Month: March 2018

During the past several weeks we’ve watched mushrooming legal disputes involving Trump and a number of women that he either had affairs with or defamed.

You can’t make it up.

First there was the affair with the porn movie actress, Stormy Daniels.

Next came the affair with a Playboy centerfold and model named Karen McDougal.

This week, a New York State court ruled that a defamation action brought by a woman named, Summer Zervos, a former contestant on Trump’s reality television show, The Apprentice.

The facts underlying each of these disputes are fairly straight forward.

It is the legal machinations involving them that make them interesting.

In the Daniels case, she alleges that she had an affair with Trump in 2006.

She contends that Trump wined, dined and promised her an apartment and a place on the Apprentice.

In the Daniels case it appears that within days of the 2016 election, Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, arranged a payoff to Daniels in the amount of $ 130,000 to keep her quiet.

Cohen went to the trouble of forming a Delaware Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) whose sole purpose, it appears, was to serve as a vehicle to launder the payoff money through.

In exchange for the payoff, Daniels had to sign a Non- Disclosure Agreement (NDA) in which she had to refrain from ever discussing her relationship with Trump or providing any details about the affair including photographs and paternity information.

The agreement that was prepared by Cohen had an alias for Trump and an alias for Daniels which each was supposed to sign.

It was apparently signed by Daniels using the alias but not Trump, which has led Daniels to declare that it isn’t valid.

Cohen, moreover, claims that the money used to pay off Daniels came from Cohen’s home equity loan, not from Trump or the Trump Organization and that Trump had no involvement in the negotiations.

If that scenario is true, Cohen could find himself facing disciplinary proceedings in New York for ethical canon violations.

On top of that, the money paid could be viewed as an undisclosed and illegal campaign contribution designed to effect the outcome of the election since it came so close to the 2016 Election Day.

Trump’s attorney, Cohen, has attempted to drag the dispute into arbitration which would get it behind closed doors and out of the public’s view.

In doing so, he removed Daniel’s lawsuit from California State court to the Federal court there.

In order to do so, he had to file an affidavit from Trump revealing that he is the party in the case, which would seem to put an end to trump’s claim that he was not involved with Daniels and not the party to the NDA.

If the point was to shield Trump from this controversy, Cohen hasn’t accomplished much.

What makes the matter screwier is that Daniels gave an interview to a magazine years ago in which she disclosed her affair with Trump in some detail.

Last night, Daniels gave an interview to 60 Minutes in which she disclosed that she had a single sexual encounter with Trump.

Considering Trump’s history it seemed like an underwhelming revelation.

Thus the question becomes what is there currently to hide?

The legal wrangling in the Karen McDougal case is just as strange.

McDougal claims that she had an affair with Trump at about the same time as Daniels and that he made many of the same promises to her that he made to Daniels, an apartment, gifts etc.

In May 2016 during the election campaign, the affair was reported on social media and she decided to sell it to America Media Inc. (AMI) for $ 150,000.

AMI is the publisher of that journalistic gem, the National Enquirer.

Once AMI acquired the exclusive right the story, it promptly buried it, a practice known as “catch and kill.”

Why would AMI and more pointedly the National Enquirer spend $ 150,000 to bury the story?

It turns out that AMI’s chief executive, David J. Pecker, is a friend of Trump’s.

AMI contends it killed the story because it couldn’t verify some of McDougal’s claims after consulting with none other than Michael Cohen, Trump’s attorney.

Sumner Zervos, a contestant on Trump’s reality television show The Apprentice, is one of the ten women who came forward during the campaign to report that Trump had sexually harassing her.

Trump, it will be remembered, declared that all of the women were liars and would be sued after the election.

While Trump hasn’t sued any of the women, Zervos has sued Trump for calling her a liar.
Trump’s lawyers lost a round in New York State Supreme Court where they tried to argue that Trump was immune from the lawsuit because he was President of the United States.

Alternatively, they argued that the lawsuit should be postponed until after Trump left office.

