After a series of embarrassing acquittals and charges being dropped over weak cases or mishandled evidence from far-right agitprop outfits, the last of the J20 defendants are having their charges dropped:https://t.co/jsYTXXLwk2
— Dan Trombly (@stcolumbia) July 6, 2018
Update: There were 39, not 38, Inauguration Day cases still pending before today. Reporters asked about this, and the US attorney's office has notified us that it filed papers dismissing the 39th defendant https://t.co/WhP6U2Rxhn
— Zoe Tillman (@ZoeTillman) July 6, 2018
The Trump Occupation certainly tried to live by that adage during the 2017 inauguration — going for maximum thuggery, combined with an open embrace of oligarchic corruption. But their ambitious attempt to crush public dissent didn’t work nearly as well as they hoped. And now their OPEN FOR BUSINESS, FELLOw GRIFTERS! inaugural parties are giving Mr. Mueller a wealth of useful data against them, per Vox:
What happened at Donald Trump’s inauguration 18 months ago, and why does special counsel Robert Mueller appear to be so interested in it?
Last week, ABC News’s Matthew Mosk and John Santucci reported that several wealthy Russians were “granted unusual access” to Trump inauguration parties back in January 2017 — and that Mueller was seeking to find out why.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of Mueller’s interest in the inauguration. Back in April, CNN reported that the special counsel was investigating “whether wealthy Russians illegally funneled cash donations directly or indirectly into Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and inauguration” — and had even questioned some oligarchs directly.
These reports have broken in the months since former Trump aide Rick Gates agreed to a plea deal with Mueller’s team in exchange for his cooperation. That may not be a coincidence — Gates was heavily involved in planning the inauguration, with a Yahoo News report in 2016 calling him the “shadow chair” of the event.
Yet beyond just Russia, there have long been serious questions about the money behind Trump’s inauguration — and where, exactly, it went. Trump’s inaugural committee raised a truly astonishing $106.7 million, double the previous record set by Barack Obama’s 2009 inaugural. But what they did with it isn’t so clear.
In a report for ProPublica and WNYC by Ilya Marritz earlier this year, the chair of George W. Bush’s second inauguration, Greg Jenkins, said he was baffled. “They had a third of the staff and a quarter of the events and they raise at least twice as much as we did,” he said. “So there’s the obvious question: Where did it go? I don’t know.”
Much like a typical Trump Organization project, then, his inauguration combined eye-popping sums of money and opulence with questions of financial mismanagement, corruption, and shady foreign influence…
Many, many more details at the link — it’s a veritable Who’s Who of right-wing sugar daddies and shady influence groups, both domestic and foreign. “But if there is anyone who might know where much of the money went, it is Rick Gates. And whatever he knows, Robert Mueller now knows too.”
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