A corruption hat trick in the investigation closing in on Trump.
Plus, the Senate blocks a judicial nominee too racist even for Jeff Flake, Americans are dying younger, and the Democratic civil war that never was.
Another day, another game-changing development in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and their potential conspiracy with Donald Trump’s campaign. Trump’s former fixer and personal attorney Michael Cohen has pleaded guilty for lying in his August 2017 letter to the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. This brings the total number of Trump associates who have pleaded guilty to Mueller up to five. There are three lies in Cohen’s plea, all of which pertain to the Trump Tower Moscow deal (referred to as The Moscow Project) that Cohen worked on with Trump’s Russia-connected associate, and former FBI informant, Felix Sater.
In his letter to Congress, Cohen said the Trump Tower deal ended in January of 2016 and it was not discussed with other members of the Trump Organization. In his plea, Cohen is now confirming that not only was the deal still in the works in June 2016 (same month as the Trump Tower meeting), but it was discussed with “Individual 1” (Trump) and his family members. Cohen also originally wrote to congressional investigators that he never agreed to travel to Russia and never considered asking Trump to travel with him. Cohen is now confirming that not only did he agree to travel, but there was also an effort for Trump to travel and set up a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin around the time of the Republican National Convention. The final lie was that Cohen never got a response from the Russian government about The Moscow Project. Turns out, Cohen received a response from the Press Secretary for President Putin.
The court documents outline the hard evidence, including emails, that paint the picture of what transpired. The timeline also confirms Buzzfeed’s original report that indicated Sater and Cohen were still discussing the deal into June 2016. Buzzfeed is now reporting, sourced by Felix Sater, that the Trump Organization also planned to give Putin a $50 million penthouse at the proposed Trump Tower Moscow. It’s important to note that Trump has been eager to obtain a Trump Tower Moscow deal for years and has a history of alleged money laundering for Russian oligarchs. All this news comes after Cohen’s August 2018 guilty plea as part of the criminal investigation being conducted by federal investigators in the Southern District of New York (SDNY). That probe led to President Trump becoming an unindicted co-conspirator in two campaign finance violations for his hush money payments to Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels.
The Cohen plea appears to have caused President Trump to cancel all his bilateral meetings in the upcoming G20 summit, including his planned meeting with President Putin.
2.
That wasn’t the only news on Trump’s mind on Thursday morning. Deutsche Bank (DB) was raided in a money laundering investigation in Germany sparked by the Panama Papers. One of the components of the probe involves an investigation into whether or not DB helped clients set up offshore accounts for illegal activity. We don’t know if it’s related, but it’s important to note Trump’s company owes Deutsche Bank $364 million and Kushner’s company owes Deutsche Bank $285 million.
Also, the FBI ordered a raid of Ed Burke, a Chicago attorney who also happened to be Trump’s attorney for 12 years. There are minimal details as to what the raid was about.
If you want to get caught up on the developments surrounding Trump’s former Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone’s apparent Wikileaks back channel source Jerome Corsi, read our article from Wednesday.
3.
The nomination of Thomas Farr for district judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina has been killed in the Senate today. Farr had a history as an architect of voter suppression in North Carolina going back decades, most notably working for a Republican campaign in the eighties that sent postcards to black voters warning them of arrests at the polls. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republican Senator, was the deciding no vote. Jeff Flake also opposed Farr’s nomination, both on the merits and because of his Mueller protection bill protest.
This comes as positive news for those who prefer their judges not to suppress minority votes. However, it should be noted that this is merely a drop in the bucket. Unlike most of his other duties, President Trump has been incredibly efficient when it comes to nominating judges and getting them approved by the Republican-controlled US Senate. He has secured confirmations for 84 federal judges during his time in office (not including the two Supreme Court appointments), one of the highest counts for a president at this point in their term. This process could be ramped up even more now that Republicans have even more seats in the Senate.
