Daily Bread for 9.9.17

Washington (CNN) Around the time presidential candidate Donald Trump was touting his real estate dealings at a Republican primary debate, a proposal was in the works to build a Trump Tower in Russia that would have given his company a $4 million upfront fee, no upfront costs, a percentage of the sales, and control over marketing and design. And that’s not all: the deal included the opportunity to name the hotel spa after his daughter Ivanka.

An internal Trump Organization document from October 2015, obtained by CNN on Thursday, reveals the details of a 17-page letter of intent that set the stage for Trump’s attorney to negotiate a promising branding venture for Trump condominiums, a hotel and commercial property in the heart of Moscow. Trump signed the document later that month, according to Michael Cohen, his corporate attorney at the time. The document CNN obtained does not have Trump’s signature because it is a copy of the deal that Cohen brought to Trump to sign….

Trump did not mention during the presidential campaign that his company explored the business deal in Russia. Instead, he insisted that he had “nothing to do with Russia.” Even when talking about his past dealings with Russians — like the Miss Universe pageant he held in Moscow in 2013 — Trump never referred to the prospective licensing deal that fell through a few weeks before the Iowa caucuses….

Ryan Lizza writes how Donald Trump, Jr., Attempts to Explain That Russia Meeting:

….Over the course of five hours of private testimony and in a nearly eighteen-hundred-word public statement, Trump, Jr., tried to offer a more definitive account of the June, 2016, meeting held at Trump Tower between senior members of his father’s Presidential campaign and a group of Russians promising opposition research about Hillary Clinton. In the statement, Trump, Jr., denied that any collusion occurred, and painted himself as distracted by the “maelstrom” of the campaign and by running the family business. He played down his interest and understanding of an associate’s offer of information from the Russian government. “I did not quite know what to make of his email,” Trump, Jr., said. “I had no way to gauge the reliability, credibility or accuracy of any of the things he was saying.”

Trump, Jr., is now the third person who has testified to Congress about the meeting. Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman, and Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law and in many ways the de-facto campaign manager, both testified before congressional committees in July. All of the testimony occurred behind closed doors. Manafort, who turned over notes about the Trump Tower meeting to the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been silent about what he told Congress, while Kushner publicly released the opening statement he made to the committee.

One of the questions raised by the three men’s testimonies is the extent to which their accounts of the meeting are consistent. Kushner’s July statement to congressional investigators was notable for how much he assigned responsibility for the meeting to his brother-in-law. “In June 2016, my brother-in-law, Donald Trump Jr. asked if I was free to stop by a meeting,” Kushner said in his statement. He insisted that the meeting was “a waste of our time” and that he had forgotten about it until it was raised in the press this year….

Renato Mariotti offers his assessment of Trump’s written statement in A Former Federal Prosecutor Dissects Donald Trump Jr.’s Statement to Congress:

Unlike the prior statements of Donald J. Trump Jr., which drew criticism and may have created potential liability for him and others, his Statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee appears to have been created with the assistance of counsel. Nonetheless, the prior statements limited what Trump Jr. could say here without creating contradictions that could be used against him. In this statement to Congress, the stakes are very high for Trump Jr., because lying to Congress is a federal crime. By carefully examining what he said, and what he didn’t say, we can gain insight into his legal strategy.

STATEMENT OF DONALD J. TRUMP JR.
September 7, 2017

I welcome the opportunity to share this prepared statement in an effort to set forth the sum and substance of what I know regarding a meeting I attended on June 9, 2016[1]. I am thankful for the opportunity to meet with you today and look forward to answering all of your questions. As will become clear, I did not collude[2] with any foreign government[3] and do not know of anyone who did[4].

[1] This is meant to limit the scope of his statement. He might know things about other meetings, and his failure to volunteer them in this statement will be attributed to this clause.

[2] The term “collude” has no legal significance whatsoever. What matters legally is whether he agreed to commit a crime with someone else, whether he knew about a crime and helped make it succeed, or whether he actively concealed a crime. So Trump Jr. is not denying that he committed a crime. Whether his denial is broader or more narrow than that depends on what exactly is meant by “collude” in this statement, which we don’t know.

[3] Does this include individuals who were associated with a foreign government, or who held themselves out to be? He could potentially make this statement even if he “colluded” with individuals at the Trump Tower meeting. He would simply deny they were officials of a foreign government. And the full statement scrupulously avoids any mention of the Russian government, which leaves room for him to claim they were not involved in the events in question or that he had no belief of their involvement.

[4] This doesn’t mean much, for two reasons. First, as discussed above, “colluding with a foreign government” is a vague and potentially narrow phrase. Second, just because Trump Jr. claims he knows no one who “colluded” doesn’t mean he doesn’t have knowledge that could be evidence of a crime. Criminals don’t always announce their crimes to others or reveal all parts of their crimes to others….

(I’d particularly invite readers to review Atty. Mariotti’s assessment in full. It’s how a capable attorney would assess a statement within his or her field. Sophistry on Fox News or Breitbart ignore or distort centuries of legal tradition. Neither Trump nor his family have successfully overturned that tradition, of which they show neither respect nor understanding.)

Casey Newton contends that Why we can’t trust Facebook’s story about Russian ads:

….Independently of the Russia inquiry, Facebook has suffered a series of embarrassing revelations this year about its advertising metrics, requiring the company to apologize at least three times. In one case, it admitted to overestimating the average viewing time for video ads for two years; in another, it admitted to inflating the number of visitors to businesses’ pages. Another glitch resulted in some advertisers being overcharged. On the same day as the Russian ad buy revelation, an analyst said Facebook overstated the number of people its ads reach by at least 10 million, using US Census data as a reference point. (Facebook said the estimates “are not designed to match population or census estimates.”)

On one level, the glitches have little to do with Facebook’s ability to track the purchase of ads by Russian agents. But they suggest a sloppiness with data practices that places anything Facebook says about ad-buying efforts — the number of ads bought by fake pages, for example — under a cloud of suspicion. The fact that Facebook initially found no evidence of Russian involvement in the ad-targeting scheme has lessened the credibility of its subsequent disclosures.

Finally, and perhaps most consequentially, there’s Facebook’s reluctance to share relevant information about political advertising on the platform. The company refused to release any of the Russian ads it found, saying that doing so would violate its data policy and federal law. (It did not specify which law. In fact, political ads that air on television and radio are required to be made available for public inspection.)….

Tech Insider explains that most hurricanes that hit the US come from the same spot in the world: