Trump and Paulson’s Proposal: U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund (or Another Grifter Bailout)

 

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Trump and Paulson’s Proposal: U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund (or Another Grifter Bailout)

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 9, 2024 ~

John Paulson

Last Thursday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump spoke before the Economic Club of New York. During the speech, Trump revealed that if he wins the election he will create a U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund.

Sovereign Wealth Funds are what countries that are rich from oil exports create with their surplus budget balances in order to diversify their nation’s investments. (Countries such as Norway, Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, and numerous other countries have Sovereign Wealth Funds.) Not only does the U.S. not have any budget surpluses to invest but it is projected to have a $1.9 trillion budget deficit this fiscal year as well as having an existing national debt of $35.4 trillion.

Trump explained his plan as follows in his speech at the Economic Club of New York:

“We’ll create America’s own sovereign wealth fund to invest in great national endeavors for the benefit of all of the American people. Why don’t we have a wealth fund? Other countries have wealth funds. We have nothing. We have nothing.

“We’re going to have a sovereign wealth fund, or we can name it something different. I’ll talk about it with Mr. Paulson, who’s in the audience, and a lot of other friends of mine. And we’ll name it something that’s appropriate. Perhaps sovereign wealth fund wouldn’t be appropriate, but it’s going to be the same thing. We’ll put tremendous amounts of money through all this money that will be taken in through tariffs and other intelligent things, and we’ll have the greatest sovereign wealth fund of them all. And we should have.

“And that will be used to do things that will be great for our country, including to invest and wisely invest and build it up bigger and stronger and better than any place on earth. We will build extraordinary national development projects, and everything from highways to airports and to transportation, infrastructure, all of the future. We’ll be able to invest in state-of-the-art manufacturing hubs, advanced defense capabilities, cutting-edge medical research, and help save billions of dollars in preventing disease in the first place…

“And it is many of the people in this room who will be helping to advise and recommend investments for this fund….”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but most people who believe in capitalism also believe that it’s the job of efficient markets to allocate capital to the most critical areas — not the job of government.

The “Mr. Paulson” that Trump referred to in his speech is the billionaire hedge fund titan, John Paulson. Bloomberg News reported that Paulson is advising Trump on the Sovereign Wealth Fund plan and his name is being floated as Trump’s Treasury Secretary should Trump win in the November election. Paulson has hosted multiple fundraising events for Trump in the current election cycle and in Trump’s failed run for reelection in 2020.

John Paulson became infamous for his role in the Goldman Sachs’ ripoff known as Abacus, where he was allowed by Goldman to pick subprime debt he thought would default in order for him to take short bets. The SEC charged that Paulson made $1 billion on the deal while defrauded investors to whom Goldman Sachs sold the deal as a good investment lost an equal amount.

The Securities and Exchange Commission failed to bring charges against Paulson. On July 15, 2010, the SEC announced that Goldman Sachs would pay $550 million to settle its Abacus charges. Fabrice Tourre, a young Goldman investment banker involved in the deal, was the only person to face a civil trial. No one was criminally prosecuted in the matter.

More recently, Paulson has been making salacious headlines for being engaged to another woman who is pregnant with his child while he is still legally married. He and his wife, Jenny Paulson, have been engaged in a high profile, nasty divorce for three years, where she has charged that he hid billions of dollars from her in trusts.

Trump’s previous Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, had similar warts on his character and set up a giant slush fund. (See 75% of the $454 Billion CARES Act Money Never Went to the Fed; It Was Invested by a Mnuchin Slush Fund Called the ESF.)

In addition, Mnuchin battled the media for months in an effort to keep secret the names of the businesses that received funds under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a Trump administration program ostensibly to help small businesses survive during the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. ProPublica reported the following when the Trump administration finally relented and released some of the details:

“Businesses tied to President Donald Trump’s family and associates stand to receive as much as $21 million in government loans designed to shore up payroll expenses for companies struggling amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to federal data released Monday…

“Several companies connected to the president’s son-in-law and White House adviser, Jared Kushner, could get upward of $6 million…

“Monday’s list included a Manhattan law firm whose marquee attorney has fiercely defended Trump for almost two decades. Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP — whose managing partner, Marc Kasowitz, was at one point the president’s top lawyer in the special counsel’s Russia investigation — was set to receive between $5 million and $10 million….”

Wall Street On Parade also reported extensively on the dodgy details underlying the PPP program and its sister operation, the Paycheck Protection Program Liquidity Facility. See, for example, Jay Sekulow, Trump’s Impeachment Lawyer, Collected $1-2 Million in a PPP Loan for his Scandal-Ridden Charity; and The Fed’s Paycheck Protection Program Gave a Tiny NJ Bank $5.3 Billion – 9 Percent of all the Money It’s Spent Thus Far.

During his speech last Thursday, Trump kept to his trademark brand of grossly distorting facts in favor of his imaginary alternative reality. Paulson was one of only four people allowed to ask questions of Trump during the Q&A that followed his speech at the Economic Club last Thursday. Paulson asked him about the $2 trillion deficit under President Biden. Trump answered as follows:

“Well, we just hit record highs at numbers that nobody ever thought possible. You’re right, over $2 trillion. Nobody thought that was a number that was – I mean, you could go back four years. Nobody thought a number like that would be possible. It’s crazy. It’s like – it’s just horrible, actually.”

According to the U.S. Treasury’s data, the budget deficit in Trump’s fourth year in office, 2020, was $3.13 trillion.

As for allowing Donald Trump to get anywhere near investing large sums of money for the future of the United States of America, this is what Trump said during his speech last Thursday regarding the impact of climate change: (You can hear the remark at 1:08 on the C-SPAN video here.)

“When people talk about global warming, I say the ocean is going to go down one hundredth of an inch within the next 400 years. That’s not our problem. Our problem is nuclear warming.”

Trump has used the phrase “nuclear warming” in previous interviews. Scientists have no clue as to what he is talking about. Credible climate change scientists also do not believe the ocean “is going to go down.” They have concluded that “Global warming is causing global mean sea level to rise in two ways. First, glaciers and ice sheets worldwide are melting and adding water to the ocean. Second, the volume of the ocean is expanding as the water warms….”

The Economic Club of New York did its own reputation no favors by hosting Trump at last Thursday’s event.


