Tag Archives: Donald Trump Jr.
A Deeper Conspiracy: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates Enter the Mix
Conspiracy, defraud, Donald Trump Jr., Election, george, impeach, investigation, israel, joel, manipulation, nader, russia, saudi arabia, social media, trump, united arab emirates, zamel
The New York Times reports that Donald Trump Jr. met with George Nader, an emissary for the princes of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and Joel Zamel, an Israeli social media specialist, 3 months before President Trump's 2016 election. Supposedly, the main purpose of the meeting was to develop relationships among the parties, but there was also discussion of the potential for social media manipulation on behalf of the Trump campaign. Nader and Zamel met with the Trump team again after he was elected. These meetings are being investigated by the FBI.
The question which may spring to one's mind is whether this meeting could constitute further conspiracy to defraud the United States. This question has been analyzed thoroughly by Professor Bowman in the context of the Russian Lawyer Meeting. The crime is composed of two basic elements: 1) an agreement to 2) defraud the United States. The United States can be defrauded of its right to a fair and honest election, and we will assume for the sake of this post that the manipulation of social media constitutes such a fraudulent taking (though that may in fact be a gray area). So what is left to be examined is whether the meeting between Trump Jr., Nader, and Zamel constitutes an agreement.
Though we have no direct evidence of an agreement, a conspiracy may be established, at least in the context of antitrust, by parallel behavior accompanied by certain "plus factors" (those which add to the circumstantial possibility of agreement). What we know is that Nader paid Zamel $2 million after President Trump was elected, the reason for which is unclear. We also know that Trump recently abandoned the Iran Nuclear Deal, a position Nader was known for advocating. This is probably not enough to establish a conspiracy, but perhaps further investigation will reveal more. There is also some evidence of ties between Nader and Zamel and Russia. Though it is very unclear as of yet, we may be dealing a conspiracy much larger than we first imagined.
Ron Sachs/Picture-Alliance, via Associated Press
Donald Trump, Jr. & the Attorney-Client Privilege
Posted by impeachableoffenses in Uncategorized
Adam Schiff, attorney-client privilege, Donald Trump Jr., Trump Tower meeting
Donald Trump, Jr. was questioned at length on December 6, 2017 by the House Intelligence Committee concerning, among other things, his June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with Russians offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. He was also questioned about his discussions thereafter with his father concerning that meeting. Donald Jr. refused to answer, claiming attorney-client privilege. Congressman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) expressed incredulity at this claim inasmuch as neither Trump Sr. or Jr. is a lawyer. Donald Jr. responded by claiming that the privilege arose because there was a lawyer present.
NOTE: I wrote the following earlier today (12/7/2017) based on the understanding that there was only one lawyer present. I see that it is now reported that lawyers representing both Donald Sr. and Donald Jr. were present. If so, that changes the analysis significantly, even though it remains unclear whether a valid claim of privilege exists. A solid analysis by Andy Wright of the problems presented by the two-lawyer scenario appears today on Slate and Just Security.
The most famous definition of the attorney-client privilege was provided by Dean J.H. Wigmore:
(1) Where legal advice of any kind is sought (2) from a professional legal adviser
in his capacity as such, (3) the communications relating to that purpose, (4) made in
confidence (5) by the client, (6) are at his instance permanently protected (7) from
disclosure by himself or by the legal adviser, (8) except the protection be waived.
Broadly speaking, the privilege applies to communications from a client to a lawyer in a situation where the client is seeking legal advice from the lawyer. In order to be privileged, a communication must be confidential – meaning that it cannot be made in the presence of a third party, that is, someone who is not a client or employed by the lawyer to assist in representing the client.
In the Trump situation, the only way the attorney-client privilege could apply is if the lawyer was, at the time of the conversation, retained by both Trump Sr. and Trump Jr. to represent them. It is possible, though profoundly inadvisable, for lawyers to represent two clients. This is particularly true when the interests of the two parties may diverge. If, for example, Donald Jr. did some things in the Trump Tower meeting that would subject him, but not his father, to legal liability, no sensible lawyer would agree to represent or advise both. It seems quite unlikely that whatever lawyer was present in the conversation or conversations at issue here represented both Trumps.
If that was the case, then the whole conversation is outside the attorney-client privilege. If the lawyer represented Trump Sr. only, anything Trump Sr. said would not have been said in confidence. So no privilege would apply to Trump Sr.'s statements, or for that matter to anything said by anyone else present. If the lawyer represented Trump Jr. only, the same would be true. Anything Trump Jr. said would not have been said in confidence, so no privilege would apply to his statements or those of anyone else present.
The remarkable thing about the exchange between Rep. Schiff and Donald Jr. (at least as reported) is that no one, including Schiff, seems to have had the legal knowledge or the fortitude to press the point. It's not surprising that a congressman in the midst of interrogating a witness, even one like Schiff who is a lawyer, would fail to recall all the details of the attorney-client privilege. But Schiff was not the only lawyer-congressman in the room. And congressmen have staff whose job it is to prepare for obvious turns of events like a witness claim of privilege.
