Society The Donald J. Trump Show - 4 more years editions

Welcome to our Community
Wanting to join the rest of our members? Feel free to Sign Up today.
Sign up

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,589
Donald Trump suggests he wants US law to limit free speech in wake of publication of explosive new book
President Donald Trump has hit out at “very weak” libel laws in the US as he branded an explosive new book detailing the inner workings of the White House as “fiction”.

Suggesting he would like to see tougher laws on speech, Mr Trump said that if libel laws “were strong... you wouldn’t have things like that happen where you can say whatever comes into your head” – referring to Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.
 

sparkuri

Pulse on the finger of The Cimmunity
First 100
Jan 16, 2015
38,215
50,294
This is easily the best presidency in history.

Most liberals are childishly whining about Trump's childish whining.
Sexual deviants and Hollywood are disgusted at the lack of dignity for "the office" all of a sudden, ignoring the historically brazen impudence of the Clinton's while praying not to get busted themselves.
CNN has gone from Agenda-driven BS to full-blown Weekly World News.

The ACTUAL changes occurring are positive financially, and the globalists are re-writing their agenda around him because they can't kill or get a stable read on the guy.
Even if you can't read between the lines it's often must-see-tv.

The "presidency" has been turned on it's head forever by a 70-year old tweeter who bangs 10's and rules the "free world".

And now Queen Obama is considering a run in 2020 because Queen Clinton couldn't pull it off, and Prince Bush IV got booed of stage.
Fucking unreal.
 

Robbie Hart

All Kamala Voters Are Born Losers, Ha Ha Ha
Feb 13, 2015
51,673
51,994
The Juiciest Newly Reported Passages From Michael Wolff's Trump Book

Trump Complained About His Accommodations And Fought With Melania On Inauguration Day
Dissuaded by his staff from staying at the Trump International Hotel in Washington and regretting his decision, the president-elect woke up on inaugural morning complaining about the accommodations at Blair House, the official guest residence across the street from the White House. Too hot, bad water pressure, bad bed.

His temper did not improve. Throughout the morning, he was visibly fighting with his wife, who seemed on the verge of tears and would return to New York the next day; almost every word he addressed to her was sharp and peremptory...

[via Isabelle Hanne]

Bannon Called Ivanka Trump 'A Fucking Liar' And A 'Bitch'
Such was the animosity between Bannon and "Jarvanka" — Bannon's dismissive term for Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner — Wolff reports, that, during one Oval Office meeting, Bannon called Ivanka "a fucking liar," to which Trump responded, "I told you this is a tough town, baby." Wolff also quotes Bannon commenting gleefully after Trump decided to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, a decision that Ivanka opposed: "Score. The bitch is dead."

[The New Yorker]

Trump Didn't Warn Anyone In The White House Before He Fired Comey
Jared and Ivanka were urging the president on, but even they did not know that the axe would shortly fall. Hope Hicks... didn't know. Steven Bannon, however much he worried that the president might blow, didn't know. His chief of staff didn't know. And his press secretary didn't know. The president, on the verge of starting a war with the FBI, the DOJ, and many in Congress, was going rogue.

[via The New Yorker]


Trump Took Immediate Action On Trans Military Ban After Receiving A Briefing On The Topic Minutes Before
In Fire and Fury, Wolff claims the Commander-in-Chief tweeted that trans people would be prohibited from joining the armed forces just minutes after a briefing on the subject. Trump had not been advised to do so. The book, which hit bookstores today, alleges that advisors presented the president “with four different options related to the military’s transgender policy.”...

Instead of awaiting further consultation from the Pentagon or the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Trump is said to have taken immediate, unilateral action — moving to roll back a year-old policy which had allowed transgender troops to serve openly for the first time.

[Into]

Trump Didn't Understand Obamacare And Thought A Single-Payer System Was A Good Idea
"All things considered, he probably preferred the notion of more people having health insurance than fewer people having it," Michael Wolff writes in Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. "He was even, when push came to shove, rather more for Obamacare than for repealing Obamacare."

Trump also reportedly asked his aides aloud, "Why can't Medicare simply cover everybody?"

Roger Ailes, who was chairman and CEO at Fox News, told Wolff that "no one in the country, or on earth, has given less thought to health insurance than Donald." ...

