The Trials and Travails of Defendant Donald J. Trump
Sometimes things only become interesting upon reflection. Like a thunderclap you realize something all at once. Tout à coup.
So it is with the trial of President Donald Trump where things that had hitherto eluded attention have become only too apparent.
I don’t want President Donald J. Trump to win the presidency in 2024. I’m on record having endorsed President Joe Biden.
Still, I am struck by a moment I had with Michael Cohen nearly eight years ago on the evening Donald Trump won the presidency. Cohen and I were standing next to one another at the Hilton. Cohen and I exchanged pleasantries and he seemed positively dour. He was somewhat drunk. He was very dismayed.
At the time I dismissed that for what I thought it was — a man overcome with the evening, the press, and all that jazz.
Now I think there was something more disturbing. I think Cohen was worried about having been found out.
Unbeknownst to us at the time Cohen was about to begin a thriving practice as a lobbyist for Columbus Nova, a firm closely linked to Andrew Intrater, the cousin of Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. In other words, Cohen was a fixer but not just for Donald Trump. He also represented Viktor Vekselberg, then alleged to be Russia’s richest man.
That name Intrater ought to sound familiar. He was linked in a separate scandal with none other than George Santos. There are obvious questions here. Did Intrater turn federal informant? Did Santos? Who was stinging who? Who is to say?
Every Russian I met during the course of 2016 election was more or less convinced that Donald Trump couldn’t win. Every Israeli I met during the course of the 2016 election was more or less convinced that Donald Trump couldn’t lose.
I said this years later to the Mueller Report investigators. I told the U.S. Senate this very point when I was questioned. I told it to the FBI.
Vekselberg lost millions when Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan and I bankrupted Gawker. Thiel called me and told me that Cohen later called Thiel and asked Thiel not to continue pursuing Gawker in bankruptcy courts, something Thiel and I found strange at the time. Looking back at it, though, it seems obvious that Gawker’s connections to the Russian Federation were extensive. The property where Gawker’s servers supposedly was in Hungary was owned by players close to the Russian Federation. Nick Denton, the proprietor of Gawker, decamped for Switzerland. And there were these weird connections to the Chabad world which kept popping up in strange ways.
When someone loses millions of dollars there’s the larger question of whether or not that money was ever theirs, especially if they seem relatively chill about it. Did you lose the money or was the asset simply transferred? Gawker was later acquired by the Gizmodo Media Group, itself owned by Netanyahu ally Haim Saban, a man who once said that “I'm a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.”
Returning to Cohen and Stormy Daniels and Trump I suspect that Cohen recorded Trump because he wanted to jam up Trump and have some self protection. I suspect Cohen never expected Trump to win. I suspect that Trump wanted the matter behind him. I suspect that Cohen was collecting dirt on his own client to use at a later date.
It seems as if Cohen, working for the Russo-Ukrainian (and pro-Israel) mob world, wanted to get Trump more on the hook for the pro-Netanyahu forces as represented by David Pecker, the proprietor of the National Enquirer.
I’ve had my own dealings with the National Enquirer and to be honest they behaved more like an intelligence agency or even a mob front than a traditional journalistic outfit. Many such cases, I suppose.
Sharon Churcher worked there at that time and boy did she hound me over Alan Dershowitz and Jeffrey Epstein. When I told her that I thought Epstein might have even been a good guy, she grew quite irate and started screaming at me. “Yes, we know all about your reputation!” she stammered when I told her that the evidence didn’t support what she was claiming. That was that.
(Later that night I told a friend of mine in an allied European intelligence service about that encounter after cognac and a cigarette and he started laughing, “Oh, you’re worried about a national tabloid questioning your reputation?”)
The truth is that tabloids have always operated as the plaything of intelligence agencies and organized crime and the National Enquirer is no exception.
All of which is to say that I think the Stormy Daniels National Enquirer contretemps was about making Trump more subject to Netanyahu-level extortion and that Cohen was its handmaiden. Ironically I think Cohen’s role is to help Trump win this trial by being not credible.
