What's That Robert Mueller Secret Grand Jury Subpoena Fight About? Let's Wildly Speculate, Together!

Whatever it is, HE'S WINNING.

CORRECTION/RETRACTION TYPE THING: Hi! We got a very nice note from Mr. Elliott Broidy's lawyers correcting some of our thinking here, and as we are a very honest Wonkette, if we may have screwed something up, we say so. There are after all seven million characters in this whole saga, and it's possible to get your wires crossed or accidentally make an inference you shouldn't. We said below in our original post wildly speculating about what the hell that Robert Mueller secret grand jury fight is about:

We know Mueller has been investigating a scheme between Nader and former RNC money man Elliott Broidy that sure seemed like it involved funneling all kinds of weird Saudi and Emirati money very indirectly into Trump's orange B-hole.

Actually we may not know that. What we know for sure is that Nader, who has lobbied for the Saudis and the Emiratis, is a cooperating witness for the Mueller investigation, with full immunity, and that he and Broidy, a former RNC money man, have worked closely with each other. We also know that money has changed hands between the two men. Broidy's attorneys reference payments that funded two 2017 conferences put on by think tanks in DC about Qatar's support for terrorism. (Shitting on Qatar has been kind of a thing lately, as you may have noticed.)

If we unfairly elided things together and suggested Mueller is investigating something we can't know for sure if he's investigating or not, or we unfairly suggested (in a "LET'S WILDLY SPECULATE" post, which, as you all know, is something we do around here when the news is confusing and we're trying to understand it and/or when we just want to make dick jokes) that somehow that money, from the Saudi UAE lobbyist to the RNC guy, could have made it into Trump's coffers or had any other nefarious purposes, we're sorry.

We are, after all, just a simple mommyblog/recipe hub trying to figure out the news, just like everybody else. If you'd like to figure it out for yourself, start with this New York Times  article, which is where this all began.

AND NOW BACK TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED POST!

Late Tuesday, Vanity Fair 's Gabe Sherman came out with a gossip story about the shitshow currently happening in the White House, and at the end shared a tidbit of speculation about the super-top-secret Robert Mueller grand jury subpoena fight that's been playing out in the federal courthouse in DC the past few weeks, behind closed doors and away from reporters' nosy questions. Somebody who went to some dumb party at the Trump hotel was just spreading the rumor that the secret fight was about Donald Trump Jr. WHOA IF TRUE, RIGHT?

But that somebody who went to some dumb party needs to SHUT THEIR DUMB FACE ALL THE WAY UP because a new filing dropped last night that tells us a little bit more information, and unless Junior counts as a "corporation" that's owned by a "country," it's not about Junior.

If you're just catching up, this is a secret grand jury subpoena fight that reportedly involves the Mueller investigation, although we suppose it's entirely possible that this is that QAnon thingie and it's about to arrest Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and probably Oprah and Jennifer Aniston and Sheryl Crow because THEY KNOW WHAT THEY DID. But let's just assume it's Mueller until we hear different.

 Zoe Tillman from BuzzFeed has the filing. Let's look at it!

First off, we learn that despite whoever 's attempts to quash the grand jury subpoena, the courts aren't having it.

Here are some details:

OK, so we have "the Corporation," and it is "owned by Country A." And the court is not buying the argument that it would be against Country A's laws for the Corporation to comply with this subpoena. To that end, the corporation/country has already been held in contempt, and in this filing, we see that Robert Mueller (if it is indeed Mueller!) has won this latest round.

So who are we talking about here? We don't know! We can tell you a bit about who it's not , though, based on these details. It's not Deutsche Bank, which has been wrapped up in the Mueller investigation in the past, because Deutsche is not state-owned. That also knocks out Russian banks like Alfa, the one that seemed to be the primary cyber-buddy of a server owned by the Trump Organization, a situation that is still under investigation. Though everything successful in Russia is connected to the state somehow, Alfa is also technically privately owned.

Our best guesses would be that we're either dealing with one of Russia's fake-ass state-owned money laundering banks, like VneshEconomBank, which Jared Kushner has had very weird contacts with. It could be Sberbank, which is also state-owned; which is Putin's favorite for money laundering (allegedly, as if he'd so such a thing!); which sponsored Trump's Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013; and which was at one point supposedly going to provide financing for the Moscow Trump Tower project that never happened. You know, the one Trump was trying to make happen during the presidential campaign while repeatedly lying about it in public.

Perhaps we should note that both those banks have been under heavy sanctions, because we just learned Mueller is zeroing i n on secret negotiations between Trump people and Russians over lifting those sanctions, which they all talked about constantly , and which is at the center of the question of what the quid pro quo was between the Trump campaign and Russia. Was it something about "We'll win you this election, and you get rid of these sanctions"? MAYBE. Trump people surely do lie about it every single time they're asked.

So maybe it's something like that. Maybe it's another kind of Russian state-owned company, like oil giant Rosneft. Alleged Trump-Russia bribes involving Rosneft certainly have come up in this investigation!

OR MAYBE it's a sovereign wealth fund. For instance, the clandestine meeting Aryan Blackwater sadist Erik Prince had in the Seychelles just before the Trump's inauguration, reportedly as an unofficial emissary of the Trump transition, which he lied about to Congress , was with Kirill Dimitriev, who runs the Russian Direct Investment Fund, which is owned by the Kremlin. Lebanese-American Lobbyist George Nader, who has been a cooperating witness for the Mueller investigation for quite a little while now, has been helpful in exposing that matter, because he brokered the meeting, and presumably also with whether the Trump campaign, transition, inauguration and/or administration has been taking bribes from mere handfuls of Arab nations, because Nader seems to be right in the middle of all of that. We know Mueller has been investigating a scheme between Nader and former RNC money man Elliott Broidy that sure seemed like it involved funneling all kinds of weird Saudi and Emirati money very indirectly into Trump's orange B-hole. (Saudi money? THE FUCK YOU SAY. ) (OR NOT. See correction above!)

And then there's the matter of the Qataris, who were cooperating with the Mueller investigation, and were ready to give up all kinds of dirt on secret meetings involving Nader, Broidy AND ALSO JARED, but suddenly decided against it, because they wanted to make nice-nice with the Trump administration. Could be their sovereign wealth fund, we dunno!

(Incidentally, last year Jared Kushner went to the Qataris begging them to bail out his failing family business. They ultimately told him to fuck off. Strangely, not long after that, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's blockade of Qatar began and the Trump administration accused Qatar of being a gi-normous state sponsor of terrorism, even though that's where CENTCOM is, which is kind of important . Related? Who the fuck knows.)

OR MAYBE IT'S SOMETHING ELSE! Maybe Russia has started its own state-owned version of Big Lots, and it's already laundering money for Putin while simultaneously having big sales on things you didn't even know you needed.

All we know for sure is what we told you above, that it seems Mueller is in a grand jury fight with a company that's owned by a country, and he's winning that fight.

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