Voice of America |
Lobbying by Trump Associates Highlights Foreign Agent Law
Voice of America The Podesta Group, a Washington lobbying firm, has already retroactively registered for its part in the Ukrainian influence campaign. The firm was one of two that worked under the direction of Manafort and his former deputy, Rick Gates. The other firm ... Paul Manafort's Activities Arouse Interest Of Ukrainian ProsecutorsKALW After Campaign Exit, Manafort Borrowed From Businesses With Trump TiesNew York Times Trump advisers waged covert influence campaign - Big Story AP - Associated PressBig Story AP - Associated Press all 42 news articles » |
U.S. News & World Report |
RNC Must Take The Lead Preventing Future Russian Interference in Elections
U.S. News & World Report The main purpose of the two congressional investigations into the Russian campaign to interfere in America's electoral process is to prevent such a campaign from ever happening again. There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about future ... and more » |
World Tribune |
Turns out there was a FISA warrant which 'opened every door there was' to spy on the Trump campaign
World Tribune Well, if this were a sane world and if this were a normal day, do you know what the big news of the day would be? That Donald Trump nailed it, that Donald Trump was exactly right, that the Obama administration was in fact spying on them — and indeed, ... and more » |
Western Journalism |
Shepard Smith Targets Two From Trump's Campaign Team
Western Journalism Fox News host Shepard Smith went after former Trump campaign figures Carter Page and Paul Manafort on his program Wednesday, contending that the evidence related to Russian ties is “damning.” The implication of Smith's charge was clear: President ... and more » |
McClatchy Washington Bureau |
Why did FBI suspect Trump campaign adviser was a foreign agent?
McClatchy Washington Bureau He has a lengthy military background, academic credentials and, until recently, a largely apolitical financial career. But now, Carter Page is a central character in the investigation into Russia's meddling in the United States election. And this week ... and more » |
Mostly what Carter Page has displayed in interview after interview is that he’s completely unhinged. He’s convinced the FBI isn’t just listening in on him, but blocking his communications:
Page told TPM on Thursday that he was “jammed” and unable to conduct a phone interview, but that the FBI was “unjustified” in monitoring his communications.“It shows how low the Clinton/Obama regime went to destroy our democracy and suppress dissidents who did not fully support their failed foreign policy,” he said in an emailed statement.
Yes, because right now Hillary Clinton is directing the FBI to jam Carter Page’s cell phone.
People who used to work with Page at Merrill Lynch also have fond memories of his time with the firm:
Ian Bremmer, the influential president of the Eurasia Group, on Thursday used Twitter to call Page the “most wackadoodle” alumni of the firm in history.
But no matter how hard the Trump regime works to hold Page at a distance now, the paranoid wackadoodle was a hand-selected part of his foreign policy team. Why? Because of his Russian expertise.
In what he said was his capacity as a private citizen, Page gave a commencement address in July 2016 at Moscow’s New Economic School that slammed the United States’ “hypocritical” policy toward Russia and called for the U.S. to lift the sanctions put in place after the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea. …Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States who’s had a run-in with many a Trump campaign staffer, also had an encounter with Page. …
And then there are those claims that Page promised to convince Trump to drop sanctions against Russia in exchange for a few million dollars worth of stock in the Russian state owned oil and gas company—a claim that included a prediction about an upcoming sale of part of that company that just happened to nail every detail.
Page now says he can’t be sure that he didn’t talked about sanctions, and that we’ll just have to see what the FISA warrant reveals. Here’s a clue: Whatever was convincing enough to wrangle a FISA warrant three times, is not going to be good for Carter Page.
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Carter Page is a 'wackadoodle' but that doesn't mean he's innocent
Daily Kos - 8 hours ago
The former Merrill Lynch banker, who was relatively unknown in politics before he was touted as being a foreign policy adviser in the Trump campaign, has steadfastly declined to comment on how he got involved in the Republican campaign. He told ABC ...
Why did FBI suspect Trump campaign adviser was a foreign agent?
News & Observer - 11 hours ago
He has a lengthy military background, academic credentials and, until recently, a largely apolitical financial career. But now, Carter Page is a central character in the investigation into Russia's meddling in the United States election. And this week ...
Carter Page: 'All the Lies ... Are Finally Coming Out'
PJ Media - 15 hours ago
07/07/2016 Carter Page delivers a lecture in Moscow. Carter Page is one US presidential hopeful Donald Trump's youngest advisers and is believed to be an expert in energy and economic development, especially in the former USSR nations and socialist ...
