Payola, Cash, Sex, Security Clearances – What Could Go Wrong? By Josh Marshall

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 2h

Mother Jones has an important follow up to yesterday’s news about the Chinese massage parlor baron who managed not only to get a selfie with President Trump but appears to be a fixture of the Trump Mar-a-Lago grease and sleaze world. She is the founder, though not currently the owner, of the massage parlor where Trump pal and frequent Mar-a-Lago guest Robert Kraft (owner of the Patriots) got busted for soliciting sex last month. But there’s even an additional thread to the story, an obvious connection, that is still yet to be made: a foreign national selling direct access to the President of the United States to other foreign nationals and one who happens to also be involved in the sex trade. The potential not only for venal corruption but blackmail, extortion and even espionage are all pretty obvious.

First to the Mojo story. It’s a very clever piece of the reporting, grabbing an important and obvious-in-retrospect thread of the original Miami Herald piece, pulling it and finding it unravel a whole new dimension of the story.

In addition to the massage parlors, Cindy Yang also has a business consulting/influence peddling business – setting up just after President Trump’s inauguration. Business people usually have business reasons for wanting to sidle up to the politically powerful. But MoJo found something much more direct. On its website Yang’s firm offered clients access to Trump and his family via Mar-a-Lago and other channels. The site offered “the opportunity to interact with the president”, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and other political figures.

US President Donald Trump, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (2nd-L), his wife Akie Abe (R), US First Lady Melania Trump (L) and Robert Kraft (2nd-L),owner of the New England Patriots, sit down for dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort on February 10, 2017. / AFP / NICHOLAS KAMM (Photo credit should read NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)

These grifts are often pretty slapdash operations. The company’s DC office appears to be located in a UPS postal box location. But as Mojo notes, a look at the photographs published on Yang’s company site (now offline) and social media pages suggest she was able to make good on those promises to clients, getting various Chinese business people and tycoons into Mar-a-Lago for chats and meet-and-greets with the President, members of his family and various Trump toadies.

It’s be understood since the President took office that he was in essence selling access to the Presidency by making his private club the locus of so much presidential activity. One a number of occasions he’s hosted dinners with foreign heads of state in the same dining room where members eat their own meals. But this is one of the most explicit and direct examples yet of something we assumed must be happening.

US First Lady Melania Trump (L) and US President Donald Trump (3rd L) pose with Chinese President Xi Jinping (2nd R) and his wife Peng Liyuan (R) upon their arrival to the Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Florida, on April 6, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / JIM WATSON (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

But there are two other parts of the equation worth noting. If you’re wondering why Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump had a hard time getting top level security clearances there are likely a number of reasons. But this kind of regime of checkbook access to the Trump inner circle must figure high in the equation and likely applies to many others in the Trump orbit.

And that’s not all. Yang’s business looks like a pretty standard pay for access operation. Not good at all but hardly something new under the sun. Trump is open for business for pay-to-play access. And through Mar-a-Lago he has essentially made members club franchisees of his pay-to-play operation. Yang pays Trump for her and family members Mar-a-Lago membership. Trump get his cut and she can start running her own influence peddling racket. But remember, Yang also appears to be in the prostitution business. At least one of his local area pals, Kraft, got busted using those services. Another mega GOP and Trump donor, John W. Childs got busted as part of the same sting, though it’s not clear it was the identical location as Kraft. If you have someone selling access to the President, mainly to foreign nationals from China and that person is also in the prostitution business, the avenues for corruption, blackmail, extortion and even espionage are all pretty obvious.

We don’t know if all these wires are crossing in Yang’s case. But that’s not even really the point. We’re finding out about Yang’s grift because Robert Kraft somehow happened to get swept up in the “rub and tug” massage parlor sting. That led to Yang’s ownership of the massage parlors and her connections to Trump. That led to her website openly selling access to the President, his cabinet secretaries and his family. There’s less than zero chance she’s the only one. And it’s just as unlikely that Mar-a-Lago is the only channel of Trump’s presidential corruption.

Whether or not Yang’s is just garden variety influence peddling, it has all the potential markers of something much more serious. A foreign national selling access to other foreign nationals from a country that runs extensive espionage operations in the United States; someone who appears to be involved in criminal enterprises and ones often used as traps for blackmail. Clearly the door is open for anyone.

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