"Trump had little or no interest in the central Republican goal of repealing Obamacare," Wolff wrote. "The details of the contested legislation were, to him, particularly boring; his attention would begin wandering from the first words of a policy discussion. He would have been able to enumerate few of the particulars of Obamacare — other than expressing glee about the silly Obama pledge that everyone could keep his or her doctor — and he certainly could not make any kind of meaningful distinction, positive or negative, between the healthcare system before Obamacare and the one after."

[The Washington Examiner]

Trump Insiders Called Trump's Sons 'Uday' And 'Qusay'
His sons, Don Jr. and Eric — behind their backs known to Trump insiders as Uday and Qusay, after the sons of Saddam Hussein — wondered if there couldn't somehow be two parallel White House structures, one dedicated to their father's big-picture views, personal appearances and salesmanship and the other concerned with day-to-day management issues. In this construct, they saw themselves tending to the day-to-day operations.

[via Isabelle Hanne]

Trump Defined 'White Trash' As 'People Just Like Me, Only They're Poor'
Once, coming back on his plane with a billionaire friend who had brought along a foreign model, Trump, trying to move in on his friend's date, urged a stop in Atlantic City. He would provide a tour of his casino. His friend assured the model that there was nothing to recommend Atlantic City. It was a place overrun by white trash.

"What is this 'white trash'?" asked the model.

"They're people just like me," said Trump, "only they're poor."

[via Isabelle Hanne]

Trump Theorized That Younger Women Were More Likely To Tolerate Older Men's Cheating
While nobody would ever say Trump was sensitive when it came to women, he had many views about how to get along with them, including a theory he discussed with friends about how the more years between an older man and a younger woman, the less the younger woman took an older man's cheating personally.

[via Isabelle Hanne]

Trump's Staff 'Held Their Breath' Whenever He Spoke Publicly
"He spoke obliviously and happily, believing himself to be a perfect pitch raconteur and public performer, while everyone with him held their breath.

"If a wackadoo moment occurred on the occasions … when his remarks careened in no clear direction, his staff had to go into intense method-acting response. It took absolute discipline not to acknowledge what everyone could see."

"At points on the day's spectrum of adverse political developments, he could have moments of, almost everyone would admit, irrationality. When that happened, he was alone in his anger and not approachable by anyone."

"His senior staff largely dealt with these dark hours by agreeing with him, no matter what he said."

[via Axios]

Bannon Relished The Idea Of Ivanka And Jared Kushner Being Investigated For Money Laundering
"You realize where this is going ... This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose (senior prosecutor Andrew) Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy," Bannon reportedly said: "Their path to f***ing Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr., and Jared Kushner ... It's as plain as a hair on your face."

Wolff also quotes Bannon saying this of Mueller hiring Weissmann: "You've got the LeBron James of money laundering investigations on you, Jarvanka. My a---hole just got so tight!"

[Axios]

Trump Defended Klansmen After Charlottesville
As [Trump] got back on Marine One to head to Andrews Air Force Base and on to JFK and then into Manhattan and Trump Tower, [after addressing the Charlottesville murder,] his mood was dark and I-told-you-so. Privately, he kept trying to rationalize why someone would be a member of the KKK — that is, they might not actually believe what the KKK believed, and the KKK probably does not believe what it used to believe, and, anyway, who really knows what the KKK believes now?

[via The Daily Beast]

Trump Encouraged Wolff To Write The Book
The book is based on "conversations that took place over a period of eighteen months with the president, with most members of his senior staff — some of whom talked to me dozens of times — and with many people who they in turn spoke to," Wolff writes in the author's note. His original idea, he says, was to write a fly-on-the-wall account of Trump's first hundred days. "The president himself encouraged this idea. But given the many fiefdoms in the White House that came into open conflict from the first days of the administration, there seemed no one person able to make this happen. Equally, there was no one to say 'Go away.' Hence I became more a constant interloper than an invited guest."

[The New Yorker]

Trump Considered Jared Kushner For The Role Of Secretary Of State
In an early meeting with the president, General Kelly had Jared and Ivanka on his agenda — how the president saw their role; what he thought was working and not working about it; how he envisioned it going forward. It was all intended to be a politic way of opening a discussion about getting them out. But the president was, Kelly soon learned, delighted with all aspects of their performance in the West Wing. Maybe at some point Jared would become secretary of state — that was the only change the president seemed to foresee. The most Kelly could do was to get the president to acknowledge that the couple should be part of a greater organizational discipline in the West Wing and should not so readily jump in the line.