FBI Obtained Warrant to Monitor Former Trump Adviser Carter Page's Communications
pppFocus - 37 minutes ago
A member of the Trump campaign's foreign policy group, Page is said to be the only American to be targeted by a FISA warrant in 2016 as part of the USA authorities investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election. That said, a ...
RNC Must Take The Lead Preventing Future Russian Interference in Elections
U.S. News & World Report - 18 hours ago
The main purpose of the two congressional investigations into the Russian campaign to interfere in America's electoral process is to prevent such a campaign from ever happening again. There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about future ...
Read the whole story
· ·
ExpertGazette |
Federal Bureau of Investigation obtained secret court order to surveil Trump aide during campaign
ExpertGazette One current official told AFP that Page never met Trump, did not have a campaign pass and was only mentioned as an advisor because the billionaire candidate was under pressure to show he had a policy brain trust. Page says he was not recruited by the ... Ex-Trump Campaign Adviser Carter Page's Accounts Of Russia Ties Keep ShiftingTPM all 83 news articles » |
The American Conservative |
The Five Most Powerful Populist Uprisings in U.S. History
The American Conservative The 2016 election constituted one of the great populist uprisings of American history. A large segment of the .... The violence outside the Democrats' Chicago convention betokened the state of political affairs in a country filled with anxiety. Into ... and more » |
Sputnik International |
Ex-US Air Force Officer: MOAB Strike Reduces Prospects of Putin-Trump Meeting
Sputnik International WASHINGTON(Sputnik) — The dropping of the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb in Afghanistan and escalating tensions with North Korea have decreased the likelihood that presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will meet soon, retired US Air ... |
CNN |
House Russia investigator travels to Cyprus, island at center of Manafort allegations
CNN (CNN) A Democrat on the House intelligence committee flew to Cyprus this week as part of the panel's broad investigation into allegations that Russian operatives and top aides on President Donald Trump's campaign colluded to influence the US election. and more » |
Chattanooga Times Free Press |
Ignatius: Trump gets a taste of success
Chattanooga Times Free Press The Bay of Pigs illustrates what happens when a policy process goes bad. Other administrations have also had bumpy starts. President George W. Bush had a messy first few years, with recurring feuds between Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary ... The Brilliant Incoherence of Trump's Foreign PolicyThe Atlantic all 965 news articles » |
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WRCB-TV |
Q&A: How federal law unmasks foreign influence on US policy
Minneapolis Star Tribune WASHINGTON — Paul Manafort says he's registering with the Justice Department as a foreignagent. Michael Flynn already has. In both cases, the decisions to register by these associates of President Donald Trump came late — after the lobbying has ... Lobbying by Trump associates highlights foreign agent lawWRCB-TV After Campaign Exit, Manafort Borrowed From Businesses With Trump TiesNew York Times AP Exclusive: Manafort firm received Ukraine ledger payout - AP NewsAP News Big Story AP - Associated Press -Holland & Knight all 47 news articles » |
National Review |
The Post-Trumpism Presidency Begins
National Review Trump's elite supporters in talk radio, TV news, and elsewhere convinced themselves that just because the “people” rejected one coherent ideological program that meant they embraced another coherent ideological program called “Trumpism,” “America First ... There's no such thing as Trumpism | Commentary | Dallas NewsDallas News (blog) The Republican Party Has Defeated Donald Trump | New RepublicNew Republic all 4 news articles » |
Media Reports Confirm Judge Napolitano Scoop About U.K. Spying On Trump
The Inquisitr - 7 hours ago
Two news media outlets have seemed to confirm Judge Andrew Napolitano's claim that British spy agency GCHQ engaged in surveillance of President Donald Trump, albeit with a somewhat different spin. On March 14, Napolitano claimed on Fox & Friends ...
Limbaugh: The World Was Spying on Trump During Campaign to Impress Hillary
Breitbart News - 12 hours ago
Friday on his nationally syndicated radio show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh observed the statement made by Fox News contributor Andrew Napolitano in March claiming that a British intelligence agency spied on then-Republican presidential nominee ...
Trump's Morphed From Spy Agency Critic to Fan, CIA's Pompeo Says
Bloomberg - 19 hours ago
Not long ago Donald Trump was describing U.S. “intelligence” agencies in mocking quote marks and comparing them to Nazi Germany for damaging leaks about him. As a presidential candidate, word was he barely wanted to sit still for top-secret briefings.
