DeVos, the even richer secretary of education (about $1.1 billion); and, of course, the extended Trump-Kushner clan. (To be sure, Ivanka Trump could use a financial pick-me-up to help take the sting out of having to close down her clothing brand.)

Thus die the final vestiges of this president’s pretty little narrative about being a populist hero. 

Hard-core economic conservatives and anti-tax activists have long pushed to index capital gains taxes for inflation under the dubious argument that it would bolster the overall economy. Unsurprisingly, this crusade has failed to catch fire in Congress, where even anti-tax lawmakers can be skittish about so blatantly playing to the plutocrats.

But here’s where Mr. Mnuchin’s plan is so politically inspired. He hopes to cut Congress out of this deal altogether by declaring it a regulatory matter and allowing Treasury to unilaterally redefine the term “cost.” No need to subject this process to the messiness of the legislative process when it is so much more efficient to claim jurisdiction for oneself and change the meaning of words to suit one’s purpose. Behold Trumpian logic at its purest. 

One potential sticking point is that Mr. Mnuchin’s proposal may not be, strictly speaking, legal. Congress has never authorized the Treasury Department to interpret tax law in the bizarre way the secretary is advocating. And the last time such a possibility was floated, in 1992, President George Bush’s Justice Department shot it down with extreme prejudice. The department’s Office of Legal Counsel went so far as to issue a 23-page opinion laying out in excruciating detail why the Treasury Department does not have the legal authority to index capital gains for inflation by means of regulation. 

So there’s that.

But the Trump administration isn’t one to fret about legal niceties when pursuing its pet projects. It much prefers to plow forward and let the court challenges shake out as they will. You win some. (Think travel ban, eventually, after multiple revisions.) You lose some. (Snatching migrant kids from their families at the border.) But as the adage goes, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. 

Mr. Mnuchin may well figure that the risk is worth the potential gain for himself, his wealthy friends and, more broadly, members of the Republican Party’s donor class who might very well show their gratitude by channeling some of their tax savings into party coffers. Besides, a case like this could take a while to wend its way through the courts, and who knows how many millions could be saved in the meantime. 

Beyond pure greed and a desire to suck up to the 0.1 percent, it’s hard to see any real-world logic behind this move. As political messaging goes, it seems flat-out bonkers to position Republicans as the party of the superrich — especially during a critical midterm election campaign with control of both houses of Congress on the line.

But at this point, President Trump may have decided that it doesn’t much matter what economic policies he pursues so long as he can keep the base distracted and fired up with his relentless culture warring. (Build the wall! Lock her up! Gorsuch! Kavanaugh! Stand for the anthem or be fired!) In early 2016, candidate Trump famously boasted that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any voters. Since becoming president, he has been given little cause by his base — or by Republicans in Congress — to doubt his political infallibility. As such, with Mr. Mnuchin’s proposal, as with so many other moves undertaken by this administration, Mr. Trump’s thinking may boil down to little more than, “Why the heck not?” 

This may strike some as a depressingly cynical reading of what is being proposed. What, you thought their motives were pure?