[CBS]

'Alternative Facts' Was Supposed To Be 'Alternative Information'
The Next day Kellyann Conway, her aggressive posture during the campaign turning more and more to petulance and self-pity, asserted the new president's right to claim "alternative facts." As it happened, Conway meant to say "alternative information," which at least would imply there might be additional data. But as uttered, it certainly sounded like the new administration was claiming the right to recast reality. Which, in a sense, it was.

[Isabelle Hanne via Twitter]
Totally
 

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,589
Judge Tells Trump That DACA Protections Must Continue for Now
In the middle of the intense political fight about the DACA program for “Dreamers” who were brought illegally to the United States as children, a federal judge in California late Tuesday issued a nationwide injunction ordering the administration to start the program back up again, saying the decision to kill it was improper.

Critics of President Trump’s decision to end the DACA protections for the Dreamers had sued the administration, saying that the decision to end the Obama-era program was arbitrary and done without following the proper procedures.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup agreed, writing in his ruling that the administration must “maintain the DACA program on a nationwide basis” as the legal challenge to the president’s decision goes forward. The judge wrote that previous recipients of the DACA protections must be allowed to renew their status in the program.
Former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio announces bid for Senate
Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff who was spared a possible jail sentence when President Donald Trump pardoned him for disobeying a judge, announced Tuesday that he would run for the Senate seat being vacated by fellow Republican Jeff Flake.

The 85-year-old longtime lawman said the lack of support for Trump’s agenda in Washington inspired him to make the bid. He also cited supporters who urged him to seek public office again after a crushing 2016 re-election defeat following six terms as sheriff of metro Phoenix. Then Trump offered the pardon last summer.

“If I go to my grave, I don’t think I’d be happy if I didn’t take the shot to run,” Arpaio said, adding that Trump had not asked him to run.

Arpaio’s plan could set up a race in which one of the president’s most prominent supporters attempts to take over for one of his fiercest critics.

Flake has sparred with Trump over free trade, immigration reform and opening relations with Cuba, even while supporting parts of the president’s agenda, like recent tax cuts. Trump, in turn, has denounced the senator, who is not seeking re-election after acknowledging that he could not win a GOP primary in the current political climate.

Arpaio’s announcement also raised questions about whether he was serious about the Senate or if he was mainly seeking publicity. Over the years, he flirted with running for Arizona governor no fewer than five times before demurring and abandoning the idea.

Asked whether the White House supports Arpaio’s candidacy, spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to comment.

Arpaio said he would accept a Trump endorsement, but he would not seek it.

“If you know my history, you know they (other candidates) ask for the endorsements,” Arpaio said. “You never see me with a list of endorsements.”

The former sheriff’s ambitions also sparked speculation that he could edge out a former state senator, Kelli Ward, in the GOP primary and could potentially create an opening for Republican Rep. Martha McSally, who colleagues have said is planning a Senate run but has not yet made an announcement.

David Berman, a senior research fellow at Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute of Public Policy, said if Arpaio follows through on his announcement, his candidacy will likely hurt Ward’s chances.

Arpaio will probably siphon off support from some Trump voters and tea party supporters. “I think he would wipe her out,” Berman said.

Zachery Henry, a spokesman for Ward’s campaign, said the campaign is not concerned that Arpaio would split the GOP vote to Ward’s detriment.

Ward, who lost a 2016 GOP primary challenge to Sen. John McCain, has been endorsed by former Trump strategist Steve Bannon in her campaign to replace Flake. Trump made a favorable tweet about Ward but never formally endorsed her.

The primary to decide nominees will be in August, followed by the general election in November.
Steve Bannon stepping down from Breitbart
Steve Bannon, former chief strategist to President Trump, has stepped down from Breitbart, the far-right website he returned to over the summer as executive chairman after being ousted from the White House.
The website announced the news Tuesday afternoon in a short article posted to the site.

"I'm proud of what the Breitbart team has accomplished in so short a period of time in building out a world-class news platform," Bannon is quoted as saying in the article.

Neither Bannon nor a spokesperson for Breitbart immediately responded to a request for comment.

Addressing staffers in the company's internal Slack channels, Breitbart CEO Larry Solov wrote, "Steve Bannon has decided to step down from Breitbart News Network. Steve is a valued part of our legacy, and we will always be grateful for his contributions, and what he helped us to accomplish. ... We will continue doing what we do as well as anybody in the world, and that is report the news."