'Concrete and Corroborative Evidence of Collusion' Between Trump Associates and Russia, Source Says
The Root - 18 hours ago
We all know that President Vladimir TrumPutin is in bed with Mother Russia. Whether it's photos of 45 with Russian hookers, or Russia's cable installation bill for an extra cable box in the basement of the White House with the RT News package, we all ...
The official investigation into relations between Donald Trump and Russia now has "specific, concrete and corroborative evidence of collusion", it has been reported.
New evidence proves discussions took place “between people in the Trump campaign and agents of [Russian] influence relating to the use of hacked material,” a source allegedly told the Guardian.
The developments come as it has emerged that Britain’s spy agencies were among the first to alert their American counterparts to contact between members of Mr Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives.
Rex Tillerson: US have "low level of trust" with Russia
British and other European intelligence agencies first intercepted suspicious “interactions” between people associated with the US President and Russian officials in 2015 as part of routine surveillance of Russia, intelligence sources have confirmed to a number of different publications.
Spy agencies, including GCHQ, were not deliberately targeting members of the Trump team but rather recorded communications through “incidental collection,” CNN reports.
This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information under the "Five Eyes“ agreement, which calls for open sharing of certain types of information among member nations the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Russia and Iran have threatened the US over Syria
Over several months, different agencies targeting the same people began to see a pattern in communications between the Republican's inner circle and Russian operatives. For six months, until summer 2016, these interactions were repeatedly flagged to intelligence officials in the US, who sources have said were slow to act.
“It looks like the [US] agencies were asleep,” a source told the Guardian. “They [the European agencies] were saying: ‘There are contacts going on between people close to Mr Trump and people we believe are Russian intelligence agents. You should be wary of this.’
“The message was: ‘Watch out. There’s something not right here.’”
GCHQ's involvement in the investigation is controversial, with Mr Trump's press secretary, Sean Spicer, having previously accused the "British spying agency" of bugging Trump Tower on behalf of Barack Obama. Mr Spicer cited an unsubstantiated report on Fox News, from which the television station later distanced itself.
At the time GCHQ diverged from its usual policy of refraining from commenting to the media, describing the allegations as "nonsense".
“They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored,” a spokesperson for the agency said.
World news in pictures
1/38 10 April 2017
A flower covered police car is pictured at the site where a truck drove into a department store in Stockholm, SwedenGetty Images2/38 10 April 2017
A woman lays flowers to commemorate the victims of Friday's terror attack at a makeshift memorial near the site where a truck drove into Ahlens department store in Stockholm, SwedenGetty Images3/38 10 April 2017
NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough being carried into a medical tent shortly after he, Russian cosmonaut Sergey Ryzhikov of Roscosmos, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Borisenko of Roscosmos landed in their Soyuz MS-02 spacecraft in a remote area near the town of Dzhezkazgan (Zhezkazgan), KazakhstanEPA4/38 10 April 2017
The International Space Station (ISS) crew members NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, surrounded by ground personnel, rest shortly after the landing of Russia's Soyuz MS-02 space capsule near the town of Dzhezkazgan (Zhezkazgan), KazakhstanReuters5/38 10 April 2017
Egyptians carry the coffin of policewoman Brigadier Nagwa el-Haggar during her funeral, after she died during a blast that struck outside the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate headquarters in the Mediterranean city of AlexandriaGetty Images6/38 10 April 2017
Women cry outside the funeral for those killed in a Palm Sunday church attack in Alexandria Egypt, at the Mar Amina churchAP7/38 10 April 2017
Mourners pray next to coffins of victims of the blast at the Coptic Christian Saint Mark's church in Alexandria the previous day during a funeral procession at the Monastery of Marmina in the city of Borg El-Arab, east of AlexandriaGetty Images8/38 9 April 2017
A person walks past posters for 'Reporters without borders' that refers to the French presidential election campaign in the district of Montmartre in ParisGetty Images9/38 9 April 2017
A couple take a photo of the sunset from Dune of Pyla, the tallest sand dune in Europe, in Pyla-sur-Mer, southwest FranceGetty Images10/38 9 April 2017
A family watch the sunset from Dune of Pyla, the tallest sand dune in Europe, in Pyla-sur-MerGetty Images11/38 9 April 2017
People watch a live performance under illuminated cherry blossoms on the final day of the cherry blossom festival in Yeouido, central Seoul, South KoreaEPA12/38 9 April 2017
Imam-i-Kaaba Saleh bin Muhammad bin Ibrahim al-Talib (Saudi Arabian Imam of the Grand Mosque in the Islamic holy city of Mecca) waves to supporters at the historical Badshahi Mosque during Maghrib prayer in Lahore, Punjab, PakistanRex13/38 9 April 2017
