A huge new revelation about President Donald Trump made in a new book could well be the end to his presidency.
The new book, Fire and Fury, just hit bookstores on Friday, and it has set Washington into a furore of anger and excitement.
That’s because in the book, there are claims about Donald Trump‘s alleged connection to money-laundering and Russian criminals.
The author, Michael Wolff, writes about how Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were ‘increasingly panicked’ when FBI Director James Comey began looking into the family finances.
He alleges, based on testimony from Steve Bannon himself, that Kushner and Trump were instrumental in getting Comey fired from his position.
Bannon told Wolff:
This is about money laundering. Their path to f*cking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr. and Jared Kushner… it goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner sh*t.
For those of you who don’t know, this ‘Deutsche Bank and Kushner sh*t’ is a nod back to the revelation last year that federal prosecutors were looking into Kushner’s ties to Deutsche Bank.
Included in those investigations was the $285 million borrowed from a bank which is implicated in Russian money laundering scandals to refinance his holding property in Manhattan.
Last July, The Guardian revealed that Kushner bought property from a ‘Soviet-born oligarch whose company was named in a high-profile New York money laundering case.’
It was released just last week by the New York Times that there are hours of unreleased, Congressional testimony about the Trump family’s alleged links to Russian criminals who needed their money laundered.
But somehow, all of this manages to fly under the radar, and Washington seem to close their eyes in wilful ignorance. But that is getting harder and harder to do.
All the separate pieces of information are beginning to add up to a pretty unsavoury picture for the Trump family, especially in light of Don. Jr’s meeting with Russian officials, which Bannon called ‘treasonous, unpatriotic and bad shit’.
When this meeting was revealed, Trump Sr. reportedly took control of the statement designed for damage limitation. He insisted the meeting was exclusively about the adoption of Russian children.
We now know the Russian officials offered up ‘incriminating’ intelligence on the Clinton camp thanks to an email chain that was released.
All of this makes the fact that Trump tried to get the publication of Fire and Fury halted even more sinister. Who, but despots, tries to censor books and literature, even if they do criticise them?
None of this will actually matter if Donald Trump Sr. manages to hold on for dear life with the support of his fellow Republicans in Congress, but the president may well be stood on shrinking ground there too.
Now Trump has passed his significant tax cut bill, it is arguable he has served a purpose for the Republican party of serving their interests in a way they could never do as a ‘mainstream’ political party.
But with Trump’s achievement in the tax cut, official support for him may well wane, as the Republicans try and regain the narrative of their party and move forward.
They can only do that if they take the bull out of the china shop.
