Talking Points Memo: Trump Manages To Give Some House GOPers More Heartburn In Hill Meeting

By Lauren Fox:

Another Republican in the meeting Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC) told TPM that Trump was asked pointedly if he would defend Article I of the Constitution. "Not only will I stand up for Article One," Trump enthusiastically stated, according to Sanford. "I'll stand up for Article Two, Article 12, you name it of the Constitution." Sanford said Trump's lack of knowledge about how many articles exist, gave him "a little pause." (The Constitution has seven articles and 27 amendments.) "There wasn't a lot of substance, and I think at some point we got to get to substance in the most significant political position in the world," Sanford said.

The Full Story (July 7, 2016)

The Star-Ledger: Trump's Atlantic City Windfall Left Others Broke

By Star-Ledger Editorial Board

Their consensus: Trump is a master grifter, who uses bullying and arrogance as negotiating methods, before ending the relationship by withholding payments and making contractors settle for far less by threatening them with litigation – knowing the cost of litigation would eat up most of the money in the dispute.

And frequently, these exploited contractors were left ruined after the Taj went bankrupt in 1991, the AP found.

One contractor whose company did $1.3 million in paving work ended up with one-third that amount.  Atlantic Plate Glass installed walls of glass and was screwed out of $1.1 million. Molded Fiber Glass sued Trump for the $3 million it took to install the Taj's famous onion domes, and ultimately settled for $1 million. A marble supplier was owed $3.9 million, and after he settled for 30 cents on the dollar, he went bankrupt.

Even the guy who was owed $232,000 for putting up the bathroom partitions had to lay off his brother after Trump reneged.

In hindsight, it seems so predictable: By the time the Taj opened in April 1990, Trump owed $70 million to 253 contractors. Within months, he was already missing debt payments to his investors, who had bought $675 million in junk bonds (at 14 percent interest) to finance the $1 billion Taj disaster.

Many of the contractors sued, but time ran out on collections in July 1991, when the casino went bankrupt.

The Full Story (July 4, 2016)

Esquire: WTF Does Trump's Star of David Tweet Mean?

By Peter Wade:

The main image is taken from a graphic the Clinton campaign used the night she secured enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination for president. Beneath that, is a Fox News poll showing that 58 percent of respondents agreed that "corrupt" is an accurate description of Hillary Clinton.

Then there is the pièce de résistance: a Star of David screaming that Hillary is corrupt. In the background, piles and piles of money, presumably from those corrupt sources (Jews?).

It is offensive on so many levels. It evokes negative Jewish stereotypes and misappropriates a religious symbol. And, the graphic design is embarrassing. It looks like an intern threw it together with Microsoft Paint.

The Full Story (July 2, 2016)

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Bonus Article - The Washington Post: Trump draws rebuke for his tweet with an image of Clinton and a Star of David

By David Weigel:

But the image that Trump chose to illustrate his point, which portrayed a red Star of David shape slapped onto a bed of $100 bills, had origins in the online white-supremacist movement. For at least the fifth time, Trump’s Twitter account had shared a meme from the racist “alt-right” and offered no explanation why.

“We’ve been alarmed that Mr. Trump hasn’t spoken out vociferously against these anti-Semites and racists and misogynists who continue to support him,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). “It’s been outrageous to see him retweeting and now sourcing material from the website and other online resources from this crowd.”

The Full Story (July 3, 2016)

Talking Points Memo: Welp, That's Weird. But of Course It Is

By Josh Marshall:

Now, normally (i.e., completely separate from anything to do with Trump) it would be entirely unremarkable that someone was getting fundraising emails both from a campaign and also Super PACs supporting the campaign. They're likely both buying lists from the same vendor or even different vendors of likely Trump voters.

But remember, Tim is a foreign citizen and part of the government in another country. We've already speculated about the various ways all these foreign legislators could have ended up on Trump's list. The more we've looked into it, it seems increasingly implausible that he got this list from a list vendor. Not impossible just not likely at all. It now seems more probable that the Trump Organization simply had these emails in some business related database and decided to dump them into the email hopper for the fundraising blitz or just found some site that had a zip file of foreign government officials and used that. As I've said, all of these possibilities are outlandish and ridiculous. But we know for a fact that he has and continues to spam members of Parliament in the UK, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland and Iceland and possibly others. So one of these completely preposterous set of facts has to be true.

And here's where we get to coordination, which is a big no no.

The Full Story (July 1, 2016)

Politico: The Believer - How Stephen Miller Went From Obscure Capitol Hill Staffer to Donald Trump’s Warm-up Act—And Resident Ideologue.

By Julia Ioffe:

Breitbart is Miller’s preferred media ally. “Every movement needs a dialogue,” Miller says. “Breitbart was a big part of that.” Miller worked tirelessly to make sure the dialogue kept going, and in the right direction. “When I first joined the staff, the first email I got was from him,” says one former Breitbart reporter. “It said something like, ‘Congratulations from everyone at Sessions’ office, we look forward to working with you.’” From that day on, the day’s first email would come from Miller, highlighting inaccuracies in other media outlets’ work or suggesting avenues for investigation. He worked primarily with two reporters at Breitbart, Caroline May and Julia Hahn, constantly feeding them scoops about the Disney workers’ plight, immigration numbers and welfare fraud. He used to organize a weekly Friday happy hour for Sessions and Breitbart staffers at Union Pub, across the street from the Heritage Foundation. “They’re all really good friends,” says the former Breitbart reporter.