Saleh bin Muhammad bin Ibrahim al-Talib one of the 10 Imams of the Grand mosque in the Islamic holy city of Mecca, visits Pakistan to meet Pakistani officials, Security has been high alert to avoid untoward incident around the Badshahi Mosque.Rex14/38 7 April 2017
Paramedics work at the scene where a truck crashed into the Ahlens department store at Drottninggatan in central StockholmRex15/38 7 April 2017
Reports say three people have died after a truck crashed into an Ahlens department store in Stockholm Truck drives into crowds on a street in central StockholmRex16/38 7 April 2017
The guided-missile destroyer USS Porter (DDG 78) launches a tomahawk land attack missile in the Mediterranean SeaAP17/38 7 April 2017
The United States military launched at least 50 tomahawk cruise missiles at al-Shayrat military airfield near Homs, Syria, in response to the Syrian military's alleged use of chemical weapons in an airstrike in a rebel held area in Idlib provinceEPA18/38 7 April 2017
Demonstrators pray next to mock coffins during a protest against Russian and Iran in Ankara, TurkeyReuters19/38 7 April 2017
People carry symbolic coffins with pictures of Syrian victims and inscriptions which translates as "killer Asad" and "killer Putin" during a protest against Russia for its alleged role in a chemical attack in the Syrian province of Idlib, in front of the Russian embassy, in AnkaraGetty Images20/38 6 April 2017
A man watches a TV news program reporting about North Korea's missile firing with a file footage, at Seoul Train Station in Seoul, South KoreaAP21/38 6 April 2017
Filipino villagers collect recyclable materials amongst debris following a fire at a shanty town in Bacoor, Cavite province, PhilippinesEPA22/38 6 April 2017
According to media reports, more than a thousand familes were left homeless from the fire, which burned around seven hundred shanties. The fire marshal, Superintendent Robert Pacis, stated that the four-hour fire was likely started by children allegedly playing with matches in the house of a person named Raffy UnaEPA23/38 6 April 2017
Filipino Eddito Fernandez displays his hands that are covered in dirt as he collects belongings amongst debris following a fire at a shanty town in Bacoor, Cavite province, PhilippinesEPA24/38 6 April 2017
Israeli forces stand guard at the scene of a Palestinian car ramming attack near the Jewish settlement of Ofra near the West Bank city of RamallahReuters25/38 6 April 2017
Israeli soldiers and police arrest a Palestinian attacker at the scene of a car ramming attack near the Israeli settlement of Ofra, north of RamallahEPA26/38 6 April 2017
One Israeli was killed and another wounded in a car-ramming attack near the Ofra settlement in the occupied West Bank, the army said. The alleged attacker was arrested, an army statement said, without giving details about himGetty Images27/38 6 April 2017
Activists of the Basle political action committee 'March against Monsanto and Syngenta' protest in front of the Syngenta headquarters against the acquisition of Syngenta by the Chinese company ChemChina, in Basle, SwitzerlandEPA28/38 5 April 2017
Universidad de Chile fans clash with the police during a Copa Sudamericana soccer match against Brazil's Corinthians in Sao Paulo, BrazilAP29/38 5 April 2017
Universidad de Chile fans scuffle with riot police during their match agains Corinthians at the Arena Corinthians Stadium in Sao Paulo, BrazilGetty Images30/38 5 April 2017
Members of the military police of Sao Paulo clash with supporters of Universidad de Chile before the Copa Sudamericana soccer match between Corinthians and Universidad de Chile at the Arena Itaquera Stadium in Sao Paulo, BrazilEPA31/38 5 April 2017
Members of the military police of Sao Paulo clash with supporters of Universidad de Chile before the Copa Sudamericana soccer match between Corinthians and Universidad de Chile at the Arena Itaquera Stadium in Sao Paulo, BrazilEPA32/38 5 April 2017
Jose Adan Salazar Umana, a businessman and alleged leader of the Texis Cartel, one of the largest money laundering and drug trafficking networks in El Salvador, is presented at the headquarters of the National Civil Police in San Salvador, El SalvadorEPA33/38 5 April 2017
Nikki Haley, United States' Ambassador United Nations, shows pictures of Syrian victims of chemical attacks as she addresses a meeting of the Security Council on Syria at U.N. headquartersAP34/38 5 April 2017
Russia's deputy UN ambassador, Vladimir Safronkov attends the United Nations Security Council meet in an emergency session at the UN in New York, about the suspected deadly chemical attack that killed civilians, including children, in SyriaGetty Images35/38 5 April 2017
Syrian children, along first aiders and civil defense volunteers, hold placards and photos showing victims of the recent alleged chemical attack Khan Sheikhoun, during a gathering to show solidarity with the victims in Douma, SyriaEPA36/38 5 April 2017
Reports state 72 people, including 20 children, were killed in an alleged chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun of Idlib provinceEPA37/38 4 April 2017
Destruction at a hospital room in Khan Sheikhun, a rebel-held town in the northwestern Syrian Idlib province, following a suspected toxic gas attackAFP/Getty Images38/38 4 April 2017
Abdul-Hamid Alyousef, 29, holds his twin babies who were killed during a suspected chemical weapons attack, in Khan Sheikhoun in the northern province of Idlib, Syria. Alyousef also lost his wife, two brothers, nephews and many other family members in the attack that claimed scores of his relativesAlaa Alyousef via AP
But both US and UK intelligence sources now acknowledge that GCHQ played an early and important role in kickstarting the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, which began in late July 2016.
