Here comes the part where Robert Mueller takes apart Donald Trump’s family
There’s a reason why career criminals like Donald Trump tend to rely on their family members, no matter how inept they might be, to handle their corrupt business interests: family members are the only ones who can be trusted to remain loyal. It’s why Trump’s business empire and his political regime have essentially consisted of his kids at the center with a bunch of hired thugs surrounding them. This also means, of course, that once the criminal empire starts getting torn down, the family gets torn down too. Robert Mueller just signaled that we’re now at that point.
Mueller already has the cooperation of key former Trump political advisers Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, and presumably soon to be Paul Manafort. This gives Mueller a lot of access to the Trump political regime’s criminal inner workings. But what about Trump’s lifetime of financial crimes? By design, very few people have the kind of insider information required to expose it all. Manafort appears to have some of the pieces. But exposing all of Trump’s real estate crimes requires getting to his family.
In large part, Donald Trump bet correctly that his kids would remain loyal to him. It’s impossible to imagine Donald Trump Jr or Eric Trump cutting a plea deal against him, and it’s somewhat difficult to see Ivanka Trump giving him up. But Trump appears to have made one key mistake when he allowed Ivanka’s husband Jared Kushner into the breach. Kushner’s financial dealings appear to be every bit as shady as Trump’s, and now CNN is reporting that Mueller is moving in on Kushner for having used the power of the White House to obtain foreign loans for his failing real estate ventures.
So now Jared Kushner gets to decide whether to risk spending the rest of his life in prison by refusing to cooperate, or risk losing his wife and kids if he cuts a deal and Ivanka decides to bail on him. What’s remarkable is that there is almost no scenario here which doesn’t involve Donald Trump Jr going to prison for his involvement in his father’s crimes. Mueller is about to take the Trump family apart.
