Beto, Maria Butina, National Enquirer: 3 Stories You Should Read 12/13/2018

December 13, 2018 Confluence

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Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.

In the category of: Be careful where you hide your skeletons.

A ‘loud gong’: National Enquirer’s surprise deal could imperil Trump

The National Enquirer’s parent company has agreed to tell prosecutors everything it knows about Donald Trump — and it might know a lot.

In a court document released Wednesday, the tabloid publisher, American Media Inc., admitted to coordinating a hush-money payment with Trump’s 2016 campaign, reversing two years of denials. The confession came as part of an immunity agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office in New York, made public shortly after Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was sentenced to three years in prison over charges of tax fraud, campaign finance violations and lying to Congress.

But the disclosure might just be scratching the surface. Based on court documents and a plethora of media reports, Trump and his aides have worked for years with the tabloid to kill incriminating stories. AMI’s CEO David Pecker also had a decades-long copacetic friendship with Trump.

Legal experts say that could mean more legal peril for Trump, who has already been implicated in directing Cohen to work with the National Enquirer during the 2016 campaign to pay women in exchange for their silence about alleged affairs.

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In the category of: Not the way she planned it.

Alleged Russian spy Maria Butina pleads guilty to engaging in a conspiracy against the US

The conspiracy, as prosecutors described it in court, kicked off no later than March 2015 with a draft proposal Butina wrote to Torshin and others called the “Description of the Diplomacy Project.

It described her plan to become an unofficial conduit of communication between Russia and the US, especially through the Republican Party, at a time when the two governments were less willing to negotiate formally. She had also planned to use $125,000 from Torshin to attend conferences associated with the GOP — particularly the NRA, which she believed “had influence over” the Republican Party, she admitted.

NRA members also received her invitation to visit Moscow and meet with high-ranking Russian politicians. Torshin and “US Person 1”, whom CNN identified as Butina’s boyfriend Paul Erickson, a GOP political operative, helped her prepare for the trip. After the trip in December 2015, she said to her Russian backer, “We should let them express their gratitude now, we will put pressure on them quietly later.”

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In the category of: Do we need inspiration or do we need leadership?

Beto is the new Bernie

What Bernie and Beto have in common is not necessarily policy, but the ability to engage this kind of person, voters who normally wouldn’t care about elections and to transform them into political animals who believe that change is possible by working within the system rather than bitterly watching from the sidelines. At his best, Obama had this quality too. I think we frequently forget that an eloquent, inspirational call for national unity is what launched him on a faster-than-light trajectory from state legislator to president in the first place. From what national Democrats saw of Beto this year, he seemed willing to speak truth to power even when doing so might cost him politically. The moment that took his Senate campaign from underdog longshot to national sensation was from August, when he was asked if it was “disrespectful to this country, to the flag, to service members” for NFL players to kneel during the national anthem to protest racial injustice and police brutality.

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