WALL STREET ON PARADE

POLITICO NIGHTLY: How to tell who’s winning Georgia

BY RENUKA RAYASAM AND TYLER WEYANT Presented by Stickers for voters sit on a table at a Cobb County voting location in Atlanta. | Getty Images SCATTERED, SMOTHERED, COVERED — The rallies have ended, the ballots have been cast, the tweets on Dominion Voting sent. Tonight — or later this week, when results come out — Georgia’s two Senate runoffs conclude, with control of the Senate on the line. The polls close at 7 p.m. ET. Before you turn on your TV and start scrolling Twitter on your phone, Nightly has the latest on the Peach State showdown. — Some background: Our senior campaigns editor Steve Shepard explains the latest polling as well as early voting figures and where you should be paying attention as results come in. (Steve also tweeted this great thread of POLITICO’s Georgia coverage throughout the election.) — Expectation setting: Tyler Pager and Megan Cassella reveal Bidenworld’s private skepticism of Raphael Warnock’s and Jon Ossoff’s chances. — Postcards from voters: Photographer Jonathan Frydman took a recent tour of the state and found many Georgians don’t feel they have any say in the election. — Your go-to links: The Georgia results page from POLITICO is your spot for the latest numbers from Brunswick to Blairsville. We’ll also have live expert analysis from our newsroom. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out at rrayasam@politico.com and tweyant@politico.com, or on Twitter at @renurayasam and @tweyant.   A message from Salesforce: The most extensive vaccine program in history is upon us. Distributing COVID-19 vaccines to the public fast and at scale can make a difference for hundreds of thousands of lives. That is why Salesforce is helping provide digital vaccine management using data-driven information powered by its trusted Customer 360 platform. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, is using Saleforce’s platform to help equitably distribute billions of vaccines to 190 countries. Learn about secure digital vaccine management solutions at Salesforce.com/vaccines.   NIGHTLY INTERVIEW DIALING 4-0-4 — Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden held rallies in Georgia on Monday laying out the stakes for the Senate runoffs for their parties. Now that the end is finally here, Renu spoke with Atlanta’s mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms today about what she’s going to be looking for tonight as the results come in. This conversation has been edited. How will you be watching the election returns tonight? I have a few national interviews this evening, so I’ll be at home with all of my TVs on, paying attention. I’ll be going to the secretary of state website trying to get updates in real time. That’s the plan. So like us, you’ll be hitting refresh on the SOS website a lot tonight. I’m certainly gonna be looking at the metro area as a whole, wanting to see how strong the turnout is not just in Fulton and Dekalb Counties, but also Gwinnett County. And we’ve got to watch other urban areas across the state: Richmond County, Chatham County in Savannah. Then looking at those more rural counties. Trump was in Dalton, in Whitfield County yesterday. My 18-year-old actually went to vote today. So I texted him to ask him if there was a line. He’s 18, so of course he’s not responded to me. This is gonna be a nail biter. I think it’s going to be close. What do you think of this idea that Georgia is no longer a Republican state? Georgia is definitely a swing state. Every conversation I’ve had with President-elect Biden going back from the time that I endorsed him in 2019, I stressed that we could take Georgia with the right amount of focus. We’re trending younger. We’re a more diverse state. We could see the trend happening, in the same way as we could see the trend when we went from blue to red a couple of decades ago. There is a group that has specifically focused on turning out African American voters who did not vote in November. A group called Battleground Georgia. As of yesterday, they had turned out maybe 40,000 people who had not voted in November. The Republicans are doing the same thing. We’ve been trending blue for quite some time, but it’s gonna be interesting because Donald Trump brings out people who don’t often come out to vote. Tell me about your conversations with Biden recently. Something that I’ve talked with him about