The Crimes
of Trump:

The Megaphone’s Case for Impeachment of the Peach

by Sander Hicks

The time has come to impeach the President. The framers of the Constitution gave us this “way out” if our democracy suffers a bitter hiccup. Impeachment is a noble alternative to violence, coups, or assassination.

The authors of our Republic didn’t put impeachment in the hands of the Supreme Court. Instead, they made it political, by placing it in the hands of the people’s representatives: the House, the US Congress. So it’s time for a total overview into some of the best arguments for the impeachment of the President you love to hate: Donald Trump.

An impeachment trial is not limited to crimes committed while in office. All past offenses are on the table. Everything from Trump’s 1973 violation of the Fair Housing Act for his racist denial of housing to black people to Trump’s racketeering with his cronies in Kazakhstan. Or his perjury, when he denied having multiple connections to the mob in Atlantic City or with his Russian pal, Felix Sater. Or his pattern of fraud or his sexual assault against 15 documented plaintiffs.

Sex is a big theme with Donald Trump. If you pick up a copy of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, one theme keeps popping up: the President is dangerous, and these doctors feel they have a grave “duty to warn” us. The doctors point out Trump is a classic victim of trauma. Maybe from when he was shipped off to military school at a young age. Maybe it was his psycho racist real-estate developer father. But today, we have a 72 year old President with the emotional maturity of a 12 year old, hyper-aroused, an admitted sexual predator, bragging about sexual assault, even proudly lusting in public for his own daughter, Ivanka.

Explore Trump’s history, and sex with under-age girls keeps coming up. Start with the case of Tevfik Arif. One of Trump’s partners, Arif is a Kazakh hotel magnate who founded the Bayrock company in 2001 in order to work with Trump to develop the controversial Trump SoHo Hotel. In June 2010, a Turkish SWAT team raided a hotel and boat full of under-age Russian girls working as prostitutes. Arif was arrested but later acquitted.

In a similar way, Trump’s friend, the billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, ran a “sex slave island” in the Caribbean on an island he owned; he flew powerful celebrities, including Donald Trump, and Hillary and Bill Clinton, there on a private plane dubbed the “Lolita Express.” An FBI document seems to indicate that Epstein was also some kind of FBI informant. That may explain why Mueller’s FBI only gave him a slap on the wrist. The US Attorney who gave Epstein such a free ride, Alexander Acosta, was later appointed Secretary of Labor by President Trump.

With a wink and a nod, Trump admitted to New York Magazine in 2002, “I’ve known Jeff [Epstein] for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” According to Daily Beast, Jeffrey Epstein had 14 private numbers for Trump and his family in his little black book. Could it be that Epstein’s job was to control politicians?

Virginia Roberts Guiffre and two other women have filed suit against Trump for rapes and sexual assaults. They claimed they were raped by Trump at the homes of Jeffrey Epstein. In the late ’90s, the media documented that Trump attended dinner parties at Epstein’s 71st Street mansion. In April 1999, UK tabloid The Mail reported that Donald Trump was among the guests at a dinner Epstein threw in honor of Prince Andrew.

Mobbed in Atlantic City

The people Trump did business with on his hotels in Atlantic City, Dan Sullivan and Kenneth Shapiro, were mob-related. Trump even admitted to his biographer, Tim O’Brien, "They were tough guys. They say that Dan Sullivan was the guy that killed Jimmy Hoffa." Sullivan "probably wasn't an honest guy," Trump added, and Shapiro "was like a third-rate, local real estate Mafia."

The main legal problem with that is that Trump 25 years earlier claimed that his partners in Atlantic City were clean. He did so in promises to government casino regulators in New Jersey. In a court, the legal term for this is fraud.

Racketeering and Bayrock

Attorney Ken McCallion is a former U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Prosecutor - who investigated money laundering and organized crime in NYC. McCallion tells the Megaphone, “As far as the money-laundering activities of the Trump organization, Bayrock and others, that is, I can tell you definitively, this an intensive area of investigation by the Special Counsel’s office, the FBI and other Federal investigators who are pursuing it. We will be seeing very shortly indictments related to that.”

