Those who seek to expose Trump's crimes may be under attack now, but the truth is coming for him--it is "inevitable"

Leave it to Fox News in its zeal to “expose” true patriots who seek to bring the Trump administration’s crimes out of the darkness and into the light to actually make things sound even worse not for the alleged “criminal,” but for Donald Trump. In its website report on former Treasury Department official Natalie Edwards, who pleaded guilty to leaking confidential banking reports related to the activities of Trump campaign officials, there were a few of what one might characterize as “inadvertent” admissions that something was amiss, such as the implication that there is a large  quantity of reports of suspicious activities, and the lack of mention that the Treasury and Justice Departments have done almost nothing to investigate these reports.

As a senior advisor in the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, Edwards was in a position to observe that political appointees of the Trump administration were blocking investigations of numerous SARs—Suspicious Activity Reports—involving members of the Trump campaign, including money laundering and illegal wire transfers. Edwards began communicating in secret with BuzzFeed in October, 2017, before being caught with a flash drive containing “sensitive” information a year later. We are told that the drive contained not just additional SARS, but material relating to Russia, Iran and ISIS. 

We can “assume” that Edwards was not a Trump supporter and sought to expose him. Partisan? Maybe; but what about those seeking to conceal Trump and his associates’ crimes? And it still begs the question of why professional Treasury Department and IRS investigators (not political appointees) as well as the financial institutions providing the information would in 2018 be concerned about Trump administration dealings with those countries and entities. Edwards claimed that she felt she had a “right” to disclose the “suspicious” activities of Trump and his associates as a “whistleblower,” although her secret disclosures were technically illegal because she did not submit an official whistleblower report. 

Edwards’ attorney, Marc Agnifilo, admitted that supporters of Trump would view her activities as “more politically motivated than for some conception like the good of our republic” but that she rightly believed that investigations of "certain critical facts" were not being pursued “in the right way” by “the government agencies tasked with handling them.” Agnifilo also stated that his client believed that “if I can't trust government officials to handle this, I think I can trust the media to handle this and to bring this to the attention of the American people.” Edwards had also apparently made contact with some members of Congress on the matter, but nothing came of it. 

Interestingly—or more appropriately, hypocritically—U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman claimed that Edwards “violated the integrity of the system of suspicious activity reports relying on banks and other financial institutions alerting law enforcement to potentially illegal transactions.” What he neglected to mention was that these institutions had a right to expect that their suspicions be taken seriously, which they apparently were not the higher up the chain of command they went. Trump has been in office three years, and although under the chance of coincidence the Mueller investigation prosecuted Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, not a single criminal act identified by a “suspicious activities” report involving Trump or one of his associates has been pursued by the Trump Treasury Department. Remember that the Trump Justice Department attempted to similarly conceal the whistleblower report on the blackmailing of Ukraine’s president for Trump’s personal political gain, discovered only because a third-party—the kind of person Trump likes to call a “traitor and coward”—revealed its existence.

Of course, the reality is that there are many traitors to U.S. interests, prestige and moral credibility in the Trump administration, beginning with the man at the top, but for Trump the only  true “traitors” are those who cross him personally, even when done for the good of the country. The Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, is not one of those people, and we can assume that he had a hand in directing the IRS to sit on SARS that involve Trump and his familiars. Mnuchin is also the boss of the sleepy-eyed Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, who employed “executive privilege” in refusing to answer questions before Congress seeking the rationalization behind adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. Trump has more recently sought to oust Ross from his post—his “reward” for playing Trump’s fool and leaving himself open to future investigations. 

Last week on MSNBC, New York Magazine writer Frank Rich warned Trump’s “cult” following that the day of reckoning was coming. We only know the surface details of the Trump administration’s crimes, barely seeing the tip of the iceberg, with vast bulk of it hidden from view by the fraudulent claim of “executive privilege.” One day, it will all come out, perhaps sooner than Trump and his familiars would like if a Democratic Justice Department returns in 2020, and there will be no one to claim “executive privilege” to conceal it. For now, the truth and those who wish to bring it to the light may be under assault in certain quarters, but the truth will have its day—it is “inevitable.”  For Trump, he hasn’t seen anything yet. The deluge of truth is coming for him, and it will engulf him and his familiars as they so richly deserve.