Their objections were bizarre since their client had brought none other than Paula Jones to the Clinton-Trump debate in 2016.

Jones was the litigant who successfully brought an action against President Bill Clinton for sexually harassing her while he served as Governor of Arkansas before he was President.

The Supreme Court ruled that Clinton was not immune from being sued for something that occurred before he was President and that defending the lawsuit, while he was President was not unduly burdensome.

While being deposed by Jones’s lawyers, Clinton lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky and, as they say, the rest is history.

This past week a lawyer for the woman accusing failed Alabama Senate candidate of pedophilia came forward to report that two Moore supporters offered him $ 10,000 to drop the woman as a client and declare that he didn’t believe her.

In addition to the money he would be introduced to Steve Bannon.

One circus leaves and another one comes.

I have a confession to make.

Winter weather, snow, follows me.

Fortunately, it doesn’t happen in the summer months but it is pretty much a constant when winter begins.

This past February, I drove to Florida.

A friend let Terri and I use her condominium for the months of February and March and we, gladly, took her up on the offer.

The plan was for me to drive down with all of our clothes and Terri would fly a few days later.

I don’t fly anywhere that I can drive since having a knee replacement a little over ten years ago.

It wasn’t the marathons and road races that did me in or even the sixty or so miles I ran each week.

No, like a moron, I took up skiing at the age of forty-nine.

During my second season, I fell, got up the wrong way and that was the end of my right medial meniscus.

I went bone on bone for another ten years until I couldn’t stand it anymore and had the knee replaced.

Now, if I go to the airport, I set off the metal detector and TSA assumes they have found the second coming of Osama Bin-Laden.

The friendly skies of United aren’t that friendly anymore, so I drive.

I snuck out of town on the 1st of February and winter didn’t notice because a Nor’easter hit after I was gone.

Poor Terri was faced with plowing out several times a day just to get to the barn to feed her menagerie.

When I arrived in Florida, the weather was beautiful and warm but, as usually happens, the temperatures got cooler there and the snow stopped here as the temperatures started to climb.

This is not some paranoid weather fantasy, I have a proven track record.

A number of years ago, Terri decided that we would get away from the winter and made travel plans for us to visit New Mexico.

It was pleasant when we arrived in Albuquerque, much cooler when we made it to Santa Fe and we arrived in Taos in time for a snow storm.

A couple years later, I proposed renting a place in Florida for a couple of weeks.

Terri is not a big fan of Florida since she lived there for a year and found it too flat, hot and humid. My entreaties that it would be different in the winter fell on deaf ears.

“Can’t you find another warm weather destination?” she asked me.

The light went on in my head. I am a graduate of the University of Tennessee and I recalled how my friends raved about the Gulf Coast of Mississippi.

I rented a beach house on the Gulf just outside Ocean City, Mississippi a few miles from Gulf Port.

When you walked out the front door, you were feet from the Gulf water.

We were there two days, when it snowed.

We were told that it was the first time it had snowed on the Gulf Coast in one-hundred and seventy-five years.

Of course it was.

In the aftermath of that experience, I have toyed with the idea of visiting Hawaii or Cuba to see if it will snow there.

I have since vacationed in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and Asheville, North Carolina in March where the snow dutifully arrives during my stay. It’s not much but there is always some.

Not long after I arrived in Florida, the temperatures started to cool.

It seemed imperceptible to me but the natives remarked how unusual it was.

Terri arrived a week after me and we had a great time.

She flew home after ten days and the plan was for her to come back in the middle of March.

The day after she left, my daughter, Kate, and her husband, Ben, arrived for five days.

We had a lot of fun, went to the beach, took a dolphin cruise and ate out every night.

The weather was pleasant but it was still too cold to swim in the ocean.

You’re probably wondering did it snow.

It didn’t.

After Terri returned home, she discovered our two old dogs missed her so much that she couldn’t bring herself to leave them in March.

A week later Kate and Ben left, I decided to cut my stay in Florida short and return home.

Florida was fun but I missed Terri.