A Breitbart employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter, told CNN that "everyone seems stunned."

SiriusXM also announced it had ended its relationship with Bannon, saying in a statement, "Breitbart News has decided to end its relationship with Stephen K. Bannon, therefore he will no longer host on SiriusXM since our programming agreement is with Breitbart News."

Bannon took over at Breitbart after founder Andrew Breitbart passed away suddenly in 2012. A veteran of the U.S. Navy, Bannon has worked as an investment banker and dabbled in the film industry. But he really rose to public prominence when Trump named him CEO of his campaign in the summer of 2016. From there, he followed Trump to the White House, serving as chief strategist for much of 2017 before being ousted and returning to Breitbart.

 
Last edited:

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,589
Source inside Trump campaign reported concerns to FBI, new transcript suggests
A source within the Trump campaign reported concerns to the FBI, according to the man behind a controversial dossier on Donald Trump, a new transcript suggests.

Senator Dianne Feinstein on Tuesday unilaterally released the transcript of a congressional interview with Glenn Simpson, whose research firm, Fusion GPS, was behind the dossier on alleged contacts between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government.

The dossier – compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele – makes an allegation that there was a “conspiracy of cooperation” between Russian agents and the Trump campaign, and the president has frequently scorned it since its publication last January.

According to the transcript, Simpson told Congress that Steele, the former British spy, stopped sharing information with the FBI just one week before the US election because of concerns that the law enforcement agency was being “manipulated” by Trump insiders.

According to Simpson, Steele “severed his relationship with the FBI” after the New York Times published a story in late October 2016 that said agents had not found “any conclusive or direct link between Mr Trump and the Russian government”.

Steele was concerned “that the FBI was being manipulated for political ends by the Trump people and that we didn’t really understand what was going on”.

Feinstein’s decision to make the transcript public renews a fierce debate about transparency surrounding the whole Russia-collusion investigation.

Elsewhere in his 312-page testimony, Simpson told the senators that “an internal Trump campaign source” or “a human source from inside the Trump organization” had reported his or her concerns to the FBI.

Simpson said that this information was drawn from Steele after the FBI “had debriefed him” that fall.

However, a person close to the matter suggested Simpson had got some details wrong about the human source during his evidence session in August and was actually alluding to the role of George Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, who shared knowledge of the Russian hacking of Democratic party emails with an Australian diplomat.

Papadopoulos is co-operating with the ongoing federal investigation into the Trump campaign as a part of a plea deal that he reached with prosecutors after admitting he lied in his first interview with the FBI.

Steele had been compiling the dossier during the 2016 presidential campaign and approached the FBI, according to Simpson, because “he thought from his perspective there was an issue – a security issue about whether a presidential candidate was being blackmailed”.

“He honed [sic] in on this issue of blackmail as being a significant national security issue,” Simpson said.

Simpson cautioned that he was paraphrasing Steele’s account, and added: “we did not have the detailed conversations where he would debrief me on his discussions with the FBI.”

He added: “I think it was a voluntary source, someone who was concerned about the same concerns we had. It was someone who decided to pick up the phone and report something.”

He said that Steele did not rely on this source for his work with the firm.
 

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,589
Senate testimony debunks a key conservative theory on Trump and Russia
The FBI was already investigating potential links between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government before they heard anything about Christopher Steele’s famous dossier on the matter. That’s the key takeaway from Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson’s extensive testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, released Tuesday by ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) over the objections of her Republican colleagues.

Simpson’s hearing lasted for hours, and the transcript is extremely long and mostly fairly tedious. But Simpson does clearly state that when Steele spoke to the FBI about his findings, the bureau “believed Chris’s information might be credible because they had other intelligence that indicated the same thing, and one of those pieces of intelligence was a human source from inside the Trump organization.
That sounds like Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, who, according to a recent report in the New York Times, accidentally kicked off the Trump-Russia investigation by telling Australian diplomat Alexander Downer that Russia had political dirt on Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, after a night of heavy drinking in May 2016.
Conservatives have recently been pushing a theory that the basis for the FBI investigation was an opposition research document compiled at the behest of Clinton’s campaign. Simpson’s testimony seems to confirm the Times account and thereby debunk a conservative counternarrative that places the dossier itself at the center of the story.

