Campaign Finance Laws, John Edwards, Donald Trump, IOKIYAR

Every time I mention IOKIYAR (It's OK if you are Republican) someone tells me that there is no such thing.

Well, I have another case for you to consider.

Donald Trump's former fixer Michael Cohen just admitted in court that he was asked to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal.

The purpose was to prevent any electoral damage stemming from these stories.

Do you remember John Edwards?

The senator from North Carolina? John Kerry's running mate in 2004, presidential candidate in 2007 primaries?

He was the Democratic rising star, a great trial lawyer, with good looks and charismatic presence.

Do you remember what happened to him?

He had an affair with a campaign staffer called Rielle Hunter and paid her some hush money to cover up the affair.

He was indicted by the Justice Department for having violated the same campaign finance laws Donald Trump is accused of breaking.

At the time you could not believe the shitstorm this caused. Everybody was up in arms, Democrats and Republicans stepped on each other to vilify Edwards.

He was an immoral person, the cause of decline in national moral standards, the worst human being imaginable. People were outraged and enraged. You would think that he was the first politician to have an affair.

As a result, his political career was ruined and he could not show his face in public. No one would vote for him for the lowliest position.

Fast forward to today. Trump has done exactly the same thing. He had affairs and paid to cover them up. Just like Edwards, he lied about them, he changed positions many times as did the people around him.

The reaction? Nothing.

No senior Republican leader would comment on it.

A spokesperson for the House of Representatives speaker, Paul Ryan, issued an abrupt statement, saying: “We are aware of Mr Cohen’s guilty plea to these serious charges. We will need more information than is currently available at this point.”

Leslie Graham said there was no collusion with Russia and Mitch McConnell didn't even bother issuing a statement of tweeting.

The Guardian ran a hilarious piece highlighting the various hypothetical reactions if Trump had actually shot Michael Cohen in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

Then they asked Tumpkins as they always do after such revelations. Unsurprisingly, they were unanimous and categorical. They couldn't care less if he paid off a porn star and broke the law.

When Edwards or Gary Hart has an affair pearl clutching ensues, evangelicals faint. When they lie that is the worst crime.

When Trump has affairs, no big deal. If he lies, who cares?

That's IOKIYAR.

On a related note I wish people stopped speculating about impeachment. It is simply impossible even if Democrats win the House back in November. The Senate trial requires two thirds majority. It is a pipedream that makes look like a martyr to the Trumpkins.

As I said many times, Trump made a mistake by attacking National Security Apparatus. Those folks don't take that sort of thing lying down. They will come up with irrefutable evidence of financial crimes, like money laundering for Russian mafia types.

The crimes will be so obvious and staggering that even Hannity will be unable to defend them. 

Until then, Democrats should work on getting people to vote in large numbers.

Did Tillerson Stop the Invasion of Qatar?

I don't know if you've heard the news.

According to a new expose by The Intercept, Rex Tillerson lost his job because he prevented the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ?) from invading Qatar.

Mohammed bin Salman

Qatari intelligence agents working inside Saudi Arabia discovered the plan in the early summer of 2017, according to the U.S. intelligence official. Tillerson acted after the Qatari government notified him and the U.S. embassy in Doha. Several months later, intelligence reporting by the U.S. and U.K. confirmed the existence of the plan. 

The plan, which was largely devised by the Saudi and UAE crown princes and was likely some weeks away from being implemented, involved Saudi ground troops crossing the land border into Qatar, and, with military support from the UAE, advancing roughly 70 miles toward Doha. Circumventing the U.S. air base, Saudi forces would then seize the capital.

As the former CEO of Exxon Mobil who had very close ties to the Qatari royal family, it is no surprise that Tillerson placed dozens of calls to both United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia governments right away to defuse the situation.

Rex Tillerson

He understood the stakes and the risks. There is a large American military base in the country and Qatar is the largest producer of natural gas in the world.

The piece suggests that Tillerson was successful because he enlisted the help of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and together they stopped the plot.

I don't think so.

Jim "Mad Dog" Mattis was fun for Trump initially until he sided with "the grown ups." And Rex "he is a fucking moron" Tillerson was doomed when he never denied the actual quote.

Trump did not pay any attention to them once they looked like they thought they were more intelligent than him.

Sure, I concur that there was a plan to invade Qatar. As I've written many times, Saudi Arabia was and is essentially bankrupt.

But I don't think it was Tillerson's efforts that stopped the invasion.

Allow me refresh your memory.

White House and Trump were in on it from the get go.