One source told the Guardian the British eavesdropping agency was the “principal whistleblower”.
A GCHQ spokesperson declined to comment on the revelations, saying: “It is longstanding policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters”.
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In early March, President Trump sent four tweets accusing his predecessor of wiretapping the phones in Trump Tower in the months before the 2016 election. The tweets were just the latest manifestation of Trump’s preoccupation with eavesdropping and surveillance—one that can be traced back decades. As BuzzFeed’s Aram Roston reported last summer, during the mid-two-thousands, Trump kept a telephone console in his bedroom at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach that allowed him to listen in on phone calls, between his employees and, sometimes, staff and guests. (Trump denied this.) In the mid-nineteen-eighties, Trump allowed Tony Schwartz, his ghostwriter, to listen in on his private phone calls with bankers, lawyers, and developers, as Schwartz wrote “The Art of the Deal.” And, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many of Trump’s private conversations with his late mentor, the lawyer Roy Cohn, were eavesdropped on by Cohn’s longtime switchboard operator and courier, whose activities were later exposed.
Cohn, who had been an aide to Senator Joe McCarthy in the nineteen-fifties, was a political fixer and lawyer who represented New York power brokers, from the Yankees owner George Steinbrenner to the mob boss Carlo Gambino. Trump was one of his favorite clients; before Cohn’s death, of AIDS-related complications, in 1986, the two men talked up to five times a day and partied together at Studio 54 and other night clubs. “Roy was brutal, but he was a very loyal guy,” Trump told the writer Tim O’Brien, in 2005. “He brutalized for you.”
Christine Seymour had recently graduated from Sarah Lawrence College when she started working at the back of Cohn’s office as a switchboard operator, connecting calls with clients including Nancy Reagan, Gloria Vanderbilt, and the mobsters Gambino and Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno. “She listened in to all of them,” Susan Bell, Cohn’s longtime secretary, recalled recently. “Not at his direction, but he knew.” A pretty brunette, Seymour was, according to her brothers, brash and funny, with a gossipy sense of humor. Cohn had his reasons for tolerating her behavior. “She was very efficient, and he liked that about her,” Bell said. “She would work anytime, day or night. She was always at his beck and call.”
After Cohn died and his law firm dissolved, Seymour, then in her late forties, left the city and moved to Florida. She settled in Key Colony Beach, a sleepy town at the bottom of the Keys, where, in the early nineties, she started writing a book, “Surviving Roy Cohn,” based on her notes on the eavesdropped calls. It must have seemed an ideal moment for a project that promised to take the reader inside the town house of one of the most scandalous figures in recent New York history. In 1993, James Woods was nominated for an Emmy for his portrayal of Cohn in an HBO biopic, “Citizen Cohn,” and “Angels in America,” Tony Kushner’s play dramatizing Cohn’s struggle with AIDS, had débuted to acclaim on Broadway.
On the morning of May 5, 1994, the New York Post ran a column by Cindy Adams with the headline “Savvy Chris Spills the Beans on Roy Cohn.” In her characteristically breezy manner, Adams wrote about Seymour’s book project, listing the secrets she would expose. (“How a porno flick was filmed in the office and business was conducted while someone was being whipped”; “How Sen. Joe McCarthy hid the fact that he was gay. . . .”) “Chris taped conversations,” she wrote. “She kept a log—three spiral notebooks a day—of transactions.” Adams wrote that Seymour “monitored every call in or out, knew everything, everyone, knew where all the bodies were buried.” The story ricocheted through the city, and Cohn’s former law partners and staffers received phone calls from several other anxious clients, worried that their secrets would be revealed.