on more than one occasion is the need to address the mental health aspect of this pandemic in our community. The mental health crisis is our next pandemic because we’re seeing anxiety, depression, and we’re seeing it play out in our streets. We’ve got a massive uptick in violent crime and uptick in domestic violence cases. That’s gonna be an immediate need. We just had a great conversation yesterday, a pretty lengthy conversation after he spoke. For me it was a very emotional moment. Just watching him on the stage and seeing that it’s all come down to Georgia. For me, it feels like the longest election cycle ever. It feels even longer and more arduous than when I ran for mayor. As a country, we’re just all ready for the transition to happen.   GET THE BIG PRE-INAUGURATION SCOOPS IN TRANSITION PLAYBOOK: Inauguration Day is quickly approaching. Is the Biden administration ready? Transition Playbook brings you inside the transition and newly forming administration, tracking the latest from Biden world and the transition of power. Written for political insiders, this scoop-filled newsletter breaks big news and analyzes the appointments, people and emerging power centers of the new administration. Track the transition and the first 100 days of the incoming Biden administration. Subscribe today.     FIRST IN NIGHTLY THE BIG ASK — This hinge-of-history week kicked off with the leak of audio of Trump asking Georgia’s secretary of state to illicitly reverse the results of an election that he lost. It continued with a rally he used principally to traffic in conspiracy theories while unabashedly pressuring his vice president to side with him instead of facts or the Constitution. Now, on the eve of a no-longer-rote certification of the Electoral College vote, the outgoing president is demanding that Republicans in Congress go on record saying they’re more loyal to him than to the nation’s bedrock principles. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, whose fealty landed him in prison, feels like he’s watching a reprise of his own demise. “I warned them,” Cohen told POLITICO Magazine senior staff writer Michael Kruse . “I warned Mark Meadows at my oversight hearing. I warned the Jim Jordans,” he said, referring to Trump’s current chief of staff and other notably pro-Trump GOP House members whom he name-checked in his congressional testimony less than two years ago. His message: “I know what you’re doing. I know the Trump game plan, because I wrote it, and it didn’t work out for me. And it’s not going to work out for you.” The specifics of this particular moment are without doubt newly alarming — never, needless to say, has he attempted quite so overtly to subvert American democracy and its Constitution — but this also is merely the latest turn to a well-worn page of the old Trump playbook. He is gauging the strength of the devotion to him by demanding others perform ethically suspect, legally murky things that accrue to his immediate benefit while often creating lasting trouble for the doers. What Trump does in the end is to make people choose: Are you for him, or not? In or out. Yes or no. Pick.       BIDENOLOGY Welcome to Bidenology, Nightly’s look at the president-elect and what to expect in his administration. Tonight, as many of us hope to stick to dietary New Year’s resolutions, Daniel Lippman looks in the pantry to see what Biden’s diet is like: “He has very simple tastes in food,” said a former Biden staffer. The president-elect loves spaghetti Bolognese and is a big aficionado of other types of pasta with red sauce, with a person familiar with what he eats calling it a “mainstay.” A current Biden aide said the president-elect also loves chicken parm. “He’s a very big ice cream fan,” said another source. “He’s done a lot of OTR [off-the-record] stops at ice cream parlors,” such as at a Dairy Queen in Iowa, where he turned a Blizzard upside down to show how viscous it was. After Biden accepted the Democratic nomination at the 2020 convention, granddaughter Naomi Biden tweeted a picture of a carton of Breyers chocolate chip ice cream with a note: “Pop, Tonight, you eat from the box. Love, the grandchildren.” His granddaughters told the Democratic convention in a recorded video that “he’s always eating ice cream,” often vanilla with chocolate sprinkles. He’s also a fan of Jeni’s. He likes milkshakes. “He has the taste buds of a 10-year-old kid,” joked a former Biden