When the Saudis and Emiratis were about to launch the blockade of Qatar in June, then-US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Stuart Jones got a call in the middle of the night from UAE Ambassador Otaiba to inform him of the impending action. Jones’ reaction was “extremely harsh. ‘What are you guys doing? This is crazy,’” a former US ambassador to the region told Al-Monitor. “And … Yusuf [sic][Otaiba]'s response was, ‘Have you spoken to the White House?’”

You see how cool and confident that riposte is?

"Have you spoken to the White House?"

Al-Otaibi

The next day Trump was in the Rose Garden accusing Qatar of "funding terrorism at a very high level".

He did so just as Tillerson was intensely urging the Gulf countries to stop the embargo and ease the tensions.

As I reported at the time, that line about Qatar was scripted by the UAE Washington ambassador Yousef al-Otaibi who is a very close friend of Jared Kushner and was inserted by Kushner in Trump's speech.

It should also be said that Kushner was and is very close to MBS and MBZ, you know, the Crown Princes.

And for Kushner, this was a payback for Qatari investment company Al-Mirqab pulling out of a deal involving 666 Fifth Avenue (which itself might have been a payback by HBJ for losing his position after the previous Emir's forced abdication).

With both Trump and Kushner on the side of Saudi Arabia, nothing would have stopped MBS from invading his tiny neighbor.

Besides, given his financial woes, he had no other choice. The war in Yemen has been depleting the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund at an alarming rate. Qatar's SWF has $320 billion in it, not to mention the country's continuous natural gas revenues.

In fact, getting his hands on a substantial amount of money was so critical that, when he couldn't do the invasion, he had to round up his relatives in a posh hotel and extort $100 billion from them.

In short, it was too important for MBS to back down on the strength of Tillerson's opposition. Especially if Trump and Kushner were on board. And they were.

But Qataris are not stupid. As I explained before, they bought themselves three great insurance policies right away.

In fact, they later bought a fourth one that made them pretty invincible, much to the chagrin of MBS.

First, they enlisted Iran's help right off the bat and the Islamic Republic made it clear that they would not allow such an invasion.

By itself, it would not have been enough to stop MBS, especially if he assumed that Trump would come to his help against Iran. In fact, he might have seen as a bonus. But it still gave him pause.

The second policy was to enlarge Turkish military base in Qatar and sign a mutual defense agreement with Turkey. Again, this might have given MBS pause but if Trump was firmly on his side, his thinking would have been, well, how far would or could Turkey go to defend Qatar's sovereignty.

The best policy was the third one and it is also the one that stopped Trump from siding with the Saudis at the time.

As you can see in that post, Qatar's SWF purchased a 19.5 percent stake in Russian oil and gas giant Rosneft just after the US presidential elections. The deal was put together, during the campaign, by Carter Page, a Trump advisor, in August and was announced immediately after Trump was elected.

Critically, the deal had a secret clause which stipulated that Russia could buy that stake back any time. Essentially Qatar's Emir was lending $11.5 billion to Russia making it look like a commercial transaction.

A Saudi invasion would have made that stake permanent as MBS had no reason to honor it.

That's when Putin reached out to his poodle and whispered the magic words.

I know you don't believe me. But do you know what happened next?

Trump stopped saying that Qatar funded terrorists.

Just like that.

Then he hosted the Emir at the White House like nothing happened and praised him for combating terrorism financing.

[O]n Tuesday he praised Sheikh Tamim Al Thani for becoming a "big advocate" of combating terrorist financing. 

He also said the emir was a "great gentleman" and a "friend of mine".

There is one more wrinkle to the story and that is the fourth insurance policy bought after the fact by Qatar.

As I said, they are not stupid.

As soon as they realized that Kushner was siding with the MB playboys because their former Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs HBJ (Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani) refused to pay for the albatross on Kushner's neck, they moved to correct that mistake.

666 Fifth Avenue loan payment is due in six months (February 2019) and Javanka do not have the money.

So it needs to go away and if it does, they know that Trump White House will make MBS and MBZ go away.

Good thinking, you say. Like foreign dignitaries making a point of staying at Trump's Washington Post Office Hotel.

Obviously by then, Qataris were fully cognizant that they could not openly invest in that doomed property. Too on the nose. Anbang did that and got burned. Their CEO is still in jail.

What Qataris did was to find a clean and nice third party in which they had a massive stake and move through them.

Enter the nice and clean Canadian real estate company Brookfield. Even the name sounds nice and innocuous.

Well, they have just leased the property for 99 years and agreed to invest $700 billion US dollars for upgrades.

They also bought the shares of Vornado Realty. And interestingly, they succeeded even though nobody thought Vornado would sell.

One more thing.

And, this is unheard of in the real estate annals, Brookfield agreed to pay the totality of 99 years lease upfront.

Not annually as it is required. Everything.

Which will allow Kushner to pay back its lenders in full in February 2019. And the Kushner family will get the building back in 99 years.