You can see that with Cohen repeatedly saying negative things about Trump during the course of the trial, almost as if to damage his own credibility deliberately. Cherchez la femme and you find a Ukrainian mob princess. Don’t let anyone tell you that marriage isn’t political.
Much of this New York trial is to distract from Trump’s more serious problem which is his willingness to show off America’s submarine technology to his guests at Mar-A-Lago, namely a Mr. Anthony Pratt, an Australian-Jewish scion of a paper producing dynasty. But even there things get complicated. Pratt, of course, tried to donate to Trump but was rebuffed. He nevertheless became a member of Mar-A-Lago where he plied seemingly anyone and everyone with liquor, attention and the promise of further lucre. To my mind that smacks of an intelligence asset and Pratt’s varied interests around the world would be a sort of perfect cover. His (and his family’s) donations to various Israeli interests make the matter more interesting and complicated still.
Now the Aussies care a great deal about the U.S. and British Navy coming to their rescue. They simultaneously want the Chinese trade but not the Chinese influence. Who knows if any of that will work out, much luck to them, but that’s the state of play.
Britain, meanwhile, rules Australia from across the planet. I suspect this explains, by the way, why Lord Cameron visited Trump in Mar-A-Lago. The British will seemingly not reveal all they know about Trump because Trump eased the passage of Ukraine aid.
Were I defending Trump, I’d make a strong case that Trump ultimately did America a solid by disclosing some of that antiquated technology which surely the Chinese and Russians already had. One of Biden’s first moves was the AUKUS deal which largely strengthened the alliance with Five Eyes and that involved building submarines.
Finally, all of this brings to me Peter Thiel. You’ll no doubt recall that on the day of the Trump New York trial a man lit himself a blaze. That mad man made mention of Thiel running Ponzi schemes. The rather incendiary claim — pun intended — was that Thiel (presumably through Founder’s Fund) had essentially taken pension money and bought crypto with it. Palantir, where Thiel is the main shot caller, had also purchased lots of gold. (The Russians love it when you buy crypto and gold.)
Thiel’s Founder’s Fund has been compromised for quite some time — we’ve written about it extensively here — and he is implicated in Wirecard and other European intrigue within the Russian sphere, especially as concerns Russians fronts such as life extension and of course, Christian Angermayer, who served as Thiel’s step and fetch it in Europe and especially Malta. Thiel recently complained to Tyler Cowen of the Chisraeli institute George Mason about how you can’t even commit tax fraud in Switzerland anymore.
My sense is that the Anglo-American deep state is flexing upon both Trump and Thiel to achieve their objectives — re-election of Joe Biden and taming of Eastern European criminality. I support both objectives.
So this ultimately explains my own support for the Ukraine/Israel/Taiwan package.
If you are against the Ukrainian mob, the surveillance state being extended to its fields and cities is a net advantage.
If you worry about Israeli war crimes, forcing the Israelis to use American technology (with its own backdoors to Langley and Fort Meade) is a way to keep them honest.
If you fret about China’s (and really Taiwan’s business elite’s capture) increased detection will give Taiwan a fighting chance. And the rest of our Asian allies.
Trump’s acquiescence to the Ukraine aid did not go unnoticed.
He praised Mike Johnson as a “good person” who is “trying very hard.”
If you’re charitable, you might say that Donald Trump is a “bad person” who is nevertheless “trying very hard” to be good.
Good for him. The Lord works in mysterious ways. It’s always nice when you see a Christian In Action ministering to the downtrodden.
Providence may well have intervened when He spared Johnson’s two boys from drowning at Mar-A-Lago and Johnson is merely returning the favor by rescuing Donald Trump from the abyss.
Oh, and Johnson’s son? He’s headed to the Naval Academy, you know, the place that has the longest running intelligence agency in American history?