Five months later, on October 20, 1994, Seymour was driving her blue two-door Yugo on a highway in Florida at dusk when she collided head-on with a tractor-trailer and was instantly killed. She was forty-six, and the book was still unfinished. Seymour’s collaborator on the book, an author and literary agent named Jeffrey Schmidt, was at home on Long Island when he got the call from Seymour’s mother, Adele, who lived in nearby Shoreham. As he recalled recently, on hearing the news of Seymour’s death, he panicked, took a box of the notebooks, and burned them.
As for the recordings, none of Cohn’s former employees can confirm that Christine made any. But Christine’s brother, Brian, who once worked as a crew member on Cohn’s eighty-foot yacht, Defiance, told me that when Christine moved to Florida, she had handed him three small reel-to-reel tapes that she claimed she had made. The tapes were, he recalled, “in god-awful shape, spooled and unspooled and crinkled.” He stored them in his mother’s attic, where he later found them, in 2009, after she passed away. “We just tossed them in the trash,” he told me. In the spring of 1995, Schmidt told the syndicated columnist Liz Smith that some tapes still existed and would soon be the basis for a Broadway musical, written by Seymour and Schmidt, with music by Jeanette Cooper. “Nothing Sacred” is really Seymour’s story; her eavesdropping is at the heart of the drama. The play kicks off with Cohn’s voice “heard over the telephone wire.” On one of her first days, she tells a colleague that Cohn is on the phone with Nancy Reagan, adding, “Oh, I wish I could hear what they’re saying.” The office manager replies, “Go ahead and listen. Roy doesn’t mind.” Later, she adds, “Some of the most important conversations of the twentieth century have come through the switchboard. And they’re all on tape.” One of the first songs includes the line, “This damn phone, needs a chaperone / Someone who’ll defend, the fortress of a friend / In exchange she’ll learn things she would never know.” After one staged reading of “Nothing Sacred,” in the winter of 1997, at the Dicapo Opera Theatre, on the Upper East Side, Schmidt got caught up in other projects, he said, and the play was never produced.
Schmidt still lives in Stony Brook, on Long Island, where he runs NYCreative Management, a literary agency. Last September, we met at the Strand one afternoon and then walked across the street for a cup of coffee. It was a warm afternoon, but Schmidt was wearing a black suit with a bright yellow tie. He handed me a yellow packing envelope, containing “some things left behind in Roy’s office.” Inside the envelope were several floppy disks, a cassette tape, the “Nothing Sacred” screenplay, a 1981 invitation to a Ronald Reagan Presidential Inauguration party, the consent form to participate in an AIDS drug trial, a few faded photographs, and dozens of notes, some of them stained, written in Seymour’s hasty longhand. The notes contain lists of the clients who called Cohn’s office, including their personal phone numbers; Seymour’s reminiscences of her experience working with Cohn, including lunch orders for pepper-sausage-and-mushroom pizza slices; and her description of Cohn’s conversations with Trump, Steinbrenner, Vanderbilt, and Nancy Reagan, among others, and what appear to be direct quotes from some of those phone calls—although it’s almost impossible to know how much of Seymour’s account in the notebooks and script is true.
One of Seymour’s notes describes Cohn’s efforts to advance the judicial career of Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, who served as a federal appeals-court judge for decades, until stepping down soon after Trump assumed the Presidency: “Roy got the White House to give her her judgeship,” Seymour writes. “Roy was out and the call came in to tell her she got it. I took the call and called her to tell her. Ten minutes later, Donald called to say thank you.” (Barry did not respond to requests for comment.)
Seymour also describes some of Cohn’s political dirty tricks, including that he had researched Geraldine Ferraro, the 1984 Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, with the assistance of Trump’s adviser Roger Stone. (“Roger Stone—worked with Roy very heavily before and after elections. Was the one with Roy to find out the dirt on the Ferraros.”) Stone, who first met Trump through Cohn, initially did not think much of the brash young real-estate developer, Seymour’s notes indicate. “Roger did not like Donald Trump or his new house, told me they were losers, but if Roy used them, he would, too,” she writes. When I recently asked Stone about this, he said the “notes make no sense,” adding, “I was very impressed with Donald Trump when I met him.”