Before he was allowed to leave the hearing, Donald Jr. should have been asked about the identity of the lawyer and the nature of the relationship between that lawyer and the Trumps. The existence of an attorney-client relationship and its subject matter is not itself privileged.
If, as I strongly suspect, the facts would not support the existence of attorney-client privilege, the committee chair should have insisted that the question be answered. A refusal should have produced a move for immediate sanctions against Donald Jr. It is possible, of course, that follow-up inquiries along these lines have been initiated by Schiff or someone else.
If not, letting this lie will be a clear signal of lack of seriousness by Republicans and Democrats alike.
The Russian collusion investigation: Bumbling grifters & the risks of keeping it all in the family
Carter Page, Donald Trump Jr., emoluments, George Papodopoulos, Hope Hicks, J.D. Gordon, jared kushner, Jeff Sessions, Lewandowski, Manafort, Michael Flynn, nepotism, Putin, Robert Mueller, Sam Clovis, scheme of peculation, Stephen Miller
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of doing an interview with Canada's CTV network on developments in, and speculations about, the progress of the Mueller investigation. The anchor wanted to talk about the testimony of former Trump campaign foreign policy advisor, Carter Page, to the House Select Committee on Intelligence, Attorney General Session's upcoming appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, and the rumor that an indictment of former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn (and possibly his son) will soon be forthcoming.
I can't say that I had anything particularly novel to tell Canada's TV audience about any of these subjects, but reflecting on the interview has provoked a couple of observations.
First, as I have had occasion to observe before, passionate opponents of Mr. Trump who confidently expect (or even fervently hope) that the Mueller investigation of Russia-Trump campaign collusion in the recent election will produce some smoking gun that will lead naturally to articles of impeachment should moderate their expectations. So far, at least, the picture is not one of sophisticated, nefarious, high-level Trump operatives working hand-in-glove with agents of the Russian government, but of something altogether murkier and more ambiguous.
To be sure, there exists nearly irrefutable evidence that the Kremlin was working hard through every means at its disposal to harm the Clinton campaign and help Mr. Trump. Mr. Putin's repeated denials that Russia was meddling and Mr. Trump's on-again–off-again acceptance of those denials may convince his endlessly credulous base, but outside those blinkered precincts it merely prolongs the bizarre spectacle of an American president siding with the dictator of a hostile foreign power against the conclusions of his own intelligence agencies.
(As an aside, when I began drafting this post, Mr. Trump had just said that he accepted as sincere Putin's denial of meddling. Mere hours later, Trump straddled the question, saying that he accepts both the findings of U.S. intelligence and Putin's sincerity. This waffling is either: (a) Yet another example of Mr. Trump's persistent tendency to say whatever he thinks will please the audience immediately in front of him, with no thought for either truth or how today's effort to ingratiate will affect his own or the country's interests tomorrow; (b) Yet another example of Mr. Trump's seeming inability to engage in rudimentary critical thinking — the idea that the Russian government could engage in a wide-ranging effort to influence the American presidential election without the knowledge or approval of Vladimir Putin is laughable, and thus it is impossible for U.S. intelligence to be right and for Putin to be sincere; or (c) Just another manifestation of Mr. Trump's knee-jerk rejection of any fact, however firmly established, that might suggest his election victory was due to anything other than his own personal merits. My best guess is that all three factors were at work.)
But it is not a crime or an impeachable offense merely to be the unwitting beneficiary of foreign efforts to damage one's political adversaries. What must be shown to prove a crime is that affiliates of the Trump campaign consciously aided or sought to aid the Russians' subversion and violated some statute in the process. What must be shown for any of this to amount to an impeachable offense is that Mr. Trump himself approved, was aware of and failed to stop, or later tried to cover up culpable conduct by his subordinates.
It is too early to assess the ultimate question about whether culpable collusion occurred. But the emerging (though far from complete) evidence suggests at least three points about the Trump campaign's Russian contacts:
Repeated claims by Mr. Trump and his subordinates that there were no contacts between persons associated with the Trump campaign and Russian officials or agents were simply untrue. As the Chicago Tribune summarizes, at least nine people in the Trump orbit had Russian contacts during the campaign or transition.
At least some of those contacts involved persons high up in the campaign hierarchy or personally close to Mr. Trump, people like Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and Jeff Sessions. Others, like George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, had impressive-sounding titles like "foreign policy adviser," but were in reality on the fringes of what was always a barely coherent campaign organization. Nonetheless, it is now clear that campaign higher-ups, like Senator Sessions, Stephen Miller, Hope Hicks, J.D. Gordon, campaign manager Cory Lewandowski, and national campaign co-chair Sam Clovis, knew about the Page and/or Papadopolous contacts.