aide. In that vein, a current Biden aide said that their boss likes cheese and pepperoni pizza. At one point in his Senate career, there was a week to two-week period when Jill Biden made pasta for him every night to see if he ever wanted to change up what he was eating, a Biden source recalled. "She was trying to see if he would get sick of it, but he never tired of having pasta and didn’t say anything," the source said. When Biden was vice president, he ate a chopped salad from the White House mess almost every day for lunch, which was delivered to his office, recalled the person. When on the road, he often ate Jif peanut butter sandwiches. Biden kept a fridge in his White House office where he would store drinks. He often has a Diet Coke with lunch. Like Trump, he doesn’t drink alcohol. One of his favorite drinks these days is orange Gatorade, and it’s in every green room that Biden enters. He told Us Weekly in 2016 that orange Gatorade was his favorite drink, leading to a Biden candle that smells like it . Before the 2020 presidential run, a rider to speaking contracts would require that “bottled water, Coke Zero, regular Coca-Cola, orange Gatorade and black coffee” be stocked in his dressing room, according to the Washington Post. Biden also required that he be served “angel hair pomodoro, a Caprese salad, topped off with raspberry sorbet with biscotti.” That revelation led Eater to write a story headlined: “Joe Biden Just Can’t Get Enough Angel Hair Pasta.” Biden’s favorite foods don’t seem to have changed much over the years. In a Q&A in the former Washington Dossier magazine in 1985, Biden listed “steak and pasta” as his favorite dinner foods, Diet Coke as his drink and fruit as his snack of choice. His “presidential aspirations” were listed as “strong; definitely interested in making a run someday, perhaps as early as 1988.” AROUND THE NATION PARTY LIKE IT’S 2003 — A year ago, California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed an ambitious $222 billion budget that explicitly drew a stark contrast with Trump and positioned himself as a future presidential candidate. This year he’s fighting for political survival, trying to fend off a recall effort that could prematurely end his term. In the early months of the pandemic, Newsom seemed poised to emerge as a governor who led his state through crisis. But rather than cementing his status atop California’s Democratic hierarchy, the virus appears to have chipped away at Newsom’s standing, California Playbook author Carla Marinucci told the Nightly today. More than 27,000 Californians have died from Covid. The virus continues to rapidly spread across the state with no signs of slowing. Hospitals in Los Angeles are turning away ambulances. In addition California has the lowest vaccination rate in the country. The blame doesn’t entirely lie at Newsom’s feet, Carla said. But the governor has lost his authority: Much of the state remains under stay at home orders but no one is really listening to him. His plan for the Covid vaccine has been criticized for getting bogged down in the details without actually distributing any shots. The pandemic has opened Newsom up to critics on the right, such as San Diego’s former mayor Kevin Faulconer, and those on the left who see a chance to make a move, said Carla. The recall effort is gaining momentum and diverting resources from Newsom’s 2022 reelection campaign. “Every day that goes by and people aren’t getting shots in their arms is another day he is closer to the recall,” said Carla. PALACE INTRIGUE SEKULOW DISSENTS — Trump attorney Jay Sekulow today shot down claims that Vice President Mike Pence has the authority to overturn Biden’s election . “Some have speculated that the vice president could simply say, ‘I’m not going to accept these electors,’ that he has the authority to do that under the Constitution,” Sekulow said during his radio show. “I actually don’t think that’s what the Constitution has in mind.” SPLIT INDECISION — The move to challenge Biden’s presidential win in Congress on Wednesday bucks not only the will of voters but also the wishes of prominent GOP leaders like Mitch McConnell. