Cohen....Kraft.....All the President's Men

2/27/2019

Buddies

The star of Wednesday's hearing was, of course, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Inner Baltimore. I have been calling him "The Prophet" since I observed him during some steroid hearings, oh, back a few years. He was always righteous with smarmy ballplayers and he remains righteous with smarmy politicians trying to smear an already-smarmy enforcer.

In his emotional wrap-up speech, The Prophet addressed our better selves. May people listen to him.

Michael Cohen managed more dignity than most members of the Republican minority, admitting his crimes and often displaying a lawyer's wits we did not know he possessed.

Most of the Republicans, most notably Jim Jordan, were a collection of Paulie Walnuts of "Sopranos" fame -- that is, menacing without even a hint of some attractive or interesting trait.

I did love Rep. Clay Higgins of southern Louisiana, thick and balding, addressing Cohen as "Good Sir" in his lush accent. Higgins was formerly a member of the Military Police and also an officer in Louisiana; he seemed a character made for a series of Cajun noir novels, followed by gritty films. If Clay Higgins did not exist, a writer would lust to invent him.

The real object of the hearing was 12 time zones away, not far enough. Fortunately, most Democrats on the committee, however wordy, wasting chunks of their five minutes with stream of consciousness, gave Cohen a forum for his damning details about Trump. Thank you "Good Sir."

(This is what I wrote earlier about Robert Kraft of the Super Bowl champs, another Trumpite in the News:)

Robert Kraft wanted to see me at halftime of a Patriots playoff game.
It was important enough that he enrolled an NFL official to escort me from the press box to his luxury box, halfway around a stadium bulging with tanked-up fans.

I was taken through a crowded reception, full of hoi-polloi millionaires and power brokers, where I was introduced to Myra Kraft, his wife, philanthropist and social conscience. She would pass in the summer of 2011; people in Boston speak glowingly of her.

I was taken to an inner-inner sanctum, where Kraft wanted me to see the Super Bowl trophy as well as three special guests.

“These are my best friends,” Kraft told me. “I think you know them.”
I knew one of them.

“My Queens home boy,” I said, nodding to a guy who had grown up a very crucial half mile from me, whom I knew from the old United States Football League.

Donald Trump nodded, vaguely. He is not good at normal interpersonal relations, but I already knew that. Small talk, politeness, makes him fidget. So we sort of acknowledged each other. (I knew he was a germaphobe so we did not shake hands.)

Another “best friend” was Alan Dershowitz who, as I recall, shook my hand politely.

The third “best friend” was a network biggie (no, you have not seen his name in sordid headlines lately) who kind of glowered at me and grunted and stayed away.

Kraft ushered me over to the Super Bowl trophy and we had our photo taken. The New York Times was clearly important to him, yet another trophy, yet another accomplishment.

I can’t remember what year it was, whether we knew that Kraft had taken off his Super Bowl ring to show to a former KGB thug named Vladimir Putin, who walked away with it.

I was thinking about Kraft’s inner sanctum this week as he got in a bit of trouble for having his chauffeur take him to a low-scale mall in Florida. Right now he is charged with two felonies for patronizing the sexual favors available from Chinese immigrants/captives in a nail salon.

This follows hearings about the gratuitous plea bargain for a sordid Florida guy named Jeffrey Epstein, who apparently preferred very young women. His name has been linked to Alan Dershowitz, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. Epstein’s light treatment was facilitated by R. Alexander Acosta, now Trump’s secretary of labor.

Quite a crowd.

The current thinking is that Bob Kraft will get off with a fine and community service.
(Sorry. I don’t have time to type any more right now. Got to watch the Cohen hearing and see what else Our Leader has been up to.)

Alan Rubin link

2/27/2019 05:43:12 pm

You were probably the only normal and rational person in that room at Foxboro. Birds of a feather always flock together.

Luckily,none of it rubbed off on you. We are currently in Mexico City waiting our third flight of the day to Los Noche. We followed the Cohen hearings live at the first two long layovers.

I believe Cohen will tell all in the hope of avoiding jail time. Prior convictions can be revisited if the information is good enough.

I’m reading “Threat” by McCabe. It is a fascinating read and very insightful. There is too much to explain here, but you will be exposed to how the FBI works and how the do not trust the politicians, who do not listen to the briefings and only want to hear what reinforces their beliefs.

McCabe has the utmost respect for Adam Schiff, who always explained things and wanted to know what was happening.

His interactions with Trump and Sessions is worth the read.

I’m with three non-soccer travelers, but I will try to get to a game in Mexico City.

George Vecsey

2/28/2019 04:44:11 pm

Alan: Gracias. Bueno viaje.

GV

Altenir Silva

3/1/2019 12:44:43 pm

Dear Alan:
Very nice to know that you had met Tony Schwartz. I did not read the book, but I’ve read an article from The New Yorker about the despair of Mr. Schwartz on this subject.
Best regards - Altenir

Altenir J. Silva

2/27/2019 08:47:21 pm

Dear George,

Thanks for sharing this amazing piece with us. At the moment, I’m reading from The New Yorker: "How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success” by Patrick Radden Keefe. All of these subjects are interesting.

Be well. Altenir

Randolph

2/27/2019 09:36:13 pm

George,

Very interesting piece. Strange times we are living in!

