Weekly Recap (Sept. 10-16) and a Musical Sanity Break

by Nomad

For most of this week, the nation's eyes were turned to the Carolinas as monster hurricane named Florence threatened East coast devastation. It was the first major hurricane of the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season.

For a moment, Americans were offered a chance to talk about something besides Trump and his latest shenanigans. Unfortunately, that respite was short-lived and by mid-week, Trump managed to elbow his way back into our lives.

Trump's Legal Team Drops Stormy Daniels' NDA

On Monday, the Trump administration at long last announced that it would not attempt to enforce the unenforceable $130,000 hush-money nondisclosure agreement between Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen, Trump's lawyer.
According to the court document filed by Trump's lawyers, the president has "never taken the position that he was a party " to the NDA with Daniels. Not really sure what that means?
The document reads:

“Mr. Trump does not, and will not, contest Ms. Clifford’s assertion that the settlement agreement was never formed, or in the alternative, should be rescinded. Moreover, Mr. Trump covenants that he will not bring any action, proceeding or claim against Ms. Clifford to enforce any of the terms of the settlement agreement.”

All parties are now in agreement that the NDA was never valid because it was never signed by Trump. If the NDA was never valid, then its one and only purpose was to convince women like Daniels that it was legal and that there would be serious legal repercussions if they came down with a case of "loose lips."

An attachment to the contract specified that the alias used- "David Dennison" - was actually Donald Trump. The lawyer for Ms. Daniels alleged that Trump "purposely" did not sign the agreement in order to disavow any connection to Daniels or the NDA. Yet, in failing to sign, Trump also invalidated the agreement.

The latest statement puts Trump in an extremely shaky legal defense for a number of reasons.

First, the hush money Cohen pay to Daniels was apparently reimbursed by the Trump Organization. Whether or not, Trump actually authorized the payment has not been disclosed to the public.

Secondly, Trump's claim that Cohen acted without his knowledge in the matter of the NDA is contradicted by Trump's April 26 admission that Cohen represented him in "the Stormy Daniels deal."

Add to that, Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal attorney, told Sean Hannity on May 2 that Trump reimbursed Cohen for the payment of the hush money, but also stated that his client "didn’t know about the specifics of it but he did know about the general arrangement, that Michael [Cohen] would take care of things like this," which contradicted Trump's claim on Air Force One of April 5 of having no knowledge of the payment.

Daniel's lawyer, Michael Avenatti, will no doubt demand Trump give a deposition under oath and with Mueller holding all of Cohen's e-mails and phone call recordings, the possibility that Trump will commit perjury is probably around 99.9%.

This statement also opens the door to all other NDAs that Trump and his lawyer might have used to keep other women silenced.

Trump's Remembrance of September 11

If there was any remaining doubt that the Trump administration is completely distracted (to the point of paralysis) by the Mueller investigation, those doubts disappeared on Tuesday morning. It was the 17th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in US history, the 9/11 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks in 2001.
The president spent the morning tweeting a defense of himself in the Russia investigation while also attacking the FBI. In a multi-part tweet-rant- lifted verbatim from Fox News, Trump returned to blaming all his problem of the FBI and the Department of Justice.

As it became clear that Trump had no clue of the importance of the date, dismay turned to anger in the next few hours. Later, the president lamely tweeted "17 years since September 11th!"

In fact, Trump marked the occasion by visiting the crash site of
Flight 93 in which 40 passengers and crew members launched a desperate but doomed attempt to retake their hijacked plane. (According to Trump's own logic, these were not heroes. Heroes wouldn't have crashed the plane.)

Trump's visit to the solemn event was marred by a bizarre photo of the president "fist-pumping" as if he were about to attend another rally.

Gaslighting Maria

As Hurricane Florence took aim at the East Coast, Trump assured the nation that his administration was "totally prepared." He described Florence as a child might describe a water park: "tremendously big and tremendously wet" with "tremendous amounts of water."

His silly remarks might have gone unnoticed had it not been that he took that moment to "gaslight" the American public with praise for the government's government's "incredibly successful" response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico a year ago "one of the best jobs that's ever been done."

In the real world, the response was the disaster after the disaster, indirectly leading to the deaths of nearly 3000 people and the island without power for months.

(If you need a refresher on Trump's great success story, try this. The Associated Press, the news site Quartz and Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism have put together the most detailed portrait yet of the agonizing final days of victims of the storm, interviewing 204 families of the dead and reviewing accounts of 283 more to tell the stories of heretofore anonymous victims.)

Diverting Money from FEMA
The cleansing light of the Thursday morning brought news that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had diverted almost $10 million from FEMA, the federal agency responsible for disaster relief. The money was used by DHS to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) pay for detention and removal operations.
Defending the decision to transfer the sum- at the start of hurricane season, officials pointed out that the money in question could not have been used for hurricane response 'due to appropriation limitations." A spokesperson as DHS called the reporting "a sorry attempt to push a false agenda."

Totally Incompetent
Trump's remark about his great success in Puerto Rico sparks a sharp exchange between the president and San Juan mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz. He blamed the island's post-hurricane problems on Cruz. a harsh critic of Trump. He discounted the recently-updated number of deaths as a Democratic conspiracy
"to make me look as bad as possible,”
With no apparent irony, Trump called her "totally incompetent" on social media and labeled Puerto Rico as "an inaccessible island with very poor electricity." Cruz responded by calling the president“delusional, paranoid, and unhinged from any sense of reality”.

