“Let’s hit Trump with our Kompromat!” Plus: Sister Act

To the best of my recollection, I've never linked to this DC Blue site. It seems dodgy. The name brings to mind Capitol Hill Blue, another dodgy site which became semi-prominent during the Dubya years.

(Surprisingly, they're still in business. The cerulean nomenclature suggests a certain similarity.)

Nevertheless, this story from Christopher Powell seems worthy of note. The headline: "Russia claims to have blackmail on Trump – Official threatens to release it"

A Russian debate took place on Russian state-run television where several Russian officials discussed various political issues. One of which was was Nikita Isaev, the Director of the Russian Institute of Contemporary Economics.

He said, “Let’s hit Trump with our Kompromat!”, which certainly looks like a reference to the infamous Pee Pee Tape or, at the very least, some type of other blackmail material the Kremlin is holding over Trump’s head.

The host asked, “Do we have it?” Isaev responded “Of course we have it!”

The interested part here is that someone in Isaev’s position wouldn’t have said something like this on Kremlin-controlled TV unless Vladimir Putin gave him permission to say it.

If the video really does carry this exchange, then debating the credibility of DC Blue is beside the point. The video cannot be embedded in this blog, but you can see it here. I don't understand Russian, but perhaps one of my readers does. YouTube kindly notes that this channel is "funded in whole or in part by the Russian government."

Even if we presume that Powell has reported accurately, we need not take this exchange at face value. In the recent past, we've seen a series of reports that Trump has been trashed on Russian television. It would make strategic sense for Putin to allow such a campaign on Russia's airwaves: Doing so works against the collusion narrative. In other words, the real target would be the American public. The message: "See? Trump wasn't working for the Russians. Obviously, they hate his guts!"

When you think about it, Putin should have begun this campaign in the summer of 2016.

Russia will not hit Trump with kompromat. It's not as though the Dems will give Putin an easier time. Trump is tearing this country apart, and this "cold civil war" works to Russia's advantage.

Trump's big sister Maryanne Trump Barry, a retiring judge, is as corrupt as he is.

The court inquiry stemmed from complaints filed last October, after an investigation by The New York Times found that the Trumps had engaged in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the inherited wealth of Mr. Trump and his siblings. Judge Barry not only benefited financially from most of those tax schemes, The Times found; she was also in a position to influence the actions taken by her family.

Judge Barry had been a co-owner of a shell company — All County Building Supply & Maintenance — created by the family to siphon cash from their father’s empire by marking up purchases already made by his employees, The Times investigation found. Judge Barry, her siblings and a cousin split the markup, free of gift and estate taxes, which at the time were levied at a much higher rate than income taxes.

On a financial disclosure form filed in 1999, Judge Barry noted that her share of the All County profits for the previous 17 months totaled just over $1 million.

The family also used the padded invoices to justify higher rent increases in rent-regulated buildings, artificially inflating the rents of thousands of tenants. Former prosecutors told The Times that if the authorities had discovered at the time how the Trumps were using All County, their actions would have warranted a criminal investigation for defrauding tenants, tax fraud and filing false documents.

Similarly, Judge Barry benefited from the gross undervaluation of her father’s properties when she and her siblings took ownership of them through a trust, sparing them from paying tens of millions of dollars in taxes, The Times found. For years, she attended regular briefings at her brother’s offices in Trump Tower to hear updates on the real estate portfolio and to collect her share of the profits. When the siblings sold off their father’s empire, between 2004 and 2006, her share of the windfall was $182.5 million, The Times found.

Some of you may recall what David Cay Johnston had to say about Judge Maryanne. Briefly: Donald Trump had a longstanding relationship to a drug-dealing gangster named Joseph Weichselbaum.

Meanwhile, Weichselbaum agreed to plead guilty in Federal District Court in Cincinnati. His Ohio lawyer, Arnold Morelli, asked that sentencing be done either in Miami, where Bradford Motors is located, or Manhattan where the confessed drug trafficker lived.

Instead the case somehow ended up in New Jersey—and in not just any courtroom, either. It came before Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, Trump’s older sister.

After three weeks Judge Barry recused herself, explaining to the chief judge that her husband, Trump casino lawyer John Barry, and she had flown in the helicopters of a confessed drug trafficker. At the time, there was only a signed order reassigning the case, but not explaining the reasons for doing so. Six years passed before Barry’s reason for recusal—potentially damaging to the federal judiciary—emerged in a book by investigative reporter Wayne Barrett.

Then Trump wrote a letter on Trump Organization stationery pleading for mercy for Weichselbaum. He called him “a credit to the community.” Trump also described the drug trafficker as “conscientious, forthright and diligent,” not the sort of language a law-and-order presidential candidate would be expected to apply to a drug trafficker who moved more than 11 pounds of cocaine in one shipment alone and more than three quarters of a ton of marijuana in another.

Trump wrote that letter even though doing so might have endangered his casino license. Since Judge Maryanne was flying around in a known drug lord's chopper, can you be terribly surprised to learn that she stands accused of ripping off tenants in rent-controlled apartments and engaged in dubious schemes to avoid estate taxes?

"Trump" is not a name, not a family, not a brand, not a business. It is an infection.