Tuesday, May 22, 2018

SLEAZE! Trump, pedophilia, assault and abortion...

(Update: There are surprising new developments in the tale of Shera Brechard, whose recent tweets have been quite...interesting. See my latest.)

Hold your nose. We're diving into the sleaze.

The pedo praetorians. A tweet from the invaluable Sarah Kendzior:
Nader is the fifth pedophile tied to Trump. Others are men to which Trump had closer ties: Roy Cohn, John Casablancas, Jeffrey Epstein, and Tevfik Arif.
A pattern emerges, does it not?

Arif is the Trump business partner linked to that notorious boat loaded with underaged whores raided in the Mediterranean. That operation was all about gathering kompromat on VIPs. I suspect that a similar operation netted a certain American congressman.

The tale of Trump and Casablancas has been told many times -- for example, here and here.

There was a smear story linking Epstein and Bill Clinton that made the rounds during the election; this story traced back to a falsified version of the Virginia Roberts deposition. In fact, the links between Trump and Epstein are far, far stronger than any link between Epstein and Clinton.

Virginia met Epstein when she was working at the Mar-A-Lago. At the time, she was all of 15 years old -- and she worked as a masseuse.
In the late 1990s, Roberts was recruited to perform a massage for Epstein while working as a $9-per-hour locker room attendant at Mar-A-Lago. Roberts' father also worked at Mar-A-Lago, which is located about 3 miles away from Epstein's estate, as a maintenance manager.
Let's repeat the salient points: Virginia Roberts was working as a masseuse. At the age of fifteen. Her employer was Donald Trump, now sitting in the White House. And someone at Mar-A-Lago "recruited" her to massage a man who was Trump's friend, a man whom Trump knew to be interested in young girls.

I'm amazed that these facts have not received greater publicity.

Abortion. Paul Campos of New York Magazine has written a fascinating new article which adds further weight to his previous argument that Playboy model Shera Bechard aborted Trump's child, not Eliot Broidy's.

Before proceeding, an uncharacteristic immodesty compels me to note that -- before Campos got involved -- I published two posts devoted to this theory. See here and here. In the first post (published the day after we first learned about the payment to Brechard), I noted Broidy's relationship with the mysterious George Nader -- a link which now seems very important.

In my second post, I noted that Bechard physically resembles Ivanka. Trump rather ickily told both Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal that they reminded him of his daughter.

If "the Campos theory" proves valid, perhaps a few people will recall that it was originally "the Cannon theory." I have just enough residual vanity to request that small bit of recognition.

None of this is meant to take away from the excellent work done by Campos, who reveals something about Broidy which I did not previously know:
Trump, I pointed out, is exactly the kind of man who has affairs with women like Shera Bechard, while Broidy has a history of bribing public officials to further his business interests — indeed, he had even made payments to the mistress of a politician he was bribing. And it was clear Broidy had spent much of 2017 touting his connections to Trump to various foreign officials.
So: In order to grease his way through the world, Broidy has previously demonstrated a willingness to handle "girl problems" for his rich associates. Good to know.
The AP exposé only strengthens the evidence for my hypothesis: The first payment from Broidy came two days before the meeting that apparently helped him ink a nine-figure deal with a foreign country — a deal based in no small part on his access to, and influence on, Trump. If it’s difficult to imagine Broidy being willing to take the fall for Trump’s affair with Bechard and then paying her a seven-figure sum, it’s much simpler to imagine it simply as a perfectly timed and fantastically profitable bribe.

It’s also important to keep in mind that the only hard evidence for Broidy’s claim that his payoff to Bechard wasn’t actually a straight-up bribe of the president of the United States continues to be Broidy’s own assertions.
Not quite. There was also the "person familiar with the matter" who provided information to the Wall Street Journal. It seems quite possible that this person was Broidy's lawyer (his real lawyer, not Cohen), although we cannot be sure.

Let's get back to the deal which made so much money for Broidy:
Here is some additional context that now seems especially noteworthy: Just two days before that meeting, on November 30, Broidy wired $200,000 from his Bank of America account to Real Estate Attorneys’ Group, a California firm. On December 5, REAG transferred that money to attorney Keith Davidson. Davidson was at the time supposedly representing the legal interests of Shera Bechard, a Playboy model with whom Broidy now claims to have had an affair. (Bechard fired Davidson shortly afterward, when she became convinced that Davidson was actually working in concert with Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s personal attorney, to protect Cohen’s client’s interests rather than hers.)
Methinks we will hear more about this REAG.

Tellingly, we have not heard from Bechard. She received money to keep quiet about her supposed affair with Broidy -- yet Broidy himself has de-bagged that particular cat, thereby effectively rendering her NDA pointless. Stormy has talked, and so has McDougal. So why no word from Bechard?

Perhaps her continued silence stems from the fact that a more important cat remains hidden in the bag.

Assault. And then there's Summer Zervos, the former Apprentice participant who says that Trump assaulted her.
A New York appeals court Thursday denied Trump's attempt to pause the case as his lawyers sought to get the suit dismissed. Sorry not sorry.
Trump had sought to stay the case while he pursued his appeal but, without explanation, the judges said, “The motion is denied.”
It gets better. Trump may well be deposed in the case, and soon. I wonder if the Republicans are starting to regret setting the Paula Jones precedent?

Better still:
Lawyers for Zervos already subpoenaed The Apprentice tapes earlier this month, which reportedly contain jaw-droppingly racist quotes from Trump.
For ages, we've heard that those tapes contain recordings of Trump using "the N word" (a childish euphemism which I usually avoid).

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