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, Kyle Cheney reports on how the situation is creating a rift within the Republican Party that could last far beyond Trump’s presidency. Listen to the latest POLITICO Dispatch podcast ASK THE AUDIENCE Nightly asks you: What are you most hopeful about heading into 2021? Send us your answers through our form, and we’ll use select responses in Friday’s edition. THE GLOBAL FIGHT DON’T PACK YOUR BAGPIPES — If Trump thought he could escape Biden’s inauguration by playing golf in Scotland, he looks to be sadly mistaken. Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon today warned the outgoing U.S. president that playing golf would not be deemed an “essential” reason for transatlantic travel during the pandemic. Sturgeon told a press conference: “I have no idea what Donald Trump’s travel plans are, you’ll be glad to know. I hope and expect … that the travel plan that he immediately has is to exit the White House. But beyond that I don’t know. “We are not allowing people to come into Scotland without an essential purpose right now. And that would apply to him just as it applies to anybody else,” she added. “Coming to play golf is not what I would consider to be an essential purpose.” STAY TUNED TOMORROW — On Wednesday morning, listen to the newest episode of POLITICO’s Global Translations podcast. Ryan Heath and Luiza Savage explore what solutions exist in the global labor market after Covid’s instability.   A NEW YEAR MEANS A NEW HUDDLE IS HERE: Huddle, our daily congressional must-read, has a new author! Olivia Beavers took the reins this week, and she has the latest news and whispers from the Speakers' Lobby. Don’t miss out, subscribe to our Huddle newsletter, the essential guide to all things Capitol Hill. Subscribe today.     NIGHTLY NUMBER 24 The number of GOP senators, thus far, who have said they will vote to certify Biden’s election as president, according to a series of interviews and statements. PARTING WORDS ON THE MOVE — Tyler emails us: I am writing to you from my new apartment, one I moved into quite early this morning, gambling successfully that I would have enough time to work on an Election Day once I was finished. Over the summer, I helped one of my best friends move. He was in my small bubble, and in small groups, our bubble helped as we could. Boy, I thought, moving in a pandemic must be hard. I decided to one up him: Moving across D.C. during a pandemic … on the day of the Georgia primary … as thousands of protesters come to Washington. And you thought fitting that armoire in the minivan was hard. My initial thought in picking this time of year to move? It is the New Year, and required a fairly large new start. I jumped into the 2020-was-bad-2021-has-to-be-grand boat with both feet. But 2020’s energy bled into my bright optimism. I strained to hear movers through their masks as they asked me where sofas should go. I checked D.C. government Twitter accounts occasionally to monitor closed roads. I placed hand sanitizers around my new apartment as though I were running a Bath & Body Works store. My hope for a fresh start was dashed on a series of reminders that the past isn’t over yet. I suspect my next move won’t be as infected with its place in history, or its literal potential for infection. So I am deferring the hope I had for this new year’s move to my next one. Oh, and to my close friends reading this? I am deferring you lending a hand to that move, too.   A message from Salesforce: There are many challenges while delivering vaccines to fight the global COVID-19 pandemic, and technology will play a critical role in helping governments and healthcare organizations distribute billions of doses worldwide. Distributing COVID-19 vaccines to the public fast and at scale will make a difference for hundreds of thousands of lives. That is why public health officials around the world are turning to Salesforce to help securely manage their vaccine distribution programs. Salesforce is proud to help provide premier digital vaccine management solutions, which use data-driven information powered by its trusted Customer 360 platform. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, is relying on Salesforce’s cloud-based services to manage information that will help equitably distribute billions of vaccines to 190 countries. With Salesforce, public health providers have a trusted partner for administering vaccine programs. Learn about secure digital vaccine management solutions at Salesforce.com/vaccines.   Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter Renuka Rayasam @renurayasam Chris Suellentrop @suellentrop Tyler Weyant @tweyant Myah Ward @myahward   FOLLOW US

