When the Emir is displeased with you
With backstory about my peculiar exchange with Michael Cohen, the American president's disbarred lawyer and disgraced hush-money fixer.
This is going to be an unusual Real Story Sunday newsletter. It’s mostly about journalism, and whether to publish stories when all the pieces just don’t quite seem to fit, even if the story is by all available evidence a true story.
This isn’t the same problem as half-reported stories that are recklessly published and cause the public to be dangerously misled, as in the dozens of versions of this headline that have made the rounds over the past couple of days: Richmond firm denied funding for $100M project following Cowichan case, says councillor.
Let’s get the “local” craziness out of the way right off the top
The ony thing that can be described as “true” about that story is that Richmond Councillor Alexa Loo indeed appears to have made that claim. In later iterations of the story, running under the equally unhelpful headline Richmond company refused financing for $100M project after Cowichan case: councillor, you still have to read to the fourth or the fifth paragraph to learn that the story is apparently bullshit.
According to the bank involved, the purported megaproject in question was not denied financing because of the B.C. Supreme Court ruling in the Cowichan Tribes’ successful claim of unextinguished aboriginal title to the site of an old fishing village on the mainstem of the Fraser River, in what is now Richmond.
Over the last few days, owing mostly to incitements that can be traced back to Richmond mayor Malcolm Brodie, a farrago of spastic outbursts and hysterical imbecilities about the ruling have spread like smallpox, and it’s all just too dispirting to revisit here at any length.
It’s exactly like the psychodrama inflicted on Canadians by our former prime minister, now Katy Perry’s insufferable boyfriend, that I documented fairly exhaustively in The Year of the Graves. Except in the case of the Cowichan ruling, the psychosis is running in reverse, sort of.
This might help, from August 16: Try not to replace your marbles, which expands on a piece I wrote for the Post naively appealing for calm and sober judgment. My column in the Post last week, Cowichan ruling tells us what B.C. really needs is treaties, lays out the case that the crux of the distemper is that both Ottawa and British Columbia have preferred glamorous UNDRIP-induced “reconciliation” arrangements that understandably erode trust and give a lot of people the creeps.
Some of the journalism involved in the recent paroxysms are just so weird it’s hard to know how to describe it properly, as in: “Most B.C. residents think recent rulings by the province’s Supreme Court robbing legal landowners of their titles in favour of a First Nations land claim could damage reconciliation efforts, a new poll says.
Excuse me? There it is, right there, in a straight up news story: the court is “robbing legal landowners of their titles,” if you don’t mind. The story is supposed to be about how people feel about court rulings, when it’s really about how people feel owing to crappy journalism about court rulings.
No landowners have been robbed of their titles, I shouldn’t have to point out. The Cowichan decision itself explicitly excludes private landowners, and the federal and municipal landowners in the aboriginal title area are not being “robbed” of anything.
No First Nation in B.C. is claiming private property in any land claim. The few modern-day treaties that have been settled in B.C. all contain provisions in which the First Nation explicitly relinquishes aboriginal title beneath fee simple title.
By all means, beat up on B.C.’s New Democrats for talking out of both sides of their mouths about this, and let’s not fail to notice that Crown sovereignty and unextinguished aboriginal title remain unreconciled over much of the landmass West of the Rockies, so it’s weird. But this isn’t even news.
Enough for now about the “spoilt child of Confederation,” as British Columbia was not unreasonably described in the 19th century.
Back in the real world. . .
I’ve also been noticing the willed amnesia that has obscured an historic shift, or perhaps merely a return to Liberal Party normalcy, in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s adoption of a wholly “transactional” posture in relation to the Chinese police state. In his various commitments and pronouncements at the ASEAN and APEC gatherings in Korea and Malaysia, we’ve turned our China policy clock back 20 years or so. It’s as though everything that has happened in the interregnum never happened at all.
Not the brutal crushing of Hong Kong’s democratic uprising, nor Beijng’s massive mobilization and military buildup in preparation for an invasion of Taiwan. Not the kidnapping of the two Michaels, the United Front Work Department’s extraordinary efforts to influence the outcome of the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, the transnational repression of Chinese exiles in Canada, Beijing’s commitment of financial support for Russia’s war on Ukraine, the infiltration scandal at the national microbiology laboratory in Winnipeg . . . bygones.
“We now have a turning point in the relationship — a turning point that creates opportunities for Canadian families, for Canadian businesses and Canadian workers,” Carney has happily declared.
It’s a turning point, alright.
On to this Michael Cohen business
My exchange with Cohen occurred exactly as I report it below. It’s what gives rise to the question I mentioned at the top about whether to publish stories when all the pieces just don’t quite seem to fit, even if the story is by all available evidence a true story.
Cohen was the guy who was jailed for his role in handling the illegal payoff to the pornstar Stormy Daniels prior to Trump’s first-term inauguration in January, 2017, which was all tangled up in Trump’s eventual conviction on 34 felony counts last year.
It will require some explaining to understand why it’s immediately relevant, but for the moment the thing to keep in mind is that Canada’s suddenly disrupted and degraded place within North America’s integrated continental economy is now almost entirely subject to the whims and erratic mood swings of a deeply disturbed and vengeful American president.
Trump’s sudden ten percent tariff hike on Canadian imports and his abrupt shutdown of Canada-U.S. trade negotiations, purportedly over a mere television advertisement commissioned by Ontario premier Doug Ford, is ample evidence of that.
If you’re the head of state of any one of 90 countries Trump has tariffed in recent months, you have to be really careful about what you say. That’s only partly because of the broad “emergency” power to impose tariffs that the MAGA Republicans have allowed President Trump to usurp from Congress.
Foreign leaders are also expected to bow and scrape and flatter and humour Trump, so there’s little stock you can put in any sentence they utter that has Trump’s name in it. He responds to baubles and flattery and kowtowing, 747 jumbo jets, a replica crown of Korea’s ancient kings, red carpets and parades. So you call him “daddy,” or nominate him for a Nobel peace prize.
The president’s obsessive vindictiveness and his proclivity to bend and break rules in the pursuit of vendettas against people who have crossed him is matched only by his determination to reward his friends. Among the beneficiaries of Trump’s various clemencies and pardons are more than 1,200 duly convicted rioters from the January 6 “stop the steal” disturbances in 2021, and most recently, on October 23, the crypto multibillionaire and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, Canada’s richest man.
In the weeks leading up to Zhao’s pardon on charges related to guilty plea on money-laundering and sanctions violations Binance entered in court two years ago in exchange for a $4 billion fine, Zhao busied himself boosting the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial crypto venture, all the while lobbying for the pardon.
Binance also wrote the foundational code underpinning World Liberty’s “stablecoin” USD1. On World Liberty’s opening trading day in September, the Trump family amassed a windfall of up to $5 billion.
As for those who have earned Trump’s disfavour, here’s a short version of the president’s enemies list: Former CIA director John Brennan, former FBI director James Comey, New York Attorney-General Letitia James, former national security adviser John Bolton, and most immediately relevant to this newsletter’s content, as we shall see: Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen.
You don’t turn the prosecution’s evidence against Trump on a 34-count felony rapsheet and expect to get away with it. You’re not going to be able to hide in Canada, that’s for sure. A Canadian passport won’t be enough to protect you, and on Monday Trump’s lawyers were back in court, seeking to have his convictions overturned. This brings Cohen back into Trump’s crosshairs.
So let’s get into it.