if and when the American Kennel Club gets around to assigning a new breed for dogs that resemble President Donald Trump—portly with short paws and a chow chow mane of Clorox blond?—it should not neglect to single out the breed’s primary behavioral trait: Trump is what dog handlers would call a “fear-biter,” not a naturally fierce or aggressive hound, but one that snaps and chomps when frightened.
A panicky and snarling Trump toothed his way down to bone this week, even burning chief strategist Steve Bannon in a Farewell Friday pyre. Trump’s ostensible topic of the week was white supremacists, with whom he threw in at a news conference and via a tweet triptych. But the intensity of his fury could not be easily explained. Who could have known he felt this strongly about Southern “heritage” beyond the casual racism he drools from time-to-time? As with canine rage, Trump’s fulmination was probably a matter of transference, with some other trauma setting him off. You’d be swamped with generalized wrath, too, if Congress and special counsel Robert Mueller were slithering through your prodigious paper trail as they are Trump’s.
Mueller’s people called on the White House, the New York Times reported on Sunday, about setting up interviews with current and former administration officials to chat about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Mueller wants notes, transcripts, documents, and other markers of meetings hosted inside the Trump kennel. “Among the matters Mr. Mueller wants to ask the officials about is President Trump’s decision in May to fire the FBI director, James B. Comey,” the paper stated, as it pursues its obstruction of justice angle. Of special interest to Mueller: Fired chief of staff Reince Priebus. He appears to have met with former campaign director Paul Manafort on the same June 2016 day Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner met with all of those Russians to inspect allegedly incriminating evidence against Hillary Clinton.
Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti intuited the greater meaning of Mueller’s interview request in a Tweetstorm, and it indicates that the investigation has reached ramming speed: “It means that Mueller has already acquired all of the documents he believes he needs to question White House staffers. He wouldn’t want to interview them before gathering evidence because he wants to know exactly what questions to ask and be able to confront them with documents if they contradict what he’s being told.”
Journalists like to call evidential stacks of paper “paper trails.” In Trump’s case, the records of business transactions better resemble a paper superhighway. In the August 21 New Yorker, Adam Davidson published his roadmap to just one sliver of Trump’s financial history. As the Mueller dragnet sweeps through Trump’s shady business arrangements, real-estate deals with partners in former Soviet Georgia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, and other places, the special counsel has a good chance of snagging on money-laundering operations, Davidson asserts. One deal in Georgia, which earned Trump a reported million dollars, “involved unorthodox financial practices that several experts described to me as ‘red flags’ for bank fraud and money laundering,” he writes, and “intertwined his company with a Kazakh oligarch who has direct links to Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin.”
Trump can’t plead that he knew nothing about crooked money, if it comes to that. As retired IRS special agent John Madinger puts it to Davidson, if you’re part of a deal you must perform due diligence on the source of your money. “You have to care—otherwise, you’re at risk of violating laws against money laundering,” Madinger says.
It’s easier than playing fetch with puppies to connect Trump’s assessment of the “very fine people” advocating white supremacy at Charlottesville and the ease with which he’s done real-estate deal with dodgy people both in Manhattan and overseas. It speaks to the ethical blind spots—a self-inflicted blindness, I should add—that run through everything he touches. At one time or another, we all look the other way when we shouldn’t. Does Trump look away every time?
One must be mindful of who they do business with. They must also be mindful of who works for them. In the early days of the Trump campaign, George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy wonk of exceeding greenness volunteered his service to Trump. He repeatedly tried to arrange meetings between the campaign and Russian leaders, as the Washington Post, which had “internal emails read” to it, reported. Papadopoulos’ campaign elders kept slapping his invitations down, but his persistence poses the question of whether the Russians had deployed low-level Trump aides to “penetrate” his campaign. It was only three months after Papadopoulos tried to broker a Trump-Putin meeting that Junior, Manafort and Kushner met with the Russians, as the paper notes.
Were Russians running Papadopoulos? If so, what were they up to? “I think they were doing very basic intelligence work,” retired CIA officer Steven L. Hall told the Post. “Who’s out there? Who’s willing to play ball? And how can we use them?”
Worming his way into the Russia interference story this week was Julian Assange, profiled at length in the New Yorker by Raffi Khatchadourian, and attempting some sort of handoff of “new information” to Representative Dana Rohrabacher, the California Republican known as one of Congress’ most pro-Russia members. Assange has long insisted that the hacks of Democratic National Committee emails, which his WikiLeaks organization published, were not provided by the Russians, not even through a cutout. At the same time, his efforts have earned him the status of a Russian intelligence asset in Washington—a “non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” as CIA Director Mike Pompeo has said.
Khatchadourian concludes that the Podesta emails, liberated in a separate hack and published by WikiLeaks, “only make the connections between WikiLeaks and Russia appear stronger.” If remotely true, this presumably puts Assange on Mueller’s list as an interview subject as well as a suspect in the criminal hacking of the DNC. Trump has distanced himself from WikiLeaks, but we know it makes his heart beat. In the final two months of the campaign, he lavished love on the organization, mentioning it by name 124 times.