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RSN: FOCUS: In 'True Crimes,' Jeffery Toobin Presents a Summation for the Jury in the Case Against Trump

31 July 20

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31 July 20 It's Live on the HomePage Now: Reader Supported News FINAL DAY, PLEASE CHIP-IN! - We are fighting to hold on to our budget and serving our readership with dedication while doing it. It can be a thankless assignment. Ask yourself why you trust RSN. It requires support. Now is the time. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News Sure, I'll make a donation! FOCUS: In 'True Crimes,' Jeffery Toobin Presents a Summation for the Jury in the Case Against Trump Ron Elving, NPR Elving writes: "At some point in the future, it is entirely possible that the full details of Donald Trump's business affairs, personal imbroglios and political maneuverings will be laid bare to the public."  In that hour, readers may well turn to True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump. This tome by Jeffrey Toobin, the longtime CNN legal analyst and contributor to The New Yorker, analyzes Trump's survival in the face of two major investigations during his first years in the presidency. It also asks whether the magic charm that saw Trump through these travails will suffice for him to survive the coronavirus pandemic. This 450-page work is more than a journalist emptying his notebook of all his interviews and insights. It is more than a legal expert analyzing how the best work of talented and committed lawyers could be frustrated by governmental rules and rivalries within the executive and legislative powers in our federal system. Perhaps its highest function is as a condensation of the best evidence against the presidency and character of Donald Trump, a summation offered up much as a prosecutor would do in seeking to sway a jury. Few who are familiar with Toobin's career, or his previous seven books about law and power, will be surprised that he finds fault with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's two-year investigation of Trump and the extensive interference by Russian operatives in the 2016 election. "Mueller's caution and reticence led him to fail at his two most important tasks," Toobin writes. "Thanks to the clever actions (and strategic inaction) of Trump's legal team, Mueller failed to obtain a meaningful interview with Trump himself. Even worse, Mueller convinced himself — wrongly — that he had to write a final report that was nearly incomprehensible to ordinary citizens in its legal conclusions." Worst of all, Toobin contends, the form and manner of Mueller's report played directly into the hands of Mueller's immediate boss, Attorney General William Barr, who was able to suppress the document and distort it as a total exoneration of the president. In the end, of course, Toobin concedes he faces the same dilemma as Mueller himself. There's a wealth of evidence indicating the Russians strove mightily to interfere in the 2016 election and did so with a conscious wish of defeating Hillary Clinton and electing Donald Trump. Moreover, the Trump campaign's response was to be fascinated, intrigued. "Certainly Mueller found abundant evidence that Trump and his campaign wanted to collude and conspire with Russia," Toobin says, "but they hadn't been able to close the deal." Yet the best admissible evidence Mueller or Toobin could find suggests the Russians did their thing and Trump's campaign did its own. They may have shared goals, but there was not enough beyond that to sustain a charge of conspiracy in a court of law. There may have been a far clearer case for charging Trump with obstruction of justice, as he attempted several times to have someone fire Mueller and end the special counsel's investigation. There were also indications that pardons were being dangled to persuade Manafort and others not to "flip" and testify against the president. But without an actual firing of the special counsel or the actual granting of pardons, Mueller had less to work with. Complicating all this was the decades-old policy of the Justice Department saying that a president could not be indicted while in office. This was a relic of the 1970s era when President Richard Nixon was on the brink of impeachment, a legal opinion rendered by the department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and never repudiated. Whatever the legal merits of the OLC policy itself, Toobin is dismayed that Mueller took it a step further. Mueller's report clearly stated that it was not exonerating the president, adding that it would have done so if the evidence supported exoneration. Yet Mueller refused to say explicitly that he was only withholding an indictment because of the OLC-imposed ban. Instead, Mueller insisted that such an "if only I could" statement, in the absence of an actual indictment, would leave the president standing accused de facto with no means of clearing his name. Toobin tells us this attitude, combined with Mueller's studied air of dispassion and detachment, left the prodigious work product of the special counsel's team vulnerable to misinterpretation and dismissal. And that was precisely what happened. Barr, who had denounced Mueller's investigation almost from the moment it began (when Barr was still a private citizen), received Mueller's report and called it total exoneration. Mueller raised mild objections in a statement, but the president and his supporters celebrated and never looked back. But Toobin is not writing exclusively about the Mueller saga, as he segues in the book's later chapters to the subsequent scandal and impeachment trial over Trump's dealings with Ukraine. The shift is foreshadowed when Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, is convicted of tax evasion and bank fraud based on his alliances with pro-Russian factions in Ukraine. Even after agreeing to cooperate with federal authorities, Manafort is still adjudged to be lying to protect those connections. We also see Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York and presidential candidate, traveling to Ukraine to collect dirt on the son of Joe Biden, a probable Democratic