The Fertilizer King: MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow did some long takeouts this past week about Donald Trump, his associates, and Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian billionaire known as the Fertilizer King for the commodity on which he made his fortune.

During a messy divorce about 10 years ago, Rybolovlev was buying real estate assets all over the world to shield his money from his wife. In 2008, Rybolovlev bought a vacant Palm Beach estate from Donald Trump for $100 million cash, which was 2 ½ times what Trump paid for it two years earlier. Rybolovlev also left the house vacant.

According to Maddow, the money for the estate purchase went through the Bank of Cyprus, which has some cronies of Russian President Vladimir Putin on its board. Rybolovlev is a major shareholder, but the biggest shareholder at the time was Wilbur Ross, the investor who made his fortune on distressed businesses and leverage buyouts. Ross is now Donald Trump’s Secretary of Commerce.

Maddow said, “Every investigative reporter in the country is trying to figure out whether there is some reason that our new president seems so beholden to Russia and to Vladimir Putin. Well, this part here, it’s not like a loose thread.
This is like a rope ladder hanging down from the ceiling begging people to
crawl up this and look around.”

In that vein, Maddow looked into the travels of Rybolovlev’s private jet, which on at least three dates was in the same city as Donald Trump campaigning for president: Concord, NC; Charlotte, NC; and Las Vegas, NV.

On Feb. 11, the same weekend now-President Trump hosted the Japanese prime minister at his Mar-a-Lago club, Rybolovlev’s jet was in Miami.

Tap Tap: President Trump’s claim that former President Barack Obama had the Trump’s phone tapped during the campaign is hanging out there, waiting for any kind of proof or verification. Trump hasn’t said where he got his information, if he got it from anywhere at all.

A wiretap requires probable cause and a warrant signed by a judge. Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for Obama, said in a statement that, “A cardinal rule of the Obama Administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice. As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen.”

In his Twitter attack on Obama, Trump referred to the former president as a “bad (or sick) guy!” California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff said, “If there is something bad or sick going on, it is the willingness of the nation’s chief executive to make the most outlandish and destructive claims without providing a scintilla of evidence to support them. ”

Promises, Promises: Despite President Trump’s promise to “buy American” and executive orders that the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines must be built with American steel, that’s not going to happen because the pipes have already been bought and made.

More than 40 percent of the Dakota pipe was made in Canada by a company owned by a Russian billionaire with ties to Vladimir Putin. About half the pipe for the Keystone was bought from companies with corporate headquarters in Russia, India, and Italy that own mills in the United States.

Wiggling for the president, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said Trump’s order applies to new pipelines or those under repair. The Keystone and Dakota lines are already under construction.

Used Car: General Motors has reached an agreement to sell its Opel division to the company that owns Peugeot and Citroën. Three lemons are almost enough for lemonade.

-30-