Breitbart was also Sessions country long before it was Trump country. “Anything that Sessions sends out, Breitbart writes up immediately,” says the former Breitbart reporter. “There was no question whatsoever. They’d send out an email saying, ‘Anyone who has five minutes, can you write this up?’ I would do it sometimes because people were overloaded and it was just regurgitating a press release into a blog post.” The reporter added, “It was their way of repaying them” for the scoops. Now that Breitbart has also thrown in for Trump, the same happens for his news releases. “They’re all in the same boat together, Sessions, Trump and Breitbart,” the reporter said. “There’s no other politician that Breitbart does that for. They go above and beyond.”

The Full Story (June 27, 2016)

Talking Points Memo: Yep, Trump's Stone Broke

By Josh Marshall:

Even more revealing is the fact that Trump has been using a huge amount of campaign expenditures to cycle money back through his own businesses. According to an analysis by the AP, through the end of May Trump had plowed $6.2 million into various Trump companies, which is to say, back into his own pocket. That's roughly 10% of his campaign spending so far, which is almost entirely from the loan (which he can still repay to himself out of future fundraising) he made to his campaign. He kept up the pace in May, spending $6.7 million on his campaign and more than a million of that to various Trump enterprises.

What's notable about that roughly 10% of money back into his own pocket is that Trump only has businesses in so many sectors. He doesn't appear to have a company to make red trucker hats and he doesn't own radio and TV stations to run ads. So that 10% is basically as much as he could possibly run to [his] own companies.

The Full Story (June 21, 2016)

[Special] Paul Manafort, Trump Campaign Chief

Talking Points Memo: Trump & Putin. Yes, It's Really a Thing
By Josh Marshall:

At a minimum, Trump appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin. And this is matched to a conspicuous solicitousness to Russian foreign policy interests where they come into conflict with US policies which go back decades through administrations of both parties. There is also something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of evidence suggesting Putin-backed financial support for Trump or a non-tacit alliance between the two men.

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Then there's Paul Manafort, Trump's nominal 'campaign chair' who now functions as campaign manager and top advisor. Manafort spent most of the last decade as top campaign and communications advisor for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian Ukrainian Prime Minister and then President whose ouster in 2014 led to the on-going crisis and proxy war in Ukraine. Yanukovych was and remains a close Putin ally. Manafort is running Trump's campaign.

The Full Story (July 23, 2016)

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Talking Points Memo: It Can't Be Dismissed

By Josh Marshall:

Drezner says Trump's advisors who have various levels of connection to Putin or Putin-aligned leaders or businessmen in the post-Soviet successor states are largely irrelevant because the people who call the shots in Trumpland are Trump and his immediate family, specifically his adult children. I think this is largely true. But it misses the point.

Does Ivanka or Donald Jr have strongly held views on NATO commitments to member states in the Baltics or who the good guys and bad guys are in the Ukraine? Of course not. The question answers itself.

So while I don't think Carter Page is secretly running the Trump campaign, I think his views and agenda are actually quite significant on a critical foreign policy question that I strongly suspect neither Trump nor anyone in his family knows the first thing about. The same goes for Paul Manafort and others.

The Full Story (July 25, 2016)

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Talking Points Memo: The Trump and Putin Thing, A Detailed Response

By Josh Marshall:

Here's a few grafs from a Politico article that was, notably, written in 2014, before Manafort's business dealings had any obvious political import. So we can rule out any effort to pump up Manafort's role to damage Trump ...

Manafort’s friends describe his relationship with Yanukovych as a political love connection, born out of Yanukovych’s first downfall when he was driven from power by the 2004 Orange Revolution. Feeling that his domestic political advisers had failed him, Yanukovych turned to a foreign company, Davis Manafort, which was already doing work for the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov. The former Ukrainian PM and Manafort, the Georgetown-educated son of a Connecticut politician, hit it off.

Manafort’s firm had a set of international clients and produced an analysis of the Orange Revolution that Yanukovych found instructive, according to one operative involved in Yanukovych’s political rehabilitation. Manafort became, in effect, a general consultant to Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, shaping big-picture messaging, coaching Yanukovych to speak in punchy, American-style sound bites and managing teams of consultants and attorneys in both Ukraine and the United States ahead of an anticipated Yanukovych comeback. While it’s difficult to track payments in foreign elections, a former associate familiar with Manafort’s earnings say they ran into the seven figures over several years. 

After Yanukovych’s 2010 victory, Manafort stayed on as an adviser to the Russia-friendly president and became involved in other business projects in Eastern Europe. In 2012, then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Tefft told the newspaper Ukrainska Pravda that he had met with Manafort, though he declined to elaborate on the American’s role there.

This sounds very much like the relationship I described. Yanukovych wasn't one of many of Manafort's clients that I'm just cherry-picking. And Manafort wasn't one of many US advisors. It was a key relationship for both men. And business deals which grew out of the Yanukovych relationship were part of it.

The Full Story (July 25, 2016)

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New York Times: Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief

By Andrew E. Kramer, Mike McIntire and Barry Meieraug

And Mr. Manafort’s presence remains elsewhere here in the capital, where government investigators examining secret records have found his name, as well as companies he sought business with, as they try to untangle a corrupt network they say was used to loot Ukrainian assets and influence elections during the administration of Mr. Manafort’s main client, former President Viktor F. Yanukovych.

Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.

In addition, criminal prosecutors are investigating a group of offshore shell companies that helped members of Mr. Yanukovych’s inner circle finance their lavish lifestyles, including a palatial presidential residence with a private zoo, golf course and tennis court. Among the hundreds of murky transactions these companies engaged in was an $18 million deal to sell Ukrainian cable television assets to a partnership put together by Mr. Manafort and a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin.

The Full Story (August 14, 2016)