candidate against Trump at the time. Soon we have Trump himself calling the president of Ukraine and speaking of military aid to that country in the same breath with his personal desire for an investigation of the Bidens. The rest, as we know, is history. The phone call led to Trump's becoming the third president in history to be impeached. Ultimately, Trump was acquitted in the Senate, so the impeachment process came up as empty as Mueller's probe. Yet Toobin is far more respectful of the managers of impeachment, starting with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is nearly always described in magisterial terms. Toobin is also impressed with Adam Schiff, the Southern California congressman featured in the impeachment proceedings in the House and Senate. But no amount of evidence or lawyering was enough to break the phalanx of the Republican majority's resistance in the Senate. With the lone exception of Mitt Romney of Utah, every member of the president's party voted for acquittal.  There is a great deal of detail amassed here that even hardcore Trump investigation junkies will not have seen. Much of it has to do with behind-the-scenes strategizing and negotiating by the myriad lawyers involved on all sides — the FBI, Mueller's team, the White House, other executive offices and both parties in both chambers of Congress. Toobin is fascinated not only by the language of, say, the impeachment articles themselves, but by the individuals who drafted them, reviewed them or lent their imprimatur. In fact, while True Crimes offers a one-stop catalog of the legal proceedings surrounding the Trump presidency, it can also be read as a who's who of the legal profession in Washington and New York. More than a dozen key attorneys each rate pages of description and detailed narrative, while dozens more make cameo appearances or get drive-by mentions. Many will recognize the main names, but most have mercifully forgotten the likes of Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for porn star Stormy Daniels' suit against Trump. Most of us had also forgotten the early phases of Trump's negotiations with Mueller that were handled by the likes of Ty Cobb and John Dowd. Later we meet Jay Sekulow, who plays a role in both the Mueller matter and the impeachment struggle and continues to represent Trump in current cases. Toobin has plenty to say about them all. One attorney after another appears, like Shakespeare's "poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is heard no more." In a few cases, these players continue strutting and fretting right out the back end of the book and remain very much in the news today. One such is Michael Cohen, one of a host of Trump's personal lawyers who seem willing to do anything for him. Cohen gets caught up in Mueller's web, handed off to the U.S. Attorney in New York City for prosecution on unrelated crimes and then sent to jail on an ill-advised and poorly rewarded guilty plea. Cohen has recently been in and out of prison, and is now at work on what is touted to be an explosive tell-all. We also hear Trump bellowing "Where's my Roy Cohn?" –- a familiar wail to those who have tried in vain to please him on legal matters. Cohn advised Trump and his father on a federal discrimination-in-housing case in the 1970s and later became a kind of mentor for the younger Trump. Cohn was also known for his work for red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy and later for various figures from organized crime. Another intriguing figure highlighted at length is Donald McGahn, who was chairman of the Federal Election Commission and then a campaign law advisor to Trump before becoming his first White House attorney. McGahn is an unusually colorful figure, known for his lead guitar work with a cover band in East Coast rock clubs as well as for being a partner in the nationally eminent law firm of Jones Day. McGahn had some 30 hours of interviews with Mueller's team, souring his relationship with the president and leading to a quiet departure from the White House (he called it his "Irish exit"). It is a notable irony that while Toobin expressed disappointment with Mueller's key decisions, he always describes Mueller himself in terms of respect that border on reverence. His treatment of Giuliani the person, by contrast, is critical to the point of contempt. He finds some of Giuliani's TV appearances cringe-worthy, as when he tells NBC's Chuck Todd: "Truth isn't truth." Yet he tips his professional cap to Giuliani the lawyer, saying "his methods had been unconventional, to be sure, but his public advocacy for Trump had transformed Robert Mueller's image from that of a revered public servant into that of just another partisan actor." Beyond that, Toobin credits Giuliani's leadership when the Trump team avoids an interview with Mueller and negotiates "a nearly risk-free substitute of written questions and answers, only about the campaign period." Toobin is often most respectful of people such as Marie Yovanovitch and William Taylor, ambassadors who represented the U.S. in Ukraine and held out against White House pressure. Their testimony was key to the House hearings on impeachment, as was that of former Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. Each of these witnesses has paid a professional price for telling what they knew of Trump and the ways he deals with business rivals, political opponents, critical journalists, former wives and associates and employees and, yes, even foreign leaders. Most of what is new here is at the level of detail. The broad outlines and the key quotations from the Mueller saga and from the subsequent impeachment and trial of the president have been the stuff of nightly news, daily papers and constant Twitter feeds for years. But Toobin has gathered such a weight of evidence and such a chorus of witnesses that his summation is more damning than the sum of its parts. By integrating the Russian interference story with all the twists and turns of Trump's defensive moves and the segue to the Ukraine arms-for-favors deal, Toobin presents a persuasive summation to the jury of his readers. READ MORE Contribute to RSN Update My Monthly Donation