By now you might have guessed who is behind such a sweetheart deal.

The Qatar Investment Authority is the second-largest shareholder in Brookfield Properties, ranking only behind Brookfield’s former parent company. And the Qatar fund and Brookfield have teamed up on several real-estate deals in the United States and elsewhere in recent years, including Brookfield’s retail and apartment complex, Manhattan West, now under construction on the West Side. Brookfield and Qatar also control the Canary Wharf office complex in London.

This took place three days ago and other than the Canadian Globe and Mail not many mainstream news outlets covered it.

As I say it often, we live in interesting times.
_____________

UPDATE:

A friend told me that other mainstream news outlets covered the transaction.

Well, if you Google "Brookfield Kushner" this is what you get. None mentions Qatar's involvement.

Don't you think that's amazing?

Fake news and liberal media

The Globe and Mail piece is the only one you get if you add Qatar to the search.

A #MeToo Moment for the United Nations?

As we all know, the #MeToom movement swept all male bastions and went through power structures like a Category 5 hurricane.

Hollywood studios, high tech companies, Wall Street banks, large corporations all had to face the music.

There were two exceptions.

One was the conservative politicians, as exemplified by the indifference accorded to Donald Trump by his own party, his supporters and the corporate media.

If a Democratic president (and God forbid if it was Obama) had asked his personal lawyer to cover up his affair with a porn star with a $130,000 hush money or did this to hide another affair with a Playboy model all hell would have broken loose.

Tellingly, the linked expose was signed Ronan Farrow, the man who single handedly brought down industry titans like Harvey Weinstein or Les Moonves.

With Trump, nothing.

After his denials, his former lawyer's secret recordings showed he was in on it. Still nothing.

IOKIYAR.

The second exception was the United Nations.

There, we already knew that peacekeeping operations had turned into double victimization of women and girls. But recently, we found out that sexual abuse and harassment was also the norm at UN civilian agencies as well.

And the modus operandi was not very different in either cases.

Peacekeepers or Sex Ring Operators?

Since 2001, thousands of sexual misconduct allegations surfaced against UN peacekeepers in Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Central African Republic (CAR).

Yet not much has been done about it.

In early June, the New York-based Code Blue Campaign, dedicated to ending impunity for crimes of sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers, released an internal UN memo that showed no action had been taken against the Congolese troops in CAR, despite multiple complaints about their behaviour.

In fact, the problem has gotten worse and sexual exploitation increased over the years. UN's own chart summarizes the incidents between 2010 and 2016.


Through it all, the UN managed to maintain the stories in check and to hide the true scope of the problem.

Of the 2000 cases of sexual misconduct reported to the UN over the past 12 years, 700 emanate from the DRC. Another report shows that 300 of these 2000 cases involve children. This geographic and demographic spread is however impugned by the fact that UN statistics on this issue (while steadily improving) are notoriously inaccurate. Record collection is impeded by under-reporting and chronically bad record-keeping by the UN.

I know what some people might be thinking. They might be attributing these incidents to developing country soldiers. Without touching on the implicit racism of this assumption, let me tell you that while in African situations this might be largely true (due to the composition of the troops), the misconduct known as SEA (Sexual Exploitation and Abuse) was quite prevalent in the Bosnia and Kosovo cases and there, the bulk of the UNPROFOR soldiers and commanders were from European countries.

With one Swedish, three French and one Indian Commanding Officer, this is what happened:

A Kosovo victims support group reported that of the local prostitutes, a third were under 14, and 80% were under 18. Amnesty said the victims were routinely raped "as a means of control and coercion" and kept in terrible conditions as slaves by their "owners"; sometimes kept in darkened rooms unable to go out

In any event, dwelling on the identity of the perpetrators is a futile exercise in racism. Sri Lankan soldiers might have ran a child sex in Haiti but they did it under UN command and they couldn't have done it if the top echelons had not turned a blind eye.

If anything, the UN largely ignored the problem and actively tried to cover it up.

In fact, when you look at the behavior of senior managers in other UN agencies you realize this is not a peacekeeping issue and the same nonchalance about sexual abuse exists in the organization's civilian institutions.

Sexual Abuse and Harassment in UN Agencies

In January 2018, the Guardian published an article about rampant sexual harassment, abuse and rape in UN agencies. It was an eye opener.

It showed that women who reported sexual misconduct usually lost their jobs while the perpetrators were promoted to higher positions.

Three women who reported sexual harassment or sexual assault, all from different offices, said they had since been forced out of their jobs or threatened with the termination of their contract in the past year. The alleged perpetrators, who include a senior UN official, remain in their posts.

