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Marc Kasowitz Might Be Responsible For Trump's First Diplomatic Blunder

Who needs the State Department when you have Marc Kasowitz?

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Marc Kasowitz (Photo by Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

Technically we’re still waiting on Robert Mueller to confirm that Trump’s first diplomatic blunder was giving urine-stained kompromat to Vladimir Putin, so until then, we’ll pin his first major screw up on a phone call to the Prime Minister of Vietnam. In the immediate aftermath of the election, Trump called Vietnam’s leader without any coordination from the State Department — the professionals who choreograph these calls to make sure no one accidentally starts a war or greenlights a genocide.

Why would Trump randomly call the Vietnamese in contravention of all these conventions? That’s when it all comes back to Marc Kasowitz.

ProPublica has a new in-depth look at Trump’s Vietnam call and Kasowitz’s role:

The contact with Vietnam was not set up by the State Department. Instead, Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, helped arrange the call.

Kasowitz had another client with a keen interest in Vietnam: Philip Falcone, an American investor with a major casino outside Ho Chi Minh City. After the Trump call, Kasowitz traveled to Vietnam with Falcone. They met with government officials as part of an effort to persuade Vietnam to lift a ban on gambling for its citizens. Such a shift would deliver vastly more gamblers to Falcone’s casino.

“Phil asked if Marc could arrange a phone call between the president and prime minister of Vietnam,” said a person familiar with the call. “Marc did that.”

What kind of business genius builds a casino in a country full of people who can’t gamble? That’s almost as dumb as building multiple casinos to suck business away from each other in a crumbling relic like Atlantic City.

It’s not clear whether Trump mentioned the casino on his December 2016 call with the prime minister or in any other communications with the Vietnamese. A White House spokeswoman referred all questions to Kasowitz. The Vietnamese embassy in the U.S. didn’t respond to requests for comment.

U.S. embassy officials in Vietnam heard about the call in advance from Falcone’s casino company, not the Trump transition.

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There’s so much going on in this passage. Note that the White House, when confronted with the accusation that they have abdicated their ultimate responsibility for America’s foreign policy, opted to refer the inquiry to an outsider. It’s like they don’t get what’s even at stake here. When the problem is “we think this might have been a favor to Kasowitz rather than a key component of foreign policy” the answer isn’t, “gosh, you’ll have to ask Marc about that one!”

And the embassy finding out about it from a casino company? Priceless.

Falcone says he never asked for the call and has gotten nothing out of the president’s outreach to the Vietnamese government. Kasowitz’s people also say he never “used any access [to Trump] to help a client of the firm.” But even if the call didn’t delve into murky ethical waters, the mere fact that Marc Kasowitz “provided a ‘telephone contact’ to the Vietnamese government to call Trump” is already a black eye for the administration.

But no one involved seems to realize that.

The Hidden Hand of a Casino Company in Trump’s Contact with Vietnam — “Trump, Inc.” Podcast [ProPublica]

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HeadshotJoe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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