For more insights into Trump’s character, just look into the cast of characters he put together for his real estate ventures from the kleptocratic country of Kazakhstan. For starters, there’s Viktor Khrapunov, a former mayor who was accused of embezzling $300 million from the government of Kazakhstan. He and his daughter bought and flipped three units in the Trump SoHo, a move that was largely seen as the laundering of stolen funds.

Indeed, of all the sales of Trump condos, 21% were bought in all-cash deals by anonymous shell companies, according to Thomas Frank, writing for Buzzfeed.

Khrapunov and Trump have shared the same attorney, Rudy Giuliani. Bracewell & Giuliani set up a shell company for Khrapunov in the Netherlands in 2007. The company was called KazBay B.V., and was partially owned by Bayrock. Bracewell & Giuliani opened an office in Kazakhstan in 2007, the same year Khrapunov fled to Switzerland. Their law firm seemed to be interested in joining the wave of international investors keen to exploit Kazakhstan’s natural resources after the fall of the Soviet Union. Giuliani even raised money from expatriates in Kazakhstan when he was running for US President, in the late aughts.

Bayrock’s managing director Felix Sater connects Trump to the Kazakhstanis and the Russian mafia. Sater is the son of mob underboss Mikhail Sherferovsky, who worked for Russian Mob Boss Mogilevich. Mogilevich, according to FBI, is the kingpin of all Russian Mafia, and Mogilevich has a “good relationship” with Putin, according to top Russian government critics, most of whom have since been killed off, by Putin.

In 1991, Felix Sater was banned from working as a professional broker/dealer on Wall Street after stabbing a fellow broker in a bar-fight with a broken margarita glass. Sater followed that up by getting convicted of running a “pump and dump” scheme defrauding $40 MM from elderly holocaust survivors from the top floor of the Trump Wall Street tower for the Russian Mob. And then, from there, of course, he went on to work for the FBI as an informant.

When Loretta Lynch was being confirmed for Attorney General, she was asked why Sater’s files were sealed.  She explained that Sater had generously shared "information crucial to national security and the conviction of over 20 individuals, including those responsible for committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra."

Sater joined Trump SoHo’s Bayrock Group as a senior advisor in 2003 at the behest of the company's owner and founder, Tevfik Arif. (Arif, remember, is the one mentioned above, arrested regarding under-age prostitutes in Turkey.)

Felix Sater was a managing director of Bayrock Group LLC, as well as a senior advisor to Donald Trump and The Trump Organization when construction of the Trump SoHo began in 2006. In December 2007, The New York Times  exposed his criminal past and mafia ties, so he left Bayrock and went to work exclusively for Trump. He even had a Trump organization business card….

This makes it particularly hard to believe when Trump denies knowing Sater. On November, 15, 2013, Donald Trump lied under oath in a deposition. Trump was suing one of his biographers in a failed attempt to block the truth.

"How many times have you conversed with Sater?"

"Not many. If he were sitting in the room right now,I really wouldn't know what he looked like," replied Trump with a forced, blank expression.

“That was a lie,” says attorney Ken McCallion. Perjury is an impeachable offense.

Felix Sater also played a role in the relationship between the Russians and the Trump Campaign. Felix Sater wrote and sent to his Russian contacts (probably Dmitry Peskov, Putin's personal assistant) an email stating, "I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected."

Felix Sater ‘s childhood friend from his days in South Brooklyn is the now-convicted Trump attorney Michael Cohen. Sater and Cohen were partnering on a hotel deal for Trump Tower in Moscow 2016 during the election. "Trump World Tower Moscow" was going to be backed by Russian investor Andry Rovoz, who claimed to be the sole backer. But according to investigative reporter Scott Stedman, part of Rovoz’s money came from Russian Mob kingpin, Semion Mogilevich, the same mafia godfather linked to Sater and Putin.

Trump’s Father Figure: Putin

It seems that Putin came to power using the help of his own 9/11. In September of 1999 (9/99?), there were  the Russian "Apartment Bombings" that many experts in the West believe were false flag attacks staged by Putin’s agents. In Russia, they helped Putin achieve “overnight popularity.”