According to Seymour’s notes, Cohn’s frequent phone pals included Nancy Reagan and the former C.I.A. director William Casey, who “called Roy almost daily during [Reagan’s] 1st election.” Cohn also enlisted his friend and the owner of the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch, to help bring down Ferraro’s campaign: “Whenever Roy wanted a story stopped or item put in, or story exploited, i.e Ferraro—and her family, Roy called Murdoch.” Cohn killed stories that would hurt his friends. When he found out that “60 Minutes” was about to do a negative story about Reagan’s potential Vice-President, Senator Paul Laxalt, of Nevada, “Roy called the producer of 60 Minutes and asked him to take it off the schedule.” The longtime “60 Minutes” producer Lowell Bergman, who didn’t talk to Cohn himself, confirms that the story never aired amid pressure from lawyers, including Cohn.
Another note says, “Donald was the last one Roy spoke to on the phone,” perhaps referring to Cohn’s last days, in 1986. Seymour also noted that Trump could be “two-faced,” and described how he had once heard from an assistant that a lawyer working for Cohn wanted to leave his firm and immediately told Cohn about the treachery. Trump “did things like that always. Roy’s line on him: ‘He pisses ice water!’ “ It appears that Trump was aware of her eavesdropping; Seymour claims that Trump told Cohn that she was listening in on the phone calls. Seymour’s jottings also suggest that she had eavesdropped on the call between Cohn and his doctor on November 4, 1984, when Cohn was told that he had been diagnosed with AIDS. A poignant note records that, when he got the news, Cohn responded, “Should I commit suicide now or later?”
Some of Seymour’s claims in the notes are disputed by Bell, who says that Cohn rarely called the White House, though he was friendly with Nancy Reagan. Bell also doubts that Cohn’s last conversation was with Trump, who, she said, abandoned his lawyer when he found out that Cohn was H.I.V.-positive. “They were so close, they talked at least several times a week,” she said. “And as soon as he found out, he took all his cases away from Roy except for one and got new lawyers. After all they’d been through together.” But the notes, and the lingering mystery of what secrets were contained in the lost notebooks, continue to inspire rumors and, perhaps, a legacy of paranoia. Brian Seymour told me that Christine had a photographic memory, but he can’t say for sure what is true and what isn’t. “She probably knew a lot about a lot of things, but she’s not here anymore,” he said.
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Paranoid politics did not start with Donald Trump, and sadly, it will not end with him either. In a seminal piece on political paranoia, published in the November 1964 issue of Harper’s, Pulitzer Prize winning historian Richard Hofstadter noted that the paranoid style has been around long before the alt-right discovered it — its targets in American political history have included immigrants, Catholics, international bankers, Masons, Jesuits, abortionists, the press, munitions makers, and most anyone else worthy of scapegoating. The term is intentionally pejorative as paranoia has “a greater affinity,” Hofstadter argued, “for bad causes than for good.”
Immigration has long been a salient feature of paranoid politics. Hofstadter wrote about Lyman Beecher, father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote in his 1835 Plea for the West that “A great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions, was sweeping in upon the country, subsidized and sent by ‘the potentates of Europe,’ multiplying tumult and violence, filling jails, crowding poorhouses, quadrupling taxation, and sending increasing thousands of voters to ‘lay their inexperienced hand upon the helm of our power.’”
By “paranoid” I don’t mean to suggest that Trump, is a certifiable lunatic. This would be beyond my expertise. I would only argue that his political approach of demonizing his enemies; fabricating claims out of whole cloth; relying on conspiracy theories; expressing suspicion that others are out to get him, including the intelligence agencies, the FBI, Obama (with unsupported allegations of wiretapping), and the media; pandering to anger and fear in the populace; gross exaggeration, and distortion; xenophobia, racism, and let’s not forget misogyny, resonates with a paranoid style sadly seen all too often in American history.
In modern times, besides Trump, leading exponents of the paranoid model have been Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. All these men did political battle in a paranoid style. And connecting the dots between these complicated men was a corrupt lawyer named Roy Marcus Cohn, who never held elective office, but was close to all of them.
The grand jury brought three separate indictments against Cohn in the Southern District of New York for crimes ranging from conspiracy to mail fraud, bribery to securities fraud and extortion to obstruction of justice. Cohn launched a vicious counter attack against the motives of his accusers; Prosecutor Robert M. Morgenthau, he claimed, was engaging in payback because McCarthy alleged Morgenthau’s father, as FDR’s Treasury Secretary, had helped the Soviets manipulate the currency in Berlin. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, he said, held a grudge against him from McCarthy days because Cohn edged Kennedy out to become McCarthy’s chief counsel. (I worked for Morgenthau as an Assistant United States Attorney.)