But I think you were better off when you were covering Appalachia for the New York Times and hanging out with Howard Baker and Fred Thompson. Give Ms. Whipple my best regards.

Randy

George Vecsey

2/28/2019 04:49:15 pm

Randy: I was just visiting a class at my alma mater today, and a student asked about memorable politicians I had met. On my feet, I came up with a delightful autumn day in Tennessee in 1972, running around with Sen. Howard Baker and his batman, Fred Thompson. They were fun to be around, intelligent adults, and from a horrible distance, old-guard Republicans, thoroughly admirable. How low we have fallen. GV

George Vecsey

2/28/2019 04:46:30 pm

Altenir: I read that article. He seems to have no regrets over convincing nearly half this addled country that Trump has some business sense, and an adult personality.
Tony Schwartz feels deep regret about having helped write "The Art of the Deal." He does community service on cable TV -- but too late to amend 2 1/2 years of the Child King.

Ed Martin

2/28/2019 05:11:31 pm

GV, I give Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-Cortez an A+. She was calm, concise, to the point, no histrionics, and her questions set the stage for legal action in MY and USA.

On a more political note, the Congressman who told Cohen that “his colleagues were not upset by his lying, but because he stopped lying for trump, had the quote of the day!

The Chairman’s comment, while moving, were not as potent as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’ legally.

Altenir Silva

2/28/2019 07:31:58 pm

Dear George,
You are right. Tony Schwartz should go to bed every night with that in mind. David Letterman once said that reality shows are more fiction than ever. It was planned to entertain the audience, just that. But many believe it is true.
Best wishes - Altenir

Alan Rubin link

2/28/2019 08:42:10 pm

Tony Schwartz is an interesting guy. He owns the small building he lives in and he purchased the appliances for the rental apartments.

He always wanted me to come to his apartment to place his orders. I enjoyed our conversations on multiple topics.

Tony knew how to go to the jugular of people he did not like.

bruce

2/28/2019 06:22:03 pm

george,

i watched all of it yesterday.

cohen did a lot better job than i thought he would.

ocasio-cortez was a surprise.

no grandstanding. i thought she might indulge herself.

good calm serious questions and got some info.

dems were certainly better behaved and professional.

republicans were disgraceful. no interest in trying to do the job they should be doing.

and i see your boy behaved with honour with his understanding of dear leader3's being kept in the dark by his people with the kid they sent home brain dead.

probably forgot what he said when the kid arrived home as soon as the words were out of his yap.

obviously fellow authoritarians have a special understanding of what the others are going thru.

not sure of your body language in that kraft photo.

i see he's not showing a ring; hope you didn't borrow it.

bruce

George Vecsey

2/28/2019 09:10:25 pm

Ed: as always, you are right. You've been to those hearings, you know how most pols need two minutes of verbal throat-clearing to get to the point. She was prepared. Marianne noticed she was taking notes while the pol ahead of her was blathering. AOC knew what she wanted...just like beating an established pol last fall. What a great public impression for her first major hearing....
Bruce, what is my body language in that photo? I'm not comfortable having my photo taken, hence a lot of bad photos. In this one, I seem to be establishing a distance, physically and psychologically, right?
"Why did this guy haul me across the stadium for this?"
GV

bruce

2/28/2019 09:16:29 pm

george,

uncomfortable and wary.

AOC seemed one of the few professionals.

ed's right about the comment of the day.

I thought the same thing.

bruce

John McDermott

3/9/2019 01:50:21 am

To Kraft I suspect you were a sort of trophy. Not to be put on the top shelf because that honor is reserved for the likes of Trump and the network exec and “real” celebrities. You are probably one or two shelves below in the Kraft personal trophy case. I wonder if this violated some draconian NYT poicy? I also wonder if Kraft’s pal Dershowitz is helping him out with his massage parlor matter?

Hansen Alexander

3/7/2019 10:50:48 am

George,

It would be a gross disservice to discuss the actual substance of your observations on Rep. Cummings during the Cohen testimony and your intimate portrait of Robert Kraft summoning you to receive the seal of approval from The New York Times, because the real importance of your piece is its superior writing.

Step back, everybody, breathe in, enjoy the roll of words across the paragraphs, the quick, unmatched assembly of the English language you composed, George, and enjoy it. You have always written fun, interesting, insightful, columns, but let's be honest. When I tell people I know you, people are thoroughly impressed because they know you by the quality of your writing first.

Now that I have indulged myself in the pleasure of your words, I too was inspired by Rep. Cummings' final remarks that concluded the Cohen hearings. And that from a writer who has severely bashed Cumming's conduct and words during the Clemens-McNamee hearings, an issue that you and I have always been on the opposite side of the divide. Not to plug it too much, but a revised edition of the Clemens sequel, ONE BRAVE MAN, will be released in the next few weeks, and will be available on Amazon.

A warranty warning to my fellow fans of George. I really give George a hard time in this book, criticize him almost harshly, so if that makes you uncomfortable, I'm coming clean with this information. But you should know, that this is the rare exception in George's 40 years of writing, in which he and I have not agreed. We have probably been in accord in 95 percent of the time on most issues he writes about. And I clearly share his liberal, political values and beliefs.

As always,
Hansen

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Cohen....Kraft.....All the President's Men

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