Looks like Russia has found a new way to pay Donald Trump’s legal bills
Earlier this fall it was revealed that the Republican National Committee was paying Donald Trump’s legal bills in the Trump-Russia scandal. It was then further revealed that a Kremlin-connected oligarch was supplying that money to the RNC to begin with. Yesterday, Trump’s team announced that the RNC would no longer be paying Trump’s legal bills, and that he would begin paying his own bills instead. Of course no one actually believes this.
First of all, Donald Trump doesn’t pay his own bills, period. His entire career has consisted of scam after bankruptcy after scam. He’s notorious for simply not paying contractors and employees, and daring them to sue him. Yesterday’s announcement about Trump taking over his own legal bills, reported by CNN (link), simply doesn’t hold water. From the tenor of the article it appears the Republican National Committee may have grown uneasy about funneling money from the Kremlin to Trump, and decided to extricate itself from that financial pipeline. But who’s paying Trump’s legal bills now?
The previous arrangement was shady, but it was technically legal because the Kremlin oligarch has dual U.S. citizenship and he was funneling the money through a Super PAC. There would be nothing to stop this same oligarch from finding another barely legal way to pay Trump’s legal bills. We’ve also seen the Kremlin use various other methods to funnel money to Trump over the years, including buying property from him for twice its value. Deutsche Bank, which has loaned absurd amounts of money to Trump for decades, was caught earlier this year laundering Russian money to unnamed clients in New York City.
So it’s a safe bet that nothing has changed here. The RNC must have gotten nervous about being a pipeline for allowing the Kremlin to pay for Donald Trump’s legal bills in a scandal in which he rigged an election and committed treason. Russia will simply find a new way to continue paying Trump’s legal bills. Investigators will have to hunt it down accordingly.
