Recorded for Your Protection: The audiotape of one conversation between candidate Donald Trump and his lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen has been released and it sounds like Joey Meatballs talking business with Vinnie the Chin. They’re discussing a $150,000 deal to keep a former Playboy model from revealing the affair she had with Trump.
Here’s just one line from Cohen: “I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend, David, you know, so that — I’m going to do that right away.”
The “friend David” is likely David Pecker, whose company owns the National Enquirer.
In the middle of it all Trump says to someone in his office, “Get me a Coke, please!”
It goes on:
TRUMP: So, what do you we got to pay for this? One-fifty?
COHEN: … Funding . . . Yes. Um, and it’s all the stuff.
TRUMP: Yeah, I was thinking about that.
COHEN: All the stuff. Because — here, you never know where that company — you never know what he’s —
TRUMP: Maybe he gets hit by a truck.
The Trumpster Fire: In his war on truth, President Trump yesterday told the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, “Stick with us. Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news.” He said, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
What was happening at almost the same time was that the administration promised $12 billion in aid to farmers getting crushed by the tariff escalation with China. Soybean farmers are losing their sales, causing a glut of supply and a 10-year low in prices. One study says soybean, corn, and wheat farmers have already lost $13 billion.
Amazingly, the administration will have to borrow the money to pay the farmers, possibly even from China. Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker said, “You have a terrible policy that sends farmers to the poorhouse, and then you put them on welfare, and we borrow the money from other countries.”
While it was hot, wet, and humid in Washington yesterday, it was blustery in the halls of power. After denying, sort of admitting, then denying again that Russia tried to influence the 2016 election, President Trump tweeted that the Russians are going to do it again — to help the Democrats.
He said, “I’m very concerned that Russia will be fighting very hard to have an impact on the upcoming Election. Based on the fact that no President has been tougher on Russia than me, they will be pushing very hard for the Democrats. They definitely don’t want Trump!”
This comes just a week after Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters in the presence of Trump that he wanted Trump to win in 2016.
Somebody Should Be Locked Up: As Attorney Gen. Jeff Sessions spoke to a conservative high school leadership conference in Washington yesterday, the crowd began to chant, “Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up! “
That, of course, was the refrain of the Trump 2016 campaign calling for Hillary Clinton to be jailed.
Sessions laughingly repeated the line. “Lock her up,” and said, “I heard that a long time over the last campaign.” During his speech, Sessions decried what he sees as the silencing of young conservatives on college campuses to create a “generation of sanctimonious, sensitive, supercilious snowflakes.”
Nation: The Los Angeles police now admit that it was a police officer’s bullet that killed a manager at a Trader Joe’s grocery during a running shootout with a suspect believed to have killed his grandmother before driving off with a 17-year-old girl in his car. Police dash and bodycam video shows that at the end of a chase the gunman dodges into the front of the store. It’s not clear who’s shooting, but the police appear to be shooting toward the store even while bystanders are only a few feet away.
Police Chief Michel Moore said, “I believe my officers’ actions were taken to defend themselves and in direct response to the deadly threat.”
The Roundup: Greek authorities are still fighting fire and cleaning up after wildfires that killed at least 79 people. Some streets are cluttered with burned cars. — Rescuers in Thailand today were trying to help as least 3,000 stranded people after a dam burst, killing 26. Dozens more are missing. — Singer Demi Lovato is recovering from a drug overdose. The troubled singer has claimed to be sober for six years. — A federal judge has ordered the release of an undocumented immigrant who was arrested while delivering pizza to a Brooklyn military base and scheduled for deportation. The man, Pablo Villavicencio Calderon, is married to an American and has two daughters. Judge Paul Crotty said during the hearing, “The powerful are doing what they want and the poor are suffering what they must.”
Out of Fashion: Just 10 days after the major Canadian department store company Hudson’s Bay announced that it is dropping Ivanka Trump’s fashion line, the President’s daughter announced that she’s dropping the whole line herself.
Ivanka’s business has been troubled since she moved to Washington to work for her father, but she said in a statement, “After 17 months in Washington, I do not know when or if I will ever return to the business, but I do know that my focus for the foreseeable future will be the work I am doing here in Washington.”
The New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz posted that Ivanka has been named Dean of the Business School at Trump University.

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