Clearly feeling the pressure of the four criminal trials he’s facing, disgraced one-term, twice-impeached, and multiply-indicted former president Donald Trump held a pity party for himself on social media and openly suggested that he might abscond to Russia in order to avoid having to serve a day in prison for his crimes.
On Monday, attorneys for the failed ex-president reached a deal with Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis to surrender in Atlanta on Thursday, Aug. 24 for arraignment, booking, and processing. After he posts a $200,00 bail, Trump will be allowed to return home.
However, shortly after news of the surrender deal was made, Trump posted this on his struggling Truth Social site:
The failed District Attorney of Fulton County (Atlanta), Fani Willis, insisted on a $200,000 Bond from me. I assume, therefore, that she thought I was a “flight” risk – I’d fly far away, maybe to Russia, Russia, Russia, share a gold domed suite with Vladimir, never to be seen or heard from again. Would I be able to take my very “understated” airplane with the gold TRUMP affixed for all to see. Probably not, I’d be much better off flying commercial – I’m sure nobody would recognize me!
Trump has already been warned in other jurisdictions that he should be careful about what he posts on social media, and yet he’s now suggesting he might want to flee to Russia, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States.
Even if Trump is just joking (is he?), any accused criminal defendant who made a similar posting would likely be in custody and held without bond until their trial. Yet Donnie continues to walk free.
As he continues to investigate the matter of classified documents former president Donald Trump illegally removed from the White House and took with him to Mar-a-Lago when he left office, Special Counsel Jack Smith is focusing in on Russia as the motive for why the failed ex-president took thousands of secret files and stored them at his Palm Beach golf resort.
In what may wind up being the greatest irony of all, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Murray Waas, Special Counsel Smith and a grand jury he impaneled believe Trump’s obsession with Russia led him to steal the information.
As he left office, Waas has learned, Trump desperately tried to declassify thousands of pages of secret documents that detailed Russia’s efforts to help defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
But Trump was stymied in his efforts to make the records public, leading the outgoing president to rage to aides that the documents would never see the light of day.
Now, sources close to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation tell me that prosecutors have questioned at least three people about whether Trump’s frustrations may have been a motive in Trump taking thousands of pages of classified papers from the White House to Mar-A-Largo, in potential violation of federal law. One of those people was compelled to testify before a federal grand jury, the sources say.
The sources say that prosecutors appear to believe the episode may be central to determining Trump’s intent for his unauthorized removal from the White House of the papers. Insight into the president’s frame of mind—his intent and motivation, are likely to be the foundational building blocks of any case that the special counsel considers seeking against Trump.
That has led Smith to take a close look at conversations between the White House counsel, the Justice Department, and then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the last frantic hours of the Trump administration.
The sources familiar with some aspects of the special counsel’s investigation further disclosed to me that prosecutors sought information regarding the following issues: the witnesses were asked about any conversations they personally had with then-president Trump or any of their White House colleagues about the Russia papers; they were asked about conversations between senior Justice Department officials and attorneys with the White House counsel’s office, including two former senior lawyers in the office, John Eisenberg and Pat Philbin, regarding Trump’s presidential order to declassify the Russia papers; and they also were asked about the circumstances surrounding a memo written by Trump’s then Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, the day following Trump’s declassification order, in which Meadows appeared to reverse courseand related that the papers would not be released before the concerns of other agencies regarding the Privacy Act were fully assuaged.
“It was very clear from what they asked that their emphasis was on Trump and Meadows,” one personsaid.
Another former aide to Trump, Kash Patel, has publicly stated that he saw all of the records the disgraced ex-president wanted declassified, telling Breitbart:
“It’s information that Trump felt spoke to matters regarding everything from Russiagate to the Ukraine impeachment fiasco to major national security matters of great public importance—anything the president felt [the public] had a right to know is in there and more.”
So it was Russia that allegedly helped elect Trump, Russia that led to his impeachment, and Russia that may wind up sending him to prison for the rest of his life if Smith’s investigation proves Russiagate was what Trump clung to even after he left the White House.
Right about now, Donald Trump is probably wishing he had never heard of Russia or his BFF, Vladimir Putin.
Though the Trump Tower in New York is probably much more well-known than any other property that carries the name of the indicted and twice-impeached former president/sex offender, all of the attention this week has been on Trump Towers located at Sunny Isles Beach in Florida.
On Thursday, according toThe Miami Herald, FBI agents raided Trump Tower III in Florida, which just so happens to be owned by two Russians.
A squad of FBI special agents, assisted by local police, descended on Trump Tower III at 15811 Collins Ave. to carry out a search of unit 4102. It’s owned by a shell company, MIC-USA LLC, that is controlled by two Russian businessmen, Oleg Sergeyevich Patsulya and Agunda Konstantinovna Makeeva, according to state corporation records.
