I'm old enough to remember when this guy was just a footnote in a 24-count indictment:
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Bank CEO Stephen Calk indicted for giving $16 mil in loans to Manafort in exchange for admin position
- Thread starter Sho_Nuff82
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And that 2 days will be reduced to 0 days and a coupon to Chiles
Looks like the question of "Why didn't Mueller investigate the financial stuff?" is starting to be answered. The investigations are on-going.
If I can just step for a moment into an alternate but very close reality where the GOP starts to unbuckle its unity pants and individual congressmen and senators start to worry about how this will all affect their chances:
The amount of cold fucking brain jarring terror that every single person involved in this must be feeling every time they see a headline, including that walking Costanza lake-shame excuse for a president, must be absolutely wrecking them. They'll bluster and lie like they always do, but they have gotten away with this their whole lives in large part because nobody really looked. And the few times people DID look, they lost.
So I'm F-fwd-ing to a time where the major players are screwed - I don't kow what that looks like - maybe a Nixonian-deal to make it all go away in the service of protecting the union. Maybe an actual perpwalk by the whole family, maybe something even crazier like a full-on mental break 25th amendment right on TV. So imagine we're past that.
I want to get to the part where we start finding out the specifics about Nunes, Gaetz, McCOnnell and Graham. The secondary players. The ones who enabled this. The people who opened the doors of the kindergarten to let the bees in. I want to see what they did and why they did it. I want to know how deep the NRA-Russian-Money-Hat went, what they offered or threatened Graham with, and I want to know how frequently McConnell was directly involved in fuckery - not the obfuscation or permitting of, but the actual creation of - as it relates to shit like Kennedy's sudden retirement, or maybe how he's the one blackmailing Graham. I want to see them gnash their teeth and eat each other alive.
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Doing Crimes While Whi…..OTHERWISE BLAMELESS LIFE!
(that hasn't aged well, now has it?)
Is a trump administration position really worth $16mil? Most government salaries are 100-200k/yr, tops. He must have been planning some corrupt practices while in the position to offset the $16 million investment
It's a loan so it's likely other people's money guaranteeing the risk but in a world where manafort is paying it back at all (possibly an oligarch is) it's possible it's a laundering scheme in and of itself too.
In the minuscule chance it was standard graft and only what it looks like on the surface then the "real" amount would be some fraction of the interest on the loan. So if the bank wanted him to pay, say $17 million to repay the $16 million loan- the investment in manafort by the bank would be whatever they could have made over and above one million bucks within the period of the loan terms by investing that $16M elsewhere.
Don't get me wrong, the "value" of the crime is still arguably $16M but it also depends on the scheme and the nature of the guarantor- it's possible that manafort is directly involved with the backer too - it could be a lot worse than just the $16 M loan... so here's an elaborate but extremely possible scheme:
1. Manafort owes Oleg deripaska somewhere between $19 and $45 million depending on how you view Oleg's claims against Manafort in the Cayman Islands. While it's certain Manafort really did owe him that money- it's also certain that Deripaska went after it as a direct influence operation with the Kremlin's advice and blessing - and more likely their plan.
3. It puts two pressures on Manafort - serious financial ruin AND kompromat on the origin and nature of the funds he owed — all to get him to take bigger more reckless risks (Russia wanted influence and kompromat on as much of the trump campaign as possible) and as the Russian plot evolved so did their leverage on Manafort and others. That campaign was in an iron grip with Trump, the .Org, Manafort, General Traitorpants and the kids.
3. So Deripaska could have offered a carrot too - "I'll settle for $16M, get this loan guaranteed by me from this bank and we'll arrange for it to default or be forgiven and I will also have cleanly laundered more dollars into or out of the US to get around some of the sanctions we need you to lift. You get him a cabinet position and we now have crazy leverage over another bank in the USA."
Kremlin gets:
1. Trump as Manchurian candidate
2. Kompromat on multiple valuable assets including a laundering banker.
3. Sanctions lifted
If it sounds ridiculous then sure, maybe it is, but the oligarchy isn't just an alternative to our version of capitalism, it's literally a self sustaining organized crime racket and it has expressed every single facet of a standard mob operation - but at a vastly more ambitious scale and level of sophistication. American corruption in politics is one of the best returns on investment dollars for Americans. No reason to suspect Russia has vast tendrils of influence and ability even now.
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If I can just step for a moment into an alternate but very close reality where the GOP starts to unbuckle its unity pants and individual congressmen and senators start to worry about how this will all affect their chances:
The amount of cold fucking brain jarring terror that every single person involved in this must be feeling every time they see a headline, including that walking Costanza lake-shame excuse for a president, must be absolutely wrecking them. They'll bluster and lie like they always do, but they have gotten away with this their whole lives in large part because nobody really looked. And the few times people DID look, they lost.
So I'm F-fwd-ing to a time where the major players are screwed - I don't kow what that looks like - maybe a Nixonian-deal to make it all go away in the service of protecting the union. Maybe an actual perpwalk by the whole family, maybe something even crazier like a full-on mental break 25th amendment right on TV. So imagine we're past that.
I want to get to the part where we start finding out the specifics about Nunes, Gaetz, McCOnnell and Graham. The secondary players. The ones who enabled this. The people who opened the doors of the kindergarten to let the bees in. I want to see what they did and why they did it. I want to know how deep the NRA-Russian-Money-Hat went, what they offered or threatened Graham with, and I want to know how frequently McConnell was directly involved in fuckery - not the obfuscation or permitting of, but the actual creation of - as it relates to shit like Kennedy's sudden retirement, or maybe how he's the one blackmailing Graham. I want to see them gnash their teeth and eat each other alive.
That RICO charge against the entirety of the criminal enterprise known as the Republican National Committee is going to be beautiful. There's so much bullshit that went down with GOP people not named Trump during the '16 election and inauguration and everything since then that even the better informed people here don't know about.
This has always been bigger than Trump. He's who he was before the presidency: a racist grifter up to his eyeballs in debts and surrounded by gangsters, mobsters, and fellow conmen.
But the GOP should not be allowed to escape from their own sins, and I'm not talking about merely supporting and aiding and abetting their criminal president...
When impeachment begins, the entire GOP needs to be put on trial and blasted daily for their complicity. They operate best when their dealings are obscured in shadow or buried in some NYT/WaPo exclusive to be discarded a few days later in our hypersonic media cycle or hidden away in standard committee procedure that no one except for CSPAN pays attention to.
No more of that bullshit.