None of these men had hard and fast policy objectives. When Trump breached the barriers of political correctness and the Constitution to preach criminalizing abortion, mass deportation of immigrants, or barring Muslims from the country, these views were hardly born of a sincerely nurtured ideology. Fear-mongering techniques such as anti-intellectualism, communist witch hunts, racism, sexism and the suggestion of anti-Semitism, xenophobic building of walls to keep out foreigners and refugees are all paranoid ideation that go down well in the populist “alt-right” culture.
Cohn parlayed his reputation as the prosecutor in the Rosenberg atomic spy case, into appointment as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. In January, 1950, McCarthy had soared to national prominence with his infamously bogus claim: “I have here in my hand a list of 205 names made known to the Secretary of State as Communists, but who are still on the payroll.” In fact, there were only 65. Of these, the Secretary ordered further security tests. All passed.
As McCarthy’s consigliere, Cohn mastered the art of the smear, the lie, and the counterattack. Cohn, a willing handmaiden, sat at McCarthy’s side at the nationally televised Senate hearings. He rocketed to national prominence just as Trump did with The Apprentice. As Cohn later wrote, “people are bored; they want entertainment.” Entertainment would prove to be the vehicle for both men to achieve political power.
Cohn and Trump first met at Le Club, a trendy New York café society hangout on East 55th Street. The two quickly became joined at the hip, and Cohn became Trump’s lawyer. A journalist told me that in 1984, the first time she interviewed Trump at the 21 Club, Cohn was there.
Also among Cohn’s clients were Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, owners of Studio 54, a watering hole for the international glitterati, where recreational drugs were plentiful, sex happened in the men’s room, and half-naked busboys cleaned up the remains of the evening. Studio 54 attracted city leaders, Hollywood stars and a pot pourri of straight, gay and bisexual revelers. Trump remembered going to the nightclub and seeing a couple “getting screwed” on a sofa.
Trump first hired Cohn in 1973 when the federal government investigated claims of racial bias involving Trump apartment buildings. At Trump’s Shore Haven apartments in New York City, the superintendent told a white woman she could have her pick of two units shortly after a black woman had been told there were no vacancies. The Justice Department then accused Trump of violations of the Fair Housing Act. Trump remembered that other lawyers told him, “You have a good case, but it’s a sticky thing.” Then, he explained his predicament to Cohn, and was thrilled when Roy instantly declared, “Oh, you’ll win hands down!” Cohn was quick to counter. He launched a suit against the government lawyers who had brought the case for $180 million, asserting that the charges were irresponsible and baseless. The court dismissed the lawsuit. Trump and Cohn settled the government’s original discrimination suit out of court in 1975 without admitting guilt. This marked a key moment in Trump’s career, as he became schooled in the tactic that would be a core feature of his political approach: hitting his critics back hard when he feels attacked. When Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer attacked Attorney General Jeff Sessions over Sessions’ ties to the Russians, Trump published an old picture of Schumer eating doughnuts with Vladimir Putin, and charged Schumer with “hypocrisy.”
Both Cohn and Trump abhorred paying taxes. In How to Stand Up for Your Rights—and Win! Cohn devoted an entire chapter to tax avoidance. He wrote: “More so than any other institution in these free and United States, the IRS smacks of a police state with police state methods. All this procedure must be viewed in the context of where tax money goes…welfare recipients…unemployment compensation…bloated bureaucrats…political hacks, and to foreign aid, where big money is ritualistically poured into countries that hate our guts….All of this provides an incentive not to overpay taxes….”
Trump learned at the feet of the master, reporting almost a billion dollars of questionable losses, which he could use to shelter substantial taxable income over a ten-year period. Giving the spurious excuse that his returns were under audit, he stubbornly refused to release them lest the returns disclose the extent of his tax avoidance schemes, and his rumored dealings with Russia.
On June 24, 1986, Cohn was disbarred for defrauding clients and others. Six weeks later he died of AIDS. Resonating with Trump’s reaction to criticism, Cohn dismissed the Bar grievance committee as “a bunch of yoyos.” Trump remained friends with Cohn. He had testified as a character witness for Cohn in the disbarment proceeding. He attended Roy Cohn’s funeral.
Hofstadter wrote that: “We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.” With their paranoid political styles, McCarthy, Cohn, and Nixon, like Daedalus, flew too close to the sun, and went down in flames doubly afflicted. The jury is out on Donald Trump as it ponders the verdict of history.
Jim Zirin is author of two best-selling books, the latest of which is Supremely Partisan-How Raw Politics Tips the Scales in the United States Supreme Court. He is working on a book about paranoid style politics.
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