Tracking Russian Payoffs?

On the same day, another intriguing bit of news emerged. According to reports by Buzzfeed, federal investigators are examining a series of suspicious financial transactions involving some of the "planners and participants" to the 2016 Trump Tower meeting.

By following the sage advice from the Watergate era of following the money, the FBI tracked transfers of Aras Agalarov, a Russian billionaire with ties to both Putin and Trump. Agalarov used a complicated web of banks accounts to distribute money to himself, his son and "at least, two other people who attended the meeting."

According to a Buzzfeed piece,

Investigators are focusing on two bursts of activity: one occurring shortly before the Trump Tower meeting and one immediately after the 2016 election.

New Allegations Against SCOTUS-nominee Kavanaugh

More questions emerged about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. As if serious allegations of perjury were not quite enough to cause Kavanaugh to withdraw his name, new claims surfaced in a New Yorker article.

An unidentified woman charged that Kavanaugh had “attempted to force himself on her” during a party when they were both in high school in the early 1980s. According to the magazine article, the writer of the letter claimed:

“that Kavanaugh and a classmate of his, both of whom had been drinking, turned up music that was playing in the room to conceal the sound of her protests, and that Kavanaugh covered her mouth with his hand.”

The accusation came in a letter that the magazine said was given to the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein. In his own defense, Kavanaugh said

“I categorically and unequivocally deny this allegation. I did not do this back in high school or at any time.”

And in an act of impressive prescience and fortuitous timing, Senate Republicans on Friday released a letter from 65 women who knew Kavanaugh during his high school years vouching for his character.

Since Kavanaugh went to an all-boys school, Georgetown Preparatory School in Bethesda, Maryland, instantly rounding up so many women after so long was a remarkable feat.

The wisest thing to do- meaning, the thing the Trump administration is least likely to do- would be to pull Kavanaugh's name from consideration and head back to the drawing board. Of course, that's not what will happen.

Another Big Score for Mueller

But the big news didn't have anything to do with Kavanaugh. It was the Paul Manafort story. Prosecutors announced that Trump’s former campaign chairman agreed to cooperate with the investigation in “any and all” matters, and brief officials about “his participation in and knowledge of all criminal activities”. He also agreed to turn over documents and testify in other cases.

It was a breath-taking with for Team Mueller. So what did Manafort get out of it?

Along with his agreement to cooperate, Manafort pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the US and conspiring to obstruct justice in return for other charges being dropped. Mueller’s team indicated that Manafort would receive a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

This opens up some interesting speculation of the "why" variety. Until this latest news, it was all but certain that Trump had offered - or had implied- some kind of arrangement involving a presidential pardon. If so, Manafort became convinced that Trump would never have kept his word.

Too bad for Trump.

Another juicy bit from the plea agreement.

In addition to any prison sentence he might receive, Manafort also agreed to forfeit homes in Virginia and New York – including an apartment in Trump Tower – and the funds from several bank accounts.

Number crunchers sharpened their pencils and took a look at those properties and came up with a combined value of about $22.2 million and that alone nearly covers our estimated costs of the investigation to date.

However, those properties also aren’t the only items of value being forfeited. Manafort also has to give up his life insurance policy. It's quite possible this is a low estimate. In any event, whatever the total, it's more than enough to fund the Mueller probe for quite some time.

If Trump still thinks he can dole out pardons for people like his former lawyer Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort, he needs to think again?

Manafort’s lead lawyer said Friday his client has already cooperated with Mueller’s team. Another hitch is that Manafort has already admitted guilt to unpardonable state crime.. in writing.

As former Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman said:

“By admitting to all of the facts in both indictments, the conviction is pardon proof in the sense that if Trump ever pardoned Manafort, a state attorney general could take Manafort’s admissions in the plea and use them to indict Manafort for state charges.”

"Tremendously Wet" Florence Arrives
Damage caused by Florence occupied front page news on Saturday with 13 people dead and nearly 800K without power.
As was expected, the hurricane created dangerous flooding conditions throughout the Carolinas.
As the New York Times reported:

Inland flooding is perhaps the biggest continuing danger as Florence trudges through the Carolinas, and an improvised network of volunteers, some helping from as far away as Africa, has sprung up to locate and rescue people who did not evacuate.

Over 1 million North Carolina residents have been evacuated from their homes and the area affected extends over six states.

Postscript Update:
On Sunday, the woman who had anonymously accused SCOTUS- nominee Brett Kavanaugh revealed herself. Fifty-one-year-old Christine Blasey Ford is a research psychologist at Palo Alto University in Northern California. The New York Times stated:

But Ms. Ford’s decision to put her name behind accusations that began to circulate late last week — a choice made after weeks of reluctance — appeared to open a door to a delay in a Senate committee vote on the nomination scheduled for Thursday.

Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein has called for a complete FBI investigation of the allegations. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island said that Ford's decision to come forward "requires a pause, at a minimum, in the unseemly, special-interest-funded rush to put Brett Kavanaugh on the court."

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So that's the weekly round-up. Were there other news stories that you think deserved more attention? Any predictions what next week top story will be?