It takes a certain kind of genius to screw up something as simple and mundane as putting up the Xmas decorations and turning on the festive season lights, but the Trump clan managed it in spades yesterday.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/28/melania-trump-red-christmas-trees-white-house-decorations
Commentators were already struggling to find words to describe what the Guardian called Melania Trump’s “jarring blood red Christmas trees” in the West Wing which have been likened to car-wash brushes, or the waves of blood in the film of Stephen King’s iconic tale The Shining. The sinister blood red cones have already been photoshopped online into wearing white bonnets resembling those worn by the suffering women in The Handmaids Tale, and likened to the decorations that might have been in place at the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones.
Yesterday president Trump went to attend the 96th National Christmas Tree lighting ceremony organised by the National Park Service not far from the White House. But things did not go quite as planned
https://www.theblaze.com/news/2018/11/28/something-bizarre-happened-after-the-christmas-tree-lighting-ceremony-at-the-white-house.
After the briefest of appearances, Trump vanished from sight and sped back to the White House in his motorcade moments after Melania flipped the switch, abandoning the entire protective press pool of reporters who were supposed to be covering this seasonal fixture. The dumbfounded press pool were left standing in the cold for 15 minutes before being ferried back to base, and then being told that WH staff were “putting a lid on it”. Some of the press were not amused:
Where is Donald Trump tonight anyway? Is he in the White House, hiding under his desk? Is he down at the local strip club, asking if they take rubles?
Bill Palmer
On a more serious note, The BBC is reporting that the Frankfurt HQ of Deutsche Bank which is Germany’s biggest bank is being raided by police and German prosecutors in connection with a giant new criminal money laundering scandal.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46382722
Today’s raids apparently arose from new information disclosed by the ‘Panama Papers’, a very large cache of leaked confidential data stolen from the computers of a Panamanian law firm called Mossack Fonseca in 2016.
In 2017, Deutsche Bank was fined $630m (£504m) by US and UK regulators in connection with a Russian money laundering plan.
Under the scheme, clients illegally moved $10bn out of Russia via shares bought and sold through the bank's Moscow, London and New York offices.
Deutsche has also been connected with another huge money laundering scandal at Denmark's Danske Bank. An internal investigation by Danske found that about €200bn (£177bn) of payments were funnelled through its Estonian branch.
Anyone who has been following the footnotes of the Mueller investigation will find this news particularly interesting for several reasons:
- It was said to have been a friendly intelligence agency based in Estonia that first warned the CIA that large amounts of Russian money were being laundered into Republican party funds in March 2016 during the run-up to the US 2016 presidential elections.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/apr/13/british-spies-first-to-spot-trump-team-links-russia
- It was Deutsche Bank who were directly implicated in laundering Russian Mafia money into the New York real estate market with the help of the Bank of Cyprus run by governors that included Wilbur Ross who later became Trump’s Commerce Secretary.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/05/trump-commerce-secretary-wilbur-ross-business-links-putin-family-paradise-papers
- One of the key executives in Deutsche Bank’s international investment branch was a man called Justin Kennedy who was the head of their Real Estates Capital Markets division. Remarkably he authorised loans of $1billion to Donald Trump’s real estate projects at a time when no other bank would do so.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/anthony-kennedy-son-loaned-president-trump-over-a-billion-dollars-2018-6
Justin Kennedy happens to be the son of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, a swing vote SCOTUS judge who unexpectedly resigned his office in late June 2018, thereby creating the vacancy that was subsequently filled by a conservative Roman Catholic Brett Kavanaugh in October.