Whether contacts between Trump surrogates and Russian actors ever produced concrete results, such as the direct transfer to the Trump campaign of negative information about Secretary Clinton or her team, remains unclear … and frankly seems doubtful. What is clear is that multiple members of the Trump entourage were willing and eager to receive that kind of material — even when it was plain that the source would have to have been Russian intelligence services, and that the means employed to obtain the material would likely have involved violations of American law. The first proof of their eagerness was the now-famous Donald Trump Jr. – Kushner – Manafort meeting with the Russian lawyer. Now Mr. Papodopoulos admits to having received a purported Russian offer of "dirt" on Secretary Clinton in the form of emails, and to have passed the offer along to Trump campaign officials.
If, in the end, Trumpists and Russian emissaries never quite did a deal that produced active cooperation or transmission of opposition research "deliverables," efforts to cover up all the active flirtation could nonetheless amount to criminal obstruction of justice and even impeachable conduct. That's the thing to watch for in coming months.
Second, the overriding impression, reinforced by each new revelation, is that both the inner circle of the Trump campaign and the outer rings of staff, consultants, and advisers consisted primarily of pathetically ill-informed amateurs like the Trump children and in-laws, eccentrics like Carter Page, desperate wanna-be's like George Papodopoulos, or outright scoundrels like Paul Manafort. Even those with long government resumes and conventional credentials, like Trump's short-tenured National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Senator Jeff Sessions, gravitated to Trump because, in Flynn's case, he had been expelled from the circles of power for persistent bad judgment, and in Sessions' case, he was a fringe player in the Senate, with views on many subjects too extreme even for for a caucus edging steadily to the right, and no path to any meaningful leadership role.
Moreover, the one character trait common to virtually all of this ill-assorted crew is greedy opportunism. The Trump family, from the paterfamilias on down, has profited by skating on or over the edge of legality for decades and has been monetizing its connection to the presidency ever since the election. Manafort's long career as apologist for thugs and dictators should have disqualified him from a role in any American presidential campaign, and predictably has both embroiled Trump in controversy and produced an indictment founded in part on money laundering and tax evasion. Page reportedly combined his Russian overtures for Trump with efforts to secure private deals for himself. Michael Flynn is under investigation for an array of dodgy, but potentially lucrative, deals, as well as illegal failures to report work on behalf of authoritarian regimes like that of ascendant Turkish dictator Recip Erdogan.
The mix of incompetence, bad judgment, blithe disregard of normal legal and ethical boundaries, and personal greed in the Trump campaign is both a gift and an impediment to any effort to impeach Mr. Trump.
On the one hand, it is increasingly obvious that people high and low in the Trump campaign were trying quite hard to collude with a hostile foreign power to win a presidential election. On the other hand, it may prove that the Russians simply didn't trust these escapees from the Island of Misfit Toys enough to enter into any active collaboration, preferring to feed toxic misinformation to the American electorate indirectly through Wikileaks and directly through social media. Now that Mr. Trump has shed virtually all of the primary actors in the Russian contacts — with the notable exceptions of his family members — he can disavow former staffers' conduct as the inconsequential bumbling of fringe nobodies.
BUT — having foolishly chosen to ignore settled norms against nepotism in the White House, Mr. Trump is probably stuck with whatever the kids have done or may yet do. Even an ordinary father would shrink from throwing his children overboard and into the clutches of waiting prosecutors, but in Mr. Trump's case, ordinary considerations of paternal affection are infinitely complicated by the fact that the Trump campaign was, and the Trump Organization remains, a family business … and the kids, notably including son-in-law Jared Kushner, are privy to their secrets. Perhaps Ivanka or Don Jr. might be willing to take a fall for dear old dad. Were I Mr. Trump, I would not bet that, at the last extremity, young Mr. Kushner would do the same.
Thus, Mr. Trump will never be able to make a clean break from the Russian meddling investigation. Some of its central figures will remain close to him. He will continue defending them. And as in Watergate, it may prove that the cover-up, rather than the original wrong, will be his undoing.
Finally, it would be easy to dismiss the near-universal obsession of those around the Trumps with self-enrichment through politics as a side issue. For two reasons, it's not.
First, as Mr. Manafort recently discovered, the United States has a web of laws that regulate, and often criminalize, aspects of the "deals" he and his ilk are so eager to make. Those laws are a tool box for Robert Mueller's prosecutors, and the questionable financial motives and maneuvers of those involved in contacts with Russian representatives will provide legitimate grounds for inquiring deeply into financial matters the Trumps would surely prefer remain hidden.
Second, to the extent Mr. Mueller's investigation or other sources reveal that Mr. Trump and family have used the presidency for personal profit, such disclosures implicate at least two grounds for impeachment. The most obvious of these is violation of the emoluments clauses. But I would go a bit further. I do not believe that a technical violation of, for example, the foreign emoluments clause of Article I, Section 9, is required to make out an impeachable offense if it could be shown that, as James Madison put it, the president "pervert[s] his administration into a scheme of peculation."
I will expand on this latter point in later posts. Stay tuned.
Frank Bowman
Trump Jr. and Russian Collusion
Donald Trump Jr., Emails, Lawyer, Meeting, Russian
Click here to read the background of Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer, and then click here and here to read how it might influence President Trump's likelihood of impeachment.