I took three days to drive home and the weather got progressively cooler.

I saw my first snow in southern Pennsylvania.

A day after I arrived home we had another Nor’easter.

They are forecasting another for next week.

Yes, I brought it with me.

If you are sick and tired of it, I have a suggestion.

Start a Go Fund Me page and I’ll go wherever you send me until spring.

This past week, the trial of Joseph Percoco and two others, in New York City continued with jury deliberations after almost seven weeks of testimony.

The trial revealed the all too common pay to play system that has come to embody Albany involving bribes and extortion that play an integral role in the awarding of lucrative contracts for economic development projects and public improvements.

It opened a window into the way contractors and developers obtain access to the public officials and their appointees who have the power to reward contributors to their political campaigns.

In this case, the two developers that are charged with Percoco, during the past decade, contributed over five hundred thousand dollars to the Governor, state legislators and local public officials that are influential and instrumental in awarding these contracts.

While the contributions were apparently legal and don’t constitute the bribes charged in the indictment, the way in which they were made should draw some scrutiny and reforms to eliminate the mechanism that allowed them to go unscrutinized.

At the heart of the case is a disgraced lobbyist named Todd Howe.

Howe pled guilty to eight felonies in connection with the charges in the indictment and agreed to cooperate with the government and testify about the acts charged in the indictment in exchange for leniency.

It hasn’t helped his credibility that he got arrested in the middle of his trial testimony, after it was revealed that he broke the terms of his plea agreement, which required him to commit no further crimes. He attempting to defraud his credit card company during a trip to New York City to meet with government prosecutors to prepare for trial.

Howe advised the developers to make their contributions through a Limited Liability Corporation (LLCs) that did not contain the company name so that no connection would be apparent between the developers’ contributions and the contracts awarded to them by virtue of their “preferred developer” status.

In the midst of all of this testimony, it was disclosed that Cuomo, who has always claimed to champion closing the LLC loophole, that allows contributors to skirt the limits on individual contributions, additionally accepted $ 2.2 million dollars from state appointees in violation of an executive order barring this practice.

The order was first promulgated by Eliot Spitzer at the beginning of his Administration and was renewed by Governor David Paterson and Cuomo, himself, at the start of his first term as Governor.

When this issue was raised with the Cuomo Administration, they tried to re-interpret the order by saying that it only prohibited donations from state employees that could be fired by the governor.

When that explanation didn’t “play in Peoria” as John Ehrlichman like to say, they offered a new interpretation, claiming that it only applied to employees who had to file disclosure forms with the Joint Commission on Public Ethics.

Observers and critics have pointed out that this requirement is not mentioned anywhere in the executive order.

Cuomo is sitting on a re-election campaign fund that exceeds $ 30 million dollars.

Cuomo’s determination to retain these contributions is tone deaf at best and arrogant at worst, since this disclosure comes during the first of two trials of a bribery and extortion scheme that reaches to the highest level of his Administration.

Joseph Percoco, the lead defendant in the current corruption trial is Cuomo’s closest confidant, whom he described as “Mario Cuomo’s third son.”

Testimony in the trial also revealed that Percoco retained and utilized his state office adjacent to Cuomo’s despite having left state service to run Cuomo’s 2014 re-election campaign.

Both of them apparently ignored a prohibition on utilizing state government resources for political purposes.

The New York Times, The Daily News and other newspapers have been highly critical of Cuomo’s shifting two-step as he tries to justify his questionable fundraising practices against the back drop of the first of the corruption trials.

When it was revealed that Howe had pled guilty to multiple felonies and was cooperating with the government, Cuomo tried to distance himself from him, claiming they weren’t friends and did not have a close relationship.

Like his tortured accounting of the executive order, history belied these claims too.

In e-mails introduced during the trial, Howe was included in the “brotherhood” of the Cuomo clan activated by Percoco as Cuomo began his 2010 campaign for Governor. He had worked for Cuomo’s father, Mario Cuomo, when he was Governor, worked for Andrew Cuomo when he was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Clinton Administration where he hired Percoco.

