All In The Family

Where are these guys from again? Queens?

Lara Trump is a former story coordinator and producer for Inside Edition. She is married to Eric, the “dumb” one who was not quite dumb enough to schedule a meeting with half the KGB and go bragging about it in his email.

Dummy is as dummy do.

Tapes? Lordy, I hope there are tapes. Alexander Butterfield is kind of a sad and nerdy existence to aspire to but everyone is into the “selfie” thing I guess and New York is a one party state (only one party to a conversation need be aware that it is being recorded).

We already know about Cohen’s, but interestingly enough Tom Arnold is saying that the mother lode of material is not the unredacted Access Hollywood flotsam, but hundreds of hours of archival footage documenting Trump’s interactions with every “contestant” on Apprentice that Mark Burnett is obligated to keep on file because of the Twenty-One scandal and will not release because he is a friend of Trump.

The most recently revealed documents an offer of $180,000 annually “It sounds a little like there’s something you’ve got in the back pocket to pull out Everybody’s positive, right?”

“I think we can work something out where we keep you along those lines.”

Nixon Debated Paying Blackmail, Clemency
By Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Washington Post
Wednesday, May 1, 1974

President Nixon, during a lengthy meeting in the Oval Office on March 21, 1973, told White House counsel John W. Dean III that “you have no choice but to come up with the $120,000” demanded as blackmail payment by one of the Watergate burglars, according to an edited transcript of the meeting.

The transcript reveals that Mr. Nixon, on his own initiative, discussed accommodating blackmail demands on at least a half-dozen occasions during the meeting without once suggesting that paying the men for their silence would be wrong.

Instead, the transcript reveals, Mr. Nixon repeatedly discussed different methods by which as much as $1 million could be paid to the burglars without the payments being traced to the White House. The purpose of such payments, in the President’s own words, would be “to keep the cap on the bottle,” to “buy time,” to “tough it through.”

“How much money do you need?” the President asked Dean early in the March 21 conversation, according to the transcript.

“I would say these people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years,” Dean replied.

“We could get that,” the President continued. “On the money, if you need the money you could get that. You could get a million dollars. You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten. It is not easy, but it could be done. But the question is who the hell would handle it? Any ideas on that?”