Trump’s Billion and Trillion Dollar Non-Disclosures

Trump’s Billion and Trillion Dollar Non-Disclosures

So Trump has beyond-the-grave non-disclosure agreements in his Trump Organization Business, his Campaign, and his White House.

Since Trump’s family is involved in his business, and he no doubts seeds their separate businesses, they also must have lifelong non-disclosure and non-criticizing agreements.

While Omarosa is being sued by the Campaign for disclosures, the White House, and even the Campaign agreements are said to be un-enforceable, as previously ruled by courts. My guess is that the suits are temporarily being pursued to cost her in lawyers, and to temporarily restrain her from revealing more. My guess is that like most Trump-threatened suits, they will not be pursued to trial. The threat to Trump of losing such a suit is enormous. One loss is like a crack in the dam, the floodwaters of hundreds of disclosures would sweep him out of office. Another analogy would be a House of Cards.

This last week’s tussles have introduced a new term into the nation’s vocabulary, NDAs, or Non-Disclosure Agreements.

While both Clinton’s much pursued attacks concerned millions of dollars, as a billionaire, Trump’s concealments start at the hundreds of millions in alleged loans, tax breaks, tax liabilities, and fraud.

Trump’s trade deal in removing a total trade sanction against a possibly subversive Chinese phone company at the same time as China loaned the Trump Organization a half a billion dollars for an Indonesian resort development is well known. So is White House Aide Jared Kushner’s receiving a Middle Eastern loan for a half billion dollars, at the same time that sanctions on Qatar were released.

But the killer is the campaign and after efforts to remove sanctions on Russia for invading Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. Indeed, Trump tried to justify these invasions since both regions have Russian speakers. Not that they had met any UN criteria for self determination through a fair vote.

Russia did not take Crimea to help Russian speakers. With Crimea, Russia has access to 200 miles of oil resources in the Black Sea, with an estimated value of a Trillion dollars. Putin himself has a geology degree based on a thesis that he would fund a Russian Renaissance based on Russia’s natural resources. He also “captured” the Eastern Ukraine based on the valuable mines there. We know Russia’s crucial influence in Europe by supplying them with natural gas for heating in the winter. It has a hold over Ukraine the same way.

Nobody has any idea what hold Putin may have over Trump. My own belief is the most valuable debt Trump has to Putin is Putin’s aid in getting Trump elected by election hacking and their influence campaign. This is possibly the biggest NDA in the world right now, and we hope for the health of the nation that Special Counsel Mueller can get to the bottom of it. On Putin’s side, this is the Trillion dollar question concerning Crimea and Ukraine.

The second biggest NDA is Trump’s insistence on meeting alone with Putin for hours, and then remaining mum about what was discussed even to his National Security team and the Department of State. I think the country has just again been distracted by Trump’s reality show shenanigans to forget that the public, and possibly the government, is still in the dark about the meeting. It seems ludicrous that Trump would have asked Putin to sign an NDA, but did Putin make Trump sign one?

It is unfortunate for the Republican Party and those that work in the White House that the NDAs do not work both ways. When somebody leaves the White House, or even stays (Jeff Sessions), they can be subject to schoolyard bullying by Trump, much to the denigration of Trump’s reputation, and the embarrassment of his White House leadership, and his Republican Party sycophants.

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
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