A woman who was raped by a senior staff member had this experience:

She said that despite medical evidence and witness testimonies, an internal investigation by the UN found insufficient evidence to support her allegation. Along with her job, she says she has lost her visa and has spent months in hospital due to stress and trauma. She fears she will face persecution if she returns to her home country.

The system was stacked against the victim who were constantly told not to report such incidents.

One woman allegedly assaulted while working for the UN says she was told by her agency’s ombudsman that there was nothing more he could do to help her pursue a complaint, because he was being threatened by senior UN staff. Seven other alleged victims who spoke to the Guardian were told by an ombudsman or colleague that they should not try to pursue a complaint.

Another victim who was raped was not offered any medical assistance or counseling and the rapist suffered no consequences. In one case, "a man accused of sexual harassment was allowed to interview the woman who brought the complaint against him."

In fact, it is a systemic problem and the people who were supposed to investigate these crimes were explicitly instructed not to do their jobs.

Peter Gallo, a former OIOS investigator who left the UN in 2015, said he witnessed evidence being routinely ignored and facts skewed. “As an investigator I was told I should ‘never ask questions just to satisfy my curiosity,’” he said. “The only rule is not to publicly embarrass the organisation.”

So it is not surprising that,

An internal UNAids staff survey found that almost 10% of 427 respondents had experienced sexual harassment. Only two had reported it.

Malaya Harper, the general secretary of the World YWCA, says that while she was working at UNAids she was sexually harassed and assaulted by the deputy executive director of the agency Luiz Loures. She didn't reported because she knew nothing was going to be done about it.

Two women told the Observer they had warned the agency’s executive director, Michel Sidibé, about Loures’s alleged behaviour. One former employee, who left in 2015, said: “I had an exit interview with Michel when I left and the first words out of my mouth were, ‘your deputy director is a sexual predator and everybody knows it. I’m telling you because you really have to do something about it.’”

After multiple sexual misconduct allegations Loures announced that he was not going to seek the renewal of his contract at the end of last March and he was allowed to retire without any negative consequences.

And he was not alone:

The announcement of Loures’s departure follows news that Justin Forsyth has stepped down as deputy executive director of Unicef, the UN’s children’s agency, after accusations of inappropriate behaviour toward female staff while working for Save the Children.

There is also the case of Ruud Lubbers, the former UN High Commissioner for Refugees, who "was eased from his post 12 years ago, following multiple allegations of sexual offenses against female staff."

And Frank La Rue of UNESCO who also retired with full benefits while being investigated for sexual misconduct.

Feel free to Google Tero Varjoranta of IAEA (he was in charge of the Iran nuclear deal, known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) and his protector Yukio Amano.

I can go on as these are only the most senior and most visible cases.

You may rightly ask the question whether the UN is doing something about this endemic problem.

Is Anything Being Done?

The short answer is "not really."

UN's position had always been to sweep the dirt under the rug, as illustrated by the egregious case of Luiz Loures:

An internal investigation report said Sidibé had attempted to settle the assault allegation informally, despite the matter being under official investigation by the World Health Organisation’s investigations team, Internal Oversight Services.

What was Antonio Guterres' reaction, the Secretary General who was elected over a group of highly qualified and deserving women candidates by claiming his feminist credentials?

Officially, this is what the UN said:

In a statement, the UN pledged to “look at strengthening our capacities to investigate reports and to support victims”. The organisation said Guterres has appointed a victims’ rights advocate and established a high-level taskforce on sexual harassment, to review policies and strengthen investigations. The UN will also carry out a survey to measure the extent of the issue, and introduce a helpline for people seeking advice.

Another task force, you may say but this is not any old task force, this one is special:

Its members will be drawn the Chief Executives Board, which includes 31 top UN officials, just 26% of whom are female. That task force will be chaired by Jan Beagle, who also held the title of Deputy Executive Director at UNAIDS throughout much of the Luiz Loures scandal and did nothing and said nothing. Ms. Beagle was promoted last year by Secretary-General Guterres to the most senior and visible management position in the UN system. The identities of the other members of the sexual harassment task force of "senior leaders" are the Secretary-General's carefully guarded secret.

A internal task force which largely consisted of men whose identity would be unknown and chaired by a colleague of Luiz Loures who did nothing to stop a sexual predator while she was a senior executive at UNAids.

That's the best the Secretary General of the United Nations could do to change the oppressive culture of sexual abuse and harassment.

Unless member states give UN agencies a wake up call about this problem, I doubt that the institution would move to clean house.

And given the largely conservative profile of member state politicians who love their male privileges don't expect any concerted effort in the regard.

As I said before, "women are the last group in the world about whom discriminatory practices and sexist speech are widely tolerated."

And unfortunately, it will continue to be the case with UN being a special case.