WAIT, WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?
Glenn Simpson is one of the co-founders of Fusion GPS, a “strategic intelligence” firm that was hired first by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news publication, and later by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to conduct opposition research on Donald Trump. Fusion, in turn, contracted with former MI-6 Russia specialist Christopher Steele to look specifically at Trump and Russia.

Steele’s investigation ended with a number of allegations, including that Trump is possibly being blackmailed by Russian security services with a recording of him paying prostitutes to pee on a bed at a luxury hotel at Moscow, and also that Trump’s campaign was the beneficiary of a multifaceted Kremlin plot to interfere in the 2016 US election.

BuzzFeed published Steele’s dossier in January 2017, setting off a firestorm of controversy and intriguing many liberals. But in recent months, the dossier has taken on new life as the centerpiece of a conservative counter-conspiracy theory, which holds that the whole Trump-Russia investigation was cooked up by the president’s political enemies. Simpson’s testimony is significant in the present context primarily for debunking that narrative.

THE DOSSIER IS NOW THE CENTERPIECE OF A CONSERVATIVE COUNTERNARRATIVE
January 3, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) — a key House conservative — rolled out a tweetstorm asking 18 questions about the FBI and Russia, many of them centering on the dossier.

https://twitter.com/Jim_Jordan/status/948567146279374849

Rep. Jim Jordan

✔@Jim_Jordan


18 questions in 2018 about Russia and the FBI. The American people deserve answers...

6:50 AM - Jan 3, 2018
Twitter Ads info and privacy




Jordan, joined by another leading House conservative, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-SC), is also calling for Trump to fire Jeff Sessions so he can put a new attorney general in place who would oversee (and presumably quash) the Russia investigation. This is part of a broader conservative effort to discredit the Mueller investigation, which in turn is part of a broader conservative counternarrative on the whole Russia scandal.

And the dossier plays a key role in this conspiracy theory.

Because conservatives are “just asking questions” about the FBI and Steele, they tend not to explicitly state what they think happened. But in broad strokes, the theory is something like this:

  • Trump’s political enemies paid Fusion GPS to write a dossier full of debunked claims about his connections to Russia.
  • “Deep state” anti-Trump elements in the FBI used this false opposition research document to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant targeting Michael Flynn.
  • The Flynn surveillance, which never should have been allowed because it was based on the phony dossier, was used to catch him in a lie about a meeting with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that was completely innocuous.
  • This got Flynn fired and, by making meetings with Kislyak into a hot-button issue, also forced Sessions into recusing himself, which in turn gave Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (whom Trump has decided is “a Democrat,” though it’s not clear why) the opportunity to appoint Robert Mueller as special counsel.
  • Mueller, in turn, is buddies with former FBI Director James Comey, who is bitter about having been fired by Trump (Comey under this theory is a bad guy because he went too easy on Hillary Clinton over the email server, and we’re not supposed to pay attention to the fact that Trump’s stated reason for firing him was that he was too hard on Clinton) and is therefore leading an anti-Trump witch hunt.
There are, of course, other penumbras and emanations around the conservative account of the Steele dossier. Former Rep. Jason Chaffetz was on Fox recently, for example, arguing that it’s against the law to hire a foreign national to do work for a campaign (this is not true) and therefore the existence of the dossier is just another example of Crooked Hillary’s lawbreaking.

The reality, however, is that while Steele is well-regarded in intelligence circles, there is no indication that his work has ever been the basis of the FBI’s Russia investigation.

PAPADOPOULOS WAS THE START OF THE INVESTIGATION
A New York Times report earlier this month indicated that the investigation began not with Steele’s dossier but with Papadopoulos’s drunken conversation with Downer, Australia’s ambassador to the UK and a former Australian foreign minister.

Simpson’s testimony appears to independently corroborate what the New York Times already reported — the FBI listened to Steele because they already had an investigation into this question underway, an investigation that was launched because Papadopoulos’s conversation with Downer was shared with other Australian officials, who ultimately passed word of it to their American counterparts once the hacking of Democratic email accounts became a big deal.

As best as we can tell, this, rather than Steele’s memo, was the start of the investigation.

And while the investigation has not yet proven the existence of anything like the vast conspiracy that Steele alleges, it certainly has uncovered real evidence of wrongdoing — including a guilty plea from Papadopoulos himself, and serious charges against former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

We’ve also learned from the investigation that key Trumpworld figures, including Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr., were, at a minimum, eager to potentially collaborate with the Russian government on revealing anti-Clinton “dirt,” rather than emulating Downer in alerting the authorities to the existence of an active Russian intelligence effort aimed at the United States.