On Friday, a spokesman for the FBI’s Miami field office said it “was conducting court-ordered law enforcement activity in the vicinity of that location,” but provided no other information.
Sunny Isles Beach has been called “Little Moscow” because it serves as a home to a large number of Russian expatriates, some of whom expressed worries when Russia invaded Ukraine last year. In response, the U.S. government began cracking down with sanctions against oligarchs who are believed to hide their wealth by purchasing real estate in South Florida and other U.S. locations.
Trump agreed to have his name placed on the three Sunny Isles Beach condos before he became president in 2016. It was believed doing so would help promote sales of the units.
The Heraldalso reports that “MIC-USA … acquired the three-bedroom, three-bath condo residence at Trump Tower III for $1.65 million a decade ago, according to Miami-Dade property records.
In 2020, BAC Florida Bank, which provided financing for the purchase, sued Patsulya and Makeeva, claiming they defaulted on their $975,000 mortgage. The dispute was resolved later that year, though it’s not clear how from the court records. MIC-USA, controlled by the two Russians, continued to own the 41st-floor unit at Trump Tower III.
Though he has denied any connections to Russia, the former president’s son, Eric, said in 2014 that the Trump Organization got significant funding from Russian sources, according to The Hill:
”I said, ‘Eric, who’s funding? I know no banks — because of the recession, the Great Recession — have touched a golf course. You know, no one’s funding any kind of golf construction. It’s dead in the water the last four or five years,’” the writers told WBUR.
“And this is what he said. He said, ‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.’”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, telling U.S. lawmakers that “Your money is not charity. It is an investment in the global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way.”
But despite the fact that Russia continues to attack Ukraine and kill innocent civilians, some Republicans have been critical of the U.S. commitment to our Ukrainian allies.
One of those is none other than the son of failed, one-term, twice-impeached loser ex-president Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., who called Zelensky a “welfare queen” for daring to seek more military aid from the U.S.
On Twitter, Don Jr. posted this hateful missive:
“Zelensky is basically an ungrateful international welfare queen.”
The “welfare queen” slur was coined by Ronald Reagan during his first run for the White House in the 1970s. It was a direct attack on antipoverty programs that began during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson to help rectify the injustices that led to the civil rights movement.
While Don Jr. is certainly entitled to his opinion, no matter how ignorant his take on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, he’s not exactly the one to be throwing stones at others, as Twitter users quickly reminded him.
You stole money from kids with cancer. You really should just fuck off.
Referring to a world leader facing a brutal, unprovoked invasion from a nuclear power as a "welfare queen" (which is a racist trope) is quite a choice pic.twitter.com/CBWKwOBQz3
A daddy's boy who met with a foreign adversary that was attempting to subvert an American election is daring to denigrate a true hero battling Putin & defending his nation from a genocidal war? This may be the dumbest remark ever from Junior. And that's quite an accomplishment. https://t.co/oLBZ3BpqTH
Tell me your father's tax returns are about to be made public without telling me your father's tax returns are about to be made public. https://t.co/fuOupnBqbL
Disgraced, one-term, twice-impeached former president Donald Trump told aides that he wanted to make a deal with the National Archives to return classified and top secret documents he stole from the White House and spirited away to his Mar-a-Lago resort in exchange for “sensitive” documents that he was convinced would prove his 2016 campaign did not conspire with Russia to guarantee he was elected.
Mr. Trump, still determined to show he had been wronged by the F.B.I. investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, was angry with the National Archives and Records Administration for its unwillingness to hand over a batch of sensitive documents that he thought proved his claims,” before adding, “In exchange for those documents, Mr. Trump told advisers, he would return to the National Archives the boxes of material he had taken to Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla.
Trump’s aides “never pursued” his harebrained plan, but the very mention of such a scheme “…demonstrates how Mr. Trump spent a year and a half deflecting, delaying and sometimes leading aides to dissemble when it came to demands from the National Archives and ultimately the Justice Department to return the material he had taken, interviews and documents show.”
In doing so, Trump may have opened members of his staff and even his attorneys up to charges of obstructing justice, if only because they didn’t immediately report his actions to federal authorities.
The Justice Department believes the failed ex-president still has classified materials in his possession, according to a separate report from The Times.
A top Justice Department official told former President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers in recent weeks that the department believed he had not returned all the documents he took when he left the White House, according to two people briefed on the matter.
The outreach from the official, Jay I. Bratt, who leads the department’s counterintelligence operations, is the most concrete indication yet that investigators remain skeptical that Mr. Trump has been fully cooperative in their efforts to recover documents the former president was supposed to have turned over to the National Archives at the end of his term.