Many of the judges appointed or waiting to be appointed have similar CVs to Thomas Farr. Since these appointments are for life, these judges could have an impact on American politics far beyond Trump’s term in office. They could rule in favor of conservative stances on a variety of issues, including abortion rights, fair voting measures, LGBTQI rights, and many others. Make sure you remind your “too woke to vote” friends about that for the next elections.
4.
US life expectancy has decreased for the second time in three years, to 78.6 years in 2017, according to the CDC. While the drop was only recorded as about 0.1 years from the years before, it is still a significant negative trend. The last time the average American lifespan decreased that drastically was between 1915–1918 when the US was dealing with WWI and a Spanish flu epidemic.
The biggest cause for the drop was attributed to increases in deaths from opioids and suicide, which have increased more than fourfold and threefold over the last twenty years, respectively. Opioid deaths have seen a 45 percent increase from 2016 to 2017 alone due to the spread fo the drug fentanyl. This is particularly troubling, as many of those deaths were young adults.
The CDC reports underpin the overall dismal record of the US healthcare system as a whole. The US’ life expectancy is last among rich countries, comparable to eastern European countries like Albania rather than world leaders like Japan (84 years.) Where the US does lead is in the prevalence of conditions such as obesity, which are primary risk factors for other causes of death such as heart disease and stroke. Even if they do not cause death, such factors increase the number of years Americans live in morbidity or disability, often due to conditions such as diabetes.
The burdens of death and disease are also not spread evenly but vary among a variety of socioeconomic and geographical factors. For example, opioid deaths are concentrated in the New England and Rust Belt regions, while deaths from suicide disproportionately affect the swathe of western states from Montana to New Mexico. Politics plays a role too; the states with the largest death rates are all red states with Republican governments who have blocked progress on healthcare provision for generations.
Race plays a huge factor too, as minorities suffer greater rates of death and disease from most conditions. Nowhere is this starker than in the case of maternal mortality. The US has the highest maternal mortality of any rich country and is the only industrialized nation where this rate is increasing. The majority of maternal deaths are black women, who are three to four times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related complication than white women. Maternal mortality rates for white women are closer to those of women in New Zealand; while for black women, they closer to those in Malaysia.
These trends should alarm and disturb Americans, yet generally take second stage, even in the wider healthcare debate. Lost in the main healthcare conversations of our day- for or against the ACA, the pros and cons of “Medicaid for All” etc.- is the wider realization that this country has treated healthcare as a badly allocated commodity instead of a primary public good and fundamental human right. This change in thinking must take root in the American populace if the average citizen is ever to live a longer and healthier life.
5.
Nancy Pelosi secured the Democratic nomination for speakership yesterday, ahead of the full vote in January. 32 Democrats voted against her, however, and the MSM would really like you to think that this means there is a Democratic civil war brewing. We’re here to tell you that’s a bunch of malarkey.
The biggest reason the notion of infighting in the Democratic Party is nonsensical is that there has been no one that has emerged to challenge Pelosi. It is hard to have a leadership standoff when the other side is nonexistent. The Democrats who voted against did so in a secret ballot, and will probably not endeavor to publicly jeopardize the party in a full vote.
It is true that some incoming Democrats ran on a platform opposing Pelosi as Speaker (more than a few of them probably account for the no votes this week.) Pelosi is also not without her flaws. She bears at least some of the responsibility for the loss of seats in Congress between 2010–2016. One of the reasons no one has been capable of challenging her is that she, willingly or not, has failed to cultivate young leaders in a party dependent on young voters. Pelosi has still not corrected this; she has not placed a single member of the newly incoming Democrats in a top leadership position, and one must reach all down to Hakeem Jeffries at №5 on the totem pole to find a top Democrat elected this decade.
Despite all that, Pelosi is unquestionably the right woman for the top job, at least for the time being. She is a deft fundraiser, a skillful politician, and a proven legislator. Her record as Speaker will go down as one of the most accomplished in American history. She has proven this even in the face of the party’s recent “insurrection”, negotiating with would-be defectors on a few rule changes that would make it easier for individual members to advance legislation. In the face of all the challenges that Trump and the GOP bring, Pelosi’s steady hand is much needed to counter them.