It also, obviously, continues to be an ongoing investigation that might yet reveal other criminal activity. Or it might not. But either way, Simpson’s testimony — which Republicans on the committee didn’t want released to the public — is more evidence that the question was taken seriously by law enforcement for reasons that had nothing to do with Steele or his dossier.
 

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,589
Trump Administration Waives Punishment For Convicted Banks, Including Deutsche — Which Trump Owes Millions
The Trump administration has waived part of the punishment for five megabanks whose affiliates were convicted and fined for manipulating global interest rates. One of the Trump administration waivers was granted to Deutsche Bank — which is owed at least $130 million by President Donald Trump and his business empire, and has also been fined for its role in a Russian money laundering scheme.

The waivers were issued in a little-noticed announcement published in the Federal Register during the Christmas holiday week. They come less than two years after then-candidate Trump promised “I'm not going to let Wall Street get away with murder.”

Under laws designed to protect retirement savings, financial firms whose affiliates have been convicted of violating securities statutes are effectively barred from the lucrative business of managing those savings. However, that punishment can be avoided if the firms manage to secure a special exemption from the U.S. Department of Labor, allowing them to keep their status as “qualified professional asset managers.”

In late 2016, the Obama administration extended temporary one-year waivers to five banks — Citigroup, JPMorgan, Barclays, UBS and Deutsche Bank. Late last month, the Trump administration issued new, longer waivers for those same banks, granting Citigroup, JPMorgan, and Barclays five-year exemptions. UBS and Deutsche Bank received three-year exemptions.

In the year leading up to the new waiver for Deustche Bank, Trump’s financial relationship with the firm has prompted allegations of a conflict of interest. The bank has not only sought the Labor Department waiver from the administration, it has also faced Justice Department scrutiny and five separate government-appointed independent monitors. Meanwhile, the New York Times recently reported that federal prosecutors subpoenaed Deutsche for “bank records about entities associated with the family company of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser.”

All of these interactions with the Trump administration and the federal government are transpiring as Deutsche serves as a key creditor for the president’s businesses.

Trump owes the German bank at least $130 million in loans, according to the president’s most recent financial disclosure form. Sources have told the Financial Times the total amount of money Trump owes Deutsche is likely around $300 million. The president’s relationship with the bank dates back to the late 1990s, when it was the one major Wall Street bank willing to extend him credit after a series of bankruptcies. In 2016, the Wall Street Journal reported Trump and his companies have received at least $2.5 billion in loans from Deutsche Bank and co-lenders since 1998.

The relationship has had problems. After the financial crash, Trump defaulted on a $640 million loan from the bank. Deutsche brought Trump to court, and the famously litigious real estate mogul countersued for $3 billion in damages, claiming the financial crisis was a “force majeure” event that Deutsche Bank helped create. But the rift was short-lived: the parties settled, the loan was repaid, and Deutsche was soon lending to Trump again.

In December, Bloomberg and others reported the bank had turned over financial records to special prosecutor Robert Mueller after his office subpoenaed the records as part of his investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. Trump’s lawyers have called that reporting inaccurate.

“We have confirmed that the news reports that the Special Counsel had subpoenaed financial records relating to the President are false,” Trump attorney Jay Sekulow said in a statement. “No subpoena has been issued or received. We have confirmed this with the bank and other sources.”

Less than three weeks later, the New York Times reported federal prosecutors had subpoenaed Deutsche Bank records related to White House senior adviser and Trump son-in-law Kushner and his vast business holdings. There is no evidence those subpoenas were related to Mueller’s investigation.

The subpoenas come less than a year after Deutsche Bank was fined $425 million by New York State for laundering $10 billion out of Russia.

All five of the banks granted waivers from the Obama and Trump administration were fined for their involvement in the LIBOR scandal that led to $9 billion worth of fines from regulators around the world. Deutsche Bank has paid $3.5 billion for its role in the scandal, more than any other bank. The scandal involved illegally manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate or LIBOR, which is used to set the cost of borrowing for a variety of financial transactions.

In 2015, Deutsche Bank pled guilty in the U.S. to wire fraud for its role in the scandal. Less than two years later, in the final hours of the Obama administration, Deutsche Bank agreed to a $7.2 billion settlement with the Justice Department for misleading investors in mortgage-backed securities between 2006 and 2007.