Despite his self-styled persona as a “reformer,” Cuomo surrounds himself with the Howes and Percocos of the world where everything is measured by what it does to advance Cuomo’s career, whether it is legal or not.

I don’t know how the trial will conclude.

It could end in a conviction, an acquittal or a mistrial.

If it ends in a mistrial, it is likely to be rescheduled late this year, after the bid rigging trial scheduled for June.

If that happens, it may overlap this year’s primary and general election campaign for Governor, putting the issue of this Administration’s corruption front and center before the voters as they go to the polls.

One can only hope.

Tomorrow, the deadline that Trump imposed for Congress to enact “Dreamer” protection for those previously protected under the Deferred Action for Children, expires.

Deportations of these people, who were brought to this country as children and know no other home, are not expected to proceed until two federal lawsuits enjoining them are concluded.

Congress took no action because the U.S. Senate requires sixty voted to move the measure and three separate bills which would resolve this and other immigration issues have failed to pass.

Trump has been all over the landscape on these issues.

He proclaims his love for the “Dreamers,” yet abolished DACA by executive order.

He promised to sign any “beautiful” bill sent to him but then larded any proposal with so many demands and restrictions that its enactment was doomed.

He invited Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Durbin to the White House to discuss their proposal, only to ambush them with a number of anti-immigrant supporters that culminated in his calling certain nations “shitholes.”

Trump’s xenophobic beliefs are never far from the surface.

His followers spring from that element that fell behind him when he championed the “birther” movement and his racist insistence that President Obama wasn’t born in this country and was an illegitimate president.

He insists that the country abandon its current immigration policy that allows citizens to sponsor family members from other countries, which he calls “chain migration.”

His record on allowing refugees from war-torn countries, many of which are in wars that we are a part of, who fear persecution and genocide is hard hearted and abysmal.

Then there is his signature promise, “The Wall.”

His entire campaign was built around a promise that he would build a “big beautiful wall” and make Mexico pay for it.

Mexico, which was never consulted, understandably, has no intention of paying for it.

Interestingly, one of the demands he and his anti-immigrant coterie made during their session with Senators Graham and Durbin was funding for The Wall.

Since that demand undercuts his promise that he would make Mexico pay for the Wall, it seems like that would be any easy response for Senators Schumer, Durbin and others to justify the refusal to commit to it.

Trump’s myopic insistence that this fantasy would come true has now poisoned relations with Mexico and led to the cancellation of a visit by that country’s president this spring.

Never mind that they are one of our oldest and closest allies.

Never mind that they are one of our largest trading partners.

Trump’s own actions when it comes to immigrant labor are, to say the least, inconsistent with his expressed views.

Despite his “buy American, hire Americans” pledge, last October, Trump obtained visas to hire 70 foreign workers for the 2017-2018 season for his business at Mar-a-Lago.
This was an increase from the 64 he obtained for the 2016-2017 season there.

Trump’s antipathy for undocumented immigrants has never stood in the way of his willingness to use and abuse them when it is to his advantage.

Indeed, as far back as 1980, Trump employed 200 undocumented Polish workers to perform demolition on one of his work sites in Manhattan.

The workers were paid four dollars per hour, half the union scale, to work twelve hour shifts without gloves, hardhats or masks to protect them from the asbestos in the building.

Ultimately, Trump stopped paying them and when they complained, threatened to report them to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The workers sued and eighteen years later Trump settled the class-action lawsuit for 1.375 million dollars.

But there is something to celebrate.

This past week, the Washington Post, reported that the country has two new permanent residents.

Viktor and Amalija Knavs received their green cards.

It is probably a mere coincidence that they happen to be Melania Trump’s parents.

Melania Trump became a citizen in 2006.

Trump and his anti-immigrant supporters would call this “chain migration” which needs to be outlawed.

Under Trump’s proposal sponsoring family members would be limited to spouses and children.

I guess there are situations when “chain migration” would be acceptable.

Like if you are married to a Trump.