It’s widely known that Putin has killed an alarming number of journalists and critics, most prominently Alexander Litvenko, an investigator who said that Putin had a "good relationship" with Russian mob kingpin Semion Mogilevich. Litvenko was poisoned three weeks after accusing Putin of killing the dissident writer Anna Politkoskaya. An inquest in the UK tied Litvenko’s poisoning with radioactive polonium-210 to Putin.

So Trump’s fawning over Putin in Helsinki is a political crime. Attorney Ken McCallion calls it “Treason - defined by giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Trump actively soliciting and cooperating with his campaign team, with Russia, is in my view, actionable.”

Cohen/Manafort

Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney, was convicted this August, but has turned into a witness against Trump. It was Cohen who transferred the hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels to have her remain silent about an affair with Trump. Trump claims there was “no crime” and that the hush money was not “campaign funds.” This is an admission of guilt in itself because the crime at issue is using personal money for campaign affairs. Trump’s misuse of funds here could also be evidence of obstruction of justice. And for trying to dissuade FBI director James Comey from looking at Russia connections, the charge would be the same.

Also convicted in August was Paul Manafort, a long-time GOP operative who became Trump’s campaign manager. He was convicted on eight counts of crimes including tax fraud, bank fraud and failure to report foreign bank accounts.

Manafort worked for Putin’s man in Ukraine, for ten years, Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych was ousted in a popular revolt in 2014, and the Ukrainian Parliament issued a warrant for his arrest for the “mass killing of civilians.”

Financial records from December 2015, certified in Cyprus, showed that Mr. Manafort was approximately $17 million in debt to interests connected to Mr. Putin and Mr. Yanukovych, a few months before he joined the Trump campaign. That included million-dollar debts to Russian oligarchs, like Oleg Deripaska, a billionaire related by marriage to Boris Yeltsin. Deripaska also has close ties to the Kremlin.

END GAME

Today, Trump has a 60% disapproval rating according to an ABC Poll. The New York Times accuses him of being a “congenital liar.” The new book Fear by Bob Woodward tells of White House insiders questioning the President’s sanity. There’s talk of the 25th Amendment being invoked, where a majority of the cabinet could vote that the President is not fit to serve. According to Michael Wolff, author of The Fire and Fury, Trump is mentally deteriorating, repeating himself constantly.

“Trump is a demented bully with his finger on the nuclear trigger – brazenly ratcheting up the danger of war from North Korea to the Middle East. Immigrants are terrorized and children are still separated from their parents. The Supreme Court sits on the verge of a pro-fascist majority, making it a fully pliant tool in the Trump/Pence regime’s drive to ratify, protect and enforce its agenda,” according to protestors from the Refuse Fascism movement.

Independent author and journalist David Lindorff told the New York Megaphone, “It's pretty certain that Democrats will take over the House in November, but probably narrowly, and there are plenty of gutless bastards there so impeachment is not the sure thing it should be, even if they dump Pelosi.”

The political establishment was utterly shocked that Trump won. Trump was too; he actually disappeared for awhile to process the shocking news. America is run by an oligarchy, and the big-money-dominated, corporate media system assumed that a spineless, pro-corporate, pro-War hawk like Hillary Clinton would win easily. Trump was too raw, he was too weird, surely the people wouldn’t chose someone so coarse.

The Big Media underestimated the discernment of the American People. Swing state Americans were more than willing to take a risk on a reality-TV star they knew.

After all, Hillary was just too stiff, too sterile. There had been rumors for far too long about Hillary and her secrets: Rose Law Firm, Vince Foster, Mena Arkansas, Libya, secret servers, the 30,000 emails, and the Clinton Global Initiative. In fact, according to a failed plea agreement with Jeffrey Epstein, famous attorney Alan Dershowitz pleaded for his client, that Epstein had been one of the Clinton allies who helped set up the Clinton Global Initiative.

So, in Trump, the corporate Democrats got what they deserve.  But what do we, the people, deserve? We deserve a leader with integrity, a vision, a sense of service. Do we even believe this is possible? What does it say about our country, the core values of our society, that we have Donald Trump as our leader? And what can we say to our children and descendents, to history, if we don’t take a stand and impeach him, now.