It's Still All About the Money, and Robert Mueller Knows It

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a55400/robert-mueller-russia-trump/
It's Still All About the Money, and Robert Mueller Knows It

The Justice Department's special prosecutor is zeroing in.
By Charles P. Pierce
May 31, 2017



(Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post)



Things are getting interesting around the special counsel's office. From Bloomberg:


The official, Andrew Weissmann, is the most senior government official to join Mueller, the former Federal Bureau of Investigation director who became special counsel on May 17, said two people, who asked not to be named discussing a personnel matter that hasn't been made public. Mueller recently brought on Peter Carr, a veteran spokesman for the Justice Department, to deal with the news media. He also hired at least two lawyers from his former law firm, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr LLP.

As the head of the Justice Department's fraud section in the Obama administration, Weissmann's specialties have included corporate wrongdoing and foreign corruption. He has overseen investigations into Volkswagen AG over diesel-cheating, global banks over market manipulation and Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras over corrupt payments. He also started a pilot program that offered companies incentives to self-report possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits bribing foreign officials.


It's going to be about the money. It always was going to be about the money. There is something distinctly rotten at the heart of the president*'s family business, about which the president* and the rest of the Borgias don't want the world to know. The money is all that matters to these people. The money always has been all that matters to these people. The money is central to whatever arrangements the extended clan made with the Russian banks, which is to say with the Russian governments. The money is central to the absurd defense of Michael Flynn and the preposterous alleged double-naught escapades of the Dauphin with the Russian ambassador. The money may be the only thing of which the president* himself is consistently cognitively aware.

Weissmann is a wartime consigliere about this stuff. He has worked as both a prosecutor and a defense lawyer in the area of white-collar crime. His specialty is international financial fraud, and unwinding its complexities in such a way that the rest of us schmoes can understand. And we, the schmoes of the world, make up jury pools. Robert Mueller is not fooling around and, for all the bizarre behavior concerning secure comms and Russian ambassadors, he seems to have homed in already on the key to the whole sorry mess. Somewhere, at the heart of it, there's nothing more or less banal than the classic American hunger for a quick and easy buck. That's where this whole thing is headed.